Curatorial concept development:
The topic of childhood seems to be getting farther and farther away from us.
Picasso once said: “I was as good at drawing as Raphael when I was fourteen, and I spent my whole life learning to draw like a child. “
Not only Picasso, but also Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama, etc., in their works of art, we can see traces of their search for childhood. These works created by searching for childlike innocence have become the most “cute” landscape in modern and contemporary art. At first, I tried to seek and collect some well-known artists’ works of art reminiscent of childhood, but different countries and different historical backgrounds are strange to us, especially myself, and I can’t empathize with them. So I turned to the perspective, hoping that the “childhood stories” behind these works can be understood and empathized by us. I chose the works of art around me who are engaged in art workers, hoping to feel the artist’s childhood emotions while appreciating the works .
About the exhibition:
Regarding the location of the exhibition, the entire exhibition is about childhood memories, so more attention is paid to the understanding of the content and the more familiar environment. Viewers will use habitual thinking to think, and think that good works should be in museums. In fact, This is not the case. The “famous” works of many artists are often pasted on buses and on walls. Therefore, it is hoped that the young people visiting the exhibition can generate their own thinking through their own observation and understanding.
The whole exhibition hopes to talk about the combination of “new” and “old”. It can also be combined with childhood objects through the presentation of current media equipment. This is one of the reasons why I chose to cooperate with classmate yushan zhao. Each work is exhibited in a printed form and is accompanied by a story copy sticker placed next to the work. The site will also be accompanied by a short art video on the computer and monitor for display.
The reason why I choose to use headphones with a computer to play a video form of art work is to hope that people can hear and understand a work.
I saw the artist Cielo Meireles’ “Tower of Incomprehension” work in the Tate Art Museum in London. The whole installation uses a circular In the form of a tower, the radios are stacked in layers. These radios are tuned to different stations around the world and adjusted to the minimum volume that can be heard by the human ear. The dense sounds interact with each other to create a low and dissonant hearing. environment. But behind those voices, there seems to be a metaphor that we can only hear or understand one voice at a time, whether it’s television, radio, social media, or a conversation in a bar. Multiple voices are speaking at the same time, so that none of them are properly heard or understood. So I put this idea into practice in this curation.
Artist
The selection of artists are all workers in the art industry, who are good at different forms of artistic expression, such as book design, illustration, animation and installation design. In terms of content, everyone’s childhood is either happy or unhappy, and there is hatred for childhood and nostalgia.
I will display the works of gege wang and zhiqian zhang in the same form, because they are both book designs about childhood memories. The commonality between the two is not only the form, but also a negative emotion.
The works of yiran li and aiping zhang are both in the direction of illustration, respectively recording a form of companionship. And jiaxin lu’s works are stop-motion animation short films, which are full of imaginative space and have no special storyline, which can leave room for the audience to imagine and think.
Reflection:
Before I did this theme, I saw the French artist Seth‘s work exhibition, His work also uses the wall as a blank canvas, relying on individual or collective imagination. He makes every child his spokesman, an emissary of his investigations, an image of innocence and placed in difficult social, political and geographical circumstances. “The sweetness and innocence of childhood are often contrasted with the chaotic environments I choose to place them in.” As screen habits become more pervasive, we read less and less. Screens make us lazy and destroy our imaginations.
Soย the content of the exhibition I planned is not only the “autobiography” of the artist, but also the “autobiography” of each audience. After the audience resonates with it, they recall their past, triggering each audience’s thinking about childhood, freedom, existence and possession.
