I was honored to receive a peer review of the WHY exhibition from Yirong Fan, and I gained a lot from her comments. So this week’s blog will respond to the questions raised by Yirong.
First question: Why did you choose this topic and what motivated you?
At the beginning of my personal project, I just planned to curate an exhibition about negative emotions, and I wanted to invite artists from different countries and regions, different genders, different ages and others to participate in this exhibition. Unfortunately, due to my limited social range, I only invited a few female artists from China. So I narrowed it down to women in China. In addition, during the collection of works, I did not collect works related to pregnancy and children, so I further limited the theme to the negative emotions of Chinese women who are neither married nor pregnant. In a nutshell, it’s a younger woman who was at my stage. These women may be in college or just entering the workforce. So, to some extent, it’s not that I chose the topic, but that objective factors led me to choose the topic.
Yirong’s second question: You say that your project is about the connection between feminism and contemporary art, but it seems that you never talked about any feminist theory relevant to this exhibition and ignored the context of feminist art today.
I really appreciate Yirong asking this question, and it’s true that I haven’t explored much about feminism in my past blogs. I’m just repeating the topic of White Cube. As I mentioned before, due to objective reasons, the theme is positioned as feminism and negative emotions. I didn’t know about feminism until I curated this exhibition. When I saw the article about feminist art shared by Yirong, my shortcomings and deficiencies were thoroughly exposed and I began to know more about feminist content. Like reading the article Yirong shared.
Yirong’s third question is about the questionnaire.
The questionnaire is one of the determining factors for the direction of art collection. Questionnaire is a communication mode to help me directly understand the source of negative emotions of the target group. As Krosnick (2018) mentioned, questionnaire is certainly a method of conversation, and interviewees are not aware of the difference between the rules of such conversation and those of standard conversation. Therefore, in this project, I use the questionnaire as the carrier of research questions to research the source of negative emotions of the target population.
As for the questionnaire, I think I can directly send the screenshot of the final conclusion of the questionnaire, which can answer many questions for me.（figure 1）The questionnaire was aimed at women in China who are currently neither married nor child-bearing. The survey asked: For you, what is the cause of most of your negative emotions? The questionnaire was conducted in a bilingual format, that is, Chinese and English.
Figure 1: A screenshot of the questionnaire
Yirong’s fourth question:I’m curious about the communication with your artists. How did you find their art and contact them? How was your communication with them? Have you encountered any difficulties?
First of all, according to the feedback of the questionnaire, I mainly collected six artworks of negative emotions. I classified study pressure, work pressure and economic pressure into life pressure. Secondly, as I mentioned before, it’s not a particularly easy thing for me to invite artists but it’s certainly not a very difficult thing to do. I post my search for artists on all of my social media, and I also initiate artist communication on those social platforms. The end result was that I got their support. It’s important for me to be proactive in looking for opportunities to collaborate.
That’s all for my Yirong peer review new, thanks for reading.
Reference
Krosnick, J.A. (2018). Questionnaire Design. In: Vannette, D., Krosnick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Survey Research . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54395-6_53
