Wee3#Response of visiting Talbot Rice Gallery and Seminar

Part I: About visiting Talbot Rice Gallery

We followed the spatial sequence of this exhibition hall when we visited it. First, we entered the area located on the 2nd floor, which presents a distribution of small and large spaces for the exhibition throughout the venue. When we entered the distribution in the white dome, we could see that the building was very fine and grand, but the distribution of artwork in it was not so comfortable. Because there is no clear separation of areas. But James also told us that we could not change our workplace as curators, and like the wooden floors in the rooms, we had no power to reconstruct them. Like the light in the art gallery, the ground floor is lit by light bulbs, while the second floor is lit by strips of light like in a movie theater.

This explanation of the lighting arrangement reminds me of what I noticed during my last visit to Talbot Rice Gallery, the lighting on the first floor is not as concentrated as on the second floor, because the paintings of Zhijie Qiu on the first floor are large and difficult to be completely illuminated under the lower wattage lighting, if replaced by led light boxes of the same size behind the works, there should be a better presentation. presentation. The works on the second floor are smaller in size and more scattered so that the audience’s visual center is more focused on the work itself, thus ignoring the small physical space and social distance on the second floor of the art museum, and because of the dome style of decoration, the whole creates a grand artistic atmosphere, I personally think the second floor is more ornamental than the first floor.

Part II: The seminar at the old college

After visiting TRG, we had a seminar with James. He asked us to try to make an exhibition with our peers. The first thing is making the themes. We take notes about our ideas of themes and then put the notes on the table. Some of them were about cultural or sexual, others might be about the environment and the management, and some were about social care. My theme was to See the big with the small.

I was inspired by what Dr. JL said in the first seminar: “Small is beautiful”, and I am a very detail-oriented and “insightful” person in my daily life. Therefore, I remembered this theme very well after the first session and have been thinking about how to carry it out.

After each person came up with our theme, James asked each of us to find artists who had worked on similar projects related to our theme. Based on the principle of small is beautiful, the artist I chose was Tanaka Tatsuya from Japan, who works in the style of miniature art.

I think miniature art like this is the most intuitive and direct way to see the big in a small way, and it can also awaken people’s passion for life in the digital media era, so I decided to set miniature art and see the big in a small way as my final project theme.

Today’s seminar gave me a lot of inspiration and made me start thinking about how to set up my final project, in terms of lighting, space, audience experience, and discourse, etc. I will start thinking about it in the next few weeks and keep updating it on my blog.