By commenting on Xiaotong’s essay, I not only learnt from her approach to developing her curatorial thinking, such as constantly expanding her interests through real-life exhibitions to build connections to more content, but also from her essay to see her own shortcomings, such as the incoherent knowledge network caused by fragmented learning and the filling in of ideas from a stereotypical theme.
Xiaotong and I have very different themes and conceptual directions, but in a sense, she and I have a lot of similarities.
For example, from last semester’s Themes course, my interest also extended to the concept of Play, but obviously, I didn’t extend this point of interest to curating as a course. From my understanding of the whole programme, I personally believe that Open&learning and Themes, as well as this semester’s Art Anthropology course, all serve to complete a personal curatorial project. This is crucial and I think it is also a process that assists in the development of one’s curatorial philosophy as a new curator.
In this process of developing curatorial ideas, I think the commentary between peers is not about someone having to convince someone of something, but about marking out the ideas that are close to each other and the things that we don’t agree on, so that we can think about them. Because before we can face the audience, we first have to face the questioning and empathy between each other.
For example, I disagree with Xiaotong’s current interpretation of the relationship between PLAY, TIME and HUMAN, and believe that more research, documentary references and more convincing works by the artists concerned are needed, which is not to be difficult, but I think this is a basic logical closure and what proves the most valuable aspect of the exhibition (what is not explicitly stated needs a point to be expressed in a straightforward manner, rather than (what is not explicitly stated needs a point to be made, rather than wrapped up in a cumbersome documentary administration).Here is my comment to Xiaotong. But Zekun Yang’s interpretations and views on relationships resonated very well, and I recommended the film Spring Tide to her (which is very relevant to my theme of women and it was through her theme that I was triggered to say something), as well as the documentary series I am Li Xiaomu (a narrative about identity) and the film I wrote about in my previous blog I also wrote about Chen Danqing’s lecture “Mother Tongue and Motherland” in Singapore.
Having summarised the problems with the previous reviews of other people’s work below:
I am therefore tempted to ask the following questions,
- What is the ‘sense of Connection*’ for curators and audiences? How can this subtle relationship be constructed?
- when curators plan a thematic exhibition, how do they avoid narrow misinterpretations of the work by the curator’s characterisation of the exhibition? How to reconcile the curator’s and the artist’s right to interpret the work in the exhibition?
*Sense of Connection(通感）: It is a rhetorical style in which different senses, such as sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing, communicate with each other, intermingle, and shift from one to the other, using words that originally denote sense A to denote sense B, making the imagery more lively and novel.
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