The understanding of Pain: Collective memory and Mystery views
Our collective project website: 2023 CATs Art Exhibition
As a final presentation of this course, I have created the website for my online curatorial project. For my online curatorial project ‘The understanding of Pain: Collective memory and mystery views’, the theme of my project starts from (East Asian) feminism and focuses on the collective memory of women and women’s spirituality from the central point of women’s pain. As I myself was entirely responsible for the design of my website and interviews with the artists, the whole project fully reflects my own subjective attitude. Most obvious, for example, is my tone for this project – black and grey – which is reflected in my homepage, an image that is a screenshot from an experimental film by Xinhao Li, an artist I invited to work on, The Daughters of Confucius and Meng, which is illustrated through white paper and gestures, as well as women’s closed eyes and mouths, and crowned with pieces of paper filled with Confucian keywords, shows the dark oppression and intense pain and fear of women, and such scenes are eerie and somewhat psychic.
I worked with Nuanxin Zhang on this website as part of a group project. As I studied interaction design as an undergraduate and know some basic principles and methods of web design, I was mainly responsible for the content and build of the website. We didn’t work in tandem with the other peers, we only started building the layout of the homepage after we had made sure the posters and guidebooks were ready. This gave us a very tight time frame. Based on the visual design given by the peers of the collective project, we adopted the same design.
We looked at a number of web designs and finally chose a blue background and a sequential graphic structure as it fitted in well with the official colour scheme and website style of the University of Edinburgh. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to make the site better, not just for me, but for most of the peers, who couldn’t give me the full curating information in a short time (something that needed constant coordination). For example, I had initially envisaged making links to each peers’ project, so that they could display relevant introductory articles and information about exhibitions, artists, etc., as I envisaged the site to be archival and presentational in nature. And without thinking about style I would even like to think about categorising the collective projects by theme and making a website project categorised by theme. But I believe this could have been done better if I had more time or if the course had gone on for longer.
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