Artists and Cooperator Decided——”Alienation”

Once I had decided on the theme of my project and how I wanted to exhibit it, the next thing to do was to choose the artists and their work that I liked. This is to a certain extent random. It is true that we will have some artists we have been following for a long time and they will have some work in their own style, but that does not mean that their work will necessarily fit in with the theme of my exhibition.

The artists I am working with for this exhibition are new friends, Chun Sun, a graduate student in experimental communication at the Royal College of Art, and Chen Tongpu, an undergraduate student in design at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, China. My guest curator, Yifan Xu, who studied at the same university as me and is currently a young curator based in Glasgow, runs an artworkshop.

When I found out that I needed to do an art exhibition on my own, I quickly contacted Yifan Xu, who had arrived in Scotland a year before me and already had a lot of experience in running art projects and art practices, and I was looking forward to her experience and advice. I spoke to her about the theme of my exhibition and she expressed interest and introduced me to some of her young artist friends. I spoke to Jake and learnt that I could invite people to work with me on my practice, so I invited her to curate the exhibition with me.

Unfortunately, after contacting all the artists we knew, we found that none of the young artists we knew had any work that fit my theme or my expectations for the time being, so we had to find new artists for the exhibition. I knew that my exhibition was not very large and that it should be a part of our overall CAT group show, so I set the number of participating artists at 2-3.

So where do I go to find artists? A good way to do this is through friends, and I have used online calls before but with less than satisfactory results. So this time I wanted to be proactive and find artists I liked.

Firstly, I want to make it clear that I’m a postgraduate student, so the artists I’m working with are likely to be young people like me, who are likely to be studying at art schools at the moment, and when I looked online I found out that the Royal College of Art was hosting the 2023 Visual Communication WIP Show.When I visited the exhibition, I discovered Chun Sun and was drawn to her work the first time I saw it. The narrative in her work struck me as a perfect fit for my subject matter and I soon made a connection with her.

The second artist was discovered by some coincidence, when I was searching for information on social media, his work was pushed to my home page and although I didn’t know who he was, I took the initiative to send him a private message expressing my desire to collaborate. Excitingly he replied quickly and expressed an interest in participating in my exhibition.

This is how I found my artists, and although the process was full of coincidences, there were two practical lessons I learned from it. The first point is to make good use of channeled resources and search for more information. After identifying everything you want do a wide search and gather information, whether through others or through the internet, and make sure to look and browse very heavily to increase the chances of finding matching artists. The second point is to speak up and communicate honestly. They are not the only two artists I have actually contacted and unfortunately some have not agreed to work with me or even responded to my emails and messages of invitation to collaborate, nevertheless, as curating it is important to actively communicate with others to maximise the possibility of collaboration.