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Hanyun Xue / Curating (2024-2025)[SEM2]

Tag: decentralized curation

W7-Reflections on CORPSE FLOWER & New Directions for Fluid Curating 🌿🔍

By

On 4 March 2025

In ✨ Individual Curatorial Project: Fluid Curating, 💬 Peer Exchange & Curatorial Dialogue, 📚 Curatorial Theory & Literature Reflection, 🧭 Field Notes & Exhibition Visits

This week, I visited CORPSE FLOWER, an exhibition curated by MA Contemporary Art Practice students at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. The show examined the delicate balance between fragility and resilience in plant ecosystems, mirroring the fleeting bloom of the Titan Arum (the “Corpse Flower”)—which flowers for just a day before decaying. 🌺💫

This exhibition deeply resonated with me, not just for its ecological themes but for the way it embraced temporality, audience engagement, and archival thinking—all of which directly relate to my Fluid Curating project. This blog will reflect on key aspects of the exhibition and how they inform my curatorial framework.

🌱 Experiencing CORPSE FLOWER: A Meditation on Impermanence

As I walked through the exhibition, I was struck by how each work invited contemplation of the life cycles of nature, the passage of time, and the act of preservation. The curators used the spatial setting of the Royal Botanic Gardens effectively, situating art within an environment where organic life itself is in a constant state of change.

Curatorial Highlights That Stood Out:

Interactive Art & Audience Participation: Touch-Responsive Installation

One installation featured a digital projection of Mimosa Pudica (sensitive plants) that reacted to touch, folding its leaves when engaged.

The instructions guided visitors to interact carefully, mimicking the natural responses of living plants.

This created a haptic, embodied experience that was both scientific and poetic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interactive video：Touch-Responsive Installation

🔍 Relevance to Fluid Curating:

This installation demonstrated how simple, intuitive interactions can create a sense of immersion and engagement—something I aim to integrate into my AI-driven curatorial interfaces.

The delicate balance between control and unpredictability in the piece (the plant reacts in real-time, but only within predetermined parameters) reflects my challenge in Fluid Curating:

    • How much agency should an audience have in shaping an exhibition?
    • Where does the curator’s role shift from author to facilitator?
    • Could AI-generated curatorial statements behave like these plants—reacting, adapting, yet following certain structural constraints?

Archival Curation: Layla Knox’s “Rounding Up the Aliens” (2025)

This mixed-media installation reinterpreted Ida Margaret Hayward’s herbarium, a historical collection documenting non-native plant species in the UK.

The artist used vintage textiles, lace, and wool to reconstruct botanical forms, evoking themes of colonial botany, migration, and ecological displacement.

A poem from Hayward’s 1918 scrapbook was displayed, reinforcing the interplay between personal memory, scientific taxonomy, and artistic interpretation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

🔍 Relevance to Fluid Curating:

This piece prompted me to reconsider how curatorial practice can function as an evolving archive. Much like how Hayward’s herbarium was continually expanded, my project envisions an exhibition that accumulates audience contributions over time, rather than being fixed.

Additionally, the use of alternative materials to represent botanical specimens aligns with the way I want to explore the intersection of digital and physical archives—how do digital objects (such as NFTs) function as archival markers of artistic practice?

Bridging These Insights with My Curatorial Approach

The exhibition left me reflecting on how natural systems provide a compelling model for digital, decentralized curation. Some key takeaways for my project:

1. The Archive as a Growing Organism

  • Hayward’s herbarium was a dynamic archival practice—it documented, categorized, and evolved.
  • This is precisely what blockchain technology enables in Fluid Curating: an exhibition that records curatorial decisions over time, allowing for an expanding, decentralized archive.
  • I plan to further explore “Living Archives” (Färber, 2007) and how new media artists are using dynamic data-driven archives to rethink preservation and authorship.

2. Intuitive, Tactile Participation in Digital Curating

  • The touch-responsive plants in CORPSE FLOWER reminded me that interactivity should feel natural and rewarding.
  • Instead of making audience engagement a purely gamified voting process, I want to design AI-curated elements that respond meaningfully to audience actions—perhaps an exhibition layout that shifts in real time based on interaction metrics.
  • Exploring Claire Bishop’s (2012) work on participatory art can help clarify the power dynamics at play in audience-driven curation.

3. Temporality as a Curatorial Strategy

  • The Corpse Flower’s one-day bloom and the fleeting nature of the exhibition resonated with digital culture—where NFTs, algorithmic art, and blockchain transactions create moments of scarcity and ephemerality.
  • How might I introduce time-sensitive elements into my exhibition? Could digital works evolve, decay, or disappear over time based on market trends or audience interactions?
  • I plan to research Hito Steyerl’s (2017) writings on the “duty-free art” economy—how digital art exists in flux, between presence and absence.

 Next Steps: Integrating These Learnings into Fluid Curating

1. Refining the “Living Archive” Framework

Reviewing case studies of AI-driven curation, particularly in NFT and digital museum settings.
Mapping how blockchain could structure a decentralized exhibition history—should audience votes be permanent, or should the system allow for reversible decisions?

2. Experimenting with Interaction & Participation

Developing an interface that reacts dynamically—perhaps using algorithmic clustering to visualize shifting audience preferences over time.
Researching the balance between curator-led vision and decentralized audience influence.

3. Implementing Temporality & Scarcity into the Exhibition Model

Exploring whether certain exhibition phases could be time-sensitive, requiring participation within specific windows.
Investigating how NFTs could function as time-based contracts, altering their appearance or metadata as the exhibition progresses.

 Final Reflections: Curating as an Evolving Ecosystem

Experiencing CORPSE FLOWER reinforced my belief that curating should be an ongoing, adaptive process rather than a static event. The show’s reflection on impermanence, ecological cycles, and audience interaction pushed me to think deeper about how my own exhibition should:

Evolve dynamically over time—shaped by audiences, AI, and external forces.
Encourage intuitive participation—making audience engagement feel organic rather than imposed.
Challenge the limits of authorship—exploring how power, control, and decision-making shift in decentralized curatorial models.

Fluid Curating is becoming clearer in my mind—not just as an exhibition format, but as a way of rethinking how art is displayed, archived, and experienced in an ever-changing digital world. 🌊💡

📚 References & Further Reading

  1. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Verso, 2012.
  2. Färber, Alexa. Exhibition Experiments. Blackwell, 2007.
  3. Martinon, Jean-Paul. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. Bloomsbury, 2013.
  4. Rugg, Judith & Sedgwick, Michele. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Intellect, 2007.
  5. Steyerl, Hito. Duty-Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. Verso, 2017.

 

💬 What do you think about shifting authorship in curation? Should exhibitions be fixed, or fluid? Let’s discuss in the comments! 💭

W5&W6-Reflecting on My Curatorial Presentation & Next Steps 🚀

By

On 4 March 2025

In ✨ Individual Curatorial Project: Fluid Curating, 📚 Curatorial Theory & Literature Reflection, 🤝 Collective Practice: 11:11 Collective

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of ideas, refining concepts, and pushing my curatorial project, “Fluid Curating: Experimenting with Decentralized Art Ecologies and Archiving,” further. Last week, I finally presented my work to my peers and tutors, and it was a moment of clarity—exciting, challenging, and full of insights.

In this blog, I want to take a step back and reflect on what I presented, the feedback I received, and what’s next as I shape this project into something tangible.

🎤 Presenting “Fluid Curating”

My presentation centered on the idea that traditional exhibitions are too static—curators decide everything in advance, and audiences passively consume what’s on display. But what if exhibitions were fluid? What if they could evolve based on audience interaction, real-time AI insights, and blockchain participation?

💡 The core of Fluid Curating is:
✅ Decentralized decision-making – Artists, audiences, and algorithms all contribute.
✅ Dynamic exhibitions – Layouts, text, and artworks shift in real-time.
✅ Transparent archiving – Every change is recorded on the blockchain, creating an evolving, living archive.

A big question I posed in my presentation was:

“If an exhibition is always changing, how do we keep it conceptually coherent?”

This made me rethink the role of curatorial anchors—fixed thematic points that structure the exhibition, even as other elements change. Using AI-driven thematic mapping could be one way to ensure coherence while allowing flexibility.

📣 Feedback & Key Insights

Getting feedback from my peers and tutors was incredibly valuable. They challenged me to refine my approach, think about real-world implementation, and sharpen my project’s focus.

1️⃣ Could “Fluid Curating” work as a hybrid online-offline model?

💡 Insight: Instead of just being a physical exhibition, could there be a digital platform where people interact with the curation remotely?

📌 Next Steps:
✔ Look into NFT exhibitions like MOCA Amsterdam 2023 for hybrid models.

2️⃣ Who controls the curatorial decisions?

💡 Insight: If everything is audience-driven, does the curator still have a role? Some feedback suggested that full decentralization might weaken curatorial structure.

📌 Next Steps:
✔ Research other exhibitions that balance participatory curation with curatorial guidance.

3️⃣ How does the tech actually work?

💡 Insight: My project relies on interactive screens, AI-generated text, and blockchain voting—but how will people engage with these tools? The feedback highlighted the need for clearer descriptions of how the audience physically interacts with the exhibition.

📌 Next Steps:
✔ Identify the exact tech requirements (touchscreens, projection mapping, AR integration).
✔ Study existing interactive exhibition interfaces for reference.

4️⃣ Making the presentation more visual

💡 Insight: The feedback suggested adding more sketches, diagrams, and visual prototypes to help people understand how Fluid Curating functions in real time.

📌 Next Steps:
✔ Design mockups of the exhibition space showing audience interaction.
✔ Create data visualizations that illustrate how AI and blockchain influence the curation process.

🏛️ Fact Liverpool: Bringing the Project to a Real Space

One major takeaway from the feedback was the importance of site-specific testing. Since I’m considering FACT Liverpool as the exhibition venue, I need to visit and evaluate:

✅ Can their digital infrastructure support interactive tech?
✅ How does their audience engage with new media exhibitions?
✅ Is their space flexible enough for a constantly evolving exhibition model?

📌 Next Steps:
✔ Plan a site visit to FACT Liverpool and assess feasibility.
✔ Look at previous interactive exhibitions hosted at FACT for inspiration.

W4-11:11 | The Curatorial Lucky Signal ✨

By

On 9 February 2025

In 💬 Peer Exchange & Curatorial Dialogue, 🤝 Collective Practice: 11:11 Collective

💡 This week’s key words: Co-creation, decentralization, curatorial responsibility

🌱 Curatorial team Progress: lucky number 11:11

This week, our curatorial group finally has an official name—11:11 ✨! The inspiration for this name came from one of my personal quirks—I always see 11:11 as a lucky moment. When I realized that our group had exactly 11 members, the name just felt right!
Why 11:11?
In the occult, 11:11 is known as an angelic number, symbolizing good luck, inspiration, and guidance.
The name reflects our vision for curating—we want to create an open, positive, and collaborative atmosphere, where everyone’s ideas can shine and contribute to something greater.
Curating is not just about exhibitions, it is about co-creation between people, and our group itself is an experimental space for collective growth.
My friend Yiran Gu and I both felt it was a great idea, so we brought it up to the group! 🎉
In addition, I helped further refine the group’s Mission Statement, which I proposed:
“Curating for the Future”
Curation is responsibility. From material selection to energy consumption, we integrate Sustainability into our curatorial practices, ensuring that our exhibitions are not only conceptually forward-looking, but also operationally consistent with environmental justice principles.

🚀 Personal curatorial project progress:

In terms of personal curatorial projects, I continue the vision of last week and continue to promote the research of Decentralized Curation. The focus of this week is to make my curatorial ideas more specific, gradually from concept to practice! 💡
🔍 What’s Next?
1️⃣ Deepen research on curatorial models based on blockchain
This week’s reading of Rugg & Sedgwick’s (2007) Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, which explores how curatorial power structures affect audience experience, got me thinking further:
Does decentralized curation really empower the audience, or is it just a “democratizing” strategy for curators?
At the same time, I’m looking at the case of the Zien Foundation, which uses the NFT to let the audience vote directly on the content of the exhibition, rather than the curators alone. This model is enlightening, but it also makes me wonder if “co-curating” is really fair. Or will it be dominated by economic capital?
2️⃣ Outline the exhibition layout & interactive tools
This week, I started thinking about how to make the audience really become part of the exhibition.
How can technology improve interaction? I studied Refik Anadol’s AI-generated curatorial experiment and wondered if AI could be a “digital curator” to help visitors generate a personalized exhibition experience.
How does NFT fit into the exhibition? I hope that every decision of the exhibition can be recorded on the blockchain, forming a “Living Archive”, so that curation is no longer static, but a process of continuous evolution.

🖼 Exhibition visit: Glasgow Kendall Koppe Gallery

This week I went to Glasgow to see The sun and the sun’s reflection at Kendall Koppe Gallery.
Rather than the exhibition itself, I am more interested in how it presents time, memory and longing. The exhibition raises an intriguing question:
Is memory a comfort or a constraint?
Is our obsession with the past an attempt to find ourselves, or an escape from reality?
The exhibition made me think about the other side of Archival Curation – curation is often the reproduction of history and memory, but if we have been immersed in memories, will we miss new possibilities? It also made me reflect:
Can my concept of “fluid curation” make the exhibition free from the “burden of the past” and become a space that is always evolving? 🤯

📌 Key Focus for Next Week

1.Continue to deepen the research on decentralized curation, especially the interactive model co-created by NFT and the audience.
2.Design interactive aspects of the exhibition, such as allowing the audience to vote on the content of the exhibition.
3.Explore the role of AI in curating and test the curatorial relationship between curator, audience and AI.

Bibliography

  1. Rosen, Aaron. 2021. “The Impact of NFTs on the Art Market: A Decentralized Approach.” Art Market Journal 15 (2): 45–58.
  2. Smith, John, and Emily Johnson. 2022. “Decentralized Curation: How Blockchain is Transforming Art Exhibitions.” Journal of Digital Art Economies 4 (1): 29–52.
  3. Thompson, Sarah. 2023. “NFTs and the Democratization of Art Ownership.” Cultural Policy Review 12 (3): 112–117.
  4. Williams, Mark, and Laura Stevens. 2024. “Challenges and Opportunities in Decentralized Art Curation.” On Curating 56: 78–95.
  5. Brown, David. 2025. “Top Auction Houses Courted the Crypto Crew — Is It Enough to Save Them?” Financial Times, January 22, 2025.
cover

W3-Rethinking My Curatorial Project: From Symbolic Power to Decentralized Ecologies

By

On 3 February 2025

In ✨ Individual Curatorial Project: Fluid Curating, 📚 Curatorial Theory & Literature Reflection

🎨 Introduction: A Shift in Perspective

 

Over the past week, my curatorial approach has gone through a major transformation. Initially, my project was an extension of last semester’s research, focusing on value construction and symbolic power in the art market 🎭, particularly how auctions shape the perception of cultural value. This was a familiar territory for me, something I had explored during my time at Sotheby’s.

But after diving into this week’s readings 📚—especially on archival studies, decentralization, and participatory curation—I started to realize: my curatorial approach could be bolder, more open, and more experimental.

I found myself increasingly drawn to decentralized curation and the NFT market 🔗💡—especially how they challenge the traditional role of curators and redefine audience participation. This realization pushed me out of my comfort zone , but it also led me to a more dynamic, experimental direction that better connects with my background in the art market. So, I decided to shift my curatorial framework and develop “Fluid Curating: Experimenting with Decentralized Art Ecologies and Archiving” .

 

 

💡 What Changed My Thinking?

Throughout my readings, a few key texts and ideas significantly influenced my thought process:

1️⃣ Curation is a Dynamic Process, Not a Static Product

Reading The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating by Jean-Paul Martinon (2013) really struck a chord with me. I was particularly drawn to his idea that curating is not just about putting works of art together, but a constantly changing, continuous process of generation. This got me thinking, why can’t the exhibition be more “fluid”? Could it be a space shaped by multiple forces, rather than a framework decided unilaterally by the curators? 🤔

2️⃣ Curation as a “Living Archive” Instead of a Static Record

In Living Archives (Färber, 2007), I saw a new way of curating – that archives could not only be static records but also evolving active ecology. It dawned on me that curation could actually become an open “archival system” in which audiences, artists, and even AI could contribute to its evolution.🏛️➡️💻

3️⃣ NFTs and the Decentralization of Curatorial Power

I used to think of NFTs mainly as digital collectibles, but after reading Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Rugg & Sedgwick, 2007), I began to think: Can NFT be a curatorial tool? If the way artworks are displayed can be recorded via blockchain, then the exhibition itself becomes a transparent, traceable process, giving the audience greater decision-making power.🤯

4️⃣ The Potential of AI in Curating

Refik Anadol’s work and Algorithmic Curation (Golding, 2011) made me rethink AI’s role in exhibitions. AI can analyze market trends, generate curatorial texts, recommend artworks, and even predict future artistic movements 🔮. What does that mean for curators? Could AI become a co-curator rather than just a tool?

 

“Fluid Curation” : My new curatorial concept

“Curating on the Move: Experiments and Archives in Decentralized Art Ecology” is an experiment in future curatorial approaches. This project combines the NFT art market, AI curatorial models and audience co-curation to create an exhibition model that is not restricted by traditional institutions. Its key features include:
🔹 Living archival curation
Every curatorial decision will be recorded on the blockchain, resulting in an open and transparent curatorial history.
The exhibition will not be fixed, but will evolve with the contributions of the artist and the audience.
🔹 Audience as co-curators
Viewers can vote on which works are shown or removed.
Interactive installations allow visitors to generate curatorial texts either on-site or online.
🔹 AI combined with NFT market
AI analyzes NFT market trends and predicts future art genres.
Exhibition works circulate directly on the NFT market, making the exhibition not only a display space, but also a trading space.
🔹 Experimental market curation
Viewers and collectors can trade art directly through smart contracts.
Set up a real-time bidding system to test how the market influences curatorial decisions.

 

🚀 Next Steps: Making This Vision a Reality

🔍 What’s next?

1️⃣ Deepening my research on blockchain-based curatorial models to refine the decentralization aspects.

2️⃣ Sketching out exhibition layouts and interactive tools to create an immersive experience.(leveraging technology partnerships for implementation 🤝💡)

3️⃣ Sharing my ideas in group discussions to explore potential challenges and refine my approach.

 

✨ Final Thoughts:

The process of writing this blog has made me more clear about my curatorial direction. I hope my project is an exploration of future curatorial possibilities. Through NFT, AI and audience co-curation, I wanted to see: How can curators work in a more decentralized curatorial model? How does the dynamic nature of the art market fit into the exhibition?

📌 What are your thoughts on decentralized curation? Feel free to discuss in the comments! 💬

 

 

📖 References

Brown, Stephen, and A. Patterson. 2007. Imagining Marketing Art, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde. Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury.

Färber, Alexa. 2007. “Exhibiting ‘Science’ in the Public Realm.” In Exhibition Experiments, edited by Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald, 211–232. Blackwell Publishing.

Golding, Johnny. 2011. “Fractal Philosophy (And the Small Matter of Learning How to Listen): Attunement as the Task of Art.” In Deleuze and Contemporary Art, edited by Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn, 37-72. Edinburgh University Press.

Martinon, Jean-Paul. 2013. The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. Bloomsbury Academic.

Rugg, Judith, and Michele Sedgwick. 2007. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Intellect.

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