Further adjustments and reflections on the selection of artists
In the second round of blog feedback, Tutor pointed out that there were obvious problems with the artworks I initially selected: not only did the overall budget exceed the practical scope, but some works, such as those from the Tate collection, obviously did not conform to the curatorial direction of our project, which emphasized supporting emerging artists. This feedback prompted me to rethink: in curatorial practice, the selection of artists and works is not only about the fit of the theme, but also involves multiple dimensions such as resource conditions, curatorial ethics and curatorial positioning.
Fortunately, Tutor recommended several platforms that specialize in collecting emerging artists for us at this stage. These resources broadened my horizons at once and made me realize that curating is not only about finding existing answers, but also about actively exploring and discovering potential. With this idea in mind, I began to pay attention to young artists who had just graduated from undergraduate or graduate programs, as well as some non-mainstream creators practicing outside the art system.
After re-screening and matching, combined with budget constraints and the overall narrative structure of the exhibition, I decided to make major adjustments to the list of artists. In the end, I only kept Martha Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen” among the originally selected works. This work still maintains a high degree of fit with my exhibition theme in its cross-critique of women’s labor, family space, and symbolic language.
At the same time, I added works by three emerging artists: Ying Xiong’s installation work “Trace Declaration” explores the intertwined traces of family and identity in everyday objects in a subtle way; Sarah Buckius’s “Hidden Mothers: Enactment of Emotional Labor” reveals the invisible burden of emotional labor in the form of body performance; Christine Mitchell Adams’s “I am your doll” transforms the intimate space of the bedroom into a field of resistance and voice through the criticism of “women as objects”.
This adjustment made me realize that curating is not only about presenting works with existing power, but also about discovering, supporting, and amplifying marginal and emerging voices. If the previous choices tended to rely more on the authority of well-known works, now I hope to inject more openness, experimentation, and contemporary urgency into the exhibition by introducing more perspectives of emerging artists.
