My Peer Review of June Tang
Thank you for sharing your ongoing reflections and developments in your blog. Your commitment to exploring socially engaged art through site-specific interventions, especially addressing urban marginalization in China, is both compelling and meaningful.
Your blog thoroughly documents your evolving thought processes and clearly shows how you connect theoretical ideas with practical considerations. I found your analyses of Qiu Zhijie’s “Writing Project” and Renzo Martens’ “White Cube” particularly insightful, demonstrating your ability to critically engage with complex projects and extract useful strategies for your own curation. Additionally, your comparative reflection on exhibition spaces visited during our Glasgow field trip highlights your capacity for critical spatial and contextual thinking, which strengthens your overall curatorial framework.
Reflecting on our recent discussion at Summerhall, we collectively suggested that your project could benefit significantly from a more detailed practical framework. For example, clarifying the selection criteria for collaborating artists (e.g., specific skills, local ties, or social engagement experience) would enhance both the project’s credibility and feasibility. Furthermore, we recommend articulating more explicitly the mechanisms you intend to use for community participation. How exactly will local high school students and art students collaborate? Providing concrete steps for facilitating meaningful exchanges would greatly enrich your project’s participatory dimension.
Moreover, we highlighted during our conversation that focusing your project around a specific, manageable point—such as the ancestral hall “handshaking floor”—is an excellent strategy. This approach helps you maintain a clearly defined scope and realistic budget. Considering governmental or educational institutional support, as discussed, would also improve your project’s viability.Lastly, our Summerhall discussion underscored the importance of clearly identifying your target audience. Clarifying this will help ensure that your exhibition effectively reaches and engages the community you aim to support and inspire.
Personally, upon reading your blog, I believe your project would benefit significantly from stronger narrative cohesion. At present, your reflections offer valuable insights but occasionally feel fragmented. I suggest clearly connecting your weekly reflections and theoretical insights back to your core project aims—integrating art into everyday life and addressing social marginalization. By consistently grounding your discussions in your overarching research question or curatorial goals, your blog will communicate a stronger, more cohesive narrative, allowing your audience to fully grasp the project’s importance, urgency, and relevance.
In addition, I’d like to offer some specific suggestions that might further enrich your project. For practical examples of participatory and socially engaged art in China, you might find inspiration from the Handshake 302 Art Space in Shenzhen, which emphasizes local community collaboration in urban villages. Considering your focus on cultural identity and social marginalization, Claire Bishop’s book “Artificial Hells” could provide valuable theoretical insights on participatory practices. You could also explore websites such as Creative Time or Artangel, both well-known for innovative public art projects that effectively integrate local narratives and community voices. From another angle, you might consider utilizing multimedia elements, like short videos or recorded interviews, to document the community’s response and interaction, adding depth and authenticity to your exhibition.
Overall, your curatorial project holds great potential and displays clear critical engagement with socially relevant issues. By implementing the practical recommendations we collectively identified at Summerhall and enhancing the narrative cohesion within your blog as I’ve suggested, your work can achieve a deeper impact and clarity. Keep up the excellent effort—I am excited to follow your continued progress!
You are continuing to use your blog consistently and since the last round of feedback have written posts reflecting on Digging in Another Time at the Hunterian, collective working at Summerhall, and recent rethinking of your exhibition focus based on feedback from peers and myself as your tutor.
I think you’ve made some useful changes to your project focus and there is now a clear connection between one of your focuses – on the relevance of art education/training in the context of AI – and one of your proposed target audiences – art students. In our recent tutorial, we also spoke of the potential connection between ECA as a site and Joseph Beuys, who participated in the Strategy: Get Arts exhibition that took place at ECA in 1970.
However, as also briefly discussed in our tutorial, it is important that you engage more fully and more critically with Joseph Beuys’ statement “Everyone is an artist” to ensure that this is a useful reference for your exhibition. For Beuys, this idea was not simply that everyone could be an artist in the traditional sense of the word, but was specifically connected to his ideas around social transformation and the role that everyone can play in this through creative and cooperative approaches.
Whilst your recent blog posts do show evidence of the ongoing development of your own project, there is still very limited engagement with curatorial methods and theories relevant to your project in your blog at present. The learning outcomes for the course (and which are the criteria against which your work is assessed) specifically require that you research and engage with curatorial theories and methods, locating your own practice in relation to the expanded field of curatorial theory and practice and this is something to address before submission.
For example, what other projects have looked at AI and art? Reflecting on similar projects and the curatorial approaches of these would help to locate your approach in relation to the wider field of contemporary curatorial practice. If you look back though our chat on Teams, I’ve also shared links to a range of theoretical resources on related subjects.
Johanna Zylinska’s AI art: machine visions and warped dreams may be a relevant theoretical text on AI art. This can be accessed online through the university library. Zylinska, Joanna. AI Art : Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. London: Open Humanities Press, 2020. (
Your post on Digging in Another Time shows a reflective engagement with this exhibition, detailing questions around curatorial practice that this exhibition raised for you and key ways in which your learning from this visit is shaping your thinking around your own curatorial project proposal. This post does ignore some key elements of the exhibition’s curation – in particular, the fact that alongside Jarman’s work, the exhibition presents work by contemporary artists commissioned in response to the work of Jarman. Whilst you can absolutely focus in on particular aspects, I’d encourage you to ensure that when you write about exhibitions/projects, you make sure they are clearly introduced.
Another thing to be mindful of is the difference between artistic practice and curatorial practice. In this blog post you write that “Jarman’s work suggests that art and curation can be powerful tools for political engagement and social commentary.” However, Jarman’s work does not speak to what curation can do as his is an artistic practice.