Month: April 2025
29 Dreaming Artists Collective
Due to the constraints of the exhibition budget, this exhibition could not select some very famous art works as exhibits, so I decided to focus on the selection of exhibits on whether the works can resonate with the audience. I need these works to create a space between reality and illusion for the audience, so that the audience can step into the flow of dreams that cannot be fully interpreted when entering the exhibition. I set three criteria for selection around this goal. First, the theme of the work should be related to dreams, subconscious, memory, etc. Second, the form of the work should be immersive and interactive, which can bring sensory stimulation to the audience to enhance the sense of experience. Third, the artistic language of the work should be open, which can allow multiple interpretations from different perspectives.
In addition, I tend to choose the works of emerging artists, not only because of the constraints of exhibition budget, new artists often have more freedom of expression and more experimental creative language, and are more closely linked to the local youth cultural community, which can enhance the location of the exhibition.
The following is my exhibit list:
Hotbed’s Alibi, Jie Xie, 2024
Variable size
crib, acrylic, monitoring equipment, display, carpet
“For childhood memory loss, it may be trauma caused by not receiving a positive response to a strong psychological need, and these traumas do not disappear, but appear in more subtle ways, such as nightmares, automatic fantasies, memories actively creating false and true confusion, invasive images, or sudden flashes of memory fragments.” Sometimes it can occur in more dangerous ways, such as repetitive compulsion, where you recreate the traumatic experience you had as a child and repeat the same traumatic patterns. I want to reconnect and pay attention to everyone’s inner child, to confront the trauma, missing or unmet needs, beliefs and patterns of behavior that may have existed during childhood, rather than avoid and fear the trauma and memory loss.” (Jie Xie, 2024)
The scene of the virtual dreamscape, Haoyang Chen, 2024
Variable size
video
“Nostalgia is a uniquely human emotion that can bring us comfort and insight. I create a virtual dream filled with Chinese nostalgia, a space that is both connected to the past and full of infinite possibilities, so that young people can reconnect with the past, rekindle their expectations for life, regain their longing for the future, and face the present life with a hopeful attitude. Continue the expectations and imagination of contemporary youth for the future. In this virtual world, I want them to feel familiar and free. You can temporarily get rid of the shackles of the real world, find inner peace and freedom, and pursue the life you really want in the future.” (Haying Chen, 2024)
Alice, Jieyu Tan, 2021
Variable size
video equipment, ha ha lenses, dirt, turf
“Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” as a mental illness in childhood, from the beginning of the name to reveal its symptoms. The main material of this installation work is Ha-ha lens. When the viewer is in it, the distorted sense presented by the mirror reflects the pressure, distortion and alienation of the contemporary people. At the foot of the installation, there is a soft lawn, and the rabbit hole is in the center, just like “Wonderland” as a dream woven by Alice’s patient. To escape all the discomfort of real life. The sensory experience brought by the whole space atmosphere of the work is unreal, and it is a metaphor for the contradictions and struggles between illusion and reality, reality and ideal, distortion and calm, pressure and escape of contemporary people. (Tan Jieyu, 2021)
Good Night, Ziyue Jin, 2024
90cm*180cm*120cm
glass, resin, bed frame, cotton, curtains
“Due to the somatization reaction of severe depression, I can spend 24 hours a day lying in bed, which seems to have become an important organ of my body. What is more magical is that the plots in my dreams can be connected like TV dramas, and the places in my dreams can also be spelled into a complete map, as if the existence of a different world. In the dream, there are two kinds of fish, the good fish can walk freely in the sky, and the bad fish will be locked in the cage, which will make me afraid. Due to severe autism and anxiety, fewer and fewer friends kept in touch with me, and the waking time was painful for me. I began to look forward to dreaming every night. Many warm and luminous fish were my good friends.” (Ziyue Jin, 2024)
28 source of funds part 2
Support program for young curators of Guangdong Provincial Art Museum
link：https://whly.gd.gov.cn/gkmlpt/content/4/4518/post_4518599.html#2630
（*Guangzhou serves as the provincial capital of Guangdong, a bit like how Edinburgh functions within Scotland. That is why I will further search for resources available in Guangdong Province.）
I also searched for available funds in Guangdong Art Museum Association and finally found this “Guangdong Art Museum Young Curators Support Program”. This fund is jointly organized by the Guangdong Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, the Guangdong Provincial Art Museum Association and the Guangdong Art Museum, and the province’s state-owned and private art museums can recommend curators to apply for exhibitions in the museum. Another Art Museum where I have a personal curatorial project fits that bill. Secondly, the declaration of this fund requires a complete exhibition planning plan, and the exhibition must be independently planned by the applicant. My personal curatorial project has already had a complete curatorial plan and was completed by myself independently, which meets this standard. Finally, Another Art Museum can provide the guarantee of the site and hardware facilities to ensure that my personal curatorial project can be implemented in the museum as planned, which meets the condition of applying for funds that “the applicant should fully demonstrate the rationality and feasibility of the exhibition planning scheme submitted by the applicant and promise that the exhibition can be implemented in the museum as planned”.
Based on previous years, my personal curatorial project was able to receive about £10k from this grant.
27 Source of funds part 1
After the exhibition planning is basically complete, I need to start to consider some objective conditions that will affect the exhibition, such as available funds. I plan to find available funds as much as possible, and then further refine the exhibition according to the combination of funds. With this as a starting point, I started a search for funding programs for exhibitions in China. Below are a few of the funding schemes eligible for my personal curatorial project.
Guangzhou special fund for the development of culture and tourism industry
link：http://wglj.gz.gov.cn/gkmlpt/content/9/9725/post_9725881.html#886 （This is last year’s rule announcement, this year’s funding application has not yet started, so there is no rule announcement.)
Since my exhibition is held in Guangzhou, I first thought of looking for resources on the websites of relevant government departments in Guangzhou. I think my personal curatorial project meets the requirements for the application of this fund. First of all, it is clearly mentioned in the relevant rules of this fund that the project to declare the fund must be “a cultural and artistic project with public benefit attributes and open to the public.” My personal curatorial project takes dreams and subconscious as the theme, and I plan to let the audience experience the journey of individual subconscious mind in dreams through art works, multimedia installations and other forms. Meanwhile, I will hold two artistic creation workshops in the exhibition hall during the exhibition period, which is highly consistent with the “cultural benefits for the people” emphasized in the policy. Secondly, my personal curatorial project has initially built an execution system: The venue will cooperate with Another Art Museum in Guangzhou. The Art museum team will provide part of the necessary technical equipment, and the venue will publicize the exhibition on various social media. The proposed budget plan of the exhibition strictly follows the “special funds for special purposes” in the fund application rules, and the core expenditure will be concentrated on the necessary links such as the transportation of works.
According to the funding criteria published on the website, the maximum amount of funding for a single project is no more than 1.5 million RMB (about £150k). According to the standards, my personal curatorial project belongs to the third category of municipal projects/innovative practice projects. The amount of money that similar emerging art exhibitions can get from this fund is 50,000-150,000 RMB (about £5K-15K), so I expect my exhibition to get about £5k from this fund.
26 Sleepwalker Archives Vol.4: ‘Objects of Reality’ — A Show & Tell Session
This event was Sleepwalkers’ last group event at summerhall. The activity plan starts from the objects around you and extends to a discussion about “real” and “fake” (the real and fake of the objects are completely subjective).
I brought a ticket from Linlithgow to Edinburgh and argued in the discussion that it was a “real” item while stating my reasons. First of all, the ticket is an actual entity that I can touch on paper. Secondly, the ticket is printed with the exact time, place, price and some specific conditions, these objective factors are real. The ticket was a proof that I had been to Linlithgow or Edinburgh, that I had boarded the train that day and gone from one place to another. In addition to its physical existence, the ticket is also a silent way of telling the story, in the form of a piece of paper, about the traces it has left in my life, the memory of my travel behind it, which is the “reality” of the memory level given to it by my behavior.
the train ticket
Among the items brought by others, the three glasses in different forms brought by Yubing Hu gave me a new inspiration. These three pairs of glasses are glasses with lenses, frames without lenses, and sunglasses. These three contrasting objects reflect the changing concept of “reality.” We wear glasses when we need a clearer view of the world. We wear sunglasses when we need to hide part of reality; As a decoration, frames can make an individual appear to be a “person wearing glasses.” This corresponds to the correction of reality, the filtering of reality and the camouflage of reality, and also makes me more aware of the diversity of “reality”, which is not only physical existence, but also subject to the influence of function, perception and social identity.
