Through my pre-class reading, Building a User-Generated Museum: A Conversation with Alistair Hudson, I further refined the theoretical foundation of my exhibition. My exhibition is intended to serve oppressed groups—residents of peripheral communities, sexual minorities, people with disabilities, and ethnic minorities—rather than the art market controlled by a select few[1]. I will reallocate power and direct funds toward artists and communities in peripheral regions[2]. The products I design and sell are not intended to serve the cultural capital of the art market; instead, I will discuss with the artists who provide the patterns how to donate the funds earned from these products to peripheral regions. Since sources of income have a variety of impacts, including strengthening public programs, I have chosen to sell these products so that the profits can be used to expand future public programs. My exhibition is not merely a single event, but rather a tool for an ongoing strategy that incorporates various public programs[3]. Naturally, this expansion might involve broadening the scope of the online accessibility platform, such as creating a website for fundraising and promotion.
My exhibition should not be targeted at a single group of collectors[4]. Consequently, the artworks I have selected are printed copies of digital works, including design drafts and 3D model renderings provided by artists who have recently graduated from the ECA. These works explore narratives surrounding peripheral communities, with the aim of engaging with these areas and offering solutions—rather than entering the art market to become mere decorative items in collectors’ homes.
As for why I chose to hold my exhibition in Edinburgh rather than in the rural area where the development is needed, I referenced the Middlesbrough case study mentioned in Building a User-Generated Museum: A Conversation with Alistair Hudson[5]. For this reason, I did not choose to hold the exhibition in peripheral areas with difficult socioeconomic conditions, or in places where contemporary art is not understood or accepted[6].
As mentioned in the lecture slides, the article by Mick Wilson and Paul O’Neill states: “Curating also serves as a site of resistance, contesting dominant neoliberal narratives of individualism and market-driven culture in favor of public engagement.” Therefore, I will incorporate public programs into my exhibition, which focuses on the urbanization of rural areas and explores solutions to rural issues. My workshop focuses on the concept of “home” within the hearts of international students and immigrants, while my online accessible platform public project supports participation for all.
The second public program called “Create Your Tiny Village”. I will invite Kefan Zhang, a student in the ECA CAP program, to lead a handmade workshop at the Summer Hall Sciennes Gallery on the first day of the exhibition—August 15—from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. We will invite visitors to design a model of the countryside that leaves the strongest impression. This model can be a sketch or a handmade object.
[1] Alistair Hudson, Building a User-Generated Museum: A Conversation with Alistair Hudson, openDemocracy, 5 May 2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/building-user-generated-museum-conversation-with-alistair-hudson/ (accessed 30 March 2026). So I've been interested in that trajectory within the history of art, which is not the one we're told – which has been defined by the market and by capital – and we should instead reclaim art as a much more all-encompassing, ordinary activity for everybody, rather than something for the elites or the 1% or for those that have, as opposed to those that don't. [2] Alistair Hudson, Building a User-Generated Museum. So the ambition – and this is why I talk about ‘usership’ and the useful museum – is that you create an institution that is created by and through its usership, so that the content and the function is increasingly less determined by those in power, but rather you redistribute authorship, you redistribute power, to make the institution the true manifestation of its community. [3] Alistair Hudson, Building a User-Generated Museum. throughout the show we developed a programme of what we call 'community days' where everybody came together to the museum, to reinforce their status and identity on equal terms. Always the ambition was that this would not be a singular exhibition but a tool in developing this as a continual strategy as we went along. So every Thursday we have a community day for these groups: a free lunch, a whole day of activities, these groups are developing our garden as a community garden, and we're running English classes, craft and design and technology workshops. [4] Alistair Hudson, Building a User-Generated Museum. And with the idea that we should not tell the story as singular curators, but we should open up the narrative to the communities around us – so we basically did an open call and in effect crowd-sourced the exhibition. It was this mayhem of artworks suggested and contributed by people, artists, non-artists and archives from the environment around us. [5] Alistair Hudson, Building a User-Generated Museum. Middlesbrough is in the north-east of England. It's what you might call a post-industrial town. It was a small farm, and then they discovered iron ore and coal in around 1830 and then it just exploded like an American frontier town. So it's a town of migrants by origin, and has been reliant essentially on the iron and steel industry, which has been in decline since post-war. And as a consequence of that, it's always been a place which has had difficult socio-economic circumstances, and now it's probably in a position where it comes top of the table in most surveys of places in Britain in terms of disenfranchised communities, and high indices of deprivation. And then the steel works closing the year before last, from a psychological point of view, is almost the end of the very reason the town exists. So historically it has been a troubled place, but it has huge potential and lots of positives. But it naturally makes it a place where there are a lot of intense versions of all the problems we see in British post-industrial, post-colonial society. So it's not one that's necessarily receptive to the idea of an art gallery. [6] Alistair Hudson, Building a User-Generated Museum. You had that 'Bilbao effect' and everything that's required in order to drive yourself forward in a precarious economy, and I guess at the beginning it sort of worked, and had a splash. But it's always had resistance from all the usual things like, you know, 'we don't need an art gallery, we need schools and hospitals', 'we don't need contemporary art, we don't understand it, it's not for us, why would we be interested in it' – all those kinds of dialogues.
