Introduction
Endless Circulation is a speculative curatorial project that explores circular movement, repetition and return through installation, video, photography and participatory workshop practice. Rather than presenting circulation as a fixed symbol, the project gradually developed into an investigation of how spatial movement, artwork selection and audience participation can transform circularity into a curatorial experience.
This reflection examines the development of the project alongside my work within the Collective. I begin by reflecting on my shift from viewer to curator, before discussing how the formative Curatorial Pitch helped me refine the conceptual framework of Endless Circulation. I then consider spatial ambition and practical feasibility, followed by collective work and cultural translation. Finally, I reflect on peer review and identify the curatorial skills and professional questions I will carry forward.
From Viewer to Curator: A Shift in Perspective
One of the most significant shifts I experienced during this course was learning to look beyond artworks themselves and toward the spatial, structural and ethical decisions that shape how they are encountered. During fieldwork visits in Edinburgh, I began to distinguish between the artist’s practice and curatorial decision-making: the sequencing of works, wall space, lighting, interpretive text and the choreography of audience movement. This was a form of what Rogoff describes as “turning”, a movement away from passive reception and toward a critical awareness of how knowledge is produced within cultural contexts (Rogoff 2008). Rogoff’s point is not only that one changes position, but that one becomes conscious of the conditions that make seeing and knowing possible. For me, this idea helped name what was happening in my own learning process: I was no longer asking only whether I liked an artwork, but how the exhibition had taught me to look at it.
This shift was particularly important because, in my previous experience of exhibitions in China, the curator often appeared as an invisible figure. Their name was not always foregrounded, and audiences rarely discussed the decisions that structured their viewing experience. O’Neill describes the curator’s traditional role as a “behind-the-scenes organiser”, whose labour was often hidden behind the artwork and the institution (O’Neill 2012). He also argues that contemporary curating has increasingly repositioned the curator as a visible cultural producer who generates meaning through selection, arrangement and framing. This helped me understand that curatorial visibility is historically and culturally uneven. My own background confirmed that the older model of curatorial invisibility still persists in many contexts, while this course introduced me to curating as an independent creative and critical practice.
Through this process, I came to understand curating as the management of attention. Crary argues that attention in modern culture is actively structured and contested, rather than simply a natural act of looking (Crary 1999). This means that the way an audience looks is shaped by systems, technologies and cultural arrangements. In exhibition-making, the curator becomes one of the agents who organises this attention through route, lighting, rhythm and interpretation. This made me more aware of curatorial responsibility. Deciding who sees what, in what order, and under what conditions is not neutral. It is also an ethical and political act. This shift directly shaped Endless Circulation: I began to understand the circular route not as a visual motif, but as a way of organising attention, movement and responsibility within the exhibition.
Refining the Concept: From Ambition to Clarity
The formative Curatorial Pitch in Week 6 was a turning point for Endless Circulation. In the early stages, I attempted to build a broad theoretical framework around circulation, combining Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence with economic theories of repetitive capitalist movement. Although this felt intellectually ambitious, it made the project too heavy and unfocused. The feedback I received during and after the pitch made me realise that the concept was trying to do too much. The theoretical references were not strengthening the project; they were making the curatorial narrative harder to read.
This feedback prompted an important act of subtraction. I removed the economic framework and repositioned Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence as a conceptual prompt for the public workshop rather than as the main explanation of the whole exhibition. After this, the exhibition became clearer: it would guide visitors from physically circular forms toward more abstract experiences of repetition, return and daily cycles. O’Doherty argues that the gallery is never a neutral container, but a space with its own ideological and spatial logic (O’Doherty 1999). His argument made me realise that my problem was not only theoretical excess, but also a failure to respect the limits of what an exhibition space can hold. A curatorial project cannot simply carry every interesting idea. It has to shape ideas into an experience that audiences can physically and conceptually follow.
The workshop design changed in a similar way. My first idea, Circular Writing, asked participants to write in circular patterns. However, after attending several workshops in Edinburgh, I realised that this format was too dependent on literacy, confidence and conceptual understanding. It risked becoming a performance of intelligence rather than an accessible public programme. I therefore redesigned it as Mapping My Circles, a workshop in which participants collect, draw or photograph circular forms and repetitive patterns from everyday life. This lowered the threshold for participation while still connecting to the exhibition’s central theme.
Kester’s discussion of dialogical aesthetics was useful here. He argues that some forms of socially engaged art create meaning through conversation, duration and exchange, rather than through the immediate transmission of an artist’s or curator’s singular vision (Kester 2004). This does not mean removing structure completely; rather, it means designing a situation where participants can contribute their own knowledge and experience. I applied this to my workshop by shifting from asking participants to “understand” Nietzsche to inviting them to notice the cycles already present in their own lives. Looking back, the formative pitch was not simply a presentation. It taught me that curatorial practice is iterative, and that feedback can reveal when an idea is conceptually attractive but publicly or practically unworkable.
Spatial Testing: Curtains, Scale and Feasibility
The spatial design of Endless Circulation underwent the most significant transformation of any element in the project. From an early stage, I imagined a circular exhibition route formed by hanging curtain walls. Visitors would move from the outer edge inward, physically enacting the project’s theme of circulation. At first, I imagined a dense, immersive exhibition with around twenty artworks related to circles, loops and cycles. This felt exciting because the form of the exhibition seemed to match the concept directly. However, as the project developed, I realised that formal consistency is not the same as curatorial clarity.
The first major challenge came through the Collective Space work at In Vitro Gallery in Summerhall. Measuring and planning within that space made me aware of how strongly architecture limits curatorial imagination. Two central structural walls disrupted movement and made my ideal spiral layout impossible. O’Doherty’s argument about the white cube helped me understand this experience more critically. He suggests that the gallery presents itself as neutral, but actually imposes particular conditions of looking and meaning (O’Doherty 1999). In my case, this was not only an abstract ideological point. The physical infrastructure of the gallery, including walls, entrances and circulation routes, directly shaped what could and could not be curated. What I had imagined as a flowing spiral was interrupted by the material reality of the building.
I then researched alternative venues in Edinburgh and found that many affordable spaces contained columns, narrow entrances or fixed architectural interruptions. The ideal open gallery I had imagined was difficult to find. Klonk’s study of gallery interiors shows that exhibition spaces have historically been shaped by changing theories of perception, politics, commerce and display (Klonk 2009). Her argument helped me see that space is never only a practical issue. It carries histories of how audiences are expected to move, look and behave. My own search for a venue confirmed this. The space available to a curator is not simply a backdrop, but an active participant in the exhibition’s meaning-making.
Eventually, I selected Dundas Street Gallery as the most suitable speculative venue. Its proportions allowed a modified curtain structure, but the smaller scale forced me to reduce the number of artworks from twenty to six. Initially, this felt like a compromise, as if the project had become less ambitious. In reflection, however, it strengthened the proposal. Obrist suggests that curating depends on creating meaningful connections rather than simply accumulating works (Obrist 2014). This helped me rethink selection not as a loss, but as a curatorial method. With six works, each piece could breathe within the space, and the relationships between Bao Rong’s rotating installation, the looping video work, photography and smaller installations became more deliberate.
There are still unresolved practical questions, including whether the gallery’s hanging systems can support the curtain structure and how the scale of prints and video screens should be determined. However, these uncertainties do not weaken the proposal. They show that curatorial work is not the execution of a fixed vision, but a continuous process of testing, adjusting and making decisions within material constraints.
Collective Work and Cultural Translation
Working within the Collective was one of the most practically grounding parts of the course. The Collective Space was important because it allowed curatorial decisions to be tested materially rather than only discussed verbally: measurements, floorplans and graphic proposals made the limits of the exhibition visible. My roles included measuring the exhibition space, contributing to artist selection, discussing artwork placement, designing graphic materials and helping with exhibition text. These tasks developed my understanding of curating as collaborative labour rather than individual authorship. The course’s emphasis on the Collective also made me realise that curatorial practice is not only about having ideas, but about negotiating those ideas with other people, spaces and responsibilities.
The most important learning point for me was cultural translation. Our Collective developed a solo exhibition around San Zhang, a Chinese-heritage artist based in Scotland. One selected work, The Dreameater, refers to 兔儿神 (Tu Er Shen), a figure from Chinese folk religion and often connected with rabbit imagery. In a Scottish context, however, a rabbit can easily be read through the Easter Bunny or other local associations. Because Zhang’s painting style is contemporary and does not rely on stereotypical “Chinese” visual markers, this gap in interpretation became especially important.
This made me realise that exhibition text cannot simply describe content. It must mediate between the artwork’s references and the audience’s existing cultural assumptions. Bal argues that the exhibition is not merely a site for displaying objects, but a medium that constructs cultural experience through narrative, framing and interaction (Bal 2007). This means that interpretation is not secondary to the exhibition; it is part of how the exhibition works. In our Collective project, wall text and sequencing became curatorial tools for reducing misreading without over-explaining the work. My contribution to cultural translation therefore felt actively curatorial, not simply linguistic.
This experience directly influenced Endless Circulation. My own project includes artists from different cultural backgrounds, including Chinese and European practitioners. I became more aware that curatorial framing must consider not only what the work means in relation to the artist, but also how local audiences may interpret it. Collective work taught me that curating involves building routes of understanding between artists, artworks, space and publics.
Reflecting Through Peer Review
Reviewing Zhenwu Zhang’s blog from around Week 9 onward was not only an exercise in evaluation, but also a mirror for my own curatorial development. What struck me most was the clarity of his conceptual framework. His project, which investigated visibility through responsive lighting, followed a focused line from research question to spatial outcome. Each weekly post built on the previous one with a clear sense of development. His blog made the process visible, not only the final idea.
This made me recognise a weakness in my own process. My thinking often moved outward in many directions at once. I was drawn to multiple theories, references and possible artworks, but this sometimes produced overcomplication rather than depth. Understanding peer review as a professional curatorial skill rather than a student exercise, I became more capable of identifying where a project was clear, where it needed more explanation, and how a curatorial narrative develops over time.
The process also turned back onto my own blog. As a curator, it is easy to become absorbed in one’s own conceptual logic and lose sight of how the project appears to others. Reviewing another student’s work from the position of a fellow curator in the same Collective helped me practise an external critical eye. It encouraged me to simplify the framework of Endless Circulation and make the relationship between theme, works, space and workshop more legible. In this sense, peer review functioned not as a one-directional assessment, but as a reciprocal process of learning.
Conclusion
Endless Circulation began with my attraction to Pink Roundabout, a rotating pink installation that seemed to contain the visual and affective energy of circular movement. At the beginning of the course, I tried to expand this fascination into an ambitious exhibition of circular forms, philosophical references and immersive spatial design. Through the semester, however, the project became stronger by becoming smaller. I learned that curating is not the accumulation of ideas, artworks or references, but the careful organisation of relations between works, spaces, publics and practical conditions.
The most important lesson I take from this process is that constraint is not the opposite of creativity. Spatial limits, budgetary questions, audience accessibility, peer feedback and collective negotiation all forced the project to become more precise. In the future, I want to continue developing curatorial practice through this balance between research and production: using theory as a tool for shaping experience, while remaining attentive to the material, ethical and cultural conditions through which exhibitions are actually made. My strongest skills have emerged in visual communication, spatial thinking and cross-cultural mediation, and I hope to apply these in future exhibition-making contexts where curating is understood not simply as display, but as the organisation of attention, movement and understanding. The sentence I kept returning to was: “Do not trouble troubles until troubles trouble you.” At first, it calmed me when the project felt difficult. By the end, I understood it as a curatorial attitude: planning requires risk-awareness, but practice also requires the courage to move before every uncertainty is fully resolved.
References
Bal, Mieke. 2007. “Exhibition as Film.” In Exhibition Experiments, edited by Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu, 71–93. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kester, Grant H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Klonk, Charlotte. 2009. Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000. New Haven: Yale University Press.
O’Doherty, Brian. 1999. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press.
O’Neill, Paul. 2012. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Obrist, Hans Ulrich. 2014. Ways of Curating. London: Penguin Books.
Rogoff, Irit. 2008. “Turning.” e-flux Journal, no. 0. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/00/68470/turning/.
