Annie Xu

To Be Continued... is a group exhibition I curated in China at April 2017.

Introduction

This curatorial project is designed to lead the research from three different perspectives:

--- contemporary text art, which contains the philosophical contemporaneity, the literal textuality, and the contemporary thinking on art.

--- contemporary Chinese art, which contains the thinking of contemporaneity and textuality from younger generation artists.

--- contemporary thinking on curation in China, which contains the analyses on currents and context of exhibition making and how to be contemporary for both artists and curators today in China. This curation sought to ask the following questions:

(1) As a contemporary curator, how does the curatorial selection process the purpose of the curation?

(2) How to embody the discourse on contemporaneity and textuality by laying out the artworks?

(3) What new contemporaneity of contemporary Chinese art can be find out from this exhibition?

This curatorial project gathered together eleven artists (including myself) from UK and China, with different contexts on nationality, education background and overseas experiences.

Series of virtual reality (VR) text art works are the highlight of the exhibition. With VR devices (Oculus Rift) and software (Google Tilt Brush and Oculus Quill), these VR text artworks attempt to explore contemporaneity from the perspective of spatial dimensions and boundaries. Since above VR technologies only has been used in art from 2016, I have yet to find an example of VR text artwork that exhibited in China so far. From this aspect, our VR text artworks in this exhibition can be considered as early explorations of VR text art.

As a part of the exhibition, I held a round table discussion with professors on Chinese art and some artists from the exhibition. During which we discussed problems and interests on contemporary art practice and teaching art in higher education in China, as well as the prospect of contemporary Chinese art, especially contemporary Chinese text art. This meeting is important to my research because Chinese art students are the next generation of Chinese artists, their sight and understanding on contemporary art depend largely on their education in university, namely, depend largely on their teachers’ understanding on contemporary art.