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.
