Curatorial Culture
In the 9th issue of Curatography, titled “Curating Against Forgetting,” we have brought together a collection of works by artists and writers who utilize visual analysis to delve into exhibition histories, in order to explore the forgotten aspects of public memory. Our objective is to shed light on the processes through which specific epistemological boundaries are constructed and how cultural/historical amnesia takes shape. This project stems from a genuine interest in critical artistic research that has gained significant attention in recent years. Parallel to this trend, within the realm of curating, there has been a growing movement over the past decade involving numerous artist-curators actively engaging in dialogues with intellectual history. Alongside the pioneering influence of the Raqs Media Collective in the region of Asia, we have observed a significant increase in the curatorial exploration of intellectual historiography across various artistic, curatorial, and literary mediums since the 2010s. Artists such as Liu Ding, Park Chan-kyong, Ho Tzu Nyen, Jitish Kallat, Shubigi Rao, and many others have made valuable contributions to this ongoing endeavor.
In the historiography of exhibition making, there is a recurring pattern emerging that both celebrates, and therefore mythologizes, “artist-curators” as pioneering figures who shape curatorial visions. It may be worthwhile to subject these subsequent “artist-curator-intellectual historiographers” to an even more critically rigorous framework of exhibition history, warranting further scrutiny and examination in the future. However, it is important to note that this issue of Curatography does not aim to exhaust this vast subject within its limited spatial capacity. Instead, the editorial team provides a glimpse into these individual approaches in historicizing respective narratives and archival materials, thereby elucidating a distinctive style of artistic and critical analysis.
In his essay, “Icon and Network: Solidarity’s Mediums and a Materialist Internationalism,” written in the wake of the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic, artist Ho Rui An extends notions of viral transmission borrowed from epidemiology to the field of visual semiotics to distinguish between two distinct logics of international solidarity: iconic reproduction and the production of “materialist” networks. Ho further provides a close reading of Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), which traces the project’s leftist historiography and explores a turning point in the Non-Aligned Movement, from open internationalism to conservative nationalism. Adopting Mohaiemen’s temporal framework, Ho further explores the ideological shifts of the transformative 1970s, a period marked by the rise of global neoliberalism and the decline of emancipatory politics.
In addition to the aforementioned essays, we have extended an invitation to Chen Wan-Yin, a Taiwanese art critic based in the Netherlands, to provide her insightful response by delving into the discourses surrounding exhibition history that have piqued her interest in recent times. Inspired by an epistolary correspondence between artist Rasheed Araeen and cultural studies scholar Chen Kuan-hsing, which explores the intersection of art and leftwing politics, Chen Wan-Yin seizes upon this evocative exchange to delve into a critical reflection on the relationship between art, research, and their significance within the larger context of our journal’s focus on Asia. The untimely recollection of this nearly forgotten correspondence serves as a master signifier for the essay, stimulating an expansive speculation on the complexities inherent in this multivalent discourse.
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Author
Zian Chen works as contributing editor for Ocula. As a writer and researcher, he collaborates with artists to develop alternative frameworks for thinking and speculation. Together with artist Ho Rui An, they conducted a research residency in Duke Kunshan University (2023). He is one of the founding members of Pailang Museum of Settler Selves (2022–), an editor-in-residence for Compost in ICA NYU Shanghai (2021–2022), and one of the editors for Made in Public (2022) and Arrow Factory: The Last Five Years (2020). He has also curated Production Fever 2008: Study Materials in Nida Art Colony, Nida (2022). In 2020–21, he was one of the founding editors for Heichi Magazine, an online journal for contemporary art in Chinese and English.
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