Artistic practice has its own context and order. An exhibition theme establishes a context of its own. A good exhibition should make 1+1>2 (exhibition theme + artworks > 2).
Curatorial Notes
When Being Becomes a Moment:
2025 Art Nova 100 Annual Exhibition
Exhibition Time:
8 — 29 May, 2025
01
Archive
I want to write it all down: the thoughts, decisions and hesitations of curating, and to write myself into the text as its curator. With When Being Becomes a Moment in mind, I ask: what do I choose to remember, and what do I choose to forget? These scattered thoughts may be the exhibition’s most precious archive, moments not yet fixed in a final form.
On 24 March 2025, I wrote in my diary: “For me, curating is also a process of self-healing. Time, periods, moments would pass, flow away and change, and that is what gives them meaning. Art, exhibitions and archives record this rapidly changing age and resist it.”
This article is both an exhibition and a digital archive. Its first task is to communicate clearly. We tirelessly record information and leave traces. Why? Because many exhibitions vanish from public view soon after they close, as though they had never existed. Countless times in my research, I have tried to trace an exhibition or an artist, only to find that the information has disappeared. A viewer’s encounter with a work in the exhibition space is brief, but a detailed online record can extend that encounter. Years later, when a researcher reads these words, they may become evidence of the exhibition’s place in history.
Curating a group exhibition of more than seventy artists for the first time was daunting. I felt apprehensive and under considerable pressure. From being invited to serve on this year’s preliminary selection jury in December 2024 to settling the final exhibition plan, we worked with Kun Geng , Yingying Chen , Jiaxin Fu and Chang Liu at Art Nova 100. We took part in interviews, organised archives, wrote about the artists and searched for available material online, studying each artist’s work and experience closely. Spending weeks recording the details of more than seventy artists was difficult, but I felt that this kind of archival work was necessary.
Fabrie: a record of the curatorial team’s research process and artist archives.
Notes on the exhibition’s spatial design.
Curators should work for artists, rather than expect artists to pursue curators. Everything we do is meant to help artists’ work be seen and discovered.
02
The Distance of an Exhibition
The American art historian Donald Preziosi wrote of making the visible legible. Yet in contemporary art, clarity can seem to disappear. What does that mean? Put plainly, people can no longer understand what we are saying. Contemporary art faces this problem acutely.
I have two thoughts about exhibition themes. First, an exhibition should try to narrow the distance between art and its viewers. Many contemporary art exhibitions create that distance through increasingly closed language, complex theories and vague concepts. An exhibition is public; it should not use a complicated theme to explain an already complex artistic practice. Wanting to make something clear and being able to make it clear are different things. I have always felt that plain language has the greatest power to cut through. An exhibition should convey its central ideas in language that is clear, accessible and precise, while balancing academic rigour with the viewer’s ability to enter the work.
My second thought concerns the relationship between an exhibition theme and the works themselves. Artistic practice has its own context and order; a theme establishes another context. A good exhibition should make 1+1>2 (exhibition theme + artworks > 2). When a theme and the works feel disconnected, the relationship between their two contexts has not been properly worked through. We end up seeing a collection of separate works, rather than what the exhibition makes possible between them.
03
Classification
I often wonder whether artistic practice needs to be classified, distilled and summed up. Contemporary art is difficult to define precisely because it reflects the complexity of the world we inhabit. Whenever I try to account for everything and draw it into categories, I find myself out of breath. We seek an overarching narrative for an exhibition, yet each artist’s practice has a life of its own.
I once said to Yuna Wang: “The more art I see, the harder I find it to truly feel what someone else has felt—or to convey it through words alone. You can only try to understand, feel as much as you can, and communicate through feeling. Through the work, you sense energy moving between two lives.”
Wang replied, “Curating takes a great deal of energy and patience.”
Richie Xiang, Yuna Wang, Esther Liu, Xudian Cheng, Xianyi Li
I stopped trying to sum everything up in a single narrative. Instead, I looked for a way of seeing that could hold plurality and difference. An exhibition theme offers a shared context in which to view the works, while an open context allows each viewer to interpret them through their own background, experience and perspective. An exhibition calls for active participation rather than passive reception, allowing each person’s encounter with the works to take its own course.
When being becomes a moment, what we touch in another person is only a fragment of their life, or a projection of what they have lived through. We see them in the present, but cannot experience their past. When we look at an artwork, are we not also touching a fragment of the artist’s life? So much in art cannot be put into words—not because we are unwilling to speak, but because language often struggles to reach the moments that matter most: an emotion, fragments of memory, a fleeting sensation, those decisive moments.
04
The Unresolved State
“Enjoy the process” feels too dry, too weightless a thing to say. It can make us overlook the importance of keeping a record. If we leave no trace, these precious moments will pass almost as soon as they appear.
I often remember what Allen Ren told me: “The more clearly you think things through at the start of an exhibition, the easier they become later. You take the trouble early so it does not become trouble later.” Yuna Wang, Yiwei Liu and I have gone over this exhibition and the last one again and again, returning to the importance of these details. We do it not to make a fuss, but because we know we have to.
I have been “hyper” these past two days of installation, bouncing around and moving at full tilt. The professional team and skilled workers built the exhibition space quickly and efficiently. I used to take that for granted. Perhaps it was when I found myself defeated by a few screws while trying to open a box that I began to respect all the work I had once thought ordinary.
Unlike when I first began curating a few years ago, this time I feel more capable, more confident and better able to handle the work and its many details.
The unresolved state opens up a way of imagining that I find compelling. I enjoy it because it holds possibility, because nothing has yet been settled.