To Martian Anthropologists as Curatorial Practices: an Interview with Chun-Yi CHANG (2/2)

Q: What is the difference between the curatorial conception of the present exhibition and those of the exhibitions you’ve curated? How do you deal with the relationship between the online and offline interfaces? 

From Physical Venue to Online Exhibition

The principle online exhibition venue of To Martian Anthropologists is divided into “united exhibition area” and “individual exhibition room”. The “united exhibition area” shows in a panoramic manner the clues “left” by the artists in the physical exhibition venue. On this web page, viewers can click on these clues to open the “individual exhibition room” for the artists and enter into their online works for cyberspace. Here, the clues of the physical venue become the objects of hyperlink that lead viewers to the online works. This explains the  two eye-catching slogans at the entrance of the physical site: “What we left is the clue. You may now attend personally the site.” The “site” here refers to the online exhibition area.

 

Symbiosis of the Online and Physical Interfaces

The online and physical interfaces working parallely in the exhibition indeed exige a different disposition of the works, for the first exhibition venue takes place in the cyberspace, and the interface of web page indeed influences how the works intervene the space. For example, the ceiling occupied a considerable proportion on the online interface of a 720-degree panorama. An exhibition emphasizing the online venue where the works actually take place, i.e. the works on the online interface free of gravity, in my opinion, seems not to be limited to the conventions of installation in the physical venue. So, the idea of disposition for many works comes from the characteristics of online space by which I could proceed to think over the form of the works in the physical venue.  

 

For example, I suggested to Jui-Chien HSU that, instead of installing objects on the ground as we used to do, he could use the ceiling as the base to extend the work (not to fulfill the base, but to occupy it by “use”). Later, the artist uses the ceiling as the skeleton of the work, beset with the iron sheets that fit the size of the light steel frame of the ceiling, so that the elements of the work are extended from the iron sheets, and cleverly made the ceiling as part of his work.

 

Likewise extended from the ceiling is the work of Wan-Jen CHEN. Compared to the past video works commonly seen in the exhibitions of the artist, only a LED panel light hung from the ceiling is left here. This lamp echoes the artificial light source in the vacation scene in his online video work. In the physical exhibition venue, we look up at the light source of the panel light; on the online exhibition venue, we look down at a group of people on vacation through the mobile phone screen. While people are enveloped by the artificial light source, we are sliding our mobile phones to receive the same light sources, just like us standing under the lights in the physical exhibition venue.

 

Q: Between the online and physical exhibition venues, there seems to be some reading paths that allow viewers to shuttle in between. As a curator, what do you hope, through these paths, to leave for the Martians and viewers ?

Value Judgement

I want to answer this question in another way. As a curator, instead of what I want to leave for the Martians/viewers, I feel more likely to say what an exhibition uniting the efforts of all will leave behind. Many works seem to extract respectively some slices of human behavior. For example, Closky designs an online game based on the price of works in the art market. He extracts the images of nearly 5,000 artworks for auction from the art markets and creates an interactive web page which invites the audience to choose the more expensive one from a random pair of pictures. When the audience faces these works out of the artistic context and observes the operational logic of art and money in human behavior, it might be just like a Martian anthropologist coming to the earth to observe the world of human art.

 

Standards for Beauty and Ugliness

This kind of judgment concerning the value judgement of human beings appears as well in Pharmakos by the American artist Dorian GAUDIN. His work also invites the audience to participate online and the result will actually affect the works in the physical venue. The artist installs nine ceramics with different forms and styles in the physical venue. At the same time, he creates a voting mechanism on the internet to invite the audience to vote online. The ugliest ceramic is selected every week and according to this collective judgement, the curator will break in the physical exhibition venue the ceramic recognized as the ugliest of the week. Through the process of destroying the ceramics, the work tries to reveal to the Martians the human behavior: “destruction brings creation”.

 

Absurd Behaviors

On the opposite side of the two above-mentioned works in the physical venue stands Discreet Works (thanks to Bruegel), a work comprising 50 proverbs about (absurd) human behaviors. This is a joint work by the French artist Eric WATIER and I: the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder of the Northern Renaissance once transformed into drawings the proverbs about human behaviors. Watier translates the drawings into words, and I design an online game that the user has to look for the images matching from the text of behavior instruction. In the game, if the user finds out the relative positions of all the instructions, he can call back the original drawing of Brugel. The cross reference, translation, and misunderstanding of words and drawings between the online and physical spaces bring out many seemingly absurd behaviors of human beings.

 

Human Presence

Located near Discreet Works are Joyce HO’s works which reveal a “human presence” in low profile between cyberspace and physical venue. One is the white shirt hung on the wall and the corresponding online work shows a pair of hands that are typing on the keyboard according to the rhythme of a song’s lyrics (No Surprises). In addition, in correspondence to the water cup and light bulb in 20200804 is the online work in which a girl demonstrates a basic human behavior--sleeping.

 

Q: It seems that you have to consider lots of details concerning the disposition of the works. How do you come to choose these artists and communicate with them? Or, how do you see the communication with the artists in curating? 

A total of fifteen domestic and foreign artists were invited to this exhibition. In general, their creations are related to the site, environment, media, or reflection on the current conditions. At the beginning of this year, under the impact of the pandemic, when all art and cultural activities were suspended, there were many unknown factors in the preparation of the exhibition. In my opinion,  these artists were willing to spend time discussing and working together on this exhibition planning. In addition to the enthusiasm and ideals for artistic creation, I think that the mutual trust and willingness to free communication are also very important.

 

The communication is the most interesting and challenging part in curating, and it is also the key to form an exhibition because for me, the work is the protagonist of the exhibition. It takes time to communicate, and more time to wait for the ideas to take shape, or for a specific opportunity. It’s a bit like “waiting for the right card” in a card game. Sometimes the situation becomes clear after a certain work comes in. Sometimes you may not have the best cards, but you certainly hold relatively good cards. In short, what interests me in a card game is the uncertainty and controllability. Sometimes the works in discussion might not be realized and the long wait might result in nothing. What matters most is not to set an expected result as the purpose of communication, but the flow of creative ideas.

 

For a long time, I’ve been trying to discover as a departing point the possibility of an artist’s work itself, or the potential connection between the works, and then to think about how to organize an exhibition. And I’ve been trying to construct an exhibition’s thinking context so that the audience can approach works step by step in the process of watching, reading, experiencing or participating, and develop a narrative of their own. I think an exhibition will not truly come alive and its narrative will not begin until the audience actually sets foot in the exhibition venue.  

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