Hsieh Feng-Rong

“Disorderly Performance”: An Innovative Attempt at Curating

Art museums had mushroomed in China with its economic boom between the late 1990s and early 2000s. The craze for museum establishment swept China’s first-tier cities previously and second-tier ones today. Globalization and cultural exchange have made occidental museums a source of reference for local art institutions, whether in terms of their functions or the philosophies and forms of their curatorial practice.

A “curatorial turn” occurred in the Western world during the 1990s, which was highlighted by Paul O’Neill in his essay[note] that art exhibitions, while go in tandem with curatorial discourses, have been increasingly distinguished as larger than the mere presentation of artworks. To put it another way, they not only serve as vehicles for knowledge production and intellectual speculation, but also open up new spaces for art criticism. As curatorial practice evolves every day, theories from different disciplines have been introduced as conceptual materials into exhibitions. With regard to art exhibitions, the balance of their focus has been weighed too much towards theoretical sophistication, and their forms have grown rigid as well, hence the unidirectional edification from art to audience. It is exactly the curatorial mainstream nowadays. In the meantime, the massive production of exhibitions has dulled visitors’ senses, which is exacerbated by the mutual influence between the consumer market and the artistic ecology. Therefore, we are not only confronted with the challenge of rigid exhibition forms, but also hit by the crisis that consumer-oriented exhibitions are replacing academic and critical projects.

In view of the aforementioned issues, the Rockbund Art Museum initiated an annual project titled RAM HIGHLIGHT in 2016, seeking to transcend the limitations of existing exhibition forms by treating performance as a method. On a more specific basis, this project extensively applies performance-related concepts and harnesses their “fluidity” to constantly disturb the established structures, relations and order, insofar as to reconstruct the art-audience relationship. The project also features collaboration with artists and commissions of site-specific works without stipulating any art form in order to explore new possibilities. Apart from curating exhibitions, the museum not only organizes a series of seminars to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues, but also plans to have its own publications. That is, a multi-pronged strategy has been employed towards the sustainability of this experimental venture.

Note: Paul O‘Neill, “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse”, in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Judith Rugg & Michele Sedgwick(ed.), Intellect Books, 2007