Hangzhou Triennial Of Fiber Art

On the morning of the 13th of March 2013, the Dean of the China Academy of Art’s Inter-media division Gao Shiming chaired a meeting held in the Academy’s Fiber and Spatial Art Studios. His informal presentation, made to parties engaged in work preparing for the Triennial, addressed mainly curatorial issues. During the meeting, Gao Shiming elaborated on the triple-aspect of curatorial practice.

In its first dimension, curation utilises artworks as a means to articulate certain arguments or lines of inquiry. The curator attends to the relationships that exist between distinct artworks, correspondences of form or significance, bringing these together to embody these intersections and assembling from this the aforementioned argument or line of inquiry.

Each artist possesses their own, unique status and identity. It is the task of the curator to deconstruct this, helping the artist to come to terms with themselves; attempting with them, to uncover the relationships their works create with the present.

Secondly, curation is a means of establishing a context. As a specific art form, fiber art has its own territories within the international Artworld. It has its own publications, its specific platforms - this situation is ideal. Fiber art also possesses its own criticality and generative force. Bound up as it is with the everyday, the context of fiber art extends further than the limited confines of the exhibition space.

The third and final aspect relates to curation in its capacity to establish certain proposals or projects. This is the most taxing of the three. Every cycle of Kassel’s Documenta incorporates a related project or proposition. With every cycle, there is accrual; a response to what has come previously, along with reactions to present issues. The project is sustainable, and it is this in part that has placed it so high in the ranks of Europe’s large-scale expositions. This is also the reason why Documenta is not only a platform for the Artworld, but also represents the pinnacle of intellectual culture. Gao Shiming pointed out that the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, given the support of the Zhejiang Art Museum, the China Academy of Art, the Varbanov Institute for Tapestry Research, as well as local industries, creates a link between society, the structures of academic research and production. It is because of this that the Triennial has the potential to satisfy all three of the aforementioned tenets.

Gao Shiming also called attention to the crisis of contemporary art: namely, the distancing of art from life and its confinement to the limits of the museum. He urges that we remember art’s origins in the everyday.

Alongside students from the Academy engaged in projects relating to the 2013 Triennial, also in attendance at the meeting were the departmental curators of the Zhejiang Art Museum. The meeting was therefore also an opportunity to provide a beneficial stimulus to the work these individuals engage in within the art museum.