Curator's Notes from a Singapore Exhibition (Part One)
In early October 2026, while preparing my interview series on artists and art professionals, I reached out to Ms. Ye, an independent curator in Singapore whom I had known for some time. She is a seasoned independent curator, and every year she also organizes a charity exhibition for an institution dedicated to art education for children with special needs. I thought her story would make for a fascinating conversation.
We hadn't been talking long when she asked whether I'd be interested in joining the curatorial team for a mature, formal, commercial group exhibition. She explained that instead of buying or renting lavish display equipment, the team wanted to try multimedia and online promotion. The money saved would open up some pro bono space for grassroots artists who are serious about their art but have nowhere to show it. She had titled the exhibition "Not an Artist. Just More Than Art." However, some of the young artists she had approached weren't fully on board with this approach. Not enough artists who fit the theme had signed on yet, so it was still uncertain whether the exhibition would happen at all. She asked if I would join the curatorial team as assistant curator for the China side, with the goal of building a joint exhibition between the two places. The physical show would take place at a Japanese chain gallery in downtown Singapore, but she hoped its reach would extend to China and to other countries and regions beyond.
For me, the answer was an easy yes. Whether or not the exhibition came together in the end, this was a meaningful and challenging internship opportunity.
Before we formally began, Ms. Ye gave me two lessons on how to judge whether an artist's work is original and whether it fits a given exhibition. That was when I realized, to my surprise, that a curator does far more than an exhibition organizer. A curator is involved from the very beginning. We conceive the exhibition's theme and draw up a detailed curatorial plan. We select artists who suit that theme: we interview them, learn their creative philosophy and artistic goals, and collect their work. Then we choose the pieces to be shown. That means uncovering the stories behind them, looking for resonances and connections between different artists and their works, judging each piece's originality, and deciding whether it fits the exhibition and adds something essential to its narrative. We also plan how the works are presented and how the exhibition tells its story, write every text the exhibition needs, and work with the marketing team on sponsorship. Only after all of that come delivery of the artworks, installation, the opening, sales, the closing and after-sales.
Shortly after these lessons, I received my first assignment: find five or six candidate artists for the exhibition.
Grassroots artists are everywhere in Europe, so my first instinct was to contact teachers I knew at galleries and art institutions in France and the Netherlands. But the high cost of shipping and the tight installation schedule quickly ruled that out. Looking for artists closer to home, in China, was the more practical and manageable option.
In the end, I found six "grassroots" artists:
Artist A: Mr. Wang, an elderly gentleman whose work I believe in deeply and love dearly. He grew up poor, worked as a construction laborer, and spent half his life doing hard physical work. After retiring at 60, he planned to return to calligraphy, which he had loved since boyhood. Then, at a university for seniors, he happened to see a Chinese painting class in session and was drawn in. (How much that resembles my own first encounter with Chinese painting!) As the old saying goes, calligraphy and painting share the same roots. He soon grasped the essence of traditional Chinese painting and fell in love with landscape painting. For nearly twenty years he has kept going into the mountains to sketch from life and has painted prolifically. Over that time he developed a creative process of his own, which I later summarized in his artist bio for the exhibition: "Before he paints, he commits the vast panorama to memory, then selects a distinctive smaller scene as the foreground. His compositions are carefully considered, and his brushwork is decisive and clean." Gradually, he has formed a distinctive artistic style.
Artist B: A teacher with many years in early childhood education. Painting has always been her passion, and her traditional bird-and-flower paintings are delicate and graceful. From a purely aesthetic point of view, her work is a joy to look at. It carries the artist's inner calm and her wish for a quiet, peaceful life.
Artist C: A full-time mother who gave up her career to raise three children. Still, the artistic atmosphere of her childhood home and her early art training planted a seed in her. Now that her children are growing up and becoming independent, she finally has time for her own passion. Her style is bold and expansive, and her spare, rough-hewn lines fill the whole picture with tension. Sometimes I honestly find it hard to connect her paintings with how she looks in person. People say motherhood makes a woman strong, and perhaps her paintings show that inner resilience.
Artist D: A Chinese "slash" career woman living in Canada who has worked as a flight attendant for years. She loves travel and sports and seems able to do everything, and she truly opened my eyes. Her oil paintings use bold colors and are full of passion. You can feel her love of life and her drive to be herself right away.
Artist E: Ms. Yu is the candidate I worked hardest to bring on board. I was looking for paintings to pair with a sculpture by another Singaporean artist when I came across one of Ms. Yu's award-winning works, and that is how I got in touch with her. She is a young artist who has long studied Chinese gongbi (fine-brush) painting, and she is also an educator. Through research and experiments with color and materials, she gives traditional gongbi painting new content and new meaning. She draws her subjects from issues close to everyday contemporary life. Few artists I know blend the feel of modern life with the aesthetics of traditional Chinese painting so naturally.
Artist F: A Chinese child with special needs living in the United States. I learned about her story and her love of painting by chance, and through her father I got some photos of her paintings. The way she handles color is wonderful: very harmonious, and in a style all her own.
After some discussion, Mr. Wang's (Artist A) paintings became one of the main candidates for Ms. Ye and me. He only began studying Chinese painting after retiring at 60, but his many years of calligraphy gave him an excellent command of the medium. He has traveled to mountains all over China to sketch from life, and his cun texture strokes for rocks and peaks are highly distinctive. At 80, he doesn't have the skills to promote his work on social media the way young artists do. His artistic journey closely mirrors that of Mr. Cai in Singapore, a grassroots artist who started out as a shoemaker, kept making sculpture anyway, and is now fairly well known in Singapore. Better still, Mr. Cai had created an "Ink" series of sculptures inspired by Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, and it sits in perfect harmony beside Mr. Wang's work. So we decided to place their paintings and sculptures together in the exhibition's first section.
For the second section, Singaporean sculptor Ms. Zhang had created a "Cloud" series based on a childhood memory, full of innocent delight. The hard part was finding an artist whose experience and creative philosophy fit our theme and whose work would also sit well beside Ms. Zhang's sculptures. I kept searching. Finally, among award-winning works from the Jiangsu Young Artists Association, I found a gongbi painting of sailboats. Its creator, Ms. Yu (Artist E), had taken the sport of sailing as her subject, and the painting focused on the force and flow of the wind. An idea took shape in my mind: a "Wind and Cloud" pairing, one in motion and one at rest, one taut and one at ease. The two would complement each other perfectly.
Next, I had to reach out to Ms. Yu. She was very easy to talk to and had already been thinking about turning the sailing theme into a full series. However, she was busy with a commission for the China Academy of Oil Painting and had no time for new work, and our exhibition was set to open in Singapore over Christmas. The timing simply didn't work. I didn't give up. I talked with her again about our exhibition's theme, the work of the Singaporean artist she would be shown alongside, and how the exhibition could help her reach overseas markets in the future. In the end, she agreed to paint four sailing-themed works especially for our exhibition!
Meanwhile, I managed another surprise. The paintings by the young artist with special needs I had recommended (Artist F) would normally never have been shown alongside works by accomplished artists with established records. But her work moved Ms. Ye as well. So we plan to set up a special display area in one corner of the gallery, where her paintings and those of two other children with special needs will be shown and sold. That alone will be a huge encouragement for them to keep making art.
Looking back, I did something in just one month that had seemed completely impossible. Even Ms. Ye was amazed by how it turned out.
More curatorial stories to come…
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