Curator's Notes from a Singapore Exhibition (Part Two)

In early November 2026, once our two participating artists were confirmed, the work ahead fell into three main tasks. The first was confirming the works to be exhibited with each artist, gathering details on each piece and arranging shipping. The second was writing an introduction for each artist. The third was making a short promotional video for each of them.

Mr. Wang's works are all landscapes he painted from life over the past two years, so most of our discussion was about mounting them as traditional Chinese scrolls. Scroll mounting shows off the character of Chinese painting, and it also makes the works easy to ship. A few pieces of Mr. Wang's calligraphy would have suited the exhibition beautifully. Mr. Cai, a Singaporean artist, makes sculptures based on Chinese calligraphy, and the two would have echoed each other in the same gallery. But Mr. Wang felt he had fallen out of practice in recent years, and his health would not let him cram at the last minute. After talking it over with Ms. Ye, I agreed that we should respect the artist's own pace, and we decided not to ask him for calligraphy.

As I mentioned in my last entry, none of Ms. Yu's existing works were right for showing in Singapore. So I invited her to create a series especially for this exhibition: four gongbi paintings of the same size, all on the theme of sailing boats. Looking back, I'm still deeply grateful for the trust and support she gave my work.

I would have to write Mr. Wang's introduction more or less myself. Fortunately, our meetings and phone calls had given me a good sense of his artistic career and creative philosophy. All I had to do was pick out what fit the theme of the exhibition and shape it into a text. Ms. Yu, on the other hand, is a natural communicator, and she presents herself very well in both speech and writing. This may be typical of today's younger artists: years of sharing their work on social media have taught them to find the right words for any occasion. So I wrote a first draft of her introduction from the material she gave me and sent it to her to revise. She works remarkably efficiently, replying to every message and following through on every task, which is a rare quality among artists.

The promotional videos turned out to be the most interesting part. We could, of course, pay a professional team to do the filming and editing, but the script, or really the directing, had to be my job. And if I could save some of the budget along the way, so much the better.

Ms. Yu sent me the footage Nanjing art museum had shot for her promotional video this past summer. When I went through it, I found it very thorough and well worth reusing. I also asked her to film a few clips of the finished sailing-boat paintings, just a few seconds each, to add to the footage. Since she speaks so well, I wrote her a voiceover script of about two minutes, which she revised, recorded herself and sent back. With the footage and the audio in hand, there was no need to pay anyone else, and I could edit the video myself. The film covers how Ms. Yu understands and practises gongbi painting, her experiments and breakthroughs with new pigments and materials, and why she began the sailing-boat series, how she painted it and the ideas behind it. It ends with her hopes for her future as an artist. The aim is to give a full picture of her artistic journey and her ideas about art.

I designed Mr. Wang's video quite differently. To match the "perseverance" that defines his artistic pursuit in this exhibition, the film focuses on his life in art: how he first came to painting, grew to love it and kept painting ever since. Mr. Wang is advanced in years and has a strong accent. Speaking fluently to the camera in an interview would be hard enough, and even reading a whole voiceover from a script would not be easy. So I decided to write and record the voiceover myself, telling his story in the third person. To keep the filming efficient and spare him unnecessary strain, I wrote a shot-by-shot storyboard based on his story and hired a professional film crew. Afterwards, I recorded the voiceover in a studio.

Most of the work in this entry may look small and tedious. But once I threw myself into it, I found a surprising amount of room for creativity and design. It taught me that every step of curating takes careful thought. You have to weigh everything together: the quality and impact of the finished work, real understanding between you and the artists, and the cost and efficiency of producing the materials.