“A Seven-Day Discourse on Curatorial Sojourning“
Day -7: The Traveler’s Solution
This marks my eighth year in the art industry. Five years working, two years studying, with scattered time spent wandering and self-questioning. Such a retrospective might seem loose, but zooming into the minute details reveals a rhythm more akin to the hurried pace of a constant wayfarer. As a “traveler” (viewing life as a journey), I have deliberately ensured that my few work experiences took root, neither too deeply nor too shallowly, in different cities (even different time zones), to guarantee the heterogeneity of each embodied experience—the backdrop of life outside those 8 hours must be different; ideally, even the 8 hours within shouldn’t be entirely the same. Long before the popularization of the saying “life is only thirty thousand days,” I was already diligently practicing “living each day as if it were the last,” thus closing the book on my first three decades.
If within these thirty thousand days we are merely racing against ourselves, chasing various goals, then why not choose a more direct, more self-directed way to spend a lifetime? I am not speaking some delusion detached from reality or evading identity, although I have harbored self-doubt on this point—for instance, I find it difficult to agree with, ignore, sideline, or waste people or things I still cannot accept after careful consideration. The thought, “does this mean I lack certain social survival skills?” once occupied my mind, to the extent that I considered enrolling in some course to remedy my shortcomings. Fortunately, I soon realized that in the present moment, I am merely a circle within a square; the square isn’t wrong either, but it seems I should rather seek the tribe of circles. Moreover, such special “intrusive” experiences are, for someone striving to experience multiple ways of life, the norm.
The day I formally left my last work journey, I noticed I didn’t really have any dramatic emotional fluctuations. After an almost ideal, earnest farewell, I hurriedly continued with my life. It was already midsummer in Shenzhen, which had experienced a long period of humid spring weather and persistent rainy season downpours this year—truly too much rain (as of this writing, Southeast Asian typhoon rains are likely brewing too). Just then, I received a sojourn invitation from the North. “Let’s go then, go with the flow.” Seeds planted in the past abruptly broke through the soil amidst twists and turns, becoming the best resting harbor for this very moment.
Day -6: A Familiar-seeming Partner
This opportunity coincided with the China debut exhibition of an international artist, its timing overlapping perfectly with my participation as a curator in the “Creator Residency” at Aranya Friendship Bay. Compared to issue-based local explorations, a short week might more reliably allow one to “produce an exhibition on the spot.” An Italian painting artist, who retains an inheritance of classical materials and techniques yet isn’t confined to purely painterly expression, enjoys delving into the more intricate processes of sculpture and video—the latter having already gained acclaim in both museums and major international biennials. All factors considered, I had no reason to refuse.
The artist is named Valerio Berruti (I translated his name as such, though he expressed a desire for a real Chinese name, like Bei Walai or something). He is a mid-career artist born in the late 1970s during Italy’s politically tumultuous “Years of Lead,” possessing an innate, heightened awareness of the macro-environment and globalization. Yet, half a century ago, it was also a golden age where Italy’s economic and social levels soared dramatically, so they also had levels of production, consumption, and multiculturalism rivaling post-war America. Since graduating from the oil painting department, I haven’t picked up a brush. While I still deeply admire Pompeian frescoes, the Renaissance, and those great names etched into European art history, I was then quite convinced I couldn’t create anything new in the role of an artist. So, I moved to the periphery of painting, wondering if I could use other methods to convey and expand its two-dimensional tension—in short, to let more people, borderlessly, understand painting, feel it, and read it.
Frankly, I hadn’t been aware of Valerio Berruti or his work before this. So, seeing the children drawn with simple lines on paper in his work, it was hard not to be drawn in, to scrutinize them closely—I wanted to know the stories of these children, happy or sad, and also whether the artist had seen Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings, their similarities and differences. Before Valerio arrived in China, our communication was via WeChat. He was quite proficient using it for text and images, translators, even emojis. I was repeatedly struck by his openness, efficiency, and talkativeness. Most of the preliminary communication directly concerned the selection of works for display and the exhibition layout, leaving little time, or rather proceeding in parallel with the formulation of practical plans, for me to feel and contemplate the core of the artist’s practice. So, I insisted on adding an extra online meeting specifically to discuss the development of Valerio Berruti’s work, while also wanting to inquire with the gallery team for more background on the origins and process leading to this exhibition.
My wish was quickly granted. Valerio generously sent more images of his past works, exhibition scenes, and some vistas of Alba, the Italian town where he lives—the sheer informational volume of visual images felt like reading a thousand volumes in an extremely short time, allowing me to quickly build a more three-dimensional imagination of Valerio. The moment the video call connected, a foreigner on the other side of the lens cheerfully boomed “Ciao!”, his studio in the background. During our conversation, Valerio explained his near-obsessive love for sketching, but emphasized he would never limit himself to any single form of expression or material. “Usually an idea comes first, then I conceive a whole narrative logic, and then I go find the most suitable medium, be it painting or sculpture.” Valerio’s confidence also boosted mine. “‘Childult’ is a concept I find most powerful. Look at our external world, constantly changing rapidly, but actually, in the last twenty or thirty years, the human heart hasn’t produced many truly different places. Regardless of how different borders, skin color, language may seem, the globalization and politico-cultural changes we experience are largely similar.”
Day -5: Collision and Reconciliation
Over the next few days, I needed to outline a rough work framework for the upcoming sojourn and continue delving into the artist’s creative map, finding the “landing points” within his paintings, videos, and sculptures—points of connection that could engage the local context and move Chinese audiences. After considering Valerio’s generational factors, visual language, and the modes and contexts of his past exhibitions, when I extracted and compiled these “relevant clues” from historical materials, I first gathered these keywords: line drawing, sketch, childhood, tranquility, loss and search, one-dimensional life, pause, rest, kinship. Of course, my understanding and feelings inevitably reflected the perspective and experience I, as the “other” at this moment, invested—such as reflexivity, psychological projection, etc.
Delighted by the flash of inspiration from these point-like “probe lights,” I quickly anchored the main tone and continued extending it, imagining the possibilities for textual narrative. The more I looked at Valerio’s works, the more I believed in the power of the “demo”: how classic are the line works of artists like Tracey Emin and Cy Twombly. The “sketch” as an exploratory method in the drafting stage and a self-contained style is an underestimated creative approach. Thinking of Italian masters like Leonardo da Vinci, whose ultimate mastery is universally admired, his erudition in painting, music, and various sciences made me ponder the role and influence of sketches and demos in other artistic disciplines. But from conception and experiment to outputting a relatively complete work, does it involve the stacking of drafts, or is there an essential “evolution” in some inadvertent moment? This led me very naturally to think of the formation of polyphonic music—and I was very curious how Valerio would view this.
Delving into the definitions and examples of sketches in music and literature reveals their common qualities: clarity, simplicity, naivety, relaxation, and humor. Polyphony, however, is almost like the adhesion of independent voices, emphasizing the coexistence of multiple viewpoints, with the continuous canon and the interactive fugue being the two most representative genres within polyphonic music. But just as I excitedly shared this perspective with Valerio, he hesitated slightly, because to this European, “Fugue is a very old word,” Valerio said, “It feels like an ancient elder walking towards you, but we are contemporary art.” As my enthusiasm cooled, two signals appeared in my mind: another good opportunity to rethink the definition, boundaries of “contemporary art,” and the process of its historical scholarly determination; good, we’ve reached a moment of confrontation between curator and artist.
When indecisive, returning to the exhibition plan itself is a reliable navigational path. The works to be exhibited, the time and place of the exhibition, the opportunity and background context facilitating this collaboration—these factors would calibrate the final output to a state where interpretive text and visual works could engage more organically and tightly, also playing a key role in fermenting a deeper space for expression.
Standing at the crossroads, I repeatedly perused the images of children created by Valerio and various online information about Aranya. The overlapping layers of text, imagery, soundtracks, and community scenes made me associate: compared to the complex, variable fugue and the seemingly simple sketch, are they rivals or independent entities? Like the fleeting childhood and the relatively prolonged adulthood in life’s progress, is this a one-way street or a variation that our subjective consciousness can orchestrate, occasionally comforting the protracted and tangled modern daily life by physically and mentally returning to purity? I thought that for people living in what Byung-Chul Han describes as the “burnout society,” returning to the draft, to childlike innocence, is undoubtedly an important and urgent issue. Thus, persisting with this concept, the compound title “Circulating Sketch” (whose literal translation, “循环的速写,” offers another path of understanding) not only ultimately gained the artist’s support, but Valerio, as a discerning yet tolerate Italian, also gladly named a new work in the exhibition’s final room “The Sound of The Shadow,” pointing to a synesthetic connection with music, thereby completing the conceptual design loop of this exhibition.
Day -4: Landing in the Town, First Meeting
After the exhibition plan, introductory text, and the sojourn itinerary to Friendship Bay were finalized, time quietly arrived at the day of departure. Traveling from Shenzhen to Beidaihe in the lingering chill of April, this northbound journey didn’t offer much sensory difference; but perhaps due to excitement, anticipation, and a lightness and freedom I hadn’t felt in a long time, as imagined scenes printed onto reality, poetry and distant horizons felt like a mysterious gravitational force pulling me from my origin into the forest town. Upon arrival on the first day, I curiously measured with my steps the Friendship Bay hotel, square, chapel, apartment residences, community canteen, and various shops. Perhaps because it wasn’t a holiday, the town’s residents were visibly sparse, but this didn’t hinder my walking work; instead, a hint of secret delight in wandering alone passed through my heart.
The next day, Valerio was also due to land in Friendship Bay town. In the morning, I woke in the deep, warm brown and dark green rooms of my residency hotel, mi casa su casa. Foreign opera classics drifted over the town walls, the soaring vocals possessing the coarse granularity of public broadcasts from last century’s factory schools, yet their robust penetrating power far outweighed the musical quality, so much so that in the following days, these Viennese operas became my indispensable morning alarm and spiritual caffeine. It’s worth mentioning that besides the two serene main tones, the quality control over the Sean Scully-esque striped pattern sofas and materials like metal, glass, and terrazzo was like a restrained yet tango. After a quick tidy-up, following a bowl of morel mushroom rice noodles, I retraced the route from yesterday’s exploratory dark to the coffee shop and bookstore, and upon entering, saw Valerio directly—he was sitting at a beige-white table somewhat dazzling under the scattered morning sun, scrolling on his phone while having a latte and a large croissant. After a nearly ten-hour long-haul flight from Milan to Beijing, followed by a four-hour drive to the Aranya area, Valerio’s face showed no signs of jet lag-induced fatigue or lethargy, making me spontaneously begin to envision what this “first work day” would entail, what the site was currently like, and the most anticipated “unboxing” of the artworks. In fact, when I threw my first three-dimensional “Ciao!” at the Valerio before me, his volume was an octave higher than my own, fully charged after a good sleep. The Italian’s brightness and ease, eloquence, and friendliness, surrounded by the aroma of coffee, instantly filled the remaining space.
Day -3: The Lost Note and the Enduring Score
This exhibition was located on the square-facing side of the second-floor rectangular corridor hall of the hotel, so the basic shape and circulation path of the space were relatively fixed. Furthermore, wooden display shelves recycled from the 2023 Juanzong Design Awards exhibition at the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai had naturally carved the “冖”-shaped space into 5 “rooms”—the score for “Circulating Sketch” was ready. According to the several themes Valerio planned to exhibit, each room would be an independent work. Simple, clear section divisions, combined with the space’s inherent definite conditions, led to the exhibition’s starting point being conceived in the double-height room at the southeast corner. There, audiences would first encounter several stop-motion animations, laying a foundational layer of initial impression regarding the artist’s general style, the exhibition’s ambiance, and their own sensations. Adjacent to the screening area were the monochromatic works on paper “Endless Love,” where coherent series of works depicted kinship bonds resembling an infinite loop. The most intimate shared relationship is undoubtedly that of siblings. Valerio purified and amplified the sense of security provided by blood ties by personifying the spiral of DNA as children entwined together. The lighting chosen for the exhibition site was low-illumination spotlights, akin to bedside lamps in a bedroom, mixed with the pure music emanating from the video space. The scene before one’s eyes felt like the final glimpse before peacefully falling asleep, utterly secure and relaxed, gradually retreating into memories and dreams.
Next was an entire glass wall pasted with images of boys and girls holding hands as if dancing. The children stood casually, wearing toddler swimwear as if playing a game by the sea—outside the glass window was indeed a splash pool children would love, and the exhibition itself backed onto the Bohai Bay gradually entering summer. Childhood friendships are pure and profound; the shadows of childhood playmates can sometimes migrate and project onto the subtle moments one takes for granted. Certain Innocent and even childish little habits are gradually disciplined, smoothed away in later days. We don’t know since when we learned restraint and pretense. Although social etiquette is also a system maintaining operation and boundary safety, daily life lacking childlike innocence isn’t necessarily comfortable or happy. Looking at the window and wall decals Valerio custom-made for this China debut, along with the planned square sculpture, I often found myself genuinely admiring his patience, warmth, and attentiveness to detail. On the other hand, I also began to slowly understand Friendship Bay and the alternative life Aranya strives to create here with all its might: an easily accessible ideal polis.
Passing through the glass window corridor and the statement board made from two framed canvases, also completing a local reverie triggered by the distant gaze towards the spiritually elevated North Bank Chapel and the tidal square, the “Fugue” had by now presented its agile, peaceful first half. The other end of the “冖” shape, composed of “Looking to The Future,” “Childhoods,” and “The Sound of The Shadow,” displayed a cleverly balanced symmetry in structure: two important groups of the artist’s works, “Endless Love” and “Childhoods,” resided on either wing. “Childhoods,” comparatively, served as records of interactive moments using Valerio’s own two children as specific prototypes. Additionally, what moved me deeply and left me shamed was Valerio’s consideration of sound and silence as a symmetrical pair. If the concrete melody of the animation screening room at the starting point were placed at the end point, “The Sound of The Shadow” would then bear the abstract sublimation of silence being more powerful than sound. These were two hollowing out sculptures made from Valerio’s commonly used resin material and natural pigment, enveloped by the interplay of light beams and fabric space, creating a Three in One experience of the sculpture’s warm substance, the unreal flowing light and shadow, and the intimate atmosphere permeating the entire space. With Valerio’s child sculptures as the central spine, “Circulating Sketch” could be called a guide for the lost paradise of adults who have been away for too long, wherein the child images are none other than the former selves of each of us, the sleeping parts within, and the secret key to finding our way back to the harbor.
Day -2: The Wanderer’s Far and Wide
Bringing an exhibition from a nascent idea through multi-party communication to actual physical manifestation is never a light undertaking. Although the twists and turns and difficulties of the frequently accidents happen process is beyond words, thanks to the resilience of Teagan Gallery and the installation support of Maxin Exhibitions, “Circulating Sketch” finally settled into place. The first day of the May Day holiday was also to be the public opening day of “Circulating Sketch.” The coordination work of the various teams was completed, even approaching perfection, with an almost relentless, high-intensity production efficiency.
Speaking of work, apart from observational writing and exhibition installation, another item in my curatorial sojourn plan was to set up a “Curator’s Study-Table” in a slightly more introspective location within the exhibition. Supplementary materials related to the exhibition, such as book pages and catalogs featuring more of the artist’s work, relevant literature aiding the generation of the exhibition theme, etc., were originally planned to occupy another white cube space within the community as a sister exhibition hall. However, considering practical factors like time, space, and content, the external supply “station” was refined to an L-shaped desk and a felt pinboard. Yet, it remained a very necessary component. I recorded and presented parts of my map studies, local customs, and reflections on the identity of the “curator” during my community stay entirely through “sketch”-like texts or doodles. I, myself, reflected on the differences, commonalities, and mutual observation existing across different regions and cultures amidst repeated withdrawal and anchoring.
Time slid to the eve of the opening. During these days, Valerio and I often ate, walked, and talked together. I was deeply infected by the cultural similarities and integration between China and Italy, to the extent that we had many interesting discussions about judgments concerning humanity, gender, and the unnamed parts of language as a form of self-armament in films like Anatomy of a Fall (2023). Chinese people today also drink plenty of coffee and alcohol, dream of financial freedom and world peace, not much different from most residents of the global village. The world seems to be in a beautiful spectacle of “great unity” while simultaneously erupting with conflicts, crises, and homogenization threats. But in any case, holidays always arrive as scheduled, and the exhibition would be successfully completed tomorrow.
D Day: The Total Victory of Idealism
“Circulating Sketch” abruptly began its performance within Friendship Bay during the May Day holiday, amidst the holiday market, and on the lips of the community’s migratory birds. The opera broadcast that punctually sounded each morning from the neighboring ocean park now had its polyphonic neighbor, and I gradually began to live contentedly within its rhythm here—usually, that’s when I know it’s time to set off for the next destination. Discussions about Aranya seem never-ending. It is a myth, a middle-class back garden, a cultural utopia, a sample of spiritual realm and commercial operation… Each term eventually lands in a concrete scene. The scale of such planning and its implementation achievements are, in fact, already sufficient to be called the total victory of idealism—regardless of whether this ideal is closer to, or further from, so-called life.
If using Xiang Biao’s explanation of the “disappearing nearby” and “reconstructing the nearby” as a concrete reference for idealism, then borrowing a tidy, bright, high-configuration community to rekindle the imagination and desire for the “nearby” is perfectly understandable. Placing myself as an experimental sample between life and art, slightly higher than ordinary life yet more “grounded” than usual artistic practice—caching or resting briefly in this in-between zone, I think my “curatorial demo” here helped me, integrating constantly changing personal sensations, reorganize and understand professional identity and ideal vocation. At this moment, I already have the courage to face the sea and shout, to hear my own voice.
*Originally published on Teagan Gallery, Aranya.
Yuting (Roxy) TANG 