2014-16 | senior curator
island6 is a multimedia art gallery in Shanghai that showcases work from its in-house collective, Liu Dao. I’ve been involved since 2014, most intensively between 2014 and 2016, when I worked as a senior curator—a role that spanned exhibition planning, concept development, event organization, painting, and visitor engagement. I helped shape show concepts, guided the creation of new works, and organized opening events that brought the gallery’s ideas to life.
So what kind of work does the collective produce, exactly? It’s a big range but here above is a great example, and one that made the gallery quite famous. It’s a vase painted on rice paper, which is transparent enough to install LED panels behind the work. The size of the piece and the painted vase are then mapped precisely enough to animate LED objects interacting with the vase (in this case butterflies).
Works also combine video with paintings or photographs. A small screen is installed in a precise position and an actor interacts with the work (I painted the car here by the way)
While I was there, one of my major conceptual contributions was introducing more interactive works. Sound or motion sensors that trigger a video switch and play different animation loops. For example, there are works similar to the butterfly vase above where users can clap and cause the butterflies to fly away.