Curating Untitled: When Kindness Opens the Door by Danielle Lin

 

UNTITLED curatorial team from left to right Jakob van Klang, Kimberley Boudville, Danielle Lin, Nurunnuha Md Alwi, Haymie Yu and Lorrain Tan.

I didn't step foot into art college expecting to be a curator.

For that matter, I don't think I stepped foot into art college expecting to be anything other than an artist. I was fully prepared to embrace the starving artist stereotype. But as I progressed in my career, I realized something – I was not prepared, nor was I willing, to see everyone else starve.

The idea for Untitled was drawn from my own experiences and observations from the current art world: prejudice, biases, gatekeeping, unsustainable livelihoods. As the daughter of two counselors, I found it very bizarre that people could be so condescending and be so smug about it. Maybe they earned their pride, or whatever. Power became synonymous with being intimidating, mysterious, and a little curt with the newbies. I wasn't anything like that, so when I curated an exhibition for the first time, I thought of myself as a helper of the arts rather than an authoritative figure. To no surprise, people respected me regardless – almost as if one does not need to assert dominance in order to lead. The more I dove into the many pockets of the art industry, the more I found that very few artists actually made a livelihood from their labour, and it seemed like everyone had already adopted the mantra of "it is what it is". I guess my youth was an advantage in this case – I had not been tamed to accept these working conditions yet.

Untitled on The Star (Photo credit: Danielle Lin)

To this day, "curator" is a descriptor I find astonished to see next to my name, but I suppose when you strip away the perceived prestige often tied to the title and revert to its latin origin of the term, "cura" – to take care of – then I suppose to do take care of artists and their artwork. I care a lot about art, and I care a lot about artists. And as far as I'm concerned, no curator should be working without these qualities. Yet, I find that many in power in the art industry do not care for art and artists in the way that I do. Status, privilege, and money don't mean much to a woman whose parents counseled people who only ever needed kindness and respect. Rather than sales and press coverage, I measure the success of an exhibition based on its relevancy to our timeline, the depth of the impact it serves to communities, and how many people it inspires. "Inspires" is the key word here. If you can believe me, many people have called my curatorial work "inspiring" and said that I've "inspired" them to do the same. I genuinely hope so. Then all the curators in the industry wouldn't be so burnt out and pressed for survival. But for some reason – new curators, and subsequently, new ideas, are few and far between. It's either that these people were only stroking my ego, or that somewhere along the way, they got lost in the jungle of art-world politics or had their passion snuffed out by the realities of surviving on nothing but dreams.

Untitled Installation View (Photo credit: Danielle Lin)

Sometimes I find myself at a loss for what to say when an aspiring curator asks me where she can learn to curate. That is the same question I ask every time I scroll through the only colleges and universities that my family can afford in Kuala Lumpur, every time I look up the backgrounds of my local role models and feel a twinge of hopelessness when I read that they obtained BFAs abroad in expensive countries, and every time I pass by a group of established industry players and disappear into the background of their familiar conversations heavily seasoned with inside jokes. The truth is I am an outsider to curating just as much as a self-taught artist hoping to be spotted by a gallery. That's not very motivating, but I don't try to motivate; I try to be honest. Stay passionate, work hard, and network with industry professionals, I say. Because these are not just the best things to do – in our country, it's the only things we can do. Normally I leave the second part out.

Untitled "Gift Shop" (Photo credit: Danielle Lin)

But the amount of times that I've been asked, "How can I be a curator?", and the sheer amount of job inquiries that flooded my email just minutes after I posted the hiring ad for curators and gallery support staff for Untitled implies that people are keen on contributing to the arts in some way. The question is, are we willing to let these people in?

In the months leading up to Untitled, I posted two job open calls on social media, interviewed over 50 people, and eventually hired 18 people of varying degrees of art experience, all with a lot of sincerity and heart. My curatorial team consisted of fellow artist-curators and fresh industry faces – Kimberley Boudville, Haymie Yu, Jakob van Klang, Lorrain Tan, and Nurrunnuha Md binti Alwi. In my younger years, I had witnessed firsthand on multiple occasions how quickly one person's ego could derail an entire project, so I was extra cautious of making sure that Untitled was as professional as it could get. In the least "I'm-such-a-nice-person" way possible, I sprinkled in lots of kindness and understanding to my team as well. All I asked for was a good exhibition and a friendly experience for everyone involved. What they showed me took my breath away.

Installation night. (Photo credit: Danielle Lin)

Impeccable organization. Immaculate exhibition design. Multiple friendships formed. Cheery smiles to every single artist and visitor. Everything accounted for, no serious hiccups, no workplace politics. Over the span of a few weeks, I witnessed this group of strangers become something like a family, all connected by their shared interest in the arts. They learned a lot about what went into curating an exhibition, that much I expected and was what I wanted. But I did not anticipate how wonderful it all felt – sharing dinner together on the exhibition floor in the middle of bubblewrap and half-unboxed artworks, hearing echoes of their laughter in the other rooms while they worked happily on their gazillion tasks, wrapping over 300 artworks together with hot chocolate in our stomachs. Not a single fight happened. Not even so much as a snide remark. Only sincere warmth, gratitude, and well wishes. Several artists and visitors commented on how professional and friendly the team had been, which is usually the part that goes unnoticed in the making of exhibitions. For the first time, I saw what a vibrant workplace an art exhibition could be – all because I said yes to the new art workers, yes to the people with so much to contribute, yes to the people who shared my mission.

Untitled Installation View. (Photo credit: Danielle Lin)

About halfway through the exhibition, it hit me. I thought I was curating an exhibition together with my team. It turned out that I was also curating something very precious: the perfect collaborative workplace. And on top of that, it wasn't even hard. Don't get me wrong, managing an exhibition is tough work, but being a good leader and treating people with kindness and respect was the easiest, and perhaps best part of everything that we were doing. It turned out that the only difference between me and the condescending elites that I'd met was that I was a decent person.

But despite the obvious success, there is one part about Untitled that saddens the smile on my face – and it is the fact that it was born from a world of judgment, a utopia of an exhibition that is becoming increasingly hard to find anywhere. What does it say about the state of our art industry, when it pushes a 25 year old and a handful of young people to stand up and say "this is how it should be"? Why is it that my proposal of an exhibition that upheld honest opinions, fair ethics, and professional yet friendly management could be deemed "inspiring" and "a breath of fresh air", instead of just being the bare minimum? And when people tell me that the art industry needs more people like me, what are they doing to encourage young people to do the same? How is it that my curatorial role models have written and spoken about all the gaps and issues in the art industry from 30 years ago, and nothing has changed?

These are all rhetorical questions. We know the answers. So to avoid ending this article on a depressing note, I will say that I believe change can be made, but not in the ways that we think. Rather than lecturing artists on how to polish their portfolios, moaning about how not enough people wish to work for the arts, and watching defeatedly as the masses swarm to purchase factory-made merchandise instead of lining up at art galleries, I believe we should zoom into our own behaviours and ask ourselves: If I wasn't in the art ecosystem already, what would convince me to contribute to it? Love for the arts isn't enough. Love is not direction. Love is not clarity. And love does not warn you about the power dynamics woven into the threads of virtually every exhibition across the board and what to do if you receive the short end of the stick. If we want to bridge the gap between art and the public, we have to admit that we cannot do this with only the few art workers still soldiering on after years of burn out. And we have to admit that some of us can come across as intimidating or hard to approach sometimes. 

Group photo of the Untitled team. (Photo credit: Danielle Lin)

So if I were to sum up one main takeaway from my reflections of Untitled and all the experiences I've had as an artist curator, it would be this – we don't have to impress aspiring artists or curators by sounding smart or looking important. What we really need to do is to smile at them and let them contribute to the conversation.

And this exhibition just proved what happens when kindness opens the door.