It’s the day before my exhibition opens. My work is installed, except one piece that I need to finish in the morning, but the poster has only just arrived and the students who are participating will need to set up tomorrow. I hope it all comes together. I’m feeling a bit exhausted and frustrated by the last minute approach.
The delay with the poster was, in part at least, because Yan Yan, the residency director, was unhappy with how the title translated into Chinese and wanted to alter the Chinese title before it went to print. I find it amusing that the title Lost in Translation was quite literally lost in translation, but am less amused by the delay that it caused.
Most of the performance artists in Huang Jue Ping Arts District, the area I am staying in, have gone to a live art festival in Xian so Yan Yan asked four students to participate in my exhibition. They all work in performance, but other than that I knew nothing about their work until they presented the performances they have developed for the exhibition to me yesterday. They had been asked to make new work in response to the exhibition title and the information I gave them earlier in the week about the concepts that inform my project. With less than a week to come up with something it did worry me that the quality of the work wouldn’t be very good. Also I had been given the job of pulling all the works together into a coherent exhibition, another last minute appointment.
I was quite impressed, not to mention relieved, that a group of BA students with such a limited timeframe had developed work that I felt happy to exhibit. One student in particular had come up with an interesting way of navigating the space with a mirror. The same student showed me a piece of work that she had performed at a recent live art event that involved spending a whole day drawing the shadow of a tree every time the sun came out. I really liked her idea and the photos of its realisation were quite beautiful. I just hope they’re as pleased with my curation – I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.
