Curating & Projects
CURATORIAL PRACTICE
My curating is not a commercial service detached from theory; it is the field where theoretical claims are tested against lived reality. Every exhibition enters the research framework of social reality — curatorial mechanism — artistic response.
Positioning
Over the past decade I have taken part in more than thirty exhibitions as curator or academic adviser, working with close to two hundred artists. Much of this work took place at the margins of the official art system: community spaces, regional institutions, non-profit venues, and the studios of individuals who appear in no art history.
What concerns me is never whether an exhibition looks presentable, but whether it can actually bring artworks into a real relationship with a specific public. This is why curating belongs to my research: theory that cannot be tested on site remains rhetoric.
Exhibitions curated or advised
Artists worked with
Years of practice
Steps in the working framework
How I Work
① Read the site first
Enter a concrete space and its people: what is happening in this community, and what do these works have to do with the people standing before them? Ignore the press release; look at the actual conditions.
② Unpack the mechanisms
Lay out the conditions that make the exhibition possible — funding, institutions, media, local power structures — and see clearly what is speaking on behalf of the artwork.
③ Only then, the works
Once reality and mechanism are on the table, judge whether the work genuinely answers the question — or merely produces a pose.
Project Archive
Related Sections
Writing
Essays and field notes that remain after the exhibitions, all authored by Li Yukun.
Publications
Five completed book manuscripts and a register of published texts.
Glossary
A running glossary of key concepts in contemporary art. (In Chinese.)