On The White Wall: 20 Litre Interior and Exterior Stable Wall Paint

About

Since modernism, museums are usually abstracted to a colorless ‘white cube’ – to neutrally accommodate, aiming at exhibiting objects objectively. However, the concept ‘exhibiting’ introduced a non-neutral at the beginning of its use: it includes subjective pre-actions like archiving, layout and installing. About ‘archive’:

“The archive is the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance [and disappearance] of statements as unique events”  (Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge)

Through their forms, contemporary art and museums alienate themselves and denote a ‘the Other’ continuously. But that doesn’t mean the postcolonial research should be negated entirely; In concrete curating practice, critical use of exhibition form can present a deconstruction of the alienation and objectification happening in contemporary art: as an exhibition initiates by artists, this exhibition expects to use this opportunity to start a concrete internal critique. The title  ‘On The White Wall’ is an appropriation of familiar academic discourse, refers to the exhibition itself and the rejection of categorizing discourse ‘beyond’ the ‘white wall’; ‘20 Litre Interior and Exterior Stable Wall Paint’ refers a real, specific and available commodity on eBay, emphasizing the materiality of a specific exhibition and meanwhile leads the narrative to a commodity constructing an exhibition, in which the power in the layer of exhibition-viewer is replaced into a collective and open act – The exhibition form is objectified as the instrument of a self-critique, and is equally open to every viewer and artist; within the flickering of signifies, the narrative towards objects inward the exhibition is filled by the process of a continuous self-reference. This constitutes the bond between artists and viewers, inside artists and viewers.

Furthermore, under the gaze of ‘the Occidental’, this subject intends to build a new political criticism by the deconstruction of its power and political narrative.