Feigned Innocence
Osage Kwun Tong
This group show presents the ideas of four trainee art curators - Lam Hoi-sin, Iris Lo, Nana Euna-Seo and Evangelo Costadimas - who have just completed an eight-month art curatorial training programme run by Para/Site Art Space and partly funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
Each trainee curator has presented a sub-themed exhibition using four separate spaces in the Osage Kwun Tong galleries to present 20 artists and explore the 'very fine lines between curiosity and spying ... between desiring and lusting'. This theme, however, induces each of the curatorial displays to hover around the clich? with the audience offered aspects of nudity, surveillance and voyeurism; perennial topics for artists.
The tightness of theme and the close physical proximity of each of the curator's displays cause an unfortunate homogeneity between each of the four rooms - exacerbated by the decision not to provide any explanatory wall text.
Teachers of trainee curators should know that an art curator has the role of exhibition organiser, provocateur and informer, and is an interpreter of art, artists, history and culture. Of utmost importance is the intellectual articulation of the art on display to an audience. If an audience is ignored, then exhibitions become questionable exercises in academic entertainment.