Carol Yinghua Lu is an art critic and curator. She is the director of Beijing Inside-out Art Museum and PhD candidate in art history at the University of Melbourne. She is a contributing editor at frieze and is on the advisory board of The Exhibitionist. Lu was on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale and on the jury for the Filipino National Pavilion of 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. She was the co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale and co-curator of the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, she was the artistic director and chief curator of OCAT Shenzhen. She was the first visiting fellow in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship program at the Tate Research Centre in 2013. She is one of the first four ARIAH (Association of Research Institute in Art History) East Asia Fellows 2017 at Bard Graduate Center.

She was a researcher on the exhibition history in China for the Asian Cultural Complex in Gwangju and a co-curator of Discordant Harmony, a touring exhibition on the potential, challenges and impossibilities of imagining Asia. In collaboration with Liu Ding, she is in the process of researching into the legacy of Socialist Realism in the practice and discourse of contemporary art in China.

11.12 From Research to Exhibition - A Case Study of Curating Practice of "Salon Salon Exhibition"

Adopting "Salon Salon: Fine Art Practices from 1972 to 1982 in Profile A Beijing Perspective" as an example, combining "From the Issue of Art to Issue of Position: Echoes of Socialist Realism" and "Xin Ke Du (New Measurement) Group and Qian WeiKang", I will share the curating practice based on historical research jointly developed with the artist Liu Ding. The speech will cover the starting point of revisiting history, the methods of historical research and the process of translating the study of art history into an exhibition, with emphasis on the rhetoric of the research exhibition.

In this speech, I hope to outline a mutual portrayal relationship between curating and rhetoric, and draw a parallel of curating to a kind of linguistic practice. By this parallel, curating involves questions of what to express and how to express at the same time, and the importance between contents and methods of expression is equal. There are logics behind what works are chosen, where they are placed, what stories are told and how they are told. Every wall, every inch of space and every element of the exhibition can be expressive and can play a role in the presentation of the exhibition.