How To Curate Your Own Life: Yen Lin Kong (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of educator Yen Lin Kong’s talk titled “How To Curate Your Own Life” at TEDxNTU 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Myth of Art Being Intimidating

How many of you here feel intimidated going to art museums? Art to most of us is that precious painting ensconced in an ornate gilded frame, seated austerely behind a low barrier that prevents one from coming too close, or that fragile sculpture on a pedestal under the solemn and watchful eye of museum attendants. Some of us fear going to art museums because it is too high-brow. You can’t even talk loudly in it, and when you do, you risk sounding silly.

A friend once told me in dismay, “Art makes me feel stupid. I’m a barbarian because I don’t understand it.” I’m here today to debunk this myth and bring art down from its pedestal, because truly, art is all around us, and all it takes is an open mind, an appreciative and observant eye to connect the dots. I argue that art is an integral part of daily life, even in seemingly mundane moments like the way we choose to make our beds, fold our laundry, or spread jam onto bread.

Curating as Taking Care

I speak from years of experience working in the visual arts industry, starting out in muse, and while I may be moving on to a new role with the National Museum as a curatorial position, and that is my first full-fledged curatorial role, I realize that I have actually been curating and applying curatorial skills since the start of my career.

Every act and gesture in daily life can potentially be a creative springboard to creative expression, conveying identity, personality quirk, or even social commentary, but the creative process doesn’t just stop there.

A curator then comes in to extract and organize these moments, expound on them, heighten their meanings, and bring them into conversation with larger social discourses. And do you know, the word curating actually stems from the Latin word “curere,” which means to take care of.

Traditionally, it refers to someone who oversees and manages a collection of precious objects as a custodian or guardian. But in contemporary times, the definition of this role has evolved to include the selection, adjustment, and organization of content to convey new meaning. This was precisely what I did during my time at the Arts House as a visual arts programming manager between 2016 to 2018, where I had numerous opportunities to work with Singaporean photographers whom I deeply admired.

The Intimacy and Transience of Life

And one of them was photographer Sean Lee, who created a series on his aging parents titled “Two People.” Shot in black and white, the series consisted of portraits of his parents interspersed among numerous close-up images of their bodies. Most of these close-up images resembled landscapes. For instance, the curve of a knee resembled the gentle curve of a hill, and the delicate skin under the neck resembled ripples on an ocean.

Through his sensitive and masterful eye, Sean drew our attention to the mundane and banal details we would not normally associate as art in ordinary circumstances. By slowing down and enlarging the gradual decay of the parental body over time, these images get us to contemplate on the intimacy between parent and child and also the transience of life.

To present this series, I suggested printing the close-up images on long scrolls of paper with their ends hung loose, while the smaller portraits can be small, unframed, and pinned using specimen needles. I wanted the presentation to appear free and floaty, very much like the ethereal quality of Sean’s works. Sean was agreeable to this suggestion, and this exhibition turned out to be one of the most memorable that I have curated at the Arts House.

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Bringing Art to the People

My canvas for curation later expanded from swipe cube spaces to streets and parks when I joined the National Arts Council in 2018. There, I was assigned the portfolio of commissioning public art under the Public Art Trust. As someone who has worked with constantly 2D media within indoor gallery spaces, having to work with 3D large-scale sculptures in the public arena constituted a huge learning curve. But I was strongly encouraged by the possibility of finally being able to bring art out to where people live, work, and play.

Every public artwork is an opportunity to reach out to someone unlikely to step into a museum or gallery, bring them on a flight of fantasy, and endow them with new discoveries and reflections about life. It was a chance to demonstrate that art was truly a part of daily life and encounters. In fact, some of our most successful public artworks were the simplest objects, such as this series of oversized, inflatable five stones by artist Twardzik Ching Chor Leng, which popped up in various locations across Singapore for six months. Precisely because it was visually and conceptually simple, it resonated immensely with people and reminded them of the childhood game of five stones.

Rewriting the World Ahead of Us

One of my most memorable commissions was “rewritten: The World Ahead of Us,” a series of 14 public artworks curated under the theme of text-based art. These were meant to provide an outlet for the struggles and thoughts we have when confronted with a new reality of social distancing during the global pandemic. The artworks range from large-scale to Ang Song Nian’s thimble installation of 100 “mu,” or wood in Chinese characters, that symbolise unity and how every tree makes up a forest, to small-scale, such as Sam Low’s “temporary escapism,” a series of ten quirky signages that encourage human connection post-pandemic. Blending seamlessly into Punggol Waterway Park, these artworks provided small doses of humour and respite for keen-eyed residents to notice them.

And that is the power of good public art, to be able to open up opportunity for that serendipitous chance encounter, capture your curiosity and attention with a hook, and draw you in with a compelling story and message. However, public art doesn’t just stop being a big, cool idea. It is strongly enmeshed with many disciplines, such as math, science, engineering and architecture. Hence, public art is often a highly collaborative act, as public spaces are often owned and used by various stakeholders.

Curating Across Disciplines

Hence, public art is often a co-creation by many hands, and never just by a solo genius working in isolation. After sharing about my experiences curating art in public spaces, I would like to share about another form of curating that takes place across another discipline, one that I discovered during my time as a journalist. I loved visual arts as a child, and I am an extremely visual thinker and learner. However, my first foray into curating wasn’t in visual arts, but in photojournalism or reportage photography.

During my undergraduate days, I served as the photo editor of the Nanyang Chronicle, where I pioneered the photo essay format, which is a weekly feature in the newspapers, which included a series of images that tell a coherent story about campus life. I titled it, “Through the Lens.” And to determine the content and pace of each story, we had to select who to profile, how to do it, using colour of black and white, and to be laid out in what sequence and size. We captured stories ranging from epic to the mundane, and I recall a particularly memorable one where I captured a series on canteen vendors in the midst of food preparation.

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The Beauty in Insignificant Moments

For close to a month, I returned to the same setting for many times in order to capture the changing rhythms and atmospheres of activities that happen from dawn to dusk. I would like to think that the canteen is a commonplace setting, but I have at least captured a slice of beauty in these seemingly insignificant moments, such as a ray of light filtering in through the theme of freshly made food like a spotlight on stage, or the geometric patterns of bowls and plates in the kitchen. Little did I know back then that selecting and organizing visual elements into a meaningful sequence was itself an exercise in curation. It was a preparatory ground for my first job upon graduation, which was the Reuters Global Picture Desk sub-editor.

It was a highly competitive and fast-paced news operation where me and my colleagues were on the constant end of an endless flow of images shot by photojournalists from all over the world. We would then edit, check for manipulation, and craft an accompanying caption for each image. Content duration was key as we had to select the most precise and striking images to be disseminated as quickly as possible in order to score as many front-page usages ahead of fierce competition from other news agencies. It was like an all-seeing eye, but I soon realized that being able to perceive such an immense depth and breadth of humanity also meant having to take in pain and beauty in equal measure.

The Complexities of the Human Condition

Witnessing the juxtaposition of human emotions ranging from grief, joy, despair, and anxiety made me realize time and again the contradictions and the complexities of the human condition. Which brings me to my next point that not all art is manifested visually. Some are intangible. It may be poetic, unseen, but felt beyond description.

I realized this when I was on a six-month journalism internship to Nepal in 2008 that there can be so much irony, pain, and trauma coexisting alongside hope, joy, and love. This intangible vibe may refer to the way people think and aspire as a community or how the place feels intangibly. During my internship in Nepal, I actually encountered in my reportage in various parts of Nepal stories about human resilience and healing. And that was because the country was emerging from a decade-long civil war and was on the cusp of writing a new constitution.

Healing Deep Within

I recalled a particularly moving story which was part of a documentary called “A People War.” “A People War” captured stories about individuals affected by the conflict. And one of them was a story about a pair of siblings who both joined opposing factions of the war. At some point in time, they were probably fighting against each other.

It struck me then how poignant it was that the family was a microcosm of society and how there could be two opposing ideologies under one roof and that the process of reconciliation and healing was ultimately a very challenging one that reached deep within families and individuals to put aside their differences and work towards a common future. In addition, I started to observe that the capital city of Kathmandu had very few museums. I soon realized that this was because the historic Kathmandu Valley was a living, breathing museum where art and culture abound at every street and corner. There was no need for a circumscribed institution for art.

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Art, Culture and Life Mix

Art and culture and life were actually mixed in a chaotic, heady mix, practically indistinguishable. There was no need for pedestals or captions. And for instance, an unassuming tree stump at the corner of a street intersection with coins nailed onto it turned out to be the much-venerated Vaishyadev, or toothache god, which locals have been making offerings to in hope of relieving them of toothaches. How then, you ask, may we cultivate curatorial skills in daily life?

In fact, some of you may have already been exercising unconscious curatorial skills in your life. For instance, in the way that you have designed your university education journey to select courses that broaden and deepen your skill sets, or the way that you have intentionally chosen your overseas attachment program to be in Europe, your industrial attachment program to be in Asia, in order to capture working knowledge of both continents. The choices and decisions that you make in life are critical, and over time, they inadvertently form patterns that inform about who you are and what you believe in. To hone one’s curatorial skills, cultivating an observant and sensitive mind is key.

Two Approaches to Honing Curatorial Skills

I have no one answer to how to do that, but I can humbly suggest two possible approaches. Firstly, pause, observe, and record. Curating is ultimately about recognizing patterns and extrapolating these patterns into an overarching theme to convey a meaningful message. Secondly, create space for doubt and cultivate a tolerance for uncertainty.

Not everything has to be within the boundaries of your knowledge. Sometimes creativity means acknowledging the limitations of what you know and finding alternative ways of knowing. Most good arts do not end with a full stop but a question mark, meaning that they are extremely open-ended in the possibilities they embody. Life is as such, and it is in these grey areas that curators operate.

Discovering Art in Daily Life

There is surely some form of art in your home, and I don’t mean expensive designer furniture. It could be that sliver of evening light filtering in through your window or that droplet of water hanging off the faucet of your tap. It could be food. The way you prepare it or the way you have chosen to innovate from the recipe in order to give food its distinctive flavor.

We are all visual creatures, and it is just second nature in us to observe and create and interpret art and beauty in everyday life. And with that, I conclude by hoping that you will too be inspired to discover art in daily life with me. Not just art with a capital A in the museums and theaters, but art with a small a nestled in the interstitials of daily life where everyone is capable of interpreting and creating. Thank you so much.