Spectacle Exhibition

Museum buildings, while presenting spectacles, often become spectacles themselves within the city, creating a complex relationship of seeing and being seen. These spectacles blur through superimposition, forming an aura. In a modern society that hungrily consumes spectacles, these museums, imbued with such an aura, inevitably become objects endowed with sacred meaning—worshipped as objects rather than places. Architects, in turn, often take pride in the opportunity to design museum buildings.

Synchronizing with China's rapid urban development, museum buildings have also been constructed across the country at an incredible pace in recent years, among which there are many outstanding works. However, it is precisely this nearly frenzied scale and quantity that makes us feel it is difficult to address this topic through a traditional architectural exhibition format. While we might present fragments through models, photographs, or drawings, these are insufficient to explore the deeper issues behind this grand spectacle: museum construction and usage, public space and private realm, presentation and observation, eventfulness and everydayness...

Therefore, in this exhibition, we attempt to present rather than re-present, inviting twelve architects or artists to use the museum as a theme, re-expressing museum architecture from their own perspectives through the medium of pan-visual arts.

Co-curators:

 Zhang Ming, Zhang Jiajing