Established in 2014, Emerging Curators Project is an annual platform open to curators from China or of Chinese descent born after 1970. With a jury made up of international curators, artists, critics, and directors of art organizations, the program selects each year three curatorial proposals, and the winners will be able to set up their respective exhibitions with financial and professional support provided by Power Station of Art. The project looks for the most vibrant, stimulating modes of thinking and expression today, while at the same time striving equally to examine the edgiest, most pressing of topics at present.

Launched on 28 April 2016, this year's Emerging Curators Project was enthusiastically embraced by emerging curators of Chinese ethnicity both from home and abroad, with a total of 86 entries submitted as of the 15 June deadline. After careful selection by the jury of experts, whose members included Chris Dercon, Ding Yi, Feng Yuan, Gao Shiming, Gong Yan, Hou Hanru, Li Xu and Manray Hsu, 3 winners were announced, followed by the materialization of "2+1" exhibitions. To allow contemporary art to seep deep into the city, 1 of the 3 winning projects landed on was realized at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, and constituted a "City Project" became part of the 11th Shanghai Biennale's City project. The other 2 exhibitions took place on the 5th floor of the Power Station of Art, in parallel with the Shanghai Biennale. Furthermore, with full support from the Consulate General of France in Shanghai, 2 individuals from the winning teams were offered the opportunity for overseas research. They will head to France in early 2017 for 3 to 4 weeks of interactions with local artists and art organizations.

The Amoy Meat Factory

Axis Art Project

Seemingly a location with specific address, Amoy Meat Factory stems from the virtual game “Street Fighter”. Despite this, its veritable origin has nowhere else to be traced and its future unpredictable as well. Aimed at transforming its role in Scheme Phase II, the Axis Art project team strives to be a novelist to write the “history”. Tracking an “in-out” or “out-in” structural prototype of the same category in certain texts, we try to write something new based on this structure: starting from a specific and seemingly familiar geographic space, we construct a deceptive but definite immersion.

The text of the novel will finally be disassembled into two paralleled parts for theatrical presentation: one presented in drama language based on the time clue, and the other via visual exhibition by structuralizing the space in the text. As all the audience enter the spot forged by the text and the artists, the text is ready to withdraw at any moment and the art work will be resumed to symbols, the possibility to overturn the original text is thus achieved in the audience’s rearrangement.

Articulators Summit

Liu Yihong, Wang Yan, Ou I-Chun

Articulators Summit project is a practice initiated by the Multitude-Till We Have Face team, motivated by an opportunity of the Emerging Curators Project ran by the Power Station of Art (PSA).

Multitude -Till We Have Face try to bulids an interactive datebase in Asia. Nevertheless, what we expect to see is how a group of people make self-study of knowledge and practice in association with other groups, for the autonomousness and junction of mobilization forces have always been a mainline of people and thoughts that we has concerned. We begin with them, till we have faces.

The exhibition uses Theatre, Education, Music, Alternative space, Bookstore, Media station etc. as its key mediums, be marked by the power of action, then strike its reversibility. This exhibition is an exodus which the artist become the artivist, looking for the local practice, invite the articulators and their various groups away from their own forts. In here, articulators could catch sight of each other in this frontier theater. They are the one who makes the singularity of the multitude become plurality through common wealth.

The exhibition itself as a “threshing ground”, make individual harvests as "exposed" as a harvest ritual of the collective for mutual recognition and for forging more possibilities, so as to present the possible “unit” inside the difference of Asia’s social power of the porosity.

Grain God Narrative

Mao Chenyu, Zhou Jing, Fen Lei

The exhibition closely focuses on the “Receipt of Grain Loan” to investigate and represent the comtemporary lineage of the giveness between the rural and the urban, to follow the whereabouts of the borrowed grain and its genealogy, and to re-recognize the narrative of the rural areas in China under the context of globalization: the paddy, the countryside, even the whole rural areas, are more of the gift than of the debt. This giftness or giveness of the local events is called “Grain God”, and its vicissitude in contemporary China is called Grain God Narrative.

Grain God Narrative attempt to invoke a reverse writing between the rural and the urban spectacle, attempt to restart the spatial negotiation of the local and global commerce.

About the project

Dates: 2016.10.22-2017.02.14

Venue: Power Station of Art

Courtesy of the artists and Power Station of Art, for further information please visit http://powerstationofart.org.