The gendered predicament of women has never existed in isolation but was always intertwined with, embedded within, and obscured by other structural conditions.¹ This is why exhibitions involving women, especially those featuring exclusively women artists, resist easy evaluation. On one hand, such exhibitions must strip away the essentializing label of “female,” and must likewise remove the essentializing label of “women.” On the other hand, they often must strategically invoke a collective female identity, to generate political momentum.² This factor essentially echoes a longstanding feminist paradox, concerning both resisting and redefining female identity.

This dual movement of differentiation and aggregation produces its own contradiction: it refuses categorization while simultaneously deploying it; it challenges essentialism while operating, strategically, under its name.³ This tension is not merely a conceptual paradox, but a historical one—an accumulation of gendered dilemmas shaped across generations.⁴

Today, exhibitions featuring exclusively women artists are not presented for their own sake, but rather to point toward—and attempt to correct—the structural biases behind them. The issues they bring into view include: Why are women excluded? How do institutional systems operate? How has mainstream art history systematically pushed women out? Why is there such a disproportion between the number of female art students and the number of recognized women artists? How do heavy labor, domestic responsibilities, and gendered divisions of work shape an artist’s ability to create? In other words, the critical core here is: how do all-women exhibitions or all-women curatorial teams—when adopted as a curatorial methodology—relate to systemic bias and exclusion? And where do they fail to relate? Besides treating “all-women” as a straightforward strategy for correcting institutional prejudice, have we overlooked the active, generative conditions they may also produce?

One illustrative example is the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams. The curator, Cecilia Alemani, deliberately downplayed the symbolic significance of gender representation, emphasizing that The Milk of Dreams was not conceived as an overtly feminist exhibition. Instead, the exhibition sought to question and reorient perspectives historically framed by the white, male, rational subject as a universal norm.⁵ Following the announcement of the curatorial team for Documenta 16, similar questions have increasingly come to the fore: when “all-women” curating is mobilized as a symbolic tool for institutional correction, should we not be more cautious about the structural problems that risk being once again bypassed? Moreover, how might the failure of institutional systems be subtly redirected and reassigned to “women” themselves?

Might all-women exhibitions and curatorial teams signal not (merely) political correctness, not (merely) identity politics, nor (merely) gestures of systemic repair? These phenomena are not necessarily feminized, do not imply fragility, are not tokens of gender inclusiveness, nor simple responses to a historical rupture. Rather, they may point to a differentiation, a shift, or a transformation within existing structures—and within the very modes through which practice and knowledge are produced.

Three Ways of the “Non-center” Approach

In this issue, we extend our gratitude to writers and curators Binna Choi, Tammy Yu-Ting Hsieh and Ileana Tu for revisiting recent women-related exhibition cases, each through the lens of her own experiences and perspectives. The selected cases fall into three categories: (1) collection exhibitions held by museums or institutions; (2) curated exhibitions centered on women’s or gender-related issues; and (3) international biennials curated by all-women teams. These three essays, coincidentally, adopt non-typical writing forms—conversation, semi-fictional letters, and first-person perspectives—and position themselves in a “yielding,” non-comprehensive mode of writing. Notably, the word “feminism” appears only sparsely.

Together, they take up the notion of the “non-center” to relieve the binary frameworks of gender, structure, and power, suggesting that “women” is not simply a curatorial theme or tag, but a distinct mode of acting and making. By emphasizing leaving—as an active verb—rather than adding further labels or meanings, they open new space beyond existing categorizations. This, in turn, helps explain why engaging with “women,” or attempting to dismantle or overturn any structural formation, remains such an inherently challenging task. “Non-center” remains a new political stance and ethical consideration, grounded in a cautionary refusal of, and vigilant resistance to, the reproduction of power and the re-inscription of labels. By departing from rather than replacing the center, and by underlining partial, fragmented, and limited perspectives, these writings not only embrace the self-awareness of their own limits, but also reveal the political impasse of the present moment.

Blind Spots in Thinking “Woman”

In Speaking Nearby: A Letter on Ocean in Us—Southern Visions of Women Artists, independent curator Tammy Yu-Ting Hsieh was invited to engage in a form of “paper curation” to respond to the exhibition Ocean in Us at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. The aim was to open a conversation about the institutional logics and curatorial structures that underpin collection-based exhibitions. Acts of collecting, beyond acknowledging artists and artworks “within institutional systems,” also constitute key sites where paradigms may shift and structures are reproduced. From a curatorial perspective, collecting could be an institutional intervention that actively and decisively frames historical narratives. Collection exhibitions, therefore, hold the potential not only to display holdings, but also to uncover mechanisms of exclusion, re-articulate gendered perspectives, and recalibrate the historical positioning of artworks and artists.

Ocean in Us—Southern Visions of Women Artists is a women artists’ collection exhibition developed within KMFA’s strategic framework of the “Plural Histories of the Greater South,” jointly realized with the National Gallery Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum, drawing from the combined holdings of all three institutions. Building on this institutional and historical context, Hsieh’s essay adopts Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of “speaking nearby,” articulated by the Vietnamese-American artist, filmmaker, and theorist. It notes that even when we appear to stand at a threshold from which we are “able to speak,” we must remain vigilant toward the essentializing logics of qualification and identity at work, and acknowledge the irreducible differences between our respective positions of speech. Instead of describing the spatial arrangement in detail, the writing moves through the exhibition in a drifting, flickering manner—appearing and disappearing—leaving footnotes and annotations in its wake. This approach resonates with the artworks’ explorations of language, interiority, the Other, and collective voices, opening a polyphonic space that slips across national borders and linguistic boundaries. These voices—whether silent, marked by traces of action, or engaged in the dismantling and rethinking of linguistic oppositions—reflect the resistances and resiliencies articulated from the perspectives of Asian women in relation to the visible and invisible constraints of society (within Asian women’s lived negotiations with both the visible and the unseen constraints of society).

On the Ubiquity of Women’s Situations

In the third essay, The Fiction of Michelle Chen, curator Ileana Tu reflects on how she maps out and constructs the fictional figure “Michelle Chen” through her field research, curatorial vision, and lived experience. It depicts how the “living, imagined, and projected” figure of the woman-mother reappears across generations. In that era, women’s circumstances were often confined to the roles of homemaker and mother, or marked by the struggle to claim an independent place in society. Through her curatorial practice, Tu revisits—and seeks to mend—these memories, hoping to interrupt the ongoing reproduction of such gendered conditions. Tu articulates her intentions and methodology clearly: “Michelle Chen weaves together the factual world of the mother’s generation and the imagined world of the child’s generation, writing a counter-history at the intersection of history and fiction. It is an attempt to revisit the scenes in a mother’s life in which she was compelled to obedience, without reproducing the grammar of patriarchal violence.”

The subject she investigates is not merely the socially assigned role of “women or mothers,” but the dense entanglements women face as they navigate between generations: gendered discipline, aging, shifting temporalities of life and labor, and complex family relations. She invited novelist Kao Po-Lun to write a short fiction as her curatorial statement, in which the prematurely deceased mother, Michelle Chen, is recalled through the memories and imagination of her gay son. The figure of Michelle Chen exists simultaneously as remembrance and projection—much like the maternal image in our everyday lives, an identity we rarely have the chance to understand beyond expectation. This “nearly indescribable” figure of the woman-mother is continually extracted, deployed, and accumulated through social, domestic, and emotional labor.

The first stage of Michelle Chen, titled Michelle Chen’s Room, presents an immersive “Michelle Chen’s” bedroom within the exhibition space. Elements of Tu’s field research—stories from eight Taiwanese women aged sixty to seventy—are transformed into sound narratives woven into corners, furniture, and objects, allowing this elusive “female or mother” figure to surface through fiction. The second stage is a group exhibition featuring video works, commissioned pieces, live performances, and other forms by six artists and collectives across different nationalities, generations, and genders. Tu extends the imagery of “woman” and “mother” across the artists’ practices, regardless of whether they themselves are mothers, leading audiences to sense both the shared and divergent imaginings of the maternal figure—its traces, its tensions, its quiet constraints—haunting in the air.

On the Celebration and the Necessary Caution of All-Women Formations

In the essay “ALOHA NŌ: What’s Love Got to Do with It?,” Binna Choi, one of the curators of the Hawai‘i Triennial 2025 (HT25), shares her experience co-curating as part of an all-women team. Drawing from this experience, her article discusses gender dynamics in the contemporary art world, modes of collaboration, and curatorial models. The text includes a section that documents the exchanges among the three curators of HT25—Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Binna Choi, and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu—during the preparation stages of the Triennial. Choi offers a sharp caution on the risks of romanticizing all-women curatorial formations: first, she notes that “…women take up the majority of work and labor–from cleaning to curating.” This means women frequently occupy the center of labor, rather than the center of power; and second, all-women team conditions require careful consideration. As she writes, “…women are left to carry the work of care and healing… while the figure of a male remains in the old image of power…”

The methodological anchor of HT25’s curatorial approach rests largely on linguistic epistemologies and Hawaiian Indigenous methodologies. These methods serve to dismantle the commodified and overly simplified colonial gaze that has long shaped perceptions of Hawai’i. Reclaiming the term “ALOHA” from its colonial and touristic framing, the curatorial practices foreground deeper histories of colonization, illegal occupation, and Indigenous sovereignty embedded in the land. They redirect the view from Hawai‘i’s familiar circulated identity as a strategic node in the Pacific “Third Island Chain” toward its lived condition as an islanded world interconnected by the ocean. The article further contemplates what it means, as a haole wahine (a non-Native woman), to participate in these histories and to engage in Mo‘o—practices of continuation, transmission, and learning—within a local context. The embodied experience becomes the axis through which curatorial action unfolds. Meanwhile, she highlights the complexity of naming the exhibition Aloha Nō as a form of resistance. As Choi writes, “…NŌ in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language) – of aloha as it meant to be in native Hawaiian epistemology – that is loving as an ultimate truth, loving as a way of being in touch with oneself, loving (un)learning from ocean, loving for forgiving.”