Curatography is an outgrowth of the achievement of various grants from Taiwan’s National Culture and Arts Foundation (NCAF) in recent decades. In 2018, the NCAF established ARTWAVE – Taiwan International Arts Network platform, which works to integrate Taiwan’s key arts initiatives, including the Taiwan Pavilions Initiative, Curators’ Intensive Taipei (CIT) International Conference, Youth Curatorial Workshop, and the Asian Curatorial Forum to connect with international professionals and organizations. In order to further expand professional networks, the Foundation commissioned to establish “Curating Asia International (CAI)” and build Taiwan’s first online publishing platform with the aim of exploring the global curatorial culture of contemporary art. The result is “Curatography.”
Curatography is an electronic journal, dedicated to the exploration of contemporary art and curatorial culture. It is produced by Curating Asia International (CAI). The publication examines the geopolitical dimensions of cultural production in East and Southeast Asia, adopting a reflexive stance towards curatorial practice and the way it has generated an interdisciplinary knowledge of Asia today.
Curation in the twenty-first century is marked not only by its expanding role in society but also by its changing functions and responsibilities. The neologism “curatography,” is thus born out of the necessity to retroactively define shifting meanings of “curator” and “curation”. The journal will examine curatorial practices across various Asian societies, in order to seek out their different genealogies, resist the “exhibition amnesia” of the white cube, and take a measure of their ontological dimensions.
Taiwan’s National Culture and Arts Foundation (NCAF) has supported curatorial practices for more than a decade. NCAF has not only funded numerous international exhibitions and curatorial projects by independent curators, but has also supported conferences, symposiums, and workshops such as the “Curators’ Intensive Taipei 19 (CIT19)” (2019) and conferences in Dhaka and New Delhi (2017, 2019). Curatography was launched in part from the momentum of these grants, and particularly on account of the curators, artists, and scholars, who’ve shown interest in contributing to the field of inter-Asian curatorial culture.
