Curation as Tinkering
How Yancheng Art Festival Reimagines Everyday Life Through Ethical Experimentation
Peng Yi-Hsuan, Above (之上), 2026, site-specific installation with zine. Photo by Sid Chen.
When a property owner in Kaohsiung’s Yancheng district first saw portraits of the district residents by photographer John Tang Yi-Choon displayed in an abandoned market space, he barely recognised the faces. “These people, I know every one of them,” she told curator Lee Jay-En. “But when the artist photographed them and displayed them here, they suddenly felt like strangers to me.” The moment contained a paradox: the artist had made the familiar strange, and that estrangement sparked recognition. The owner was moved enough to invite the photographer to document her own employees.
This anecdote crystallises what the inaugural Yancheng Art Festival accomplished, not through spectacular intervention, but through what I call restoration ethics expressed as curatorial tinkering. The festival positions itself as a gentle intervention in everyday life, much like salt in cuisine: essential but never dominating. Rather than deploying the spectacle-driven tourism economy that increasingly defines Kaohsiung, the curatorial team consisting Shen Yu-Rong, Lee Jay-En, Huang Zhi-Lii, and Sung Hsiang-Pang, pursued a patient methodology of hands-on experimentation rooted in long-term presence within this community.
“The festival positions itself as a gentle intervention in everyday life, much like salt in cuisine: essential but never dominating.”
What distinguishes this festival from typical municipal initiatives is that its curators already live in Yancheng, and they remain after the festival concludes. This continuity transforms the temporal frame of engagement. Instead of the compressed timelines that characterise government-sponsored cultural programs, which often produce performative “partnerships” between institutions and communities, Yancheng Art Festival permits something more difficult to manufacture: trust, built across repeated encounters over months and years.
First Layer: Tinkering with Space
Peng Yi-Hsuan’s work Above (之上) (2026) in the later stages of the exhibition. Photo by Sid Chen.
Peng Yi-Hsuan’s Above (之上) (2026) emerged from one such extended negotiation. Working in an idle market space that a local resident had entrusted to the curatorial team, itself an act of faith, the artist transformed the space’s condition into the work. He installed track lighting, replaced flooring, and regularly cleaned the accumulated dust, while deliberately preserving traces of years of neglect. A small publication documented the artist’s discussions with curators about the space’s possibilities.
The installation acquired an unexpected dimension when the track lights attracted insects, which in turn drew spiders. The work’s meaning evolved through its ecological context, a reminder that curatorial tinkering is never a closed act but an ongoing negotiation with the environment.
This differs markedly from what French social theorist Michel de Certeau theorised as tactical resistance. The Yancheng approach operates differently, not through subversive tactics but through what curator Shen Yu-Rong calls restoration ethics. As Shen explained in an interview with Arttouch, the artist’s role shifts from “what do I want to create?” to “what can I do for this object and its owner, given existing conditions and relationships?” Tinkering–patient, material engagement–becomes an ethical practice constrained by care rather than vision.
“… the artist’s role shifts from ‘what do I want to create?’ to ‘what can I do for this object and its owner, given existing conditions and relationships?’”
Second Layer: Space as Co-Author; How Venue Transforms Meaning
The House in Between, 2026, featuring works by Yukyung Lee and Jisu Choi, exhibition view at YPC Space, Seoul. Image courtesy of the artists and YPC Space.
One extraordinary case best exemplifies how the festival site itself becomes a generative force for art-making. Lin Chun-Da’s Phototaxis (趨光)(2024) originally began as an ironic investigation: a work designed to test the power of “blindness”. The artist wanted to probe the blurred boundaries between faith and superstition, sacred and profane, at the level of bodily sensation and visual perception.
When invited to exhibit in an abandoned shop space on Yancheng’s main street, the work underwent fundamental transformation. Lin installed dozens of miniature 3D-printed Mazu figures at varying heights on the walls, clustered around light bulbs. These goddess figurines are barely millimeters tall. Crucially, before moving them into the space, the artist commissioned a Daoist priest to conduct a consecration ritual and the recorded ceremony is screened within the exhibition space.
Surrounded by traces of community spiritual practice and the building’s material decay, Phototaxis‘s original critique revealed something unexpected. Rather than emptiness, there is power residing within this blindness. The venue did not merely display the work; it fundamentally altered its register—from a nihilistic inquiry, to witnessing faith as force. The space became a collaborator in meaning-making, reminding us that curatorial tinkering is not simply about arranging objects, but about allowing sites to speak back to artworks, transforming them through proximity and context.
John Tang Yi-Choon, Upon the Path (我的所在之處), 2026, installation view. Photo by Sid Chen.
The festival’s photographic works extend this attentiveness to context into a question of relational ethics: that how images are earned rather than taken? Malaysian Chinese photographer John Tang Yi-Choon’s series Upon the Path (我的所在之處) exemplifies this ethical framework. Over two months, the artist visited residents, built relationships, and earned sufficient trust to photograph them. Each portrait was the residue of repeated daily encounters. When displayed on a facade overlooking a major street, these images activated a collective consciousness of place: the residents saw themselves, but transformed.
A partial view of Huang Yu-Hsiu's photography series Where the River Meets the Sky－Takao River (在河流與天空之際－打狗川) (2026). Photo by Sid Chen.
Li Ting-Huan, The faint sadness of those chosen by salt, pearls, and drops of water (那些被鹽、珍珠、水滴選中的人們的一絲惆悵, 2026, site-specific installation. Photo by Sid Chen.
This operates inversely to what institutional critique typically produces. Rather than revealing systemic contradictions, the photographs reveal dignity. Artist Huang Yu-Hsiu’s Where the River Meets the Sky－Takao River (在河流與天空之際－打狗川) documented people living along Kaohsiung’s reconfigured waterfront, mapping urban transformation and the lives of people displaced by it. The project traces changes to the river’s name, from “Takao” in the Japanese colonial period to its current designation.
Li Ting-Huan’s installation The faint sadness of those chosen by salt, pearls, and drops of water (那些被鹽、珍珠、水滴選中的人們的一絲惆悵) (2026), positioned outside the Yan-First Public Market, reassembled building imagery onto digitally printed fabric. It references the structures of former shops in the area, by incorporating a 1958 photograph of the Dagouding Market before it closed down. Architectural memory is given material form. In these works by Tang, Huang and Li, photography functions as a technology of recognition, making the ordinary visible, the routine remarkable.
Third Layer: The Time-Scale of Tinkering
Yancheng Art Festival demonstrates that local art festivals need not choose between cultural rigour and community accountability. The festival’s modest budget precluded grandiose interventions; this limitation became conceptual clarity. The curatorial team collaborated with eight universities and multiple youth cultural groups, creating feedback loops between art education and community practice.
This model challenges the standardised framework of municipal cultural programming, where government administration and performance metrics often force artificial synchronisation between institutions and communities. The Yancheng approach suggests an alternative: that curatorial work operates at a temporal scale measured in relationships, not accounting cycles. Artistic meaning deepens through proximity rather than visibility; that trust, once accumulated, becomes a form of cultural infrastructure.
The festival’s resonance lies not in transforming Yancheng into an international destination but in helping residents perceive their own neighbourhood with renewed attention. In a moment when Kaohsiung’s cultural economy increasingly depends on spectacular concert tourism and consumption spectacle, the insistent focus on everyday life feels radically countercultural.
“Yancheng Art Festival demonstrates that local art festivals need not choose between cultural rigour and community accountability.”
Shen mentioned the Japanese town of Higashikawa, famous for photography and cultural place-making, as a reference point. But the Yancheng approach operates differently. It is more concerned with deepening local knowledge than establishing international reputation. The curators define themselves as guests in the district, yet their tinkering produces genuine artistic exchange and not merely service provision.
This distinction matters. Art is not being deployed for the community; rather, community engagement generates new artistic possibilities. The work of tinkering, whether applied to abandoned spaces, neglected objects, or overlooked residents, becomes a methodology through which both artists and inhabitants discover unexpected dimensions of their shared world.
Toward an Ethics of Tinkering
Contemporary art seasonality typically assumes compression: intense programming, rapid visibility, then absence. Yancheng Art Festival inverts this logic by betting on the slow work of curatorial tinkering. It suggests that the festival’s true value emerges only after its official close, when the relationships built, spaces transformed, and perceptual shifts initiated continue to work within the community.
This requires rethinking the festival as a temporal event. It demands patience and a willingness to cede control over narrative outcomes. It means understanding curatorial tinkering not as authorial expression but as facilitation of recognition between community members and the places they inhabit.
In doing so, Yancheng Art Festival models a different relationship between art and locality: not art for place-making but art as a practice of collective attention. The patient work of tinkering—adjusting, observing, responding—becomes a form of cultural thinking that remakes what it means to dwell together.
This article was first published on 記号 JIHAO in Chinese. It is translated and edited by the author for Art & Market.
