Curating as Mediation — An Analysis of Ting Ting Fang’s Academic Logic

By Zhao Jun

“The body is our anchorage in the world.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty

For Merleau-Ponty, it is not reason or knowledge, but the body and perception through which we encounter the world that constitute the foundation of who we are. Ting Ting Fang’s research logic takes this proposition as one of its points of departure. In her thinking, museology is a site where knowledge is continually reproduced, while curating is likewise a field in which knowledge production and cultural mediation interact, contend, and reshape one another. Even her own artistic practice is constructed as an event marked by the tension between passivity and agency.

These distinctive research tendencies ultimately arise from Fang’s particular experience and identity: she is an independent curator and artist who moves continually between China and the West. Through this experience, and often at an unconscious level beyond deliberate intention, she has developed a worldview and a mode of action uniquely her own, shaping both the expansive narrative logic of her work and her strategic approach to cultural practice.

Her research, therefore, might be described less as something actively designed than as something that reveals itself through experience; less as purely strategic than as embodied. The perception of her own body becomes a fundamental point of departure for her research.

Image caption: Ting Ting Fang at the British Museum, London, United Kingdom, January 2025.

Reception Aesthetics, which emerged in the 1960s, is founded on the proposition that a work should not be understood as something enclosed entirely within the boundaries established by the text itself. Rather, meaning is generated and developed through the audience’s act of reading and reception. Genuine aesthetic experience takes place within the “aesthetic distance” between the audience’s horizon of expectations and the text.

This generative logic of aesthetic experience closely corresponds to the embodied research logic underlying Fang’s practice. Her curatorial approach can be understood as transferring methods associated with Reception Aesthetics from the literary text into exhibition space.

In her Manifesto exhibition at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, Fang deliberately adopted a strategy of removing conventional explanatory labels, presenting wall texts only in Chinese. This decision intentionally created a condition of “linguistic asymmetry,” preventing many viewers from relying on familiar interpretive frameworks provided by labels.

Here, the exhibition itself became an “open text,” while the audience’s act of interpretation became central to the production of meaning.

Her findings from 50 semi-structured interviews closely correspond to one of the central insights of Reception Aesthetics: viewers from different cultural backgrounds enter an exhibition carrying markedly different “horizons of expectations.”

French viewers interpreted the absence of conventional labels as offering “an authentic, unmediated encounter with Asian art.” Within their horizon of expectations, resistance to institutional and authoritative structures could be understood as a legitimate mode of contemporary artistic practice; consequently, the absence of labels enhanced rather than diminished the perceived authenticity of the encounter.

Chinese collectors, by contrast, were more accustomed to exhibitions structured by academic frameworks. Their horizon of expectations included a degree of trust in authoritative interpretation and scholarly contextualisation. As a result, the absence of labels was more likely to be understood as an “experimental format,” or even as a form of informational absence.

The same curatorial strategy thus generated very different modes of reception among two groups of viewers.

The significance of this finding extends far beyond curatorial technique. It suggests that the central question in cross-cultural reception is not simply “How can Western audiences understand Asian art?” but rather: What horizons of expectations do audiences from different cultural backgrounds bring with them, and how can curating enter into dialogue with those horizons?

Image caption: Installation view of No Boundaries, Marginalised Voices: Manifesto, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France, 2023.

Fang’s use of a dual curatorial structure in her 2024 Hong Kong exhibition—one section without explanatory wall texts and another retaining conventional labels—represented a further experiment with this question.

By creating a controlled contrast within the same exhibition, she sought to examine how the presence or absence of textual interpretation shapes audience participation and the construction of meaning.

From the perspective of Reception Aesthetics, Fang’s research logic can therefore be summarised as follows: she reconstructs the exhibition from a “display apparatus” into a “field of reception”; she reconceives the audience from passive viewers into active agents in the production of meaning; and she shifts the criterion of curatorial success from the “efficiency of information transmission” to the “depth of dialogue between horizons of expectations.”

This logic directly responds to theories concerning the formation of disciplines: new ways of seeing are not invented in a vacuum but are forged through concrete processes of reception.

Image caption: Installation view of Echoes, Asian Visionaries: Manifesto, Hong Kong, China, 2024.

The same research logic can be examined from three different theoretical perspectives: Reception Aesthetics, phenomenological aesthetics, and the philosophy of technology. Each foregrounds a different dimension—respectively, the audience’s horizon of expectations, the sensory experience of the body, and the mediating role of technology.

Yet these three dimensions are not isolated from one another. They are connected by a single underlying concept: mediation.

At the heart of Fang’s research lies the question of how independent curatorial practice can function as a site of both knowledge production and cultural mediation. “Mediation” is precisely the concept that links these three theoretical dimensions.

From the perspective of Reception Aesthetics, curating mediates the relationship between the text—the exhibition—and the reader—the audience. Curatorial strategies such as the removal of labels alter the mode of mediation and thereby transform the ways in which meaning is generated.

From the perspective of phenomenological aesthetics, curating mediates the perceptual relationship between the body and the world. Sensory curating activates a pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual level of mediation, establishing cross-cultural connections before rational interpretation takes place.

From the perspective of the philosophy of technology, curating is itself a technology of mediation. It is not simply a channel connecting artworks and audiences; it actively shapes the form that this connection takes. In Marshall McLuhan’s well-known formulation, “the medium is the message.”

Image caption: Installation view of Asian Emerging Artists Ranking, Hong Kong, China, 2025.

The originality of Fang’s academic logic lies precisely in her simultaneous mobilisation of these three dimensions of mediation within curatorial practice, and in her attempt to theorise them systematically through her continuing research.

Her Manifesto exhibition series gathers qualitative data on audience interpretation—the dimension of Reception Aesthetics—while also designing immersive dialogues based on sensory experience—the dimension of phenomenological aesthetics—and consciously modifying the “technical parameters” of the curatorial apparatus—the dimension of the philosophy of technology.

These are not three separate experiments. Rather, they constitute different aspects of a single curatorial research practice.

Image caption: Installation view of Manifesto II, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France, 2025.

More importantly, these three dimensions converge on a deeper proposition: cultural mediation is not a one-way process of “transmission,” but a two-way process of “generation.”

When a French viewer encounters a work of Asian contemporary art in an exhibition without conventional labels, what occurs is not simply “a Western viewer receiving Eastern information.” Instead, a new event of meaning takes place—an event that is neither purely Western nor purely Eastern, but is jointly created within that specific mediating situation.

Image caption: Installation view of No Boundaries, Marginalised Voices: Manifesto, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France, 2023.

Embodied consciousness can be made visible. This is not merely a slogan. Across Fang’s continuing programme of research, a consistent academic logic can be discerned: curatorial practice is reconceived as a practice of mediation, and systematic, reflexive curatorial experiments are used to reveal how processes of mediation shape the production of cross-cultural knowledge.

Rather than collecting data within a ready-made theoretical framework, Fang uses her own practice to explore and challenge existing frameworks.

The significance of this academic logic extends beyond the specific question of how Asian contemporary art is presented. It demonstrates that curating can not only be an object of research; curating itself can become a method of research.

Mediation, similarly, need not be understood solely as a structure of power requiring critique. It can also become a creative practice that is deliberately designed, tested, and transformed.

Knowledge production is not the exclusive domain of academia. It can take place within exhibition spaces, in encounters between audiences and artworks, and at the intersections of sensory experience and technological apparatuses.

It is precisely at these intersections that Fang’s research is developing a new academic paradigm—one that is practice-driven, interdisciplinary, and grounded in curatorial experience.

Such experimentation, of course, also carries considerable risk. When processes of internal generation and external theoretical extrapolation appear coherent, this apparent coherence may sometimes result from an insufficient excavation of deeper dimensions. Put differently, when generative processes become deeply connected with actual embodied experience, the unknown and uncontrollable factors involved remain highly uncertain.

Yet it is precisely this uncertainty that also gives the research its sense of possibility—and makes its future development worth anticipating.

About the Author

Zhao Jun is Head of the Department of Oil Painting at the School of Painting, China Academy of Art, and a doctoral supervisor. He is a member of the China Artists Association and Vice President and Council Member of the Zhejiang Oil Painting Association.

His long-term practice and research focus on interdisciplinary engagements between art and philosophy within contemporary art. His writings have appeared in major academic publications in China and internationally. He has held solo exhibitions in London, United Kingdom; Rome, Italy; the Municipal Art Museum of Bari; the University of Cassino; and the Municipal Art Museum and Museum in Bad Säckingen, Germany. His works are held in the collections of major museums and institutions in China and abroad, including the Italian Senate.