Opinion Market

December 12 - January 31, 2022

Curated by Luna Wenxin Xu 徐雯莘

Unlike a supermarket of commodities, Opinion Market staged a marketplace of ideas. I invited twelve emerging curators—based in Sydney and originally from the United States, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong, China, and Australia—to articulate their curatorial thinking through a shared sculptural device: a white, translucent box, roughly melon-sized. Each box served as a vessel of curatorial vision, a portable exhibition space in miniature, holding proposals, notes, micro-objects, or fragments of text that stood in for a larger practice.

These individual contributions were threaded together with yarn, iron wire, and light cable, forming a delicate, legible network across the room. The lines did not merely connect points; they diagrammed relations—affinities, tensions, and provisional alliances—making visible how curators, as an identity adjacent to yet distinct from the artist, interdepend and diverge. The installation foregrounded curating as a relational technology: a way of hosting and translating that is spatial as much as conceptual. In the context of Puzzle Gallery’s unconventional garage architecture—with its thresholds, changing light, and street-level permeability—the market metaphor became both concept and method, welcoming noise, friction, and the possibility of disagreement.

As my first curatorial project, Opinion Market asked how young curators from diverse backgrounds are actively defining the role today. Are we connectors, translators, concept-makers, editors, designers, negotiators—or all of these at once, depending on the ecology we enter? The exhibition refused a single answer. Instead, it assembled multiple definitions side-by-side, allowing each participant’s miniature “vessel” to propose a different function for curatorial work: as bridge, as hinge, as filter, as amplifier.

The structure was opened further to public exchange. Visitors were invited to fold colored origami cubes, inscribe thoughts and emotions, and place them back into the installation. The color choices offered an immediate, embodied index—mood, urgency, alignment—while the written notes added nuance. Over time, these cubes accumulated among the curators’ boxes and connecting lines, subtly reweighting the diagram and altering the spatial density of ideas. What began as a map of professional relations gradually became a living ledger of collective thinking: an open market where positions could be offered, contested, borrowed, and returned.

This emphasis on process over object reframed authorship. Rather than a fixed display authored by a single curator, Opinion Market staged curating as a shared ecology of relations. Authorship circulated: between participating curators, between their propositions and the audience’s responses, and between the visible network and the quieter gaps that held it together. The pauses between boxes—the intervals of air and light—were not empty; they were the spaces in which listening, hesitation, and recalibration could occur.

By foregrounding dialogue rather than objects, Opinion Market proposed curation as a collective experiment in civic intimacy. It tested whether an exhibition could function like a temporary public forum, where transparency and connection are deliberately engineered yet outcomes remain emergent. The work left no singular resolution—only a changing archive of perspectives and a diagram of relations that continued to resonate after de-installation. In this sense, the project treated opinions not as fixed endpoints but as materials: mobile, negotiable, and generative for whatever conversations come next.