Socializing is Part of An Artist's Work
Social Series
Event Art, 2022
Printed matters
The starting point of this series is my feelings and thinking about "artist socialization".
Similar to many social and professional identities, artists also need to expand their personal networks and exposure through social behaviour. Similarly, exhibitions are also a work activity that spreads artists and their works through exhibition and display. If there is no team, the artists themself need to have the awareness of publicity and public relations to help their careers grow. So, "socializing" is often considered part of an artist's work.
However, when the social gradually formed a fixed circle, the content of the conversation gradually shifted from work to private life. During the opening ceremonies of some exhibitions or preview activities, the friends who know each other will start some daily conversations. Whatever the work on a show that day, it seems that the focus will be on "socializing". Artists, as well as art practitioners, seem to grab the viewer's attention more than works.
I played a word game with "work" to unravel what "social" means. It's not just myself that is mirrored, every artist on the exhibition site is doing this kind of behaviour.
I arranged the homepages of my two Instagram accounts in the form of couplets to support "socializing is a part of the artist's work " as a horizontal banner, which makes my own position clearly divided into one in the entire exhibition space field, let the audience interact with me, here I have prepared some stickers for them to choose to stick on their own body, the intention is to let them use stickers to socialize more effectively in the venue, and also make this work looks more social.
In the end, everyone in the exhibition hall had stickers on their bodies to chat, which also made this social work more complete. The work is critical, in a softer way that allows the audience to interact with pleasure and their actions to form the whole work, even though the entire process seems to be a slogan declaring that "socialization is part of the artist's job", but Essentially, in a field like an art exhibition, almost everyone is talking about their private life and it's pretty absurd, and it's not being pointed out by anyone.