Hard Boiled Wonderland: An Encounter With The Visionary Imagination of Xiaorui Zhu-Nowel

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At just 26 years of age Xiaorui Zhu-Nowel is already an assistant curator at the Guggenheim, and is also something of a torchbearer for non-gender specific queer culture. Preferring to be referred to by the pronouns they or them, Zhu-Nowel has carved a formidable reputation as a curator, not least for the incredible installation they were invited to curate at in their role as Creative Director of Asia Now Paris’s annual curatorial platform earlier this year. Entitled IRL {In Real Life}, the radical programme Zhu-Nowel created celebrated an emerging generation of artists whose work disrupts, celebrates and challenges new media and speculative futurism. The dizzying result was something akin to wandering on the set of Blade Runner and encountering the absurdism of Spike Milligan’s post-apocalyptic classic The Bed Sitting Room. Highlights included Wong Kit Yi’s iridescent karaoke booth, which explored notions of digital eternities, Jiu Society’s Jiu Jiu Dog Shopping Channel which parodied global market integration in panic-style marketing TV shopping advertisements, and a show by Chinese artist Liu Wa, in association with Michael Xufu Huang, which was activated via an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset–the immersive environment reflecting the viewer’s changing attention levels as they concentrated on various painted figures struggling to survive an ecological apocalypse. Here the axis that brought all these talents together and is overseeing acquisition of Asian art at The Guggenheim, discusses curation, dystopian connective technologies and fragmented collective memory.

How did your journey into art begin, and what would you say drives you?

This is a tricky question; in my past, I’ve lived in very different places and have had very different identities, so, to answer you... I’d say intuition brought me here! I’m typically a very curious person and draw inspiration from brave creatives, so in many ways my participation in the ‘art world’ is for therapeutic purposes. Our bodies are very sensuous, and that sensuality is policed to death in countless ways, throughout our lives. Being able to have meaningful encounters with works of art allows me to be more empathetic. More empathetic to the world around me, to the ways our bodies have been rationalized, and to the sheer difficulty of communication.

What would you say are the key criteria you are looking for when curating a group show? I think that to curate an exhibition is to facilitate an encounter of some sort, to establish a relationship between a subject (most likely a person) with a work of art. Impactful group exhibitions often take advantage of the fact that you’re engaging with a multiplicity of voices in this relational experience. When there are more voices in the mix, the ways in which we relate and establish a relationship with artworks also changes. Whether it’s a group show, a solo show, or any other kind of organization, I always try to ask ‘how might artworks establish a relationship with us?’ So often, that question is presented vice-versa, ‘how might we establish a relationship with a work of art?’  My only real criteria for curating group exhibitions is to steer clear of any impulse to engage in metacriticism! It’s a slippery slope...

Do you think connective technologies have ironically turned us into increasingly isolated units of consumption? 

Communicating is rough, communication is tough. Connective technologies certainly make this extra clear. I will say, though, it’s quite easy to find one-self using technology naively—we are constantly being seduced, tricked or otherwise compelled to become active consumers. We cannot turn ourselves into this ultimate consumer, a 24/7 consumer/producer–we have to mindful of how we are being used if we are going to stop complying with this cycle. However, that being said, no technology is inherently bad in itself- it’s a technology. I don’t see how recent connective technologies are any more isolating than the invention of the alphabet. However, how we utilize the technology of “connective technologies” is very oppressive and certainly does turn us into increasingly isolated consumers, among other things subject to the vice grip of capitalist logic.  

What is your own relationship to your smartphone? 

I think of my phone as an extension of my body, similar to my contact lenses and platform shoes. We’ve long been cyborgs as a species, we truly are. 

What is the role of the curator in this paradigm?

As a curator, and as a queer and non-Western person, I’ve always been hyper-aware of western conventions of experiencing art and how they are domineering. A large part of disrupting these models has to do with how we perceive of what matters, not just disrupting ‘what matters’. This is a very exploratory mode. Lots of spillages. We must embrace this as curators. Our bodies are extraordinarily sensuous, and I’m drawn to artists that explore the communicative potential of this.

In an environment of multiple media and information streams, how can we have shared cultural touch-points or collective cultural memory?

I’m not sure, but I do think it’s good to reconsider the idea of collective cultural memory. Or, at least try to figure out a way to think about it. We can perhaps consider current collective cultural memory through modes of participation. We are passive consumers, so we need to figure out ways to be unconventional in this paradigm.