My Own Words: The Online Exhibition—Do We Like Them Yet?
Immersive and alternative digital spaces
By Clara Che Wei Peh
This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.
'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.
The online exhibition has had a long and varied history since the 1990s. It was only in 2020, however, that the format gained unprecedented acceptance. The global pandemic and lockdowns pushed artists, galleries, and institutions to turn to the online exhibition as an urgent substitute of the physical. While the online exhibition was able to provide an important point of access for the public to continue engaging with art despite the pandemic, many lamented that the presentations were often disengaging, disorientating, and sometimes, just lagging. Beyond the virtual walkthroughs and replicas of the physical white cube, however, the online exhibition has and can be so much more.
In the essay "Curating Online Exhibitions", written in 2020, Michael Connor, Co-Executive Director of Rhizome, a subsidiary of New Museum in New York City, demonstrates the multiplicity of the online exhibition: “A crowd-funding campaign… An exhibition in the virtual world… A zip file downloaded to a user’s computer. An HTML page featuring thumbnails and links to artists’ works. A curated app offering selections of smartphone-based VR works.”¹ These are all forms in which the online exhibition has taken, and constitute only a small fraction of what it may be. As a curator primarily focused on the intersections of art and technology, I have been on the lookout for artist-centred online exhibitions that continue to demonstrate its versatility. Moving beyond replicating offline structures, the online exhibition could be as dynamic and varied as digital media itself in its ability to construct immersive and alternative spaces, and examples such as Slime Engine, EPOCH Gallery and Bangkok Art Biennale 2022 virtual venue show us how.
The Chinese collective, Slime Engine, has been constructing online exhibitions since 2017. Founded by Li Hanwei, Liu Shuzhen, Fang Yang, and Shan Liang, they have worked with hundreds of artists to curate and construct immersive projects built for the web, often presenting exhibitions as virtual experiences available for free distribution and interaction on their website. “China, with its extensive internet infrastructure and the participation of hundreds of millions of netizens, is forming a new cultural order based on the web,” says the collective. The collective thus seeks to explore this emergent cultural order in their various projects, reflecting upon internet culture and networked technology in both their curation, presentation and spatial design. Their exhibition ‘Extreme Live’ (2021) is one such example.
Slime Engine, ‘Extreme Live’ (still), 2021, animated moving image. Image courtesy of Slime Engine.
‘Extreme Live’ was presented as a site-specific video installation at ‘Boomerang: OCAT Biennale 2021’ in Shenzhen, and as a single video and webpage on Slime Engine’s website. It depicts a 3D avatar livestream shopping as she takes a walk through the canyons. She begins by introducing the collective, even poking fun at its name and how difficult it is to get right in Mandarin, and sharing with the audience that we will be encountering eight different artworks placed in the desert throughout the livestream.
Another screen on the right displays an e-commerce site reminiscent of Taobao with the eight artworks listed as items for sale, complete with close-up product images and flash discounts. The middle screen in the installation shows us the livestreamer’s POV as she encounters the works in the wide-open landscape. Drawing directly from internet culture and consumerism, ‘Extreme Live’ not only presents an engaging curation of digital artworks, but also questions the format in which online exhibitions should take. Perhaps, in the age where attention is the scarcest commodity, an animated livestreamer coupled with the excitement of a time-limited sale is what is necessary for us to be introduced to new works.
Screenshot of Slime Engine, ‘Ocean’, 2019, 3D interactive environment as online exhibition.
Slime Engine is also known for their ‘Ocean’ exhibition, first launched in 2019, where they brought together 103 artists and placed their works on a shared ocean. The collective describes ‘Ocean’ as a first-person video game, where the player can navigate freely around an endless ocean and encounter each artwork one by one. The visitor is able to zoom in, rotate, and move wherever and whenever you wish, and leave comments in a fashion like live captioning or a forum. In this shared space of an imaginary ocean, it becomes clear that Slime Engine’s exhibitions are most often rooted in collaborative and open play. It takes some of the best things the internet has to offer and combines them with artworks.
Similarly launched and led by an artist, EPOCH Gallery, founded by Peter Wu+ has quickly established itself as a leading example of online curation and exhibition-making. Each exhibition is set in a distinct environment, from landscapes inspired by the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska, a building modelled after the Luxembourg Freeport, to an imagination set after Queen’s Central in Hong Kong. Often drawing from and being tethered to physical sites, EPOCH’s custom environments offer critical and imaginative contexts for site-responsive artworks. In other cases, EPOCH has also pushed the limits on what virtual environments can look like by incorporating emerging technologies and imagining tools directly in the construction of the exhibition backdrop.
Installation view/screenshot of EPOCH Gallery, ‘XENOSPACE’, 2023.
In ‘XENOSPACE’, the works of seven artists engaging with artificial intelligence and machine learning were brought together in the virtual “non-space” of a server room. The space was created with the use of Stable Diffusion, generating high-resolution 360-degree equirectangular panoramas, constructing an environment that interrogated and made use of the very technology that also foregrounded the selection of works.
In addition to the rigorous research and technical brilliance that characterises each of its exhibitions, EPOCH seeks to revamp the market’s relationship with exhibitions. In contrast to the typical gallery exhibition, where works are brought together in a space to share in dialogue but sold as individual objects, EPOCH offers artworks for sale as individual panoramas set within the exhibition environment, as well as the complete virtual show as one. In doing so, EPOCH ensures that the artwork is seen in context to a wider dialogue or environment and not in isolation.
Screenshot of Bangkok Art Biennale 2022 virtual venue.
Both Slime Engine and EPOCH Gallery approach online exhibitions as close-knitted collaborations with the participating artists and take the site or environment of the exhibition to an area of experimentation and play in and of itself. While institutional shows and biennales have also begun to further their engagement with online exhibitions, they are often geared towards a different set of priorities that emphasises accessibility and legibility above all else. The virtual venue of Bangkok Art Biennale 2022 embodies these concerns as central principles behind its design. Titled ‘Chaos: Calm’ and led by Artistic Director, Dr Apinan Poshyananda, the 2022 edition included an online exhibition as one of its 12 exhibition venues. The online site featured nine new media artworks by artists such as Gabriel Massan and Nawin Nuthong.
In designing the online exhibition, Nath Poshyananda, curator and designer of the virtual venue, shares that the priority was for the experience to be as “frictionless” and “immersive” as possible. “The artwork itself should be at the centre and forefront of the experience,” says Poshyananda. “We arrived at a virtual platform that is easily accessible on any web browser and seamlessly scaled to mobile…and does not depend on complex rendering requirements or expansive ‘world’ creation.” The resulting online exhibition presents the works in a scrolling horizontal list, inviting the viewer to click into each artwork and view it in full screen. Instead of being a digital replica of the physical biennale, the virtual venue continues the exhibition into the web and offers a unique entry point for more audiences to encounter the biennale, while providing a digital-native environment to encounter digital-born works.
Over three decades have gone by since the proliferation of the world wide web, and with it, the online exhibition. In her essay, ‘Do We Like Digital Exhibitions?’ written in 2020 for Art & Market, Vivyan Yeo suggests that the online exhibition will be increasingly recognised as an independent medium rather than “a shadow of the ‘real’ in-person experience”.² Taking a look at projects such as Slime Engine, EPOCH Gallery, and the virtual venue of Bangkok Art Biennale 2022, I am inclined to agree with Yeo. Each of these projects have a different intention and context but all centre the artists and the specificities of their artworks, just as any good exhibition would. Yet the online exhibition is something of its own, and it functions best when one understands the unique possibilities and limitations of the web interface and digital environment.
This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.
2Vivyan Yeo, "Do We Like Digital Exhibitions?", Art & Market, 3 October 2020, https://artandmarket.net/analysis/2020/10/3/do-we-like-digital-exhibitions.
About the Writer
Clara Che Wei Peh’s work examines the intersections between art, money, infrastructure, and technology. She has curated exhibitions at Art Dubai, ArtScience Museum, and The Institutum. She was previously Art Lead at Appetite and Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts. She is currently Asia Collection Fellow at KADIST.
