Meet the Curator Zirui Zhuang

IDA Looking back at the beginning of your journey, what first drew you to the art world, and when did you realize that you wanted to turn that passion into a profession and become a curator?

ZZ What first drew me was never the art market or the white cube of the gallery, but the silent invitation that a work extends to its viewer. That decisive moment came when I first walked into Gagosian and saw Francis Bacon’s exhibition Couplings. Those distorted, intertwined figures were not depicting bodies they were staging the very fragility and violence of relation itself: two forms pulling and pressing against each other, yet never able to fully separate.

It was not visual pleasure, but something closer to an existential interrogation felt almost physically. In that moment, I realised that art is not decoration; it is a cognitive tool for understanding both the world and the self. Yet what truly led me to choose curating as a profession was not the market value or the legendary status of Bacon’s work, but my growing obsession with a different set of questions: “Why must these images exist in this torn manner?” and “How do they reawaken themselves in the minds of viewers across different times?” For me, curating is not about selecting objects to hang on walls, but about weaving a web of meaning much like the relentless tension in Bacon’s paintings where works, architecture, and audience provoke, tear, and generate one another.

IDA When you choose an artist to work with, what makes you realize that you are not simply looking at a talented artist, but at someone who could become truly important?

ZZ  Talent is cheap. What I call “true importance” resides in a quality I think of as inescapability. When I encounter an artist’s work, I am not judging technique or style, but a more fundamental question: Does this person’s practice have to be exactly this way? Truly important artists are not those who respond to art history, but those who respond to the irreconcilable tension between their own lived experience and the time they inhabit. Their work carries a sense of necessity as if, were it not spoken in this manner, that thing would vanish forever. The artists I have come to recognise as “important” all share a rare honesty: they do not pander to audiences, chase trends, or even indulge their own past successes. They allow themselves to be transformed by the very act of making.

IDA You have worked extensively with themes of memory, history, and identity. Do you think artists today still have the power to rewrite history, or are the market and institutions increasingly shaping the narrative for them?

ZZ  That is a sharp question. My position is this: artists no longer possess the grand power to “rewrite history” if they ever did, that was an illusion born of historicist narratives. Today, artistic production is indeed increasingly shaped by market mechanisms, institutional discourses, and the attention economy of social media. But I would argue that genuine artistic practice is not about rewriting history; it is about creating fissures within it those gaps, noises, and silences where standardised narratives cannot fully close. The market can buy works, and institutions can name trends, but they cannot completely erase the untranslatable tremor that a work ignites in a particular viewer. The true power of artists today lies not in offering an alternative version of history, but in exposing the inherent fictiveness of all historical storytelling. In that sense, the critical edge of art has never disappeared it has only become more difficult, and more concealed.

IDA In your curatorial practice, you have explored the way we look at art. How much of our experience in front of an artwork truly belongs to the work itself, and how much is shaped by our culture, education, and background?

ZZ  It would be irresponsible to say that the experience belongs entirely to the work itself, or entirely to the viewer’s background. My experience tells me this: looking is an unanticipated complicity. The work provides a formal language, a material texture, and a conceptual skeleton but the viewer must fill it with their own lived experience. A piece about migration, for instance, is nearly a different work for someone who has never left their homeland than for someone who has lived through displacement. Yet I must also insist and this is something I hold firmly in my curatorial practice that the work itself must possess sufficient resistance. It cannot wholly surrender to any single interpretation. A great artwork, at the very moment you think you have grasped it, withdraws its meaning, reminding you that your reading is but one among many. This is precisely what distinguishes art from mere information transmission.

IDA Curating inevitably means constructing a narrative. How willing are you to influence the meaning of an artwork through its exhibition space and context? And where do you draw the line between interpretation and manipulation?

ZZ You have touched upon the most ethically weighted question in this practice. My answer is this: curating is, by definition, a deliberate construction of narrative, and I fully embrace that. Spatial arrangement, lighting, circulation paths, juxtapositions, wall texts all of these shape meaning, and to deny this would be disingenuous. But I have drawn a line for myself: I never fabricate a “false meaning” that the work itself does not carry. I can amplify, echo, contrast, or even create tensions, but I cannot invent. I always respect the work’s own non-cooperativeness if a piece refuses to be placed within my narrative framework, I change the framework, rather than forcing the work into it. To me, that line is precisely the difference between interpretation and manipulation: the former invites the viewer into an open negotiation of meaning; the latter presupposes a conclusion and orchestrates all elements to steer toward it.

IDA Shanghai and London represent two very different art ecosystems. What do you think the Western art world could learn from Shanghai, and conversely, what could Shanghai learn from London?

ZZ  These are two entirely different energy fields. London taught me how historical depth continues to ferment within contemporary art its institutional systems, critical traditions, and collecting cultures cultivate a deep, longitudinal sense of time. Shanghai, by contrast, offers me a kind of lateral expansion: immediacy and experimental courage here, there is no heavy historical burden, but there is astonishing speed, vitality, and a looser, more street-level relationship between art and urban life.

What I think the West could learn from Shanghai is this: to relinquish its fixation on “international standards” and rediscover the wild connections between art and indigenous life. Shanghai’s art ecosystem does not rely heavily on the authoritative endorsement of museums; it thrives more in alternative spaces, temporary venues, and interdisciplinary experiments and this spontaneity is worth attention. What Shanghai could learn from London, in turn, is to build a more robust system of art criticism and public education, so that art does not depend solely on the discourses of fairs and auction houses, but enjoys more sustained scholarly support and social dialogue. This is not a matter of superiority or inferiority, but of different temporalities and spatialities and the ideal, I believe, is to let them calibrate each other.