Qin Yan
I had wanted to write an article about Hans Ulrich Obrist for a very long time, but I never actually started. I first learned about Obrist while interning at the Long Museum in Shanghai, when the museum happened to be preparing the international exhibition 15 Rooms, curated by him and Klaus Biesenbach. That experience had a great impact on me and ultimately led my life onto a completely different path. To this day, I still remember the scene of Obrist carefully inspecting each exhibition room before the opening, and I can vividly recall him pausing in front of Laura Lima’s work (Man=Flesh/Woman=Flesh – Flat, 2012), pointing out the wrinkles in the carpet with dissatisfaction, saying: “I just want everything to be perfect.” What amused me was that, despite being so meticulous about the exhibition, he was wearing a suit that looked even more rumpled than the carpet. The stark contrast struck me deeply and made me all the more curious about him.
These days, I’ve been reading Obrist’s book Kuratieren! (published in 2015), which has resonated with me a great deal. In the book, he first discusses his early curatorial experiences and ideas, then explores important processes in curating through concrete cases. Obrist mentions the Italian Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti as a major influence. Boetti believed that curators should never simply provide artists with a predetermined space to fill; more importantly, they should communicate with the artists and ask which projects they were unable to realize under the given conditions. This later became a core question in Obrist’s curatorial practice. In fact, Obrist has never believed in the curator’s creative authority—coming up with a sensational exhibition concept was never his focus; instead, the key lies in repeated conversations with artists. He asks them about unrealized projects and tries to find ways to make them happen, because the role of a curator, in essence, is to turn the impossible into possible—to help artists realize their dreams.
As early as over 30 years ago, Obrist began accumulating his experience through dialogues with artists. One of his most famous long-term projects is the Interview Project, which has included interviews with more than one hundred figures from both the art and scientific communities. Even though he is a curator of art exhibitions, Obrist has never limited his interviewees to artists. As art historian Alexander Dorner once said, to understand the power of visual art we must also learn about the strengths of other fields. This reflects the current trend in contemporary art as well—artists are no longer confined to traditional techniques, but integrate cutting-edge technologies such as multimedia, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence into their work.
The renowned cultural magazine Du once published a special issue on Obrist’s Interview Project. By chance, I discovered it in a Berlin bookstore a few days ago and purchased it with great excitement. In the Interview Project, Obrist focuses his conversations primarily on exhibitions or collaborative projects with the interviewees. Notably, many artists were interviewed multiple times, some for as long as 50 hours, allowing the dialogues to expand both in depth and breadth. Moreover, these conversations rarely took place in a fixed setting—they could happen on trains, in taxis, on airplanes, in hotels, or even while walking. This format of artist dialogue can be traced back to the first half of the 20th century, especially after World War II, when artists in the U.S. were expected to articulate their concepts to better convey their ideas and maintain some control over art criticism.
Obrist’s interviews were far from smooth at the beginning. Initially, he never thought of publishing them, regarding them instead as private conversations. His first interview, around 1990, was a failure: he spoke with philosopher Vilém Flusser, hoping to demonstrate a connection between his article and Fischli/Weiss’s photographic works through dialogue. Flusser agreed with him, but his commentary on Fischli/Weiss failed to actually prove the connection. Yet this setback did not discourage Obrist. He continued exploring. In 1991/92, he interviewed Huang Yong Ping, but later realized the content lacked structure. Over time and with growing experience, he resolved these issues. Usually Obrist does not prepare extensively before interviews, since he already knows the artists well. Only for first-time interviews does he spend weeks preparing—thinking about questions no one has asked the artist before. For example, when interviewing Ed Ruscha, he asked questions about architecture, a field Ruscha rarely engages with. Gradually, Obrist developed his own method: starting with a list of questions, then compiling around 200 notes about the interviewee, enabling him to guide the conversation flexibly. For Obrist as a curator, this interview project also serves as research, providing invaluable resources for future exhibitions. In 2003, the Venice Biennale published more than 1,000 pages of his interviews, covering about 80 conversations—yet this still showed only part of the material, which left Obrist dissatisfied. He later continued publishing The Conversation Series to give readers a deeper understanding of his interviewees.
Interestingly, many of Obrist’s exhibition concepts are inspired by Édouard Glissant’s idea of mondialité (worldliness). Unlike globalization, this concept does not refer to making the entire world conform to a single model, but rather a global exchange that acknowledges and sustains cultural diversity. Based on this, Obrist has presented certain exhibition series in multiple locations, allowing the exhibitions to retain their essence while being shaped by the host context—site, local laws, governmental conditions, culture, and so on. At the same time, the exhibition influences its site in return. These interactions create variations and uncertainties. Obrist calls this continuous interplay between the local and the global “feedback effects” (Rückkopplungseffekte). But he also emphasizes that such change must occur without losing or distorting one’s identity (“Veränderung durch Austausch mit dem Anderen, ohne sich selbst zu verlieren oder zu verfalschen”).
Ultimately, curating is about connecting different cultures and elements so they can be perceived by the audience. How we handle their differences and allow them to resonate within the exhibition is a question every curator must carefully contemplate in the future.
