The Art-Architecture Complex of Instant Garden is an intensive study into the emerging curatorial practices for architecture and design in today’s China. Contradicting the idea of the art-architecture complex by Hal Foster, Yuan believes that the complex of the two discipline’s inbetween can actually stimulate the contemporary thinking of the material environment. By the case of Instant Garden, she elaborates how the complex involves as a gesture and opens up a milieu translating the traditional embodiment of mountains in Chinese landscape painting into the critical engagement of the typology of roofs in urban building activities, and considers how the practice of site-specificity in this case facilitates the complex. What she has achieved is distinguishing the notion of the art-architecture complex in the Chinese cultural spheres from its western counterpart and reflecting upon the historical circumstances of formulating the complex in our country.
Jiawei Yuan is a curator at the Museum of Shanghai University. She received her BA degree in Museology from Fudan University (2013), MA degrees in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art (2015) and History & Critical Thinking from Architectural Association (2016). She is also a contributing writer for Ray Art Centre, which is a non-profit organisation in Shanghai dedicated to photo-based art.