MUSEUM WORKS

The Asian Food Aisle

RISD Museum 2024

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The digital publication from the 2024 Mellon Internship features museum interpretation tools such as video, illustrations, and literary essays. It began as an independent research project on Asian Decorative Arts, using a playful approach to critique museum taxonomies and institutional histories. The project aims to reinvent provenance and adopt imaginative approaches to labelling.

This project is ongoing.

Museum Interpretation, Experimental Publication, Arts Education & Accessibility

Come Again?

RISD Museum Digital Initiatives 2024

The Audio Guide for RISD Museum’s Contemporary Galleries offers a welcoming introduction and a “Ways of Looking” guided experience. Designed for a diverse audience, it includes interviews with members of the museum’s extended community, humanizing the museum’s institutional voice. The audio piece encourages audiences to relook at art and rethink their perspectives.

This is a collaborative project between the Audio Production Intern and myself as the Digital Storytelling Intern under RISD Museum Digital Initiatives.

This project is ongoing.

Museum Facilitation, User Survey, Interviewing, Audio Production

Reflection & Refraction

RISD Sculpture 2023

Exhibition celebrating student work from the RISD sophomore sculpture cohort. The curation creates dialogues between wood and metal artworks in a dynamic yet approachable presentation.

Curation

Re:Pattern

RISD Museum Guild 2022–present

The RISD Museum Guild is a group of undergraduate students developing self-directed programs that engage communities within and beyond the Providence area. We want to inspire critical dialogue around the collection, purpose, and future of art museums.

In 2024, we facilitated Re:Pattern, a two-part program series that presents work by student artists in a wide range of modes and media—visual, text-based, performance, video, and more—informed by visual or conceptual patterns at play in the museum. The program asked students to respond to the central question: “How can we re-pattern the museum, revising its history to create new futures?”

Public Programming, Artist Collaboration

PUBLICATIONS

Worlding Englishes

RISD Research 2023-present

Worlding Englishes is an upcoming repository of the different varieties of English spoken around the world. Ensivioned as a living archive of these World Englishes, the digital project intends to complicate ideas of linguistic standardisation, nativity, and “appropriateness”, among other ethnoracial traces of British colonialism.

Housed digitally, the archive will contain meta-commentaries and reflections from individual contributors on their experiences with these linguistic registers, along with an evolving body of digital and physical thinking art objects and experiences.

The project is funded by the Rhode Island School of Design through the SPUR Fund.

Mixed-Media Installation, Digital Humanities, Decolonization

volume 1.

RISD Center for Arts & Language
2023 - present

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Quickies and Questionings is one of many contributions to RISD’s literary arts publication volume 1. at the Center for Arts and Language. The narrative follows an investigation of a past student club that was shut down due to COVID-19. Through this small entry point, the piece speaks to the structural challenges faced by student organisers, the lack of interdisciplinarity in art institutions, and the overly individualistic nature of artistic labour. The piece provokes internal introspection and institutional conscientiousness.

Beyond this piece, other contributions include art criticism and artist interviews.

Journalism, Institutional Critique
& Developmental Editing

Kairos: A Timeless Myth

CREDITS 2024

MUSIC by Arete Xu
BOOK & LYRICS by Arete Xu & Waverly Huang
DESIGN by Grace Liu
EDITED by Arete Xu
IMAGES provided by Arete Xu

This self-published book contains notes, photographs, and artworks documenting Kairos’s performance process, featuring graphic design elements supporting the show’s concept. Kairos reinterprets the Trojan War myth cycle through themes of non-linear time and entropy. The heroes of Greek mythology are filled with the same existential howl as we have within us today, sifting through the different versions of themselves from across time to find who they are.

To the seeds I sowed in my youth
To the fruits I reap in my fall.

Playwriting, Music Composition & Publication

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