Projects in the Drawer

 

The student exhibition of China is titled ‘Projects in the Drawer’. It focuses on young designers’ ideas that extend beyond professional experience and judgment. Although these ideas are unrecognised and impossible to realise, having been temporarily sealed away in a drawer, they have significant potential. This exhibition intends to highlight the value of ‘failure’.

 

Scenography is a highly technical and practical process that encourages collaboration. However, almost every designer has a few ideas that are never displayed and are kept inside a drawer. Nearly every scenography student has whimsical and impractical ideas that result in such a situation. These impossible ideas are an extreme form of imagination. Yet it is precisely the impossibility that imbues these ideas with utopian meaning and values. While they are unachievable, they will continue to influence a designer’s work in the future.

 

The drawer is a metaphor that reminds us of the potential costs of making creative works. The drawer is a private space in which we hide our own histories, so that a drawer’s individuality reflects its contemporaneity in art. 

 

The student works exhibited are defined as ‘art imagination that overflows from the shadowed space of the drawer’. We use the keywords ‘drawer’, ‘shadow’ and ‘overflow’ as the basis of the entire structure to underline the constantly growing energy that lies in the darkness of the drawer. 

 

This installation is also the set of a staged performance, of which a video recording is displayed in the exhibition. As with the national exhibition of China, the student exhibition is also arranged in concentric circles. By regularising this pattern, the space can expand infinitely.