The idea for this drawing exhibition came from a handful of students on MA Drawing who wanted to reflect on the first question we were asked on our course: what is drawing research? From my perspective, the exhibition operated as a love letter to drawing students in the year below us, forging a mentorship connection and friendship between classes. I Don't Understand Your Drawing was also a great way to synthesize, for ourselves, how drawing had come to feature in our work across diverse mediums. I came up with the title during one of the planning meetings for the show, where Susan Askew, Nele Bergmans, Natsuki Iwamoto and I were joking about how people were often shocked than any of us were on a drawing program. "But you don't draw!" was often the first reaction. Explaining what it means to be a drawing researcher as a practitioner of mixed media sculpture used to be difficult, but has since become a fun and engaging conversation with friends, family, and professionals. 

 

I wrote the following introductory text which welcomed visitors to the exhibition: 

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I DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR DRAWING

The Fine Art: Drawing Masters students (2023) have spent the past year contextualizing their practices, across mediums, in terms of drawing research. While drawing has been described as the most fundamental mode of thought and artistic expression, from the doodle to the sketchbook to the way we understand science, an understanding of ‘drawing as research’ could not be more complex and disputed.

In Drawing: The enactive Evolution of the Practitioner Patricia Cain describes drawing as ‘both method and methodology; "it is a method in the sense that it is a tool for investigation, and a methodology because the inherent nature of the activity determines how as a tool, it can be deployed and interpreted.” In Other words, Cain views drawing as both a means of selecting a research technique (method), and as a way of analysing one’s methods (methodology).

I DON’T UNDERSTAND YOUR DRAWING spotlights artists whose work does not always appear ‘drawing’ in the traditional sense, making use of drawing as a means of selecting how they make what they make, and why they make it. Eleven students in Fine Art: Drawing have chosen artworks that provide a diverse range of examples of what it means, to them, to place drawing research at the foundation of visual art practice.

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Contributing Artists: 
Natsuki Iwamoto

Susan Askew
Xinyu Zhou
Weiqi Sun
Te Palandjian
Jianing Kang
Changhong Sum
Ziqi Chen
Oli Li
Xinyue Liang

Nele Bergmans

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Head curator: 

Sarah Woodfine

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This final group exhibition was personally very important to me— since the show was in our studio, like the Work-In-Progress show in the Winter of 2022, I felt the full force of the journey I have taken over the last year, and my development as an artist. I was incredibly involved in the curation of the artworks, alongside Natsuki Iwamoto and Sarah Woodfine, working to make sure all artists were happy with their installation and that the artworks interacted with each other in important ways. This interaction between artworks, I have come to reflect, is of central importance to me when I think about how I am exhibiting at this early stage in my career. For me, the point of exhibitions is not to display, but to EXPERIMENT, where experimentation means that the installation is not predetermined, works from different artists bleed into each other, and new relationships are formed. In other words, my artwork should be changed and decontextualized during the curation process.

 

One such important experiment was the intermingling my massive artwork with Iwamoto's fragile works. This exercise has come to inform our collaboration for our upcoming show together, Interzone at Peckham Levels.