We are used to exhibitions that assert, that correspond to a theme, take a position, translate concept into form. But The Right Shape, realised between Zhengzhou and London in the summer of 2024, chose to tread a different path. Rather than asking what is right, it was an inquiry into how form finds a place through dialogue. Co-organised by Arthology and Alsolike Gallery, the exhibition took place across two centres: the first reflecting the spatial sensibility of a Chinese institution, the second the stillness of a London craft gallery. Five of the finest British metal artists were invited to investigate the language of silver and metal in contemporary craft. The works were not large, they were measured, considered and intimate. Through closeness of scale and finish, it was a statement of curatorial proposition, not through a lens of spectacle, but one of resonance.
At Alsolike Gallery in London’s Shoreditch district, beams of light played over vessels and sculptural works that seemed to hold the breath of the maker. In Zhengzhou, works were placed within the villa where Arthology has long exhibited – a place weighted with history, where polished silver met the sedimentation of time. The two exhibitions were not responses to each other, but to each other’s rhythm. One invited closeness; the other stillness. Between them, a conversation was had across continents, where the “rightness” of form became less a rule, but a feeling.
“Form does not belong to a single culture,” wrote Fan Shi in her curatorial introduction. “It takes shape in relation to the body, to material, to context. This was as much a philosophical position as it was operational. To realise an exhibition existing in two cities, in two languages, and across two institutional systems required more than curatorial vision, it demanded translation in every sense of the word.
That translation was realised through Programme Director Fan Shi, whose curatorial direction for The Right Shape was realised from conception to realisation. Working between the UK and China, she saw the exhibition as an ongoing negotiation between different ways of seeing, making and organising. It required the development of a concept, international communication, scheduling, and space planning between the two venues. But her role went beyond coordination. Having led the HUGO BOSS Asia Art Award, collaborating with the Guggenheim Museum, and directing independent projects at Arthology for over fifteen years, she had seen translation become authorship. Under her direction, from the quality of light to the interval between objects, every decision was an articulation of balance and exchange.
Colleagues pay her a compliment of sensitivity: the quality of holding to artistry while accommodating opposing institutional rhythms. For The Right Shape, sensitivity expressed itself in structure: in spatial accommodation, the objects from the same makers enjoyed distinct atmospheres, one in the crisp particularity of a craft gallery, the other in the deep resonance of a historic villa bearing decades of cultural inscription. Through her dual structure, Fan turned a bilateral meeting into a cohesive artistic statement.
More importantly, The Right Shape was not conceived as a study of East versus West, but as an investigation of translation without loss, how, when moved, objects do not lose meaning, but gather it. To the five artists’ works, with their subtle pleats and delicate forged texture, was revealed a craft is a language, one that recognises no borders, but needs to be proclaimed for no border.
The Right Shape also articulated Fan’s ongoing exploration of curatorial hybridity: of how the act of organisation itself is creative. For her, curation is neither a species of academic writing nor event-making, but meeting-making. In The Right Shape, meetings happened not only between objects and viewers, but between geographies, languages, and thoughts. In the end, The Right Shape offered not an answer, but a way of seeing, one in which volume yielded to velocity, assertion to affinity. By giving two spaces room to breathe within tandem, the exhibition itself became an exercise in what unites as much as what divides.
While exchange is increasingly measured in points and kilometres, The Right Shape moved differently. It moved with velocity, precision, and tenderness to find, in the shimmering plane of metal, a geometry of common understanding.
Author: Liu Yang