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Perhaps what we should be discussing is not the independent curator, but the independence of curating. Because of their different relationships to resources, curators and artists inevitably develop distinct modes of creative practice. For artists, creation demands an absolute confrontation with freedom—it is a demand placed upon the self. For curators, creation is a process of negotiation with unfreedom, a continuous struggle between institutions and economic resources. The only clearly identifiable endpoint shared by both is visual: the exhibition.

Institutionalization: Balance and Practice

This reflection recalls my participation, two years ago, in a curatorial project consultation meeting organized by the National Culture and Arts Foundation (NCAF). The meeting addressed both the Curatorial Training Program and the Visual Arts Curatorial Project, inviting practitioners to offer perspectives on curatorial development and training. Several fundamental questions, however, remained insufficiently clarified. How does the training mechanism transition effectively from the Curatorial Training Program to the Visual Arts Curatorial Project? What distinguishes a “curatorial project” from an “exhibition grant” mechanism? Do applicants primarily seek funding, or entry into a sustained curatorial development system?

If the discussion centers on curatorial training, then perhaps such mechanisms could be modeled after the tiered systems found in the performing arts. These systems are designed to support gradual growth, acknowledging that not all groups are suited to advance seamlessly from incubation to excellence. Their core objective is to cultivate domestic teams capable of becoming cultural brands—supporting national theaters while also serving as cultural representatives. This foundational structure may already offer a direction worth considering for curatorial development.

After all, aren’t the exhibitions produced by curators themselves a site of institutional struggle—a form of institutionalized production? When cultural institutions serve as endpoints for self-produced exhibitions, do they not also reveal unresolved tensions between institutions and curators? Not every curator is suited to academia or prolonged institutional confrontation. Structurally, therefore, beyond linking the Curatorial Training Program to the Visual Arts Curatorial Project, the next stage becomes even more critical.

Is it possible to allow experienced curators—who nevertheless remain long constrained by subsidy systems—to continue cultivating cultural production beyond the framework of curatorial project grants? The circulation and appropriateness of talent and resources matter far more than their mere allocation. A system that can only produce one kind of nomadic practitioner can hardly sustain cultural diversity.

From this perspective, my proposal for the next stage of curatorial projects was straightforward: rather than spending several million NT dollars on a single exhibition as a brief spectacle—adding lines to résumés while consuming budgets—why not allocate these resources to placing curators within cultural institutions? Are not different cultural institutions akin to distinct academic disciplines in their modes of development? Deepening curatorial culture should not be confined to the art field alone. Do exhibitions in history museums, science museums, natural history museums, or anthropology museums not also involve aesthetics and visual production?

If curators’ research interests already traverse these disciplines, why should curating not address the cultural realities emerging from our own land? The response, however, was predictable: “This would be administratively difficult.” After approximately ten seconds of awkward silence, the discussion moved on to the next topic—the challenges of contemporary curating.

The forum ended, but the discussion had barely begun.

When we talk about curatorial training, empowerment, or education, the discourse that resurfaces every one or two years shares striking similarities: a worship of form within exhausted imaginaries. Repeated keywords such as “imagination” and “possibility” paradoxically drain curating of imagination altogether. Beneath the appearance of energetic discourse performances lies a fatigue marked by rupture and monotony.

Returning to this special issue, the attempt to construct broad curatorial perspectives from narrowly defined curatorial studies only further exposes an exhausted imagination and an anxiety toward the future. This is evident in the press release for “CIT19: New Challenges in Contemporary Curating—International Forum and Young Curators Workshop,” which states:

“(...) Amid trends of cross-cultural integration and the expansion of exhibition-education functions, we consider how ‘curating’ can construct new, efficient, and creative contexts across its composite roles in research, exhibition, and pedagogy.”

Transposed twenty years earlier, this statement would still be applicable. What follows are several reflections addressing the challenges most frequently raised in discussions of curatorial training.

The Anxiety of Curatorial Studies

Which curators, from past to present, were trained through formal “curatorial studies”? What deficiencies, revealed through curatorial practice, have rendered the construction of such a discipline an urgent task? Most active curators today emerge from backgrounds in philosophy, art education, art criticism, arts administration, or museum studies, subsequently shaped by extensive exhibition practice.

So what exactly fuels the anxiety surrounding curatorial studies? Is it anxiety over how exhibitions can be produced academically, or over how curators themselves are recognized within academia? Is the concern that curators are insufficiently “international,” or that their exhibitions—unlike artworks—cannot circulate within the global market?

In many unspoken case studies, these may in fact be the real reasons curatorial studies are deemed necessary.

Contemporary curating was born alongside critical theory. It emerged as one strategy for dismantling and reconstructing the museum’s production logic. Curating can function as a tool for cities and localities to enter globalization, while simultaneously serving as a method for excavating local culture. Yet under conditions of cultural lag, Taiwan’s current pursuit of “internationalization” moves uncritically toward what is already a late-stage globalized graveyard.

In my view, the construction of curatorial studies should not originate from questions of “professionalization,” but from examining how expertise across diverse disciplines ultimately manifests within the visual-cultural process of an exhibition. Before building curatorial studies, we must ask how knowledge can be enacted as a public good, and how curating can reconstruct local culture. Only by valuing these dimensions can projects such as “South of the South – South-Link Art Project” or “Near Future Interactions: 2017 Soulangh International Contemporary Art Festival”—projects marked by cultural confidence and an integration of historical and social dynamics—be genuinely produced.

Policy Resources and Curatorial Independence

There is no absolute independence—only relative independence. The distinction between artists who rely long-term on government subsidies and socially engaged practitioners who receive partial public funding marks one of the most ambiguous grey zones of “independence,” and constitutes a crucial lesson in accountability for one’s choices.

This ambiguity surfaces repeatedly in debates over resource and power distribution within the cultural field. To borrow a centrist cliché, artists simply want to create without dealing with politics. Yet it is precisely after such disclaimers that problems begin. When artists and institutions are long nourished by public funding as their primary economic source, can we ignore the ways in which policy imperatives reshape or expand their trajectories?

More critically, when they begin administering government projects, serving on funding juries, or transforming project outcomes into official achievements aligned with vague state ideologies, the line separating them from de facto policy spokespersons becomes perilously thin. Professionalized jury systems and state-cultivated “expert authority” still operate through deeply conservative and bureaucratic logics.

While such arrangements may be framed as cooperation between public and private sectors, or as supply-and-demand relationships, policy direction and resource allocation exert far greater influence over the independence of institutions and curators than over artists’ individual practices. This is because curators and artists fundamentally differ in their resource dependencies. An artist’s work may shrink in scale under reduced resources, but a curator’s exhibition—flexible and mutable by nature—becomes a double-edged sword. Independence lies precisely in how this balance is negotiated.

A Hijacked International Perspective

Funding policies often exacerbate the curatorial practitioner’s mobility within economic ecosystems. When livelihoods depend on subsidies and atypical labor conditions, independent curators can begin to resemble outsourced civil servants.

Extending the “imagined professionalism” narrative, consider this scenario: if young talents are continuously dispatched abroad for temporary work, while domestic institutions are occupied by bureaucratic systems, leaving no curators rooted within institutions—how does this differ from the situation twenty years ago?

When curators privately discuss Anselm Franke curating the 2012 Taipei Biennial at the age of 34, or Martin Guinard participating in the curatorial team of the 2020 Taipei Biennial at the age of 30, Taiwan still frames its perpetually “young” curators as insufficiently international—lacking networks, experience, and global vision—thus requiring further cultivation of a distinctly “Taiwanese-style” internationalization.

If curatorial discourse merely chases fashionable texts and case-sharing, why not instead deepen local cases to articulate our own cultural characteristics? In the internet age, knowledge production and social relations have fundamentally shifted. Insecure cultural governance coupled with a colonized international perspective functions much like the belief that “taller people breathe cleaner air”—imbuing “imagination” and “possibility” with excessive, hollow power.

In an international-perspective-addicted society, “internationalism” rarely denotes the ability to analyze or care for diverse cultures, to construct frameworks for understanding global events, or to grasp systemic global dynamics. Instead, it becomes shorthand for language proficiency, overseas study records, and expatriate experience. While such credentials undoubtedly add value, they distract from the most crucial component of international perspective: the capacity for critical understanding.

Why not admit that Taiwan’s international outlook is hierarchical and conservative? Like the state’s red-envelope diplomacy in the New Southbound Policy, this form of cultural exchange pales in comparison to the lived presence of Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taipei’s Qingguang Market, Zhongli Railway Station, or Taichung’s Zhongshan Park. A distorted, utilitarian internationalism too often views the world solely through its own lens, forgetting that others see the world differently.