Curating a vibrant, complicated image of Asia through garments

The Endless Garment, a two-fold group exhibit at Beijing's X Museum, will end on March 20, but the show will travel around the globe to showcase a complicated, vibrant Asia, says the museum's chief curator Wu Dongxue.

Wu, 29, and her peer Jeppe Ugelvig, a Danish curator and art critic, started collaborating on the project as soon as X Museum was founded in the summer of 2020.

After nearly a year of research, preparation, and curation, they mounted the exhibit's first installment in March 2021, bringing together the work of more than 20 emerging artists and designers in China, Southeast Asia, and their Western diaspora. In December 2021, the exhibit's second leg, featuring a similar lineup, opened and filled half of the museum with a melange of garments, photos, videos, and installations.

At the heart of the project is a deep dive into Asian-ness and Chinese-ness, which are often flattened by Westerners into one totalizing image of "foreignness", according to the curators.