CHARLES KANG
SINCE 2022, Charles Kang has been the curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He previously held positions at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Frick Collection in New York, the Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. His first exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, “Point of View,” was on view from July to September of last year. Cocurated by Maria Holtrop and Marion Anker, the show explored the construction of gender in Western Europe from the sixteenth century to the present via 150 works from the museum’s permanent holdings.
—the Editors
HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE CURATING?
Thinking with and for objects. Stewardship of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings is the primary component of my position at the Rijksmuseum. Being responsible for more than twenty thousand drawings means that every decision I make has to be in service of the collection. Whether in collection care, acquisitions, loans, or rotations and exhibitions, every move I make is also part of a long process of learning the collection—a process that might never be completed within one’s lifetime.
WHAT WAS THE LAST SHOW YOU TRAVELED TO SEE?
I did not travel specifically for it, but I am very glad to have caught “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum of American Art while in New York over the winter holidays. It was truly impressive how the show, a tribute to a choreographer and performer, managed to avoid fetishizing bodies while resolutely keeping them central. The exhibition was dense in themes and in the number of objects, yet the presentation was light and delicate—I wish I could come up with some pithy dance metaphor here! Even the constant audiovisual backdrop was a delight, despite my expectations.
WHAT UPCOMING EXHIBITION (BESIDES YOURS) ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT?
“Art Is in the street” at the Musée d’Orsay [in Paris], which will focus on the rise of the illustrated poster in Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century. I have a fascination with fin de siècle posters. To me, they powerfully encapsulate urban life and the culture of production and consumption at the dawn of modernity. I also love that they constantly test my sense of a proper and “refined” taste—think of Jules Chéret and Alphonse Mucha. To put it in a more pompous way, these posters are where Walter Benjamin’s ideas of reproduction and public spectacle intersect with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class and taste.
WHAT IS ONE SHOW THAT HAD A BIG INFLUENCE ON YOU?
Nancy Spector’s “theanyspacewhatever” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008. The exhibition opened while I was in my first semester of a master’s program, during which I took a seminar on relational aesthetics. It left a deep impression on me to trace the arc of a discourse—from Nicolas Bourriaud to Claire Bishop and beyond—and then to see an exhibition that both responded to that discourse and introduced it to broader audiences. The show allowed visitors to critically reassess the idea of activated spectatorship, but they could also simply enjoy moments of audience participation. I still remember the shared excitement in the air, and this was long before “experience” became a catchall term in the arts! That sense of excitement has since become a benchmark for me. I would like to think that an exhibition of drawings, when well curated, could incite a similar sense of curiosity and discovery.
WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF CRITICISM YOU’VE READ RECENTLY?
I’m currently reading Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024). It is mesmerizing to see how they surgically deconstruct the recent uses of gender as a smoke screen for conservative anxieties about challenges to social norms, and how they lay bare the rhetorical mechanisms and fallacies behind them. In these times of uncertainty, I find Butler’s fiery call for a broader coalition especially inspiring.
IS THERE A PARTICULAR IDEA THAT IS INSPIRING YOUR WORK NOW?
I have been thinking a lot about the idea of youth—not only in terms of how youth has been celebrated, desired, mocked, and sometimes feared in visual culture, but also in the sense of “youthful work”: What makes a work of art youthful? Without any other means of dating a drawing, for example, how do we determine it to be the work of a young artist? Perhaps I’m prematurely manifesting my midlife crisis here.
WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION HAPPENING NOW WITHIN THE CURATORIAL FIELD OR IN THE ARTS MORE BROADLY?
Some museums are beginning to re-strategize how they communicate to their audiences at a granular—that is, textual—level. It is one thing for museums to address complex histories and socially relevant themes, but it is another to make them understandable and relatable to a wide range of audiences while holding their attention. Prioritizing communication is a delicate business: One has to sacrifice certain nuances and complexities, but also trust that audiences are willing to be challenged and to grow. This might all sound corporate, but I do believe that rethinking how we generate texts—instead of the traditional draft-edit model—could help collection presentations and temporary exhibitions to have a bigger impact. It could also ease some of the prevalent tension—or harness it in a more generative manner—between curatorial and education departments at institutions where text is generated through the collaboration between the two.
WHAT DO YOU WISH PEOPLE BETTER UNDERSTOOD ABOUT CURATING?
For a collections curator, curating is about preserving objects for future generations, but one also has to acknowledge that nothing can be preserved in perpetuity—I think Alois Riegl touched upon this in his essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin” (1903). This is apparent nowhere more than in the field of works on paper, where both the media and the supports are especially sensitive and prone to change. It humbles you to recognize the sublime nature of curatorial work: the beauty and terror of resisting time yet accepting its inevitability.
WHAT PIECE OF ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO AN ASPIRING CURATOR?
It always helps to look outside one’s field of specialization. If my answers to some of the questions above are any indication, I love visiting exhibitions that have little to do with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings. It trains my eyes, and it helps me hone my language.
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING A CURATOR CAN DO FOR AN ARTIST?
Creating and nurturing memory is the most important thing a curator can do for an artist of the past. This is slightly different from keeping memories of certain known artists alive. In the vast number of drawings stored in the Rijksmuseum’s vaults, I regularly encounter works by artists I had never heard about, artists that even more established scholars do not know. Finding the right opportunities to introduce them in a meaningful way—rather than simply foregrounding the “discovery”—is a difficult, but worthwhile, challenge.
