Jo-ey Tang’s curatorial practice is difficult to describe; words tend to sneak around a corner just as I become aware of their presence. If I had to describe it in three, far from singular ways, I would say Tang's practice embodies slowness, centers artists and their works, and tends to turn host institutions inside out, exposing the internecine and externalized methods and processes of contemporary exhibition-making. Tang began his career as an arts editor for the literary magazine, n+1 and photography editor for Condé Nast before earning his MFA in Studio Art from NYU in 2011. During grad school, he worked as The Notary Public to organize exhibitions and other programs out of his NYC apartment. He would go on to curate exhibitions for Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus (CCAD), and most recently, KADIST in San Francisco, among others.

Tang’s idiosyncratic practice has little precedent. As the first artist to be named Director of Exhibitions at the Beeler Gallery at CCAD, Tang’s inaugural exhibition Season Zero: How well do you behave? IN THE FLAT FIELD, brought together radical literature archives, art and design school printed matter, and philosopher’s notes among other materials, and ended with Columbus’ first art book fair staged inside the Gallery. The exhibition expanded and contracted over time, with objects cycling in and out. Season Zero framed these objects not as locked in static histories, but as mobile investments of aesthetic, political, and intellectual urgencies to be shared with viewers. In his second year at the Beeler, Tang exhibited Season One: arms ache avid aeon, Chapters One to Four of his work with fierce pussy, a queer art collective comprised of Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka, all AIDS activists. Each chapter examined the work of the collective through the lens of their individual practices in an iterative, almost shapeshifting exhibition that saw objects come, go, or even change positions within the gallery. Tang began talking with fierce pussy in 2015, and is still working alongside them today. Chapter Seven took place at Palais de Tokyo in 2023, and Chapter Six, a book, is forthcoming.

I first learned of Tang’s work as a graduate student and emerging curator, when he came to speak at my alma mater. I was shocked (and later, keenly interested) in the way he deployed traditional archives, worked alongside artist collectives, and seemed to unfurl so many assumptions I brought to thinking in and around exhibitions of living artists. Tang’s work struck a chord with my own research on queer artist collectives like DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television), where I’ve grappled with how to best translate their extremely diverse practices and political energies into an exhibition format. I interviewed Tang this past September after reading about the (forthcoming) Chapter Eight of arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified to take place at Participant Inc. in New York in March 2025. Our conversation traces some of Tang’s initial work and interest in magazines, slowness as a guiding principle, and the art’s importance as a site of exchange.

 

 

If I'm installing an exhibition in a more conventional  space, I imagine it's on the rooftop. I imagine the decisions that I would make if I mentally shift what is in the actual. It's often useful. I check the assumptions I’m making about the space, so I don't fall right into the institutional groove. It's not so much disregarding the site, but it's just to allow the site to have more than what it is. Most often sites have multiple histories anyway. So really we are only contending with the current form of what it is.

 

 

 

 

Austen Villacis: I’d like to start off by asking you if there are any early visual (or sensory) experiences that stand out to you as very important to your practice, whether they registered then, or in retrospect.

Jo-ey Tang: I think this could go in a few different ways. Maybe, I can go back really to my first engagement with what I thought of as art, which was in the form of magazines. I was a very avid international magazine reader, mostly at Tower Records in the Castro in the mid-90s. I was reading there because they're quite expensive, the international magazines. Tower Records had lots of magazines from Japan and Europe.

I was gravitating toward fashion, music, and (loosely) lifestyle magazines. I was a very conscientious “gutter” reader, where all the credits and captions would live. This is of course, in the 90s. So this was how I imagine a teenager gets information beyond the beginning of home internet access, beyond TV or MTV. So the magazine was my entry into music, to art, to other forms of art. It’s what I ended up doing, working in magazines.

I haven't really thought about how the form of the magazine is actually quite impactful in my thinking. There is a kind of narrative that takes place in the pages, within the pages, and there are sections that are dedicated to certain attention spans. Every magazine reinvents itself as to how they do it, so there are reviews, long form pieces, and strictly photography pieces that are not tied to language, and of course, as a reader you don't read it from the beginning to end. Even though it's created with a chronological convention, no one reads the magazine from the first page to the last. That to me is very much akin to an exhibition. You do plan, but no one in the audience goes through it one by one. This is something that still informs me, both the intention of putting something together, but the openness of having an audience and the freedom that they have within the exhibition.

The magazines I would read would be like i-D and The Face, which are British fashion/lifestyle magazines, to American ones like Ray Gun, which is more like a music magazine, and later on design and typography magazines like Emigre, which is really influential in terms of destabilizing information. The hierarchy of things is disrupted. The font size is not correlated to heading, for example. I think all those things really mark me in some ways.

There’s certainly a history of how the form of the magazine has influenced exhibition-making. There are many parallels, maybe primarily how to account for the presence of an interlocutor or “public”. Were there experiences that taught you more specifically about curating?

There are two instances which I feel taught me ways to be a curator both practically speaking and how to conceive of an installation. The first would be more formative. When I was first coming out of my MFA at NYU, spending time in Paris on a fellowship, an artist-friend asked me to curate a show in a garage/storage space that he wanted to turn into an exhibition space. I was really hesitant to accept his offer and put a show together. Especially on the outskirts of Paris. It was almost like we knew that the audience would be slim and I really struggled to agree to do it. I think I put too much importance on the reception. I thought every gesture had to be so considered. But anyway, I did it, and it turned out to be maybe one of my most productive exhibitions. What ended up happening was that my artist-friend’s gallerist came to the opening, and then the gallerist was asked by Palais de Tokyo to be part of a citywide artist-curators season in the year after, and so then asked me to organize a show at the gallery as part of the Palais de Tokyo season, which then led me to the Palais de Tokyo position.

So while it might have seemed inconsequential in the moment, the project had a large effect. It was a good reminder to see what's in front of you rather than what's beyond. As a creative practice, as an arts practitioner, as a curator, as allies of artists, that scale of working with people on an intimate level could have consequences or reverberations. I always remind myself of that moment because sometimes I feel as the curator’s trajectory becomes more professionalized, everything is so intentionally planned, strategically planned, in order to advance in some way or another.

A second instance was one critique session that I had with the artist Trisha Donnelly who was one of my professors. She made a remark about installing one’s work, and I might be paraphrasing here. She told me to pretend to be someone else while you’re doing it, so you have a distance—it’s the emotional connection to the work that gets in the way of making the right decisions for the exhibition or installation.

I ended up taking it a little bit further and thought of the installation or exhibition, in what I would call “out-of-site.” If I'm installing an exhibition in a more conventional  space, I imagine it's on the rooftop. I imagine the decisions that I would make if I mentally shift what is in the actual. It's often useful. I can also check the assumptions I’m making about the space, so I don't fall right into the institutional groove. It's not so much disregarding the site, but it's just to allow the site to have more than what it is. Most often sites have multiple histories anyway. So really we are only contending with the current form of what it is.

Where does your work as The Notary Public fall in that world?

The Notary Public, an exhibition space I ran out of my New York apartment, was a dream in grad school between the first and second year. It was my first inclination to invite other artists into what might be the form of an exhibition. It was also a practical response as I had nowhere to go that summer because of tuition debt. I had to stay in New York. This was 2010, so there were already quite a few apartment shows with people showing with their friends. I put something together at my home and I invited teachers, people who came through studio visits, classmates, and other artists. At the beginning it was very much about having different folks under the same roof. There was Elaine Cameron-Weir, a fellow MFA candidate at NYU, our teacher Carol Bove, and the visiting author and artist, Wayne Kostenbaum, among others.

Wayne’s contribution got me interested in archives. He gave me a bunch of his notebooks for his debut novel Circus or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes. They were all different; he doesn't buy notebooks because people always give them as gifts. We also organized a performance, I can't remember if it was in the same year or the year after. I was living near Central Park at the time, and we had one of the biggest storms in over 100 years. There were all these trees that fell. I had read Wayne's book on Jackie Kennedy; he wrote about the picture that Ron Galella, the paparazzi photographer, took of Jackie crossing the street, running around, fleeing the paparazzi. That was whirling in my thinking, and I happened to walk around the reservoir because I knew where the tree Jackie leaned on was. I proposed to Wayne to have a reading on an anniversary of the photo at the tree because it was still standing.

That performance started at my apartment followed by a walk around the reservoir to the tree. It happened to be a stormy day, also in the rain. I think the City told people not to go to Central Park but we still did. There were no runners because of the rain. But there we were, the 15 of us, walking in the rain. Wayne read the last page of the book at the tree, and then we all dispersed in the park.

I know of his work, but didn't know anything about that performance. That is so cool.

It's really beautiful.

It’s interesting how you framed The Notary Public initially as a project born of student debt. You’ve also made a point of talking about student (and teacher) debt in your essay for shelf documents. I remember back when the San Francisco Art Institute closed, there were students who published testimonies of how the school left them with exorbitant tuition debt and credits that weren’t transferable. Now it’s been purchased by Laurene Powell Jobs and is expected to reopen as a non-profit school. How did you react to their closing as an alumni?

It was strange. Because I had been away for quite a long time. I was also a transfer student, which means I always felt like I wasn’t a “full” alumni. I mean I did spend two and a half years there, but I was an interdisciplinary major which meant you choose wherever you land but you also don't belong anywhere. My focus was in photography, critical theory, sound, and new genres. I was floating but not claiming any particular discipline. I think that also made an impression or way of being, or set an example, of a kind of interwoven sense of a practice that doesn’t belong.

What did you do between undergraduate and graduate school, and immediately following graduate school?

After I graduated from SFAI, I moved to New York and worked in magazines. At that time, I wasn’t really participating in contemporary art very actively. The 2008 financial crisis was a turning point for me—it kind of pushed me back into art because the magazines were closing. Within a few months, everyone I knew had lost their jobs. I couldn't go back to freelancing in magazines, and that gave me the push to go to grad school, which was something I’d always wanted to do.

When I jumped to Palais de Tokyo after grad school, I was travelling quite a lot—many different trips between January and August of 2014, because the show was set to open in October. It was a tight timeline, with a lot of mandates. One of my responsibilities was researching artists from China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, starting with Myanmar and Singapore.

That sounds intense—six months of travelling and then mounting an exhibition right away in October.

Yes, it was really short. It was also my first time working for a large institution. I was probably naïve to think it would be fine since before that, I was only ever planning things a couple of months ahead for smaller projects. This was a much more intense process, very rushed, with a lot of pressure.

Did you find that there were major differences between the French and U.S. art systems, beyond just governmental support and infrastructure?

That’s a good question. My usual point of reference is the Palais de Tokyo, which was open every day until midnight. I found that practical because it allowed more people to visit after work, especially if they had a nine-to-five schedule. Even if you didn’t go, just knowing the museum was open created this kind of subconscious awareness—like having a 24-hour convenience store in the neighbourhood. You might not visit all the time, but it's reassuring to know it’s there. This accessibility is something I often think about in relation to museums and institutions.

Then there’s the FRAC system in France, which stands for Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain (Regional Funds for Contemporary Art). It ensures contemporary art is distributed across different regions. Each regional fund has its own perspective and collection, so the support for artists is spread out geographically. There’s also subsidized housing for artists in Paris, although I’m not sure how it works in other cities. Even though there’s competition and waiting lists, it gives artists the opportunity to live and work without excessive financial pressure. That’s something I wish we had more of in the U.S., where housing for artists is often tied to lottery systems or certain construction and real estate projects.

That sounds like a pretty robust system. I remember in Nantes, in 2018, there was this project where they built an enormous animatronic elephant with moving parts that visitors could stand on—it was this massive, interactive art installation. If I remember correctly, there were actually candidates for municipal government that took positions for or against the project.

Yes, Nantes has a FRAC, and they recently expanded to a second site on an island that used to be an industrial zone. That’s one example of how art can transform a place. But I think France is missing something that the U.S. has—the university museum system. In the U.S., universities often have strong art museums, which don’t exist in the same way in France. These teaching museums connected to universities create a much stronger infrastructure for art.

Do you think, ultimately, that university galleries are beneficial?

It’s hard to say. University museums are great, but they also come with invisible boundaries—like class, privilege, and access. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive moved closer to the subway for that reason, and Carnegie Mellon is building a new site outside of campus for its museum as the ICA Pittsburgh. These boundaries can be strong, and they can limit who feels welcome in these spaces. But I was surprised to learn, for example, that the Wexner Center for the Arts is part of Ohio State—I didn’t realize that until I lived in Columbus. There’s a subtle but important difference in how these museums function in their communities.

 

 

 

 

 

That’s really interesting. I’m curious how you saw Ohio State’s exhibitions and programs functioning in its community. You embraced a model where exhibitions grow and contract over time as if they are alive.

Yes, that approach was intentional. I was attracted to the position at the Beeler at CCAD because of its history—there were so many different directions taken by previous directors, which felt like permission to propose a completely different approach. At the same time, it was important to acknowledge the institution’s memory. Institutional memory is both long and short—you have staff who remember how things were done 10 or 15 years ago, but also rapid changes that make certain practices feel ingrained, even if they’ve only been in place for a few years. My aim was to remind people of the institution’s history while also leaving room for openness to new ideas.

When I came to the Beeler at CCAD, I proposed a different model for exhibitions—a season that would unfold over time, with artists engaged for longer periods. This was a reaction to my experience at Palais de Tokyo, where I had to put together a show in just nine months. I wanted to stretch out the timeline, to spend more time working with artists and the institution.

When you first began working with fierce pussy, did you ever expect to be working with them for nearly ten years?

It wasn’t planned to take this long, but I did think it would last a while since there wasn’t a set deadline. At the beginning, the goal wasn’t to have an exhibition as the endpoint. We didn’t know what the endpoint was; the idea was to free ourselves to be ourselves. So we would not arrive at the destination before we got there. It was about relieving ourselves from the pressure of personal and institutional expectations, about moving at everyone’s pace and rhythm. I didn’t know how long it would take, but I thought that approach was necessary. Without this commitment to indeterminacy, I’m not sure we would have worked together from the start.

 

 

 

 

That really resonates with me. Sometimes I don’t know what a collaboration might look like, though I do really respond to certain artists and works. I struggle with that. There are expectations of artists, like expecting them to do studio visits or have certain kinds of conversations. But they also have expectations of us. Sometimes our expectations of each other don’t align. It’s about finding a way to navigate these situations so that no one misses each other’s intentions. Lately I’ve tried to just let things grow more organically over time. I’m in no rush.

It’s about finding ways to move beyond the often transactional nature of the artist-curator relationship. From my experience, I realized it was important to explore other ways of engaging with artists. As a curator, it’s inevitable that when you request a meeting, you’re asking artists for their time, even without a clear outcome. It’s a fine line to navigate. You can have high hopes for meeting with an artist, hoping a collaboration might coalesce, but it’s equally important to clarify the intention of the meeting and have a mutual understanding. It’s about navigating that process with sensitivity.

Yes. You’re so attuned to these issues in part because you are an artist yourself. One of the things I noticed, specifically at the Beeler, was how much documentation of exhibitions you provided online and ostensibly to artists. How do you think about the afterlife of your exhibitions—like the documentation, and how the experience of the show continues afterward?

That’s a welcome observation. There are two things to mention here. One, artists often don’t get enough documentation of their work in exhibitions. Institutions usually budget for just a few images of the show, so artists may only get one or two. We were lucky to have a photographer who provided extensive documentation, but I also made sure we allocated more budget to ensure that artists had enough material for their archives.

Second, we tried different ways of photographing the shows. We had a graduate student JiaHao Peng, whose medium was photography, document the exhibitions using film. This provided another layer of documentation that wasn’t the official one. Sometimes we had two photographers because different people are good at capturing different things. This gave us multiple approaches.

That makes a lot of sense. One of my first experiences out of college was creating catalog entries for AIDS-related exhibitions in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition history, and because my intern desk was inside the archives, I’d often ask to look at gallery layouts while I chose which exhibition photographs to use in the entry. Suffice to say, it was a very hard thing to represent in just five to seven photographs. Another component of the afterlife of your exhibitions at Beeler was the written responses to the exhibitions that you commissioned. Could you talk a little bit about that choice?

In mid-sized U.S. cities, there’s often a lack of arts writers. National publications only cover a few shows from each city each year, so we saw an opportunity to invite writers to reflect on exhibitions or artworks beyond traditional gallery labels. For Season Two: Follow the Mud, we created large freely distributed posters for each piece of commissioned writing. It was a way to expand the relationship between language and the exhibition.

That structure might also generate a different kind of engagement compared to just writing for an existing framework. The way that some art is written about today is so formulaic and structured. I’m curious about how you navigate writing texts while maintaining long-term relationships with the artists you work with. It seems like there is a delicate balance between writing informed by relationships between the artist and curator and writing for the institution.

I think in 2016, when I was writing out of Paris for Artforum.com and other publications, I noticed that many reviews were focused on large shows. I was more interested in smaller projects, new spaces, and emerging artists, which allowed me to write more freely without having to situate myself within an existing body of critique. I had a great editor, Lauren O'Neill-Butler, who was very sensitive to these ideas and helped shape the writing process. It was a learning experience working with her.

When I commissioned writing for an exhibition, I approached it differently because the temporality of the shows often don’t fit the traditional review format. This connects to how we thought about writing in relation to the exhibitions at the Beeler—posters, first-person accounts, and other ways of mixing language with the gallery experience.

I imagine you have also influenced other writers in your editorial work. How did you find writing in institutions?

Working in institutions is definitely more collaborative. Writing becomes a collective process, which I welcome. It’s a different kind of writing than working with artists, where the process is more informed by long-term relationships. Those interactions have influenced how I write over time. It’s been an ongoing process of evolution in my writing, informed by these artist relationships.

I wonder if that kind of extravagant review writing made things feel more high-stakes—maybe that contributed to how long certain pieces stayed relevant. Sometimes it’s a good exercise to ask yourself why a work didn’t provoke a reaction. Do you make big distinctions between writing a critique that’s critical, versus writing that draws out intentions and associations, and meets the artist where they are? Has your approach to writing changed much over time?

I tend to only want to write about something if it creates space for further contemplation or reflection, or deepens my sense of the world. I don’t want to write about something if I don’t have any of those things to offer. Critical reviews are often pleasurable to read, but I don’t think that’s where I want my language to reside. On the other hand, a lot of the reviews I’ve received of exhibitions I’ve curated have actually been quite lukewarm.

I think what I value now are conversations with people who are paying attention to the details, the specificity of language, the installation, the exhibition format, and so on. Those conversations have been the most fulfilling.