Curators: Zhuoqi Liu, Yu He
Opening Date: 09 January 2026
The exhibition “The Label Takes Over” originates from curator Zhuoqi Liu’s observation of a recurrent dissonance in contemporary exhibition practices: the disparity between the narrative intrinsic to the artwork and the narrative constructed through its packaging—such as labels, catalog texts, and promotional materials. In the contemporary art market, Zhuoqi Liu argues that the value of artworks has been displaced by artificial narratives, thereby depriving them of their own language.
Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of “Insichstehen” (standing-in-itself), the exhibition posits that an artwork, in its essence, should be by itself—its meaning and value residing within its own presence rather than being derived from external determinants such as the artist’s biography, intended function, or specific context of display.
In contemporary art systems, however, the value of an artwork is frequently mediated and even constituted by paratextual information: the artist’s credentials, institutional recognition, market performance, and curatorial narration. This mediation, the exhibition suggests, may be interpreted as a mechanism of capitalist commodification, wherein the artwork’s autonomy is systematically appropriated by commercial and discursive packaging.
In response, curator Yu He created a virtual exhibition space, employing a minimalist approach to construct the exhibition environment in order to remove, as much as possible, supplementary narratives attached to the artworks themselves. Furthermore, through an ironic method, background information about the artists was extensively added to the exhibition labels, which were made equal in size to the artworks.
This inversion of visual hierarchy shows how the commodified value of art—its résumé, awards, and market endorsements-often replaces the work’s intrinsic value, revealing the art market’s dependence on symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Through its spatial intervention, it prompts a reconsideration of artistic subjectivity within contemporary institutional frameworks. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production, where artistic autonomy is in structural tension with market forces, the exhibition renders this tension spatially, examining how artists negotiate dominant market discourses while preserving the independence and diversity of their practices.
