Installing an exhibition-what a week
- Joey Spl
- Sep 18
- 2 min read
OPENING 19 SEPTEMBER 2025, FRIDAY 5.30PM ONWARDS
@GoodGriefStudios check out details here
(Details of the above artwork is below)
More documentation about how it started in the coming weeks.
Installing an exhibition is never just about hanging works on walls. It is a conversation with the space itself, a response to its scale, its silences, its hidden geometries.
We began with what felt like a 300% vision — expansive, ambitious, burning in clarity — and perhaps only 10% rough ideation, drawn from technical knowledge of the site. Yet the moment we stepped into the space, everything shifted. Vision and idea dissolved into a new 1000% intuition, something unmeasurable, carried not by plan but by presence.
It is the body that begins to lead: sensing light, listening to echoes, noticing how each work insists on its own placement. The materials speak back, reshaping their own relationships. Walls become thresholds, corners become pauses, and what once existed only in sketches finds a living form.
This process carried its own exhaustion: a week of climbing, lifting, measuring and re-measuring, balancing precision with improvisation. Yet even in the tiredness, there was a sense of listening — of allowing the space and the works to guide us rather than forcing them into place.
When it finally came together, the feeling was not pride so much as surprise — a quiet recognition that the exhibition was breathing in its own way, beyond what we had imagined. What stood before us resembled the vision we had held, but it had also shifted, shaped by intuition, by dialogue with the site, and by the generosity of collaborative feedback.
It felt less like we had constructed something, and more like we had uncovered what was already waiting there — revealed through patience, trust, and the collective act of allowing the process to unfold.
About this installation: Collaborative installation between Xiao Yun and Joey
Beyond the Margins
2025
Medium / Materials: Refer to the artist’s description below
Dimensions: Site-specific installation - Variable
When we began imagining how to collaborate while being in two very different places, we knew we wanted to create something new - something that wasn’t drawn from old work but born from this moment and for this audience. Our starting point became the simple act of walking outdoors, each of us in our own natural environment. From there, we gathered our experiences and responses - our own “backyard” reflections - and wove them together into this installation. What emerged is a nook - an intimate space where we invite you to step inside and share in these private yet connected reflections, now held within the shared environment of the gallery. In this way, the work speaks to the title of the show, Beyond the Margins - creating a space within a space, carrying other landscapes and moments into Good Grief Gallery.
Scattered within the installation are QR codes - like little secret doors - that open to sounds, words, moving images, and hidden stories waiting to be discovered.
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