Essay
HOW TO PEOPLE A PLACE
Jason Wee
2023 PhD Scholar
Goldsmiths, University of London
Jason Wee, Stand.Move. (A Repose), 2024, installation view. Courtesy the artist
As part of a series of reflections by our fellows, we have partnered with ArtReview to publish a collection of writings that will explore and unlock the future of curatorial and research practice. In this article, our 2023 PhD scholar, Jason Wee, reflects on art, cruising, and our evolving lexicon of space, drawing from his installations exhibited at the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale in South Korea.
What does it mean to people a place, when ‘the people’ relinquish any identitarian categorisations that are locked to genealogies of identity or as a basis for legitimatising sovereignty and amassing power: when ‘the people’ no longer designates a collective noun but a verb, an acting-upon, a motion?
To people runs in the other direction, away from those associations with power. Instead, it offers me an opportunity to think about a gathering of those who are divested of or denied power, where those who occupy the opposite pole of our social hierarchies nonetheless find an occasion to take their sometimes very public places. In this way, people is distinguishable from populate where the latter is a matter of census and accounting. The tallying-up of any given population by governing authorities is so often useful in enclosing domiciles and establishing the frontiers of said authorities’ influence by quantification. To populate suggests a thinking based on capacity and Malthusian density; to people is to ask about the hows and whens of occupying space.
Click here to read Jason's full essay for ArtReview, published on 09 January 2025.
BIOGRAPHY
Jason Wee is an artist-curator, writer and researcher whose practice centres on polyphony and ‘powerless’ minor poetics within architecture, infrastructure and history. His works move restlessly between art, design histories, poetry, publishing, activism, sculpture and photography. Most recently, he is embarking on a multiyear project on the figuration and futuring of Asia and Southeast Asia.
His recent projects include the choreographies of queer secrecy in parks and shipping lanes (Asia Society Triennale, 2020) and the history of publishing ‘undesirable literatures’ in Malaya (Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2022). Jason founded and runs Grey Projects, an artists’ library and residency. Through Grey Projects, he explores organising as an artistic principle, producing Singapore’s first island-wide open studio self-guided art tour ‘Walk Walk Don’t Run’. He is an editor for Softblow poetry journal. He was a 2005-2006 Studio Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2019, he curated Stories We Tell To Scare Ourselves With at Taipei MOCA. In 2015, he curated Singapur Unheimlich at ifa galerie Berlin and Stuttgart. He has written three poetry collections, including An Epic of Durable Departures (Math Paper Press, 2018), a Singapore Literature Prize 2020 finalist, and the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize finalist In Short, Future Now (Sternberg Press, 2020).