Dialogue｜Writing as Curating: The Origin of Form without Form

Prologue: Why Return to 2012?

Form Without Form, shown at NordArt in 2012, has remained an “unfinished state” throughout my curatorial history — never truly defined, never systematically understood, never written into any art-historical narrative with real explanatory power. It has hung suspended in time: not a completed judgment, not yet an open question, but something closer to a point of origin the language hadn’t caught up with.

To return to 2012 today is not to revisit an exhibition, but to re-enter a conceptual structure that, at the time, could neither be expressed nor named. The real difficulty that year was this: we had no adequate language to explain what was happening in Chinese art. “Abstraction,” as the reigning subject of Western modernism, was applied with overwhelming convenience to nearly all non-figurative, non-narrative work. It offered Chinese art a translation that seemed reasonable on the surface — while obscuring the actual generative logic inside the work itself.

Standing in the NordArt galleries, I felt the lag in language for the first time, directly. Zhang Yan’s accumulated fingerprints, built up over years. Sui Jianguo’s paths, formed jointly by body, material, and time. Meng Luding’s rhythms, generated through mechanical motion. Zhan Wang’s compression of a billion years of geological scale into a single hour. Abstraction, as a word, could account for none of it.

Not because abstraction lacks complexity — but because its ontological premise is simply wrong. Abstraction deals with “the form of what has already become.” These artists were working with “energy that had not yet become form.” One is concerned with how a result appears; the other, with how generation happens.

Back then, I could already sense a new structure of judgment forming — but I didn’t yet have the capacity to build a language for it. Curating let me realize the structure; it couldn’t complete the language. The real meaning of “writing as curating” lies here: using language to finish the structural gap the exhibition left behind. To return to 2012 now is not to retroactively assign it meaning, but to finish what was left unfinished — to finally give a concept named over a decade ago, but never truly explained, the language it deserves. That concept is Form Without Form.

Dialogue Note 1 | Why Does 2012 Matter More Now Than It Did Then?

Suriana: Back then, you worked the exhibition as a curator — handling space, handling relationships. Today you’re returning to the same site as a writer. Why do you think talking about 2012 matters more now than it did at the time?

Michael Suh: Because back then I could see the structure, but I had no language to say it accurately. The judgment existed; the container for it didn’t. When language can’t carry a judgment, an exhibition can only partially succeed, and the concept stays unfinished.

Suriana: So the curatorial practice back then actually reached the concept — the language just hadn’t caught up?

Michael Suh: Right. The concept was still forming, and I didn’t have the theoretical tools to say it yet. We’re returning to this question now because that “unfinished” state was never resolved — it’s still asking to be finished. Writing is how I’m filling in what couldn’t be written down then.

Part One: Where Abstraction Falls Short — A Doubt That Began in England

1.1 The Grammar and Limits of Modernist “Abstraction”

Within Western modernism, abstraction developed into a highly stable linguistic system: form breaks from representation, vision returns to itself, narrative is excluded, the world becomes something that can be “simplified,” “distilled,” “purified.” This system explains Kandinsky, Mondrian, Rothko, Pollock — it forms the main narrative line of twentieth-century art history.

But abstraction only holds together on two ontological premises: first, that the world can be broken down into form and content; second, that form can be detached from its own becoming and fixed into a structure that can be discussed and reproduced.

In much of Chinese contemporary practice, neither premise really holds. These artists rarely subtract or strip away; they aren’t pursuing a purified form cut off from the world. What they care about isn’t form’s autonomy, but how form comes to be. Material, body, time, gesture, repetition, duration, process — all of it gets pulled into the work together, so that what results is a form still in the process of forming, not one that has already settled.

Abstraction asks how form breaks away from the world. Form Without Form asks how form generates the world. This is exactly where abstraction’s linguistic limit shows itself — it cannot enter the stretch of time before form has become form.

1.2 The Real Difficulty for Chinese Artists: Being Misread

In the European context of the 2010s, almost any Chinese work that wasn’t narrative, wasn’t figurative, wasn’t representational got filed automatically under “abstraction.” On the surface, this classification offered an internationally legible frame. In substance, it was a mistranslation — folding behavior, time, material, experience, and generation into a modernist vocabulary that was never built to hold them.

Zhang Yan’s accumulated fingerprints are an act of time accumulating itself, not an abstract schema. Sui Jianguo’s work records a trace left by body, material, and time acting on each other. Zhan Wang compresses a billion years of geological scale into a single hour — that’s a reconstruction of scale and time, not a detachment of vision. Meng Luding generates rhythm through mechanical motion — a rhythm that’s self-generating, not a form that’s been arranged.

Abstraction can describe what these works look like once they’ve arrived. It can’t describe how they got there, from formlessness into form. This isn’t a question of finding a more precise name — it’s a methodological blind spot. The real thing to clarify isn’t whether “abstraction” is the right word, but that as a conceptual tool, it was never built to hold generation in the first place. What Form Without Form is trying to address is exactly that: how generation becomes visible.

Dialogue Note 2 | What Can’t Abstraction Explain?

Suriana: Where did you first realize abstraction couldn’t explain Chinese art — in a classroom in England, or on-site at NordArt?

Michael Suh: Strictly speaking, my doubt about the assumptions built into abstraction as a language didn’t start at NordArt — it started earlier, while I was studying art history in England. By 2009, when I began writing the curatorial proposal for Form Without Form, I already sensed the core problem: many Chinese contemporary artists’ practices simply couldn’t be captured by “abstraction,” a framework belonging to Western modernism. What their work presented was a process of generation, not a detachment of form — an accumulation of energy, not a simplification.

But at the time, that judgment could only exist in the text as a question being raised. It hadn’t yet found the on-site conditions to fully expose itself. It wasn’t until the exhibition was realized in Germany that the problem became impossible to avoid — the relationships between works, the density of time, the behavior of materials, and the resonance running across dozens of artists’ practices, all of it turned that question from an intuitive judgment into a structural fact for the first time. So more precisely: it wasn’t Germany that forced the question on me — it was the exhibition site in Germany that let the question already latent in the original proposal fully show itself. The curatorial proposal had already been pointing toward a kind of generative understanding. What actually illuminated and unfolded it was the exhibition itself.

Suriana: In other words, you realized the real issue wasn’t whether “abstraction” was the right word — it was what abstraction simply couldn’t carry.

Michael Suh: Exactly. Abstraction can’t hold the condition of something not-yet-become. It can’t hold the fact that the process itself is the work. It can’t hold how a density of time accumulates, or how material and body collaborate generatively with each other. It can only handle a settled result — it can’t explain a world still in the act of happening.

Suriana: And what Form Without Form wants to explain is exactly that — the stretch before the result.