How to People a Place2023 PhD ScholarJason Wee

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.