Roundtable: 2025 Artlab Editorial Fellow Reflections

Artlab Editors: As the 2025 Artlab Editorial Fellowship comes to a close, Fellows Jiaying Sim and Elvia Wilk convened virtually with Advisors Rahel Aima and Orit Gat to consider how their writing practices have evolved through the course of the program.

In the third year of the Artlab Editorial Fellowship, we sought out two writers whose proposals brought fresh insights to the theme of connecting across boundaries. As such, Fellows Jiaying Sim and Elvia Wilk approached this program with an expansive curiosity, setting out to explore the hidden frameworks and scripts that propel artistic production in today’s world. With individual mentorship from respective Advisors Rahel Aima and Orit Gat, Sim and Wilk took the opportunity to blur and connect across the boundaries of their own critical writing practices, discovering new ways of seeing and articulating their vantage points as art writers.

Connecting from New York, Dubai, Hong Kong, and London, this year’s fellowship cohort concluded their term in conversation with Artlab Editor Shannon Lee. Together, they shared their reflections on their processes, challenges, and the impact this fellowship has had on their work.

Shannon Lee: Happy new year, everyone! And congrats on wrapping up the 2025 Artlab Editorial Fellowship. I thought it would be nice to begin this closing discussion with a callback to our first roundtable conversation, where we took a temperature read of our respective locations literally. So, where is everyone and how’s the weather? I’m in New York’s Hudson Valley where it’s cold and rainy.

Rahel Aima: I’m in Dubai and it’s quite pleasant right now. Winter is a good time here; it’s maybe about 20 degrees (celcius).

Orit Gat: I’m in London. Lately, it’s been really cold and sunny like in New York but it broke last night. Now it is drizzly and about 9 degrees—classic London. I’m dying to hear about the weather in Hong Kong.

Jiaying Sim: I’m in Hong Kong and it’s been windy and sunny at the same time. I think we’re at 20 degrees.

Elvia Wilk: I’m cold in Brooklyn. The weather forecasted snow for the last 48 hours so I’m looking outside constantly; so far, no luck.

Shannon Lee: What a range! Elvia and Jiaying, in developing your essays with your respective advisors, was there a moment or piece of feedback you received that was particularly revelatory or vital?

Jiaying Sim: That really happened in my second essay. For my first essay, I worked with Charmaine Poh’s video works; I’m quite used to writing about this type of media. When I started working on my second piece, which was about Yanyun Chen’s charcoal drawings, I started to feel a little apprehensive about the way I was writing.

During our first meeting on the piece, I told Shannon and Rahel that I was tired of my writing voice. I was so bored and sick of it. After a long ramble, both of them were really kind about my voice and helped me to navigate not liking it. My biggest takeaway from that meeting was that there are many ways in which you can work with your background, whether it’s in academia or not. You can find a way to work to your strengths; that’s how your writing voice changes. I thought that the conversation we had about not boxing myself up in the academic way of writing really helped me to love the way I write. I found that particular meeting really encouraging and important for the rest of my fellowship.

Shannon Lee: Rahel, what are your thoughts on that process?

Rahel Aima: I would actually love to know how you feel about the tree now!

Jiaying Sim: During that meeting, I told them that I didn’t care about the tree I was writing about. I was like, “I hate this tree and my writing!” But now, I’m obsessed! I can’t stop looking at trees. Even now, in Hong Kong, I’m looking at trees. I think I’ve been forever changed, which is great.

Shannon Lee: I love that perspective shift through the process of writing and rediscovering your voice. Elvia, what was a vital piece of advice you received through the Fellowship?

Elvia Wilk: I just want to say that the tree piece was possibly my favorite of [Jiaying’s]; it really stuck with me. For whatever it’s worth, pushing through the hating of your own voice seems like a worthwhile struggle. That essay feels deceptively associative when it’s actually got a really rigorous structure. I learned a lot from reading it—and also came to really appreciate this tree.

The feedback I received was pretty consistent throughout: “Reel it in, you’re spiraling.” Having a theme for these pieces was so important—for me to continue to be brought back to a path, because I really can just go and go and go.

Shannon, you were really helpful in reminding me what my bigger goals were. I tend to mistake the forest for the trees. It was helpful to be reminded to see the bigger picture of what I’m doing. Then there was a micro piece of feedback that I got from Orit in every piece which was to swap the order of two sentences. That highlighted this strange way I have of leading into the actual thing I want to say. As writers know, those small things end up being a big deal. Noticing that as a writing habit has been really useful.

Shannon Lee: Whenever those small writing habits are pointed out to me in my own writing, it feels like this interrogation of the psyche—is that how I form thoughts? Orit, what was your perspective on that?

Orit Gat: I’ve always felt a really intense lack of confidence when talking to writers about their writing rather than about their text. As an editor, I’ve always felt more comfortable being in front of a text rather than having a conversation or an engagement about ideas. But through this Fellowship, I’ve actually really enjoyed the process of meeting and chatting and through these larger concepts. Getting to chat about something and watch it grow and seeing how those conversations came through on the page was one of my favorite things about this process.

Shannon Lee: Elvia, as an author of fiction, your initial proposal set out to examine the role of storytelling, particularly the act of scriptwriting by artists who make films. Jiaying, you conversely come from a background as a scholar of expanded cinema and came to this Fellowship aiming to investigate contemporary art’s hidden infrastructures. Now that your essays have been published, I’m curious how each of you are now considering your initial Fellowship proposals.

Jiaying Sim: When I first started to write the proposal for the Fellowship, I wanted to figure out the hidden infrastructures of artwork and art objects. As I went through the Fellowship, I realized that I was also learning about the hidden infrastructures of writing itself—what it means to be supported as a writer, to have your work edited really kindly but also very incisively, I became very aware of how difficult it is to write alone and how much better it is when you have a community that responds to your work. Beyond the final pieces of writing, there is a shared experience and the collective feeling of everyone trying to help you get published. There are a lot of hidden people supporting you.

To Elvia’s point about spiraling, I also spiraled quite a bit in my second essay. By my third, I actually felt myself losing stamina. But when you know you’re part of a writing group, it really helps push you beyond those spirals to complete the task at hand. So thank you for building this community!

Elvia Wilk: For my projects I wanted to uncover how artists approached their scripts. Because I haven’t written a series about scriptwriters, I can’t really make a comparison, but my suspicion is that artists are doing it really differently than people who are making movies for the film industry—I just wouldn’t be able to say how.

I’d love to do a follow-up comparison where I talk to people who see themselves as film writers. I learned a lot about artists starting to confront the different distribution apparati of the film world. Every industry has different scripts for production and circulation but none of the three artists who I talked to were doing anything like sitting down and writing a script on a blank piece of paper.

It made me realize that I am not writing that way either—I’m not writing about art by sitting down and writing it top-to-bottom as a script. I’m also having conversations. I’m pulling pieces from other people’s writing. I’m looking at images all the time. I realized that I’m assembling writing in a way that’s very similar to the artists who I’m talking about. I found a lot of kinship with the artists I was talking to.

Shannon Lee: Rahel, Orit— did your perspectives on the Fellow’s topics shift throughout the course of the Fellowship?

Orit Gat: Watching Elvia’s process from the sidelines (a very privileged position), after reading the Lawrence Lek piece, I felt really committed to Lek’s Practice, felt like I understood it in a way that was really profound.

Elvia and I first met when I was an editor at Rhizome and Elvia was working on a piece with Jenna Sutela, so returning to her practice was also very rewarding. Here was this artist whose work I feel like I’ve known for a very long time, but watching the growth and ambition of Elvia’s interpretation thereof was really mind-blowing to me. It came with rigor, but also friendship and warmth.

Rahel Aima: One of the most interesting or most rewarding things was seeing Jiaying’s confidence grow over the course of the Fellowship. But also, for me personally, some of the most valuable conversations were about audience—who you are writing for. What does it mean to write from the margins-ish? I learned a lot from these conversations about positionality: where you’re writing from, who you’re writing for. Very often, art criticism is a transaction for the ad purchase. An exhibition review is linked to commerce in a way so it’s very interesting to see and think in this more expanded feel of criticism that exists outside of that.

I also had a question. Did you find writing around a theme helpful or hampering? Very often, we tend to write in one-offs, so I’m curious how this thematic linking worked for each of you.

Elvia Wilk: What was interesting to me was the structure that it gave me. All of these pieces ended up being stories about a decade (more or less) of evolution in an artist’s practice. It isn’t what I had envisioned—I had envisioned looking at fewer artworks—but in order to really spend time with an artist’s process, you end up thinking about the evolution of their practice over time.

These aren’t really profiles of an artist or monographs based on an exhibition. They’re certainly not reviews. They’re the kind of writing that you don’t really get to do in those sponsored spaces or the typical vertical.

By focusing on a specific kind of thinking around a specific practice that evolved over time, I felt really liberated. I was able to indulge in a question that I wouldn’t have been able to get so much time with otherwise.

Jiaying Sim: As I’ve never written much art writing beyond academia, I don’t have much to compare my experience with. Overall, I found that thematic thread helped me to not get too caught up in experimenting. There was a particular draft of the second essay where Rahel suggested that I try writing from the perspective of the tembusu tree. It ended up not working (it sounded really preachy) but the Fellowship allowed me to play with the boundaries of what my writing could be while also not losing track of what I should be working on. It kept me focussed on the question that runs through my work.

Shannon Lee: In the past, some Fellows opted to write about several artists within one essay, zeroing in on a kind of thesis tying their work together. You both chose to focus strictly on one artist for each of your essays. Elvia, you used the word “indulgent” earlier, which I think is quite nice in this context—having the time and space to really examine these practices. How did each of you decide on the artists you wrote about?

Elvia Wilk: I think indulgent is the name of this game, for sure. I remember being halfway through reading Jiaying’s final essay on expanded cinema and being excited that there was so much more—that I’d get to keep reading about it! We’re so used to having to cut to the next artist or work or exhibition. There’s a slowness to these essays that’s rarely allowed.

It was a huge gift to get to spend so much time with artists who I feel are so important and who everyone should be looking at. When you’re moving quickly, you have to rely on instinct and affinity. With this Fellowship, I got to really figure out what it was about an artist like Meriem Bennani that I found so compelling. I got to name it: it’s her humor, her rhythm and sound, inside jokes. I wanted to take this opportunity to spend time with people whose practices have been really transformative to me.

There’s also an evolution to the essays: Lawrence Lek’s work is really tight, controlled, and relates to free will versus determinism. Meriem’s is based a lot on chance encounters, a hybrid of improvised and forged. And Jenna Sutela is doing something magical and mysterious, creating the conditions for something to happen that changes the viewer. They all have a different approach to play, change, prediction, and sensibility. I was really happy with that evolution throughout the three essays.

Jiaying Sim: I’d been following Charmaine Poh’s work for a long time. It was both straightforward and necessary for me to write on her video work and her approach to queer narratives.

When I picked Yanyun Chen’s work. was because I’d always been moved by her charcoal drawings and this Fellowship felt like the perfect time to, as Elvia said, indulge in this instinctive attraction. I didn’t know it would lead me to discover more things about the process and trees—how they are all quite cultural in narratives and research.

For Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen, their work in expanded cinema has always been something that I felt was difficult to do in a place like Singapore that’s always so preoccupied with the new. They are so determined and dedicated to their craft and specific way of working. All three of the artistic practices I chose have a certain kind of stubbornness and grit that I think is necessary to their craft, particularly within the context of Singapore.

Shannon Lee: I love indulgence as an emerging throughline in this conversation. Given the accelerating attention economy and AI, this concept is particularly salient. Having the space and the time to really dedicate, hone, and discover things feels really valuable right now.

I’d love to know if either of you have seen your writing practices transform throughout this Fellowship. Rahel and Orit, I’m curious what your observations are as well.

Elvia Wilk: I feel braver and more ambitious to take a wide lens. I began each piece with a really long conversation with the artists where after, I felt like I had so many more questions and kept asking them. In the past I’ve held back more, partly because I felt I was supposed to be objective and respond to things from the outside, partly because I didn’t want to be a bother.

Ultimately, I think the back-and-forth I had with each artist was fruitful, hopefully for the artists as well. I think that something emerges when you keep asking questions past the cursory interview phase. That was an unexpected growth point for me.

I also asked a lot of questions of my editors: Do you like this? Do you think this is good? Should I take this out? Rather than try to present a text as something I’m fully confident in and done with, there was a lot more openness to uncertainty and figuring things out. That was huge. In a world of prepackaged products, it’s nice to think that I might be able to go back to an artist and say, “Did I have this right or did you mean something completely different?” Or that an editor could tell me to try again from the perspective of a tree—I think that’s pretty great.

Jiaying Sim: I learned a lot reading Elvia’s work. Writing can sometimes feel like it’s happening in a bubble. Even though we only met at the start, because we’re in a fellowship together, there’s this kind of anticipation and ping-pong that happens every time a new Fellowship article gets published. I think this creates a really nice dynamic relationship in this Fellowship.

Coming from academic writing, I very seldom got the chance to speak to artists directly. This was the first time I’ve been able to be in direct dialogue with the artists I’m discussing. In academia , there’s always this distance that’s applied where we’re positioned objectively. This Fellowship allowed me to practice a middle point of knowing deeply, even personally, but also still from a critical distance.

Rahel Aima: There’s an illusion of objectivity that I think is starting to wane. Those days of a certain kind of art writer, I think, are over. Jiaying, you were really thinking from the position of where you are and what that brings. I think both of you were also free of genre and encouraged toward experimentation.

I’ve been thinking about writing as a kind of tool or a certain mode of being, but not something that defines your identity as a writer, which it sometimes has for me. It made me question why I’m doing this in the way that I am—this is not the only way to write or the only way to be. It’s a big question but how would you define art writing? Why are we doing it? What does it look like? What can it look like outside the verticals we expect to see it in?

Elvia Wilk: It’s a really good question; I’m struggling with it too. Last year, I ended up writing a lot about the role of criticism. I was thinking about how sacred criticism is to me. At the same time, I don’t know if I think about the pieces that I wrote for the fellowships as criticism. I wasn’t evaluating the work. I was asking questions of how the artist arrived at their work. That felt different than the critical mode I would usually go into when writing, say, a review.

On the other hand, I don’t know what criticism means at all. With art writing in general, I’m enjoying its capaciousness and that it can be a lot of things.

Jiaying Sim: I agree with Elvia that there is something capacious about this genre which is why I think I was able to begin writing in the first place.

Getting to spend six months really focusing on the hidden infrastructures that produce art in Singapore was something so precious. With that in mind, I think art writing might be about having a sustained interest in something and being able to translate that through whatever output and medium.

Orit Gat: It’s funny, halfway through the fellowship, I got told off by an editor of mine after I submitted a piece. He was like, “I feel like you got tired of doing straightforward art criticism—and straightforward art criticism is what we do at this magazine.” He wanted me to strip away all the other references that I brought to the and stay close to the work.

It really made me think about this idea of an editorial voice within publications. You don’t often get to ask a magazine that has a strong sense of editorial voice whether they think something works or get to experiment. There’s something about coming to a more open space that doesn't have a specific, boundaried voice that allows you to try things out and to ask those questions. The result of it writ large is experimentation.

Rahel Aima: I’m also struck by this concept of writing about things that you like. A lot of art writing is tied to circumstance—something I didn’t fully realize until the pandemic. If you want to write a feature or a profile, it has to be tied to something. Someone has a big museum show, an institutional presentation, or they’re in a major biennial like Venice.

Something this conversation is making me think about is whether there were different reasons to write about a particular artist. This Fellowship is so valuable because it allows things to marinate, which is rare.

Shannon Lee: Before we selected the 2025 Artlab Editorial Fellows, we had a conversation with the advisors about the state of art criticism. Rahel, your question was a lovely way to close, allowing the Fellows to voice their thoughts on the subject.

Thank you all for such a generative Fellowship year! Were there any closing thoughts we wanted to have on record?

Orit Gat: On record or not, I think we should all get together at some point, somewhere in the world!

Rahel Aima, Jiaying Sim, Elvia Wilk, and Shannon Lee: Agreed!