Roundtable: Meet the 2026 Artlab Editorial Fellows

Artlab Editors: Is it possible to write about art without losing something in translation? To kick off the 2026 Artlab Editorial Fellowship, Fellows Travis Jeppesen and Yutong Lin met virtually with Fellowship Advisors Mira Dayal and Gary Zhexi Zhang for a wide-ranging roundtable conversation facilitated by Artlab Editor Shannon Lee. Dialing in from Montreal, Berlin, London, and New York, they explored the far reaches of art writing, discussing the limits of language in contemporary art, being artists as well as art writers, and what it means to know—and not know.

As they unpacked all that’s on the horizon for this year’s Fellowship, they unearthed some of the core existential contradictions at the heart of art criticism—the inherent impossibility of the task and the freedom, challenge, and grief that exists therein.

Shannon Lee: Something that struck us when we were reviewing this year’s finalists was the dialogue between each of your proposals. On the surface, your article proposals seem quite different, both thematically and texturally—Travis’s interrogation of criticism is highly cerebral while Yutong’s engagement with grief is deeply felt. Yet there’s a fascinating throughline between them, which is a critical analysis of language. Both endeavor to answer: What are the capacities and limits of language within contemporary art?

How did each of you come to your perspectives on language and writing? And why do you feel these investigations are pertinent to today’s contemporary art landscape?

Yutong Lin: Our topics are quite different, but both of us are thinking about the power of language—what language can do in terms of writing. My writing experience comes from my practice as an artist and author. Whether I’m working in video or documentary or photography, there’s always a writing component, including writing texts or making subtitles. In that, there is this relationship between text and image. I always thought about how to position the voice in my work—to what extent am I in the work itself and whether and how I communicate that presence.

Writing about other people’s work is quite different from writing about your own—you need more sensitive, precise, and self-contained language. Curatorial language has a tendency to simplify things and fit them into certain narrative expectations to make the work more legible, often sacrificing complexity. While I understand this, I also think there’s space to write in a way that balances legibility and complexity.

I appreciate when someone’s writing doesn’t feel as though it’s pushing you into a set of meanings. I think a lot of that gets accomplished through narrative, and also in description. I think these things are easier to identify in literature than in an art review—still, I think narrative is a really powerful device that can create a space of engagement.

Travis Jeppesen: What drew me to writing about art initially is the inherent impossibility of the task. I always thought that writing about art was the most difficult form of writing that there is. It’s essentially an act of translation. Walter Benjamin famously called it the impossible task: attempting to translate something that exists in one, let us say purely visual language, into written language. How does one grapple with that? How does one succeed at that? In fact, in some ways, one can never succeed. It’s almost always a failure. You’re almost always running up against a wall. I think that’s the initial impulse—it’s also what’s kept me in the game.

I’m still asking the same questions I was back then: naive questions, we might say. I’m probably not as naive as I was when I was first starting out writing about art 20 years ago or whatever. But I still sort of cling aspirationally to this spirit of naivete because it keeps things fresh and vital. I started writing about art not as a professional but as an amateur; I was and still am a creative writer. I was writing fiction and poetry and plays. I hadn’t studied art history so in a sense, I’m self-taught.

I wrote about this a bit in my 2022 essay Object-Oriented in Mousse. It was about the history of art criticism as a discipline. What I found in that investigation is that the position of the enlightened amateur is at the very origins of art criticism as a practice. It’s only been in the last hundred years that we get the professional art critic as we tend to think of them: somebody who has an art history PhD and who is trained in that particular direction.

In many ways, I still find myself asking the same questions over and over about the conditions of art writing because some things change and some things stay the same. Earlier this week, as I’ve been getting myself into the mindset of writing my first essay (on style and art criticism), I’ve been revisiting that Triple Canopy essay from about 14 years ago on International Art English International Art English . Alix Rule and David Levine describe how this type of writing came to form the vernacular of the art world at the time. I’m thinking a lot about that in today’s context: To what extent is that still valid?

In many ways, I feel the conditions of art writing and criticism have gotten worse than what was outlined and satirized in that essay. Art writing these days very much seems grounded in the language of marketing and the language of the bot. That’s a particularly interesting place to find ourselves historically, especially with the advent of AI. So that’s my rambly answer!

Shannon Lee: That was brilliant! And I think an excellent preview of what each of you will bring to this Fellowship through your essays. I love this connective thread of impossibility and how it presents itself as a potent space for both grief and excitement. There’s something existential here, about the truth of failure and finding freedom and meaning in the attempt.

Gary Zhexi Zhang: I’m also obsessed with this question between art and writing, art and language. Travis, what you said about naivete seems really important—recently, both as an artist and as a writer, I’m coming up against the problem of knowledge. Increasingly, I feel that knowing is the problem. I realized that as a writer, I train myself to be the one who knows. Then, as an artist, I have to try and untrain myself. As an artist, knowledge doesn’t operate in the same economy.

Thinking about International Art English, 20 years on, I’m wondering if we can even speak this language properly anymore. We’ve mellowed into this mushy, postcritical kind of writing.

Travis Jeppesen: We’re also entering this really weird period of time as well, right? So much of International Art English was rendered in this era of globalization. I hate to call it this but right now, we’re in this postglobalization era where nationalism is on the rise everywhere and everything is about closing borders, policing expression, and staking claims. So where does that leave this kind of writing or this expression?

Mira Dayal: There’s another really interesting thread between your two responses—and some of this second layer of response from Gary. Travis, you were talking about this aspiration toward the perfect and complete translation, and the problem of transparency and directness within a translation. I’m thinking about that alongside what Yutong said about an aspiration toward complexity—perhaps against directness, allowing for ambiguity and multiplicity. Somehow, this comparison between a direct and complete translation versus an effort toward multiplicity feels connected to Travis’s point about nationalism versus globalism—the desire for a very neatly bordered thing versus a complex, multiple thing.

Gary, I really liked your articulation of this notion that the artist is supposed to be the one who knows about a thing, and therefore they also end up being accountable for that thing. It’s such a great, more expansive way to put the problem of being pigeonholed, and to connect that to our conception of artists’ knowledge. It’s also a helpful thing to keep in mind as a critic—the complexity of thinking that an artist is an expert on x concern or identity or topic. What happens if we suppose that the artist might not “know?”

Shannon Lee: Something else that’s distinct about this Fellowship cohort is that each of you have a creative practice in addition to your critical writing. How do you navigate the relationship between the two disciplines: What shapes do they take? How do they inform each other?

Yutong Lin: Reading, writing, and research have always been foundational to my studio practice. But I think coming from a studio art practice makes me approach other people’s work differently from, say, a strictly historical perspective. I’m very invested in the process of an artwork and the bodily sensations expressed in it and the conditions of making: What are the materials? What are the limits? How did this thing’s creation come into place?

There’s also such an overlap between writing and making; we could argue that writing is itself part of a broader kind of practice. At the end of the day, everything we’re working with engages with language composition and writing—whether it’s visual, musical, or written. For me, there’s always been a will toward finding ways to eradicate the artificial constructions meant to separate things. There’s nothing particularly radical or necessarily original about that—most artists these days engage in kinds of critical practice that informs their work. I also seek ways to make my criticism more creative. 

Gary Zhexi Zhang: There’s a whole set of conceptual and post-conceptual art practices that are a lot like writing without words, or arranging signs in space. In my own work, I’m always veering kind of unstably between trying to extricate myself from that and making art “properly” or composing signs in a way that feels very similar to writing. I’d say I have a pretty fraught relationship with that relationship.

Mira Dayal: Over time, I’ve thought of these two practices as mutually supportive in different ways, and separate to different degrees. I’ve become more interested in complicating that narrative in my head about the ways in which these two practices are different. From the start, they’ve always existed simultaneously: As long as I’ve been making, I’ve been writing. Writing has been a way of researching and understanding what other people are making. It’s a way to look at and spend time with things in ways that inevitably inform my studio practice—even if I’m not directly trying to respond to what I’m writing about.

My orientation to writing and editing is so similar to my orientation to making. I think it’s similar to what Gary was describing. The ways I work with materials or put together shows feel so much like the ways I put together ideas when I write. When I begin this process, I might have an initial sense of what I’m interested in—an impulse about what I think. But of course, in the act of writing or making, you’re figuring out what to do with this set of ideas. Once you’re working with the stuff itself—the language or the material—you understand the subject and your questions differently, and arrive at different answers or propositions. The act of composition and the act of working out the ideas in a work or exhibition feel very similar for me.

There is a kind of uniting force between all these different paths in that I, as a person, am the same one thinking about all these forms. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I want my exhibitions to be read in literal connection with my writing, like “this sculpture looks like a text.” Although language is a subject of my work, the connection isn’t always that direct. But I do think it’s fruitful to think about when I want to play that up and embrace it, and when I want to break free of or establish distinct patterns of thinking.

Shannon Lee: I feel like I could have an hours-long conversation just about this relationship between art writing and art practice. Travis, your first essay for this Fellowship is very much connected to your 2022 essay, Object-Oriented, which was published in Mousse. Can you tell us how your essays in the Fellowship will revisit and expand on some of these ideas?

Travis Jeppesen: There’s a real necessity for spaces to discuss issues having to do with art criticism. I think that publishing within the context of this Fellowship and working on this idea with Gary provides this third place that I think is necessary for those thoughts to develop.

The essay in Mousse is more historically grounded whereas the essay I’ll be writing for the Fellowship posits an argument for what criticism might be in the future. My other two essays, while not directly related to the Mousse essay, do expand on my earlier work—a collection of essays published in the volume Bad Writing [object Object] . It deals a lot with what Gary was talking about earlier: What do we do with these so-called negative aspects like failure, stupidity, and not-knowing? Can they be redeemed or embraced into a positive project?

Shannon Lee: Yutong, we touched on this concept of translation earlier on—this is something that your essays will be engaged with quite directly in exploring the subject of grief. Having worked as a translator and also having written in both English and Chinese, I’d love to know how you navigate between these two languages, while also navigating between image and text. What has your experience been with this act of double translation?

Yutong Lin: My day job is actually working as a medical translator—I help patients talk to their doctors and vice-versa. This is the work that helps sustain my art. In that way, I’m engaged with translation on a daily basis.

My ability to write in English in a way that feels truthful and close to myself happened recently, maybe in just the past two or three years. Prior to that, I was mostly trying to mimic academic English writing, which I didn’t feel connected to in terms of expression.

I’ve thought about language a lot and the different powers of different languages. English is very powerful for obvious reasons. So is Chinese. Now, I live in Montreal, where English is not the default language but is still the main language and platform I use to communicate with other people. Through English, I am able to read a lot of things that weren’t written or translated into Chinese. On the other hand, the uneven structural privilege of English comes also with accessibility. Still, even though each language has its own specificity and history, the endeavor to express and the longing for understanding are mutual. That’s across language and beyond language—that’s the translator’s work.

Shannon Lee: There’s something really beautiful about finding your own voice in a specific language, apart from just translation. It’s working with something more meaning-oriented rather than literal.

Thinking about the Fellowship itself, I’d love to know about the kinds of mutual exchanges and influences you anticipate and are looking forward to in this Advisor-Advisee exchange.

Travis Jeppesen: I’m very excited! I’m quite used to working with editors but for me, it’s a new way of working. I’ve followed Gary’s work from afar for many years. I think we only met in-person once before very briefly, years ago at the Taipei Biennial. We have similar networks so I’m really excited to see what will come of us working together. Gary’s work and concerns are very different from mine and I anticipate that difference being very fruitful and productive. I’m imagining that he will be able to bring a lot of things to my project that I would have never thought of myself.

Gary Zhexi Zhang: Advisor is a funny word here. Travis, you have much more experience writing and publishing than I do. And as you said, we have very different practices. I don’t think I can definitively say what this relationship will be. I’m really interested in being a generous and critical reader of your work and am excited to read some of your earlier novels. I also think this will be an interesting challenge for me as well. While I write a lot, I don’t actually write very much about art specifically.

Yutong Lin: For this Fellowship, I really want to experiment with different forms of writing and what narrative can look like when you are writing about other people’s work. I’m really looking forward to working with Mira to hone my craft. Each of the works I’ll be writing about has its own very specific relationship to grief, processing it, transforming it through artistic practices. I hope my writing can be appropriate to each of the works, able to carry their sensitive skin and texture. I’m also really looking forward to getting recommendations of other artists and authors that are relevant to my work.

Mira Dayal: I’m also really excited to work with Yutong. I’ve worked with a lot of writers over the years as an editor but also as an informal mentor to writers who are trying to figure out how to navigate publishing. I think a lot of people start out writing and want to work with more magazines and publications. That tends to encourage a kind of adherence to a mold, or making your writing into a thing that other people want. It’s really exciting and very unusual to be able to move along a path toward being more of a practiced writer in a way that’s actually experimenting with language and style and trying to do things a bit differently. There aren’t too many contexts where that is explicitly encouraged and rewarded. So I’m really happy that the context of this fellowship and your application will foster that experimentation.

Topically, I haven’t written a lot about grief, or about artists who are working with grief, so I’m really looking forward to learning about this more intimately through your writing. It’s also exciting to me that your process will begin with conversations with these artists. I started publishing largely through doing interviews with artists. Beginning with those conversations is so generative: It requires you to think about your voice in relation to the artist’s, and consider how writing can translate their concerns, but also maintain a critical distance with your own thoughts and ideas.

Shannon Lee: Something that comes up every year is this verbiage of Advisor and Advisee. In the small world of art writing, it’s inevitable that the relationship is much more horizontal and mutual rather than something more top down. To round things out, I’d love to discuss this year’s fellowship theme: critical empathy.

How do each of you interpret this phrase? How do you plan to embody this throughout the Fellowship?

Travis Jeppesen: For me, criticism always begins with the self and then extends outwards. This goes back to what I was saying earlier about the intersection between criticality and creativity. As artists, there’s a lot of criticality that goes into your own work before you let it out into the world. I think that’s essential and something that critics should never forget.

Critical practice, when done right, is essentially empathetic. One could go so far as to claim that it’s about trying to sever the space between oneself and the object—becoming one with the art, to put it in somewhat melodramatic terms. Empathy is part and parcel with the critical project.

My second essay, which will consider, among other things, the role of empathy in writing a bad review. I want to explore whether a bad review can be issued forth from a place of love and conviction. If someone says a sculpture is bad or this sculpture fails, can it come from a place of love for the medium of sculpture? Having said that, I’m also interested in where empathy fails—what about the bad review that comes from a place of spite or mean-spiritedness? Can we differentiate these reviews from ones that come from an empathetic position?

Yutong Lin: Travis, I was thinking about what you were saying earlier about the impossibility of writing about art, writing about something that wasn’t meant to be put into words. That’s how I think about critical empathy, always bearing in mind this impossibility. There’s always a limit, and so, we’re humble. There is no way to reach a place that is fully transparent and understood completely. I think empathy itself is similarly impossible—how can we endeavor to fully understand someone else’s feelings when it’s such a struggle to even understand our own?

There is this interrogation and ambivalence that is inherited in the practice of writing—it’s always trying to confront the unspeakable and the unlanguageable. There’s also an aspiration to that. I think that’s what’s really interesting about critical empathy as a positionality: We are trying to go there and see what language can do along the way. The experimentation is what’s most compelling to me. Grief struck me as a really great subject for this because it’s exactly the thing that resists easy understanding, easy wording, and easy naming.

Travis Jeppesen: Not to sound too grandiose, but tagging onto that thought—I think a lot of the ethos of my practice is grounded in this embrace or at least acknowledgement of failure. I know that nothing that I manage to do is going to reach the standard or ideal I set out for myself. It will always be an approximation. Once you grant that permission to yourself, you’re free in a way that I think that a lot of people aren’t free. A lot of people who grapple with the fear of failing or really struggle with writer’s block are really struggling with the anxiety of whether or not what they make will be good. You just kind of have to tell yourself that it’s not going to be good. Once you can be open to that idea, and give yourself permission to be bad, there’s an opportunity to surprise yourself with how good it actually turns out to be.

Gary Zhexi Zhang: I honestly don’t know if I have very much to add to the critical empathy prompt other than to say I think you both picked incredibly difficult things to write about, while navigating this tension between subjectivity and rigorous judgement. Yutong, you’re navigating something so inherently hard to verbalise like grief, where you almost need theology rather than theory. Travis, yours is an extremely meta project about the state of criticism which is also deeply necessary at this moment. I’m really glad that we’re in this space where we’ve gone into the hardest reaches of this problem of critical empathy.

Mira Dayal: I totally agree. I’m curious to see how both of these projects take shape and how Gary and I can support these projects. I want to pick up on what you said, Travis, about giving yourself permission to be bad and the freedom therein. I think of that in parallel to the role of play in one’s practice and writing. If you can get yourself into this space of feeling like you’re just playing around and trying stuff, that’s where a lot of discovery can happen. That’s such a great way to get into the good stuff. I say that even as a writer and artist who really likes having constraints, set rules or parameters to go by, as a way of figuring out how to create at all.

I think to some degree, Gary and I feel some ambiguity about our roles as Advisors. But to the degree that we might embrace it, this idea of critical empathy is central: We’re very much trying to get on board with your projects and ideas and really understand what you’re trying to do, and to facilitate that as much as possible, but we’re also here to push back on ideas, provide different perspectives on something that you’re working through, reframe things that you’re struggling to articulate, or be that other subjectivity in the room. In this Fellowship, you’re uniquely in a place where someone is in dialogue with you, even more so than in a standard editor-writer relationship. That’s part of what appeals to me about being in this Advisor role. We get to have something more sustained. That level of critical empathy is always something I strive to bring as an editor, but I think will be even more explicit here. I’m excited to see where that goes.