Saying No for Change: Dawn Chan On Grounding Herself in a Jet-Setting World

September 23, 2025Uncategorized

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1582245" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/IMG_9823.jpeg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A woman with long, wavy dark hair and a streak of gray looks directly at the camera in a softly lit room. Behind her, a shelf holds colorful books and documents." width="970" height="779" data-caption='Critic Dawn Chan’s project proposes both serious and absurdist alternatives to the constant jet-setting that’s become an art-world norm. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy of Dawn Chan</span>’>A woman with long, wavy dark hair and a streak of gray looks directly at the camera in a softly lit room. Behind her, a shelf holds colorful books and documents.

Many in the international art world adore its jet-setting ways, but recently, the writer and academic Dawn Chan showcased a research project that tackles this aspect of the lifestyle head-on by asking: What happens when an art critic refuses to fly for art events and press trips? Chan is a core faculty member at CCS Bard and well-known for her writing in the New York Times, Art Review, Spike and, formerly, Artforum, where she was an editor in the 2010s. Her talk was this past Friday in Brooklyn, but if you couldn’t make it in person, you might have taken a page from Chan’s book and sent a doppelganger. (She met an artist named Dawn Chan, based in Europe, who is willing to collaborate.) Observer caught up with the critic to hear more about the project and the talk, which was presented by the Asia Art Archive in America.

How did this project come about?

My elderly mother’s basement flooded in 2023, in an extreme weather event, and I was dealing with water ankle-deep and rising while simultaneously being on the phone with an editor who was picking apart a line I’d written in an art review. For me, that was a visceral moment; before that, I’d compartmentalized my work as a cultural critic and kept it separate from my concerns as an average person worried about the climate crisis. A flight seems so incomparably convenient compared to a train ride. But you just kick the can down the road. There I was, logging at least thirty hours that summer fixing up that basement after a flood, calling Verizon and remediators and plumbers and contractors. Did I actually save time by taking those flights to see art shows? Looking at the bigger picture of cause and effect, it suddenly didn’t seem so clear.

You emphasize that this isn’t about shaming colleagues who travel. Why was it important to you? Because it’s so ubiquitous?

It’s definitely not about shaming colleagues. There are structural realities built into how art’s various global ecosystems work right now. You can’t ask people to risk their jobs or pass up opportunities and just ask someone to comply because someone else’s index finger is wagging at them. We wouldn’t dream of asking a coal miner to stop working because their work contributes to the climate crisis.

The only reason I felt like I could experiment with not flying for art and see what happens is that a whole host of factors all came together at once to make this experiment possible right now. I sort of figured it was a good moment to try to shift and play with the protocols we see as normal.

In the worst case, if I am no longer employable because of this project, the town where I live doesn’t currently have a good cheese shop. If I lose all my jobs, I am going to launch a Kickstarter campaign, open a shop and sell local Hudson Valley cheeses. Clearly, this is a totally foolproof and very well-thought-out plan.

I’d love to hear more about some solutions you’ve explored. You already told me about the doppelganger, but how else might you solve this problem in a creative or absurdist way?

I’ve proposed hiring a local lawyer as my proxy for a day. I’ve suggested co-bylining a review with a local critic who could walk right over to see a show that’s far away for me. Or instead of flying around the world to moderate a panel, my suggestion was that we delegate my questions to the audience to read. Mostly these ideas just get a lot of rejections. Which is okay—even putting them out there in the world makes them a tiny bit more normal or conceivable. I’m also trying to think about how to share resources and opportunities. When I opt out of something, I’m trying very consciously to recommend younger and more emerging local critics who might have more use for that opportunity, too. And then, as a last-ditch effort, I also suggest Zoom, which—meh. We all know Zoom’s pros and cons. That alternative has already been tested out pretty thoroughly.

There was one solution I really liked, which came about thanks to the innovative thinking of Zeynep Öz, one of the co-curators of the Sharjah Biennial. She didn’t love the idea of me hiring a lawyer as my mouthpiece (which I was really pushing, but in retrospect I’m glad she advised me otherwise), but after a lot of brainstorming and thinking through other options, we did end up merging my talk for Zeynep’s April Acts programming with the research of Christianna Bonin, a scholar based in Sharjah. The result was an experimental two-person lecture merging sound clips of my voice with Professor Bonin’s live, in-person delivery. Someone in the audience later told me they really liked it and that it punctuated the rhythm of a day of lectures. I wasn’t there, so I can’t assess how it went, but I liked that feeling of giving up control over our event’s success to Christianna.

You’ve linked your thinking to Conceptual art precedents, from Tehching Hsieh to collaborative practices. How does situating your project in that lineage shift how we understand it?

As we know, there’s a whole history of art-world folks using doppelgangers, with Warhol being just one of the most famous. I hope that connecting this project to these lineages almost speaks in shorthand to colleagues by leaning into our shared conviction that Conceptual art practices and projects have power—maybe by nudging social norms far out at the edges of perceptibility and far before we understand the impact that’s being made. It counters the sort of hopelessness I feel when I consider a sustainable alternative and then think, “What’s the use? It’s just a drop in a bucket.” But we’ll spend a whole month studying an art collective’s performance from, like, a single night in 1965. We’ve clearly already organized our lives around the belief that drops in the bucket have meaning somehow.

You’ve said your CV now lists what you’ve skipped or refused to do. Why make refusal part of your professional record?

First of all, I should clarify that this isn’t about lying! I’m listing things I was invited to do and then adding a parenthetical note that clarifies how and why these events didn’t ultimately come to pass. I guess my thinking is that a CV seems like a proposal to transfer someone’s trust in you to someone else. If someone invited me to give a lecture and I opted out of it, it seems like the function of the CV is still to say to a third party, “Someone else saw worth in whatever content I was going to bring to a podium. So maybe you can trust that it has some value too.” If I were an employer and a potential hire had been invited to give a lecture, say, but couldn’t because visa issues stood in the way, I’d still really want to know about that accomplishment, right?

Also, my CV shift is trying to counteract the cost of not doing. Sometimes, refusing to participate feels like it makes no difference, because the opportunity just goes to someone else. And no fault to them for taking it, when opportunities and resources are so rare in a precarious business that feels like it’s literally 80 percent built on labors of love. So the CV strategy is my attempt to make what we’re all doing more than just a zero-sum game we’re all forced to play against each other. You have this opportunity that I sit out, and then we both list this thing on our CVs. Why not?

Finally, if a prospective employer doesn’t like the look of what I’m doing and thinking about on a CV, then they’re definitely, definitely not going to like what comes next. On the flip side, if an employer sees these refusals as something that might actually be productive—if it makes sense to them—then we’ll probably get along. I remember being so, so moved when I talked to Lauren Cornell, the director of CCS Bard’s grad program at the time, to get her advice on this project. Her reaction was, “Why not give a talk about this?” And she also shared a whole host of resources: a reading list and other people to connect to.

Your project raises questions of privilege and precarity, ie, who can afford to say no to travel. Why bring this aspect into it?

Well, first of all, because so many people can’t travel, or not to the extent that others can. Whether it’s due to disability or political constraints or the ability to cross borders in the first place. I guess it really matters to me to convey that this isn’t just about flexing privilege but rather trying to make decisions out of a very somber recognition that it’s precisely the collective actions of the privileged that most urgently need to be reconsidered.

These days, we hear a lot about the Overton Window and how our mainstream politics have been shifted slowly but surely over the years. Are there other small actions you think that other denizens of the art world could undertake to shift our Overton Window regarding matters like climate change and other salient issues?

There are a lot of really interesting things happening and new shifts I’m still learning about. There are people who are much more administratively gifted than me, working on things like new protocols around temperature control at museum collections or how artwork gets transported. For example, I’m loving that the Swiss Institute in New York City seems to be constantly innovating new sustainability strategies but also normalizing the way that sustainability can be something you work on in the background, even if it doesn’t take center stage at each show you do, among many other examples. And then, there are so many curators, artists and critics who are just figuring out what art looks like when it both addresses the realities of the looming climate crisis and is also interesting, resonant, haunting or memorable. All those shifts seem small and important, if only so that we encounter art that fully considers the whole scope of our life and times.

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