Art & Creative Expression
Timing how long museum visitors spend on each label
Xinyu Wang is researching how to rewrite art exhibit labels, starting with a poll of 53 people and a count of how long over sixty visitors at 798 Art Zone spent reading.
At COLORS!, an exhibition at 798 Art Zone, Xinyu Wang watched over sixty visitors read the labels. She timed them. By her count, 26 percent passed the exhibits in under three seconds, 46 percent stayed between three and ten seconds, and 28 percent lingered for more than ten. Eighty percent actively read the label text; the other 20 percent did not pay attention to it.
"Interestingly, my initial thought was proven wrong," she says. "I used to believe most people would ignore exhibit labels. But in fact, nearly all visitors do take a look." They spend only three to ten seconds on average, and she guesses they tried to read and failed to understand. Since observation alone cannot confirm that, she plans face-to-face interviews next.
“Challenges are good.”
Xinyu Wang
Her project is to redo the content and style of exhibit labels, making them read like tour guides, while keeping art standards. She began learning art history in high school. "As I knew more, I became really interested and went to art rooms often," she says. "As a visitor keen to learn, I see problems with today's exhibit labels."
Her parents often took her to art shows when she was young, but she only viewed the pieces and never knew their backgrounds, so most did not stay in her memory. Many trips, she says, are just empty formality. Most labels now, she says, "use small letters, difficult terms, and long dull writing." Tour guides, on the other hand, are well-liked: "They talk about art in easy, vivid and plain words, helping visitors recall details."
She also ran an online poll and got 53 useful answers on current labels and ideas for upgrading them. She says that "if I want to draw visitors closer and create immersive labels, I must never distort history at the same time."
The project is still at the research and paper design stage. She plans to visit exhibitions of other kinds, installation art and modern design among them, to test whether the problems she saw with painting labels are universal. Her goal, she says, is to find a balance: "how to make the exhibition a friendly bridge for the public to enter the world of art without sacrificing academic rigor."