Do you remember all the times you fell in order to be able to walk upright, starting from when you were a baby crawling on your hands and knees? We start walking when we become curious about the world, after we’ve passed through the newborn phase, when we can barely keep our heads up. All of us must have fallen countless times learning to walk, and invested countless hours so our legs could support our bodies. This effort doesn’t exist solely as a physical rite of passage. Walking is evidence that your body moves according to your will, and is the most basic element of self-reliance. Walking also symbolizes the expansion of our world, as our area of activity grows larger the minute we learn to walk. 

While learning to walk is an extraordinary personal experience, it is at the same time universal and mundane. Almost everyone goes through this experience; it is a process that takes us to the next stage. Everyone is ultimately successful, yet everyone will have endured a seemingly endless process of trial and error, failing countless times before learning to walk correctly. How do children come to think that they have to walk? Must we conceive of learning to walk as merely a habit of children looking at adults and reflexively following them? Where does the motivation and will to walk come from? I’m not exactly sure, but whatever the reason, we all instinctively endeavor to take those first steps. 

Exhibition: Walking Practice shares many similarities with a writer’s creative attitude. Creating something new requires collecting resources and learning from an artist. Just like we are able to walk safely only after repeatedly falling and stumbling in awkward positions, an artist’s work must also repeatedly pass through those unsatisfactory and lacking steps before it reveals itself as a finished work. 

Artists capture the unfamiliarity of life and continually reflect on the present. The artist who relentlessly tries to improve their past self is just like a young child learning to walk. A newborn who is just beginning to face the world is clumsy and afraid of everything, yet they look the world straight in its eyes and try to comprehend, because the place where they are standing on is exactly where they will have to live. The artists who participated in this exhibition have endeavored to show in their pieces the endless process of learning to walk, albeit sometimes clumsy and restless.  ■ Artlecture