What opportunity could convince you to get on a nearly four-hour call at 4:30 a.m., three days a week, for several months, all before going to work for the day? For Daisy Desrosiers, director and chief curator of The Gund, the answer is the opportunity to co-curate the 15th Shanghai Biennale in Shanghai, China, titled Does the Flower Hear the Bee?

Desrosiers mentioned this detail during the “Curatorial Practice in Conversation” talk on the afternoon of March 26 in the Gund Community Foundation Theater, which was guided by Assistant Professor of Art History Katherine Calvin. In the talk, Desrosiers explained that, because they are in different time zones (Chief Curator Kitty Scott is based in Canada, and the other co-curator, Xue Tan, is based in Europe but spends a lot of time in Hong Kong.) the team would call at dawn Ohio time to narrow down the list of artists whose work they would include in the Biennale. The conversation also included Desrosiers’ discussion of how the curatorial team chose artists for the Biennale, Chinese state vetting, censorship of works and her experience curating an exhibition of this scale.

Though the Shanghai Biennale, an international contemporary exhibition held every two years, closed on Tuesday, Desrosiers explained that she will draw on her experiences curating this show as she continues her work in and out of The Gund. Scott wanted to keep the curatorial team small for this project, which, as Desrosiers told discussion attendees, meant each curator had a massive workload; she oversaw more than 20 artists. One slight quirk of the Shanghai Biennale is that it doesn’t hire curators until the museum (Power Station of Art) has already raised the funds for the show, giving the curators only one year to put the exhibition together. “It’s complicated because you need to move fast but need to be very thoughtful,” Desrosiers said.

When asked about the challenges of curating the Biennale, Desrosiers told Calvin and the audience that the condensed timeline caused the team to favor established artists who could produce quality work quickly. “There’s not a lot of time for experimentation. If it had been a triennial and we had three years to think about this, then we [could] have a more thoughtful follow-up process with the artists, and maybe, I want to say, take greater risk with artists for whom that might be a first exhibition [on] this scale,” she said. Another challenge is the absolutely monumental size of the Biennale’s space inside the power-station-turned-museum. “I can’t even compare it to any museum I’ve seen in the U.S., because I’ve never seen a space like this before,” Desrosiers said.

Curating a state-funded show in China also meant that Desrosiers had to adapt to some unfamiliar practices. She wasn’t told the budget, and the team proposed works and costs to the museum, whose staff then told the curators whether they were approved. “I’m actually scared of what the price point would be, because I just feel there was an incredible amount of labor… This remains a mystery,” Desrosiers said. All of the works also had to be externally reviewed and approved. “It’s called the Cultural Office, so it’s not called, like, the censor office, but it is an office that [is] required to look at all the films, for example,” she explained before adding that some frames in a film by artist Sara Cwynar had to be blurred in order to be allowed in the show. “She’s really interested in this kind of North American uber-consumerism culture. So in the film, at some point, we see a McDonald’s sign, and there’s a Mickey Mouse image that shows up. Those were absolutely ‘No’ [from the Cultural Office] because they represented a form of American propaganda, I guess.”

Reflecting on what she learned from curating the Biennale, Desrosiers described discovering both the good and the bad. Throughout the process, she learned her limits and how much she could handle before the workload began to take a toll. At the same time, “a project like this makes me fall in love with artists even more. I love working with art. I love when we disagree. I love when we agree. I love when we, like, all the parts,” Desrosiers said, adding, “I’m glad I was able to be a part of it. Now I can just hold the catalogue, and it feels enough.”