Exhibition: Life Rehearsals
Opening remarks by Carol Yinghua Lu (Director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum), Li Mu (Professor, Tsinghua University) and Na Rongkun (curator)
Venue: Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing
Dates: 14 June – 19 October 2025
Life Rehearsals traces the cognitive history of autism diagnosis and care in the 20th century, while exploring evolving representations of autism in global cinema and media. It presents commissioned works by neurodivergent artists, alongside responsive artworks from artists and art groups across China, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and elsewhere. These works engage with the daily challenges of individuals with mental disabilities and the psychological states of caregivers. Focusing on the core symptom of autism spectrum disorder - difficulties in social interactions - the exhibition offers a reflective examination of the shifting concepts of “normality” and “abnormality”, and how social norms construct self-discipline, seeking to reaffirm the confidence in the dignity of diverse modes of existence.
Curator: Na Rongkun
Artistic Directors: Carol Yinghua Lu, Professor Li Mu
Exhibition Coordinator: Cao Liyao
Exhibition Assistant: Li Huiyi
Artists: Issac Chong Wai, Zhao Jianze, Sijben Rosa, Wataru Koyama, Daisuke Kosugi, Shanzhai MFA, Project YYIN, Desmond Mah, Kang Jing, He Ziyu, HASS Lab, Fu Boren, David Bernstein, Brittany Thorpe, Bethel House
Opening remarks by Carol Yinghua Lu (Director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum), Li Mu (Professor, Tsinghua University) and Na Rongkun (curator)
Venue: Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing
Dates: 14 June – 19 October 2025
Life Rehearsals traces the cognitive history of autism diagnosis and care in the 20th century, while exploring evolving representations of autism in global cinema and media. It presents commissioned works by neurodivergent artists, alongside responsive artworks from artists and art groups across China, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and elsewhere. These works engage with the daily challenges of individuals with mental disabilities and the psychological states of caregivers. Focusing on the core symptom of autism spectrum disorder - difficulties in social interactions - the exhibition offers a reflective examination of the shifting concepts of “normality” and “abnormality”, and how social norms construct self-discipline, seeking to reaffirm the confidence in the dignity of diverse modes of existence.
Curator: Na Rongkun
Artistic Directors: Carol Yinghua Lu, Professor Li Mu
Exhibition Coordinator: Cao Liyao
Exhibition Assistant: Li Huiyi
Artists: Issac Chong Wai, Zhao Jianze, Sijben Rosa, Wataru Koyama, Daisuke Kosugi, Shanzhai MFA, Project YYIN, Desmond Mah, Kang Jing, He Ziyu, HASS Lab, Fu Boren, David Bernstein, Brittany Thorpe, Bethel House
Life Rehearsals
This exhibition stems from a series of annual exhibitions titled Autistic or Artistic, held by Inside-Out Art Museum since 2010. In these seven exhibitions, the museum showcases artworks created by children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, along with artists’ dialogues about the pieces, academic discussions, and medical consultations for charity. This initiative bridges the gaps between society and individuals affected by autism. In planning the upcoming annual exhibition, we continued our experimentation based on past experiences and issued an open call centered around the theme of Love on the Spectrum in June 2024: It is accessible to people of all ages. In addition to painting, it encourages submissions in various art forms, including images, videos, installations, and documentary archives. Meanwhile, we aim to broaden the topic of creativity, maintaining our focus on autism while relating it to the experience of facing obstacles at different stages of life. The condition will serve as a metaphor for a broader social context and all walks of life, connecting to the various limitations each of us may encounter in daily living. Within two months, we received over eighty submissions, from which we carefully selected a portion that forms the foundation of this exhibition. Autism spectrum disorder is one of the “symptoms” we hope to explore. We aspire to address the limitations of bodies, minds, and thoughts that each individual may face.
According to the standard of diagnosis in DSM-5-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth revised edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2022), the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder include persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction; restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities; symptoms must be present in the early developmental period; symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning; and these disturbances are not better explained by intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder) or global developmental delay. Underlying the making of these three criteria are the research and resistance supported by relevant groups across hundreds of years: in the first half of the 20th century, autism was long recognized as schizophrenia; the “refrigerator mother theory” in the mid-twentieth century resulted in countless mothers carrying the moral burden “cold and irresponsible,” their children sent to quarantine institutions for treatment. Although it may seem ridiculous nowadays, such perspectives constituted the context of survival for autistic communities at the time. It was not until the 1990s that the bias of “illness caused by upbringing” was overturned. This history of perception, filled with detours, is fundamentally a transformative process about humankind’s breaking bias and approaching truth. Around the world, although the medical research of a century continues to achieve progress, most professionals and the general public still limit autism to the medical categories of “illness” or “disorder.” The excessive yearnings of “perfection” or “coherence” in progressive values result in difficulties for individuals perceived as “different” to fit into public life. The exhibition reviews the history of how our perception of autism evolved in the 20th century through documents, images, and videos, thereby advancing critical thinking about the limitations of perception in social awareness.
In China, people with autism also face similar challenges that are highly complicated. Every step is filled with obstacles, from medical diagnosis and treatment to accessing educational resources, and even getting familiar with life skills or participating in day-to-day outings. Meanwhile, the multiple social discriminations and misunderstandings (such as regarding autistic people as born geniuses who don’t need any emotional support and social interaction) not only reinforce the difficulties for the survival of people on the autism spectrum, but also increase the economic and psychological burden for their families. The caregivers endure a high level of long-term stress, which often ends up triggering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and causing the falling apart of family structures or the quitting of staff from institutions providing treatment. Difficulties in social interaction, as often mentioned nowadays, are only the tip of the iceberg in the numerous problems faced by people with autism. Underneath is the crisis of an entire ecosystem of survival. Perhaps the solution to this conundrum lies in a more reasonable and humanistic perception of autism.
Life Rehearsals, the title of the exhibition, comes from a core symptom in autistic patients who take repetitive actions as self-consolation. Elaine Hall, a teacher in Los Angeles, is the mother of an autistic child. Her experience is: “Creative dramatics can be a bridge between the outside world and the inner world. We used what I call ‘rehearsing for life’ with my son whenever we had something new that we needed to do.” Due to an inability to understand nonverbal and invisible communications, the seemingly repetitive and stereotypical actions of people with autism can, in fact, help them digest the sensory stimulations in everyday life with control. Their needs for social interactions and emotions exist, only in the form of “different, but not less”.
With the development of theories related to neurodiversity, more research groups are pointing out that autism is a manifestation of neurodiversity in human existence. The concept emphasizes the natural differences between human nervous systems and acknowledges that each individual is unique in thoughts, actions, and modes of learning. This theory breaks the binary oppositions between traditional views of “normal” and “abnormal,” thus rectifying the false perceptions of people with autism and inspiring self-reflection among “neurotypical” groups: the over-alertness of patients with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), the resistance to instructions of people with pathological needs avoidance (PDA), and the patterns of attention dispersion for patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These traits were once perceived as “problems,” leading to repetitive self-denial. The perspective of neurodiversity liberates these traits into new understandings. People begin to realize that the anxiety they experience in social interactions and the discrepancies in sensing time share many similarities with the symptoms of some neurodiverse groups. The survival crisis faced by people with autism is not far from each of us. In online spaces, individuals continue to break down complex social rules into manageable “modules for rehearsal”: how to start a conversation, how to react to changes in the environment, how to recognize the difference between “hunger and emotional eating”… These are concrete expressions of how our perception revolutionizes our understanding of ourselves.
These “rehearsals” don’t refer to specific defects but form a mode of interrelated thinking beyond medical perspectives. It represents a consensus: our characteristics should not be simplistically corrected. Referencing the experiences of people with autism spectrum disorder, the behavioral patterns once considered “abnormal” are genuine reactions to feeling out of place in their environments. In this sense, although Life Rehearsals stems from a strategy for how people with autism react to the world, it offers everyone valuable insights. It reminds us that life is a process of constant adjustment, adaptation, and growth. Life Rehearsals also signify the need to update our understanding of concepts like “illness” and “normality.” It is a lifelong process of challenging one’s existing perceptions. Maintaining oneself in a state of “rehearsal” means embracing suspension and openness, being honest about one’s limitations, dancing with uncertainties, and transforming vulnerabilities into the courage for continual learning.
Regarding autism and neurodiversity, the impact of any art exhibition is likely to be limited. We cannot revise the logic of reality in distributing medical resources or eliminate the biases entrenched in society. Even in the realm of art, the presentation of the artwork itself faces the risk of misinterpretation: Is it a spectacle of “disorder,” a romanticization of illness, or wishful thinking aimed at satisfying the gaze of an external perspective? How can we honor the artistic values of individual creativity amidst these challenges? This exhibition aims to expose this sense of “helplessness”—the rules and limitations inherent to the art field when confronted with “atypical” expressions. In terms of accessibility, the exhibition features a double entrance with an open and barrier-free passage, allowing the audience to freely explore the art spaces on both the first and second floors. In addition to the artworks, we have compiled a history of how the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has evolved over the past century, illustrating its changing representations in medical documents, movies, and television programs. Alongside artworks from the open call, Love on the Spectrum, we also invited several neurodiversity artists to create on-site. The exhibition includes works by artists and art groups from China, Japan, the Netherlands, Korea, and other countries. Some of these artists have long been focused on the subject of autism and neurodiversity and have initiated creative practices around it. Others may not have directly addressed the issue but have inspired new understandings of it from different perspectives. For example, HASS Lab, a project initiated by Hong Kong artist Pak Sheung Chuen, encourages the expressions of neurodiverse individuals by bringing them into museums and showcasing their unique viewpoints; Japanese-Norwegian artist Daisuke Kosugi, driven by a concern for how neurodivergent individuals struggle to meet societal norms, created a video work depicting a child character, “Luka,” experiencing emotional outbursts in various domestic settings; Zhao Jianze, an artist from China, creates numerous spaces for “zoning out” and taking rest.
These artworks explore the observations of neurodiverse communities, their everyday struggles, and the psychological conditions of those who care for them. We take this opportunity to look back at ourselves, reflecting on how the norms in social communication discipline us, and providing a chance for autism-related teachers, doctors, relatives, participating artists, and the general audience to think creatively based on their real-life experiences.
Acknowledging the diversity of life requires a lifelong practice of enhancing self-awareness and renewing one’s mindset. For a future filled with more mutual respect, we need humanitarian, stigma-free language and concepts when thinking about different people. The rehearsal in Life Rehearsals doesn’t mean performing as or for others. The exhibition doesn’t aim to locate the value and utility of individuals in society. Rather, it reverses the foreground and background of society, offering an open platform and an experimental game. In it, we can deconstruct our social life into steps and form a mutually supportive community that reveals the intricacies of caregivers’ emotions, the authentic expressions of people on the spectrum, and our bewildering feelings. Many of us are experiencing cognitive dissonance or dissociation as we try to accept what has happened over the last few years and reimagine our future. Perhaps it’s time to slow down, take things step by step, cultivate a renewed perception of personal life, rediscover each stage of life, regain bodily freedom and energy, retrieve the methods for establishing interpersonal connections and interpreting social signals, and ultimately learn more about ourselves. We hope that Life Rehearsals can gather people with similar interests, relieve the tensions in our bodies, explore experimental responses, adjust a common way of living and acting, extend our experiences into a sustainable long-term practice, be inclusive of differences, and unleash the features of diversity inherent to human existence.
Na Rongkun, curator
This exhibition stems from a series of annual exhibitions titled Autistic or Artistic, held by Inside-Out Art Museum since 2010. In these seven exhibitions, the museum showcases artworks created by children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, along with artists’ dialogues about the pieces, academic discussions, and medical consultations for charity. This initiative bridges the gaps between society and individuals affected by autism. In planning the upcoming annual exhibition, we continued our experimentation based on past experiences and issued an open call centered around the theme of Love on the Spectrum in June 2024: It is accessible to people of all ages. In addition to painting, it encourages submissions in various art forms, including images, videos, installations, and documentary archives. Meanwhile, we aim to broaden the topic of creativity, maintaining our focus on autism while relating it to the experience of facing obstacles at different stages of life. The condition will serve as a metaphor for a broader social context and all walks of life, connecting to the various limitations each of us may encounter in daily living. Within two months, we received over eighty submissions, from which we carefully selected a portion that forms the foundation of this exhibition. Autism spectrum disorder is one of the “symptoms” we hope to explore. We aspire to address the limitations of bodies, minds, and thoughts that each individual may face.
According to the standard of diagnosis in DSM-5-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth revised edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2022), the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder include persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction; restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities; symptoms must be present in the early developmental period; symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning; and these disturbances are not better explained by intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder) or global developmental delay. Underlying the making of these three criteria are the research and resistance supported by relevant groups across hundreds of years: in the first half of the 20th century, autism was long recognized as schizophrenia; the “refrigerator mother theory” in the mid-twentieth century resulted in countless mothers carrying the moral burden “cold and irresponsible,” their children sent to quarantine institutions for treatment. Although it may seem ridiculous nowadays, such perspectives constituted the context of survival for autistic communities at the time. It was not until the 1990s that the bias of “illness caused by upbringing” was overturned. This history of perception, filled with detours, is fundamentally a transformative process about humankind’s breaking bias and approaching truth. Around the world, although the medical research of a century continues to achieve progress, most professionals and the general public still limit autism to the medical categories of “illness” or “disorder.” The excessive yearnings of “perfection” or “coherence” in progressive values result in difficulties for individuals perceived as “different” to fit into public life. The exhibition reviews the history of how our perception of autism evolved in the 20th century through documents, images, and videos, thereby advancing critical thinking about the limitations of perception in social awareness.
In China, people with autism also face similar challenges that are highly complicated. Every step is filled with obstacles, from medical diagnosis and treatment to accessing educational resources, and even getting familiar with life skills or participating in day-to-day outings. Meanwhile, the multiple social discriminations and misunderstandings (such as regarding autistic people as born geniuses who don’t need any emotional support and social interaction) not only reinforce the difficulties for the survival of people on the autism spectrum, but also increase the economic and psychological burden for their families. The caregivers endure a high level of long-term stress, which often ends up triggering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and causing the falling apart of family structures or the quitting of staff from institutions providing treatment. Difficulties in social interaction, as often mentioned nowadays, are only the tip of the iceberg in the numerous problems faced by people with autism. Underneath is the crisis of an entire ecosystem of survival. Perhaps the solution to this conundrum lies in a more reasonable and humanistic perception of autism.
Life Rehearsals, the title of the exhibition, comes from a core symptom in autistic patients who take repetitive actions as self-consolation. Elaine Hall, a teacher in Los Angeles, is the mother of an autistic child. Her experience is: “Creative dramatics can be a bridge between the outside world and the inner world. We used what I call ‘rehearsing for life’ with my son whenever we had something new that we needed to do.” Due to an inability to understand nonverbal and invisible communications, the seemingly repetitive and stereotypical actions of people with autism can, in fact, help them digest the sensory stimulations in everyday life with control. Their needs for social interactions and emotions exist, only in the form of “different, but not less”.
With the development of theories related to neurodiversity, more research groups are pointing out that autism is a manifestation of neurodiversity in human existence. The concept emphasizes the natural differences between human nervous systems and acknowledges that each individual is unique in thoughts, actions, and modes of learning. This theory breaks the binary oppositions between traditional views of “normal” and “abnormal,” thus rectifying the false perceptions of people with autism and inspiring self-reflection among “neurotypical” groups: the over-alertness of patients with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), the resistance to instructions of people with pathological needs avoidance (PDA), and the patterns of attention dispersion for patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These traits were once perceived as “problems,” leading to repetitive self-denial. The perspective of neurodiversity liberates these traits into new understandings. People begin to realize that the anxiety they experience in social interactions and the discrepancies in sensing time share many similarities with the symptoms of some neurodiverse groups. The survival crisis faced by people with autism is not far from each of us. In online spaces, individuals continue to break down complex social rules into manageable “modules for rehearsal”: how to start a conversation, how to react to changes in the environment, how to recognize the difference between “hunger and emotional eating”… These are concrete expressions of how our perception revolutionizes our understanding of ourselves.
These “rehearsals” don’t refer to specific defects but form a mode of interrelated thinking beyond medical perspectives. It represents a consensus: our characteristics should not be simplistically corrected. Referencing the experiences of people with autism spectrum disorder, the behavioral patterns once considered “abnormal” are genuine reactions to feeling out of place in their environments. In this sense, although Life Rehearsals stems from a strategy for how people with autism react to the world, it offers everyone valuable insights. It reminds us that life is a process of constant adjustment, adaptation, and growth. Life Rehearsals also signify the need to update our understanding of concepts like “illness” and “normality.” It is a lifelong process of challenging one’s existing perceptions. Maintaining oneself in a state of “rehearsal” means embracing suspension and openness, being honest about one’s limitations, dancing with uncertainties, and transforming vulnerabilities into the courage for continual learning.
Regarding autism and neurodiversity, the impact of any art exhibition is likely to be limited. We cannot revise the logic of reality in distributing medical resources or eliminate the biases entrenched in society. Even in the realm of art, the presentation of the artwork itself faces the risk of misinterpretation: Is it a spectacle of “disorder,” a romanticization of illness, or wishful thinking aimed at satisfying the gaze of an external perspective? How can we honor the artistic values of individual creativity amidst these challenges? This exhibition aims to expose this sense of “helplessness”—the rules and limitations inherent to the art field when confronted with “atypical” expressions. In terms of accessibility, the exhibition features a double entrance with an open and barrier-free passage, allowing the audience to freely explore the art spaces on both the first and second floors. In addition to the artworks, we have compiled a history of how the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has evolved over the past century, illustrating its changing representations in medical documents, movies, and television programs. Alongside artworks from the open call, Love on the Spectrum, we also invited several neurodiversity artists to create on-site. The exhibition includes works by artists and art groups from China, Japan, the Netherlands, Korea, and other countries. Some of these artists have long been focused on the subject of autism and neurodiversity and have initiated creative practices around it. Others may not have directly addressed the issue but have inspired new understandings of it from different perspectives. For example, HASS Lab, a project initiated by Hong Kong artist Pak Sheung Chuen, encourages the expressions of neurodiverse individuals by bringing them into museums and showcasing their unique viewpoints; Japanese-Norwegian artist Daisuke Kosugi, driven by a concern for how neurodivergent individuals struggle to meet societal norms, created a video work depicting a child character, “Luka,” experiencing emotional outbursts in various domestic settings; Zhao Jianze, an artist from China, creates numerous spaces for “zoning out” and taking rest.
These artworks explore the observations of neurodiverse communities, their everyday struggles, and the psychological conditions of those who care for them. We take this opportunity to look back at ourselves, reflecting on how the norms in social communication discipline us, and providing a chance for autism-related teachers, doctors, relatives, participating artists, and the general audience to think creatively based on their real-life experiences.
Acknowledging the diversity of life requires a lifelong practice of enhancing self-awareness and renewing one’s mindset. For a future filled with more mutual respect, we need humanitarian, stigma-free language and concepts when thinking about different people. The rehearsal in Life Rehearsals doesn’t mean performing as or for others. The exhibition doesn’t aim to locate the value and utility of individuals in society. Rather, it reverses the foreground and background of society, offering an open platform and an experimental game. In it, we can deconstruct our social life into steps and form a mutually supportive community that reveals the intricacies of caregivers’ emotions, the authentic expressions of people on the spectrum, and our bewildering feelings. Many of us are experiencing cognitive dissonance or dissociation as we try to accept what has happened over the last few years and reimagine our future. Perhaps it’s time to slow down, take things step by step, cultivate a renewed perception of personal life, rediscover each stage of life, regain bodily freedom and energy, retrieve the methods for establishing interpersonal connections and interpreting social signals, and ultimately learn more about ourselves. We hope that Life Rehearsals can gather people with similar interests, relieve the tensions in our bodies, explore experimental responses, adjust a common way of living and acting, extend our experiences into a sustainable long-term practice, be inclusive of differences, and unleash the features of diversity inherent to human existence.
Na Rongkun, curator
14th June 2025, Exhibition Opening