Last year Song and Olive created The Hidden Exhibition, organized by the Center for Asian Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago. For the duration of the show the artists occupied a conference room, which was open for use by anyone who wanted it. Through being the conference room’s facilitators, Song and Olive took on their most remarkably unpredictable group of collaborators yet. The college’s Development Office, the room’s primary user, took ownership of the space’s décor, displaying a show of student artwork and two months of unopened office mail. The Windy City Gay Naturists and the Chicago Area Naturist Sons held a meeting in the conference room, as did the Women Associates, a social group of diplomatic wives. Local businesses donated food and other sundries. Song and Olive attended all meetings and acted as administrators, butlers, busboys, conversationalists, janitors, and archivists—whatever was called for. They encountered people they had never met before, as did the people that were brought together in the room. The result was the transformation of an otherwise invisible and nondescript space into a crossroads of communities, activities, purposes, and aesthetics, none of which Song and Olive could ever claim as their own. Friends share and share alike.
