On The Rise: The 5 Leading Young Chinese Curators

Here, we take a look at the next wave of young curators working in institutions, independent project spaces, and galleries across China who are expanding definitions of Chinese contemporary art, and offering a roadmap to the globalised Chinese art scene.

1. Cui Cancan Cui Cancan is an active Chinese independent curator. He was the winner of the CCAA (Chinese Contemporary Art Award) Critics’ Award, Critics’ Award in Chinese contemporary art by YISHU (Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art), the annual award by L’OFFICIEL Art and so on. He was also appointed special observer for the 13th Kassel Documenta. As a curator, Cui contributed to the success of major exhibitions including Heiqiao Night Away (2013), FUCKOFF II (2013), Unlived by What is Seen (2014), etc.

2. Iris Xingru Long Iris Xingru Long is a curator and she currently works as a researcher on art, science and technology at Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing, China), with a research focus on how art responses to the current global reality of ubiquitous computing and big data. She lectures on data art at CAFA and her artistic work has been exhibited internationally in venues including CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Power Station of Art (Shanghai), V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), ISEA (Hong Kong) and further more. Her work has been shortlisted in Prix Cube Art Prize, received an honorable mention in ifva, Hong Kong and she was shortlisted by the first M21-IAAC Award (International Awards for Art Criticism). Her translation work, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, received a nomination from AAC Art China awards in 2016. Recently she received the Hyundai Blue Prize, a curatorial award to support emerging curators.

3. Xn Office Xn Office is a curator group founded by Chinese art history Ph.D candidate Penny Dan Xu and Shanghai-based artist Ni Youyu, who was awarded the CCAA 2014 Best Young Artist. This curator group shows great interest in artworks concern about tradition and craftsmanship. As a Shanghai/London-based curator team, they extended their collaboration to artists outside of main land China. They have worked and continue to work with artists from Hong Kong, Japan, Philippine, Belgium, Denmark, and etc,. Xn Office has curated exhibitions The Temporary Museum in Museum of Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in 2016; a museum-level, large-scale exhibition Collage: The Cards Players at Shanghai Gallery of Art in 2017. Their unconventional project It all happens after sunset… taken place at Shanghai MoCA Pavilion in 2017 has garnered wide attention and was selected as Nuite Blanche Paris official program in the subsequent year. They have also curated exhibition in Hong Kong and about to present a new exhibition in Tokyo this year. Together with the artist Ni Youyu, Penny Dan Xu has compiled and edited the research-based bilingual publication Temporary Museum and Collage: The Cards Players. They continued to publish their exclusive interview with artists, writers and curators on their media platform.

4. Victor Wang Victor Wang is currently Artistic Director and Chief Curator of M WOODS Museums in Beijing: M WOODS 798 and the newly established M WOODS Hutong. Wang was Curator of Frieze LIVE, London (2020) edition, editor of the publication Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–90s (DRAF 2018), and founder of the Institute of Asian Performance Art (IAPA). Named one of Apollo International Art Magazine’s “40 under 40: Europe, 2018” Thinkers, Wang’s recent exhibitions include the first large-scale museum surveys in China of the work of celebrated composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto (2021); influential Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (2020); and pioneering artist Richard Tuttle,(2019), all at M WOODS, Beijing. He also curated Afterimage: Dangdai Yishu (2019) at Lisson Gallery, London, which exhibited for the first time in London the work of key artists such as Yu Hong, Lin Tianmao and Xiang Jing, and is a co-curator of the exhibition Micro Era. Time-based Media-Art from China (2019), alongside curator Anna-Catharina Gebbers, co-curator Yang Beichen and curatorial advisor, Pi Li, a special exhibition for the Nationalgalerie Berlin – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, which featured works by artists such as Cao Fei and Zhang Peili. In 2018 Wang collaborated with artist Oscar Murillo on his publication The Build-up of Content and Information, published by David Zwirner Books; and collaborated with artist Katja Novitskova on her first solo exhibition in the UK, at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018). He also curated the first institutional solo exhibition in Europe by artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (2017) who is of Hul’q’umi’num’ Coast Salish and Okanagan (Syilx) First Nations descent, at the Canadian High Commission’s gallery in London.

5. Yang Beichen Dr. YANG Beichen is a curator/scholar of film and contemporary art. He is currently a member of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada(Milan, Venice), also a guest researcher at the New Century Art Foundation (Beijing, Shanghai) and contributing editor of Artforum China. He lectures on film and media studies at The Central Academy of Drama (Beijing), with research interests on the theory of Moving Image, Media Archaeology, Technology&Ecology, and New Materialism. His curatorial practices corresponds with his multidisciplinary academic approaches, including “New Metallurgists” (Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf), “Earthbound Cosmology” (Qiao Space, Shanghai), “Anti-Projection”(NCAF, Beijing), “Micro-Era” (Nationalgalerie, Berlin), “Embodied Mirror”(NCAF, Beijing). He will co-curate the Guangzhou Image Triennial 2021. He has contributed critical essays for the catalogues of the artists such as CAO Fei, Laure Prouvost, Omer Fast and HO Tzu Nyen, etc.. HX book, a publication edited by him, is recently launched during CAO Fei's solo exhibition “Blueprints” at the Serpentine Galleries. His academic monograph Film as Archive will be published soon.