On Isotopica this week,
we meet Haoyue Chen
a curator who moves like water.
Her practice drifts between shores: between the discipline of design and the freedom of art, between Ningbo and Hangzhou’’s Zhōngguóhuà traditions and the tidal coastlines of Britain.
Chen thinks with places. She treats every exhibition as a living ecosystem, something
breathing and slightly untameable.
In Mushrooms, Threads and Gondola (2025), she follows the spores of Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World into a seaside vintage shop in St Leonards.
There, among rusted hooks and traces of old commerce, she builds a quiet conversation between textiles, clay, salt, and memory. Nothing is polished; everything is alive.
Water runs through her stories — the Orkney residency, the gondolas of Venice, the
shifting deltas of her own coastal home. For Chen, water isn’t just motif but method: it
carries, it connects, it refuses borders. Her curating feels like tidework, gathering
fragments, letting them find their own rhythm together.
Listening to her speak, you sense an independence shaped by curiosity more than ambition.
She questions systems, hierarchies, and definitions — even the distinction between artist and curator. In truth, she’s both: an artist whose medium is relation itself.
What emerges from Haoyue Chen’s work is a tenderness towards the world — an attention to what’s overlooked, washed up, or fragile — and a belief that from these remnants, new forms of connection can still grow.
Simon Tyszko writes about Haoyue’s practice
Haoyue Chen’s practice operates in that generative liminal zone between artist and
curator, theory and experience, East and West.
Her formation in Ningbo and Hangzhou—where she first trained in traditional Chinese ink painting and later in environmental design—imbues her work with a deep sensitivity to spatial composition and cultural ecology. This architectural awareness extends through her curatorial methodology, which treats exhibitions not as containers for artworks but as living environments shaped by material, social, and affective flows.
What distinguishes Chen’s approach is the seamless integration of curation as creation.
Rather than staging art as object, she orchestrates situations of encounter, privileging
permeability and process over fixity. In her ongoing collaborations—most recently
Mushrooms, Threads and Gondola (Unit 2 St Leonards, 2025)—Chen translates
theoretical inquiry into a physical poetics of site, matter, and interdependence. Drawing
from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, the exhibition re-imagines
ecological fragility as a curatorial principle: regeneration through collaboration, and
survival through mutual adaptation.
Chen’s curatorial decisions demonstrate a rigorous understanding of material agency. The
project’s use of reclaimed clay, water-worn textile, and found detritus performs an ethic of
attention—what might be called a post-anthropocentric aesthetics. By situating these
works in a reclaimed vintage store rather than a white-cube space, Chen foregrounds the
entanglement of memory, labour, and locality. Hooks in the wall, rusted garage doors,
traces of domestic use: these residual textures are not erased but activated, becoming
co-authors of the exhibition.
Her practice also embodies a cross-cultural reflexivity. The recurring motif of
water—evident across projects developed in the Orkney Islands, Venice, and coastal
China—serves as both literal and metaphorical connective tissue. For Chen, water is
migration, dialogue, and continuity: a medium that dissolves hierarchies and connects
disparate geographies. Her curatorial language mirrors this liquidity, moving effortlessly
between Chinese traditions of ink-based landscape (where negative space carries equal
weight) and Western relational aesthetics. The result is a curatorial voice fluent in hybridity
yet grounded in place.
Intellectually, Chen resists dogma. In our conversation she emphasised autonomy of
thought—an early defiance against prescriptive education that continues to animate her
method. She approaches theory as a living organism rather than a system to obey.
This independence yields a curatorial practice that is simultaneously analytical and empathetic:
she constructs conceptual frameworks, yet remains responsive to the unpredictable vitality
of materials and contexts.
Her exhibitions and texts reveal a maturity that exceeds her years. They demonstrate an
ability to engage with urgent global concerns—climate precarity, migration, decolonisation
of the gallery space—without resorting to didacticism. The work’s quiet strength lies in its
interlacing of sensitivity and critique. One might trace an affinity with the eco-feminist
lineages of Ursula Le Guin or the material storytelling of Tacita Dean, yet Chen’s
sensibility remains distinct: grounded, research-driven, and affectively generous.
In short, Haoyue Chen exemplifies the contemporary curator-as-artist, whose medium is
not merely the exhibition but the choreography of relation itself. Her capacity to synthesise
spatial, theoretical, and emotional intelligence marks her as a significant emerging voice
within international curatorial discourse. Her practice already contributes meaningfully to
the United Kingdom’s artistic ecology, offering cross-cultural dialogue, intellectual rigour,
and a humane sensibility urgently needed in our fragmented times.
Simon Tyszko (Isotopica / Resonance FM, London) 2025
