{"id":6466,"date":"2025-11-19T21:39:02","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T21:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theculture.net\/radio\/?p=6466"},"modified":"2026-05-14T17:59:45","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T16:59:45","slug":"curiosity-curation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theculture.net\/radio\/curiosity-curation\/","title":{"rendered":"Curiosity Curation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On Isotopica this week,
we meet Haoyue Chen
a curator who moves like water.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her practice drifts between shores: between the discipline of design and the freedom of art, between Ningbo and Hangzhou\u2019\u2019s Zh\u014dnggu\u00f3hu\u00e0\u00a0traditions and the tidal coastlines of Britain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Chen thinks with places. She treats every exhibition as a living ecosystem, something
breathing and slightly untameable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\u00a0Mushrooms, Threads and Gondola<\/em> (2025), she follows the spores of Anna Tsing\u2019s\u00a0Mushroom at the End of the World<\/em>\u00a0into 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Water runs through her stories \u2014 the Orkney residency, the gondolas of Venice, the
shifting deltas of her own coastal home. For Chen, water isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listening to her speak, you sense an independence shaped by curiosity more than ambition.
She questions systems, hierarchies, and definitions \u2014 even the distinction between artist and curator. In truth, she\u2019s both: an artist whose medium is relation itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What emerges from Haoyue Chen\u2019s work is a tenderness towards the world \u2014 an attention to what\u2019s overlooked, washed up, or fragile \u2014 and a belief that from these remnants, new forms of connection can still grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Simon Tyszko writes about Haoyue’s practice<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Haoyue Chen\u2019s practice operates in that generative liminal zone between artist and
curator, theory and experience, East and West.
Her formation in Ningbo and Hangzhou\u2014where she first trained in traditional Chinese ink painting and later in environmental design\u2014imbues 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What distinguishes Chen\u2019s 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\u2014most recently
Mushrooms, Threads and Gondola (Unit 2 St Leonards, 2025)\u2014Chen translates
theoretical inquiry into a physical poetics of site, matter, and interdependence. Drawing
from Anna Tsing\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chen\u2019s curatorial decisions demonstrate a rigorous understanding of material agency. The
project\u2019s use of reclaimed clay, water-worn textile, and found detritus performs an ethic of
attention\u2014what 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her practice also embodies a cross-cultural reflexivity. The recurring motif of
water\u2014evident across projects developed in the Orkney Islands, Venice, and coastal
China\u2014serves 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intellectually, Chen resists dogma. In our conversation she emphasised autonomy of
thought\u2014an 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her exhibitions and texts reveal a maturity that exceeds her years. They demonstrate an
ability to engage with urgent global concerns\u2014climate precarity, migration, decolonisation
of the gallery space\u2014without resorting to didacticism. The work\u2019s 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\u2019s
sensibility remains distinct: grounded, research-driven, and affectively generous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s artistic ecology, offering cross-cultural dialogue, intellectual rigour,
and a humane sensibility urgently needed in our fragmented times.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simon Tyszko (Isotopica \/ Resonance FM, London) 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On Isotopica this week, we meet Haoyue Chen a curator who moves like water.\u00a0 Her practice drifts between shores: between the discipline of design and the freedom of art, between Ningbo and Hangzhou\u2019\u2019s Zh\u014dnggu\u00f3hu\u00e0\u00a0traditions and the tidal coastlines of Britain.…<\/p>\n

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