Hou Hanru is an art critic, writer and curator based in Paris and Rome. He was Artistic Director of MAXXI (National Museum of 21st Century Arts), Rome (2013- 2022). He has curated more than 150 exhibitions around the world including biennales and triennials in Johannesburg, Venice, Shanghai, Gwangju, Guangzhou, Mexico City, Tirana, Istanbul, Lyon, Auckland, and Shenzhen. From 1997 to 1999, he co-curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist the exhibition Cities On The Move, which toured from Secession, Vienna to CAPC/Arc-en-rêve, Bordeaux; PS1, New York; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek; Hayward Gallery, London; various venues in Bangkok; and Kiasma, Helsinki.
He is an advisor for numerous cultural institutions including Times Museum, Guangzhou; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; and The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York. He frequently contributes to journals, books, and catalogues on contemporary art and culture, and lectures and teaches at numerous international institutions. His books include Hou Hanru (Utopia@Asialink and School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, 2014), On the Mid-Ground (English version published in 2002, by Timezone 8, Hong Kong, and Chinese version published in 2013, by Gold Wall Press, Beijing), and Curatorial Challenges (conversations between Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist in Art-It magazine as “curators on the move”, Japan, 2006-2012; Chinese version, Gold Wall Press, Beijing, 2013).
Au Hoi Lam focuses on drawing and painting. She likes to explore text art and installation art. Au’s work is gentle and calm, using the language of painting to express profound but subtle ideas and emotions, embodying the delicate relationship between the individual and the world. She devotes herself to introspective thoughts and craftsmanship, capturing the ephemeral; exploring relationships between text, time and space; contemplating how artworks exist; and practising reminiscence and forgetting. Depending on the subject matter, her works may have unforeseen leaps in appearance, revealing undercurrents of paradox.
Au graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (MFA 2004, MPhil in Philosophy 2009). Au has participated in solo exhibitions, including Painting, Its Reasons to Be (Hanart TZ Gallery, 2024), My Father is Over the Ocean (Osage Gallery, 2013), and Definitions of Time (Edge Gallery, 2010). Au has been awarded the Alexandre Yersin Excellence Scholarship (Consulate General of France, 2001), Hong Kong Arts Development Awards - Award for Young Artist (Visual Arts) (2013), and Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship (2019). Her works are collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, M+, University of Cambridge, and private collections.
Yang Zhenzhong (b. 1968) is an artist from Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, currently based in Shanghai. Yang’s artistic practice focuses on conceptual art, involving video, photography, installation, painting, sculpture, and other art forms. He has been active in the global contemporary art scene for a long time and participated twice in the Venice Biennale (2003 and 2007). As a curator, he has planned and initiated more than a dozen crucial contemporary art exhibitions and projects with artists in Shanghai since the late 1990s, including Art For Sale, Express Art Exhibition, and Hipic. On the one hand, Yang’s creations centre around life and death with his cynical attitude to reinforce the numerous contradictions and disorders existing in society; on the other hand, he transforms and recovers daily life and political space within which people, objects, and landscapes reside.
Yang has participated in numerous prominent exhibitions, including selected solo exhibitions such as Surveillance and Panorama, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (2018); Eternal Return | Вечное возвращение, Moscow Museum and Exhibition Association Manege, Moscow (2014); Trespassing, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai (2013); and Don’t Move, ShanghART, Beijing (2011). Selected group exhibitions include Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Our Bright Future: Cybernetics Fantasy, Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin-si (2017); Avant-Garde China: Twenty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art , The National Art Center, Tokyo (2008); and Global Cities, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2007). His works are in the collections of many public and private institutions such as MoMA New York, Guggenheim Museum, Ikon Gallery (U.K.), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Musée National d’Art Moderne and the UBS Collection.
