When viewers step into one of Yanru Hu’s exhibitions, they may notice something different. Perhaps it is a sense of rhythm that pervades the space, the way artworks seem to guide the body’s motion, or how unexpected actions interrupt the expected path of looking. What they may not immediately realise is that Yanru’s curatorial work is grounded in the language of the body—a language she has spoken fluently since her early career as a choreographer and performer. Her trajectory, from dance to stage production to contemporary curating, reveals a compelling and evolving engagement with form, space, and audience. And it is precisely this embodied knowledge that allows Yanru to approach exhibition-making not simply as a matter of placement and theme, but as a choreography of meaning.
Before Yanru ever wrote a curatorial framework or assembled an exhibition team, she spent years directing bodies on stage. Trained in dance choreography, she worked on large-scale performances that drew on complex themes of memory, national identity, and cultural representation. The early works embedded in Yanru a lasting sensitivity to composition, rhythm, and the affective power of movement. Her fascination with narrative through motion extended beyond traditional theatre. In her work as a producer of documentary film, she brought these same principles to bear on moving images, crafting emotionally resonant visual languages that emphasised presence and place. In the documentary Let the Flower of Ballet Bloom in the Valley, she followed the story of two ballet educators working in rural Yunnan, focusing on themes of resilience and cultural transmission. Whether on stage or on screen, Yanru’s approach consistently emphasised movement as a method of storytelling, using the body not merely as an expressive tool but as a vehicle of social and cultural meaning.
Yanru’s academic path mirrored this professional evolution. After completing a master’s degree in dance science and education in the UK, she gradually transitioned into the realm of curating. The shift was less a rupture than a recalibration. What she once organised in time and gesture, she now began to organise in space and structure. Yet the underlying logic remained intact: how to create emotional resonance, how to lead the viewer’s perception, and how to allow different elements—whether dancers, performers, objects, or audiences—to coexist in dynamic tension.
This transition came to full fruition in her curatorial practice over the past few years. Working in both the UK and China, Yanru has developed exhibitions that reflect a distinctly interdisciplinary ethos. She has curated projects that investigate how contemporary objects encode meaning in the digital era, how memory and archive can be embodied, and how emotional states can be translated into spatial experience. A hallmark of her work is the integration of performance within exhibition spaces. Rather than relegating performance to a secondary program, she often builds it into the exhibition itself, allowing the live body to cohabit with material artworks. In one such project, performances unfolded throughout the run of the exhibition, disrupting the static expectations of the white cube and inviting visitors into moments of unpredictability and immediacy.
Choreo Archive Exhibition
This strategy reflects not only her dance background but also her understanding of audience as an active presence. “In dance, we always choreograph for the space, but also for the eye,” she notes. “The audience is not passive. They are moving, sensing, interpreting.” This sensibility carries over to her exhibitions, where spatial design is often used to choreograph attention. Works are not simply arranged but positioned in relation to how a viewer might walk, pause, or turn. The curatorial gesture becomes an invitation to movement.
Crucially, Yanru’s cross-cultural position—working between East Asia and the UK—has also shaped her curatorial values. She frequently collaborates with emerging artists from both regions, building bridges between different educational traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, and cultural vocabularies. In particular, she has emphasised the role of craft and embodied knowledge as critical forms of intelligence, resisting overly conceptual or dematerialised approaches that dominate some sectors of the contemporary art world. In her view, the hand, the body, and the gesture remain vital sites of knowledge production.
What unites all these practices is a fundamental belief in art as an embodied, time-based process. For Yanru, curating is not about fixing meaning but animating it. Her exhibitions breathe, pause, accelerate, and surprise. They invite audiences not only to look but to move—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. In a cultural moment increasingly saturated with static images and disembodied discourse, Yanru’s work reminds us of the body’s intelligence, of motion as method, and of the curatorial as choreography.
In that sense, she has never truly left the stage. She has simply expanded it.
