CURRENT | 不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland​

‘CURRENT: Contemporary Art From Scotland’ (2014 - 2020) is a large-scale international curatorial collaboration with major organisations in China, funded by Creative Scotland, British Council, Scottish Government and Shanghai International Culture Association.

Adopting Roland Barthes’s aphorism ‘the contemporary is the untimely’ as its maxim, Hao’s curatorial methodology interrogates artistic practice as a process of the contemporary and its multiple iterations as culture and social realities within a transnational context. The intention of ‘CURRENT’ was developed in dialogue with Chinese critic Wang Nanming over a one-year research period.

Curated by Hao as a four-phase exhibition, artists-in-residence programme and events programme at multiple venues in China and the UK, ‘CURRENT’ is the largest presentation to date in China of contemporary art made in Scotland, foregrounding critical engagement in grassroots politics and their social and political contexts. The outcomes feature over 40 established and emerging artists in 6 newly commissioned solo exhibitions and 2 group survey exhibitions. ‘CURRENT’ also presented a group exhibition of seminal British Artists’ video works of the 1970s and 1980s, selected from the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design REWIND archive alongside a group exhibition of recent artists’ moving image works made in Scotland, FFWD, selected in collaboration with Modern Edinburgh Film School and choreographed as a juxtaposition of the histories and current conditions of artists’ video/moving image practice, with their connections, overlaps and synchronicities.

Three phases of ‘CURRENT’ took place at Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, Beijing Red Brick Art Museum and K11Art Foundation, with two subsequent exhibitions and a symposium at Cooper Gallery. ‘CURRENT’ garnered over 100 reviews in national media, art press, and academic journals in China and the UK. The project was funded from a range of competitive sources, totalling £175,700.