Ou Ning

Ou Ning is a multi-disciplinary practitioner from China, now living in New York. As an artist and filmmaker, he is known for the urban research and documentary projects such as San Yuan Li (2003), commissioned by the 50th Venice Art Biennale; Meishi Street (2006), commissioned by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and premiered in MoMA New York. As a curator, he founded the touring art and design exhibition “Get It Louder” (2005, 2007, 2010), and curated the group sound installations at Battersea Power Station in London, commissioned by Serpentine Gallery (2006); 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (chief curator); 2011 Chengdu Biennale (co-curator); Liu Xiaodong’s Hotan Project (co-curated with Hou Hanru, 2012-2013). As a writer and editor, he is known for his seminal books New Sound of Beijing (1997), Odyssey: Architecture and Literature (2009), The Chinese Thinking: Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviewed China’s Leading Figures (2012), South of Southern: Space, Geography, History and the Biennale (2014) and his literary bimonthly journal Chutzpah! (2011-2014), which published an anthology Chutzpah! -New Voice from China by University of Oklahoma Press in 2015. As an activist, he lived in a village and founded the Bishan Commune (2011-2016) and School of Tillers (2015-2016) to join the new rural reconstruction movement in China, which had a retrospective exhibition at Florence National Library in 2015 and participated in Guggenheim Museum’s touring show “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” in 2017-2018.

Ou Ning was the member of Asian Art Council at Guggenheim Museum (2011) and speaker of Aspen Idea Festival (2012). He also worked as a jury member of the 8th Benesse Prize at the 53rd Venice Art Biennale (2009), Yokohama International Media Art Festival (2009), the 22nd Milan Asian, African and Latin American Film Festival (2012), Debut Award at Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2013). He is a frequent contributor to various magazines, books and has lectured around the world. Ou Ning taught at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University in Fall 2016 and Spring 2017, and worked as the founding curator of Kwan-Yen Project from 2016 to 2018, a historical preservation and renovation project in Yantai, China. He is the senior researcher of the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR, Boston) from 2019 to 2024. His collected writings Utopia in Practice: Bishan Project and Rural Reconstruction was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. His current projects include a book on the communitarian experiments and utopian practices in different countries since 19th century and series of workshops and exhibitions on acoustic milieu, sound art, and local identity.