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Mia Yu is an independent researcher, curator and educator based in Beijing. As the winner of the Yishu Award for Critical Writing and the CCAA Art Critic Award, Mia Yu has widely published in art journals in English and in Chinese. Her research on Chinese exhibition history was recently published in the book Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000. She has also edited special issues including Atlas of Archives: Reimagining History in Chinese Contemporary Art and Exhibition History: The Emergence of A Research Field. As a curator, Mia Yu has addressed issues of border, geopoetics, historical memory and speculative geography through exhibitions such as “From Vladivostok to Xishuangbanna”, “Photoethics: CHINAFRICA” and “Ni Jun: An Inconvenient Case”. In 2020, she was the co-curator of Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival and nominated for the AAC Curator of Year Award. As an educator, Mia Yu regularly lectures at China Academy of Art, China Central Art Academy and Xi’an Art Academy. She is also committed to teaching at the Alternative Art School, an online educational platform and community for mid-career artists around the world. Mia Yu’s video essay Pan Yuliang: A Journey of Silence based on her ongoing research on marginalized women artists in history has been exhibited at Villa Vassilieff Paris, Guangdong Times Museum, Asia Society Hong Kong, Times Art Center Berlin and Shenzhen Art Museum.

Hauntings in the Archives

Situated in the liminal space between the art historical, the curatorial and the artistic, Mia Yu’s work departs from identifying the voids and the contradictions in historical archives and sites of memory. The process often enables physical encounters with the persistence of the past through various forms of haunting. Using recent exhibition and research projects as case studies, Mia Yu traces how artists and curators, particularly in China, have engaged and enacted haunting and spectrality as an ethics of memory and mutual recognition across time and space.