As a curator who poetically weaves architecture, performance, and visual art into living fields of perception, Ruoru Wang conceives exhibitions as porous spaces where memory, the body, the social, and the image converge. In Nostalgia and Selfhood Becoming (6–11 October 2025, Fitzrovia Gallery, London), beholders are invited to cross a field of visuality functioning as a membrane—each pore architecturally connotative, implying metaphorical passage and a crossing between worlds. Whether these worlds belong to individual subjectivity, or collective experience, they meet in a curatorial practice that symbolically adopts the notion of the interstice as a locus of encounter and negotiation.
Figuration—at times blurred, bordering the organic rather than obeying realist representation of form and subject—becomes a tender threshold where inner experience and outer reality exhale into one another. The juxtaposition of these motifs with pastoral scenes underscores the transition Wang pursues: a state in which body and nature, through visual association and formal simplification, are experienced as continuous, one condition flowing into another within a single realm. In this exhibition, this connective tissue also opens passages toward architectural themes as metaphors for the collective—crystallised in notions of community, memory, and belonging, and expressed through painting, photography, and digital media. Through this phenomenological approach—by focusing on how things appear to consciousness, and how perception, embodiment, and temporality shape meaning—Wang constructs a curatorial narrative where works exploring the natural world and the body as a beacon of subjectivity, self-awareness, emotion, and fluidity enter a filament-like dialogue with spirituality and form. As Assistant Curator of ArtEvol 2025: Voices from the Undefined (13–19 September 2025, Saatchi Gallery, London), Wang facilitated permeability linking tensions, contradictions, unresolved desires, and potential resolutions, creating the necessary porosity for a large-group exhibition and establishing a rhythm and flow culminating in a narrative of emancipatory fluidity and becoming.
In conceptual terms, Wang’s practice aligns with The Aesthetica Art Prize 2025 at York Art Gallery, where a multimedia assemblage explores global and multicultural expressions of identity, culture, and place—from ancestral memory to working-class landscapes in rural North-East England, and the experience of love and disconnection in an age shaped by digital technology and AI. Her curatorial concerns also resonate with Memory Coexistence: Where Time Converge (2 October – 2 November 2026, Fondazione CARIPLO, Milan), a major exhibition centred on empathy, connection, and the body as a participatory element in collective dialogue beyond cultural and psychological boundaries, affirming a shared human voice.
Aligned with key trends in the global art landscape, Wang asserts her originality by reconstructing subjectivity at the intersection of poetic and metaphorical expression with the culturally and historically collective. Her work evokes ideas and experiences intrinsic to both literal and subjective architectures—structure, space, boundaries, thresholds, and the relations they organise. In Wang’s practice, perceiving space, structure, and passage becomes a phenomenological encounter between perceiver and perceived, inviting the viewer to move through the image and question their own inner architecture.
