Artist Statement
London as an emerging independent artist. His artistic practice
centers on conceptual art and the study of Institutional Critique, as
he adeptly navigates both curatorial interpretation and artistic
creation. Ren employs publicly recognisable elements essential for
constructing exhibitions and art events—such as labels, signs, and
curatorial tools—as mediums for his work. This approach invites a
thoughtful exploration of how we perceive the spatial dynamics of
production, research, and display.
Through his work, Ren seeks to uncover the positive cultural
potential of exhibitions as social events, viewing them as creative
mediums that foster cognitive experiences and collective
engagement. The decentralisation of artistic authority serves as a
key criterion for assessing the sustainability of his practice as a
valuable research endeavour and paves the way for fostering long-
term collaboration with curatorial teams.
Education
2021-2023 MFA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom
2014-2018 Oil Painting, Fine Art, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, Beijing, China
2011-2014 The Attached Middle School to The Central Academy of Art & Design, Beijing, China
2014-2018 Oil Painting, Fine Art, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, Beijing, China
2011-2014 The Attached Middle School to The Central Academy of Art & Design, Beijing, China
Group Shows
2025 Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2025 ‘The Director’s Cut’ , Online Showcase
2025 ITERATION, Koppel Collective, London
2024 The No-Art Art Show Vol.2, hARTslane Gallery, London
2024 Annual Open 2024, Southwark Park Galleries, London
2024 ASCERTAIN, Espacio Gallery, London
2024 About Time, The Handbag Factory, London
2024 17th Community Art Exhibition in Virtual Reality, Circular Artspace
2024 Leamington Open 2024, Friends of Leamington Art Gallery (FLAG) & Warwick
District Council, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Royal Leamington Spa
2024 Perceive, Espacio Gallery, London
2023 OBSCURA-SHADOWS AND WHISPERS, Crypt Gallery, London
2023 Through the Looking Glass, Mall Galleries, London
2023 Tide, Koppel X Gallery, London
2022 Present Tense, Deptford X Festival, Deptford Art Studio, London
2022 The Fish Restaurant of The End of Universe, Billingsgate Market, London
2022 On Hold, Deptford Art Studio, London
2017 XingErShangXia, Beijing institute of Fashion Technology, Beijing
2025 ITERATION, Koppel Collective, London
2024 The No-Art Art Show Vol.2, hARTslane Gallery, London
2024 Annual Open 2024, Southwark Park Galleries, London
2024 ASCERTAIN, Espacio Gallery, London
2024 About Time, The Handbag Factory, London
2024 17th Community Art Exhibition in Virtual Reality, Circular Artspace
2024 Leamington Open 2024, Friends of Leamington Art Gallery (FLAG) & Warwick
District Council, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Royal Leamington Spa
2024 Perceive, Espacio Gallery, London
2023 OBSCURA-SHADOWS AND WHISPERS, Crypt Gallery, London
2023 Through the Looking Glass, Mall Galleries, London
2023 Tide, Koppel X Gallery, London
2022 Present Tense, Deptford X Festival, Deptford Art Studio, London
2022 The Fish Restaurant of The End of Universe, Billingsgate Market, London
2022 On Hold, Deptford Art Studio, London
2017 XingErShangXia, Beijing institute of Fashion Technology, Beijing
Press
article by Sophie Nowakowska, July 2025.
2025 “Meet The Artists,” Homiens, June 2025
2025 This is Tomorrow, “The Conceptual Architecture of Absence: Haochen Ren’s Institutional Critique.” authored by James Smiths, April 2025
2025 Contemporary Art Issue, “The Space Between Declarations: On Haochen Ren’s Art; Borrowed Spaces & Labels Without Anchors,” featured article by Julien Delagrange, April 2025
2025 FAD Magazine, “Renegotiating Meaning: Labels, Spaces, and the Viewer in Haochen Ren’s Practice,” authored by Mark Westall, April 2025
2024 “Interviews: 10 Questions with Haochen Ren,” Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art Magazine, June 2024
2024 “101 Contemporary Artists and More Vol.6,” Collect Art, June 2024
Prizes and Awards
2025 Finalist, Doddington Hall Young Sculptor Award 2025, Doddington Hall & Gardens
2025 Extended Longlist, Jackson’s art prize 2025, Jackson’s Art Supplies
2024 Artistic Merit, The Luxembourg Art Prize 2024, Pinacothèque (a private museum in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg)
Private Color, 2019
Transparent plastic paper
144 x 96 cm
Transparent plastic paper
144 x 96 cm
What colour did you possess—if only momentarily—through this flag?
The process of perception is rarely neutral. Our encounter with any object or image is inevitably shaped by the cultural context, social frameworks, and hypothetical principles that govern our modes of understanding. The work you are reading about is itself being mediated by this text—a framing I have constructed to guide, or perhaps disrupt, your encounter with it. Equally, the viewer’s interpretation participates in shaping the work’s meaning. This dynamic exists within a specific relational and institutional framework, subject to the exhibition’s internal logic and spatial politics.
Cognitive experience—particularly in the field of art—is never immune from prior knowledge or the structures of cultural transmission that inform it. This includes how we understand the act of interpretation itself. Recognition and misrecognition alike are conditioned by what precedes them.
Through this flag, I invite each viewer to encounter their own “Private Colour”: a subjective inflection shaped by context, memory, and belief. That multiplicity is both our potential and our constraint.
Public Reserved, 2022
Wooden folding chair, wooden folding table
79 x 43 x 47 cm, 66 x 48 x 37 cm
The work examines a privately owned chair through the lens of the inscription Reserved, using this term to challenge prevailing notions of ownership and accessibility. By foregrounding the tension between private objects and public space, the piece suggests that artefacts marked by systems of reservation can transcend individual possession and acquire a form of communal significance.
This interplay generates a layered dynamic: the private attributes of the object are experienced within a public context, transforming discrete encounters into a shared narrative. The work proposes a paradoxical environment in which privately owned objects occupy public settings, activated by individuals who reconfigure these spaces into personalised experiences.
Adopting a functional approach, the piece incorporates a private object akin in purpose to public seating, re-contextualising its characteristics through a deliberate act of inscription. In doing so, it reframes the object’s role and invites reflection on the shifting boundaries between the private and the public.
Untitled Collection, 2023
Outdoor: acrylic cubes combination, metal lock systems, indoor: heavy duty tape, vinyl stickers
Modifiable size (39.37 in x 23.62 in x 19.69 in)
Outdoor: acrylic cubes combination, metal lock systems, indoor: heavy duty tape, vinyl stickers
Modifiable size (39.37 in x 23.62 in x 19.69 in)
The work extends a portion of the individual exhibition space beyond the physical limits of the original site, reconstituting it through a modular system of hundreds of transparent acrylic cubes—each embedded with an independent locking mechanism. These cubes collectively act as a spatial proxy, replicating the original volume while existing externally to it.
Audience members engage in the co-curation of the exhibition through actions such as appropriation, intervention, and occupation. As each cube is altered—whether conceptually or materially—the state of the original interior exhibition space is rendered unstable, subject to continuous fluctuations both physical and conceptual. The project thus establishes a reciprocal dynamic between the internal and external, between absence and occupation, between structure and variability.
Notably, the graduation exhibition had no centralised curatorial authority; its framework was conceived and enacted entirely by the participating artists. Deliberately forgoing the definition of a singular narrative or relational structure among individual contributions, the exhibition emerged as an open system. While the artists authored the initial conditions, they collectively chose to attenuate their authorial presence in the final presentation, foregrounding instead the agency of participants and the
emergent possibilities inherent in their interactions with the work.
no title, 2023
Printing on foam board
6 in x 4 in x 2
It seeks to unsettle the conventional agreement between the artwork and its institutional framing. If two or more exhibition labels can simultaneously function as both referents and referents-to, their significance may no longer rely on the objects they purport to describe. Instead, meaning is displaced towards the interpretative acts of the viewer, shaped by the immediate context in which the labels are encountered.
These labels—whether perceived as bureaucratic instruments of institutional authority or as autonomous works in their own right—intervene in the ontological structure of the exhibition. Their presence conditions not only what is seen but how it is thought. The viewer's cognitive engagement with these elements initiates a destabilisation of the conceptual foundations on which the exhibition rests. Ontology, in this sense, becomes an unstable field: provisional, mutable, and contingent upon perception and its conditioning forces.
Within such a framework, the physical site of the exhibition begins to recede. It is replaced by a plurality of overlapping and, at times, conflicting ‘exhibition concepts’—intangible and transitory structures shaped by those who possess the agency to define or influence the exhibition's conceptual identity. The work, therefore, ceases to occupy a stable spatial logic. It exists instead within the fluid negotiations of meaning, authorship, and authority as enacted in the subjective space of the viewer’s mind.