Lin Wu - Curator
Lin Wu is an independent curator and researcher in art education. He graduated from Tsinghua University and holds a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art. His research and curatorial practice focus on media history, educational reform, public learning, and the relationship between technology, space, and social environments. Through interdisciplinary projects, he examines how educational experience is shaped by changing systems of communication, architecture, mobility, and cultural production. His work is driven by a central question:
Can exhibitions become a new form of public learning infrastructure for the twenty-first century?
Wu’s research is grounded in the study of historical experiments in alternative education and media-based learning. He has developed an ongoing genealogy that includes the Open Air School Movement, Educational Radio, Teaching Machines, Mobile schools, Temporary Schools, and learning practices situated within museums and exhibition spaces. Rather than treating these examples as isolated episodes, he understands them as responses to specific historical conditions, including disease, war, migration, technological change, and institutional disruption. Together, they reveal how education has repeatedly been reorganised through new media, spatial structures, and forms of public participation.
His curatorial approach understands education not as a fixed institutional system, but as an environmental technology: a way of organising knowledge, bodies, attention, and social relationships. Within this framework, exhibitions are not conceived as the final presentation of completed artworks. Instead, they operate as temporary, adaptable, and publicly accessible structures for learning. Through the arrangement of objects, conversations, workshops, performances, and collective encounters, the exhibition becomes a site in which knowledge can be produced, transmitted, questioned, and experienced.
Wu’s projects often bring together artists, educators, researchers, young people, and local communities. He is particularly interested in how artistic practice can contribute to public participation, youth education, intercultural exchange, and social innovation. His work explores the possibility that art institutions might move beyond their conventional role as spaces of display and become active environments for collective inquiry. In this sense, exhibitions can function as platforms that connect different forms of expertise while allowing audiences to encounter knowledge through material, spatial, emotional, and embodied experience.
A recurring concern in his practice is the growing inability of traditional educational structures to respond adequately to technological acceleration, social mobility, and future uncertainty. When schools, families, and established institutions are unable to accommodate rapidly changing conditions, Wu proposes that exhibition spaces can offer alternative forms of public learning. These spaces may organise knowledge, connect communities, regulate attention, and create opportunities for experimentation. Through curatorial projects, workshops, and collaborative research, he seeks to develop new models of public learning and to strengthen exchanges between art education communities in the United Kingdom and internationally. By positioning the exhibition as both a cultural form and a civic structure, his practice asks how contemporary art can participate more directly in the organisation of knowledge and public life.
Education
Royal College of Art
Tsinghua University
Jury
2026
Kane Art Prize, London
2023
Changting Art Prize III, Tokyo
2021
Annuario d'Arte Contemporanea , Milan
Trustee
THEM Institute, Hangzhou
K:art Studio, London
Selected Curatorial Exhibitions
2026
Dwelling, The Museum of Kyoto
2026
9th International art exhibition, Kurumi City Art Musuem
2026
Luminous Lunatic Park, The Wind H Art Centre
2025
Education Machine, A60 International Art Space
2024
Invisible Classroom, SFZY Gallery
2023
Coupling, Luan Gallery
2022
Cache, A60 International Art Space
2021
Digital Residue, Eastern Art Museum
2020
Threolds, Changting Art Gallery