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A Conversation with Huiyu Lan
Curating from the Inside Out
There are curators who arrive at practice through theory—who move from the seminar room to the gallery via a series of careful academic preparations. Huiyu Lan (Lana) arrived by a different route: through theatre, through the space, through intuition. Trained as a scenographer at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing before completing her MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, Lana has built a practice that is as attentive to the atmospheric and sensory dimensions of exhibition-making as it is to its conceptual ambitions.
Since founding Purist Gallery in London in 2024, Huiyu Lan has progressed efficiently. The gallery has produced a series of exhibitions that collectively sketch the contours of a distinctive curatorial sensibility: one drawn to the unstable ground between abstraction and legibility, between psychoanalytic theory and embodied intuition, between the inherited structures of Western thought and the less visible traditions of Chinese metaphysics that Huiyu Lan has studied privately for more than five years.
Huiyu Lan works across exhibition-making, research, academic mentorship, and institutional programming, and has collaborated with more than one hundred emerging artists since establishing Purist Culture as a broader platform. The gallery sits alongside Purist Magazine and a series of alternative educational initiatives, reflecting an approach to the art world that is at once commercially aware and philosophically serious.
Curating, for Huiyu Lan, is ultimately a form of translation: the attempt to make abstract experience concrete, to transform an intuition into an environment that another person can enter and encounter for themselves. A stand-out quote that describes her curatorial endeavors can currently be found on the about page of Purist Magazine, stating that she does not aim to focus on what is already established, but on what is urgent. Which seemed reason enough to, with urgency, sit down with her for a conversation about art and her hybrid approach when it comes to curating it.
Julien Delagrange: Welcome to CAI, Lana. How are you?
Huiyu Lan: Good. How are you?
JD: I am doing great; we’re very pleased to have you on CAI. Before we move into your practice itself, I’d like to start with formation. You trained initially as a scenographer—a discipline concerned with how space, light, and environment set the stage for the experience. How did you make the move from theatre to curating, and what did that training leave behind in the way you approach exhibitions?
HL: I have been searching for a more liberal mode of expression. During my studies in France, I encountered the working methods of several contemporary artists, whose practices resonated with my understanding of the avant-garde — direct, pure, evolving, and diverse, moving away from established systems of censorship and rigid frames. These attitudes led me to reconsider my early training in scenography. Shifting from actors to artworks, elaboration becomes less central, while imagination takes on a greater role.
JD: You have spoken of your curatorial practice as beginning with feeling or atmosphere rather than theory. That’s an interesting way to frame it—intuition as method. Can you describe what that looks like in practice? Where does an exhibition actually begin for you?
HL: Information processing and atmospheric perception happen at the same time and intuition is what tells me in that moment whether something is worth digging into further. Manque, Objet petite “a” is a good example. Long before that project came together, a lot of difficult things kept happening around me, some to me, some to people close to me. Around that same time, I got pretty deep into Lacan’s writing on desire. Something just clicked. There’s really only one root and fundamental feeling of incompleteness. We’re constantly trying to fill a void that can never actually be filled, and that drive is desire.
As a late millennial, I’ve lived through a lot of intense social and technological change. I’ve felt how fast-shifting environments mess with people’s mental states, and watched the anxiety, confusion, and new desires come out of that. So most of the time I’m kind of just in searching mode through reading, through conversations, or just paying close attention to things. From the outside it probably looks like nothing’s happening. But internally, all these unresolved questions keep piling up and brewing, that’s quietly where the real core of an exhibition starts to form.
JD: Purist Gallery launched in December 2024 with My Favourite Colour is Transparency. The title itself is a provocation of sorts—transparency as a color, a preference, an aesthetic condition. What were you trying to establish with that first show, and what did you learn from it?
HL: This title is, in some ways, a distillation of my thinking, almost like a slogan, but one carrying feelings that language can’t fully describe. What I’m trying to get at is a state that exists before language kicks in. By stripping away fixed coordinates, contexts, and identity markers, meaning gets pulled from any specific location and becomes something closer to a shared human unconscious, felt rather than read. “Transparency” here isn’t a visual description; it’s a method, a way of looking that refuses to be filtered through mediated reality. When theory and science can themselves become footnotes to war, skepticism becomes necessary. Transparency is, in that sense, its visual expression.
As the opening exhibition, it was also a structural experiment: breaking away from the traditional reliance on narrative and boundary, so that “transparency” stops being just an adjective and becomes a methodology for looking. This also draws on Eastern philosophy: the Taoist wu points toward an undifferentiated wholeness, while the Buddhist śūnyatā points toward the idea that nothing has a fixed, inherent nature. Together, they form the philosophical backdrop: transparency as a way of dissolving boundaries. Clearing away the noise to get to the essence is not a state to arrive easily, and maybe that’s exactly why it’s worth keeping asking.
JD: In November last year, you presented Soft Exit—a solo exhibition by British artist Ted Le Swer, whose practice brings together moving image, CGI, wet photography, and sculptural prop-making to examine how contemporary society negotiates its relationship with ecology. It was also a personal discovery—an introduction to Le Swer’s work that I found genuinely striking. You have described the show as emerging from your sustained interest in electronic sculpture and new-media art, and in how non-traditional materials can challenge the relationships between artworks, materiality, and the environment. What drew you to Le Swer’s practice specifically, and how did that ecological framework inform the curatorial decisions you made for the show?
HL: The conversation around ecology actually came out of my first conversation with Ted about his work. “Soft Release” is originally a term from wildlife conservation, it’s about helping animals gently transition out of human care and back into independence. But embedded in that process is control. From there, I wanted to bring in Ted’s own experience. Outside of being an artist, he works for a large advertising agency, and there was this urgency in him to respond to that.
So Soft Exit takes a slightly different angle from “Soft Release”; it points more toward gradual firing procedures, leading to Marx’s concept of alienated labor. Labor stops being a process of self-realization and becomes something external to yourself, something you’re forced to adjust to. Whether it’s ecological management or corporate systems, humans keep trying to use various mechanisms to reset the meaning of life, gradually disconnecting from their own humanity. You slowly lose touch with your own feelings and agency. That’s what we were trying to get at with Soft Exit.
JD: Your ongoing research project Paradoxical Field is one of two exhibitions you describe as closest to your heart, and it has a particularly personal origin—an experience of uncanniness in your grandparents’ home, a memory structured around conflicting feelings of enclosure, fear, warmth, and laughter. How did that experience become a curatorial framework, and what does the first phase of the project—the Prelude—represent within the larger arc of the research?
HL: Liminality is a state I keep coming back to, and I think it’s the experience closest to what I’d call post-existential existence. I believe multiple possibilities can coexist at the same moment. Meaning doesn’t depend on a single correct interpretation; it is activated by the tension between different interpretations. So for me, the point isn’t to choose an interpretation, it’s to stop any single one from taking over. I’m less interested in choosing than in coexistence. If paradox operates at the level of language and concept, two contradictory positions holding true at once, then liminality points to the space between them. A state in which the old order has broken down and the new one hasn’t arrived yet. As the anthropologist Victor Turner described it, liminality is a “betwixt and between” experience. It belongs neither to the past nor quite to the future.
The first artist confirmed for this exhibition was Louise Gaubert. The moment I saw her work, What Remains (2025), I was immediately pulled back to memories of my grandparents’ home. The window in the piece triggered something I couldn’t quite explain. Windows have always fascinated me; they naturally exist between two worlds: inside and outside, private and public, real and imagined. Maybe it’s also a coincidence that Gaubert is French, because it was during my time living in France that I first started wanting to make an exhibition about windows. Sometimes I’d stop on the street and just stand there, drawn to a particular window and the strange pull of not knowing, imagining who lived inside, what their life was like, whether they were happy or lonely. It sounds almost absurd, but that kind of gazing into the unknown has always excited me.
So Paradoxical Field – Prelude is more a process of discovery about liminality. In its earliest stage, our perception of the outside world becomes paradoxical: existing frameworks start to dissolve, and new understanding hasn’t formed yet. We’re forced to stay inside the uncertainty.
JD: There is another dimension to your thinking that has not yet fully surfaced in your public work—a long-standing study of Chinese metaphysics, geomancy, divination traditions, and Western astrology, which you describe as alternative ways of understanding the relationships between self, time, space, and the wider world. Why has this remained in the background, when frameworks such as Lacanian theory or Jungian thought—which arguably sit more comfortably within postmodern artistic discourse—have been easier to bring forward? And do you have a sense of what form this other strand of your thinking might eventually take in an exhibition context?
HL: These systems belong to a broader numerological tradition that extends from the Chinese Yi Jing as its core influence, a text Carl Jung was deeply engaged with in his later years. The character “Yi” means change; it’s essentially a philosophy of change, one that spans a remarkably wide range of disciplines and carries a complexity that, honestly, is very hard to fully grasp. Feng Shui, for example, can be understood as a methodological system built on the structures of yin-yang and the five elements, organised around the movement of qi. More specifically, it’s concerned with how qi flows, gathers, or becomes blocked within a space, and how that affects the people in it. My exhibition Paradoxical Field connects to this way of thinking; it’s an extension of that framework.
My grandmother’s house is a good example of what poor qi circulation actually feels like. Growing up, the place always carried a strange, oppressive quality I couldn’t explain. I later found out that several of the male members who had lived in that apartment died not long after moving in, my grandfather among them. That information arrived late, but it formed a kind of retroactive confirmation of what I had felt as a child. This kind of thinking is easily mistaken for something cult-like or superstitious, but for me, it’s not a religious belief. It’s more like an alternative explanatory system for the relationships between space, time, and existence. I wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking about it publicly until I understand the theory more fully. But I do think these ideas might find their way out eventually, through writing, performance, or some other medium that feels more suited to them.
JD: When you select artists to work with, you have said you are less concerned with medium or theme than with sensibility—with whether the work has a distinctive aesthetic language and can sustain prolonged attention. What does that mean in practice? What are you actually looking for when you look at work?
HL: I have always felt that truly powerful work resists being taken apart. It cannot be fully explained. There is something about it that remains irreducible, the way Coca-Cola’s formula has never been fully reverse-engineered. That particular pull is what I am looking for: something essential and singular that belongs only to that work and no other. You either feel it or you don’t. And when you do, it tends to be immediate.
JD: You have been running Purist Gallery for just over a year and have worked with more than one hundred emerging artists in that time. That’s an ambitious pace. How do you balance the commercial reality of running an independent gallery with the kind of research-led, philosophically serious practice you are describing?
HL: There is a strategic dimension to it, certainly. In the early stage, we needed to move quickly to establish a presence in the UK and European markets, build visibility, and engage with a large number of artists to understand where the real energy in the field lies. That was a proactive choice. But I would not say I am balancing the two. Curatorial standards come first, and rest follows naturally.
JD: Looking ahead: Purist Gallery is expected to reopen with a new exhibition this summer. Without giving too much away, can you tell us something about the direction of that project and how it relates to where your thinking currently sits?
HL: Artificial intelligence has become an unavoidable subject in recent years. I am interested in the ethical questions that surround it: Whether AI can ultimately serve society in a more responsible and meaningful way. Scholars including Alessandro Perrella and Alexey Turchin have raised ethical questions surrounding AI and the prospect of immortality. If humans were to achieve immortality through mind uploading or body enhancement, would such a future be accessible only to privileged elites? Would human beings continue to seek meaning at all?
These questions have remained with me for a long time. Throughout history, technologies developed in the name of progress have often evolved beyond their original intentions. Whether artificial intelligence will follow a similar trajectory is, in my view, one of the most urgent questions of our time.
JD: Thank you very much for your time, Lana. It has been a real pleasure.
HL: Thank you for having me.
Last Updated on June 30, 2026
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
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