Sophia Yadong Hao

Sophia Yadong Hao is Director & Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery where she leads an internationally recognised programme that has positioned Cooper Gallery as a distinctive platform in Scotland for its radical curatorial research, international approach and focus on critical inquiries in contemporary art and culture. 

Hao’s research addresses contemporary art curating and visual culture. Employing a rhizomatic curatorial methodology, Hao focuses on exhibition making as a critical inquiry, Feminist ethos as curatorial method, the political potential of the curatorial, and alternative art pedagogies as a radical praxis of decolonised knowledge production.

Hao has curated contemporary art projects internationally, notably NOTES on a return (2009), a re-contextualisation of performance art from 1980s Britain; Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (2016-2017) which evoked the ethos of feminism for an alternative politics in culture and society; and CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland (2015-2021) a touring programme in China interrogating contemporaneity in a global capitalist context. 

Since 2021, Hao has conceived and curated The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins Towards Creative Emancipation, a five phase exhibition programme examining histories and future possibilities of creative pedagogy as a radical emancipatory praxis emphasising knowledge as a collective social experience.

Founding editor of the art journal &labels and online publication What I am Reading Now…, Hao’s noted publications include Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? (2019), Hubs and Fictions: On Current Art and Imported Remoteness (2016, with Edgar Schmitz), A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (2015) and NOTES on a return (2010).

Hao was awarded the Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowship 2014/15. 

Hao served as a committee member of British Art Network Steering Committee (Tate Britain and Paul Mellon Centre, 2019-2022), a member of Art 360 Advisory Group (2019-2024), a member of Live Art Sector Review Steering Group (Arts Council England, 2019-2021) and a Board Member of Scottish Contemporary Art Network (SCAN 2012 – 2018). 

Hao is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland. 

Hao’s curatorial research is focused on:

• Rhizomatic curatorial methodology and its capacity to configure a ‘space of appearance’: the role of the curatorial in the production of the political.
• Art school gallery as a laboratory for radical pedagogies.
• The performativity of the gallery.
• Rethinking ‘contemporaneity’ of transnational contemporary art exhibitions  in a global capitalist context.
• Feminist ethos as a curatorial method.
• The role of ‘fiction’ in the globally distributed art world ecology.
• The proposition of artists’ collaboration as a de-materialized studio and as an Event.
• The Para-curatorial as a mode of investigating and challenging ideas of public, context and critical discourse through discursive, participatory and process led strategies.

• Art and design