Artist bio
Ranran Hu is an artist from southern China. She completed her BFA in Digital Media Art at Nanjing University of the Arts in China and moved to the United States in August 2024 to attend the MFA program at Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Her work currently centers on the themes of movement and imagination, focusing on the individual's experience of geographical and cultural mobility. Photobooks and abstract paintings are her main mediums. She is sensitive to the abstract moments of daily life and tries to capture the passage of life and the fragility of human existence in tiny, fleeting moments. Also, she reflects on and criticizes the patterns of repetitive life, exploring human burnout, adaptation and resistance in the daily cycle. Her works emphasize the uniqueness and importance of individual experience in the world and oppose grand narratives.
In the coming year, she hopes to explore performance and conceptual art, as she has a strong interest in making action itself an integral part of her work.
In addition to art, in her daily life she enjoys reading, swing dance, playing the ukulele, running, biking, traveling by train, and talking to people.
Artist statement
My work grows out of a lifelong experience of “movement”: moving between countries, switching between Mandarin and English, and navigating memories that I keep forgetting and recalling. Growing up in a migrant worker family, and as the middle child, I learned early how to entertain myself: wandering the streets, writing short stories and poems, and documenting small, often humorous moments in daily life. Over time, these habits became the foundation of my practice, making self-amusement, imagination, and movement the starting points of my work.
Now, as an MFA student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, I work across photography, painting, and bookmaking. My research focuses on feminism, psychogeography, the reconstruction and materiality of memory, and the subtle forms of humor and politics in everyday life.
My interest in photobooks began with my teenage habit of making journals. Holding a book in your hands creates a kind of intimacy and openness that I value. I started making abstract paintings in the summer of 2025. They come from improvisation, from physical intuition, and from the unstable and shifting nature of memory.
An episode of meningitis in my infancy shaped how I understand time. I often feel that I live in a nonlinear sense of time, where memories reappear and reorganize themselves through emotions, bodily actions, or chance encounters with materials.
I believe art belongs to everyone, not just to certain groups. My work does not try to give clear answers; instead, it invites viewers to bring their own experiences into it. I hope to create a space where my memories and the viewer’s memories overlap, where boundaries soften, and where looking becomes a form of wandering.
Exhibitions
MCAD MFA Fall Show, MCAD Main Gallery, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 2025.
Suzy Greenberg Juried Exhibition, SOO Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN. 2025.
Photography &, Center for the Visual Arts in Wausau, WI. 2025.
Midwest Graduate Art and Design Symposium (GRAADS), Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. 2025.
Early Career Artist Show, Squirrel Haus Arts, Minneapolis, MN. 2025.
Made at MCAD, MCAD Main Gallery, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 2024.
MCAD MFA Fall Show, MCAD Main Gallery, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 2024.
Self Portrait, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2025.