Colin Chinnery was born in 1971 in Edinburgh, Scotland. From 1992 to 1995 he was part of the experimental rock band 'Xue Wei'. From 1998 to 2002 he contributed to the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, and then he continued to be the Arts Manager of the British Council in Beijing until 2006. He initiated large projects in sound art, theatre, and live art, bringing a wider audience into contact with experimental practices. Following that, he was the Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Beijing's Ullens Center for the Arts until 2008. While in this position, he was instrumental in organising China's first major contemporary art institution. In 2009 he was the Director of the ShContemporary Art Fair in Shanghai.
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Colin Chinnery's project, I Want What You Want (2009) engages the formal language of exhibition construction. Each artwork within the show has its independent language and meaning, but the device of artwork repetition and placement will deliberately undermine that identity. By having several versions or copies of each artwork, and by placing them in formation to create a formal pattern, the exhibition emerges as a unified whole at the expense of each work. The exhibition becomes a large artwork that only has the lifespan of one showing. By exploring the formal languages of the individual artwork and the exhibition, this show can be understood either as an investigation of the nature of individual versus group identities, or as an exploration into whether new meaning can be created whilst attempting to escape it.
He currently is the Artistic Director of the Wuhan Art Terminus (W.H.A.T), a contemporary art institution under development in Wuhan, China, and is the Director of the Multitude Art Prize, a pan-Asian art award and international conference.
