Ben Wenhou Yu (b. 1981, Shanghai) is a curator, architect, literary translator, and founding director of Northing - Centre for East-Asian Art and Culture in Bergen. He is also a board member of Norwegian Crafts from 2022 to 2025. Ben received his architectural education at Tongji University in Shanghai and worked as an architect in Bergen for 12 years. During this period, he translated several novels from Norwegian, English, Swedish, and Danish into Chinese. His translation of Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen was shortlisted for the Lu Xin Literary Prize for Best Translation. He was one of the key speakers at the 7th edition of StoryDrive, an all-media platform in Asia dedicated to exploring new forms of collaboration across media boundaries.
At the end of 2019, he co-founded Northing Space with visual designer Yilei Wang, a multi-disciplinary art venue promoting contemporary East-Asian art and culture. Ben and Yilei have curated most of the exhibitions in Northing Space’s annual programs. Alongside the gallery space, they also run an art publishing project called Kinakaal Forlag (Chinese Cabbage Publisher), which continues to bridge Nordic and East-Asian art and literature in the form of printed matters. Books published by Kinakaal Forlag have won the “Most Beautiful Books of the Year” award in Norway four times, with Ben editing three of the four winning books. Ben was also the designer of Debt Verses by Miriam Stoney, which won the award in 2023. This book was the result of a collaboration with Bergen Assembly in 2022. The joint exhibition "Flex Point," curated by Northing in collaboration with Entrée (Randi Grov Berger) in 2023, received a very positive review on Kunstkritikk, praising that “The architect Ben Wenhou Yu and the designer Yilei Wang […] have created an incredible institution, one that you wouldn't expect to exist in a city the size of Bergen.” In 2024, to celebrate their first quinquennium, Northing changed its name to Northing - Centre for East-Asian Art and Culture.
