Beijing museum director sketches future of Chinese contemporary art
Beijing-based Philip Tinari has quietly aided the boom in Chinese contemporary art, writes Doretta Lau
A few weeks before the opening of the Armory Show, New York's largest art fair which ran from March 6-9, the director of Beijing museum Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Philip Tinari, stopped off in Hong Kong.
He was curating "Armory Focus: China", a spotlight on the nation's artistic landscape, and was en route to Los Angeles to meet artists for an exhibition. On his brief stopover, Tinari spoke to a group of art writers at Duddell's in Central about current and upcoming projects.
Our mission is to present Chinese art in a way that implies an international context
His expertise in contemporary Chinese art includes Hong Kong. In 2009, he curated "The Hong Kong Seven" - featuring artists Nadim Abbas, Lee Kit, Leung Chi-wo, Pak Sheung-chuen, Tsang Kin-wah, Adrian Wong and Doris Wong - as part of a Louis Vuitton-sponsored exhibition at the Museum of Art.
Come May, Tinari will be curating an exhibition for Duddell's.
The American was born in 1979 and grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. "Very far from China, no personal connection except we had this very famous Chinese symphony conductor that lived at the top of the hill in this property development," he says.
At Duke University his love of languages set him on a course to become an expert on contemporary Chinese art. "I started studying Chinese and got really interested in contemporary Chinese art … as a crystallisation of the other things I was interested in: globalisation and cultural change, the perilous future position of the US - this was high Clintonian times. And then this idea of whether liberalisation leads to democratisation," he says.
"All that kind of stuff seemed to very neatly be reflected in this body of practices and texts that was the Chinese art world, which is a weird supposition to call it an art world at that point because it was a very kind of underground moment."