Watch the complete program in the video above. (53 min., 40 sec.)

A conversation with collector Harold Newman, founding patron of Asia Society’s Contemporary Art Collection; Lori Zippay, Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix; and Michelle Yun, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, on the best strategies for collecting, preserving, and presenting new media art and how to engage audiences with this medium. Moderated by Boon Hui Tan, Asia Society Vice President of Global Arts & Cultural Programs and Museum Director, on the occasion of the exhibition Rewind: Selections from the Harold and Ruth Newman New Media Collection, Asia Society Museum, on view from June 9 to August 7, 2016.

Harold Newman was Partner & Managing Director of Neuberger Berman, an asset management firm, prior to starting Harold J. Newman Capital LLC. With investments in China, India, Russia, and Kazakhstan, he has been investing in the Asian securities market for more than fifty years. He is Director of the Safe Water Network, which provides clean water to communities in India and Ghana. He has been a steadfast supporter of Asia Society since 1988, serving as a Trustee from 1989 to 1998 and rejoining the board in 2007. He and his wife Ruth, a Trustee from 1999 to 2007 and currently Trustee Emerita, have generously supported a variety of Asia Society initiatives including the establishment of the Museum's contemporary art collection. Aside from his Asia Society activities Mr. Newman has served as a director of the East-West Institute and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation; as Vice Chairman of MCC, an off Broadway Theatrical Production Company; and as a member of the New York Historical Society Chairman’s Council. He is also a member of the International Programs Center Board of Visitors and the Board’s planning and development committee for the Institute of U.S.-China Issues, which Mr. and Mrs. Newman endowed at the University of Oklahoma. Additionally, Mr. and Mrs. Newman established The Newman Prize to recognize excellence in Chinese literature. Their first honoree, Mo Yan, subsequently received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012. Mr. Newman received an MBA from the Harvard Business School, an MA from the School of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and a BS in geography from the University of Oklahoma. He taught geography at The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania. 

Boon Hui Tan is Vice President for Global Arts & Cultural Programs and Director, Asia Society Museum, New York, where he leads the organization’s global arts and cultural activities. He oversees Asia Society Museum’s acclaimed exhibition programs and the Asia Society Museum Collection, which comprises the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of Traditional Asian Art and the Contemporary Art Collection of photography and new media works by Asian and Asian American artists. Additionally, he directs the organization’s initiative Asia Society Museum: The Asia Arts and Museum Network. Prior to this, he was Assistant Chief Executive (Museum & Programs) at the National Heritage Board (NHB) in Singapore, overseeing exhibitions, programs, and outreach events across the Board’s museums, institutions, and divisions. He was Artistic Director for the 2015 Singapour en France, le Festival, the largest multidisciplinary presentation of contemporary culture from Singapore and Southeast Asia in France, and is a founding board member of the International Biennial Association. As Director of the Singapore Art Museum from 2009 to 2013, he led the transformation of the museum into a contemporary art institution focused on Southeast Asia and assembled the largest public collection of contemporary art from the region. He conceived the regional focus and group curating approach of the groundbreaking Singapore Biennale 2013: If The World Changed, as well as serving as its Project Director and Co-Curator.

Michelle Yun is Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Asia Society Museum where she oversees the museum’s initiatives in modern and contemporary visual art by Asian and Asian American artists. Appointed in 2012, Yun specializes in Chinese contemporary art and diaspora artists. In addition to planning and implementing the museum’s modern and contemporary exhibitions, she also manages and builds the Museum’s contemporary art collection, initiated in 2007. Yun is currently co-organizing a retrospective exhibition for the celebrated modernist painter Zao Wou-Ki scheduled to open at Asia Society Museum in the fall of 2016. Yun was formerly curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries. She previously served as Project Director of Cai Guo-Qiang’s studio and managed the artist’s mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that traveled to the National Art Museum of China in Beijing as part of the cultural Olympiad in 2008. She was a curatorial assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and has also organized numerous independently curated exhibitions. Ms. Yun is a frequent lecturer on modern and contemporary Chinese art and has previously taught at SUNY New Paltz, Columbia University, and The Museum of Modern Art. Her writings have been included in many publications, among them Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot; Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue; Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want To Believe; Benezit Dictionary of Asian Artists and The Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press; The Figurative Impulse: Works from The UBS Art Collection; Greater New York, and Artforum International, among others.

Lori Zippay is the Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, a nonprofit organization that is a leading resource for media art. Active in video art exhibition, distribution, and preservation for more than thirty years, she has curated, lectured, and written extensively on media art and developed numerous curatorial, preservation, and educational projects with emerging and established artists. She developed and curates EAI’s major collection of 3,700 new and historical media artworks, initiated its pioneering video preservation program, and inaugurated and co-authored its extensive online resources, among other artistic projects and programs. Her internationally organized exhibitions include the 2012 survey exhibition “Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive” at Dia: Beacon, along with related panel discussions and programming; and “Kinetic Histories” at LABoral in Gijon, Spain, in 2011. Zippay has taught extensively and in 2006 was Visiting Critic at Yale University’s Graduate School of Art. She has served on numerous international panels, symposia, festival juries, and boards, including the Advisory Committee for the first Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, and has served as consultant on numerous media art projects over the past three decades.