The Curator and the Cultivator: Asian Art for a Global Audience
VIEW EVENT DETAILSAsia Society Hong Kong Center and Art Central Education Program Series
Afternoon Discussion with SUSAN BENINGSON, KARIN OEN, AARON SEETO and ALICE MONG
Central Harbourfront Event Space, 9 Lung Wo Road
Discussion 3:00pm – 4:00pm
This high calibre panel discussion will follow the path of Asian Art on a global scale and provide an insight into what curators of Asian art need to consider when organizing exhibitions and forming collections for audiences outside of Asia. With divergent visions from curators with differing backgrounds in life, education, and experience, we will interpret the ways in which a seemingly uniform body of art can transcend a single idea and be redefined so that the collections provide a relevance to their international audiences.
Susan L. Beningson joined the Brooklyn Museum as the Assistant Curator of Asian Art in 2013. Prior to her arrival, she taught Asian art history at the City University of New York, Rutgers University, and Columbia University. She co-curated the exhibition Providing for the Afterlife: “Brilliant Artifacts” from Shandong (2005), a loan show at the China Institute in New York of recent archaeological discoveries, organized in conjunction with the Shandong Provincial Museum in China. She has contributed to catalogues for the exhibitions Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art (2010), Buddhist Sculpture from China: Selections from the Xi’an Beilin Museum (2007), among other publications. Beningson received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 2009. Her dissertation focused on Buddhist cave temples along the ancient Silk Road at Dunhuang, located in northwest China.
Karin G Oen serves as the Asian Art Museum’s first full-time assistant curator of contemporary art. In addition to building the museum’s new modern and contemporary department she is currently curating a site-specific installation by Liu Jianhua for the spring of 2016. She joined the museum in June 2015 after serving as curator at the Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas, TX and teaching courses on modern and contemporary Asian art at the University of North Texas and the University of Texas at Dallas. She was previously a museum educator for Asian art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Dr. Oen holds a Ph.D. in history, theory, and criticism of art and architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.A. in modern art history, connoisseurship, and art market history from Christie’s Education, and a B.A. in urban studies, art history minor, from Stanford University.
Aaron Seeto is Curatorial Manager, Asian and Pacific Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. He is part of the curatorial team that delivered the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT8) at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and was formerly Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. His work revolves around the Asia-Pacific region and the impact and experience of migration and globalisation on contemporary art practice, working with artists to create projects that approach migrant and diasporic communities in critical ways. Recent curated projects include ‘Yangjiang Group - Actions for Tomorrow’ (2015, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and offsite venues); ‘Mass Group Incident’ and ’48 HR Incident’ (as co-curator, 2015, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art) and has assisted in bringing major exhibitions of key artists to Australia including He Xiangyu, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Song Dong amongst many others.
S. Alice Mong became the Executive Director of Asia Society Hong Kong Center (ASHK) in August of 2012. Prior to ASHK, she worked in New York for almost a decade in the non-profit sector in senior management position. While in New York, Ms. Mong was the Director of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) from 2009 till 2011. Ms. Mong left MOCA in July 2011 after successfully transforming the museum from a New York Chinatown institution to become the leading national museum. Ms. Mong also served as the Executive Director for the Committee of 100 in the United States, a Chinese-American non-profit membership organization founded by architect, I.M. Pei and cellist, Yo-Yo Ma. Prior to New York, Ms. Mong worked in Hong Kong from 1992 to 2002.
Event Details
Central Harbourfront Event Space, 9 Lung Wo Road