The Pandemic Influence: Art Collection and Curation in 2020

Thursday, September 10th, 2020

Discussion Starts 17:00, Ends 18:00

Facebook and Youtube Webinar Only. Free Admission.

Taking a more refined look at the effects of the global pandemic, the 4th episode in the At Home with ASHK: Museum Webinar Series will explore how Hong Kong’s M+, the UK’s Tate Modern and Singapore’s National Gallery are dealing with a new set of challenges never before faced by art institutions. The panel, including Clara Kim (Tate Modern), Pauline J. Yao (M+), and Russell Storer (NGS), moderated by Christopher Mattison, will deep dive into how each institution is altering their curatorial approaches and acquiring new skills to help remain sustainable and engage with global and local audiences in the face of lockdowns, snowballing Covid-19 cases, and worldwide decentralized movements.

At Home with ASHK: Museum Webinar Series bring international museums into the heart of your home through conversations with some of the best and brightest museum and curatorial names across the globe. Hear about the ways in which they have persevered and adapted to remain sustainable, learn the long-term implications those changes will have on their future collections and exhibitions, and take a sneak-peak behind the scenes at some exceptional shows that have been closed to the public eye.  

Clara Kim is The Daskalopoulos Senior Curator, International Art (Africa, Asia & Middle East) at Tate Modern in London where she is responsible for the research, acquisition and interpretation of international art, taking a transnational approach to the presentation of modern and contemporary art histories. Recent curatorial projects include a major survey of the artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen; the 2019 Turbine Hall commission with Kara Walker; and A Year in Art: 1973 exploring the artistic and cultural repercussions of the coup d’etat in Chile. She curated Imagined Nations/Modern Utopias for the 2018 Gwangju Biennale and Condemned to be Modern as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST initiative in 2017—both exhibitions examined the contested legacies of modernism through art and architecture. 

Russell Storer is Director (Curatorial & Collections) at National Gallery Singapore, where he co-curated the exhibitions Minimalism: Space. Light. Object., Between Worlds: Raden Saleh and Juan Luna, Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, and A Fact Has No Appearance: Art Beyond the Object. He was previously Head of Asian and Pacific Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane where he was a co-curator of the 6th, 7th, and 8th Asia Pacific Triennials; and a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, where he organised exhibitions by Juan Davila, Simryn Gill, Matthew Ngui and Ugo Rondinone, amongst others. He was a co-curator of the 3rd Singapore Biennale (2011), and has written widely on Asian and Australian contemporary art.

Pauline J. Yao is Lead Curator, Visual Art, at M+. She has held curatorial positions at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and worked as an independent curator and writer in Beijing for six years. She is responsible for acquisitions, research, and interpretation of Visual Art at M+, including sub-areas of Ink Art and Hong Kong Visual Culture; and serves as the co-editor of PODIUM, M+’s online publication. Recent curatorial projects include M+ Pavilion exhibitions In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections (with Shirley Surya, 2018) and Five Artists: Sites Encountered (2019). Yao is a regular contributor to Artforum International and her writings on contemporary Asian art have appeared in numerous catalogues, online publications, and edited volumes.

Christopher Mattison’s primary line of research centres on the relationship of text and image in the museum environment. Apart from his curatorial work at The University of Hong Kong's Museum and Art Gallery, Mattison is the museum's publisher and series editor for a range of digital programming being developed in conjunction with the Getty’s Arches and Quire platforms.