2025 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards
Asia Society 
Monday, May 12, 2025

6:00 PM | Cocktail Reception 
7:00 PM | Seated Dinner
9:00 PM | After Party 

Dress Code | Cocktail Attire

This celebration is Asia Society’s biggest fundraiser for its Arts and Culture sector and for the Asia Society Museum’s exhibitions, and it is also a vital source of our programmatic funding. For more information, please contact Mariel Pezik Pajoow at [email protected].

This year we honor Huang Ruo, Alexandra Munroe, Shirin Neshat, and Yang Fudong. 

TICKETS

For information regarding purchasing a table or tickets, please click here. 

AUCTION 

To see artworks offered in the benefit auction at Asia Arts Game Changer Awards, please visit Artsy. Bidding for all silent items closes on Tuesday, May 13 at 12 noon. To participate in the live lots during the gala on Monday, May 12 via phone or absentee bids, please email [email protected] with the subject "2025 Benefit Auction" by Monday, May 12 at noon EDT. 

Every year, at the Asia Arts Game Changer Awards, major art collectors, artists, gallerists, dignitaries from the art world, and Asia Society trustees and patrons gather to celebrate contemporary art in Asia and the Asian diaspora and honor artists and arts professionals for their significant contributions to contemporary art.

For more than thirty years, Asia Society has been a pioneer in identifying and fostering the latest contemporary Asian artists, and engaging new audiences for their work.

HONOREES 

Best known for his operas An American Soldier (2012) and M. Butterfly (2022), composer Huang Ruo creates music that transcends borders and genres, harmonizing Chinese and Western melodic traditions with 21st-century avant-garde tones. His diverse repertoire encompasses compositions for orchestra, chamber music, opera, film, theater, and dance, as well as collaborations in multimedia installations and other artistic expressions. Born in Hainan, an island province in the South China Sea, Huang grew up in post-Cultural Revolution China, where he studied works by such European classical composers as Bach and Mozart, and 20th-century masters like Stravinsky and Lutosławski. He was also exposed to Western pop music such as the Beatles and other modern genres, including heavy metal. He has premiered his music with many leading American orchestras and opera companies including New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Santa Fe Opera. Huang is a faculty member at the Mannes School of Music, at the New School. His new opera The Monkey King will premiere with the San Francisco Opera in 2025.

Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D. is an award-winning curator, Asia scholar and author focusing on art, culture and institutional global strategy. She is Senior Curator at Large, Global Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, where she founded the Guggenheim's Asian Art Initiative in 2006. Under her leadership, the Guggenheim has presented groundbreaking exhibitions and scholarly publications on Asian art in a global context and has expanded its mission across the Guggenheim’s constellation to study, acquire and exhibit art from Asia and diasporic artists of Asian descent. A founding curator of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project since 2007, she served as Senior Curator and Director, Curatorial Affairs, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi from 2018-2023, where she led the foundational curatorial program, collection growth, and research initiatives shaping the future museum. Over her distinguished institutional career, Munroe has organized over forty exhibitions and is recognized for her pioneering scholarship on artists Cai Guo Qiang, Daido Moriyama, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Ufan, Mu Xin, and Yoko Ono, among others, and for bringing such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, Japanese otaku culture, and Chinese conceptual art to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s NEH-awarded exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (2017), which Artnews named as Top 25 most influential shows of the decade.  Her exhibition, Yu Hong; Another One Bites the Dust, was named as among the Top 8 Hits of the 2024 Venice Biennale by the New York Times. Munroe received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan in recognition of her contributions to Japanese art; and was the 2024 recipient of the Japan Society Award. She is Chair of the Aspen Music Festival and School and a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, LongHouse Reserve, and Open to Debate, a non-partisan, debate-driven media organization to promote civil discourse. 

Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat experiments with the mediums of photography, video, film, and opera, which she imbues with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question the issues of power, religion, race, and gender. Through the lens of her personal experience as an Iranian woman living in exile, she examines the relationship between the past and present, East and West, and the individual and the collective. Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including Tate Modern, London (2022); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2019); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2015); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2014); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2014); and Asia Society Museum, New York (2003). Neshat has directed three feature-length films and received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival for Women Without Men (2009). Her opera directorial debut, Verdi’s Aida, was presented by the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and 2022, and will be restaged at the Paris Opera House in 2025. She is the recipient of prestigious international awards including the Praemium Imperiale (2017), the Golden Lion Award at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), and the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005).

Trained in painting, Beijing-born and Shanghai-based artist Yang Fudong is best known for his atmospheric films, videos, and photographs. Since the 1990s he has developed a unique dream-like visual prose, creating often silent yet philosophical characters in nonlinear narratives, while referencing the sensibility of traditional Chinese landscape paintings and aesthetics of film noir. His film’s subject matters include history, mythology, memory, and life experience, the latter two of which he sometimes borrows from the performers. Yang has participated in prestigious international group and solo exhibitions around the world, including at Suzhou Museum (2019); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2016); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); Asia Society Museum, New York (2009); the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); and Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2004). His seminal five-part film, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–2007) is in the Asia Society Museum collection, currently on view at Asia Society Museum through August 2025. In November 2025, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Beijing will present his most comprehensive institutional exhibition to date.