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

6:00 PM | Cocktail Reception 
7:00 PM | Seated Dinner

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. 

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 twenty 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 is a 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 has led the Asian Art Initiative since its founding in 2006. From 2018 to 2023, she served as Senior Curator and Director, Curatorial Affairs, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, where she built the foundational curatorial, collection, and research initiatives for the new museum. Munroe has worked on over forty exhibitions and is recognized for her scholarship on artists including Cai Guo-Qiang, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Ufan, Daido Moriyama, Mu Xin, and Yoko Ono, and for bringing such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai and Mono-ha to international attention. Her exhibition Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is credited for establishing the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Munroe was lead curator of the acclaimed Guggenheim exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. Recent publications she contributed to include Shilpa Gupta (Phaidon, 2023), The Shape of Time: Korean Art since 1989 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2023), and James Lee Byars (Marsilio, 2023). She received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, bestowed by the government of Japan.

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.