Asia Society Seattle Launch Celebration 2023
VIEW EVENT DETAILSWe are celebrating the launch of Asia Society’s 16th global Center—Asia Society Seattle! Established in April 2023, Asia Society Seattle is our first official presence in the Pacific Northwest.
Speakers at our celebration include an all-star lineup:
- Bill Gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft, Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Founder of Breakthrough Energy
- Kevin Rudd, Australia’s Ambassador to the U.S., former Australia Prime Minister and former global Asia Society CEO
- Tom Robertson, Microsoft Corporate Vice President
- Robert Blair, Senior Director of National Security and Emerging Technology
- Daniel Russel, Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Gary Rieschel, Asia Society Northern California & Seattle Chair
- Yasufumi Nakamori, new global Asia Society Vice President of Arts & Culture
- Lingling Wei, senior China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal
- Catherine Roche, Seattle Art Museum’s Board President-Elect
- Foong Ping, Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Seattle Art Museum
- Hao Jiang Tian, world renowned bass opera singer
- Margaret Conley, Executive Director of Asia Society Northern California and Seattle
- And more!
Exciting experiences include musical performances, museum tours, books from our speakers, and dim sum!
This momentous event will be hosted on Tuesday, September 12 in Seattle.
Asia Society Seattle brings together the global organization’s three pillars of policy, arts, and education to the region, serving the Asian American Pacific Islander community and tapping into the region’s arts and culture community, education community, strong corporate base, and deep and vibrant economic and cultural connections throughout Asia. The Seattle Center creates unique value for all the Asia Society Centers through a focus on technology, natural resources/energy/sustainability, and China, among other critical topics.
Asia Society guests will come together September 12, 2023 for our special celebration and to discuss our vision, share our collective ties with Asia, and foster a strong Asia-focused community. Guests will hear from and dialogue with the most renowned leading international and local voices from the private and public sectors on Asia and its importance to our region.
This is an invitation only event and invitations are not transferrable.
Speakers:
Robert B. Blair is the Senior Director of National Security and Emerging Technology. Formerly he served as Senior Director for 5G and External Affairs for Microsoft Corporation, where he worked with partners to develop and achieve Microsoft’s policies on 5G and other advanced technologies.
Before joining Microsoft, Mr. Blair served in the federal executive and legislative branches for more than two decades. Most recently he was the Director of Policy and Strategic Planning at the Department of Commerce, where he led the Department’s policy development and execution, including initiatives for advanced technology, telecommunications and national security.
Mr. Blair previously was the United States Special Representative for International Telecommunications Policy and Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff of the White House. Before the White House, Mr. Blair was the Associate Director for Defense Programs at the Office of Management and Budget, overseeing $1.3 trillion of defense, veterans, and foreign policy programs. Mr. Blair served 14 years on the staff of the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives, leading two subcommittees as staff director, and began his service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Central African Republic.
Mr. Blair is a graduate of Cornell University, Tufts University, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He has received the Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards from the Department of State, and the Decoration for Distinguished Civilian Service from the Department of the Army.
Margaret Conley is the Executive Director of Asia Society Northern California. She is Chair of Asia Society's global Asian Americans Building America task force. Margaret was previously based in Asia for several years as a television news correspondent with ABC News in Jakarta and Tokyo, and with Bloomberg Television in Shanghai. She was part of the global ABC team that won a News and Documentary Emmy Award for presidential inauguration coverage. Margaret was selected as one of the Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business by the San Francisco Business Times in 2019. She is on the Advisory Committee of TiE, and is a member of the board of the International Women's Forum.
Bill Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and founder of Breakthrough Energy. Bill co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with Paul Allen and led the company to become the worldwide leader in business and personal software and services. In 2008, Bill transitioned to focus full-time on the Gates Foundation’s work to expand opportunity to the world’s most disadvantaged people. As co-chair, he leads the foundation’s development of strategies and sets the overall direction of the organization.
At Breakthrough Energy, he’s putting his experience as an innovator and problem-solver to work to address climate change by supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs, big thinkers, and clean technologies. Bill uses his experience partnering with global leaders across sectors to help drive the policy, market, and technological changes required for a clean energy transition.
In 2010, Bill, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett founded the Giving Pledge, an effort to encourage the wealthiest families and individuals to publicly commit more than half of their wealth to philanthropic causes and charitable organizations during their lifetime or in their will.
Through his private office, Gates Ventures, he pursues his work in Alzheimer’s research and other healthcare issues, interdisciplinary education, and technology.
Yasufumi Nakamori, an experienced museum leader, curator, and noted scholar of modern and contemporary Asian art from cross-disciplinary and transnational perspectives, is Asia Society's new Museum Director and Vice President of Arts and Culture. He will be responsible for overseeing the museum’s exhibition program and collection, as well as arts and culture programming across the global organization. He joins Asia Society in August.
Nakamori comes to Asia Society from Tate, where, since 2018, he has served as the Senior Curator, International Art (Photography), leading the development of Tate’s collection of photography as well as the strategy for representing photography in the program at Tate Modern; developing and curating exhibitions, including Zanele Muholi (2020-21), and collection displays. He has also advised on numerous initiatives on Asian and Asian diaspora art in programming, and provided strategic management for photography and modern art in the programming at Tate Britain.
From 2020 to 2022, Nakamori was a member of Tate’s Race Equality Task Force, which made recommendations to the Tate Executive Group to set institutional goals, and monitored for the goals to be actioned, for the purposes of combatting racism and achieving equity and diversity at Tate.
Prior to Tate, Nakamori headed the department of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, developing exhibitions of photography and time-based media within the context of a global encyclopedic art museum. His exhibitions of artists such as Amar Kanwar and the Propeller Group revealed interconnections between contemporary video and premodern art from the global south in the museum collection. He was also responsible for numerous key acquisitions which transformed and diversified the museum’s photography collection.
He previously served as curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2008 to 2016, organizing ground-breaking exhibitions such as Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (a recipient of the 2011 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Exhibitions), and For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-1979 that traced the development of conceptualism in Japan in the wake of the Anpo protests. In Houston, he also taught graduate seminars focusing on the history of modern Japanese art and architecture at Rice University.
Nakamori has authored numerous essays and four books, including Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Yasuhiro Ishimoto (2010). His essays are included in Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (Haus der Kunst, 2016) and Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan (Noguchi Museum, 2019).
From 1995 to 2002, Nakamori practiced corporate law in New York City and Tokyo.
Nakamori serves on the board of several institutions in Japan and the U.K., including the Yayoi Kusama Foundation. He is a 2016 fellow of the Getty Leadership Institute. He received a BA from Waseda University in Tokyo, a Juris Doctor from the University of Wisconsin Law School, an MA in the History of Art from Hunter College, the City University of New York, and a PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University.
Foong Ping received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and is Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Seattle Art Museum, and Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Her experience spans the academic and curatorial realms. She began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, and taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, as Assistant Professor of Chinese Art. Her 2015 book, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court, won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize. Dr. Foong helped lead an extensive effort to expand and modernize the landmark 1933 art deco building of the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and to envision its global future.
Gary Rieschel has over 30 years of successful operating and investing experience as a senior executive, entrepreneur, investor, and global business strategist. He held executive positions at Intel, Sequent, and Cisco, and was the Founder of the Softbank Venture Capital group. He is Founding Managing Partner of Qiming, a firm with over $8B USD under management focused on early stage investments in China and one of China’s premier VC firms. Mr. Rieschel’s investment areas are Healthcare and Cleantech. He advised the China Greentech Initiative, and the Rocky Mountain Institute in its introduction to China. He actively supports the US China Clean Energy Forum, PERC (Property and Environmental Research), The Nature Conservancy, the Climate Leadership Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, and the U.S. Olympic Foundation where he and his wife Yucca serve as Sports Ambassadors for mental health for the U.S. Olympic team. He served on the joint venture boards of Blackrock/Bank of China and Silicon Valley Bank/Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. Gary holds a BA in Biology from Reed College in Portland, OR, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He lived in Japan for five years in the late 1980s and lived in Shanghai from 2005 through 2016. He now lives in Seattle, WA. He is the Chairman of the Asia Society Northern California Advisory Board and a Global Trustee.
Tom Robertson is Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Microsoft Corporation, leading the Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs team supporting the Experiences and Devices organization, which includes Windows, Office, Surface devices, Microsoft 365, Teams, Bing, Edge, Microsoft Advertising, and their AI-integrated functionality. He sits on the boards of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, the National Bureau of Asian Research, and Town Hall Seattle. Among other things, he has in the past led Microsoft’s Legal and Corporate Affairs team for North Asia, based in Tokyo, served as an Associate General Counsel in the Office of the US Trade Representative, been an attorney at Covington & Burling in DC and London, and served as a law clerk in the Eastern District of Virginia. He is a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the U.S. Japan Leadership Program.
Catherine Roche is Seattle Art Museum’s Board President-Elect. She holds a bachelor's degree in English with distinction from the University of Virginia (Phi Beta Kappa), a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University, and a PhC in Japanese art history from the University of Washington.
From 2008-2012, Catherine worked at SAM first as a Blakemore intern and then as the Interim Assistant Curator for Japanese and Korean Art. In 2013, Catherine transitioned to the Board of Trustees at SAM. In addition to her leadership at SAM, Catherine also serves as a trustee at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (formerly Freer/Sackler) in Washington, DC.
From 2018-2023, Catherine resided in Bentonville, Arkansas with her husband Stephan Roche, former CEO of Walton Enterprises. While in Northwest Arkansas, Catherine served on the boards of TheatreSquared, a nationally-recognized professional theatre company, and Thaden School, an independent school founded by the Walton Family.
HE the Hon Dr Kevin Rudd AC is Australia’s Ambassador to the United States of America, taking up his posting in Washington in March 2023. Ambassador Rudd served as Australia’s twenty-sixth Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Minister for Foreign Affairs, before a second term as Prime Minister in 2013. He was Member for Griffith in the Australian Parliament from 1998 to 2013.
Since leaving government, Ambassador Rudd has resided in the United States where he is recognised as a leading analyst of China. In 2015, he became inaugural President of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. In 2020, he was appointed President and CEO of the Asia Society globally and, in 2022, he founded the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.In 2019, Ambassador Rudd was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia for eminent service to Indigenous reconciliation, innovative economic initiatives, and major policy reform, and through senior advisory roles with international organisations. Ambassador Rudd holds honorary positions at the Atlantic Council and Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC; the Asia Society, Schwartzman Scholars and Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New York; the Paulson Institute in Chicago; the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po in Paris, France; the Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation in Hamburg, Germany; and Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House in Canberra. He is founder and co-chair of an Australian charity, the National Apology Foundation, and a trustee of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City.
Ambassador Rudd started his diplomatic career in 1981 with postings to Beijing and Stockholm. In 1988, he was appointed Chief of Staff to the Hon Wayne Goss and served him as Premier of Queensland. He was Director-General of the Cabinet Office in Queensland from 1991 to 1995, and Senior China Consultant for KPMG from 1996 to 1998.
Ambassador Rudd graduated with Honours in Asian Studies from the Australian National University and received his PhD from Oxford University in 2022. He also studied at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei.
Daniel Russel is Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI). Previously he served as a Diplomat in Residence and Senior Fellow with ASPI for a one year term. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service at the U.S. Department of State, he most recently served as the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Prior to his appointment as Assistant Secretary on July 12, 2013, Mr. Russel served at the White House as Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director for Asian Affairs. During his tenure there, he helped formulate President Obama’s strategic rebalance to the Asia Pacific region, including efforts to strengthen alliances, deepen U.S. engagement with multilateral organizations, and expand cooperation with emerging powers in the region.
Prior to joining the NSC in January of 2009, he served as Director of the Office of Japanese Affairs and had assignments as U.S. Consul General in Osaka-Kobe, Japan (2005-2008); Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands (2002-2005); Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus (1999-2002); Chief of Staff to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering (1997-99); Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (1995-96); Political Section Unit Chief at U.S. Embassy Seoul, Republic of Korea (1992-95); Political Advisor to the Permanent Representative to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Ambassador Pickering (1989-92); Vice Consul in Osaka and Branch Office Manager in Nagoya, Japan (1987-89); and Assistant to the Ambassador to Japan, former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (1985-87).
In 1996, Mr. Russel was awarded the State Department's Una Chapman Cox Fellowship sabbatical and authored America’s Place in the World, a book published by Georgetown University. Before joining the Foreign Service, he was manager for an international firm in New York City.
Mr. Russel was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and University College, University of London, UK.
Hao Jiang Tian, world renowned bass born in Beijing who came to the U.S. 40 years ago, has sung over 1400 performances of 50 operatic roles worldwide. The only Chinese singer who has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera for 20 years in 26 operas, Tian has been highly praised for his appearances as major bass in many international opera houses in the States, Germany, Italy, France, Argentina, Belgium, Spain, Holland, Portugal, Chile, Russia, Japan and China. His autobiography, Along the Roaring River: My Wild Ride from Mao to the Met, was published by Wiley and Sons as a Lincoln Center Book. His book Turandot at the Arena, in Chinese, was published by San Lian Publishing Company. A member of the Committee of 100, Tian is the founder and artistic director of iSING! International Young Artists Festival which had its American premiere performance of Echoes of Ancient Tang Poems with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Lincoln Center in January, 2023. His honors include Lifetime Achievement Award from Denver University (2014), Ellis Island Medals of Honor (2015), Carnegie Mellon Award (2011), and Honorary Doctorate from Manhattan School of Music (2021).
Lingling Wei is the award-winning Chief China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of "Superpower Showdown," a history of the U.S.-China trade and economic stand-off. Hailing from a farm province in southeastern China, she came of age as a journalist in New York in the early 2000s and returned to China in early 2011 to report on changes in her homeland. From then until 2020, when China expelled Journal reporters including Lingling, she had covered all aspects of China's economy, its opaque policy-making process and key decision-makers. She has won many awards for her China coverage. In 2021, she's among a team of reporters and editors whose work was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Currently living in New York, Lingling continues to focus on the intersection of the Chinese economy and politics.