Our new exhibition, Crossing: Art, Heritage, and Personal Journeys, features three local artists from the Asian community who share their personal journeys related to transcending boundaries of lands, cultures, and generations. This brings to mind my participation in the Forum of Curators of Chinese Art this fall in Hong Kong, which also centered on transcending boundaries.
Entitled “Transcending Boundaries: Towards a New Era of Curating Chinese Art”, the forum brought together curators and professionals in Chinese art from museums and art institutions worldwide. Invited speakers shared their insights and experiences on transcending boundaries and pioneering new directions in research and curation. I was honored to be invited to speak at the forum.
While humbled by the presence of curators from renowned institutions such as the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Palace Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Asian Art Museum San Francisco, whose sizes and budgets significantly surpass that of the AGGV, I am equally proud due to the remarkable Asian art collections and vibrant exhibitions and programs we offer.
During the forum, I introduced our Asian art collections and discussed my curatorial approach, emphasizing contextualization to make Asian art relevant and accessible to the local audience. I highlighted specific exhibitions, including Blue and White, which, drawing entirely on our collections, tells a global story of blue-and-white porcelain as a Chinese invention turned global product. I discussed The Place We Live exhibition, using landscape paintings from our Asian art collection to encourage the audience to contemplate the relationship between themselves and the environment. I also touched on the Reverberations exhibition, where local community members responded to our collections, resulting in the collective work by a local Chinese painting and calligraphy group that employed the traditional artistic form of fan painting to document local scenes.
After my presentation, I received numerous congratulations and inquiries about further details of our Asian art collections, along with proposals for future collaborations. A text message from a curator of a world-renowned museum read: ‘Congratulations. Now the whole museum world knows about the AGGV and your Asian art collections’
The AGGV holds the second largest collection of Asian artwork in Canada, and is praised as one of the most important collections in the country. We look forward to sharing more of this world-renowned collection with you in our upcoming permanent collection exhibition.
Written by Dr. Heng Wu, AGGV Curator of Asian Art
A View From Here: Reimagining the AGGV Collection, opens on Saturday, April 27, 2024.
To learn more about the Bei Shan Tang Foundation and the Forum for Curators of Chinese Art, visit the their website: beishantang.org
Featured Image: Dr. Heng Wu discussing AGGV’s Blue and White exhibition. Courtesy of the AGGV.
