For the 154-year-old Metropolitan Museum of Art, “modern and contemporary art” has always been at the core of its existential query. Though the encyclopedic museum began to collect and display “art of the present” in the early 20th century, and the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art has been established since 1967, contemporary art at The Met has often been treated with intense scrutiny. As the Modern and Contemporary Wing prepares for an architectural overhaul, I will lay out some of the challenges and opportunities ahead by looking at a few of the museum’s recent presentations of contemporary Asian art. The discussion will be viewed in parallel to the collection and display strategies of Hong Kong’s M+, a museum focusing on 20th and 21st-century global visual culture with an Asian perspective that opened 3 years ago. I had the privilege to serve on the inaugural curatorial team of M+ (2013–2022) before joining The Met. By examining the curatorial visions of the two institutions, I hope to offer some fruit for thought in creating dialogues across time and continents on the topic of the contemporary.
Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Curator, Modern and Contemporary, The Met, New York
Photo: Wing Shya
Lesley Ma is the inaugural Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She leads the strategy for the acquisition and programming of modern and contemporary East and Southeast Asian art. From 2013 to 2022, she was the founding Curator, Ink Art at M+, Hong Kong. Prior to M+, she curated projects at Para Site, Hong Kong, and was Project Director at Cai Guo-Qiang’s studio in New York. Her Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego, focused on abstract painting in postwar Taiwan.
Director, Taichung Museum of Art
Yi-Hsin Nicole Lai is currently the Director of Taichung Art Museum, and previously served as the Director of Chiayi Art Museum and independent curator. After graduating with a Ph.D. from the Institute of Visual Culture at the University of Westminster in the UK in 2011, she has experienced nearly ten years of independent curatorial work. The main focus of her curatorial practice has long been on the silent voices of politics and society, and the postponement of historical space. Through the artistic creation and curation of contemporary art, she proposes the possibility of re-writing and re-imagining another (historical) narrative. At this stage, Lai is dedicated to enhancing the professionalism, public engagement and diversity of art museums, as well as promoting international and local art exchanges.
Associate Professor, Graduate of Fine Art, Taipei National University of the Arts
Jau-lan Guo is the Associate Professor of MA in Art History and Visual Culture at Taipei National University of the Arts. She teaches modern and contemporary art, art history, and curatorial practice. Her research interests revolve around the issue of artistic migration, circulation, art historiography, and how exhibitions make history.
In On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Brief Moment in Time (MoNTUE, 2021), a collaboration with artist Michael Lin and curator Lee Ambrozy, she explored the possibilities of trans-historical display as an expanded field of art historiography. In the Score Project, she rationalized and visualized interdisciplinary exchanges while reintegrating a “score’s” capability of mobilizing time and space into the subject of “ecology-form” in regional art. Guo is also the Chinese translator of Boris Groys’ Art Power (co-translator, Artist Publishing, 2015). She was the organizer of the 2022 Reconstructing History of Art in Taiwan symposium in the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, entitled Horizontal Art History: Perspectives from Taiwan.