If you were to speak of the rapidly developing Chinese art world, Pi Li will not go unnoticed – the art world veteran’s career spanning the beginning, rise and transition of the contemporary art market Chinese.
Initially a young critic and curator after earning his doctorate from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Pi once served as deputy executive director of the art administration department at the university. In 2005, he co-founded Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing (now Spurs Gallery) at a time when the local contemporary art gallery scene in China was booming. He then left the gallery in 2012, surprisingly, for a position as senior curator at M+ in Hong Kong.
Also one of the founding directors of M+, Pi oversaw the planning and opening of the museum, as well as the construction and expansion of its collection. More importantly, he witnessed the dramatic changes in Hong Kong’s social, political and cultural environment in recent years, especially the impact of the 2020 pandemic. One year after the museum’s opening, Pi shifted gears again, taking on the role of Head of Art at Tai Kwun, a young arts and heritage venue in Hong Kong, in February 2023.
Before Hong Kong Art WeekPi spoke to Artnet News about his tenure at M+, his new role at Tai Kwun, and the future of art in Hong Kong.
Aerial view of the Tai Kwun. Photo courtesy of Tai Kwun.
As a veteran of the Chinese art world, do you think Hong Kong’s position as a hub for Asian art remains unshakeable?
Yes, and I think there are several reasons. Even though not so long ago everyone compared Hong Kong to Singapore and Seoul, there is a big difference between the art markets of the three cities. The art market in Hong Kong began in the 1990s, with auction houses first, and galleries as Hanart TZ Gallery hasand others do it spontaneously at that time. Both auction houses and galleries drove the market forward. After the 2000s, art fairs began to appear and other galleries arrived later. Let’s not forget that Hong Kong is still a huge distribution center for Asian cultural antiquities.
The Hong Kong art market is a diverse market that has gradually built up over decades. It was a spontaneous formation process, very different from Singapore and Seoul which are stimulated by government policies. Of course, regarding the dynamism of the whole economy, after the pandemic, many families and businesses moved their offices to Singapore. But after Hong Kong returned to normal, many businesses started pouring in again. Personally, I have more confidence in Hong Kong.
View of the “Myth Makers — Spectrosynthesis III” facility at Tai Kwun. Photo: South Ho, courtesy of Tai Kwun.
I was in Hong Kong last month and saw the LGBTQ+ themed group exhibition in Tai Kwun. In some of your previous interviews, you mentioned that Hong Kong is a place that allows for freedom of research, curation and expression. Do you think such conditions of freedom will exist or still exist in Hong Kong in the future?
I think such conditions have always existed in Hong Kong. During the pandemic, there has been a lot of misinformation spread by some international media. I would like to give two examples. The first is that some news outlets have reported that more than 100,000 people left Hong Kong in a year, but according to figures I saw last year, 220,000 people also left Singapore, not to mention the number people who chose to leave the UK after Brexit. year. You can’t rely on a simple number to make a judgment; our age is a globalized, constantly mobile age.
The second example is something that I have personally experienced that makes me very angry. When M+ opened in 2021, our exhibition lineup was scheduled for 2018, and some outlets claimed the lineup had been changed due to “censorship”. But in fact, not even a single artwork has been changed or removed. I think this incident speaks volumes about the international bias against Hong Kong due to media rotation.
This is why I think this next Art Basel Hong Kong is very important, and I hope that my international colleagues, professionals and art collectors will be able to discover M+’s collection and exhibition projects for themselves, as well as than the LGBTQ+ exhibit currently on view at Tai Kwun. They say a lot about the current cultural situation in Hong Kong.
Installation view of Pipilotti Rist, Behind your eyelid (big skin) (2022). Photo courtesy of Tai Kwun.
It’s been almost 11 years since you first moved to Hong Kong. Do you think the local public’s perception of contemporary art in Hong Kong has changed over the years?
He has changed a lot. When I first came to Hong Kong, Hong Kongers were critical of contemporary art, and they didn’t understand it. Many thought that a project as big as M+ made no sense. But things started to change after the museum opened in 2021.
In a year and a half, we have welcomed more than two million visitors (not counting the international public), and have completely changed mentalities. With the opening of Tai Kwun in 2018, contemporary art culture has gradually entered the hearts of Hong Kong people. No one wonders if Hong Kong needs a contemporary art venue anymore; people just say, “I like this contemporary art or I don’t like it, and here’s why.”
Why did you decide to join Tai Kwun? When did the discussion take place?
I was among the top 10 employees when I joined M+; the museum now employs nearly 200 people. I think I accomplished a lot at M+, like making it easier to land the Sigg Collection. After 10 years at M+, I wondered if I should do something else interesting. In the United States, institutional diversity is important, and Hong Kong, with a population of seven million, has reached another stage where it needs this type of institutional diversity, which means that it needs at the both international museums equivalent to a MoMA and institutions like the MoMA PS1. and Tai Kwun, which can bring a cool feeling. I wanted to do something about it, and that was the first important reason.
Another reason is that before coming to Hong Kong, I had already done many international contemporary art projects, including the first YBA exhibition in 2006 and the Antony Gormley exhibition in 2003. I was also a project curator Asia from the Japan Foundation. I thought it was time to make international art, so in that sense Tai Kwun is the best place for me.
Installation view of “Gender & Space” in Tai Kwun. Photo courtesy of Tai Kwun.
Can you tell us about your new role in Tai Kwun? What are your main responsibilities and the focus of your work?
I focus on contemporary Tai Kwun within Tai Kwun. But in addition to contemporary art programs, I am also in charge of public art throughout the Tai Kwun region. Many contemporary art projects are embedded in cultural heritage, so you can see that my position is not that of director but that of head of art, because I am responsible for more important and broader issues than the gallery herself.
From this perspective, there are a few things that Tai Kwun will establish with its future projects: First, it will always be an international art center that reflects the current art scene. The second point is that we always want Tai Kwun to accurately reflect the Hong Kong and Asian art scene as a whole, while helping young artists to flourish.
The third is that there is another strand in the Tai Kwun program, developed by previous and current curators over the past seven or eight years – such as Xue Tan who has organized artistic performances that have lasted four or five weeks. in the gallery – projects that constantly push the limits of the gallery. So we also hope to do something in performance art on the curatorial side, combining traditional theater and gallery performance.
In the past, Asian institutions often borrowed from Western institutions, but in recent years Asia has established its own systems and approaches. How do you see the exchange and interaction between the West and Asia developing in the future?
After the pandemic, the most important thing is for museums to think about the environment, which is a common problem facing museums around the world. This leads directly to the question: is it time to change the paradigm of traditional blockbuster exhibitions and large-scale traveling exhibitions? For example, the UK now talks about the carbon footprint of each exhibition.
Over the past 10 years, foreign galleries have brought artists to Asia for exhibitions, and I think this is also seen in other Asian countries. Thus, one of the main changes is that this type of exchange will no longer be one-way, but two-way, or even multi-way. The Mori Art Museum in Japan, the M+, the Singapore Art Museum and the National Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, to name a few, have formed a small “museum ecosystem”. In this region, I think that more and more exhibitions will rotate, and a dialogue with European and American exhibitions will take place in the future. Not only will Western artists come to the East, but we will also present retrospectives of our regional artists and bring them to the international stage.
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