Curated Exhibitions

Starting my career as an artist, I had my first taste of curating during my undergraduate degree with my fellow class mates with our exhibition of contemporary ceramic arts back in the 1990s in Sydney. Over the years, I have worked across the arts industry in the private, museum and local government sector. My experience of living in Beijing in the early 2000s as a young artist exposed me to wide range of locally Chinese and international contemporary art practices and introduced me to the idea of the 'artist as curator'. In Beijing, I worked with many artists, who also worked as curators and were driven by activism, they wanted to create an awareness of certain issues in their often dysfunctional and chaotic world. Returning to Australia, the experience inspired me to want to work in a curatorial capacity, as a way of bridging the contemporary Chinese art community with the Australian. 

The experience of living and working in the Chinese contemporary art scene also influenced me to keep wearing both hats of artist and curator. As a curator, I have developed independent art projects, but also worked for Customs House, City of Sydney and Newcontemporaries Gallery, Sydney. Working for two non-commercial exhibition spaces, gave me the opportunity to exercise my creative mind in the development of curatorial projects and apply this spatially. As a curator, I enjoyed working in a capacity of building a community around commons interests through art and to be able to create an environment which supports artists in experimenting with their ideas. I have worked closely with contemporary artists based in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia and also Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou, China. 

I have also managed and developed social history exhibitions relating to various Sydney based urban themes in my roles at Customs House and Newcontemporaries. More recently, working at the community run Chinese Museum in Melbourne, has also been a great experience in opening up my thinking of the experience of being Chinese in Australia, which at times I found confronting and challenging, but then also eye opening allowing me to understand and re-define the Chinese Australian diaspora. In this role, I worked with historical materials, the wider Chinese community and also developed contemporary art projects in the temporary gallery space. One of the most successful project at the Chinese Museum was the curation of Claire Tracey's Water Dragon in 2012, which was a 5 storey high water dragon sculpture made from recycled water bottles and funded by the City of Melbourne. The work became a iconic attraction in the heart of Melbourne's Chinatown and won the Museum Australia (MAGMA) Award for Sustainability in 2013.  For more information on selected independent curatorial projects, please refer to their own page. In recent years, many of my projects have been developed collaboratively with other independent curators and artists.