Shanghai Himalayas Museum has announced the appointment of Wang Nanming as the new director. An independent curator, artist and critic (his publications include Understanding Modern Calligraphy: Artistic Transformation of Modern and Avant-Garde, Art Must Die: from Chinese Painting to Modern Ink Painting and After Concept: Art and Criticism), he has been a key advocate of avant-garde, ‘post-avant-garde’ and ‘metavant-garde’ developments in Chinese contemporary art.
Since the early 2000s, Wang’s writing and curatorial work has focused on the more contentious activities and practices in performance art, installation and photography, elaborating the shift in contemporary art in China from aesthetic debates to sociopolitical commentaries.
From 2007–2009, Wang was the editor-in-chief of art magazines Art Focus and Art Time. He has also taught at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Since 2015, Wang has co-curated the four-part exhibition programme CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland, alongside Sophia Yadong Hao, writer an curator at Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee.
As an indication of the direction he will take in his new role, Wang has outlined a number of new developments for the museum, including initiating a ‘Young Thinker Residency’, which he hopes will encourage ‘self-reflexivity amongst a new generation’, strengthening public engagement and scrapping the positions of in-house curators in favour of bringing in different independent curators, critics and researchers to generate a more organic programme of exhibitions.
26 June 2017
