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Philip Tinari on his journey through art and culture, and Tai Kwun’s potential

After 20 years in Beijing, Tai Kwun’s new deputy director and head of art talks about why Hong Kong is now the place to be

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Philip Tinari, an American writer, critic, art curator and expert in Chinese contemporary art, was recently appointed as deputy director and head of art at Tai Kwun Hong Kong. Photo: Jocelyn Tam
Gavin Yeung

I WAS BORN outside Philadelphia and I lived a typical American East Coast suburban childhood. My grandparents had a business selling African violets, so we would help out in the greenhouses on school holidays. It wasn’t so much art, but it was very much about putting something beautiful into people’s lives.

I WENT TO an all-boys’ Jesuit high school in Philadelphia, then I went to Duke University, in North Carolina, as an undergrad. My major was literature and history, but I started to study Chinese because it was seen as quite difficult and also maybe useful in the future.

I CURATED MY FIRST exhibition as a student at the Duke University Museum of Art. Called “Made in Asia?”, it had actual pieces from Takashi Murakami, Huang Yong Ping and Do Ho Suh. This was the privilege of American universities, especially at that time. We went to New York with the director of the museum, to galleries to negotiate the loans, then we put this exhibition together.
Philip Tinari curating the “Made in Asia?” exhibition at Duke University, in 2001. Photo: courtesy Philip Tinari
Philip Tinari curating the “Made in Asia?” exhibition at Duke University, in 2001. Photo: courtesy Philip Tinari
IN 1991, I went to China for the first time, as a student for six months. I was totally hooked. After that, I got a Fulbright scholarship to go to Beijing and study at Tsinghua University, where I decided to do a year of intensive Chinese-language study. Our first day of school was September 10, 2001. The Chinese art world at that time was quite small and a bit underground, so I would get invitations to art shows through SMS, then I would take a cab to the other side of the city and maybe the show had already been shut down by the police. There were certainly no institutions – maybe one commercial gallery – and the internet was still quite nascent, so it ended up just being this very tight-knit community of artists, curators and critics.
Philip Tinari attends the UCCA Gala in Beijing, in 2015. Photo: courtesy Philip Tinari
Philip Tinari attends the UCCA Gala in Beijing, in 2015. Photo: courtesy Philip Tinari

I DECIDED TO stay in Beijing. I just figured I had learned all this Chinese so it would be a shame to forget it. For a few months I worked on the first Guangzhou Triennial – I remember living inside the museum for two or three months just helping to prepare the catalogue. I was also quite connected with the journalistic community, so when Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) began, in the spring of 2003, Erik Eckholm, the bureau chief for The New York Times, would have me read the Chinese newspapers and write a report on what was going on. Whenever we heard there were cases in places like Taiyuan, we’d get on a plane and fly there and look for them. The following year, I went back to the United States and did a master’s degree in East Asian studies at Harvard. I felt contemporary Chinese art was fascinating, but it was something you maybe did for one year after college.

WHILE I WAS AWAY from China, between 2003 and 2005, things really picked up because the Beijing Olympics were coming and the market really started to rev. When I finished my degree, I was taken on by Sotheby’s to write the catalogue for their first auction of contemporary Asian art in New York. After six months, I was certain that this was what I wanted to do. So, in April 2006, I bought a one-way ticket to Beijing, where I set up a small office with a few friends and we did translation, editorial work and project consulting. In my first or second week, MoMA New York brought its whole international council of more than 100 high-level donors to Beijing. I knew people from Herzog & de Meuron, so I got them permission to drive their tour buses right into the construction site of the Bird’s Nest Stadium. Things were so open.

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