ying kwok
Independent curator and founder of the Art Appraisal Club
“Sometimes I feel that the role of a curator is similar to that of a merchandiser in a department store. They need to understand the position of the store, have a knowledge of what’s on the market, what sells and who’s the right designer to go to,” says Ying Kwok, who is an independent curator and herself an artist. After Kwok, 39, gained a degree in fine arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, she won the British Council’s Chevening Postgraduate Scholarship and obtained her master’s from the Chelsea College of Arts, a constituent college of the University of the Arts London, in 2004.
Kwok has had several solo exhibitions in Hong Kong and was awarded the Prize of Excellence at the Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition in 2001. In 2006 she decided to take up curating full-time. “My practice is quite inward-looking and forces me to respond to subject matter in a way that is rather slow and narrow,” she says. “As a freelance curator, I can focus on different subject matter I’m interested in and curate an exhibition or project using different platforms and formats, serving my interests and the subjects I want to discuss in a better way.”
Kwok was the curator at the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester, England, from 2006 to 2012, delivering four exhibitions a year and overseeing the artist residency programme. From 2013, working independently, she co-curated the Harmonious Society exhibition (part of Asia Triennial Manchester 2014), From Longing To Belonging with the Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland (in 2014 and 2016), and No Cause For Alarm at La Mama Galleria, New York (2016). She was awarded the Asia Cultural Council Fellowship in 2015 for a five-month study of participatory and engagement projects in the US.
Back in Hong Kong in 2014, Kwok founded the Art Appraisal Club, an initiative to encourage critical thinking and discussion by disseminating exhibition news, reviews and art-related essays via a website. “I wanted to bring an independent voice to what’s going on in the city,” she says. A team of six art professionals “sit together and have a close-quarter discussion each month about what we’ve seen, what we think is good and what could be better,” and then provide a monthly round-up. They launched a bilingual journal, Art Review Hong Kong, in September last year and are working on their second edition.
Kwok is also curating Samson Young’s presentation for Hong Kong at this year’s Venice Biennale, which opens in May—“the biggest project I have worked on so far”—while simultaneously working on an exhibition showcasing the work of seven Hong Kong artists across five venues in Liverpool, England.