Curators

International Curators


Liu Sola | Curator of the Opera Project and Chamber Music

The composer, singer and writer Liu Sola was born in China in 1955. She now lives in Beijing and New York. She became famous with her novel Ni Bie Wu Xuanze (You Have No Choice), which was published in 1984. As a singer and composer she works on the relationship between traditional Chinese music, jazz and blues. Liu Sola’s literary works have already been translated into six languages.


Tian Mansha | Curator of the Opera Project

Tian Mansha, who was born in 1963 in Chongqing, is a famous performer at the Sichuan Opera and Professor at Sichuan Art School and at the Institute of Sichuan Opera. Tian Mansha continually strives to preserve the tradition of Sichuan Opera and ensure its contemporary renewal. She has developed a large repertoire of classical and new pieces such as The Ripples of the Stagnant Water, Wu Song Killing Brother’s Wife, Lady Macbeth, and Yin Yang River, which she has presented in China and at festivals all over the world.


Wu Hung | Exhibition Curator

Wu Hung is Professor of Chinese Art at the University of Chicago. Wu Hung was born in Beijing. From 1973 to 1978 he worked in the research team at the Palace Museum, or Forbidden City. In 1980 Wu Hung went to the USA, gained his PhD at Harvard University in 1987 and taught there until 1994. Although he specialises in the art of the Tang Dynasty, he is interested, above all, in contemporary Chinese art. Since 1999 he has been organising exhibitions; in 2002, for example, he was curator of the first Guangzhou Triennale.


Christopher Phillips | Exhibition Curator

Christopher Phillips is Curator at the International Center of Photography, New York, as well as an art critic and expert on the history of photography. He worked for ten years as senior editor for Art in America, before switching to ICP. Christopher Phillips has been the curator of several important exhibitions and co-organised others such as Cosmos (1999), Voices (1998), Montage and Modern Life (1992) and The Metropolis and the Art of the Twenties (1991). His publications include Photography in Europe in the Modern Era (Aperture,1989), The New Vision (together with Maria Morris Hambourg, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989) and Steichen at War (Abrams, 1981).


Dai Jinhua | curator of the film series

Dai Jinhua was born in 1959. She is a film theorist and also works in the field of comparative literature. From 1982 to 1993, she taught and did research at the Beijing Film Institute/Department of Filmic Literature. Since 1993, she has had a professorship at the Institute of Comparative Literature and Culture, Beijing University, Haidan District. She has written numerous books and essays on film and literature, some of which were recently published together in the volume Dai Jinhua: Imprints: A Collection of Essays (2002).



Ackbar Abbas | Conference Advisor

Ackbar Abbas is chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) at Hongkong University. One of the focal points of his work involves doing research on the urban condition and, above all, on the relationship between film and architecture. He is the co-author of Internationalizing Cultural Studies (2004), wrote Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997) and is one of the authors of Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism and the Search for an Alternative Modernity (2002), Mapping Hong Kong (2001) and Wong Kar-Wai (1997).