In collaboration with Art Week Tokyo
Adam Szymczyk, Curator-at large at Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich
Doryun Chong, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, M+, Hong Kong
Moderator: Andrew Maerkle, Editorial Director, Art Week Tokyo, Tokyo
How do exhibition makers approach issues of ‘placeness’ in a globalized art world? Home to a rich and complex art history, Japan has long offered curators fertile ground to work with. Yet exhibitions of Japanese Modern and contemporary art often get caught up in trying to define the national characteristics of artistic practices that are necessarily implicated in transnational networks of empire, migration, and trade. What possibilities emerge from decoupling place from essentializations of the local, while still being attuned to local realities? Looking ahead to this year’s edition of Art Week Tokyo, this talk brings together two internationally renowned curators who are currently working on exhibitions in Japan, Adam Szymczyk and Doryun Chong. They will discuss how their ambitious projects offer new ways of thinking about art today.
Adam Szymczyk is a curator, author, and editor based in Zurich, Switzerland. Szymczyk is the first international curator of AWT Focus, Art Week Tokyo’s centerpiece exhibition platform, which this year addresses the theme ‘What Is Real?’ He was the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel (2003–2014) and the artistic director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2014–2017). He is a curator at Büro für geistige Mitarbeit at Kunsthaus Zürich. Upcoming projects include a monograph on Ahlam Shibli, and the exhibition ‘André du Colombier: Lyrical Point of View’ at Museu Tàpies in Barcelona.
Doryun Chong is the artistic director and chief curator at M+, Hong Kong. Chong is curatorial director of ‘The Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989–2010’ at the National Art Center, Tokyo, which is organized in partnership with M+. For over a decade, Chong has overseen all curatorial activities and programs at M+, including collections, exhibitions, learning and public programs, publications, and digital initiatives across the museum’s three main disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art. Leading up to and following the museum’s grand opening in November 2021, he led the transformative growth of the M+ collections. He steered the museum’s curatorial direction and pedagogical practices, foregrounding the transcultural and transnational narratives of 20th- and 21st-century global visual culture from a uniquely Asian perspective rooted in Hong Kong.
Andrew Maerkle is a writer, editor, and translator based in Tokyo. He is currently the editorial director of Art Week Tokyo and, since 2010, the deputy editor of the bilingual online publication ART iT. From 2006 to 2008 he was deputy editor of ArtAsiaPacific in New York, where he helped create the annual ‘Almanac’ edition. Maerkle is a contributor to international journals including Aperture, Art & Australia, Artforum, and Frieze. His book of translations Kishio Suga: Writings, Vol. 1, 1969–1979 was published by Skira in 2021. From 2018 to 2023 he taught in the Graduate School of Global Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts.
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