Symposium: How has Japanese contemporary art changed since 1989?

Kathy Halbreich is an independent curator and philanthropy advisor.
She was Director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1991-2007), and the first Associate Director at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008-2016) where she organized retrospectives of Sigmar Polke (2014) and Bruce Nauman (2018) and initiated new global research programs. She became Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2017, developing scholarly and philanthropic programs that reflect Rauschenberg's joyful, responsive and irreverent approach to making art, including exhibitions, academic partnerships, and residences that open the artist’s career to expanded interpretation, the preparation of a catalogue raisonné to launch on the artist’s 100th birthday in 2025, and the founding of an anonymous Artists Council that decides upon grants to that promote the well-being of creative practitioners and those whose lives have been affected by social inequities.

Art Critic, Independent Curator

Pi Li is the Head of Art of Taikwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. He was a former Sigg senior curator and Head of Curatorial Affairs of M+ Hong Kong. He previously served as the deputy executive director of the art administration department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA, 2001–12); the co-founder and director of Universal Studios-Beijing (2005–12), later Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing.

Exhibitions Pi Li curated include Right Is Wrong: Four Decades of Chinese Art in M+ Sigg Collection at Whitworth Gallery in Manchester and Buildmuseet, Umeå 2015 and 2014; Moist: MAAP in Beijing 2002 at the Beijing Millennium Monument in 2002; Fantasia at space imA in Seoul in 2001 and East Modern Art Center in Beijing in 2002; Image Is Power at He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen in 2002.

He was one of the curators of Under Construction at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2002; and Media City Seoul in 2006. He has also served as curator for the Shanghai Biennial in 2002; and Allors, la Chine? at Centre Georges Pompidou in 2003. Publications include From Action to Concept (2015), Farewell to Moralism (2018) M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Art (2021), and Madame Song: A Life in Art and Fashion (2023). Pi Li earned his Ph.D. degree in art history from the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Doryun Chong is Artistic Director and Chief Curator, M+, Hong Kong. He was appointed as the inaugural Chief Curator of M+ in 2013. From 2016 to September 2024, he also served as Deputy Director, Curatorial. For over a decade, Chong has overseen all curatorial activities and programmes at M+, including collections, exhibitions, learning and public programmes, 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 has led the transformative growth of the M+ Collections and steered the museum’s curatorial direction and pedagogical practices, foregrounding the transcultural and transnational narratives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century global visual culture from a uniquely Asian perspective rooted in Hong Kong.

He has curated and overseen more than twenty exhibitions prior to the museum’s opening, including Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint (2018) at the M+ Pavilion in the Art Park of the West Kowloon Cultural District. He has also helped organize and supervise the five editions of Hong Kong’s participation in the Venice Biennale from 2015 to 2024, bringing a new generation of Hong Kong artists and curators to the international stage. He co-curated (with Mika Yoshitake) Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, the most comprehensive retrospective of the celebrated Japanese artist to date, which opened to great critical acclaim and positive public reception at M+ in November 2022. It later toured to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2023, becoming one of the most visited exhibitions in that museum’s history, and then to Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, in 2024. He is a co-curator of Picasso for Asia: A Conversation, co-organised by M+ and Musée national Picasso-Paris, which will open at M+ in March 2025.

Prior to joining M+, Chong worked the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2009–2013), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2003–2009), and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (1999–2000). He has curated several landmark exhibitions, including major retrospectives of Tetsumi Kudo (2008) and Huang Yong Ping (2005) and a survey of postwar Japanese art, Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (2012). Chong has published and lectured widely and served on numerous award juries and public panels across Asia, North America, and Europe. He is a member of the Sounding Board at Haus der Kunst München.

He earned his Bachelor of Arts and completed doctoral studies in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Curator at the National Art Center, Tokyo.
Before joining the National Art Center, Tokyo, Yun worked at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2015-2019) and the Ashiya City Museum of Art & History (2020-2021).
Yun curated Universal / Remote (2023-24, Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto; National Art Center, Tokyo; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art) and served as assistant curator for Lee Ufan, 15th Anniversary of the National Art Center, Tokyo (2022, National Art Center, Tokyo), Ashiya Time: A Large Collection Exhibition (2020, Ashiya City Museum of Art and History), Christian Boltanski – Lifetime (2019, National Museum of Art, Osaka).