Phil Tinari is the Director and CEO of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), a leading Chinese independent institution of contemporary art in Beijing. At this talk, Tinari will discuss Chinese art and its global context, with reference to his work at UCCA, as well as curatorial projects at the Guggenheim and SFMOMA.

Since 2011, Tinari has led its transformation from a founder-driven private museum into China’s leading independent, international institution of contemporary art, culminating in 2017 with a restructuring that has brought the institution, originally known as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, into the patronage of a new group of mainly Chinese trustees. During Tinari’s tenure, UCCA has become known for both its artistic program and its operational model. It has mounted more than seventy exhibitions and a wide range of public programs, bringing artistic voices established and emerging, Chinese and international, to a growing audience of nearly a million visitors each year.

Prior to joining UCCA, Tinari launched LEAP, an internationally distributed, bilingual magazine of contemporary art published by the Modern Media Group, in 2009. A widely published writer and critic, he is a contributing editor of Artforum, and was founding editor of that magazine’s Chinese edition in 2007. He was co-curator, with Alexandra Munroe and Hou Hanru, of the 2017 exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, now on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and opening in November at SFMOMA. In 2016 he was named a fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.- China Relations. Fluent in Mandarin and based in Beijing since 2001, Tinari holds degrees from Duke and Harvard, and is currently completing a doctorate in art history at Oxford.

This talk is co-presented by the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, the Confucius Institute, and UMMA.