FINE ART ASIA 2019 Academic Programme

Mrs Nancy Maria Lee Chang, JP has been the Chairman of the Friends of Hong Kong Museum of Art since 2005. The Friends is a non-profit organization that supports the Museum through fundraising, members’ activities, and community outreach programmes. She currently serves on the Advisory Council of Princeton University Art Museum, is a trustee of the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and a board member of the Freer-Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. She received an MA in Art History from the NYU Institute of Fine Arts (1987), having studied History of Art at University College London. She also has an MA in Physical Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University (1981), and a BA in Chemistry from Lake Forest College (1977).

She previously worked as Consulting Editor at Orientations Magazine, and is a Director of the Ink Society in Hong Kong.

Ms Yifawn Lee is the publisher of Orientations, a scholarly magazine for collectors and connoisseurs of East and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas and South Asia founded in 1969. After finishing her studies, she worked in finance in Hong Kong in the 2000s and later joined Orientations in 2008. In 2014, she founded Asian Art Hong Kong as a platform to provide art-related lectures and events. In 2018, she helped organize ‘The Blue Road: Mastercrafts from Persia’ at Liang Yi Museum and ‘From Two Arises Three: The Collaborative Works of Arnold Chang and Michael Cherney’ at The University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong.

She currently sits on the advisory board of Liang Yi Museum and on the executive committee of the Friends of Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Dr Maria Mok joined the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 1996, and is currently its Museum Director. She has extensive museum experience, previously curator in charge of different departments, including China Trade art, Chinese Antiquities, Modern and Hong Kong Art, Education and Extension Services, and has curated and led a vast number of exhibitions and programmes. She is a specialist in China trade painting with a research focus on dating and authentication, and an extensive collection of published works with particular interest in the artistic interaction of global trade that includes Images of the Canton Factories 1760-1822: Reading History in Art (HKU Press: 2015) co-authored with Paul A. Van Dyke. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts Studies, a Master’s degree in Chinese Historical Studies on Guangdong decorative arts of the Qing dynasty, a Doctoral degree on China trade painting, and a graduate diploma in Museum Studies.

Dr Daisy Yiyou Wang is the Deputy Director, Curatorial and Programming, of the Hong Kong Palace Museum. She has served as the Curator of Chinese and East Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Chinese Art Specialist at the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler. She has led a number of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art exhibitions, collection-based installations, research, acquisition, and fundraising projects. With Jan Stuart, she co-curated the major exhibition Empresses of China’s Forbidden City and co-edited the exhibition publication. This exhibition was named the “Best Thematic/Historical Show” in 2018 by the Boston Globe. A specialist of the history of collecting, lacquer, Qing court portraiture, and the history of photography in China, she has published internationally. Her new book is the first monograph on Charles Lang Freer and the formation of his Chinese art collection. She is a recipient of a Getty Museum Leadership Fellowship and a Smithsonian Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Her work has been merited with a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, a Smithsonian Scholarly Studies Award and a Smithsonian Valuing World Cultures Award.