Xiaoyu Weng is the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City. She recently curated, with Hou Hanru, the exhibition Tales of Our Time at the Guggenheim that features new commissioned works by seven artists and groups from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Previously, she served as the founding director of the Kadist Art Foundation’s Asia Programs, Paris and San Francisco. There, she launched the Kadist Curatorial Collaboration, which organizes exhibitions that stimulate cultural exchange, and she also oversaw artist residencies and the building of the contemporary Asian art collection. She has also worked as program director of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium in San Francisco and as a curator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts (CCA). She was honored by Art in General in New York as the Visionary Curator of the year 2016.
Educated at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing and the CCA in San Francisco, she has organized exhibitions and public programs for venues including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; CAFA Art Museum, Beijing; Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
She is a contributing editor of Leap, a bilingual magazine dedicated to contemporary art from China. Her essay “Working with Archive” won the Artforum Critical Writing Award in 2011. Her writing also appears in prominent art periodicals, books, and exhibition catalogues, including those published for the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, 2012 Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial, and 2013 Auckland Triennial.
Image: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Can’t Help Myself, 2016. Multimedia, dimensions variable overall. Courtesy of Xiaoyu Weng; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, 2016. Photo by David Heald. Copyright Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.
