CAF Summit 2008, Ditchley Park

The first and most successful event China Art Foundation (CAF) organised was the CAF Summit in 2008, an impressive cross-cultural gathering of influential artists, esteemed scholars and heavyweight museum curators who attended the talks from various parts of the US, Europe and Asia.

One of the most important global conferences held in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s, the three-day event was a highly exclusive and private gathering which was curated with the aim of facilitating important dialogues on the cross-pollination of culture through art.

The CAF Summit was held at the historic Ditchley Park estate in Oxfordshire, famed for its role as a secret base used by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the early years of World War II. The summit brought together 40 of the most influential people in the international arts and culture scene, both from the East and West. Among the attendees were:

• Sir Nicolas Serota, the director of the Tate from 1988 to 2017. He is currently the Chairman of Arts Council England, as well as a member of the board of the BBC.
• Wang Huangsheng, a distinguished Chinese-born artist, curator and art history scholar who is a director of the CAFA (Cultural Academy of Fine Arts) in Beijing. He was formerly the director of the Guangdong Museum of Art.
• Professor Robert Storr, an artist, critic and academic from the University of Yale’s Yale School of Art. He was a former senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. He has also been described as one of the most influential Americans in the art world by New York magazine.
• Dr Gao Minglu, scholar of Contemporary Chinese art and Professor of Art History and Architecture at University of Pittsburgh, who is also an academic at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.
• Professor Wu Hung, director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at Chicago University. He has researched and published widely on both modern Chinese art and Contemporary Chinese art.
• Wang Jianwei, one of China’s most prominent Conceptual artists.
• Dr Melissa Chiu, who was then director of Asia Society Museum in New York and a leading authority on Asian Contemporary art. The Australian-born expert is now the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.
• Joe Thompson, who was the founding director of MASS MoCA (Massachussets Museum of Contemporary Arts) and is currently special counsel to its Board of Trustees.

CAF Summit 2010, Hangzhou

Following the resounding success of the CAF Summit in Ditchley Park, the Foundation created a complementary summit two years later in Hangzhou, China. Like its predecessor, this exclusive event, held in May 2010, was also privately held and attended by influential artists, academics, critics and curators from all over the world. Some of the most prominent figures at the event were:

• Hou Hanru, an international art curator and critic who was then the Director of Exhibitions, Public Programming and Museum Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is now the artistic director of MAXXI – the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome.
• Michael Govan, a prolific curator who runs LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and was previously the deputy director of The Guggenheim.
• Alfred Pacquement, an art historian and museum curator who is one of the most influential players in the Contemporary and modern art worlds. At the time of the CAF Summit, he was the director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne department of the Pompidou in Paris. He is currently an independent curator and cultural consultant.
• Professor Gao Shiming, an academic from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. He is now President of China Academy of Art where he is also founding chair of the first curatorial programme in China.
• The late Joseph Backstein, founder of Moscow Biennale who was widely regarded as the voice of Russian Contemporary art.
• Zhang Peili, the father of video art in China, who is dean of New Media department at China Academy of Hangzhou.
• Li Lei, an abstractionist artist who was the then director of Shanghai Art Museum and a professor at Tongji University. He is an expert on Chinese Abstract art.
• Maxwell K. (Mike) Hearn, the Douglas Dillon Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who has taught seminars on Chinese painting at Yale, Princeton, Columbia and the New York Institute of Fine Arts.
• Tomas Vlcek, director of the collection of Modern and Contemporary art at Czech National Gallery in Prague.
• Chris Dercon, a Belgian museum veteran who was then at the Haus Der Kunst in Munich. He was previously a director of Tate Modern in London. He left his role as president of the Grand Palais in Paris and is currently the managing director of the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris.
• Joe Thompson, who was the founding director of MASS MoCA (Massachussets Museum of Contemporary Arts) and is currently special counsel to its Board of Trustees.
• Gary Tinterow, the former Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is now director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

China Art Foundation Talk at the Met, 2011

Following the successes of the CAF Summit in the years 2008 and 2010, the Foundation continued to curate important dialogues to create cultural bridges between East and West. One such important event was held at The Met in New York in the year 2011. It was a public discourse between prominent Chinese-French Contemporary artist Huang Yong Ping and the late Frank Stella, one of the leading abstract artists in the world.

Zhang Huan: In the Ashes of History

In September 2020 The State Hermitage opened the exhibition “Zhang Huan: In the Ashes of History” , the first solo exhibition in Russia by the famous contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Huan.

In the Ashes of History was displayed in the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace and showcased several series of works made in a variety of techniques.

The exhibition was organized by the Department of Contemporary Art as part of the Hermitage 20/21 project, with the support of Pearl Lam Galleries, China Art Foundation, DC Foundation – Diana Chen, Dr Junning Lee and Mrs Xiaojun Lee, Asymmetry Art Foundation, and Julian Zhen.

The initiators and curators of the exhibition were Dimitri Ozerkov, director of the Department of Contemporary Art, and Anastasia Veialko, junior research assistant. The guest curator was Professor Wu Hung of Chicago University.