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.