I’m Sabila.

Thank you Alina, hello Sabila, and hello everyone else.

Thank you for joining us today. Josh. Well, we have given a little introduction there in the beginning. We would love for our listeners to hear from you in your own words. Can you share a bit more about yourself?

I would like to thank Alina for her kind introduction. I was an art history major at the University of Chicago. I did not start out knowing for sure that I would want to be an art historian, but Chicago was a liberal arts college, so I had to take an art history class. It got me very interested in art history, and then I became an art history major without thinking that I would become an art historian, but I liked art history enough to pursue a graduate degree in the field. After my master's program, I decided to stay on to complete my doctorate. And then afterwards, I was pondering whether I should join the museum field or academia. I was lucky enough to be offered a position at the Seattle Art Museum as the Chinese art curator. And then I never looked back, and I am really enjoying my work in the museum field.

I think that research is very important. In my work as a curator, I find it to be very important for those of us who work in the museums to appreciate the collections that we are working with. Otherwise, it would be very difficult for any aspiring curators to work in an institution while they would like to research something else. So, what I've learned over the years, is that it would be much better if you could find a new research interest based on what your institution offers. And this lesson, I find, was particularly relevant during the financial crisis in 2008. Because during that time, when I was a curator at the Seattle Art Museum, originally, I was hoping to organise a major art project with a mainland Chinese institution. But because of the financial crisis, you know, funding got cut, and then I was encouraged to look deeper into the permanent collection. This process of deep mining collection was really beneficial for me, because I got to really have an opportunity to study the collection holistically, and then it really changed the way that I looked at the collection. And in the end, by 2013, five years after that, I wrote a book on the establishment of the Chinese art collection at the Seattle Art Museum, which happens to be one of the earliest North American museums, to start its museum collection on Chinese art, so it was a very rewarding experience. And from that, I will always tell my colleagues, you know, you can always find new discoveries on a collection that has been around for a long time. So yes, I would continue to encourage other people, especially students, to look at collections that are at their disposal.

The art museum of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is the first purpose-built museum in Hong Kong. This is not to say that it is the first museum in Hong Kong, but we are the first purpose-built museum. Originally, there were other museums in Hong Kong, but they tend to be located in the libraries or the city hall. But when we built the museum here, on the campus of the Chinese University, the architecture was actually conceived by the famous architect I. M. Pei. He was a very good friend of the founding Vice Chancellor, Professor Zhou Ming Li as well as one of the early patrons of the University Museum, Dr J. S. Lee. So, he had this idea of building a courtyard structure for the University Museum, putting the museum at the rear chamber of this courtyard design. Another unit is also located in this courtyard structure, is the Institute of Chinese studies, which used to be the mother unit of the art museum. The Chinese University prides itself on the study of Chinese civilisations and culture. And the university founders believe that it is very important for students to learn about Chinese culture through its cultural heritage and its historical artefacts. That's why a few years after the founding of the university in 1963, the founders believed that it would be important to build a university devoted to Chinese art. Eight years after the founding of the university, in 1971, the art museum opened. We began with a teaching collection, and ever since, we have worked very closely with historians, art historians and other faculty members to provide different angles on exploring Chinese cultural heritage and Chinese art history here.

So as you've mentioned, university museums have a unique position in the arts and cultural sector. Could you talk more about the specific functions and significance of university museums? It would be great if you could mention a few examples from around the world as well.

I think it might be difficult to generalise university museums per se, because there are so many different kinds of university museums. Some of them are extremely well established, and may even have much longer history than other municipal museums. Yale Art Gallery, for instance, has been around for over 200 years. And then, for other smaller museums, sometimes they are operated by a few people, and they don't get as much attention. I believe that our museum, the Chinese University Art Museum, is in a very good place, because we are one of the few university museums that are centrally-located on the main quad of campus. So that makes it very convenient for the university leadership to pay attention to what we do, and also for us to welcome and to receive our visitors. But having said that, the location of our university is a little bit far from the city centre, and so oftentimes, we don't necessarily get as many local visitors to see our museum. But I would say that most of our visitors are actually from outside of the university, so there are visitors who come all the way to the university campus just to see our exhibitions. These visitors are not only limited to Hong Kong residents, but they also include our international visitors, and especially scholars, collectors, and researchers who have special interest in the topics that we are working on. In my experience, I believe that some of my colleagues who lead university museums believe that university museums play a very similar role as other museums, because we believe that it is very important for us to generate new scholarships. But I would believe that my colleagues working in non-university museums also believe that to be important. It may not be fair to just say that university museums only focus on research, with the implication that other museums don't. On the other hand, for us to say that we focus on research, it may also give other people the wrong impression that we care less about impact, because in the 21st century, I believe that most university museum professionals would believe that it is also very important for our museums to have a greater impact beyond the university community. I think that nowadays there is this convergence between university museums and other museums operating in the city or nations.

Well, we believe that it is very important for the university museum to serve as a bridge for the university and other institutions. Our university has a mission to combine China and the rest of the world, and also to connect the past and the present. We want to use our museum, in our capacity as a research museum on Chinese art history. We want to leverage our expertise to build connections with other institutions that have an interest in China and Chinese art. Over the years, we have worked very closely with colleagues in other museums, not only the ones in Hong Kong, but also in mainland Chinese institutions, and in recent years, we have focused more and more on collaborating with other institutions in other parts of the world. We want to make sure that whatever we do, the brand of CUHK will be known in the arts world elsewhere.

Thank you so much for sharing this, Josh, we really hope you'll achieve your goals. We understand that collaboration is important, and are sure that our listeners would like to hear more about some of the unique projects that you've done at the CUHK Museum. Could you share some examples of these projects that best represent what you're trying to achieve?

The few projects that are on top of my mind are actually happening as we speak. I will be flying to Beijing later this week. We have a collaboration with the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City, and over the past few years, those of us who live in Hong Kong are aware of the significance of the arts that the Hong Kong government has placed. And while we are trying to fashion Hong Kong as an arts hub, many of us would like to bring in interesting artworks and pieces from other collections and from other countries, but we are a small museum. We thought that instead of just trying to bring in extremely precious objects with very high insurance values, why don't we just try to bring our own treasures to other cities? So earlier this year, we collaborated with the Arts Institute of Chicago, where we introduced the works of a pioneering Hong Kong artist Lu Xu Quan, and then we mounted the first retrospective of his works in a major North American museum. We thought it was a very good opportunity for us to tell a Hong Kong story on the international platform. And then, as I mentioned earlier, we are also working on a project with the Palace Museum in Beijing, and for that exhibition, we are also bringing some of the key masterpieces in the university collection, and these are rare rubbings from the Song Dynasty that are about 800 years old. We are bringing these rare pieces to Beijing and to show the tourists and also the residents of Beijing that a university museum in Hong Kong actually has such great treasures, and so it will be a great way for us to showcase the research and also the collection of the Chinese University of Hong Kong with audiences in other parts of the country.

These projects sound really interesting. Could you tell us more about how students and faculty members are involved in these programs?

Thank you for asking that. We are trying to engage more faculty members and students in the work of the museum. Even though our mission statement has changed, I think the idea of trying to engage the university community intellectually through the work that we do is still very much relevant to our line of work here. In the past, we have worked primarily with the fine arts department, because a lot of the art experts on campus are art historians affiliated with the fine arts department, but we truly believe that works of art provide an entry point for, you know, different aspects of life. In that regard, we are trying to broaden our reach to other faculty members to get their expertise on something that we may not know regarding our own collection.
For instance, we will be working with professors and also researchers in the chemistry department to look at the bronze mirrors collection in the museum, because they can tell us the physical properties better than we can. So that's a very interesting perspective. We also work with the music department, because when we organise exhibitions, we think we want to create a new experience for our visitors. Over the past few years, we have invited seniors of music majors to compose and to perform exhibition theme songs, and then during the exhibition opening, we invite them to perform those theme songs on site. It is a great platform for them to showcase what they have learned, and it also turns out to be a very happy collaboration between our curators and the students and also the music teachers. And then, more recently, we are also working with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering on a really important project that tries to popularise the study of artificial intelligence. Over the past few years, the computer science department has gotten a major grant from the Hong Kong Jockey Club to revolutionise the education curriculum of Hong Kong by trying to introduce the youngsters to AI at an early age. The museum is privileged to take part in this project, and we try to help out by creating an art module. So what we propose to do, is to use one of our masterpieces, namely a rare rubbing from the Song dynasty. And this is a rubbing that would actually be shown in the Palace Museum in Beijing later on. To use that piece of calligraphy after the style of Wang Xixhi, and then to kind of recreate a calligraphic font after his style. Because the rubbing only consists of 324 characters, and we want to build a character font composed of many more characters in his style. We thought that maybe AI could help us to develop that, and so far, after a year and a half working on this project, we have made some breakthroughs, and it's been interesting. The result is not exactly where we want it to be, but right now, we are getting a better understanding of how AI works, and that actually is the purpose of this project. Whether we create a beautiful font or not, it doesn't change the fact that we can educate the next generation on how AI works. In a sense, we are using calligraphy to teach about AI, or you could also say that we are using AI to teach calligraphy.

Regarding the project on AI and calligraphy, the field of AI has developed so rapidly. The past few years, we talked a lot about style transfer. You could potentially have a famous painting by Van Gogh, and then if you want to, you can convert it into a painting like Picasso, so you will have a hybrid image of Van Gogh and Picasso painting. That is a technique our computer scientists have tried to explore, looking at how Chinese calligraphy could be studied and could be reinvented, so to speak. But then we realised that in doing so, that may not necessarily give us the optimal result, because, after all, we are not trying to create a hybrid font. In order to have an in-depth understanding of the nuances of Wang Xizhi’s calligraphy, we have to look into another approach of looking at calligraphy from an AI perspective. It is called the component conditioned approach, which is to say that each character consists of several parts, a radical and then another part. Then we are looking at the relationship between these different components within a single character, so AI could deep-learn the relationship of these characters, and then perhaps, after learning dozens of characters, they could try to write or recreate other characters with similar components that are different characters, but are real words. These are not made of characters. That's one of the breakthroughs that I was thinking about when I mentioned our computer scientists have gotten better results in recent days, actually.

I would admit that it is a challenge that we are trying to overcome. We are trying to make the museum more popular for our university community as well as for our outside visitors. I would say that for the general visitors, of course, people would be fascinated by the physical structure of the building. Earlier, I mentioned that our museum was originally built as part of a courtyard structure design conceived by I. M. Pei, but the idea of that original design is predicated upon its use as a teaching facility, meaning that it was not originally intended for the public, and so when the museum was situated at the rear chamber of this courtyard structure, it is basically similar to the ancient architecture of having an ancestral shrine or family hall in the back, which oftentimes was the most private area of the Chinese household. So in the 21st century, the idea of having a museum at the back of a courtyard structure may not intuitively be a welcoming place.
What we have done over the years was that, the museum has expanded, and currently we are also undergoing a capital project where we will have a new wing built adjacent to the original museum. The nice thing about the new structure is that it will have a new main entrance that connects directly to the university avenue, which is the main artery on campus, so iit will be very easy for us to give directions to our visitors in the future, because in the past, we have to tell our visitors that, oh, the museum is located at the back of the Institute of Chinese Studies, but the Institute of Chinese Studies is actually not open to the public. Okay, here I have digressed a little bit, because your question was really about how we try to attract our audiences. Well, I think that for you know, whether we are talking about 18 year olds or the general visitors, people like to look at or go inside a fantastic building. I'm very excited that our new museum, it's going to be an iconic piece of architecture on campus. When people want to come inside a building and see what it is like, I think the hardware is very important, and I think that it is also important for the galleries to provide a very different visual experience. If the different galleries have different layouts, I think that would be more visually appealing and exciting for our audiences. I think that would go a long way for us to make our academic research more enticing to the young audience as well as the general visitors.

That is definitely the trend, and this is also what our museum aspires to be. Currently, we have limited space, which does not really allow us to position ourselves as a social gathering place. We don't even have a cafe in a museum, and we all know how important a museum cafe is to the general visitors, not only for you know, for food and beverages, but also as a place to communicate with one another. In the new museum, we will have a communal space. We'll have a cafe, and we also expect the site to be the venue for many other kinds of academic activities and social activities on campus, whether or not those activities actually focus on the exhibitions or the arts. We want to welcome our colleagues from other departments and faculties to make use of that space. So you're absolutely right. We are trying to turn the museum into a social hub.

So, climate change is on my mind as well as on many other people's minds. Well, one of my colleagues in the Seattle Art Museum has mentioned that the museum field is a very carbon intensive industry. It creates a lot of wastage, because a lot of the installations that are created for us for a special exhibition cannot be reused. That is very much on my mind, and sometimes I feel that it might be important when we think about creating a glitzy exhibition, what the carbon footprints might be, even if we can afford to mount those kind of very immersive or engaging or attractive exhibitions, we just have to think about the environmental cost of those exhibitions. On my end, I would be more concerned about the carbon footprint of the work that we do at the museum, and this is something that I hope to take a more holistic approach in the future to be able to quantify the carbon footprint. Not many museums have done that. I think some of the museums have started doing that. That would be a future goal for us.
Regarding other challenges, of course, I think most people will talk about funding issues. And here, I don't necessarily want to dwell so much on the funding issue. I think it's going to be quite similar everywhere. The one challenge that I would like to highlight is for our stakeholders to acknowledge quality work. These days, we hear so much about trying to create impact for the work that we do, and oftentimes we want, you know, we try to quantify the impact of those exhibitions through visitors and through other kinds of metrics, but sometimes, I think we have lost sight of the fact that to be able to mount an original exhibition is already a huge feat of success, especially for the kind of scholarly exhibitions that we do. Of course it will be great if the work that we do is of interest to the general audience. But this is a flawed logic, because museums don't exist merely for the purpose of entertainment. We cannot compete with a cinema or shopping mall to create, you know, you know, fun or exciting experiences for the audience. We exist to give people a chance to reflect and to learn something new, and to give them an opportunity to learn about something that they did not know they had an interest in, because they had never approached that topic before. Oftentimes, when a museum tries to do something very much in depth that would take many years of research and hard work to be able to realise that actually it's already a lot of effort, and the fact that we can get some funders to fund those original exhibitions are really important. I think that, depending on the funders that you talk to, oftentimes the funders who understand the purpose of those exhibitions, they automatically get it. They would just say, “oh, that is a very important project, go ahead and do it, don't worry.” And some of our donors, I would actually name him here, Mr. Anthony Jung. He would look at the research that our curators are doing, and then he will go to auctions to buy pieces that would support our research. These are the kind of supporters that we really appreciate. But then, of course, we understand that there are the foundations which are run by managers who may not have the same level of understanding of some of the projects. In those cases, oftentimes they want us to justify the projects that we do by asking us to predict the number of visitors or what we consider to be the impact in the field. If we explain to them that this would advance scholarship, they would want us to elaborate more on that, not that it's a bad thing, because being questioned by non experts would also help us to think outside of our box. This is something that I believe academics should be aware of as well, and in the end, it could also help us to become better scholars. We can think of the answer to the question more thoughtfully that could be more accessible to the general audience, but I think these days, we need to strike a better balance, and I think that governments across the world also bear some responsibility to raise the level of operations of the museums operating in the cities. It would be good if we can get some support from the public to really sink our teeth into projects that are worthwhile.

Well, first of all, I think that the museum industry has always been difficult, meaning that the job prospect has always been a challenge for us. This is not only true now, it was always true in the past. I remember being very uncertain and scared when I was an art history major at the University of Chicago, because all of my family members, relatives and fellow classmates would ask me what I wanted to do in the future. I think first of all, you have to come to terms with your own fear. There is nothing unusual about that, but don't let that fear deter you from what you want to do. It's helpful to volunteer for other institutions. I have done loads of volunteer work for museums and other organisations, and oftentimes, and some, well, not oftentimes, but sometimes. Of course, before trust was developed between you and your supervisors, you may not be given some worthwhile projects or meaningful work, but as time goes on, as you develop working relationships with your supervisors, then gradually they would start to give you things that might interest you, something that they think you can excel at. Then that's when you get the things that you want to get in return, and then as time goes on, these are the kind of experiences that would really build up to help your profile.
So, the first thing I want to say to our younger colleagues is, don't be afraid to try. I've been told that nowadays, some museums cannot offer free internships. But in the past, I have done a lot and they may have a different term for it. Now they may have to call it ‘volunteer’ if you don't get paid for it. You can only call yourself an intern if you get paid for it. But anyway, I don't think these kinds of terminologies are that important. As long as you have been given an opportunity to work in an institution, I would say that you should go for it.
Then another piece of advice I would give to our colleagues is that, hold on to the projects that you really want to do, even if it means that it is a project that may not be endorsed by your superiors. I'm sure your supervisors would not discourage you from having a pet project, but if you're committed to that project, you could potentially turn that pet project into something that is much more useful to you. A more concrete example that I have in recent months was this exhibition. At the Art Institute of Chicago that I just mentioned, I have been researching this Hong Kong artist, Xiao Quan, for a number of years now, but over the years, I've never really had a chance to sink my teeth into writing a monograph about the artist. But then I was able to find a partner with the curator at the Art Institute. Then I thought, okay, well, this will be the opportunity for me to sink my teeth into the project and then find all the extra time that I could get to make this project happen. On top of the expansion or capital project that I've been working on, I was able to find time to work on this side project, and then when that project bore fruit, I could present it back to other university stakeholders that, “oh, look, actually we are working on this other project that is not happening on campus here, but that is also having impact elsewhere.” I think it will be important for you to think about working on something that you believe deeply in.
And also, some people might tell you that, well these days, you want to focus on what other people are interested in doing. You have to think about that more thoughtfully. Sometimes there could also be an element of luck or serendipity, if you will. The example that I want to give on that note actually concerns the academic focus of my museum here. As I mentioned earlier, we focus primarily on Chinese art, especially classical Chinese art. About 20 years ago, before I joined the museum, my predecessors and other stakeholders of the of the museum wondered whether the university museum should also shift its focus from classical art to contemporary art, because there seems to be such great interest in contemporary art that would make sense, and people assume that the younger generation would automatically be interested in contemporary art. But in the end, we decided to stick with classical art, and I think that it has turned out to be a very good decision, because as the art ecosystem has grown in Hong Kong, we find that more and more institutions focus on contemporary art and visual culture, and we happen to be one of the few places, if not the only place, that still focused most heavily on classical art. In other words, we have developed a niche market for ourselves, and this is how we have become distinguished in the museum field. In other words, for those of you who have a special interest, do not abandon your interest. Okay, you could always explore what would be of interest to you, what might be of interest to other stakeholders, but do not lose hope in the things that you are interested in.

You know, this is a very tricky question when you think that you are given all the resources that you might need. The reason, I think that is a tricky question is, because part of the fun of working in the cultural sector, and in the museum in particular, is actually convincing other people to give you the resources that you do not have. If you're just giving me all the resources that I could have without asking for it, you would actually be depriving me of some of the fun that I do get in the process. It might be a very prepared way of analysing your question, but here I am not going to dream that. Actually, I have a very small dream, but this dream has been difficult for me to realise. I think access to the museum, as in transportation access to the museum is very important. Last year, the subway opened up a new line that would connect our university to the city centre, and it's a very convenient ride. It only takes about 25 minutes to go from the city centre of Hong Kong to the university campus. So we feel that we are very much connected to the city centre. But CUHK is actually built on a hilly campus. From the subway station to the main quads, which are on top of the hill, it could easily be a 20-minute hike from the MTR subway station to the University Museum. And I would say that that has been a deterrent for some of our visitors, they think that it is very difficult to get to our museum if they do not drive, or if they, you know, if they choose not to take a taxi. So I think it would be lovely if the museum could operate a free shuttle system that connects the museum to the university subway station. That would be a dream. A small dream, but still a good dream.

Thank you so much, Alina and Sabila for your thoughtful questions. I enjoy this dialogue very much.