Doryun Chong

Academic and Professional Background

Since September 2013, I have been the inaugural Chief Curator at M+, Hong Kong. Asia’s first global museum of visual culture, M+ opened in November 2021 following more than a decade of preparation. From January 2016, I have also been Deputy Director, Curatorial, and from October 2024, Artistic Director. I oversee all content-related aspects, including exhibitions, collections, learning and interpretation, publishing, and digital content, across the three main disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image, and visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Before Hong Kong, I was educated and built my museum career in the United States. Following my undergraduate studies in the history of art and anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, I did my graduate work in the history of art at the same university, focusing on non-Western modern and contemporary art, in particular in East Asia. Subsequently, I worked as a curator at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Recent experiences of serving on boards include the Martin Wong Foundation Board, the Sounding Board at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, and the Kuratorium at the Stiftung Humboldt Forum in Berlin. These three ongoing roles have taught me the importance of ensuring and enriching the legacy of artists into the future; the crucial nature of collegiality and mutual support; and the essential requirement of openness to diverse, even conflicting, viewpoints and values in our field of work.

Motivation statement explaining what encourages you to join the Board of CIMAM

We are every day made increasingly aware of and alarmed by mounting challenges facing cultural and educational organizations around the world. Questions are now being raised around the fundamental values and even the raison d’être of museums, something that was unthinkable until recently. My experiences of having spent a substantial number of years in the West—in the United States, in particular—and in Hong Kong, China, over more than a decade have taught me an essential lesson about seeing the world from at least two divergent points of view, which I believe are not mutually exclusive or irreconcilable. I believe that while local realities are always specific, no context is irreproducibly unique. More efforts to empathize and understand contexts other than one's own are needed more than ever. And we must learn to exercise genuine empathy through critical self-reflection, generous knowledge sharing and mutual care, and collective intelligence and conviction in no single dominant system of values. I believe CIMAM has an even more critical role to play in our field and in contemporary culture at large, and I am confident that I can fulsomely support CIMAM’s mission and vision.

Explain how you see the role of CIMAM in advancing contemporary art museums globally

CIMAM has progressively grown over the years not only in its scale but also in its diversity, as well reflected in the composition of its board members from all regions and continents, and reflecting its conviction in a global network and solidarity. All successful and consequential organizations and associations are led by their robust missions and visions and their steadfast values. The values adopted by CIMAM – ethical responsibility, autonomy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, coexistence, and global perspective – can and should serve as a clear set of guiding principles for all contemporary art museums – or all museums for that matter – around the world, especially in a global age that has entered a rather troubled period. While challenges for museums have been mounting in many parts of the world, CIMAM’s values are universal and should be insisted upon as such. By maintaining alliance and solidarity across many countries and contexts, CIMAM can help mitigate or counter the pressures that are occurring in different parts of the world. We often fall back into our own views of the world, and associations such as CIMAM can help us productively question and critique our own self-centeredness, helping to foster a truly multifaceted view of our own field, its responsibilities, and contributions.

How would you help CIMAM advocate for museums in areas such as funding, membership engagement, and strategic initiatives to achieve its mission?

I have worked in multiple museums of divergent models and structures in different cities, countries, and contexts for over 25 years. I have also observed, advised, and learned from a range of institutional approaches in North America, Asia, and Europe that are disparate in the areas of funding, engagement, and strategy, but each effective in its own context. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to running a museum, and the wealth of case studies I have been exposed to over the years provides me with a willingness to adapt and be flexible in thinking of multiple possibilities for museum operation around the world.

For more than a decade at my current institution of M+, I have been a key member of the museum’s executive management team that set up and inaugurated one of the most ambitious and complex museums to open in recent years. A crucial part of the job includes the development work of cultivation, patronage, fundraising, and sponsorship. Several supporters of CIMAM are donors and patrons very close to M+ and are from our region, and we are very well poised to expand that circle. These experiences would greatly inform CIMAM advocacy for other museums.

If elected as a Board Member, what would be your main objectives or areas of action for the next three years for CIMAM to contribute to the sustainable development of the modern and contemporary art museum sector?

I would turn to the CIMAM values, especially focusing on ‘autonomy’, ‘coexistence’, and ‘global perspective’, the areas in which I have gained a lot of insight and experience over the years. These are also the areas that have come under threat in an increasingly fractured and polarized world. I believe the autonomy of contemporary art museums in different parts of the world can be greatly ensured through context-specific and yet flexible strategies based on networked alliances and information sharing across regions – in other words, coexistence. And a coexistence of multiple possible modes of exercising autonomy should be the basis for a newly calibrated and bolstered global perspective for a more challenging – and hopefully more rewarding – era for museums we have now entered. Next year’s annual conference, which will take place in Harare, Zimbabwe, the first time ever in Africa, signals a much-needed shift away from long-established and dominant centers and axes toward reimagining new possibilities of autonomy, coexistence, and globalism.

With my longstanding interests in and commitment to sustainability – in all aspects including environmental, economic, and cultural – as well as global ethical standards for the museum professions, I will be able to fulsomely contribute my regional and transnational expertise to CIMAM’s sustainability and museum watch committees.