Affordable is a word that doesn’t easily match with Sydney, and yet access is a key vision on the horizon for incoming Director of Artspace, Victor Wang 王宗孚.
Relocating from the international art hub of Beijing in China, where Wang has served as the Executive and Artistic Director of the multidimensional, private museum M WOODS Museum for the past five years, he describes Sydney as “an nexus.”
Wang tells ArtsHub: “It’s one of the things, as an outsider, that has stood out to me, and I’m still trying to figure out why Sydney’s rental prices are as expensive as Beijing, which has 20 million people.”
Creating affordable spaces for artists to grow their practice was a key vision that attracted Wang to the position at Artspace, which offers 10 rent-free studios annually.
“We’re in a time when many institutions are under pressure,” says Wang. “I think globally, there’s a real demand for artistic space of experimentation – for affordable space, not just housing, but for studios. What an incredible gift to have 10 rent free studios embedded within an institution.”
Wang starts in the role this week, after an extensive international search to replace the Director of 10 years, Alexie Glass-Kantor.
In this article:
Centring exchange and new thinking
Cultural exchange and collaboration have been threads across Wang’s illustrious career, having partnered on projects with institutions such as Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Tate Modern (London), Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Berlin), and the first collaborative exhibition between the British Museum (London) and a non-state-run art museum in China – a project of which he is especially proud.
“We had the privilege of loaning Renaissance masterpieces from their collection, which we placed in conversation with works by living, contemporary Chinese artists. In many ways, it was to challenge the historical narrative, but it was also to put artists in dialogue,” explains Wang.
Putting artists and institutions in dialogue across geographies will be a key part of the future that Wang hopes to finesse over his tenure in Australia. But he says that, rather than the loaded term ‘cultural exchange’, he prefers the phrase, ‘institutions without borders’ or ‘institutions without shores’.
“I think it really speaks to the very interesting time that we’re at, in 2025, where many artists and cultural institutions are looking to collaborate and are thinking through networks.”
Wang continues: “If you have followed Artspace’s development over the past five to 10 years, they really have taken initiatives to go into the Asia Pacific, and to reach out across the waters. It’s a very exciting time in the organisation’s journey. In fact, the seeds that the staff – Alexie [Glass-Kantor], Michelle [Newton] and the team – have put forward, I am somewhat of a result of that.”
“Part of my job, I think, is finding sister institutions in the region to partner with, so that we can bring a lot of the great art that’s done locally, abroad.”
Wang adds that this recent experience of working on international partnerships is “a great resource, and I hope to also align Sydney with those developments. I would love to think about developing Artspace commissions in Jakarta, Tokyo, Shanghai. It’s very exciting.”
How do you lead an institution?
Apart from M Woods Museum, Wang has also worked in a curatorial capacity with K11 Art Foundation in its first partnership with Palais de Tokyo, as an Assistant Curator with the exhibition team of the Twelfth Havana Biennial (2015), and as co-curator, alongside Cuban curator Blanca Victoria López at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam in Havana, Cuba on its first performance-based exhibition in 2016.
Describing his leadership style to ArtsHub, Wang explains: “As a Director, I’m not just focused on exhibitions. I’m focused on the studios. I’m focused on the visiting curatorial program. I’m focused on the institution as a whole, and making it accessible to publics.”
He adds that one of the biggest attractions for him was Artspace’s recently refurbished building. “I love the fact that it’s accessible. I think it’s important that galleries are accessible, and inclusive spaces for everyone. I think it’s super important – and it’s an important value to me. There’s many ways of belonging, and there are many people who just belong to many nations, to many communities and many places. And I think, actually, Australia, for me, is very interesting in that way, because it’s not just a country. It a place that embodies the histories and cultures of many nations and peoples.
“I think there are so many beautiful things that Australia and Sydney get right, and that other places in the world could really benefit from.”
Read: A new era for Artspace begins
The bonus of being an ‘outsider’
ArtsHub is talking with Wang during his first week on the job; he says one of the things that really interests him is “being an outsider to Sydney”.
“I was discussing with an artist, and they said, ‘You know, sometimes you need an outsider to see the beautiful things locally that are hiding in plain sight, and sometimes you need fresh eyes to maybe ask the questions that weren’t so obvious to us.’ I believe that Artspace, for many years, has been slowly developing this perspective – to pull back and see a larger networked perspective. I’m quite excited to exercise that right in a way of seeing, and in terms of projects.”
Wang believes that the current slow curatorial movement encourages unhurried looking.
“China is such a rapidly evolving landscape. In fact, one of the things I really admire about the Chinese art community, is the rate of acceleration, and how quickly they can develop institutions that often have alternative models to what you find in the West,” says Wang.
“I have a real admiration for the idea of taking time for things to develop, and to slowly look again.”
With regard to global trends, landing in a future dialogue across Artspace’s programming, Wang tells ArtsHub: “I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s been a great shift in the last decade, what I would call a reconfiguring of cartographies – it is a movement beyond using Euro-America as a cultural sphere of validation.
“Artists are more interested now in looking at alternative models, alternative histories, challenging the status quo, challenging power structures – and, let’s say, realigning their compass with the Global South, and the larger Asia Pacific.
He continues: “I believe that there’s been a shift in artistic centres, and no longer are those old centres the main ones that dictate all. I think Australia is also unique in that context for its relationships and lineages to Europe.”
Ushering a next wave of performance art
Wang has a particular interest in performance art, and has previously served as curator of Frieze LIVE at the Frieze Art Fair in London (2020). Plus he was the founder of the Institute of Asian Performance Art (IAPA) and the editor Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–90s (2018).
When asked about this background, and his vision to integrate performance into Artspace’s future programming, he tells ArtsHub: “I think performance is one of the mediums that offers a counter narrative. It’s often seen as being the most experimental, being the most open to interpretation. It’s very hard to collect. So in some ways, it’s very anti institutional. And I think for all those reasons, it’s ideal for a mid-scale institution like Artspace to activate.”
Surprisingly Wang admits: “I actually started as a dancer. This is one of my dark secrets! Many people don’t know that. And I started curating very young, around the age of 19. I always approached art through the body, first through time base, and thinking about the body as a medium. And now, with Sydney being so culturally diverse, there are so many histories and communities represented, and often performance is a great way to engage with them.”
Read: Rethinking performance, exhibition and documentation through dance
Understanding ambition and scale
Wang adds that a further attraction to the role, was the scale of Artspace.
“M Woods was a larger scale. In fact, it has multiple locations and we had a staff of over 30. So Artspace is actually a very welcome change,” he tells ArtsHub.
“Mid-scale institutions like Artspace are the backbone of our art ecology,” he continues. “You don’t graduate from university and go straight to solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art or Tate, so mid-scale institutions like Artspace are pivotal in artistic growth, and providing artists with platforms, with studio time, letting them experiment, letting them fail in the safety of their studios, is super important.”
He concludes that he is extremely excited for what lies ahead as Artspace’s Director.
In 2023, Wang was awarded ‘Curator of the Year’ in China by Robb Report, and in 2018 was named one of Apollo International Art Magazine‘s ’40 under 40: Europe, Thinkers’. In 2016 he was awarded the AICA Incentive Prize for Young Critics by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). His biography reads like a Rolodex of China’s most influential contemporary artists, often presenting their first exhibitions beyond Asian shores. He has worked extensively with galleries and institutions in London – indeed at the top echelons globally – and holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London.
