Asian Artists in Paris: New Narratives (Joint symposium by National Gallery Singapore and Musée Cernuschi)

About the speakers

Anne Fort is Curator at the Cernuschi Museum where she is in charge of the South-East Asian collection of art and archaeology. Graduated in history of art from the Ecole du Louvre, she then studied Chinese and Japanese at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris. Graduated from French National Institute of Cultural Heritage, she joined the Cernuschi Museum. She co-curated exhibitions about Vietnamese ceramics and bronzes in 2012 and in 2014 at Samadet and La Rochelle’s Museums. In 2021, she participated to the first monographic exhibition about Mai-Thu organized in Mâcon, followed in 2024 by the retrospective of Lê Phô, Mai-Thu, Vu Cao Dam, Pioneers of modern Vietnamese art in France, at the Cernuschi Museum.

Cai Heng holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from The University of Sydney and is currently a Senior Curator at the National Gallery Singapore. As a curator and art historian, she has contributed to a series of exhibitions and publications, including Siapa Nama Kamu: Art in Singapore since the 19th Century (2015), Rediscover Treasures: Ink Art From The Xiu Hai Lou Collection (2017), Strokes of Life: The Art of Chen Chong Swee (2017), Georgette Chen: At Home in the World (2020), Liu Kuo-sung: Experimentation as Method (2023) and Wu Guanzhong exhibition series (2015-2022). Her research focuses on modern and contemporary ink, modern Chinese art, and the art of the Chinese diaspora.

Eric Lefebvre has taken up his role as director of the Musée Cernuschi since 2015, where he previously has occupied the position of curator of the Chinese collections for almost ten years. He obtained his PhD in Art History at the Université Paris-Sorbonne and has written several articles and publications on the history of Chinese painting and collecting amongst other modern and contemporary topics. He also taught the history of Chinese art at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and at the École du Louvre and has curated many exhibitions devoted to Chinese art, particularly painting, in France and abroad.

Horikawa Lisa is Senior Curator and Director (Curatorial & Collections) at the National Gallery Singapore, overseeing the strategic development and enhancement of accessibility for its collections including artwork and archives. Her current research interest is on comparative examination of intersecting modernisms in Southeast Asia, East Asia and beyond in the first half of 20th century.  She was a lead-curator of Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (2015), (Re)Collect: The Making of Our Art Collection (2018) and co-curated Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016). Prior to joining the Gallery, she was Curator at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan from 2003 to 2012, where she co-curated China Dream—Another Stream of Chinese Modern Art (Fukuoka, Kobe, Niigata, 2004) and the 3rd and 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005, 2009).

Mael Bellec is the curator in charge of the Chinese and Korean collections at the Musée Cernuschi. In this capacity, he has curated several exhibitions and published numerous catalogues and texts on modern and contemporary art from these two countries.

Patrick Flores is Chief Curator at National Gallery Singapore. He is concurrently Professor of Art History and Criticism at the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003. He was the curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum. He curated the Philippine Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and was curator of the exhibition “Impossible Dreams”, an event by Taiwan at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

Phoebe Scott is Senior Curator and Curator of Research Publications at National Gallery Singapore and is the curator of the exhibition Familiar Others: Emiria Sunassa, Eduardo Masferré and Yeh Chi Wei, 1940s–1970s (2022). She was also a collaborating curator on the exhibition Ever Present: First People’s Art of Australia (2022) and the inaugural exhibition of the UOB Southeast Asia Gallery, Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (2015). She is also an adjunct lecturer in art history at the National University of Singapore.