Live talk - Dialogues: Renaissance Masters and Chinese Contemporary Art

Nadja Race is Director of International Engagement at the British Museum, overseeing a range of international activities including touring exhibitions, consultancy and training. Nadja joined the British Museum in 2010 to lead the business planning team responsible for advising on the establishment of the Zayed National Museum, the national museum in the United Arab Emirates.

For ten years prior to joining the British Museum, Nadja was a management consultant at Ernst & Young and Economics Research Associates.  Working with public and private sector organisations in the cultural and heritage sectors across the world, the projects included strategies for development of cultural tourism, feasibility studies for mixed-use developments and urban regeneration projects.

Sarah Vowles is the Smirnov Family Curator of Italian and French Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in London and is co-curator of the exhibition Italian Renaissance Drawings: A Dialogue with China. She studied at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute in London, and began her career at Christie’s, where she worked for six years as a specialist in the Old Master Drawings department, before joining the British Museum in 2014.

Victor Wang (王宗孚) is currently Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the M WOODS museums in Beijing. He was editor of the publication ‘Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–90s’, Curator of Frieze Live for Frieze Art Fair London (2020), and founder of the ‘Institute of Asian Performance Art’. Recently, Wang has curated the first large-scale museum surveys in China of influential artists such as Man Ray; Ryuichi Sakamoto; Giorgio Morandi; Richard Tuttle; and is currently organizing the first collaborative exhibition between the British Museum (U.K.) and a non-state-run art museum in China, opening in 2021. Prior to this, Wang curated significant cross-cultural exhibitions in commercial and non-commercial institutions such as the Nationalgalerie Berlin, Lisson Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, and K11 Art Foundation.

Rehana is the Director Arts, British Council in China and Culture and the Arts Counsellor, Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy.

In this role, she oversees a diverse and impactful portfolio of activity designed to connect individuals and organisations from the UK and China to opportunities that build connections, capability, and appreciation through and for the arts. Rehana has over 25 years’ experience working in the arts sector both in the UK and internationally. Before coming to China, she led the delivery of an ambitious multi-million-pound cultural programme for the British Council in the Gulf Cooperation Countries.