The director of Hangzhou’s By Art Matters was responding to an article about white men dominating senior museum jobs in China
Oh dear – it appears that some feathers have been ruffled by a recent article investigating the predominance of white men in senior roles in China’s museum sector. The Italian curator, writer and director of Hangzhou’s By Art Matters museum, Francesco Bonami, recently took to social media to hit back.
“Under the new identity rules and laws, this article assumes, by how we look, that inside of ourselves, we feel always like white, ageing, western man,” Bonami said in the recorded video. “And this is not true, for example in my case, I often, often, felt inside myself, to be, sometimes, a thirty-five-year-old Iranian lesbian. So they don’t know what I feel inside.”
Bonami was responding to an article by Lisa Movius published in the Art Newspaper which pointed to senior hires in China’s museum sector – Bonami to head up By Art Matters, William Smith as head of editorial at M+, Peter Eleey as curator-at-large for UCCA, and Shai Baitel joining Modern Art Museum Shanghai as artistic director.
‘All are white men with minimal experience in Asia and three are working remotely from overseas,’ Movius wrote.
“It’s a totally inappropriate article and totally not correct,” Bonami raged in his video. “They talk ‘white’ […] The three people here [featured in the article’s lead image] has white hair. So I don’t know which kind of white they are referring to.”
Bonami continued: “In China, old people are revered very much. They probably feel that as we are ageing curators, we need to be revered and helped in our final years of life […] In all Asia, the prostate of a thirty-five-[year-old] or older man is considered something mythic, an object of cult, almost a divinity. In certain cultures, [it] is actually considered a délicatesse in their cuisine.” Serving himself up, some might say, on a plate.
