Philip Tinari is learning Cantonese. After 20 years in China, his Mandarin is, according to his CV, “near-native fluency”. But in early February, he moved to Hong Kong to take up the post of deputy director and head of art at Tai Kwun Culture and Arts Company Limited. “It’s useful to be able to understand what’s going on in meetings before they are called to order and everyone switches to English,” he says.
Until this January, the slightly reserved, besuited American was the director of Beijing’s Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) — a non-profit institution that helped set something of a blueprint for the plethora of museums that opened throughout China from 2007 onward. In this post since 2011, Tinari celebrated the key Chinese artists of his own generation such as Geng Jianyi and Yang Fudong alongside heavyweight western names — William Kentridge, Robert Rauschenberg — and showed himself to be adept at navigating the boundaries of censorship. “You have to give full exposure [to the authorities] of what you want to present,” he says, “and that wouldn’t be anything anti-government. Then it’s a clear yes or no. But so much art is critical of society,” he adds, implying that subtlety and deeper reading isn’t for bureaucrats.
In 2021, demonstrating what feels like an almost masochistic desire to work within authoritarian parameters, he curated the first Diriyah Biennale in Saudi Arabia. “You’re trying to show what contemporary art might be for the local population,” he says, against accusations of art-washing. “And maybe to provoke a bit of awe.”
Since February 23, Tinari has taken charge of the art gallery and performance programme at the broader Tai Kwun centre. The collection of 16 historic buildings was expertly converted over the 2010s from a prison, police station, court and parade ground by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron into a charming lifestyle spot. In the heart of Central (so-called for its location in the city), it offers restaurants, retail and civic spaces along with the art. “There’s seating, limitless WiFi, immaculate bathrooms,” says Tinari of his new workplace. “It’s a gift to the city.” Tai Kwun has recorded 25mn visitors since the complex’s opening in 2018.
Tinari is devising his programme over the next year, and working with performing arts for the first time. “My programmatic interest has always been about putting artists on the global stage and bringing things in from the outside,” he says. In 2018, he co-curated Tai Kwun’s inaugural exhibition of multimedia artist Cao Fei — a showstopper that set the institution going with bang.
Tinari and his wife, who worked for Art Basel until 2020, are now living in a 1960s apartment block in Pokfulam, one of Hong Kong’s most desirable areas. He has sea views from his kitchen window and can watch huge container ships passing by. “Hong Kong has a lot to recommend it, even at this quite uncertain moment,” says Tinari. “It has resilience wired in. It’s been responding to change and upheaval since 1841.”
As someone who has worked in the cultural sector in China since the 2000s, Tinari has resilience wired in too. Born in Pennsylvania in 1979, he first came to Beijing as a Fulbright scholar in 2001, connecting with the last gasps of its underground art scene. Then, after his masters at Harvard, he fully committed, and has been in Asia ever since. UCCA had been established by what was once called an “Old China Hand”, the late Swiss collector and billionaire food magnate Guy Ullens, to house his first-class collection of contemporary Chinese art, and by the time Tinari came along in 2011, the same epithet could be applied to him too.
UCCA had opened in 2008 in an 8,000 sq m factory building in the city’s 798 district, surrounded by other galleries and non-profits. “The budgets weren’t huge and we were punching above our weight,” says Tinari of his early days there. “But it felt like there was something relevant to say to the world. The audience continued to grow — in 2008-2010 it had been not expats, but a fairly rarefied community. By 2019, there was a broad base of local interest, especially among those born in the 1990s.”
It wasn’t entirely plain sailing. In the mid-2010s, Ullens decided to step down, and investment was needed to keep the thing going. In 2017 a private equity company, Lunar, led by Jerry Mao and Derek Sulger, stepped in, making UCCA part of its lifestyle and culture conglomerate, at a time when luxury and art became increasingly aligned in China. “They were years of huge ambition,” says Tinari who oversaw UCCA openings in Shanghai, the seaside resort of Beidaihe, and UCCA Clay in the ceramics city of Yixing. The Beijing mothership expanded by 3,000 sq m. Of course, no one saw Covid coming.
“Those three years changed everything,” says Tinari of the Covid period. “We reopened the museum in May 2021, but revenues had gone right down, and it had accelerated the political and economic decoupling of the country.” Other issues arose. An artwork by Li Songsong was withdrawn from an exhibition in 2022 when a visitor complained that it showed Japanese Kamikaze pilots. (There is still anti-Japanese sentiment over its invasion of China in 1937). The show closed a week early. The same year, a Matisse exhibition was held up when the president of France’s Nord department refused permission to loan 280 works from the Matisse Museum, due to China’s relationship to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. “It was much better that it got delayed to 2023 in the end,” says Tinari brightly. Around 200,000 visitors saw the show in Beijing, before it went on to Shanghai.
UCCA continued to have financial woes. Its branch in Shanghai closed in 2025 and it was reported in the press that staff in Beijing hadn’t been paid. “Things were difficult but the wages story was a huge exaggeration,” says Tinari.
Now, however, he has a rather different overseer: the Hong Kong Jockey Club, one of the territory’s richest and most powerful organisations, deeply conservative and pro-establishment. (His direct boss is the Australian Timothy Calnin.) But the budgets at Tai Kwun are good and the institution — now eight years into its journey — has been allowed to establish an open-minded point of view. (The far bigger M+ which opened during Covid, under greater scrutiny, has been more challenged by governmental intervention). “I’m feeling humble,” says Tinari. “This is a different society with a complicated geopolitical situation and a special status. I’m only starting to wrap my head around it.”
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