ICOM Voices Curating as an Asian in the UK: a path strewn with pitfalls

Keywords: decolonisation, diversity, workforce, Asian, curatorial

With the growing discussion about decolonisation over the past five years, there has been a surge of opportunities for people with non-European ethnicities to have a stronger curatorial voice in the museum sector. In most cases, for the positions that result from these new opportunities, preference is given to a person ethnically non-European with a solid knowledge of a specific area of European heritage. Despite being someone from Asia specialising in European art history, this has evoked in me a moment of self-doubt. I then had the invaluable opportunity to join a young theatre group (Undone Theatre) to curate an exhibition about the (mis)representation of British East and South East Asian identities in opera. This inspiring project then prompted me to conduct my own research on the employment of East Asian museum and curatorial professionals in the UK last year, by simply asking the question: “is our museum industry still perpetuating a practice as harmful as the yellow-face practice in the theatre by casting European ‘actors’ to play Asian ‘characters’? And what are the other ‘roles’ that Asian ‘actors’ in the museum industry can play other than the Asian ‘characters’?” Here I regard the “characters” of the museum sector to be curators, collection managers, interpretation assistants etc., whoever is working in the back office and with the power of making any interpretation or curatorial decisions.

A sketch about diversity in UK

Through literature and social media research, I could see that the lack of ethnic diversity of employees has been a deep-rooted issue of the museum sector in the UK. In 2022, the Art Fund commissioned Culture& to assess curatorial diversity in the UK arts and heritage sector. Despite recommendations on improving the workforce diversity in all the other previous reports, the findings in this 2022 report underscored that most ethnic diversity workforce initiatives in the UK concerned only operational and administrative entry-level positions instead of curatorial positions. Curatorial diversity remained low: museums had only 6 per cent of its workers identifying as being “Black, Asian and Ethnically Diverse”. The same issue was evident in a report produced by the National Museum Directors’ Conference two decades ago: this report had already found that none of the Black and Ethnically Diverse staff were working in curatorial departments, even if the group accounted for 10 per cent of the overall staff in some of the institutions. Among the 8 large cultural institutions that participated in this NMDC research, only 1 institution had more than 5 per cent of its curatorial staffing identified as non-white. Comparing this data with that of the 2022 report, it seems that the percentage of non-white curatorial professionals working in the museum sector has only increased by 1 per cent in 15 years. When we consider that 18.3 per cent of the England and Wales population is non-white, the sector was (and still is) indisputably far behind in terms of hiring workers from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Reviewing the curatorial teams of some of the most recent exhibition programmes in London’s museums and cultural institutions in 2023, the British Museum’s China’s hidden century exhibition was curated by Jessica Harrison-Hall, and the Royal Collection Trust’s Japan: Courts and Culture by Rachel Peat. The Chinese and British exhibition about the history of Chinese communities was co-curated by Alex Tickell and Lucienne Loh; the latter was Reader in English Literature at the University of Liverpool and is of Asian heritage. Exploring contemporary Asian subject matters, the Tokyo: Art & Photography exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in 2021 was co-curated by Lena Fritsch and Clare Pollard. The V&A exhibition, Hallyu! The Korean Wave, interpreting a contemporary subject too, was the only one entirely curated by Asian curators, Rosalie Kim and Yoojin Choi. This review of the curatorial teams was of course not to express any doubt and judgement towards the scholarly expertise and curatorial practices of these non-Asian curators. However, it seems that our sector is still largely casting European “actors” to play the Asian “characters”. Where are then the opportunities for Asian curatorial and museum professionals?

I conducted interviews with seven museum and curatorial professionals, who identify as having Chinese, Japanese and Korean heritages, and are currently active in the sector, about their job-seeking and working experiences in the UK. While the 2022 Culture& report shows that many initiatives attempted to diversify the workforce through operational and administrative entry-level positions, my research did not reflect any progression of this ethnic diverse workforce to the mid- or senior-level positions. Three of my interviewees had worked in Asia for more than five years before they immigrated to the UK and got their current mid-level positions. Three other interviewees with less than two years of experience in the sector completed their postgraduate studies in the UK. While they recognised the potential of their unique perspectives in contributing to museum programmes and curatorial projects, they frankly expressed how they felt pigeonholed into specific positions based on their ethnicity. One interviewee, who graduated with the highest-class honours from one of the most prestigious institutions in the country, said that her ethnicity seemed to be a barrier for her to get a job aligned with her European academic specialisation.

Conclusion: decolonisation to go beyond tokenism

With these few highlights from my research, we can see that while the museum sector is developing lots of programs to diversify audience profiles and focusing on engaging various social groups in learning activities and material collections, the operational structure remains almost unchanged. True decolonisation should go beyond token gestures. If decolonisation is about equality of access to and respect for diversity of knowledge and perspectives, then everyone should have the opportunity to interpret material objects that may be not direct connections with their heritages just as everyone should have the opportunity to receive education in whatever subjects they are interested in.