Art critic, curator and former LEAP editor Phil Tinari takes the reins at the UCCA. He shares his thoughts on the current state of the Chinese and international art scenes, where he'll steer UCCA, and building an Asian art hub.

You’ve just become the curator of the UCCA. I’ve heard a lot about how choosing you means not only that the UCCA is staying in China, but is moving towards a more local focus. I always say we are serving an international Beijing public. That local/international distinction doesn’t actually hold up anymore in this uber-globalized moment in a world capital where people from all over the place happen to be passing through. So it becomes a question of how you serve the public that, on the one hand, has a very local element, and on the other, is just inherently international right now. It’s about walking that line. I think it’s really much more about a style and a way of taking this city seriously on its own terms than it some precise mix of where artists were born or where they happen to be working now.

Can you explain a little more about what you mean when you say “taking this city seriously on its own terms?” We want to be a place where people from all walks of life in China, or outside of China but present here, living here, or visiting here, feel welcome. And not just that they feel welcome, but that they feel they should come and see what’s going on. And that means catering to these groups in slightly different ways.

For example? Through things like our membership program, free admission Thursdays, and through things like very direct collaborations with diplomatic and other entities.

When Jerome Sans created the “Curated By” series, it became his signature. Will you create a signature of your own? I’m not sure that it will be so straightforward or clearly articulated. I hope that if I have a signature it will be relatively effortless. Toggling back and forth between the Chinese, who will represent half of our exhibition program. That we are equipped to do better than anyone else, and that is what we really should be doing for the sake of our public and also the global art situation. Broadly configured, looking at building ties to India, to Japan, to South Korea, to Southeast Asia in a way that doesn’t happen as naturally as you might think. Most artists here know much more about what’s going on in New York or London than they do about what’s happening in Tokyo or Seoul or Manila. We currently have on an exhibition by Thai director Apichatpong, we are already moving in that direction. The third part, a national network, these are all important to us.

A quarter to a third of our program will be international artists. It’s going to be about maintaining a balance. There are so many artists that are at that point in their careers where they deserve a serious museum career retrospective, the kind of thing that happens very naturally if you’re Glen Ligon, who had a great one at the Whitney this year, or George Condo who did the Hayward Gallery, or Gerhard Richter at the Tate. For different reasons, in China there are artists who are taken very seriously who haven’t received that kind of attention. What happens then is that the market determines what is good and valuable. Through concerted and meaningful institutional actions we have a chance to intervene in terms of that conversation of what things are worth looking at by presenting them convincingly to our audience. Doing it thoroughly with serious documentation, thoughtfully curated presentations that will leave here and then circulate and tour other institutions around and beyond China. It’s not as simple as saying “this will be it.” It’s the idea of us as a node on a network that is local, national, regional and ultimately international.

It’s interesting what you were saying about the lack of cohesion between various Asian art scenes. If you were to choose a country that now is where China was about 20 years ago, which country would you have your eye on? We’re doing a big project with India this summer, an exhibit called Indian Highway, which was generated in London a few years ago. I’m really excited about this as an opportunity to bring some of the Chinese and Indian artists together, and create a dialogue around the show. Japan and South Korea in one sense have very developed art scenes, and in another sense they are in a very similar place to where China is, with a state institutional system but not much of a private, or more contemporarily-minded institutions. India didn’t even get its act together to have a pavilion at the Venice Biennale until this year. Yet in other ways it’s ahead of China. It had a modernism that happened in the 70s when other things were happening here.

It’s not as simple as those kind of diuretics of who is where, as it is these radically different, but affectively similar, contexts and how you go about linking them through various things. One thing we’re going to be doing is putting together groups of Chinese collectors who are interested in becoming patrons of the museum. The first signature project will be a trip to Japan in April, pegged to the Tokyo Art Fair, but also a chance to see private collections there. Certainly the Japanese galleries are very excited about it. And also many other people in the society are too: the curators, the critics, the collectors. It’s always ironic to me that when a Japanese and Chinese artist meet, or when a Chinese and Korean artist meet, that they have to speak English to each other, because there actually isn’t a common language. I think by building up these institutional connections we can actually go a very long way toward resolving these lasting separations.

You mentioned the need for an institution that can host serious retrospectives. Are you hoping the UCCA will become this institution? This is the main problem with the Chinese art world. There are very few mechanisms that allow for widely recognized credentialing to happen. With LEAP I was trying to create a space like that on paper. A magazine where the coverage is not for sale. If we give a good or bad review it’s because there was a critical decision on the part of the writer, approved by the editors to do that. I think the museum is a similar kind of context, ultimately. You’re only going to present things you think are relevant and interesting. Why would you waste resources on curating anything that was bad? We’re incredibly blessed in that we can make these decisions based on a sensibility of what is urgent and interesting, rather than based on the space, the brand. Our revenue-generating projects are not our exhibitions projects.

Many are saying that the Chinese art scene is directionless at the moment. Your take? It’s interesting because the story of contemporary art in China more or less runs parallel to reform and opening. So the kind of problems and questions that drive it over its first 20 years, all open up to this crazy world of new possibilities around the year 2002 and 2003. From something like the Stars exhibition in 1979 to the China avant garde exhibition in 1989 to all of those early China shows abroad in the 90s, it was a clear story of emergence and evolution. Then you have this wide open playing field with different actors pursuing different agendas, and then you had the onslaught of the market, where suddenly things didn’t actually have to justify themselves by whether or not they were palatable to Western tastes, and artists could come out of a Chinese school and sell to Chinese collectors, show in a Chinese gallery, without any responsibilities to a broader context, which is actually a great thing. The old model was quite tired. There was no reason why things in one place need to necessarily justify themselves in terms of the other. The risk then is that you lose the sense of shared narrative, which we as Westerners from this post-post sort of context are nostalgic for. In a way having things open is a gift. It’s a question of creating momentum around certain things. By the way, it’s not just the Chinese art scene that’s directionless, it’s culture in an international sense. This moment of Google epistemology, when anything is accessible at any second. On the Western side is the aftermath of multiculturalism and the cannon, on the Chinese side its what we just said. We can see we’re adrift, but maybe being adrift is a kind of possibility.

You mentioned bringing Chinese collectors to Japan to introduce them to the art scene there. Is part of your plan for the next year to foster and grow a sense among Chinese collectors of buying art for aesthetic purposes rather than as an investment? I keep hearing the same thing, but this has been a big shift internationally over the last ten years or so. It used to be that contemporary collectors were the new-fangled ones inside the broader situation of art collectors. I just came back from Miami Basil yesterday, and you talk to older dealers and older collectors and they’ll all bemoan exactly the same thing—that collectors today, all they care about is investment value. Yes, it’s true in a certain sense. Sometimes I think it means many of us aren’t doing our jobs as well. We have to create reasons for people to be interested in things on their own terms.

It becomes a very individual question too. I think it’s like a hierarchy of the stages of moral development. At a certain point, I’ve watched it happen with certain collectors, who got involved in the beginning out of financial reasons, out of excitement, and their eye improves, and they get a more refined sense of what it is they’re looking for. It would be really interesting for more people to realize is how much work a connoisseur-like Chinese collector can do metaphorically on the international scene. I can point to one or two examples of men and women who really get it. They buy in China, they buy from Western galleries. They go back and forth a few times and don’t take what they are offered, and perform connoisseurship. These few people have actually done much more to raise the place of China in the overall hierarchy of the art world than any auction record‑that’s always looked at kind of cynically. A few people really are in there with liasons with the very top galleries. They then become the conduits because the gallerists then ask the collectors who they should be showing.

It’s an interesting moment with Art Basel buying the Hong Kong Art Fair, for example. With the broader shifts in the global economy it’s no longer just going to be China as China, it will be about China as a player in an international conversation. This being the art world—an inherently cosmopolitan and a somewhat nationless place—it’s a realm of people who understand multiple possibilities, who are not so convinced of the rightness of one or another way. I think the art world in China is poised to play a very interesting role in this conversation as it unfolds over the next five or ten years.