Curator and artist Jo-ey Tang to lead CCAD’s Beeler Gallery

Curator, artist, and art critic Jo-ey Tang will head Columbus College of Art & Design’s Beeler Gallery, effective June 15.

Tang was curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, from 2014 to 2015, and arts editor of literary magazine n+1 from 2009 to 2014.

“Jo-ey is an incredibly talented curator, artist, and art critic who has produced innovative exhibitions and programming in Europe, Asia, and North America,” CCAD President Melanie Corn said. “We’re thrilled to have him at the helm of CCAD’s Beeler Gallery.”

Tang said he’s looking forward to the vibrant cultural ecology of Columbus, with an eye towards international, national, and local co-productions and collaborations at Beeler Gallery.

“I am excited to join Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design to continue its ambitious programming,” Tang said. “I hope to foster an ethos of ’slow programming’ that will counter the speed of production in contemporary art and its contingent fields, to allow for multiple temporalities and deeper encounters with artists, designers, filmmakers, and thinkers, in engaging with their practices, developments, trajectories, and influences.”

Tang was born in Hong Kong and raised in Hong Kong and Oakland, California. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master of Fine Arts from New York University. He received a New York University post-graduate fellowship to Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, and has been based in France since 2011. He is currently a researcher at Villa Arson, Nice.

In 2010, Tang founded the curatorial project The Notary Public. The first exhibitions took place in his apartment and included emerging and established artists such as Carol Bove, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Luke Stettner, and B. Wurtz. There, he organized Windblown Jackie Anniversary Stroll, a literary walk led by poet Wayne Koestenbaum in Central Park. In 2013, he curated Forming the Loss in Darkness at Praz-Delavallade, Paris, as part of Nouvelles Vagues, a citywide young curators season initiated by Palais de Tokyo.

As curator at Palais de Tokyo, Tang conducted over 200 studio visits of emerging artists in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Myanmar, Singapore, and Germany. He was chief curator of Inside China – L’Intérieur du Géant (2014), which traveled in expanded forms to K11 Art Foundation Pop-Up Space, Hong Kong (2015), and Chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai (2015), featuring emerging Chinese and French artists, including Cheng Ran, Aude Pariset, Renaud Jerez, Li Gang, and Yu Ji, alongside 19th-century photographer Nadar. He served on the search committee of le Pavillon Neuflize OBC, the artist-in-residence program and research lab of Palais de Tokyo.

Recently, Tang curated More Than Lovers, More Than Friends, at Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague (2016), which included Kasper Bosmans, Sonja Engelhardt, Marthe Ramm Fortun, Jason Hendrik Hansma, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Li Jinghu, Tan Lin, K.r.m. Mooney, Pierre Paulin, Parallel Practice, Carlos Reyes, Ben Schumacher, Augustas Serapinas, and Allison Somers. Tang is a frequent contributor to Artforum and LEAP, and his writing has appeared in Flash Art, Kaleidoscope, ArtAsiaPacific, and This Is Tomorrow. For Kadist Art Foundation, Paris / San Francisco, he produced a series of videos on Barbara Bloom, Gabriel Kuri, Pratchaya Phinthong, R.H. Quaytman, and Maaike Schoorel.

As a visual artist, Tang has exhibited at IAC - Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes; Lyles & King, New York; Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris. His upcoming curatorial work include an exhibition at Kim? Art Center, Riga, Latvia; and a project with the New York-based collective of queer women artists Fierce Pussy (Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka).