For the Asia-Pacific iteration of Apollo's '40 Under 40' feature, I interviewed the new director of Hong Kong's leading non-profit, Para Site, about the complex route and impressive focus that led to this important role at a moment of change for the city.
In May this year, Billy Tang took on the role of executive director at Para Site. Founded in 1996, in the shadow of handover, Hong Kong’s oldest non-profit has a reputation for adaptability, experimentation, risk-taking and leadership. Under Tang’s predecessor, Cosmin Costinas, it emerged as an international player, offering an alternative template for progressive art spaces in Asia and beyond, while shifting from an artist-led to a curatorial model. Tang describes it as ‘a kind of monster with many heads– it’s had so many lives, transforming and mutating according to the different challenges it faces.’
Tang’s move to Hong Kong dovetails neatly with his family history. Ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, his parents escaped Vietnam in the late 1970s, living in Tuen Mun refugee camp in Hong Kong for eight months before coming to London. As well as three languages, this diasporic upbringing has given Tang a certain cultural freedom, and a conviction that ‘there are things beyond borders that require fostering solidarity, an ability to go beyond our fixed perspectives’.
His career has been marked by an impressive accumulation of complementary skills. While studying to become an artist at Chelsea College of Art and Design, he detoured to curating, immersing himself in London’s independent art spaces. A longstanding fascination with China led to repeated visits to Beijing, where he discovered ‘a sense of familiarity and strangeness, of traversing differences, of mobility and exchange’ ...
You can read the whole piece on Apollo's website here.