Speaker: Hai Huilan
Academic Planning and Moderation: Professor Shi Qian and Professor Zhang Xiaoming

Time: 19:30–21:00, Thursday, March 26, 2026
Venue: Multifunctional Hall, 1st Floor, Duxue Building, Xianlin Campus, Nanjing Normal University

Hai Huilan is the former Senior Vice President of China Institute in America, and former Director and Chief Curator of China Institute Gallery. She is currently an independent curator and writer. After graduating from Nanjing University in 1977 with a master’s degree in history and archaeology, she taught in the Department of History at Nanjing Normal University. Since 1989, she has worked with China Institute in New York, where she has curated and produced more than 70 exhibitions, and written, edited, and published over 30 exhibition catalogues.
During her 30 years as director, Hai organized more than ten major exhibitions on Chinese art in collaboration with museums across China. The exhibition “Flowers on a River: The Art of Chinese Flower-and-Bird Painting, 1368–1911,” which she curated and produced in cooperation with the Tianjin Museum and the Changzhou Museum, received the International and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Cooperation Award at the 21st National Top Ten Museum Exhibitions Awards in 2023. She is also the only Chinese art curator to date to have been interviewed by The New York Times in a full-page feature. Her publications include Overseas National Treasures: Hai Huilan on Chinese Art Abroad, Curatorial Philosophy, Chinese Art in America: 55 Years of China Institute Gallery, The Chinese Prince of Broadway, Three Seas Collection, and Travels Across Four Seas and Five Continents.
In the rapidly expanding museum landscape of the 21st century, curating has emerged as a new and increasingly significant profession. Exhibitions are the decisive visual presentations through which museums distinguish themselves, and the quality of an exhibition depends directly on the vision and ability of its curator. What is a curator? How does one curate an exhibition? Drawing on more than three decades of curatorial practice, Hai Huilan will share her reflections on the scope and perspective required in selecting curatorial topics. Through an analysis of the exhibition “Echoes of Troubled Times: Art of the Six Dynasties,” she will discuss the broader scope of curatorial thinking; through “Gold of the Dragon City: Selected Cultural Relics of the Three Yan,” she will explore the importance of perspective in curatorial topic selection.