CATCHING UP WITH...Philip Tinari ’97

Philip Tinari ’97 is the Chief Executive and Director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, a museum in Beijing’s 798 Art District, and one on the forefront of China’s booming art scene. Recently, Alumni Prep Update caught up with Phil to learn more about his work.

APU: Tell us about your experience at the Prep.
PT: I was in one of Father (J. Vincent) Taggart’s homerooms (1G!) and had an incredible academic experience from the start. Father (then Mr.) Dave Collins’s theology class, Barbara Brown’s biology classes, the late Judy Christian’s English classes, Frank Raffa’s Spanish classes, and of course Dr. Bender’s Latin classes were just some of the highlights. I ran cross-country for three years (not particularly well, but nonetheless) and was involved in a number of service programs, as well as some more academic extracurriculars like forensics and the Hawklet. Taking part in the Summer Classical Program and going to Rome the summer before senior year—essentially my first time outside of the US—was transformative. And the friendships remain among the deepest and most lasting I have ever enjoyed.

APU: Where did you continue your education after the Prep?
PT: I went on to do my undergraduate work at Duke, where I majored in literature and history, and minored in Chinese. Upon graduation I got a Fulbright to study in Beijing, and spent a year doing intensive Chinese language training at Tsinghua. I then did an M.A. in East Asian Studies at Harvard, focusing on modern Chinese history and literature.

APU: How did you transition from academia to the workforce?
PT: I was lucky to encounter the field of Chinese contemporary art while still at Duke and was instantly fascinated—it somehow combined all of my interests in language, humanities, and global politics. It was still a new, even underground, world at the time and so while in grad school I interned with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in Beijing and thought seriously about pursuing a career as a journalist. This was in the period when China was starting to boom in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics, and somehow by the time I was finished it seemed there was a way to make a career in the Chinese art world. I moved to Beijing in 2006 not knowing entirely what would happen, but very quickly started writing for magazines like Artforum and consulting for organizations like Sotheby’s and Art Basel. In 2009 I started an art magazine of my own called LEAP with a major Chinese publishing group, and then in 2011 I was recruited to lead the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), a museum in Beijing’s 798 Art District founded by a (Jesuit-educated) Belgian art collector in 2007. I’ve been there ever since.

APU: Tell us about your career today.
PT: I’ve been fortunate to lead UCCA through a number of transitions—notably, in 2016, Mr. Ullens, who was in his eighties, decided to sell the place to a group of new, mostly Chinese, patrons. In this process I became Chief Executive in addition to Director, and am now responsible for the business side of things as well as the exhibitions and curatorial program. In 2018 we opened a second location in the seaside enclave of Beidaihe, a town I always joke is the Stone Harbor or Ocean City to Beijing’s Philadelphia. Next year we will open in Shanghai, and are planning further locations in other cities in China. The American conversation around China has grown rather negative in the last few years, but from afar it’s hard to understand not just the economic progress that has been made, but the depth of the social evolution that has taken place. To be part of this transformation by offering a cosmopolitan space for contemporary art and culture just feels extremely meaningful. And in a country where new museums are being built every month, the chance to lead a staff of brilliant young professionals who will hopefully drive the field for the next two generations is something very special.

I have also been lucky to witness art history unfolding firsthand, and to translate some of it into projects back home. In 2017 I co-curated a major exhibition at the Guggenheim, “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” which attempted to show American audiences some of the ways in which artists in China have championed new ways of thinking. I definitely do not rule out working in the US museum world at some point, but things here remain so exciting.

APU: Can you reflect on how the Prep prepared you for the work you are doing now?  
PT: On a basic level, Father Taggart’s periodic slideshows of his own trips to China with Prep students in the 1980s were some of the first images I ever saw of the city that would become my home. I have to think his decision to take students there so early after China’s opening was in turn inspired by the great Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), the first European to master Chinese.

I’m not sure the point of the Prep is to specifically prepare its students for the work world. It offers something much deeper and more lasting—a chance to gain a moral compass and an intellectual framework for approaching life. The ideals of altruism, action, and self-improvement that I internalized at the Prep have guided me ever since. And the idea of an institution with a higher purpose that can provide some element of formation to its subjects—in my case, our more than one million museum visitors each year—inspires me every single day.
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