HONG KONG.- The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority today announced that Mr Doryun Chong, a respected name in the international museum field, will join the team of M+, the museum for visual culture in the District.

"I am thrilled that Mr Doryun Chong is joining the M+ team," said Dr Lars Nittve, Executive Director of M+. "We have been searching for a right Chief Curator for years and with his extensive knowledge and understanding of the contemporary art scene, not the least in Asia, Doryun is an extraordinary addition to our growing team."

"I am extremely excited about M+’s vision of creating a unique 20th and 21st century multidisciplinary institution of visual culture. I look forward to working with the already accomplished, diverse team of curators at M+ to build a truly global museum that is also locally rooted and contribute to making Hong Kong a great cultural hub," said Mr Chong.

Mr Doryun Chong will join WKCDA this September as Chief Curator, assisting Dr Lars Nittve in overseeing the future development of M+ with his extensive curatorial experience and global network. Mr Chong has been the Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York since 2009. At MoMA, he organised one-person exhibitions with Ernesto Neto, Bruce Nauman and Henrik Olesen. In 2012, Mr Chong organised the major exhibition, Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, which the New York Times selected as one of the best museum exhibitions of 2012.

Prior to MoMA, Mr Chong held different curatorial positions in the Visual Arts department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis between 2003 and 2009. During his time at the Walker, he organised or co-organised numerous exhibitions including House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective; Brave New Worlds; Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis; and Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider, just to name a few.

Mr Chong began his curatorial career at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 1999 and was the coordinator for the Korean Pavilion exhibition at the 2001 Venice Biennale as well as a co-curator of the 2003 exhibition Time After Time: Asia and Our Moment at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Mr Chong is also a contributing editor for ArtAsiaPacific and serves on the editorial board of Art Journal. In addition, he has contributed his writings to a wide range of contemporary art periodicals such as Artforum, Parkett, and Afterall. In 2010, Mr Chong was awarded the inaugural Independent Vision Award by the Independent Curators International.

Mr Chong earned a BA in history of arts and further studied in the doctoral program of history of arts at the University of California at Berkeley.

M+, the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, is scheduled for completion in 2017 with a mission to focus on 20th and 21st century visual culture, broadly defined, from a Hong Kong perspective and with a global vision.