The Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, branded last year with having an ‘entrenched acceptance of racist attitudes’, is getting new leadership. Xiaowen Zhu, who is the former assistant director of at Times Art Center Berlin, will join as director, arriving alongside five new board members and a new chief operating officer. The controversy-plagued organisation has also created a new role of community development and engagement manager.
CFCCA emerged in the late 1980s, inspired by the Black Arts Movement, as a community centre serving the large Chinese diaspora in the city. In March 2020, artist JJ Chan raised concerns that twelve of the thirteen members of staff at the arts centre were white. ‘In striving to become a more mainstream Arts organisation,’ Chan wrote, ‘CFCCA privileges a Eurocentric leadership, whose authorship has, in turn, contributed to the politics and perspectives of the Chinese in the UK through a hierarchical form of selective cultural diplomacy that draws the labours of Chinese artists from across the world in order to uphold the powerful agency of a white knowledge, expertise, and perceptions of Chineseness narrated only in English.’
The centre responded first by appointing a working group to help institute change, but one member, artist Jack Tan, complained: ‘We were meant to be equal partners in reforming and revisioning the organisation but what we experienced was institutional racism through cancelling and avoidance and not being upfront about historic and very recent allegations of racist bullying by staff’.
The centre then hired an external consulting firm to conduct a report, replying to one critic of the previous process that ‘some of the team are finding this process a challenge at best and unbearable at worst but we are all completely invested in the necessary change and within it are actively questioning the validity of our roles and actions’.
As a result of the second report, joining Zhu are board members Philomena Chen, Simon Li, Yung Ma, aaajiao (aka Xu Wenkai) and Bonnie Yeung.
In Berlin, Zhu oversaw the solo exhibition Earwax (2022) by Wong Ping, curated by Hou Hanru, the group exhibition Más Allá, el Mar Canta: Diasporic Intimacies and Labour (2021), curated by Pablo José Ramírez, and Neither Black / Red / Yellow Nor Woman (2019–20), curated by Nikita Yingqian Cai and Xiaoyu Weng.
