Jay Xu Jie has long had a connection with the Asian Art Museum (AAM) in San Francisco - it was the first museum outside China that he learned about while working as a young curator in Shanghai. So when 45-year-old Xu was named director of the AAM earlier this year, a member of the museum commission described the appointment as 'destiny'.
Securing the top job at one of the west's largest institutions devoted to Asian art was no mean feat. Formerly head curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, Xu was chosen after an international search that at one point included 100 candidates.
But he has been something of a high-flier since arriving in the US in 1990 to pursue a doctorate at Princeton. His meteoric career, leapfrogging from one prestigious institution to another, is a tribute to his heart and mind, says Jane Chang Tom, secretary of the Asian Art Commission, which runs the museum. 'There is a Chinese saying that translates something like this: 'The right time, the right place and the right person [doing] the right thing'. That's how I see Jay.'
Xu's first public role in his new job was to open an exhibition of Ming court art put together in a collaboration with three of the mainland's most important institutions - the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Nanjing Municipality Museum and the Shanghai Museum. Even though he didn't have a hand in the show, it points to where some of the AAM's attention will be directed: training.
Since 2003, Xu has served on the Mellon Programme for Chinese Museum Professionals, which helps develop expertise for the mainland's rapidly expanding museums.
'During the past 20 years, China has had arguably the fastest economic development in the world. This has seen construction going on everywhere, and wherever you dig, you find ancient objects. As they keep coming up, you need to build museums to house them,' Xu says. 'They're building museums in just about every county in China as we speak, and there are a lot of counties.