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James Taylor-Foster, Para Site’s ‘wild card’ director, on ‘beautiful paradox’ of Hong Kong
The new Para Site executive director talks about his plans to make contemporary art accessible in Hong Kong, censorship and more
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With his peroxide blond hair, dark moustache and luxuriant eyebrows, London-born curator and writer James Taylor-Foster is easy to pick out among the tourists and selfie-takers in the courtyard of Yick Cheong Building, also known as the “Monster Building”, in Hong Kong’s Quarry Bay neighbourhood.
The South China Morning Post is meeting the 33-year-old here shortly after the board of the Hong Kong non-profit art space Para Site chose him to be its next executive director. That space, a few minutes’ walk away, is off-limits because a new exhibition, “Site-seeing”, is being installed, so we meet instead at this dense, photogenic residential complex made famous by the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction – a fitting setting for a conversation about change.
Unlike his immediate predecessor, Billy Tang, who was a familiar face in the region before he moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai, Taylor-Foster has hardly any Asia experience and is not well known in the local art circle.
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“I am what they call a wild card,” he says straight away.
From architecture to art
Ebullient and loquacious, Taylor-Foster fits the profile of previous Para Site directors. He is also around the same age as Tobias Berger, Cosmin Costinas and Tang when they were appointed – a lineage of young men of cosmopolitan outlook and international ambition.
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