20 Meiqin Wang Everyone Curates: From Global Avant-garde to Local Reality C ontemporary Chinese art since the 1990s has evolved across multiple geopolitical, economic, and cultural spheres. The interactions of different individuals, including artists, curators, critics, collectors, dealers, news reporters, officials and policy makers, in these spheres add to the complexity of the art. This essay focuses on curators as the object of investigation because of the significant contribution they have made in the development of contemporary art in China. In the past two decades, the accumulative efforts of curators from disparate backgrounds and motivations have contributed to the rapidly growing landscape of contemporary Chinese art and its visibility in the global art world. These individuals, together with the institutions they have collaborated with, have defined scopes, shaped meanings, and formulated theoretical frameworks for contemporary art from China that we now consider as a serious academic subject. In his effort to identify effective methodologies for researching contemporary art from China, art historian Wu Hung proposes three of the most important spheres that condition the nature, characteristics, and meaning of this art: China’s domestic art spaces; the global network of multinational contemporary art; and individualized links between these two spheres created by artists and curators. 1 These overlapping but functionally distinct spheres generate different standards, structures, and significance in contemporary art making, and each could serve as a useful framework for art historical narratives. In this text, I focus mainly on the processes, relationships, and phenomena that take place within China’s domestic art spaces. However, considering that the idea of the curator as a new arbitrator of the contemporary art world is itself an imported concept grown out of the global network of contemporary art and that individualized connections have played a determinative role in the world of Chinese curators, it is necessary to consider these two spheres as well. From Global Avant-garde to Local Authority The term “curator” is not of contemporary invention; it has existed for many years, referring to individuals working in a broad range of fields such as museums, libraries, zoos, or other places of exhibition. Museum directors could be referred as curators; librarians responsible for organizing slides, films, and other visual materials could also be referred as curators. The independent curator, who came to the fore in art circuits as an avant-garde figure at the global level, however, is a phenomenon of the 1990s, when the rapid globalization prompted new ways of thinking about, making, and viewing art. These independent curators are not only the by-product of this