Johnson Chang is a top curator and dealer of contemporary Chinese art. He is a co-founder of the Asia Art Archive

Asia Art Archive

Based in Hong Kong, Asia Art Archive , a non-profit organization and registered charity, is dedicated to documenting the recent history of visual art from the region within an international context...

 (AAA) in Hong Kong and a guest professor of the China Art Academy in Nanjing.

Background

Chang Tsong-zung was born in 1951 in Hong Kong.
He has been curating art exhibitions since the 1980s.
He founded Hanart TZ gallery in Hong Kong in 1983. It is now one of the city's most established.

He was a pioneer in introducing contemporary Chinese art to international exhibitions in the 1990s.

It was through his gallery that he organized exhibitions of the Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming

Ju Ming

Ju Ming is a Taiwanese sculptor, who attained fame in Taiwan in the 1970s, and in New York in 1983. Ju Ming was trained as a woodcarver, apprenticed to Lee Chin-chuan, as a teenager...

 at the Singapore Art Museum

Singapore Art Museum

The Singapore Art Museum contains the national art collection of Singapore. It has a collection of 7,750 pieces of Singaporean and Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art, and has an expanding collection of new Asian and international contemporary art.- History :Officially opened in 1996, it...

 in 1986 and Place Vendôme

Place Vendôme

Place Vendôme is a square in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, France, located to the north of the Tuileries Gardens and east of the Église de la Madeleine. It is the starting point of the Rue de la Paix. Its regular architecture by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and pedimented screens canted across the...

 in Paris in 1997. It was also with Hanart that he staged "China’s New Art Post-1989," which debuted at the 1993 Hong Kong Arts Festival and then toured the United States from 1995 to 1997.

In Shanghai in late 2010, Chang organized "West Heavens," a contemporary art collaboration between China and India.

In their annual "The Power 100" listing, Art Review named Chang, alongside Claire Hsu, for their co-founding of the AAA.

Personal

Chang is known for wearing old-fashioned Chinese-styled outfits with Mandarin collars.

He is a friend of Sir David Tang

David Tang

Sir David Tang, KBE is a Hong Kong businessman and socialite best known as the founder of the Shanghai Tang fashion chain, which he sold in 2006 to Richemont.Tang's grandfather "founded the Kowloon bus company and became one of Hong Kong’s greatest philanthropists"...

, founder of Shanghai Tang. Chang helped Tang put together The China Club

China Club

The China Club is a retro-chic, Shanghai-style club and restaurant in Hong Kong. It is related to the China Clubs in Singapore and Beijing but is not related to the clubs of the same name in New York City and Berlin, Germany...

's famed art collection.

Chang is also part of Hong Kong's elite social scene and is listed in Asia Tatler

Tatler

Tatler has been the name of several British journals and magazines, each of which has viewed itself as the successor of the original literary and society journal founded by Richard Steele in 1709. The current incarnation, founded in 1901, is a glossy magazine published by Condé Nast Publications...

's "Top List."

He has two sons.

Shows and Projects

• “China’s New Art Post-1989” (1993)

• Special Exhibitions at the Sao Paulo International Biennial (1994 and 1996)

• Hong Kong participation at Sao Paulo Biennial (1996)

• The Venice Biennial (2001)

• “Power of the Word’ series of exhibitions

• “Strange Heaven: Chinese Contemporary Photography”

• “Open Asia International Sculpture Exhibition” in Venice (2005)

• “Yellow Box” series, Guangzhou Triennial (2008).