Kim Machan (PhD) is founding director of MAAP and has developed curatorial projects in Australia and the Asia regions through this organisation since 1998. Previously she worked as an independent curator and producer initiating several projects in the mid 1990s including Art Rage: Art Works for Television involving 70 contemporary artists over four series broadcast on the ABC (1996-2000).
Machan has pioneered collaborative cultural partnerships with arts organizations and governments throughout the Asia regions to produce and curate major exhibitions, festivals, public art programs and innovative art projects. She has negotiated complex projects working with museums, galleries, contemporary art spaces, universities and non-traditional art settings in Australia and the Asia Pacific regions. In China, Machan has managed MAAP’s exhibitions in a range of institutions, including the China Millennium Monument Art Museum (2002), National Art Museum of China, National Library of China, and China Academy of Fine Arts, the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou Public Library, Shanghai Library , and Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou). In 2002, she curated (with Fan Di’an) MAAP in Beijing: MOIST, the first international new media art exhibition presented in a Chinese museum. In 2008, she was curatorial advisor Synthetic Times: Media Art China 2008 at the National Art Museum of China, which was a Beijing Olympics Cultural Project.
Other curatorial works include the public library site specific touring project Light from Light that won the highly distinguished Australian Arts in Asia Award for Visual Arts in 2013. She also curated and produced LANDSEASKY: Revisiting Spatiality in Video Art that toured major museums and galleries in Seoul including Art Sonje; OCAT Shanghai; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; National Art School Gallery Sydney; and Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane through 2014-2015. Machan has curated numerous solo exhibitions including Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxin, Shilpa Gupta, Yeondoo Jung. In 2016 she co-curated Zhang Peili: From Painting to Video with Olivier Krischer and is a contributor to the exhibition’s publication of the same name, published by the Australian National University Press in 2019.
Her Phd thesis titled Refocusing on the Medium: the Rise of East Asia Video Art , completed in 2021 with the associated exhibition presented in China at OCAT Shanghai in 2020-21 https://vimeo.com/526364077 and Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, 2022 https://vimeo.com/691701584. Machan has lectured in curatorial masterclasses, contemporary Asian art, and art theory in universities and art schools in Australia, China and Singapore.