About the LYC Foundation

Trustees of the Li Yuan-chia Foundation

The founder of the LYC Foundation was Guy Brett (1942-2021), a London-based art critic, curator and lecturer on art. He was a close friend of Li’s for over thirty years. In 2000, he curated the first major exhibition of Li Yuan-chia, held at the Camden Arts Centre in London, Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Museum in Kendal and Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. With Nick Sawyer, he also co-wrote the accompanying catalogue, Li Yuan-chia: tell me what is not yet said (InIVA, London, 2001). In 2014, Brett and Sawyer were the UK co-curators of exhibition Viewpoint: A Retrospective of Li Yuan-chia in Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. The Foundation continues to be governed by:

Bruce Haines (http://brucehaines.com) is an ex-gallerist, current shop keeper, publisher and researcher. His gallery Bruce Haines, Mayfair (née Ancient and Modern), was a London gallery active for ten years 2006-2016, regularly exhibiting at Frieze London and New York, Liste Basel, Art Cologne, Nada Miami and Armory New York. He continues to work with artists, having founded an imprint published by his shop Intaglio Printmaker while writing a PhD funded by TECHNE at Kingston University. Bruce was the exhibition organiser at inIVA for the Li Yuan-chia touring exhibition ‘Tell Me What Is Not Yet Said’ at Camden Arts Centre curated by Guy Brett in 2001 after which he became inevitably implicated into the work of LYC.

Katie Hill is a curator, author and Senior Lecturer specialising in art from China and the Chinese diaspora. She holds an MA in Chinese language and literature from the University of Edinburgh and a DPhil in Art History from the University of Sussex. She is Academic Lead, Asia at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, where she founded the MA in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art, a pioneering programme in the field. She has curated exhibitions in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Oxford and Milan, through collaborations with galleries, institutions and museums. She is co-author of The Chinese Art Book (Phaidon, 2013), and her writing appears in many journals and exhibition catalogues. Her Oxfordshire-based consultancy, the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art (OCCA) www.occaspace.com which she runs with Cai Yuan, promotes the work of artists from China and the global Chinese diaspora, in collaboration with galleries, collections and museums.  

Diana Yeh (http://www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/diana-yeh) is a Lecturer in Sociology, Culture and the Creative Industries at City, University of London. She has undertaken several years of fieldwork on Li Yuan-chia, tracing his life and artistic work from London, Cumbria, Bologna and Taipei to Guangxi. Her essays on Li are published in China Fictions/English Language: Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (Rodopi: 2008); The Reception of Chinese Art across Cultures (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014); and Viewpoint: A Retrospective of Li Yuan Chia (Taipei Fine Arts Museum 2015). She is also currently writing a book arising from her research on Li and other Chinese diaspora artists in the UK. diana.yeh@city.ac.uk

Cai Yuan was born in Nanjing, China and grew up during the Cultural Revolution. He studied at the Nanjing College of Art and emigrated to the UK in 1983. He gained a First Class Honours from Chelsea School of Art and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. Cai has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including at Tate Modern, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, Ullens Centre of Contemporary Art, Beijing, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, ZKM, Germany, and Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea. He has participated in several international biennales, including Liverpool, Prague, Thessaloniki. In the 1990s, he became known for his performance practice, which was widely publicised in the national media. He is co-founder of the performance duo Mad for Real with JJ Xi and the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art (OCCA). He co-organised the first touring exhibition of Chinese artists in Britain, Journeys West (1995).