The International Examiner is proud to honor Ping Foong with a Community Voice Award (CVA) for a Leadership in Arts Award. Please join us in-person, on October 23, 2025, to celebrate her and other community leaders.
Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, shown at Seattle Art Museum (SAM) between March and September 2025, was the largest-ever U.S. retrospective of the groundbreaking contemporary Chinese artist’s work, showcasing 130 pieces from more than 40 years of Ai’s career. After seeing the show, Ai said it was his “strongest in terms of narrative and expression.”
The curator and force behind this monumental exhibit was Ping Foong, the Foster Foundation Curator of SAM. At first glance, Foong may seem like an unusual curator of Ai’s work. She has a Ph.D. in Chinese art and archaeology and was previously a professor of art history and Chinese art. She received The Joseph Levenson Book Prize for her monograph on 11th century Chinese ink painting and is currently working on a book about medieval Buddhist calligraphy.
Ai, on the other hand, is known for destroying artifacts similar to those that Foong has long studied. Despite the dichotomy of ancient and contemporary, it was Foong’s prowess, vision, and leadership that moved Ai to bring his work to Seattle for the retrospective.
“It was almost like a cold call,” Foong said, recalling her flight to Berlin to meet Ai in the summer of 2024, where she proposed a show at SAM. “I didn’t know him; he didn’t know me. I didn’t know how he was going to respond.”
Foong presented Ai ideas for a potential show, along with several of the SAM’s publications and an assortment of hand-knit cat toys, since Ai owns more than 30 cats. When Ai pulled out his computer and offered Foong pieces to debut in the U.S.—plus some that had never been shown anywhere before—Foong took that as a good sign. That meeting set into motion the exhibit that came to fruition within 13 months, which Foong describes as “jaw-droppingly fast.” Most exhibits typically take more than four years to develop.
Although aspects of Ai’s work and story are known worldwide, Foong knew that she could bring a different perspective than those told before by contemporary art experts, thanks to her knowledge of artifacts used by Ai. The process built upon Foong’s curatorial experience during the renovation of the Seattle Asian Art Museum—between 2015 and 2020—which was her first foray into putting together a museum exhibit.
“For me, [working on Ai’s show] is about how I bring my skills to talk about a contemporary artist,” Foong said. “A retrospective is a perfect occasion to summarize what he was thinking about at the very beginning of his career as a young artist in the 1980s to what he’s doing now. Are there any threads that connect the decades, the works of art, that connect patterns of thinking? That’s what we historians do; we look for past and bigger pictures to write up what happened, but also eventually, maybe come up with some ideas of why.”
Foong’s research resulted in an exhibit that began with a tree, symbolizing Ai’s roots, that extended from the ground to just two inches shy of the ceiling, introducing visitors to the artist’s early days. The tree also represented Ai’s relationship to his father, the Chinese poet Ai Qing, who wrote a poem about trees. From there, the exhibit took visitors on a journey through Ai’s biography and his work.
“My intention was for [the exhibit] to resonate—to ring true—to Ai Weiwei himself,” Foong said. “I never get to talk to living artists; it’s so rare. This was like my third time ever, so I wanted to take this opportunity to really make a human connection.”
Mentor, scholar, and inspiration
In 2015, Foong moved to Seattle to lead the curatorial renovation of the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Her team defied convention by organizing artwork by themes, rather than the traditional practice of grouping collections by geography or time period, challenging viewers to find connections between countries and histories. Since the museum reopened in 2020, Foong has received national recognition for her exhibits, including Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms in 2022, as well as for Ai, Rebel.
While her mastery in the art world is to be revered, Foong is equally admired for the way she pours into students and colleagues. They describe her using words like “genius,” “strategic,” “inspiration,” “mentor,” and “hilarious.”
Tingting Xu, Foong’s former student at the University of Chicago in 2012, said Foong is a charismatic scholar—one who is immensely generous, and is “the embodiment of sharp intellect and thoughtful preparation.”
A highlight for Xu was when Foong hung up reproductions of three Northern Song dynasty paintings for the class to compare side by side—a practice that has since been dubbed “The Gathering of the Three Mountains”—and continues among Foong’s former students who now teach their own classes.
Ramzy Lakos, a digital interpretation designer at SAM, interned with Foong in 2019 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and collaborated with her on interpretive gallery experiences for Ai, Rebel. He thinks of Foong not only as an academic, a scholar, and someone committed to the truth and integrity of an exhibit, but also as someone who is invested in other people.
“She is so present when you’re working with her; she gives you 100% of her attention,” Lakos said. “She is incredibly smart and could do a lot of this herself, but she really wants to do it with you as a collaborator, and she’s invested in your ideas.”
After working closely with Foong on Ai’s exhibit, Emily Gardner, manager of gallery learning at SAM, said one characteristic of Foong that stood out most was her deftness in building relationships with key stakeholders, particularly when challenges arose.
“She was so quick on her feet as a thinker and knew when to compromise—when to give in to someone else’s demands, and when to put her foot down and stand up for what she wanted,” Gardner explained. “I found that really inspiring and something that I want to think about more, for myself as a woman early in her career.
“I would love to grow to be a leader in the way that Ping is a leader in navigating those different stakeholder relationships, because it can be fragile and delicate,” she continued.
Lakos and Gardner recounted their travels with Foong to Portugal, where they spent a long day interviewing Ai for the exhibit. After dinner, Foong insisted on visiting ancient Roman ruins nearby—in the dark and in pouring rain.
“We had an amazing conversation about the history, the idea of ruins, and the arcs of societies around the world through time,” Lakos recalled. “It goes to show the intellectualism that she brings to any conversation.”
The same intellect and passion—in another teacher—is what drew Foong to art in the first place. On her first day of undergrad, Foong mistakenly ended up in a class about Chinese art history while trying to find her engineering class. Captivated by the teacher’s lesson, Foong stayed for the class, and that serendipitous error solidified her career path.
“Since then, I’ve always been in the arts,” Foong said. “It appealed to me—that you can tell stories with things, with art, with artifacts … To me, that was mind-blowing and exciting and worth doing. I felt like it’s important that somebody like me be the keeper of this information. I wanted to be the recorder and the interpreter. … In a way, it was kind of like falling in love. I never looked back, from that moment on.”
Melody Lee Ip is a freelance writer/copy editor when she’s not singing with or shuttling around her three kids. She loves the trees and rain of the Pacific Northwest, still sends handwritten letters, and always has at least five books on her nightstand.
