BIOGRAPHY
Lance Fung is the chief curator for Fung Collaboratives, an arts organization that conceives and realizes contemporary art exhibitions around the world.
Lance curated Constellations: Global Reflections, the first exhibition for a G20 and B20 summit, in Bali, 2022. Twenty visionary artists, each representing a G20 member state, created new site-specific artwork in the form of giant, rotating lanterns. Artists Yinka Shonibare, Minerva Cuevas, Xu Bing, Kimsooja, and Thomas Ruff led the narrative about environmental and social crises including gender equity, colonialism, and disparity between nations.
The Snow Show was one of Lance’s most notable endeavors. First realized in Lapland in 2003 & 2004, he later created the third iteration in 2006 for the 20th Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. Over the series, Lance commissioned twenty teams of artists and architects to realize ephemeral site specific works made primarily from snow and ice as an investigation of the boundaries between art and architecture practices. Norman Foster, Williams & Tsein, Tadao Ando, Yoko Ono, Ernesto Neto, and Rachel Whiteread are only a few of the creatives that were engaged.
In 2008, Lance was selected as the seventh SITE Santa Fe International Biennial curator resulting in Lucky Number Seven, a massive exhibition of twenty-five emerging artists that expanded to all the cultural institutions in Santa Fe included the famed Opera House.
Lance realized his concept for Illuminate Coral Gables, a public art exhibition to be viewed in the daytime and through light and technology a different viewer experience was provided after dark. This exhibition planning began prior to the pandemic but Lance continued to work with the sixteen artists and fabricators and opened the outdoor exhibition during the pandemic in February & March, 2021. With health experts, the exhibition provided a safe and enjoyable activity for the 70,000 visitors that came to see the exhibition in person by foot or car. A diverse group of artists participated by making new site-specific commissions such as Kiki Smith’s Blue Sky.
This opportunity allowed for the return of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Fireflies that Lance first curated in 2017 as the centennial celebration for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Lance also transformed vacant lots in Atlantic City into a much-needed park system through his exhibition Artlantic. These “giant living sculptures” attracted local residents and visiting art enthusiasts to experience art in “green” settings designed by Fung and the participants Diana Balmori, Robert Barry, Peter Hutchinson, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Kiki Smith, etc.
He has created other important exhibitions such as Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark at Next: The Venice Architectural Biennale in Venice, Italy; The Snow Show: Venice at the 50th International Art Exhibition/La Biennale di Venezia; The Ship of Tolerance by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, in Siwa, Egypt and Dreams and Conflicts–The Viewer’s Dictatorship, in Venice, Italy; Crossing Parallels at the SSamzi Space in Seoul, Korea and Going Home at the Edward Hopper Historical Museum in Nyack, New York; Wonderland in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district; and Nonuments, as part of Washington DC’s 5 x 5 curatorial initiative.