Philip Tinari

Philip Tinari (born 1979, Philadelphia) is a notable writer, critic, art curator, and expert in Contemporary Chinese Art. He is the director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing.

At UCCA, Tinari oversees an exhibition program devoted to established and emerging artists both Chinese and international, aimed at UCCA's annual public of more than half a million visitors. Prior to joining UCCA, in 2009 Tinari founded LEAP with the Modern Media Group, "the international art magazine of contemporary China," and ran as the Editor in Chief until 2011. He has previously worked as China representative for Art Basel, contributing editor to Artforum and founding editor of the magazine's Chinese-language web edition artforum.com.cn, academic consultant to the Chinese contemporary art department at Sotheby’s (where he drafted the catalogue for the house's first New York sale of contemporary Chinese art in 2006), and lecturer in art criticism at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He has written and lectured extensively on contemporary art in China, and particularly on the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. He serves on advisory boards including the Guggenheim Asian Art Council and the gallery committee at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center. Tinari holds a B.A. from the Program in Literature at Duke and

an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Harvard. He was a Fulbright fellow at Peking University. In 2014 he curated the Focus: China section of The Armory Show in New York.

Since arriving at UCCA in late 2011, Tinari has mounted exhibitions including Gu Dexin: The Important Thing is Not the Meat, Kan Xuan: Millet Mounds (later included in the 2013 Venice Biennale), Yung Ho Chang + FCJZ: Material-ism, ON|OFF: China's Young Artists in Concept and Practice, Duchamp and/or/in China, Wang Xingwei, Tino Sehgal, Wang

Keping, and Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I-XVIII.