Expect the Unexpected

"A healthy degree of unpredictability" drives Para Site's next chapter, with Billy Tang now at the helm

- Tara Sobti

Most children want to be a superhero when they grow up. Not Billy Tang. He wanted to be Vincent van Gogh. "I wanted to go outdoors with an easel and paint everything I saw," he says. The Chinese Vietnamese art connoisseur and executive director of the contemporary art centre Para Site always knew he would work in the realm of art and design.

Tang, who was born in London, graduated from the revered Chelsea College of Arts and moved to Beijing in 2013. Although he started out as an artist at the beginning of his career, he soon found he preferred to call the shots from behind the scenes with curatorial work. "I realised that I didn't always have to be the author of the work. When I was an artist, sometimes it would take a whole year to make one single piece of art. It was torturous," he says.

Putting together inspiring exhibitions is where Tang's passion lies, and his background as an artist helps him see things from a creator's perspective. "I try to be as artist-centric as possible. I like to delve deep into the artist's work to get a sense of how their mind operates, and I'm very big on the scenography of an exhibition and how it's staged," he says.