Ohio State PhD Candidate Allie Mickle spent three months in Hong Kong as the gallery and exhibitions visiting fellow at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center (ASHK) during the spring of 2024. While there, she assisted the gallery and exhibitions team by helping open the Wifredo Lam: Homecoming exhibition in the Chantal Miller Gallery.
“I was so interested in art history as a discipline and found that it really clicked for me,” Allie said. “I loved learning about the past through its visual culture, making connections to politics, religion, society and theory. I continued learning Chinese in college and started to learn more about contemporary Chinese artists that experimented with Chinese language, like Xu Bing and Cai Guoqiang.”
Allie’s interest and experience led her to apply to the Asia Society Hong Kong Center fellowship, a shared opportunity open to art history graduate students. The fellowship was facilitated by Ohio State alumna Alice Mong ‘86, president of ASHK and board of directors member for The Ohio State University Alumni Association.
“I was inspired to raise money for this fellowship because I personally benefited from an internship during my senior year at Ohio State,” said Alice. “My internship started my career which has brought me to Asia today. I’m so glad that Allie could have a chance to come and work in Asia as a result of this fellowship.”
Having previously visited Hong Kong for her research in 2023, Allie was excited to deepen her experience by returning with support from ASHK. “When the fellowship opportunity was announced, I was excited to learn more about non-profit art spaces and be able to experience the art world in Hong Kong over an extended period of time.”
While in Hong Kong, Allie learned more about best practices of art handling and curatorial trends by working alongside Assistant Curator Hain Yoon and the son of artist Wifredo Lam, Eskil Lam.
The exhibition that Allie worked on was a wide-ranging, multi-modal retrospective spanning forty years of works by artist Wifredo Lam, a Cuban-born artist whose mother was of Afro-Spanish heritage and father had Cantonese roots. The exhibition marked Wifredo Lam’s first major solo presentation in Hong Kong and also the pivotal return of Lam to Asia—tracing his Chinese father’s lineage and studying the significance of the Chinese diaspora.
According to Allie, it was exciting to be part of the process firsthand and help troubleshoot any last-minute questions or changes. “I have gained the ability to coordinate across multiple departments and various parties, work with artists and artist estates, as well as organize and conceptualize exhibition catalogues and programming,” she said. “I have also been able to think about how to market exhibitions to the public and make people excited to come to the show.”
While in Hong Kong, she also had the opportunity to experience the art fairs Art Basel and Art Central, perform dissertation research at the Asia Art Archive and M+ Research Centre and visit the collections of museums and galleries in Hong Kong, Taipei and Guangzhou.
This experience was generously funded through the Asia Society, Hong Kong History of Art Internship Fund.
