Alumni Outcomes: Vy Tsan
I am Vy Tsan, an early-career contemporary art curator whose practice examines global history through the movement of materials and objects, semiotics of displacement, and moments of contradiction. I completed the SOAS-Alphawood Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art in 2024/25, and was supported by the Dr Hettie Elgood Scholarship. Originally from Gadigal Nura/Sydney, I am now based in London, where I continue to develop my curatorial practice.
I am currently a Curatorial Fellow with New Curators, a year-long curatorial training programme based in London, where I am co-curating Korean-American artist Kang Seung Lee’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The exhibition will open in December 2026 at South London Gallery. Alongside my curatorial work, I am continuing my studies with the SOAS-Alphawood Asian Art Programme through an MA in Asian Art. My MA dissertation will focus on the role of provenance in contemporary practice through the readymade objects within Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo's work.
Before joining the SOAS-Alphawood Asian Art Programme, I held positions as Curatorial Assistant, International Art at the National Gallery of Australia; Content Coordinator at Craft + Design Canberra; and Curatorial Intern at Galeri Nasional Indonesia. My arts education started at the Australian National University, where I undertook a Bachelor of Art History & Curatorship alongside a Bachelor of Laws (Honours).
The SOAS-Alphawood Asian Art Programme's emphasis on object-based study, combined with rigorous critical and history inquiry, has been fundamental to developing my curatorial and research practice. As a curator interested in the dialogue between global history and contemporary culture, the programme has equipped me with the tools to observe how objects and images carry, transform, and contest meaning across temporal and geographic contexts.
Whilst studying with the SOAS-Alphawood Asian Art Programme, I represented SOAS as the 2025/26 Fellow for the Venice Biennale of Architecture, where I invigilated the Geology of Britannic Repair exhibition at British-Kenyan Pavilion and conducted research mapping the ‘material after-lives’ of the exhibition objects following de-installation. This experience deepened by engagement with questions of material circulations, institutional framing and the extended lifecycles of artworks beyond exhibition contexts. (See Vy's full report on her experience of this fellowship here.)
Throughout the SOAS-Alphawood Asian Art Programme, I was grateful to receive guidance and mentorship from Programme Director Malcolm McNeil who supervised my Independent Study Project on the shared semiotic systems between Dadaism and Chan Buddhism as expressed through contemporary artist Huang Yong Ping's work. It was a pleasure to draw on Malcolm's expertise in Chan Buddhist painting and literati culture, and be encouraged to apply them in a contemporary global context.
Completing the SOAS-Alphawood Asian Art Programme has enabled me to develop a contemporary curatorial practice that is foregrounded by a deep understanding of global histories, philosophies and material lineages.
