bio | Zoe Butt is Executive Director and Curator of Sàn Art, Vietnam’s most active independent contemporary art space and reading room in Ho Chi Minh City. From 2007-2009, she was Director, International Programs, Long March Project – a multi-platform, international artist organization and ongoing art project based in Beijing, China. From 2001-2007, she was Assistant Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia where she assisted in the development of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) and key acquisitions for the Contemporary Asian art collection. Zoe’s current Ph.D. study examines her experience of working with artists in China and Vietnam where cultural memory and historical consciousness is socially prohibitive, government censored or traumatically hidden. It will challenge the social responsibility of curatorial labor, in relation to particular artist-initiated organizations; in the role both have to play in these societies where 20th Century cultural material archives are relatively non-existent. Her curatorial work has been pan-Asian with an increasing focus on the Global South, working with private collectors and researchers, independent curators and major museums globally.
