News and events

21 August 2021 - 8:03pm

Grace Lai LLB (Hons) Curator of Applied Arts and Design

Curating: Curiosity for Forgotten Stories

Grace delighted us at our July meeting by sharing her timeline to the position she now holds as the Curator responsible for the development, exhibition and research of the Applied Arts and Design collection at Auckland War Memorial Museum. Generated by the curiosity of stories and the web of connections spun by objects, she enjoys taking an object and unpacking the cultural values it has been assigned, teasing out the interrelationships between material and immaterial culture.
Grace illustrated her talk with examples of various vessels, studio glass, pottery, jewellery and bags
Favourite Things: Auckland Museum Curator Grace Lai – Viva

Her ambition now is to build alternative accounts of art often forgotten as a result of the inequality of knowledge, locating Chinese-New Zealand artists, as well as the influence of Korean ceramics on local pottery tradition.