City of Others, City of Migrants: Art in Paris, 1920-1940s

Phoebe Scott

Phoebe Scott is Senior Curator and Curator of Research Publications at National Gallery Singapore. She is currently Lead Curator of the exhibition City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s (2025). Her previous curatorial projects include Radiant Material: A Dialogue in Vietnamese Lacquer Painting (2017); Reframing Modernism: Painting in Europe, Southeast Asia and Beyond (2016); Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century, (2015–ongoing). Her research interests include modern art within a global framework; intersections of modernism and colonialism, especially in Indochina; Socialist Realism and post-Socialist art. Scott holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney, on the subject of modern art in Vietnam. She is currently also an Adjunct Lecturer in Art History at the National University of Singapore.

Inaga Shigemi

Inaga Shigemi is a leading Japanese scholar in comparative literature, art history and cultural studies. He earned his BA and MA from the University of Tokyo and completed his PhD at the University of Paris VII in 1988. His academic career includes teaching positions at the University of Tokyo and Mie University, before joining the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto as a Professor Emeritus, where he later served as Deputy Director-General. He was a specially appointed professor at Kyoto Seika University between 2022 and 2025.

Inaga’s research focuses on East-West cultural exchange, modern Japanese art and Japonisme. His major publications include Le Crépuscule de la peinture (1997), L’Orient de la peinture (1999), and Images on the Edge (2014). He has also edited influential works such as Vocabulaire de la spatialité japonaise (2014) and A Pirate’s View of World History. Inaga has received several honours, including the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities and the Watsuji Tetsuro Culture Award. As a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress’s Kluge Center, he further explored cross-cultural aesthetics, bridging Japanese and Western artistic traditions.

Eric Lefebvre

Eric Lefebvre (易凱) is the Director of the Musée Cernuschi—Asian Art Museum of the City of Paris. He holds a PhD in Art History from Sorbonne University, with a dissertation on the collections of Ruan Yuan (1768–1849), exploring the transmission of cultural heritage in pre-modern China. His research focuses on the history of Chinese art collections in pre-modern China and the presence of Chinese artists in France during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Lefebvre has curated numerous significant exhibitions that highlight both historical and modern Chinese art. Among them are Chinese Artists in Paris (2011), The Shanghai School (2013), Splendor of the Han (2014), Walasse Ting: The Flower Thief (2016), Fragrances from China (2018), Song of Spring: Pan Yuliang in Paris (2018), Painting Apart from the World (2021), Ink in Motion (2022), Return from Asia (2023), and The Journey of Ink (2024). Through his curatorial work and scholarship, Lefebvre has played a key role in promoting Chinese art in France and internationally.

Denise Murrell 

Denise Murrell is the Meryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, Office of the Director, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with a focus on the art of the 19th and 20th centuries to the present. Her work centers on expanding the narratives of modern art to include the contributions and presence of Black artists and models, particularly in the context of European and American modernism. She gained wide recognition as curator of the 2018 exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today at Columbia University in New York and as co-curator for its 2019 expansion, as Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Murrell earned her PhD in art history from Columbia University in 2014 and was awarded a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship to further her research. She joined the Met’s curatorial staff in 2020, in a move seen as part of the museum’s efforts to broaden its cultural perspectives. In 2024, she curated The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, a landmark exhibition developed in collaboration with historically Black universities, among other lenders, with the objective of establishing this first African American-led movement of modern art as central to the history of international modernism.

Roy Ng

Roy Ng is an Assistant Curator at National Gallery Singapore. Broadly, he explores art through a material and transhistorical lens, but specifically his research focuses on the social practices of Southeast Asian photography from their colonial archives to contemporary experimentations. Thematic preoccupations in his research include: death and photography in Straits Chinese ancestral halls, monk portraiture and Buddhist identities in Thailand and Laos, the Myanmar Photo Archive, and currently, photographic “Otherness” in interwar Paris. At the Gallery, he co-curated major exhibitions including Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia (2022–2023), Nam June Paik: The Future is Now (2021–2022), and City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris (2025). He holds an MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture from Trinity College, University of Oxford.

Teo Hui Min

Teo Hui Min is Curator at National Gallery Singapore, where she contributes to the curation of Singapore Stories  (2014–ongoing) and Beyond Declarations and Dreams (2015–ongoing), long-term exhibitions of Singapore and Southeast Asian art from the 19th century to the present. Her area of research covers visual art practice in Singapore (1950s-1980s). Other exhibitions she has co-curated include Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America (2023), Mohammad Din Mohammad: The Mistaken Ancestor (2021), Georgette Chen: At Home in the World (2020) and Lim Cheng Hoe: Painting Singapore (2018). Teo holds an MA in Art History from University College London.

Cai Heng

Cai Heng is Senior Curator and Lead Curator for ink at National Gallery Singapore. She has curated several exhibitions including Liu Kuo-sung: Experimentation as Method (2023), Wu Guanzhong: Beauty Beyond Form (2015) and Chua Ek Kay: After the Rain (2015). Her research focuses on modern and contemporary ink, modern Chinese art, and the art of Chinese diaspora. Recent essays and publications include Liu Kuo-Sung: Experimentation as Method monograph (2023) and “Transnational Development in Georgette Chen’s Early Artistic Practice” in Georgette Chen: At Home in the World (2020). She received a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney.

Patrick Flores

Patrick Flores is Chief Curator at National Gallery Singapore. He is concurrently Professor of Art History and Criticism at the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003. He was the curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum. He curated the Philippine Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and was curator of the exhibition Impossible Dreams, organised by Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

Horikawa Lisa

Horikawa Lisa is Senior Curator and Director (Curatorial & Collections) at National Gallery Singapore, overseeing the strategic development and enhancement of accessibility for its collections including artwork and archives. Her current research interest is on comparative examinations of intersecting modernisms in Southeast Asia, East Asia and beyond in the first half of the 20th century. 

She was a lead curator of Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (2015), (Re)Collect: The Making of Our Art Collection (2018) and co-curated Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016). Prior to joining the Gallery, she was Curator at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan from 2003 to 2012, where she co-curated China Dream—Another Stream of Chinese Modern Art (2004) and the 3rd and 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005, 2009).

Adele Tan

Adele Tan is Senior Curator at National Gallery Singapore. Her curatorial work focuses on contemporary Southeast Asian and Chinese art, with a special interest in performative practices, photography, and new media. Some of her major exhibitions include  Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow (2017) and Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s –1990s (2019).

Before joining National Gallery Singapore, she was assistant editor at the British Journal Third Text and her articles have appeared in numerous other scholarly publications, exhibition catalogues and journals such as PAJ, Broadsheet, Yishu and Eyeline. Tan was part of the curatorial panel for the 4th Singapore International Photography Festival and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics.

 In addition to her curatorial role, Adele also lectures at the National University of Singapore.