Case Study of Good T&L Practices > Cases > Dr KOON Yee-wan
Dr KOON Yee-wan
Associate Professor
Chair of Department of Art History
School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts
The University of Hong Kong
Awardee of 2021
(Category: General Faculty Members)
Dr Koon Yee Wan is the recipient of several research awards, including a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, American Council of Learned Scholars, and visiting scholarships at Cambridge University and Columbia University. She is actively involved with art communities in Hong Kong and internationally. In 2018, Dr Koon was one of the selected curators for the 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea. She also curated the exhibition “So long, thanks again for the fish!” in 2020 as part of the Inspired Programme of the inaugural Helsinki Biennale in Finland. Her primary research interest in Chinese painting has resulted in publications including A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art (2019) and A Defiant Brush: Su Renshan and the Politics of Painting in 19th Century Guangdong (2014). Her secondary interest in contemporary art in Asia includes studies on the artists Nara Yoshitomo (2020) and Xu Bing (2014).
In addition, Dr Koon is highly respected in the arts community and is a devoted and distinctive educator in art history. In 2013 she received the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (HKU) and Outstanding Teaching Award (HKU) in 2020. Her pedagogical practice aims to enhance her student’s learning experience with direct engagement with arts, artists, and professionals in the art world. Using her networks of cultural institutions, students are able to experience first-hand the many ways that academia can connect to the larger art world.
Dr Koon is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Hong Kong.
Art history in action
Dr Koon develops a three-pronged strategy, ‘art history in action’, into teaching practice to transform students’ curiosity into a deeper commitment to arts. She uses the method of bringing art objects (and people) into the classroom, bringing students into the art world, and constructing knowledge of art history in Hong Kong. Her methods of authentic learning experience lead her students in the contribution of knowledge creation in art history in Hong Kong.
Bringing art objects (and people) into the classroom
The object-based approach capitalises on haptic engagement with art objects and real-time dialogues with the creators as a stimulus for promoting interaction, exploration, understanding and critical thinking. Learning directly from the object is one of the greatest pleasures of being an art historian, and Dr Koon passes her enthusiasm to her students through engagement. In the classroom, she demonstrates to her students that an art historian is a storyteller, an investigator, and a forensic scientist– and her roles change with each object. With a piece of broken ceramic, she is able to tell a history of technology, trade exchange and imperial taste. Dr Koon is keen on engaging with real-life art experience, hands-on experiences, and knowledge as an art historian.
By collaborating with the Hong Kong SAR Government’s Arts Promotion Office, she developed an annual internship programme for undergraduate students to join a working artist community in Japan. In doing so, they learnt about the artistic process of creation and how art was culturally and contextually situated.
Bringing students into the art ecosystem
The experience-based approach can leverage teachable for students. With this experiential approach, she not only engages students in authentic, real-world learning but also opens them to a range of career opportunities in the art industry. Due to the rapid expansion of Hong Kong’s visual art world in the past ten years with new museums and galleries, non-profits, and artist-run spaces, students’ interest in being part of the region’s vibrant cultural landscape is interesting. Dr Koon has introduced her students to curators, artists, writers, directors, conservators, development teams and collectors. The speakers she invited included the guests from National Gallery of London, Tate, M+, Westminster Abbey, and artists such as Jeff Koons, Guerrilla Girls, Cai Guoqiang, and Yoshitomo Nara. She provides more than a foundation in art history; she brings her students to meet the people behind the scenes of museums and galleries and understand the art world’s different sectors. This component is an invaluable part of her teaching. By taking art history students into the local and abroad art communities, she has opened their eyes to the role art plays in society.
Producing knowledge of art history in Hong Kong
In 2020, due to the pandemic, Art Basel was cancelled, and Dr Koon needed to redesign assignments that allowed independent work. The replacement project was to design timelines to recover histories of people/institutions missing from the standard narrative of Hong Kong art scene, for example, queer culture, street art, and migrant communities. Dr Koon has been extending her professional art network and encouraging the student with her Southeast Asian identity to create a comprehensive timeline of Hong Kong art history on a web base. It has become an exemplary model of undergraduate student research. The timeline now has over 400 entries, and five more in-depth projects are coming onsite. Dr Koon has adapted her Hong Kong art history project to a digital timeline and partnered with her students as part of co-creators and co-curators contributing to art history in Hong Kong.
Learning how to ask questions
Asking questions is the process of learning which can stimulate thoughts, exploring and deepening the knowledge, which leads to critical thinking (Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996). Dr Koon has introduced a new approach to art history education and engaged her students in learning in an authentic environment.
In the course of Hong Kong Art workshop, Dr Koon “flipped” the course to teach students how to ask questions rather than seek answers and set the following learning outcomes:
- Acquire skills in primary research methods;
- Direct problem-based projects in “real-life” art environments; and
- Acquire an understanding of Hong Kong art within a global art world.
As one student reflected in her course assessment, learning to ask questions is difficult: “Confronting a huge pool of materials, we felt quite lost sometimes – we were too used to being provided with a fixed list of references (passive consumption). This type of active engagement is challenging.”
Her design of “speed dating at Art Basel” allows her students to interview leading institutional leaders and artists about their practices in the format of rapid-fire questioning. The leaders and artists had to answer these questions spontaneously and instinctively. Her students are not only treated as fellow peers in the process but also sharing an authentic experience with the art practitioners and artists. The interviewees were impressed by the sharpness of their questioning. Some of her students have even received an invitation to the art shows as participants. Dr Koon has seen her students’ transformation through her pedagogies and course/programme design.
Creative and adaptive as an art historian, art practitioner and educator
Dr Koon demonstrates her professionalism as an art historian and practitioner in the art community. Moreover, she uses her networks and relationships to take her students into the art ecosystem and unfold their capabilities in researching and creating knowledge.
She had had the privilege of curating three exhibitions in Hong Kong (Asia Society, Hong Kong Center), Korea (12thGwangju Biennale), and Finland (HIAP x Arts Promotion Office), each offering training unique to their sites. Dr Koon used these opportunities as case studies where she taught her students curating, the ethics of being a curator and researching exhibition history.
In 2020, Dr Koon’s hard work and dedication to Hong Kong art history were rewarded by donating the archives of the artist Ha Bik Chuen documenting over 40 years of Hong Kong’s art scene. This important archive is now shared by three institutions, each with a designated area of research: Asia Art Archive (exhibition history of HK), M+ (visual artworks), and HKU (personal archives). In addition to the platform for research, Dr Koon’s students could expand the timeline of Hong Kong art history with her funding support from the 2021-23 UGC Virtual Teaching and Learning Grant.
In 2021, Dr Koon was learning how to use digital technology to create a virtual version of her exhibition in Finland (June 8, 2021), held on the UNESCO site of Suomenlinna. It was her first experience working with a heritage site and dealing with issues of diversity and sustainability (such as recycling materials, wastage, and local environmental and site-specific issues). These become the new and current issues that she now incorporates into teaching.
Contribution to Hong Kong and global art community
This is most recently evident in her 2021 invitation to curate the first Hong Kong art exhibition in Finland sponsored by Arts Promotion Office and HIAP – Helsinki International Arts Program. Her 2018 guest role as co-curator of Faultlines, one of the top five non-profit art events, was visited by over 250,000 audience members. Since 2016, her leadership of the flagship Behind the Scenes Lecture Series has brought international art professionals to Hong Kong annually. In the past decade, Dr Koon has served as an expert advisor for multiple governments and non-government organizations such as the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and Asia Art Archive. Her innovations in Hong Kong are world-leading and influence practice in Asia and Europe.
Reference
Rosenshine, B., Meister, C., & Chapman, S. (1996). Teaching students to generate questions: A review of the intervention studies. Review of Educational Research, 66(2), 181– 221.