In this blog post, Hoyee Tse discusses employment patterns for Asian museum professionals in the UK, uncovering signs that they have very restricted possibilities for paid work, usually focussing on exhibitions ABOUT Asia. Hoyee recently curated the Butterfly Project exhibition by Undone Theatre, and was the 2022 Design Trust Curatorial Fellow at the Royal College of Art. Read more about her work here.
During the workshop, I presented primarily about my concept and some of my initial findings of my ongoing project about the cultural and ethnic diversity of the museum workforce in the UK, especially the employment of Asian museum professionals.
I started my research when I was a co-curator in the Butterfly Project exhibition initiated by Undone Theatre in early 2023, which was a response to the practice of yellow-face in the Madama Butterfly opera performance. It also aimed at speaking up against the misrepresentation of Asian identities as well as the lack of racial diversity in the performing arts sector. With my curatorial experience of the Butterfly Project, I reflected on my own experiences in the museum sector and found it necessary to ask similar questions about the museum sector, including: in what capacities are the non-White communities, such as Black and Asian, employed in the museum sector? Are the non-White professionals employed at various levels of the institutions? Are they employed to be in certain departments only, meaning that this is another form of racism by racializing different museum positions?
To answer these questions, I referred myself to some major UK museums with East Asian collections. I chose to take the employment of Asian professionals, particularly East Asian, in the museum sector as my case study. It was partly because of my own Asian identity as much as the Anti-Asian Racism movement during the Covid-19 pandemic. The movement showed that there were certainly many British-born Asians and Asian immigrants in the UK but our voice in the society and more specifically in the whole decolonisation advocacy within the arts and heritage sector, was less noticeable than the other global majority groups. With my project, I thus aimed at outlining what Asian museum professionals are and were experiencing in our sector by trying to examine how they are and were employed in some of these museums with Asian collections.
One of the first steps of my research was to review the reports produced by arts and cultural institutions and organisations. There are three key reports investigating the changing demographic profiles and diversity of museum workforce in the UK. The Arts Council England published a report in 2015, which assessed the situations and conditions of equality and diversity in the museum workforce. Although the responses collected from individual staff members from under-represented groups showed that their experiences of being part of the museum workforce were positive, the report highlighted that the data about the demographics of the workforce were not detailed enough. More importantly, it underlined the issue that the visitor services staff were more diverse than the staff in curatorial, exhibition and collections care departments.
In fact, in a report produced by the National Museum Directors’ Conference in 2006, it already told us that there was in some large museums none of their BME staff working in their curatorial departments even if it accounted for 10% of the overall staffing. So, what the 2015 Arts Council England report did was to tell us that the same lack of diversity of museum workforce had persisted for more than a decade without any significant improvement. Another official report showed the continuation of such a lack of diversity in 2016. The report research team commented that it was a well acknowledged fact that the UK museum workforce was not diverse and lacked diversity in all regards. One of its findings indicated 88% of the museum staff was made up of white women and by those with a high level of education. It meant that, even with various apprenticeships and traineeships, the pace of change in workforce diversity of the sector still did not keep up with the pace of change in the demographics of the population. In 2022, the Art Fund commissioned Culture& and Museum X to assess the curatorial diversity in the UK arts and heritage sector. Despite the recommendations in all the other reports prior to this, its findings remarked that most of the ethnic diversity workforce initiatives in the UK aimed at generic entry-level positions instead of curatorial positions and curatorial diversity remained low. Museums had 6% of workers identifying as being BME, which suggested that, more than 15 years after the National Museum Directors’ Conference report, the curatorial diversity might have only increased by about 1%.
In response to the findings of these reports, I looked into some of the Asian art and culture exhibitions and wondered if this slow and tiny increase might be shown by the curatorial teams of some of the most recent exhibitions focusing on Asian art, cultures and collections in London. With some quick search about the curatorial teams, I found that many European museum professionals were leading in the curatorial works of these Asian-related exhibition programmes. The ‘Hallyu! The Korean Wave’ exhibition at the V&A was the only one entirely curated by an Asian curator, Rosalie Kim, while the ‘Chinese and British’ exhibition at the British Library, one of the two curators was an Asian descendant, Lucienne Loh, who was a reader in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. What is revealed by the ethnic backgrounds of these exhibition curators is that the job opportunities available for the Asian workers in the UK museum sector could be even more limited than we have imagined because, even for these Asian focused programmes, many curators were still not Asian.
Reflecting on this situation, I considered the priority of my project should focus on gathering more quantitative and qualitative data of the organisations and the roles that Asian museum professionals are working in. Without more concrete data, we would not be able to evaluate what barriers or challenges the Asian professionals are experiencing in the UK museum sector. Reaching out and conducting interviews with these professionals have therefore become my main tasks to continue my project in the months following the workshop.