Hong Kong Palace Museum | The Hong Kong Palace Museum Collections and Collectors Talk Series | A Passion for Chinese Textile: Chris Hall on Collecting and His Promised Gift

Mr Chris Hall

The Hong Kong art collector Mr Chris Hall was born in Sudan, Africa, but spent much of his early life in Hong Kong. He studied history at the University of Cambridge and subsequently became a chartered accountant. Returning to work in Hong Kong in 1978, Mr Hall developed an interest in Chinese textiles in the same year, a passion that would later become the central focus of his collection. Mr Hall is a founding committee member of the Textile Society of Hong Kong and a member of the Min Chiu Society, a collectors’ organisation in Hong Kong. He is an executive committee member and former president of the Oriental Ceramic Society of Hong Kong. An expert in Chinese textiles, Mr Hall regularly contributes to periodicals and museum publications. He is the principal author of the entries for the exhibition catalogue Heavens’ Embroidered Cloths: One Thousand Years of Chinese Textiles, which accompanied the exhibition of the same title at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Dr. Daisy Yiyou Wang, PhD

Deputy Director, Curatorial, Collection and Programming, Hong Kong Palace Museum

Dr Daisy Yiyou Wang leads the Hong Kong Palace Museum’s curation, research, exhibition planning and management, collection, conservation, publication, design, and learning programmes. She has served as Chinese Art Specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and Curator of Chinese and East Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum. A specialist of the history of art collecting, Ming lacquer, and Qing imperial portraiture and textile, Dr Wang has published internationally and received numerous awards, including a Getty Museum Leadership Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and a Smithsonian Scholarly Studies Award. Dr Wang co-curated the ground-breaking exhibition “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City”, which was named the “Most Influential International Exhibition from Chinese Museums” in 2019 and the “Best Thematic/Historical Show” in 2018 by the Boston Globe. She co-edited this exhibition’s catalogue, which received the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. A leader in international museum professional exchange, she has served as the founding Chair of the American Alliance of Museum’s China Program.