Welcoming James Taylor-Foster as Para Site’s Next Executive Director

As we celebrate our 30th anniversary, we are thrilled to announce that James Taylor-Foster will join Para Site as Executive Director in the summer of 2026!

This appointment marks an exciting new chapter for Para Site – deepening our commitment to independent expression and artistic experimentation in Hong Kong, across the region, and internationally.

A Cross-Disciplinary Practice

James’s practice bridges contemporary art, design, architecture, and digital culture. As a convenor and curator, he blurs disciplinary boundaries, exploring unconventional ways of nurturing institutions and their audiences. His approach is both greenhouse and staging ground: cultivating emergent ideas for wider cultural spheres while building ambitious platforms for assembling many forms of making into new ways of seeing, feeling, and imagining. His work shines light on how creativity continually reimagines our world – shaping popular culture and public life.

“Para Site is one of a kind. Its roots as an artist-founded cultural space, born from a unique condition with local and regional creative scenes as its engine, remains its soul. Today, as then, contemporary art is our present interrogating itself. At its most powerful, it makes room for thinking in public, fuelling culture more broadly.” says James.

The Para Site team. From left: Jessie Kwok, Holly Leung, Lynna Lam, Miki Hui, Junni Chen, James Taylor-Foster, Alan Lo (Chair of Para Site’s Board), Lydia Tai, Celia Ho, Stefan Luk, Yuanyu Li. © 2026 by Ray Leung. CC BY-ND 4.0.

From the Chair of the Board

Alan Lo, Chair of Para Site’s Board, adds: “As Para Site marks its 30th anniversary, we’re focused on what the institution must become in the decades ahead. James brings a rare combination of curatorial imagination and institutional stewardship. His practice is rooted in the contemporary yet firmly focused on the future: how institutions can shift their centres to stay alive and relevant, how culture moves across borders and disciplines. This is precisely the thinking that Para Site needs as it enters its next chapter.”

Lo continues: “Para Site was founded thirty years ago by artists who believed Hong Kong deserved a space that was genuinely independent, genuinely curious, and wholeheartedly committed to the art of its time. That spirit has never left us. We owe it to our next generation of artists, audiences, and communities to ask what Para Site could be in the decades ahead – not just what it has been. James’s appointment is our answer to that question.”

On behalf of the Board, Lo notes that “throughout the open, global recruitment process we have been struck by James’s desire to understand Hong Kong on its own terms – its history, its complexity, its extraordinary creative community. He does not arrive with a fixed vision imported from elsewhere but with deep respect for what has been built here, alongside a desire to listen and grow the organisation with the city and its regional relationships. This combination of bold thinking, unique institutional experience, and genuine humility is rare. We are not looking back; we are building forward. We are enormously excited to do so with James guiding the way.”

Listening Closely, Facilitating Generously, and Imagining with Courage

For James, “cultural leadership today means listening closely, facilitating generously, and imagining with courage. Holding this ground means nurturing the heart of this storied institution towards a place that mediates culture in its broadest sense. In a moment marked by uncertainty and possibility, Para Site and its communities serve as a context in which care and risk can coexist hand in hand with experimentation – where artists, curators, audiences and ideas come together in ways that are rigorous, playful, and provocative.”

He adds:

“Para Site’s role in Hong Kong’s cultural ecosystem—close to the streets, close to the urgencies of our present, committed to new voices and ideas—is matched by its resonance regionally and around the world. The organisation’s next chapter will reaffirm this position, emphasising the ways in which art and culture can be key agents of transformation in society.”

Please join us in giving James a warm welcome! We look forward to the journey ahead.