Call to defund arts centre after board quashed ‘futile’ revisioning project

Seven artists tasked with 'revisioning' an art gallery are calling for its closure after their project was cut short, alleging racist attitudes among an unrepresentative board have led to "various strategies of organisational yellowface".

Manchester's Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) says it is "listening intently" to criticism that just one of its 13-person staff is non-White. Six trustees, including Chair Lisa Yam, have resigned since the start of May.

As artists withdraw from exhibitions and petition for a boycott, CFCCA has issued a statement declaring its commitment to "realise a new direction and genuine change" once a new chair is appointed.

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But the working group contracted in September – Jack Tan, Eelyn Lee, Gayle Chong Kwan, Erika Tan, Enoch Cheng, Yuen Fong Ling and Whiskey Chow – have lost hope the organisation will ever get there.

While CFCCA said the group's work is "an important part" of its institutional soul-searching, Lee and Chong Kwan told ArtsProfessional they were never able to submit final recommendations.

"It was over before it began," Lee said.

"Once the racism was revealed at a board level, they decided to pause – and then the pause was indefinite.

"It's futile. What we experienced and what we witnessed is an organisation that is not fit for purpose."

Arts Council England (ACE) has raised the working group's concerns with CFCCA. It says it expects the National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) "to take appropriate action in response to the concerns and very serious issues that have been raised," but is not responsible for the centre's governance or management.

The working group disagrees: "ACE can't just say this is a bad apple," Chong Kwan said.

"We are the tip of the iceberg… there must be some sort of change so this doesn't just happen again and again."

In an open letter they condemn ACE for appointing a White director to lead CFCCA after giving it NPO status, and advocate for a new diversity monitoring body to ensure the funder and its portfolio are held accountable.

Lee, Chong Kwan and other members of the group said they have not taken speaking out lightly.

"To say nothing would be complicit with an organisation whose function has not only been lost but whose existence perpetuates deeply rooted racism, and to whom we can no longer entrust our narratives, our histories our work or our time," the letter says.

'Asian veneer'

CFCCA board members claimed the organisation's whiteness was a result of there being "no qualified Chinese curators [or] employees of colour in the job market," the working group said.

They say this belief, expressed in a meeting in January, led to debate and suggestions the group presented a threat to staff. The revisioning project was "paused" two weeks later and the working group disbanded in March, two months earlier than planned.

"This was supposed to be an opportunity for us to help shape a new vision of the organisation's future," the open letter reads.

"Instead, it has been doubly disheartening for us as East Asian artists who already face institutional exclusion in the mainstream arts sector, to learn and confirm from our experience that the only art space dedicated to contemporary ‘Chinese’ visual art in the UK supports a bamboo ceiling."

They are not the only artists to feel this way. Tiffany Leung, the CFCCA's only East Asian curator at the time, resigned in February 2020 over its "increasingly hostile environment".

JJ Chan withdrew from a CFCCA exhibition in March 2020, citing the centre's contribution to upholding "White knowledge, expertise and perceptions of Chineseness narrated only in English".

"In striving to become a more mainstream arts organisation, CFCCA privileges a Eurocentric leadership."

In an open call for the revisioning project, CFCCA acknowledged it had shifted its mission and approach several times, most significantly in response to a 1993 report that found it had "consistently fallen well short of fulfilling its purpose".

"We now find ourselves at another juncture, a moment to take action, to reflect on our model of cultural production and consider how we can best speak to [a] societal need to ensure our work is both effective and relevant now," the centre said.

"There are issues of under representation within the staff team we need to solve and steps to being actively anti-racist we need to take."

But it got off to a rocky start, the working group said, with three months of the six month contract spent negotiating terms of reference.

"We had growing concerns that as a ‘Chinese’ artist working group our appointment was a performative gesture adding an Asian veneer to a White organisation’s revisioning."

'Imagined fragility'

CFCCA did not respond to the working group's claims that a senior staff member member cited "White fragility" as the reason the revisioning project was halted.

"It has become clear to us that we are dealing with an organisation that dysfunctionally avoids, dodges and spins issues that need to be tackled honestly, directly and quickly," its open letter says.

"This imagined fragility and other excuses such as needing to 'reflect', 'recuperate' and 'recover'… renders CFCCA incapable of becoming an organisation that is able to do its job."

The centre receives £287,481 from the Arts Council each year and was granted £55,000 in the first round of the Culture Recovery Fund, making it "much more secure than other organisations in terms of political power, financial security and influence in our sector," according to the working group.

ACE gave CFCCA a 'strong' rating in its latest Creative Case for Diversity, which predates many departures from the organisation. However, the organisation may struggle to meet the inclusivity and relevance principle of ACE's new strategy, which aims to address the "persistent and widespread lack of diversity" in arts workforces and governance, and platform overlooked creatives

"CFCCA not only fails to meet these requirements but has been active in sustaining and perpetuating the opposite of this," the group says.

"Having a predominantly White staff team lead an ethnic minority cultural organisation is unthinkable."

CFCCA is investigating alternative leadership models to strike a better ethnic balance among its senior team. It commissioned an audit into its equality and people management processes last autumn, which it has pledged to share the findings of.

Instead of waiting for the outcome of this, the working group says the centre needs to be disestablished.

"What we are suggesting is that funding be repurposed for East and South East Asian artists," Lee said.

However, she cautioned against turning CFCCA into a "sacrificial lamb" and obscuring the systems that have allowed it to operate in an unrepresentative fashion: "This is a common pattern that's happening within organisations."