COURTESY ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
In the midst of a year-long period of institutional turmoil at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, May Xue, the nonprofit institution’s CEO, has announced her resignation. She began her directorship at the Ullens Center in 2011 and will leave on April 20, after first arriving at the center in 2009 as director of its design-concept store.
Xue leaves the center nearly a year after its namesake, the Belgian art collector Guy Ullens, said he would put it on the market. Whether the center would continue to survive without his support, and how much Ullens gave for support since its founding in 2007, varied according to several reports. In July 2016, after Ullens announced that he would sell, Xue told the South Morning China Post that she had been helping the center figure out how to continue without Ullens’s funding.
Xue, who also organized the first Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2008, did not immediately disclose her future plans. Artnet News reports that she may join the staff of the K11 Art Foundation, which is run by Adrian Cheng, and which is currently expecting to open an “art mall” in Beijing in 2019.