Lesley Ma
Lesley Ma Wei-chung is a Taiwanese and American art historian. She is the Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Early life and education
Ma was born in the United States in 1980 to a prominent Taiwanese political family. She is the eldest daughter of former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou and his wife, Christine Chow Ma. She was raised in Taipei, Taiwan, before returning to the U.S. for college.After high school, Ma studied history as an undergraduate at Harvard University. In 2003, she graduated cum laude from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Arts in history and science. She then obtained a Master of Arts in museology from New York University in 2005 and earned her Ph.D. in art history, theory, and criticism from the University of California, San Diego, in 2016. Her doctoral dissertation, completed under professor Kuiyi Shen, was titled, "The Mountains and Rivers Remain: Abstract Painting in Postwar Taiwan, 1957–1968".
Career
After receiving her master's degree from New York University, Ma became a project director at the art studio of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang in New York City. From 2009 to 2012, she was a teaching assistant in the visual arts department at the University of California, San Diego, during which period she also was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from 2011 to 2012. After serving as a researcher at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong from 2012 to 2013, she became a curator of ink art at M+ art museum in Hong Kong in 2013. Ma was in charge of the museum's ink art collection and exhibits.On March 10, 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City announced that Ma would become the museum's inaugural Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Associate Curator of Asian Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, beginning April 2022.