Kindred Spirits

Patrick M. Kwok is a third-generation Singapore collector whose family art business marked its centennial in 2018. Over the past four decades his research interests have covered a wide range of Chinese art, in particular bronzes and ceramics. These constitute the core collections of Shen Zhai, the Studio of Reverence. The bronzes were documented in a volume that he edited, Dialogue with the Ancients: 100 Bronzes of the Shang, Zhou, and Han Dynasties: The Shen Zhai Collection (Select Books, 2018). He is a vice president of The China Society, Singapore, and since the early 1980s he has been a member of the Oriental Ceramics Society in London, as well as in Hong Kong, and of the Southeast Asian Ceramic Society, Singapore. His interest in Japanese art led him to focus on the influence of Chinese aesthetics in Japanese ceramics, sculpture and painting. Dr. Clare Pollard is Curator of Japanese Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. After gaining her doctorate in Oxford in 1996, she worked for seven years as Curator of the East Asian Collections at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. In 2004 she took up the position of Curator of Japanese Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, before returning to the Ashmolean in April 2006.