About Vivienne Chow
Vivienne Chow is an award-winning journalist, cultural commentator, and strategist whose work shapes discourse on art, cultural power, and the evolving relationship between Asia and Europe. Working at the nexus of East and West, she challenges conventional frameworks and reframes how Asian art ecosystems, institutions, and cultures are understood within the global cultural landscape. Over more than two decades spanning Asia and Europe, she has built an internationally recognised career examining art, cultural policy, institutions, and the geopolitical dynamics shaping the contemporary art world and Global Asia. She is a Salzburg Global Fellow and an IJP Premium Fellow.
Originally from Hong Kong and currently based in London, Vivienne has spent more than two decades helping define international coverage of Asia’s art and cultural landscape across Anglophone media. Her career spans from 15 years at the South China Morning Post, where she specialised in arts and cultural affairs, to serving as London Correspondent at Artnet News, where she co-founded The Asia Pivot, a biweekly newsletter analysing Asia’s art world and markets, cultural dynamics, and diasporic networks. Through her reporting, analysis, convening, and public engagement, she amplifies Asian perspectives on global stages while fostering deeper cross-regional dialogue between Asia and Europe.
Her writing has appeared in leading international publications including BBC Culture, The Art Newspaper, Quartz, Variety, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Interpreter by Lowy Institute, among others. She has also contributed commentaries and essays on cultural policy, cultural industries, and the evolving global art ecosystem for think tanks and cross-disciplinary platforms.
Beyond journalism, Vivienne is deeply committed to building cultural ecosystems and expanding critical discourse. In 2014, she founded Cultural Journalism Campus, a non-profit educational initiative promoting arts and culture appreciation among young people through arts writing and critical engagement. The initiative received a Merit Award in Arts Education from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2015 and was nominated for the Best Soft Power Cultural Activation Award at the 2017 Leading Culture Destinations Awards in London — the only Asian project shortlisted in the category.
An active public speaker and moderator, Vivienne regularly convenes conversations at major international platforms including Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze Seoul, the Art Business Conference in London, Goethe-Institut Hong Kong, AICA International Congress, re:publica in Berlin, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. She has taught arts and cultural journalism at the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and other tertiary institutions, while also advising non-profits and cultural organisations on strategy, research, and cross-cultural development.
Vivienne is the recipient of numerous international honours and fellowships. She was named one of the world’s best young journalists at the inaugural Berlinale Talent Press at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2004. In 2015, she received the IJP Fellowship in Germany for mid-career journalism training and cultural policy research, followed by the IJP Premium Fellowship Award in 2018, becoming the first Hong Kong-based journalist to receive the distinction. In 2020, she received an Excellence in Arts & Culture Reporting honour at the SOPA Awards for Editorial Excellence organised by the Society of Publishers in Asia. She became a Salzburg Global Fellow in 2026.
Vivienne holds a journalism degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a master’s degree in cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong, where her research focused on cultural policy, postcolonialism, elitism, and neoliberalism in Hong Kong’s cultural development. Her academic work continues to inform her engagement with cultural governance, diplomacy, institutions, and long-term ecosystem strategy. She has also contributed to publications on cultural industries and contemporary Asia and Europe.
Beyond her professional practice, Vivienne maintains a long-standing interest in astrology, Tarot, and symbolic systems as parallel frameworks for understanding culture, identity, and human behaviour.
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