Yu-ping Luk (British Museum)

About the Talk

On 26 September 2024, the British Museum launched its major exhibition Silk Roads, exploring the movement of people, objects and ideas across Afro-Eurasia from 500 to 1000 CE – a significant period in the history of cross-cultural connectivity. The exhibition brings together over 300 objects from the British Museum collection, as well as 29 national and international lenders. These include star loans from Japan to Spain, from Uzbekistan to Scotland. The exhibition provided many welcome opportunities to build on existing partnerships and develop new ones. In this talk, the co-curator of Silk Roads will discuss how the exhibition came together, and approaches the team took, with a focus on the East Asia section and its links with the rest of the exhibition. It will highlight some of the key objects on display and the collaborations that made the exhibition possible.

About the Speaker

Dr. Luk Yu-ping is Basil Gray Curator: Chinese Paintings, Prints, and Central Asian Collections in the Asia Department at the British Museum. Previously, she served as the Curator of Chinese Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and was the Project Curator for the British Museum’s exhibition Ming: 50 Years That Changed China. Yu-Ping also held an academic position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Empress and the Heavenly Masters: A Study of the Ordination Scroll of Empress Zhang (1493) (2016) and co-editor of Ming China: Courts and Contacts, 1400–1450 (2016). She is currently co-curator of the British Museum’s Silk Roads exhibition and co-author of the new book Silk Roads (2024).