James Taylor-Foster, Para Site’s ‘wild card’ director, on ‘beautiful paradox’ of Hong Kong

With his peroxide blond hair, dark moustache and luxuriant eyebrows, London-born curator and writer James Taylor-Foster is easy to pick out among the tourists and selfie-takers in the courtyard of Yick Cheong Building, also known as the “Monster Building”, in Hong Kong’s Quarry Bay neighbourhood.The South China Morning Post is meeting the 33-year-old here shortly after the board of the Hong Kong non-profit art space Para Site chose him to be its next executive director. That space, a few minutes’ walk away, is off-limits because a new exhibition, “Site-seeing”, is being installed, so we meet instead at this dense, photogenic residential complex made famous by the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction – a fitting setting for a conversation about change.Unlike his immediate predecessor, Billy Tang, who was a familiar face in the region before he moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai, Taylor-Foster has hardly any Asia experience and is not well known in the local art circle.“I am what they call a wild card,” he says straight away.James Taylor-Foster in front of Yick Cheong Building, aka the “Monster Building”, in Quarry Bay. Unlike his predecessor Billy Tang, Para Site’s new executive director Taylor-Foster is not well known in the local art circle. Photo: Elson LiFrom architecture to artEbullient and loquacious, Taylor-Foster fits the profile of previous Para Site directors. He is also around the same age as Tobias Berger, Cosmin Costinas and Tang when they were appointed – a lineage of young men of cosmopolitan outlook and international ambition.