Meet The Curators Behind This Year’s Public Art Highlights

For its annual Best of Public Art feature with Artsy, UAP brings together six curators from across the international art world to reflect on the public artworks that stood out to them in 2026. Representing museums, biennials, festivals, public sculpture and independent practice, each offers a distinct perspective on the year's most memorable works.

This year’s contributing curators are Low Kee Hong, Creative Director of Factory International and Artistic Director of the 26th Biennale of Sydney (2028); Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Partner at The Curatorial Office; Victor Wang, Executive Director of Artspace and Adjunct Curator at Mori Art Museum; Fatoş Üstek, independent curator, writer and curator of Frieze Sculpture; Natasha Smith, Global Director of Curatorial; and Danielle Robson, Head of Curatorial, Australia, at UAP.

Together, their selections will offer a view of 2026 through several different lenses, revealing the ideas, places and practices that caught their attention and stayed with them.

The full 2026 Best of Public Art feature will be revealed exclusively with Artsy later this year.

Missed last year’s Public Art Highlights feature? You can check it out here.

Low Kee Hong is Artistic Director of the 26th Biennale of Sydney (2028), and Creative Director of Factory International based at Aviva Studios, the most significant cultural landmark in the UK since the opening of the Tate Modern in 2000. He oversees the Curatorial team at Factory International and, alongside John McGrath, the organisation’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, works to develop the artistic program for the organisation. Low Kee Hong recently collaborated with Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei to co-create the artist’s first 24-hour durational performance Sewing a Button, which took place at Aviva Studios as part of Factory International’s major new exhibition Ai Weiwei: Button Up! the artist’s largest ever site-specific exhibition, curated by Low Kee Hong. Low Kee Hong also leads the curation for the biannual Manchester International Festival (MIF), a core pillar of Factory International’s programming.

Previously, Low Kee Hong was the Founding Director and General Manager of the Singapore Biennale, Artistic Director and General Manager of the Singapore Arts Festival, Associate Artistic Director of TheatreWorks (Singapore), and Head of Theatre, Performing Arts at the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong.

Wassan Al-Khudhairi is an accomplished curator and arts leader known for her creative, entrepreneurial thinking and profound curatorial achievement across major global institutions. She is currently based in New York, where she is the Co-Director of The Curatorial Office (C/O) with Christopher Y. Lew and Artistic Director for Art Basel Qatar 2027. 

Al-Khudhairi was part of the curatorial team for the 2025 Hawaii Triennial, demonstrating her ability to shape large-scale international exhibitions. This followed her tenure as the Ferring Foundation Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM), where she organized exhibitions and new commissions with artists including Hajra Waheed, Dominic Chambers, Gala Porras-Kim, Martine Gutierrez, Derek Fordjour, Stephanie Syjuco, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Bethany Collins, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Guan Xiao, Hayv Kahraman, among others. At CAM, she co-produced the Radio Resistance podcast, which accompanied the thematic exhibition Stories of Resistance.

A testament to her leadership experience, Al-Khudhairi served as the Founding Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, overseeing its successful opening in 2010. Her extensive international biennial experience includes serving as co-curator for the 6th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan (2017) and co-Artistic Director for the 9th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea (2012).

Earlier, as the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, she organized Third Space: Shifting Conversations About Contemporary Art, for which the accompanying catalogue earned her an Award for Excellence from the American Association of Museum Curators in 2019.

Al-Khudhairi holds an MA with Distinction in Islamic Art and Architecture from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She is a graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute and a fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership program, and in 2020, she was honored with ArtTable’s New Leadership Award

Victor Wang is the Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney, one of the Asia-Pacific’s leading contemporary art organisations, located on Gadigal Country. He is also an Adjunct Curator at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Previously, he served as the Executive and Artistic Director of M WOODS Museum (2019–2025), overseeing its Beijing and Chengdu locations. Wang serves on the Curatorial Advisory Group at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, contributing to the Changing Curatorial Legacies project to rethink the museum’s permanent galleries and advance decolonising curatorial practices.

Across his career, Wang has curated exhibitions and developed major collaborations with leading international institutions including Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Tate Modern (London), the National Gallery (Berlin), and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), as well as overseeing the first-ever collaboration between the British Museum (UK) and a non-state-run art museum in China. His early curatorial experience includes work on the Vancouver Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012–2013), the 12th Havana Biennial (2015), and Ghost:2561 (2018), a triennial platform for video and performance art in Bangkok.

Across the Asia-Pacific, Wang has organised numerous landmark exhibitions and major presentations, including those of artists such as Josh Kline (2026), Sonia Boyce (2025), Nabuqi (2024), Ann Veronica Janssens (2023), Ryuichi Sakamoto (2023 and 2021), Salman Toor (2023), Huang Rui (2023), Martin Margiela (2022), Bruce Nauman (2022), Man Ray (2021), Giorgio Morandi (2020), Haroon Mirza (2019), and Richard Tuttle (2019), among others.

Wang has a particular focus on performance art. He was curator of Frieze LIVE at Frieze London in 2020 and is the founder of the Institute of Asian Performance Art (IAPA). He is also editor of Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–90s (DRAF, 2018).

His writing has been published in Artforum International, Frieze, ArtReview, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His editorial projects include Richard Tuttle's Pod, Capsule, Cluster (M WOODS, 2024), Bruce Nauman, the first Chinese-language monograph on the artist, co-published by Tate Publishing and M WOODS (2024), and MAM Project 034: Sonia Boyce (Mori Art Museum, 2026). His publishing collaborations include The Build-up of Content and Information with Oscar Murillo, published by David Zwirner Books (2018). He has also contributed essays to exhibition catalogues published by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and Tate, and has contributed as a writer, nominator, and advisor to Phaidon publications including Prime: Art's Next Generation (2022), Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art (2024), and Vitamin P4: New Perspectives in Painting (2025). He holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.

Fatoş Üstek is a curator, writer, and cultural strategist currently working on establishing a new institution inspired by the concepts in her acclaimed book, The Art Institution of Tomorrow (2024). The former director of two leading UK art institutions, she is co-founder of FRANK Fair Artist Pay and the curator of Frieze Sculpture, London. Üstek serves on numerous international award juries, including Ars Fennica 2027, Art Senses Mentorship Award, and Art of Progress Prize in 2026. She is also a member of advisory boards such as Urbane Kunst Ruhr and the Istanbul Modern Collection Acquisitions Committee, and she nominates for awards like the Fourth Plinth and Jarman Award. Additionally, she publishes and lectures internationally.

Highly skilled in curating art for the public realm, having developed art master plans and strategies, conducted creative placemaking and delivered art programs for commercial developments, Natasha has master-planned art for cities and community spaces across Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Asia, the Americas and Europe.

As an active supporter of the arts, particularly grassroots organisations, Natasha is currently Chair of the Board of Outer Space, a not-for-profit contemporary arts organisation supporting critically engaged practice in Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia. Natasha regularly speaks for key notes and on panels, and was managing editor of Public Art in Review, Volume 1 (2019–2023), an ongoing review series, highlighting significant public artworks from around the world.

Natasha has collaborated with international curators and arts leaders including Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of Public Art Fund, New York; Mona Khazindar, former Director of the Arab World Institute, Paris; Chris Saines, Director of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the late Rhoda Roberts AO, independent curator and former Head of Indigenous Programming at the Sydney Opera House; and Alison Kubler, independent curator and Board Member of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Natasha has worked closely with leading contemporary artists from around the world, including but not limited to, Jeppe Hein, Ugo Rondinone, Arne Quinze, Timo Nasseri, Michael Lin, Lindy Lee AO, Fiona Foley, Judy Watson, Brook Andrew, Reko Rennie, Judy Darragh, Ruben Paterson and Ivan Argote.

Danielle Robson is a curator, researcher and arts manager with more than two decades of experience shaping ambitious cultural and public art projects. As Head of Curatorial at UAP, she provides strategic curatorial leadership on major projects throughout Australia and internationally, overseeing teams across the Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane studios.

Robson has previously held roles as Director | Public Art Curator at curatorial consultancy Soda Arts, Co-Founder | Director of arts consultancy company, ArtsPeople, and Creative Program Manager at the Australian Design Centre. She is also a former Board Member of SafARI Initiatives. Robson holds a Master of Curating & Cultural Leadership and a Bachelor of Law and Media. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Contemporary Cultural Practice & Public Art at UNSW Art & Design.

Missed last year’s feature? You can check it out here.