Tai Kwun Conversations: UNESCO Series - Talk 1
Urban recovery through culture, arts, and creativity

Desmond Hui is Professor and Head of Department of Art and Design at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He obtained his Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University; then Master and Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Cambridge. A registered architect in both Hong Kong and Canada, he has held Visiting, Honorary and Adjunct Professorship in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Formerly he was Associate Dean of Arts and Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He taught architecture previously at the University of Hong Kong and was Director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at HKU.  He has served in the UNESCO expert facility of the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and is now regional expert for the UNESCO Culture/2030

Jyoti Hosagrahar is the Deputy Director of the World Heritage Centre.  Among other responsibilities, she leads the implementation of the Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation, the Cities Programme, policies for cultural and natural heritage for the 2030 Agenda and the New Urban Agenda, the Earthen Architecture Program, and the World Heritage Fund as well as the development and implementation of Thematic Indicators for Culture in the Sustainable Development Goals across the Culture Sector. From May 2016-November 2018, she served as Director of the Division for Creativity at UNESCO. Prior to joining UNESCO, she was a professor and Director of the SUI Lab at GSAPP, Columbia University, New York; UNESCO Chair in Culture, Habitat, and Sustainable Development at Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology in Bangalore, India where she was also Chair of the Ph.D. program; and Founder-Director of Sustainable Urbanism International (SUI), an NGO in Bangalore, India. She has a Ph.D in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of California, Berkeley.

Edman Choy began his collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron in Basel in 2003 as a Project Architect and became an Associate in 2009. He worked on projects of a wide range of typologies and scales in Asia, including the Tree Village Campus Master Plan and TPT Tower in Beijing, China; Jinhua Structure and Jindong New Development Area, a mixed-use residential and commercial development in Jinhua; the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art in India; a mixed-used tower in Saigon; the Macau Central Library competition; and a corporate headquarters in Shanghai. In 2011, he was relocated to Hong Kong to manage the design realization of Tai Kwun, Centre for Heritage and Art, which was opened to the public in 2018. He was involved in the M+ Museum in West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong since the competition stage in 2012, and has led the Hong Kong team as Project Director since the design execution and construction stages of the project until the museum opening in 2021. He coordinated the setup of Herzog & de Meuron’s Hong Kong office in 2014, has since managed its daily operations. Edman became the Studio Director in 2022.

Edman has lived in Hong Kong since childhood and graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2001 with a Master of Architecture degree. From 2001-2003, he lived and worked in Beijing for Yung Ho Chang/Atelier FCJZ. 

Xin Gu is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media Film and Journalism at Monash University. She is an Expert appointed by UNESCO for the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. She was director of the Master of Cultural and Creative Industries (MCCI) at Monash University in Australia (2018-2019). She has published widely on urban creative clusters and agglomerations, cultural work, creative entrepreneurship, cultural and creative industries policy, media cities, maker culture and cyberculture. Dr Xin Gu has worked with policy initiatives in the UK, China and Indonesia to support small-scale local creative industries development services. Her work focuses on the transformation of creative cities and the creative economy under different social, economic and political conditions. Gu’s current research concerns the digital creative economy, looking at the democratization of creativity through vast transformative digital media ecosystems. Her recent publications include Red Creatives (Intellect, 2020) and Re-imagining Creative Cities in Twenty-First Century Asia (Palgrave Macmillan 2020).