Karen Smith is a Beijing based expert on contemporary Chinese art, and has lived in Beijing since the early 1990s. Currently she splits her activities between curating exhibitions, educational programmes, and writing about Chinese art. She lives and works in a courtyard close to the Forbidden City. She is one of the few personalities in the Chinese art scene who has consistently followed her instincts in developing new work by emerging and unknown artists, while at the same time maintaining her relationships and interest in the work of China’s now more established big name artists. Her book “Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant Garde Art in New China” is now considered one of the key texts in the study of Chinese art. She will be talking at Frieze on October 16, and is also lecturing at a groundbreaking new series of education based discussions, the Asia Art Forum, which be held in Shanghai in mid-October.