Alice Huei-Zu Yang, an art historian and curator, died early Saturday morning after a hit-and-run accident at Canal and Varick Streets in Manhattan. She was 35 and lived in TriBeCa.

Ms. Yang's husband, Gerald Szeto, an architect with the firm of Calvin Tsai, was injured in the accident and was in stable condition yesterday at St. Vincent's Hospital.

Ms. Yang was born in 1961 in Taipei and came to the United States when she was 15. She studied art history at Yale University, graduating cum laude in 1984. After completing internships in several Manhattan museums, Ms. Yang worked for five years as an assistant curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo, organizing several exhibitions, including a survey of the work of Alfredo Jaar in 1992 and a group show titled ''The Final Frontier'' in 1993. That year, she left the museum to work as a critic and independent curator while earning her master's degree at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

Ms. Yang had recently passed her oral examinations for a Ph.D. at the institute and last week began working as the Robert Lehman curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, L.I. She was also organizing an exhibition of drawings by emerging Taiwanese artists at the Drawing Center in SoHo.

In addition to her husband, Ms. Yang is survived by her parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Yang, of Taipei, and two brothers, James, of Hong Kong, and Andrew, also of Taipei.


If you want to know more: buy her book, Why Asia?

description from barnes & noble site -

Why Asia?: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art is a ground-breaking investigation into two overlapping and rapidly emerging areas in contemporary art. Extricating them from their current confusion under a generic "Asian" label, Yang reveals the specificity of each. The book consists of lucid discussions on individual artists, exhibitions and theoretical issues. With over sixty illustrations it serves to introduce the current landscape of Asian and Asian American Art, with essays on art in China, Taiwan and North America, as well as individual essays on leading artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Xu Bing and Michael Joo. Above all, Yang explores the challenges that contemporary Asian and Asian American art poses to artists, critics, curators and viewers alike. In particular, she reflects on the complexities of exhibition practice, the role of identity politics in arts, the unspoken assumptions of Western critics faced with Asian art, and the difficulties faced by artists working between cultures. This is a major critical contribution in an area where criticism conspicuously lags behind artistic practice.