Jane Portal

Jane Virginia Portal BA, MA, FSA (née Bowerman, born 1955) is a specialist in Chinese and Korean art history, and is Keeper of the Department of Asia at the British Museum.
About.
Portal was born in Mtarfa, Malta, where her father served in the British Navy. After attending Maidstone Girls' Grammar School, where she was Head Girl, she studied Chinese at Girton College Cambridge (BA, 1978; MA 2000), and Korean at the School of Oriental and African Studies (BA, 1996). She studied Chinese archaeology at Peking University, 1979-80 (the first British student to do so), and a year studying Korean at Yonsei University, Seoul, 1994–95.
Career.
Portal worked as Curator of Chinese Korean Collections at the British Museum, 1987–2008, curating the Korea Foundation Gallery (the museum's first gallery of Korean art), 2000. In 2001 and 2002 she made two visits to North Korea, following the establishment of diplomatic relations, and started collecting contemporary works from the DPRK for the British Museum. In 2007 she curated the "First Emperor, China's Terracotta Army" exhibition, which attracted a record-breaking 850,000 visitors and won the Art Fund's exhibition of the year award.
From 2008 to 2014, Portal was the Matsutaro Shoriki Chair of Asia, Oceania and Africa at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where she oversaw new galleries for South Asia, Oceania and Benin as well as many Asian exhibitions. In December 2014 she returned to the British Museum, where she led the renovation and redisplay of the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery of China and South Asia, opened by Her Majesty the Queen in November 2017 and oversaw the redisplay of the Mitsubishi Corporation Gallery of Japanese Art which re-opened in 2018.