The Asia Society of New York announced on June 26 Yasufumi Nakamori, senior curator of international art at the Tate Modern in London, as its next director. Nakamori will take up his new role in August. He has filled a vacant position since last June, when Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe left to become executive director of the Katonah Museum of Art in New York’s Westchester County.
“I want to bring power and dynamism to the museum,” Nakamori told the New York Times, noting that he plans to commission new work from contemporary artists, work to bring local communities into the fold, and focus on shows investigating Asian influence on other continents. “It is important that we fill in the gaps in Asian art history,” he continued. “I want Asia Society to be an interlocutor and an instigator.”
The institution, one of America’s top museums devoted to exhibiting and collecting Asian heritage artworks, got bogged down earlier this year in controversial after two Islamic art images depicting the Prophet Muhammad were blurred on its website. The Asia Society argued that they were obscured by accident and then made visible. “I don’t think the footage should have been blurry,” Nakamori told the Time. “What happened was due to a lack of internal consensus, perhaps because there was no clear and stable leadership.”
Nakamori landed at the Tate in 2018, including curating an exhibition there by South African artist Zanele Muholi who traveled to six European institutions. He previously headed the Department of Photography and New Media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. From 2008 to 2016, he was curator of photography at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Nakamori has also taught graduate seminars at Rice University and is the author of numerous essays and four volumes, including Katsura: imagining modernism in Japanese architecture (2010). He holds an MA in Art History from Hunter College, City University of New York and a Ph.D. in the same field from Cornell University. Prior to 2002, Nakamori enjoyed a distinguished career as a corporate lawyer.
“We have found in Yasufumi Nakamori a leader who will guide the Asia Society Museum in advocating for the vital importance of Asian art and artists to visual culture around the world as it develops. [its] list of exhibitions, arts programs and collections,” said Emily Rafferty, trustee of the Asia Society and co-chair of the search committee, in a statement.
