The Asia Society in New York on June 26 announced Yasufumi Nakamori, a senior curator of international art at London’s Tate Modern, as its next director. Nakamori will take up his new post in August. He fills a role that has been vacant since last June, when Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe departed 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 planned to commission new works 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 the gaps in the history of Asian art,” he continued. “I want Asia Society to be an interlocutor and instigator.”
The institution, one of the top museums in the US devoted to exhibiting and collecting artworks of Asian heritage, earlier this year became mired in controversy after two images of Islamic art depicting the Prophet Muhammad were blurred out on its website. The Asia Society contended that they were obscured by accident and subsequently made them visible. “I don’t think the images should have been blurred,” Nakamori told the Times. “What happened came from a lack of internal consensus, perhaps because there wasn’t a clear and steady leadership.”
Nakamori landed at Tate in 2018, notably curating an exhibition there of South African artist Zanele Muholi that traveled to six European institutions. He previously led the department of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. From 2008 to 2016, he served as curator of photography at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Nakamori additionally taught graduate seminars at Rice University and is the author of numerous essays and of four volumes, among them Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture (2010). He holds a master’s degree in art history from Hunter College, the City University of New York, and a Ph.D. in the same field from Cornell University. Prior to 2002, Nakamori enjoyed a successful career as a corporate lawyer.
“We have found in Yasufumi Nakamori a leader who will guide the Asia Society Museum in making the case for the vital importance of Asian art and artists to visual culture globally, as it grows [its] roster of exhibitions, arts programming, and collection,” said Emily Rafferty, an Asia Society trustee and cochair of the search committee, in a statement.