Tate Senior Curator Yasufumi Nakamori Named Director of Asia Society’s Museum

The Asia Society has the appointed Yasufumi Nakamori as its new museum director and vice president of arts and culture. Nakamori will oversee the museum’s exhibitions and collection, as well as the organization’s arts and culture programming. He will join the organization in August.

The position has been vacant since June of last year, when Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe left to become the executive director of the Katonah Museum of Art. 

The Asia Society was founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1956 and is now one of the country’s leading institutions focused on Asian art. It exhibits and collects Chinese and Korean ceramics, Indian bronzes, Southeast Asian sculpture, and contemporary art, including videos, animations, photography, and new media works by Asian and Asian American artists.

“I’m extremely excited about leading the next chapter of the Asia Society Museum and the global organization’s arts and culture program,” Yasufumi said in a statement. “I would like the museum to become the engine for expanding the scholarly and curatorial field of Asian and Asian diaspora art by looking at Asia’s relationship with the world throughout history.”

Nakamori is currently the senior curator of international art at the Tate museum network, where he focused on photography. Since 2018, he has led the development of the museum’s photography collection. According to a press release, Nakamori has also advised the museum through its Race Equality Task Force, as well as on “numerous initiatives on Asian and Asian dispora art in programming, and provided strategic management for photography and modern art in the programming at Tate Britain.”

Asia Society trustee Emily Rafferty, who co-chaired the search committee, called Nakamori a leader who would guide the museum in highlighting the vital importance of Asian art and artists to visual culture globally. “The search committee is delighted that he is joining at this critical juncture for Asia Society and for museums, as they redefine what it means to be an engaged and relevant museum today,” she said in a statement.  

In addition to his experience at the Tate, Nakamori has also worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as its head of photography and new media department; at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as a photography curator; and at Rice University as an instructor on graduate seminars on the history of modern Japanese art and architecture. His books include Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, and Photographs by Yasuhiro Ishimoto (2010).

Nakamori is a 2016 fellow of the Claremont Graduate University’s Museum Leadership Institute. He received a BA from Waseda University in Tokyo, a Juris Doctor from the University of Wisconsin Law School, an MA in the History of Art from Hunter College, the City University of New York, and a PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University.

Prior to his arts administrative career, Nakamori practiced corporate law in Tokyo and New York City between 1995 and 2002. He also serves on the boards of institutions in Japan and the UK, including the Yayoi Kusama Foundation.