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Yasufumi Nakamori joined the Asia Society in August 2023 as its museum director and vice president of arts and culture. Prior to that, he had been senior curator for international art at Tate, specializing in photography, since 2018. Previously, he served as the head of the department of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Nakamori practiced corporate law in New York and Tokyo between 1995 and 2002.

Do you have a place that you feel you belong to? That’s an important question for us, being Asian in the field of contemporary art and culture.

I was born and raised in Japan. The U.S. then became my adopted home before I joined the Tate in London in 2018, and now I am back in the U.S. to lead the Asia Society Museum in New York. As a part of the senior management of an institution in New York with global centers in the U.S., Asia, and Europe that has a very special position in the cultural space, I constantly wonder: How can we create authentic experiences involving arts with a wider appeal, to promote deeper and broader understanding of who we are? How can we become the place where people feel they belong?

At the art and culture pillar of Asia Society, there are two focuses of our research-driven programs. First is indigenous art across the wider regions of Asia. Currently, we have the exhibition “Madayin” focusing on historical and contemporary Aboriginal Australian bark paintings from Yirrkala, accompanied by a display of Aboriginal canvas paintings. They mark a major milestone in the advancement of this space in the U.S. since the 1988 Asia Society show “Dreamings,” one of the first on Aboriginal art from Australia in the country.

Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Baratjala (2018) and Baratjala (2018) in “Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” at Asia Society. Photo by Ben Davis.

Another focus will be the intersection between Asia and Africa, a project we are now embarking on with Joan Kee, the art historian and director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, who authored The Geometries of Afro Asia (2023). The book covers art movements in the 20th century and the conversation with Joan has been inspirational. We want to look beyond Asia. Africa is a logical focus. If you combine the populations of Africa and Asia, together with their diasporas, isn’t that the global majority?

The intersections between Asia, Africa, and their diasporas may not be well known, but research is beginning to change that. South Asian artists, for example, played a key role in the 1980s British Black Arts Movement, and this is addressed in the current Tate Britain exhibition “The 80s: Photographing Britain,” my last exhibition at Tate. While researching for the survey show of Zanele Muholi, now back on view at Tate Modern, I discovered that there is a strong South Asian presence in the artistic community in South Africa. I thought: There have to be exhibition programs looking into this intersection.

Jason Evans, Simon Foxton, [No title] From the series Strictly, 1991. Tate: Presented anonymously 2001. © Jason Evans

In between, we will stage several exhibitions of Asian diaspora artists and artists from Asia. We will be organizing a solo show by Martin Wong, his first museum solo in America in almost a decade. He was born in Portland, Oregon. He did not read or speak Chinese, but he reclaimed his space by collecting pre-1900 Asian art, primarily calligraphy, and spending a lot of time in Chinatown. Through the lens of Martin’s body of work, we will revisit his process of reclaiming his identity and how that process impacted his painting practice.

I also wonder: How can we develop an art and culture space with a young generation who can work and express themselves more effectively with much bigger ideas than what we have, in their unique ways?

I am assembling a young people’s committee, consisting of people from their late teens to late 30s. I want to listen to them, to understand their habits and desires, how they spend time at the museum, and how we can create fun and educational experiences for them. We may also consider how to bring our programs to those who are living in different parts of New York and beyond. Compared to some other institutions, we are smaller, but this gives us an advantage, as we can move quickly and afford to take risks.

—As told to Vivienne Chow