June Yap Appointed as Director of Curatorial Programs and Publications at Singapore Art Museum

The Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has announced that June Yap will serve as its new director of curatorial programs and publications, beginning on September 1.

In her new role, Yap will oversee the museum’s content creation, injecting fresh expertise as the 21-year-old institution is about to initiate a SGP 90 million (USD 66 million) revamp meant to double the exhibition space for presentations of large-scale installations, modernize the museum’s equipment for exhibitions of technologically demanding multimedia works, and renovate the building so that it is more accessible for special-needs visitors.

Regarding her new appointment at the museum, Yap said, “SAM has come a long way since it first opened in 1996. This period of rejuvenation and improvement of its buildings presents a great opportunity for reflection upon the museum’s historic moments, as well as to forge its future path.”

Earlier in her career, Yap organized exhibitions of new media art when she was a curator at SAM from 2003–04, and later joined the institution’s acquisitions committee as she left her mark not only in Singapore but also abroad. More recently, she was a member of the advisory committee of the Singapore Biennale’s 2016 edition, and was meant to curate the Singapore Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale before she left the team due to what the Singapore National Arts Council cited as “differences in the operational approaches.”

Yap has been an independent curator since 2008, and was also the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s UBS MAP curator, South and Southeast Asia from 2012 to 2014. In that role, she organized the first exhibition of the UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,” which also traveled to the Asia Society Hong Kong Center and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, where the show won Best Exhibition of Asian Contemporary Art at the Prudential Eye Awards.