Yasufumi Nakamori Appointed Senior Curator of International Art at Tate Modern

On September 10, London’s Tate Modern announced the appointment of Yasufumi Nakamori as its new senior curator of international art (photography). Nakamori will be responsible for the museum’s photography collection and exhibitions. He is Tate Modern’s second international photography curator, succeeding Simon Baker, who joined Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris this April. Nakamori will officially take up his post in October. 

Before his career as a curator, Nakamori had practiced law for seven years in Japan and the United States. It was after 9/11 that he embarked on his study of modern and contemporary art, focusing on postwar Japanese art and architecture. In 2008, Nakamori joined the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he served as a photography curator for eight years and organized celebrated exhibitions, including “Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro” (2010) and “For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979” (2015). In 2011, he earned his PhD in art history and visual studies from Cornell University. From 2016 to 2018, Nakamori oversaw the collection of photography, video and other time-based media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where he also staged exhibitions with artists and collectives such as The Propeller Group, Omer Fast, Naoya Hatakeyama and Amar Kanwar. He has taught modern and contemporary Japanese art and architecture at Rice University in Houston and at Hunter College, the City University of New York.

Tate Modern stated in the press release that photography has played a pivotal role in modern art and visual culture today. The museum has shown growing ambitions in its research and representation of the medium, with a five-fold increase in the number of photographs in their collection over the past decade. Nakamori’s appointment “continues Tate’s commitment to collecting and exhibiting photography.” 

Dennis Mao is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.

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