New Leadership at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum
By Emily Cheung
Portrait of SOYOUNG LEE. Photo by Marvin Smith. Courtesy the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
On January 14, the Asian Art Museum—Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art & Culture in San Francisco named scholar Soyoung Lee as the institution’s next director and CEO. Lee, who starts her role as the Barbara Bass Bakar Director and CEO in April, succeeds outgoing director Jay Xu, who had led the museum since 2008.
Lee has been the chief curator at Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 2018. There she directed the museum’s collection building, mentorship, and organized exhibitions such as “Earthly Delights: 6,000 Years of Asian Ceramics” in 2022 and “Future Minded: New Works in the Collection” in 2024. Before that role, Lee was the first-ever curator for Korean arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 15 years, transforming the scope and impact of Korean culture at the museum and in the country’s cultural landscape by organizing several internationally acclaimed exhibitions.
Born in Jakarta, Lee received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees as well as her PhD in art history from Columbia University in New York. Her publications include Diamond Mountains: Travel and Nostalgia in Korean Art (2018), Silla: Korea’s Golden Kingdom (with Denise Patry Leidy; 2013), and Korean Buncheong Ceramics from the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (with Jeon Seung-chang; 2011).
Salle Yoo, chair of the Asian Art Museum Foundation and Asian Art Commission, commented that Lee demonstrates “creativity and openness in bringing art to broader audiences and has successfully led efforts to make museums a place of connection.” Lee said she welcomes “the chance to harness the strengths of the Asian Art Museum’s collection and people, to shape together a boldly inventive museum of the 21st century.”
Emily Cheung is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.
