Call it magical mishaps, call it emotional volatility, but one truth persists: instability reigns in 2025. At the Asia Society in New York, Yasufumi Nakamori, a former lawyer turned curator who was appointed director of the Asia Society Museum in mid-2023, vanished without warning. His abrupt exit, occurring just a week before the institution’s important gala fundraiser in May, was followed by a steady drip of departures, including Beth Citron, who joined in March 2024 as curator of modern and contemporary Asian and Asia Diaspora art. She has since jumped ship to become executive director of New York-based nonprofit Artis, which supports contemporary artists from Israel. It remains to be seen who will helm the historically significant, albeit somewhat stuffy, Asia Society, once bankrolled by the Rockefeller family.

Concerns are swirling in Singapore around the Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) Centre for Contemporary Art. Many predict it will soon lose its steady captain, Karin Oen-Lee, who has been steering the legendary but beleaguered ship with a skeleton crew. Formerly deputy director of curatorial programs from 2019-2021 under founding director Ute Meta-Bauer, Oen-Lee succeeded her mentor in the summer of 2024. Armed with a PhD from MIT in history, theory, and criticism of art and architecture, she fully dedicated herself to the daily administrative grind. However, despite her qualifications and commitment, NTU declines to upgrade Oen-Lee’s lecturer title to a professorship. Word on the street is that American universities are courting her, dangling the scholarly title carrot she worked so hard to attain.