In May, city staffers, employees from neighboring cultural institutions, and a smattering of reporters and community members gathered inside the Asian Art Museum‘s private Peterson Room to meet Dr. Soyoung Lee, the museum‘s newly-appointed director and CEO.
“This museum should be a destination for San Francisco and the Bay Area,” Lee said at the time. “I don’t think it is right now.”
With a 20,000-piece permanent collection and a central, if not necessarily plum, location across from San Francisco City Hall, the Asian Art Museum is arguably one of the city’s artistic crown jewels. Like many other neighboring cultural institutions, its success rises and falls with the city.
And, like the city itself, the museum is hoping to seize on the broader narrative that San Francisco is back, while also confronting the reality that truly being back comes with its own set of challenges.
“Before, at a certain stage, the Asian Art Museum was all about the traditions of Asia, and Asia as a thing that‘s ‘over there’ geographically, an ‘exotic’ culture, and we‘re ‘introducing’ it,” Lee explained in a recent interview with Gazetteer. “That was what was needed; it was the right thing at the time. We’re just in a different moment.”
The Asian Art Museum was founded in 1958 as a wing of the deYoung to house the art collection of former International Olympics Committee president Avery Brundage, who gave away over 7,700 pieces from his private collection by the time he passed in 1975. His presence in the museum’s legacy came under scrutiny in 2020 as his racist, anti-Semitic views were surfaced by critics. It also prompted soul-searching from artists and observers about how the museum‘s original sin may have shaped the museum’s point of view. In response, the museum’s leadership promised to decolonize itself while not quite fully disowning its founding patron.
Lee has the challenging task of defining the Asian Art Museum’s identity in 2025, a time when museum attendance is still below pre-pandemic levels and federal funding for the arts has been under siege. Also challenging is the fact that Asian art and culture exhibitions have become plentiful around the city, as with the Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA, Art of Manga at deYoung, or BTS leader RM’s recently-announced collaboration with SFMOMA.
The Asian Art Museum, effectively, has to figure out what an Asian art museum looks like.
The immediate answer, Lee says, is reminding art lovers of the centrality of modern Asian culture in everyday life. It is not an “other” to be romanticized or a novelty to be brought in. It’s central, and the museum needs to reflect this fact.
“Our focus is going to be about selling the fact that Asia and its diaspora culturally is the center of the world,” she said. “That‘s who we are. That‘s who the city is, that’s who this country is, that‘s who the world is.”
In recent months, the museum’s programming has widened in number and variety, with exhibitions and events centered around Asian music and culture, like an upcoming display showcasing West Asian electronic music and rave culture. The museum has found some success with family-friendly events on the weekends like all-day Mahjong and batik workshops intended to have inter-generational appeal.
Most emblematic of their cultural shift is bringing in musicians for concerts and panels. K-pop boy group 1Verse, the first boy band to debut with North Korean members, joined a talk about the industry’s future. Another event with the Empire-partnered Cambodian music label Baramey showcased five rising rappers and artists. Violinist Rose Crelli performed a suite of Bay Area rap.
“People aren’t necessarily going to come to museums because they know art or gravitate toward art,” Lee explained. “They come to find community and cultural events like food, music, dance. Those are natural entry points.”
This democratic approach may be surprising given Lee‘s highbrow pedigree. She comes to the Asian Art Museum from the Harvard Art Museums, where she served as chief curator. The daughter of a diplomat, Lee was born in Jakarta and spent time in Sweden and the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. She was also the first curator of Korean art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she served for 15 years.
“If you knew me from when I first started out, you’d be laughing that I‘m now in this role where I’m propagating pop culture and high and low,” she said. “It’s an evolution for me.” (She credits her daughter’s K-pop fandom with opening her ears and eyes to the possibility of the museum reaching new people.)
That evolution needs to somehow attract older patrons who have supported the place “emotionally and financially” and still value its permanent collection of centuries-old art.
“We’re very conscious of sustaining those types of programming, especially around collections, because that’s where they‘re tied to, while at the same time understanding that the future is actually about culture,” Lee explained. A looming question, then, is how to bring together stalwart supporters and younger audiences? Lee is still figuring that out.
I ask her how some longtime patrons have responded to, say, exhibitions like the Hallyu! The Korean Wave, which predates Lee, but is emblematic of the museum’s pop culture pivot, or Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War, a tense, video-heavy exhibition by a Taiwanese artist.
“So, there are people for whom anything new is…” She pauses. “Dicey. Not much you can do.”
With this embrace of popular culture, Lee is feeling a positive, new energy. Part of that is thanks to vocal buy-in from the city and the board of trustees; at a recent gathering of supporters and the board at the museum, the city’s head of housing and economic development Ned Segal spoke favorably of her, and assured them that he would get the city out of the way, and let them operate as they need to.
“Our supporters, our circle of friends and people coming to visit, they feel a sense of vibrancy, safety,” Lee said. “They want to come into the city; they’re not as hesitant about coming into downtown or the Civic Center area.”
A new question has emerged, though, since Lee’s appointment: other museums in the city leaning into Asian art and culture. Where does that leave the Asian Art Museum?
You get the sense that this is a quandary. She finds San Francisco’s art world to be more collaborative than, say, New York’s, but she must know that the Asian Art Museum’s new era could be cannibalized by its contemporaries.
“I would like the various museums to talk a little bit more and share our futures,” she said with some diplomacy. “It’s a little bit of a challenge because, yes, sure, there’s a little bit of competition and you don’t want somebody else to…,” she pauses and laughs. “On the other hand, it’s a big space.”
