Karin G. Oen to Lead NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

Karin G. Oenhas been appointed director ofNTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore(NTU CCA). Oen from 2019 to 2021 served as deputy director for curatorial programs at the center before departing to become senior lecturer and head of the art history department at NTU’s School of Humanities. On July 1, she stepped into the role vacated by founding directorUte Meta Bauer, who spent more than a decade in her post. Bauer, who established the institution in 2013 in the city-state’s historic Gillman Barracks, will retain her high-level investigative roles in two of the Ministry of Education’s climate change programs and will continue teaching in the master’s program in museum studies and curatorial practices at NTU’s School of Art, Design, and Media.

Oen will remain in her posts at NTU’s School of Humanities. Before arriving to NTU, she held curatorial roles at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, the Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. She holds a Ph.D. in the history, theory, and criticism of art and architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she and Bauer met. The pair since 2019 have collaborated on exhibitions and programming at NTU CCA and have coauthored and coedited various publications.

“I could not imagine a better-suited successor [than] Dr. Karin Oen, who endorses CCA in all its components, knowing it from the inside yet bringing a basket of fresh ideas to the table,” said Bauer in a statement.

“I am honored to return to CCA to continue the work of this important and unique research center,” said Oen in a statement. “I hope to renew the center’s commitments to fostering critical thinking and writing; innovative exhibition-making; local, regional, and international coalition-building through the arts; and digging deeper into the connections between art and technology through diverse lenses including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. I look forward to [increasing] collaboration with NTU’s other institutions, harnessing their abundant resources for artistic engagement, including for our residence program.”

NTU CCA, which Bauer founded as the contemporary art research arm of Nanyang Technological University, was forced to shutter its Gillman Barracks exhibition hall and residency studios in 2021 following a budget shortfall.