Yuko Hasegawa

Yuko Hasegawa is Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2006 - present) and Professor of curatorial and art theory at Tama Art University in Tokyo. She was a Chief Curator and Founding Artistic Director (1999 - 2006) of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Her responsibilities included the architectural design, collections and programs.

Since 2001, Hasegawa has served on the International Arts Advisory Council for the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio, USA), and since 2008 has been a member of the Asian Art Council at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York). Most recently, she has served as a Board Member of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, Hong Kong (2009 - 2010), as well as the Artistic Director of Inujima House Project at Benesse Corporation, Japan (from 2010).

She has curated major exhbitions including Encounters in the 21st Century: Polyphony – Emerging  Resonance (2004), Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint (2005) at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Qiu Anxiong (2007), Marlene Dumas: Broken White (2007), SPACE FOR YOUR FUTURE: Recombining the DNA of Art and Design (2007), Neo Tropicália: When Lives Become Form, Contemporary Brazilian Art: 1960s to the Present (2008) , Ryoji Ikeda +/－[the infinite between 0 and 1] (2009), Rebecca Horn: Rebellion in Silence Dialogue between Raven and Whale (2009), Kazuyo Sejima Spatial Design for COMME des GARCONS (2010), Transformation (co-curated with Shinichi Nakazawa, anthropologist in 2010), and Architectural Environments for Tomorrow: New Spatial Practice in Architecture and Art (co-curated with SANAA, architect, in 2011) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Trans-Cool Tokyo: Contemporary Japanese Art from MOT Collection at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2010), at Singapore Art Museum (2010) and at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2011).

Hasegawa has also curated numerous international exhibitions, acting as Artistic Director of the 7th Istanbul Biennale (2001), the Co-Curator of the 4th Shanghai Biennale (2002), the Commissioner of the Japanese Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the Co-Curator of the 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale (2006), the Artistic Advisor of the 12th Venice Architectural Biennale (2010) and the Co-Curator of the 29th São Paulo Biennale (2010).

Her other independent exhibitions include: Trial Balloons at MUSAC (León, Spain, 2006), and When Lives Become Form: Dialogue with the future Brazil at MAM São Paulo (Brazil, 2008).

Previously, she has served on the Jury of the Venice Biennale (1999), the Hugo Boss prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2002) and the Future Generation Art Prize at Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, Ukraine (2010).

She has written extensively throughout her career, including her recent essay "Performativity in the Work of Female Japanese Artists In the 1950s-1960s and the 1990s" in Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa, New York, 2010).

(From press information by Sharjah Art Foundation, 2013)