Singapore arts pioneer Tan Boon Hui’s death ‘a tremendous blow’ to Asian art
- Tan is best remembered internationally as director of the Asia Society Museum in New York from 2015-20, launching its Asia Society Triennial event in 2020
- He ‘changed the discourse’ of Asian art history and ‘his passion and curatorial flair enriched our ecosystem’, said those who knew him. He died July 7 aged 53
Singaporean curator, arts administrator and festival organiser Tan Boon Hui, who died on July 7 at the age of 53, was a tireless champion for Asian artists and a visionary leader who recently returned home with ambitious plans for the organisation that ran Singapore’s main arts festival and a range of historic venues.
Internationally, Tan is best remembered as director of the Asia Society Museum in New York from 2015 to 2020. The museum’s inaugural Asia Society Triennial, lauded as the biggest event of its kind in the city, was very much his creation. Its opening during the height of the pandemic in 2020 was a climactic ending to his successful tenure at the non-profit institution, where he was also vice-president of global artistic programmes.
Tan was “instrumental” in launching the triennial, said Kevin Rudd, former Australian prime minister and president and CEO of the Asia Society, who remembers him for “a dynamism and effervescence that propelled him in his work”.
Nasim Nasr, an Australia-based Iranian artist who exhibited at the triennial, thanked Tan for making her dreams come true. Very few artists living and working in Australia, geographically remote from Europe and the US, would have been able to exhibit their works at an important international museum show in New York, she said.
Tan, who studied geography at the National University of Singapore, began his museum career as an assistant curator at Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum in 1997.
