Karin Oen-Lee
Assistant Professor, Art History and Museum Studies
Affiliate Assistant Professor, Asian Studies
k388@umnc.edu@umbc.edu
Karin Oen-Lee is a curator and art historian. She lived in Singapore from 2019-2025, where she served in several roles: as Deputy Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2019-2021), Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Asian Art and Design (2021-2022), Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Humanities (2022-2025), and Director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2024-2025). A global modernist, she is most interested in transdisciplinary and transnational art practices that resist easy classification, and in examining modes of writing about, displaying, and collecting art in diverse cultural contexts. From early career research on avant-garde art practices in early Reform Era China to serving as a museum curator for historical, modern, and contemporary collections of Asian art, to recent investigations of paracuratorial and paracurricular practices, her work has been characterised by attention to historiographies and genealogies, institutional power structures, and a broader project of balancing the global, the local, and making space for non-canonical art histories. Significant exhibitions include solo projects with teamLab, Haroon Mirza, Koki Tanaka, Afruz Amighi, Jean Shin, Fyerool Darma and Ala Ebtekar. Her group and thematic exhibitions have explored contemporary Japanese ceramics, modern and contemporary Japanese fashion, courtly arts from around South, Southeast, and East Asia, and the complex relationship between the physical and metaphysical in the concept of divinity.
Prior to her time in Singapore, Dr Oen was associate curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. As that museum’s first full-time curator of modern and contemporary art, Dr Oen grew of the museum’s contemporary collection and exhibition programme — especially in new media and works by Asian diaspora artists. Earlier in her career, she was a curator at the Crow Museum of Asian Art, a museum educator for Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and curator and director of the artists-in-residence program at ArtWorks, a multi-disciplinary contemporary art organization in New Bedford, MA.
Dr Oen holds a PhD in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture from MIT, an MA in Modern Art History, Connoisseurship and the History of the Art Market from Christie’s Education New York, and a BA with honors from Stanford University.