Mami Kataoka
Mami Kataoka is a Japanese art curator and writer. She is presently the director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Early life and education
Kataoka was born in 1965 in Nagoya.She received a BA from Aichi University of Education in 1988.
Career
Mori Art Museum, 2003–present
Between 2003 and 2019, Kataoka was the Chief Curator of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan. In 2019 she was appointed director, succeeding Fumio Nanjo. The Mori Art Museum is a contemporary art museum in Roppongi Hills in Tokyo. During her tenure at the Mori Art Museum, Kataoka has curated a number of exhibitions, including: “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”, which is touring in the United States from 2012 onwards, and “Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only”, the first large-scale solo exhibition of Asia's leading female artist. In addition to overseeing the activities of the curatorial department at the Mori, she has curated diverse exhibitions such as "Roppongi Crossing: New Visions in Contemporary Japanese Art 2004", which provided an overview of the recent art scene in Japan; "Ozawa Tsuyoshi: Answer with Yes and No!", which was the first in a series to introduce mid-career Asian artists with solo exhibitions; co-curated "Follow Me!: Chinese Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium", which showed the museum's strong focus on Asian contemporary art; and "MAM Projects", which sought to encourage young and upcoming artists internationally. She curated the first three MAM Projects: 001: Santiago Cucullu, 002: Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba and 003: R.O.R, a group from Finland. She has also worked on "Hiroshi Sugimoto: End of Time" in collaboration with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. and "Tokyo-Berlin / Berlin-Tokyo" in collaboration with the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.From 2007-2009, Kataoka joined the curatorial team at the Hayward Gallery, London as the esteemed gallery's first international curator. Here she curated “Laughing in a Foreign Language” an exhibition exploring a role of humour in diverse cultures.
Kataoka is a key figure in documenting and analyzing trends within contemporary Japanese art since 2000, considering relevant social historical and generational themes evident in contemporary Japanese art. She most recently guest curated “Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past” at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
Kataoka was a Co-Artistic Director of ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale. Recognizing the temporary and circulatory nature of biennales, which by definition reflect shifting curatorial themes and structures in rotation, Kataoka's work as part of the ROUNDTABLE curatorial team confronted the diverse inter-connectivities of different contexts within which we can find our own temporal positioning.