New director for the Berlin Museum of Asian Art
Press release from 12/01/2009
Dr Klaas Ruitenbeek will succeed Prof. Dr Willibald Veit, who retired yesterday, as Director of the Museum of Asian Art at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin from the beginning of January 2010. Ruitenbeek, who was unanimously chosen by the Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, is currently still working at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
The 58-year-old has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in the field of East Asian art (painting, sculpture, decorative arts and archaeology), architecture and literature, as well as more than two decades of museum work. He studied sinology at the University of Leiden, where he also gained his doctorate in 1989 after research visits to Taiwan, Japan and China. For almost ten years, Ruitenbeek worked as a curator for East Asian art at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam until he moved to the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in 1994 as Professor of Art History and Archaeology of East Asia. In 1996 he moved to the Royal Ontario Museum, a universal museum with extensive non-European collections of art, archaeology and ethnology, where he holds the Louise Hawley Stone Chair of Far Eastern Art. From 2003 to 2008, as the responsible Coordinating Curator, he and a large team remodelled and reorganised the museum's East Asia department, for which he raised third-party funding. The Dutchman was also responsible for successful exhibitions in a national and international context.
At the Berlin Museum of Asian Art, Ruitenbeek focusses both on the importance of the collections for science and for the wider public. Both with the museum's permanent exhibition and with innovative exhibitions of ancient and modern art, he intends to awaken and promote the public's knowledge and understanding of different cultures and their history. He also intends to utilise his diverse contacts and worldwide network when it comes to bringing guest academics to the museum for research purposes. He sees the future Humboldt Forum as a unique opportunity to present the artistic and ethnological collections not as separate worlds, but in a meaningful context and as complementary parts of one another.