Christian Hiller: In 2013, you became the founding director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Prior to that, you held various positions in cultural and educational institutions around the world, including head of the program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) at the Department of Architecture at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What prompted you to go to Southeast Asia, and more specifically to Singapore, and take over the director position of the CCA?
Ute Meta Bauer: It wasn’t a plan I’d been mulling over for a long time, but was much more a spur of the moment decision. I’ve always found this region very exciting. In 2005, my first year at MIT, I went to China with the architect Yung Ho Chang—our chair at the time—to visit the Shenzhen Biennale for Urbanism and Architecture, which he launched and curated. By then I already knew this metropolis quite well, having already been there on trips to Hong Kong and Guangzhou, beginning in 1998. I was fascinated by how quickly everything was changing and modernizing, but still keeping traditions and local cultures visible. This parallelism of different temporalities and time layers is characteristic of many Asian cities even today.
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