Regionalist and other decolonising perspectives: Honouring T.K. Sabapathy’s ideas and lifework
This panel invites critical engagement with the scholarship and practice of T.K. Sabapathy, a foundational scholar of Southeast Asia’s modern and contemporary art. Sabapathy is recognised for his critical edge and unwavering insistence on the value of “regional consciousness” and the need for it to “be made concrete and palpable” and submitted to “comparative bases for study” (1982). He was trained in Singapore, then in London at SOAS and at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, developing a regionalist approach through a position of distance and later, upon his return to teach in Malaysia and Singapore, proximity. His foundation lay in studying Southeast Asia’s premodern art, often in colonially formed collections. Sabapathy positions art as “linked with processes related to the attainment of political independence [and] self-determination” (1982), working during and after Southeast Asia’s period of decolonisation from British and French rule. Sabapathy was an early proponent for seeing art criticism and exhibition-making as significant sites of art-historical discourse in Southeast Asia (2012). His writings are anthologized (2018) and his archives are at the National University of Singapore. He recently co-edited a landmark two-volume collection of primary sources (many newly translated) on Southeast Asia’s modern art (2023). For this panel, we invited proposals for papers which critically examine Sabapathy’s ideas and lifework. Does his work enable new approaches to decolonising art histories of and for Southeast Asia? Could his regionalist approach serve as a basis for other regionalist studies linked to colonial veins of empire but with ramifications far beyond it?
Session Convenors:
Roger Nelson, Nanyang Technological University
Vera Mey, University of York
Speakers:
Roger Nelson, Nanyang Technological University
Rethinking “Critical Activity” in Southeast Asia’s Art Histories
What diverse, creative, and border-crossing literary, visual, and other forms does critical activity in Southeast Asia’s art histories take? In what ways have the practices of artist-scholars and curator-scholars shaped the development of this regional field? This paper will address these and related questions, while considering what the curator-scholar Patrick D. Flores (2017) calls the field’s “norm and its fiction, its écriture.” If Southeast Asia’s art histories have achieved what Flores (2016) terms “art-historical alterity” in their forms, then these quirks may also be contributing to the decolonising of the discipline in this region, given that—as T.K. Sabapathy (1982) has proposed—art here is understood as “linked with processes related to the attainment of political independence [and] self-determination.” A starting point for my thinking about the manifold aesthetic manifestations of critical activity on Southeast Asia’s art is Sabapathy’s (1979) affirmation that “critical activity need not necessarily be defined in terms of, or limited to, literary forms.” In this paper, I will survey the entwining of artistic, curatorial, and scholarly contributions to art-historical knowledge about Southeast Asia. I will argue that artworks and exhibitions, like texts in a range of formats, can be forms of critical activity, thinking and theorising about regional and decolonial art histories.
Melissa Carlson, University of California, Berkeley
Roving Regionalism: Untethering Myanmar’s Modern Art History
What happens when entire countries and art histories are absent from a presented regional framework for writing an art history of modernism? T.K. Sabapathy’s scholarship chartered innovative methods for researching modern art histories of Southeast Asia based on exhibitionary practices and artistic connections, enabling scholars to inject art histories from the region into the ongoing project of writing a global history of modernism. However, Sabapathy’s approach to Southeast Asia omitted the avant-garde art, artists, and exhibitionary history of Burma/Myanmar. Burma/Myanmar’s postcolonial modern art history, most of which unfolded under a trifecta of authoritarianism, isolationism, and censorship, can be overlayed into a parallel timeline alongside many of the studies conducted by Sabapathy. Avant-garde artists from Burma/Myanmar remained mostly outside of regional cultural circuits of art exchanges and exhibitions, yet a rich and immense artistic production within the country persisted. This paper examines whether Sabapathy’s treatment of Burma/Myanmar is mere omission or, as I argue, if his scholarship can be leveraged to suggest that the case of Burma/Myanmar supports a roving regionalism within Southeast Asia. Does Sabapathy’s silence on Burma/Myanmar permit its art history to be placed more squarely alongside that of South Asia? Or, perhaps, Burma/Myanmar’s postcolonial art history is situated somewhere between the two regions, crossing all boundaries.
Clara Cheung, University of York
Imaginings of “Asia” in the Festival of Asian Arts, Hong Kong (1976-1979)
In 1973, while still under British rule, Hong Kong’s Urban Council gained financial autonomy and transitioned to an elected body. This restructuring expanded the Council’s mandate from public housing to include cultural institutions, laying the groundwork for more cultural initiatives. In 1976, the Urban Council launched the first Festival of Asian Arts in Hong Kong, a festival primarily focused on folk and traditional performances, but also had visual art exhibitions. This event came three years after the first Hong Kong Arts Festival, founded by Ian Hunter, a former director of the Edinburgh Festival and the Commonwealth Arts Festival, to feature high art and classical performances from the West.
This paper examines the Festival of Asian Arts as a site for cultural re-presentation by participating states, with a particular focus on Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, given their shared histories of British colonial rule. By analysing how these former colonies presented their cultural identities within the festival, I explore the underlying visions of “Asia” that emerged. Drawing on T.K. Sabapathy’s analyses of Singaporean and Malaysian art in the 1970s, I consider whether each state’s conception of “Asia” varied in response to their unique colonial legacies and stages of independence. This paper aims to shed light on how differing levels of political autonomy and regional consciousness shaped each state’s cultural narratives within the context of a pan-Asian festival in Hong Kong in the late 1970s.
Carlos Quijon Jr., Museum of Modern Art (New York)
Generative Consequences: Latitude of Southeast Asian Modern in ASEAN Exhibition History
Throughout his engagements with Southeast Asian art history, T. K. Sabapathy has persistently foregrounded the salience of writing and exhibition-making in staking a regionalist perspective. In a 1982 essay on the premises of studying modern art in Southeast Asia framed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Sabapathy remarked that “the expectation has been that ASEAN exhibitions are institutional endeavours seeking to provide overviews of varied and shared conceptions shaping modern art practices in the countries of the region.” These “varied and shared conceptions” are elaborated by way of an artwork’s “revealed, aesthetic qualities as well as its marking a moment of generative consequence, around which perceptions and contexts regarding importance and influences can be suggested.” This paper elaborates on these aspects and posits intricate interfacings between practitioners, institutions, artworks, and exhibition as “marking a moment of generative consequence” by way of looking at the development of articulations of modern art in Southeast Asia that emerges out of and cultivated in the exhibitionary form from the 1980s to the 1990s. Particularly, this paper considers how the ASEAN, through the institutional platform of the ASEAN Workshop, Exhibition, and Symposium on Aesthetics (WESA), allowed actors (teachers, art historians, critics, curators—usually hyphenated or hybridised) across the then consolidating region to convene and think about modernity and modernism in Southeast Asia. It looks at three practitioners active during the period and who participated in WESA: Sabapathy (b. 1938, Singapore), Alice Guillermo (b. 1938, Manila), and Rod Paras Perez (b. 1934, Manila). Sabapathy, Guillermo, and Paras Perez became prominent figures in annotating and parsing modern art histories in Southeast Asia as these were belatedly accounted for in exhibitions in the 1990s. ASEAN becomes an extraordinarily productive cipher in this inquiry since it is embedded in the political demands of diplomacy inasmuch as it has, specifically during this period, allowed and enabled practitioners and interlocutors to stake their claims on the pragmatic inflections of regionalist perspectives.
Seng Yu Jin, National Gallery Singapore
Museums as Sites for Constructing Art Histories: A Tale of Two Southeast Asian Art Exhibitions
This paper compares two art historically groundbreaking exhibitions, Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art (1996) one of the two exhibitions that inaugurated the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia: Artists and Movements (1997) organised by the Fukuoka Art Museum. Just a year apart, these two exhibitions marked the earliest endeavours by art museums in Singapore and Japan to construct the art histories of Southeast Asia as a region discursive through the exhibition publications, and curatorially by drawing in part from their respective museums’ collection of Southeast Asian art. The lead curators of Modernity and Beyond and The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia were T.K. Sabapathy and Masahiro Ushiroshoji respectively, both art historians who taught art history as a discipline at the university. This paper compares how both Sabapathy and Ushiroshoji adopted different curatorial approaches to construct the region’s histories of modern art from a regionalist perspective grounded in modernity as a cultural condition from which art is produced in Modernity and Beyond, and the history of art as a history of artists and art movements in The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia. Comparing the intersections and divergences between the curatorial approaches of these two exhibitions make visible the productive competition between the two art museums as exhibitionary sites that construct the art historical and the curatorial that was not isolated but part of a transnational network of curators, art historians and artists actively constructing the region’s art histories. The research for this paper draws from the archives of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM), SAM and oral histories.
Respondent: Ashley Thompson, SOAS, University of London