![]() 2 His focus was the classical, and the means of interpretation primarily iconological when he encountered modern art through the divergent approaches of Philip Rawson and Claire Holt, he recounts feeling unequipped, and that “the modern was strange.” 3 He continued his studies supported by a research fellowship over two years, while supplementing his income through teaching. The propelling scheme was the survey.” 1 However, to gain specialist knowledge in Southeast Asian art, he continued his studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in the later 1960s, where he undertook research into premodern narrative representations. At Berkeley he received training in the classical traditions of art and art historical method, both European and Asian: “The grandeur of history of art as an academic discipline was revealed to me when I commenced studies in Berkeley in the fall of 1962. He departed for California in 1962, making the journey by sea. ![]() He found the teachings of his art history lecturer, esteemed scholar of Chinese art history Michael Sullivan, deeply influential, and subsequently pursued a master’s degree in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley. He studied art history as an elective, as no major provision was available, a situation that he laments has not changed. Sabapathy, was born in the British Straits Settlements and began his study of art history as an undergraduate history major at then Singapore-based University of Malaya in 1958, a year after the territories proclaimed independence as the Federation of Malaya. Thiagarajan Kanaga Sabapathy, more commonly referred to as T. As much as Sabapathy wrote about art and artists to create the building blocks of an art history, he never ceased to rigorously tackle art’s frames of representation, from the written text to the gallery space to the exhibition symposium, highly attentive to his own role in interpellating readers from within these constituent elements at every turn. Enriching this body of work is a historical outlook shaped by memories of 1950s and 1960s postcolonial fervor in former British Malaya and the respective national projects of newly split Singapore and Malaysia, followed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)’s spearheading regional artistic affairs in the 1980s and 1990s. How these topics have been imaginatively, even forensically, explored in Sabapathy’s attempt arguably to define a field of study-concomitant with his wariness of definition as an act of prescription-is unparalleled in terms of a scholarly perspective shaped from Singaporean, Malaysian, American, and British institutions. Interrogated as fields, in terms of Sabapathy’s concerns with the nature of their discursive formation and utility, these frameworks may be construed as art history, the modern (and the contemporary), and regionalism. The book surveys the development of Sabapathy’s grappling with several interrelated inquiries as they have come to shape studies of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia over nearly half a century. ![]() The editorial team comprises Ahmad Mashadi (director of the National University of Singapore Museum), Susie Lingham (former director of the Singapore Art Museum), Peter Schoppert (director of National University of Singapore Press), and Joyce Toh (senior curator at the Singapore Art Museum). For the first time, the Singaporean art historian’s prolific body of writing, extracted from such sources as newspaper columns, exhibition catalogs, artist monographs, and symposium proceedings, is presented in a formidable more-than-four-hundred-page compendium of fifty-seven selected texts. ![]() Sabapathy to the field of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art history seems long overdue, and in this regard, this anthology published by the Singapore Art Museum in 2018 is a welcome development. $48Ī serious volume testifying to the contributions of T. Ahmad Mashadi, Susie Lingham, Peter Schoppert, and Joyce Toh. ![]() Writing the Modern: Selected Texts on Art and Art History in Singapore, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia, 1973–2015. ![]()
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