Art History's Takeaways

The texts of art historians, critics, and curators are creative projects in their own right, and should not be seen as merely auxiliary mechanisms for the amplification of an artist’s or institution’s ideas. The importance of artistic discourse was not lost on the revered art historian TK Sabapathy, who throughout his over-fourdecade career sought to forge pathways for the scholarship of Southeast Asian art, from the context and historical genealogies of modernism in Malaysia and Singapore, to broader lenses through which to consider these trajectories. Divided into four sections, each oriented by a helpful editorial introduction, Writing the Modern (2018) collates the octogenarian’s efforts, which have inarguably set the course for Southeast Asian art history today.

Chapter one, “The Southeast Asian Artist in Relation