Regional WorldingArt History’s Pedagogies in SingaporePriya Maholay-Jaradi and Roger Nelson

In classrooms and scholarly works across the planet, worlding takes different forms; in Southeast Asia, it is often expressed as a ‘regional turn’, which may also be understood in relation to the ‘transnational turn’ in modernist studies.11Teck Heng Tan, ‘The Regional Turn to Modernist Studies in Singapore’, Literature Compass, 20.1 (2023), e12693 (p. 2) <https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12693>. The extraordinarily diverse region we call Southeast Asia may be imagined as constituting worlds within a world, and so too its art histories. Patrick D. Flores cites Geeta Kapur’s commitment to ‘unembarrassed alterity’, and with this he calls for ‘an art-historical alterity instead of an alternative art history’.22Patrick D. Flores, ‘Art-Historical Alterity in the Post-Colony’, in Art History and Emergency: Crises in the Visual Arts and Humanities, ed. by David Breslin and Darby English (Sterling and Francine Clark Institute and Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 85–104 (p. 95). In other words, Kapur and Flores do Beginning of page[p. 16] not seek mere inclusion of hitherto excluded art histories, which tend to remain alternative to existing disciplinary structures; rather, they perceive new, local, and regional art histories as active sites for engaging, deconstructing, and remaking the discipline’s conceptual, methodological, and language-based frameworks.33Patrick Flores, ‘Address of Art: Vicinity of Region, Horizon of History’, in Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia, ed. by Low Sze Wee and Patrick D. Flores (National Gallery Singapore, 2017), pp. 12–21 (pp. 19–21).

To what extent are Southeast Asia’s art histories engaged, active, and consequently, worlded in such a way as to facilitate alterity? To answer this question we turn our attention to Southeast Asia’s art histories as studied and taught in Singapore, the city-state that is often discussed as being (or aspiring to be) a key centre of the region, and of scholarship on the region. Concurrently, we explore how other art histories — including those of other Asias and of the West — are studied and taught here. We hypothesize that the pedagogical strategies which develop around Southeast Asia’s art histories not only support worlding at various levels, but also bear an inherent capacity to alter the field.

In what follows, we outline the context, aims, and preliminary findings of an in-progress research project titled Art History’s Pedagogies in Singapore. We initiated this collaborative, cross-institutional (and, at the time of writing, ongoing) project in 2022 to study the histories of the teaching of art history in Singapore, both in formal institutions such as universities and museums, as well as within less official settings such as artworks and newspapers.44This cross-institutional enquiry was made possible thanks to the Staff Research Support Scheme (2022–23) administered by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, alongside infrastructural support lent by the NUS Museum. Priya M. Jaradi (NUS) and Roger Nelson (NTU) served as the principal investigator and co-investigator, respectively, while Lim Tze Qi Rachel, a former student of the Art history Minor at NUS, served as the Research Assistant. It has come as no surprise for us to find that the histories of teaching art history in Singapore appear practically and theoretically Beginning of page[p. 17] inseparable from the histories of (mostly regionalist manifestations of) ‘worlding’ within art historical research and teaching, including within syllabi. Here, ‘worlding’ refers to a constant interplay between specific localities such as Singapore and their immediate and wider neighbourhoods, such as Southeast Asia and the world; these disparate geopolitical entities engage each other to find cultural commonalities and differences as a way of defining themselves individually and collectively, thus giving value to what we referred to earlier as ‘worlds within a world’.55We understand ‘worlding’ as a constant interplay between centrifugal and centripetal forces; specifically, in our context, nation-states such as Singapore tend to look outside their discrete geopolitical borders to find long, material, environmental, or philosophical connections in the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) neighbourhood. In turn, the latter looks inward toward a common cultural core that binds and defines the neighbourhood amidst other varied configurations that constitute the world. All the same, this regional conception of worlding radiates outward to engage South Asian, European, and Latin American cultures through the lens of trade, pilgrimage, migration or other kinds of transcultural flows and mobilities, thus tending towards a global-worlding. Our notions of worlding are inspired by Patrick Flores and Arjun Appadurai’s ideas of thinking about the vaster world of which one is a part and consequently producing variable or shifting geographies (and, we suppose, equally variable and shifting art histories). Patrick Flores, ‘Address of Art: Vicinity of Region, Horizon of History’, p. 18; Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, Public Culture, 12.1 (2000), pp. 1–19 <https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-1-1>.

Thus, having clarified our conceptual landscape, we offer some institutional context for our inquiry: both to explain its impetus, and also to elaborate on the regional-worlding that it reveals to be pervasive within various kinds of art history syllabi in Singapore. While many university art history departments and museums across the planet bemoan the draining of funding and the dwindling of enrolments, in Singapore, the situation is strikingly different. Reasons for this may be attributed to the city-state’s unique brand of pragmatic nation-building which, after independence (1965), turned its attention to the first comprehensive arts and culture advisory and blueprint in 1988–89.66Hoe Su Fern and Terence Chong, ‘Nurturing the Cultural Desert: The Role of Museums in Singapore’, in The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions, ed. by Terence Chong (World Scientific, 2019), pp. 241–65 (pp. 245–46). This meant that in tandem with subsequent masterplans, the next three decades (and counting) have witnessed increased investments and allocation of resources to arts institutions and allied activities in a bid to become a global city for the arts.77See The State and the Arts in Singapore, ed. by Terence Chong, among others. After establishing the Singapore Art Museum (1996), the Asian Civilisations Museum (1997) and a series of heritage centres, in the past fifteen years, half a Beginning of page[p. 18] billion Singapore dollars have been spent by government agencies on establishing the National Gallery Singapore, a new museum dedicated to displaying the world’s largest public collection of Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art.88Lydia Vasko, ‘Going for Gold: National Gallery Singapore Approaches Final Stages of Construction’, The Straits Times, 9 August 2014 <https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/going-for-gold-national-gallery-singapore-approaches-final-stages-of-construction> [accessed March 2023]. That collection has been expanding rapidly thanks to a healthy acquisitions budget.99Although the budget is not released publicly, its scale can be deduced from the list of artwork acquisitions that are published in the Annual Reports of National Gallery Singapore, which are available at <https://www.nationalgallery.sg/about/about-the-gallery/annual-reports> [accessed March 2023]. National Gallery Singapore has built a team of curators specialised in the region’s art histories, fluent in many of its languages, and able to travel frequently, including to visit the growing number of private museums and independent arts organisations appearing across Southeast Asia. While expressly regional in focus, the collection (and the knowledge that surrounds it) is also worldly in its scope. For example, it includes major works made by diasporic ‘Southeast Asian artists’ working in places as varied as Khartoum, London, Doha, Canberra, and Shanghai.

Since the 1990s, the massive state-driven investment of financial and human resources in Singapore’s museum sector culminated in a recognized need for arts education, including art history. In the past decade or so, no fewer than three new art history programmes have been established: two at the city-state’s largest public universities (NUS, the National University of Singapore and NTU, the Nanyang Technological University), and one at an established art school (Lasalle College of the Arts). These programmes were initiated by passionate individuals rather than by state-driven or top-down decree, and they remain tiny by any global measure; the number of instructors in each institution can be counted on one hand, and only Beginning of page[p. 19] NTU hosts an actual department of art history with tenure-track faculty and postgraduate students. These limitations notwithstanding, for Singapore to proceed from having no art history programmes at all to boasting three within such a short time is clearly significant, and there are strong indications that the NTU programme will continue to grow its faculty while the Lasalle programme will be given a boost by its integration within the recently announced University of the Arts Singapore, which began operations in 2023.1010Ng Wei Kai, ‘Singapore to Get First University of the Arts, Formed by Alliance between Nafa and Lasalle’, The Straits Times, 3 March 2021 <https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/singapore-to-get-first-university-of-the-arts-formed-by-alliance> [accessed March 2023]. Moreover, the NUS programme is also optimistic that its student enrolment (which consists mostly of local students) will continue to grow. In his 2010 book, the Singapore art historian and critic T. K. Sabapathy lamented with piercing pessimism that the only art historical courses at universities in Singapore were ‘boutique offerings’ and that the ‘story of the practice of history of art as a disciplinary field in Singapore is frozen, entombed as chapter two in the 1960s and early 1970s’.1111T. K. Sabapathy, Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (The Art Gallery at the National Institute of Education, 2010), p. 37. Less than fifteen years after that excoriating and despairing statement was made, recent developments offer some cause for cautious hope.

It was with these rather unusual circumstances of ‘art-historical alterity’ in mind that we initiated the collaborative, cross-institutional research project to investigate pedagogies of art history in Singapore, and to begin to prospect some histories of the discipline here. The project gathers researchers from several institutions in Singapore, as well as from elsewhere in Southeast Asia.1212Participating researchers at the time of writing are: Kevin Chua (Texas Tech University, Austin); Simon Soon (University of Malaya, Malaysia); Nadya Wang (Lasalle College of the Arts), Sujatha Meegama (The Courtauld, London); Seng Yu Jin (National Gallery Singapore); Imran bin Tajudeen (NUS), with lead investigators, Priya M. Jaradi (NUS) and Roger Nelson (NTU). It builds on the research published in Sabapathy’s 2010 book, mentioned above, Jaradi’s recent publication, Transcultural Beginning of page[p. 20] Imaginations: Revisiting the 1959 Donation from the Government of India to Malaya,1313Priya Maholay-Jaradi, Transcultural Imaginations: Revisiting the 1959 Donation from the Government of India to Malaya (NUS Museum, 2024). and a published round table on teaching art histories in Southeast Asia.1414Yin Ker and others, ‘Teaching the History of Modern and Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 4.1 (March 2020), pp. 101–203. That round table saw contributions from eighteen scholars currently or formerly affiliated with fifteen institutions and based in seven countries. It was published in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the region’s art histories, published by NUS Press at the National University of Singapore, the only university press in Southeast Asia with an effective global distribution network. Launched in 2017, Southeast of Now can be considered another manifestation of the rapid and sustained growth of art history in Singapore and the region, and its manifold ties to other geographies.

The expressed aims of our project were fourfold. In our initial proposals for the project, and our initial invitations to our participants, informants and collaborators,1515Discussions have been enriched by feedback offered to participating researchers by several invited informants; these include Patrick D. Flores (University of the Philippines and the National Gallery Singapore); Hwang Yin and David Teh (NUS); Jeffrey Say and Venka Purushothaman (Lasalle College of the Arts); C. J. Wee Wan-ling, Neil Murphy (NTU), and Kwok Kian Chow. we articulated our intentions as follows:

1. To document and examine past and present pedagogies of art history in Singapore;
2. To examine the founding rationales of the varied programmes, their attendant teaching philosophies, syllabi design, modes of delivery, and learning outcomes;
3. To enhance art history’s identity as a distinct, decolonizing discipline;

   Beginning of page

   [p. 21]
4. To forge creative pathways to suit a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary and virtual/blended learning environment.

We were guided by the following leading research question: how have the self-reflexive and periodic shifts towards a postcolonial or decolonised art history, a world art history, and global or connected art histories informed the modular and topical range of art history curricula as taught in Singapore?

To begin to address this question, we also advanced some observations and provisional hypotheses, which included the following:

• The locally specific and the worlded are imagined not as counterposed but as co-constitutive: from the outset, we envisioned the project as focused simultaneously on ‘pedagogies of art history in Singapore’ and also on the city-state’s imbrication in and perspectives on ‘a world art history, and connected or global art history’.
• Some art history programmes in Singapore were founded in active partnership with museums (as at NUS) or institutions teaching contemporary artistic practice (as at Lasalle).
• The teaching of art history in Singapore has a strong experiential, object-based, and applied component, i.e., it is integrated with galleries, museums, archives,

  Beginning of page

  [p. 22] exhibitions, and artistic practice, to include new objects and sources.
• Following from the above, the teaching and learning of art history may cultivate new methods, and vocabularies, which alter existing approaches.
• The teaching of art history in Singapore is highly adaptable, i.e., it engages educational, artistic, and curatorial shifts locally, regionally, and globally.
• Consequently, art history curricula in Singapore demonstrate a cadenced approach to include local, regional, and global topics, and thus, remain worlded.

Early on in the project’s development, we identified a number of comparative contexts within which our collective inquiries may be situated in conceptual and historiographical terms. These include recent projects studying art schools in Asia;1616Art Schools of Asia was a project hosted by the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong from 2021 to 2022. See <https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/art-schools-of-asia> [accessed March 2023]. The project builds on, among others, John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Craftsman House, 1998). recent studies of teaching in other humanities disciplines;1717See, for example, John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2022). recent studies of art history as a discipline (within which scant attention has been given to teaching);1818See, for example, Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History (Princeton University Press, 2019). and recent studies of teaching and critical pedagogies in alternative, independent, and often artist-led initiatives.1919For example, Gudskul or The School of Improper Education, the latter an initiative of Kunci Study Forum & Collective. See Kunci Study Forum & Collective, ‘The School of Improper Education’, Critical Times, 3.3 (2020), pp. 566–78. All of these parallel inquiries — some scholarly, some curatorial, some artistic, and some genre-defying in their interdisciplinarity — engage with varied voices and plural practices from many places across Southeast Asia and beyond; in short, they are worlded.Beginning of page[p. 23]

At the time of writing, work continues on Art History’s Pedagogies in Singapore, and plans are underway for a publication. Yet — and importantly — the geographical spread and ‘worldliness’ of the readers that such a publication may or may not attract remains to be seen, since despite the worldly entanglements of Singapore’s and Southeast Asia’s art histories, for many art historians elsewhere on the planet, the region remains somehow out of view. Perhaps edited volumes such as this one may make the interplay between locality and neighbourhoods, worlding and alterity more easily recognizable.Beginning of page[p. 24]