PMC and Asia Art Archive announce the recipient of the second London, Asia Research Award

The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Asia Art Archive are delighted to announce the grantee of the second research award under the collaborative London, Asia project.

Ming Tiampo is a Full Professor in Art History, co-Director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, and Director of the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. Her research focuses on transnational networks and artistic production in the postwar period, with a theoretical commitment to rethinking discourses of global modernism.

Tiampo will be conducting research on how the Slade School of Fine Art, which welcomed students from all over the world since its inception in 1871, functioned as a crucible of encounter and a site for articulating Global Asias. Tiampo’s research will determine which students shared classrooms, investigate the lectures that they attended, and theorize the pedagogical implications of their lectures. One case study revolves around the investigation of which students attended E.H. Gombrich’s lectures, and the Other Stor(ies) of Art that might be told if the intellectual lives of artists from Asia and the Asian Diaspora who took his classes, such as Anwar Jalal Shemza and K.G. Subramanyan, are researched in depth. Oral history interviews and archival research will be conducted on the students in question, in order to create a larger picture of the role that the Slade played in their artistic careers, paying particular attention to the ways in which peer groups created discursive cultures for themselves in that environment.

Tiampo will be presenting her research findings in London in late 2018, and in Hong Kong in 2019.

The London, Asia Research Award

London, Asia posits London as a key, yet under-explored, site in the construction of art historical narratives in and of Asia, and examines the city’s influence through exhibitions, patronage, art writing, and art education. London, Asia also reflects on how the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with, and challenges, existing histories of British art.

The 2018 edition of the London, Asia Research Award, which focuses on researching the multilayered and multitemporal histories of art schools, is key to shaping a more nuanced understanding of the cultural entanglements between London and Asia across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Art schools are nodes within complex webs of cultural connections. Through the designing of syllabi and teaching practices, the bringing together of students and teaching staff, as well as informal activities outside class time, art schools are also sites where relationships with traditions and colonial histories are contested, pushed, and reinvented. In thinking about the role art schools have played, we can cut across different time periods and bring together a range of people, objects, materials, and approaches.

Information on the next open call for London, Asia Research Grant will be released in early 2019.

Image: Gulam Mohammad Sheikh at Royal College of Art Diploma exhibition, 1966. Courtesy of Gulam Mohammad Sheikh.