Slade, London, Asia: Intersections of Decolonial Modernism

When the Slade School of Fine Art was established in 1871 within University College, London, it joined an institution that was the first university in England to admit students from around the world, regardless of race or religion, and thus became an important site for the education of ambitious students from the colonized world.

Ming Tiampo discusses how artists from Asia came to the Slade, confronted their new environment, and endeavoured to co-constitute worlds alongside their professors and fellow students. Encountering a faculty focussed on observational realism rather than style, an art historical curriculum that was Eurocentric but not formalist, an ambient environment of postwar modernism, London’s excellent collections of global art, and classmates from other parts of the world, these students critically engaged with a conjunctural problem space that was constituted historically, politically, and artistically.

Through an analysis that connects the histories of artists from several decolonizing contexts at their points of intersection with the Slade, this lecture argues for an understanding of decolonial modernism as a transversal phenomenon rather than as separate, disconnected, ‘multiple modernisms.’ The lecture addresses three generations of artists: Firstly, postcolonial nation builders such as Zainul Abedin (East Pakistan/Bangladesh), Affandi (Indonesia), Shakir Ali (Pakistan), K.G. Subramanyan (India) and Jamila Zaidi (Pakistan); Secondly, artists focussed on the formal articulation of decolonial modernism such as Kim Lim (Singapore/UK), Anwar Jalal Shemza (Pakistan/UK), Tseng Yu (China/Hong Kong) and Wendy Yeo (Hong Kong); Thirdly, artists for whom student movements and revolution took on distinctly decolonial perspectives such as Vivan Sundaram (India), Chila Kumari Burman (UK), and Bhajan Hunjan (India/Kenya/UK).

This talk is part of a series of programmes for London, Asia, a collaboration between Asia Art Archive and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and builds on Tiampo’s research as the second holder of the London, Asia Research Award. Tiampo’s project also informs the ‘Pedagogy and Learning’ stream of the forthcoming conference/events London, Asia, Art, Worlds which she is co-convening with Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner.

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Banner image credit: Vivan Sundaram, South Africa, 1968. Collection of the Artist