Slade, London, Asia

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.