Welding Orbits

Program

Link to live online broadcasting (Booking required)

10:00 – Opening  

Xavier Rey, Director of the Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris  

Floriane de Saint Pierre, President of Les Amis du Centre Pompidou 

10:20 – “Striking the West with the East, striking the East with the West”: A Public Asian Art Collection in France Throughout History 

Marcella Lista, Head Curator, Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris  

10:40 – South of x, East of y: Southeast Asia at the Centre Pompidou  

Yin Ker, Adjunct Curator, Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris 

11:00 – Modern and Contemporary Art Histories in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia Compared 

John Clark, Professor Emeritus, University of Sydney, Sydney 

This essay will address possible comparative perspectives in the modern and contemporary art histories of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. Parts of this comparison have been carried out earlier, but I will here look more directly at two recent bodies of work which assemble and analyse texts drawn from the different geographical and cultural regions of Northeast and Southeast Asia, concentrating for the former on China and Japan, and for the latter on Malaysia and Singapore. Are there common approaches in this material? Do where these compilations differ between their respective regions? Do they provide varying embedded cultural delineations for the shift from ‘modern’ to ‘contemporary’ art in these regions.   

11:40 – The Artist’s Monograph as Writing Histories of Southeast Asian Art 

T.K. Sabapathy, Professor, National University of Singapore, Singapore, in conversation with Yin Ker 

In this critical discussion on the artist’s monograph as writing histories of modern Southeast Asian art, art historian, critic and educator T.K. Sabapathy draws on insights from almost half a century of reading, teaching and writing on Southeast Asian artists since 1973. With art historian Yin Ker, he reflects on his writings—and monographic studies in particular—which have been intertwined with the emergence of scholarship on modern Southeast Asian art. To examine the monograph’s import in the production and transmission of contextually-informed knowledge and critical perspectives on modern Southeast Asian art, they ask: What constitute interplays of an artist’s life and works, how does one explicate this relationship, why and to what ends? Have monographs shaped knowledge of Southeast Asian modern art over time? The monographer’s undertaking is not self-evident.   

12:20 – Break 

13:30 – Leading Patrons of Asian Art by Patricia Chen, Independent Filmmaker and Writer, Singapore     

China’s Art Missionary(2022)  

Uli Sigg is a Swiss national whose fascination with China saw the establishment of the largest and most significant collections of Chinese contemporary art in the world. The partial donation of the collection to M+ museum, originally conceived to avoid the fate of censorship within mainland China, was met with a changed political order in Hong Kong during the years that followed. This is the story of a man and his three-decade long quest to preserve and share history that was never his. This film was first shot in 2012 and is still in production. 

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The 24-Hour Art Practice (2019)  

The film traces the journey of Dr Oei Hong Djien (OHD), a whimsical godfather of Indonesian art who amassed one of the most significant collections of modern Indonesian art by adopting a round-the-clock open-door policy for sellers and visitors to his home. When he was alleged with attempting to authenticate fake works in his collection, the Indonesian art world became incensed and knotted over issues of provenance, authentication and accountability. This film was withdrawn from screening at the Singapore Art Museum due to controversies that were locked in cultural politics. It has since been screened to audiences in Europe and Asia. 

15:00 – Public Legacies and Private Patronage: Collection- and Canon-Building in Chinese and Thai Art  

Uli Sigg, Patron and Collector of Chinese Contemporary Art, Mauensee, and Kittiporn Jalichandra, Patron and Collector of Thai Modern & Contemporary Art, Bangkok, in conversation with Patricia Chen 

What does it take for private individuals to assemble historically-relevant collections of art? How, and to what end? Meet two collectors, Uli Sigg from Switzerland and Kittiporn Jalichandra from Thailand, who interpret patronage and contribute to canon-building in dramatically different ways. 

Criss-crossing between time periods, art genres, and geographical localities, the panel will examine their respective missions, approaches and challenges in canon-building in the Chinese and Thai contexts. Moderated by Patricia Chen, whose research and films have revolved around patronage and private museums in Southeast Asia, the session will be especially insightful for those who are legacy-directed, and intent on building collections of art with a keen historical consciousness and purpose. 

15:40 – Bodies of Subjects: Collection, Collector, Culture   

Patrick Flores, Professor, Vargas Museum, UP Diliman, Manila 

This presentation looks at the story of the collection of Jorge Vargas, a political figure in the Philippines who served the governments of the United States and Japan, from 1935 to 1945. Apart from playing a vital role in the colonial bureaucracy, Vargas was engaged as well in the scouting movement, international sports, and the collecting of an array of things from art to ash trays. This sensitivity to the broadness of culture would shape the context of his collection. Specifically, the corpus of research called Filipiniana, or everything pertaining to the Philippines, became the matrix of the miscellaneous materials in his possession, which would be donated to the University of the Philippines, his alma mater, in the 1970s. The term “body” in this talk is sensed in various registers: the body of objects, of the collector, and of knowledge. Because embodied, these are intuited as subjects, or subjectivities, to be reflected upon and made to constitute the history of art and the theorization of the collective in the present.  

16:20 – Break 

16:40 – Round-table and Q&A 

17:30 – Closing 

Biographies  

Patricia Chen 

Patricia Chen is an independent art writer, art consultant and producer of Leading Patrons of Asian Art In Conversation series of art films. She has contributed to various international art publications including ArtAsiaPacific, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, and Financial Times on the Asian art, art market and scene. In the last decade, she has focused her research on private museums in Southeast Asia and patrons of art with strong social footprints. Her films have been screened in France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore and the Netherlands, including a solo film presentation at the Authentication in Art Congress, 2016 in the Hague.   

Prof. John Clark  

John Clark is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the University of Sydney where he taught for 21 years. He wrote Modern Asian Art in 1995 in Japan and this was published in 1998 at Craftsman House, Sydney, and University of Hawai’i Press. His Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art of the 1980s and 1990s, Sydney, Power Publications, 2010, won the Best Art Book Prize of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2011. Modernities of Chinese Art, and Modernities of Japanese Art came out from Brill in 2010 and 2013. His two-volume The Asian Modern, 1850s–1990s which examines 25 Asian artists in five generations from the 1850s to 1990s, was published by the National Gallery Singapore in March 2021. Also active as a curator, he devised and co-curated “Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, 1910–1935”, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1998, and “Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Story tellers of the Town” at 4A, Sydney in 2014. 

Prof. Patrick Flores 

Patrick Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is the Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Art After War: 1948-1969 (2015); and Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017). He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and Convener of the Forums for the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.   

Kittiporn Jalichandra 

Kittiporn Jalichandra is an art collector based in Bangkok, Thailand. He is the founder of Thai Art Collector Association (TACA) (2019). His collection of Thai modern and contemporary art dates from 1998, with a focus on the modern period. His recent contributions to the Thai art scene include the exhibition “Crossover II: The Nature of Relationships” (2022) organised in collaboration with TACA at Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, which features works from major public and private collections, and activates reflections on the role of private collections in the history of Thai art. He also supports scholarship on Thai art through the commission of research and publication projects.   

Dr Yin Ker 

Yin Ker owes her training in art history to the Sorbonne University, France where she completed her PhD on Myanmar’s foremost modernist, Bagyi Aung Soe, in 2013. From 2014 to 2021, she was Assistant Professor at Nalanda University, India followed by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she worked with students on Buddhist and Southeast Asian art at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2010, she co-curated the first major exhibition of contemporary art from Myanmar held overseas, “plAy: Art from Myanmar Today“, supported by the Osage Art Foundation; in 2021, prior to joining the Centre Pompidou - Musée national d'art moderne as Adjunct Curator for Southeast Asia, she co-curated the first retrospective exhibition of Bagyi Aung Soe at the museum.  

Dr Marcella Lista  

Marcella Lista is an art historian and head curator of the New Media collection at the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou. She holds a PhD from the University of Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne and has taught in several universities, such as Paris 1, Paris 10-Nanterre and Limoges. She was in charge of contemporary art programming at the Auditorium du Louvre, then joined the Centre Pompidou in 2016, where she recently curated “Hito Steyerl, I Will Survive. Physical and Virtual Spaces” (with Florian Ebner, 2021), “Martha Wilson in Halifax, 1972-1974” (2021) and “Hassan Khan. Blind Ambition” (2022). In 2019, she curated the exhibitions and scientific programme for the opening of the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum in Shanghai. Since then, she has been the reference curator of the Asia Pacific collection. Her exhibition "Ma Desheng" will open on 19 October 2022 within the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne.   

Dr Hélène Njoto 

Hélène Njoto is the representative of EFEO Jakarta in Indonesia. Specialised in the history of art and architecture of Java in the modern period, she has also published on the Indonesian art market and history of cultural heritage. She graduated from the Sorbonne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris), and wrote her PhD in history and civilisations (EHESS, 2014). She conducted three historical studies on Indonesian institutions, including one on cultural heritage, "The Invention of Indonesian Heritage" (IRASEC, 2016), and one on the Indonesian art market "Master Dealers of Indonesian Painting " (Archipel, 2006). In 2019, she coordinated with Dr Terence Chong a comparative study on Southeast Asian art collectors sponsored by the National Arts Council of Singapore. She currently coordinates a research project with the Indonesian National Archaeology Research Center (now BRIN) on the early Islamic art of Java (15th–18th century). She is also a member of the Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CASE UMR 8170, CNRS/EHESS).     

T.K. Sabapathy 

T.K. Sabapathy is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture in the National University of Singapore, where he has been teaching the histories of art since 1981. For close to five decades, he has been devoted to the research, documentation and support of contemporary visual arts in Singapore and Malaysia. His art historical methods, critical documentation, deep dialogue with artists and detailed explication of their works have helped define Singapore and Malaysian art. He has curated exhibitions and published extensively on art and artists, laying foundations for examining the modern in the region of Southeast Asia, historically. Sabapathy has also written countless articles, books, catalogues and artist monographs, making an invaluable contribution to the study of art in Southeast Asia.  

Uli Sigg  

Uli Sigg did a PhD in Law, then as a journalist wrote for various Swiss newspapers and magazines. In 1980, working for an industrial enterprise, he established the first Joint Venture between China and the outside world. In 1995, the Swiss federal government appointed him ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia. Upon his return to Switzerland, he again assumed the chairmanship or board membership of several multinational companies. As an art collector, Uli Sigg formed the most significant collection of contemporary Chinese art in the world, with more than 2,500 works. In 2012, he donated 1,450 of these works and sold 50 of them to M+ Museum for Visual Arts in Hong Kong. He also established in 1997 the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) for Chinese contemporary artists living in Greater China, and the CCAA Art Critic Award, with the former having been transformed into the SIGG PRIZE, hosted by the M+ Museum. He is a member of the M+ Museum Board, the International Council of New York Modern Art Museum MOMA and the International Advisory Council of Tate Gallery, London.