Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversations About Art follows an earlier project Between Here and Nanyang: Marco Hsu’s Brief History of Malayan Art (2013 – 2016) and continues to proceed with ways in which the University’s permanent collection may be read in relation to writings on art and cultural history. It examines lines of inquiries that are predicated by various practices, institution-making, scholarship and politics. As a backdrop to the evolving discussion on Malayan culture which Hsu was part of, the exhibition (re)introduces writings by T.K. Sabapathy and S. Rajaratnam, the former on a construction of Southeast Asian historiography and its implications on the project of art history, and the latter in the 1950s as a call for a cultural history that forms part of a shaping of community and nation. These frames provide ways to link or contrast objects whose collecting histories may be associated with Malaya’s period of formation, and the evolving project of art history.

Image: Gallery impression of Radio Malaya Abridged Conversations about Art, 2016. Photo by Geraldine Kang for NUS Museum

Read More