T.K. Sabapathy

Sabapathy was born in 1938 in Singapore. Visual art would predominantly be pushed forward by local and migrant artists whose art practices drew upon Western watercolor and oil painting, as well as Chinese ink traditions, while art education in Singapore then and in the following decades was predominantly confined to studio-based studies. Sabapathy is an alumnus of the Raffles Institution, where he was also a sports champion. After graduating, he enrolled in the Singapore-based University of Malaya in 1958 with history as his major. With a curiosity in art, Sabapathy took up an elective two-year undergraduate programme on the history of art, which the Faculty of Arts had only recently begun offering in the 1950s. From 1958 to 1960, Sabapathy would study art history from the British art historian, Michael Sullivan, an Asian art scholar and the curator of the first University of Malaya Art Museum who was committed to forming a representative collection of Malayan art. Though Sullivan would leave the university and Singapore in 1960, Sabapathy would be greatly inspired by Sullivan's cause, and the two would remain in touch. In August 1962, with encouragement from Sullivan and K.G. Tregonning, Sabapathy's professor in history, he moved to San Francisco, California, enrolling in graduate studies in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1962 to 1965, Sabapathy would study European and Asian art, the closest he could get to the study of Southeast Asian art. After graduating in 1965, Sabapathy left California for London. There, he studied Southeast Asian Art as a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, from 1966 to 1969. == Career ==

Early teaching and writing career While still a research fellow at SOAS, Sabapathy would teach Asian art three days a week at the Farnham School of Art in Surrey. In 1983, he and Piyasada, under the aegis of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, an agency of the Ministry of Education Malaysia, co-authored Modern Artists of Malaysia, one of the earliest surveys on Modern art and artists in Malaysia. In 1973, three years after the meeting in London with Toh, the art history programme and university museum set up by Sullivan and expanded by his successor William Willetts was shut down. Writing about art and teaching art history in Singapore In 1980, after his contract with the Universiti Sains Malaysia ended, Sabapathy returned to Singapore with his wife and child. In 1996, the young curatorial team of the newly opened Singapore Art Museum (SAM) received pivotal support from Sabapathy as an art historian and scholar during the curating of the inaugural exhibition, Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art. Recent work and publications In 2015, at the exhibition 5 Stars: Art Reflects on Peace, Justice, Equality, Democracy and Progress at SAM, Sabapathy's work was presented alongside that of artists Ho Tzu Nyen, Matthew Ngui, Suzann Victor, and Zulkifle Mahmod. Tracing the chronology of Sabapathy's critical writings across four decades, the presentation drew on his personal collection of books and his authored texts, presenting them in an 'artifactual' manner. Sabapathy was also co-chair and Curatorial Advisor of the Singapore Biennale 2013 and 2016, and is the Curatorial Advisor to SAM. In 2018, an anthology of Sabapathy's writings, Writing the Modern: Selected Texts on Art & Art History in Singapore, Malaysia & Southeast Asia 1973–2015, was published. == Selected publications ==

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