Prof. Emeritus John Clark
John Clark is Emeritus Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney, the author of five books, and editor or co-editor of another five. His Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai art of the 1980s and 1990s (2010) won the Best Art Book Prize of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2011. His most recent book is Modernities of Japanese Art (2013), and he is currently working on a two-volume study, The Asian Modern, 1850s–1990s. 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. In 2014 he has co-curated an exhibition of the work of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook in Sydney and Canberra.
Prof. Patrick Flores
Patrick D. 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 Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999, and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010) and a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). He convened in 2013 on behalf of the Clark Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines, the conference ‘Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia’ in Manila. He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014.
Prof. Nikos Papastergiadis
Nikos Papastergiadis is Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, and Professor at the School of Culture and Communication, at the University of Melbourne. He studied at the University of Melbourne and University of Cambridge. Prior to returning to the University of Melbourne he was a lecturer at the University of Manchester. Throughout his career, Nikos has provided strategic consultancies for government agencies on issues relating to cultural identity and worked on collaborative projects with artists and theorists of international repute, such as John Berger, Jimmie Durham and Sonya Boyce. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. His sole authored publications include Modernity as Exile (1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Metaphor and Tension (2004) Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012), Ambient Perspectives (2013) as well as being the editor of over 10 collections, author of numerous essays which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwanju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki, and Documenta 13. He is Chair of the International Advisory Board for the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
Assoc. Prof. T. K. Sabapathy
T. K. Sabapathy is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture in the National University of Singapore, and a part-time lecturer in the School of Art, Design and Media of the Nanyang Technological University where he teaches the history of art. He is Singapore’s foremost art historian, curator and critic. For four decades, he has devoted his life to the research, documentation and support of contemporary visual arts in Singapore and Malaysia. Sabapathy has also written countless articles, books, catalogues and artist monographs, making an invaluable contribution to the study of art in Southeast Asia, and is well respected for his scholarship and beloved for his tireless advocacy of art and artists of Singapore and Malaysia.
Dr Simon Soon
Simon Soon is a researcher and senior lecturer in Southeast Asian art history at the Visual Art Department of the Cultural Centre, University of Malaya. He completed his Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Sydney under an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship. His thesis ‘What is Left of Art?’ investigates the intersection between left-leaning political art movements and modern urban formations in Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines from 1950s–1970s. His broader areas of interest include comparative modernities in art, spatial-visual practices, history of photography and art historiography. He has written on various topics related to 20th-century art across Asia and occasionally curates exhibitions, most recently Love Me in My Batik: Modern Batik Art from Malaysia and Beyond. Together with Malaysia Design Archive, he is working on a crowd-sourced Jawi to Romanised script transliteration project of writings on art in the Malay language from the 1950s – 1960s. He is also co-editor of Narratives of Malaysian Art Vol. 4. From 2015–16, he is a participant in the Power Institute’s ‘Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art’, funded by Getty Foundation’s ‘Connecting Art Histories’ initiative.
Prof. Nora Taylor
Nora A. Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (2004 and 2009), as well as numerous articles on Modern and Contemporary Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Art. She is also co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (2012). She has curated Changing Identity: Recent Work by Women Artists from Vietnam with International Arts and Artists, 2007–2009, as well as Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 New Work by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Arizona State University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently working on a project about the history of performance art in Vietnam, Singapore and Burma.
Prof. Ashley Thompson
Ashley Thompson is Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is a specialist in Southeast Asian cultural histories, with particular expertise on Cambodia. Her work on classical and pre-modern arts and literatures is complemented by work on contemporary Cambodian arts. Thompson has extensive experience in teaching and institutional development in Southeast Asia, the US and Europe. She is co-founder and editor (with Ang Choulean) of Udaya, a tri-lingual journal of Khmer Studies. Her publications include Angkor: A Manual for the Past, Present and Future (with E. Prenowitz and Ang Choulean, 2006); Calling the Souls: A Cambodian Ritual Text (2005); and Dance in Cambodia (with T. Shapiro-Phim, 1999). In 2010 she was named Directeur de Programme at the Collège international de philosophie, Paris, for a six-year research and teaching project entitled ‘On the Subject of the Non-Self’. Her long-term project, developed with University of Leeds Cultural Studies colleague Eric Prenowitz, to stage a Khmer language production of Hélène Cixous’ epic ‘Cambodia’ play, The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, came to a first stage of completion in 2013. The full 8-hour production, by a 32-member Cambodian troupe from Phare Ponleu Selpak (Battambang) directed by Georges Bigot and Delphine Cottu under the aegis of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, Paris, met with resounding success on a European tour highlighted by a 3-week sell-out at the Théâtre du Soleil as part of the Festival d’Automne à Paris. Ashley Thompson served as Historical and Linguistic Director of the production. Sihanouk, Archives Inachevées
Dr Clare Veal
Clare Veal undertakes research on Southeast Asian photography, art and visual culture, with a particular focus on Thailand; until early 2021, she was a lecturer in the MA Asian Art Histories program at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She received her PhD from the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney for her thesis entitled, ‘Thainess Framed: Photography and Thai Identity, 1946-2010.’ Clare was the sub-editor for Asian Art for the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism (2016) and has contributed papers to a number of publications, including Journal of Aesthetics and Culture and Trans-Asia Photography Review. From 2015-16, Clare was a participant in the Power Institute’s ‘Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of South East Asian Art’ research program, funded by the Getty Foundation. In 2017 she was co-convener of the symposium Gender and Southeast Asian Art History, held at the University of Sydney.