Thiagarajan Kanaga Sabapathy (born 1938), better known as T.K. Sabapathy, is a Singaporean art historian, curator, and critic. Sabapathy has written, researched, documented, and supported contemporary visual art in Singapore and Malaysia for four decades. He has held positions at the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological Institution, and National Institute of Education as a lecturer of art history. Sabapathy further established and headed pioneering art research facilities in Singapore, such as the Contemporary Asian Art Centre (2001–2004) and subsequently, Asia Contemporary (2015–).
Sabapathy has written a large number of articles, books, catalogues, and artist monographs, making significant contributions to the study of art in Southeast Asia, also providing support to curatorial work at art institutions and major exhibitions.
Education and personal life
Sabapathy was born in 1938 in Singapore. Then, the arts scene in British Malaya was still nascent, with the visual arts receiving little interest or investment from colonial rulers. 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. From 1969 to 1970, he also taught Southeast Asian sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art, and harboured thoughts of returning to Singapore to teach art history. While in London in 1970, however, Sabapathy would meet the vice chancellor of the University of Singapore, the late politician Toh Chin Chye, who dismissed the university’s art history programme as “unproductive” and told Sabapathy of his intention to close the facility.
The same year in 1970, Sabapathy would be offered the position of art history lecturer at the newly-founded Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, which had Malaysia’s first Fine Arts degree programme. From 1971, Sabapathy relocated to Penang to teach for almost 10 years, where he delved into the research of the modern in Malaysian art and created course materials, catalogues, biographies and other texts where there were previously none. During this period, he laid foundations for the further study of modern Malayan art, and his work brought him close to the Singapore art community, given Malaysia and Singapore's long shared history as British Malaya leading in an overlap in the art of both countries. He also established a close friendship with fellow art writer and educator, the late Redza Piyadasa, with whom he co-curated exhibitions and collaborated on numerous publications. This would include their famous 1979 study of Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts artists, in which they became the first to identify and define the now well-known Nanyang style of painting. 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.