Book Launch & Panel Discussion - The East Asian Economic "Miracle", Art Exhibitions and Popular Culture, 1979-2008

C. J. W.-L. Wee's latest book A Regional Contemporary: Art Exhibitions, Popular Culture, Asia (MIT Press, 2025) offers the first critical account of the enormous upsurge in cultural expression across Asian countries from 1979-2008, and the new possibilities it presented for the aesthetic and cultural re-imagining of a "unified" contemporary Asia

To mark the launch of Wee's book, this specially convened panel, chaired by Peter Schoppert (Director, NUS Press), examines the 1990s, in particular, as a productive era of cultural production. The panel is composed of Ahmad Mashadi (Head of NUS Museum), T. K. Sabapathy (Art Historian and Curator) and Patrick Flores (Chief Curator, National Gallery Singapore).

A Regional Contemporary: Art Exhibitions, Popular Culture, Asia.

Biennial-style art exhibitions. New discourses in modern and contemporary art. The circulation of increasingly border-crossing popular culture such as J-Pop and K-Pop. A Regional Contemporary documents the enormous upsurge in cultural expression from 1979 to 2008. with the 1990s as the focal point, and works through the possibilities then for the aesthetic-cultural re-thinking of a "unified" contemporary Asia. The so-called Fast Asian miracle projected a shared contemporary regional identity onto Northeast and Southeast Asia. The cultural explosion enabled by expanded capitalist energies facilitated engagements with the region's postcolonial and Cold War-era nationalisms. This book investigates the resulting implications.

About the Author, Moderator & Panellists

C. J. Wee Wan-ling is Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University. He has held Visiting Fellowships at (among other institutions) Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India and the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. Wee is the author of The Asian Modern: Culture. Capitalist Development, Singapore and the editor of The Complete Works of Kuo Pao Kun, vol. 4: Plays in English.

Peter Schoppert has contributed to Singapore's art and publishing scene for three decades. He has written for publications such as Far Eastern Economic Review. Art Asia Pacific, and Inter-Asian Cultural Studies. Schoppert's involvement includes founding PublicArt.S, chairing Singapore's Public Art Appraisal Committee, and serving on The Substation's board. He co-edited Writing the Modern, a collection of T.K. Sabapathy's seminal texts. He is currently Director of NUS Press, promoting Southeast Asian art and culture through the journal Southeast of Now and related publications.

Ahmad Mashadi is Head of the National University of Singapore Museum. His curated exhibitions include Seni: Art and the Contemporary (2004), the Singapore participation for the São Paolo Biennial (2004) featuring Ho Tzu Nyen, Telah Terbit (Out Now) (2006), which explored the emergence of contemporary practices in Southeast Asia during the 1970s, and Picturing Relations: Simryn Gill and Tino Diumini (2007).

Adjunct Associate Professor (NUS) T.K. Sabapathy has dedicated four decades to teaching, researching, documenting, and supporting contemporary visual arts in Singapore and Malaysia. He founded and led Singapore's first art research centers, the Contemporary Asian Art Centre and Asia Contemporary. Through numerous articles, books, catalogues. and artist monographs, he has made an invaluable impact on Southeast Asian art studies and is respected for his scholarship and advocacy for artists in the region.

Patrick Flores is Chief Curator at National Gallery Singapore. He is concurrently Professor of Art History and Criticism at the Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003. He was the curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum. He curated the Philippine Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and was curator of the exhibition Impossible Dreams, an event by Taiwan at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.