Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez - East and Southeast Asian Art of the mid-20th c.

Lesson part of the course Decolonised History of Art: Global Narratives from 1900 to the Present. Click here for the programme and the entire course.

This session discusses how East and Southeast Asian artists worked through the intertwined cultural, political, and institutional changes that shaped the region from the early 20th century into WWII. It examines how cross-regional encounters, shifting artistic hierarchies, and anxieties about influence or perceived belatedness informed both image-making and the evolving dynamics of the art world. Through the practices of Fang Junbi, Pan Yuliang, Kuroda Seiki, Nguyen Gia Tri, Georgette Chen, and Nena Saguil, among others, the session highlights how gender and mobility shape access to training, exposure to different artistic languages, and the capacity to move between local and transnational networks. By tracing these entanglements and restructurings, the discussion shows how artists in this period negotiated broader forces of change while formulating new visual strategies rooted in their specific cultural and historical conditions.

Eileen Legaspi Ramirez is an art historian, curator, educator, and writer. Now Associate Professors at the University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Art Studies. His research focuses on art as a means of collective memory, forms of historiographical criticism from below, and the reactivation of “contested” spaces. She presently serves as editorial collective member of the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, and as Research Advisory Committee member of The Flow of History collaborative project.