 So we've got, the numbers have gone up and we have actually about 400 people signed up for the event today. So it might be good to get started given that we're relatively short on time. There's a lot to cover and discuss. So I would like to say on behalf of the Poor Melling Centre, good afternoon to all of you. I'm Anna Reid and I'm Head of Research at the Poor Melling Centre. I'm delighted to welcome you to this event titled Stade London Asia, Intersections of Decolonial Modernism. It is of course a virtual event, an autumn programme of webinars and podcasts at the PMC this autumn at a time of second lockdown in the UK such that the Poor Melling Centre itself is claimed. The upsides to that are obviously that we can have a very big and international audience for the event today, which is exciting and a great upside. And this talk is part of a series of programmes for London Asia, a collaboration between Asia Art Archive and the Poor Melling Centre. Through three research strands, exhibitions, institutions and art schools, the London Asia Research Project is working towards a more expanded and diverse narrative of British art. It posits London as a key yet underexplored site in which construction of art historical narratives in the construction of historical narratives in Asia and it reflects on the ways in which they're growing modern and contemporary. As a research project, London Asia is led by Sarah Turner, Deputy Director for Research at the PMC and Hamad Nassar, Senior Research Fellow at the PMC. And I would like to welcome Hamad as our Chair today. Hamad is a London-based curator, researcher and strategic advisor. And he's also Principal Research Fellow at the University of Arts London and Co-curator of British Arts in Artsha Nine and alternative to Hamad now and to introduce our esteemed speaker. Well, thank you, Anna, for the introduction and thank you everyone for joining in. We have just crossed 200, which as every cricketer amongst you will know, is something that needs to be applauded. So, welcome all. Before I sort of jump in and introduce me, as Chair for today, I need to just run through some quick housekeeping, which I'm sure as experienced Zoomsters, we're all very used to. Firstly, just to remind you that you are now all mute. You've been turned mute. But we want to encourage you to use the question and answer box throughout the course of Ming's talk, so that we can accumulate questions for her to address as soon as she finishes. The lecture will be for 45 minutes. And we have at least 15 minutes allocated for Q&A. And of course, you can write in your questions, but we will also encourage you to raise your hand. Because in Zoom times, it's always good to hear a human voice every now and then. The session will be recorded, but we encourage you not to take any photos. And I'm sure I don't need to say this, but to remind you that any offensive behavior will not be tolerated and attendees will be removed from the webinar. Before starting to introduce Ming, I actually wanted to anchor it in the London Asia project, which Anna described and which Sarah and I lead here at the Paul Mellon Center. And last year when we sort of did a special issue of British art studies, we wrote a little sort of four point manifesto. We're not going to read everything out, but just just to give you a few phrases. One was to experiment with approaches and methodologies for researching writing about connections encounters and differences. The second was to socialize a field of inquiry. The third was to create art histories which are not siloed into neat categories, but can exceed boundaries. And the fourth point was to build a project that is not self-contained, but can infect, and this was used in more innocent pre-COVID times, can infect other projects and researchers working across art produced by artists from Britain, from Asia, and their diasporas. And I cannot think of a person who most, you know, better embodies that spirit of the manifesto than Ming Ciampo. It's been a real pleasure to have her with her collegiality, generosity, and sense of fun to think alongside us in the London Asia project. You'll hear about her research project on Slade London Asia right now, but even beyond that, she has been co-convening the convening sort of seminar conference murmuration that will take place next summer. And we really have enjoyed that journey and look forward to continue working with her. This particular talk is a continuation of our collaboration with Asia Archive, with whom the London Asia project was first established, and Ming's research and lecture is made possible by her winning the second research award. And I'm not going to describe what that award was about because that's her lecture, but the last thing I'll do is just give you a little introduction to Ming. I'm sure you have access to her bio on the web page. But Ming is a professor of art history and co-director of the Center for Transnational Culture and Analysis at Colton University. Her interest in trans-cultural models and histories, I'm sure we are going to be benefiting from her lecture on. And in particular, things to mention are her work on Gutai, where her book Gutai Decentering Modernism and her co-curated exhibition at the Guggenheim Gutai Spended Playground were both award-winning initiatives. She's currently working on not one, not two, but three book projects that all sort of deal with issues of the transnational. And alongside the project that she's working with us here at London Asia, she's an associate member of ICI Berlin, a member of the Hyundai Tate Research Center's transnational advisory board, and a founding member of Trace, the transnational and trans-cultural arts and culture exchange network. With that, I'll pass over to you, Ming, really looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you, Hamad. Thank you, Anna. It's an absolute honor to deliver this lecture as the second London Asia Fellow, and I would like to thank, in particular, the Paul Mellon Center for British Art and also Asia Art Archive for having supported this fellowship. But in particular, I really have to express my delight and gratitude to Hamad and Sarah for bringing me into the London Asia project, which has been an absolute pleasure to be a part of, and I look forward to how this all develops in the future. So thank you to Sarah, to Hamad, and also to John Tain from Asia Art Archive. Thank you. I will begin by sharing my screen. Please tell me if you aren't able to see my slides. Slade London Asia, intersections of decolonial modernism. When the Slade School of Fine Art was established in 1871 within the University College of London, it joined an abolitionist institution that was quite self-consciously the first secular institution in England, which admitted students from around the world, regardless of race or religion. As a result of its reformist politics and admissions policies, UCL and by extension the Slade became an important site for the education of ambitious students from the colonized world. It was supported by the governments of their newly independent nations, by Commonwealth scholarships, British Council scholarships, foundations, private companies, or by their own private means. Between 1945 and 1981, hundreds of students from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America attended the Slade. Without said the Slade, they confronted their new environment and endeavored to co-constitute worlds alongside their professors and fellow students. Encountering a faculty focused on observational realism rather than style, an art historical curriculum that was Eurocentric but not formalist, an ambient environment of postwar modernism, London's excellent collections of global art, and classmates from other parts of the world. These students critically engaged with a conjunctural problem space that was constituted historically, politically, and artistically. In this lecture, I will be mapping out how three generations of artists from Asia, or with ties to Asia, negotiated their experiences at the Slade, and the complexities of their contrapuntal world making. In order to give a sense of scale, I will be introducing more individuals than I will have time to discuss, unfortunately. Artists focused on decolonizing art education were for the most part students who were mid career when they went to the Slade with a remarkable sense of purpose. These students, many already early career professionals, were generally funded by their governments to assist in the process of nation building by learning artistic and pedagogical techniques at the Slade that they then transformed and adapted when they returned to build and develop art schools in their countries of origin. The second group, which obviously also includes many of the artists in the first group, were artists focused on the formal articulation of decolonial modernism. They arrived in the late 1950s and stayed for longer. Some of them, like Kim Lim and Shemza, settled permanently in the UK. Of the artists that I will be discussing today, Subramanian, Lim, Shemza, and Tseng, all of them attended lectures by Ernst Gombrich, who I argue provided them with the open epistemological tools of analysis to work through their own schemas and corrections with respect to the history of modernism. The third group came to the Slade between 1965 and 1981. They were artists for whom student movements and revolution took on distinctly decolonial perspectives against the backdrop of student demonstrations, the anti-apartheid movement, and racial discord. The conjecture in this period of Slade interdisciplinarity, its understanding of art as research, the freedom that students had to determine their own paths and historical events, created a cohort and loose network of Slade alumni that created politically engaged and activist work with decolonial perspectives that build solidarities across communities. By focusing on the Slade School of Fine Art, this project adopts methodologies from the emerging field of global micro history that bring together the questions of global history with the methodologies of micro history, whose studies will often focus on an event, a community, a city block, or a school, allowing for the writing of more precise histories of the global through the smaller scales of transnational and transcultural ecosystems. In so doing, this global micro history both traces the condensed context of a shared and evolving cultural infrastructure at the Slade, and also scopes the trajectories of these students after the Slade in order to identify transversal articulations of decolonial modernism through these three generations. In order to theorize decolonial modernism as a phenomenon that traversed multiple national contexts rather than a separate disconnected multiple modernisms, I am introducing the notion of transversals, connecting lines that in Euclidean geometry equate, create equal angles at their points of intersection with parallel lines on the same plane. So for example in this diagram, angles one and five or three and seven are congruent or identical. This methodology traces the histories of artists from multiple decolonizing contexts at corresponding points of intersection in order to draw transversals, geographical, such as London, institutional, such as Slade, pedagogical such as the life room, Ernst Gombrich or complimentary studies, historical, such as decolonization racial tensions in the black art movement, and aesthetic, such as modernism. That reveals shared conceptual structures and also act as points of connection and relationality. This transversal analysis allows us to understand the formulation of a world of decolonial modernism historically from its earliest moments, and thus to write a transnational history of Solidarity's from decolonization to the black arts movement. The goal of this transversal analysis is threefold. Firstly, to arrive at a theory of decolonial modernism that refutes existing narratives about the dissemination of knowledge and culture from center to periphery, like the diagram I'm showing you on the left. Secondly, it argues for the transnationality, transculturality and entanglement of both British and Asian art histories. And thirdly, it proposes conceptual structures for understanding the visual languages of decolonization, transversally and globally. Let's begin by examining our most important transversal, the Slade School of Fine Art. From the beginning, the Slade distinguished itself from other art schools through its location within a university and its concomitant understanding of art practice as a liberal arts subject, situated within an intellectual enterprise. Its art practice curriculum was based on the Beaux-Arts model until William Coldstream became Slade principal in 1949, following a strict progression from drawing from antique plaster casts to drawing in the life room before painting and sculpture could be taken to the junior levels. Coldstream's arrival brought many changes, including a reorientation of the school's focus away from the Beaux-Arts model, and a move towards methods of inquiry rather than idealized Western aesthetics, both on the level of pedagogy in the studio, and also with respect to the teaching of art history. Coldstream was a painter of the Euston Road School, which sought to create works accessible to a larger public through observational realism and engagement with social issues. For Coldstream, the goal was not to continue in the academic tradition of the Beaux-Arts, nor to transmit Euston Road School painting as a technique, or to follow current trends, but rather to create an environment where representation and form was aligned with research and society rather than with style. Under Coldstream, who led the school from 1949 to 1975, four important reforms were introduced that fostered intellectualism, inquiry, and interdisciplinarity in their students. With the intention of nurturing a greater diversity of styles. Coldstream commented in 1965, quote, a modern art school is run on the understanding that all sorts of ideas and approaches good of their kind have to be encouraged. In a context where British art was also finding its way, these reforms contributed to a pedagogical environment where the relationship between art practice and the history of European art was purposefully misaligned, pivoting students gently away from the history of continental European art as the model for all art making. Firstly, although the art curriculum continued to be based upon drawing and the life room, drawing from the antique was dropped as a prerequisite to the life room, and plants were introduced to the space, encouraging direct observation. As the slave perspective of 1951 to 1952 declared students were quote, expected to inquire into the principles of drawing and to use their own vision, rather than to accept without question, academic convention. The result, as Emma chamber chambers argues, was that quote, the antique studio was transformed from an environment of revered classical prototypes, which inculcated students in the academic tradition to a state is cited to a site for observational practice. Changes were made to the classes in anatomy and perspective, which further emphasize the methodological shift in life room pedagogy. As coldstream stated, quote, Mr. Bamakot has not to confine his teaching to a description of the superficial form of the human body, but has also used the nature of form taken by living things in general. And that'll Smith has worked towards a wider approach and is successfully attempting to teach, not only the conventional perspective of art schools, but something of the nature of vision. Thirdly, despite coldstream suspicion of academic models in art practice, he emphasized the importance of art history as an academic foundation for students at the slave, increasing the art history requirements for the diploma, explaining that quote, the presence of art historians has enabled the student to understand relationships between his own activities and the culture within which he lives. Slade students after coldstream were thus not taught to revere an idealized past, but to understand how to critically situate their work within a Western history of art. Formal application procedures for overseas students appeared in the slave calendar for the first time in 1950, and once they arrived, they were mentored by William Townsend. A visa application on behalf of Chinese student, saying you gives us an insight into the slaves motives for recruiting overseas students, despite the high competition for a limited number of posts. In it, to Garth and Jenkins Slade Secretary writes quote, it is a very great advantage to us and to all working at the school to have a number of overseas students here to instill a new outlook and possibly to bring unusual styles of work to the school. By basing practice based classes on observational realism rather than academic models, and by separating art practice from art history. The Slade under coldstream encouraged a relationship to art history that was not emulative for art practitioners, but critical. Thus, although the slave curriculum was not adjusted to specifically accommodate overseas students. And although it was by no means global. After William Coldstream became Slade principle in 1949, the school became an environment that, although still entrenched in Eurocentric epistemologies of its time, provided a reformist framework for education that encouraged critical engagement and was structurally open to interpretation for students coming from the colonized decolonizing or formalized formally colonized worlds. The artistic perspectives that they brought, combined with the technical and artists to historical tools that they learned, as well as opportunities to meet other overseas artists to travel, and to access global museum collections, transforming the Slade into a transversal of decolonial modernism. London art circles have recently had the opportunity of admiring the works of two remarkable artists, each the most striking and representative in his country begins in 1952 article on Bangladesh she artist signal Aberdeen and Indonesian artist a funding. The two artists were both visitors to the Slade in 1952 with Aberdeen having arrived the year before in 1951 for a full year of study. The article notes that the two artists were friends and describes the quote impact of their work on London's art world. As most impressive in the case of a funding and in the case of Aberdeen of having taken London by storm. This slightly breathless article captures the excitement that overseas artists brought to London, and in particular to the Slade, following independence and decolonization in Asia. At a time when European and American art was heading towards pure abstraction British art was as James Hyman argues looking for alternative models of realism. Both of these artists offered compelling and urgent visions of realism in their work of Aberdeen. Eric Newton wrote that his famine series quote are brilliant drawing done at white heat under the immediate spur of a visible tragedy. Strikingly, John Berger championed a fondly as a painter of genius, praising his exhibition as quote the most important exhibition seen in London since the 1945 Picasso show. In particular, he commented on the foundation profound sense of active solidarity, which the critics saw as a necessary repost to art in the West where quote aesthetics have triumphed over vitality. We in Europe will finally have to learn from that attitude he wrote, giving us a tantalizing period I insight into the impact that our visitors whose work was marked by political urgency may have had on their British hosts. A funding and Aberdeen brought their complimentary visions to the Slade, where they learned from each other and from their hosts. Additionally, other artists came from around the world and from across Asia in the 1950s to study at the Slade and to prepare for future careers as arts administrators educators and nation builders. Here I'm showing you a selection of key figures, most of whom I regrettably will not be able to discuss today. At the Slade, these nation builders carefully studied methods, pedagogies and practices, as well as exchanging views and strategies with colleagues that they encountered from other newly independent and decolonizing nations. For example, Aberdeen and a fondly must have discussed their visions for building art schools, as they both went to the Slade with the same intentions. According to William Townsend's diary, the fondly is reported to have described as ideal art school as quote, a center, physically modest with students working most of the time in the native. Perhaps influenced by his time at Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan in India. This would have provided Aberdeen with a significant counterpoint to his experiments at the Slade, and a reportant reminder of the decolonial models provided by Shantiniketan and the Bengal School. Here, refracted through the eyes of an Indonesian colleague and fellow traveler. Zainal Aberdeen's one year study at the Slade was particularly well documented due to the fact that he was already the principal of the Government Institute of Arts Dhaka in East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971. Inspiring this Commonwealth Today article. We are now observing classes in the antique room, the life room, learning in the printmaking studio, but we also see his artworks and the new perspectives that he of own representation that he brought to the Slade. Aberdeen's notes from printmaking studio indicate his deep engagement with this medium, as he imagined printmaking as the foundation for a new public culture in East Pakistan. Indeed, his extensive notes demonstrate how he was simultaneously adopting and adapting the recipes and techniques that he was learning for use in Dhaka, noting that any acid resisting substance could be used to protect the back of a plate, for example, as well as how to make printers ink from any really good black powder. Aberdeen's letter's home to colleague Anuril Huok, demonstrate his thoughts about upon how his experiences in London could be useful to the Institute, and his reflections are ultimately translated into a new modern curriculum, which I show you here. Additionally, he had two etching machines and a library of art books sent to Dhaka, establishing a fine arts library, which he stipulated was important to, quote, develop knowledge of the history of arts, unquote. Strikingly, Keiji Subramanian and Senyu also advocated for the importance of art libraries in establishing art schools in the context of Baroda, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, intriguing comparisons for future research. Here, in Aberdeen's curriculum, although art history is provided as a framework, the focus is almost exclusively on practice until 1963 when art history is formally added to the curriculum. Most importantly, from the perspective of decolonizing art education, Aberdeen created an environment where Western art and, quote, Oriental art, meaning the arts of Asia, were in dialogue. All students were required to undergo instruction in both during the elementary course, establishing a decolonized foundation for all students in the program, and a department of Oriental art was established in 1955, which offered an advanced specialization. His efforts to decolonize art education were potently embodied in the building that he commissioned for the Government Institute of Arts. Completed in 1956 by his friend and interlocutor, Musarul Islam, the architect who later co-designed the parliament buildings with Louis Kahn. This building is characterized by a clean modernist design that rejects the colonial era hybrid Indocera scenic style, yet articulates its own decolonized modernist language with a distinct cosmopolitan and secular Bengali identity, encapsulated by the terracotta screens on the left of this photograph, which refer to Bengali Berra, or bamboo partitions. Indeed, the building proclaimed in physical form a new kind of decolonial modernism that comfortably and confidently challenged the notion that modernism was a purely European phenomenon. In 1956, four artists overlapped at the Slade, who would each go on to define visual vocabularies that at once de-centered European claims to universality, reclaimed modernism's relationship with non-western visual practices, and participated in co-constituting a decolonized global modernism. Sen Yu from China, Keiji Subramanian from India, Anwar Jalal Shamsa from Pakistan, and Kim Lim from Singapore. All were artists who confronted their own positionalities within the art historical structures that were taught at the Slade, as well as the ambient environment of post-war modernism beyond the Slade, and eventually defined new decolonial languages of modernism. This particularly rich cluster of artists who defined decolonial positions with respect to the history of art, they all attended lectures by Ernst Gombrich, who began teaching in 1956 after the departure of Rudolf Wittkauer. Although, as Lim and Shamsa's comments demonstrate, Gombrich's teachings never escaped his own Eurocentres, I argue, following the analysis of another Gombrich student, post-colonial art historian, Partha Mitter, that Gombrich's lessons contained within them a provocation towards decolonial thinking. As Mitter points out, although Gombrich's knowledge only extended to the history of art and aesthetics of European art, his perspective on the modern system of the arts was not epistemologically closed, resulting in the famous opening lines of the story of art, quote, there is no such thing as art, there are only artists. More importantly, according to Mitter, with the possibility of epistemological pluralism afforded by Gombrich's work on cultural codes in his next project, Art and Illusion, a study in the psychology of pictorial representation. It was this notion of the history of images being an articulation of visual language through convention or schema that is gradually corrected by its practitioners that Gombrich was working out in his lectures at the Slade in the late 1950s before its publication in 1960. As Mitter notes, this book prefigures the study of visual culture in its approach to visual forms beyond the classical canon. For him, opening critical methodological pathways, he writes, quote, it was Gombrich's method that enabled me to challenge the unquestioned acceptance of the superiority of the classical canon. Indeed, this notion of schema and correction empowered Slade students who were already being encouraged to define their own observed realities in the Slade in the life room to imagine their own corrections to the schemas that they learned at the Slade. And in Gombrich's darkened art history theater. For KG Subramanian, this conceptualization of art as language, espoused by Gombrich was fundamental to his thinking. And as Shiva Kumar Raman writes, gave him a theoretical vocabulary through which to express what he learned from Nandlal Bose in Shantini Keitan. On art education from 1997 Subramanian wrote that quote, global art forms probably came out of different environmental conceptual and psychological predispositions of different peoples and can be considered therefore various dialects of a total art language. Clearly embracing Gombrich's vision, yet correcting it to foreground his own more global perspective. This he did as a student in the works in work such as nude on a chair, and man with a fruit cart, where we see his articulation of what he may have characterized as an expression of his quote, moving location at the time. In these works he combined the printmaking technique that he was learning at the Slade under Anthony Gross, with an idiom that he learned in Shantini Keitan. The use of texture and contour to suggest three dimensions without recourse to carry skewer. More explicitly, when he returned to Baroda he started to teach an introductory world art history course called fundamentals of the visual arts from 1959 to the 1970s. And as Sonal Kullar argues quote, incorporated and extended Gombrich's insights on quote, building the world vision that he developed while at the Slade and Shantini Keitan into a practice that included both pedagogy and art making. For artists Kim Lim, who went to the Slade from Singapore itself across roads of cultural forms, being asked to situate her own practice within the history of art taught at the Slade meant that she quickly understood its limitations. She commented, making her own corrections quote. When I went to the Slade there was an art history where you learned that there was primitive art, leading up to the kind of epitome of Western art, which is the Renaissance. And I still don't feel that way. There were other things equally good. So in the end, you just have to go according to your instincts on quote. Lim developed her instincts in the summers between school sessions, which when she would return to Singapore taking advantage of the journey to explore. She saw her work as being in dialogue with Brancusi and her cultural references complex. She also learned that contrapuntal visual language layered through her education in Japanese and British colonial schools. Her art school education, her place in the British art world, and in a cultural claim over the journeys that took her back home every summer, which included the way there as well as the multi ethnic landscape of Singapore. She wrote quote. It was those summers to and from Singapore that what I call my real visual visual education began. Lim's relationship to the art that she saw on her journeys was not just iconographical, but was articulated through space and active emplacement and critique of the epistemologies of display in European encyclopedic museums. Lim's advice to see sculptures in the original sites that they were intended for in the specific light and landscape they were carved for was totally a totally different experience to looking at the same pieces in a museum. Marvelous, though that is. In works such as stack and ladder, for example, Lim defined a sophisticated sculptural voice that subtly worlded the spatial ambits of minimalist sculpture to Japanese screens. Notions of porosity and breaking down the distinctions between inside and outside became important in her work, serving as a metaphor for the ways in which she constructed a visual language inflected by her complex and self consciously mobile way of being in the world. Shamsa's response to Gombrich was similar to Lim's, although more violent in its in his reaction in a 1963 artist statement discussed by both Rashid, Irene, and if to car daddy. Shamsa wrote. One evening when I was attending a slave weekly lecture on the history of art, Professor Gombrich came to the chapter on Islamic art and art which was functional from his book, the story of art. All evening I destroyed paintings, drawings, everything that could be called art. All night I argued with somebody, as I was told the next morning by my hostel neighbor. All day, restlessness sent me from place to place until I found myself in the Egyptian section at the British Museum. For the first time in England, I felt really at home. For Shamsa, the realization came all at once that Islamic art did not partake of quote unquote, Europe universal European epistemologies and could not be called art within that system because it was functional. That moment of alienation allowed Shamsa to see the operations of art history and enabled a decolonial critique, as well as the possibility of solidarity. Indeed, it is crucial to note that Shamsa's response was not that of an essentialist articulation of national identity. Did not, in other words, find himself at home in the South Asian collections of the British Museum, but rather in the Egyptian wing. In the work, The Wall, created shortly after this crisis, Shamsa created a painting that was at once abstract, representational and decorative. Piercing to the heart of the problem posed by Gombrich's analysis of Islamic art as functional. The work appears at first entirely abstract, placing an abstract figure defined by graphic lines against a two-toned ground of thick impassioned paint in a manner that nods towards play, an important reference point for Shamsa. The title, The Wall, pulls the work back to the realm of representation, however, causing a shift in the viewer's perception of form. As the figure resolves into what in some of his other works of the same period is explicitly identified as a city wall, ornamented with Islamic patterns that in this context call into question the distinction made in Western modernism between abstraction and decoration in the non-Western world. It is as if in this work, Shamsa is taking Gombrich's thinking about the openness of art's epistemologies to its logical conclusion and using it to challenge his claims about Islamic art. By positing abstraction, realism, and decoration as three possible contradictory readings within the same work, Shamsa questions their separability, positing the inextricability of modernism and its presumed other stories. Of the four artists, we know the least about Seng Yu, who appears as a ghost in the Slade archives. Given form through his student records, a prize in head painting in 1954-55 shared with Polarigo, correspondence with Coldstream and Townsend, as well as a lecture he gave at the Slade in 1975 on Chinese painting. A favorite student of both Coldstream and Townsend, Seng saw his role at the Slade as not just a student, but also as an educator and an active agent in crafting the history of art. Indeed, Seng eventually became the chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University in Hong Kong and translated Janssen's survey text book, History of Art, and Giulio Carlo Argan and Maurizio Fajolos, a primer on art historical methodology, most illuminating to this study, is the preface that he writes to the Chinese translation of Argan and Fajolos' Guide to Art History. In it, he sets out his vision for the role of art history and art education in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and advocates for pushing Chinese art history beyond aesthetics and counter-storship towards a more active engagement with history and society. In his letters to Coldstream, this one written when he was merely a third-year student, he updates the Slade principle on contemporary Chinese art, opiny, qi, he writes simply, quite simply, is good, while shubei hong is not. Qi, sorry, Seng goes on to explain that Qi, quote, mingles art and craft elements and traditional elements together, creating a very individual style that he writes is, quote, very modern in Europe, whereas shu, on the other hand, is, quote, known for propagating Western academic art in China. His Western oil painting is very dull, and I feel his combination of East and West, like Whistlers, is a very superficial one, unquote. That is to say that Seng appreciates the transnational modernity of Qi's painting and disparages what he understands as the conflation of westernization and modernity in Qi's work. A hackneyed blend of East and West or barely veiled Orientalism is simply not enough in Seng's view. What Seng was seeking, which we can see in his own work, Blue Vase with Persimmons, was a challenge to the West's exclusive claim to modernism. In this painting, his use of space, color, and the disintegration of form refer to both Qi Baixue and Matisse, questioning modernism's identity as purely European. As he writes in a letter to Coldstream, Matisse must have seen Qi's pictures as their artistic approach is very alike, unquote. In this clever reversal of modernisms or origin stories, Seng proposes a worlded, co-constituted modernism that speaks from multiple sites in multiple languages, rather than hegemonic European European American modernism that extracts motifs and inspiration for contemporary Japanese and Orientalism and disseminates the results to its so-called peripheries. Through this transversal analysis that employs the Slade, Gombrich, and London's museums to connect expressions of modernism with roots in Pakistan, India, China, and Singapore, and beyond. It was possible to see them not as separate multiple modernisms or discrepant abstractions, but as specific nodes of a transcultural and rhizomatic decolonial modernism, a part of a co-constituted and worlded modernism student responses. On the other hand, the history requirement was broadened to encompass aesthetics and film studies as options for postgraduate students, and later relaxed to allow students to select courses from any discipline to encourage what became known as complementary studies. Finally, in the context of student revolts across the UK, the administrative structure of the Slade was also opened up with the creation of the 50-50 governing committee that was half student representatives and half faculty, and the creation of a student advisor position that in 1975 was filled briefly by Filipino artist David Madala. The student experience at the Slade becomes much less uniform in these later years, but is characterized by a single word that I heard repeated time and again in my oral histories with artists, freedom. What artists learned at the Slade was to think about art as a means of knowing and shaping the world, to reimagine its relationship to society and to other disciplines. In this context, the Slade became a conjunctural problem space, giving students the freedom, the training, and the impetus to consider their own relationships to art and society against the backdrop of student unrest and societal upheaval. Lisa Tickner has written at length about the art world revolutions of 1960s London, including the Art School Revolution at Hornsey in 1968, where for many students, revolution was a revolt against the bourgeois order, the art school system, and modernism itself. For diasporic and overseas artists at the Slade, however, these student movements and calls to activism took on distinctly decolonial perspectives, linking the decolonial modernism of the 50s and 60s with the rise of the Black Arts movement. These artistic developments took place against the backdrop of racial tensions sparked by Enoch Powell's Rival of Blood Speech in 1968, fanned by Margaret Thatcher's words that Britons were fearful of being, quote, swamped by people with a different culture, unquote, in 1978. The Brixton race riots in 1981, as well as struggles against racial injustice internationally, most notably the anti apartheid movement. For these artists, race became a cipher through which solidarity with other forms of oppression was perceived and built, bringing intersectional third world perspectives to discourses on anarchism, class struggle and feminism. For Vivaan Sundaram, who has become a leading figure of contemporary art working between painting, sculpture, photography, installation and film, his years at the Slade were formative in developing an interdisciplinary and politically engaged perspective. Here I'm showing you his monumental installation, Meanings of Failed Action, insurrection 1946. Most important were his studies in the first film department to be established in a British university. He commented, my sense of history, politics and international worldview came from the exceptional history of cinema course run by Thorold Dickinson. Not only did Sundaram begin to think about politics more globally and more structurally through this course, but as you can see from the notes that I'm showing you here, he also learned to dissect the formal construction of meaning through images in frame by frame formal analysis taught by Dickinson. In his shot by shot sequence study of Alain Rene's film Muriel, a young Sundaram examines Rene's formalist and activist engagement with history through a film haunted by the Algerian war, a form that he reinvents as expanded cinema in this 2018 work, which confronts the Bombay Mutiny of 1946. As Sundaram writes in 1968, quote, this contact with cinema has on the one hand opened new ways of looking and influenced by painting, as well as left me in the suspended position of changing to film. Sundaram's main tutor was RB Kitai and under his guidance, the lessons that Sundaram learned in the film department, the activist engagement with history and the agitational potential of montage were set in relation to a Warburgian history of art explicitly explored and from Persian ministers to stand brackage on the left. He recalls Kitai's invocation of Warburg's cross-cultural inter-disciplinary art history as a framework that he was given for navigating multiple visual epistemologies, which was built upon his post-colonial training at Baroda, where he was taught by fellow Slade alumnus Keiji Subramanian. Kitai said Sundaram put me on the course of becoming a thinking self-reflective artist. In a 1968 application to extend his Commonwealth scholarship for a year, he encapsulated the statement describing his work as an artist as research and writing quote, I must unlearn and learn so much more. Sundaram began living in an anarchist multiracial commune and joined his first student demonstration in 1968, becoming involved in political activism. Indeed, he recalls the symbolic moment when he left his Slade cubicle to join the struggle, making anti-racist posters protesting Powell's rivers of blood speech. The Slade also provided a rich intellectual context with many visiting lectures, the most memorable of which was John Berger, who spoke about Russian sculpture. Post-lecture, a small group of students, including Sundaram and Gita Kapoor, who was studying at the Royal College, joined Berger at the pub, out of perspectives long into the night. This structural analysis and led him to engage with other sites of oppression, such as South Africa, Auschwitz, the Gulf War and the Bombay Mutiny of 1946. Bajan Hunjan and Chayla Kamari-Berman arrived at the Slade one year apart, and although from different Indian diasporas, Hunjan from Kenya and Berman from Liverpool, connected in the print room and found common ground working on Asian women's issues, decolonizing West white feminist discourses. Like Sundaram, they understood art making as part of an intellectual and interdisciplinary practice, research that connected art and society working towards social justice by building solidarities and communities across exigencies. They both worked under Barto dos Santos, the Portuguese born head of printmaking, himself a Slade alumnus, who was as legendary for the convivial and transnational environment that he created in the department as he was for his committed political stances, formed against Salazar's fascist and colonial regime in Portugal. That said, it is important to note that whilst the Slade teaching environment was international, open and marked by a degree of freedom. The institution mirrored art world norms in that there were few female professors and professors of color. Indeed, in Berman's 1986 manifesto, there have always been great black women artists. She comments on the black women artists encounter with art schools as being characterized by quote, a mixture of hostility and different indifference from their college, unquote. For women of color such as Hoon Jun and Berman neglected at the intersectional gap between white feminism and a masculinist black arts movement. It was abundantly clear that self organization was the only way of getting work shown. In December 1981, they organized their first exhibition together for Indian women artists at the Indian Artists Gallery UK, which I am showing you now. Demonstrating the importance of Slade networks of the four artists in the show, three, Hoon Jun, Berman, and Naomi Inie on the right here were Slade graduates. No small accomplishment. This exhibition was acknowledged by Ruzika Parker and Grisza the Pollock as the first exhibition of black women artists in Britain. Hoon Jun went on to become a gifted organizer and artist, creating projects that occupied the space that we would now call social practice, as well as building arts infrastructure. In addition to organizing an important series of exhibitions of Indian women artists. She also played a significant role in the creation of the visual visionary black and Asian global network and archive, panchayat co founded at the Slade by Shaheen Mareili and island as Suza. Solidarity was central to Berman's work as well, although her political awakening began while she was a student at Leeds Polytechnic, where she learned about colonialism from her Yugoslav partner, your Slav Radovic, and began selling the socialist worker She mobilized her feeling of being an outsider at the Slade into a driving force for her work, identifying imperialism as a source of oppression that linked multiple struggles, as we can see in the top left corner of if there is no struggle, there is no progress. In the Slade print studios, she defined a visual language of struggle, challenging rules and expectations to produce politically eloquent and conceptually elegant work such as militant women, a work which links the struggles of black women in South Africa. Lower caste women in India and Irish women in the UK through collage rupture and repetition stitching the found texts together are these two photographs here and here that when examined closely are identical, one, the black and white reversal of the other, giving the formal impression of parallel struggles in parallel worlds linked by their universal campaigns against patriarchy, oppression and colonialism. This history of Asian artists at the Slade offers us a global micro history of the entanglements, translations, transformations, solidarities and encounters that took place in London during decolonization and independence. What this analysis enables beyond complicating our understanding of Slade history and the history of art in Britain is the articulation of a critical global art history that draws transversal connections and relational comparisons from the ground up, rather than adopting a God's eye view of the world with a single point perspective. By constructing new geometries that allow us to analyze these decolonial figures from different parts of the world together. We are as she may she argues, bringing into relation terms that have traditionally been pushed apart from each other. And to the European exceptionalism that undergirds Eurocentrism quote unquote and writing a transnational history of decolonial decolonial modernism that sees these figures who have generally been understood as isolated from each other in the history of art as relatively revelatory of larger art historical structures. This study is part of the London Asia project at the Palmelin Center for British Art headed by Sarah Turner and Hamad Nasir in collaboration with Asia Art Archive. It is a project that plays with scale, scale shifting down to the level of the urban and up to the scale of the region in order to shift the lenses through which we see transnational and transcultural histories. In this way, the nation is rendered as a thematic rather than as a fundamental organizational category, allowing us to find new histories of allowing us to find new ways of connecting the dots through new lines and transversals that give birth to new histories. It is also a project that is experimenting with new forms of collaboration and knowledge co creation. In order to create a global history of art from the bottom up that necessarily is collaborative generous and generative working across archives, the boundaries of area studies and languages. This paper and my research is only one aspect of London Asia, which is entering into a next phase, which will include workshops, such as a joint workshop on the history of printmaking between the National College of Arts Lahore and the Slade, a conference in May and June 2021 and an edited book. We hope that you will join us in this ambitious endeavor to rethink how we write art history, and perhaps more importantly at this moment in history, how we imagine new forms of transnational connection. And worlds beyond ethnic nationalism. Thank you. Thank you, may. Can everybody hear me, but thank you for that really wonderful and rich paper. In particular, I mean there's so many things that we could focus on but we are piling up the questions and I'm just going to allow some more to gather. And, and also just point out that if for anybody who wants to ask me the question themselves, do please raise your hand, and then Danny will unmute you. But I think there's a lot for us to ponder and and given that we still have more than 200 people on on on the zoom 231 to be exact. We're going to extend the little time so at least from the next 1015 minutes. So please stay with us if you can. And as we sort of dive in because Ming has what I really wanted to also point out and appreciate is the propositional nature of this paper, that it's not just about saying what what her project is this idea of the transversal the colonial, that it's not about multiple modernisms or it's not about discrepant abstraction. It's a really an imaginative way of looking at the past that it can illuminate the future. And for that, you know that's something really exciting. We look forward to developing that more. So, Danny, if I could ask you if there's anybody with their hands raised. Oh, we have a couple of. Yes, we have a attendee called path meter, and I'm going to allow her to talk now. Apologies. Welcome. Oh, hi. Your video. Yes, absolutely. I'm totally stunned. Amazing work at, you know, for instance, I had connection with Slade as you know and Cambridge and in a way you've linked them up so interestingly. I mean, it's absolutely I mean this is the way I think decolonization. I mean, the history should proceed. It's a very important micro study, very granular. I mean, I'd love to hear more about it. And one small point. One brief thing you mentioned after. I remember course from the kind of very alive study precise and kind of antique and part of the whole European tradition you say it then after him things began to be very different. I was quite struck by the fact that what they did was to move away from this kind of antique and probably even live drawing towards a new understanding of nature. But you know, of course, and shan'tinica that I've talked about it in another context, none the law actually, and, you know, also, to some extent to go. I talked to, I'm particularly none the law spoke about nature is a direct understanding look at nature in a much more East Asian way. And he says that I personally not keen on life drawing. I don't know if his teacher was absolutely allergic. Life drawing, but take the students out to into nature, let them study all the minutiae of nature. So it seems like there are panels here, which I'm quite intrigued by it. No, no, I was just going to say, absolutely. There are parallels here. And I think this might be more of a case of parallels rather than connection, in the sense that cold streams ideas of realism came from wanting to pursue observational realism. But I mean, what is interesting is the is the alchemy of what happens when we bring those two things together in a figure like Supermanion right who studies at shan'tinica and understanding nature in this in this way, same actually goes for somebody like the Indonesian artist a funding was also at shan'tinica and what happens when that view of realism comes in confrontation with the observational realism of cold stream. That's, that's something that I think is really exciting. And then to under to think about not just what happens to their understanding of realism but also cold streams, which is which evolves over time as well. I won't take up all the time. There's so much to ask you. Oh, we can talk about it more later. Yes, sure. Thank you. Danny, could I ask you to unmute Devika, who has her Devika Singh, who has her hand up. No problem. Thank you. Thank you so much for this great paper was really terrific to hear you. I wanted to return to something we discussed at one of the London Asia workshop in which I was delighted to participate, which is to ask you how much do you think say in the case of an artist like Vivaan Sundaram but others as well. London, as much as the Slade was the impetus for their work. Absolutely. And thank you so much for that question Devika. You know, one of the difficulties of doing a study like this is disentangling what parts of your conjunctural problem space come from the city of London and what parts come from the Slade. And in a certain sense. There are part and parcel of the same experience. But then the question then becomes what was distinctive about the Slade that allowed students at the Slade to do something different than what happened, say for example at Royal College. And, you know, I think it comes down to this, the single word, which is freedom this sort of idea that there was no sense of a clear direction. Stylistically that was set by Coldstream, which, as I said, was something that Coldstream actually prized as something that was important in modern art school, but actually he came under quite a bit of criticism for that position from John Brick, who thought that he was being neglectful of the students by not setting a sort of stronger example or a stronger set site, a stronger sort of narrative of what Slade aesthetics might be, a direction. And so, you know, whereas at the Slade they had the sense of almost chaos and freedom at the Royal College there was much more of a sense of, you know, a direction that was sent to, to look at realism that was much more sort of socialist in its nature but there's a very different, there's a very different sense of what was possible, but within a very similar context. Thank you. Thank you. Can we go to Sanjitha Sanderson? Of course, no problem. Hi, can you hear me? I'm delighted to hear the work in progress. It sounds so exciting. I just have a question about, you know, the kind of people and now that I see all the artists here who you have selected, I'm just wondering whether there is a connection. Do you see in the Slade archives a connection between the Imperial Institute and later the Commonwealth Institute, and the kind of funding that is then being circulated to draw particular kinds of artists to the Slade, because these are all artists fit into a particular genre and we have discussed it before. I'm just thinking, do you see any, so in the archives do you see any connection between the way the Commonwealth is being imagined and the Commonwealth scholarships that are then being given to artists like Abedin or let's say Afandi or and so on. Do you see that? Thanks a lot. Thank you for this wonderful question, Sanjitha. Unfortunately, I have to disappoint you by saying I do not know the answer and I will throw the ball back in your court and hope that you will be able to develop this. It's a big more, but as we move forward, because it's a really good question, you know, how is the Commonwealth being imagined and in what way are these funding structures, this bureaucracy of culture responsible for shaping what comes out of it. But it was so exciting to see all these artists being brought together into not a singular question but a singular kind of framework as it were, and I love the graphics. I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you for that question. We also have now I think 18 open questions. And I'm just sort of thinking through them and in no particular order but if I could start with one and this is by Jane. It's hard looking at the maps that put London Slade as the pivot point for so many artists, not to see the aesthetics of the Imperial British centrists. How to avoid the risk that your research will be co-opted to put London Slade at the center once more. That's also a very good question and something that has haunted me for a long time, because I also work on Paris. The risk in Paris is much, much greater than it is at the Slade, to be honest. I think that the important sort of guiding methodology that I have taken through this research is really to try to narrate from the outside in, meaning that I'm trying to tell the stories from the perspectives, the archives, and the artworks of the artists that are coming from the decolonizing world, rather than from the Slade. So I have provided structures so that we understand what it was about the Slade that made things possible or what was distinctive about the Slade, kind of in response to Devika's question about how does the Slade do something different than, say, other art schools. But you may have noticed that I tried to de-emphasize the sort of large figures of the Slade, Coldstream and Bartodis Santos, for example, who were important figures in creating these communities, but I think it's critical in writing this kind of a story to really make sure that they become one of many players rather than a central one. Thank you, Meg. The next question is one that's been posed by Kate Bet. Can you elaborate on nation as a theme, instead of an organization, and how these narratives in art history established that? Yes. So the way that it works here is that nation becomes thematized in the works of decolonial modernism, that nation building in terms of building the art schools, the articulation of national forms in terms of decolonial modernism, those are the themes that become, that are repeated when we look at these different artists in a comparative perspective within the framework that is transnational. So we're not looking at sort of, you know, the articulation of national identity in Thailand or in India, but what we're doing is we're sort of looking comparatively across different contexts to understand what the theme of, how the theme of nation plays out in a transnational comparative framework. I hope that answers your question. Could be Danny go to Parul Dave, who's just got her hand raised. Of course, no problem. Parul and I are muted. Can you hear me, Ming? Hi, Parul. How are you? I enjoyed your talk immensely. And I just want to raise a slightly provocative question. And that is, you know, I mean, there's not the use of the term decolonizing in the context of early institutional history of plate school as you'll be doing, kind of run the risk of certain kind of anachronism, because you know we're really talking about a period when a certain kind of structure of power where very much in place. And before really, you know, the post-colonial discourse has really taken place. And, you know, even from the exchange between part of meter and gone bridge, of course it takes somebody, you know, with part of the interest to impute a radical intent to go bridge and you know, you can make something interesting out of that. So, how do you deal with these questions? Well, it is true that Perth is very exceptional. The thing is here that we are looking at a moment where there is self-conscious, there's a self-conscious effort at nation building, both on the level of the nations that the artists are coming from, but also on the level of the UK, which is, in itself, I don't, I haven't quite processed or understood what I think of this yet. But there is a series of documents about the colonial, oh gosh, what is it called now, it's the, there's a colonial organization of universities that is set up by the UK government in order to enable countries that they imagine will become independent in the future to reach independence more quickly. And part of their strategy is to build universities. And so, you know, this is in a sense a classic example of decolonization, both in the UK and in these countries that are building new structures. Is the vocabulary there to call it decolonization yet? It's not being called decolonization, no. But I think that it quite could quite comfortably be understood as such. But it's something that I would be willing to sort of, you know, think through and argue out with you, Perth. Danny next could be unmute dot price. No problem. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Great. Hi, thank you so much. That was such an interesting talk ring. Really enjoyed it. And in your talk you mentioned in passing tutors of color within the sort of framework of all of these artists training. And I wondered if you could say a bit more about that because I'm imagining there weren't that many in the period that you're talking about, but I'd be interested to know a little bit more about what you've been covered in relation to that. Yes, absolutely. And Liz, just hold on one second. I just want to say, yes, Liz. Thank you for rescuing me. I am referring to the Inter University Council for higher education in the colonies. And that was the document I was referring to earlier. So thank you, Dorothy. I had a dot for your question. I wish I could say more about tutors of color at the slate. The only one I have been able to find thus far was David medalla. Of course, Bajan who John, I mean, much later becomes an assistant in the print room but really they're very few and far between. I, if anybody knows anything more about this, I would be grateful. I just, yeah, thank you. I thought that was kind of interesting in relation to the sort of power dynamics that are kind of being raised in some of the questions as well about the sort of colonizer and the and the decolonized and the sort of role within the slate itself as an institution, you know, in sort of replicating colonization with with its kind of art students perhaps. Absolutely. Now I think that that's an important point and one that parole also makes about the power dynamics because, you know, I am by no means arguing that the slate itself was doing the decolonizing. And what I'm saying is that there were these structures in place that in that allowed for allowed enough movement for these students to actually produce something very interesting in that site. Yeah, thank you. And I think sort of one other point on that is just that idea of, you know, which history is being created by whom. So the idea that a British art history can only be created by, you know, a central body like the Slade or something within is kind of, you know, at the heart of what what the London Asia project is challenging. That that history itself a bit like this, this research project and me reaching out to you to actually to help with research is that those histories are also being co created. And then so highlighting the agency of the students who during this time are not producing histories just for when they go back home wherever home happens to be, but also sort of more than just annotating history of Britain, but rather sort of co creating it. I mean, there are a number of people and I will pick on Lou Moe and so can Lee, who are very curious to get your perspective on how your experience of London compares with other geographies I suppose Paris being the most obvious one. So is there is there, is there a quick response that you can give to that question. Well, it's one that I'm thinking about right now because as I mentioned earlier I'm also working on Paris and in fact this project this research kind of began with me working on Paris and then I got drawn into the London Asia world by Hamad and Sarah and the call for the London Asia project. And what I'm realizing, though, is that London may be a better case study for what I was hoping to find when I started this project. So here it might be worth me quoting a letter that send you wrote to Coldstream from Paris and so send you goes to Paris and works at a TV set with William Hater after he graduates from from the slate. And he, he writes a series of letters to Coldstream where he describes his experience and talks about how the aesthetic environment in Paris is totalitarian. So, you know that there was just too much of a sense of identity and voice in the Parisian art world for him to really be able to articulate something that was his own. And the other thing is that, I mean, the one thing that I'm really trying to figure out, and I'd be curious to hear what you all have to say is the differences between a model of French universalism versus, I guess what Europeans call an Anglo Saxon model of French universalism and how that changes are perceptions of identity and race. And the kinds of artistic possibilities that become available to artists when they're in those situations I haven't quite figured it out yet, but those are my thoughts. I want to hear from Hilary flow, who was curious about the extent to which you feel Asian students at the Slade may have had experiences distinct from those from Africa, the Middle Easter elsewhere. And I'd be curious to know more about evidence you may have found of cross cultural friendships and dialogues between Slade students from different geographic backgrounds. So, I mean, for example in the 1957 photograph that I showed you. Ibrahim El Salahi is sitting next to Chamsa. And, you know, the organization of these photographs is not is not accidental, but at the same time, I don't think they were very they weren't very good friends they just were known to each other. It's very difficult to trace these friendships in a very, very meaningful way, although I'm trying, and I've been trying to sort of understand what those socialities looked like. But, and that's the reason why I started to think about transversal articulations, because it's not necessarily the case that we will always get very clean and I guess productive intersections as we might imagine them or want them. That's what I was hoping for when I was when I started this project. That said, I do think that there are these important transversals that shape the way the experiences of the students that are there, and the kinds of discourses that they engage in with people with other students. So, then your other question, which was about the relationship between Asians, or sorry, the differences between the experiences of ages and Asian students and African students or students from the Middle East. I will not answer that question yet either. I have some interesting, I have some insights from the, from a few archives, but I don't know if I can really generalize. And I'm not sure that I want to generalize. I haven't written countries of origin in quite this way yet, because, you know, so for example, we have some letters from Ben and one rule from Nigeria to cold stream which are very interesting I wanted to show them to you today but I didn't really have time where he talks about, you know, it's a kind of repudiation of the slate as having existed just far too much influence over the formation of art schools in Africa and in particular, the zarianists, and the, but at the same time, it's hard to disentangle that because he also attended the slave much earlier in 1946 before cold stream arrived so he was actually forced to do two years of remedial drawing instruction after arriving at the slate as you know, a fully formed mid career artist so so there are very important differences there. I don't know that we would that I am not able to answer that question at this moment is what I'm saying. I think at this point, although we still have 165 people still with us and many a question still on our chat. But I think we are coming to about half an hour beyond our schedule time. So I think it may be time now for us to thank me, but also thank everybody who's made this this possible. One is to reassure you that there will be a recording of main lecture that will be made available on the PMC website. If you go back to the London Asia project page, you will be able to access that and in hopefully within a couple of weeks time. You will also be able to access past lectures conferences on figures such as Leewon chair or on exhibitions of South Asia and Britain. But as you would have also seen from me and the way that she's been developing her project. This is very much a project that's been co created. The Slade, particularly Susan Collins and Liz Boucher for for sharing so generously with us. And that generosity we will, we will Bangkok on up on in the future as we extend this project as as you had been described to the National College of Arts in Lahore. So I want to thank our colleagues at Asia archive, John Tane and Oscar soy to for co hosting this talk with us to allow you know and really sort of. It was just thrilling to see the names and cities of people who gathered today. I just acknowledge Ella Fleming and Danny Conway for making the zoom work. And last but certainly not least to mean herself for giving such a generous and generative talk. I look forward to welcoming you back in in the summer for the London Asia art world's conference where many of the themes that we've been talking about will will hopefully be developed collaboratively and collectively. Perhaps with many of you here. Thank you so much. Goodbye. Thank you.