Simon Soon completed a PhD 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, Malaya, Thailand and the Philippines from 1950s–1970s. His broader areas of interest include comparative modernities in art, spatio-visual practices, history of photography and art historiography. He has contributed essays to a number of journals including Yishu and Modern Art Asia. 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. He is a member of the editorial collective of SOUTHEAST OF NOW: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art, a new peer-review journal to be published in 2016. In 2016, he co-curated a survey of modern batik painting at Kuala Lumpur's ILHAM Gallery, ‘Love Me in My Batik: Modern Batik Art from Malaysia and Beyond.’

Artist talk | 2016.05.18 (Wed), 13:30 (General Education Building C403, TNUA )