Introducing David Elliott, our Chair Judge for The 2021 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, a writer, a curator and museum director for exhibitions from Oxford and Stockholm to Tokyo. He has been on our judging panel for the last 14 years and leads the way in modern and contemporary art curation across different cultures. As the pit-stops of his global art travels stack up, we look back on his career and developments in the Asian art region — plus check in on the first round of judging for this years’ Prize.

Having started your career in the UK, what first drew you to art from Asia?

It was in my mid-teens; I remember picking up an inexpensive Japanese nineteenth-century woodblock print of a beautiful young woman from a bouquiniste in Paris during the mid-1960s. At about the same time South Asian culture was making a big impact in the UK. Partly this was the effect of immigration and in the Midlands, where I lived, there was a welcome plethora of curry houses and Asian corner shops. Many of them sold spices, incense and the gaudy festival calendars with which I used to decorate my bedroom.

Also, promoted by George Harrison of the Beatles, a fashion for Indian classical music developed. Whilst I firmly remained a “Stones man,” I liked the Indian music, listened to it a lot and never ponced around in a kaftan. One of the best things about Durham, where I studied history as an undergraduate, was the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art and Archaeology. Here I developed a long-standing regard for classical Tibetan and Chinese art and also got to know Philip Rawson, its curator.

I have related the full story of this time in my life in “Going Global in Oxford (1976-1997),” the first chapter of my next book (Art & Trousers. Modernity and Tradition in Contemporary Asian Art) that will appear in September 2021, published by the AsiaArtPacific Foundation. The rest of the book includes many of my other writings about modern and contemporary Asian art, artists, and their background.

Could you share how your curatorial vision has evolved from your major stints in Europe and Asia?

When I became director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1976, contemporary art in the West was in danger of dematerialising itself into a sublime, conceptual vapour as successive avant-gardes had become increasingly resistant to the idea of art as a commodity.

It struck me how quickly some curators’ tastes had changed as if they too were subject to the vagaries of the art market. Art that would have been anathema ten years previously was, almost overnight, the coolest on the block. As a result, the contemporary art world, as it then stood, seemed to me to be increasingly limited as it was populated by an exclusive “boys’ club” from “the developed world”, to which only a few women were beginning to be admitted. This threw into question the standards by which art was being judged, and I began to look again at the history of the avant-gardes, not only in the West but also in different parts of the world. By 1996, I had spent twenty years at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and needed a change. 

Each place has had different challenges and, while I made no large exhibition of Asian art in Stockholm, in 1999 I put together, with Bojana Pejić, After the Wall: Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, a huge exhibition that examined the emergence of the new generation of artists in the “East” during the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Also, with Simon Njami, I started work on Africa Remix, a large pan-African exhibition of contemporary Art as we both felt that previous exhibitions shown in Europe and America had been both too apologetic and without sufficient focus on the quality of the art actually being made.

I moved to Tokyo in 2001; setting up the Mori Art Museum was terrific. A new museum completely from scratch, situated on the top of a skyscraper. Having a 360-degrees-view of the entire city on the floor above was a huge challenge as the art shown there had to be at least as good as all the teeming life around it. I got to know the contemporary art scene in Japan very well and to see much of its historical art and architecture.

The key ideas behind the Mori’s programmes were to focus primarily on Asian art, to celebrate the relations between art and life, to explore what role a new museum of contemporary art could and should have, and to look for continuities between the present and the past so as to appreciate more the differences. And we viewed the rest of the world from what we defined as a “specifically Asian perspective” which was basically what we thought it should be.

Looking back on your fifty-year career across Europe and Asia, what has been your biggest take away?

I am still trying to make sense of it all. Art everywhere is in a constant state of change and development, so therefore is my work.

Living in a place is very different from being a visitor; on top of this, when living away from one’s place of origin, it is also easier to visit other neighbouring territories. Each place is different and as one’s experience, knowledge and mind expand, it is possible to track links and communalities between different places and traditions.

There are still a few destinations that I want to visit, and I am slowly ticking them off. I do a lot of research using my own and others’ libraries, as well as online, but the best thing is to directly experience good new and old art and architecture in situ – wherever it may be.

Having completed the first round of judging for the 2021 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, what is your impression of this year’s entrants?

Each year’s submission is heavily dependent on the hard work of the various nominators and this year they seem to have been particularly active in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. This does not affect the final result which is based on the quality of individual works – not origins – and over past years this has been consistently high. But it is also fascinating for the judges to see different regional developments as, obviously, context has a strong effect on much of the work that is produced.

Next year, there may be other focuses, as there have been in previous years. At present, these are created “organically” by the nominators, rather than planned.

How do you feel The Sovereign Asian Art Prize reflects the developments within the region?

We place a focus on emerging talent in young and middle generation artists and are a small but effective part of a much larger ecology that includes the long-established Asia-Pacific Triennale in Brisbane, new museums set up in the region, particularly the National Museum in Singapore and the soon-to-be opened M+ in Hong Kong, and a web of biennales, galleries and universities across the whole region and beyond.

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Find out more on The Sovereign Asian Art Prize here.

To read more about David’s career and the wider development of modern and contemporary Asian art, you can read his upcoming book Art & Trousers. Modernity and Tradition in Contemporary Asian Art – due to be published in September 2021 by the AsiaArtPacific Foundation.