Art historian Bridget Tracy Tan and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts are redefining Southeast Asian arts and arts education through practice-based research and cultural memory.

By Victoria Salcedo

UCLA International Institute, May 7, 2025 — UCLA’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Center for Performance Studies recently hosted Bridget Tracy Tan, Ph.D, senior director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Arts at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in Singapore. Tan introduced an approach to regional arts education rooted in practice, ecology and ritual — not just theory. Her work defines Southeast Asia as a lived and evolving identity, one that is enacted through artistic expression, community engagement and cultural memory.

“We’re thinking about the communities or the people and the artists who have a history, who have a heritage, and who are calling upon them in order to bring out some kind of a value that they want to share and to express in contemporary times,” she said.

Reimaging Southeast Asia

Tan challenged conventional definitions of Southeast Asia by reframing it as a cultural ecology rather than a geopolitical zone. NAFA’s pedagogy centers on tropical anthropology, which can be defined as learning through place, climate and embodied experience. Students engage with oral traditions, rituals and environmental memory, pushing back against colonial metrics of civilization that prioritize written text and Western epistemologies, in order to develop an idea for an art project.

Tan emphasized that the most meaningful outcomes arise when students use heritage as both subject and method. “There’s nothing quite like experiencing this environment,” she said, referring to tropical anthropology. “It’s just going to change the way you look at everything.”

This approach came alive through student artworks showcased in the talk. A cross-cultural performance piece, born from classroom tension between a Muslim and a Chinese student during the post-pandemic reopening, explored religious and racial identity through movement. A grieving granddaughter, unable to express her loss in words, performed a silent dance on Lazarus Island wearing her late grandmother’s shawl. Another student, descended from the Orang Laut — tribes living around Singapore, Malaysia and the Indonesian Riau Islands, created a time-based installation using sensitized paper to capture the ebb and flow of the tides, where each print was a trace of familial and environmental memory.

One student drew on the trauma of pandemic isolation to co-create a performance piece about reconciliation and identity. Still another, inspired by ancestral grief, turned to gesture and body memory to process loss. Each project is more than an assignment — it’s a personal act of remembering and remaking culture, said Tan.

These works, she noted, exemplify the “embodied vernacular” of Southeast Asia, a term she uses to describe how lived experience, grief and ritual shape artistic practice. “What are rituals and shamans and ancestral heritage to us in the modern day?” she asked. “They teach us respect toward each other and … the environment.”

Bridget Tan (NAFA). (Photo: Victoria Salcedo/ UCLA)

The NAFA Legacy

Trained as a critical art historian, Tan’s work is interdisciplinary and intercultural, spanning exhibitions, publications and teaching. Her insistence on using “Southeast Asians” as a noun, she said, highlights a political and cultural commitment to the region as a shared, evolving identity. At NAFA, she guides faculty and students in redefining what it means to study Southeast Asia from within the region.

NAFA itself was born from diaspora and rupture. Founded by émigré Chinese artists who could no longer return home after 1949, the academy was shaped by exile, hybridity and reinvention. Tan framed the institution as a site of ongoing dialogue: between generations, media and histories.

NAFA’s curriculum resists static programming in favor of platforms for experimentation. For example, the annual Southeast Asian Arts Forum provides a stage for performance, film and art installations on such broad themes such as sustainability, memory and war. The Southeast Asian Academy-Wide Project invites students to engage deeply with iconic sites like Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Ayutthaya in Thailand. And White Space, NAFA’s exhibition and workshop lab, cultivates collaborative work across disciplines. In all of these programs, students take the lead in moderating panels, curating shows and crafting research-based, creative responses to historical and cultural stimuli.

Building Regional Networks

NAFA's impact extends beyond Singapore through SEARCH (Southeast Asian Arts Alliance), a regional network of universities in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. Projects have included heritage games, digital ethnographies and river-based exhibitions. Through this network, Southeast Asian arts become “a connective tissue”: intercultural, interdisciplinary and intergenerational.

The speaker closed with a powerful reminder that Southeast Asia is not just a region to be studied — it is a region to be practiced. Its arts circulate not only in galleries or journals, but in gesture, ritual and community.

“Creative knowledge circulates through ritual repetition,” she reflected. “It sustains not just culture, but a sense of human belonging in the world.”

Published: Wednesday, May 7, 2025