1939–2007
Redza Piyadasa
Redza Piyadasa was born in Kuantan into a family of Sinhalese origin, studied in London and from 1967 taught at the school of art and design at Universiti Teknologi MARA. He made paintings, collages and installations, and in 1983, with the art historian Sabapathy, published one of the first surveys of modern Malaysian art. In 1998 he received the Prince Claus Award.
Biography
In 1979 a study of the artists of the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts appeared, and in it the term “Nanyang Style” was used for the first time. Among its authors was the artist Redza Piyadasa.
He was born in 1939 in Kuantan, the capital of the state of Pahang, into a family of Sinhalese origin. The exact date of his birth is not known, only the year. He did not begin as an artist. He first trained as a teacher at the Malaysia Teacher’s College at Brinsford Lodge, in England. Then, with a scholarship from the Malaysian government, he entered Hornsey College of Art in Crouch End, London, and graduated in 1967. Back in Malaysia, he began teaching at the School of Art and Design, which had recently been founded as part of Universiti Teknologi MARA.
As an artist Piyadasa worked in painting, collage and installation. At the same time he wrote, in Malay and in English, on the theory and history of art. In the 1960s and 1970s there were almost no such texts in Malaysia, and his articles in effect began a discussion that had not existed before: what modern art in the country was, and how it related to tradition. There is no record of how his first publications were received, so I would not try to judge the scale of their influence. He was interested above all in Asian art, which he linked both with the traditional artistic practices of Asia and with contemporary art in the West. In his articles he responded to the neo-nationalist, Islamic and global currents then visible in Malaysian culture. He worked for many years with the scholar and art historian Sabapathy. One result was the 1979 study of the Nanyang Academy artists, which gave the name “Nanyang Style” to the painting of that era. In 1983 they published together “Modern Artists of Malaysia”, issued in Kuala Lumpur by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, under the Ministry of Education; it was one of the first general surveys of modern Malaysian art.
For about twenty years, in the last decades of the twentieth century, Piyadasa worked on a series of collages, the “Malaysia Series”, inspired by episodes in the country’s cultural history. Among the exhibitions named in connection with his work are “A Matter of Time” (1978) and “Baba Family” (1987).
In 1998 he was awarded the Prince Claus Award (the Netherlands).
Redza Piyadasa died on 7 May 2007 in Selayang.
Profile notes