About
Aparupa is a visual artist, printmaker and art writer whose practice moves between visual culture, critical research and narrative-making.
Recently completing her MA in Asian Art Histories at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, her research centres on modern Asian art history, particularly questions of identity, cultural exchange and transnational artistic movements.
Her interests extend to the intersection of histories and cultural identities, particularly how identities come to be constructed, translated and reinterpreted through history, and how this interplay manifests in visual practices across regions and communities.
Aparupa’s route into the arts has been distinctly interdisciplinary. Before entering the creative field, she practised corporate law for over a decade, eventually becoming a partner at a leading law firm. In 2021, she left legal practice to pursue art and design, graduating with First Class Honours in Design Communication from LASALLE, while continuing her independent practice in painting and printmaking.
Her creative practice across mediums developed around critical making, local and everyday culture, and practice-based research, gradually drawing her towards the histories and theoretical frameworks underpinning visual practice.
Her work today brings these different modes of thinking together: the analytical rigour of legal research, the critical perspectives of art history, and the exploratory possibilities of image-making. Aparupa has also participated in collaborative contemporary art projects exhibited in Zurich and Taipei, and she continues to explore research, writing and artistic practice as interconnected ways of thinking through the histories and contemporary realities of Asia.
Transnational Translations of India: Intra-Asian Artistic Exchange and the Question of the Orientalist Lens in Early Twentieth-Century Paintings
The first half of the twentieth century saw expanding artistic and intellectual exchanges across Asia, shaped by cultural nationalism, anti-imperial politics and attempts to formulate artistic modernities beyond European cultural dominance.
Within these exchanges, India became a significant site of artistic encounter and representation. This thesis mobilises Orientalism and its pictorial representational frameworks as an interpretive lens for examining cross-cultural artistic production from this milieu.
Central to the inquiry are two Asian artists, Yokoyama Taikan (Japan) and Xu Beihong (China), and the ways in which each translated and represented India in their works from the period. While Taikan’s encounter was conditioned by Okakura Kakuzō’s revivalist Pan-Asianism and its spiritual imagination of India, Beihong’s emerged from wartime nationalism and Sino-Indian anti-imperial solidarity.
Despite these different circumstances, their works exhibited Orientalist conventions of essentialisation, selective idealisation and homogenisation, in their pictorial logic and visual grammar, while redirecting them towards distinct ideological and personal ends. The thesis considers what Orientalism as a lens might reveal when moved beyond its conventional Euro-colonial context and applied trans-contextually to these intra-Asian artistic productions, with implications for cross-cultural art more broadly.
The study finds that Orientalism can make visible the representational mechanisms through which cultural difference is constructed in art, while also exposing the limits of reading them apart from the circumstances of their use. Read alongside translational studies, similar visual mechanisms can also be seen to acquire different meanings across cultural, historical and ideological contexts.
This combined approach illuminates how meaning is carried, transformed and reconstituted from one culture to, and for, another, opening up new perspectives on cross-cultural art and its practices.
