Redza Piyadasa was a respected art historian, critic and artist who had contributed much to the development of contemporary art in Malaysia and the Southeast Asian region. Born in Kuantan, Pahang, Malaysia in 1939, he was trained as an art teacher at Brinsford Lodge in England but turned to pursue formal studies in sculpture at the Hornsey College of Art, London in the mid-1960s. Upon returning home, he taught at the newly established Mara School of Art and Design from 1969 to 1975, before leaving again for his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Hawaii in 1977. A conceptual artist, Piyadasa did not limit himself to painting and sculpture, the two areas he was trained in. ‘Four Propositions’ is a constructed collage made up of illustrations extracted from publications on the history of Western art,which were then pasted on a hollowed, square wooden block and cast over with plastic resin. Stenciled on the inner surface of the plastic layer are four propositions, which read ‘Non – Art’, ‘Art – Art’, ‘Anti – Art’ and ‘Un – Art’. The propositions originate from concepts formulated by the exponents of the new art philosophy, in which the traditional premises and practices of the history of art and art criticism are questioned and rejected.
