Art as autobiography: a unique collection of Asian art

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Ashoke Nag talks to art collector K.P.V. Nair, who has amassed a fine collection of Asian art on his travels round the region

Calcutta-based K.P.V. Nair is a completely ‘out of the box’ art collector. He has been lapping up the spectrum of Asian artworks for the past 40 years. Nair has been travelling to Southeast Asia and China for decades because of his business interests and his deep involvement in geo-political initiatives around this region.

‘I began collecting this genre of artworks when I discovered my Asian identity’, remarks Nair. ‘I went to Japan for the first time in 1970 for the Expo 70. That’s when this passion of collecting pan-Asian art germinated in me’.

Nair’s collection spans paintings, porcelain, sculptures encompassing metal, porcelain, wood and ceramic works and collectibles. Over the years, his repository of Asian art has swelled to around 250 Asian artworks. Among the high-watermarks of Nair’s life as a collector are his travels to deep Siberia and the Arctic Circle, Central Asian periphery, old Russia and Mongolia, shooting an incisive series of photographs of these daunting landscapes and their inhabitants.

Nair described his collection of paintings from Russia and Mongolia.

The paintings cover figurative works, landscapes and nudes, just to mention a few areas. The paintings are all modern and contemporary. Some of the painters were trained in hallowed art institutions in Russia, but most of them hail from the suburbs and the Arctic region. The paintings are in oil, watercolour and mixed media. Interestingly, even in a place like Mongolia, which is not very developed, one comes across the finest artists.

Agreeing fully that Chinese paintings lead the way amongst Asian works, a view endorsed by the prices that they fetch at art auctions, Nair is of the opinion that Vietnamese art ‘ranks second on the ladder’. ‘In fact, sometimes Vietnamese works [are] better [than] Chinese paintings’, Nair opines. 

The indefatigable Indian collector, who is now in his mid-seventies, has sourced his unique pieces from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, South and Central China, Tibet, Vietnam, Siberia (in the Asian half of Russia) and Mongolia. ‘My collection of these pieces can be said to be autobiographical because many of them have been sourced hingeing on my varied experiences in these places’, reflects Nair.

He has travelled to China more often because:

there’s more to learn from the Chinese civilization than from any other place I have journeyed to…From the beginning of life, I was interested in old civilizations like the Roman, Greek, Iranian and Iraqi. It is from this keen interest that East Asian cultures also bowled me over. Then, of my own volition, I started studying world art. When I began building up an Asian art collection, Indian collectors were not drawn to this artistic form. Nowadays, with Asian art, together obviously with Western art, dominating the world market, collectors in India are giving it a closer look. You can’t blame them, since it all depends on demand.

Nair hopes to preserve and exhibit his unique treasure-chest in a private museum provided he gets the requisite support from individuals and the government. K.P.V. Nair is so dedicated to his collection he has never sold even one of his Asian artworks. ‘I have never bought to sell’, he insists.

For me, collecting art has always been a passion. It was not just a hobby. This unshakable interest in building up a collection of Asian art could have taken root within me from when I was just around 16 or 17. In fact, as I went on in my pursuit, my business interests, for which I travelled to Asian countries, slowly started taking a backseat.

I never indulged in trading with the art I collected from across Asia. If I sold the artworks I was picking up, I may have made millions from art. But, that was not my intention and neither [is it] part of my nature, asserts Nair.

Nair’s focus on Asian artworks primarily stemmed from the fantastic artistic diversity that Asia harbours.

The most outstanding feature of Asian art is that even different regions of the Asian continent sport variegated styles and thematic treatment. This itself was enough reason to draw me to Asian art, explains Nair.

Asian modern and contemporary art were not developed in the same way as modern European art, in the beginning. But, with the coming of colonialism, different cultures intermingled, in turn also influencing Asian art. Of course, many European masters, including the great Picasso, also drew blood from Asian art forms. Chinese master Jang Dah-Cheng’s lifelong friendship with Pablo Picasso is well known in enlightened art circles.

While dwelling on the breadth of Asian art, Nair explains why Chinese art and artists are at the vanguard in the international scene amongst all Asian nations.

You see, the Chinese enjoy a tradition of 7000 years revolving around porcelain and ceramic. The Chinese language script translates into calligraphic form when written. Chinese artists have drawn heavily from calligraphy, too. This extremely rich artistic tradition has[flowed] and is also [still]  flowing through modern and contemporary Chinese art, Nair observes.

If K.P.V. Nair is able to found a museum to hold his collection and make it available to the public, it will be a rich resource for everyone interested in Asian art.