Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia

Developed as an exploratory study of artworks by artists of Singapore and Malaysia, Retrospective attempts to account for contemporary artworks that engage with history. These are artworks that reference past events or narratives, of the nation and its art. Through the examination of a selection of artworks produced between 1990 and 2012, Retrospective is both an attribution and an analysis of a historiographical aesthetic within contemporary art practice. It considers that, by their method and in their assembly, these artworks perform more than a representation of a historical past. Instead, they confront history and its production, laying bare the nature and designs of the historical project via their aesthetic project. Positing an interdisciplinary approach as necessary for understanding the historiographical as aesthetic, Retrospective considers not only historical and aesthetic perspectives, but also the philosophical, by way of ontology, in order to broaden its exposition beyond the convention of historical and contextual interpretation of art. Yet, in associating these artworks with a historiographical aesthetic, this exposition may be regarded as a historiographical exercise in itself, affirming the significance of these artworks for the history of Singapore and Malaysia. In short, which history rarely is, Retrospective is about the art of historicisation and the historicisation of art.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Histories Chapter 2: Witness Chapter 3: Profane Chapter 4: Return Appendix 1: Some Notes on Soviet–Malayan Connections Appendix 2: Some Notes on Performance Art Support in Singapore

About the Author :
June Yap received a PhD in cultural studies from the National University of Singapore.

Review :
In an interview published a month before his passing, Hayden White suggested historical studies had finally arrived at an “era of the image,” given how long it took for historians to recognize the potentialities of photography and subsequently cinema and post-cinema as not just historical objects but also modes of doing history. White cited queer history as an example of complicating the binary between the object and method of historical study, enabling new approaches to understanding history and historiography (Ethan Kleinberg and Hayden White on the Practical Past, Part 2, published on YouTube, February 5, 2018). June Yap’s Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in ContemporarySingapore and Malaysia (2016) is an essential curatorial, historical, and aesthetic contribution to this enlargement of history and historiography. If Malaysia and Singapore continue to share one thing in common, it is not their languages, politics, economics, or even contemporary culture—it is a shared history of modernity. June Yap posits that a historiographical aesthetic underlines many contemporary artworks in the two societies. Yap makes an important case for why contemporary artists across the political divide of nation-states are persistently haunted by this twentieth century modern past, which they share. It would seem that the stakes are too high for artists to ignore the debates. In lucid and poetic prose, Yap makes the case that serious and rigorous engagement with critical history is no longer the sole purchase of the academia. This is a significant work not only for scholars of contemporary art, but also for historiography. It is a theoretical cross-disciplinary study that contributes to a larger conversation about how we come to terms with a haunted past. By turn speculative, incisive, and rigorous, Yap's study provides useful conceptual apparatuses on how creative outputs in the form of contemporary artworks contribute to new ways at looking at our past. June Yap’s Retrospective is a journey that is at once her own as well as Singapore’s and Malay(si)a’s. It is a journey of reflection through the eyes and works of artists who draw on the nations’ histories to both understand and to create what it means to be Singaporean and Malaysian. Written the with passion of someone who loves her subject, and crafted with the attention of someone who cares for her words, Retrospective deserves a place on the shelf of every scholar of Malaysia and Singapore, and of art in Southeast Asia. A much-awaited book, this is the culmination of June Yap's long term engagement with the art ecologies of Southeast Asia. Her proposition of the ‘historiographical aesthetic’ as a means to disrupt and unpack the workings of national history requires our careful attention.