This book is the first overall study of research-based art practices in Southeast Asia. Its objective is to examine the creative and mutual entanglement of academic and artistic research; in short, the Why, When, What and How of research-based art practices in the region. In Southeast Asia, artists are increasingly engaged in research-based art practices involving academic research processes. They work as historians, archivists, archaeologists or sociologists in order to produce knowledge and/or to challenge the current established systems of knowledge production. As artists, they can freely draw on academic research methodologies and, at the same time, question or divert them for their own artistic purpose. The outcome of their research findings is exhibited as an artwork and is not published or presented in an academic format. This book seeks to demonstrate the emancipatory dimension of these practices, which contribute to opening up our conceptions of knowledge and of art, bestowing a new and promising role to the artists within the society.
Author(s): Caroline Ha Thuc
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 284
City: Cham
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Research-based Art Practices: Context and Framework
2.1 Open-ended Definitions and Local Specificities
2.2 Challenging Established Systems of Knowledge
2.3 A Singular Form of Knowledge
Chapter 3: Birth of a New Art Language
3.1 Heritage and Early Developments
Research and Traditions
Documenting Reality
A Fresh Wave Within Contemporary Practices
3.2 Generative Possibilities
A Relative Freedom
The Question of Funding and Support
Education and Artists’ Discourse
The Building of Memory: Zeitgeist, Archives and Historiography Fever
A Global Trend
Chapter 4: The Artist-Researcher
4.1 Research Methodologies: The Case of the Artist-Historian
4.2 Research as Material
Chapter 5: The Artist as a Producer of Knowledge: Cultural Activism in Tiffany Chung’s The Vietnam Exodus Project (2009–)
5.1 The Vietnamese Refugee Crisis in Hong Kong
The Vietnamese Context: A History Officially Denied
The Hong Kong Context
5.2 The Artist-Researcher
The Artist Working as an Archivist
The Artist Working as a Historian
The Artist Working as a Cartographer
The Artist Working as an Ethnographer
5.3 Cultural Activism and Knowledge Production
Research and Cultural Activism
Building a Collective Memory and Reclaiming an Identity
Objectivising and Mending a Traumatic History
Escaping Authoritarian Frameworks
Building Knowledge from Fragmentations
Chapter 6: Research as Strategy: Reactivating Mythologies in Wah Nu and Tun Win Aung’s The Name Series (2008–)
6.1 The Artists Working as Historians
Against the Humiliations
A Systematic Process of Work
In Search for “Truth”
6.2 From Representation to Interpretation and the Construction of a Myth
From Archival Materials to Representation
From Representation to Interpretation
The Building of a Monument
The Creation of a Myth?
6.3 Research as a Strategy
Countering Ignorance and the Official Narratives
Building a Legitimacy
Activating Debates
Chapter 7: Beyond the Artist’s Discourse: Implicit and Sensuous Knowledge in Khvay Samnang’s Preah Kunlong (2017)
7.1 A Thirst for Knowledge
7.2 The Artist-Researcher: Working Freely as an Ethnographer
7.3 Discourse and Cultural Appropriation
A Cultural and Social Otherness
A Confusing Discourse
7.4 An Anthropology of Nature: Implicit and Sensory Knowledge Production
Consubstantiality
An Anthropology of Nature
An Implicit and Sensuous Knowledge
Chapter 8: Emancipatory modes of knowledge production in Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2003/2012–ongoing)
8.1 What Is Southeast Asia?
8.2 The Artist-Researcher
Extensive Academic Research
Expanding the Singaporean Context
8.3 Emancipatory Modes of Knowledge Production
A Rhizomatic Approach
Experiencing Southeast Asia
Chapter 9: Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
