London: Lexington Books, 2016. ix, 353 pp. (B&W photos.) US$110.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4985-5581-4.
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 Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (2016) is an essential curatorial, historical, and aesthetic contribution to this enlargement of history and historiography. Yap’s interpretive framework of the “historiographical aesthetic” applies White’s philosophy of “metahistory” to show how the complexities of historical narrativity necessitate close attention to art and literature as both historical object and method, even while negotiating difficult questions of factual responsibilities. This is an especially timely intervention in Southeast Asia, given how prone Singaporean and Malaysian history is to being understood as a mere “fact-checking,” despite or perhaps because of their many historical traumas.
If the “era of the image” came late into history, art history, on the other hand, began with images as a historical method (even if not in explicitly academic terms). Yap’s historiographical aesthetic integrates history, art history, and curatorship “to determine ways of organising and understanding these artworks, collectively and in relation to one another, as opposed to viewing them as sporadic and individual instances” (273). She takes us through over 30 artworks, discussing them vis-à-vis their economic, geopolitical, institutional, and aesthetic historical contexts—and even the physical geographies and landscapes—of Singapore and Malaysia.
“History in the making” takes on a new meaning in Retrospective, where all the different historical pieces of the puzzle are simultaneously inert and alive. How, where, and when history is made are just as important as what is made and who is doing the making. Yap skillfully weaves her palette of history, art history, and historiography, of theory, event, and interpretation, to paint an intricate transdisciplinary mosaic that is promising but also challenging to navigate, particularly if the reader does not already have a background familiarity with contemporary art in Singapore and Malaysia.
As a case in point, Yap’s chapter and section headers (e.g., Land, Affect, Profane, Poetry, Linchpin, Transcendence) follow what can only be described as an aesthetic structure (if not perhaps a perplexing exhibition catalogue), as if to poke fun at the pretension of imposing a similarly reductive structure on either the themes or chronologies of the subject matter. Yap seems to playfully suggest her book itself should be approached retrospectively; it is the first page of “Linchpin,” the introduction (to the concluding chapter, that is) that really summarizes the overall trajectory (or aesthetic, if you will) of the book:
Looking back, the subject of the historiographical artwork appears to be of histories variously neglected, suppressed, suspended, and left behind (often too, left histories)… In approaching these artworks, three elements were identified as fundamental to the historiographical artwork: nation, land, and representation… To examine the nature of the historiographical aesthetic, two trajectories have been employed to organise the discussion, broadly corresponding to aesthetic production geared towards history or to art history. The first, elaborating on the concept of the witness and witnessing, presented a variety of responses to the historical event and narrative… The second trajectory under the concept of profaning gathered artworks that respond largely to art history to look at methods of charting transformative developments within aesthetics (273–274).
Yap shows us that the historiographical aesthetics of Singaporean and Malaysian art (premised by an introductory section on “Malaya” early in the book) cannot lie about their joined and separated histories: of colonialism, anti-colonialism, and neo-colonialism amidst the backdrop of the Cold War and late capitalism; the failed merger between 1963–1965; nation-building projects including the reification of state history and the historicization of national discourses; local communities and networks within and beyond national boundaries; the historical ties to and scarring of the land and the sea (e.g., in the works by Zai Kuning and Yee I-Lann).
Through this, Yap gives us her take on the timeless dilemma of area studies, neither reducing Singapore and Malaysia to mere “case studies” for “Western theory” nor exoticizing them as beyond the need for a global theoretical conversation. Her complex methodology stages a continuous looping of the historiographical operation in relation to history, art history, and relevant theory and discourses. Selected terms receive extensive elaboration—contemporary, academic realism, landscape, performance art, modern—both to add theoretical rigor and to ensure they do not get a free pass to smooth over their significatory particularities within the Singaporean/Malaysian context.
Another group of works that Yap takes us through references Operation Coldstore (1963) and Operation Spectrum (1987) in Singapore and Operation Lalang (1987) in Malaysia, known for their exercise of detention without trial on national security grounds. What wounds are opened by the historical erasures, the lack of history, the historical un-making, that accompany these traumatic events in a young nation’s upbringing? And how do art and art history come into play? There appears to have been institutional endorsement at some level: Jason Wee’s 1987 (2006) was presented at the Singapore Biennale, site of the former Supreme Court under conversion into the new National Gallery Singapore. Wong Hoy Chong’s Lalang (1994) was presented at the Malaysian National Art Gallery, while Green Zeng’s Malayan Exchange (2011) and Seelan Palay’s Walking the Streets, Haunting Ghosts (2009) were exhibited in independent art spaces—The Arts House and Your Mother Gallery, respectively. However, as of May 2018, Palay has been charged in Singaporean court for taking part in a public procession without permit for his subsequent performance piece, 32 Years: Interrogation of a Mirror (2017), a one-person “procession” from Hong Lim Park to the National Gallery Singapore to the Parliament House, to commemorate the 32 years that Chia Thye Poh spent living in detention or restriction without trial.
Besides asking how art makes history, Yap also forces us to ask how state history allows art to make history, and where art history (a history of art or the history that art has made?) sits in relation to all the other histories. In what ways are these historical operatives in visual and performance art similar to and different from historical writings or the depiction of historical events in literature? How do the formal characteristics of such works contribute to the historiography of historicization and history?
June Yap’s Retrospective demonstrates the lack, need, and potency of a historiographical approach to art and aesthetic approach to history in Singapore and Malaysia. A final comment is that given the ambition and complexity of Retrospective, I would have appreciated an index section at the end of the book.
Kwok Kian Chow
Singapore Management University, Singapore