https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1373-9352
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ABSTRACT
With his on-going, and probably endless, series Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen questions today’s representations of South East Asia and attempts to embrace the region’s plurality, fluidity, complexity and intangibility from an artistic perspective. Based on academic research, the series embodies the artist’s effort to convert and transform the outcome of his research into multisensorial and empirical art forms. As such, the Critical Dictionary brings forth new creative possibilities and innovative epistemological languages that challenge today’s modes of knowledge production, and in particular a form of rational and scientific knowledge that dominates our society.
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Notes
1 Kevin Chua, in particular, analyses and criticizes these archival practices, understood as a local ‘archive fever’ (Citation2018).
2 The Singapore Story is a 1997 National Education initiative aiming officially at reformulating Singapore history, based on a selection of key elements and understandings from the past. See in particular Loh (Citation1998).
3 This article is based on two conversations with the artist in Hong Kong (27 March 2019) and in Singapore (17 May 2019) and a few email exchanges in-between.
4 Against this usual narrative, Reid and Diokno (Citation2003, 98) argue that the term was first used by an ethnically South East Asian scholar, Nguyen Van Hoang, in the 1930s.
5 In particular, one heavy metal concert (Like The song of the Brokenhearted Tiger, 2012), theatre performances including shadow puppetry (Ten Thousand Tigers, 2014; The Mysterious Lai Teck, 2018), video animations (2 to 3 Tigers, 2015; One or Several Tigers, 2017; R for Resonance, 2019), videos based on film footage (The Name, 2015; The Nameless, 2015), academic essays (Every Cat in History is I; H for hydrography), and videos based on Internet footage and edited by an algorithm (R for Rhombicuboctahedron, 2019).
6 Cited in Alastair (Citation1995, 11).
7 Historian Antoine Cournot, for example, underlines that history cannot be a sequence of isolated figures that do not impact each other. He rather compares history to a chess game in which each move creates a causality chain that will, ultimately, bring forth the history of the game (cited in Prost Citation2010, 154).
9 Extract from the script of The Mysterious Lai Teck, courtesy of the artist.
10 This extract from the script of The Mysterious Lai Teck can also be found in the video The Name under a quotation by Ricardo Piglia from his 1981 book Artificial Respiration.
11 A half-tiger, half-human creature common in South East Asian cosmology (see Chua Citation2007; Ho Citation2007).
12 The sound is performed by Singapore artist Bani Haykal and his chants are notably mixed with electronic resonances.
13 Thomas Stamford Raffles first landed in Singapore on 28 January 1819. Under his statue along the river it is written that he ‘changed the destiny of Singapore from an obscure fishing village to a great seaport and modern metropolis’ (From a site visit, May 18 2019).
14 Interview with Fyerool Darma and Jason Wee, Singapore May 2019.
15 In his analysis of Jason Wee’s installation about the 1987 ‘Marxist conspiracies’, Kevin Chua notes that ‘Operation Spectrum (…) is an open secret – a piercing wound – that many shy away from talking about’ (Citation2018, 64).
16 Gene Z. Hanrahan, a scholar who purportedly wrote The Communist Struggle in Malaya, is the subject of Ho’s work The Name (2015).
17 See in particular Taylor (Citation2016).
18 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Citation1988) has notably criticized Deleuze’s Eurocentric philosophy.
19 Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in particular, borrows many of his concepts from Deleuze, yet aims at decolonizing Western thought (Citation2014).
20 In the video animation R for Resonance (2019).
21 The region of Zomia, originally invented by Dutch social scientist Willem van Schendel, includes five South East Asian countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar) and four provinces of China. Its area is comparable to Europe (Scott Citation2009).
22 Animism used to be the dominant beliefs among hill people from South East Asia (Scott Citation2009).
23 This idea is developed by Yuk Hui (Citation2016).
24 Extract from the subtitles of the video.
25 R for Resonance (2019) is an animation film focusing on the history of the gong in South East Asia, from the discovery of copper, through metallurgical arts to the casting of Dong Son drums. Against the background of an eclectic sound track – a powerful orchestration of percussions, electronic vibes, choirs and traditional instruments – two computer generated voices recite the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the related concepts of the Dictionary (for instance ‘F for Friction, Fluidity, Forest, Frontier, Fiction … ’), while symbolic images from the cosmos, meteorites, deep forests, bronze coins and mandalas melt and transform.
26 In particular Earth (2009–2014), a silent video developed into several versions with various soundtracks.
27 See in particular Yap (Citation2016, 89–96). However, according to the artist, there might be another confusion here because there have been at least two to three communists named ‘Plen’ in Singapore’s post-1945 history.