Name: Yvonne Wang Yi Wen
Thesis Title: Printmaking as a Conceptual Device in Contemporary Chinese Art
Thesis Abstract
This thesis investigates the role of printmaking in contemporary Chinese art. It examines the use of printmaking as a conceptual device and critical tool through close reading of the works of three contemporary artists – Xu Bing, Fang Lijun, and Sun Xun. Each represents a generation of artists who graduated from the printmaking department of China’s leading art academies in the post-Mao era. This thesis intends to situate the artists and their works not only within the art-historical discourse of Chinese printmaking and contemporary Chinese art but also within the broader context of China’s socio-political, culture, and economic transformation. It examines the diverse ways in which these artists have engaged with and transformed the vibrant tradition of printmaking in their multimedia practices. It explores their employment of the tangible medium of woodblock to alert audiences to complex ideas and provoke them into thinking more deeply about their lived realities. By underscoring the innovative ways in which they have reimagined printmaking, this thesis aims to demonstrate how the medium has been provocatively questioned, subverted and extended. Despite printmaking’s pivotal role in shaping Chinese culture, its recognition as a vital medium in contemporary Chinese art has been largely overlooked in mainstream Euro-American presentation and discourses. This thesis hopes to fill this void and reposition printmaking as a vibrant and evolving artistic vocabulary of contemporary art in China.

Name: Ely Nayir
Thesis Title: Repetition as Method in the Works of Melati Suryodarmo
Thesis Abstract
Central to the durational performance of Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo (b.1969, Surakarta) are bodily actions, gestures and movements that she repeats throughout the act, which often stretches into hours and even days. They yield motion to the performance and form part of its visual aesthetic. However, it is the ceaseless doing again and again of a single action or a set of movements into feats of endurance that are memorialised in her oeuvre. Rather than being embodiments of physical strengths or limitations, the mimetic renderings are seminal to Melati’s creative process in the making and presentation of her ideas and narratives during the performance. This thesis examines repetition as a necessary condition for her work to take place and how it operates as a compositional tool. Repetition emerges not only as a methodology but also functions as the work’s subject matter. In an art form that is devoid of script or choreography, repetition is the mechanism that facilitates the unfolding of her artistic intentions that are not initially apparent but develops over time through the reiterations. Repetition serves as the unspoken language in her performance. While most analyses of Southeast Asian performance art tend to focus on the socio-political contexts of the artist’s intentions, this study aims to offer a formalistic approach by delving into the method in Melati Suryodarmo’s practice as a case study of one of the region’s most maverick performance artists whose iconographic use of repetition makes her distinctive in the field.

Name: Theresa Tan
Thesis Title: Countering stereotypes of the nyonya in popular culture: Photographs of Peranakan women in the Straits Settlements from 1844 to 1942
Thesis Abstract
In popular culture, the young Peranakan girl is frequently projected as powerless and submissive, while the elderly Peranakan woman is stereotyped as the all-powerful family matriarch. Narrow tropes of the nyonya identity as circulated by successful cultural productions such as the multi-award winning play Emily of Emerald Hill, arguably undermine the multifaceted identities of Peranakan women as historical subjects. Juxtaposing the fictional life of the protagonist of Emily of Emerald Hill with historical photographs and records of the nyonya, this thesis looks at the social history and identities of the nyonya beyond her domestic space. Applying semiotic theory, this thesis deconstructs signifiers of meaning towards reading identity projections in photographs taken in the Straits Settlements between 1844 and 1942, and concludes that contrary to popular culture’s imagination of the stereotypical nyonya, historical photographs enact such a varied range of identities, including the anomalous and ambiguous ‘naked’, ‘cross-dressing’, and ‘not-so-nyonya’ nyonyas, that call for greater attention and examination not only in academic disciplines, but also through artistic and cultural productions.

Name: Vanessa Yeo
Thesis Title: Sculpting Nature: Investigating the role and significance of nature in the sculptural practices of Han Sai Por, Delia Prvacki and Kumari Nahappan
Thesis Abstract
Central to the discussion in this thesis are more recent critical theories and philosophies that contest the long-held divide between art and nature. Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson put forth new aesthetic theories that call for a more intimate relationship with nature and to engage with nature in its anthropomorphic context. Jeffrey Kastner also argues for the relationship between culture and nature to be reconceived, and TJ Demos proposes a multifarious eco-aesthetic of nature which considers the sociopolitics of capitalism, postcolonialism, environmentalism and social justice an essential part of the nature as an aesthetic. These theories frame critical analysis of the sculptures of Han Sai Por, Delia Pvracki and Kumari Nahappan. The thesis will compare and contrast the role and significance of nature for these contemporaneous female sculptors, who come from diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds, in three aspects of their work – their aesthetic archetype, their conceptual installations and their public commissions.

Name: Charleen Leo
Thesis Title: New media art in Singapore: Its emergence, development and practice, 1990s – 2019
Thesis Abstract
New media art in Singapore is an uncharted territory. This thesis investigates the emergence, development and practice of new media art in Singapore, from the 1990s to 2019. It will consider new media art practices in relation to the historical, social and political contexts of Singapore’s contemporary art, with optimism to generate a new mode of knowledge production and deepen the understanding of new media art practices within the global contemporary art history from a specific locale. By examining how the relationship between the state and the arts, individual artistic practices, the confluence of exhibitions, academic programmes and the influence of external forces in the exposition of international symposiums and festivals, have enabled the rooting and growth of new media arts in Singapore. This thesis anatomises the works of tsunamii.net, Urich Lau, Debbie Ding and Ho Tzu Nyen to propose three key characteristics of Singapore’s new media art.

Name: Li Chi Kwan
Thesis Title: The other in self — The role of ethnic minorities in contemporary Chinese art after the Cultural Revolution
Thesis Abstract
This thesis investigates the role of ethnic minorities—both as subject matter and artist—in the development of contemporary Chinese art after the Cultural Revolution, exploring the dichotomy between national and cultural identity. Ethnic minorities have their own culture, history and lifestyle, some even having their own language. They have always appeared as the subject matter in Chinese fine art to demonstrate unity during the Cultural Revolution. However, with modernisation and liberalisation in these last decades, their depiction in contemporary Chinese artworks has changed. They have been utilised as the subject matter for a breakthrough in art-making because of the difference in cultural identity. Ethnic minorities have thus indirectly become a catalyst of the revival of Chinese art. As artists, ethnic minorities no longer only create folk art after the Cultural Revolution. The case studies of Gonkar Gyatso and Dedron in this thesis show a critical commentary on their identity, culture and art as opposed to the stereotypes understood through the society. Since this thesis is not about characteristics of one particular ethnic-minority art, examples from Yunnan art, Inner Mongolian art and Tibetan art have been used throughout the thesis. These examples demonstrate that ethnic minorities are not minor or peripheral as one imagines. They have played an important role in Chinese art history.

Name: Akshatha Rangarajan
Thesis Title: Framing the lexical rhetoric: The socio-political context of Indonesian text-based art from 2008-2013
Thesis Abstract
This thesis explores the inherent connections between Bahasa Indonesia and text-based art, delving into artistic strategies that necessitated art’s conceptual and aesthetic textual methodology. The examination of four artworks created between 2008 and 2013 by artists FX Harsono (b.1949) and Jompet Kuswidananto (b.1976) are positioned in the Indonesian historical and sociopolitical realm perceiving that 2008 marked a decade after Suharto’s Orde Baru (New Order) regime (1968–1998). The visual and semantic modes of representation exemplify the voice of the Indonesians in the post-colonial Era Reformasi period, during Indonesia’s ongoing process of transitioning to democracy. Acknowledging that literary, political and social ideologies have influenced Indonesian power systems, this research targets artistic interventions, analysing and critiquing the interplay between language, art and identity that enables the artist and their work to be situated in the contemporary. The texts in these narratives becomes a verbal, aural and visual marker, essentially recording power contestations and affecting the meaning and significance of identity – realised through conceptual strategies discussed in this thesis – democracy, history and hybridity. The artists’ practice obliquely references and dynamically shifts the awareness and knowledge of neglected history through differences in the narrative, creating a contemporary reading of Indonesia’s sociopolitical and visual discourse.

Name: Claire MacLean Aitken
Thesis Title: Reframing the Gaze: Challenging Gendered Gaze in Contemporary Thai Art through the Works of Pinaree Sanpitak and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
Thesis Abstract
By examining the artworks of female Thai contemporary artists Pinaree Sanpitak and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, this thesis endeavours to analyse the influence of the male gaze in Thai contemporary art by primarily applying the feminist theories of abjection and the male gaze theory. In addition, this thesis will use comparative iconographic analysis to explain how Pinaree and Araya use female iconography to challenge the male gaze in contemporary Thai art and nuance ideas of female selfhood from an experiential lens. Furthermore, by examining the male gaze, this thesis will explore how Buddhism and its propensity towards favouring the male sex in Thailand impact depictions of women in Thai contemporary art.This thesis will apply various feminist theories, including abjection theory, as presented by French philosopher Julia Kristeva, and the male gaze theory, made famous by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey. In addition, this thesis calls upon regional-specific discourse from Southeast Asian scholar Barbara Watson Andaya to problematize gender, specific to Buddhist Thailand. Furthermore, this thesis will call upon examples of Thai literature to refine the internalized male gaze of Thai women and demonstrate that both Pinaree and Araya challenge patriarchal views of women in ways mainly based on their personal experiences being female.