Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia – Modernisms in Contemporary Practices

In Artistic Art Histories of Southeast Asia, Roger Nelson asks what knowledge is produced when contemporary artists engage – within their artworks – with overlooked histories of modern art. Through close readings of artworks by artists living and working across Southeast Asia and in the region's diasporas, Nelson argues that their practices contribute to decolonizing art history, drawing on the discipline's distinctive qualities in Southeast Asia. Chiefly concerned with contemporary art of the twenty-first century, the book also considers modern art made since the 1940s as a precursor to more recent practices. Nelson demonstrates that many contemporary artists in and affiliated with Southeast Asia conduct art-historical research on modern artists who are under-studied in conventional, academic scholarship. They make artworks with this research, and these "artistic art histories" go beyond the familiar model of "artistic research" to propose new ways of telling stories about the art of the past. Their practices foreground the human and nonhuman lives and life-forces that animate artworks and also art histories, bringing Southeast Asia's (post)colonial modernisms back to life.