BOOK REVIEW | Malaysia is not a cultural desert

BOOK REVIEW | How do we begin talking about Malaysian art?

June Yap’s Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia, gives this challenge a try. The result is an ambitious look at how regional contemporary art does more than capture the past, and instead also produces its own narratives of history.

This work is an extensive survey that spans several recent decades and takes into consideration the works of artists such as Wong Hoy Cheong, Green Zeng, Dain Iskandar Said and Reza Piyadasa, examining how they interpret the glossed-over and/or simplified histories of the Orang Laut, the Singaporean leftists and "Ops Lalang", among others.

The challenge with Yap’s book is that it is not accessible to a layperson audience, requiring a certain degree of familiarity with critical theory beforehand. The text, while informative, is often dense, and Yap also quotes extensively from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - who has a reputation for being notoriously difficult to read and understand.

Still, she lays out historical facts in great detail and her work catalogues various threads and recent important works of art, and the result can be vivid. The strangeness of some of the works surveyed, such as the aforementioned Wong’s alternative history “documentary” of the Malaysian conquest and colonial rule of Austria, or his public spraying of...