Journal & Book Publications

The vast majority experience fashion today is through a screen, as we scroll on social media, encountering endless global information. We have shifted from glossy magazine images, taken by professional photographers where supermodels pose while being styled, edited and retouched versus the supposedly candid snapshots of popular influencers we find on social media, that share experiences of fabricated lives, overuse hash-tagging labels and finished with love heart emojis. Do values start to shift or become lost in translation where garments are being translated from a foreign perspective and it’s meanings? We accept that fashion is a complex system of ambiguities and even more with the developments in media technologies, fast fashion, and consumerism on the rise has created a new generation of fashion storytellers, image-makers, and curators that produce and share a pastiche of perspectives. These communicators provided the world with uninterrupted white noise, highlighting the discourse of fashion language and its many shifting values. The intent of fashion is two-fold: both informative and communicative. An audience must know what the communicator means to convey where garments are being translated from foreign perspectives and meanings something. Society needs to question the aspect of communication in these times of change, keeping in mind it is not relied upon being fully understood. In the East, we look to the West to be informed and attempt to translate the creativity into a language that we do not fully grasp, re-communicating it as a foreigner. With this research, I aim to examine the power of social media influence on fashion and how it is generating a disjuncts fashion language, the loss of knowledge and heritage across time and space, subsequently creating a local voice through craft and culture changing the global dialog of fashion."    
Citation:
Bonney, Martin. “Craft and Culture, Changing the Global Dialog of Fashion.” Fashion Futures Conference Proceedings, edited by Li Jun, Donghua University, pp. 362–370.

Through a close study of key moments, the chapter establishes the relationship between state enterprise and cultural rootedness, and social access and political agency as key engines of artistic development in postcolonial Singapore.
Citation:
Purushothaman, Venka. "Presenting Culture and Nationhood: The Singapore Arts Festival.” The State and the Arts in Singapore, edited by Terence Chong, World Scientific, 2018, pp. 67-107.

Consequently, the “services sector” (which included the arts) was identified as a potential future growth engine for Singapore. It is important to place the ACCA Report in a historical perspective against developments in the arts and cultural scene of Singapore in the 1980s, particularly movements and activities occurring ‘on the ground’ that were driven by artists and other cultural workers. The chapter will firstly discuss the key recommendations of the ACCA Report in the context of Singapore’s arts scene then, and in view of the economic imperatives that underlie Singapore’s cultural policies, offer a perspective on how the ‘arts workforce’ has emerged and been nurtured since the 1980s, partly through stimuli from the state’s arts and education policies.     

Citation:
Wong, Audrey. "The Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts.” The State and the Arts in Singapore, edited by Terence Chong, World Scientific, 2018, pp. 111-126.

It considers why current key performance indicators are perceived as problematic, discusses the distinctions between intrinsic and instrumental benefits of the arts as well as existing literature on these, and argues that there is a need for more research in order to develop complex indicators in Singapore that can be used by arts organisations and the National Arts Council alike to capture the more intangible effects of the arts.
Citation:
Wong, Audrey. “Towards ‘Meaningful’ KPIs? Capturing Multidimensional Impacts in the Arts.” The Art of Measuring the Arts, Institute of Policy Studies, 2018, pp. 18–26.

Pierre Huyghe's mysterious installation responds to the life-breath of visitors to mutate human cancer cells. Susan Collins and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer construct cybernetic worlds-within-worlds to render us beings-for-others during intimate encounters with strangers. Urich Lau and TC&A involve and implicate the audience in eerie expressions of what existentialists term being-towards-death. These artworks prompt feelings of separation, alienation and existential angst; and emphasize human estrangement within a mysterious, incomprehensible or absurd world. But a cybernetic-existentialist reading also reveals that their evocation of human disquiet and isolation is tempered by an equal emphasis on positive notions of feedback loops, 'separation with communion', existential freedom and authentic interactions with the world and with Others. The artworks articulate cybernetics' and existentialism's shared interest in collapsing boundaries and erasing distinctions: between agents within a system; between the self and the Other; and between perceiving, feeling and acting.    

Citation: 
Dixon, Steve. “Uncanny Arts and the Aesthetics of Cybernetic-Existentialism”. Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, vol. 16, no. 2, 2018, pp. 191-214.

Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide is the first English-language book to be devoted solely to the topic of Thai cinema, which has revived and gained new world-wide recognition since the late 1990s.
Citation:
Knee, Adam. Entries on 3 Thai Films. Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide, edited by Mary J. Ainslie and Katarzyna Ancuta, I.B.Tauris, 2018.

While the phonetic resonances between Sur and its English counterpart 'surrealism' might suggest European origination, Apinan's framework hinged on the nationalist premise of the uniqueness of Sur within the Thai context. By way of contrast, one may point to the dismissal by the French surrealist André Breton (1896-1966) of the limitations of language and cultural difference as an impediment to his internationalist goal of promoting surrealist practices in 'the four corners of the earth [as] a fairly extensive scheme of resistance and experiment'. In fact, this distinction between Breton's and Apinan's frameworks points to a central problematic of Southeast Asian modern art history: determining the particularities of relationships between exogenous and endogenous artistic discourses and the ideological weight of prioritising one over the other. In this chapter I offer another entry point, one that accounts for the deployment of photographic techniques associated with surrealism in the work of Thai photographers, without deferring to nationalist narratives of cultural exceptionalism or Eurocentric frameworks of belatedness and provincialism. Instead, I am concerned with locating the specific points where Thai Sur and European surrealism intersect and diverge, found here in the resonances between photography and notions of realism. Against the apparent incommensurability between the ease with which Thai artistic institutions accepted Sur and the avant-garde fervour of European surrealism, this approach maintains the relevance of conceptual linkages between the two while also reaffirming their distinctiveness. In doing so, the aim of this enquiry is transformed from an evaluation of how faithfully Sur photographic practices adopted European surrealist techniques and principles, to what the 'sur-real' connoted in a context where the relationship between photography, truth and reality was something quite different. For photography, this is revealed through a discussion of two major functions of Sur. First, as a means to overcome the medium's exclusion from discourses of fine art, and second as a replication of the dharmic vision encountered in photographic icons of highly regarded monks and monarchs.
Citation:
Veal, Clare Elisabeth. "Beyond Reality: Locating the Sur-Real in Thai Photography." Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945-1990, edited by Stephen H. Whiteman et al., Power Publications & National Gallery Singapore, 2018. 

Through this incredible archive, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up gives readers a unique window into Kahlo's life. It will focus on the personal, combining her prosthetics, jewellery, and clothes with self-portraits, diary entries, and letters to build an intimate portrait of the artist through her possessions, setting this in the context of her political and social beliefs.
Citation:
Wilcox, Claire and Circe Henestrosa, editors. Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up. V & A Publishing, 2018.