AN4AA Talks 2025 | Roger Nelson | “The Poem is a Temple”: Artistic Art Histories (in Southeast Asia)

This talk will be co-presented by the Australasian Network for Asian Art and the University of Melbourne

What can we learn from an air-conditioning controller hanging next to a painting, in an artist’s ancestral home? How can we feel moving images in our stomachs? Why are contemporary artists in Southeast Asia drawn to the region’s under-studied modernisms? If these artists are honouring their forebears, can they also be critical? Can their artworks also be art histories?

Artistic art histories is the term used by Roger Nelson to discuss artworks in which contemporary artists do art-historical work, including through extensive art-historical research of various kinds. Nelson proposes the concept of artistic art histories as a companion to the more widespread notion of artistic research because it emphasises the historiographical and theoretical contributions that artists make, alongside their research. These artworks are thinking and theorising, and thereby proposing ways of knowing that may contribute to the ongoing decolonising of art-historical work.

In this talk, Nelson argues that Southeast Asia is a fertile site for examining artistic art histories, even though this mode of practice proliferates globally, because of the distinctive characteristics of the discipline in the region. This creates an opportunity for artists to make significant contributions to decolonising the ways the art of the past is studied and known.

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, currently Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, focusing on questions of historiography and method. His current book project on “artistic art histories” in the region is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. He is also co-editing a volume on the artist and activist Emiria Sunassa, under advance contract with Leiden University Press. He was the 2022 recipient of the A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize, presented by the Association for Asian Studies. He is a 2025 Sir William Dobell Fellow at the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory. Roger was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore. He is cofounding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a scholarly journal published by NUS Press.

Image: Sriwhana Spong, The painter-tailor, 2019, still from video. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett.

The Australasian Network for Asian Art (an4aa) is a group of researchers including academics and curators from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand working in the field of Asian art and visual culture. The Network and its affiliated mailing list serve as a platform to share research, promote events and exhibitions, foster a scholarly community, cultivate interest, and act as a vehicle for advocacy.