Roger Nelson | Staging and Circumventing the Picturesque: Hilmi Johandi’s Singapore

This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).

Situated in a public park built along a former railway track in Singapore, Stagecraft: Landscaped Grounds (2022–24) by Hilmi Johandi is the artist’s largest artwork realised to date. Comprising seven distinct components, it is made from industrially printed metal sheets attached to structures made from metal tubing, of the kind usually used in construction sites. The printed surfaces are derived from paintings and prints made by the artist, which in turn cite from 1930s colonial travel posters, inviting tourists across the British Empire to “visit Malaya” and to travel by train through stylised tropical landscapes.

In this talk, I will use the image of staging to consider how Hilmi’s work critically engages with the picturesque, as an aesthetic principle underpinning both the colonial source images, and also the contemporary urban landscape in Singapore today. I will propose that Hilmi’s work is theatrical (playing with imagery of a theatrical stage), concerned at once with the past and the present (engaged in multiple stages of history), testing out new ideas and techniques (staged like an experiment), and temporary (its structure repurposing materials used in scaffolding or staging). I will suggest that staging is one of several strategies taken up by artists seeking to engage with Southeast Asia’s modern art histories, within their artworks.

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, with a focus on questions of historiography and method. His current book project on “artistic art histories” is forthcoming with Cornell University Press; it examines how artists contribute to the ongoing decolonising of art-historical work by engaging with Southeast Asia’s modernist art, within their practices. Roger was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore. 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 co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by NUS Press at the National University of Singapore.

Image: Hilmi Johandi, Stagecraft: Landscaped Grounds, 2022–24. Public installation, Wessex Estate, Singapore. Photograph by Roger Nelson.

The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 17 February and 21 October 2025, co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore and Alia Parker.