Sheryl Lynne Tan

MA Asian Art Histories

2024

Sheryl’s love of history began in junior college and led her to pursue a degree in history at the National University of Singapore, specialising in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asian history. During her undergraduate years, she began to explore different ways in which histories were recorded, and was drawn to photography and photographic archives. This interest, coupled with visits to various photography exhibitions over the years, led to her decision to join the MA in Asian Art Histories programme at LASALLE.

Sheryl’s current research focuses on contemporary photomedia practices in her native Malaysia, with her thesis focusing on the use of the photographic medium in artworks that express themes of national identity and the reading of these works in various exhibitionary contexts.

sheryl.lynne.tan@gmail.com

Thesis abstract

To picture a nation: The representation of Malaysian identity in selected photomedia work from Yee I-Lann

This thesis investigates themes of Malaysian identity and the imagined Malaysian community through selected works from Yee I-Lann’s photomedia practice, Through Rose Coloured Glasses (2002), the Malaysiana series (2002) and the Rasa Sayang series (2012-2021).

Malaysia is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious plural society that continues to grapple with issues of identity. Sabahan artist Yee explores ideas of identity and the imagined community through the use of found studio photographs and crowdsourced photographs in her work that pictures the imagined Malaysian community.

This paper situates Yee’s works in the sociopolitical contexts in which they were created, discusses the strategies that Yee uses in her work as well as examines the impact that curatorial intent and the exhibitionary context have on the reading of Malaysian identity and the imagined Malaysian community in the selected works from Yee’s practice.