Agnes Tan Ee Boon

MA Asian Art Histories

2025

Agnes is graduating with an MA in Asian Art Histories from LASALLE College of the Arts. She also holds a degree in multimedia arts from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.

Her works engage the intersections of world histories and Southeast Asian histories as mediated through art, exhibition and visual culture. Her thesis examined Xu Beihong’s art, nationalism and exhibitions in Singapore, applying critical inquiry across transregional and historical contexts.

Agnes' pedagogical practice reflects a sustained interest in inclusive and interdisciplinary methods, shaped by meaningful engagement with diverse audiences and creative communities. Committed to critical and reflective practice, her presentation, 'Milestones And Messengers–Structuring Creative Practices With AI', was selected for the Art and Design Practice Exchange Forum and is currently being prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed venue, contributing to ongoing conversations around critical methodologies and knowledge exchange.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bacallstudio

bacall.studio.asia@gmail.com

Thesis abstract

Xu Beihong’s art and nationalism in context: A study of four Singapore exhibitions (1939–2008)

This thesis examines how Xu Beihong’s artistic nationalism was reframed through four major exhibitions in Singapore between 1939 and 2008.

While Xu (1895–1953) is celebrated in China for fusing Western realism with Chinese ink traditions, his legacy in Southeast Asia—particularly Singapore—invites further exploration. Through visual analysis of five key works (Fishing in the Cold River, Tian Heng and His Five Hundred Followers, The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains, Running Horse, and Put Down Your Whip), alongside curatorial, archival and press materials, this study traces how exhibitions shaped evolving narratives of nationalism, diaspora, and identity.

The 1939 Victoria Memorial Hall exhibition, staged during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), cast Xu as a patriotic realist and diasporic mobiliser. In 1954, a posthumous memorial positioned him as a cultural ancestor and educator, reinforcing diasporic continuity. The 1998 Sojourn in Nanyang exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum highlighted hybridity and multiculturalism, aligning him with postcolonial nation-building. The 2008 Xu Beihong in Nanyang retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum situated him within global modernism, framing Singapore as a cultural mediator between East and West.

Drawing on Tony Bennett’s “exhibitionary complex” and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s “performing identity,” the thesis argues that exhibitions actively produce memory and identity than merely preserve heritage. It extends critical museology into Chinese diasporic contexts, showing how Xu’s oeuvre has been strategically mobilised to reflect shifting cultural politics. His art becomes a dynamic site of negotiation—between nationalism and diaspora, heritage and modernism—affirming the exhibition’s role in shaping collective memory and cultural diplomacy.