From Mansau-Ansau to Gotong Royong: The collaborative practice of Yee I-Lann and Pangrok Sulap
This thesis critically examines the work of Sabahan artist Yee I-Lann and collective Pangrok Sulap’s in order to address the question of how frameworks for understanding collaboration can be more attuned to the specificities of context.
It will demonstrate that though existing frameworks for collaboration as conceptualised by thinkers like Claire Bishop, Nicolas Bourriaud and Grant Kester have their merits, they do not adequately capture the ways in which collaborative practices derive from and are shaped by the sociopolitical and cultural nuances of the context of Sabah, Malaysia. Sabah is a region with a complex history of colonisation, and the artists who practice here today draw upon the postcolonial conditions of this context in their collaborative practices.
This thesis argues that engagement with this postcoloniality is critical for understanding how Yee I-Lann and Pangrok Sulap approach collaboration, in particular their focus on community and indigenous forms of knowledge. It will demonstrate how this focus on the local is in actuality enacting a decolonising project, and to adequately understand how collaboration functions in this region, there is a need to decolonise art historical knowledge, its vocabulary in particular.
Yee’s practice has for a long time engaged with these ideas and has enacted a decolonising project through actively deconstructing legacies of colonial power and recentring local knowledge over that of the foreign. It is through the privileging of indigenous knowledge that her collaborative practice develops its own vocabulary and new forms of knowledge rooted in the local such as mansau-ansau (to walk and walk, not knowing where you are headed).
The case study of Pangrok Sulap’s collaborative work will illustrate how drawing upon local vernacular traditions like gotong royong (mutual aid) in our analyses allows for cultural nuances of locality to be captured more attentively. In sum, this thesis argues for the decolonisation of art historical knowledge when addressing the Southeast Asian context, one that highlights the ways in which contemporary practices emerge from the traditional in this region and are reflections of the contexts they operate within.
