About
Krystle Huan serves as the assistant director of visual arts at the National Arts Council Singapore, where she oversees Singapore Art Week.
Her earlier career spans strategic communications in private and public-sector settings, most recently at the Council while also serving with the Culture Academy, Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth.
She holds an MA in Asian Art Histories from LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore, with research on the role of aesthetic experience in reorganising our self-world relations, read through the world-making strategies of three modern and contemporary East Asian artists.
Affording Orientation in the Aesthetic Worlds of Yamashita Kiyoshi, Shiota Chiharu, and Sun Xun
Modernity has transformed the inherited structures of time, place and meaning, which give rise to conditions of metaphysical anxiety. In response, this thesis asks what role aesthetic experience can play in reorganising our self-world relations.
In East Asian art historiography, this question is broached with two tendencies: (1) reading artworks as belatedly derivative of Euro-American models, or (2) essentialising them as remnants of premodern spiritual tradition. Both privilege what artworks represent over what they do, treating artists as recipients of influence or necessary bearers of tradition for marketability.
This study proposes world-making as an alternative approach whereby artworks can be understood as active arrangements of perception and experience that make forms of orientation possible.
Through the aesthetic worlds of three modern and contemporary East Asian artists, Yamashita Kiyoshi (1922–1971), Shiota Chiharu (b. 1972), and Sun Xun (b. 1980), this study looks into the historically specific metaphysical anxieties negotiated, the world-making strategies employed, and forms of orientation their aesthetic arrangements make available to viewers.
Using an analytical framework of four dimensions, I foreground two principal facets in each work most germane to their world-making. Yamashita negotiates the unfreedoms of a finite, determinable life, reorganising temporal experience through chronoception and material accumulation that affords reclaimed belonging within time; Shiota negotiates memory, mortality, and bodily dissolution, reorganising embodied space through immersion and spatialised absence that affords dwelling within irreversible absence; and Sun Xun negotiates epistemic uncertainty over what is true, reorganising ways of perceiving knowledge through analogical correspondence and cultivating a historical consciousness that affords traversal across disparate ways of knowing.
In this crowded attention economy where seeing is increasingly expected to become knowing instantaneously, these artists have created opportunities to renew, with imaginative verve, our relationship with ourselves and our sense of where and how we stand amid the complexities of contemporary life.
