• Our Colonizers are Different— Critiquing the Contemporary Through Appropriating Colonial Vestiges in Singaporean Contemporary Art

Within the field of Singaporean contemporary art, there is a considerable body of work that engages with the imagery of colonial vestiges in the postcolonial state of Singapore. In this essay, I argue that beyond mere critical engagement with the colonial past through the lens of postcolonial theory, these works engage critically with pressing social issues and the contemporary condition through interactions with symbols of the colonial legacy. This layered meaning within a single work is enabled through the appropriation of colonial symbols that themselves are encoded with a complex layered meaning as a result of the intertwined relationship between Singapore’s exaltation of its colonial legacy and the authoritarian rule of the independent government of Singapore that is very much a part of the contemporary condition. This engagement with the contemporary through loaded yet ambiguous colonial symbols situates this mode of expression within the larger classification of Southeast Asian contemporary art that is characterized by the use of an associative and conceptual visual language that alludes to rather than explicitly illustrates the social realities that the artist wishes to put into the critical spotlight.