The archive as artistic practice : Koh Nguang How's Singapore art archive project, from 1980s to now

• Main Author: Teo, Sie Peng
• Other Authors: Sophie Goltz
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Visual arts and music
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/137066
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The Singapore Art Archive Project (SAAP) was first initiated as a personal collection by artist Koh Nguang How in the 1980s. However, it was not formalised until 2005. It consists of over one million articles, art ephemera and the like related to art practices in Singapore. SAAP has since materialised into a cacophony of ever-changing forms, including a diverse range of exhibition methods. The work has emerged in the very specific art historical context of Singapore, where there is a distinct lack of historical and archival material. Consequently, recent texts have generally ascribed Koh’s archival contents as instrumental for various purposes, particularly filling this art historical gap. Yet, there is little scholarship on Koh’s archival mechanism itself and the artistic qualities of his practice. This study thus proposes to understand Koh’s work under the rubric of archive as artistic practice. The research asks: What does Koh’s work do and how does it do it? How can we understand the multiple iterations of SAAP as generative sites for discourse and meaning? How can the archive as artistic practice inform us of a different modality towards our understanding of the archive? This state of uneven coexistence is the backdrop to which Koh, an independent artist, can be seen to resort to a unique aesthetic negotiation of Singaporean national history, culture and art. Fundamentally, this research is driven by a lack of documentation of artistic practices in Singapore in general, with a particular absence of artist’s own voices and perspectives. More viii importantly, until recently, the use of the archive has not been fully understood as an artistic practice and as a malleable construct to engender alternate modes of knowledge production. While many artists keep separate archives for the construction of work, these archives and their artwork are often divided as two separate entities. The scant discourse on SAAP appears, similarly, to privilege his archival activities over his art practice, segregating the two. This research argues, however, that Koh’s archival activities and art practice are one and the same, together constituting an artwork. By no means a comprehensive history of artistic archival practice or even SAAP, this research aims to posit Koh’s SAAP at the interstices of the archive and art practice. By using a narrative inquiry approach, specifically with a significant selection of in-depth interviews with the artist and related persons, this study constitutes several of Koh’s exhibitions between 1980s and now as symptomatic of an archive as artistic practice. Such findings may be of specific value to the artist, art historian, curator, archivist and the art patron in Southeast Asia and beyond. The notion is that amidst the stories of Koh and other scholarship in context lies a discursive space for historical, theoretical and methodological possibilities of the archive.