Xing Jun Seah
Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Architecture, Art History, Visual Culture, Heritage discourse
Biography
Xing Jun is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne exploring the profound cultural implications of the built urban environment’s changes on heritage preservation, communal identities, and senses of belonging, delving into how these changes ripple across social and artistic realms, giving rise to innovative creative expressions and aesthetic paradigms. Her work examines creative practices as forms of dissent and critique against conventional physical constraints, bringing critical discourse and art historical lens to the study of built urban environments. She holds an MA in Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne and BA (Hons) in English Literature from the National University of Singapore.
Thesis
The (An)aesthetics of Transgression: Cultural resistance to urban renewal in Singapore
Scholars of Southeast Asian studies have predominantly normalised the trajectory from colonial urban planning through nation-building to hyper-modern global urbanism, overlooking the complex entanglement of rural and urban experiences unique to Singapore. This research examines how a generation, born during the 1990s, experiences nostalgia as a critical lens through which the tensions of urban transformation, heritage production, and cultural counter-narratives in Singapore’s evolving national identity are negotiated and contested.
Studying creative and discursive forms of resistance to state-driven postcolonial urban development as expressed in cultural and heritage responses in Southeast Asian nations like Singapore, this research investigates key societal tensions through four built environment case study scenarios surrounding heritage production following Singapore's political independence in 1965, and to examine how the politicised cultural values projected in state narratives are impacted by accelerated neoliberal economic expansion and globalisation after 1990.
Xing Jun's research utilises moral panic as a regulating mechanism to analyse discursive constructions of national unity and identity in texts, artworks and media and explore how moral and affective tensions surface in built environment responses – through the mobilisation of public memory and dissenting practices, informing ongoing controversies over state-led cultural production.
The research's investigative methods explore theories of nostalgia, memory and affect as they are applied to the built environment to critically analyse the discursive tensions that continue to shape the transformation of Singapore’s urban spaces and ideals. Across the case study scenarios, they look at the resilience of rural/urban spaces, the erasure of public architecture, commodification of spatial practices and enduring colonial legacies as they manifest as provocations for controversies.
This research is supported by the Research Training Program Scholarship from the Australian Commonwealth Government (2024).
Contact
- Email xseah@student.unimelb.edu.au
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