Picturing Conflict in Southeast Asia: History, Memory and Ecology

Alexandra Torrens is Senior Curator of Art, Australian War Memorial. An art curator with more than 20 years of experience, Alex is a graduate of the Australian National University and the University of Canberra. Since joining the Art section in 2009, Alex has curated contemporary art commissions, public art works and exhibitions including the official war artist commissions of Tony Albert to NORFORCE (2012); Alick Tipoti to Charlie Company, 51st Far North Queensland Regiment (2016); and Stanislava Pinchuk to Operation Kudu (2023). Her research focuses on the Second World War art collection and Indigenous art in response to conflict. 

Dr Anthea Gunn is Senior Curator of Art, Australian War Memorial. Anthea was awarded a PhD in art history for her thesis Imitation Realism and Australian Art in 2010 at the ANU. She worked as social history curator at the National Museum of Australia from 2008 to 2013 and joined the Memorial's Art section in 2014. Her research is widely published, and she has curated contemporary commissions and exhibitions. She was lead curator of the online showcase of the Memorial’s First World War art collection, Art of Nation: Australia’s official art and photography of the First World War, and the touring exhibition of the contemporary collection, Art in Conflict. She was a partner investigator on the ARC Linkage Research project Art in Conflict. 

Dr Elly Kent is a researcher, teacher, and artist with over two decades of experience in academia and the arts in Indonesia and Australia. Elly teaches Indonesian language and researches Asian art at the Australian National University, where she is a senior lecturer and Sub Dean of Languages and Mobility in the College of Asia and the Pacific. Elly is the author of Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia (2022, NUS Press) and co-editor/author of Living Art: Indonesian Artists Engage Politics, Society and History (2022, ANU Press). Elly’s research looks at the nexus between art, artists and social change; she is currently investigating how war has been depicted by artists in Southeast Asia, and the rise of creative expressions of local identities in Eastern Indonesia.

Dr Hsu Fang-Tze, who holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the National University of Singapore, is currently a Curator and the Head of Interpretation & Publishing at the Singapore Art Museum. Previously, she taught in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Hsu has been honoured with the President's Fellowship and the FASS Promising Scholar Award at NUS. Her research interests include the development of acoustic modernity, Cold War aesthetics, and the philosophy of technology. Her recent curatorial projects include Attunement: Contemporary Politics between Mindscape and Soundscape (2026) at the Taipei Fine Art Museum, Singapore Biennale 2025: Pure Intention (2025–2026), Lost & Found at the Singapore Art Museum (2024–2026), Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2021–2022), and Fistful of Colours: Moments of Chinese Cosmopolitanism (2021–2022) at the National University of Singapore Museum (2020). Hsu's recent academic publications include Performing Homescapes (2025) from Springer, The New Television: Video After Television (2024) from No Place Press, and the journal "Cultural Politics" (2023), published by Duke University Press.

Dr Kathleen Ditzig is Curator at National Gallery Singapore. She received a PhD from Nanyang Technological University with a dissertation titled Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s). She obtained her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Inspired by her experience in cultural policy, Ditzig studies modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art in relation to global histories of capitalism, technology, and international relations. As a curator and researcher, she is invested in advancing and interrogating art as an exceptional site and system of speaking to power. She won an IMPART Curatorial Award in 2021. Her writing has been published by Southeast of Now (NUS Press),  Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia (NUS Press), Afterall (University of the Arts London), post: Notes on art in a global context (MoMA), Art Agenda and Art Forum, among others.

Dr Margaret Hutchison is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra. Her research examines the policies and practices of care for Australian veterans and the cultural legacies of war. She is the author of Painting War: A history of Australia's First World War art scheme (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of Portraits of Remembrance: Painting, Memory and the First World War (University of Alabama Press, 2020), and Exiting War: The British Empire and the 1918-20 moment (Manchester University Press, 2022).

Dr Phoebe Scott is Senior Curator and Deputy Director of Content Publishing at National Gallery Singapore. A collaborating curator for the exhibition Into the Modern: Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2025), she was also recently the lead Curator of the exhibition City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s (2025). Her previous curatorial projects include Radiant Material: A Dialogue in Vietnamese Lacquer Painting (2017); Reframing Modernism: Painting in Europe, Southeast Asia and Beyond (2016); Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century (2015–ongoing).

Phoebe holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney, on the subject of modern art in Vietnam. Her research interests include modern art within global frameworks; intersections of modernism and colonialism, especially in Indochina; Socialist Realism and its legacies.  

Dr Roger Nelson is Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices (Cornell University Press, 2026). The book asks what knowledge is produced when contemporary artists engage – within their artworks – with overlooked histories of modern art. He was awarded the Sir William Dobell Fellowship at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University (2025) and the A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize (2022). Recent curatorial projects include Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: The Bouquet and the Wreath, presented in 2025–26 at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (Chiang Mai), Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai), and Ilham Gallery (Kuala Lumpur). He is co-founding co-editor of  Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press. 

Dr Seng Yu Jin is a Senior Curator and Director (Curatorial, Research & Exhibitions) at the National Gallery Singapore. He was previously a Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts in the MA Asian Art Histories and BA Fine Arts programmes, and now lectures in the National University of Singapore’s Minor in Art History programme. He obtained his PhD from the University of Melbourne. Seng’s research interests cover regional art histories focusing on Southeast Asian art in relation to the history of exhibitions and artist collectives in Southeast Asia. His selected curatorial projects include From Words to Pictures: Art During the Emergency (2007), Cheong Soo Pieng: Bridging Worlds (2010), the Singapore Biennale, If the World Changed (2013), and Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, 1960s to 1990s (2019). He recently co-edited Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art and co-authored Singapore Chronicles: Art.

Dr Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance, and book-making. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022–23) and holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London. She did a solo performance-installation at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in August 2026. Other recent exhibitions include: the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2024); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); Barbican Centre, London (2023); Camera Austria, Graz (2024); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Datsuijo, Tokyo (2024); Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery, Berlin (2021); and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021). In August 2024, she premiered a theatre performance on her project One Day We'll Understand, on her family history and the anti-colonial war in what was British Malaya. The performance toured to the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts in Melbourne in February 2025.

Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Harvard Art Museums, M+ Hong Kong, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum Singapore. Sim is based in Berlin.

Dr Thy Phu is Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora and Visual Justice in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research examines photography, war, migration, refugee histories, and visual culture through critical and community-engaged approaches. She is the author of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam and Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, and co-editor of Cold War Camera, Refugee States, and Feeling Photography.

Dr Wulan Dirgantoro is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is an art historian with research interests in modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, with a special focus on Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Wulan is the author of Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesian Visual Arts (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and other publications related to her research focus on contemporary art, gender, memory, and activism in post-conflict societies. Her recent research projects bring together art history, oral history, and interdisciplinary methodologies to examine how artists respond to political violence, social change, and lived experience. 

Horikawa Lisa is Senior Curator and Director (Curatorial & Collections) at National Gallery Singapore, overseeing the strategic development and enhancement of accessibility for its collections, including artwork and archives. Her current research interest is in comparative examinations of intersecting modernisms in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and beyond in the first half of the 20th century. She was a lead curator of Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (2015), (Re)Collect: The Making of Our Art Collection (2018), and co-curated Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016), City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s (2025), and the Japan Pavilion of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2026). Prior to joining the Gallery, she was Curator at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan from 2003 to 2012, where she co-curated China Dream—Another Stream of Chinese Modern Art (2004) and the 3rd and 4th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005, 2009).

Katsuo Suzuki is the Chief Curator of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and a specialist in the history of Japanese modern art. He has organized numerous exhibitions at the museum, including Okinawa Prismed 1872–2008 (2008), Experimental Ground 1950s (2012), Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s (2018), 100 Years of Mingei: The Folk Crafts Movement (2021–2022), and Opening Documents, Weaving Memories: A Special Exhibition Featuring Works from the Museum Collection (2025).