Picturing Conflict in Southeast Asia: History, Memory and Ecology | Session 3

Dr Wulan Dirgantoro

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. 

Dr Kathleen Ditzig 

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 Seng Yu Jin

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 Elly Kent

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 Margaret Hutchison

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 Sim Chi Yin

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 Roger Nelson

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 Anthea Gunn

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.