Open Access

The PhD dissertation takes art as enactments of different theories of materialism – both new materialism(s) and historical materialism, to provide conceptual tools through which both material agents and socio-political processes could be understood in emergent, relational and dynamic ways. The dissertation examines the politics of language and how the materiality of language could transgress political boundaries by focusing on Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s works. The problematisation of language as a signifier continues with bioart works engaging with DNA technology from Paul Vanouse and Spiess/Strecker, which also challenge organic death and the capture of life under necropolitics with hypernature. This is followed by an analysis of Geumhyung Jeong’s choreographic works with machines, which highlight the relational co-emergence with the man-machine assemblage. The dissertation ends with Ho Tzu Nyen and Royce Ng’s transhistorical works on Southeast and East Asian modernity, with the figures of the tiger and the vampire embodying the free flow of desire in capitalism. Traversing different histories and geographies while interweaving diverse topics including animism, technology, colonialism and Confucianism, the core question remains the same throughout the dissertation: to locate the agency in the material and the (in)dividual bodies.