ABSTRACT
Rephrasing Nietzsche’s title, this essay examines works by contemporary artists and curators that employ various forms of archive in exhibitions as the politics of aesthetics. Since the notion of ‘archive’ has become a heated issue, following the translation of Jacques Derrida’s Mal d’Archive, contemporary artworks have been accessing images, objects, and documents for broader political and social significance. Contemporary artworks, whether in the archival formats of collecting, documents, or libraries, always carry Derrida’s paradoxical definition: “preservation and destruction,” to mediate the contradictory essence of archive itself. Much so in the works of Sinophone artists, such as Chen Jie Ren (Taiwan), Wong Hoy-cheong (Malaysia) and Ming Wong (Singapore), showing in video installations, works which create a fictional archive where the un-presentable can be present and preserved. Their fictional works promote desires for authenticity and origin where the lost realities can resurface and be preserved, and therefore reconfigures the experience of modernity in their own terms. These works, much different from the straightforward archive where a huge collection of objects and photographs are used in a feverish way, attends to an archive in its reflexivity, which is to say, a topographical reconfiguration to evoke the impossibility of the origin.
