Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and currently Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches and publishes widely on the modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia. His forthcoming book, Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices (to be published September 2026 by Cornell University Press) discusses artists from across the region and its diasporas, arguing that artists make important contributions to art-historical knowledge. Nelson’s recent curatorial projects include Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: The Bouquet and the Wreath, presented in 2025–26 at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (Chiang Mai) and Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai), and soon to travel elsewhere. He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by the National University of Singapore (NUS) Press.
This essay attends to some of the ways in which artists have mediated (and sometimes remediated) their interactions with curators as well as to their understandings of the curatorial. It surfaces a less familiar view of artists’ experiences of curation as often fraught, even while such engagements may also be enabling and even nourishing.
