Prosthetic Memories : A Group Exhibition at Gallery 181

In a localised Chinese community like that of Malaysia’s, the search for identity has increasingly moved away from notions of authenticity and the homeland. Rather, it takes on a dynamic “prosthetic” form, a term adopted into Sinophone studies to refer to the specific ways that Chinese identity can splinter and interpret from mediated memories of events never directly experienced. At the same time, these internal developments must continue to reckon with perceptions from outside the community that embalm Sino-Malaysian identity in a state of perpetual foreignness and diasporic longing.

Prosthetic Memories brings together four Sinophone artists whose practices speak to a range of these creative negotiations. This paraphrastic formulation of Sinophone identity can be seen in the ways they engage with and reinvent its memories left behind in the landscapes and linguistic mosaics of contemporary Malaysia. In so doing, these artists demonstrate the alliances that form out of Sinophone's multidirectional diasporic condition. The significance of identity begins to crumble in our era of fast-paced and globalising developments. At the precipice of change, artists find in speculative memory a method for mediating the process of becoming and unbecoming. Malaysian Chinese identity resolutely grows on such awkward foundations.