What is the place of contemporary art forms from the 1980s within the present global dispensation in which the attempt to obliterate temporality transpired, as witnessed in the Hegelian revivalism of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992)? This essay suggests that the contemporary of contemporary art in Singapore and Malaysia is less a period style and more a differing artistic response to the end of temporality as a situation. The idea of contemporary art entails the existence of an idea of the contemporary. Temporality, in turn, is to be comprehended as the way time is conceptualised and lived out in society. The contemporary is both an idea of the time in which we are in and a goal of reacting more effectively to the demands of the immediate present. And a part of the 1980s was a sense that earlier regional formations of modern art that had eradicated traditional cultural forms as backward needed to be rethought. The artistic practices of Singapore playwright and director Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) and Malaysian director Krishen Jit (1939-2005) are major examples of such artistic responses. Their work incarnates a contemporary in which historicity, cultural memory, and interpretations of traditional art forms had roles. Their overlapping theatre commitments require us to see their engagement with the issue of plural identities within and without the modernising nation-state (for Kuo) and within the boundaries of the modernising nation-state (for Jit) in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when that great modern ideology of nationalism was being revamped by globalising imperatives. They represent a shared engagement with a common colonial-era Malayan legacy of multiracialism and state formation from the Cold War. Historicity for Kuo and Jit is not the modernist desire to reconstruct the fragments of the past into a whole, and is not centrally about the representation of the past (though that occurs), but is in the first instance the need to capture the past’s fragments in order to conceive a fuller sense of the present’s multicultural opportunities.

中文翻译：

---

郭宝坤和克里斯汀的历史与当代戏剧

从弗朗西斯·福山（Francis Fukuyama）的《历史的终结与最后的男人》（1992）的黑格尔复兴主义中可以看出，在1980年代当代艺术形式在当前全球体制中占什么地位的尝试消灭了暂时性？本文认为，新加坡和马来西亚的当代艺术较少是一种时代风格，而更多的是对暂时性局面的一种艺术反应。当代艺术的观念需要当代观念的存在。反过来，随着时间的概念化和在社会中的生存，应当理解暂时性。当代既是我们所处时代的观念，也是我们对眼前需求的更有效反应的目标。1980年代的一部分感觉是，现代艺术的早期区域形成已经消除了传统文化形式的落后，因此需要重新考虑。新加坡剧作家兼导演郭宝坤（1939-2002）和马来西亚导演克里斯滕·吉特（1939-2005）的艺术实践就是这种艺术反应的主要例子。他们的作品体现了当代性，其中历史性，文化记忆和对传统艺术形式的诠释具有重要作用。他们对剧院的承诺重叠，这要求我们看到他们在1980年代和1990年代的几十年间（无论是在现代化的民族国家之内还是在不存在的情况下）（对于Kuo）以及在现代化的民族国家（对于Jit）的范围之内的参与。全球化的当务之急改变了伟大的现代民族主义意识形态。它们代表着殖民时期马来亚人对多种族主义和冷战后国家形成的共同遗产的共同参与。Kuo和Jit的历史性并不是现代主义者将过去的碎片重构为一个整体的愿望，也不是集中于过去的表示（尽管发生了），但首先是需要捕获过去的碎片为了更全面地了解当前的多元文化机遇。