Notes on Closed Worlds and Speculative Encounters

This short article proposes some ways of thinking about speculative encounters that may shed light on approaches to the writing of global art history. In the past decades, narratives of postcolonial positions have become a core pursuit of creative practice in contemporary Asian art, and many such narratives are in dialogue with approaches of art historiography regarding temporality, locality, identity, and cultural transmission. Since this may sound like an overly ambitious claim, let us start with ‘Pailang Museum of Settler Colonialism,’ a project for Bleed, and elaborate on speculative encounters since the colonial era along two lines of thinking: first, how we might reimagine the colonial encounters to practice decolonisation and delinking; and second, how the concept of ‘closed worlds’ might inspire us to think beyond the hierarchy and limitations of geography and temporality in art historiography.