Positioning contemporary art worlds and art publics in Southeast Asia

The Substation, Singapore, 2020

On Southeast Asian art's modern-to-contemporary shift: argues a distinctive Southeast Asian contemporary art methodology whereby public space and intangibles (money, national anthems, history, so on) are co-opted to engage audiences on social issues. Analysing seminal Southeast art from the 1970s onwards, author shows how these strategies emerged and persisted from contextual necessity, and are fundamental to Southeast Asian art's transition to contemporary modes.

Art Journal, 2022

Published in "Art Journal" 81:4 (2022): 146-149. Review of Pamela N. Corey, "The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia" (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021) and Viêt Lê, "Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 2018

2018 ‘Negotiating Change in recent Southeast Asian Art’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, vol.2, no.1 March. Preceded by a short disquisition on what is the "Asian" and the "Southeast Asian", I go on to examine the works of artists F.X. Harsono, Dacchi Dang and Dinh Q. Lê, historicising their work in relation to their predecessors including Sudjojono and Nguyen Tu Nghiem, as well as mentioning their peers Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Roberto Bulatao Feleo. I examine what unites these disparate practices in their nimble negotiation of personal and collective identities and histories, and discuss the insertion of a notion of resistance to political power or ideology into their artistic practice. Southeast Asian Regional Identity This article considers the works of artists F.X. Harsono, Dacchi Dang and Dinh Q Lê, historicising their work in relation to their predecessors, including Sudjojono and Nguyen Tu Nghiem, as well as their peers. What unites these disparate practices, in my analysis, is their nimble negotiation of personal and collective identities and histories, and their insertion of a notion of resistance to political power or ideology, into their artistic practice.

Southeast of Now: Directions in Modern and Contemporary Art, 2017

Curating Art, eds. Janet Marstine and Oscar Ho Hing Kay , 2022

The Third Avant-garde: contemporary art from Southeast Asia recalling tradition, 2018

The Third Avant-garde investigates radical art manifestations in Southeast Asia, which took place around the mid-1980s when postmodernism started to gain force in the region. It proposes that the advent of postmodernism in Southeast Asia is anchored in the materiality of traditional arts, an aspect that renders it different from its Western equivalent. The dissertation distinguishes two sets of postmodern manifestations: first, practices that use traditions in a celebratory way, and second, a set of works that use traditional arts radically. This study proposes that the second possibility manifests a double dismantle—first, against local patronizing forces that were enforcing artists to practice academic art and Western media (such as painting and sculpture), and second, a distancing attitude from Western art intelligentsia, who acted as ‘owners of the discourse’, and regarded ‘non-Western’ practitioners as followers rather than as trendsetters. For this investigation, the discipline of anthropology was called in, as was the art historical category of the avant-garde. The two approaches combined reveal how contemporary art from Southeast Asia that reprocesses traditional arts can be regarded as avant-garde. These gestures are novel, and result from practicing art in a certain location, and which is bound to a specific socio-political context. Keywords for Library Repository Avant-garde Tradition Southeast Asia Art History Anthropology Postmodernism Agency Multi-temporality

SUNSHOWER Exhibition catalogue: SUNSHOWER – Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, Date of Issue: August 9, 2017 >>Exhibition-catalogues are significant. However big the show, once taken down, it is primarily the catalogue, that speaks for the exhibition-artworks’ relationship with each other and the larger field. When the field is young and undecided, the catalogue, embodying the curator’s vision and position, matters more. This critic’s own knowledge of Southeast Asian art is grounded in the scholarship built through multiple-essay catalogues of historically relevant shows. A number of these were produced by Japan’s institutions, particularly with the opening of the Fukuoka Art Museum in 1979. Take for instance the principal text from the catalogue of one such regional exhibition, ‘Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses into the Future’, produced by The Japan Foundation Asia Centre in ‘97. Curator Junichi Shioda’s essay ‘Glimpses into the Future of Southeast Asian Art: A Vision of what Art should be’, constructed and cross-examined the idea of a regional canon, independent from Euramerican modernism, through the socially-rooted practices of artists from five Southeast Asian countries. Two other academic essays in this exhibition-catalogue further provided analyses of art in Southeast Asia and contemporary art in Indonesia. Around the same time, a similarly vital exhibition ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions’ was curated by Thai scholar Apinan Poshyananda. This exhibition’s catalogue included seven essays that built the discourse around the politically charged practices of various Southeast Asian artists among others from Asia. Such exhibition-catalogues sought intellectual contributions from field-scholars who connect socio-economic complexities, and ground artistic practices in their respective historical, cultural and political contexts. Such catalogue-essays, written two decades ago or today, are important to establishing the canon around Southeast Asian art because scholarly analyses of exhibition artworks, and their comparison with other pieces, permit the discerning of larger currents and parallels that give shape to the field. That artists from Southeast Asia have been potent voices for social change and reformation is established through scholars’ analyses of artworks presented in writing for exhibition-catalogues, past and present.<<

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 2021

Should paintings made in Sudan, or depicting scenes in Kenya, be considered “Southeast Asian” art? This essay considers this and related questions, in dialogue with the works of artists Chen Cheng Mei (b. 1927, Singapore; d. 2020, Singapore) and You Khin (b. 1947, Cambodia; d. 2009, Thailand). Chen was based in Singapore but travelled extensively on short study trips that she initiated between the 1960s and 2000s, while You Khin lived and worked in Sudan, Ivory Coast, Qatar and elsewhere during his three decades in exile from Cambodia, from the 1970s to the 2000s. The essay argues that their work reflects the divergent histories of Southeast Asian nations during the period of decolonisation, while also necessitating new critical approaches to artworks that depict unfamiliar people and places, going beyond concepts of primitivism. Drawing on primary research in both artists’ archives as well as on discourses derived from the locations depicted in their work, the essay argues that Chen’s and You’s works enable a deprovincialising of Southeast Asia’s modern art, and exemplify a postcolonial cosmopolitanism that traverses the Global South.

suedostasien.net, 2022

ART IN AMERICA, 2019