South and Southeast Asian Art History

Southeast Asia’s earliest cities emerged by the mid-first millennium CE after more than one thousand years’ growth toward urbanism and complexity. These early cities appeared both on the coasts and in river networks; their inhabitants engaged in trade and agriculture, and selectively embraced urban and religious concepts from neighboring cultures with which they interacted. This chapter examines competing arguments for how and why cities first appeared in Southeast Asia, their timing, scale, and form. Despite heterogeneity in urban pattern, early Southeast Asian cities shared key
structural features in configuration and social construction that reflect pan-regional ideological systems. Fewer urban forms arose in insular Southeast Asia compared with the mainland, and they emerged later in time; selected examples are also included for comparison. Early Southeast Asian urban systems were participants in the process Sanskrit cosmopolitanism (sensu Pollock), but a growing body of archaeological research identifies regionalization in urban form that distinguished
even the earliest Southeast Asian cities them from their South Asian counterparts.

The image that portrays Śiva in a very specific dance posture, with his proper left leg held in a nearly horizontal position, ranges among the best-known representations of this deity. The article attempts to define its ‘typological boundaries’ as well as proposes a fresh reading of the icon and, particularly, the dwarfish figure that the god is dancing upon, Apasmāra / Muyalakaṉ.

The centuries-old interactions between the different regions of Asia took various forms including the migration of people, trade in raw materials and goods, and the exchange of religious, literary, and aesthetic ideas and forms. Covering diverse aspects of these interactions, this volume studies the connections between India and other parts of Asia including China and Southeast Asia.

It, therefore, approaches the subject of Asian cultural interactions during the pre-modern and early modern periods through the prism of politics, art, religion, and trade. By bringing together these inter-related aspects of cultural encounters, it explores the complex connected histories of the Asian people in a comprehensive manner.

The diversities of cultural interactions addressed in this book range from issues of war and diplomacy to trade, trade routes and ship-wrecks; from the making of grand monumental edifices to the circulation of tiny terracottas and coveted carpets, and from the religious to the secular domains in the exchange of cultural ideas and forms. Crucial for a comprehensive understanding of contemporary networks between the Indian subcontinent and various other parts of Asia, this work shows that interactions across cultures in pre-modern Asia were motivated not only by commercial but also cultural ties and explores the historical context in which they took place.

Hendra Gunawan: A Great Modern Indonesian Painter, is a new book - the first book - on the life and oeuvre of Hendra Gunawan, the flamboyant Indonesian nationalist painter who was kept out of the public eye for nearly four decades due to political circumstances. In the following article the author discusses the continuing importance of his work.
    Author's NOTE: As a PhD student doing fieldwork, I wrote about the artists I interviewed in the Jakarta Post, Indonesia's main English language newspaper read widely by the professional and culture-aware class. Publishing these media articles served two purposes: it helped me organize my notes and thoughts and it brought attention to young artists whose work I felt mattered, in an art world where there were few mechanisms for younger artists to get the attention of curators, critics, and collectors. I am posting some of the over 30 articles I wrote for the JP here, as they represent the earliest writing in English about many Indonesian artists who are globally known today.

The lintel situated above the eastern portal of the garbhagṛha (sanctum sanctorum) at Phimai depicts a three-headed deity with eight arms dancing on an elephant’s head. As Phimai is confirmed to be a temple for Esoteric Buddhist practices according to the inscriptions attributed to various kings of the Khmer Empire, this deity unquestionably belongs in the Tantric Buddhist pantheon. While most agree that the deity is Tantric, some scholars have mixed opinions about the identity of the deity, which has been thought of as either Cakrasaṃvara or Trailokyavijaya. Hence the primary objective of this paper is to verify the identity of this deity through the studies of Sanskrit texts on Tantric Buddhist iconography. The results demonstrate that Tantric Buddhism once flourished in Thailand and that Buddhist Sanskrit texts on iconography may have been used in the creation of Tantric iconographies at Phimai.

Co-authored with Francis Maravillas. Published as part of the special issue "Contemporary Art Worlds and Art Publics in Southeast Asia" for World Art, coedited by Michelle Antoinette and Francis Maravillas.

This essay positions the rapidly changing field of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and the shifting structure, dynamics and influence of the region's contemporary ‘art worlds' and ‘art publics’. It seeks to open up new horizons and frameworks for understanding the particular character of art worlds and art publics in Southeast Asia by being especially attuned to the local contexts and histories of contemporary art in the region and their particular ecologies. We contend that while contemporary art worlds and art publics in Southeast Asia might bear similar structures and dynamics to contemporary art worlds and publics elsewhere, they are nevertheless indicative of culturally specific and localised developments. Indeed, the various past and present practices and mediation of art and its publics in the region are suggestive of the ways in which art worlds take on nuanced character and meaning in Southeast Asia, are diversely configured and imagined, and are multiply located and complexly interconnected. The worldliness of these practices are, moreover, indicative of the ways in which Southeast Asian artists continue to respond to the exigencies of the everyday and the political economy of survival in an increasingly challenging world.

Keywords: Southeast Asian art, contemporary art, art worlds, art publics, regionalism, world-making

Abstract
This chapter engages with the specific nature of Asian interactions at Ðồng Dương, located in present-day Vietnam. Ancient Ðồng Dương participated in a network of contacts between India, China, and Southeast Asia. A grand Buddhist monumental complex, patronized by an ancient Campā polity, stood there during the late 9th–early 10th centuries. Ravaged by time and war, its art remains now lie scattered in various Vietnamese and European museums, offering a unique view into the fragmented history of Vietnam’s Buddhist heritage. While Buddhism was the dominant religion, a close study of the art and inscriptions from Ðồng Dương reveals that Śaivism and local beliefs mingled inextricably with it, questioning the current tendency of creating a Buddhist-Hindu divide in the study of Asian religions. Some enigmatic sculptures from Ðồng Dương are difficult to identify and require going beyond established iconographic formulae to address cross-cultural issues such as hybridization and localization.

This entry reviews the history of archaeological (and, by extension, art historical) research in what was first part of French Indochina, and is now the Kingdom of Cambodia.  It reviews the impact of 19th-century expeditions on European knowledge of Cambodia's archaeological past, and traces two parallel strands of research during that time: one that focused on prehistory (and emphasized geology), and one that focused on reconstructing a fallen classical civilization, akin to the ruins found in the Mediterranean. The entry concludes by discussing some developments in Cambodia's archaeological world after the end of the civil war.

https://readymag.com/bagyiaungsoe/essai/
Along with “Modern Burmese Painting According to Bagyi Aung Soe” from the Journal of Burma Studies (2005/06) and a selection of texts by the artist, this essay “BAGYI AUNG SOE (1923–1990): Juggling Paradoxes in the Here & the Now” was intended for the publication accompanying the exhibition, BAGYI AUNG SOE (1923–1990), scheduled at Musée national d'art moderne - Centre Pompidou in Galerie 0 from December 2020 to February 2021. The exhibition was rescheduled to February 10 – May 3, 2021 [and extended till August 23, 2021] due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with various setbacks thwarting the realisation of the anticipated publication. Independently of the exhibition’s hosting institution, a decision was made to electronically publish this curatorial essay for four reasons: in line with Bagyi Aung Soe’s credo, to make widely accessible this text on the appreciation and legacy of his practice and oeuvre three decades after his passing; to spur reflection, discussion and further research; to register this exhibition marking a milestone in the history of modern Burmese art with which Aung Soe’s life and work is intertwined; and finally, to explore new possibilities of knowledge-making via alternative publishing with fellow students of art and art history: Issa Sng Yi Xian, Toby Wu and Zune Ei Htet. This essay includes images of works and documents other than the exhibition’s selection numbering more than three hundred. It is hoped that any oversight or error will encourage a more robust enquiry and scholarship of equal delight.

NUS Museum presents an exhibition featuring encounters and exchanges between the arts and sciences, between practice and research, between the inquiring subject and the object inquired. An interdisciplinary project, “When you get closer to the heart, you may find cracks” is a continued inquiry by the Migrant Ecologies Project into the human relationships to trees, forests and forest products in Southeast Asia – explored in terms of materials, metaphors, magic, ecological resources and historical agency. Beginning with an attempt to trace the origins and stories connected to a teak bed found in Singapore, and set against the macro-context of “cutting of wood” (deforestation) today, the project has evolved into an accumulation of the diverse “aborealities” – connections between the peoples, trees and wood – in Southeast Asia.

The exhibition will feature several new woodprint works from artist Lucy Davis alongside works by photographers Shannon Lee Castleman and Kee Ya Ting. Two tales from “Islands after a Timber Boom” comprise an underlying structure to the exhibition, vacillating between Muna Island, Southeast Sulawesi (where early DNA tests have suggested as the origins of the wood from the teak bed) and Singapore island (where Davis has been researching stories of the local entrepot timber industry in and around the Sungei Kadut Industrial Estate). Fragments of iconic woodblock prints from the NUS Museum’s collection are also reconstructed as animated shadows which weave in and out of the exhibition.

ABSTRACT When the Portuguese admiral Alfonso de Albuquerque conquered the sul-tanate of Melaka (Malacca) on August 24, 1511, he brought under Portuguese control a Southeast Asian polity whose reach stretched across the Malay Peninsula. Melaka then housed an urban population of 100,000, in which eighty different languages were spoken by Malays, Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and other ethnicities. Melaka's urban form was not anomalous in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Southeast Asia. Many of the region's coasts and river valleys housed port cities and capitals with populations of 50,000–100,000 people; population density/square kilometer varied from sparsely peopled hill country to lowland agrarian areas in northern Vietnam and Bali with higher densities than those in contemporary China. 1 The onset of European colonialism in the late eighteenth century reversed this seemingly inexorable trend toward Southeast Asian urbanism, whose roots lay two millennia deep. It is this earlier heritage of Southeast Asian urbanism, and the role of the urban form in promoting and maintaining polity in first–second millennium Southeast Asia, that forms the focus of this chapter. Polity, power, and urbanism were linked in most regions of Southeast Asia, although the timing and nature of urbanization varied greatly across the region. While mainland Southeast Asians built large fortified urban centers, the densely populated island of Java remained largely free of cities until the thirteenth century ce. Disagreement over when the region's cities first appeared and the forms they took constitute the core of most debates on early Southeast Asian cities. Relatively few scholars, however, have queried the relationship

We are at a point in contemporary cultural practice where the ‘Global Contemporary’ needs to be re-imagined. And one would argue that this starts with rethinking artistic practice and the artist as an individual. The framework to begin this lies in a singular and ubiquitous idea – travel and more importantly, ‘travel as metaphor’, to borrow the title of a book by Georges Van Den Abbeele.  Abbeele presents a series of readings that examines the figure of travel in the writings of Montaigne, Descartes, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. He argues that “each writer’s discourse allows for the elaboration of a metadiscourse opening onto the deconstruction of the writers claims to a certain property (of his home, of his body, of his text, of his name)” (Abbeele 38)1. Now, travel as metaphor exists within two very distinct art histories – one being stagnant, visible, dominant, gender-defined and white, as embodied for example in Gauguin’s ‘Primitivism’. The second strain is invisible, in exile, transient, genderless and the ‘Other’, seen through artistic practices like that of Ana Mendieta. It is within the latter that one would situate the work of Firoz Mahmud.