Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art After 1990 [1 ed.] 9789401211963, 9789042039148

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Reworlding Art History

C

ROSS ULTURES

Readings in Post / Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

178 SERIES EDITORS

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Bénédicte Ledent (Liège) CO-FOUNDING EDITOR Hena

Maes–Jelinek

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Reworlding Art History

Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990

Michelle Antoinette

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

COVER IMAGE Lee Wen. Splash! (Series #1 and #2), 2003. Digital print on archival paper (edition: 3/5 +1 artist proof), 60.96 cm x 76.2 cm (24 inches x 30 inches). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3914-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1196-3 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2014 Printed in The Netherlands

For Gran, Luke & Keir

ART WORKS NEVER EXIST IN TIME, THEY HAVE “ENTRY POINTS”

Stencilled text presented in the artwork Entry Points of 1978, by Redza Piyadasa (1939–2007).

Table of Contents

xi xv xxxi

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Preface: Departures

Prologue: Points of Entry Frames, Axes: Art History’s Temporalities and Spatialities ‘Worlding’ from the Region The Southeast Asian Regional Frame: A Critical Mapping Cosmopolitan Intersections Regional Intervention in ‘The Contemporary’

Coordinates, Parameters, Trajectories: Between the Cultural and the Aesthetic

xxxv xxxvi xl xlii xlv xlviii xlix

PART I PRELIMINARY ENCOUNTERS

1

Contemporary ‘Southeast Asian’ Art: Regional Interventions Why ‘Southeast Asian’ Contemporary Art? The Shifting Art-Historical Field for Southeast Asia: Tradition, Modernity, and ‘the Contemporary’ Reworlding ‘Contemporary Art’ Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: Between ‘the Cultural’ and ‘the Aesthetic’ Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: Oscillating Currents Fluid Encounters I: Lani Maestro’s a book thick of ocean Fluid Encounters I I : Yee I-Lann’s Sulu Stories

3 3 8 34 46 58 58 67

P A R T II LOCATING SOUTHEAST ASIAN DIFFERENCE 2 Mapping Regional Difference: Institutionalized Cartographies of Southeast Asian Art A Southeast Asian Regional Agency Defining Southeast Asia: Contending with Maps of Colonial Inheritance Towards an Art History of Contemporary Southeast Asian Art Institutional Perspectives: Locating Contemporary Southeast Asian Art through Regional Exhibitions and Collections Alternative Art Spaces in Southeast Asia: From the Margins to the Centres of Contemporary Art ‘Territorializing’ and ‘Deterritorializing’ Regional Difference in the Art of Wong Hoy Cheong

3 Exhibiting Southeast Asian Difference: Global and Regional Currents Visible Difference: Asian Spectacles and Spectres in International Mega-Exhibitions of the 1990s Art and Anthropology: The Ethnographic Impulse Figuring Asia in the World ‘Global Art’ Exhibition Precedents Dilemmas of Representation: Shifting Asian Identities under Globalization A “Journey Without Maps”? En Route to the ‘Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ ‘Traditions/Tensions’: Figuring the ‘Asian Contemporary’ in Art ‘Cities on the Move’: Tumultuous Visions of the Asian Metropolis Interventions of Difference: The International Journeys of Lee Wen’s Yellow Man Shifting Curatorial Imaginaries for Asian Art: ‘Under Construction’ and ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ Into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Identitarian Art

81 84 89 94 105 127 136

157 160 166 169 176 181 182 190 198 209 221 235

P A R T III COUNTERPOINTS: SOUTHEAST ASIA IN PRACTICE 4 Trans/Localities? Between Dwelling and Movement Globalizing Currents ‘A Border Crosser with Good Ballast’: The Consummate ‘Hybrid’ Artist, Heri Dono Netscapes: tsunamii.net’s Translocal-Locative Aesthetic ‘A Map to My Own Becoming’: Judy Freya Sibayan’s Nomadic Aesthetic Simryn Gill’s Moving Representations

5 Memoryscapes: Present Pasts Revisioned Gathering Memories: The Aquilizans’ Projects of Belonging and Remembrance Across Borders Re-Searching History in the Present: The Memory-Work of Wong Hoy Cheong Contemporary Aesthetics of Traumatic Memory Dadang Christanto’s ‘Counter-Monuments’ to History José Legaspi’s Dark Pasts – Resurrected and Released Making the Invisible Manifest: The Art of Lim Tzay Chuen

6 Corporeographies: Locating Intimate Spaces of Art Art of the People, for the People: The Politics of Figuration Exchanging Skins: The Art of Mella Jaarsma Presencing the Abject Body in Singapore: Suzann Victor’s Bodies by Proxy Nindityo Adipurnomo: The Cultural Matter of Hair Ecologies of ‘Being-in-the-World’: Performing the Body in Art (Roberto Villanueva, S. Chandrasekaran) Breathly Presence (Ye Shufang, Susyilawati Sulaiman)

Epilogue: Origins, Futures, Becomings Southeast Asia and Contemporary Art History’s Contingent Imaginaries

Contemporary Tracings: Repetition and Difference Reflections, Projections, Vectors

Bibliography Index

239 242 246 269 278 286 309 316 330 341 343 367 383 401 404 417 434 460 472 475 483 483 488 498 507 561

Acknowledgements

I

for their support in making this book possible. First, I am immensely grateful to the many artists, curators, art historians, and other arts professionals – too many to name individually here – who have inspired me with art in different ways and assisted me with the development of this book, especially those I met and spoke with at length during fieldwork trips in Southeast Asia, wider Asia, and Australia, many of whom have become dear friends now. For your extraordinary generosity and hospitality, expertise, knowledge, creativity, and inspiration, I am truly thankful. I am especially indebted to those artists who assisted me so graciously and generously with interviews, image permissions, and/or reproductions for this book and whose art moved me to undertake this research in the first instance: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, Agnes Arellano, the late Santiago Bose and his family, Dadang Christanto, Heri Dono, Simryn Gill, Ho Tzu Nyen, Mella Jaarsma, Lee Wen, José Legaspi, Lim Tzay Chuen, Lani Maestro, Ruangrupa, Rumah Air Panas (R A P ) especially Yap Sau Bin, Sanggawa, Judy Freya Sibayan, Susyilawati Sulaiman, Charles Lim Yi Yong, Woon Tien Wei and Melvin Phua Yang Chien of tsunamii.net, the family of the late Roberto Villanueva, Wong Hoy Cheong, Yee I-Lann, and Suzann Victor. Very special thanks must go to Lee Wen for also kindly allowing me to reproduce his artwork for the book cover. Various cultural institutions and other individuals also very kindly assisted with permissions and/or reproductions and I thank them, too, for their support and generosity: Balai Seni Lukis Negara in Kuala Lumpur; the Drawing Room and Hiraya Gallery in Manila; the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Japan Foundation, and the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Japan; the SingaH AV E M A N Y P E O P L E TO T H A N K

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pore Art Museum; and, in Australia, the National Gallery of Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art. I am also grateful to Quentin Bertoux and Brent Hallard for permission to reproduce their photography as well as Stanley Schab, Managing Editor at the Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, for his kind assistance in recovering reproductions. This book has its genesis in my doctoral research and ensuing thesis – “Images That Quiver: The In/visible Geographies of ‘Southeast Asian’ Contemporary Art” – which I undertook at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra. I am grateful to the H R C for their generous support of my initial research and writing; in particular, I extend my sincere thanks to Dr Caroline Turner, who, as Deputy Director of the H R C , served as chair supervisor of my research and continues to be a generous collaborator in shared projects on Asian art; I am also tremendously thankful to Caroline for so kindly taking the time to read the manuscript for this book and providing such thoughtful and astute advice for its development from dissertation to book. Alongside Caroline, I am also especially grateful to Professor Jacqueline Lo for her intellectual guidance as a PhD supervisor and for her continuing support and collaboration thereafter. Professor Mandy Thomas, Professor Paul Pickering, and Dr Ashley Carruthers also gave generously of their time and advice as research supervisors and advisors, and my warm gratitude to Professor Margaret Jolly for her support and encouragement of my book proposal and postdoctoral research, as well as for continued support and friendship. My profound thanks to my long-time friend and colleague Dr Francis Maravillas, who, besides offering terrific camaraderie over the years, also very generously read the manuscript for this book, providing invaluable and sage advice for its development. My thanks to the Australian Research Council, which funded the three-year Discovery Project ‘The Rise of New Cultural Networks in Asia in the Twenty-First Century’ (D P 1096041), which allowed me to undertake further research and writing so as to update, revise, and complete this book in tandem with new research. I also acknowledge the support of the A N U ’s College of Arts and Social Sciences, which was host to my A R C research. This book has been generously supported by publication subsidies from the Australian National University and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. These have made possible the inclusion of the many reproductions featured throughout this book, so integral to a study of art and the affective en-

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Acknowledgements

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counter with it. Indeed, I could not have responsibly published the text of this book without the very images it speaks to, so am thankful for this financial support and its crucial contribution to realizing this book in its entirety of word and image. Parts of the material in this book now also appears in extracted and/or altered form in individual publications, where they are also foregrounded in different intellectual purposes and contexts, namely as: a journal article for the special issue on “Autographics” in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly by the Biographical Research Center, in which I focus on the art of José Legaspi – see 33.1 (Winter 2008): 133–60; a book chapter in Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, ed. Daniel P.S. Goh et al. (Routledge, 2009), in which I focus on the art of Wong Hoy Cheong in the Malaysian context; a book chapter on Indonesian artists in Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters, ed. Jurriëns & de Kloet (Rodopi, 2007); and as a chapter in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress of the History of Art (Melbourne University Publishing, 2009), in which I focus on the making of Southeast Asian art history. I am grateful to the respective publishers for their permission to include material for republication in the current book. I wish to express my sincere thanks to Rodopi’s Cross /Cultures series editor, Gordon Collier, who has been an incredible source of support and guidance. I am tremendously thankful for his encouragement of the book, his enthusiasm for the topic and art generally, and his energetic and sustained commitment to seeing the manuscript to completion (yes, finally!). I have been so privileged to work with such an expert, patient, genial, and goodhumoured editor, someone so understanding of the personal lives we all juggle alongside academia, and am delighted to have made another friend through the journey of this book. This book could not have been realized without the continued love and support of my family and friends. I thank my late grandmother Giséle, always with me in spirit, sister Sabrina, mother Brigitte, father Gerard, Aliette, Nic, Mike, Roselyne, Priscilla, and all my other aunties, uncles, and cousins who have been there for me as I have developed this book. So, too, my gratitude to the Hamblys, especially Anne and Kevin, for giving generously to me of their kindness and love. My heartfelt thanks to all who make up my ‘second’ Antoinette family in France, for their unconditional love over the years. And, of course, my thanks to all my friends and other colleagues who in their various ways have helped me arrive at this point – in particular: Kim, Sonia,

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Nathalie, Melissa (‘MD’), Sandra, Mar, Antonella, Yolanda, Nsangou, Sally, Tzay-Chuen, Pedro, Rebecca, Olwen, Ursula, Katie, Sophie, Silke, John, Christine, Chaitanya, Ludger, Christiane, Rachel, Stephan, Markus, Duncan, Neil, Ben, Toni, Delilah, Nathan, Kristen, Jess, Savanhdary, Ruth, Liam, Shayne, Randall, Greg, Denise, Gail, Sue and Rachel; thanks to you all for your friendship, love, and support. Finally, my deepest, heartfelt gratitude goes to my new family. To my wonderful partner Luke, thank you for your infinite love, friendship, and kindness, and for your unwavering support both as I completed my doctorate and throughout this book endeavour. Your tireless practical help, incredible patience and understanding, always reassuring words of encouragement, sharedness in conversation, affecting smiles, infectious warmth, and unending love have been so instrumental to realizing this book. I am truly blessed by your presence in my life and so thankful for the happiness, care, and love that you give to me as a partner, and now also as a father to our little Keir. And Keir, thank you for the sweet joy and immeasurable new happiness that you have brought to my life. For giving me new perspectives on life, humanity, and family, for showing me the remarkable thing that is new life – with its new beginnings, new learning, and new trajectories – for reminding me of wonder and awe, presentness and play, for your cuddly, warm embrace, your affectionate smiles, and your beautiful, boundless love, and, of course, your incredible patience.

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List of Illustrations

COVER ILLUSTRATION Lee Wen. Splash! (Series #1 and #2), 2003. Digital print on archival paper (edition: 3/5 +1 artist proof), 60.96 cm x 76.2 cm (24 inches x 30 inches). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

FIGURES P R E L I M I N A R Y N O T E : In a sequent listing of Figures from the same artwork, descriptive details are provided for the first only. 1:

Redza Piyadasa. Masa Penerimaan – Entry Points, 1978. Acrylic and assemblage on board, 152 x 136 cm. Acq. No. B S L N 1979.004. Image courtesy of the National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia (Balai Seni Lukis Negara).

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Sulaiman Esa, Prof. Madya Dr. Menanti Godot I – Waiting For Godot I, 1977. Etching, 76 x 62 cm. Acq. No. B S L N 1980.040. Image courtesy of the National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia (Balai Seni Lukis Negara).

10

3:

Tang Da Wu. Tiger’s Whip, 1991. Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 1993–01665. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

28

4:

Lani Maestro. a book thick of ocean, 1993. Installation with hardbound book with linen cover, title stamped in silver, duotone reproduction, 600 pages, oak table. Book: 61 x 48.2 x 3.8 cm; table: 182.8 x 91.4 x 78.5 cm. Photograph: Lincoln Mulcahy. © Lani Maestro. Image courtesy of the artist.

59

5:

Lani Maestro. a book thick of ocean, 1993.

59

6:

Lani Maestro. a book thick of ocean, 1993.

60

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7:

Lani Maestro. a book thick of ocean, 1993.

8:

Lani Maestro. a book thick of ocean, 1993.

62

9:

Lani Maestro. a book thick of ocean, 1993.

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Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Barangay, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 183 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

68

11:

Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: The Archipelago, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Map, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 122 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: The Landmark, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 183 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: The Ch’i-lin of Calauit, 2005. Digital Ctype print, 61 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

72

15:

Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Brothers in Arms, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Song of the Keris, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: High Noon, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Borderline, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Sarung, 2005. Digital C-type print, 61 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Liu Kang. Artist and Model, 1954. Oil on canvas, 84 x 124 cm. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. P –1070. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

102

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Cheong Soo Pieng. Tropical life, 1959. Chinese ink and gouache on Chinese rice paper, 43.6 x 92 cm. Image courtesy of the National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia (Balai Seni Lukis Negara).

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22: 23:

24:

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Rumah Air Panas (R A P ). “S P A C E [ S ] Dialogue and Exhibition,” 2003 (installation view). Image courtesy of the artists.

131

Eko Nugroho in collaboration with Ign. Clink Sugiarto, Yennu Ariendra, Ki Catur Kuncoro, and Andy Seno Aji. Hidden Violence, 2009. Multi-media performance, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Cemeti Art House.

131

Ruangrupa. P I C N I C K I T [a project about holiday in the city of Jakarta with Sebastian Friedman], 2006. Interactive C D , newsletter, flyer, video, games, object, postcard & photography. For

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List of Illustrations

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Ruangrupa 2006 Artist in Residency Program. Participants / Artists: Sebastian Friedman (Arg), Ari Dina Krestiawan (I D N ), and Irayani Queencyputri (I D N ). Photograph: Sebastian Friedman. Image courtesy of the artists.

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Ruangrupa. P I C N I C K I T [a project about holiday in the city of Jakarta with Sebastian Friedman], 2006.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. Text Tiles, 2000 (installation view). 290 tiles made from disintegrated, pulped, and burnt text of Asian histories, 20 woven images of world leaders, catalogue made from leftover pages from books, 4.5 x 5.5 m. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. Text Tiles, 2000 (detail: woven image of Ferdinand Marcos, Philippines, and Ronald Reagan, U S A ) .

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Wong Hoy Cheong. Buckingham Street and its Vicinity, 2002. Offset line lithograph, 62 x 82 cm (edition of 6). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. Downing Street and its Vicinity, 2002. Offset line lithograph, 62 x 82 cm (edition of 6). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. In Between Masjid Kapitan Keling and Narcissus, 2002. Charcoal on paper, 75 x 51.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. In Between Malayan Railway Building and Eleanor Cross, 2002. Charcoal on paper, 75 x 51.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. Non Indigenous Skins, 1998 (detail of papaya). 9 partial faces / masks cast in resin, covered with dried fruit and plants, 122 x 255 cm in vitrine (edition of 2). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. Non Indigenous Skins, 1998 (detail of tea). 9 partial faces / masks cast in resin, covered with dried fruit and plants, 122 x 255 cm in vitrine (edition of 2). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. Poison, 2000. Four heads cast in resin, covered with dark poisonous and non-poisonous plants; light bulbs, metal stands, variable dimensions. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Wong Hoy Cheong. Poison, 2000.

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Installation view of Magiciens de la Terre exhibition, 1989, with Red Earth Circle by Richard Long (England) on wall, and ground painting by Yuendumu community (Australia) in foreground; at La

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Villette. Photograph: © Quentin Bertoux. Reproduced by courtesy of Quentin Bertoux.

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Simryn Gill. Vegetation, 1999. Gelatin silver photograph, from a series of 5, 26.5 x 26.5 cm each (image). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Agnes Arellano. Vesta, Dea, Lola, 1995. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Simryn Gill. Interloper, 1997. Offset prints on perforated paper, on stamped and addressed envelopes, 4.2 x 2.8 cm each. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Simryn Gill. Interloper, 1997.

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Judy Freya Sibayan. Scapular Gallery Nomad, 1997–2002. At PS1 in New York in October 2008 during the opening of “Cities on the Move.” The artist pictured with “Cities on the Move” curators Hou Hanru and Hans–Ulrich Obrist. On view in S G N is Cecilia Avancena’s “Sacred Heart.” Photograph: Karen Sibayan. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Lee Wen. Journey of a yellow man no. 13: Fragmented bodies / shifting ground, 1999 (still). Videotape, 10:30 min., colour, stereo. Purchased 2000. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. © The artist. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

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Lee Wen. Journey of a yellow man no. 13: Fragmented bodies / shifting ground, 1999 (still).

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Lee Wen. Journey of a Yellow Man No 4: L I B I D O (“Sense Yellow” group exhibition, installation, and performance. Concrete House, Nontburi and Thamasat University, Bangkok, Thailand, 9–15 October 1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Lee Wen. Journey of a Yellow Man No 15: Touching China (2nd Open Art Festival, Sichuan, China (Pengshan), 13 August 2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Lee Wen. Lifeboat 3 (“Theertha International Artists Workshop – 2001,” Lunaganga, Sri Lanka, September 2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Lee Wen. Untitled (Lee Wen & System HM2T, “Selling the Yellow Man,” Chengdu, China, 16 August 2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Lee Wen. Strange Fruit (series of 12 pieces), 2003. Lamda print (edition no: 1 of 3 [+2 A P ]), 100 cm x 80 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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“Under Construction” exhibition project: “Sorry for the Inconvenience” in Bangkok, Thailand, at Project 304, Bangkok University Gallery, Si-Am Art Space, 23 February–30 March 2002. Image courtesy of The Japan Foundation.

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“Under Construction” exhibition project: Alfredo Juan and Maria Isabel Aquilizan. Habitation Project: Picking Up, 2002. Sea debris, bamboo, leaves, video. Photograph: Kioku Keizo. Image courtesy of the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.

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Heri Dono. Flying in a Cocoon (Terbang di dalam Kepompong), 2001. Fibreglass, paper, metal, fabric, bulb, paint, acrylic, mechanical system, 3 pieces, 200 x 125 x 125 cm each (approx.). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. In-flight (Project: Another Country), 2009. Photograph: Michelle Antoinette. Reproduced by courtesy of

the artists.

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Heri Dono. Flying angels, 2006. Polyester resin, clock parts, electronic components, paint, wood, cotton gauze, each approx. 59 x 140 x 15 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of Gene and Brian Sherman, 2008. © The artist. Collection: National Gallery of Australia. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.

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Heri Dono. Angels caught in a trap, 1996 (detail). Mixed media. 60 x 135 x 19 cm each. © Heri Dono. Reproduced by courtesy of the Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, and the artist.

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Heri Dono. The King Who Is Afraid of the Approaching Barong (Sang Raja yang Takut Ketika Barong Datang), 2000. Acrylic, collage on canvas, 153 x 205 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Heri Dono. Flower Diplomacy (Diplomasi Bunga), 2000. Acrylic, collage on canvas, 154 x 207 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Heri Dono. Kuda Binal (Wild Horse) (performance, Yogyakarta, 1992). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Heri Dono. Talking of Nothing, 1991. Oil and paper on canvas, 149.8 x 150.1 cm. Collection: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. © Heri Dono. Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

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Heri Dono. Makan pelor (Eating bullets), 1992. Synthetic polymer paint and collage on cardboard, 66 x 77 cm. Purchased 1995. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. © Heri Dono. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

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Heri Dono. Badman, 1991. Fibreglass, electronic circuit, coin, etc., 58 x 64 x 8 cm each. Collection: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

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Photograph: Fujimoto Kenpachi. © Heri Dono. Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

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Heri Dono. Political Clowns (Badut-Badut Politik), 1999. Fibreglass, bulb, bottle of jar, metal, cable, tape-recorder, tin-can, acrylic, plastic pipe, vegetable oil, 15 pieces, 120 x 50 x 50 cm each (approx.). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Heri Dono. A Magician Who Never Killed (Tukang Sulap yang Tidak Pernah Bisa Dibunuh), 2000. Acrylic, collage on canvas, 154 x 207 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Heri Dono. Superman Still Learning How to Wear Underwear (Superman Baru Belajar Memakai Celana Dalam), 2000. Acrylic, collage on canvas, 148 x 98 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Heri Dono. Fermentation of Mind (Peragian Pikiran), 1994. 9 pieces of wooden desks, 18 pieces of nodding heads with mechanical system, 9 pieces of loop tape-recorder, cable, adaptor, 500 x 500 cm (approx.). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Heri Dono. Ceremony of the Soul, 1995. Stone, fibreglass, plastic, radio and tape player, lamps, fans, wood (9 figures), 70 x 60 x 50 cm each. Collection: The artist. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Heri Dono. Glass Vehicles, 1995 (detail). Glass, fibreglass, cloth, lamps, cable, iron, toy carriages. 15 units: 125 x 40 x 40 cm each. Purchased 2002. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. © Heri Dono. Image courtesy of the artist and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

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Heri Dono. Animal Journey (Perjalanan Binatang) (performance, Harima Science Garden City, Japan, 1997). 25 bicycles with electronic radio / tape-machines, 1 becak/cycle, 5 traffic-lights, 30 players, sound system, etc. Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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tsunamii.net. alpha 3.8: translocation, 2003. ‘Visual traceroute.’ © The artists. Reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

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tsunamii.net. alpha 3.4, 2002 (installation view). © The artists. Reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

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tsunamii.net. alpha 3.4, 2002 (performance view). © The artists.

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Judy Freya Sibayan. Scapular Gallery Nomad, 1997–2002 (S G N in the streets of Paris, 1999). Photograph: Marian Pastor Roces. Image courtesy of the artist.

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List of Illustrations

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Judy Freya Sibayan. Scapular Gallery Nomad, 1997–2002 (Scapular Gallery Nomad Portable Archive-in-Progress for the 2002 Gwangju Biennale). Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Judy Freya Sibayan. Scapular Gallery Nomad, 1997–2002.

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Simryn Gill. Roadkill (installation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000; detail). Found run-over objects, toy wheels, installation dimensions variable. Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales. Purchased with funds provided by the Contemporary Collection Benefactors Programme, 2001. Photo credit: Jenni Carter. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Simryn Gill. Self-seeds (installation). Seeds, pods, cones, toy wheels, installation dimensions variable. Collection: Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo credit: Michele Bruet. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Simryn Gill. Self-seeds (installation, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 1998; detail). Photo credit: Petri Lagus.

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Simryn Gill. Wonderlust (detail of installation, Artspace, Sydney, 1996). Coconut bark, coconuts, shoes, banana skins engraved with

text, torn books, damar resin, miscellaneous personal effects of Lee Weng Choy, silk, installation dimensions variable. Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gift of the artist 2003 (coconut-bark suit, coconuts, shoes and instructions for engraving banana skins). Remainder of work dispersed and/or destroyed. Photo credit: Michele Bruet. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Lee Weng Choy on Mass Rapid Transit train, Singapore, wearing coconut-bark suit from Simryn Gill’s Wonderlust 1996. Photo credit: Nicholas Leong. Image courtesy of Simryn Gill.

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Simryn Gill. Washed Up (installation, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1993). From Washed Up, 1993–95. Engraved sea-washed glass, installation dimensions variable. Collection: Singapore Art Museum. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Simryn Gill. Washed Up (detail of installation, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1993). Photo credit: Hiram To. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Simryn Gill. A small town at the turn of the century, #1, 1999–2000. Type-C photograph, from a series of 40, 91.5 x 91.5 cm each (image). Photo credit: Hiram To. Image courtesy of the artist.

299

82:

Simryn Gill. A small town at the turn of the century, #34, 1999– 2000.

300

78:

REWORLDING ART HISTORY

½™¾

83:

Simryn Gill. A small town at the turn of the century, #2, 1999–2000.

300

84:

Simryn Gill. A small town at the turn of the century, #28, 1999– 2000.

301

85:

Simryn Gill. Dalam, 2001. Type-C photographs, from a series of 260, 23.5 x 23.5 cm each (image). Image courtesy of the artist.

302

86:

Simryn Gill. Dalam, 2001.

302

87:

Simryn Gill. Dalam, 2001.

303

88:

Simryn Gill. Dalam, 2001.

304

89:

Wong Hoy Cheong. In Search of Faraway Places (from “Migrants” series), 1996. Charcoal, photocopy transfer and collage on paper scroll. Three panels: 204.5 x 151 cm (each); 204.5 x 453 cm (overall). Purchased 1996 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through and with the assistance of the Queensland Art Gallery. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. © The artist. Image courtesy of the artist.

309

90:

Wong Hoy Cheong. In Search of Faraway Places, 1996 (detail). Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

310

91:

Alfredo J.D. Aquilizan. Presences and Absences, 1999. Toothbrushes. Collection: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Photograph: Shinomiya Yuji. © The artist. Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

317

92:

Alfredo J.D. Aquilizan. Presences and Absences, 1999.

317

93:

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. Wings, 2009. Used rubber slippers (collected from Singapore prisons), fibreglass, stainless steel; variable dimensions. Singapore Art Museum collection. © The artists. Image courtesy of the artists.

319

94:

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. Project Be-longing #2, 1999 (installation view, The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999). Image courtesy of the artists.

322

95:

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. Project Be-longing #2, 1999 (installation detail).

322

96:

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. Address, 2008 (installation view). Image courtesy of the artists.

326

97:

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. Address, 2008 (detail).

326

xxii

½™¾ 98:

99:

List of Illustrations

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. In-flight (Project: Another Country), 2009 (installation view; The Sixth Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 2009). © The artists. Image courtesy of the artists.

xxiii

327

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. In-flight (Project: Another Country), 2009 (detail of installation view). Photograph: Michelle Antoinette.

© The artists. Reproduced by courtesy of the artists. 100: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. In-flight (Project: Another Country), 2009 (detail of installation view). © The artists.

327 328

101: Santiago Bose. Remapping the Colonized Subject, 1996. Oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 1997– 03474. © The artist. Reproduced by courtesy of the Singapore Art

Museum and the artist’s estate.

329

102: Santiago Bose. Of Martyrs and Nationhood, 1997. Acrylic on canvas, 122 x 44 cm each. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 1997–03475. © The artist. Reproduced by courtesy of the Singapore

Art Museum and the artist’s estate.

329

103: Wong Hoy Cheong. Some Dreamt of Malaya, Some Dreamt of Great Britain, 1994. Charcoal on paper, 190 x 150 cm. Image courtesy of

the artist.

332

104: Wong Hoy Cheong. She Was Married at 14 and Had 14 Children, 1994. Charcoal and photocopy collage on paper, 190 x 150 cm.

Image courtesy of the artist.

333

105: Wong Hoy Cheong. Marriage of a Rubber Tapper to a Girl Dressed as Virgin Mary in a School Play, 1994. Charcoal on paper, 190 x 150

cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

335

106: Wong Hoy Cheong. Aspirations of the Working Class, 1995. Charcoal and photocopy collage on paper, 190 x 150 cm. Image courtesy

of the artist.

336

107: Dadang Christanto. Bureaucracy, 1991–92. Oil on plywood and canvas, 151.9 x 563.5 x 93 cm. Collection: Fukuoka Asian Art

Museum. Photograph: Fujimoto Kenpachi. © The artist. Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. 108: Dadang Christanto. For those: Who are poor, Who are suffer(ing),

Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who are victims of a dupe, Who are victims of injustice, 1993. Bamboo, cane. 37 pieces of varying lengths. Purchased 1993 with funds from the Myer Foundation and Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. The Kenneth and

345

REWORLDING ART HISTORY

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Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. © The artist. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

346

xxiv

109: Dadang Christanto. For those: Who are poor, Who are suffer(ing),

Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who are victims of a dupe, Who are victims of injustice, 1993.

346

110: Dadang Christanto. Kekerasan I (Violence I), undated (installation view). Terracotta, 300 x 300 x 300 cm. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 2012–00028. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art 111:

Museum.

350

Dadang Christanto. Kekerasan I (Violence I), undated (detail).

351

112: Dadang Christanto. Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence), 1996–97; installation detail, Bentara Budaya gallery, Jakarta, 2002. Standing figures holding clothes; terracotta powder mixed with resin / fibreglass, cloth and resin, height 200 cm (male) 190 cm (female), width and depth c.100 x 150 cm, weight c.90 kg. each.

Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Image courtesy of the artist.

353

Dadang Christanto. Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence), 1996–97; installation view, Bentara Budaya gallery, Jakarta, 2002.

354

114: Dadang Christanto. Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence), 1996–97; installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2003. Image courtesy of the artist.

354

113:

115:

Dadang Christanto. Api di Bulan Mei 1998 (Fire in May 1998), 1998–99. Performance on 10 September 1999 in association with installation comprising 47 burnt papier-mâché figures at The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, 1999. Photograph: Andrea Higgins. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the artist.

357

116: Dadang Christanto. Red rain (Hujan merah), 2003. Mixed media, including wool, paper, gold, ink, pigments, 400 x 900 x 500 cm.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of Gene and Brian Sherman, 2003. Yarn generously supplied by Cleckheaton. Hand Knitting Yarns, Australia. © The artist. Collection: National Gallery of Australia. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia. 117:

Dadang Christanto. Red rain (Hujan merah), 1999–2000 (installation ceiling detail). Mixed media, including wool, paper, gold, ink,

362

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List of Illustrations

pigments. 400 x 900 x 500 cm. © The artist. Collection: National Gallery of Australia. Image courtesy of the artist.

xxv

363

118: José Legaspi. Lovers, 1997. © The artist. Image courtesy of the

Hiraya Gallery, Manila. All rights reserved.

369

119: José Legaspi. On Suicide, 2000. © The artist. Image courtesy of the

Hiraya Gallery, Manila. All rights reserved.

370

120: José Legaspi. Dog eating a woman, 1997. © The artist. Image cour-

tesy of the artist. All rights reserved.

372

121: José Legaspi. The Crucifixion, 1999. © The artist. Image courtesy of

the Hiraya Gallery, Manila. All rights reserved.

373

122: José Legaspi. Crucifixion, 1998. Oil pastel on paper, 92 x 61 cm. ©

The artist. Image courtesy of the Hiraya Gallery, Manila. All rights reserved.

373

123: José Legaspi. La Muerte de Justo [The Death of the Just], c.1998. ©

The artist. Image courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.

376

124: José Legaspi. Phlegm, 2000–2002. Charcoal and chalk on paper (1007 sheets), 22.9 x 30.5 cm (each, approx.); installed size variable. Purchased 2002. Queensland Art Gallery Functions Reserve Fund.

Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. © The artist. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

377

125: José Legaspi. Untitled (12), 2009. Charcoal and pastel on paper (set of 20 pasted on board), 30 x 23 cm. © José Legaspi. Image courtesy

of the Drawing Room Gallery, Manila. All rights reserved.

377

126: José Legaspi. Untitled (13), 2009.

378

127: José Legaspi. Untitled, 2011.

381

128: José Legaspi. Untitled (9), 2010. © José Legaspi. Collection: Singa-

pore Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Drawing Room Gallery, Manila.

382

129: Lim Tzay Chuen. A L T E R #1 (unrealized proposal visual, United Overseas Bank, Singapore, 1999–2003). Image courtesy of the

artist. 130: Lim Tzay Chuen. A L T E R #7 (The Substation Gallery, Singapore, 2001). Image courtesy of the artist. 131:

Lim Tzay Chuen. A L T E R #10 (Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

385 388 394

132: Amanda Heng Liang Ngim. Another Woman, 1996. Mixed media. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 1998–00151. Image cour-

tesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

403

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133: Bayu Utomo B. Radjikin. Lang Kachang, 1991 (partner sculpture to Lang Ngindang). Ceramic, cement, and metal. 141 x 104 x 120 cm. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc.1993–01658. © The artist.

Photograph: Khairuddin Hori. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. 134: Bayu Utomo B. Radjikin. Lang Kachang, 1991 (detail).

405 405

135: Wong Hoy Cheong. The Nouveau Riche, the Elephant, the Foreign Maid, or the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1991. Mixed media

(oil on gunny sack, mirrors and artificial flowers), dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 1993–01669. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

407

136: Redza Piyadasa. The Haji’s Family, 1990. Mixed media, 51 x 80 cm. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 1991–00281. © The artist.

Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

407

137: Taring Padi. Land and Farmers are Free when United, undated. Print on cloth, 240 x 121 cm. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 2009–02222. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

412

138: Apotik Komik. Under Estimate, 1999. Ink drums, cardboard, paint, dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 2011– 01608. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

413

139: Sanggawa. The Second Coming, 1994. Oil on canvas, 207 x 619 cm. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 2008–06174. Image cour-

tesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

415

140: Sanggawa. Palo-sebo, 1995. Oil on canvas, 197 x 305 cm. Purchased 1995 with a special allocation from the Queensland Government. Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery’s Centenary 1895–1995.

Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. © The artists. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

415

141: Mella Jaarsma. Hi Inlander (Hello Native), 1999 (The Third Asia–

Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999). Image courtesy of the artist. 142: Mella Jaarsma. Hi Inlander (Hello Native), 1999 (face detail).

419 419

143: Mella Jaarsma. S A R A -swati, 2000. Dried banana tree trunks, fiber

glass, photographs. From a series of two costumes (S A R A -swati I , I I ). Image courtesy of the artist.

421

144: Mella Jaarsma. The Warrior, The Healer, The Feeder, 2003. Mili-

tary outfits, seaweed, miso soup, squids, fish soup, traditional medicines. 3 D V D s. Image courtesy of the artist.

421

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List of Illustrations

xxvii

145: Mella Jaarsma. Bule Bull, 2002. Buffalo horn. Image courtesy of the

artist.

424

146: Mella Jaarsma. Shelter Me, 2005. Four one-person shelters: a

Chinese shrine, a movable shelter with tattoo images, a shelter made out of flexible bark, wood and zinc, a curtain shelter with digital images from Iran. Image courtesy of the artist.

425

147: Mella Jaarsma. The Trophy (Animals have no religion), 2011. Wood,

antlers, silkscreen on cotton, embroidered emblems. Image courtesy of the artist.

425

148: Mella Jaarsma. Pribumi – Pribumi (performance, Marlioboro Street, Yogyakarta, 3 July 1998). Frying frog legs, a Chinese food, by seven

Westerners, opening up a dialogue about the racial riots. Image courtesy of the artist.

429

149: Mella Jaarsma. Pribumi – Pribumi (performance, Marlioboro Street, Yogyakarta, 3 July 1998).

429

150: Mella Jaarsma. Hi Inlander (performance, The Third Asia–Pacific

Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999). Frog legs, chicken feet, kangaroo leather, fish skin, photographs, 3 kitchen tables, spices. Image courtesy of the artist.

430

Mella Jaarsma. Hi Inlander (performance, The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999).

430

152: Mella Jaarsma. Hi Inlander (Hello Native) (A P T 3, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999). Treated skins (kangaroo, frog, fish and chicken), 244 x 97 cm (kangaroo); 140 x 84 cm (frog); 150 x 100 cm (fish); 152 x 95 cm (chicken). Image courtesy of the artist.

433

153: Mella Jaarsma. Hi Inlander (Hello Native) (A P T 3, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999; face detail).

433

151:

154: Suzann Victor. Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation)

(site-specific performance installation; drain on second floor of the Singapore Art Museum, for A R X 5, 1998). Glass panels, glass dams, water, photographs. Photograph: Jason Lim. Image courtesy of the artist.

434

155: Suzann Victor. Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation), 1998.

435

156: Suzann Victor. Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation), 1998.

437

157: Suzann Victor. Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation), 1998.

437

REWORLDING ART HISTORY

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158: Suzann Victor. Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation), 1998.

438

xxviii

159: Suzann Victor. His Mother is a Theatre (site-specific installation, For Surrogate Desires 1996, 5th Passage, at Pacific Plaza, Singapore, 1996). Human hair, bread, velvet, woks, baby rocker, buttons. Singa-

pore Art Museum collection. Installation view. Photograph: Chua Chye Teck. Image courtesy of the artist.

444

160: Suzann Victor. His Mother is a Theatre, 1996 (site-specific installa-

tion, front view: words written with human hair). Photograph: Suzann Victor. Image courtesy of the artist.

444

161: Suzann Victor. Third World Extra Virgin Dreams (detail of sitespecific installation, 6th Havana Biennale, Cabania Fortress, Havana, Cuba, 1997). Blood drops and shadow cast on floor; human blood,

magnifying squares, glass slides, metal clips, metal bed, cable, paper. Singapore Art Museum collection. Photograph: Alwin Reamillo. Image courtesy of the artist. 162: Suzann Victor. Third World Extra Virgin Dreams (detail).

450 450

163: Suzann Victor. Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame, 1994. Light

bulbs, cables, control unit, broken glass, motors, aluminum rods, mirrors, dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

453

164: Vincent Leow. Money Suit, 1992. Paper collage and cotton, dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 1993–00012.

Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

455

165: Melati Suryodarmo. Exergie – Butter Dance (São Paolo), undated. Lambda print (edition 1 of 5), 34 x 51 cm (each). Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 2011–02053. Image courtesy of the Singa-

pore Art Museum.

459

166: Nindityo Adipurnomo. Portraits of Javanese Men, 2001. Photographs (set of 6), 25.5 x 37 cm each. Collection: Fukuoka Asian Art

Museum. © The artist. Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

461

167: Nindityo Adipurnomo. Introversion (April the twenty-first), 1995–96

(detail). Carved wooden objects, photographs, mirrors, cast resin, found objects, gauze curtain, paper, glass, hair, nylon and fibreglass (21 parts), 365 x 600 cm diam. (installed); 75 x 45 x 15 cm (each). Purchased 1996. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. © The artist. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

465

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List of Illustrations

168: Nindityo Adipurnomo. Beban Eksotika Jawa, 1993. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 1994– 05552. Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

xxix

465

169: Nindityo Adipurnomo. Step on Heirloom, 2007. Carved granite

stones, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist. 170: Nindityo Adipurnomo. My Ancestors were Traders, 2010. Gouache on paper, 49 cm x 39 cm. Image courtesy of the artist. 171:

Nindityo Adipurnomo. Portraits of Javanese Men, 2001. Photographs (set of 6), 25.5 x 37 cm each. © The artist. Collection: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

467 467

469

172: Nindityo Adipurnomo. Hiding Rituals and the Mass Production I I , 1997/1998. Rattan, human hair, plastic bag, paper, string, 250 x 300 x 90 cm. Singapore Art Museum collection. Acc. 2000–01009.

Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

469

173: Nindityo Adipurnomo. Dzikir, 2008. Rattan, cow’s horn, mechanical fan, beads, iron springs, 140 cm x 140 cm x 120 cm. Image

courtesy of the artist. 174: Nindityo Adipurnomo. Boom Out of the Ground, 2008. Rattan, 135 x 135 x 100 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

470 470

175: Roberto Villanueva. Ego’s Grave, 1993 (installation and associated

performance at ‘The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, September 1993). Carved earth figure in outdoor pit, glazed terracotta, wood; pit: 600 x 250 x 150 cm). Photograph: Richard Stringer. Reproduced by courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and Napoleon Abundo Villanueva (the latter with the additional kind assistance of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum).

474

176: Susyilawati Sulaiman. A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room, 2003 (installation, Florence Biennale / Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea, Fortezza da Basso, Florence, Italy, 2003). Photograph: Brent Hallard 2003/04 (brenthallard.com). Reproduced

by courtesy of the artist and photographer Brent Hallard.

477

177: Susyilawati Sulaiman. A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room, 2003 (preparations in Malaysia, before travel to Italy for Florence Biennale 2003). Image courtesy of the artist.

479

178: Susyilawati Sulaiman. A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room, 2003 (preparations in Malaysia, before travel to Italy for Florence Biennale 2003).

479

REWORLDING ART HISTORY

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179: Susyilawati Sulaiman. A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room, 2003 (preparations in Malaysia, before travel to Italy for Florence Biennale 2003).

480

180: Susyilawati Sulaiman. A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room, 2003 (preparations in Malaysia, before travel to Italy for Florence Biennale 2003).

480

181: Ho Tzu Nyen. 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art, Episode 1: “Cheong Soo Pieng – A Dream of Tropical Life,” H D V , 23 min., broadcast on Arts Central, Singapore, 2005. Image courtesy of the artist.

491

182: Ho Tzu Nyen. 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art, Episode 2: “Cheo Chai Hiang – A Thousand Singapore Rivers,” H D V , 23 min, broadcast on Arts Central, Singapore, 2005. Image courtesy of the artist.

492

183: Ho Tzu Nyen. 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art, Episode 3: “Tang Da Wu – The Most Radical Gesture,” H D V , 23 min, broadcast on Arts Central, Singapore, 2005. Image courtesy of the artist.

492

xxx

184: Ho Tzu Nyen. 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art, Episode 3: “Tang

Da Wu – The Most Radical Gesture.”

493

185: Ho Tzu Nyen. Every Name in History is I: Film and Paintings about the Other Founder of Singapore, 2003 (video stills selection, Sang Nila Utama, on a voyage of discovery). Video, 23:00 min. Collec-

tion: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. © The artist. Image courtesy of the artist.

493

186: Lee Wen. Splash! (Series #1 and #2), 2003. Digital print on archival paper (edition: 3/5 +1 artist proof), 60.96 cm x 76.2 cm (24 inches x 30 inches). Image courtesy of the artist.

502

187: Lee Wen. Splash! (Series #1 and #2), 2003.

502

188: Lani Maestro. a book thick of ocean, 1993 (installation). Hardbound

book with linen cover, title stamped in silver, duotone reproduction, 600 pages, oak table. Dimensions: book: 61 x 48.2 x 3.8 cm; table: 182.8 x 91.4 x 78.5 cm. © Lani Maestro. Photograph: Lincoln Mulcahy. Image courtesy of the artist.

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506

Preface Departures

T

S O U T H E A S T A S I A N A R T has changed dramatically since I first embarked on the research for this book, and certainly since my earliest encounters with contemporary Southeast Asian art in the early 1990s. The present book has its genesis in research undertaken in 2002–2005 during my postgraduate degree at the Australian National University, culminating in a doctoral thesis. It should, then, be seen as an exploration of beginnings and an offering of glimpses. The artists I explore in the book have greatly extended their oeuvres since I first came by their artworks, some continuing earlier themes in different ways, others taking entirely new approaches to their art. They are now highly successful, established artists, well-known throughout the international art community, and new generations of contemporary artists from Southeast Asia have joined their company, their artworks addressing new themes and issues of ‘contemporary’ currency. As will become clear, the entry points I offer in engaging with contemporary Southeast Asian art have necessarily been shaped by my position in the Australian context. From my own geo-cultural coordinates in Australia, the region of Southeast Asia has been both foreign and familiar territory. From where I have viewed the region, Southeast Asia has always occupied the maps of my cultural imagination and travel experiences as a ‘northern’, rather than ‘southern’ or ‘south-eastern’, neighbour. There are some fairly straightforward reasons for why this region has become the focal point of this book and which go some way towards explaining my relationship with the region. In the early 1990s, as Australia sought to redefine its political and economic place in the world under the policies of Prime Minister Paul Keating, it also attempted to realign itself within its own local geographical nexus – no HE LANDSCAPE OF CONTEMPORARY

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REWORLDING ART HISTORY

½™¾

longer on the edge of Asia, but as a constituent part of the ‘Asia-Pacific’. As Australians contemplated monumental national issues such as native title, multiculturalism, and republicanism, they were also prompted to focus afresh on their nearest neighbours and to become less dependent on long-standing partnerships with geographically distant Euro-American nations.1 Indeed, many Australians, including myself, were grappling with the multiple definitions and implications of their place in Australia, the region, and the world. I was fortunate to first come to know Southeast Asia at a time of dynamic cultural relations between Asia and Australia, including the growth of new art partnerships, collaborations, and exchanges – especially through the Artists’ Regional Exchange (A R X , formerly Australia and Regions Exchange, 1987– 99),2 Asialink, Multimedia Art Asia–Pacific (M A A P ) (now Media Art Asia– Pacific), and the Queensland Art Gallery’s groundbreaking Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (hereafter cited as A P T ) exhibition with its pioneering conferences forging new connections and debates among arts professionals engaged with Asian and/or Pacific art. Studying art history in Australia was a quick way to discover how little Australians then knew about the modern and contemporary cultures of their 1

Nevertheless, throughout this book I include Australia in the geo-political shorthand of ‘Euro-America’ because the discourses which emanate from Europe and the U S A are often ones that have been influential in shaping Australian histories, including Australian art history. Moreover, Australia has played its own role in administering and disseminating Euro-American knowledge. This situation is changing to some degree as Australia explores the relevance of its Indigenous art histories, and those of its neighbouring Asian and Pacific countries, to Australian and world-wide practices and discourses of modern and contemporary art. 2 A R X was a biennial artist exchange project established in Perth, Western Australia in 1987 involving ‘Asia–Pacific’ artists, including a sizeable number of Southeast Asian artists. Pamela Zeplin has argued that A R X is an important precedent for subsequent Australian artistic engagements with Asia, especially Southeast Asia. Zeplin reports that the change of nomenclature was a direct result of the participation of Southeast Asian artists, who sought to shift the emphasis on an Australian ‘centre’ to a broader regional dialogue. See Zeplin, “The A R X Experiment 1987–1999: Communities, controversy & regionality,” Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools, annual conference papers, 2005, http://acuads.com.au /static/files /assets /06ff15eb/zeplin.pdf (accessed 15 May 2013). See also Senga Peckham, “A R X to A P T : The Museification of Contemporary Asian Art in Australia” (M A thesis, Material Culture & Museum Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, 1995).

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Preface: Departures

Asian neighbours. There was little offered in studies of Asian art in Australian tertiary centres at the time. Instead, my travels to Asia, combined with my studies of politics of the region, led me to concentrate my long-time passion for art in the vast landscape of Asia. I was fortunate to encounter some of this art first-hand during my travels to Southeast Asia, but I also gradually came upon more in reproductions. My scholarly confidence grew as I discovered that at least one Australia-based journal, then called A R T and AsiaPacific,3 was taking this art seriously, as were a few scholars scattered in different corners of the world who gathered in Australia in 1991 for the momentous conference on ‘Modernism and Post-Modernism in Asian Art’ – convened by the eminent historian of Asian art, Professor John Clark – to discuss the differently situated and long-neglected modern and contemporary art of Asia.4 These were key platforms and conferences that provide an early if developing critical mass of knowledge shaping both Australian and broader international perceptions of the art of the region. What has followed since that time is a veritable explosion of international interest in contemporary Asian art, showing that while Australia has for some time undertaken an active role in developing its knowledge of Asian art, the rest of the world has likewise also shown great interest in the remarkable contemporary art developments in Asia. Accordingly, I suggest that if what I present in this book is viewed through an Australian lens, it should also, I hope, have relevance to all interested in contemporary art and, more specifically, contemporary Southeast Asian art.

½™¾

3

The journal I refer to is now known as ArtAsiaPacific, the renowned quarterly art magazine focusing on contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific, first published in Sydney, Australia, 1993 as A R T and AsiaPacific. Since 2004, the periodical has undergone several changes of ownership and publishing location. In 2007 Elaine Ng became the sole publisher and editor-in-chief and, in 2011, moved the magazine’s office from the U S A to Hong Kong. 4 ‘Modernism and Post-Modernism in Asian Art’ was held at the Australian National University, Canberra, March 1991. Papers from the conference were revised and published in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. John Clark (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1993).

Prologue Points of Entry

T

to flesh out significant beginnings for contemporary Southeast Asian art history within globalizing currents of art practice and scholarship since the 1990s. As a story of beginnings, it does not pretend to encompass the vast and myriad histories and trajectories of contemporary Southeast Asian art development from the 1990s (or earlier) until now, nor the wide array of artists and artworks, or the proliferating cultural institutions and art-learning centres in Southeast Asia that have emerged over the last two to three decades in support of art practice and exhibition. It does not seek to provide a detailed or comprehensive survey of Southeast Asian art as a region or to provide a set of nationalist art histories or even a set of artist biographies. In short, it does not claim to capture or serve as a definitive history of contemporary Southeast Asian art thus far. Rather, Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990 traces the significance of contemporary Southeast Asian art and artists and their place within the newly globalized art world and the internationalizing field of ‘contemporary art’ history, enfolded in and refracted through the wider global visibility of contemporary Asian art since the late-twentieth century. It explores the significant ‘entry points’ – the ‘contexts’, ‘positionalities’, or ‘perspectives’ – for our engagements with and understanding of contemporary Southeast Asian art since the 1990s, by examining the prevailing discursive and representational paradigms offered in art scholarship, exhibition and collecting practices, and art practice itself. In so doing, Reworlding Art History sees contemporary Southeast Asian art as a fertile field for critically examining how today’s art relates to specific spaces and temporalities – Southeast Asian art that draws on both local and wider world contexts, intersecting and conversing with them. From this perspective, HIS BOOK ENDEAVOURS

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REWORLDING ART HISTORY

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contemporary Southeast Asian art practice, representation, and reception are necessarily proposed as creative projects possessing their very own situatedness and dynamism, and thereby reflecting cultural and temporal specificity. Moreover, they reflect crosscultural intersection and historical continuities, generating ‘contemporary art’ as a shared field of practice and knowledge in the global art sphere.

Frames, Axes: Art History’s Temporalities and Spatialities

Figure 1: Redza Piyadasa, Masa Penerimaan – Entry Points (1978). Image courtesy of the National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia (Balai Seni Lukis Negara).

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It is precisely a concern with our points of entry into art and the contingencies of context that the late Malaysian artist and art theorist Redza Piyadasa once expressed in his artwork Entry Points of 1978 (Figure 1 above) – essentially a conceptually driven sculptural artwork consisting of a frame within a frame.1 Stencilled in bold, colourful print along the bottom edge of the outer frame is the statement: “Artworks never exist in time, they have ‘entry points’.” The statement lies beneath the inner frame of an oil painting entitled Riverside Scene executed in 1958 by the Malaysian artist Chia Yu-Chian (an influential figure from the Southeast Asian ‘Nanyang’ or ‘Southern Seas’ School of painting; see Chapter 2 below). By absorbing the earlier 1958 painting into his own 1978 conceptual artwork, Piyadasa acknowledges art-historical precedents for his own practice from within the Malaysian and even Southeast Asian ‘Nanyang’ context. In so doing, he sets up a localized, dialectical story of art-historical relation between art practitioners of his generation and those working two decades earlier in the regionally inflected styles of the Nanyang School of modern art. As the eminent historian of Southeast Asian art, T.K. Sabapathy, observes of the artwork, Piyadasa makes the point that works of art are “no longer imprisoned in immutable time-frames.”2 Piyadasa instead draws temporal relations between a localized art modernity, signalled by the Nanyang School of art, and the generations of art practice which have come after it (including ‘contemporary art’), deliberately (re-)tracing an art-historical narrative. Moreover, Entry Points encourages us to see that artworks do not exist in frozen time but may be read as dynamic sites for the interplay of 1

Entry Points, first produced in 1978, has more recently been exhibited for its significance to a developing contemporary Southeast Asian art history, including in the exhibitions Telah Terbit (Out Now): South East Asian Art Practices During the 1970s, curated by Ahmad Mashadi for the Singapore Art Museum in 2006, and Turns in Tropics, curated by Patrick Flores for the “Position Papers” component of Okwui Enwezor’s 2008 Gwangju Biennale, “On the Road/Position Papers/Insertions,” which explored four Southeast Asian artists-turned-curators, including Piyadasa. 2 T.K. Sabapathy explains in his monograph on Redza Piyadasa that the statement included in the artwork is a reference to George Kubler’s The Shape of Time, in which Kubler “summarises a lifetime devoted to the study of art history and proposes ways by which the history of art can be conceptualised dynamically.” See Sabapathy, P I Y A D A S A – An Overview, 1962–2000 (Retrospective Exhibition) (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara/National Art Gallery, 2001): 77. Cf. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1962).

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specific temporalities and spatialities – that is, artworks exist in time, but also in space.3 Entry Points was created in Malaysia upon Piyadasa’s return from art studies in Hawai‘i (Master in Fine Arts, University of Hawai‘i, 1977) and, prior to this, England (Diploma in Art & Design, Hornsey College of Art, 1963), by which time he had developed a deep fascination with conceptual investigations into the very constitution, premises, and value of art. This, along with other conceptual artwork produced by Piyadasa on his return home to Malaysia, registered an exploration of the relevance of modern art for Malaysians, and a concern for a developing modern Malaysian art history, situated within larger Southeast Asian currents of modern art. Given this conceptual interest by Piyadasa, it is not surprising that he later pursued a more active role in curating Southeast Asian art4 and, together with Sabapathy, contributed to the development of an art historiography for modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with particular attention to the pictorial styles and visual vocabulary of the Nanyang School.5 Entry Points suggests Piyadasa’s awareness not only of the situatedness of his practice within a chronology of art history but also of its locally situated contexts of production, its geo-cultural points of entry, and their contingent historical effect. The work, I would argue, is emblematic of some of the earliest instances of ‘contemporary art’ emanating from the region with its selfreflexive investigation into the constitution and form of art, especially in dialogue with ‘the modern’. This self-reflexivity, I suggest, gives rise to an ambivalence in Entry Points which stems from the artist’s conflicting desires: on the one hand, his political will to recall localized but peripheralized 3

See also Francis Maravillas’ arguments on the intersections of temporality and spatiality suggested by this artwork in “Constellations of the contemporary: Art /Asia / Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies 32.4 (2008): 433–44. 4 Notably, Patrick Flores regards this turn – from artist to curator (and, by extension, to art historian) – as an emblematic marking of a shift from ‘the modern’ to ‘the contemporary’ in Southeast Asia. See Flores, “Position Papers: Turns in Tropics: Artist–Curator,” in The 7th Gwangju Biennale: Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2008): 262–85. 5 See Redza Piyadasa, “Introduction” and “The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts,” in Pameran retrospektif pelukis-pelukis Nanyang (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia, 1979): 6–7, 24–35, and T.K. Sabapathy, “The Nanyang artists: some general remarks,” in Pameran retrospektif pelukis-pelukis Nanyang (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia, 1979): 43–48.

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(Malaysian /Southeast Asian /Nanyang) art histories so as to illuminate and carve a space for them within world art histories; and, on the other, revealing the process /project of art’s canonization, only to recognize his own participation in this. Indeed, Entry Points is in this sense ironic, given the artwork’s subsequent importance in the narratives of contemporary art history for Malaysia6 and Southeast Asia. Echoing Piyadasa, Reworlding Art History hopes to elucidate the established socio-cultural ‘points of entry’ that have shaped the production and reception of contemporary Southeast Asian art history since the 1990s, but also to consider the shape of alternative art histories which might be pursued by a more active engagement with aesthetic points of entry – more precisely, the formalist and affective encounters with contemporary Southeast Asian art which, I will argue, have too often been overlooked, especially in the international context. So, too, Reworlding Art History explores as entry points the major debates surrounding the emergence of contemporary Southeast Asian art, to highlight some of the key artists, exhibitions, and theoretical discourses that have helped shape contemporary Southeast Asian art histories, and to point to the continuing development and significance of Southeast Asian art to a developing contemporary art history within ‘world currents’.7 By exploring these key themes, developments, and shifts in the interpretation and representation of contemporary Southeast Asian art, I am also investigating new means of theorizing contemporary Southeast Asian art and, more broadly, contemporary art in the world (that is, contemporary art as it is situated in different contexts of the world and, further, what that means for an art history that attempts to encompass the world’s contemporary art). The Southeast Asian regional frame – understood and applied as “critical [colonial] inheritance,” “critical regionalism,” and “contingent device”8 – offers another 6

Among other writings on Malaysian art history, see the four-volume publication project Narratives in Malaysian Art, ed. Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2012—). 7 The notion of contemporary art within “world currents” is developed in the work of Terry Smith. See, for instance, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King, 2011). 8 “critical [colonial] inheritance”: Patrick Flores, “Homespun, Worldwide: Colonialism as Critical Inheritance,” in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information & Singapore Art Museum (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2002): 16–25; “critical regionalism”: Ismail Mohd Zain, “Towards an Utopian Paradigm: A Matter of Contingencies and

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productive point of entry and even intervention into the developing (world / global) histories of contemporary art.

‘Worlding’ from the Region Recent investigations into critical processes of ‘worlding’9 provide important theoretical motivation for the book, opening up possibilities for reconstructing imaginaries of the world and its art histories, with less dependency on EuroAmerican frameworks and subject-matter. Particularly germane here is the notion of “place-based imaginaries”, in which localization and globalization are taken to be mutually constitutive processes both in constructions of subjectivity10 and in shaping contemporary art histories at the intersection of national, regional, and global contexts. By situating my discussion within the overarching concept of a ‘reworlding’ of art history, I seek to position contemporary Southeast Asian art and its histories in the growing theoretical field of ‘worlding’, as well as ‘world art’ or ‘global art’ studies, and their attendant forms of ‘reworlding’ as praxis: that is, to borrow from Aihwa Ong, “situated everyday practices […] that creatively imagine and shape alternative social visions and configurations – that is, worlds – than what already exists in a given context.”11 I am highlighting current processes in the field of contemporary art, which stem from previously peripheralized locales such as Southeast Asia, and which call for the recognition of differently situated art pracDisplacement,” in First A S E A N Symposium on Aesthetics: proceedings of Symposium held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, National Art Gallery, October 24–27 1989, ed. Delia Paul & Sharifah Fatimah Zubir (Kuala Lumpur: A S E A N C O C I , 1989): 20–25; “contingent device”: Heather Sutherland, “Contingent Devices,” in Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, ed. Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben & Henk Schulte Nordholt (Singapore: Singapore U P , National University of Singapore, 2005): 20–59. 9 See Aihwa Ong, “Introduction: Worlding Cities: The Art of Being Global,” in Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, ed. Ananya Roy & Aihwa Ong (Chichester & Malden M A : Wiley–Blackwell, 2001): 1–26; The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed. Rob Wilson & Christopher Leigh Connery (Santa Cruz C A : New Pacific Press, 2007). 10 On “place-based imaginaries,” see Arif Dirlik, “Place-Based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place,” in Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization, ed. Roxann Prazniak & Arif Dirlik (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 2001): 15–51. 11 Aihwa Ong, “Introduction: Worlding Cities: The Art of Being Global,” 1–26.

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tices and their histories in an increasingly globalized, even homogenizing, ‘art world’ context. To draw on Rob Wilson’s concept of worlding as “tactic,”12 I argue for the potential of contemporary Southeast Asian art to contribute to an art-historical reworlding: as a counter-worlding tactic, contemporary Southeast Asian art offers possibilities for contesting and unsettling Western-centric narratives of art history and their static, singular views of the world. In short, I am investigating how contemporary Southeast Asian art, as ‘worlding’ or, more precisely, ‘reworlding’ projects, invites alternative art-historical imaginaries – situated within Southeast Asia but also within the region’s diasporas and global networks – with consequences for our shared understanding of ‘contemporary art’ in the global milieu. These are imaginaries that assist in decentering Euro-America but also in disrupting homogenizing and essentializing narratives of Southeast Asia itself.13 In short, Reworlding Art History argues for a differentiated view of art’s histories in the plural, prompted by the emerging field of contemporary art. Contemporary art, I contend, emerges from particular contexts of production but is necessarily attuned to and in dialogue with world currents in the intensely globalized conditions of its production and reception since the latetwentieth century. These distinctive conditions have effected new positionalities and practices of being in the world encompassing diverse, contingent, and coeval perspectives. Thus, Reworlding Art History is concerned with the cross-currents of dialogues on globalization, decolonizing projects, and arthistorical reworldings, which have been key concerns in debates informing a developing contemporary art history since the late-twentieth century. It highlights the new kinds of art-making and patterns of increased international movement that contemporary Southeast Asian artists undergo for their art, especially on the expanding biennale circuit in which their art has become most visible and as Southeast Asian artists increasingly participate in diasporic and migratory networks. In so doing, Reworlding Art History emphasizes the cross-currents of local, regional, transnational, and international identities that are imaged and imagined by artists in new globalizing art contexts, exploring the tendency to move across and between locations, both in 12

Rob Wilson, “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic,” in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, 209–23. 13 See Kumar Sree & Sharon Siddique, Southeast Asia: The Diversity Dilemma: How Intra-Regional Contradictions and External Forces are Shaping Southeast Asia Today (Singapore: Select Publishing, 2008).

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the subject-matter of art and through art practice, as part of both regional and global dynamics. It also draws attention to the imaginative and critical possibilities of art in reconfiguring contemporary subjectivities and cartographies of Southeast Asia in an increasingly globalized world. However, as I argue throughout this book, contemporary art not only signals new geographies of art practice but also brings into proximity the differences and similitudes of aesthetic encounters as they emerge from differently situated contexts in the world. This, in turn, recognizes that the encounter with art is also an affective one. What is often forgotten in the competing meta-narratives documenting contemporary art is precisely the aesthetic fact of art and its affective capacity to move us – its ‘moving’ effect. These aesthetic considerations of contemporary Southeast Asian art are thus foregrounded in Reworlding Art History as a key argumentative thread.

The Southeast Asian Regional Frame: A Critical Mapping My explorations are rooted primarily in art-historical inquiry, inflected by the methods, scope, and insights of visual-culture studies, and form part of a wider recognition of Asian art contributions in the making of modern and contemporary art history. They are pursued in conjunction with changes in the thinking and constitution of ‘Southeast Asia’ itself, particularly apropos of the shifting fields of area studies (namely, Asian studies and Southeast Asian studies) and the new inter-Asia projects of cultural studies which seek to transform the colonial and imperial legacies of knowledge-production by advancing inter-Asia methods for the development of ‘Asian studies in Asia’.14 Further underpinning my inquiry is the relationship between the disciplines of art and anthropology and the different ways in which contemporary art has been foregrounded in and affected by each, particularly their converging methodologies for research and interpretation of non-Western art (evidenced 14

Chen Kuan-Hsing has proposed a programme of ‘Asia as Method’ and ‘Asian Studies in Asia’, in order to continue decolonizing and de-imperializing projects in Asia that are proposed to activate new modes of knowledge-production, not based exclusively on Euro-American frames of theoretical reference. See Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2010); Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, ed. Chen Kuan-Hsing, with Kuo Hsiu-Ling, Hans Hang & Hsu Ming-Chu (London: Routledge, 1998); Chen Kuan-Hsing & Chua Beng Huat, The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); and the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements.

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especially across the transformed representational spaces of the art gallery and the ethnographic or historical museum at the close of the twentieth century). With regard to the methods and approach foregrounded in Reworlding Art History, the interpretative frames – of art scholarship, criticism, and curatorship – form the argumentational impetus for the book, while the art analyses offered suggest converging modes of interdisciplinary research. The contemporary artists discussed in the book are internationally renowned, with significant international experience in major exhibitions; they include Nindityo Adipurnomo, Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Dadang Christanto, Heri Dono, Simryn Gill, Ho Tzu Nyen, Mella Jaarsma, Lee Wen, José Legaspi, Lim Tzay Chuen, Lani Maestro, the Sanggawa Group, Judy Freya Sibayan, Susyilawati Sulaiman, tsunamii.net, Suzann Victor, Roberto Villanueva, Wong Hoy Cheong, and Yee I-Lann. Reworlding Art History analyses major works by these seminal artists, featured in important regional and international exhibitions over the past two decades. The artists I discuss have been chosen not only for their captivating and affecting contemporary art practices, but also on the basis of their recurring representation in international art exhibitions since the 1990s and their subsequent international reputation. Given the varied exhibition contexts involved, I have been motivated by the prospect of gaining insights from investigating these artists’ comparative international, regional, and national spaces of artistic production and reception. Their trajectories of exhibition participation and related representation, as well as the particular kinds of art practice they engage in, provide important contexts for my concerns in this book. In gathering artists from various parts of Southeast Asia, I mark the affinities between contemporary art practitioners from the region – specifically, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore – in order to reflect critically on the generative possibilities of Southeast Asian regionalism for crafting more complex interpretations of the conditions and constitution of contemporary art and its developing critique and history, beyond prevailing centre– periphery models (e.g., West–the Rest; East Asia–Southeast Asia), but also in contrast to those national and regional cultural agendas which prioritize the political usefulness of art and culture for diplomatic ends. In these latter projects, art is often essentialized to reflect a sense of homogeneous culture. My comparative framework obviously does not reflect the full geographic compass of Southeast Asia, which is commonly understood today to span the eleven countries of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma / Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste

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(the only non-A S E A N 15 member). Rather, it is an intentionally limited and fractured view of a region which continues to be debated for its design, significance, and critical possibilities. While the case studies of art presented refer to artists with connection to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, the art histories I engage with throughout the book emerge from a wider context of Southeast Asia (and Southeast Asia in the world). This configuration of Southeast Asia intends to force a recognition of the impossibility of fixing the region’s boundaries and coordinates and the impracticality of totalizing perspectives. At the same time, it is hoped that advancing comparative perspectives between specific art practices across the region within broader art-historical work on contemporary Southeast Asian art will encourage a focus on particular currents of contemporary art, particularly in their intersections and entanglements with regional and global dynamics. Thus, Reworlding Art History conceptualizes Southeast Asia as a space and place of multiplicities rather than essentialized cultural structures, a complex and differentiated organism constituted by mixture and interpenetration, an entity of dynamic interconnections rather than rigid identities. Totalizing and fixed categories of ‘nation’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ which seek to homogenize and essentialize art from the region through discursively produced geo-political constructs16 are instead critically reconfigured in the context of dynamic temporal and spatial contingencies which mark Southeast Asia as a site of continuous remapping through acts of ‘(re-/de-)territorialization’.17 Southeast Asian-ness itself does not exist as a given entity, but is always an adaptable and inherently manifold description of transitory and transforming connections.

15

A S E A N refers to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the postcolonial political and economic grouping of Southeast Asian nations, originally formed in 1967 with the membership of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. It has since expanded to include Brunei, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. See “About A S E A N : Overview”, at the official website of the A S E A N , http://www.aseansec.org/about_A S E A N .html (accessed 26 March 2012). 16 This is what the Thai scholar Thongchai Winichakul defines as the spatially encoded “geo-body.” See Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 1994). 17 See Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, 1980; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1987).

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Indeed, the need to acknowledge the fluidity of Southeast Asia’s borders has in no small measure to do with the migratory and diasporic currents of Southeast Asian belonging, currents that flow beyond the region’s physical geography. Reworlding Art History accordingly includes discussion of artists who have featured in exhibitions as representatives of their respective Southeast Asian countries of origin but who work and/or live mainly outside them, whether permanently (as part of diasporic or cosmopolitan communities) or as peripatetic international artists. Within this frame we can identify a further set of classifications: those who base themselves for the most part within their Southeast Asian country of origin; those who reside mainly outside them; and those who regularly move among multiple locales, especially for their international art practice, suggesting the varied and plural experiences of contemporary Southeast Asian artists worldwide since late-twentieth-century global capitalism.

Cosmopolitan Intersections More often than not, the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ has been applied to describe the kind of lifestyle that is associated with a thriving European or American modern-day metropolis such as New York, Paris, or London; these days, however, their cosmopolitan characteristics make Asian locales such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Singapore unignorable.18 It was rare until recently to have an Indonesian artist such as Heri Dono described as cosmopolitan – a ‘patriot’, yes, but seldom ‘cosmopolitan.’ By contrast, recent theories of cosmopolitanism acknowledge its relevance beyond the Euro-American context and extend beyond the discipline of Western philosophy to include forms of cosmopolitan art practice in Asia. As Pollock et al. have argued, What the new archives, geographies, and practices of different historical cosmopolitanisms might reveal is […] that cosmopolitanism is not a circle created by culture diffused from a centre, but instead, that centers are everywhere and circumferences nowhere.”19 18

Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters, ed. Edwin Jurriëns & Jeroen de Kloet (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007). 19 Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge & Dipesh Chakrabarty. “Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitanism, ed. Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha & Chakrabarty (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2002): 9–10, 12.

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So, too, as Bruce Robbins asserts, “Like nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular.”20 In this way, new cosmopolitanisms provide diverse and nuanced ways of thinking through the different but commonly situated life conditions for contemporary Southeast Asian artists of global experience. Notwithstanding the many-sided perspectives on what constitutes cosmopolitanism, recent theories of cosmopolitanism help illuminate both the contemporary conditions of being an international artist in the intensely globalized world that has emerged since the late-twentieth century (especially to describe those artists who move from one international exhibition to another and continue to return, however briefly, to ‘a place of origin’ or a place they call ‘home’) and also to speak to the kind of art and art reception which emerges from this new global orientation.21 I take cosmopolitanism to be much more than the uncomplicated universalist view of world citizenship that is posited as the binary opposite of patriotism. Rather, I adopt a flexible yet grounded notion of cosmopolitanism that simultaneously encompasses both worldly and more localized lived experiences. Importantly, as with artists everywhere, admittance to transnational, cosmopolitan art practice is still largely a prerogative of a small group of artists with privileged access to national and global capital. As Joan Kee has pointed out, The realm of the transnational is still largely inaccessible to all but a small, well-funded minority, despite the idealism embedded in curatorial premises like ‘global mobility’ or ‘hybridity’.22

Related to this, Charlotte Bydler reminds us in The Global Art World, Inc. of the dimension of cosmopolitan privilege that is associated with the art world: Art has had a long-standing romance with cosmopolitanism and internationalism. The ideal cosmopolitan (of cosmos, the ordered totality of the universe, and polites, citizen) is distinguished by universal cultural 20

Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah & Bruce Robbins (Cultural Politics Series vol. 14; Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1998): 2. 21 See also Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge & Malden M A : Polity, 2012), for the application of a cosmopolitan frame for interpreting contemporary art and aesthetics more broadly. 22 Joan Kee, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Twenty Questions,” Positions: East Asia Cultural Critique 12.3 (Winter 2004): 604.

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competence and love of art. The Fine Arts is a sort of monument to the cosmopolitan community, their cultural heritage.23

By contrast, the art historian Marsha Meskimmon also suggests that new contemporary art practices encourage an aesthetic of openness and dialogue between peoples and may be viewed as part of a recent shift in art from addressing an autonomous, exclusivist art world to consciously engaging with a diversity of contemporary art audiences. Such art, Meskimmon argues, is premised on making connections with others in the world across and through difference, whether those are cultural, sexual, national, ethnic and/or differences of class and economic status.24

Thus, unlike the nineteenth-century European ideal of cosmopolitanism, Meskimmon positions contemporary art as part of a reconstitution of cosmopolitanism as “situated perspectives on the possibilities of dialogue and community building which acknowledge the complexities of the intertwining of the local within the global.”25 Importantly, the new dialogic engagement demanded by contemporary art suggests that cosmopolitanism is newly configured not only through the new global movements of the international artist but also via the crosscultural connections that are generated in and through contemporary art itself. As with Meskimmon, I situate cosmopolitan art practice not merely as “ ‘ representing’ a global subject” or “autobiographical translation […] of transnational movement” but also attend to new affective dimensions of contemporary art practice itself which engage with humanity across cultures and contribute to new “critical exploration[s] of subjectivity as an inter-subjective, intercorporeal practice”26 as well as new dialogic relations between artist and audience via the sensory response to art. In so doing, such cosmopolitan art practices demand renewed attention to art’s materiality and affective possibilities alongside its socio-cultural contexts of production and reception. These intersecting 23

Charlotte Bydler, The Global Art World, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art (published doctoral dissertation; Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2004): 11 (italics in original). 24 Marsha Meskimmon, “The Precarious Ecologies of Cosmopolitanism,” Humanities Research (special issue, “The World and World-Making in Art,” ed. Caroline Turner, Michelle Antoinette & Zara Stanhope) 19.2 (July 2013): 38. 25 Meskimmon, “The Precarious Ecologies of Cosmopolitanism,” 38–39. 26 Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London & New York, Routledge, 2011), 6.

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modes and manifestations of cosmopolitanism are teased out in the analyses of art throughout Part I I I .

Regional Intervention in ‘The Contemporary’ My engagement with Southeast Asia and contemporary Southeast Asian art in an argument about contemporary art in the world more broadly has multiple motivations conditioning the following methodological and argumentational approaches. First, I deploy the trope of Southeast Asia as both locative signifier and epistemic device in order to probe the criteria defining contemporary art. By this I mean that present-day Southeast Asia provides a geo-cultural locus for mapping the manifold, intersecting, and disparate temporalities and spatialities of contemporary art, as it navigates the intensified network of local and global forces that constitute ‘Southeast Asia’ and the ‘World’; I argue that as it uniquely negotiates the multifaceted and heterogeneous exigencies of contemporaneity under intense globalization, contemporary Southeast Asian art makes manifest the conditions of art’s ‘contemporaneity’ as these have emerged since the late-twentieth century.27 A further motivation for engaging with this region is to argue that cultural locales such as Southeast Asia have in fact assisted in creating the very conditions of contemporary art in the world, particularly as contemporary Southeast Asian art (alongside other art) opens up the field of art history to a plurality of art practices, theories, and methods that must be recognized as the effects of particular spatial and temporal contexts and which require us to confront the inherent biases of art history as rehearsed in the Euro-American traditions. Contemporary Southeast Asian art thus has great potential for disrupting the hegemonic model of art history – for emphasizing Other localities in the production of art knowledge and pointing to the elision of the West’s own localities in constructing a supposedly universal narrative of art history. In coming to recognize the multiple and distinctive ways in which both modern and contemporary art have developed in and from Southeast Asian contexts, and 27

On the notion of ‘contemporaneity’, see Terry Smith, “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor & Nancy Condee (Durham D C : Duke U P , 2008): 1–19, and Jim Supangkat, “Indonesia in Contemporary Art Discourses,” in Contemporaneity: Contemporary Art in Indonesia, ed. Biljana Ciric (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2010): 18–43.

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shifting the focus from Euro-American historical coordinates of art practice, we can also begin to recognize the temporal and spatial assumptions that underpin the narratives of art history. Contemporary Southeast Asian art, in turn, opens up new possibilities for rethinking not only what we mean by ‘art history’ but also what is meant by ‘the contemporary’, ‘Southeast Asia’, and ‘the world’ (of ‘world art’ or ‘global art’) in the context of renewed debates about the putative ‘end of art history’ after the modern,28 discussions surrounding the possibilities and directions for a ‘global art history’,29 and the definition of ‘contemporary art’.30 As the art historian Miwon Kwon argues, contemporary art may also be understood as “work that undertakes the task of figuring out what and how art of the present forces a rethinking of the stories that have described what happened in the past.”31 Indeed, much contemporary Southeast Asian art pursues this investigative concern with history’s making and related effect, adopting an exploratory lens on the past and the present to imagine alternative trajectories for Southeast Asian art futures.

Coordinates, Parameters, Trajectories: Between the Cultural and the Aesthetic As I hope will presently become clear, my approach to reading art encompasses the multiple possible perspectives of the artist, curator, art historian, art critic, audience, and institution, all taking their cues from widening reference points and disciplinary insights. However, the multiplicity of such perspectives still has the propensity in art histories of Southeast Asia to coalesce and 28

Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997; Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, tr. Christopher S. Wood (Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?, 1983; Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1987). 29 Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (New York & London: Routledge, 2007); Art and Globalization, ed. James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska & Alice Kim (University Park: Pennsylvania State U P , 2010). 30 Hal Foster et al., “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 3–124; Asia Art Archive, ed., “The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on the Contemporary,” Field Notes 1 (June 2012), http://www.aaa.org.hk/FieldNotes/Details /1167 (accessed 7 June 2012). 31 Miwon Kwon, in Hal Foster et al., “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” 14.

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concretize as hegemonic discourse. What has been less discussed, of these perspectives, is the aesthetic encounter with art. Thus, writing this book (that is, the documentation and production of ideas through words and language) is also impelled by the aesthetic capacity of contemporary Southeast Asian art to move us, to engage our senses. Hence, a further motivation for the examination of contemporary Southeast Asian art is to argue for a renewed focus on its aesthetic significance. During the 1990s, in much of the discursive work of representing contemporary art by Southeast Asian artists, there was a strong tendency to obscure the diversity of artistic subjects, themes, and creative processes in favour of essentialist, geo-culturally focused interpretations which privileged locality through essentializing frames of ethnicity and/or biography (by comparison, in nineteenth-century international expositions ‘race’ was the chief paradigm for marking such difference). In these instances, the biographical specificities of the contemporary artist’s geographical location, socio-historical background, and cultural/national identity were privileged as discursive frames of interpretation, often renouncing the particularity of art as an aesthetic encounter of affective significance and privileging ‘identitarian’ frames. In this way, locality and cultural belonging (e.g., ethnicity, race, nation) were habitually promoted as the main feature of contemporary Southeast Asian art, often underscored by modes of exhibition spectacle (see Chapter 3 below). While this tendency was particularly prevalent in international exhibitions of the 1990s, to some extent it continued to hold sway in the discursive shaping of exhibitions in the early twenty-first century. But why prioritize a specific geographic location in order to engage with the aesthetic possibilities offered by contemporary Southeast Asian art? What critical salience can be afforded the aesthetic from focusing on the notion of place – more specifically, nation, region, and cultural origin? How have various ‘Southeast Asian’ identities (Indonesian /Malaysian /Philippine /Singaporean /Southeast Asian /Asian) been invoked in contemporary art practice and exhibition since the 1990s? How is it possible to acknowledge and represent the reality of cultural difference and its complexities, without conforming to the essentializing logic of the exhibitionary spectacle? How is it possible to acknowledge and represent the variety of ‘non-Western’ contemporary art in local, regional, and global art contexts, without dependence on culturally essentialist discursive frameworks and narratives of difference? These questions provide preliminary points of departure for a critical discussion of contem-

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porary Southeast Asian art and, more specifically, its production and representation since the 1990s. Resisting essentializing narratives of art-as-locality or art-as-biography, in this book I seek to engage the critical utility and agency of Southeast Asian regionalism, especially for defining contemporary Southeast Asian art and towards expanding the larger world-wide debates on the constitution of contemporary art. At the same time, I am probing the critical limits of regionalism as a defining category for Southeast Asian art practice and its histories. Reworlding Art History accordingly foregrounds a critical tension in pursuing Southeast Asia as region – that is, pursuing the specificity of locality and its attendant identitarian politics of difference – and, at the same time, pointing to the similarities and connections between modes of contemporary art practice and its histories around the world, especially by means of art’s aesthetic (notably formalist and affective) dimensions, in this book traced through particular tropes of ‘the contemporary’ emerging since the 1990s (namely, mobility, memory, and the body). Throughout the book, I pursue a ‘spatial’ ontological and theoretical framework. Echoing the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I explore the use of contemporary art in a politics of locating (‘territorializing’) and dis/locating (‘deterritorializing’ and ‘reterritorializing’) Southeast Asian artists and their work in a place called Southeast Asia. In particular, I draw on a number of theoretical concepts proposed by Deleuze and Guattari that enable alternative representational topographies of Southeast Asian difference. Deleuze and Guattari’s epistemology of ‘deterritorialization’ is especially useful for undoing essentialist models of Southeast Asian subjectivity and representation. They propose “rhizomatic” maps of subjectivity which recognize the subject as always in a state of “becoming.” Through deterritorialization, Southeast Asia becomes a rhizomatic space of ‘active experimentation’, of ever-renewable subjectivities (or what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “being-in-becoming”) replacing static notions of a fixed, ‘territorialized’ space called Southeast Asia. Understood as an active social and representational space of experimentation and becoming, Southeast Asia also takes on a multiplicity of meanings as the definition of geography itself expands to include not only the traditional ‘spatial species’ of nation and region but also the multi-spatial and mobile cartographies of itinerant and cyber-communities (Chapter Four), alternative metaphoric and material spaces of memory (Chapter Five), and the intimate geographies of bodies (Chapter Six). Hence, I propose that, as geographies of Southeast Asia are imagined differently, so, too, can geographies of contem-

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porary Southeast Asian art, which, when viewed from alternativee deterritorialized perspectives, afford alternative ways of representing Southeast Asian artists’ experiences and expressions of place, belonging, and subjectivity. Proceeding from these preliminary questions and motivations, this book traces three trajectories of exploration and is accordingly divided into three parts. Part I provides an introduction to the overall themes and concerns underlying the book. In Chapter 1, I provide further context for the underpinning motivations and arguments. In particular, I further explain the significance of the Southeast Asian regional frame (as ‘critical regionalism’ and ‘contingent device’) before briefly outlining the historical context for the emergence of contemporary art in Southeast Asia itself. I then describe the broader theoretical framework for my discussion of ‘contemporary art’ in the developing international field of contemporary art history. Part I I provides an overview of the interpretative tendencies of major regional and international exhibitions of the period, including biennales and triennales, through an examination of dominant ideological frames in artmuseum and gallery practices, and through the analysis of significant arthistorical documentation. It investigates discursive currents and common representational challenges in both regional and international exhibition and curatorship since the 1990s, examining recurring themes of representation and reception, hegemonic interpretative strategies, and the limitations and merits of particular interpretative frameworks which grapple with the new contemporary artforms emanating from regions beyond Euro-America. Specifically, in Chapter 2, I explore the regionally focused art histories and exhibition contexts for contemporary Southeast Asian art, including key institutional (exhibiting and collecting) paradigms. I continue to explore key examples of art, but also address the kinds of regionally focused cartographies of Southeast Asia that have been drawn and tested through art-historical and curatorial frames, including those emerging from Southeast Asia itself. This is a counterpoint to Chapter 3 with its focus on the figuring of contemporary Southeast Asian art in wider ‘Asian’ and ‘global’ currents of art representation. In Chapter 3, I point to the ways in which geographies of Southeast Asia have been constructed and deconstructed in the circuit of international biennale /triennale mega-exhibitions or ‘blockbuster’ shows which provide surveys of contemporary Asian art. I build the argument that, in a current of renewed anxiety over identity in late-modern times, contemporary Southeast

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Asian art has been regularly subjected to cultural essentialization in exhibitions of this kind, particularly during the formative period of international emergence in the 1990s. While some Southeast Asian artists have doubtless employed their art and/or their cultural position as artists to represent their respective cultures, others have been frequently framed and celebrated as representatives of their respective ‘original’ culture/s in local, regional, and international exhibitions, regardless of other themes and motivations informing the content and forms of their art. I argue that this pattern in art-historical and exhibition representation re-installs precisely that Orientalist and exoticizing agenda which many curators set out to disrupt in the first place by including Asian artists. Both of these tendencies suggest the elevation of a model of art and museological practice defined by an ethnographic approach. By contrast, Part I I I is devoted to a set of in-depth readings of contemporary Southeast Asian art, organized under three thematic tropes with significance for art practice since the 1990s: ‘Mobility’, ‘Memory’, and ‘the Body’. While acknowledging the discursive enterprise at hand in discussing art, I explore these alternative themes of artistic production and art-historical interpretation as figurative devices or tropes for exploring art’s materiality and affect through the discursive-aesthetic geographies of ‘Mobility’ (Chapter 4), ‘Memory’ (Chapter 5), and the ‘Body’ (Chapter 6). The thematic discourses of the various chapters derive from art itself and are an attempt to counter the hegemonic identitarian-oriented logic in exhibitions of contemporary Southeast Asian art by concurrently focusing on their aesthetic (formalist and affective) possibilities of engagement. Significant works in particular artists’ oeuvres are examined, with the artworks themselves forming the focus of close art analysis. Representations are fleshed out critically by evoking figurative devices which reflect particular kinds of aesthetic form and affective engagement. These discursive-aesthetic tropes are employed as a critical utility to avoiding orientalist re-inscriptions but also to uphold the aesthetic integrity of art and invoke its affective capacity in conjunction with relevant cultural considerations. This approach is offered as a means of activating alternate ‘entry points’ of interpretation which are premised on more focused attention to the aesthetics and discourses of art itself and the individual concerns of Southeast Asian artists. I thereby seek to highlight Southeast Asian art’s diversity and complexity and to disarticulate contemporary Southeast Asian art from the exclusive task of inscribing location and representing identity – modes of interpretation which have dominated the brief history of contemporary Southeast Asian art thus far.

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The discursive-aesthetic tropes are by no means offered as a definitive set of alternative categories for further sedimentations of meaning but, rather, as alternative critical possibilities for engaging with contemporary Southeast Asian art beyond the logic of hegemonic identitarianism. While other themes might have been selected, the ones I employ have their basis (as indicated above) in the strong presence in art of themes of mobility, memory, and the body, linking the most internationally prevalent contemporary Southeast Asian art at the turn of the twentieth century (but also contemporary art from around the world more generally). While these themes are by no means exclusive or exhaustive, they represent some of the strongest confluences across the work of the artists I examine in this book. Finally, I want to stress that the lens of alternative tropes is also suggestive of the multiplicities and nuances of other readings of art which lie at intersections with ‘culture’, rather than being wholly subsumed under it. They are attempts to re-imagine contemporary Southeast Asian art, unsettling conventional, essentializing geo-cultural frameworks by proposing a set of alternative configurations which are nonetheless connected to specific locales and cultural contexts through critical relations. They are employed to encourage a questioning of the burden of representing culture by those assumed to be its quintessential possessors, but they are nevertheless deeply connected to the reality of cultural contexts and their effect on the shape of art production. In this sense, they encompass identity but are not exclusively bound by identitarian themes. They will, it is hoped, provide a different and at least representative set of theoretical coordinates for grasping contemporary Southeast Asian art, not dominated by completist ethno-cartographic agendas. In the last analysis, I am proposing that they offer us a different methodology, an alternative set of ‘points of entry’ for engaging with the range of Southeast Asia through comparative connections and dissonances across art practice itself rather than through essentializing categories of biography (nation, ethnicity or race, for instance), categories which not only fail to speak to the plurality of histories, societies, languages, and other markers of cultural experience that constitute the diversity of Southeast Asian experience but also fail to address art specifically. Ironically, such cultural-essentialist descriptions often miss out on pinning down the aesthetic import of art itself despite their express attempts at art-historical elucidation. Indeed, as it reworlds our images of the Southeast Asian region and of the world, contemporary Southeast Asian art also provides a critical stimulus for our reworlding of art history. In remapping the coordinates of ‘the global con-

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temporary’ in dialogue with Southeast Asian critical regionalisms, and in recalling the aesthetic encounter with all art wherever it is placed, contemporary Southeast Asian art opens fresh horizons for our broader engagements with contemporary art and its histories in world contexts – worldly engagements which nevertheless remain inextricably linked to Southeast Asia’s distinctive art histories. Ultimately, Reworlding Art History asks, ‘how might we think the difference and connection of Southeast Asia at once? – in particular, the difference and connection that are inherent in modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art production?’ Reworlding Art History attempts to convey the complexities of these positionalities and their entanglements through views of the world from Southeast Asian perspectives, via affective and sensory engagements, across intra-regional currents of Southeast Asia itself, and in deepening diasporic and transnational networks. Moreover, it seeks to expand awareness of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art as a space of already existing commonality and connection, but also suggests the newly forged connections across and with Southeast Asia as projects that highlight renewed forms of regional and global cultural collaboration and exchange. In so doing, it emphasizes Southeast Asia’s diverse, ever-changing, and contingent cultural landscapes and the resonant affinities, resemblances, and similitudes of Southeast Asian art with other conditions and experience in the world. It also suggests specific Southeast Asian histories and contexts for modern and contemporary Asian art and exhibition, illuminating distinctive trajectories of contemporary Southeast Asian art development and avenues for the future.

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P ART I P RELIMINARY E NCOUNTERS

1 Contemporary ‘Southeast Asian’ Art Regional Interventions

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for the motivations and arguments underpinning Reworlding Art History. In particular, I further explain the significance of the Southeast Asian regional frame as an overarching narrative before briefly outlining the historical context for the emergence of contemporary art within Southeast Asia itself. I then explore some of the key theories and perspectives on the developing notion of ‘contemporary art’ in the globalizing field of contemporary art history. This is followed by preliminary tracings of the relationship of contemporary art to ethnographic practice, highlighting the relative absence of attention to the aesthetic. Finally, I take up examples of contemporary Southeast Asian art itself in order to set out the key methodological and interpretative issues that inform Reworlding Art History, especially in their oscillations between the cultural and the aesthetic. HIS CHAPTER PROVIDES ADDITIONAL CONTEXT

Why ‘Southeast Asian’ Contemporary Art? The rationale for my focus on contemporary Southeast Asian art is quite simply my personal experiences of enchantment with the contemporary art of the region; these have, in turn, inspired a broader and ongoing research interest and the desire to make more familiar, to myself and others, the relatively peripheralized stories of contemporary Southeast Asian art within Asian art and the world’s art histories more broadly. However, in posing the question “why ‘Southeast Asian’ contemporary art?,” I am also pointing to larger intellectual reasons for engaging with this region, and art relevant to it, concerns

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which have implication and consequence for world-wide debates regarding the constitution of contemporary art history. To this end, this chapter explores the epistemological import of the ‘regional’ frame itself, proposing it as a productive intervention in and intersection with the global contemporary, expanding our horizons of contemporary art in the world. The regional perspective I adopt as an overarching framework follows the work of contemporary area-studies scholars of Southeast Asia who argue for the utility of the notion of ‘Southeast Asia’, not as a fixed category of geographical reference but as a ‘contingent device’ for developing knowledge about the region.1 This deployment of a critical regional comparative frame echoes the much earlier art histories advanced by Piyadasa,2 the artist–curator Ismail Mohd Zain,3 and the art historian T.K. Sabapathy,4 who in their different ways

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See Heather Sutherland, “Contingent Devices,” in Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, ed. Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben & Henk Schulte Nordholt (Singapore: Singapore U P , 2005): 20–59; and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31.3 (1997): 735–62. So, too, in her introductory essay for a special issue of the journal Third Text focusing on contemporary art from Southeast Asia, Joan Kee foregrounds the gathering of these essays in a spirit of regionalism which recognizes contingencies and connectivities across centres and peripheries. Kee, “Introduction Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: The Right Kind of Trouble,” Third Text 25.4 (2011): 371–81. 2 Redza Piyadasa also proposes the notion of “neo-regionalism” to describe the art practices of Malaysian artists in the 1980s and 1990s who were, “despite their different formalistic approaches, exhibit[ing] a broader multiracial and multicultural perspective.” Although Piyadasa suggests that they are a loose grouping without “a particular stylistic approach or a strict ideological position,” he contrasts them with the Malay / Islamic tendencies of artists of the generation before them and aligns them with the “regionalists” of the late 1940s and 1950s, “who were not constrained by self-conscious ethnic and religious perspectives.” See Piyadasa, “Modern Malaysian Art, 1945–1991: A Historical Overview,” in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1993): 58–71. 3 Ismail Zain, “Towards an Utopian Paradigm: A Matter of Contingencies and Displacement,” in First A S E A N Symposium on Aesthetics, ed. Paul & Zubir, 20–25. 4 Among other publications of T.K. Sabapathy on the topic, see “The Painter Depicted: Two Pictures by Liu Kang (Thoughts on Traditions and Aesthetics),” in First A S E A N Symposium on Aesthetics, ed. Paul & Zubir, 38–43, and “Developing Regionalist Perspectives in South-East Asian Art Historiography,” in The Second Asia–Pacific

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have sought to advance regional art histories for Southeast Asia. More recently, John Clark has employed case studies from China and Thailand to put forward an inter-Asia art-historical methodology for undertaking comparative modern Asian art studies within a wider rubric of Asia.5 Quite prophetically, at the ‘First A S E A N Symposium on Aesthetics’ of 1989, Ismail Zain was already encouraging a new “critical regionalism” as “a matter of contingencies and displacement,” at a time of strengthening A S E A N political and cultural alliances and growing regional anxieties regarding the waning of local cultures under globalization: One of the most crucial issues in addressing the subject of aesthetics in the A S E A N region will inevitably centre around tradition and past values and how these could sustain their legitimacy and their ‘communicability’ amidst environments which have undergone considerable changes. […] There is a need to believe in the diachotomy [sic] of Critical Regionalism and World Culture. The fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism [is] to mediate the impact of the universal with elements derived from its own viable standpoints. […] We have been taught that no text is without its inter-texts; as such the dialectics of a modern philosophical framework does not depend solely on its indigenous sources and from the enclave of art alone but also on a vast reservoir of informations, some of which may come outside the traditional spheres of the arts and culture. They may also come from regions outside Asean.6

Ismail Zain’s comments are visionary and prophetic in the context of ensuing developments under late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century globalization and the new kinds of cultural distinctions and dialectics that have emerged in the field of contemporary art. They foresee for contemporary Southeast Asian art collisions and convergences between notions of ‘critical regionalism’ and ‘world culture’, indigenous standpoints and sources, and extra-regional, universalizing forces. Significantly, ‘critical regionalism’ is argued by Ismail Zain as an intersection of local and global currents.

Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996): 13–17. 5 John Clark, Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art Compared, 1980 to 1999 (Sydney: Power Publications, 2010). 6 Ismail Mohd Zain, “Towards an Utopian Paradigm: A Matter of Contingencies and Displacement.” (Emphasis added.)

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Echoing Ismail Zain, my own focus on the geographic idea and practices which form a place called ‘Southeast Asia’ brings together comparative analyses of art practice and its social contexts of production across multiple Southeast Asian sites, drawing on both local and international histories of art. In so doing, the critical utility of regionalism is foregrounded, recognizing its continuing relevance in a globalizing world, and revealing how the regional – as a manifestation of local and global contingencies – is present in art and its related discourses. Contemporary histories are thus situated in relation to the temporalities of pasts and presents while being simultaneously informed by the intersections and networks of geo-cultural space, both within and beyond Southeast Asia. Importantly, while this critical approach seeks to undo the essentialism underpinning approaches to studies, exhibitions, and collections of art from the Southeast Asian region, it does not ignore the fact (as some globalization and poststructuralist theorists do) that geography, borders, culture, and their combined politics continue to define and contextualize the reality of Southeast Asian lived experience. Nationalisms and regionalisms, paradoxically, are a constituent part of the globalizing era and continue to be real cultural and organizational forces, with passports a constant reminder of this. Thus, essentialist definitions of nation and region are not merely replaced with romantic notions of locality resistant to cultural territorialization. Rather, in the words of the Singapore-based artist and art writer Susie Lingham, deterritorializing Southeast Asia becomes “a heuristic enterprise of crossing and re-crossing, existing and imagined borders marking the past, present and future,”7 whereby new forms of Southeast Asian subjectivity are continuously re-invented. Moreover, in their multiple and continual re-inventions, these subjectivities-of-becoming simultaneously insist on cultural specificity, but do so in a way that endeavours to avoid the hegemony and presumed fixity of culturalist inscriptions and to admit more nuanced conceptions of contemporary art from the region. This renewal of regionally defined knowledge of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art – a further reworlding at a local level – is an attempt to complicate the dominant frameworks for ‘mapping’ the modern and contemporary art of the region for future exercises in art historiography and art 7

Susie Lingham, “The Crisis of Context: What Holds Heterogeneities Together,” in Text and Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Woman, ed. Binghui Huangfu (Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery, 2000): 164–75.

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exhibition. Historically, these frameworks have taken two main forms: the mapping of modern and contemporary art within individual, national frames, on the one hand (each usually to be read discretely alongside each other, but rarely analysed through comparative exercises across national divides); and, on the other, the attempt to narrativize commonalities of art practice across the region towards an essentialist Southeast Asian aesthetic. My own approach seeks to reconfigure the usual trajectories for perceiving modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, beyond the grouping of discrete national frames of reference or essentializing currents of sameness across the region in favour of other discursive and aesthetic (formalist and affective) grounds of comparison. In reworlding our usual encounters with contemporary Southeast Asian art itself, I am foregrounding the concurrent localisms and globalisms at work in contemporary Southeast Asian art practice and in its related art histories. Underlying these concerns is recognition of the different forces influencing the development of modern and contemporary art in locales outside EuroAmerica and an attempt to realize the critical potential of Southeast Asian regionalism for disrupting hegemonic meanings of modern and contemporary art with their basis in Euro-American art traditions. In making modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art a complex landscape, I am also engaging with those conversations among area-studies specialists who continue to debate the importance, relevance, and shape of Southeast Asia as an organizing principle, particularly given its geo-political genesis in the postwar period and as a tool of cold-war politics. Following other key thinkers, I argue that if we recognize and pursue ‘Southeast Asia’ as ‘critical inheritance’, ‘critical regionalism’, and ‘contingent device’, we not only acknowledge the region’s historical and continuing cultural specificity, complexity, and dynamism, but also open up possibilities for reworlding the region and its art. In turn, we also help enable a reworlding the developing global field of contemporary art history (and therefore also, modern art history) as it is being pursued in world contexts, revealing additional layers of complexity. What I am proposing, finally, is that it is profitable to think about art from Southeast Asia regionally for our ongoing discussions about contemporary art more broadly; but, of course, we must always do so with critical purpose.

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The Shifting Art-Historical Field for Southeast Asia: Tradition, Modernity, and ‘the Contemporary’ From tradition to modernity Sabapathy recalls his early encounters with standard textbooks on Southeast Asian art and culture, finding that most have focused squarely on traditional art and architecture. He observes, of Philip Rawson’s classic The Art of Southeast Asia (1967), that modern art is given a mere two paragraphs of reflection at the close of the book with mention of only one modern artist, the revered Indonesian painter Affandi.8 Besides this exceedingly brief textual reference to modern art of the region is the inclusion of only one modern art reproduction on the very last page, referencing Affandi himself: a “Self-portrait by Affandi” from 1947, left without further context or explanation except for the caption text, which declares Affandi to be “modern Indonesia’s best-known painter.” This is the only hint of the wider array of artistic modernities in Southeast Asia, which have their genesis as far back as the late-nineteenth century9 (notably, despite being revised and republished in the 1990s, Rawson’s history of art remains unchanged and thoroughly outdated in this respect). Perhaps, as Sabapathy implies, this condition (not confined to Rawson) stems from the inability to articulate the connections between the traditional and the modern but also from unease at the challenge of coming to terms with modern art emerging from Southeast Asian contexts which overlap and intersect with artistic forms of Euro-American colonial inheritance – art which demands a questioning of notions of authenticity and encourages visions of multiple modernities and worlds of art-making with shared influences and connectivities, yet also marked by Southeast Asian difference. With the vital emergence of contemporary Southeast Asian art on the international landscape at the close of the twentieth century, two long-standing impasses are finally surmounted: first, that locales such as Southeast Asia, once imagined as peripheral to the project of modernity and thus perpetually 8

For more on Affandi, see the essays in Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Modern Artists I: Affandi (exh. cat.; Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 1999). 9 T.K. Sabapathy, Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and the Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (Singapore: The Art Gallery at the National Institute of Education, 2010): 2, and T.K. Sabapathy, “Continuity: The Shapes of Time,” in 4th A S E A N Art Exhibition of Painting and Photography: Current Approaches in the Art of the A S E A N Region, ed. Organising Committee A S E A N (Singapore: A S E A N 1985): np.

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and exclusively marked by supposedly unchanging practices of tradition, are finally recognized as significant contexts of modern and contemporary art production; and, second, recognition that culturally cognate, and similar but different, processes and practices of modernization, occurring in the West and elsewhere, activate different manifestations of modern and contemporary art. By this reckoning, the notion of ‘tradition’ can no longer be regarded simply as antithetical to modernity but must be seen, rather, as a constitutive part of what forges such modernity. In this vein, ‘contemporary art’ must acknowledge the plural and manifold artistic practices of people the world over and recognize that the ‘traditional’ may exist contiguously and even find presence in contemporary art and life.10 Thus, contemporary Southeast Asian art offers the potential for pushing the parameters of contemporary art more generally (the means by which we define it, including its modes, media, styles, and conditions of reception, among other formalist and affective considerations of aesthetics) so as to encompass those kinds of living ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ art that are less readily translatable into pre-existing frames of ‘internationalist’ avant-garde art practices with their Euro-American inheritances and biases. As the Philippine art historian Alice Guillermo has observed, the prevailing internationalism of the 1990s often “privileged forms and styles deriving from the West and marginalized the vital arts of the region by sustaining the academic distinction between ‘fine arts’ and ‘applied’ or ‘folk arts’, thereby making ‘fine arts’ an elite and exclusive preserve set apart from the arts of the people.”11 Moreover, ‘avant-garde’ tendencies might also be seen to coexist alongside the traditional, revealing a different set of discourses for modernist development within Southeast Asia. As Supangkat suggests for Indonesia, 10

Nicholas Thomas has made compelling arguments for renewed definitions of ‘contemporary art’ against the contemporary Pacific art context. See Thomas, “Contemporary art and the limits of globalisation,” in The Second Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996): 17–18, and Thomas, “Our History is Written in Our Mats: Reflections on Contemporary Art, Globalisation and History,” in The 5th Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 2006, ed. Lynne Seear & Suhanya Raffel (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2005): 24–31. 11 Guillermo, “The importance of local cultural influences in ‘southern’ contemporary art and their contribution to international contemporary art development,” in “Seminar Proceedings: ‘Unity in Diversity in International Art,’ Jakarta, April 29–30, 1995 (In conjunction with: The Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries Exhibition, April 28–June 30, 1995, Jakarta, Indonesia)” (Jakarta: 1995): 39.

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Indonesia’s modernist discourse did not include the rejection of tradition […]. In Indonesia, modernism developed without tension alongside many other kinds of art that remained within a traditional framework.12

Figure 2: Sulaiman Esa, Prof. Madya Dr., Menanti Godot I – Waiting For Godot I (1977). Image courtesy of the National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia (Balai Seni Lukis Negara).

The belated acknowledgement of Asia’s ‘living’ artistic cultures occurs after a largely exclusive, orientalist interest in pre-modern forms of Asian art such as Buddhist and Hindu stone carvings from Japan and Indonesia, traditional wooden masks and puppets from Malaya, Chinese ink woodcuts and 12

Jim Supangkat, “Multiculturalism / Multimodernism,” in Poshyananda, Apinan et al., Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions (exh. cat.; New York: Asia Society Galleries & Sydney: Fine Arts Press, 1996): 74.

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calligraphic paintings, embroidered textiles of South and Southeast Asia, and ukiyo-e prints from the Edo and Meiji periods of Japan. Through the historical prevalence of these representations, ‘Asian Art’ has become anchored to a traditional past that continues to govern popular notions about ‘authentic’ Asian cultures. In particular, Asia comes to signify the ‘primitive’, the ‘barbaric’, the ‘spiritual’, the ‘timeless’, and/or the ‘traditional’. By contrast, artistic movements of early modernity in the West regularly appropriated art styles and forms from Asian and other cultures13 – culminating in Western modern art styles such as Chinoiserie and Japonisme, and in art influenced by Japanese traditions of Ukiyo-e, for instance. However, if the West acknowledged its ultimate sources for these as foreign, it concurrently – and problematically – claimed exclusive originality and authorship in the subsequent application of these foreign influences in generating artistic modernity: that is, in creating and advancing the new field of modern art. As the art historian Geeta Kapur remarked of the situation in tracing modern art currents for India, “Non-Western nations, though struggling with the processes of modernization, are excluded from claiming modernism. Or they are seen as incidental to it.”14 In seeking to redress this imbalance, in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, key historians of modern Asian art forged new, vital platforms and frameworks for recognizing Asia’s modern art histories. They dedicated their work to correcting anachronistic perceptions of Asian art and asserting the unique and manifold developments of modernity and modernism across the Asian region.15 Since the emergence of their impor13

Outside Asia, other well-known examples are the influence of African arts (beginning with Cubism); and the flat technique of those such as Gauguin and Matisse deriving from Asia–Pacific aesthetic traditions. 14 Geeta Kapur, “Contemporary Cultural Practice: Some Polemical Categories,” in The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Society, ed. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt & Ziauddin Sardar (London & New York: Continuum, 2002): 19. 15 On the subject / histories of modern Asian and especially Southeast Asian art, see: Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art, ed. T.K. Sabapathy (exh. cat.; Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1996); John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Sydney: Craftsman House G+B Arts International, 1998); Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000); Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Singapore: Oxford U P , 1992); Alice G. Guillermo, “The History of Modern Art in the Philippines,” in Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, ed. Furuichi Yasuko & Nakamoto Kazumi (exh. cat.; Tokyo: Japan

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tant contributions to the field of Asian art history, modernity in art has been recast not as an exclusively Western idea or phenomenon but one which is also born out of and influenced by Asian cultural currents. With respect to writing that has been produced by art historians, curators, critics, and art writers from the region, T.K. Sabapathy, Redza Piyadasa, Jim Supangkat, Apinan Poshyananda, Emmanuel Torres, and Alice Guillermo are among a formative group of first-generation scholars who have paved the way for rigorous scholarly meditation on modern Southeast Asian art. Theirs were pioneering attempts to activate and inspire new methods and perspectives, reflecting especially these scholars’ own locales but some also considering the region as a whole. Importantly, a key objective of this pioneering generation of local writers was to excavate the suppressed or ignored art histories of indigenous modernisms throughout the region so as to develop a locally informed art scholarship, on Southeast Asian terms. Their efforts challenged the lack of attention in (Euro-American) art history to the specific existence and conditions of modernity and modern art in Southeast Asia.16 As much as this challenge responded to Euro-American dominance, it was also, as Sabapathy Foundation Asia Center, 1995): 224–31; Redza Piyadasa, “Modernist and PostModernist Developments in Malaysian Art in the Post-Independence Period,” in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. John Clark (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1993): 169–81; Piyadasa, “Modern Malaysian Art, 1945–1991: A Historical Overview;” T.K. Sabapathy & Redza Piyadasa, Modern Artists of Malaysia, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kuala Lumpur: Ministry of Education Malaysia, 1983); Kwok Kian Chow, Channels & Confluences: A History of Singapore Art (Singapore: S A M , 1996); Jim Supangkat, “The Emergence of Indonesian Modernism and its Background,” in Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, ed. Furuichi Yasuko & Nakamoto Kazumi (exh. cat.; Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center, 1995): 204–13; Jim Supangkat, Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond; Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (Kuala Lumpur & New York: Oxford U P , 1994). Claire Holt’s groundbreaking book Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1967) is an important precedent to the aforementioned modern Indonesian art scholarship, recognizing the emergence of modern art practices in a changing Indonesian society, as is Kusnadi’s study of the development of ‘fine art’ in Indonesia, Seni Rupa Indonesia dan Pembinaannya (Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1978). See also various essays in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1993). 16 See John Clark, “Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian Art,” in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. Clark, 1–17.

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argues, directed at local agencies within Southeast Asia itself who retain their own stereotypical visions of modern art and its Euro-American histories and thus remain resistant to understanding the relevance and significance of establishing art-history training programmes in Southeast Asia.17 The ‘Nanyang’ (South China Seas or Southern Seas) artistic style, for instance, was articulated for modern Southeast Asian art-historical discourse by Piyadasa and Sabapathy in the 1970s, subsequent to the work of the art critic Koh Cheng Foo.18 In their articulations, Piyadasa and Sabapathy recall the significant role played by the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1938 in British Malaya) in the formation of a particular and localized development of modern art within the region and one with relevance to and for the region. With respect to our present-day thinking on contemporary art, by foregrounding these currents of modern art history within the region, we perforce reconfigure our encounters with contemporary Southeast Asian art over a longer localized art history, even as it is in dialogue with international art beyond the region. Thus, modernisms within Southeast Asia are revealed to be not the mere mimicking of European or American modernizing projects but as unique in their own various manifestations. Moreover, they gain currency as a potentially influential force in shaping Euro-American modernisms. In asserting the specific development of modern art in Thailand, Poshyananda argues that “to understand Thai art it is necessary to trace the stages and layers throughout which modernism in the Thai context developed and dispersed.”19 Similarly, in his seminal book Modern Asian Art, Clark points to the existence of localized histories of modern art in Asia that trace contextual trajectories of modernization and should not be viewed as a simple transfer of “Euramerican” modernities but are, rather, “parallel modernities.”20 In his 17

See Sabapathy, Road to Nowhere. Piyadasa cites Koh Cheng Foo’s (aka “Ma-Ke”) art criticism as an important influence in popularizing art in Singapore. His was the first book on Malayan art, written in Mandarin, and used as a core text for the Nanyang Academy of Art teaching curriculum. See Redza Piyadasa, “The Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts,” in Pameran retrospektif pelukis-pelukis Nanyang, ed. Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia, 1979): 31. 19 See Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 28–29. 20 Clark, Modern Asian Art. Specifically, Clark characterizes this through patterns of “open” and “closed” discourses of modernity. See Clark, “Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian Art.” 18

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tracking of the genealogies of modern Asian art, Clark theorizes a world of “parallel modernities” based on internal or “endogenous” forces at play with external or “exogenous” demands and models. In his subsequent scholarship Clark takes this further, proposing comparative models for studying Asian art intraregionally and on Asian terms.21 Clark delineates parallel modernities not merely between Euramerica and Asia but also between Asian societies themselves. This intraregional platform, which is the practice of ‘Asia as Method’, enables comparisons of parallel modernities across Asia itself. By contrast, the Indonesian artist–curator Jim Supangkat advances the idea of “multi-modernisms” to describe Asia-based modernisms that might have initially been influenced by Euro-American models of modernism but were subsequently transformed within and by their local Asian contexts in non-synchronous developments.22 This sees the decentering of a hegemonic modernism through its application to multiple, localized contexts. As has been famously argued by Edward Said and taken up by others,23 the idea of the ‘progress’ of Western civilization underpins the Orientalist construction of the West’s positional superiority, hence its Western-centric version of the history of modernity. While Western master-narratives such as these have since been problematized and largely discredited, there are some areas in which the continuing dominance of Euro-American paradigms may be witnessed. For Clark, this is registered, for instance, in the uneven positioning which occurs in discussions of modern and contemporary Asian art that rely exclusively on Euro-America and valorize discursive terms that originate there,24 thereby perpetuating the myth of Euro-American modernity as the primary and therefore universal model for understanding developments of modern and contemporary art in non-Euro-American locales.25 21

Clark, Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art Compared, 1980 to 1999. Jim Supangkat, “Contemporary Art: What/When/Where,” in The Second Asia– Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996): 26–28. 23 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Said’s highly influential arguments in this book concern the Occident’s construction of the Orient as an oppositional image: that is, a reflection of the Occident itself. In this sense, the Occident’s treatment of the Orient, especially in colonial projects, is a phantasmic projection of the Occident’s own construction of the Orient. 24 See Clark, Modern Asian Art, 290. 25 For a comparative perspective, see James Elkins, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2010), which, using Chinese 22

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As Wang Hui argues in tracing the ‘West’s’ construction of ‘Asia’ as an imagined cartography different from Europe’s, “The question of Asia’s modernity must eventually deal with the relationship between Asia and European colonialism and modern capitalism.”26 Drawing on Miyazaki Ichisada’s scholarship on the Song dynasty, Wang asks: If the political, economic and cultural features of ‘Asian Modernity’ appeared as early as the tenth or the eleventh century – three or four centuries earlier than the appearance of comparable features in Europe – were the historical development of these two worlds parallel or associated?27

Wang foregrounds the early networks of trade, migration, infrastructure building, and artistic and cultural exchange forged between Europe and Asia in order to make a compelling argument for their intermeshed histories of modernity. Indeed, Western-centric narratives of modernity often erroneously assume a simple transfer or reproduction of modernities in Southeast Asia in the mimetic image of the West, especially following colonial encounter. Anne McClintock has argued, with regard to the use of postcolonial theory, that the continuation of scholarship based on a dialogue between colonizer and colonized simply replicates the hegemonic position of the West on such matters.28 Similarly, in formulating local histories of art, insisting on a supposedly postcolonial moment might only serve to reassert colonialism as a primary point of reference for developments in Southeast Asian art. By contrast, Lingham sees a need to acknowledge the “seductions” of the colonial past in the present: That South East Asia navigates its direction, en route to “identity” and “national identities,” through constant reference to the historical and mythical West as its “North” is inevitable. It bears the scars, the traces of the events that precipitated the cultural evolution over centuries of colonization. Let us say that it is one symptom of a shared colonial landscape painting as an example, argues for the purported universal institutionalization of Western art history across different cultural contexts. 26 Wang Hui, “Imagining Asia: A Genealogical Analysis,” in Edges of the Earth: Migration of Contemporary Asian Art and Regional Politics, tr. Gao Jin, ed. Xu Jiang zhu bian (Hangzhou: China Academy of Art, 2003): 381. 27 Wang Hui, “Imagining Asia: A Genealogical Analysis,” 381. 28 Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’,” Social Text 31/32 (Spring 1992): 1–15.

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experience to be magnetized around an enchantment of desired influence, because the colonized imagination is a seduced one.29

While admitting the continuing entanglements of historical colonialisms, Lingham also points to precolonial influences and their part in present-day cultural transformations in Southeast Asia: But prior to Western colonization, South East Asia was under the influence of other Asian immigrant and imperial cultures, religion and philosophical thought. Western colonial rule did not efface these earlier marks of influence. The heritage of the region is rich and varied, accruing over time and gradually, strata by strata, translated, transposed, rediscovered and assimilated into a still evolving “selfness.”30

Through the process of retracing the contingent construction of Asia and the West as mutually dependent cartographic imaginaries, we are prompted to reorient our conceptions of world history and to review the established story of modernity. By recalling the world processes and cultures that have permeated each other in shaping modernity across the world, and by acknowledging that modernity is not an exclusively Euro-American project but the result of myriad cultural interactions, we participate in the project of “provincializing” Euro-America.31 The Euro-American metahistory of modernity and modern art is thereby unsettled and must admit the reality of multiple contributions to modernity that are the historical consequence of cultural alignments and contingencies.

Modernities and Rising Nationalisms While it is true that not all Asian countries were colonized (Thailand in Southeast Asia) and that there is a long history of anti-colonial struggle in Asia, colonial encounters and impositions nevertheless had a profound impact on the development of modern art in Southeast Asia and Asia more broadly. Aside from the influence of Western modernisms in shaping the development of modern art across Southeast Asia, one other intended effect of colonialism was to enforce ruptures within the region based on national territorial borders. These divisions served to interrupt some of the precolonial cultural connec29

Lingham, “The Crisis of Context: What Holds Heterogeneities Together,” 164. “The Crisis of Context: What Holds Heterogeneities Together,” 164. 31 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000). 30

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tions and continuities that marked the region. While precolonial cultural links persist, as Lingham suggests, there are certainly new configurations for how these are lived out in contemporary, postcolonial Southeast Asia. In precolonial Southeast Asia, links between people and the land they occupied were forged especially through the South Asian religious influences in the form of Mahayana Buddhism and Hinduism; the spiritual and philosophical traditions of Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism from China; and the Islamic cultures brought by Muslim traders from Southwest Asia. Reflecting such links are various other precedents for categorizing Southeast Asia (or parts thereof) regionally, including ‘Further India’, ‘the East Indies’, the ‘Malay Archipelago’, ‘Nusantara’, and the ‘Nanyang’ (South China Seas), with each classification suggesting specific geo-cultural influences and perspectives on the region. In more recent times, the homogenizing effects of globalization, particularly via U S -led late-modern capitalism, raised fears of declining local cultures in the global sphere. This is especially evident in the A S E A N art forums of the 1980s, in which debates among arts professionals from Southeast Asia register the early challenges of developing unique regional histories for modern Southeast Asian art in the face of encroaching globalization but which at the same time admit external influence, change, and criticality. The tension between precolonial and colonial, national and international, or Asian and Euro-American artistic heritages and influences is one that has defined art from the region since its introduction to modernism. In much modern art from the region, anti-colonial and pro-nationalist sentiment is expressed even within streams of European artistic heritage. These are often registered via localized themes and/or indigenous materials, sometimes hidden in allegorical narratives and, at other times, boldly suggested in realist styles. Treasured paintings of the nineteenth century such as Spoliarium (1884), by the Philippine painter Juan Luna, and The Arrest of Prince Diponegoro (1858), by the Indonesian painter Raden Salleh, are typically cited now as markers not only of some of the earliest modern art practice in these countries but as signalling the very beginnings of the nationalistic spirit through their allegorical suggestions of possible anti-colonial themes.32 32

Salleh and Luna had both spent time as expatriates in Europe in the nineteenth century and were involved in the Romantic ‘historical painting’ tradition that prevailed at the time in European salon painting. Notably, Spoliarium won Luna the gold medal at the Madrid Exposition of 1884, while Luna’s compatriot Felix Resurreccion

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Still others suggest that truly nationalist art develops only with the turn to more direct expression of local social realities. As with societies elsewhere, modern nationhood in Southeast Asia came to be reflected in art currents which developed in step with the emergent nationalisms and which assisted in the production of new images of national belonging. However, modern art in Southeast Asia also develops through the filter of colonialism – that is, through the influence of Western art teachers based in Southeast Asian colonial societies, via colonial art infrastructure, including art schools and art museums, as well as through exchanges that enabled artists to travel to the West for modern art training. Particularly in some of its earliest engagements, modern art reflects idyllic and exoticized images of Southeast Asia (such as the Mooi Indies ‘Beautiful Indies’ style adopted in Indonesia or the Amorsolo school’s idealized rural scenes of the Philippine countryside) that were the inheritance of colonial, Orientalist visions. It subsequently registers a general shift to a new, more locally and politically inflected aesthetic reflecting the social realities and concerns of the new nations – the textures of day-to-day life in Southeast Asia. For instance, the socialist-realist paintings of Sudjojono, which are depictions of everyday life in 1930s and 1940s colonial Indonesia, were developed in express opposition to the exoticized themes of the earlier Mooi Indies style of European modern-art inheritance. Aside from Sudjojono, these realities are also represented in, for instance, the modern art of Hendra Gunawan and Affandi of Indonesia; Victorio Edades, Galo B. Ocampo, Carlos Francisco, Vicente Manansala, Cesar Legaspi, and Hernando R. Ocampo in the Philippines; Lim Hak Tai, Cheong Soo Pieng, Georgette Chen, Chen Wen Hsi, and Chen Chong Swee of Singapore (Malaya); and Syed Ahmad Jamal, Yeoh Jin Leng, Dzulkifli Buyong, Chuah Thean Teng, and Abdul Latiff Mohidin in Malaysia. For these modern artists of Southeast Asia, a necessary part of nation-building was the cultivation of a new art responsive to local concerns and needs, and distinguishable from Western art currents.

Hidalgo took the silver medal: see Guillermo, “The History of Modern Art in the Philippines,” 224–31. On Salleh, see the section “The Encounter, Art in Colonial Times” in Jim Supangkat, Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond, 15–29, and Werner Kraus, “First Steps to Modernity: The Javanese Painter Raden Saleh (1811–1880),” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, ed. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi & T.K. Sabapathy (Sydney: Wild Peony, 2006): 29–55.

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Precedents of the Southeast Asian Contemporary The pioneering work of the earlier generations of historians of modern Asian art not only carves a space for the documentation of modern art practice in Asia and draws attention to its distinctiveness, but also indicates that today’s art practices to be found across Asia have art-historical precedents of their own, with continuities and relations to local pasts – for all their concurrent inheritances from and affinities with Euro-American currents of contemporary art practice. As Sabapathy argues, this suggests that modern Asian art (“the traditions of the new”) does not emerge from a vacuum, but is the result of historical continuities, relational discourses which “do not respect neat, cultural, historical, artistic boundaries and territories.”33 (It is precisely these continuities of histories that Piyadasa brings into view in Entry Points.) In the context of Southeast Asian art history itself, selected art practices of the 1970s might more accurately offer specific instances of the initial ruptures or tensions with modernist art traditions (aligned to national art histories) and a turn to experimental, ‘postmodern’, or even ‘post-avant-garde’34 ventures into the contemporary. In his exhibition ‘Telah Terbit’ (2006), the Singaporebased curator Ahmad Mashadi traced the local currents of contemporary art in Southeast Asia to seminal artists of the 1960s and 1970s.35 Indeed, during this period significant artists dared to break new ground in their local art contexts, including: Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa of Malaysia (with their joint conceptual-art project of 1974, ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’), advancing Eastern philosophies as a basis for art practice in Asia;36 the Kaisahan Group of the Philippines (established in 1976), with their particular brand of socialrealist styles promoting a Philippine nationalism in art; the radical artforms introduced by the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement) in Indonesia (1975–79), which expressed urgent social concerns at a time of political 33

T.K. Sabapathy, “Continuity: The Shapes of Time,” np. See Supangkat’s discussions of contemporary Indonesian art within ‘post-avantgarde’ currents in the section “Contemporary Art, Development Beyond the 1970s,” in Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond, 64–89. 35 Ahmad Mashadi, “Southeast Asian Art During the 1970s,” in Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices During the 1960s to 1980s (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2007): 14–24. 36 Redza Piyadasa & Sulaiman Esa, Towards a Mystical Reality: a document of jointly initiated experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: 1974): 1–31. 34

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repression under Suharto’s Orde Baru or New Order government (1965–98); in Singapore, Cheo Chai-Hiang, with his experimental conceptual art practices (of the mid-1970s),37 and Tang Da Wu’s innovative installation and performance art practices addressing environmental and social concerns (from the late 1970s);38 and, in Thailand, the activist art groups Dharma Art Group (1971) and Artists Front (1974) were influential, both emerging from the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok and engaged in experimental art practices driven by political protest. In examining art practices of this earlier period, the genres of installation, conceptual, and performance art, often presumed to be indices of internationalist contemporary art practice marked by Euro-American art traditions, must also be seen as emerging in dialogue with their own local contexts and social concerns, some arguing for even deeper and long-standing Southeast Asian cultural influences in cultivating such art, including Filipino sculptural traditions and the Indonesian performing-arts traditions of wayang kulit theatre and puppetry.39 While the art of Rirkrit Tiravanija – often linked to the Thai context – has been given prominence in the early-twenty-first century as part of a wider international engagement in “relational aesthetics,”40 we should not overlook prior regional currents of differently configured, ‘socially engaged’, ‘participatory art’-inclined practices situated in Southeast Asia itself, which stem from the 1960s and 1970s but by the 1990s coincide with wider international interest in similar kinds of contemporary artforms.41 Importantly also, as Flores has discussed, in this earlier 37

See Cecily Briggs & T.K. Sabapathy, Cheo Chai-Hiang: Thoughts and Processes (Rethinking the Singapore River) (Singapore: Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Singapore Art Museum, 2000). 38 See T.K. Sabapathy, “Contemporary Art in Singapore: An Introduction,” in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1993): 83–92. 39 See Raymundo R. Albano, “Installations: A Case for Hangings,” in A S E A N Art Exhibition: Third A S E A N Exhibition of Painting and Photography 1984, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information (Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1984): np (originally published in Philippine Art Supplement 2.1 [1981]: 2–3); Julie Ewington, “Five Elements: An abbreviated account of installation art in South-East Asia,” A R T and AsiaPacific 2.1 (1995): 108–15. 40 See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002); and Altermodern: Tate Triennial, ed. Bourriaud (exh. cat.; London: Tate Publishing, 2009). 41 On this, see, for instance, FX Harsono’s discussion in 1993 of the type of socially

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context of the 1960s and 1970s, the instrumental hybrid figure of the Southeast Asian “artist–curator”42 also emerges, with important future consequences for the future exhibition of contemporary Southeast Asian art in the decades to follow, especially against a backdrop of rising Asian curators with increasing presence in international exhibitions.43 Significantly, Flores regards this regional pattern of professional turning – from artist to curator – as one current marking an emblematic shift from ‘the modern’ to ‘the contemporary’ in Southeast Asia.44 Importantly, however, as I have previously intimated, contemporary art of Southeast Asia is not always a ‘break’ with modernity following a chronology of avant-garde developments, but finds overlap with and oppositionality to modernity in its concurrent constitution and existence in Southeast Asian contexts. In other words, modern art may coexist alongside contemporary art in

engaged art installation which emerges from the Indonesian social context: “The resulting art installation is known as participative art. In this type of art, the participation of the public is vital”; Harsono, “The Installation as the Language of Social Concern,” in The First Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Identity, Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of the Asia Pacific Region (Q A G , Queensland Cultural Centre, South Bank, Brisbane, 17–20 September 1993) (conference papers; Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1993): np. For broader regional discussions of this, see also Iola Lenzi, “Negotiating Home, History and Nation,” and Tan Boon Hui, “Four Propositions: Looking at Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia,” in Negotiating Home History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991– 2011, ed. Iola Lenzi (exh. cat.; Singapore: S A M , 2011): 8–28; 29–38. 42 Patrick Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: N U S Museum, National University of Singapore, 2008), and Flores, “Position Papers: Turns in Tropics: Artist–Curator,” in The 7th Gwangju Biennale: Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2008): 262–85. 43 Among the most renowned Asian curators of international profile are Hou Hanru, Fumio Nanjo, Apinan Poshyananda, and, more recently, Flores himself in that hybrid capacity as art historian–curator. 44 Notably, Flores examines four artists-turned-curators working in the Southeast Asian context at this time: Raymundo Albano (the Philippines, 1947–85); Redza Piyadasa (Malaysia, 1939–2007); Apinan Poshyananda (Thailand, lives in Bangkok); and Jim Supangkat (Indonesia, lives in Bandung). See Flores, “Position Papers: Turns in Tropics: Artist–Curator,” 262–85.

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Southeast Asia, as elsewhere.45 As the Malaysia-based artist Wong Hoy Cheong observes in the context of an A S E A N C O C I conference in 1989, In the West, modern necessarily precedes contemporary. And modern or modernism refers to a period, a sensibility essentially different from that of the past, the classical period. In our context, both words are not that clearly diffentiated chronologically […]. For us, contemporary art is a reaction to modernism while contemporary art in the West is a result of modernism.46

Similarly, Indonesian art critics have also pointed to the different meaning and changeable utility of the term ‘contemporary art’ when applied in the Indonesian context.47 Sumartono observes a difference in “the popular use of the term [contemporary art] to signify both modern and alternative art, which are seen as one and the same thing” against a view of contemporary art as, more specifically, “alternative art”: that is, a “counter to modern art” referencing “installations, happening and performance art pieces” in particular.48 Meanwhile, Asmudjo Jono Irianto encourages a view of contemporary Indonesian art through a paradigm of “Postmodern Art” that need not refer to a modern art narrative that came before it. For Irianto, this opens the way for engaging with contemporary Indonesian art now as an immediate presence while the narrative of modern Indonesian art continues to be probed and defined. It also provides a means of “positioning Indonesian contemporary art in the larger constellation of the international art world.”49 45

The German art historian Hans Belting argues that the history of art as a linear narrative of sequential development in periods of art style has come to a close. See Belting, The End of the History of Art?, tr. Christopher S. Wood (Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?, 1983; Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1987). 46 Wong Hoy Cheong, “Contradictions and Fallacies in Search of a Voice: Contemporary Art in Post-Colonial Culture,” in First A S E A N Symposium on Aesthetics: proceedings of Symposium held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, National Art Gallery, October 24–27 1989, ed. A S E A N C O C I and Balai Seni Lukis Negara (Kuala Lumpur: A S E A N C O C I , 1989): 118. 47 See the essays in Jim Supangkat, Sumartono, Asmudjo Jono Irianto, Rizki A. Zaelani & M. Dwi Marianto, Outlet: Yogyakarta within the Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene (Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art Foundation, 2001). 48 Sumartono, “The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art,” in Supangkat et al., Outlet, 17. 49 Asmudjo Jono Irianto, “Tradition and the Socio-Political Context in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art of the 1990s,” in Supangkat et al., Outlet, 72.

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Supangkat, on the other hand, demarcates a clearer beginning for contemporary art in Indonesia stemming from significant changes in the Indonesian art scene in the 1970s:50 more precisely, this is underlined by a tension between modernism (and its formalist avant-garde impulse) and artists’ renewed commitment to representing Indonesia’s ‘social context’ or ‘cultural identity’. After the so called depoliticization of art from the late 1960s following the alleged communist coup attempt and the anti-communist mass killings in 1965–66,51 a new generation of Indonesian artists increasingly sought to recuperate the social significance of art. In this sense, for Supangkat, who nods to Klaus Honnef’s scholarship, contemporary art is postmodern and postavant-garde and (at least for Indonesia of the 1970s) emerges from a “questioning of the tradition of modern (Western) thinking and its domination, discussions of diversity, differences, plurality, localness, traditions of ‘the other’.”52 It is also, for Supangkat, necessarily related to the development of modern art in Indonesia, and to the acknowledgement of modernism as a plural development in the world.53 Notably, while Supangkat underlines the socio-political significance of ‘contemporary art’, he is also careful to recognize the essentializing capacity of the socio-political in distinguishing nonWestern contemporary art from Western art. In the context of the seminal exhibition ‘Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries’ held in Jakarta in 1995, Supangkat remarks: a perception that places too much emphasis on the socio-political content of artwork when observing the creations of Third World artists will inevitably return to the domination of the Euro-American perception […]. Whereas there was once a distinction made between ‘modern society’ and ‘traditional societies’ using progress as parameter,

50

Supangkat traces the emergence of ‘contemporary art’ in Indonesia in relation to changed socio-political and art-historical conditions for the production of art, which serve to distinguish contemporary art from the modern art currents before it. See Supangkat, “Contemporary Art, Development Beyond the 1970s.” 51 “Contemporary Art, Development Beyond the 1970s,” 64–89. 52 “Contemporary Art, Development Beyond the 1970s,” 65. 53 See Jim Supangkat, “Introduction: Contemporary Art of the South,” in Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries: Unity in Diversity in International Art, postevent catalogue, ed. Edi Sedyawati, A.D. Pirous, Jim Supangkat & T.K. Sabapathy (exh. cat.; Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, Project for Development of Cultural Media, Directorate General for Culture, Dept. of Education and Culture, 1997): 20–31.

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now the division is that of ‘developed societies’ and ‘not-yet-developed societies’ using democracy as parameter.54

In other words, Supangkat draws attention to the “potential that the analyses of [cultural and socio-political] difference will be trapped in elaborating otherness.”55 In his catalogue essay for the exhibition, he observed the responses of outside audiences: After seeing the works exhibited, after analysing them, after judging them, most curators, critics and art historians who have been involved in international art events came to the question: Is this contemporary art? […] For them the works were difficult to identify. Are they modern works, do they show Modernist principles, are they continuous development of traditional arts?56

The social dimension of contemporary art is also registered by Ismail Zain in observing the application of the word ‘contemporary’ to describe Malaysian art. In his review of the 1998 Californian exhibition ‘Contemporary Paintings of Malaysia’, Ismail Zain highlights how a lack of curatorial agency in foregrounding the specific relevance of the term ‘contemporary’ to the Malaysian context can lead to misleading generalizations and misperceptions on the part of outside audiences: the usage of the term ‘contemporary’ in art or culture varies considerably from its lexical meanings. In art or culture, the term implicitly imposes unto itself, most crucially, a notion of currency. In essence, it is a societal state […] it is not a measure of linear time but of space, […] a zone in which impinging new values within a society are beginning to manifest themselves as conceptually and contextually relevant.57

As with Piyadasa’s concern to recognize Malaysian art’s temporal and spatial dimensions, Ismail Zain discerns a new consciousness by artists of the socially situated contexts of art production and reception in Malaysia which is, in turn, reflected in art itself from the late 1980s.

54

Supangkat, “Introduction: Contemporary Art of the South,” 23. “Introduction: Contemporary Art of the South,” 24. 56 “Introduction: Contemporary Art of the South,” 21, 22. 57 Ismail Mohd Zain, “Malaysian Paintings: Lack of focus spoils exhibition in California,” New Straits Times (12 June 1988): 19. 55

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Indeed, ‘the contemporary’ in Southeast Asia is a developing field of diverse and contesting manifestations.58 Historically, the ‘modern’ and the ‘contemporary’ as well as the ‘postmodern’, have often been used synonymously in Southeast Asia. Accordingly, a neat periodization can never fully capture the currents and temperament of contemporary Southeast Asian art, at least for now. Nevertheless, the chosen period and art practices central to this book aim to register a more forceful coalescence and converging pursuit of ‘contemporary art’ endeavour by artists from across the region more broadly, even as it remains an ongoing and differentiated project, characterized by the specific coordinates of individual artist’s localities in Southeast Asia and beyond. This notion of a gathering density in contemporary Southeast Asian art has been confirmed since the 1990s by its parallel institutionalization (museum collections and art exhibitions, art writing and scholarship) and commercialization (interest by art markets and private collectors), as well as by the concurrent development of contemporary art and its histories worldwide. What we may more confidently discern as a characteristic of contemporary Southeast Asian art is its revaluation of established modernisms in the region and a reconsideration of the significance, purpose, and means of art practice for rapidly changing Southeast Asian societies.59 Dominant concerns of early contemporary art practice include the questioning of ‘internationalism’ as a hegemonic framework for art practice, particularly in its preoccupation with the fashionable styles of abstraction and formalism, a consequent turn to 58

On the complicated task of defining ‘contemporary art’ in Southeast Asia, see Patrick Flores, “Presence and Passage: Conditions of Possibilities in Contemporary Asian Art,” in the special issue on “Aesthetics and/as Globalization,” International Yearbook of Aesthetics, 8 (2004): 43–57; Supangkat, “Contemporary Art, Development Beyond the 1970s,” 64–89; Supangkat, “Contemporary Art: What / When / Where,”; Supangkat, Sumartono, Irianto, Zaelani & Marianto, Outlet: Yogyakarta within the Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene; Lee Weng Choy, “The distance between us / comparative contemporaries / criticism as symptom and performance,” in Knowledge + Dialogue + Exchange: Remapping Cultural Globalisms from the South, ed. Nicholas Tsoutas (Sydney: Artspace 2005): 51–65; the Asia Art Archive, Comparative Contemporaries: A Web Anthology Project, http://www.aaa.org.hk /Programme /Details/290 (accessed 10 October 2012); and Asia Art Archive, ed. “The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on the Contemporary,” Field Notes 1 (June 2012), http://www .aaa.org.hk/FieldNotes/Details/1167 (accessed 7 June 2012). 59 See the range of essays on this in Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (Canberra: Pandanus, 2005).

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social and political contexts, and an insistence on reflexivity as part of the very constitution of art. What becomes clear in undertaking art-historical inquiry into the region’s art is that the range of contemporary Southeast Asian art during the period concerned should also be viewed against the tremendous political, economic, social, and cultural change across the Southeast Asian region itself and in the light of its shifting local art histories. As Southeast Asia underwent the massive political changes that accompany decolonization and struggles for independence, along with the global politics of the Second World War and the rise of communism, art in Southeast Asia reflected a multitude of antinomies and intersections about the proposed course for art development in the region. By the 1960s and 1970s, as students returned from art institutions in Europe and the U S A , a turn to ‘internationalism’ and ‘formalism’ saw the dominance of abstract and conceptual, non-figurative artforms. However, this trend provoked a backlash by the late 1980s from other artists concerned to communicate the local socio-political realities of Southeast Asia through realist representation. The infamous rivalry between the Bandung and Yogyakarta art schools in Indonesia from the mid1960s through to the late 1970s exemplifies this. While the Bandung art school promoted abstractionism as the cutting edge of art in Indonesia, and in line with international trends, the Yogyakarta art school promoted social themes in art through figurative forms that sought to reflect the realities of Indonesian society.60 But a re-examination of that history reveals that the situation is further complicated by abstract forms whose contexts were not the West but were inspired by local spiritual and religious traditions, seen especially in Islamic-inspired paintings of the time.61 Coinciding with developments in the ‘new art history’62 and a renewed engagement with the interna60

For a more extensive account of this rivalry, see Helena Spanjaard, “The Controversy between the Academies of Bandung and Yogyakarta,” in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. John Clark, 85–104. 61 See, for instance, Kenneth M. George’s work related to this, including “The Cultural Politics of Modern and Contemporary Islamic Art in Southeast Asia,” in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, ed. Nora A. Taylor & Boreth Ly (Ithaca N Y : Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012): 53–67. 62 The ‘new art history’ refers broadly to the changes in the institutionalization and practice of art history that have occurred since the 1970s, and which seek to acknowledge the “social history of art history,” especially concerning issues of gender, class, and race. See Jonathan Harris, The New Art History: A Critical Introduction (London & New York: Routledge, 2001).

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tional art world, by the 1990s the social contextualization of art had become the dominant point of interpretative entry into contemporary Southeast Asian art. The decorative and geometric tendencies of abstract painters lost favour within the currents of international art practice while forms of installation and performance art gained popularity, particularly with their addressing of local traditions and indigeneity within these internationally accessible forms. Enmeshed in the worldly circuits of international art in the 1990s, Southeast Asian art found itself being ‘rediscovered’ by new audiences outside Southeast Asia with generally scant knowledge of the region and its existing modern and contemporary art and the developing art histories associated with them. While it gained global visibility as a valid area of contemporary art practice, it was also acutely mindful of doing so on its own terms, in tension with the hegemonic Euro-American exhibitionary gaze and its exoticizing lens. Thus, the cultural tensions implicit in the modern art histories of Southeast Asia carry through into the latter half of the twentieth century, with debates about contemporary Southeast Asian art reflecting the overlaps, intersections, and antinomies of local and worldly concerns, form as opposed to content, art in contrast to craft, social-realist and abstract or conceptual concerns, and colonial and indigenous inheritances. Path-breaking artists of the 1960s and 1970s, with interests in experimental performance and in conceptual and installation art, opened new avenues for rethinking these tensions and the values and modes of art-making for postcolonial Southeast Asian societies. In so doing, they challenged hegemonic aesthetic codes and conventions, often explicitly questioning the production of art itself and its relevance for Southeast Asian societies. Accompanying this was the introduction of new themes expressed in art reflecting the changing Southeast Asian social landscape: issues of politics, gender, religion, the environment, urbanism, social inequality, violence, capitalism, and commercialism were conveyed through a return to figurative and narrative forms. As already mentioned, others pursued more abstract geometric and decorative styles to reflect spiritual or religious tendencies and/or aesthetic concerns. A more recent generation of scholarship and art writing from the region includes Patrick Flores, Marian Pastor Roces, Flaudette May V. Datuin, Dwi Marianto, Sumartono, Asmudjo Jono Irianto, Hendro Wiyanto, Rizki A. Zaelani, Agung Hujatnikajenong, Ahmad Mashadi, Lee Weng Choy, Susie Lingham, Ray Langenbach, and Niranjan Rajah, whose work concentrates more on the contemporary art that has emerged from the region since the 1990s. In

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many ways, their writing is a mandate from the pioneering work of the earlier generation. Across both generations, the history of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art has been accorded its own trajectory and its own methods, rather than being sited as an adjunct to the art practices and histories of China or India, or as a mere derivative of Portuguese, Dutch, English, American or other colonial influences.

Figure 3: Tang Da Wu, Tiger’s Whip (1991). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

As with the earlier generation, more recent writing has tended to be undertaken by locals commenting on their respective national art contexts. Other than the important work of this collection of individuals there has been a relative lack of sustained and vigorous scholarly attention to Southeast Asian art (whether nationally or regionally), and while there is now a significant accumulation of writing it largely remains scattered and sporadic, hence little referenced and studied as part of a continuing discourse for Southeast Asian art.63 Much extant writing takes the form of light exhibition reviews and 63

As a means of alleviating this situation, a web anthology focusing on contemporary art writing in Southeast Asia has been developed by Lee Weng Choy, as part of the Asia Art Archive’s “Comparative Contemporaries – A Web Anthology Project” (“Position paper on ‘Comparative Contemporaries’ ” ). As I was completing the manuscript for this book, a rare collection of essays bringing together various experts in

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reportage, with in-depth exhibition catalogue essays by ‘curator–art historians’ also a regular outlet; more recently, we see a gradual increase in art criticism within the frame of scholarly international art journals. Lee cites “the persistent lack of support for art publications and the consistent lack of interest from the mainstream media in reporting seriously on the arts” as key reasons for this situation.64 Against this backdrop, a number of committed individuals dedicated to promoting the art of the region have recently harnessed the liberating potential of the internet to activate a freely available space for public art discussion and the dissemination of art writing, and a handful of Southeast Asia-based art-focused publishers have emerged.65 Nevertheless, as Sabapathy and Clark have cautioned, we must not dismiss the substantial and important body of art-historical writing which has paved the way for a developing contemporary art history for the region. There is Southeast Asian art appeared in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, ed. Nora A. Taylor & Boreth Ly, which is also an important contribution in this regard; a collection of essays on Indonesian fine art has been edited by Bambang Bujono and Wicaksono Adi entitled Seni Rupa Indonesia: dalam Kritik dan Esai (Jakarta: Dewan Kesenian Jakarta, 2012); and the first of an important four-volume collection of historical materials on developments in the visual arts in Malaysia has been published in Narratives in Malaysian Art: Volume 1: Imagining Identities, ed. Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2012). 64 Lee Weng Choy, “Position paper on ‘Comparative Contemporaries’.” 65 For instance, C-Arts: Asian Contemporary Art and Culture magazine (since 2007, online and print), Ctrl+P : Journal for Contemporary Art (online since 2006), and S E A R C H (Southeast Asian Art Resource Channel, online since 2011) established by RogueArt (RogueArt (est. 2011) is also dedicated to hard-copy publishing of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art materials). The English-language print magazine sentAp! was founded in 2005 in Malaysia to encourage wider art criticism on Southeast Asian art. The journal F O C A S : Forum on Contemporary Art & Society (2000–2007) offered critical essays on Southeast Asian art and culture. At the national level, javafred.net has been a long-standing electronic database for Indonesian art, while more recently the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (est. 1995, formerly Cemeti Art Foundation) offers both an online and a physical space for documentation and discussion of contemporary Indonesian art; the journal Pananaw (since 1996) is dedicated to the development of discourses around ‘Philippine Visual Art’; SingaporeArt.org is an online, non-profit art research archive for Singapore art (since 1999); Other journals which have come and gone but remain important documents of contemporary Southeast Asian art include Vehicle (Singapore); Transit and Art Manila Quarterly (the Philippines); and art corridor and Tanpa Tajuk (Malaysia).

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sometimes “historical amnesia”66 when addressing contemporary art from the region, displaced from its historical modern-art contexts so as to support new ideological or political positions of one kind or another. Writing about contemporary art has occurred almost simultaneously with the documentation of modern art histories of the region, reflecting the overlap of the modern and the contemporary in Southeast Asia. It is perhaps because of this situation of concurrent and oppositional art currents that, insofar as arthistorical documentation is concerned, contemporary art has often continued to be positioned within national frameworks that are the legacy of modern Southeast Asian art histories with their connection to the modern colonial institutionalization of art throughout much of the region but also the anticolonial nationalist movements. The vexed issue we are forced to address here is how to distinguish a differentiated field of contemporary art which, on the one hand, allows us to situate contemporary art within a longer legacy of local modernisms which emerges in the context of colonial and postcolonial nationbuilding, and, on the other, to recognize those instances of contemporary art that are born out of an oppositionality and intended rupture with modernism and which at the same time find strong resonance in the new ‘global-art’ context of the late-twentieth century. But there is also a third stream we might distinguish, which is the combined effect of these dual currents, whereby Southeast Asian modernities might actually be regarded as a concurrent, vital, and contingent force in the ongoing constitution of the Southeast Asian contemporary. This bears deep implications for a larger universal project of ‘contemporary art’ history, challenging the neat chronological narrative of changing avant-gardes with its basis in Euro-American histories of art. It demands a much more differentiated art-historical field for understanding contemporary art as a practice with relevance for the world but which at the same time retains very specific socio-historical and locative conditions of production.

A changing region, in a changing world The beginning date for this enquiry – “after 1990” – indicates the enormous socio-political shifts occurring internationally at this time, reflected in the ‘art world’ itself with its postmodern turn to non-Western contemporary art practices and a shift from Euro-America to ‘Other’ localities once considered peri66

See Clark, “The Contemporary,” in Modern Asian Art, esp. 283–84.

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pheral to the project of contemporary art. Prior to the 1990s, there was scant art-historical, curatorial or market interest in earlier forms of contemporary art practice from Southeast Asia. Instead, only first- and second-generation modernists and ‘traditional’ artists from Southeast Asia were given attention and, as I have previously intimated, often to suggest a mimetic influence of EuroAmerican modernism on the development of modern art in Southeast Asia, or, in the case of the traditionalists, to reify exotic artistic traditions. The influence of conservative governments and national galleries in Southeast Asia itself was also a determining factor in the suppression of contemporary art and the elevation of modern and traditional arts, not least because of contemporary art’s potential for symbolic and actual political radicalism.67 By the early 1990s, however, externally based art curators, collectors, and institutional officials began to circumvent the direction of government institutions by travelling to Southeast Asia to meet contemporary artists independently;68 this has much to do with the subsequent international publicity granted to artists with more progressive or politically sensitive orientations, who would otherwise have had to devote their ingenuity to evading the net cast for artists by conservative government institutions. This period marks an unprecedented degree of energetic engagement with contemporary Southeast Asian art in international exhibition contexts, particularly in Japan (exhibitions undertaken by the Fukuoka Art Museum/Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and the Japan Foundation), as well as in Australia (the Brisbane-based Queensland Art Gallery). Alongside these developments, the privileging of Western modernism came to be vehemently contested; art historians and curators increasingly sought to revise the Western bias of modern art history so as to also reflect the intercultural exchanges which have shaped modern art and to acknowledge its unique trajectories of development in non-Euro-American societies such as those of Asia; and the ‘art world’ showed an increased engagement with Asian 67

For instance, Ray Langenbach notes that officials from such government ministries and national galleries often selected artists from their own generation for international exhibitions. See Langenbach, “Performing the Singapore State 1988–1995” (doctoral dissertation, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, 2003): 186. 68 Nonetheless, for exhibitions such as A P T 1–3, contacts in government institutions remained a crucial springboard to further scouting of artists, particularly through the cultural embassies of individual countries (especially Australian diplomatic missions in these countries) and public education institutions (public universities and art schools).

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artists, a heightened exposure of contemporary Asian art on the international arts scene, and a turn in international curatorial practice to a postmodern politics of ‘inclusion’ rather than ‘exclusion.’69 So, too, the late 1990s and 2000s saw the establishment and dramatic proliferation of Asia-based biennales and triennales as well as unprecedented growth in Asian art markets, the latter a consequence of new Asian economic prosperity, a rising Asian middle class, and the new cultural capital attached to Asian art. Certainly the strengthening economies in Asia also helped to bring renewed global attention to the region. The economies of Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia all experienced phenomenal economic growth in the 1990s. In the 2000s, following the earlier opening of its economy to the world, China became an economic and political force to be reckoned with, as did the next most populous country in the world, India. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, China’s art market had overtaken that of the U S A and it became impossible to ignore the significance of Asia and Asian art to the world, with some heralding the twenty-first century as ‘the Asian Century’.70 The combined new might of China and India has no doubt again unsettled any presumed Euro-American economic but also cultural authority in the global landscape, including the sphere of art. With regard to Southeast Asia in particular, there was very little participation by Southeast Asian artists in international exhibitions prior to the 1990s. However, earlier if often limited exposure of modern Southeast Asian art occurred in exhibitions including the São Paolo Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Triennale-India, the Biennale of Sydney, and the Havana Biennale, notably with the Indonesian painter Affandi a frequent participant.71 Large69

See Emmanuel Torres’ observations on the artistic and social climate at this time in relation to Southeast Asian art in the international sphere, in Torres, “Internationality: Towards a New Internationalism,” A R T and AsiaPacific 1.1 (1993): 42–49. 70 See Wikipedia, “Asian Century,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Century (accessed 25 September 2012). 71 Affandi was included in the São Paolo Biennale of 1956 (est. 1951), the Venice Biennale of 1954 (est. 1895), and the first Biennale of Sydney in 1973. Significantly, the Triennale-India included a larger gathering of Southeast Asian artists from its first edition in 1968 (Burma, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam). Similarly, also included in the first Biennale of Sydney alongside Affandi were Joseph Tan of Malaysia, Solomon Saprid of the Philippines, and Sawasdi Tantisuk of Thailand. Established in 1984, the Havana Biennale has included Southeast Asian artists since 1986 (including the Philippines-born artists Lani Maestro in 1986 and Roberto Feleo

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scale exposure of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art did not occur until the late 1980s with the Fukuoka Asian Art Show series in Japan, and not until the early to mid-1990s did contemporary Southeast Asian art receive significant Euro-American and Asia–Pacific exposure with the international exhibitions ‘A P T ’ (from 1993), ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions /Tensions’ (1996–98), and ‘Cities on the Move’ (1997–2000) (see Chapter 3 below). While not including Southeast Asian art, the 1989 exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ is now commonly cited as a watershed in the international exhibition of contemporary art for its conscious positioning of multivalent, coexisting forms of ‘contemporary’ art practice from different cultures of the world and for engaging with issues of globalism in art exhibitions (see Chapter 3) below). Thus, it was from the early 1990s that contemporary ‘Southeast Asian’ art first gained significant international visibility as part of a broader global interest in the contemporary art of Asia. While the art of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian artists dominated most contemporary ‘Asian’ art selections, there was a steady rise in international art exhibitions that included art by Southeast Asian artists. Indeed, a number of Southeast Asian artists are now among the most prominent Asian artists internationally (such as Heri Dono, Navin Rawanchaikul, Jun Nguyen–Hatsushiba, the late Montien Boonma, and Rirkrit Tiravanija). However, international group exhibitions focusing exclusively on contemporary art by Southeast Asian artists remain fewer in number and the art of Southeast Asian artists often continues to be subsumed under the broader rubric of ‘Asia’ in many Asia-focused exhibitions. Significant exceptions to this are found in the exhibiting and collecting practices of the F A A M (Fukuoka, Japan), Q A G O M A (Brisbane, Australia), and S A M (Singapore), unrivalled for their attention to Southeast Asia. Besides the important work of these institutions, in the past two to three decades Southeast Asian art has been gathering momentum, as scholars, curators, and critics, mostly from or based in the region, draw increasing attention to the region’s art. In exploring contemporary Southeast Asian art and its representation, Reworlding Art History traces a formative stage in the development of Southeast Asian art history, especially with regard to the vital presence of ‘contemporary art’ in Southeast Asia but also in the global context. The following secin 1989). The Venice Biennale included the Philippines for the first time in 1962, with participation by Jose Tanig Joya and Napoleón Isabelo Veloso Abueva.

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tion probes the defining conditions of ‘contemporary art’, seeing it as an internationally recognized category of art that is still not fully known but which is taken to have emerged most obviously since the dramatic recalibration of world politics and economies on a global scale since 1989.

Reworlding ‘Contemporary Art’ One of the many challenges of researching and writing on contemporary art is that it is a constantly and rapidly changing field of practice and knowledgemaking, defined, at the least, by ongoing experimentation and renewal, exploration, and reassessment. By definition, it is a field yet to be fully realized and thus yet to be fully understood, comprehensively documented, theorized, and periodized. Some would think it foolish to engage with something so protean and still as uncertain as a field of art-historical inquiry. I obviously think the risk is worth taking. It is especially at this time, when the constitution of contemporary art is being passionately debated, that an exploration of contemporary Southeast Asian art might be most valuable especially as an aid to continuing contestations of ‘the contemporary’ and the ongoing challenge to provincialize European and North American histories72 of art as well as to recognize cross-currents of the contemporary. For, despite the unfinished project of contemporary art, what is certain is that contemporary Southeast Asian art has rich histories and abundant presents – yet to be fully unearthed, documented, and discussed – which point to exciting new futures for art practice and art-historical efforts emanating from this region. Moreover, as I will argue, familiarizing ourselves with these localized histories of art provides us with alternative ‘points of entry’ into the canon of modern art history – with its Western-centric biases – forcing a reconsideration and reworlding of the production of modern art history when considered from other points of view that are situated in different temporal and spatial contexts from the hegemonic Euro-American model. As I have previously intimated, the acknowledgement of contemporary art’s existence in Asia has occurred alongside evolving definitions of contemporary art itself.73 This book argues that the new and diverse forms of experi72

Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. For general discussions of ‘contemporary art’ beyond Southeast Asia, see Hal Foster et al., “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 3– 124; “What is Contemporary Art? Issue One,” ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood & 73

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mental, radical, or non-traditional art (also variously described as avant-garde, post-avant-garde, or postmodern) which have emerged from Southeast Asian perspectives since the late-twentieth century are also constitutive of the very development and existence of that growing field of practice and study that we now call ‘contemporary art’. Alongside this is the thriving existence of ‘traditional’ artforms which sit uneasily with so-called ‘avant-garde’ or experimental practices and are therefore rarely considered as part of ‘contemporary art’. Together with the task of defining ‘Asia’, art historians and theorists have wrestled with defining ‘contemporary art’ at the turn of the century, many arguing that the more culturally inclusive character of art in this period is precisely what has led to its different character. Indeed, ‘contemporary art’, much like the label ‘modern art’, is a highly debated and contested concept, multifaceted in its demarcation. In its most prosaic usage, it clearly refers to art of the present moment, “art that is being made now,” or contemporaneous.74 However, as leading contemporary art theorists such as Arthur C. Danto, Hans Belting, and Terry Smith contend, there is much more to the new conditions of ‘contemporary art’-making since the 1980s, which mark it as different from the modernist tendencies of earlier phases of art. What is being argued is a shift in art practice in the latter decades of the twentieth century, which registers the transition from the field of ‘modern art’ to ‘the contemporary’, with the latter standing for more than just a label to describe the art of our present times.75 ‘Contemporary art’ is being increasingly argued as assuming a different set of symbolic and ideological conditions from those of ‘modern art’, particularly in its global associations,

Anton Vidokle, e-flux 11.1 (December 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/what-iscontemporary-art-issue-one/; “What is Contemporary Art? Issue Two,” e-flux 12 (January 2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/what-is-contemporary-art-issue-two/ (accessed April 2010); Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2009); and Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King, 2011), among others by Smith. See also the Asia-focused responses to Foster’s questionnaire initiated by the Asia Art Archive: “The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on the Contemporary.” 74 Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, 1. 75 See, for instance, Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor & Nancy Condee (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2008).

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strategies, and manifestations.76 As mentioned previously, while terms such as ‘modern art’ and ‘contemporary art’ might in history have been synonymously used in Southeast Asian art contexts (and might still be used in this way), I would argue that there is, nevertheless, a growing density around a shared if differentiated notion of ‘contemporary art’ as distinct from the modes and motivations of ‘modern art’. This is witnessed not only in contemporary Southeast Asian art practice itself but also in the recent work undertaken by cultural institutions (in their Southeast Asia-focused collecting and exhibiting strategies) as well as by contemporary art theorists who are probing and developing Southeast Asia’s art histories from within specific national contexts that at the same time have relevance for the region. What an increasing number of art historians are attempting to interpret and articulate in exploring the wider art-historical and global implications for ‘contemporary art’ is something decidedly different in the concerns and practices of contemporary artists from all over the world, distinguishable from the modern art currents which came before them, and which becomes discernible from the 1980s onwards. For Smith, this roughly spans the period from the late-eighteenth century through to the 1950s.77 For Danto and Belting, the break signals an ‘end of art history’ or a (post)historical condition – not the end of art as a discipline, but the end of art’s history as we know it. This is marked by an opening-up of the field to a plurality of artforms where modern art’s sequential mapping of aesthetic avant-gardes gives way to a more open field of art practice in which anything might be counted as art.78 If Danto’s work is grounded in Euro-American traditions of modern art, in subsequent work by Belting as well as James Elkins, the specific cultural contexts of art’s 76

Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, ed. Hans Belting & Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009): 39. 77 Notably, this registration of a break with modernity stands in contrast to those who argue for contemporary Asian art as a continuation of modern art practice, and therefore exists within modernity in Asia. Cf. Clark, Modern Asian Art. Clark’s earlier scholarship, for instance, takes this position, but more recently acknowledges a separation between the modern and the contemporary. See John Clark, “The Worlding of the Asian Modern,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, ed. Michelle Antoinette & Caroline Turner (Canberra: A N U Press, 2014). 78 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1997); Belting, The End of the History of Art?

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constitution are brought into view as part of art-historical debates on art and globalization – more precisely, debates concerning ‘global art’ and the possibilities of a ‘global art history’.79 However, in response to Elkins’s proposals, several critics have observed the continuing Euro-American biases in conceiving of an art history for the world, even when our gaze is turned to art practices beyond the West.80 Indeed, Elkins himself provocatively argues that art history is, more correctly, ‘Western art history’ (even as it is applied across different cultural contexts worldwide).81 He contends that “Art history depends on Western conceptual schemata” and “that there is no non-Western tradition of art history, if by that is meant a tradition with its own interpretative strategies and forms of argument.”82 Such a view of art history not only argues for the discipline’s origins in the West but is also premised, we must assume, on a view of Western art history as a hermetically defined field of modern inquiry, developed in isolation from external or, in Clark’s formulation, “exogenous” sources of modernity rather than in any relation to them.83 This posits Western art history not only as hegemonic and homogeneous but also as the singular point of unchanging, authentic origination, as though devoid of its own appropriations and resistant to external flows of cultural influence. It also denies the converse processes of Western art history’s transplantation and transformation in nonWestern contexts in response to locally driven imperatives. Following Clark, Asian modernities and their art histories are, rather, seen here as parallel 79

Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” 38–73; Peter Weibel & Hans Belting. G A M – Global Art and the Museum project (Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe / Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe [Z K M ], 2006), http://www.globalartmuseum.de/site/home (accessed 27 October 2010); Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (New York & London: Routledge, 2007); Art and Globalization, ed. James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska & Alice Kim (University Park: Pennsylvania State U P , 2010). 80 See, for instance, Huw Hallam, “Globalised Art History: The New Universality and the Question of Cosmopolitanism,” Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art 9.1–2 (special issue, “21st-Century Art History,” 2008–2009): 74–89; Lee Weng Choy, “A Country of Last Whales – Contemplating the Horizon of Global Art History; Or, Can We Ever Really Understand How Big the World Is?,” Third Text 25.4 (2011): 447–57. 81 See Elkins, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History. 82 Elkins, Is Art History Global?, 19. 83 Cf. Clark, Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art Compared, 1980 to 1999.

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developments alongside and in dialogue with Western modernities. In this way, Asian art histories find correspondences in Western art history and acknowledge the latter’s inheritances and legacies, but also adapt and develop in distinctively different ways. Asian art histories thereby acquire their own specificity and agency through their contingencies and relevance to local imperatives, even if bearing the legacies and traces of Western art history (as imposition and/or desired object), for these are always conditions constituted by dynamic cultural relations. We might also note here Hal Foster’s work, which calls for the urgent establishment of a set of defining criteria by which we might develop an historically determined contemporary art criticism.84 Foster perceives that in the heterogeneous field of contemporary art, “much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment.”85 However, in engaging with contemporary Southeast Asian art, one must confront the specific histories already ‘in place’, so to speak, in order to grasp the range and complexity of localized (and global) influences which imbue artworks; to recognize the already historically determined and locally grounded currents which inform artists’ particular forms of art-production, with artists often very consciously addressing local histories. Rather than emerging from a vacuum, contemporary Southeast Asian art is often linked to local art histories in ways not always understood by outside audiences because of the latter’s lack of familiarity with or blindness to the former’s local art histories; the risk of a universal narrative of contemporary art is registered in blindness to historically determined contemporary art currents elsewhere. In response to Foster’s “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” Miwon Kwon points to the different historical determinants which necessarily come into view through the work of contemporary art history as it takes on a wider global remit – specifically, the space in which the contemporaneity of histories from around the world must be confronted simultaneously as a disjunctive yet continuous intellectual horizon, integral to the understanding of the present (as a whole). (My emphases.)

If the category of contemporary art history already speaks to issues of temporality in (Western) art history in its coming ‘after’ the Western modern, it

84 85

Foster et al., “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’.” “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” 3.

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has also compelled attention to the wider spatial and cultural horizons of contemporary art’s production and circulation. Thus, as Kwon suggests, contemporary art history marks […] a temporal bracketing and a spatial encompassing, a site of deep tension between very different formations of knowledge and traditions, thus a challenging pressure point for the field of art history in general.86

Furthermore, I suggest that once we recognize the expanded spatial horizons of art history, we are forced to address afresh Western art history’s notions of temporality, its fixed chronology of art periods. Kwon’s notion of contemporary art as situated within an expanded arthistorical world space echoes that of Smith who has interpreted the difference of contemporary art through its attention to and reflection of the world and “world currents” and within this, the practice of “place-making” and “worldpicturing”87: Contemporary art is – perhaps for the first time in history – truly an art of the world. It comes from the whole world, and frequently tries to imagine the world as a differentiated yet inevitably connected whole. This is the definition of diversity: it is the key characteristic of contemporary art, as it is of contemporary life, in the world 88 today. Placemaking, world picturing and connectivity are the most common concerns of artists these days because they are the substance of contemporary being. Increasingly, they override residual distinctions based on style, mode, medium and ideology. They are present in all art that is truly contemporary. Distinguishing, precisely, this presence in each artwork is the most important challenge to an art criticism that would be adequate to the demands of contemporaneity. Tracing the currency of each artwork within the larger forces that are shaping this present is the task of contemporary art history.89 86

Miwon Kwon, in “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” 13. Terry Smith, “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” Art Bulletin 92.4 (December 2010): 380. 88 Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents, 8. 89 Smith, “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” 380. As an aside here, I note the geographical separations in Smith’s latest book Contemporary Art: World Currents. The currents of world art-making are broken into geographies of regional and then national art practice. There are exceptions to this in the concluding chapters on more general topics affecting artists worldwide and pointing to shared human issues 87

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Indeed, the idea of ‘the world’, in its various guises (universalism, internationalization, globalization, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, etc.) has been of great interest to many in rethinking the parameters of art history as we know it and, in particular, for coming to terms with the remarkable impact of globalizing processes on art practice since the late 1980s. Reflecting the current significance and place of ‘Asia’ in our ‘worldly’ discussions of contemporary art, Flores points to the glocal entanglements of ‘worldly’ belonging which is the postcolonial condition of the Philippines, and the powerful agency of the (Asian) colonized in “disrupting the dominant worlding” of the Western, Occidental or European colonial imagination.90 Flores elaborates on this notion of “worlding” and asks us to reflect critically on its operations: “worlding,” which is the process and mapping of this world, a geography of coordinates. For instance, how is the Asian modern worlded? And how is contemporary art described in terms of how it plays out in the world. This process of worlding destabilizes the density and tenacity of the […] “world.” It lays bare the traces of its making, its construction, its rigidification, and finally its vulnerability to a reworlding.91

such as global politics, climate change, and the new connectivities of social media. The presence of ‘Southeast Asia’ is there under the broader rubric of “India, South and Southeast Asia” (India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines are discussed). This is separate from the other Asias: “China and East Asia” (China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea are featured) and “West Asia” (in which Iraq, Jordan, Iran, Palestine, and Israel are featured). Related to the intellectual concerns underlying this book is the resulting methodological tension between ‘geographically isolated’ versus ‘connected and overlapping art histories within a differentiated world frame’. 90 Patrick Flores, “The Philippine Polytrope: Intimating the World in Pieces,” keynote paper presented at the Humanities Research Centre conference ‘The World and World-Making in Art’, Australian National University, Canberra, August 11–13, 2011; see also Patrick Flores, “Polytropic Philippine: Intimating the World in Pieces,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, ed. Michelle Antoinette & Caroline Turner (Canberra: A N U Press, 2014). 91 Patrick Flores, post-conference summary for the Humanities Research Centre conference ‘The World and World-Making in Art’, Australian National University, Canberra, August 11–13, 2011, quoted in Zara Stanhope & Michelle Antoinette, “The World and World-Making in Art: Connectivities and Differences,” World Art 2.2 (2012): 170–71. (My emphasis.)

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It is now widely acknowledged that world-making in art has been a political project dominated by the Euro-Americentric ‘world-view’. By contrast, I suggest that a defining feature of contemporary art – its very reason for existence – is as a result of the reworlding of art practice and art history since the closing decades of the late-twentieth century so as to bring into view other visions of the world and other visions of art. Indeed, the assumed ‘worldly’ currents of modern and contemporary art history prior to then, as we now well know, presumed Euro-American authority on the subjects and left much of the rest of the world out of the ‘world picture’, so to speak, in the story of modern and contemporary art. Contemporary art, then, also registers the distinct shift in thinking about the world from Euro-American models and practices of world-making to non-Euro-American perspectives. Moreover, it signals that even Euro-American patterns of world-making draw on other worlds. As Nelson Goodman once argued, “Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds on hand; the making is a remaking.”92 Thus, the field of contemporary Southeast Asian art, in line with recent ‘worlding’ practices not only offers a rich terrain for “projects and practices [of worlding] that instatiate some vision of the world in formation,” but might also be recognized as counter-worlding arthistorical tactics or reworldings that reconfigure our maps of the world and, more specifically, of art history. For Flores, who situates his discussion in the Philippine and Southeast Asian context, the postcolonial condition is central to what prompts such reworlding. In positioning the postcolonial condition as a “critical inheritance,” postcolonialism offers possibilities for the critical transformation of colonized societies into agents for acts of counter-worlding.93 For Terry Smith, the post92

Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks: Harvester, 1978): 6. See Patrick Flores’s scholarship on reworking the ‘colonial’ enterprise especially in ‘postcolonial’ Philippines and Southeast Asia: Flores, Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (Manila: University of the Philippines, Office of Research and Coordination, & National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1998); Flores, “Reimagining a Postcolony,” unpublished paper presented at the 2002 Power Lecture in Contemporary Visual Culture series, The Power Institute Foundation for Art & Visual Culture, & the Department of Art History and Theory (University of Sydney), held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 25 September 2002); Flores, “Homespun, Worldwide: Colonialism as Critical Inheritance,” in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information & Singapore Art Museum (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2002): 16–25. 93

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colonial moment is emphasized by processes of decolonization – the dismantling of colonialism and subsequent emergence of independent nation-states. The decolonizing, anticolonial impetus forms one tributary in the diverse currents of contemporary art, which emphasizes the effects of colonialism and here evinces a politics of resistance and transformation with relevance for the world: “locally specific yet worldly in implication, inclusive yet oppositional and anti-institutional, concrete but also various, mobile and open-ended.”94 Witnessing the curator Okwui Enwezor’s ground-breaking ‘global’ art exhibition for Documenta 11 in 2002, as well as the two decades of global art expansion leading up to it, Smith observes: “The postcolonial had come to the metropolis, and the world of art had turned.”95 He elaborates thus: Following decolonization […] there has emerged a plethora of art shaped by local, national, anticolonial, independent, antiglobalization values (those of diversity, identity and critique). It circulates internationally through the activities of travelers, expatriates, the creation of new markets. It predominates in biennales. Local and internationalist values are in constant dialogue in this current.96

From this perspective, the potential of contemporary art lies in its symbolic and political capacity to represent otherwise marginalized and excluded interests. Moreover, the specific contingencies of contemporary art practice are revealed: if Euro-American art imposed itself on others, it also opened itself to outside influence and was profoundly shaped by external cultural forces. For Belting – co-founder of the Z K M project ‘Global Art and the Museum’, initiated in 2006 – contemporary art is foregrounded in the operations of globalization.97 Belting regards contemporary art as ‘global art’, marked by the intensified conditions and contradictory characteristics of globalization that signal a simultaneous loss of homogeneity and a reinforcement of heterogeneities under global capitalism. Rather than encouraging the kind of universalizing logic of traditional notions of ‘world art’, Belting argues that ‘global art’ is an art-historical category that registers differentiation over uniformity, especially through its interactions with the changing international art economy:

94

Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, 151–52. What is Contemporary Art?, 152. 96 What is Contemporary Art?, 7. 97 See Weibel & Belting, ‘G A M – Global Art and the Museum’ project. 95

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art on a global scale does not imply an inherent aesthetic quality which could be identified as such, nor a global concept of what has to be regarded as art. Rather than representing a new context, it indicates the loss of context or focus, and includes its own contradiction by implying the counter movement of regionalism and tribalization, whether national, cultural or religious. It clearly differs from modernity whose self-appointed universalism was based on a hegemonial notion of art. In short, new art today is global, much the same way the World Wide Web is global.98

In attempting to come to terms with the implications of this new ‘global art’ for art history and the renewed interest in ‘world art’ studies, Elkins has considered the new possible shape of a global art history posing the thoughtprovoking question, ‘is art history global?’99 Furthermore, he asks: What is the shape, or what are the shapes, of art history across the world? Is it becoming global – that is, does it have a recognizable form wherever it is practiced? Can the methods, concepts, and purposes of Western art history be suitable for art outside of Europe and North America? And if not, are there alternatives that are compatible with existing modes of art history?100

Reading across several publications by Elkins, we can discern his perspective: at present, art history is not “sufficiently malleable to accommodate worldwide art practices, or to comprehend international art practices” but it “is becoming a global enterprise.”101 In his introductory essay to the edited volume Is Art History Global?, Elkins suggests a consideration of two scenarios: one that argues against the idea that art history is or can be global (or, more precisely, that “art history is, or could become, a single enterprise throughout the world”); the other, which argues in favour of the idea of a global art history (i.e. it is possible to envision “a worldwide set of practices identifiable as art history”102). Ultimately, he suggests that the latter is more persuasive, citing, for instance, the role of shared art theories and methods as unifying

98

Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” 40. Elkins, Is Art History Global?. 100 Is Art History Global?, 3. 101 Is Art History Global?, 21 (emphasis in original). 102 Is Art History Global?, 22. 99

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forces: “it is the methods of art history, and not its subject-matter, that effectively unify the field”;103 therefore, art history would then be thought of as a field whose subject-matter changes with its location but whose assumptions, purposes, critical concepts, and narrative forms remain fairly consistent around the world.104

Elkins here registers a separation of art-historical interest in culturally specific subject-matter from a more universal interest in the methods, the form of the text, and the questions raised by art-historical work. He suggests that, unlike subject-matter (which, he argues, should be of exclusive interest to individual art specialists), issues of methods, form, and research are all of potential consequence to art historians wherever they are placed and irrespective of their specific cultural contexts for art-historical work. However, as I have previously suggested, these arguments are premised on a view of global art and its history as a distribution and application of homogeneous and essentialist Western art theories that become ‘universally shared’. There is, to some degree, a presumption of undifferentiated cohesiveness which ties together art’s histories the world over. Such a position denies a more complicated programme for a contemporary art history which admits methodological departure from Euro-American theoretical and interpretative methods – especially that which may be derived precisely from attention to different artistic subject-matter and their potentially different treatment for the production of particular artforms. The separation of subject-matter from art-historical considerations threatens to obscure the possible generative relation between them – what might be the very key to revealing alternative art histories. The concurrent pursuit of art’s methods and subject-matter, I would argue, has relevance for the potential to theorize the affective consequences of contemporary art, for instance, and, related to this, for theorizing both differences and correspondences across contemporary art worldwide. Situating her argu103

Elkins, Is Art History Global?, 15. Is Art History Global?, 21. Elkins, in a sense, answers his own question – “Is Art History Global?” – through his subsequent monograph Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, in which modes of comparison (specifically, comparing Chinese landscape paintings with Western art) are used as a basis for exploring connections and differences between Western art history and the histories of art in cultures outside the West, with Elkins ultimately arguing for a shared Western art history. See Elkins, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History. 104

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ments within art’s affective turn, Meskimmon argues that, much as “artworks show us about the world […] they can [also] enable us to participate in, and potentially change, the parameters through which we negotiate that world.”105 In so doing, Meskimmon seeks to articulate works of art “beyond the logic of representation where that entails art’s operation as a mute mirroring, a mere reflection of the conditions of the world, rather than as an active constituent element within them.”106 While Meskimmon’s intention is not to probe the defining criteria for contemporary art, I would suggest that her argument about the “cosmopolitan imagination” is yet another important means of distinguishing and revealing the particular ‘worldliness’ and ‘reworlding’ practices of contemporary art, especially when engendered through frames of affective relation, the latter reminding us of contemporary art’s connective capacity across geo-political borders and other markers of difference-as-distantiation. Importantly, contemporary art theorists such as Smith and Meskimmon do not seek so much to emphasize connection over difference as to seek to illuminate new passages of connection via difference. For Smith, this is the very definition of contemporary art: Geopolitical change has shifted the world picture from presumptions about the inevitability of modernization and the universality of Euro American values to recognition of the coexistence of difference, of disjunctive diversity, as characteristic of our contemporary condition.107

Similarly, I argue that contemporary art must always be understood as situated manifestations of differentiated experience, generated in response to a particular set of socio-cultural conditions but with potential for broader resonance in the world. This allows us to recognize contemporary Southeast Asian art as a complex and dynamic field of art production, representation, and historicization. Borrowing from Smith, I ask: how might we think the difference and connection of contemporary Southeast Asian art at once? That is, to acknowledge contemporary Southeast Asian art’s distinction but also its reson105

Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London & New York: Routledge, 2011): 6. 106 Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 6. 107 Terry Smith, “Worlds Pictured in Contemporary Art: Planes and Connectivities,” Humanities Research (special issue, “The World and World-Making in Art,” ed. Caroline Turner, Michelle Antoinette & Zara Stanhope) 19.2 (July 2013): 11–25.

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ance with and for the world? In exploring such questions, I seek to address the region and its specificity but also to reach further afield so as to speak to globally shared encounters with contemporary art and, ultimately, to broaden our current landscape of ‘contemporary art’. In so doing, I ponder questions such as, ‘Do isolations of geography encourage or hinder efforts towards the production of contemporary art from Southeast Asia?’ ‘What is the value of tracing Southeast Asian difference for broader global art discourses and theorizations of “the contemporary” ’? ‘What shared crosscultural aesthetic knowledge might be gleaned within the “world” frame of contemporary (or “global”) art?’, and ‘Can the aesthetic attention to art provide a means to comprehend contemporary art as a globally affecting phenomenon?’ Such questions are important to acknowledging the value of Southeast Asia within world currents of contemporary art, but also the world within and from Southeast Asian perspectives.

Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: Between ‘the Cultural’ and ‘the Aesthetic’ The logical consequence of an excessive dependence on culturalist discourses in art interpretation and representation is myopia or obscuration in our aesthetic experience of contemporary Southeast Asian art. Such erasure is, specifically, born out of the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the articulation of hegemonic art-historical and curatorial cartographies premised on culture which have been used to discursively map and/or ethnicize Southeast Asian art (in which some artists choose to operate and others are inadvertently typecast), and, on the other, the disarticulation or suppression of alternative paradigms of aesthetic experience as suggested by the formalist and/or affective dimensions and cues of contemporary Southeast Asian art itself. A key motivation for the gathering of artworks in Part I I I of this book arises from the failure in much contemporary art interpretation to heed the aesthetic encounter in contemporary Southeast Asian art – that is, a lack of attentiveness and sensitivity to formalist and/or affective considerations which lie at the core of art practice and its reception. These have often been displaced, especially in international contexts, by hegemonic socio-political and culturalist discourses and ideologies. As a result, what we know about contemporary Southeast Asian art has been largely and sometimes exclusively guided by issues of ethnicity, politics, and cultural history, and less so by art movements, styles, and genres, aesthetic currents, formalist and affective con-

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cerns which have informed contemporary art practices emanating from the region.108 This was witnessed, for instance, in the groundbreaking exhibition ‘Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s’ organized by the Queens Museum of Art, New York. The travelling exhibition toured American galleries and was conceived by three U S -based curators along with a panel of international curators with particular regional expertise. The ‘global’ compass of the exhibition spanned North America /Europe, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Latin America, Africa, Australia /New Zealand, and Asia. However, South and Southeast Asia were excluded from the exhibition. This exclusion stemmed from a lack of awareness of conceptual art practices in South and Southeast Asia; in the end, Poshyananda was commissioned to contribute an essay for the exhibition catalogue making at least some acknowledgement of the presence of Southeast Asia within this global movement.109 Indeed, there are few internationally directed exhibitions which explicitly foreground formalist, stylistic, or affective considerations as points of comparison for analysing modern and contemporary art in global contexts. This is likely because of the challenges involved in disrupting long-held misperceptions about artistic origins and authenticity and the precarious business of comparison within this – in other words, how to resist the tendency to assign artworks produced by Asian (or other non-Western) artists to the category of derivations from or imitations of Western aesthetics because of their resemblance to well-known Euro-American art styles, genres, and movements. One obvious answer to this is to emphasize cultural difference – the social context of art, over art’s affective and formal capacity. By contrast, I would argue, it is when cultural specificity and aesthetic considerations converge as integral 108

See also Joan Kee’s arguments relating to this in “Trouble in New Utopia,” Positions: East Asia Cultural Critique 12.3 (Winter 2004): 667–86. 109 As Isabel Ching explains, “The curators conceded in the catalogue that they were not able to provide a definitive account of the global phenomenon of conceptualism, and therefore commissioned Apinan Poshyananda to pen an essay on the region.” See Ching, “Tracing (Un)certain Legacies: Conceptualism in Singapore and the Philippines,” at Asia Art Archive, Diaaalogue: Perspectives (July 2011), http://www.aaa .org.hk/Diaaalogue/Details/1045 (accessed 26 September 2012); Apinan Poshyananda, “ ‘ Con Art’ Seen from the Edge: The Meaning of Conceptual Art in South and Southeast Asia,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, László Beke, Walker Art Center, Miami Art Museum of Dade County, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (exh. cat.; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center & New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999): 143–48.

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parts of the interpretative process that art history promises to be most productive. While attention to modern and contemporary aesthetic currents in Asia might be found within specific nationalist art histories or individual artist biographies traced by local art historians, they are rarely explored through crosscultural regional frameworks, and seldom probed in international contexts for their difference from Euro-American traditions.110 It is not often that these aesthetic currents are examined in the context of international exhibitions of modern art and their associated art discourses in order to lay bare the complex and entangled trajectories of artistic exchange and transfer in world currents beyond simplistic discussions of origins, authenticity, and imitation. Such undertakings require a significant recalibration of the terms by which modern art history has thus far been constructed; they are also implicated in the precarious political business of risking new methodologies and interpretations for art history from alternative non-Euro-American perspectives, potentially disrupting the hegemony of established meta-narratives and methods for art history; finally, these undertakings require the sustained efforts of multiple individuals and institutions. Locally, however, within Asia and Southeast Asia, some effort has been made to develop a model of crosscultural art-historical method which embraces formalist, stylistic, and affective considerations of modern and contemporary art alongside culturally situated comparative work across the Asian region/s. This has been driven by curatorial projects which have sought to reveal particularities of art practice specific to Asian contexts. For instance, Sabapathy and Piyadasa most famously explored the significance of the Nanyang School style and, in so doing, examined particular formal features as a basis for positing a Southeast Asian ‘Nanyang’ regional aesthetic of modern art.111 More recently, Tatehata Akira and others have examined cubist tendencies in modern Southeast Asian art between the 1940s and 1950s for the 110

The scholarship of Sabapathy and Piyadasa, as I argue elsewhere here, is rather exceptional for its attention to aesthetics through a Southeast Asian regional scope; Clark offers a broader Asian lens; however, aesthetic currents are rarely traced by Clark in exercises of in-depth, formal art analysis, and are examined, rather, for their place within a larger narrative of modern art’s institutional development and related art-historical discourse in Asia. 111 See Pameran retrospektif pelukis-pelukis Nanyang, ed. Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia, 1979).

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major Asia-based exhibition and accompanying international symposium ‘Cubism in Asia: Unbounded Dialogues’;112 abstractionist tendencies for modern Southeast Asian art have been explored through S A M exhibitions such as ‘Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art’, ‘Imaging Selves’, and ‘Visions and Enchantment’, observing the specificity of abstractionism in Southeast Asian contexts;113 and realism was investigated as a major aesthetic theme for the 4th Asian Art Show Fukuoka in 1994, curated by Ushiroshǀji Masahiro.114 Similarly, as Asia-based institutions acquire stronger contemporary Southeast Asian art collections, they have offered more nuanced, aesthetically attuned narratives in their exhibition presentations, but this has largely been for Asia-based audiences. A close examination of this situation also reveals that Asian art historians and art practitioners are often more knowledgeable about the contexts underpinning Euro-American histories of art and their reception in Asia than their Euro-American counterparts are of comparable art practices in Asia and elsewhere; this is what helps obscure dialectical currents in the development of modern and contemporary art history. Implicit in this is the necessity (and thus the labour), for those who have been relegated to the ‘periphery’ of (Western) art history, to learn its hegemonic narratives, not only to appreciate them but also in order to enter into dialogue with them, to contest them, and to remould them. 112

Tatehata Akira, “Why Cubism?,” in International Symposium 2005: “Cubism in Asia: Unbounded Dialogues” Presentation Papers, ed. Furuichi Yasuko, tr. Stanley Nelson Anderson (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 2005): 9–18; Cubism in Asia: unbounded dialogues = [Ya Zhou li ti zhu yi hui hua: yue jie dui hua], ed. Miwa Kenjin (exh. cat.; Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, c2006). The “Cubism in Asia” exhibition was jointly organized by the Singapore Art Museum, the Japan Foundation, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. 113 See Ahmad Mashadi, “Figurative Abstraction: Concealed Identities,” in Imaging Selves: Singapore Art Museum Collection Exhibition Series 1998–1999, ed. Joanna Lee & Bridget Tracy Tan (exh. cat.; Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1998): 38–45; Patrick Flores, “Reworlding Modernity: Abstract Art in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Visions and Enchantment: Southeast Asian Paintings, ed. Ahmad Mashadi & Keong Ruoh Ling (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum & Christie’s International Singapore, 2000): 34–43. 114 See Ushiroshǀji Masahiro, “Realism as an Attitude: Asian Art in the Nineties”, in The 4th Asian Art Show Fukuoka – Realism as an Attitude (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1994): 33–38.

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Seen against this backdrop, an exclusively culturalist approach is perhaps a less politically toxic means of addressing the difference of modern Asian art. However, from an aesthetic point of view, it runs the risk of anthropologizing the art object, reducing it to a mirror of Southeast Asian cultures. In these cases, art becomes a merely reflective instance of ‘cultural evidence’ or an illustrative adjunct to the idea of culture, rather than being considered as an aesthetic object embedded in cultural contexts. Such an approach also suggests a preoccupation with underlining the cultural difference of modern art currents in Asia so as to affirm its distinction even as it bears resemblance to supposedly Western artforms and styles – this position, as I have previously suggested, risks privileging Western origins for artistic modernity in isolation from Asian influences and processes of cultural exchange and transfer. Emphasizing cultural discourses over formalist and affective considerations also makes it difficult to forge distinctions and relationships between contemporary Southeast Asian art and contemporary art produced in different contexts: what aesthetic considerations of modes, media, styles, and conditions of reception, for instance, prompt us to be moved by contemporary Southeast Asian art in ways that are different from or similar to responses to other phenomena of contemporary art in the world? What is the relationship of such formalist and affective considerations to earlier practices and histories of art emanating from the region and elsewhere? For Ismail Zain, an exclusive reliance on the discourses of culture to elucidate our understanding of Southeast Asian art constitutes an example of the “hegemony of content” over art form and serves to deny the fullest expression of and response to the art object.115 Reflecting on Ismail Zain’s work, the late Malaysian cultural historian Krishen Jit has observed:

115

Ismail Zain first presented these ideas in his Tun Seri Lanang Lecture of 1980 entitled Seni dan Imajan: Suatu Pandangan Umum Terhadap Imajan dan Makna Kontektuilnya (“Art and Image”), also published in his book of the same title (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia, 1980). His arguments may also be interpreted against the specific socio-political currents prevalent in Malaysia at the time, which saw rising discourses of religious and racial discrimination. See Krishen Jit’s analysis of this in “Seni dan Imajan: The Appearance of a Coda,” in Krishen Jit: An Uncommon Position, Selected Writings, ed. Kathy Rowland (Singapore: Contemporary Asian Art Centre, 2003): 224–30; and Krishen Jit, “Ismail Zain: A Protean Appearance in Malaysian Art,” in Ismail Zain Retrospective Exhibition, 1964–1991 (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery, 1995): 10–29.

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Ismail [Zain] is particularly “incensed” by the narrative tendency released by the hegemonic status of content in populist thinking that robs the art object of its full expression. For example, the narrative gaze trained at “primitive” art objects reduces them to pieces of exotica that are ripe for acts of artistic imperialism by a modern, humanistic and ego-centred expressionism. Instead he desires to give us access to liberated spaces of thought created by analogies, linkages, relationships and associations provoked by gazing at the form of the artistic object. […] Ismail thus “strengthens the notion that art acts as a mediating, moulding force in society rather than as an agency which merely reflects and records” (Hawkes 1977, 36). So fortified, the artist or the observer of art would be released from the debilitating effects of an excessive dependence on content over form. Implicit in Ismail’s view is the perception that the hegemony of content enthralls observers of art into assuming sentimental, provincial, even bigoted stances.116

Ismail Zain’s argument links up with the discursive hegemony of notions of geography, socio-history, and cultural identity in the interpretation and representation of contemporary Southeast Asian art, and affirms how our knowledge and experience of art can reduce the latter to mere cultural and anthropological artefact. While the Filipino art historian Rod Paras–Perez also considers the significance of form in the interpretation of art, he does so in order to complicate its understanding in relation to the cultural contexts of art production and reception: the most common confusion within South-East Asia is the assumption that the use of indigenous materials will immediately make an installation equally indigenous to the region.117

In other words, Paras–Perez contends that art’s form – here installation art – is often too simplistically equated with art’s material origins and thus employed as a supposedly already given sign of locality, especially for buttressing arguments concerning the cultural origins and development of specific art genres and styles. He argues, rather, for a more complex web of understanding which brings specific forms into conversation with other genres and histories of artistic and cultural practice. It is in this light, Paras–Perez suggests, that art 116

Jit, “Seni dan Imajan: The Appearance of a Coda,” 225. Rod Paras–Perez, “South-East Asian Sense and Sensibility: The Well-Filled Space, the Well-Cut Silence,” A R T and AsiaPacific 1.4 (1994): 73. 117

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practice should be understood in terms of the specific contexts of its production and reception. Slaughtering chickens in the name of performance art in New York may be shocking, he argues, but in rural Southeast Asia such an act is a trivial, everyday event.118 For Paras–Perez, deciphering the significance of Southeast Asian art, including the generation and application of artforms, necessarily depends on art’s contextual (socio-historical) relations. Writing almost three decades earlier, in 1969, the Philippine art critic Emmanuel Torres noted the increasing expectation that Philippine artists express a commitment to nationalism in their art and the negative criticism directed at those artists who betrayed foreign, especially Western, influences. Torres asked: But is a painting or a sculpture or a monument ‘Philippine’ or national simply because it represents some subject which is easily recognized as our very own, like dalagas (maidens) wearing native dresses or the full figure of Manuel Quezon or a twilit landscape with the Rizal Monument in the foreground?119

Torres concludes that, for an artist to be a hero for the Philippine nation, his art need not depend on the artist’s referencing nationalist subject-matter – “to call a work of art ‘Philippine’ on the basis of recognizable subject-matter alone is questionable.”120 Rather, it is more important to simply be “a good artist.”121 For Torres, “It would make more sense to call a work of art ‘Philippine’ on the basis of form or design, the particular way the artist looks at things, his way of expressing his view or experience of things.”122 118

Interestingly, only a few months after Paras–Perez’s piece was published in A R T and AsiaPacific, the Australian artist Mike Parr carried out his twenty-four hour performance-art piece Daybreak from 20–21 January 1995, at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines, Manila. The controversial performance involved the beheading of chickens, and its differing crosscultural effect is discussed in comparative essays by Patrick Flores & David Bromfield in “The Perils of Performance / The Artist Dances: Mike Parr in the Philippines,” A R T AsiaPacific 3.1 (1996): 58–65. 119 Emmanuel Torres, “Nationalism in Filipino Art ‘Hot’ and ‘Cool’,” in Philippine Modern Art and its Critics, ed. Alice M.L. Coseteng (Manila: U N E S C O National Commission of the Philippines, 1972): 169. First published in Esso Silangan 14.4 (June 1969): 9–10, 15. 120 Torres, “Nationalism in Filipino Art ‘Hot’ and ‘Cool’,” 169. 121 “Nationalism in Filipino Art ‘Hot’ and ‘Cool’,” 168. 122 “Nationalism in Filipino Art ‘Hot’ and ‘Cool’,” 169 (emphasis in original).

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From yet another angle on these issues, the curator Julie Ewington draws our attention to intersections of form and content through the methodological frame and position of crosscultural interpretation. From Ewington’s perspective, as an Australia-based curator engaging with Southeast Asian art, art history has been lacking in the “thick description” that the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has famously argued is necessary for any interpretation of culture.123 In her thought-provoking essay on “Art and Method in Southeast Asia,” Ewington follows Geertz’s lead, citing, for instance, the influence of the wayang kulit shadow-puppet theatre and other forms of traditional performance in Indonesia as significant influences on contemporary Indonesian art practice – important content and context imbuing contemporary artform – often overlooked in the blind-sightedness of ‘outsider’ art historians searching for their own truths and resulting in all too often ‘thin’ examples of art interpretation.124 As Ewington reminds us, contemporary art in Southeast Asia is a set of discourses emerging out of completely different social and cultural institutions and practices – it may not be found in the same locations as its sister practices in other, western, societies.125

Notably, for Ewington the Dutch colonial influence, as well as other international exchanges which inform modern and contemporary Indonesian art practice, are only part of Indonesia’s art story. Such wide-ranging perspectives evoke the methodological antinomies and polemics underlying the development of contemporary Southeast Asian art history – equally propelling and haunting its becoming as it undoes and recalibrates the terms of art history. At the heart of these antinomies are contestations, of differently situated and intersecting political alignments, regarding what is meant by ‘contemporary art’ and what is peculiar to it in Southeast Asian contexts. Society, culture, content, context, form, design, and materiality wrestle alongside each other in shaping definitions of contemporary Southeast Asian art. What has been less often articulated for contemporary Southeast Asian art history is the significance of particular artforms and affects in dialogue with 123

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973):

3–30, 5–10. 124

Julie Ewington, “Between the Cracks: Art and Method in Southeast Asia,” A R T AsiaPacific 3.4 (1996): 56–63. 125 Ewington, “Between the Cracks: Art and Method in Southeast Asia,” 63.

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the specific socio-cultural (local and global) currents which underlie their production and reception. Rather, the socio-cultural has functioned as a hegemonic interpretative frame taking precedence over considerations of the form and affect of art. Admittedly, this situation is changing in the twentieth century as contemporary Southeast Asian art gradually becomes a site of more habitual art historical investigation. My approach here is to insist that art practice and its reception are located in space and rooted in cultural experience, but must always also be recognized as an aesthetic endeavour with particular formalist and affective dimensions that are intrinsic to artistic creativity. I position the interpretation of art from an ‘aesthetically oriented’ methodological perspective attuned to art’s forms and sensory affects while also paying attention to culturally and historically specific concerns. In seeking to address the erasure of the senses, I argue for more nuanced, aesthetically attuned representational paradigms for encountering and understanding Southeast Asian art, for an approach that foregrounds the multiplicity of readings beyond simplistic biographical or ethnographic interpretation and that is also attentive to the specificities of sensory and affective engagement with art. That is, to also recognize encounters with art as an embodied response to art’s distinctive forms in dialogue with other fields of meaning. In this way, we orient our senses to aesthetics while remaining attentive to an aesthetic oriented to the space–time of the social. The notion of ‘affect’ is here inspired by the proliferation of studies in social theory after the ‘affective turn’,126 influential on a new branch of arthistorical work foregrounded in interdisciplinary perspectives:127 Affect, at its most anthropormophic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations.

126

Patricia Clough, “Introduction” to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Clough & Jean Halley (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2007): 1–33. 127 See, for instance, work by Irit Rogoff, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Jill Bennett, and Marsha Meskimmon.

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Affect is in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter.128

In my attention to contemporary Southeast Asian art as a site of affective encounter, I seek to renew that most obvious provocation for affective experience – art – recalling its aesthetic capacity to move us through diverse dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. As the art theorist Susan Best has noted, “affect and sensation have not been a crucial part of either aesthetics or art history in recent history.”129 As Meskimmon and Bennett, too, have argued in different ways, art has the capacity to affect us, to move us into action in the everyday, and even to enact politics in the world.130 However, alongside the ideal of political change, there is also a more fundamental transformative potential that is enabled through the sensory response to art itself. In this way, the aesthetic experience of art is configured as an encompassing of the full range of feeling and emotion, as well as intellectual, ethical, and political responses, that are enlivened in the process of encountering art and which necessarily foregrounds the act of aesthetic transformation. Re-animating the art object in this way necessarily involves a re-cognition of the full affective dimensions of art. Much contemporary art accepts knowledge-production as an embodied experience which activates the spectrum of the human senses (physical, intellectual, and emotional) in the perception of art.131 The historical privileging of the visual over other forms of sensory engagement has often, and often inevitably and self-evidently, led to an ocular-centric experience of visual art, with its fixation on the gaze. Increasingly, however, as forms of contemporary art expand to include threedimensional, performative, auditory, and even haptic installation and perfor128

Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2010): 1–2 (emphasis in original). 129 Susan Best, “What is Affect? Considering the Affective Dimension of Contemporary Installation Art,” Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art 2.2–3.1 (special issue, “Affect and Sensation,” ed. Toni Ross, 2002): 209–10. 130 See Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2005), and Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affect and Art After 9/11 (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012); Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. 131 Maurice Merleau–Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith (Phénomenologie de la perception, 1945; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).

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mance-art practices, as well as conceptual art, our other embodied senses – of sound, smell, touch, taste, and intellect – are incited to engage more centrally with art, and are often essential to experiencing it, even to the very production of art. Hence, contemporary art audiences are prompted to feel, think about, physically manipulate, listen to, eat, smell, and walk through and around art, as much as ‘to look’, in order to experience it, to activate it, and to be moved by it. Best elaborates on this in relation to forms of contemporary installation art: we are interested in the ways in which we are moved around the installations and by them; the ideas behind the works; the qualities of their construction, operation and spatial arrangement; the materials of which they are comprised, their arrangement, forms, shapes, colours, textures, and so on. In sum, we want to “grasp” such installations in many different ways, we are excited by them and this excitement or interest is a pleasurable entwinement of intellectual, motor and perceptual activity.132

Recognizing the spectrum of embodied engagement with contemporary Southeast Asian art invests it with its extended ontologies of sensual materiality and affective aesthetics. In this way, encounters with art may be understood as affective and affecting performances, engaging the senses in an embodied, dialectical conversation of moving experience; such encounters are at the same time situated in specific temporalities and spatialities of experience. The cultural theorist Ross Gibson suggests the affective and transformative capacity of art thus: we know we are encountering art when we sense that the experience is changing us and we sense that, if we came back tomorrow, we’d undergo change again and differently. Art is a complex set of experiences, objects, subjects, processes and propositions that stimulate, disorient and re-format our senses and our cerebration.133

Encounters with contemporary Southeast Asian art take myriad different forms and shapes. My own encounters can, then, only be considered as suggestive stories, intended to be rich and plentiful in critical offering, without the burdensome fullness that accompanies stories which tend to solidification 132

Best, “What is Affect? Considering the Affective Dimension of Contemporary Installation Art,” 222. 133 Ross Gibson, “Theatres for Alteration,” http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/sites2 /speakers/ross_gibson (accessed 4 March 2005).

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or sedimentation and which foreclose the imagining of alternative possibilities. If there is insistence in the stories I tell here, it comes from indicating the possibilities for engaging with contemporary Southeast Asian art in its multiple, sensuous and sensory modes of experience, immanent to its very aesthetic premise and one’s subjective experience of art. The art I explore throughout this book offers potent examples of sensory synthesis, corporeal engagement, and affective provocation. Art is configured as an artistic encounter foregrounded in aesthetic engagement as much as social discourses of the cultural. Indeed, encounters with art are relations of affective encounter and transformation which are always also constituted by the contingent temporalities and spatialities of art’s making and elucidation. The following sections close this chapter and address the art practice of the contemporary artists Lani Maestro and Yee I-Lann. In drawing a loose frame of comparative relation between Maestro’s artwork a book thick of ocean (1993) and Yee I-Lann’s Sulu Stories (2005), my intention is to set up key themes and concerns of recurring significance in later chapters – not least of which is the shared concern with the motif of water, a renewed aesthetic trope across much contemporary art connected with Southeast Asia’s archipelagic condition. These key themes and concerns coalesce and revolve around issues concerning the interpretation of contemporary Southeast Asian art – particularly in relation to artistic intention, artist’s biographies, exhibition representation, art criticism, and a developing historiography for contemporary Southeast Asian art and contemporary art more broadly. Other issues of recurring significance that are foregrounded in this comparison of encounters are: identity and culture; geography and belonging; affective experience in the aesthetic encounter; displacement and locatedness; and connectivities and difference. However, the clearest point of tension I propose in drawing this comparison – not only between the two artworks but also for our readings within each of them – is that between the ‘cultural’ and ‘the aesthetic’. I highlight this tension not only to demonstrate the different ways in which we might approach our readings of contemporary Southeast Asian art but also to underscore the tension as a point of recurrent debate and dialogue within the developing history of contemporary Southeast Asian art itself, with consequences for its theorization, methods of analysis, modes of exhibition, documentation, and interpretation. The comparison also foregrounds the larger dynamics of this book, in which I shift from tracing the theorization and documentation of contemporary Southeast Asian art (Parts I and I I ) to adopting an analytic mode for art

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interpretation itself (Part I I I ) in order to explore the themes of mobility, memory, and corporeography as manifested in contemporary Southeast Asian art – themes which are also signalled, in different ways, by Maestro and Yee’s artworks. In analysing contemporary Southeast Asian art, I am engaging with art itself as a platform for expanding the possibilities of its interpretation. In the process, I am also engaging with artists themselves as interlocutors and agents in developing the field of ‘contemporary art’. From this perspective, contemporary Southeast Asian art itself and the artists involved in its making can be seen as manifesting and configuring ‘the contemporary’, not only for Southeast Asia but for the developing discipline and institutions of contemporary art in the international context.

Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: Oscillating Currents The stories I want to tell are never stories in the way I expect them to be. They always take different forms and shapes much like the fluid ocean does.134

Fluid Encounters I: Lani Maestro’s a book thick of ocean: Waves of Encounter, Layers of Interpretation The First Wave A dimly lit gallery space, of ‘white cube’ convention, sparsely furnished with only a small wooden table at its centre, and, laid flat upon the table, a large, weighty, open book, beckoning my presence. Upon entering the space, the serene mood gradually deepens as I encounter an image of ocean surfacing from the book’s open page, its waves rising to meet my gaze and drawing me nearer. There is nothing else in the image. No horizon, sea shore, or anything which could specifically place this vast ocean at any one corner of the globe. Instead, the page is plentiful in its gift of endless oceanic undulations of grey, black and white, captured in the magic stillness of photography and brought into view only by the peripheral frame of the book page.

134

Lani Maestro, quoted in press release for “dream of the other (rêve de l’autre),” installation exhibition at Galerie La Centrale, Montreal, Canada, April 1998.

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Figure 4: Lani Maestro, a book thick of ocean (1993) Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 5: Lani Maestro, a book thick of ocean (1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 6: Lani Maestro, a book thick of ocean (1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 7: Lani Maestro, a book thick of ocean (1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Perhaps the image is more evocative in its register of space and of elemental time over place, hinted at through the varied aspect of darkness and lightness shining on these waters, recalling the habitual tidal ebb and flow of the sea and the perpetual cycle of night into day. Is this the daily occurrence of a fading sunset or an emerging dawn that shines over oceans everywhere? Stirring my emotions and imagination, arresting my senses, the image evokes for me the calming, soothing motion of the sea. As the intensity of these feelings washes over me, I place my hands at each side of the book’s cover and carefully turn the page to discover yet another photograph of what appears to be the very same, breathtaking ocean. (But could it be a different view of ocean, from elsewhere or of somewhere else?) And as I keep turning the pages, the gathering momentum of these otherwise still images perforce transforms into fluid, rippling, and swelling waves of Ocean before my eyes. I am immersed in Ocean, I lose myself in the void of repeating, endless Ocean. The oceanic image becomes a contradictory gesture of the presence in absence, stillness in movement, the fullness of emptiness.

The Second Wave Lani Maestro’s a book thick of ocean formed part of the ‘Crossing Borders’ exhibition component of ‘The Third A P T ’ (A P T 3), which encompassed artists of crosscultural life and artistic experience (see Chapter 3 below). Following museological convention, the artwork was labelled, in both the exhibition and the related catalogue, with details of the artist and the work as such: Lani M A E S T R O Born 1957 Manila, the Philippines Lives and works in Montréal, Canada a book thick of ocean 1993 Installation comprising bound book (duo-tone reproduction), case, oak table Book: 48.3 x 61 x 3.8cm Table: 78.7 x 182.9 x 91.4cm Collection: The artist

The book itself is five-hundred pages long, with an identical black and white photograph of the ocean printed on each page. It is presented lying open on an oak table, inviting the viewer to turn its pages. While, at first, engagement with the work seems quite simple, the interaction gradually becomes highly meditative. The constant ebb and flow of the sea is made still through the

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photograph, capturing this beautiful moment in the life of the ocean for our contemplation. As we find our gaze drawn into the photograph, stillness is turned into movement as we imagine drifting with the waves that carry this ocean; in this sense, the work becomes one of healing and calm but also contemplation and reflection. In the process of absorbing a particular image of the ocean, repeated over and over again, a meditative response is induced; echoing Benjamin,135 there is no ‘original’ representation here, on account of the incessant reproducibility of the photograph. Rather, we undertake “a voyage into the erasure of repetition […] a paradoxical nothingness.”136

Figure 8: Lani Maestro, a book thick of ocean (1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

135

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970): 219–53. 136 Stephen Horne, “Because of Burning and Ashes: A Few Works by Robert Frank and Lani Maestro,” in Image and Inscription: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Photography, ed. Robert Bean (Toronto: Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Y Y Z Books, 2005): 181–89.

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The Third Wave Unlike the representation of Maestro’s fellow Philippines-born artists, in this A P T exhibition Maestro was presented through the curatorial frame of the ‘Crossing Borders’ section, together with John Frank Sabado. Her other Philippines-born compatriots – Alfredo Juan Aquilizan, Isabel Aquilizan, Agnes Arellano, and Roberto Feleo – were represented in the country-specific ‘Philippines’ section.137 Indeed, in comparison to her fellow Philippine artists, there was nothing particularly ‘Filipino’ about the visual image Maestro presented. As the art critic Marian Pastor Roces suggested in her catalogue essay for Maestro’s work, a book thick of ocean instead presented an “emptiness” of sorts, a shaping of absences.138 The work could not be anchored by a stable or seamless topography of the Philippine nation, for there was no immediately recognizable reference to Maestro’s Philippine heritage, her ‘culture of origin’. Moreover, in line with the ‘Crossing Borders’ rationale of the exhibition, Maestro represented an Asian migrant or diaspora artist. She had left the Philippines for Montreal in 1982, undertaking art studies and living and working there for some time before extending her international career by dividing her time between Canada and France.

The Fourth Wave Maestro tends to resist the idea that her Philippine cultural background might be a principal motivation for understanding her art practice and discourages the utility of race and ethnicity in defining her art: We have a fear of not knowing, of things that we do not easily identify and we are always looking for a frame to refer it to. I think my work resists any kind of representation in that it is difficult to speak of the complexities of the world as event. My interest in addressing issues of power relationships in my art practice have become more freeing as I address my own identity as something that is not fixed.139

137

Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan subsequently relocated to Brisbane, in 2006. Marian Pastor Roces, “Lani Maestro,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia– Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999): 212. 139 Lani Maestro, as quoted in Thérèse Bourdon, “The Art of Letting Go,” The Concordian (26 October 2005), http://theconcordian.com/2005/10/26/the-art-of-lettinggo/ (accessed 12 October 2011). 138

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If there is a direct source of inspiration for a book thick of ocean it might be Maestro’s vivid memory of contemplating the ocean as a child in the Philippines: “When I was young […] I just went to visit my mom who lived by the ocean and sat in front of the sea for hours and hours. It was very healing.”140 Elsewhere, we learn that the work “exists as an object of mourning for the death of Maestro’s Nany, her heart mother.”141 (‘Nany’ = Tagalog ‘nanay’ ‘mother’. Maestro’s nanay – and nanny – was not her biological mother.142) We might thus deduce that cultural memory is manifested in a book thick of ocean via the visual metaphor of ocean, of seas surrounding the Philippines and the personal memories they hold for the artist. There is also the ocean’s symbolic suggestion of cultural oscillation and disjuncture, common to artists working ‘in-between’ cultures. With regard to the latter, when she returned to the Philippines in the period after the lifting of martial law in 1981, Maestro came to the conclusion that she did not feel at home in the Philippines, but nor did she in Montreal: I was confronted upon returning from the Philippines with feelings of alienation and confusion, a loss of identity and no sense of belonging. I come from the Philippines and live in Canada, but I don’t feel like I belong to either place.143

While likely drawing on personal experiences linked to her past in the Philippines and her subsequent life experiences abroad, Maestro’s art is foregrounded in more profound philosophical questions about identity and difference, the self and the other, and the unpredictable “unfolding of new subjectivities”144 140

Michelle Antoinette, personal communication with Lani Maestro, 27 September 1999. Linked with this, the artist explains the significance of the French title of the artwork: ‘un livre en plein mer’ (a direct inversion of the English) evokes the idea of “the book out in the ocean field, that which facilitated mourning ... literally and philosophically [...;] mer is ‘mother’ in French.” Antoinette, personal communication with Maestro, 16 March 2014. 141 Keith Wallace, “The beauty of rupture: Artists of Asian descent and Canadian identity,” A R T AsiaPacific 24 (1999): 70. 142 Antoinette, personal communication with Lani Maestro, 16 March 2014. 143 At Home and Abroad: 20 Contemporary Filipino Artists, ed. Dana Friis–Hansen, Jeff Baysa, Alice Guillermo & Patrick Flores (exh. cat.; San Francisco: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 1998): 51. 144 Lani Maestro, “Locus,” in Locus: Interventions in Art Practice, ed. National Commission for Culture and the Arts (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2005): 251. Further immediate page numbers are in the main text.

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in the art-making process. Her works are therefore also deeply implicated in a kind of art premised on the subject’s relational aesthetic encounter and harnessing poetic and affective possibilities. Furthermore, they are underscored by the organicism of the creative process and the unpredictability of making art, of not knowing what is to unfold, to come, to become. Maestro’s art is guided by a philosophy of “engagement in not-knowing […] the pleasure of making art, not second-guessing criticism by being pre-occupied with theory, with adapting and second-guessing the cultural perspective and the reception of work not yet done” (251). Obvious visual markers of cultural affiliation – potentially delimiting/foreclosing audience engagement by evoking a didactic identitarian politics – are absent in much of Maestro’s art practice, allowing the artist to contemplate the complexity of her own subjectivity through her art, at the same time as allowing viewers to explore their own. As with much of Maestro’s art, a book thick of ocean activates a reflection and questioning of difference: i.e. Derridean or Kristevan différance in its broad philosophical sense – “what do we see when we begin to look at the other within ourselves?” (250). It is in this sense that a book thick of ocean, much like other artwork by Maestro, moves us beyond an identitarian politics of representation (nation, ethnicity, Asianness, etc.) to more philosophical considerations about the self and the other and the relationship between them. Maestro elaborates: Difference could be located within those spaces deemed as failed or coopted if we would accept that social reality is in constant flux, where various subjectivities unfold and reveal complexities that are transformed as they transform us. (248) Coming to my other through mortality was a very important point in understanding difference […] Fluidity, difference, non-fixity. The self in permanent mutation. (250) Art can have a recuperative potential, which is based in the possibility of silence to function as language. The relationship between silence and enunciation, between nothingness and traces, has evolved in my work in ways that acknowledge the possibilities of paradox. This has become a way for me to apprehend a fuller and more complex conception of “difference,” so that when I say difference, I don’t mean uniqueness or singularity, but rather I mean the processes of continuous differentiation, of “difference within difference.” (251)

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The Fifth Wave In her A P T 3 essay on Maestro’s a book thick of ocean, Pastor Roces evokes the paradoxes inherent in Maestro’s practice – of solids and emptiness, self and other: “Evaporate” may be the better term for apprehending the politics of this work […] From an early straightforward activism, she precipitated herself into today’s artist who seeks to wear away at ideologies of solids (fullnesses and hardnesses sealed from any notion of vital emptiness) by the constant action of fluidities. It is well to observe that what escapes her telling are not necessarily matters that have disappeared or selves that have been abandoned to the past. It may be said that she who dreams of the other is also the other who is dreamt, and time and person evaporate and re-coalesce, but do not solidify into further increments or oppressive monoliths. Things escape telling because the available words for telling – for instance, by recourse to the word “empty” – are not adequate to the stories. Best the emptiness that limbs.145

Figure 9: Lani Maestro, a book thick of ocean (1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

145

Pastor Roces, “Lani Maestro,” 212.

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In its allusion to the ocean of her childhood, Maestro’s a book thick of ocean is potentially a reminder of the fluid waters surrounding the Philippines and the archipelago of Southeast Asia more broadly. But, as she herself tells us, this work is less about identifying the Philippines and more about the complexities of identity-in-becoming – not only of the artist’s becoming but also of our own in affective and self-reflexive relation to her artwork. In this sense, a book thick of ocean is possibly about oceans everywhere but possibly, too, the invocation of a vast space of repeating, endless void in which to contemplate our being in the world is of little relevance to Oceanic things and is, rather, a personal revelation of the human condition and spirit. By contrast, as we shall now see, the artist Yee I-Lann purposefully evokes another sea – the Sulu Sea.

Fluid Encounters II: Yee I-Lann’s Sulu Stories The series of surreal photo-montages which make up Sulu Stories (2005) is the artist Yee I-Lann’s conscious and deliberate tracing of her cultural background – as a Sabahan who has looked out from the Malaysian island Pulau Selingan off the coast of Sandakan, pondering the Philippine island of Pulau Bakkungan Besar on her left, and the Malaysian Pulau Bakkungan Kecil on her right, and the myriad stories of historical encounter that connect them. Between them is the Sulu Sea, a marker of space and place which registers at once both connection and disjuncture across the slippery borders of Malaysia and the Philippines, but also that edge of horizon between sky and sea so integral to Yee’s practice. The artist’s crosscultural experiences in creating the series are telling: Whilst in the Philippines I was constantly asked, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘I am from Sabah’, I would answer. ‘Ah, a Filipina’ was the common response. I smile but am thinking difficult surf, troubled waters, dive in the deep end, not drowning, waving… But I am welcomed with a knowing embrace; we know we are connected; our histories, fate and horizon line is shared. A Sabahan in the Philippines has no option but to address Sulu, I just wasn’t sure where to begin.146

This sense of connected yet dispersed, disassociated identities across the Sulu Sea is made obvious in the serene and lyrical image entitled Map, in which a 146

Yee I-Lann, “Sulu Stories,” in Fluid World: Yee I-Lann, ed. Beverly Yong & Adeline Ooi (Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art and RogueArt, 2010): 91.

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young man and woman stand on opposite sides of the frame, facing away from each other’s gaze, but remaining attached by sweeping filaments of hair that stretch across the seascape – their shared surroundings and scene of mutual belonging. It is this sea of Yee’s ancestry that is at once the focal subject-matter of Sulu Stories and the scenic stage for dramatizing stories about Sulu, recalling its pasts for our present. Yee elaborates: The Sulu Sea, powered by the pull of the moon, filled with her tears, becomes my vessel on which to suture the dioramas I had found. It is a haunted sea, barred to the world for over thirty years by the currents of politics and prejudice and guarded by the ancient Tausug ‘People of the Current’ and Bajau ‘Sea People’ that turn to pray to the horizon of Mecca. The sea is their life, land a graveyard. The sea for a millennia brought with it empires, traders from every corner of the world and yet the peoples of Sulu ride the currents and hold their frontiers. The sea is the constant backdrop to the hundreds of stories I encountered, the subjects tantalizing: pirates, slaves, opium, M16s, Priests, wars, kidnappings, Tau Taus, typhoons, shipwrecks, Boogey men and Sultans.147

Figure 10: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: Barangay (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

147

Yee I-Lann, “Sulu Stories,” 91.

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Figure 11: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: The Archipelago (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

Here we have a geography that is overflowing with narratives of Sulu history, mythology, identity, and, ultimately, stories of Southeast Asian connection which serve to unsettle contemporary postcolonial boundaries of nation and their related hegemonies of political and economic territorialization. Invoked in Sulu Stories instead are the historical flows of cultural contact and encounter which characterized the everyday life experiences and mythological imaginings of seafaring indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia in earlier periods, as well as more contemporary stories of connection. But historical and modern divides are also suggested, as a result of religious violence and political upheaval. Such tensions carry beyond Sulu itself into the expanse of colonial networks, postcolonial Malaysian and Philippine politics, and transnational global histories. Yee elaborates: With ‘Sulu Stories’, each picture is a beginning point. By exploring the past we fabricate our understanding of the present. Sabah and the Sulu zone is an archipelago. The horizon is dominant. Borders are watery. […] I have always been aware of Sulu as an intrinsic part of Sabah history. I am also attracted to the region's history as the sovereignty of Sabah (complicated by British colonial rule), which is currently under contention at The Hague and was a major part of the Konfrontasi with Indonesia and the Philippines in the 60s.148

Sulu Stories offers an array of intriguing scenes in which different characters and landscapes point subtly to episodes in Sulu’s history, acting as clues to Sulu’s past and enticing us to probe further into these histories. If we follow the lines of investigation and are able to decode the wealth of signs and pat148

Yee I-Lann, as quoted in Gina Fairley, “Not drowning… waving: Intersections in the Sulu Sea,” http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2006/yee_i_lann (accessed 12 October 2006).

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terns of construction and deconstruction that are Yee’s aesthetic tools, we learn much about the sea of Sulu. Barangay appropriates the image of the manunggul burial jar – a national treasure of the Philippines housed in the country’s National Museum. With its accompanying boat and two spirit figures, Barangay suggests the historic journey of the manunggul, originating in Palawan, and recalls the seafaring life of Sulu’s peoples. In the Philippines, the term barangay is now used to refer to the smallest administrative unit or village, but it derives from the Malay word balangay, ‘sailboat’. “The etymology of the word,” Yee explains, “neatly illustrates the social political geographical landscape and its shifting context.”149 If Map registers familial attachments, other images in the series suggest the region’s discordant histories. In The Chi-lin of Calauit, Yee points to the incongruous animal inhabitants of the tiny island of Calauit in the Philippines province of Palawan, a curious and problematic legacy of the dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. In the 1970s, the Marcoses cleared the local inhabitants and native fauna of the island to re-create a savannah-like tourist park in the tropics, complete with giraffes, zebras, and antelopes imported from Africa. In Yee’s depiction of Calauit, the ominously grey clouds which hang overhead forecast the gloomy future for both the foreign animals and the indigenous inhabitants, whose respective modes of existence are constantly at odds with each other. In Brothers in Arms, the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is pictured alongside Tun Mustapha, the first governor of the Malaysian state of Sabah, who was also responsible for the mass conversion of non-Muslim indigenous people of Sabah to the Muslim faith and purportedly cherished ambitions to create an independent Muslim Sulu state. Yee’s image recalls Tun Mustafa’s close ties to Muslim politicians in the region and beyond, including with Libya’s Gaddafi, who is said to have assisted by offering money, arms, and refuge in support of rising militant Islamic groups. Referencing the American Western film of the same name, High Noon registers U S -colonial conflict while Song of the Keris, Landmark, Sarang, Sarung, and Shell remind us of pre-colonial, indigenous presence. Thus, Sulu Stories also expresses the tensions which continue to be felt in the region as a result of clashing Spanish, British, Dutch, and American colonialisms and the 149

Yee I-Lann, as quoted in Fairley, “Not drowning… waving: Intersections in the Sulu Sea.”

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related contestations of indigenous, Islamic, and Christian traditions. Yee further explains these legacies of contact: In the last 30 years, Sulu has been shut off from the world, as militant groups like Moro National Liberation Front remain active. Earlier crosscultural engagements came with Chinese merchants who started trading in the area about 1,000 years ago and also Arabic traders who brought religion. Different indigenous groups also have legitimate claims over the islands. The area is populated by peoples with maritime nomadic traditions that did not recognise borders and still many do not possess passports […] essentially this work addresses the accidents of histories and the influences of ‘imagined communities’.150

Sulu Stories is no doubt also the artist’s tracing of personal memory and family ancestry. Born in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, on Malaysia’s east coast (to a Sino-Kadazan151 father and mother of European New Zealand ancestry), Yee had a childhood replete with stories of the Sulu Sea. Despite her mixed ancestry, education in Australia, and itinerant existence as an international contemporary artist, Yee strongly identifies with her Sabahan heritage and lives and works from Malaysia. Sulu Stories might then also be read as an act of self-

Figure 12: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: Map (2005). Image courtesy of the artist. 150

Yee I-Lann, as quoted in Alan Cruickshank, “Yee I-Lann’s Floating World,” Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Art and Culture 39.4 (2010): 272. 151 Kadazans comprise the largest indigenous ethnic group of Sabah.

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Figure 13: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: The Landmark (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 14: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: The Ch’i-lin of Calauit (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 15: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: Brothers in Arms (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

exploration and recollection. In fact, during her youth Yee was privy to magical stories about “the dragon that lived on Mount Kinabalu in Sabah. Its favourite plaything was a giant pearl ‘the size of a tennis ball’”; she subsequently learned from her conversations with locals in Palawan while conducting research for Sulu Stories that the world’s largest and highest quality pearls were to be found in the Sulu Sea.152 As Yee investigated further, she discovered other alluring myths, legends and histories. Indeed, Yee’s artwork combines the analytic skills of a researcher with the creative talent of the artist, bringing history and ethnography to the fore. Thus, 152

Yee I-Lann, “Sulu Stories,” 91.

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Sulu Stories is Yee’s layering and weaving of personal memory, mythology, historical archives, and contemporary documentation. For her archival research into historical texts and images, Yee explored the Filipiniana Heritage Library in Manila, the Sabah State Museum, and the Sabah State Archive in Kota Kinabalu.153 Although Yee draws on the factual material she has sourced from archives, what she finally presents in Sulu Stories is, rather, a fabrication of her own making, which layers her own memories and recalled myths of Sulu with the drier stuff of recorded fact. This is reinforced by her medium – a manipulation of photography which harnesses documentary truth to make fiction in order finally to reflect a multiplicity of actual and possible histories. Yee is less interested in representing the literal reality of Sulu, and is captivated more by a general sense of the feeling of place and culture imbuing that reality – as she puts it, “the temperament of place”: History to me is about an armament of understanding and also empathy. I love the idea of the temperament of place. To understand a place we need to understand what it has been through, in all the plurality of experience. History never ends but should always be seen as part of the present and build the future. History is used all the time but in a very superficial, agenda-full manner. It is generally not appreciated as a source of great richness in understanding humanity or just simply enthralling storytelling. I would not presume to educate anyone about history through my work, I am neither a historian nor an academic. I am an artist, a highlighter pen, I give no answers but there is value in asking the right questions at the right time. I like to think I bring attention to ideas that are worth discussing.154

In The Archipelago, we encounter the incongruous presence of a figure on horseback atop a collection of rocks, an appropriated image of the last Sultan of Sulu, Jamalul Kiram II, who died in 1936. The ‘highlighter pen’ Yee uses here draws our attention to the history of the Sultanate of Sulu, formed in 1450 and for centuries in friendly alliance in matters of trade and defence with the Philippines, Indonesia, and Brunei; it was also able to withstand the colonial presence of the Spanish (and, later, of the U S A ) in the region. 153

Yee’s research fieldwork for Sulu Stories, in the Philippines and Sabah, was supported by the Goethe-Institut exchange programme on Southeast Asian connectivities. As Beverly Yong explains, “entering the Sulu region itself was discouraged,” given incidents of kidnapping and violence there. See Beverly Yong, “Introduction: Yee ILann: citizen of the fluid world,” in Fluid World: Yee I-Lann, 9. 154 Yee I-Lann, as quoted in Cruickshank, “Yee I-lann’s Floating World,” 272.

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Figure 16: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: Song of the Keris (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 17: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: High Noon (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

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The tree which spreads its branches across the seascape relates to a species taken root in Southeast Asia but indigenous to South America (the Caesalpinacaeae). Yee photographed this particular tree in Manila, at the Fallen American Soldier cemetery. The Bahala Cliffs of Sandakan form the coastline and signify the importance of these cliffs as centuries-old physical markers for the region’s sea-navigating peoples and traders. Finally, the scattering of islands and rock forms in the foreground are in fact a digital montage of individual photographs of rocks and coral that Yee had collected from the coasts of Palawan and Sabah. Thus, we see across the series how Yee uses artifice to entice us into Sulu’s histories, whereby actual, disparate elements of the Sulu region, photographed by Yee as separate representations in different times and spaces, come together as one in a surreal, digitally manipulated montage, finally evoking a sense of holistic landscape and of a unified historical and cultural narrative. Explaining the formal composition and effect of the work, the curator Matt Cox observes: A photographic skeleton is compiled from scattered sources across time and place and then built into a tightly cohesive image. Collated, the scattered visions collapse the singular linear relationships of historical events, people and places and create multiple simultaneous associations that open up history to multi-dimensional readings. […] The manipulation and morphology evident in the work reveals itself as artifice. Self-referentially the work explores the subjectivity of its own narrative whilst simultaneously examining the prejudices of any history.155

In this sense, not unlike Maestro’s a book thick of ocean, Sulu Stories is a call to reflection on one’s own subjectivity and histories in relation to those of others. Marking Sulu Stories as a turn in the artist’s practice, the Malaysiabased art writer and curator Beverley Yong observes, of Yee’s shifting oeuvre, “The question is no longer “where do I belong but, rather, “where and what is this place I/we belong to?,” “how do we look at the social and political forces that have shaped us?”156 In this sense, Sulu Stories is more than a straightforward retelling of the artist’s biography – it is, rather, an exploration of his-

155

Matt Cox, “Littoral Drift,” catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition Littoral Drift (Sydney: U T S Gallery, 2009): np. 156 Yong, “Introduction: Yee I-Lann: citizen of the fluid world,” 9.

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tory’s making and an investigation into the very politics and construction of present-day identities as they are inflected by the past. So, too, Sulu Stories presents tracings of a “fluid world,” a contact zone of regional and globalizing intersections and confluences as lived in the Southeast Asian archipelago with effects on the world at large. As with the lone sea turtle in Borderline which swims back to its home irrespective of constructed borders of human making, Sulu Stories recollects stories of deep human connection. If the tendency in Southeast Asia today is to obey the imperatives of postcolonial nation-building and its attendant segregations and territorializations, then Sulu Stories recalls the region’s historical and continuing cultural links, the enduring stories of connection across Southeast Asia, but also with the world, beyond the region’s fluid borders.

Figure 18: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: Borderline (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

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P ART II L OCATING S OUTHEAST A SIAN D IFFERENCE

Cartography is the signifying practice of both location and identity1

1

Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 8.

2 Mapping Regional Difference Institutionalized Cartographies of Southeast Asian Art

The [Southeast Asian] region today has vital vibrant art that has grown out of its particular social and historical circumstances. […] Constituting ourselves as active self-determining Subjects, the region can confidently assert itself in its art and aesthetics that are being built on its own terms, exigencies, historical and material conditions.1 What is necessary, to serve both as a bridge and as a barrier to the inevitable globalisation of Southeast Asian art, is a strong regional arena […]. We must construct an equitable and integrated Southeast Asian arena for contemporary Southeast Asian art – an arena that will empower the region to meet the cultural challenges posed by globalisation and the new suzerainty.2

I 1

there has been an expanding number of institutional initiatives which have sought to strengthen the regional network of contemporary artists and art collections in Southeast Asia. In the words

N RECENT DECADES,

Alice Guillermo, “Introduction: Affirming A S E A N Cultural Integrity in Art and Aesthetics,” in The Aesthetics of A S E A N Expressions: A Documentation of the Second A S E A N Workshop, Exhibition and Symposium on Aesthetics (Manila, Philippines: 8– 21 October 1993), Activities, Works, Symposium Papers and Discussions, ed. Nicanor G. Tiongson & Jovenal Velasco (Manila: A S E A N C O C I , 1994): 8. 2 Niranjan Rajah, “Towards a Southeast Asian Paradigm: From Distinct National Modernisms to an Integrated Regional Arena for Art,” in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information & Singapore Art Museum (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2002): 34–35.

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of Sabapathy, these are projects which seek “to foster a sense of region-ness in Southeast Asia by means of art exhibitions.”3 Prominent among such initiatives have been the efforts of Singapore-based cultural institutions to establish the island metropolis as a regional hub for contemporary Southeast Asian arts. In these kinds of art initiatives and projects, art becomes implicated in creating cartographies of and for Southeast Asia, in which certain kinds of representational maps of Southeast Asia are privileged over others. Just as Flaudette Datuin has argued with regard to the inclusion of Asian art in large-scale international exhibitions, it is important to ask, of these local initiatives and projects: what kind of map is being constructed, who are constructing them [sic], and what kind of story is this map telling? Why and how and in whose interest are these maps being constructed? What kind of ‘world’ is being constructed? Which spaces are foregrounded, and which spaces fall off?4

Indeed, the question of location, as I noted earlier, has been a persistent thematic focus in exhibitions of Asian art. In this chapter I focus on the locative question, ‘Where is Southeast Asia in exhibitions of contemporary Asian art?’ This line of enquiry echoes that of the art historian Patrick Flores, who asks the slightly different question ‘Where is contemporary Asian art?’5 The question is not posed by Flores to imply an absence of contemporary Asian art but, rather, stresses an investigative interest in the curatorial process and epistemological problem of locating it – both in place (Asia) and in time (contemporary) – and being attentive to its critical difference. However, in asking the more specific question of the place of Southeast Asian art, I wish both to address the circuits of visibility for contemporary Southeast Asian art within 3

T.K. Sabapathy, “Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art,” in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information & Singapore Art Museum, np. 4 Flaudette May V. Datuin, “Speaking to the World: The Filipino Artist Home and Away,” in Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts I I I (Manila: National Commission on Culture and the Arts, 1999): 82. 5 Patrick Flores, “Place and Presence: Conditions of Possibilities in Contemporary Asian Art,” unpublished paper presented at the 2002 Power Lecture in Contemporary Visual Culture series, the Power Institute Foundation For Art & Visual Culture, & the Department of Art History and Theory (University of Sydney), held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 25 September 2002).

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larger schemes of Asian art representation and to investigate historical and curatorial processes of that art’s representation – of locating Southeast Asian contemporary art in exhibitions, collections, scholarship, criticism, and even art practice itself. This question of locality not only prompts questions regarding the visibility and presence of contemporary Southeast Asian art, but also asks how it is that art is generative of and/or appropriated in the name of Southeast Asian-ness. In particular, this chapter focuses on the configuration of Southeast Asia and its art through the intervention of key institutional collections and exhibitions of contemporary Southeast Asian art, as well as through significant arthistorical work which documents and narrativizes histories for the modern and contemporary art of the region. Extending the cartographic investigation, my concern here is to focus more specifically on the art-historical regional mapping of Southeast Asia by exploring the use of contemporary art in practices of locating (‘territorializing’) and dis/locating (‘deterritorializing’) artists and their artwork in a place called ‘Southeast Asia’. In other words, I am interested in the kinds of regional maps of Southeast Asia that have been constructed and deconstructed through Southeast Asian art and its institutionalization. Importantly, as Rustom Bharucha suggests, this more localized focus on institutional initiatives which map the Southeast Asian region is not without its representational politics; moreover, it “cannot be separated from [their] larger implications in global culture.”6 As Bharucha argues, The new Asian museum offers a particularly embattled site to study the tension between global and the local, the intercultural and the multicultural, ‘Asia’ in Asia and the ‘Asia’ supported by the increasingly privileged hegemonies of the diaspora.7

Indeed, as is suggested in this chapter, the work of the contemporary Asian art museum is concurrently implicated in the intersecting currents of its local, regional, and global objectives, which together mark its specific purpose, positionality, and agency.

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Rustom Bharucha, “The ‘New Asian Museum’ in the Age of Globalization,” in The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Society, ed. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, & Ziauddin Sardar (London & New York: Continuum, 2002): 292. 7 Bharucha, “The ‘New Asian Museum’ in the Age of Globalization,” 292.

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A Southeast Asian Regional Agency There is a photograph, taken in 1993, in which key Southeast Asia-based arts professionals and historians of Southeast Asian art – T.K. Sabapathy of Singapore, Redza Piyadasa of Malaysia, Emmanuel Eric Torres of the Philippines, Jim Supangkat of Indonesia, and Apinan Poshyananda of Thailand – are seated around a table at a Singapore restaurant.8 The photographic import here is not particularly noteworthy; indeed, the photographer is unnamed and the image evokes a sense of the casual ‘happy snap’ taken to record a convivial gathering at a moment in social time. Despite its seeming banality, I would suggest that the meeting captured by the photograph has deep symbolic significance for developments in contemporary Southeast Asian art history. It is a rare visual record of an early meeting of leading art intellectuals in the region – presumably gathering on their own terms – towards the pursuit of intraregional art dialogue and exchange at a time of new interest in modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art across the region and in the world. By this time, they are intellectual figures who have already contributed greatly to their respective national art histories and who, along with others, are helping to sound a regional voice for contemporary Southeast Asian art and its history. What is also significant about the photograph is that the meeting it documents is undertaken from within the region itself, in the Southeast Asian hub of Singapore, situating the region as the principal site of method, content, and context. This is, then, an early instance of regionally focused gatherings, an intersection of autonomous Southeast Asian agencies in the constitution of a modern and contemporary art history for Southeast Asia, seeking to overcome previous colonial separations in the region. Indeed, this collective of art historians from Southeast Asia, alongside others before and since, has been at the forefront of articulating regionalist historiographies of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art. One significant effect of their art-historical efforts has been to re-invest the colonial label of ‘Southeast Asia’ with a self-defined regional agency. Along with their individual efforts to articulate art histories for their respective countries of affiliation, their collective work may be seen as a conscious move to overcome colonial divisions and reinvigorate regional cultural connections. Thus, 8

The photograph appears in T.K. Sabapathy, P I Y A D A S A – An Overview, 1962– 2000 (Retrospective Exhibition) (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara / National Art Gallery, 2001): 131.

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they both maintain and traverse the boundaries of nation-states and nationalist-driven narratives within the commitment to a regionalist framework. Invoking the effects of colonialism for the region, the Malaysian artist Niranjan Rajah observes that “[colonial] separation has also meant that we have modernized independently and that our contemporary cultures and art forms have developed in relative isolation from our neighbours.”9 With regard to contemporary art practice and its global circuits of art production and exhibition, it is ironic that it is only in recent decades that curators and historians from across Southeast Asia, as well as other parts of Asia, have become more fully acquainted with the art of their most immediate neighbours, hitherto obscured by borders of colonial division. It has also been said that, up until the 1990s, artists working within Asia themselves often knew very little about the art practice of their immediate neighbours and that the advent of Asian artists’ participation in international art exhibitions provided a key platform for forging new networks among arts professionals across the region. In the context of ‘The First A P T ’, the Filipino artist Santiago Bose remarked: Until recently, artists in the Philippines knew virtually nothing about artists in Indonesia or Vietnam. Now we are beginning to learn the names and through exhibitions like this, to put faces to the names and build friendships.10

Bose was also a participant in ‘The 4th A S E A N Exhibition of Painting and Photography’, part of the series of ‘Intra-A S E A N ’ cultural projects of the A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information (C O C I ) beginning in 1980, in which some of the foundational intraregional networks for contemporary art in Southeast Asia were established, preceding the ‘regional’ encounters within international art exhibitions of the 1990s.11 Since such preliminary encounters, a growing sense of regional art networking has been maintained through seminal regional and international exhibitions, including: A S E A N 9

Rajah, “Towards a Southeast Asian Paradigm: From Distinct National Modernisms to an Integrated Regional Arena for Art,” 26, 28. 10 Peter Hill, “Into the New Asia–Pacific Art Age,” Asian Art News 3.6 (November– December 1993): 71. 11 There are prior instances of A S E A N supported exhibitions before the establishment of the C O C I , which date back to the 1970s. See the “Preface” to the A S E A N Art Exhibition: Third A S E A N Exhibition of Painting and Photography 1984, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information (Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1984): np.

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C O C I exhibitions (such as ‘36 Ideas from Asia’, 2002–2003), the Japan

Foundation Asia Center exhibitions (including ‘Asian Modernism’, 1995; ‘Art in Southeast Asia: Glimpses into the Future’, 1997; and ‘Under Construction’, 2001–2003), the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum’s exhibitions, including ‘The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia: Artists and Movements’ (1997) and the recurring Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (since 1999), exhibitions by the Singapore Art Museum, including ‘Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art’ (1998–99); and the Artists’ Regional Exchange (A R X ) in which a number of Southeast Asian artists were included;12 and the ‘A P T ’ (ongoing since 1993). As the Japan Foundation’s Yasuko Furuichi has noted, this regional networking has been greatly facilitated by the availability of the Internet as well as English as a lingua franca.13 Moreover, the regional emphasis of Asia-focused arts funding agencies such as the Japan Foundation and Arts Network Asia has assisted in fostering and supporting exchanges and collaborations across Southeast Asia and Asia more broadly. Recognizing the proliferation of Southeast Asian ‘cyber’ or ‘new media’ artists, Hasnul Jamal Saidon and Niranjan Rajah (themselves cyber-artists) developed the interactive Internet resource E - A R T A S E A N O N L I N E in 1999 (@http://free.freespeech.org/eartasean/). The project initially sought to promote the growing new media scene in Malaysia14 but subsequently also served for a time as a “regional networking hub” for Southeast Asian elec12

Marco Marcon explains that the “subsequent shift [of A R X ] into SE Asia was determined by very pragmatic consideration [sic], namely by the availability of Foreign Affairs funds to support initiatives in that region.” See Marcon, “Artists’ Regional Exchange research report” (Perth: Department for the Arts, Government of Western Australia, 1993): 3. Zeplin reports that the first A R X exhibition of 1987 included the following ‘A S E A N ’ participants: Ponirim Amin (Malaysia), Chumpon Apisuk (Thailand), Genara Banzon (Philippines), Goh Ee Choo (Singapore), and Tonny Haryanto (Indonesia); the writer Kanaga Sabapathy (Singapore) gave a keynote address. See Zeplin, “The A R X Experiment 1987–1999: Communities, controversy & regionality,” Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools, annual conference papers, 2005, 14pp, http://acuads.com.au/static/files/assets/06ff15eb/zeplin.pdf (accessed 15 May 2013), 13. 13 Yasuko Furuichi, “Asia: A Collaborative Space ‘Under Construction’,” in Contemporary Asian Art Forum: Links, Platforms, Networks, ed. Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive & International Association of Art Critics, 2004): 22. 14 See Niranjan Rajah & Hasnul Jamal Saidon, “The evolution of electronic art in Malaysia,” A R T AsiaPacific 27 (2000): 64–69.

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tronic media artists and specialists. It consisted of a database of A S E A N cyber-artists and cyber-artworks, as well as a journal documenting the historical, theoretical, and critical issues surrounding cyberart development in the region. Significantly, it sought to capture regionally the otherwise dispersed processes and practices of Southeast Asian cyber-artists in currents of globalization.15 A further online project related to these aims was the Cyberarts Research Initiative established in 2001 at the National University of Singapore to support regionally based cyber-artists. As the then C R I head Irina Aristarkhova explained, among the central objectives of the organization was “to create a cyberarts and cyberculture database, specifically targeting artists and theorists from this region […] to support […] discussion and art production within South-East Asia.”16 The Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive has since 2000 been a pioneering force in developing a comprehensive collection of physical and online resources on modern and contemporary Asian art, including that of Southeast Asia. More recently, a number of specialized archives have been established, including the online archive S E A R C H (the Southeast Asian Art Resource Channel) – an index for modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art resources developed by RogueArt, specialists in Southeast Asian art exhibition and publication projects.17 Additionally, new country-specific archival initiatives have been launched in Southeast Asia, such as the Yogyakarta-based Indonesian Visual Art Archive (I V A A ), the Thai Art Archives (T A A ), the Malaysian Art Archive and Research Support (M A R S ), the archival work of 15

See Niranjan Rajah, “Digital Regionalism in an Era of Instant Information: A Malaysian Media-Arts Perspective,” in Site+Sight: Translating Cultures, ed. Binghui Huangfu (exh. cat.; Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery, L A S A L L E – S I A College of the Arts, 2002): 83. Rajah cites the late Ismail Zain as inspiration, referring to the latter’s hopes for a “critical regionalism” in the development of “digital art,” so as to counter “the kind of universalism which is the outcome of instant information.” However, I would suggest that the sense of contingency and relation with the universal that is evoked in Ismail Zain’s original formulation of “critical regionalism” is not emphasized as acutely in Rajah’s interpretation and follows a different formulation. 16 Rajah, “Digital Regionalism in an Era of Instant Information: A Malaysian MediaArts Perspective,” 90–91. The Cyberarts Research Initiative was established in 2001; see http://cyberartsweb.org/ccri/index.html (accessed May 2012). 17 See S E A R C H : Southeast Asian Art Resource Channel (A pilot portal and index for contemporary Southeast Asian art resources), initiated by RogueArt, http://www .search-art.asia/ (accessed 7 December 2011).

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the Philippines-based alternative platform Planting Rice, and the Cambodian Visual Art Archive (C V A A ) attached to the S A S A B A S S A C art space in Phnom Penh. Indeed, contemporary art projects have assisted in bringing together Southeast Asian artists and their histories in ways that have recuperated identity from the violent disruptions of colonization. It is in this spirit that Rajah defends the need for a regional frame: “what is necessary, to serve both as a bridge and as a barrier to the inevitable globalisation of Southeast Asian art, is a strong regional arena.”18 To this end, he prioritizes regional over national curatorial objectives in the face of globalization: the challenge for future curatorship in the region lies in transcending individual nationalisms and in negotiating curatorial protocols that will enable sharing of artistic values, resources, expertise, infrastructure and finances.19

Shaping a regional history of art for Southeast Asia, as Pastor Roces reminds us, is necessarily an encompassing of intersections of colonial history with precolonial pasts and dynamic cultural presents. Thus, there is a further challenge in developing Southeast Asia’s art history: to create new intellectual tools […] a calibrated terminology […] that allows respect for cultures that structured the absorption of things from outside, with a system of meaning that managed to grow and survive violent encounters with global hegemonies – though they may have managed to do so invisibly, or beyond the adequacy of dominant systems of representation to register. A calibrated terminology, therefore, that can also register the total extinctions of culture caused by the modern machine, and therefore, allows us the ability to mourn.20

Similarly, Flores proposes that a gathering and community of contemporary art and artists of Southeast Asia might be an appropriate “constitution of agency” for negotiating contentious and persistent colonial structures.21 Reasserting the regional importance of ‘Southeast Asian’ modern and contem18

Rajah, “Towards a Southeast Asian Paradigm,” 34. “Towards a Southeast Asian Paradigm,” 34. 20 Marian Pastor Roces, “Asia–Pacific triennial of contemporary art: words,” Eyeline 22.3 (Summer 1993): 47–48. 21 Patrick Flores, “Homespun, Worldwide: Colonialism as Critical Inheritance,” in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information & Singapore Art Museum. 19

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porary art is one such way to renegotiate and rewrite Southeast Asian pasts into present-day contexts, on Southeast Asian terms. Southeast Asia is admittedly an unwieldy category to contend with and there is always a challenge in addressing the scope of the region’s art and, at the same time, acknowledging its historical depths (including the particular aesthetic lineages from which individual artworks emerge). There is the risk of reverting to old nationalist categories of representation and, in so doing, missing the stirring and critical dynamics of relation across the modern and contemporary art of this region. One might, as others have done, investigate or test the art-historical or methodological uniqueness of what we might term a Southeast Asian ‘regional art’ or ‘regional aesthetic’, but while that is of some interest, it is not my central intention here. What I am more interested in pursuing is the alternative possibilities of aesthetic encounter and cultural relation through use of the regional frame as a heuristic and contingent device. Recognizing its critical utility, I am interested in the possibilities offered by the complex and protean frame of ‘Southeast Asia’ and its adaptability to the contingencies of art practice across the region, even and especially in the face of globalizing currents.

Defining Southeast Asia: Contending with Maps of Colonial Inheritance ‘Southeast Asia’ – an inherited geographic classification of convenience that at some level attempts to fix, to territorialize, the heterogeneous mix of peoples, languages, ecologies, religions, and habitats that have otherwise marked this region for centuries with its remarkable diversity. The term itself, however, is of fairly recent origin, developed in the context of post-World War I I political and military operations in the region which demarcated Southeast Asia as a threatening cold-war landscape of Communist opportunism.22 This regional mapping was subsequently formalized in area studies in the U S A and then elsewhere.23 As the Southeast Asian historian Benedict Anderson has 22

On the historical and, especially, colonial origins of the term ‘Southeast Asia’, see Russell H. Fitfield, “The concept of Southeast Asia: Origins, development and evaluation,” South-East Asian Spectrum 4.1 (1975): 42–51; and Donald Emmerson, “Southeast Asia – what’s in a name?,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15.1 (1984): 1–21. 23 See Berger, “Decolonisation, Modernisation and Nation-Building: Political Development Theory and the Appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia, 1945–1975,”

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outlined, the category of ‘Southeast Asia’ is an invention of the West in its neo-imperial response to nationalist aspirations.24 Our modern Western understanding of a place called ‘Southeast Asia’ was initially that of a territory linked principally by the experiences of colonization, war, and decolonization. Implicated in this is the colonial demarcation of Southeast Asia as a region that is further divided by the modern, autonomous nation-states that persist today.25 Of course, as the work of Anderson and others demonstrates, Southeast Asian studies have since sought to revalorize both pre- and postcolonial commonalities and discrepancies across the region. This has occurred alongside revised methodologies for studying Southeast Asia and critical attention to the strengths and weaknesses of various ‘area-studies’ approaches.26 Particularly since the late 1990s, Southeast Asian studies have come under intense scrutiny as scholars wrestle with the problem of developing appropriate research methods for studying the region in the face of galloping globalization. For one

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34.3 (2003): 423 n.5. See the sections “The Emergence of the Concept of Southeast Asia” and “The Coherence of Southeast Asia” in Martin W. Lewis & Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: U of California P , 1997): 170–76. 24 Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London & New York: Verso, 1998). 25 For a discussion of the cartographic demarcation of new Southeast Asian states, see Nicholas Tarling, Nations and States in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998), and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 1994). The latter refers especially to Thailand in the context of Southeast Asia. 26 On the crisis of area studies, see, for instance: Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America. ed. Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes & Karl Hutterer (Ann Arbor M I : Association for Asian Studies, 1992); Benedict Anderson, “Studies of the Thai State: The State of Thai Studies,” in The State of Thai Studies: Analyses of Knowledge, Approaches, and Prospects in Anthropology, Art History, Economics, History, and Political Science, ed. Eliezar B. Ayal (Athens: Southeast Asia Program, Ohio University Centre for International Studies, 1978): 193–247; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31.3 (1997): 735–62; Tessa Morris–Suzuki, “Anti-Area Studies,” Communal/Plural 8.1 (2000): 9–23; and Peter Jackson, “Space, Theory, and Hegemony: The Dual Crises of Asian Area Studies and Cultural Studies,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 18.1 (April 2003): 1–41.

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thing, the essentialist basis of traditional area studies has been exposed as a shaky foundation for regional differentiation from within and inter-regional crosscultural comparisons from without.27 As a result, studies of individual Southeast Asian nation-states have proliferated alongside those on new intraregional and transnational relationships that connect Southeast Asia crossculturally and inter-culturally,28 and, in so doing, also connect the region with other parts of Asia and the world. Importantly, contestation of these varied methods for researching Southeast Asia has served to unsettle any essentialist or totalizing designs for the region. As more recent poststructural theories apply more subtle paradigms for engaging with the region, rigidly bounded notions of space and place have become increasingly untenable. Against homogenizing inscriptions of modern Southeast Asia, new arthistorical definitions of the region propose this “metageographic”29 space as a necessarily heterogeneous and ever-changing cartography. Sabapathy, for instance, suggests that Southeast Asia is “a configuration that floats on shifting parameters and tremulous desires.”30 Similarly, Susie Lingham depicts the complexity of Southeast Asian-ness as always “already a paradoxical ‘multiplicity’, not reducible merely to a single motif but a repetition of morphing motifs.”31 These fluid definitions of Southeast Asia echo the rhizomatic dynamics of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and haphazard intersections outlined in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.32 Viewed rhizomatically, Southeast 27

Morris–Suzuki, “Anti-Area Studies,” 17. On methods for the study of ‘culture’, see also the anthropological perspectives included in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: A School of American Research Advanced Seminar, ed. James Clifford & George Marcus (Berkeley: U of California P , 1986), and George E. Marcus & Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986). 29 Lewis & Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. 30 T.K. Sabapathy, “Knowledge in the Arts,” paper presented as part of the Asialink Knowledge Forum 2003: Knowledge in working with the arts and Asia, Asialink, Melbourne (2003), http://www.asialink.unimelb.edu.au/arts/projects/forum2003 /transcripts_sabapathy.html (accessed 21 January 2004). 31 Susie Lingham, “The Crisis of Context: What Holds Heterogeneities Together,” in Text and Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Woman, ed. Binghui Huangfu (Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery, 2000), 167. 32 Unlike hierarchical “aborescent” systems of knowledge, “the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.” Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A 28

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Asian-ness comes to stand for a variety of cultural meanings for different people in different temporalities and spatialities. The geography of Southeast Asia is reconfigured as an assemblage of multiple and interconnected spaces, everchanging and ever-renewable in its possibilities. Indeed, Southeast Asia is a dynamic imagined geography of shifting contours, heterogeneous and porous cultural arrangements. The astounding geographical and social diversity of Southeast Asia defies any simple description of a singular Southeast Asian culture. Echoing this more fluid and flexible imaginary of Southeast Asia, Reworlding Art History attends to relevant poststructuralist theories and methods for identifying the particularities of contemporary Southeast Asian art alongside intra-regional and trans-regional networks of art production and reception. I would suggest that it is this notion of Southeast Asia as fluid, changing, yet distinct and connected that is invoked in, for instance, Yee ILann’s Sulu Stories as the work urges us to move between pasts and presents, stories of regional belonging and separation, contemporary global politics and myths and legends of Southeast Asian history, reflecting the real entanglements of history, politics, and culture in Southeast Asia (see Chapter 1).

Figure 19: Yee I-Lann, Sulu Stories: Sarung (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, 1980; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1987): 21.

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In their ‘contemporary art’, Southeast Asian artists reflect the differentiated and shifting landscape of Southeast Asia by offering a multitude of ideas and heterogeneous experiences. The sheer variety of art in the region complicates any straightforward and singular notions of Southeast Asian identification. For instance, some art chimes with the mainstream or official regional political and economic agenda – or territorialization – while other art communicates more individualist and transitional Southeast Asian experiences. Such factors hint at the plurality of meanings and experiences of contemporary Southeast Asia and its art. Moreover, the questions of what constitutes Southeast Asia (and where) and, in turn, its contemporary art are made more complex and heterogeneous as nation-states are seen to slip in and out of the regionally defined art-historical landscape and other intra-regional spatial markers besides nationalisms are acknowledged in art. While commonalities exist in areas such as history, geography, and culture, even these are differentiated and fractured as the crosscultures of gender, distinct pre-colonial and colonial histories, multiple ethnicities, and so on, defy any easy categorization of Southeast Asia and its art as undifferentiated and homogeneous. Moreover, like many other places in the world that claim regional commonality, the situation is not necessarily harmonious. There are political divisions and malaise, generated especially by ethnic and religious tensions. While the Southeast Asian region is today differentiated most obviously by national demarcations, its nations themselves can be a haphazard quilt of diversity. Indeed, the geographic and demographic variety within Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore has long complicated the idea of any straightforward nationalism, let alone any reality of a singular region. Political struggles over identity and belonging continue to test the meaning of nationalism in these societies. While national frameworks certainly continue to inform contemporary life in Southeast Asia, including art practice, the lived realities of intranational and intraregional difference must also be acknowledged. Recognizing the modern globalized context, Sabapathy, from an art-historical perspective, asks: how are nation-states, as sovereign entities to be mapped, rendered as operational in relation to a scope of a region? How does one slip out of one and into another?33

33

Sabapathy, “Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art.”

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Likewise, Arjun Appadurai stresses the ongoing importance of relations beyond the nation in his conceptualization of ‘post-national’ connections.34 Nonetheless, nationalism remains important in globalizing contexts, for, as Anderson observes, “portable nationality, read under the sign of ‘identity’, is [still] on the rapid rise as people everywhere are on the move.”35 In the creative domain, this is witnessed as artists move through international art contexts under the sign of national identity, highlighting the central tension between the persistence of nationalism and the increasingly globalized international sphere. While (as indicated above) the modern term ‘Southeast Asia’ was initially a geo-political construct imposed by the West to mark the forcefield of (anticommunist) operations in an arena of burgeoning postwar nationalism, in the postcolonial era societies within the region have reclaimed the term as their own and renewed its range of meaning, including its applications to histories of modern and contemporary art. The histories thus reclaimed have their very own trajectory of development and valency, distinct not only from the mainstream of Euro-American art histories but also from the catch-all category of ‘Asian art’.

Towards an Art History of Contemporary Southeast Asian Art A regional historical emphasis enables one to discern local trajectories in the development of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. It also entails refocusing the historical lens on Asia, where Euro-American colonialist discourse has often marginalized contemporary Southeast Asian art and the relative prominence of artists from other Asian locales, especially China, Japan, Korea, and India, has hitherto made up the Asian art canon. Southeast Asia sinks beneath the surface of generalizing currents of other Asias. Historically, too, our views of Southeast Asian culture have been dominated by the prisms of millennia-old Chinese and Indian cultural influence in the region (often 34

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1996). 35 Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah & Bruce Robbins (Cultural Politics Series vol. 14; Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1998), 11.

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linked to the legacies of Buddhist and Hindu traditions). From her own experience of studying Southeast Asia, Hau confirms this tendency: Southeast Asia […] has not been a place which has had grand state cultures or been the birthplace of great religions in the historical past. Historical scholarship has long defined Southeast Asia in terms of the development of Indianized states (Coedès 1968) or its participation in the Chinese tributary trade system (Hamashita 1997).36

Continued reliance on such frames posits the region not only as an imagined periphery of Euro-American modernities but also of the ‘great Asian civilizations’. So, too, reflecting on the scholarship of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and Georges Coedès as a means of drawing attention to premodern, precolonial connectivities for Southeast Asia, Sabapathy nevertheless finds bias in their indocentric interpretations, which tend to view Southeast Asia as a cultural “appendage of India” and “a passive dependency or cultural colony” of predominately indianized influence.37 This is not unlike those narrow present-day readings of modern-art manifestations as simple ‘transfer to’ and ‘imitation of’ Western modernity in Southeast Asia.38 Interestingly, the economic ascendancy of China and India in recent times sees the renewed influence of these twin powers on the Southeast Asian region in the twenty-first century.39 36

See Caroline S. Hau, “Colonialism, Communism, and Nation-State Formation: The Haunting of Asia and Asians,” in “We Asians”: Between Past and Future, ed. Kwok Kian–Woon, Indira Arumugam, Karen Chia & Lee Chee Keng (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society & National Archives of Singapore, 2000): 86. Hau is referring here to Georges Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, ed. Walter F. Vella, tr. Sue Brown Cowing (Histoire Ancienne des états hindouisés d’ExtrêmeOrient, 1944, rev. 1964; Honolulu: East–West Center Press, 1968), and Takeshi Hamashita, “The Intra-Regional System in East Asia in Modern Times,” in Network Power: Japan and Asia, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein & Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1997): 113–35. 37 T.K. Sabapathy, “Developing Regionalist Perspectives in South-East Asian Art Historiography,” in The Second Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996): 17. 38 In particular, Sabapathy investigates Ananda Coomaraswamy’s History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927; New York: Dover, 1965) and the aforementioned book by Georges Coedès. 39 This economic impetus is likely a factor in new cultural exchanges between Southeast Asia, China, and India, particularly commercial transactions underlining the

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In his efforts to draw attention to modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, Sabapathy has been at the forefront of developing an art historiography for the region and in so doing foregrounding a comparative regionalist approach that links separate national art histories. Advancing this narrative, Sabapathy noted in 1996 the tendency to adhere to nationalist perspectives in developing the histories of art within the region. Instead, he urged that modern art histories of Southeast Asia be developed on the basis of regionalist perspectives which recognize the particularities of Southeast Asia but which are also anchored in comparative, crosscultural models: Even as they [the Great Debates concerning modernism, modernity and tradition within the region] feature perennially, they are largely developed within specific country boundaries; no concerted attempts have been made to cross national boundaries and articulate, examine, these issues in relation to regional perspectives or perceptions […] In the spirit of propelling and engendering interests along these fronts, I propose widening the terrain of discussion and reaching into an earlier, pre-modern phase of the art history of the region […] Modern art historical art discourses have tended to stay within boundaries circumscribing post-colonial nation states. The principal aims have been to develop histories of modern art along national, domestic turfs. Rarely do writers step outside them to look at and ascertain the goings-on across boundaries. Consequently, comparative studies on a regional basis are undeveloped; perceptions of the emergence and development of modernism in terms of regional dynamics or in terms of historical processes particular to South-East Asia as a region have not been advanced.40

Sabapathy elsewhere notes the regionally inspired visions of the influential arts figure Lim Hak Tai, who arrived in Singapore from China in 1937 with rise of new Asian art markets in the twenty-first century. So, too, a different kind of exchange and collaboration process was marked by the Yogyakarta Biennale of 2011– 12 (Biennale Jogja X I / Equator # 1: Shadow Lines: Indonesia meets India), jointly curated by Indonesians and Indians and exhibiting artworks by contemporary Indonesian and Indian artists; and the first major exhibition of contemporary Indonesian art in China – ‘Contemporaneity: Contemporary Art of Indonesia’ – held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Shanghai, 2010. 40 Sabapathy, “Developing Regionalist Perspectives in South-East Asian Art Historiography.” See also Sabapathy, “Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art.”

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training in both Chinese and Western art. Together with others, including Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Wen Hsi, and Georgette Chen, Lim Hak Tai was instrumental in establishing the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore in 1938 and in forging a Nanyang art style. While the Nanyang Academy was modelled on progressive early-twentieth-century art institutions of China, especially in Shanghai with its hybrid Chinese/Western styles (both Chinese and Western art styles were taught there, the Western by Japanese and Chinese art teachers who had trained in European academic painting, particularly the eclectic School of Paris style), the Nanyang artists were also guided by the local realities of “living and being in South-East Asia,” at that time epitomized by the cartographic imagination of Nanyang or the South China Seas.41 The Nanyang vision, Sabapathy argues, suggests that “a sense of regionalism in artistic terms predated any political or economic mapping of South-East Asia as a region.”42 In this vein, Sabapathy sees Lim Hak Tai as an instrumental figure in developing these regionalist visions through art: He articulated the need to foster a regional consciousness and advocated that the cultural and physical aspects of the region be transcribed into pictorial reality […] the realisation of the vision of the Nanyang in pictorial terms crystallized into one of the most vital forces in the 1950s and 1960s.43

In other essays, Sabapathy further develops this pictorial basis for identifying a common, regional Nanyang art. His essay accompanying the 1979 Nanyang art exhibition, curated by Piyadasa, distinguishes the common themes of Nanyang artists’ paintings (which, he points out, also surfaced in art not directly linked to the Nanyang School) from the specific pictorial form which they adopted, arguing for the latter’s greater importance in marking the distinction of the Nanyang style.44 The subject-matter of Nanyang artworks, Sabapathy 41

T.K. Sabapathy, “Contemporary Art in Singapore: An Introduction,” in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 1993): 84. 42 Sabapathy, “Contemporary Art in Singapore: An Introduction,” 84; see also Toshiko Rawanchaikul, Modern Artists I I : Nanyang 1950–65: Passage to Singapore Art (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2002). 43 Sabapathy, “Contemporary Art in Singapore, An Introduction,” 84. 44 This is an interesting point of comparison to Elkins’ more recent reflections on what makes for distinctive art histories, different from that of Western art (see Chapter 1 above).

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argues, in the first instance treated themes “reflecting the surrounding reality” as an important but secondary principle – “by and large, the Nanyang artists looked at their surroundings with a view towards producing motifs in order to fulfill pictorial needs.”45 Theirs, he explains, was “an experimental approach, using styles and techniques derived from two sources: Chinese pictorial traditions, and the School of Paris.”46 As Michael Sullivan wrote of early twentieth-century Chinese art, with an uncanny presaging in 1973 of more recent postmodern and contemporary styles of international art, In the early 1930s it seemed that a new Chinese painting, native in spirit, contemporary in theme, borrowing techniques freely from East and West, was about to take root, while a new cosmopolitanism was beginning to colour the art journals.47

Sabapathy provides compelling analysis of various Nanyang paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, examining their formal qualities (including the influence of stylistic movements such as Cubism and Post-Impressionism combined with the ‘aerial perspective’ of Chinese landscape paintings; the adaptation of the Chinese handscroll and hanging scroll techniques to the requirements of easel-painting; studies of light in landscape painting and form in still-lifes; tendencies to abstractionism combined with Chinese calligraphic techniques; and special stylistic and technical emphases in portrait-painting). Significantly, he concludes: The works indicate a variety of interests and individual styles. The accomplishments of the Nanyang artists can be attributed to the adoption of an eclectic attitude which induced them to turn to a variety of pictorial schemas from different cultures and historical periods in order to produce a new art. In establishing their respective styles these artists, in addition to viewing their immediate surroundings as a source for motifs, also looked at art as a source for models. In these and other respects, their approach can be identified with the principal directions of modern art.48

45

T.K. Sabapathy, “The Nanyang artists: some general remarks.” in Pameran retrospektif pelukis-pelukis Nanyang (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia, 1979): 44. 46 Sabapathy, “The Nanyang artists: some general remarks,” 44. 47 Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973). 48 Sabapathy, “The Nanyang artists: some general remarks,” 46.

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Although dating from 1979, Sabapathy’s detailing of the style and techniques of the modern School of Paris and its significance to the development of modern Asian art currents is also relevant to present-day engagement with contemporary Southeast Asian art in the twenty-first century: The diverse styles and techniques collectively known as the School of Paris, manifest the new – modern – status of the artist, and a fresh approach towards art activity. The artist assumes a heroic stature, heightened by a sense of individuality and self-determination, and desires freedom from institutional constraints. Art activity is viewed as a ceaseless ‘search for the new’, uninhibited by aesthetic dogmas, the demands of patronage, and the weight of tradition; in this search the artist ranged freely over the entire history of all art, including that from non-European cultures. Furthermore, the School of Paris was not the creation of Parisians alone; artists from other countries and centres contributed significantly towards its formation. It must indeed have been an attractive model. More importantly, it was the only one which articulated and legitimized the idea of the modern in terms of art. In the absence of a comparable or an alternate model the Nanyang artists, like so many other artists in Asia who were seeking for a new art, turned towards it. In addition to proposing an attitude towards art activity that readily identified it as being modern, the School of Paris provided for the Nanyang artists a variety of pictorial schemas in which the obligations of traditional iconography were either minimised or neutralised by formal and technical considerations. The absence of such an iconography released the need to root the art object in a clearly defined ideology or value system. Consequently, artists were free to select from the available schemas features which were suitable to their own aspirations, without having to adopt any supporting ideology. The selection was governed primarily by formal (stylistic) requirements.49

Sabapathy’s reflections anticipate twenty-first-century debates on the shape of contemporary art history, particularly the antinomies of local specificity and global cultural influences (in shaping art’s production and/or reception). However, Sabapathy casts the local and global not as opposing elements but as productive intersections that manifest themselves in a distinct kind of modern art typical of Southeast Asia. He describes clearly the cyclical processes of cultural appropriation, transfer, and adaptation that mark the beginnings of modern art development in Southeast Asia (not unlike processes elsewhere in 49

“The Nanyang artists: some general remarks,” 44–45 (emphasis in original).

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the world at the time), but also registers its specific development in and adaptation to the Southeast Asian context. In so doing, he also reveals art-historical foundations for the continuing interplay of cultural and aesthetic considerations in this art – pictorial or formal stylistic preoccupations and thematic concerns bring into relief the varieties of landscape include fishing and rural villages, riverine scenes, city-scapes, and views of mosques and temples. Still-lifes feature local fruit, products of the sea, and domestic utensils. Genre scenes portray festivals, rituals, modes of work, and varieties of pasttime.50

In a later essay, Sabapathy offers a similar Nanyang-focused art-historical analysis of a painting by the Singaporean artist Liu Kang entitled Artist and Model (1954).51 A member of the Society of Chinese Artists of Singapore, Liu was not a member of the Nanyang Academy but maintained a close relationship with its affiliates, and was highly influential in promoting the Academy’s art activities and advancing its particular art style. Through postmodern interpretative methods, Sabapathy stresses in his essay the particular processes of art production that are integral to Liu’s Artist and Model – “a painting about the art of painting” – and links its stylistic properties to its art-historical context in Bali.52 He tells us of the artist’s ambition, shared by other artists (identified as Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi, and Cheong Soo Pieng, who, together with Liu Kang, undertook a now historic painting trip to Bali in 1952), to “widen the iconography of their respective practices as well as to construct an artistic identity that would be distinctive to this region (Southeast Asia).”53 To this end, as Sabapathy explains further, 50

“The Nanyang artists: some general remarks,” 44. T.K. Sabapathy, “Liu Kang’s Artist and Model: Thoughts on Art About Art,” in Postmodern Singapore, ed. William S. Lim (Singapore: Select, 2002): 132–41. See Sabapathy’s prior public presentation of this analysis alongside another painting by Liu Kang (Tenth Trip to Huangshan, 1989) in his paper “The Painter Depicted: Two Pictures by Liu Kang (Thoughts on Traditions and Aesthetics),” a paper presented at the First A S E A N Symposium on Aesthetics, in First A S E A N Symposium on Aesthetics: Proceedings of Symposium, Held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, National Art Gallery, October 24–27, 1989, ed. Delia Paul & Sharifah Fatimah Zubir (Kuala Lumpur: A S E A N C O C I , 1989): 38–43. 52 Sabapathy, “Liu Kang’s Artist and Model: Thoughts on Art About Art,” 137. 53 “Liu Kang’s Artist and Model: Thoughts on Art About Art,” 137. 51

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these artists set out to live and work in the one environment [Bali of the early 1950s] in which art and life appealed to them as integrated and as being unique. In these regards, they trod paths already contoured or mapped by others, especially from Europe, who desired a quintessential Asia […]. Bali met and fulfilled their ideals and expectations; they defined it as marking the other, to both China and Europe which constitute the ancestry of their artistic cultures. In the following year the four artists held an exhibition in Singapore, designating it as Pictures from Bali [or the ‘Four Artists to Bali’ exhibition]; it marked their coming of age in the art world here and was received as heralding the advent of a modern, Nanyang (Southeast Asian) pictorial art.54

Like Sabapathy, others have also sought to theorize the artistic distinctions of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art practices. Julie Ewington explores installation art as a preferred artistic medium in Southeast Asia in the 1990s.55 She proposes that the practice is a particular manifestation (a “renaissance”) of local Southeast Asian histories that enter into dialogue with international uses of the medium in the 1990s: “its renewed international importance […] has been seized upon by South-East Asian artists, deliberately and with vigour.”56 Importantly, in tracking this international renewal of the installation, Ewington sees contemporary approaches as part of a longer history of similar practices in the Southeast Asian region – “a far older lineage exists in the temples, shrines and customary observances of South-East Asia.” In the local context, installation art has often been synonymous with ‘Indigenous Art’, Ewington explains, given its regular appropriation of indigenous sources. Moreover, she observes, “artists in the Philippines have even claimed installation as the quintessential art of contemporary South-East Asia.”57 54

“Liu Kang’s Artist and Model,” 137–38. Kevin Chua takes up the legacy of Sabapathy’s scholarship on “Nanyang” painting and notes Sabapathy’s writings on the topic in the 1980s as an important “recovery” of Nanyang painting. See Chua, “Painting the Nanyang’s ‘Public’: Notes toward a Reassessment,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, ed. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi & T.K. Sabapathy (Sydney: Wild Peony, 2006): 72–93. 55 Julie Ewington, “Five Elements: An abbreviated account of installation art in South-East Asia,” A R T and AsiaPacific 2.1 (1995): 108–15. 56 Ewington, “Five Elements,” 110. 57 “Five Elements,” 110. See also Rod Paraz–Perez’s critique of the ‘indigenous’ label in Paras–Perez, “South-East Asian Sense and Sensibility: The Well-Filled Space, the Well-Cut Silence,” A R T and AsiaPacific 1.4 (1994): 66–73 (see Chapter 1).

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Figure 20: Liu Kang, Artist and Model (1954). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Figure 21: Cheong Soo Pieng, Tropical life (1959). Image courtesy of the National Visual Arts Gallery, Malaysia (Balai Seni Lukis Negara).

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However, even as Ewington points to the specific local cultural precedents for installation art in Southeast Asia, she also suggests its particular manifestations under the influence of the twentieth-century globalized art context: “installation is also a fine example of the successful indigenisation of imported cultural practice.”58 The sophistication of Ewington’s argument here resides in her attention to the conjunction of local precedents for contemporary practices of installation in Southeast Asia with “the international artistic mode made available through expanded global communications and travel”59 in the 1990s, thereby making a strong case for these as contingent currents, each fuelling the other. Similarly, the artist Raymundo R. Albano had previously proposed that the prevalence of installation in contemporary Philippine art is explained by the presence of similar sculptural and spatial traditions in customary rituals: “It may be that our innate sense of space is not a static perception of flatness [as in two-dimensional paintings and drawings],” Albano supposes, “but an experience of mobility, performance, body-participation, psychical relation at its most cohesive form. Thus installation is akin to fiestas and folk rituals, from all our ethnic groups.”60 In the Malaysian context, the jointly authored manifesto of Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa – Towards a Mystical Reality, issued in 1974 to accompany their conceptual art exhibition of the same name – sought to encourage a new kind of modern Malaysian, but also broadly Asian, art practice grounded in Asian philosophical traditions but in dialogue with Western artforms.61 This practice would not be merely a derivative of the latter artforms. Renewed attention paid to Asian mystical and religious beliefs (namely, Taoist and Zen influences) would, the artists hoped, see the repositioning of Asian art as situated ‘events’ necessarily marked by the art object’s intrinsic relationship to everyday modern life in Asia, and encompassing the “essence” of spatial and

58

Ewington, “Five Elements,” 110. “Five Elements,” 113. 60 Raymundo R. Albano, “Installations: A Case for Hangings,” in A S E A N Art Exhibition: Third A S E A N Exhibition of Painting and Photography 1984, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information, np. 61 Redza Piyadasa & Sulaiman Esa, Towards a Mystical Reality: A Document of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur, 1974): 1–31. 59

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temporal dynamics particular to the production and reception of art in Asia. The artists explain in their manifesto: It seems necessary from the outset to state that we are M O D E R N artists and as such, we are not involved with traditional Asian art forms. We are however borrowing from Asian philosophies in order to come up with an attitude which we hope will enrich the international modern art movement which needs to be considered in global terms these days. It is therefore not our intention to condemn or criticise all the major developments that have taken place in the west [sic] after the advent of the School of Paris. W E A R E H O W E V E R A T T E M P T I N G TO WORK OUTSIDE THE WESTERN-CENTRIC ATTITUDE

[…] The modern Asian artists have by and large opted for a scientific and rationalistic attitude and ignored the mystical and religious considerations which helped produce the great artistic traditions of Asia in the past. Clearly, the dilemma of modern Asian art to a very large extent has been the inability of Asian artists to identify themselves with their own cultural and philosophical traditions and values. The long periods of colonial domination plus the advent of a 20th century scientific materialism seems to have overwhelmed the Asian artist and left him dependent on a wholly rationalistic outlook. […] TOWARDS FORM.

IT IS OUR CONTENTION THAT THERE ARE ALTERNATE WAYS OF APPROACHING REALITY AND THE WESTERN EMPIRICAL AND HUMANISTIC VIEWPOINTS ARE NOT T H E O N L Y V A L I D O N E S T H E R E A R E . […]

It is our belief that the strength of the Asian artist of the past (especially the Far Eastern artist) lay in his ability to view life and reality in terms of the meditative and the spiritual. The mystical attitude of the eastern artists [sic] with its “spiritual” rather than “intellectual” outlook certainly contrasts with the notion of “art for art’s sake” that seems to be the fashion these days. […] THE ORIENTAL ARTIST HAS ALWAYS STRIVEN TO EMPHASISE THE ‘SPIRITUAL ESSENCE’ RATHER THAN THE OUTWARD FORM!

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Piyadasa and Esa’s desire is to create a conceptual, even spiritual, basis for the particular kinds of art practice being undertaken in Southeast Asia, rooted in local concerns and contexts. The artists’ plea for a new art-historical mode of thinking in Asia suggests the frustration felt by many Southeast Asia-based 62

Piyadasa & Esa, Towards a Mystical Reality, 4, 7, 14, 23.

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artists of the 1970s in their endeavour to articulate and make known the cultural distinctiveness of their modern art practices, which here, it might even be argued, tend towards essentialist and totalizing descriptions. Beyond the efforts of artists, art historians, and independent curators, a regionally defined art for Southeast Asia has been institutionalized through the regionally focused missions of various cultural institutions and organizations, and by commercial projects committed to forming collections and/or hosting exhibitions of Southeast Asian art. The following section tracks this and other regional institutionalizations.

Institutional Perspectives: Locating Contemporary Southeast Asian Art through Regional Exhibitions and Collections ASEAN Visions One another path that might be taken in tracing the matter of Southeast Asian locality is those curatorial maps whose main emphasis is on commonalities and continuities in the region, especially in the service of political-diplomatic undertakings such as the cultural projects of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (A S E A N ).63 In this design, the postcolonial nation-states of the region are brought closer within a new regional political frame. Political organizations such as A S E A N (established in 1967) have been instrumental in fostering a common regional identification among its individual countrymembers, encouraging member-states to pool their interests regionally in the face of global economic and political forces and to find strategic advantage in regional alliances on matters of international diplomacy and negotiation. Alongside its political and economic objectives, A S E A N has promoted a cultural arm for the aesthetic expression of a common Southeast Asian regional identity – organizing regionally rotating art exhibitions, art award shows, and related art symposia – and confirming the value of art in articulating regional difference.64 The arts have thus become an integral instrument 63

Supporting this is the strategic appropriation of Pan-Asianist discourses such as the ‘Asian Values’ doctrines. 64 “The Association of Southeast Asian Nations or A S E A N was established on 8 August 1967 in Bangkok by the five original member-countries: namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Brunei Darussalam joined on 8 January 1984, Vietnam on 28 July 1995, Laos and Myanmar [Burma] on 23 July 1997,

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in the political constitution and legitimization of organizations such as A S E A N , an indispensable ingredient in the ‘soft-power’ modes of contemporary diplomacy.65 As A S E A N states, Since its establishment in 1978, the A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information (C O C I ) has been promoting regional cooperation and development by enhancing mutual understanding and solidarity among the people of A S E A N nations through various forms of cultural and information projects. One of the first projects the C O C I considered was the A S E A N Exhibition of Painting and Photography for the obvious reason that artworks best capture the lifestyles of a people and the character of a nation and preserve them for posterity, as well as bring them to the awareness of a great number of people through public viewings.66

The high value of art-as-culture in A S E A N -supported cultural projects shows how art may be used to political or official ends, as a form of cultural legitimation and “lubricant” in diplomacy.67 Emphasis is placed on cultural unity and uniqueness across the region. The risk in such endeavours is the slippery slide towards essentialist categories, in which Southeast Asian art becomes tied to hegemonic and totalizing notions of cultural identity, problematically assumed to reflect the otherwise differentiated and dynamic experiences marking the region. In this sense, the region is defined as “an untroubled temporal and spatial continuum,”68 with art and culture employed as strategic devices for massaging away regional discrepancies and divides. The danger of instrumentalization lurks in the basic pattern of A S E A N cultural projects, in and Cambodia on 30 April 1999” (A S E A N website). For a sketch of the history of A S E A N expositions and their role in fostering regional solidarity, see Sabapathy, “Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art.” See also the regional chronology of A S E A N and other Southeast Asia art events in Simon Soon, “Maps of the Sea,” S E A R C H : Southeast Asian Art Resource Channel. 65 See Joseph S. Nye, “Soft Power,” Foreign Policy 80 (Autumn 1990): 153–71. 66 A S E A N C O C I , “Preface,” to A S E A N Art Exhibition: Third A S E A N Exhibition of Painting and Photography 1984, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information. 67 Apinan Poshyananda, “The Future: Post-Cold War, Postmodernism, Postmarginalia (Playing with Slippery Lubricants),” in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner, 3–24. 68 Sabapathy, “Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art.”

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which participating artists and art professionals gather in ‘regional unity’ through the diversity of discrete if plural national representations. As Rustom Bharucha warns, The ‘Asia’ […] that is being celebrated in recent inter-Asian collaboration [of this kind] has less to do with the propagation of democracy through people’s movements or emergent struggles in civil society, than with the creation of spectacles and events in which ‘Asia’ becomes a new manifestation of cultural capital itself.69

Historically, it is true that the A S E A N Art exhibitions (or ‘expositions’) have stressed a diplomatic politics of harmony, cooperation, and unification above any national or regional tensions. This is most obviously reflected in the art chosen for exhibitions, which is largely uncontroversial in character, both in subject-matter and in medium, but also in the curatorial design, which has tended towards individual country-based exhibitions that demonstrate little engagement with potentially divisive (and thus often stimulating and thoughtprovoking) regional issues, in favour of the art and unguent of diplomacy. Furthermore, as the Asia historian Tessa Morris–Suzuki argues, “mapping the world in this way obscures human commonalities not based on geographical proximity, not containable within the frontiers of ‘nation’, ‘area’ or ‘civilization’.”70 Certainly, while such geo-cultural spatial maps have been and continue to be important in marking Southeast Asia as a distinct context for the development of art, they also tend to invoke essentialist geographies for art history and museology, premised on falsely hermetic and rigid notions of ‘place’. This approach necessarily limits our engagement with Southeast Asian art, which, as I have previously argued, not only expresses diverse forms of social identification but also evinces diverse modes of art practice that are often obscured in the desire for neat cultural classifications. One significant consequence of defining art in this way is that questions posed by individual creative intention, especially concerning matters of form and affect, have historically tended to be overshadowed by or subsumed under matters of cultural context or artists’ biographies. However, the contribution of A S E A N to the development of contemporary Southeast Asian art should not be unduly criticized. As I have previously noted, A S E A N -supported art projects and events facilitated some of the ear69

Rustom Bharucha, “Beyond the Box: Problematising the ‘New Asian Museum’,” Third Text 52 (Summer 2000): 12. 70 Morris–Suzuki, “Anti-Area Studies,” 17.

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liest regional networks and meetings, and have encouraged dialogue among contemporary art professionals from Southeast Asia. Moreover, exhibitions and symposia mounted under the aegis of A S E A N also give evidence of a critical approach to understanding and representing art from the region. If the motive of participating government ministries was largely to furnish a backdrop for diplomatic exercises, key art historians and professionals gathered for such occasions have discussed Southeast Asian art openly and in healthily critical terms.71 The general aim of such gatherings was to set up local frameworks for developing Southeast Asian art histories and exchanging art knowledge across national borders. Transcripts of such meetings show an openness among professionals to engage in urgent debate and critique regarding the constitution of modern and contemporary art from Southeast Asia and its developing history. The artists, art historians, critics, and curators participating in A S E A N exhibitions and symposia in the 1980s include Wong Hoy Cheong, Brenda Fajardo, Anusapati, A.D. Pirous, Imelda Cajipe–Endaya, Apinan Poshyananda, Krishen Jit, T.K. Sabapathy, Syed Ahmad Jamal, Ismail Mohd Zain, Alice G. Guillermo, Emmanuel Torres, Raymundo R. Albano, Redza Piyadasa, Sulaiman Esa, Roberto B. Feleo, Santiago Bose, Ben Cabrera, and Montien Boonma – figures who have made substantial contributions to the cultivation of contemporary art of the Southeast Asian region. Thus, the official cultural work of governments has been an important foundational platform for critical engagement with contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Institutional art curatorship has, of course, also played an indispensable role, via the exhibitions and collections of public and private art museums and galleries with a focus on contemporary Southeast Asian art. In the 1990s, the Singapore Art Museum (S A M ), the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (F A A M , Fukuoka, Japan), and the Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art (Q A G O M A , Brisbane, Australia) pioneered the promotion of contemporary Southeast Asian art in their exhibiting and collecting practices. This is true, in 71

For early evidence of such critical approaches, see, for instance, the papers and discussions documented in First A S E A N Symposium on Aesthetics: Proceedings of Symposium, Held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, National Art Gallery, October 24–27, 1989, ed. Paul & Zubir; and in The Aesthetics of A S E A N Expressions: A Documentation of the Second A S E A N Workshop, Exhibition and Symposium on Aesthetics (Manila, Philippines: 8–21 October 1993), Activities, Works, Symposium Papers and Discussions, ed. Tiongson & Velasco.

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particular, for S A M , the only institution which has the Southeast Asian region as its exclusive collecting and exhibiting focus and the only institution based in the Southeast Asian region. The efforts of these institutions broke fresh ground and generated unprecedented international visibility for modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art. In so doing, these museums also became key vehicles for the discursive production and dissemination of knowledge about modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art.

Singapore as Cultural Hub Since the early 1990s, as part of the government’s efforts to position Singapore as a regional hub for Southeast Asian arts and culture, regionalist perspectives have been strongly articulated in the cultural work of the country’s national museums, all managed by a central National Heritage Board: the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore History Museum (S H M ), the Singapore Art Museum (S A M ), and the National Art Gallery Singapore (due to open in 2015). Properly beginning its collection in 1993, S A M has taken a leading role in developing a specifically regional collection of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art. The emergence of the National Art Gallery Singapore will likely lead to a separation between modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art collections within Singapore, with S A M focusing on the contemporary and the National Art Gallery on the modern. S A M has amassed the largest store of twentieth-century Southeast Asian art internationally, and holds regular exhibitions of art from its collection. ‘Modernity and Beyond’, S A M ’s foundational exhibition of 1996, was the first to focus exclusively on the modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia, setting the stage for S A M ’s future trajectories. Among other exhibitions throughout its brief history so far, in 2006 S A M presented ‘Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices During the 1960s to 1980s’, coinciding with the inaugural Singapore Biennale; and, in 2007, ‘Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia, 1991–2011’, confirming the institution’s primary mission and remarkable achievements in the collection of contemporary Southeast Asian art.72 S A M has also instituted an ongoing exhibition series which showcases leading con-

72

See Michelle Antoinette, “Negotiating Home, History and Nation, Singapore Art Museum,” Art Monthly Australia 248 (April 2012): 37–39.

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temporary Southeast Asian artists in solo retrospective-type exhibitions,73 a further project in historicizing contemporary Southeast Asian art and artists and buttressing S A M ’s regionally focused mission. S A M collects art from a broad spectrum of Southeast Asian countries from the archipelago and the mainland, its collection presenting a broad range of ‘contemporary art’ styles, genres, and media.74 It has recently intensified its fostering of local Singapore talent by exhibiting early-career and graduate artists. Certainly Singapore has been at the forefront of developing Southeast Asian regional art collections, discourses, and networks. As the young nation has attempted to map its own national and global position in relation to other globalizing economies, it has also, quite pragmatically, sought to advance and legitimize its own modern cultural histories and those with which it is implicated within the region.75 As part of Singapore’s design to transform itself into a ‘Global City for the Arts’, for instance, the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board and the Ministry of Information and the Arts (M I T A ) set an agenda in 1995 to “position Singapore as a key city in the Asian renaissance of the 21st century and a cultural centre in the globalized world.”76 Furthering its globalizing agenda, in 2006 Singapore hosted its first international contemporaryart biennale – ‘SB2006’ – with the internationally renowned Japanese curator Fumio Nanjo appointed Artistic Director for both the inaugural and the second Singapore Biennale in 2008, and the Singapore-born visual artist Matthew Ngui given the leading role in the Biennale’s third show in 2011; significantly, for its fourth edition in 2013, the Singapore Biennale focused its curatorial activity on the Southeast Asian region itself rather than on the international art world for collaborations and artistic offerings. Moreover, as Singapore has striven further towards a knowledge economy, it has also invested great effort in developing new creative industries as part of its national 73

Artists in the series have included FX Harsono (2010), Amanda Heng (2011–12), and Lee Wen (2012). 74 “S A M ’s acquisitions policy devotes 80% of funds to Southeast Asian art, and the remaining 20% to the wider Asian region, such as China, India, Korea and Japan to provide a broader cultural context for the core collection.” See “The Collection” at the S A M website, http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/the_collection/ (accessed 1 October 2012). 75 See Wee C.J. Wan-ling, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 2007). 76 See Singapore: Global City for the Arts (Singapore Tourist Promotion Board & Ministry of Information and the Arts, Singapore, 1995.

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vision for the twenty-first century, with art playing a key role in this.77 However, thus far, this has been unmatched by government initiatives to develop art history departments and solid critical training in art theory and criticism to complement the growth in the economic cultural sector.78 Within this larger context, the S A M may be regarded as an important agency in developing the idea of Singapore as representative of ‘New Asia’, a new ‘world-class’ Asian city with its own modern advancements and reflecting the global pulse. By presenting exhibitions of modern and contemporary Singapore art in conjunction with those of Southeast Asia more generally,79 S A M has been able to situate itself in an expanded geographical and historical context, establishing a continuum of culture for the young nation at the intersection of the regional and the global. The S A M ’s mission reflects this ambition through a twofold approach which firstly configures the historical importance of Singapore in the story of the region’s art and secondly, its international place in the contemporary art world:

77

See the “Singapore 21” website, outlining the national vision for Singapore in the twenty-first century launched in August 1997 by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, http://www.singapore21.org.sg/menu_sitemap.html (accessed 11 January 2012), and Government of Singapore, “Arts and Creative Industries,” http://www.gov.sg /govern ment/web/content/govsg/classic/Info_N_Policy/ip_arts (accessed 25 October 2011), especially the subsection “Creative Industries” explaining the country’s reasons for developing the creative industries: “Creative industries not only contribute towards the economy directly, they also have a powerful, indirect impact on the rest of the economy – by adding style, aesthetics and freshness to differentiate our products and services. The creative industries also improves our quality of life and make Singapore more vibrant by stimulating awareness and demand for the arts, design and media products and services.” 78 See T.K. Sabapathy, Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and the Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (Singapore: The Art Gallery at the National Institute of Education, 2010); Wee, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore. 79 Exhibitions such as these include ‘Imaging Selves’ (1998–99); the two-part exhibition ‘Modernity and Beyond’ (Part 1:‘Themes in Southeast Asian Art’, 17 April 1998–17 January 1999; Part I I : “A Century of Art in Singapore’, 4 February 1999–31 October 1999); ‘Art of Our Time’, April 2005–July 2006; ‘Telah Terbit (Out Now): South East Asian Art Practices During the 1970s’, 2006; and ‘Negotiating Home History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991–2011’, 2011.

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the mission of the Singapore Art Museum (S A M ) is to preserve and present the art histories and contemporary art practices of Singapore and the Southeast Asian region. […] Through strategic alliances with international arts and cultural institutions, S A M facilitates visual arts education, exchange, research and development within the region and internationally. […] With Singapore becoming a global city for the arts, S A M ’s international networks bring about a confluence of ideas, and create a dynamic arts scene invigorated by international flows of ideas, talents, knowledge and resources.80 S A M ’s national objectives, contextualized within crosscultural regionalist

frameworks and international agendas, suggest that Singapore’s relatively young cultural history as an independent nation might be supplemented by recalling the longer art histories of the region alongside forward-looking international currents. In this way, Singapore becomes an exemplary appropriator and agent of Southeast Asian difference. By positioning itself as the cultural hub of Southeast Asia and the nexus for longer histories in the Southeast Asian region, the relatively young city-state also presents itself to the world as a nation of age-old cultures with a long-standing multicultural lineage which reaches beyond its predominantly Chinese heritage and ethnic population and which pre-dates its modern nationhood. At the same time, this cultural strength fortifies the nation as it participates in international membership of advanced late-capitalist economies, aspiring to ‘world-class’ status in all things, including art and culture.81

Japanese and Australian Gateways to the Region Cultural institutions in Japan and Australia have also been instrumental to the exposure and development of contemporary Southeast Asian art. Turner 80

Singapore Art Museum, “About the Singapore Art Museum,” http://www .singaporeartmuseum.sg/museum/index.php, (accessed 25 October 2011). 81 In his video “World Class” (1999), presented in the Nokia Singapore Art exhibition of 1999, artist Lee Wen reflects on Singapore’s obsessive compulsion to worldclass-city status. In the video, Lee is seen performing the role of a bureaucrat calling for “world-class airports,” a “world-class society,” “world-class museums,” “worldclass artists,” and other things “world-class” – in so doing, indirectly referencing Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong’s National Day speeches in which the repeated rhetoric of “world-class” was used to galvanize the support of the Singaporean public to make real the dream of becoming a world-class city. That “World Class” was included in an exhibition supported by the global mobile-phone brand Nokia adds further irony.

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makes the point that “Japan and Australia have both changed since the 1940s but in one sense both countries have, in relation to Asia throughout the last sixty-five years, been ‘outsiders’ looking in.”82 Indeed, while both countries have histories of complicated and fraught political relations with the Southeast Asian region, recent efforts to rebuild cultural partnerships suggest changing attitudes. Apropos of Japan, Furuichi suggests that part of the reason for mutual collaboration between Japan and its Southeast Asian neighbours is the urgent need for the Asian region to re-examine and reshape its identity in the face of pressing transnational issues since the late-twentieth century.83 The strong interest in Southeast Asia from Japanese cultural institutions may also be traced to political and economic currents in the 1990s, including Japan’s economic and cultural leadership in the Asian region, fuelled by the nation’s ‘miraculous’ postwar economic growth and a new regional outlook on a new ‘Asian way’ of capitalism. This was also an opportune moment to renew cultural ties with Southeast Asia after Japan’s history of imperial engagement in the region and to assist in fostering contemporary art in countries not adequately equipped with art infrastructure and resources.84 Since its inception in 1979, the Fukuoka Art Museum, now partner to the more recent Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (F A A M ), has been a leader in the collection and exhibition of contemporary Asian art, especially for Japanese audiences, carving a strong Southeast Asian art focus within this. It is the first institution in the world to develop a regionally (‘Asia’) focused vision for collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary Asian art. Significantly, it led the way in such large-scale exhibitions with its ‘Asian Art Show’ series (held roughly every five years from 1979 until 1999), which encouraged 82

Caroline Turner, “Cultural Transformations in the Asia–Pacific: The Asia–Pacific Triennial and the Fukuoka Triennale Compared,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience and Practice of Modern Asian Art, ed. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi & T.K. Sabapathy, 224. 83 See Furuichi Yasuko, “Asia: The Possibility of a Collaborative Space – Under Construction Project,” in Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art, ed. Kataoka Mami (exh. cat.; Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center & Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation, 2002): 13. 84 For instance, the Japanese curator Tani Arata evokes Japan’s cultural leadership in the Asian region in the 1990s: “It is our responsibility as Japanese to examine Southeast Asian art and increase our interaction to promote its development.” As quoted in Poshyananda, “The Future: Post-Cold War, Postmodernism, Postmarginalia (Playing with Slippery Lubricants),” 14.

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some of the earliest regional dialogues and cultural exchanges on Asian art at a time when much of the world still doubted the existence of modern and contemporary Asian art, and well ahead of the 1990s biennale boom in Asia. F A A M ’s Asian scope is defined by “23 countries and regions eastwards from Pakistan, southwards from Mongolia and westwards from Indonesia”85 and thus includes many Asian countries often left out of most exhibitions of modern and contemporary Asian art, such as Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, and Mongolia. Notably, along with more ‘avant-garde’ expressions, the F A A M collects “folk art, ethnic art and popular art” which F A A M argues “are important in considering Asian modern and contemporary art”86 in the broadest terms possible. Thus, the varied and myriad forms of ‘contemporary art’ practice across Asia are acknowledged and, as the former F A A M Chief Curator Ushiroshǀji Masahiro suggests, are considered important to the F A A M ’s mission of “re-questioning the European centralized value system that dominates the space and system for art.”87 Through its highly successful residency programmes since 1999, the F A A M has been able to offer rare opportunities to artists, curators, and scholars from Asia to develop their work and to build networks with others in the region; such opportunities have been invaluable to those in Asia’s historically economically weaker countries. These projects provide a means for the F A A M to cultivate interpersonal relationships with visiting arts professionals from Asia and a forum for sharing and collaboration among visiting professionals who in turn use their residencies to further develop modern and contemporary Asian art. As a result of its activities, the F A A M is also distinguished by its deep and wide-ranging knowledge of modern and contemporary Asian art based on its long history of researching and engaging with the region, its resource library, and its exhibition publications. It has maintained enduring ties with artists, curators, and writers across the region and its long-term dedication and commitment have not gone unnoticed.88 85

Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, “Collection Policy,” http://faam.city.fukuoka.lg.jp /eng/collection/clt_index.html (accessed 7 March 2012). 86 Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, “Collection Policy.” 87 Ushiroshǀji Masahiro, “Looking for Channels of Hope – The Art Exchange Programme of the 1st Fukuoka Triennale,” Document of Art Exchange Programme (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 1999): 5. 88 Artists such as Amanda Heng have reported positively on their engagement with F A A M , particularly the latter’s curatorial commitment to forging long-term rela-

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For Turner, F A A M encapsulates a mission to overcome Japan’s traditional isolation from Asia (and contested history when it did engage with Asia) in a radical and culturally inclusive art program which has helped to change perceptions about Asia in Japan.89

This obtained especially after the country’s wartime engagement in the region. When F A M re-invented itself in 1999 with the establishment of its partner institution F A A M , it sought to expand its Asian collection. It established its series of Fukuoka Asian Art Triennales in the same year, replacing the ‘Asian Art Show’ series and reconfiguring itself in the then widening circuit of international survey exhibitions of contemporary art. Other, non-Triennale F A A M exhibitions such as ‘The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia: Artists and Movements’ of 1997 (showcasing modern currents in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore), and the earlier ‘New Art from Southeast Asia’ of 1992 (artists from Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand) broke fresh ground, firmly situating Southeast Asian art within modern and contemporary art discourses. F A A M also partnered with S A M and several Japanese institutions to present the 2003 exhibition ‘15 T R A C K S : Contemporary Southeast Asian Art’ (featuring fifteen contemporary artists from ten A S E A N countries). In 2012, the National Art Gallery Singapore and the F A A M signed a landmark agreement to share their kindred collections in support of their respective exhibiting endeavours; ‘The Birth and Development of Singapore Art’, shown in F A A M in 2012 to celebrate the new partnership, gathered important works of modern and contemporary Singapore art from both collections to trace a recent art history for Singapore. Indeed, the F A A M remains one of the world’s significant collections for modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art and Asian art generally.90 tionships with artists (Author’s interview with Amanda Heng, Singapore, 4 June 2002). This is compared to the phenomenon (first noticeable in the 1990s) of the ‘parachute curator’ who zips into and out of a country on an express research tour. 89 See Caroline Turner, “Imagining The Future: Museums, Artist Spaces And Communities,” in Perspectives, ed. Asia Art Archive, November 2006, http://www.aaa .org.hk/newsletter_detail.aspx?newsletter_id=67&newslettertype=archive (accessed 1 November 2006). 90 While the F A A M continues to build on its partnerships, especially through residency programmes, its acquisitions have slowed and its Triennale delayed since 2009,

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For its part, the Japan Foundation Asia Center, Tokyo, served not only as an exhibition venue but also helped organize major Southeast Asia-focused exhibitions throughout the 1990s in collaboration with other cultural institutions, both in Japan (including F A A M ) and abroad. Such exhibitions include ‘Narrative Visions in Contemporary Asean Art’ of 1990; the aforementioned ‘New Art from Southeast Asia 1992’; ‘Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand’, 1995; ‘Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses into the Future’; and, again linked with F A A M and others, ‘15 T R A C K S : Contemporary Southeast Asian Art’, 2003. The Japan Foundation also gathered art professionals from Southeast Asia and beyond for a series of seminal contemporary Asian art symposia, beginning in the 1990s and involving leading artists, curators, art historians, and critics and producing important documents of Asian art discussion by way of collected transcripts and conference papers.91 More recently, the Mori Art Museum in Japan has begun collecting in the area of contemporary Southeast Asian art under the directorship of the leading contemporary Asian art curator Fumio Nanjo. To move south of Japan and Southeast Asia itself: the Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art (Q A G O M A ) in Brisbane, Australia, has also been vital to introducing contemporary Southeast Asian art to international audiences, especially through its series of ‘A P T ’ s beginning in 1993.92 The former Q A G Deputy Director Caroline Turner commented, on the eve of ‘The Second A P T ’ in 1996:

with an expected return in 2014. This is tied to the fact that, historically, a number of F A A M activities received support from the Japan Foundation, a semi-governmental international arts agency, in line with the Foundation’s aim to educate Japanese audiences about Asian art, but this has changed in recent times with the new priorities of the Japan Foundation to focus on the development of projects outside Japan. Author interview with F A A M ’s chief curator, Raiji Kuroda, Fukuoka, 19 June 2012. 91 Various supporting symposia have shown the Foundation’s commitment to critical discussions on Asian art (‘The Potential of Asian Thought’, 1994; ‘Asian Contemporary Art Reconsidered’, 1997; ‘Asian Art: Prospects for the Future’, 1999). The Japan Foundation Asia Center (formerly known as the A S E A N Culture Center) closed in 2003; the Japan Foundation now directly presides over arts and cultural activities. 92 Since 2006, the ‘A P T ’ has also been presented by Q A G ’s partner museum, the Gallery of Modern Art or G O M A , and since 2012 the two institutions have been rebranded as ‘Q A G O M A ’.

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Now I think that Korean, Japanese and Chinese contemporary art is moving on to the world stage – particularly since the late 1980s. But what we discovered when we started working on the A P T in the early 1990s was that there was still this extraordinary feeling in Southeast Asia that the world, as a whole, had neglected the incredible and very important developments that were happening there. Of course, things are moving fast now – there will be an exhibition [‘Traditions / Tensions’] at the Asia Society in New York in the same month as the A P T , put together with American and Asian curators, and there has been an attempt, I think, to include North Asian artists in major world exhibitions recently. But to my mind there still has not been enough 93 interest in the really exciting developments in Southeast Asian art.

Turner further explains elsewhere that the Q A G initiated the ‘A P T ’ with the stated objective of informing Australians about the dynamic and changing societies of Asia and the Pacific, to initiate a dialogue among artists, scholars and writers in the region and to build bridges to Asian and Pacific cultures, including within Australia’s own multicultural society.94 Q A G O M A has not only demonstrated its long-term commitment to art of the Asia–Pacific through its continuing series of ‘A P T ’ s but also, by developing

one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Asian (and Pacific) art and introducing new Asian and Pacific curatorial appointments in conjunction with its expanding Asian and Pacific art galleries. The more recent Gallery of Modern Art (G O M A ), the Q A G ’s partner site, opened in December 2006 with ‘A P T 2006’ – the first major exhibition at G O M A .95 As well as providing a new venue for the ‘A P T ’, the G O M A building also houses a new Australian Centre of Asia–Pacific Art for developing research on art of Asia and the Pacific. In the history of the ‘A P T ’ s, Southeast Asia has been positioned to different effect, but always within the larger geo-cultural imaginary of ‘Asia– Pacific’ that is the overarching framework of the ‘A P T ’ exhibitions (see also 93

Caroline Turner, in Peter Anderson, “Considering the Asia–Pacific Triennial, Interview with Dr Caroline Turner, Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery,” Culture and Policy 7.2 (1996): 95. 94 See Turner, “Imagining The Future: Museums, Artist Spaces And Communities.” 95 Complementing the Q A G space, G O M A was opened in December 2006 to coincide with the opening of ‘A P T 5’. Prior to this, the Q A G building was the chief venue for earlier editions of the ‘A P T ’ from 1993.

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Chapter 3 below). The very first show (‘A P T 1’, 1993), however, featured Southeast Asian artists most prominently, highlighting the art of Australia’s most proximate Asian neighbours. In so doing, the organizers intended to illuminate the dynamic new art practices of Southeast Asia – until then largely overlooked in international exhibitions. ‘A P T 1’ was subdivided into contemporary art from the regions of Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam), East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea), and the South Pacific (New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Australia), and within these a further subdivision of art by national groupings.96 More recent ‘A P T ’s have turned their attention to the achievements of individual artists or particular themes taken up by artist groups /collaboratives, albeit in some form of continued relation to artists’ country or region of origin.97 Notably, since ‘A P T 3’ there has been a significant broadening of compass. The geographical scope of the curatorial imaginary has expanded over the exhibition’s history, gradually allowing a broader notion of Asia as flowing increasingly westward from Australia, with ‘A P T 7’ (2012–13) looking to West Asia and including work by artists from Turkey through the Middle East to Iran and Central Asia. There has been, since ‘A P T 1’, something of a narrowing of importance of Southeast Asia in the overall ‘A P T ’ imaginary, given this expanding cartography of Asia (and the Pacific). However, renewed attention was devoted to Southeast Asia in ‘A P T 6’ and ‘A P T 7’, emphasizing changing social conditions and the shifting art landscape: ‘A P T 6’ in 2009 included a large section focusing on artists from the Greater Mekong Subregion (including Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, and Vietnam) and in the broader exhibition included individual artists from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand; ‘A P T 7’ (2012–13) returned to a strong focus on Indonesia, 96

By contrast, the ‘A P T ’ s of 2002 and 2006 focused on the representation of a much smaller selection of artists. In 2002, an older generation of well-established Asian modern artists (working around the late 1960s) were exhibited alongside a newly established generation of contemporary ones (prominent in the 1990s). Among the latter, contemporary art from Southeast Asia was represented by Heri Dono, Montien Boonma, and José Legaspi (see Chapter 4 below for further details of Dono’s representation in this exhibition). In 2006, individual Southeast Asian artists represented were from Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. 97 This includes, for instance, the China-related ‘Long March Project’ and ‘The Pacific Textiles Project’ for ‘A P T 5’; and ‘The Mekong Project’, ‘The Pacific Reggae Project’, and ‘Mansudae Art Studio and art in North Korea (D P R K )’ for ‘A P T 6’.

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alongside other younger artists from Vietnam and Malaysia, and more established artists from the Philippines, Singapore, and the Southeast Asian diaspora. By their very name, the ‘Asia–Pacific’ trienniales register a firm commitment to representing artists via the paradigm of cultural geography. This is unlike most other survey exhibitions of similar scope, which instead nominate their host cities in their titles (Gwangju Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, etc.) and adopt an international survey approach. Whether this is a culturally empowering or limiting exercise for the ‘Asia–Pacific’ artists involved may only be determined on the basis of each exhibition’s particular objectives, agenda, and outcome, given the varying models of exhibition that the ‘A P T ’ has undertaken over its history and its different cultural and aesthetic articulations of ‘Asia-Pacific’ art. However, the weight of ‘culture’, and the regionally specific commitment of the ‘A P T ’s to it, to some degree always influences the parameters of reception through the cartographical frame of ‘Asia–Pacific’ – as the art critic and curator Lee Weng Choy remarks, the A P T – if not by expressed intent, then by structural default – still functions as a discursive and event centre for geo-graphing the arts and culture of the Asia–Pacific in ways that maintain rather than undo boundaries.98

Apropos of this, Maravillas has argued for critical attention to be paid to the geo-political aims of the ‘A P T ’s, especially given the ambiguating effect of Australia’s own positioning in the ‘Asia–Pacific’ vision and its hyphenation.99 Notably, for ‘A P T 7’, the hitherto hyphenated ‘Asia–Pacific’ label was replaced with an unhyphenated ‘Asia Pacific’, presumably to register the shift in mapping from a category, ‘Asia–Pacific’, that attempts to conjoin and show affinities between two vastly different and separate regions of ‘Asia’ and the ‘Pacific’ that converge in a hybrid space, to a dual vision which looks to Asia 98

Lee Weng Choy, “Just What Is It that Makes the Term Global–Local So Widely Cited, Yet So Annoying?,” in Flight Patterns, ed. Cornelia H. Butler (exh. cat.; Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000): 137. 99 Francis Maravillas, “Cartographies of the Future: The Asia–Pacific Triennials and the Curatorial Imaginary,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, ed. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi & T.K. Sabapathy, 244–70. See also Margaret Jolly, “The South in Southern Theory: Antipodean Reflections on the Pacific,” Australian Humanities Review 44 (2008), http://www.australianhumanities review.org/archive/Issue-March-2008/jolly.html (accessed 17 April 2012).

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on the one hand and the Pacific on the other, particularly as the ‘A P T ’ curatorial map expands westward to encompass places such as West Asia which sit awkwardly in the cartography of ‘Asia–Pacific’. Despite these contentions of geography, there is a great deal of consensus that the ‘A P T ’s have been groundbreaking in creating an international platform for both the exhibition and the critical discussion of contemporary art from Asia and the Pacific. Beyond the ‘A P T ’ exhibition itself, associated conferences, educational programmes, and publications have helped facilitate the exchange of new knowledge, dialogue, and perspectives on contemporary art. If the earliest iterations of the ‘A P T ’ were forums for heated debate on how best to approach curatorship and representation of this new art, these went well beyond the ‘technical’ and were ultimately invaluable in creating an unprecedented discursive space for dialogue and exchange, both necessary for advancing, and working for the future of, contemporary art. As Lisa Chandler observes, The A P T s and the discourse engendered from them continue to provide a significant forum in which such complex questions are negotiated […] and played a role in legitimising Asia–Pacific contemporary art practice within Australia and the broader artworld.100

With the benefit of hindsight, the long-time ‘A P T ’ curator Suhanya Raffel summarized the aims and objectives of the ‘A P T ’s in her catalogue essay for ‘A P T 6’: The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (A P T ) is an ongoing project initiated in 1993. It is one of very few regularly recurring international exhibitions with a declared interest in a specific region; it addresses culture and ethnicity and acknowledges historical diasporas. It also one of the rare series sustained within a museum context. With every exhibition since the first, the A P T has been the subject of much discussion and debate in the art world and it has developed a large, dedicated audience. Its uniqueness, asserted through geography, provides structure and agency. […] With every A P T the definition of the region is tested.101 100

Lisa Chandler, “ ‘ The Asia–Pacific Effect’: Geo-Cultural Grouping at the Asia– Pacific Triennials,” Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 13 (2007): 42. 101 Suhanya Raffel, “A Restless Subject,” in The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Seear (exh. cat.; Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2009): 24, 26.

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It is interesting to see the Q A G O M A ’s repositioning of its collection within other curatorial frames for exhibitions which straddle the A P T s. For instance, for the major exhibition ‘21st Century: Art in the First Decade’ presented in 2010, the museum nested much of the art from its existing Asia–Pacific collection in a wider frame of global ‘contemporary art’ with international resonance. Hence, rather than flagging these artworks as specifically Asian or Pacific in origin, as is the usual practice with the ‘A P T ’s, the overriding exhibition discourse of the ‘21st Century’ exhibition enabled the repositioning of this art within mainstream currents of international contemporary art and its related discourses (“the big [global] issues and ideas that have defined the 21st century, from communication and design, to architecture, health and the environment”), and encouraged attention to the kinds of socially engaged or participatory art which have been much discussed since Nicolas Bourriaud’s endeavour to theorize a “relational aesthetics” in contemporary art.102 Over the past decade, technological, political and environmental issues have had direct global effects reflected in contemporary art. This exhibition examines current directions in art practice and also the conditions for art and exhibition making in the 21st century […]. At the heart of ‘21st Century’ is the Gallery’s contemporary collection. This exhibition demonstrates a new strategic direction and commitment by the Gallery to be truly international in contemporary art collection development.103

Not unlike S A M , in the twenty-first century, the Q A G O M A clearly seeks to position itself within both regional and international currents of contemporary art practice – perhaps a reflection of contemporary art’s increasing resonance across borders. ½™¾

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Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Esthétique relationnelle, 1998; Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002); and Altermodern: Tate Triennial, ed. Nicolas Bourriaud (exh. cat.; London: Tate Publishing, 2009); On the exhibition, see 21st Century: Art in the First Decade, ed. Miranda Wallace (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, 2010). 103 Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, “Past exhibitions: 2010: 21st Century: Art in the First Decade,” http://qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/2010/21st _Century (accessed 21 April 2012).

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New Asian Art Markets The international popularity of Asian art has no doubt been helped by its increased global marketability since the mid-1990s, and this has also contributed to regionally defined engagement with ‘Asian’ and ‘Southeast Asian’ art. As the global art world has experienced radical shifts in patterns of art sales and art market demographics, parallel with larger changes in the global economy and the new might of Asia, Asian art has become a hot commodity internationally and in art markets in Asia itself. This can be seen most dramatically among the newly prosperous middle classes of China and India. However, as the Malaysia-based commercial gallerist Valentine Willie explains, Even though China and India have to a large extent stolen the limelight in recent years, Southeast Asia’s 550 million consumers remain a potent market. Ten years of solid G D P growth at 5-6% combined with strong export-orientated industries has created a thriving middle class and a burgeoning business elite eager to acquire the trappings of the good life.104

Parallel with the growth of new Southeast Asian middle classes and Southeast Asia-based art markets is a new commercial influence on the kinds of art emerging from the region. As Dwi Marianto has confirmed, by the mid-1990s the growth of the local arts industry was causing market forces to have a negative impact on the value systems of the Indonesian art world. Collectors increasingly bypassed auction houses and worked directly with young artists to establish their careers – hence, profitability – from the outset.105 The new market interest in Asian art has changed not only the kinds of art that is most visible but also patterns of art-making itself.106 For Indonesia, as early as 1997 Marianto commented: It is now not difficult for a student to sell his or her works, especially those works that appear technically skilful and artistic. Styles that are realistic, surrealistic and naturalistic are marketable.107 104

Valentine Willie, “Art in Southeast Asia: An Introduction to Southeast Asian Art,” at V W F A : Valentine Willie Fine Art website, http://www.vwfa.net/kl/sea_work .php (accessed 15 October 2012). 105 See Dwi Marianto’s remarks on this situation in “Indonesian Art Developments Under Sosio-kultural Changes,” in The Third A S E A N Workshop, Exhibition & Symposium on Aesthetics, ed. Lee Weng Choy (Singapore: A S E A N C O C I , 1997): 92–94. 106 See Mella Jaarsma & Nindityo Adipurnomo, “The Point: What Are We Waiting For?,” ArtAsiaPacific 81 (November–December 2012): 47. 107 Marianto, “Indonesian Art Developments Under Sosio-kultural Changes,” 93.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unconventional media and often critical themes of more experimental contemporary art utilizing performance or installation forms have made them less commodifiable and less appealing to collectors. Similarly, given its often site-specific purpose, less tangible, communityoriented art practice rarely figures, if at all, in the commercial space. These tendencies remain true in the early twenty-first century if we consider strength of sales in the two major art auction houses of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where Indonesian art has dominated sales in modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art.108 The first major exhibitions of contemporary Indonesian art, in the U K (at London’s Saatchi gallery: ‘Indonesian Eye: Fantasies & Realities’, September–October 2011) and in France (‘Transfigurations: Indonesian Mythologies’, at the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton in Paris, June–October 2011), also point to the present-day high currency of contemporary Indonesian art in international art markets. In international markets outside Asia and mirroring the cultural dynamics of international biennales, art which speaks to easily read identitarian themes or is readily associated with particular cultures for its political concerns was the most readily marketable in the 1990s. Examining newly emergent markets outside the West, Iain Robertson suggests that this stems partly from the inability of unschooled Westerners to make culturally and historically informed and sophisticated interpretations of art; instead, they are all too easily allured by ready stereotypes of exotic Asia, themselves Orientalist fantasies.109 In the Malaysian context, Zainol Abidin Ahmad Shariff detects the complicity of Asian art markets in these trends, whereby Asian artists and gallerists themselves hasten to cater to the (cultural) expectations and stereotypes of an Asian art as defined by the West: “the [local Malaysian] market also seems to be

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Ronald Ventura’s Grayground set a world record for contemporary Asian painting: at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction of April 2011, it sold for H K $8.4 million/ U S $1.1 million; the Borobudur auction house established a new world-record price for the modern Indonesian artist Affandi, whose work “Food Stall under the Banyan Tree” fetched more than double its last record at S G D 1.464 million. Other contemporary Southeast Asian artists who have gained remarkable international attention through artmarket activities in recent times mostly stem from Indonesia and the Philippines, and include I Nyoman Masriadi, Agus Suwage, Geraldine Javier, and Christine Ay Tjoe among others. 109 See Iain Robertson, A New Art from Emerging Markets (Surrey & Burlington V T : Lund Humphries, 2011).

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colluding in maintaining the canons of Western art.”110 These market-driven tendencies parallel the dynamics of art biennales and, as the art historian David Clarke suggests, may even flag the importance of the biennale in defining market trends: “The commercial art world lurks in the shadows of the biennales, since they are sites where reputations are established.”111 As in the biennale context, art markets betray a persistent tension between ‘the cultural’ and ‘the aesthetic’ in determinations of the appeal and economic value of contemporary Asian art. Accordingly, the relationship between the art market and collecting institutions has been of increasing importance to the shape of the Asian art canon. There is potentially a ‘feedback’ process operating in the fostering of what counts as ‘valuable’ art, with the market and the art institutions legitimizing each other. Thus, both collecting institutions and the art market are important factors in enabling the commercial viability of artists and the shape of the Asian art canon.112 Importantly, artists who have been the most popular with art auction houses are not always those who capture the interest of art scholars, critics, and fine-art curators, the auction houses often better reflecting the tendencies and tastes of the art market than the most critically attuned observers from the region. However, the strengthening Asian art markets at the beginning of the twenty-first century already appear to have great sway over a younger genera-

110

Zainol Abidin Ahmad Shariff, “The Enterprise of Private Art and the Art of Private Enterprise in Contemporary Malaysian Art,” in The Third A S E A N Workshop, Exhibition & Symposium on Aesthetics, ed. Lee Weng Choy (Singapore: A S E A N C O C I , 1997): 90. 111 David Clarke, “Contemporary Asian Art and its Western Reception,” Third Text 16.3 (2002): 237–42. 112 Rachel Mayo speculates that the unprecedented strength of Southeast Asian art sales since the mid-2000s at Christie’s and Sotheby’s “could very well have been triggered by two major institutional movements in the region in 1996: the opening of the Singapore Art Museum with one of the world’s largest public collections of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian artworks, and the inauguration of the first bi-annual sale of Southeast Asian paintings by Sotheby’s, also in Singapore the same year.” Mayo, “Yes, but is it art – or investment?” Philippine Daily Inquirer (11 June 2011), http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/3195/yes-but-is-it-art-%E2%80%93-or-investment (accessed 14 November 2011).

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tion of contemporary artists and curatorial projects.113 Further, the boundary between commercial and non-commercial activities is becoming increasingly blurred as art comes to have increasing significance in Asian culture industries and cultural economies, which suggests recognition of the cultural capital of Asian art in both symbolic and real monetary terms. ‘Art Singapore: The Contemporary Asian Art Fair’, held annually since 2001, was for some time a leading forum for sales of contemporary Asian art in the region. However, the Hong Kong Art Fair (H K Art Fair), established in 2008 and superseded by Art Basel H K in 2013, has since carved out a worldwide reputation as the leading destination for buyers of contemporary Asian and international art in the context of new offshore art exchanges in powerful city-states.114 Nonetheless, the debut of Singapore’s ‘Art Stage Singapore’ in 2011 signalled not only a continuing desire by Singapore to be a key player in commercial art activities in the region, but also the city-state’s attempt to pay greater attention to Asian art, especially Southeast Asian art. The fair stands out for its support of Asian artists and galleries and the promotion of its “own strong (Asian) identity” rather than being “a copy of a Western show.”115 The Singapore Economic Board’s establishment in 2012 of a new art hub at Singapore’s Gillman Barracks, consisting of a new Centre for Contemporary Art along with thirteen commercial contemporary art galleries, is a further demonstration of Singapore’s continuing ambition to be an economic centre for contemporary art in Asia.116 Alongside the recurring fairs are prominent regional auction houses such as Larasati and Borobudur, and privately run commercial art galleries such as Valentine Willie Fine Art (V W F A ) and Osage, all of which have helped raise the profile of contemporary Southeast Asian art. V W F A , established in 1996, was exceptional among commercial art galleries for its specifically Southeast 113

See Patricia Chen, “The Southeast Asian Art Market 2005–2010: An Overview,” in Closing the Gap: Indonesian Contemporary Art, ed. Anita Archer, Bryan Collie, Louise Joel & Mikala Tai (Melbourne: MiFA, Melbourne International Fine Art, 2011): 31–37; and Mella Jaarsma, “Indonesian art today: Navigating between idealism and commodity,” Art Monthly Australia 244 (October 2011): 16–19. 114 See “The offshore art exchanges: Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates,” in Robertson, A New Art from Emerging Markets, 184–99. 115 Art Stage Singapore, “Art in Context,” http://www.artstagesingapore.com/aboutus/art-in-context/ (accessed 29 November 11). 116 See the website http://www.gillmanbarracks.com/ (accessed 15 March 2012).

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Asian scope and ambitions, and represented some of Southeast Asia’s foremost artists. V W F A began with an exhibition space in Kuala Lumpur and subsequently built a network of galleries in Southeast Asia with complementary spaces in Singapore, Yogyakarta, and Manila, all seeking to tap into the region’s art and its art markets. More than a commercial gallery space, V W F A was also instrumental in forging artistic and curatorial collaborations in the region, as well as in offering a relatively experimental space for contemporary art in countries which had very little, if any, public infrastructure for, or interest in, supporting contemporary art. The V W F A exhibition programme was innovative in showcasing the range of artists’ practice alongside their more saleable works. It also prided itself on its educational programmes and research archive on modern and contemporary Asian art, including its own publications.117 It curated important regional exhibitions incorporating artists from across Southeast Asia such as ‘Figuring the Contemporary Body’ and ‘A S E A N Masterworks’. It also toured country-specific exhibitions across the region, such as the Filipino survey exhibition ‘Faith + The City’.118 Osage Gallery, established in Hong Kong in 2004, with bases in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai (and formerly in Singapore), has maintained a strong interest in contemporary Southeast Asian art, featuring seminal figures such as the conceptual artists Roberto Chabet of the Philippines and Cheo Chai-Hiang of Singapore. It has been particularly instrumental in forging a presence for Southeast Asian artists in China and has played an important role in staging significant exhibitions of contemporary Southeast Asian art within Southeast Asia itself, including Manila and Singapore.119 Recognizing the increasing influence of Asia’s new art markets, Robertson suggests that influential societies such as those of China and India are begin117

Former V W F A associates Beverly Yong and Adeline Ooi were instrumental to the development of V W F A , particularly through their curatorial and publication work; together they subsequently established RogueArt, focusing on Southeast Asian art exhibition and publication projects. 118 In 2012, after sixteen years of operation, the V F W A Director Valentine Willie announced his resignation, effective from 2014, at which time the management of V F W A reforms, with Liza Ho, Eva McGovern, Snow Ng, Rismilliana Wijayanti, and Lee Yip Fong entering in partnership with Willie. Willie plans to focus on creative advocacy and the development of private museums in Southeast Asia. 119 The Singapore-born curator and critic Eugene Tan was formerly Exhibitions Director at Osage Hong Kong, appointed in 2009; in 2013, he was appointed Director of the newly established National Art Gallery, Singapore (N A G S ).

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ning to assert their agency, “declaring their cultural independence from the international art market”120 and, in so doing, even creating new criteria for judging art: The international standard by which “unclaimed” artists are judged is being questioned. The universally accepted gold standard which judges the aesthetic properties of international contemporary art and measures those judgements by a market price may not, in future, be the yard-stick by which the value of core art from emerging markets is determined.121

Robertson contends that economic and political imperatives particular to the societies of the emerging art markets are now also helping establish new criteria for evaluating art. Similarly, he predicts, the types of art sold in the new market contexts “will increasingly reflect the ‘taste’ of the source markets of the emerging world”; thus, the offshore art market centres of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai “will derive more benefit from their respective regions than from the international art market […] at which point the evolutionary cycle will be complete.”122 Beyond the ambit of commercial activities, the lack of public arts funding and other necessary arts infrastructure throughout many parts of Southeast Asia has prompted artists to establish not-for-profit, non-state-supported, independent, artist-driven initiatives. It is no exaggeration to say that such artistled initiatives helped drive contemporary art development in Southeast Asia in the 1990s, and continue to play a vital role in the production and dissemination of that art. Such spaces provide important alternatives to the usual work of conventional art spaces – museum, gallery, commercial – but they also have different objectives.

Alternative Art Spaces in Southeast Asia: From the Margins to the Centres of Contemporary Art Towards the end of the 1990s independent art spaces and artist-run initiatives proliferated throughout Southeast Asia; while some have ceased to exist, others have sprouted up since the 2000s. These have come to function as significant alternative spaces for the practice and exhibition of art in Southeast 120

Robertson, A New Art from Emerging Markets, 13. A New Art from Emerging Markets, 13. 122 A New Art from Emerging Markets, 197. 121

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Asia. Among the most renowned are Cemeti Art House, Taring Padi, House of Natural Fiber (H O N F ), Ruang Mes 56, Apotik Komik (Yogyakarta), Ruangrupa (Jakarta), the Bandung Centre for New Media Arts, and Common Room (Bandung) (Indonesia); The Substation, Plastique Kinetic Worms (P K W ), The Artists’ Village, p-10, and Post-Museum (Singapore); Artis Pro Activ (A P A ), SpaceKraft, House of Matahati (H O M ), Rumah Y K P , Lost Generation Space, and Rumah Air Panas (R A P ) (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia); and Baguio Arts Guild (Baguio), Big Sky Mind, and Surrounded by Water and Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila, the Philippines). While the existence of such groups outside Southeast Asia has historically tended to be short-lived by nature, many of those which emerged across Southeast Asia in the 1990s maintained their own against state-run institutions and commercially focused initiatives. Thus, unlike many of their counterparts in Europe, the U S A , and Australia, these artist-run or independent, not-for-profit spaces contributed to the development of contemporary art within their own localities in highly significant ways, often exceeding the cultural work conventionally undertaken by major public or commercially funded art institutions. Cemeti Art House, for instance, was established in Yogyakarta in 1988 by the artists Nindityo Adipurnomo and Mella Jaarsma. While it began as a small artist initiative and independent art space known as the Cemeti Gallery, Cemeti Art House’s unique and pivotal contributions to developing contemporary art has consolidated the Gallery’s larger reputation and widening activities. Filling the vacuum in the Indonesian contemporary art scene – which was largely the result of inadequate art infrastructure – the gallery began as a small-scale operation with basic facilities and equipment, and with a mission “generally focused on promoting and discovering artists (actively working artists).”123 Its initially very locally oriented art concerns, however, expanded into a dynamic network as the gallery became increasingly involved in international art projects and exchanges. The Cemeti Art Foundation, now known as the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (I V A A ), was also established alongside the art gallery, to serve as an educational and historical resource for archiving resources and documentation on contemporary Indonesian art. Indeed, Cemeti has become an energetic and internationally recognized art space engaging in global exchanges and collaborations as well as more local 123

Mella Jaarsma, “15 years of Cemeti Art House, time for chewing the cud,” in Exploring Vacuum: 1988–2003: 15 years Cemeti Art House, ed. Cemeti Art House (exh. cat.; Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art House, 2003): 11.

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projects, and serving as a vital node in the burgeoning network of alternative art spaces that have surfaced throughout Southeast Asia and the world. As such, the gallery prospered, to the point of raising concerns for the directors about its initial purpose and premise as a so-called ‘alternative’ art space. As the co-director Mella Jaarsma commented after Cemeti’s participation in the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, ‘Pause’, which focused on artist-initiated activities, “Cemeti is often no longer seen as the ‘alternative,’ but as an established art institution, due to our long breadth of 15 years existence.” In the self-reflexive and critical voice that is often expected of the artists who occupy such alternative spaces, Jaarsma adds, “What are we alternative to, if there is no establishment except commercial galleries?”124 Reflecting again on these issues in 2012 in a changed Indonesian art economy, Jaarsma asserts that the establishment may well now be the commercial galleries and the independent art space one of few potential alternatives.125 While the rise of such independent art spaces in Southeast Asia may be linked to deficiencies in national arts infrastructure in some countries, as is clearly the case with Indonesia, there has also been a strong desire to establish separate spaces of art production and exhibition that might function as ideological alternatives to state-run and commercially funded institutions with their often hegemonic and prescriptive discourses.126 Indeed, such spaces are often the direct result of seeking to bypass the agendas of national institutions, commercial interests, and the influence of international curators, in order to create an autonomous space for the production and exhibition of contemporary art.127 In so doing, these types of independent spaces have helped create a different type of arts infrastructure for developing the region’s contemporary art and, within this, new circuits for intraregional and international collabora124

Jaarsma, “15 years of Cemeti Art House, time for chewing the cud,” 11. Notably, Cemeti celebrated fifteen years of existence in 2003 with the major exhibition project ‘Exploring Vacuum’, which sought to explore and investigate the gallery’s function as an ‘alternative’ space. 125 See Jaarsma & Adipurnomo, “The Point: What Are We Waiting For?,” 47. 126 See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Christine Clark, “Distinctive Voices: Artist-initiated spaces and projects,” in Art and Social Change, ed. Caroline Turner (Canberra: Pandanus, 2005): 554–68. 127 Clark, “Distinctive Voices: Artist-initiated spaces and projects”; The 2nd ‘InBetween’ International Alternative Space Conference – Globalism and Alternative Spaces, ed. Suh Jin-suk, Yun Chea-gap, Moon Hee-chae, Hee Juhl & Lee Hee-young ed. (exh. cat.; Seoul: Alternative Space L O O P & Yellow Sea, 2004).

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tion and exchange. In this latter sense, a shift is underway in the trajectory of art production, representation, and circulation in and through an alternative space of networks directed by more flexible ideologies and frameworks. At their most productive, these networks challenge the sometimes sedentary and co-opting tendencies of state-run and commercial institutions through their responsiveness and openness to artistic experimentation and fresh creativity. The aforementioned Gwangju Biennale gave pioneering international visibility to such artist-run spaces. Curated by Sung Wan-kyung, Charles Esche, and Hou Hanru, ‘Pause’ was “about reposing and recharging and assuming a decisive, if not risky, new approach.”128 It included twenty-six alternative art spaces or independent, not-for-profit, artist-run initiatives, mostly from Europe and Asia, with a number of Southeast Asian collectives included. The Southeast Asian art groups represented were Artis Pro Activ & University Bangsar Utama (Malaysia), Big Sky Mind & Mowelfund (the Philippines), Plastique Kinetic Worms (Singapore), and, in Indonesia, Cemeti Art House (Yogyakarta) and Ruangrupa (Jakarta). The curators sought to acknowledge the significant input made by these artist-run groups in the development of contemporary art practice, especially with respect to developing art making and discourse within their own immediate localities.129 As the curators explained, We want to make a pause in the constant search for new individual artists and make tangible the huge contribution of these initiatives, usually run by artists or their close collaborators.130

128

Sung Wan–kyung, “How Can We Make P _A_U _S_E Realized?,” in Gwangju Biennale 2002: Pause: Conception, ed. Sung Wan–kyung (exh. cat.; Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Press, 2002): 21. 129 Recognition of the important roles of independent art spaces in Asia is also registered in the form of the yearly Alternatives: Contemporary Art Spaces in Asia publication, produced by the Japan Foundation Asia Center since 2002. This publication is an informative catalogue of existing alternative art spaces in Asia. This initiative might also be read as an acknowledgement from a major investor – a centre – in contemporary Asian art of the significance of non-establishment (hence, marginal) art spaces. 130 Sung Wan–kyung, Charles Esche & Hou Hanru, “Introduction: 2002, Gwangju, Pause,” in Gwangju Biennale 2002: Pause: Conception, ed. Sung Wan-kyung, 25.

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Figure 22: Rumah Air Panas (R A P ), ‘S P A C E [ S ] Dialogue and Exhibition’ (2003). Image courtesy of the artists.

Figure 23: [Contemporary art events at Cemeti Art House:] Eko Nugroho in collaboration with Ign. Clink Sugiarto, Yennu Ariendra, Ki Catur Kuncoro, Andy Seno Aji, Hidden Violence (2009). Image courtesy of Cemeti Art House.

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Figures 24–25: Ruangrupa, P I C N I C K I T [a project about holiday in the city of Jakarta with Sebastian Friedman] (2006). Images courtesy of the artists.

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Moreover, the curators sought “to create a slightly different model or set of possibilities for the proliferating phenomenon of the Biennale itself” whereby the artist-run spaces would themselves be able to tell, first-hand, the lifestories of their communities rather than have curators narrate the circumstances of their locales from less adequate knowledge and experiences.131 In reflecting on the value of alternative spaces, the Gwangju Biennale curators observed: Young artists want to instigate independent alternative spaces so that they can continue to exist in the places they are committed to without leaving for the presumed centers or being dominated by the market and central institutions.132

Ironically, as a key international art exhibition, the Gwangju Biennale is arguably one such centre. The inclusion of artist spaces in this centralized context raises fundamental issues of locality and globality and what is achieved or compromised by artist-run spaces and initiatives as they move between the two. While artist spaces are seen to gain international exposure through their inclusion in such international events, the form and integrity of their otherwise more localized projects are undeniably altered, if not weakened, in the spectacular space–time of the international art biennale. Indeed, the strength of these artist spaces is often defined by their ability to engage at a grass-roots level and to evince a more localized, everyday, and flexible practice. They are often perceived as alternatives to mainstream art agendas but also as alternatives to the centre in their generally more grassroots engagement with local communities and for their openness to more experimental art projects. As contemporary art becomes increasingly concerned with ‘participatory’, ‘community-based’, or ‘socially engaged’ art practices, these types of spaces have gained new currency in international art. By definition, they often exist in tension with the prescribed institutional programmes and physical space of mainstream art museums, which are inclined to present art with already established circulation. Unlike state-led or commercial art spaces, these independent collectives generally carry out more localized projects, and have fewer expectations about wide viewer exposure and securing commercial interest. They are often rooted in much more localized spaces of community and the art produced in these spaces is often experimental in nature and a result of collaborative art 131 132

Sung, Esche & Hou, “Introduction: 2002, Gwangju, Pause,” 29. “Introduction: 2002, Gwangju, Pause,” 25.

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projects with their local communities or through dialogue and exchange among artists and/or curators. Artists and curators linked to these spaces, at least to begin with, are often less familiar to wide audiences and traditionally have less-established art careers. In this sense, the usual function of these spaces is unlike that of the mainstream art institution with its major exhibitions of art belonging to artists of already established reputation. As John Clark has noted, “Too often international art exhibitions merely validate previous international preferences, they neither overturn nor even relativize them.”133 In this way, not only do museums and biennale organizations more safely secure international status for themselves but they also assist in the promotion of particular artists and their art careers. By contrast, independent art spaces are usually testing grounds for emerging artists and experimental art practices. Often such spaces are also highly significant means of social and political expression, highlighting at the local level an insistence on the relationship between art and society. For instance, the nonpartisan collective Artis Pro Activ (A P A ) was expressly established as part of the 1998 reformasi movement in Malaysia which campaigned for democratic reforms. A P A ’s art is, in this sense, undeniably political. A P A was formed in a climate of escalating restrictions on freedom of expression and with a belief in the transformative potential of creative practice, one geared towards social and political change. The group organized the exhibition ‘Apa? Siapa? Kenapa?’ (‘What? Who? Why?’), which opened on 27 October 1998. This date marked the eleventh anniversary of ‘Operation Lalang’ – the government action which led to the arrest of 116 people and their detention without trial under the I S A .134 A P A 133

John Clark, “Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian Art,” in Modernity in Asian Art, ed. John Clark (Sydney: Wild Peony, 1993), 5. 134 A P A was formed in a climate of escalating restrictions on freedom of expression and in protest to the fall and detention of the then Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim – detained without the right to trial under the notorious Internal Security Act (I S A ). A P A contested the government’s use of the I S A to suppress dissent and freedom of expression and supported the calls for “reformasi.” Through its advocacy of freedom of expression as a fundamental human right, the group united in the belief that “questions must always be asked […] without fear or favor,” as quoted in Lee Weng Choy “Artis Pro Activ,” A R T AsiaPacific 24 (1999): 40. Significantly, ‘apa?’ is also Malay for the interrogative ‘what?’, thus registering the group’s critical stance towards the state of contemporary art and social life in Malaysia. See also the Media Statements by Artisproactiv on 20 and 22 July 2003, respectively entitled

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joined together with University Bangsar Utama for the Gwangju Biennale in 2002. Clearly, the desire to create alternative art spaces for the development and exhibition of art has been of considerable importance to the recent generation of Southeast Asian artists. Yet, at the same time, the extent of the continuing ‘alternative’ viability of these spaces remains to be seen. Their significant status in Southeast Asia now also means that some such spaces have become part of a new ‘mainstream’ of independent art collectives. As Sabapathy once remarked of the Anak Alam (‘Children of Nature’) artists working in Malaysia in the 1970s, the central dilemma confronting alternative art groups and spaces is often that, even as they ostensibly distance themselves from the establishment, and produce socially engaged, provocative works and are critical of the establishment, even as they situate themselves at the periphery, they also crave for recognition by the center.135

Arguably, the success of the burgeoning alternative art scene lies in the precarious business of being able to sustain collective motivation, financial support, and ongoing critical (re-)vision against the prevailing trends of institutionalization, commercialization, and governmental control. As Hal Foster has remarked, “Certainly, marginality is not now given as critical, for in effect the center has invaded the periphery and vice versa.”136 Importantly, independent art collectives have contributed to new imaginaries of Southeast Asia. They have spun important regional networks between similarly minded art collectives across Southeast Asia, keen to under“Censorship of the Arts” and “81 Suara Menjawab Satu,” as reproduced in Freedom of Expression in the Arts, ed. Eddin Khoo, Ramdas Tikamdas & Elizabeth Wong (Kuala Lumpur: National Human Rights Society (H A K A M ), 2003): 107–11. 135 T.K. Sabapathy, “Vision and Idea: Afterthoughts,” in Vision and Idea: ReLooking Modern Malaysian Art, ed. T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery, 1994): 113. Indeed, the artist Wong Hoy Cheong echoed these concerns in relation to the dilemma of present-day artists: “You are critical of the power structures and yet you are dependent on these very powers to legitimate and evaluate the worthiness of your work.” (Wong Hoy Cheong, in Krishen Jit, “New Art, New Voices: Krishen Jit talks to Wong Hoy Cheong on Contemporary Malaysian Art,” in What About Converging Extremes? (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Galeri Wan, 1993): 8). 136 Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend W A : Bay Press, 1985): 25.

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take art collaborations and exchanges, and to develop new models of art practice and curatorship. In so doing, they contribute to new means of engaging Southeast Asia in art and curatorship, as alternatives to state-supported and commercial sites. As we will see in the following section, these re-imaginations of Southeast Asia may also be traced in instances of contemporary art itself that offer a productive space for rethinking hegemonic ideologies of Southeast Asia /Asia and for reconfiguring the Southeast Asian/Asian subject. The next section closes this chapter by turning to the art practice of Wong Hoy Cheong. His work has often highlighted the political institutionalization of ‘Asian-ness’ and ‘Southeast Asian-ness’ in order to probe the limitations of these politically driven identitarian frames, but also to articulate fresh alternative possibilities.

‘Territorializing’ and ‘Derritorializing’ Regional Difference in the Art of Wong Hoy Cheong The art of the Malaysia-born artist Wong Hoy Cheong often evokes a different idea of established perspectives on the world, particularly in relation to Asia. Often re-searching and re-visioning Asian politics and histories for his art projects, Wong unsettles the legitimacy of postcolonial Asian cultural essentialisms that is otherwise taken for granted and moves deliberately between both intra-/inter-Asian and inter-West/Asia differences. This occurs, for instance, in works such as Text Tiles (2000), The Colonies Bite Back I & I I (2001), and R E :Looking (2003). In his installation Text Tiles, first presented at the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, Wong provides a critique of inherited colonial discourses foregrounded in racializations. In the Malaysian sociopolitical milieu of the 1990s, this sort of racialization occurred not only at the level of intra-national Malaysian racial politics with regard to ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ groups (evoked in Wong’s Indigenous Skins and NonIndigenous Skins of 1998), but also, more broadly, in the Othering discourses that marked Asia in opposition to ‘the West’. Fervent anti-Western discourses of pan-Asianism became prevalent in Asian politics in the 1980s and 1990s. As Chua, Wee, and others have noted, this came, ironically, after a period of enthusiastic adoption of universalizing models of economic modernization which brought much material prosperity

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to many parts of the region.137 In particular, the ‘Asian values’ doctrines propagated most forcefully in Malaysia and Singapore helped to consolidate a cultural basis for Southeast Asia’s economic boom at that time.138 As Wee explains in relation to Singapore, From the 1980s up until the 1997 Asian economic crisis, in parts of East and Southeast Asia, the desire for modernity in both national and regional contexts manifested itself in a general discourse on ‘Asian values’ and an East Asian modernity (oftentimes implicitly or explicitly read as a ‘Confucian’ modernity), in which tradition and modernity were unexpectedly combined.139

The Asian-values discourse might be viewed as a pertinent example of cultural essentialism – those “accounts of collective identities as based on some ‘essence’ or set of core features shared by all members of that collectivity and no others.”140 It is also, though, a case of Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” gone wrong. As Langenbach explains: Asian Values discourse is an interesting and important theoretical muddle, as it got part of its impetus from a reaction of cultural theorists (Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic) who saw the need for “strategic essentialism” as a counter-hegemonic method of resistance against globalisation. [. . . ] With the help of the economic upswing in Asian economies, strategic-essentialisation began to take on a particularly Asian character…141

137

Chua Beng–Huat, “‘Asian-Values’ Discourse and the Resurrection of the Social,” Positions 7.2 (1999): 573–92; Wee, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore. 138 Political leaders such as the former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohammed, the former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and his successor, Goh Chok Tong, as well as the prominent Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara were very outspoken on the unique significance of “Asian Values.” 139 Wee, The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, 22. 140 Craig Calhoun, “Social Theory and the Politics of Identity,” in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford & Cambridge M A : Blackwell, 1994): 13. 141 Ray Langenbach, “Reading the Car-Crash: The Artist as Collision,” keynote address, First Annual Art Conference, (Sidang Seni) Galeri P E T R O N A S , Kuala Lumpur, March 2001, 10.

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The problem inherent in the notion of strategic essentialism, as such political theorists as Avtar Brah have argued, is that it is open to a multitude of political purposes.142 Langenbach elaborates on this apropos of Southeast Asia: strategic essentialism suffered from a strategic flaw. The power elites, who, in many post-colonial states, were still attempting to consolidate their own hegemonies through the awarding of economic privileges along ethnic or cultural lines, found this anti-globalist rhetoric vocalized by dissident intellectuals and activists on the left, to be extremely useful. They proceeded to appropriate certain aspects of “strategic essentialism” as an ideological and a rhetorical stance, not only to struggle against the predatory demands of M N C ’s, the I M F and World Bank, but also to rationalise the suppression of democratic strivings of those very dissident intellectuals and activists who had developed this critique. Ironically, it was then Asian dissidents who were then labelled as Western “influenced,” “anti-development,” “subversive,” “disloyal,” “anti-nationalist” elements by their own governments.143

It is in this frenzy of racialized ‘Asian-values’ rhetoric that Wong creates Text Tiles, an artwork which reveals the complex history of Asia as an imaginary of political construction. The installation is a result of the shredding and burning of books that are documents of Asian histories and values. Once pulped, their narratives become unreadable and are made meaningless. The 290 individual text tiles produced are subsequently laid out on the floor. The visitor is invited to step on /walk over /trample upon these tiles and the histories and values they once declared so emphatically. Notably, the most blackened areas at the centre of the installation are those burnt from the ‘darkest pages’ of Asian histories. The types of text Wong has selected for the work refer to various events in Asia’s modern political history. In particular, they address the histories of authoritarianism and oppression relating to subjects and places such as East Timor, Tian An Men, Pol Pot, and Vietnamese refugees; texts about or written by dictatorial leaders such as Marcos, Ne Win, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Mahathir, and Mao; and texts recording or recorded by people who have been the victims of various authoritarian regimes, such as the writer Pramoedya Ananta 142

Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 126–27. 143 Langenbach, “Reading the Car-Crash: The Artist as Collision,” 10.

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Toer, Aung San Suu Kyi, Syed Husin Ali, Shih Ming-teh, Kim Tae Jung, and Chia Thye Poh.144 Besides the ‘text’ tiles, another twenty smaller tiles display the jumbled interwoven portraits of various renowned political leaders, both Asian and Western. These include an image of Ferdinand Marcos woven together with one of Ronald Reagan; another shows Pramoedya Ananta Toer with Martin Luther King, Jr. Through this provocative juxtaposition of political leaders and mash of texts, the rhetoric of Asian values, in particular their supposedly Asian basis, is called into question. The artist conveys his intentions in the following remarks: This work is meant to be polemical. It attempts to provoke a more selfconscious look at Asian histories and the fashionable stance of Asian “values” and “democracy” as espoused by many Asian leaders. It is also meant to pose questions: Is nationalist ideology fraught with contradictions? Are there linkages between nationalism and fascism? How Asian are Asian values? Are Asian “values” and “democracy” liberating and democratic? Are they so different from that of the West? Is authoritarianism and oppression part of Asian “values”?145

Text Tiles prompts critical reflection on the authority of Asian histories, an authority made symbolic through the artist’s play on the legitimizing function of texts as documents of history. The authority of these ‘Asian’ texts is disrupted by their literal deconstruction and reconstruction, highlighting their relationship to colonial and Western histories. Text Tiles thus disarticulates the ‘Asian-ness’ of Asian values.146 Echoing Said’s famous claims in Orientalism, Text Tiles reveals the political irony of these so called ‘Asian’ texts as, rather, legacies of the colonial/Western imagination and its hegemonies.147 In this way, Text Tiles offers an implicit critique of racialized politics, pointing to the manipulation of Asian culture in the service of authoritarian agendas and the strategic use of race and ethnicity in buttressing the power of political leaders, both Asian and Western. As the Malaysian cultural critic Sumit Mandal maintains, Text Tiles is a direct response to the racialized narra144

Wong Hoy Cheong, “Descriptions of Selected Works 1994–2002: Text Tiles (2000),” artist’s resumé (M S ), 2002. 145 Wong, “Descriptions of Selected Works 1994–2002.” 146 Sumit Mandal, “Valuing Asia: Wong Hoy Cheong’s quest for a postcolonial visual vocabulary,” A R T AsiaPacific 29 (2001): 75. 147 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

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tives prevalent under the leadership of the Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who, “far from acknowledging the debt to colonial rule, claims something intrinsically ‘Asian’ in the politics he […] cultivated.”148 By contrast, Text Tiles takes a more self-aware look at Asian histories to reveal how a Malaysian nationalist ideology based on ‘Asian values’ is loaded with contradictions. By pointing to the correspondences between Western and Asian leaders and associated episodes in political history, including links between fascist and democratic figures in Asian and Western history, Text Tiles emphasizes the interculturality between political figures and events in world history, and at the same time unsettles the presumed uniqueness and authority of ‘Asian values’. As with the artist’s Migrants series (see Chapter 5 below), Text Tiles alludes to the interculturality and multiplicity of communities which together make up the fabric of the Malaysian nation, be they old or new migrants or those practicing more outwardly cosmopolitan lives as part of new global cultural flows (often mistakenly simplified to ‘Western’ practices). Hence, the disarticulation of Asian values in Text Tiles might also be regarded as a kind of symbolic dissimulation of ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ in ‘Vision 2020’ – the national vision of a Malaysian society dramatically reconstructed as one nation, one race, by the year 2020, launched in the early 1990s by then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Since Asian values and Bangsa Malaysia are bound up with each other in the figure of the ‘truly Asian Bangsa Malaysian,’ we might also read Wong’s deconstruction of Asian values in Text Tiles as a disarticulation of Asian race in the Malaysian context itself. Indeed, Asian values may be seen as a forerunner of and counterpart to the kinds of multiculturalism in ‘Vision 2020’, both articulations of the neoliberal racial governmentality of the Malaysian state. Ultimately, Text Tiles suggests that the conjunctures between intra- and inter-Asian differences and also inter-West/ Asia differences reveal the artificiality of essentialist constructions of race in such political discourses of nation-building. In reflecting on Text Tiles, Langenbach highlights the contemporary artist’s intellectual role in the public sphere, and, in this instance, the artist’s critical engagement with the politics of ‘Asian Values’. In particular, Langenbach suggests that this critical self-reflexivity is a consequence of the new intellectual impulse behind much contemporary art:

148

Mandal, “Valuing Asia,” 75.

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Figure 26: Wong Hoy Cheong, Text Tiles (2000). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 27: Wong Hoy Cheong, Text Tiles (2000; detail). Image courtesy of the artist.

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The other thing that the “strategic-essentialist”/aka Asian Values dilemma paradoxically shows is the importance of the artist, as an intellectual who has developed expertise in reading, interpreting, and circulating the symbolic languages that constitute, encode and underlie national culture. The artist is an intellectual who carries out close “readings” of her culture and society and looks deeply for the power relation underlying the national spectacle. For this reason, the artist may find herself in the uncomfortable position at the border of prevailing discourses, where the frame of one socio-political position collides with another. At this point of collision, citizenship appears as a complex web of both culturalist and non-culturalist affiliations, in which identity is fluid, incessantly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed […] performed rather than essentially given.149

In this respect, Text Tiles suggests Wong’s individual agency as artist to engage in a critical, intellectual, and self-reflexive art practice that seeks to undo prevailing political hegemonies. The constitution of the subject (Asian or otherwise) is returned to us not as a given but as a process of making and continuous becoming in relation to others. As with the political vision of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor,” Text Tiles registers “that which deviates from the majority or standard which is the bearer of the dominant social code [and …] provides an element capable of deterritorializing the dominant social codes.”150 In other words, Text Tiles is a critical response to the uncritical deployment of ‘Asian values’, ultimately unsettling their legitimacy. While there is now much accepted criticism of Asian Values, they nevertheless continue to grip the popular imagination in Asia, particularly in locales such as Malaysia and Singapore, as societies strive towards an “Asian Renaissance”:151 what started out as an elite construction may be said to have found a popular resonance in Malaysia and Singapore (and possibly further afield in Asia). Like it or not, ‘Asian values’ captured for many Asians […] a rare pride in being Asian, even if that sentiment was sometimes

149

Langenbach, “Reading the Car-Crash: The Artist as Collision.” Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 7. 151 See Rustom Bharucha’s argument on the continuation of ‘Asian values’ reconfigured in the rhetoric of an “Asian Renaissance” in Bharucha, “Beyond the Box: Problematising the ‘New Asian Museum’,” 11–12. 150

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expressed in a populist anti-westernism, often sustained by sensational accounts of western decline.152

If we consider the fact that Text Tiles was initially commissioned by the Gwangju Biennale and, in the first instance, shown outside Malaysia, we might trace a different story regarding Text Tiles’s capacity for political criticism and agency with particular reference to the Malaysian context. In fact, Text Tiles, along with other politically inflected works by Wong, was not shown in Malaysia until Wong’s solo exhibition at the National Art Gallery of Malaysia in November 2004,153 and coincides with Wong’s by then firmly established international art career, in which he has also assisted in putting Malaysia on the art map.154 Given the international context in which it was first shown, Text Tiles might be perceived less as a direct dialectical response to the local Malaysian context than as a marker of the artist’s relative freedom within his own local cultural polity and as international interest in the artist’s negotiation of the local. The risk in these instances, as Langenbach cautions, is that local concerns become “translated into globally consumable tropes about Malaysia, rather than as a praxis within-by-for Malaysia.”155 Nonetheless, I would suggest that at the same time as Text Tiles resonates with the 152

Khoo Boo Teik, “The Value(s) of a Miracle: Malaysian and Singaporean Elite Constructions of Asia,” Asian Studies Review 23.2 (June 1999): 188. 153 The solo exhibition Wong Hoy Cheong was held at Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery of Malaysia), 2 November 2004 to 23 January 2005. While the exhibition took place at the National Art Gallery space, it was curated by Beverly Yong of Valentine Willie Fine Art (V W F A ), and co-organized with V W F A . This exhibition followed the earlier exhibition of Wong’s Migrants series at the National Art Gallery, almost ten years before. 154 Wong notes in an interview with the author that, “After [his] re-entry into the more […] international scene in 1997, through the Lalang work which was done in 1994, or the Rubber Trees work which was ’96, [and] which was seen [from within Malaysia] as very located within the Malaysian context, […] the Indigenous Skins or heads were seen as […] being very internationalized and global and being absorbed into the global art market, not cutting edge subversive works that dig into Malaysian history and politics, but as commodities in the international arena.” Author’s interview with the artist Wong Hoy Cheong, Singapore, 5 June 2002. 155 Ray Langenbach, “Mapping the Cartographer,” in Wong Hoy Cheong: An O V A Touring Exhibition, ed. Beverly Yong (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art & London: The Organisation for Visual Arts Limited (O V A ), 2002): 22 (emphasis in original).

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particular socio-political context of Malaysia, the work concurrently has relevance for viewers internationally in its attention to the crosscultural patterns of politics in world history, and invites recollection of their effect on humanity in general. If Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of de-/reterritorialization resonates through Text Tiles in its dis-/re-articulation of identities “in becoming,” then they also reverberate in Wong’s map-making projects. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari encourage the making of maps: The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social formation.156

Likewise, in his deceptively playful engagement with the art of cartography, Wong evokes visually the powerful political processes of territorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing that are significant in postcolonial remappings of self. In particular, he engages in visual exercises to create a new hybrid map of London–Penang for the works Buckingham Street and its Vicinity (2002) and Darling Street and its Vicinity (2002). In these finely detailed charcoal drawings, Wong borrows from the fifteenth-to-seventeenthcentury traditions of colonial cartography to map Penang-onto-London-ontoPenang. More precisely, for Buckingham Street and its Vicinity (2002) Wong has sourced two maps, one of Buckingham Street and its vicinity in London, and the other of Penang’s Buckingham Street, and has overlaid one on the other to construct an imaginary hybrid map. Wong elaborates on his aim here: I grew up in Penang, [I’m] from Penang. And Penang was the earliest British outpost in this part of the world, East of India, earlier than Australia as well. In 1786 it was colonised by Francis Light who is the father of William Light […] the so-called founder of Adelaide […] Penang is structured like a Georgian town (before Queen Victoria) and a lot of things that were reproduced in Penang [were] actually [akin to] the British city, like London.157

In the layered mapping of Penang-onto-London-onto-Penang, Wong traces a series of colonial and postcolonial territorializations:

156 157

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12. Author’s interview with the artist Wong Hoy Cheong, Singapore, 5 June 2002.

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the colonial port [of Penang] had already been ‘mapped’ by the colonial centre [of Britain] – the colonial planners nostalgically duplicating London’s street names and some building designs, in this game of “Who’s on top?”158

Wong explains this historical sequence of territorializations through his own layered experiences of Penang and London: I grew up with a Downing Street way before I knew where the original Downing Street was, I grew up with Buckingham Street, I grew up with streets that were common names in England […] Prince Edward Place […]. The first time I went to the U K was when I was 18 years old and that’s when I realised that “oh, there are actually names in England which are names that come from Penang” so [it is] this whole idea of “the coloniser colonisers” and reproduces caricatures of themselves or reclaims themselves in a narcissistic way in a different environment. But [as] for those people who have not been there […] the original Downing Street is in Penang. That was the first Downing Street I knew and the Downing Street in London is the second Downing Street I know.159

Wong’s imaginary hybrid map is more complex than a series of overlays. His attention to London’s iconic names and localities (Buckingham, Downing), its buildings and architectural styles, its geographical landscape (boats on the Thames River), belies the concurrent interplay with Penang’s own landmarked topography (Malayan Railway Building, Seri Rambai Cannon, Tun Syed Sheh Barakbah Road, Kampung Kolam, Kapitan Keling Mosque). Langenbach elaborates on the complex making of Wong’s hybrid cartographies: [he] graphically conflates the colonial economy of Penang/London, using signs that don’t collide or cancel each other but converge, merge, overlap, inflect. In this map both London and Penang are revealed as parasites of each other: each obtains its completeness in the distorted reflection of the other.160

Moreover, through the kind of visual politics of ‘mimicry’ that Homi Bhabha has described – and its attendant tactics of (re-)appropriation, subversion, recuperation, and reconversion – the imaginary map poses a series of questions regarding the politics of locality, cultural authenticity and origins, 158

Langenbach, “Mapping the Cartographer,” 18. Author’s interview with the artist Wong Hoy Cheong, Singapore, 5 June 2002. 160 Langenbach, “Mapping the Cartographer,” 18. 159

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particularly through the lens of colonial and postcolonial politics.161 “So which is the real street?,” Wong asks. “Am I recolonising London? Or which is the real map? My map, or their map?”162

Figure 28: Wong Hoy Cheong, Buckingham Street and its Vicinity (2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

In our contemporary period of intensified globalization, the notion of ‘deterritorialization’ has come to be associated with the experience of reconfigured socio-spatial conditions of belonging. As Papastergiadis describes it, people now feel they belong to various communities despite the fact that they do not share a common territory (especially national and/or regional) with all the other members.163

161

On ‘mimicry’, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). 162 Author’s interview with the artist Wong Hoy Cheong, Singapore, 5 June 2002. 163 Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Oxford & Malden M A : Polity, 2000): 115.

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So, too, communities (national, regional, ethnic, etc.) remain “connected despite being spread across considerable distances and [are] redefined through exchange across multiple borders.”164 Papastergiadis argues the experience and consequences of deterritorialization challenge the classical ethnographic assumptions that cultures could be mapped into autonomous and bounded spaces [and …] put greater stress on the need for re-imagining the possibilities of belonging.165

For Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of ‘deterritorialization’ relates more specifically to the experience of alienation through language. Drawing on Kafka’s unhomely experience and literary projection of self, Central European society, and the German language, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize a form of ‘becoming’ – in exile – that is different from that of the cultural insider’s dominant codes of language.166 In so doing, they locate another mode of (deterritorialized) consciousness which, in turn, offers the potential for another kind of (reterritorialized) community. In this, the processes of territorialization and de-/reterritorialization are inextricably linked.167 Wong’s alien re-cognition of Penang-in-London and London-in-Penang is one of deterritorialization. Moreover, the new imagined relationship to space (in Penang and London) that is constructed and which has been enabled via his travelling to London (and back to Penang) establishes an imagined reterritorialization of spatial and cultural affiliations with place. Wong’s maps thus raise questions about the politics of territory and history and claims of authoritative belonging to each, particularly in the light of the interconnectedness of cultures, and the overlays and overlaps of culture that are brought into relief. In particular, the relational maps of colonizer and colonized are brought into view and bring seemingly distant locales into deeply proximate relation, firmly emplacing and implicating the history of each in relation to its other in a politics that draws trajectories and fields of equivalence.

164

Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration, 116. The Turbulence of Migration, 116–17. 166 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, tr. Dana Polan (Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, 1975; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1986). 167 See also the condensed definition of ‘deterritorialization’ and its attendant territorializations and reterritorialization which Deleuze and Guattari provide at the conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus, 508–10. 165

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Figure 29: Wong Hoy Cheong, Downing Street and its Vicinity (2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

Related to Wong’s imagination of a new hybrid Buckingham Street are another three accompanying charcoals of children who, by virtue of their inbetween positions, carry the hybrid theme further. The children stand In Between Betelnut Palm and the Sphinx (2002), In Between Masjid Kapitan Keling and Narcissus (2002), and In Between Malayan Railway Building and Eleanor Cross (2002). The images, which also serve as self-portraits, are suggestive of the artist’s own positioned subjectivity as hybrid, as the in between, of colonized territory and the colonizer’s territory. Wong’s critiques of the power-struggles of identity politics have seen the artist constantly shift between local concerns in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, and issues of transnational, global relevance, including the significance of Islamic identifications around the world following the events of 9/11, and the subjecthood of contemporary migrants and refugees in a world of intensified globalization and continuing global conflict. What remains an ongoing thread in Wong’s practice is an acuteness to the political articulation of identities in Malaysian but also global contexts, what is revealed in their disarticulation, and the agency afforded in their re-assemblage.

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Figure 30: Wong Hoy Cheong, In Between Masjid Kapitan Keling and Narcissus (2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 31: Wong Hoy Cheong, In Between Malayan Railway Building and Eleanor Cross (2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Locally inflected subject-matter may be more strongly discerned in earlier artwork such as The Nouveau Riche, the Elephant, the Foreign Maid, or the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1991) (see Figure 135, Chapter 6 below), Lalang (1994), the Migrants series (1996), Non-Indigenous Skins (1998), and Indigenous Skins (1999–2000), which deal very specifically with socio-political themes generated from the Malaysian context.

Figure 32: Wong Hoy Cheong, Non Indigenous Skins (detail of papaya; 1998). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 33: Wong Hoy Cheong, Non Indigenous Skins (detail of tea; 1998). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 34: Wong Hoy Cheong, Poison (2000). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 35: Wong Hoy Cheong, Poison (2000). Image courtesy of the artist.

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By contrast, in later works, themes of Otherness resonate within Malaysia’s own multicultural society, but there is also an increasing interest in highlighting Otherness as it is produced and experienced in various culturally specific contexts in line with Wong’s international trajectories of art experience: the imagination of contemporary Austria as the fictional legacy of Malaysian colonial power in R E :Looking (2002) for the European-based Venice Biennale; the history of Islamic Chinese that is evoked in Fastigium (2005), created for the Second Guangzhou Triennial, China; working with children of the Roma community of the Sulukule quarter in Istanbul for Aman Sulukule Canim Sulukule (Oh Sulukule Darling Sulukule) (2007), for the Istanbul Biennial; and Southeast Asian domestic migrants in present-day Taiwan for Maid in Malaysia (2008), for the Taipei Biennial. In harnessing these culturally and historically specific articulations of Otherness in his art practice, we see how Wong engages with issues that go beyond his own ethnicChinese status in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, and, in this sense, challenges an identitarian logic of representation which seeks to contain the artist’s work in a strictly Malaysian vision. There is also an accumulation of international experience evident, which, in turn, registers a particular trait of contemporary art at the turn of the twentieth century in evoking local issues that are contingent on global currents. Wong’s projects demonstrate the utility of contemporary art in offering alternative critical figurations of Southeast Asia. In revealing the intersection of local and global influences, they evince possibilities for more fluid imaginaries of Southeast Asia, situating the region in dialogue with global concerns. The next chapter explores more specifically key international contexts for encountering contemporary Southeast Asian art and their effect on our perspectives on Southeast Asia and its contemporary art. This is a prelude to discussions of more locally oriented curatorial projects which emerge in response to the representation of Asian art in international exhibitions. In navigating between the global and the local, the chapter considers the representation of Southeast Asian art in different ‘Asian’ frames of curatorial emphasis, comparing the positioning of ‘Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ across a range of curatorial projects and reflecting on their discursive strategies.

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So now I borrow from Anderson, who borrowed from Rizal, for the demon has entered me, too, as I am bedevilled by this seeing of an object made for international exposition in the 1880s, and cannot help but see, simultaneously, the objects and texts we have made for this international exhibition for instance, and for others like it, at the end of our century.1

A

on the nature of contemporary art, there has been a shift in emphasis from the question of ‘What is contemporary art?’ to ‘Where is contemporary art?’ This shift points to questions of geography and locatedness in the globalized art landscape as chief characteristics of contemporary art – that contemporary art practice is a plural and differentiated project which defies a single universalist perspective.2 The logical extension of these questions for the Asian context is: 1

S PA R T O F T H E B U R G E O N I N G D E B AT E S

Marian Pastor Roces, referencing Benedict Anderson’s The Spectre of Comparisons and, before him, José Rizal’s el demonio de las comparaciones, recalling their respective experiences of colonial spectre and hauntings in parallel with her own in the space of the contemporary art exhibition and its repeating exoticist visions of the past. See Pastor Roces, “Consider Post Culture,” in Beyond the Future: Papers from the Conference of the Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Brisbane, 10–12 September, 1999, ed. Caroline Turner & Morris Low (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2000): 35, and José Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (Manila: Instituto Nacional de Historia, 1978; offset from original Berlin edition of 1887): 43. 2 For instance, recent conferences, exhibitions, and publications undertaken by Z K M as part of their ‘Global Art and the Museum’ project have also sought to investigate the meaning of contemporary art with ‘geography’ at the forefront of such in-

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‘Where is contemporary Asian art?’3 And, for the purpose of the current book, ‘Where is Southeast Asia in exhibitions of contemporary Asian art?’ If the previous chapter sought to investigate the specificity of Southeast Asia within a Southeast Asian regional framework, the present chapter seeks to probe the ways in which contemporary Southeast Asian art has been situated as part of the wider reception of ‘Asian’ art in both global and Asiafocused art exhibitions for international audiences. In so doing, it continues to trace the tensions between the cultural and the aesthetic, ultimately to demonstrate the identitarian logic that is the hegemonic legacy of international exhibitions in the 1990s. In particular, the chapter probes a number of major survey and ‘blockbuster’ or mega-exhibitions of Asian art in the 1990s, asking how Asian art is represented in international exhibitions at this time and, related to this, how the changing idea of Asia’s cultural geography is evoked in the international art exhibition space. What is the aesthetic and cultural effect of art exhibitions, produced in the image of Asia, that take on the geographic compass of Asia as a curatorial framing device for presenting the contemporary art of this vast region? What kind of images of Asia do contemporary Asian artists themselves contribute to such exhibitions? Thus, the exhibitionary lens is adopted in this chapter as a key discursive frame for investigation, recognizing the legitimizing force of exhibitions and their attendant curatorial frames in shaping knowledge of art. As Reesa Greenberg et al. argue, Exhibitions have become the medium through which most art becomes known [… They] are the primary site of exchange in the political economy of art, where signification is constructed, maintained and occasionally deconstructed. Part spectacle, part socio-historical event, part

quiries: ‘Where is Contemporary Art?’ was the guiding question of the Z K M ’s symposia of 2007. See Peter Weibel & Hans Belting, G A M – Global Art and the Museum project (Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe / Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe [Z K M ], 2006), http://www.globalartmuseum.de/site /home (accessed 27 October 2010). 3 See Patrick Flores, “Place and Presence: Conditions of Possibilities in Contemporary Asian Art,” unpublished paper presented at the ‘2002 Power Lecture in Contemporary Visual Culture’ series, the Power Institute Foundation For Art & Visual Culture, & the Department of Art History and Theory (University of Sydney), held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 25 September 2002).

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structuring device, exhibitions – especially exhibitions of contemporary art – establish and administer the cultural meanings of art.4

Accordingly, this chapter discusses the recent history of the international exhibition and reception of contemporary Asian art, relating how it, at last, comes to be represented in international art exhibitions in the 1990s. It thus reflects the fact that preliminary encounters with contemporary Southeast Asian art in the international context of this period are largely informed by the wider frame of ‘Asia’. Three key exhibitions of the 1990s are highlighted, reflecting the new international visibility of contemporary Asian art at this time: The Third Asia– Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art; ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions /Tensions’; and ‘Cities on the Move’. I focus on the discourses of Asianness and Southeast Asianness that are foregrounded in these exhibitions and consider how particular national and regional frameworks provide the paradigmatic mappings for engaging with the art within them. More specifically, I ask: ‘How has Southeast Asia been represented in the history of these key internationally focused, contemporary art exhibitions?’ I sketch the trajectory of Southeast Asia’s relative exclusion from such international contexts of contemporary art through to its comparative prominence in recent iterations of major recurring exhibitions. The chapter thus also reflects on one of the enduring criticisms of the international exhibition of the 1990s – the structural effects of the international art exhibition as a stage of multicultural ‘spectacle’, and the ways in which the spectacularization of Asian difference was encouraged in this by neoliberal global capitalist logic and its conjunction with postmodern sensibilities guiding forms of exhibition representation. Moreover, I begin to explore how the physically and culturally mobile Asian artist that now oscillates between myriad geographical, cultural, social, and institutional spaces poses a different set of representational issues for the exhibition and reception of contemporary Southeast Asian art in the 1990s. Artists pushed categorical conceptions of ‘Asia’, ‘Southeast Asia’, ‘Asian diasporas’, and ‘Asian cosmopolitanisms’ into increasingly complex territory for their representational charting in exhibitions as they became more habitually enmeshed in the cross-cultural and translocal spaces of globalization. However, their ‘translocal’ experiences also generated idealizations of noma4

Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson & Sandy Nairne, “Introduction” to Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Greenberg, Ferguson & Nairne (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 2.

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dic existence which either continued to stress biographical and geographical movements (especially over any formalist, material or affective concerns of iconographic movement in their art) or completely ignored where artists nurture relations of belonging, however anarchic, transitory or entrenched. In the twenty-first century, there remains a continued and intense imperative to interrogate the boundaries of ‘Asia’ forged through such exhibitions, whether to invoke ‘Asia’ and its alternate conditions as a necessary means of disarticulating universalizing currents of contemporary art and/or to continue to critique simplistic identitarian designations that fail to address the complexity of Asian social and artistic realities. Alongside this is the representational tension between, on the one hand, the necessity of forging a place and presence for something called ‘Asian’ art and, on the other, contextualizing Asian art within a larger international frame of contemporary art, but one that always threatens to engulf Asia’s cultural identity. Against the internationalizing impulse of ‘global art’ exhibitions, the latter half of the chapter, by contrast, looks to Asia itself, exploring focused Asiathemed exhibitions that might be read as direct responses to the shortcomings of representing Asian art within the frame of international art exhibitions of the 1990s. In particular, I explore two exhibitions, the Japan Foundation’s ‘Under Construction’ and the A S E A N -supported ‘36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary Southeast-Asian Art’.

Visible Difference: Asian Spectacles and Spectres in International Mega-Exhibitions of the 1990s Even as new patterns of transnational movement encouraged a questioning of conventional geo-cultural frames of exhibition representation, the issue of locality became an increasingly important feature of international art exhibitions in the 1990s. While it might be true that artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang and Xu Bing from China, Lee Bul and Kim Soo-Ja from South Korea, and Dadang Christanto and Heri Dono from Indonesia were exhibited alongside U S and European artists, their art, unlike that of their Euro-American counterparts, was often foregrounded via geo-cultural or biographical representational frames highlighting Asian difference, filtered through their respective nation affiliations.5 Exhibition representation in the 1990s showed that nation5

Interestingly, when asked how he felt about participating in major international exhibitions, the artist Alfredo Aquilizan noted a sense of “feeling used,” unease at the

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alism was very much alive in an era of increasing globalization, echoing Anderson’s claim for the resilience of national communities: “the end of the era of nationalism, so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”6 Thus, while the proliferation of international art biennales and triennales the world over offered evidence of the globalizing effect in the art economy, the presence of the nation as an emblem of cultural difference continued to prevail. This condition may be understood as a counter to the universalizing, homogenizing impulses of globalization or as evidence that the intensified presence of global communication, media, economy, and cultural forms was simultaneously met with increased forms of localized activity and even depended on such activity. Moreover, even forms of so-called ‘transcultural’, ‘hybrid’ art which attempted to fuse global and local interests were subject to national reference and essentialized difference. Thus, global art exhibitions came to thrive on a contradictory dual condition – the erasure of difference in order to uphold its universalist imperatives, while also necessarily being attached to those very specificities of difference to sustain its existence. It has been well documented that art has often been utilized to imagine and image the nation, and thereby to represent the nation and promote narratives of nationalism; that nations have often turned to art and artists for tasks of domestic nation-building (most obviously, for instance, via the establishment of national galleries and museums), but also to represent the nation’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis other nations in the world. This is not unlike the discursive work of those kinds of international art exhibitions and art criticism that tend to identitarian classification. For instance, national paradigms often continue to define how viewers receive contemporary art in international exhibitions, including Asian art: artworks are identified with their makers, and, in turn, artists by their place of birth and/or residence (i.e. mainly through the provision of information panels which accompany artworks, in line with tradi-

idea of his art and his identity fitting in with museum agendas: “For some exhibitions sometimes you feel that you’re being used … considering that well, if you’re thinking that the curators of the museums have this agenda … and in a way, being there and having your work a part of that … to define what is Southeast Asian art and what is Asian art”; author’s interview with Alfredo Aquilizan, Manila, Philippines, 2 July, 2002. 6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991).

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tional museum practice but also exhibition catalogue essays framed as/by national art histories). The resilience of this practice registers the continuing influence of the nation-state’s support in matters of art funding, including artists’ participation in international exhibitions. It also indicates the continuing strength of traditional art-historical categories of geographical differentiation. Consequently, as the cultural theorist Jen Webb argues, whatever the aesthetic intent of the artist, as soon as work enters the community through exhibitions, official commissions and purchases, reviews and so on, it begins to be put to tasks other than the aesthetic, exploratory or communicative.7

In this way, contemporary Southeast art often becomes reduced to national tropes – ‘Indonesian art’, ‘Malaysian art’, ‘Philippine art’, ‘Singapore art’ – at the same time as it performs the task of a more generalized ‘Asianness’. The aesthetic, exploratory or communicative intent of the artist is dismissed or of lesser importance, since the artist’s biographical affiliation takes precedence in illuminating the meaning of art: They insist on tracing the provenance of works and the biography of the artists as though, in knowing where the artists were born, worked and lived, and where the works have been shown and exchanged, some light would be shed on their meaning and identity.8

Thus, ‘cultural difference’ becomes a fetishized and spectacularized form of ‘multicultural’ display. Asian cultural identity is stripped of its critical political and aesthetic potential as the capitalist logic of global exhibitions transforms art into commodified (multi)cultural spectacle,9 or what Flores describes as the “Asian differential.”10 It is this kind of identitarian logic that 7

Jen Webb, “Art in a Globalised State,” in Art and Social Change, ed. Caroline Turner (Canberra: Pandanus, 2005): 32. 8 Webb, “Art in a Globalised State,” 29. 9 On the topic of Asian and particularly Singaporean forms of cultural spectacle, see Lee Weng Choy, “Authenticity, Reflexivity, and Spectacle; or, The Rise of New Asia Is Not the End of the World,” Positions 12.3 (2004): 643–66. In another article, Lee argues the case for a loss of self-reflexivity which accompanies the showcase of spectacle in the blockbuster bi/triennale exhibition; see Lee Weng Choy, “Biennale Time and the Spectres of Exhibition,” F O C A S : Forum on Contemporary Art and Society 4 (2002): 318–19. 10 Flores, “Place and Presence: Conditions of Possibilities in Contemporary Asian Art.”

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operates on the international stage of contemporary art in the 1990s, returning contemporary Asian artists and their artwork as exotic spectacles. As one arts writer put it, “curators can’t get enough of original cultures and artists can’t wait to give them up.”11 The Philippine artist Mark Justiniani makes a similar point: “sometimes you feel like a Miss Universe contestant; you need to be representing your country, but you should be representing yourself.”12 In this context, the seemingly untranslatable space between cultures becomes always translatable as otherwise complex identities are reduced to essentialist stereotypes. As Lee Weng Choy argues, “In fetishizing identity we promulgate a criticism which aspires to locate, but instead only labels.”13 Similarly, as Sarat Maharaj has observed for the international space of art, the “multiplicity of tongues, visual grammars and styles […] do not so much translate into one another as translate to produce difference.”14 Rather than being a site of meaningful, critical translations, the international art exhibition often serves as an uncritical “difference-producing space.”15 Thus, in this perverse twist of logic we see that as Southeast Asian artists gained increased international visibility during the 1990s, they also often became emblems of homogenized cultures. Moreover, while some artists actively contributed to their own characterization in this way, others – even those undertaking more critical and complex artistic explorations – remained vulnerable to such essentialist cultural coding because of the nature of their contemporary art practices of self-positioning and self-inscription. The dominance of the ethnographic approach may be understood as a means of introducing foreign viewers to the differentness of contemporary art emerging from locales and art histories unfamiliar to them. It might also be 11

Richard Hylton, “Continental Drift,” Art Monthly (U K ) 239 (September 2000): 1. Quoted in Ian Howard, (executive producer). Millennium Shift – Art of the New World Order (video recording, Special Broadcasting Service, Australian Film Commission, and Film Queensland, 1997). 13 Lee Weng Choy, “Local Coconuts: Simryn Gill and the Politics of Identity,” A R T AsiaPacific 4.16 (1997): 59. 14 Sarat Maharaj, “ ‘ Perfidious Fidelity’: The Untranslatability of the Other,” in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (London: Kala / The Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994): 28. See also Jean Fisher, “The Syncretic Turn: Cross-Cultural Practices in the Age of Multiculturalism,” in New Histories, ed. Lia Gangitano & Steven Nelson (exh. cat.; Boston M A : Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996): 32–38. 15 Maharaj, “ ‘ Perfidious Fidelity’: The Untranslatability of the Other,” 28. 12

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explained by the prevalence of culturalist discourses and practices which are maintained as part of the everyday reality of multi-racial, multi-religious politics in contemporary Southeast Asian societies. Indeed, as I have suggested, not all Southeast Asian artists refute the ethno-mapping by which they are represented; some artists subscribe to and even embrace such ethnographic tracing, either to advance a space for their respective cultural communities, to lay claims to their historically marginalized identities or, even, and more strategically, to take advantage of their cultural capital and its international allure, advancing their own political and/or economic position as artists. As Lee Weng Choy has aptly observed of the situation, the artistic engagement with issues of cultural identity is not a one-dimensional one: There are artists who embrace their roles as self-ethnographers, others who are indifferently categorized as such, and still others who resist it, but seem unable to shake off the typecasting.16

Notably, while the cultural specificities of Asian artists were time and again foregrounded as the basis of representation, this is generally unlike the treatment accorded to international artists of Euro-American heritage.17 The relative absence of cultural difference as a theme of exploration for Euro-American artists of Anglo-Saxon origin revealed that the burden of culture continued to be carried by the historicized Other. The subtext here, I suggest, was that the (‘White’) Western artist was able to transcend cultural particularity and continue the legacy of modern art with its emphasis on sequential avantgardes and art styles. An increasing disjuncture between fixed, ethnicized representations of Southeast Asian difference and the contemporary social reality of flux and change became dramatically visible towards the late-twentieth century and could no longer be ignored. The essentializing (multi-)cultural logic of the postmodernist exhibition spectacle was regularly seen to contradict the reality of cultural complexity and change in Asia, including that of Asian art. In such 16

Lee, “Local Coconuts: Simryn Gill and the Politics of Identity,” 58. See, for instance, the Venice Biennale’s TransCulture catalogue. Descriptions of the Asian artists selected generally begin with the artist’s cultural origin and this is not the case for the Euro-American artists represented. See Dana Friis–Hansen, “Artists and Works,” in TransCulture: La Biennale di Venezia 1995, ed. Fumio Nanjo, Dana Friis–Hansen, Akiko Miki, Yukie Kamiya, Anne Longnecker Dodds & Yoko Miyahara (exh. cat.; Tokyo: The Japan Foundation & Fukutake Science and Culture Foundation, 1995): 90–177. 17

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instances, essentialist classifications evoking cultural origins and discreteness potentially belied not only the multifaceted forms of contemporary art practice but also the cultural webs in which Asian art had become enmeshed in the late-twentieth century. Thus, as an increasing number of artists chose to live abroad and adopted the new peripatetic conditions of globalized art practice, exhibition formats began to respond to the presence of diasporic and global artists on the move. Indeed, pathways of movement to formerly ‘closed’ spaces were thrown open to a wider spectrum of artists in the world, witnessing to their unprecedented capacity for multiple, fluid, and shifting patterns of movement across a variety of spaces, including the virtual. Exhibition curators could no longer ignore these new influences on contemporary Southeast Asian existence and belonging which, significantly, assisted in destabilizing the simplified Asian differential figured in the dominant biennale/triennale exhibitions but also reconfigured it in new ways, including the stereotype of the Asian ‘hybrid’ or ‘transcultural’ artist. Accordingly, alongside more localized identitarian themes of nation and ethnicity, the theme of globalization itself came to the fore in exhibitions of the 1990s via a spate of ‘global art’ exhibitions concerned with issues of transnationalism, cross-culturalism, and borderlessness. As Joan Kee explains, These exhibitions attempted to imbue contemporary art in Asia with more nuanced interpretations not necessarily sutured to geospatial boundaries and historical conventions. Despite the practical difficulties in conceptualizing or facilitating this kind of community, the transnational frame of exhibitions sought to expand the scope of critical discussion rather than confine it to the territorial foundations of national paradigms.18

Major international exhibitions of the 1990s which sought to reflect the new global, cross-cultural, and mobile experiences associated with globalization include the 46th Venice Biennale’s ‘TransCulture’ (1995), ‘Cities on the Move’ (1997–2000), and ‘The Third A P T ’ (1999) with the latter’s attention to art and artists ‘Crossing Borders’. More often than not, however, exhibitions such as these struggled to achieve the ‘appropriate’ representation of international artists and their globally mobile art, against the usual museum conventions for organizing Asian artists via geo-spatial demarcation, especially national paradigms. At least for the 1990s, even when international 18

Joan Kee, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Twenty Questions,” Positions: East Asia Cultural Critique 12.3 (Winter 2004): 603.

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Asian artists were set in the transnational context, Asian art nevertheless remained tied to essentializing biographical frames in the continued desire for cultural difference.

Art and Anthropology: The Ethnographic Impulse As I have already suggested, the social or, more precisely, anthropological frame of identity and its related ethno-cultural discourses have dominated the representation and reception of contemporary Southeast Asian art, often displacing other thematic issues or aesthetic concerns. Culture has become a commonplace methodological topos in the interpretation of contemporary Southeast Asian art, particularly in international contexts.With regard to art practice itself, while some artists have been intent on expressing socio-cultural issues in their art as a means of self-expression and to communicate their everyday local reality, for others such issues have been of little importance and detract from the formalist and/or affective concerns of their art-making, or from their interests in participating in a larger programme of international contemporary art practice. Added to this is the issue of reception, whereby art might be interpreted primarily for its socio-cultural significance in foreign contexts but concurrently understood for its wider aesthetic import in the local context of its production or meaning. The dominance of the ‘culturalist’ or ‘ethnographic’ turn, I propose, was the intersection of key identity-driven motivations emerging from, first, decolonizing and de-imperializing projects from within Southeast Asia itself, and, second, the wider (multi-)‘culturalist’ turn in the emergent international field of contemporary art. In other words, this cultural turn in contemporary Southeast Asian art can be read as the principal effect of particular overlapping currents: on the one hand, culture is foregrounded in art via the locally inflected practices and histories of modern art in the region with their (postcolonial) challenge to hegemonic Euro-American colonialist modernities and through art’s utility as a ‘canvas’ for painting the domestic racial, religious, and socio-political realities of the nation in exercises of (postcolonial) nationbuilding. On the other hand, culture comes to matter alongside rising global interest in contemporary art practices from outside Euro-America after 1989 – more specifically, an art that is marked by explicit signs of cultural difference or Otherness and which therefore feeds the difference-driven demands of the neoliberal global capitalist economy. Together, the concurrent political attention to culture across these local and global spheres of art practice and circu-

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lation assisted in sedimenting ethno-cultural or socio-political narratives as hegemonic positions for engaging with contemporary Southeast Asian art in this period. For Southeast Asian art, I am particularly interested in exploring the tension between, on the one hand, the identity-shifts and dynamic changes in art practice occurring at the turn of the century brought with the intensive uprooting and movement of people and objects in the globalized world and, on the other, the continuing impetus to ‘locate’ contemporary Southeast Asian art in more conventional identitarian or cultural terms in forging histories of art for the region. The newly globalized programme of contemporary art is, as I have previously intimated, characterized by inattention to the aesthetic encounter in contemporary Southeast Asian art – that is, an ignoring of the formalist and affective considerations of art practice and its reception – often overlooked in place of the hegemonic socio-political and ethno-culturalist discourses and ideologies prevalent in the period under discussion, particularly coalescing under the signs of postcolonialism, postmodernism, and multiculturalism. Nevertheless, such curatorial paradigms seem to be gradually shifting in the early twenty-first century as exhibitions refocus our gaze on cross-cultural and cosmopolitan connectivities and attention is being drawn to the aesthetic affinities and differences in global currents of contemporary art practice. ‘International’ exhibitions from the early 1990s onwards encompassed contemporary art from all over the world; however, it was soon claimed that this merely masked the framing of non-Western artists within a persistent Euro-American perspective. Indeed, in such contexts, highlighting the specific origins of the Asian artist was often seen as a necessary, counter-identity strategy to stem the hegemony of Western-centric discourses that stood for socalled ‘international’ art. This political motivation was a major reason, I would suggest, for the biographical turn in the practice and interpretation of non-Western art, including contemporary Asian art (whereby artists’ biographies served as the principal interpretative material in explaining artworks). It also lies at the heart of the now oft-cited arguments raised by the art critic Hal Foster in his seminal book of 1996, Return of the Real, in which he describes an “ethnographic turn” in art and the reconfigured role of the “artist as ethnographer.”19 Foster argues that artists begin to take on a specialized function of 19

See the “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge M A & London: M I T Press, 1996): 171–204.

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cultural mediation from the 1960s, whereby anthropological approaches are adopted in art-making and the resultant art often comes to stand for entire cultural groups. Through this, artists performs the traditional task of the ethnographer and their art becomes configured as authentic “artifacts of difference” or signs of the Other. Foster describes the process of ‘othering’ that occurs through this kind of ethnographic framing: often artist and community are linked through an identitarian reduction of both, the apparent authenticity of the one invoked to guarantee that of the other […]. As the artist stands in the identity of a sited community, he or she may be asked to stand for this identity, to represent it institutionally. In this case the artist is primitivized, indeed anthropologized, in turn: here is your community, the institution says in effect, embodied in your artist, now on display (original emphasis).20

As Foster suggests, if there was a tendency towards ethnographic method in art practice, this model was encouraged and reinforced via an increasing fetishization of the Other in practices of institutionalized interpretation and representation (including via art scholarship and criticism, as well as curatorial undertakings).21 In particular, the aestheticization of race or ethnicity as biography became a preoccupation, a hegemonic mode of curatorial representation whereby so-called multicultural or international exhibitions “reconfigure[d] the perceived artist of minority culture to reflect an ideal image of an anthropologized identity.”22 The international shift from the medium-focused (aesthetic) to the discourse-oriented (social and cultural) doubtless helped institutionalize the relationship between art and/or artists and their cultural contexts. Within this milieu, we see contemporary Southeast Asian artists became increasingly ensnarled in a representational dilemma – even when applying 20

Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” 198. A further important point Foster makes is that “[a] related othering may occur with the artist as ethnographer vis-à-vis the cultural other [… whereby] the artist [is] asked to assume the roles of native and informant as well as ethnographer” (“The Artist as Ethnographer,” 174). 21 In the 2011 special issue of Third Text on contemporary Southeast Asian art, Nora Taylor’s contribution, “The Southeast Asian Art Historian as Ethnographer?” Third Text 25.4 (2011): 475–88, provides a valuable intersection with this argument, observing anthropologists’ interest in contemporary Southeast Asian art and the gains from ethnographic methods. 22 Nav Haq, “Intersecting Notes On Spin Cycle,” in Spin Cycle: Runa Islam, Damien Roach, Hiraki Sawa, ed. Nav Haq (exh. cat.; Bristol: Spike Island & Systemisch, 2004): 9.

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self-reflexive approaches to their art practice so as to critically probe rather than merely mirror or describe culture (and/or subjectivity in a broader sense), they remained vulnerable (as continuing signs of Otherness) to being reinscribed in simplistic discourses of the (postcolonial) Other which posited them and their art as mere representatives of authentic cultures. In this way, even if the new conditions of artistic production, exchange, and reception engendered an unprecedented global visibility for the once visually marginalized Southeast Asian artist, it paradoxically also made them vulnerable to objectification as essentialized, commodifiable, and easily translatable signs of ‘Otherness’. Ironically, imagistic abundance ran the risk of reinscribing the exclusionary politics it set out to escape. As Gerardo Mosquera has argued in relation to art from Latin America, but equally applicable to a study of contemporary art from Southeast Asia, The new fascination of the centres for alterity, specific to the ‘global’ fad has permitted greater circulation and legitimation of art from the peripheries. But all too often only those works that explicitly manifest difference or satisfy expectations of exoticism are legitimated.23

Similarly, in this context, the curator Mari Carmen Ramirez also asks: How, then, can exhibitions or collections attempt to represent the social, ethnic, or political complexities of groups without reducing their subjects to essentialist stereotypes?24

In other words, how might it be possible to represent the variety of ‘nonWestern’ contemporary art in global art contexts without resorting to cultural generalizations and essentialist versions of cultural identity? Exhibitions of the 1990s may be understood as an ongoing effort to address these central questions regarding the cultural politics of representation.

Figuring Asia in the World We are living in a rapidly globalizing world. But a real global world is yet to be invented. We are currently on the midground of such an

23

Gerardo Mosquera, “Good-Bye Identity, Welcome Difference: From Latin American Art to Art from Latin America,” Third Text 56 (Autumn 2001): 26. 24 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Brokering Identities: Art curators and the politics of cultural representation,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson & Sandy Nairne (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 23.

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endless invention, and a truly global art is a step forward in the long march.25 Art will be able to set a kind of common base of knowledge – a new global standard. One effect might be that Asian artists will become as widely known as, for example, Picasso is now.26

Contemporary Southeast Asian artists received unprecedented international exhibition exposure in the 1990s – ‘going global’ with their art, so to speak. Testimony to this is the fact that artists such as Heri Dono (Indonesia), Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thailand /South America/U S A / Europe), Jun Nguyen–Hatsushiba (Japan /Vietnam/ U S A ), Navin Rawanchaikul (Thailand /Japan) and Surasi Kusolwong (Thailand) are among the top twelve Asian artists who have participated in the most international biennales since 1990.27 The new international visibility of contemporary Southeast Asian art may be viewed as part of the broader surge of international interest in the modern and contemporary art of non-Western cultures – especially that of wider Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. This new international attention was, in turn, connected with a more general postmodernist critique of the cultural hegemony of the West since the Enlightenment and a desire to create more culturally diverse and inclusive exhibition agendas to more truly reflect international perspectives. Unlike their very earliest forms in the international art fairs or expositions of the nineteenth century, exhibitions of contemporary art since the 1990s were purported to be more extensively ‘international’ in their composition. 25

Hou Hanru, “On the Midground: Chinese artists, diaspora and global art,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999): 191. 26 Fumio Nanjo, “Crossing Borders: Toward new fields,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 190. 27 See the Asia Art Archive’s “Did you know?” section at their “Biennials / Triennials” online project: http://www.aaa.org.hk/onlineprojects/bitri/en/didyouknow.aspx (accessed 17 April 2012). The other seven artists are Yang Fudong (China), Huang Yong Ping (China / France), Cai Guo-Qiang (China / U S A ), Kim Soo-Ja (Korea), Chen Chiehjen (Taiwan), Michael Lin Minghong (Taiwan / France), and Cao Fei (China). See also Clark’s analysis of the most frequently represented Asian artists for the period 1989–2005 in “Histories of the Asian ‘New’: Biennales and Contemporary Asian Art,” in Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Vishakha N. Desai (Williamstown M A : Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2007): 229–49.

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This was maintained, first, by the international explosion of such survey exhibitions during this period, which came to be established in modern art centres outside Europe and North America – for instance, in the international art cities of Havana, São Paolo, Sharjar, Dakar, Istanbul, Gwangju, Fukuoka, Shanghai, Taipei, Yokohama, and Singapore. Second, prominent mega-exhibitions of this type began to take a committed interest in exhibiting contemporary art of Asia and other non-Western societies alongside art from the West. This occurred within a flurry of concern to represent the long-neglected ‘marginalized Other’ and a related commitment to incorporating multicultural perspectives. However, the terms of visibility concerning non-Western art were much contested, with questions raised regarding whether such exposure operated as a form of critical empowerment or, instead, as a superficial gesture of multicultural inclusivity in the professedly ‘international’ art world. As Pastor Roces has argued, when compared with the nineteenth century’s universal expositions (the ancestor of contemporary international exhibitions), the question of whether or not these recently expanded international biennale/ triennale art shows are more truly internationalist, in their design and political outcomes, is highly debatable.28 For Pastor Roces, the spectre of the ‘universal’ expositions of the nineteenth century continued to haunt the curatorial imagination of the contemporary art exhibition at the close of the twentieth century. Not unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, large-scale exhibition projects of the 1990s, if unintentionally, often translated into spectacles of cultural geography in their attempts to give visibility to contemporary Asian art in international contexts. The modes for engaging with contemporary Asian art centred on their capacity to serve as translatable signs of or referents to contemporary cultures less familiar to the Euro-American popular imagination. In their disarticulation from their localized points of reference, and their reification as signs of translatable cultural difference, the biennale/triennale model reconfigured the aesthetic art object as a mere cultural mirror in a broader showcase of nations or spectacles of ethnicized difference. Added to these critiques of the early 1990s international survey exhibition was the hierarchy implicit in the binarism between the West and its ‘Other’ which continued to channel and contain the flow of influence in contemporary 28

Marian Pastor Roces, “Crystal Palace Exhibitions,” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, ed. Gerardo Mosquera & Jean Fisher (Cambridge M A : M I T Press & New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004): 234–51.

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art from the established metropoles of Western modernism to its imagined peripheries. Moreover, it became apparent that the prevailing ‘additive model’ of international art exhibitions did not necessarily produce the politics of equivalence it suggested, with more nuanced representational practices required in order to give critical visibility to the spectrum of contemporary art. Two guest curators and writers for ‘The Third A P T ’ expressed hopes in 1999 for the realization of a “truly global art.” The Paris-based Chinese curator Hou Hanru asserted: a real global world is yet to be invented. We are currently on the midground of such an endless invention, and a truly global art is a step forward in the long march.29

Similarly, Japanese curator Fumio Nanjo wrote: Art will be able to set a kind of common base of knowledge – a new global standard. One effect might be that Asian artists will become as widely known as, for example, Picasso is now.30

As Pat Hoffie has argued in the context of the ‘A P T ’ – an exhibition stressing Asia–Pacific cultural difference and diversity – these kinds of homogenizing, universalizing hopes seemed somewhat contradictory.31 They assumed that Asian artists aspired to, and were able to, join the ranks of prominent EuroAmerican artists whose work often mistakenly came to stand for universal interests or a ‘global art’. Indeed, even with the participation of Asian curators of contemporary art, the hegemony of Euro-American perspectives could still prevail, it was argued, and Asian affiliation did not automatically guarantee new critical frameworks founded in alternative Asia-based perspectives. Nevertheless, the work of curators such as Hou and Nanjo was groundbreaking, not only in steering towards a new kind of curatorial role but also in securing unprecedented international exposure for contemporary Asian art.32 29

Hou, “On the Midground: Chinese artists, diaspora and global art,” 191. Fumio Nanjo, “Crossing Borders: Toward new fields,” 190. 31 Pat Hoffie, “A New Tide Turning: Australia in the region, 1993–2003,” in Art and Social Change, ed. Caroline Turner; 516–41. 32 For an empirical breakdown of the most prominent curators in international biennales for the period 1989–2005, see Clark, “Histories of the Asian ‘New’: Biennales and Contemporary Asian Art,” 229–49; and, with particular reference to Southeast Asian curators, see Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia. Clark has also undertaken an examination of the qualitative effect of biennales in particular, on the shape of contemporary Asian art, probing not only its modes of 30

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In so doing, they also helped to prompt questions about the constitution of contemporary art and to test its scope and parameters, contributing new platforms for contemporary Asian art in the 2000s. The representation of contemporary art in the now ubiquitously recurring international art exhibition can be traced back to the earliest national pavilions of the Venice Biennale, and since then, the Documenta exhibitions beginning in the 1970s, the proliferation of global biennales and triennales throughout the 1980s, the establishment of Asia-based bi/triennales during the 1990s, and the string of commercial art fairs that have arisen since the 1970s and 1980s with an interest in contemporary art (Art Basel, A R C O , Frieze, New York Armory Show, Hong Kong art fair, Singapore art fair, Art Stage Singapore, etc). Prior to this, biennales were associated with only a handful of places: Venice (est. 1895), São Paolo (est. 1951), New York (Whitney Biennial, est. 1932), and Sydney (est. 1973). Other long-standing shows of this type are Documenta (est. 1955), the Carnegie International (est. 1896, with triennale format est. in 1955), and Manifesta (est. 1996). These changed conditions in international exhibition suggest the unparalleled mobility afforded art, artists, curators, and the international art-going public, as well as the ways in which the exhibition of art has become a globalized industry in itself with blockbuster or mega-exhibitions taking place in an ever-increasing number of places around the world. (Notably, the trope of the ‘nation’ still often holds sway in bi/triennale contexts of the early-twenty-first century, as a means of distinguishing art and artists – and the related nationally defined financial support they often receive – in the international or ‘global art’ context). While major European and U S -based exhibitions have demonstrated a gradual increase in their inclusion of Southeast Asian art within broader curatorial themes and within an expanding imaginary of Asia, they have given minimal exposure to Southeast Asian art over the course of their histories, especially when compared with other major exhibitions that occur outside

reception but also its curatorial influence on the hegemonic types of art production which circulate within them. Citing the burgeoning Asia-based art biennales of the 1980s and 1990s, Clark argues: “they would appear to be functioning for contemporary art in as yet not fully understood ways as arbiters of taste, as consecrators of esteemed practice and works, and as the mediators and distributors of artworks, artists, and curators” (Clark, “Histories of the Asian ‘New’,” 229). See also Lee, “Biennale Time and the Spectres of Exhibition.”

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Europe and the U S A with relatively long histories, such as the Havana Biennale (est. 1984), the São Paolo Biennale, and the Sydney Biennale. Notably, in tracing the inclusion of contemporary Southeast Asian artists in South America-based exhibitions, the theme of shared colonial experiences between South American and Southeast Asian territories emerges (for instance, the Spanish and U S colonial experiences of the Philippines which resonate with South America) and cross-regional connections of ‘Third-World’ experience are strongly registered via the mission of the Havana Biennale. Apropos of the quinquennial Documenta series of exhibitions established in Kassel in 1955, the Philippines-born ‘international’ artist David Medalla participated in Documenta 5 (1972); Singapore-born Matthew Ngui, who lives in Singapore and Australia, was included in Documenta X (1997); Susyilawati Sulaiman of Malaysia participated in Documenta 12 (2007); Documenta 13 (2012) included strong representation from Thai, Vietnamese, and Cambodian artists; the Singapore-born artist Simryn Gill, who lives and works in Malaysia and Australia, was included in Documenta 12 (2007) and Documenta 13 (2012) and represented Australia at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Notably, when the Venice Biennale has included Southeast Asian art, it has done so chiefly in its separate national pavilions rather than in its central exhibition halls. Only Thailand (since 2003), Singapore (since 2001), and Indonesia (since 2003) have presented pavilions at the Venice Biennale and all at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Significantly, in 2013 the exhibition of the Indonesian National Pavilion for the 55th Venice Biennale was presented at the central Arsenale exhibition site, a milestone for Indonesia in the history of the Venice Biennale.33 Exceptions to this situation include the inclusion of the Vietnamese artist Dinh Q Lê’s artwork in the central Italian Pavilion at the Giardini as part of the themed exhibition ‘Delays and Revolutions’ curated by Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum for the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. In that same year, the individual thematic exhibition ‘Z.O.U. – Zone of Urgency’ was presented by Hou Hanru as a subsection of Franceso Bonami’s ‘Dreams and Conflicts. The Viewer’s Dictatorship’, a tenpart exhibitionary complex for the 50th Venice Biennale. Hou’s Z.O.U. included artists from China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South 33

The Singapore government controversially withdrew its pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2013, seeking to review the long-term cost-benefits of participation. After petitions to the Singapore government, the Singapore pavilion is expected to resume its participation in 2015.

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Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. Z.O.U. was thus a landmark in terms of its focused representation of Asian artists within the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition. Southeast Asian artists included in Z.O.U. were Heri Dono (Indonesia); Alfredo Juan Aquilizan, and Maria Isabel Aquilizan (Philippines); Surasi Kusolwong (Thailand); Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Vietnam); and Wong Hoy Cheong (Malaysia). Notably, together with Molly Nesbit and Hans– Ulrich Obrist, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija was involved as a co-curator for the ‘Utopia Station’ exhibition, another subsection of Bonami’s ‘Dreams and Conflicts’ vision for the 50th Venice Biennale. Other major exhibitions in the U S A and Europe have been alert to contemporary Southeast Asian art.34 Especially since its ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions /Tensions’ exhibition of 1996 (discussed later in this chapter), the Asia Society in New York has continued to be an important agency for the exhibition of contemporary Southeast Asian art in the U S A ; more recently, the Guggenheim U B S M A P Global Art Initiative project, ‘No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia’, opened in February 2013 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, registering the Guggenheim’s new interest in contemporary art of Southeast Asia.35 In Europe, in 2007, the exhibition ‘Thermocline of Art’. ‘New Asian Waves’ (15 June–4 November) was presented at the Z K M ’s (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe) Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany. It claimed to provide “the first comprehensive picture of contemporary Asian art production,” with its inclusion of “117 artists representing 20 Asian countries 34

Other relevant recent exhibitions tend to reflect prior colonial relationships and take the form of occasional and usually nationally defined thematic exhibitions or solo exhibitions featuring Southeast Asia-born artists. For instance, exhibitions of Malaysian contemporary art in the U K have featured such artists as Wong Hoy Cheong; contemporary Indonesian art by Nindityo Adipurnomo, Mella Jaarsma, and Heri Dono, has been shown in the Netherlands; and art from the Philippines has been exhibited in Spain (Manuel Ocampo) and the U S A (Santiago Bose). 35 The Singapore-born art curator June Yap was appointed to oversee the inaugural exhibition for the Guggenheim U B S M A P Global Art Initiative project. The larger project “supports a network of curators and artists from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa in a comprehensive five-year programme involving curatorial residencies, acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s collection, international touring exhibitions, and far-reaching educational activities.” See http://www.guggenheim.org/guggenheim-foundation/collaborations/map/sseasia (accessed 28 November 2012).

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from the Middle East to Far East, from Southeast Asia to Near East and Central Asia.” It stands as one among a growing series of exhibitions supported by Z K M with a strong focus on contemporary Asian art. Notably, the Z K M ’s exhibition of 2011–12, ‘The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989’ (17 September 2011–5 February 2012) took on a wider ambit for probing the significance of Asian art as part of the ‘global contemporary’.36 In Berlin, the House of World Cultures (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) presented the exhibitions ‘Politics of Fun’ and ‘Living Room’ in 2005, as part of its larger ‘Spaces and Shadows’ festival focusing on contemporary Southeast Asian artists. As I described in the previous chapter, contemporary Southeast Asian art is indeed more strongly represented outside Europe and the U S A , through the work of major collecting and exhibiting institutions in Asia and Australia. These are the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane (Australia), and the Singapore Art Museum (Singapore), the latter with its ever more vigorous Singapore Biennale as an increasingly important site for the international exposure of contemporary Southeast Asian art, and based in the Southeast Asian region itself. This situation of strong Asian and Australian interest doubtless shows that geographical proximity to the Southeast Asian region is a driving motivation for the collection and exhibition of contemporary Southeast Asian art.

‘Global Art’ Exhibition Precedents As I have intimated, the 1990s saw changing curatorial approaches to contemporary Asian art, concurrent with shifting strategies and modes of arthistorical and curatorial representation generally. Underpinning this were pivotal debates taking place across the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and the new field of visual culture – each arguing for its preferred modes of interpreting and presenting creative materials and practices originating in societies outside Western contexts. These debates have been central to shifts within each of these disciplines and changes within gallery and ethnographic museum culture, particularly with regard to their shifting strategies of representation between art and anthropology, the aesthetic and the cultural. 36

See Z K M | Museum of Contemporary Art website (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/e/MuseumfuerNeueKunst (accessed 9 September 2013).

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A key exhibition which features regularly in such debates and is often regarded as a precursor to the more multiculturally inclusive exhibitions of the 1990s that followed it is ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, held at the Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1989. Curated by Jean Hubert–Martin, the controversial exhibition reflected the prevailing postmodern discourses of the time, which sought to undo the assumed purity and inimitability of Western modernism and its privileging of Enlightenment rationality. By displaying so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnographic’ art together with contemporary urban, avantgarde works, Hubert–Martin not only ventured to suggest the heterogeneity of contemporary art but also sought to launch dialogue on the intersections between and discrepancies among various contemporary artforms. ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, held at three different venues in Paris, presented the work of fifty established contemporary artists from Europe and North America together with that of fifty less-familiar non-art-studio-trained artists grounded in mainly indigenous, spiritual, and artisanal visual traditions. The exhibition is often cited as the first global contemporary art exhibition in its attempt to draw comparisons between contemporary practitioners of art across cultures and, by doing so, intimating new definitions of ‘art’. It has figured as a seminal exhibition presumably because of its unprecedented global magnitude, its staging in the art centre of Paris, and its controversial achievements and failures. Indeed, the show was widely praised but also duly criticized. Subjected to particularly harsh censure was the weak presentation of dialogue between art from different cultures in the overt juxtapositions between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ art – one of the most often cited examples in this regard is that of Hubert–Martin’s placement of the contemporary avant-garde painting by Richard Long entitled Red Earth Circle (1989), towering over a traditional sandpainting by members of the Aboriginal Yuendumu community from Australia (see Figure 36 below). Moreover, the form of postmodernism (or multiculturalism) advocated by the exhibition, many asserted, was one of uncritical heterogeneity, with little attention to culturally specific aesthetic contexts, and betraying residual colonial and Western-centric attitudes.37 Despite the fact that the exhibition drew criticism in these and other aspects, it is nevertheless persistently cited as a landmark event which changed the course of international contemporary art exhibition. Important, too, is the fact that it marks a seminal stage in contemporary Asian art’s appearance in 37

For critical discussions of the exhibition, see Third Text 6 (special issue, Spring

1989), ed. Yves Michaud.

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Europe. There was some South Asian representation, but the most substantial East Asian representation was enjoyed by Chinese and Japanese artists. A notable absence from Hubert–Martin’s vision was contemporary Southeast Asian art.

Figure 36: Installation view of the ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ exhibition (1989), with Red Earth Circle by Richard Long (England) on wall, and ground painting by the Yuendumu community (Australia) in foreground; at La Villette. Reproduced by courtesy of Quentin Bertoux.

‘Magiciens de la Terre’ is often compared with another controversial exhibition entitled ‘“ Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’, held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984.38 In this earlier exhibition, the curator William Rubin sought to compare ‘tribal’ and ‘modern’ art so as to suggest aesthetic associations of form between the usually distinct ‘tribal’ and ‘fine art’ categories. His presentation of ‘tribal’ objects, traditionally associated with ethnographic, museological re38

For further discussion of this exhibition with regard to ‘primitivism’, see various essays in The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art, ed. Susan Hiller (London & New York: Routledge, 1991).

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presentations, in the domain of a ‘universal’ fine art tradition was indeed provocative for its break with conventional representational practices.39 The ‘ “ Primitivism” ’ exhibition was criticized mainly for its privileging of Western art, and its assumptions about ‘primitive’ art as being simply a source material for modern artists from the West (such as Picasso and Brancusi), and for excluding so-called ‘tribal’ artists from the influences and effects of modernity. Moreover, the ‘tribal’ objects were presented without contextual cultural material, and this was criticized by those supporting a more ethnographic presentation.40 As the anthropologist James Clifford explains in his chapter “On Collecting Art and Culture,” Since 1900 non-Western objects have generally been classified as either primitive art or ethnographic specimens. Before the modernist revolution associated with Picasso and the simultaneous rise of cultural anthropology associated with Boas and Malinowski, these objects were differently sorted – as antiquities, exotic curiosities, orientalia, the remains of early man, and so on. With the emergence of twentiethcentury modernism and anthropology, figures formerly called ‘fetishes’ (to take just one class of object) became works of ‘sculpture’ or of ‘material culture.’ The distinction between the aesthetic and the anthropological was soon institutionally reinforced.41

In contrast to ‘ “ Primitivism” ’, Hubert–Martin’s ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ sought to enable a more equivalent standing between the diverse creative practices arising from different cultures by foregrounding a dialectic between the aesthetic and the anthropological, art and artefact. The American critic Thomas McEvilley considered it to be “the first major exhibition consciously […] attempt[ing] to discover a postcolonialist way to exhibit first – and thirdworld objects together.” However, for McEvilley it is in the end “a major event in the social history of art, not in its aesthetic history.”42 Certainly a number of Asian artists in the ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ exhibition have gone on to receive widespread recognition. However, the presence 39

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1988): 198–99. 40 For a critical review of the exhibition, see Rasheed Araeen, “From primitivism to ethnic arts,” in The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art, ed. Hiller, 158–82. 41 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 198–99. 42 Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (New York: McPherson, 1992). (Emphases added.)

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of contemporary Asian art in the international arena emerged more forcefully with landmark Asia-focused exhibitions of the 1990s as well as the inclusion of Asian art in key survey exhibitions occurring in the Euro-American art ‘centres’ but also in the newly established Asia-based biennales and triennales. Exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Whitney Biennale and others witnessed the gradual addition of non-Western artists and a shift from exclusively Euro-American art discourses. As Terry Smith contends with regard to ‘the contemporary’, it became impossible not to address postcolonial art practice and the new sensibility towards differently situated currents of art practice in the world.43 Indeed, following the lead of ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, large-scale exhibition surveys of contemporary art were obliged to include a substantial selection of non-Euro-American art in order to be considered critically; but, as I have already suggested, this was not necessarily generative of a critical politics of representation. The establishment of recurring biennale/triennale exhibitions in Asia itself in the 1990s gave new prominence to Asia and contemporary Asian art. Such exhibitions include the aforementioned Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Fukuoka, Japan (began in 1979 as the Fukuoka Asian Art Show but reestablished itself in the globally attractive triennale format in 1999), and the ‘A P T ’, Brisbane, Australia (since 1993), the Gwangju Biennale (Korea; since 1995), the Shanghai Biennale (China; national biennales 1996 and 1998, since 2000 international), and the Taipei Biennial (Taiwan; since 1998). More recently, other major recurring survey exhibitions include the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial (Japan; since 2000), the Yokohama Triennale (Japan; since 2001), Guangzhou Triennial (China; since 2002), the C P Open Biennale (2003; 2005 only), the Jogya Biennale (Yogyakarta, Indonesia; since 2005), the Singapore Biennale (since 2006), the Jakarta Biennale (Indonesia; est. 1982 – originally with an emphasis on local Indonesian artists was replaced by the C P Open Biennale in 2003 and 2005, but then re-established in 2009), and the Aichi Triennale (Japan; since 2010). Thus, in Southeast Asia itself, Singapore and Indonesia are important gravitational ‘biennale’ centres for contemporary art exhibition. By contrast, major internationally travelling exhibitions provided another means for encounters with contemporary Asian art during this time, especially: ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions /Tensions’, first presented in 1996 by the internationally renowned Thai curator Apinan Poshyananda to43

Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2009).

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gether with Vishakha N. Desai of the Asia Society Galleries, New York (shown in New York, Vancouver, Perth, and Taipei); ‘Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change – East Asian Art, Architecture and Film Now’, first shown in 1997 in Vienna and jointly curated by Hou Hanru and Hans–Ulrich Obrist (shown in Vienna, London, Helsinki, Bordeaux, Copenhagen, New York, and Bangkok); and ‘Inside Out: New Chinese Art’, curated by Gao Minglu and organized by the Asia Society Galleries, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998, with exhibitions in the U S A and Australia.

Dilemmas of Representation: Shifting Asian Identities under Globalization In the following, I investigate three early and seminal exhibitions of contemporary art which, unlike most other international art exhibitions in this period, take Asian art as their focus and include Southeast Asia. These are the ‘Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’; ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions /Tensions’; and ‘Cities on the Move’. In exploring these three key exhibitions, I attend to the kinds of curatorial imaginaries defined by them and how contemporary Southeast Asian art in particular is positioned. I explore some general curatorial objectives and patterns in the representation of art and modes of its reception. I also discuss key curatorial shifts in the representation of Asian identity, place, and belonging, in a more comprehensively globalized milieu: How do ‘Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ figure as places of contemporary art production? What does the selection and curation of art reflect about Asia /Southeast Asia, about art, about Asian /Southeast Asian art? What is their discursive effect? The exhibitions point to some of the shared concerns and dynamics of international art exhibitions at this time. These exhibitions are unique for their emphasis on the idea and representation of contemporary Asian art, as well as for introducing contemporary Asian art to international art contexts. They were ‘blockbuster’ or ‘megaexhibitions’ targeted at international audiences for art which assisted in creating an international platform for dialogue on contemporary Asian art and its representation. They are pioneering and formative in defining the future grounds for engaging with contemporary Asian art, but each is different in the kind and degree of attention it devotes to Asia and, more specific to my concerns, Southeast Asia. Further, two follow the biennale/ triennale model, while the others take on specific curatorial themes in foregrounding contemporary Asian art in a world context. The exhibitions represent bold, risk-taking ini-

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tiatives bringing contemporary Asian art to the fore despite not fully knowing its parameters and possibilities. In this light, they can be regarded as crucial sites for experimentation in an unfamiliar and expanded field of contemporary art, generating positive effects, achievements, and successes, as well as harvesting a range of criticisms. I do not attempt to provide an in-depth or comprehensive reading of these exhibitions. Rather, my chief aim is to highlight their curatorial aims and draw attention to art criticism which responds to them, as a means of foregrounding the hegemonic representational paradigms for encountering contemporary Southeast Asian art that held sway in the 1990s. While I would argue that the gains of these exhibitions have been many, what is perhaps more interesting for continuing intellectual dialogue on the constitution and representation of contemporary art are the particular challenges involved and the kinds of risks undertaken in making the relatively unknown, unsettled, and active field of contemporary Asian art visible and translatable to international viewers. As examples of the key representational issues and criticisms that beset curators of contemporary Asian art in the 1990s we learn much about changing attitudes and approaches to this art by examining these exhibitions. Of course, this is not to deny curatorial responsibility but to acknowledge the dialectic at work in the heightened international visibility of contemporary Asian art in the 1990s and the shifting modes of contemporary art’s representation in the international landscape, factors which ultimately shape our developing notions of ‘contemporary art’.

A “Journey Without Maps”?: En Route to the ‘Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ The ambitious Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition of 1999 was the third in a series presented by Australia’s Queensland Art Gallery (Q A G ), now Q A G O M A , showcasing contemporary art from Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.44 Given the magnitude and long-term commitment of Q A G O M A to promoting the art of the Asia–Pacific, the 44

For an account of the curatorial brief and objectives of ‘A P T 3’, see Caroline Turner, “Journey without Maps: The Asia Pacific Triennial,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 21–23, and Rhana Devenport, “The A P T curatorial process: negotiating cultural moments,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 25–27.

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‘A P T ’ exhibitions serve as crucial case studies for tracing developments in the representation of contemporary art from Asia. As discussed above, they also constitute seminal advances for the visibility of Southeast Asian art in broader international currents of contemporary art. From its inauguration in 1993, the ‘A P T ’ exhibition series sought to acknowledge the heterogeneity and cultural diversity of the Asia–Pacific region as well as to embark on an open exploration of Asia–Pacific art – an exploration which the former Q A G Deputy Director and ‘A P T ’ curator Caroline Turner described as one “without preconception – a journey without maps.”45 Its curators saw the inaugural ‘A P T ’ of 1993 as a stepping-stone to future engagements with the region over a longer term: “a moment in a journey, rather than a single destination,” “part of a process of learning and discussion, rather than a single product.”46 The ‘First A P T ’ exhibition was based loosely on the curatorial theme of ‘tradition and change’, acknowledging the continuing significance of the traditional in rapidly changing socio-political Asian contexts. Importantly, through its inaugural exhibition, the curators sought to “initiate a dialogue between art and art experts in the countries of the region.”47 The exhibition was widely praised for its significant achievements. Redza Piyadasa, for instance, acknowledged the ‘A P T ’ as “a complex and far-sighted undertaking, to say the least,” establishing the reputation of the Q A G as “a truly innovative art museum within the Asia-Pacific region.”48 Likewise, Emmanuel Torres commented on the effect of the ‘A P T ’ in challenging the Western-centric thesis of modern art: far from being an exclusive preserve of the West, modernist aesthetics has provided a visual vocabulary that has been freely adopted by artists working outside the Euro-American mainstream and perfectly adapted to their own cultural-national contexts.49

45

Turner, “Journey without Maps: The Asia Pacific Triennial,” 21. Julie Ewington, “A Moment in a Journey: The First Queensland Art Gallery Asia– Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,” A R T and AsiaPacific 1.2 (April 1994): 11. 47 Caroline Turner, “Introduction–From Extraregionalism to Intraregionalism?,” in The First Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1993): 8. 48 Redza Piyadasa, “A momentous Australian experience,” Malaysian Business Times (23 October 1993): 20. 49 Emmanuel Torres, “A Feast from the East in the South,” A R T and AsiaPacific 1.2 (April 1994): 16. 46

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However, there were criticisms raised concerning the terms of so-called ‘dialogue’ between Asia and Australia in the ‘A P T ’ s, mostly emanating from Australia itself. The then Sydney-based Gallery 4a director Melissa Chiu argued that the “claim for dialogue and exchange was contradicted by the organization and structure of the event, which reflected predominantly Australian interests and concerns.”50 Others suggested that the emphasis on a geocultural curatorial frame called the ‘Asia–Pacific’ obscured Australia’s own geo-cultural positioning and potential hegemonies within this, and maintained that there were inadequacies in the platforms for equal exchange.51 Nonetheless, if there were currents of sharp criticism at its outset, the Q A G O M A is now widely regarded and praised for its recognition of the dynamic contemporary art from Asia and the Pacific and for being a leader and innovator in the area of Asia–Pacific art curatorship, exhibition, and collection. For instance, Lisa Chandler has pointed to the value of the early cultural exchanges encouraged through the multiple curatorial partnerships of the first three ‘A P T ’ editions with their curatorial philosophy of “co-curatorship” and “inclusion.”52 Notably, for the first ‘A P T ’, art was presented by three regional subdivisions within the Asia–Pacific – Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the South Pacific. Within these subdivisions, art remained committed to nationalist categories of representation. Southeast Asian artists dominated this first ‘A P T ’ (sixty works in total; thirty-five artists in total), with most from Indonesia, followed by Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam. The strong Southeast Asian representation, now a rare occurrence in major international exhibitions, no doubt reflected Australian interest in developing 50

In particular, Chiu cites the ‘A P T ’ “organizers’ dismissal of colonialism as an important reference point for the region,” positioning colonialism as “a condition of the past” so as to obscure its effects on the region and to evade Australia’s own colonial relationships to the region.” Melissa Chiu, “Rough Trade: Curating Cultural Exchange in Australia,” in Alter/Asians: Asian–Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law, & Mandy Thomas (Annandale, N S W : Pluto, 2000): 132–33. 51 Francis Maravillas, “Cartographies of the Future: The Asia–Pacific Triennials and the Curatorial Imaginary,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, ed. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi & T.K. Sabapathy (Sydney: Wild Peony, 2006): 244–70. 52 Lisa Chandler, “‘Journey without maps’: unsettling curatorship in cross-cultural contexts,” Museum and Society 7.2 (July 2009): 74–91.

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cultural partnerships with its nearest neighbours but also Australia’s prior relationships with artists from the region through the Artists’ Regional Exchange (A R X ) emerging from Perth in the mid-to-late 1980s and bringing together Australian and Southeast Asian artists through projects of artistic exchange.53 Unlike the ‘A P T ’, the A R X artists were selected in response to specific themes and the Exchange was administered as a small recurring event run mostly by artists and with a minimal budget, funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (D F A T ). Its alternative approach saw a stress on artistic process, dialogue, and exchange rather than on finished art product; artworks were realized during the event itself and displayed in a simple exhibition at the event’s conclusion. The ‘A P T ’, conversely, has largely sought finished or commissioned artworks for its exhibitions, and artworks from artists already established in their own Asia–Pacific countries. By the time of its third incarnation in 1999, the ‘A P T ’ had become an extensive and spectacular showcase of some of the most impressive contemporary art from the region. Notably, Southeast Asian artworks were fewer in number on this occasion, while artists emanating from China dominated the exhibition space. The prominence of art by Chinese artists in this third edition materialized in grand and spectacular proportions, such as the huge bamboo bridge for Cai Guo Qiang’s Blue dragon & bridge crossing – Project for the Third Asia–Pacific Triennial (1999), the giant inflatable totem poles by Sang Ye and Germie Barmé entitled Hua Biao (1999), and the extensive signage which formed part of Xu Bing’s New English Calligraphy (1999) series. Certainly, the new significance of China in the world at the turn of the century was strongly registered in ‘A P T 3’. The reduced representation of Southeast Asian art signified a change in focus from Southeast Asia to East Asia and, more specifically, signalled the might of contemporary Chinese artists internationally. Thus, if 1993 marked a seminal year for Southeast Asia’s emergence and strong presence in the ‘A P T ’, then, as one exhibition reviewer put it,

53

Southeast Asian art professionals who participated in A R X include: Matthew Ngui, Suzann Victor, T.K. Sabapathy (Singapore); FX Harsono, Jim Supangkat, and Arahmaiani (Indonesia); Apinan Poshyananda, Kamol Phaosavasdi, and Pinaree Sanpitak (Thailand); Nirmala Shanmughalingam, Ismail Zain, Wong Hoy Cheong, and Simryn Gill (Malaysia); Sid Gomez Hidalwa, Marian Pastor Roces, Imelda Cajipe– Endaya, and Jean Marie Syjuco (The Philippines). The majority of these A R X participants have also been involved in the ‘A P T ’.

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1999 was the “Year of China.”54 By ‘A P T 3’, the overarching curatorial de-

sign had become more overtly theme-based, guided by the title ‘Beyond the Future’, intended to suggest “multiple perceptions of time and the inadequacy of a teleological or sequential reading of past/present/future” in bringing together the diverse contemporary art of the Asia and Pacific regions.55 Since the outset, a model of “multiple curatorship” or “co-curatorship” foregrounded the curatorial approach for the ‘A P T ’, so as to avoid imposing a singular curatorial vision of Asia–Pacific art. This model sought to create collaborative relationships between Australian, Asian, and Pacific arts professionals, in the hope of providing a basis for learning from local experts throughout the region.56 For its third exhibition, a record number of fortyeight curators from Australia, Asia, and the Pacific participated in the enterprise compared with fifteen and thirty-eight for the first and second ‘A P T ’s respectively. The evolving ‘A P T ’ curatorial process is further explained by Turner: The first 3 A P T s were committed to curatorial selection by teams of curators with Australian curators working with curators from the region in those teams. That was a fundamental principle and underlying philosophy of the selection process which was crucial to us (as well as writers from the region writing about the artists). This was changed for 2002 with an all in-house Australian team of selectors and writers. The National Advisory Committee (1992–1999) was dissolved for the 2002 A P T . The former N A C was all Australian. It was a high level policy advice committee focused on making the event national, rather than a selection committee as such, although the N A C did review the selections through presentations by curators but the Queensland Art Gallery was the final decision maker on selections.57

The curatorial design of the ‘A P T 3’ exhibition also reflected the dilemmas of conflicting discursive narratives for representing art from the Asia–Pacific, 54

Richard Dale, “Reviews: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,” Eyeline 41 (Summer 1999–2000): 40. 55 Devenport, “The A P T curatorial process: negotiating cultural moments,” 25. 56 On the “multiple curatorship” model, see Rhana Devenport, “Voices and Spaces: Shifting Dialogue and the Curatorial Process,” in The Second Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996): 35–36. 57 Michelle Antoinette, personal communication with Caroline Turner, 2 December 2005.

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negotiating conventional curatorial frames – that is, juxtaposing works from various cultures and countries, on the one hand, and/or adopting the ‘multiculturalist’ curatorial tradition of arranging art by national categories, on the other; the latter a style epitomized by the Venice Biennale. This tension was seen in the presentation in ‘A P T 3’ of a newly devised section, ‘Crossing Borders’. Through this section, ‘A P T 3’ curators endeavoured to account for those artists whose life experiences could not be so easily framed in terms of their affiliation with any one country, place, or culture. They sought to provide a ‘third space’ for nomadic, diasporic, and/or ‘hybrid’ artists /artworks less easy to fix in any particular geographical location under the newly intensified conditions of globalization. The ‘A P T 3’ curator Rhana Devenport explains the rationale for ‘Crossing Borders’ as follows: Crossing Borders was initiated in direct response to the concern that certain artists and cultural practices may be excluded from a curatorship framed through geography […] it was clear that a selection of artists governed by physical location dissolves in the wake of global mobility.58

The rationale of selection for the “Crossing Borders” section was further explained as a space for recognizing “artists who cross borders in their life and work (including those engaged in artist collaborations and interdisciplinary work), and who have a direct relationship and involvement with the Asia– Pacific region today.”59 Evidently, the noticeable presence of mobile and diaspora artists forced curators and artists alike to reconsider old assumptions and stereotypes about cultural identity and its conventional representation in contemporary art exhibitions.

58

Devenport, “The A P T curatorial process,” 25. Caroline Turner, with Rhana Devenport, Suhanya Raffel, Pat Hoffie, Dionissia Giakoumi, Julie Walsh & Jen Webb, “Crossing Borders,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 188. 59

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Figure 37: Simryn Gill, Vegetation (1999) [presented as part of ‘Crossing Borders’ at the Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition, 1999]. Image courtesy of the artist.

In the case of ‘A P T 3’, while there were commendable attempts to acknowledge the dynamic life circumstances of travelling and ‘diaspora’ artists of the late-twentieth century, such efforts were not without some degree of contradiction and representational inconsistency.60 First, attempts in ‘A P T 3’ 60

For reviews of ‘A P T 3’, see Hannah Fink, “Fizzle: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial,” A R T AsiaPacific 27 (2000): 20–23; Melissa Chiu, “Duplicitous Dialogue: The Asia–Pacific Triennial 1993–99,” A R T AsiaPacific 27 (2000): 23–25; and Charles Green, “Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial,” Art Journal 58.4 (Winter 1999): 81–87. See also Chandler, “Journey without maps.”

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to represent the shifting and complex cultural position of artists were weakened by the fact that ‘Crossing Borders’, ironically, became yet another totalizing category alongside those of national and regional identity. The problem with the isolated presentation of artists ‘crossing borders’ juxtaposed with others who were assumed to lead more static lives was made obvious by, for example, the inclusion of Lee Wen’s Yellow Man in the section for Singapore (despite the artist then living between Singapore and Japan), and the Vegetation photographic series by the Singaporean /Malaysian /Australian artist Simryn Gill in the ‘Crossing Borders’ section. Despite the fact that the works and lives of both artists evoked themes and realities of cross-cultural experience, the two were framed differently. Moreover, as Chiu has noted, the representation of Australian artists depicted their work as dominated by European and U S reference points. Chiu explains: only one Asian-Australian artist was included, namely Guan Wei, whose work was featured in the third Triennial […] other Australian artists of Asian descent, such as Simryn Gill and Ah Xian, were included in the ‘Crossing Borders’ section rather than the Australian section of the third exhibition.61

Through the curatorial design of the exhibition, Lee’s inter-national journeys as artist, it was implied, were less influential to his art-making than his Singaporean origins. Confusingly, the inter-national and cross-cultural negotiations inherent to Lee’s performances of the Yellow Man were posited outside the discourse of ‘Crossing Borders’, revealing the inherent emphasis in this ‘A P T ’ on biographical (cultural) positioning over a more aesthetically informed curation. By contrast, Gill’s representation promoted the ‘crossing borders’ artist as framed by an ongoing and – because of its isolating categorization – restrictive condition of migration. Moreover, the representation of Gill and other ‘crossing borders’ artists as catalogues of the multiplicity of different countries in their life experience (‘Born Singapore; lives and works in Sydney, Australia’) maintains the multiculturalist curatorial logic defined by national-cultural and racial taxonomy.

61

Chiu, “Rough Trade,” 134. Interestingly, among some of the most internationally renowned Southeast Asia-born artists, Dadang Christanto, Suzann Victor, Matthew Ngui, Simryn Gill, Guan Wei, Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, and Savandhary Vongpoothorn all reside in Australia. Christanto, Victor, Gill, Guan, and the Aquilizans were all participants in early ‘A P T ’ editions.

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Interestingly, in her series of black-and-white photographs entitled Vegetation (1999), Gill explores the idea that one might be both alien and native, foreign and indigenous, at once. That is, not a sense of being either one who ‘crosses borders’ or defined by cultural maps but as constituted by both. Reflecting on this condition and its circumstantial effect on her art and life, Gill observes: ‘Rooted’ as a word is of no interest. But neither is ‘nomadic’ an interest. One is what one is. You live through your circumstances and whatever your circumstances dish out to you, you respond to that. That’s the way it is.62

Another important aspect of the ‘A P T ’s of the 1990s were their time-based exhibition narratives. While ‘A P T 1’ engaged with issues of ‘Tradition and Change’ and ‘A P T 2’ emphasized ‘Present Encounters’, ‘A P T 3’ looked ‘Beyond the Future’, encouraging viewers to understand how artists in the region were engaged in contemporary art practices that envisioned new futures while also being concurrently concerned with the past. These concerns to address contemporary Asia as a context of cultural traditions in transition and flux, but also of continuities with the past, were addressed in another influential international exhibition of the 1990s, ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions’, the focus of the next section.

‘Traditions/Tensions’: Figuring the ‘Asian Contemporary’ in Art Organized by Vishakha N. Desai, then director of the Asia Society Galleries, with the guest Thai curator Apinan Poshyananda, ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions /Tensions’ began at the home of the Asia Society Galleries in New York in 1996 and travelled to Vancouver, Perth, and Taipei. While this landmark travelling exhibition sought to acquaint wider international audiences with contemporary Asian art, its chief aim was to stimulate U S interest in particular in order to “revise North American notions of Asian culture, contemporary as well as traditional”63 and “to introduce American audiences to the

62

Michelle Antoinette, interview with Simryn Gill, Sydney, Australia, 6 September

2002. 63

Vishakha N. Desai, “Foreword,” to Poshyananda et al., Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions (Sydney: Asia Society Galleries & New York: Fine Arts Press,

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rich, flourishing art scene from among live Asian countries.”64 The exhibition’s other main objective was to encourage new perceptions of Asia which acknowledge Asia’s changing societies and the new kinds of art practice emerging from them – “an institutional change where by [sic] Asian arts would not be seen or understood solely in terms of a traditional past but also for their very vibrant present.”65 Thus, ‘Traditions /Tensions’ attempted to disrupt visions of the traditional, oriental arts more stereotypically associated with Asia and past exhibitions of the Asia Society, by introducing contemporary art practices of the region. Significantly, such contemporary art was also shown to reveal continuities with Asia’s traditional cultural and visual histories – hence the title ‘Traditions /Tensions’, “with a slash between the words, rather than to separate them in two discrete concepts.”66 A further objective, Desai noted, was to help undo the deep-rooted misperception of modern Asian art practices as merely being derivative offshoots of Western art. Thus, according to Desai, for the Asia Society the exhibition was nothing short of reformulation of the image and study of Asian art in the U.S. [… to] play a significant role in bringing the Asian contextual understanding to the contemporary works that may superficially resemble their western counterparts.67

By encouraging a closer examination of the contexts of Asian art practice, ‘Traditions /Tensions’ sought to disrupt narrow-minded qualitative labels for describing Asian art – “derivative, provincial or too much like something else”68 – which tend to preclude a closer examination of Asian art for its own specificities. The appointment of the Thai art historian Poshyananda as guest curator for the show can be read in the context of an increasing desire for multicultural curatorship in a global art environment. While Poshyananda worked with a 1996): 13; see also Michael Oren, “Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions,” Third Text 41 (Winter 1997–98): 103–106. 64

As quoted in Jim Supangkat, “Multiculturalism/Multimodernism,” in Apinan Poshyananda et al., Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions, 70. 65 Vishakha N. Desai, “East in the West: Presentations of Contemporary Asian Art in the U.S.,” in Symposium: “Asian Contemporary Art Reconsidered,” ed. Furuichi Yasuko & Hoashi Aki (Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center, 1997): 60. 66 Desai, “East in the West,” 61. 67 “East in the West,” 63. 68 “East in the West,” 66.

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regional curatorial advisory committee to select the work – a committee made up of advisors from each country represented in the exhibition – he was ultimately responsible for the final choice of artists.69 The Asia Society’s strategic decision to entrust the task of selecting the work for the show to an Asian curator was a point not lost on the international art community, at that time still largely dominated by Euro-American curators. Desai also explained that “a single curator, from Asia, dealing with multiple Asian countries” was a conscious choice in order to arrive at an alternative exhibition model for engaging with contemporary Asian art in the West. The organizers sought to distinguish the exhibition from the usual “tendency to have nationalist curatorial teams when presenting the non-western contemporary art,”70 a pattern which, as Desai pointed out, “stands in stark contrast to the general practice for western contemporary shows, which routinely have single curators.”71 It was hoped that the single-curator model would provide the basis for a more cohesive and stronger curatorial vision, on the grounds that the model of multiple nationalist teams “often results in a weak or non-existent curatorial vision.”72 Of particular concern was an attempt to avoid ghettoizing artists into distinct national categories by encompassing a broad definition of ‘Asia’ – covering India, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and South Korea – so as to “purposely suggest the diversity of Asia.”73 Thus, Southeast Asian artists featured strongly – Nindityo Adipurnomo, Arahmaiani, I Wayan Bendi, Dadang Christanto, Heri Dono, FX Harsono (Indonesia); Agnes Arellano, Imelda Cajipe–Endaya, the Sanggawa Group, Reamillo & Juliet (Philippines); and Montien Boonma, Kamol Phaosavasdi, Chatchai Puipia, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Navin Rawanchaikul, and Jakapan Vilasinnekul (Thailand). The inclusion of Indian and South Korean artists alongside these Southeast Asian artists suggested a wider ‘Asian’ curatorial narrative, the exhibition taking on

69

The curatorial advisory committee included Geeta Kapur for India, Jim Supangkat for Indonesia, Marian Pastor Roces for the Philippines, and Jae-Ryung Roe for South Korea; Poshyananda’s expertise covered the curatorial ground for Thai art. Each of the advisors provided essays for the accompanying exhibition catalogue. 70 Desai, “East in the West,” 61. 71 “East in the West,” 61. 72 “East in the West,” 61. 73 “East in the West,” 61.

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the challenging task of trying to address in a single exhibition the entire Asian continent, in all its diversity and complexity. In total, the exhibition presented works by twenty-seven individual artists and groups from the focus countries, with the aim of restricting the explorations of the ideas and images to those artists who were actively engaged in creating a dialogue with or critiquing perceived notions of traditions in their respective cultures in the context of the dynamically changing, globalizing trends that are evident in all parts of Asia.74

However, the seemingly arbitrary choice of countries making up ‘Asia’ begged the question: Why these Asian countries and not others? Why this particular map of contemporary art in Asia? And why its particular attention to Southeast Asia via Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines alongside South Korea and India? Were these countries more representative of the complexities of tradition and change in Asia in the late-twentieth century? Certainly, the decision to exclude artists from China and Japan because of their already substantial international art exposure was a pointed one. The attention to South Korea and the Philippines might be explained in part by strong historical ties between the U S A (the initiating country) and these two Asian nations and the large Asian-American diaspora linked to them. The contributing catalogue essayist Supangkat situates the exhibition within the debates on multiculturalism in the U S A at that time, linking ‘Traditions / Tensions’ in a very direct way to U S domestic political issues and the multicultural agenda, raised also a few years earlier in the ‘multicultural’ Whitney Biennale of 1993.75 Desai offered the following motivation: to present the works from countries that were less known in the western art world but with rich and mature artistic traditions... [and] also to break the mold of the regionalisation of Asia into East Asia (China, Japan and Korea), South East Asia or South Asia. At the same time, there was a strong attempt to suggest that many of the issues that are tackled by artists in the region, are indeed transnational and could benefit from interesting and imaginative juxtapositions in an exhibition with a loose thematic structure.76

74

Desai, “East in the West,” 61. Supangkat, “Multiculturalism/Multimodernism,” 70–81. 76 Desai, “East in the West,” 61. 75

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Given the curator’s cultural background and expertise in Thai art, the inclusion of Thai artists was hardly surprising. However, for an important exhibition of contemporary art from the ‘Asian’ region, curated by a ‘Southeast Asian’, the exclusion of Singaporean and Malaysian representation seemed an odd one to some, given the availability of flourishing contemporary artforms in these countries which spoke to the exhibition’s themes. Hence, from Langenbach’s Malaysia-based perspective, the overall impression of Asia conveyed by the show was a privileging of societies with long local histories […] over immigrant societies [such as Singapore and Malaysia], even in postmodernity. The ignoring of Singapore and Malaysia in Apinan’s exhibition was particularly ironical in light of the substantial body of work in this exhibition focusing on the experience and politics of displacement in Southeast Asian societies.77

Hence, like ‘A P T 3’, ‘Traditions /Tensions’ showed signs of its own representational dilemmas in grappling with issues of cultural mobility and transformation under globalization. However, we might also consider the hidden politics of such exhibitions and what is made visible and invisible to us in processes of exhibition programming. In conversation with the Malaysian artist Wong Hoy Cheong, the artist revealed that he ultimately decided to decline the invitation to participate, given his unease with its historical context: I was actually invited to be one of the initial people to thrash out the idea of the Traditions / Tensions project that Asia Society organized in New York […]. So, that one I turned down […]. I felt there was this sort of polarity. We are seen as the oppressed minority, the oppressed Third World person or this exotic person of the Third World […] and it came through especially in arts I thought, where I think some of us had long discussions about that. […] So it made me think through some of the things I wanted to do.78

Wong reveals that the interest in a broader spectrum of Southeast Asia was in fact a possibility for the exhibition, if not realized in the end. More importantly, the ‘Third World’ discourse perceived by Wong resonates with Supangkat’s 77

Ray Langenbach, “Performing the Singapore State 1988–1995” (doctoral dissertation; Sydney: Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, 2003): 187. 78 Michelle Antoinette, interview with Wong Hoy Cheong, Singapore, 5 June 2002.

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reading of ‘Traditions /Tensions’ alongside the earlier Asia Society exhibition ‘Asia /America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art’, in which he notes a wider discursive frame of ‘Third World’ artists in operation. As Supangkat explains, the earlier ‘Asia /America’ exhibition explicitly sought to give presence to “Third World Artists within the First World”79 and it is likely this historical precedent that Wong sought to avoid connection with. The curatorial thematic rationale adopted for ‘Traditions /Tensions’ saw an exploration of contemporary Asian art through the lenses of postcolonialism, religion, and gender. While the adoption of such themes also served to cut across distinctions of nationalism, some questioned this premise as perhaps mirroring Western expectations about Asian art rather than being a reflection of the art itself.80 In addition, the prevalence of the installation format raised concerns as to whether or not exhibition curators had succumbed to the fashionable preference for ‘installation art’ in the international biennale /triennale art exhibitions, potentially suggesting a particular view of Asian art through a Euro-American lens. However, Alexandra Munroe puts the selection specifically down to Poshyananda’s personal predilections: It is perhaps a testimony to Poshyananda’s curatorial skills that the show has such visual coherence – the gaps between different nations and cultures all but vanish. Yet it is precisely this consistency of style (Poshyananda favours allegorical work and installation painting) that inevitably elides some of the tensions and crises that exist among any group of modern Asian countries, and this is a note of caution.81

Munroe’s remarks suggest the risk of slipping into generalizations about a monolithic Asia, defined by a false sense of mutual harmony and consensus within. She intimates that, while aesthetic intentions may have motivated the blurring of cultural distinctions in ‘Traditions /Tensions’, the subsequent lack of critical cultural difference between artists may have evoked misleading ideas of Asian sameness, particularly for those without a deep knowledge of Asia’s diverse histories and contemporary contestations. Thus, for some, social distinctions among the participating artists, particularly with regard to economics, politics, and varying forms and degrees of colonization, were not made explicit enough in the exhibition, though addressed in the exhibition catalogue essays. As a result, ‘Traditions /Tensions’ risked invoking mis79

Supangkat, “Multiculturalism/Multimodernism,” 70–71. Eleanor Heartney, “Asia Now,” Art in America (February 1997): 70–75. 81 Alexandra Munroe, “Contemporary Art in Asia,” Artforum 35.8 (April 1997): 87. 80

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leading narratives of cultural homogeneity belying the reality of Asia as a highly differentiated region.

Figure 38: Agnes Arellano, Vesta, Dea, Lola (1995) [presented as part of the exhibition ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions’]. Image courtesy of the artist.

Perhaps more significant to the overall aims of the exhibition was the hope “to reveal aspects of [Asian] cultures in transition that may shift stereotypes and fixities of ‘Otherness’.”82 In other words, to attempt to show Asian traditions in tension and to unsettle Orientalist stereotypes of Otherness that dominate popular ideas of Asian art in the West. Indeed, this is likely the greatest 82

Apinan Poshyananda, “Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition,” in Poshyananda et al., Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions (exh. cat.; New York: Asia Society Galleries & Sydney: Fine Arts Press, 1996): 49.

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strength of the exhibition and its lasting legacy. However, in attempting to craft a more complex imaginary for contemporary art from Asia, the exhibition was criticized for seeming to perpetuate the binary schemata upon which Orientalist epistemologies and ontologies rest – stereotypes of Asia were offered as ‘contemplative’, ‘mysterious’, ‘exalted’, or ‘erotic’, on the one hand, and ‘confrontational’, ‘explicit’, ‘rough’, ‘urban’, and ‘prudish’, on the other. While there was a motivation to present Asian art as other than always pre-modern and as a confirmation of Orientalist visions, the confrontation with clichéd Orientalist binaries only seemed to maintain them, reinforcing their imagined authority. In describing the reception of the exhibition in the U S A , Desai reported on the deep-seated prejudices held by local critics who continued to cast Asia in simplistic opposition to the West, particularly as a place of unchanging traditions in contrast to an innovative, modern West: many critics were unable to look beyond the Western prism they brought to the work and through which they judged it […] most critics were afraid to really engage with the work directly and write about it.83

There were criticisms of the prevalence of installation art (thought to be already ‘passé’ in the West) and the inclusion of “weak paintings”; after the heavy focus on socio-political themes in early-1990s U S art, some expected fresh aesthetic perspectives unhindered by socio-political discourse; others found fault with the geographical scope, some deeming it too broad and others finding it not deep enough. In the end, Desai concluded, the ‘otherness’ of Asian art is still easier for people to absorb and appreciate. As it gets closer or converges, there is very little effort to understand its cultural or aesthetic nuances […] he/she [the critic] is unwilling to engage with the work on its own terms, give it more than a glance…”84

‘Traditions /Tensions’ played a crucial role in providing further international exposure to contemporary Asian art and complicating traditional perceptions of Asia and its art. With respect to Southeast Asian art in particular, like ‘A P T ’ it was fairly unusual for shining a light on contemporary art emanating from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand within a broader Asian frame usually dominated by East Asia. Moreover, the exhibition helped 83 84

Desai, “East in the West,” 65. “East in the West,” 65.

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to reconfigure the popular imagination of Asian art beyond exclusively ‘traditional’ frames of reference by firmly situating Asia within currents of modern and contemporary art history. One year on from ‘Traditions /Tensions’, another travelling show surfaced, also with a view to bringing contemporary Asian art to international viewers. In many ways, this subsequent exhibition, ‘Cities on the Move’, married the themes of late-twentieth-century global mobility suggested in the ‘Crossing Borders’ section of ‘A P T 3’ to the imperative to unsettle Orientalist stereotypes of a traditional Asia that was central to ‘Traditions /Tensions’.

‘Cities on the Move’: Tumultuous Visions of the Asian Metropolis Writing in their exhibition catalogue essay, the ‘Cities on the Move’ curators Hans–Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru describe the context for their exhibition: Economic, cultural, and political life in Asia is shifting rapidly. Apart from the already established economic powers such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, new economic powers are being developed in China, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and other countries. The most visible ‘peak’ of this rapid development is the pace of construction in cities of different scale. Connected to this is the pervasive expansion and explosion of urban space and metropolitanization […]. The City is a locus of conflict.85

First shown at the Vienna Secession exhibition space in 1997, ‘Cities on the Move’ was a major international travelling exhibition featuring works by over a hundred mostly Asian artists and architects; it sought to convey to largely European viewers the new artistic and architectural landscape being generated in Asia as part of the region’s rapid urban transformation under processes of modernization and globalization. Encompassing works ranging from architectural projects to installations, film, and photography, ‘Cities on the Move’ endeavoured to communicate aesthetically the dramatic circumstances of Asia’s changing cityscapes in the late-twentieth century. It featured artworks empha-

85

Hou Hanru & Hans–Ulrich Obrist, “Cities on the Move,” in Cities on the Move, ed. Hou Hanru & Hans–Ulrich Obrist (exh. cat.; Ostfildern–Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997): section 1, np.

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sizing physical movement and speed in a utopian vision of a new and economically, politically, and culturally powerful Asia. That the curators chose to focus on the emblematic modern space of the city was suggestive of a call to recognizing Asia’s own experiences of modernity in the late-twentieth century – that modernization is not an exclusively Euro-American condition. The exhibition’s major themes – of “density, growth, complexity, connectivity, speed, traffic, dislocation, migration, homelessness, and ecology”86 – foregrounded new urban patterns of movement and pace, social flux and transformation, as constitutive elements of Asia’s new global cities. Moreover, the figuring of Asian cities as a space of new cultural collisions between the West and the East was highlighted in order to convey the dramatic social shifts in Asian identity – a “tourbillon […] in which the West wind and the East wind encounter each other.”87 In this context, argued Hou and Obrist, in response to “the staggering frequency of displacement, speed, [and] exchange” 88 affecting the region in the late-twentieth century, Asia becomes newly configured as a site of “general disintegration of all established notions of boundary, nation, identity, [and] morality.”89 For the curators, the new “Asian city” arising from these changed conditions presents a utopian space for potential political, social, and economic transformation as societies negotiate the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the East and the West, liberal capitalism and “post-totalitarian” social control.90 Furthermore, through its numerous manifestations of “the city” concept (‘City for the People’, ‘Electronic City’, ‘Flexible City’, ‘Shaman City’, among others), the exhibition sought to make clear that “there is no such thing as an ‘Asian city’ ” and to convey, rather, “manifold heterogeneous concepts of the city.”91 After its showing in Vienna, ‘Cities on the Move’ travelled to contemporary-art museums in London, Helsinki, Bordeaux, Copenhagen, New York, and was finally shown in Asia, in the bustling metropolis of Bangkok. Unlike ‘Traditions /Tensions’ with its standardized repeat exhibitions, ‘Cities on the 86

Hou & Obrist, “Cities on the Move,” section 11, np. “Cities on the Move,” section 10, np. 88 “Cities on the Move,” section 7, np. 89 “Cities on the Move,” section 3, np. 90 For a critique of the utopian vision presented in ‘Cities on the Move’, see Joan Kee, “Trouble in New Utopia,” Positions: East Asia Cultural Critique 12:3 (Winter 2004): 667–86. 91 Hou & Obrist, “Cities on the Move,” section 11, np. 87

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Move’ sought to present the touring exhibition as an evolving journey of transformation – the materialization of a ‘moving city’. In the words of the curators, “at every step, collaborations among artists, architects, curators and local communities are encouraged and the show is continually reinvented.”92 Reflecting its title, the exhibition had a shifting curatorial agenda across its multiple international sites of exhibition; at each of its sites the exhibition underwent a series of alterations as it delivered a new set of artists and/or new set of works by repeat artists but in different configurations. However, the various exhibition editions were consistent in reflecting the general aims and issues embraced in the exhibition subtitle: ‘Urban Chaos and Global Change [in] East Asian Art, Architecture and Film Now’. Significantly, the intention of the curators was not to try and mirror the reality of Asian cities but, rather, to treat the exhibition as “a city in itself.” As the curators explained, the exhibition was “no longer a representation of the situation in Asia” but “a moving event-city situated between Asian urban reality and each different city to which it tours.”93 It is in this sense that some have argued the exhibition’s presentation of a wilfully chaotic vision of Asian metropolises may be seen to have less in common with the reality of latetwentieth-century urban Asia and more with a fictional imaginary catering to Euro-American fantasies of spectacular Asian megacities. The dizzying juxtaposition of an overwhelming number of artworks (nearly a hundred on average), in often confined gallery spaces, was argued by some to be perhaps more a reflection of the outsiders’ usual first-time experience of Asia as jawdropping chaos and culture-shock, rather than as the more complex and nuanced conditions of living in the reality of Asian cities. Combined with the exhibition’s progressive metamorphoses at each of its locations, ‘Cities on the Move’ ultimately conveyed for some a sense of “urban overkill,” an overwhelming metropolitan chaos.94 Foregrounded in an urban rubric of connection between art and architecture, ‘Cities on the Move’ proposed that the discourses of art and architecture were not only of relevance to the design of the modern metropolis, but also of significance to the relationship between the museum and contemporary art 92

Hou Hanru & Hans–Ulrich Obrist, “Cities on the Move: A Dialogue,” A R T AsiaPacific 25 (2000): 69. 93 Hou & Obrist, “Cities on the Move: A Dialogue,” 69. 94 James Swinson, “Architects Dream of Nightmare Cities: ‘Cities on the Move’,” Third Text 48 (Autumn 1999): 101–107.

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practices. In considering the exhibition’s form as a dynamic, living medium rather than a mere mapping of works in physical space, the curators pointed to the architectural legacy of Constructivism and the Bauhaus in creating a dialogue between art and architecture in the design of exhibition spaces. Indeed, the title of the exhibition was inspired by Alexander Dorner’s concept of a “museum on the move.” Obrist explains: [Dorner] anticipated very early the urgency of issues such as: the museum in permanent transformation within dynamic parameters … museum as an oscillation between object and process … the multiidentitarian museum … the museum on the move … the museum as risk-taking pioneer: to act and not to wait! … the museum as a locus of crossings of art and life.95

Echoing Dorner, Hou and Obrist sought to challenge the usual structuring principles of mainstream exhibitions and their modernist conventions, premised on the form of the gallery as white cube. Instead, they proposed their “moving exhibition cities” as dynamic organisms, with the capacity to take shape in a variety of forms and suggesting the ‘performativity’ of the exhibition itself. Thus, as Farquharson observes, ‘Cities on the Move’ was treated “as a live medium, rather than simply a spatial exercise.”96 However, in terms of challenging the modernist gallery space, it is interesting to note that despite the exhibition’s theme of ‘the city’ and its different stagings in major – and mostly Euro-American – cities around the world, artworks were often confined to the walls of the gallery space itself. Reflecting on the curatorial design of ‘Cities on the Move’, the art reviewer Douglas Fogle writes of the Vienna-based edition: ‘Cities on the Move’ was as much an experiment in the architectonic construction of an art exhibition as it was an investigation of the contemporary urban landscape of Asia. This was just as much its weakness as its strength […] it is the parallels between this curatorial displacement and the counter-modernist development of the Asian supercities that made this exhibition so provocative. And while it seemed at times ad hoc and constantly ‘in progress,’ ‘Cities on the Move’ was 95

Hans–Ulrich Obrist, “ Alexander Dorner,” email posting to electronic list (1 April 1998), http://www.thing.net/eyebeam/msg00373.html (accessed 28 September 2003). 96 Alex Farquharson, “I Curate, You Curate, We Curate …,” Art Monthly 269 (September 2003): 8.

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itself an exhibition on the move, an organic, respiring, conglomeration of projects by artists and architects brought into a kind of uneasy proximity within the modernist walls of the Wiener Secession.97

Notably, however, there were occasions when the two curators seemed to evince contrasting individual bases for the development of their joint exhibition, differing in their respective curatorial rationales and methods. For instance, two years on from the inaugural exhibition Obrist offers a sense of the exhibition’s organic, unplanned development in the following reflections: It’s a complicated world. Normally curators know what they’re looking for, but our research was a complicated process. We never worked out a complete exhibition concept – it was only during our travels that the whole complexity of urban conditions started to dawn on us. As a result of this research it became clear that the theme of the exhibition would be the city and its dynamic variables. A city is never static, it never sleeps.98

By contrast, in the same forum, Hou offers a more concrete and clearly defined curatorial basis: Our idea has also to do with globalisation. The role of the Pacific region is becoming more and more important globally, and we wanted to represent the explosive growth of the urban Asiatic areas. We wanted to examine the activity between art forms, that is, different people engaged in creative work, and a city is the best place for such research.99

Yet another point of curatorial significance was the curators’ hope to encourage new networks of creative collaboration so as to overcome the limitations of the modern museum and its assumptions:

97

Douglas Fogle, “Cities on the Move,” Flash Art International 31.199 (March– April 1998): 104. 98 Hans Ulrich Obrist, as quoted in Gregor Jansen, “Cities on the Move – Powerhouse Metaphors or How an Exhibition Turns the Pacific Region into a Museum,” in Polypolis: Art from Asian Pacific Megacities, ed. Claus Friede & Ludwig Seyfarth (exh. cat.; Freiburg: Modo, 2000): 42 (originally quoted in Kiasma 5 [exh. cat.; Helsinki, 1999]: 8). 99 Hou Hanru, as quoted in Jansen, “Cities on the Move – Powerhouse Metaphors or How an Exhibition Turns the Pacific Region into a Museum,” 42 (originally quoted in Kiasma 5, 8).

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that the activity of curators should follow the act of creation itself rather than pre-define a role as a controller or planner […] new collaborations between artists and other groups of people, and networking, are marking new ways of creation, and becoming more and more important.100

However, this definition of the curator – morphing between curatorship and art-making or “curatorial positions of inbetweenness”101 – downplays Hou and Obrist’s final authority in the selection of art, artists, and architects, and the construction of the exhibition’s themes. If artworks were selected for their connection with the exhibition theme, the bulk of artistic contributions to the various editions of ‘Cities on the Move’ also revealed a concentration of art with links to the vast geographical sub-region loosely described as ‘East Asia’. While some artworks /artists selected were not directly affiliated with Asia (mainly architects from North America and Europe), the majority represented were. Moreover, a defining characteristic in the choice of artworks /artists appeared to rest on the selection of those from East Asian societies with advanced modern market economies. For example, almost half the works in the exhibitions were from Japan and China (the latter no doubt also a reflection of Hou’s specialization in contemporary Chinese art), while the Southeast Asian urban landscapes of developing countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were omitted. The latter lacunae could be argued as producing a romanticized, totalizing vision of Asian economic prosperity. While ‘Cities on the Move’ focused largely on the new wealth emerging in Asia and, attendant on this, a new ‘Asian urban cool’, much unsexy economic disparity also characterized Asia’s cities at this time, with many parts of urban Asia still experiencing hardship and poverty during and after the economic boom. Thus, because of its lack of attention to the diversity of Asian urban realities, ‘Cities on the Move’ seemed to cater to international desires for cosmopolitan spectacles of exotic Asia, even under the sign of global capitalism. Interestingly, among the artworks that attempted to reveal the connections between the art museum and the outside world of the city space, Southeast Asian art featured strongly: Matthew Ngui’s Will You Talk to Me? (1997) – an interactive installation based on the connective materiality of grey P V C pipe structures – invited participants to experience external soundscapes beyond 100 101

Hou & Obrist, “Cities on the Move: A Dialogue,” 75. Obrist, “ Alexander Dorner.”

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the enclosed space of the gallery; Simryn Gill’s Interloper (1997–99) – a postal project engaging with the artist’s notion of stamps as “small pieces of place”102 and landscape as “a thing that we carry with us”103 – saw the artist design a set of stamps picturing the fleshy human body as topography and setting for the installation of miniature palm trees and sailing boats made of paper, the latter sourced from an historical encyclopedia which sought to offer the world’s knowledge in a single book; the stamps were subsequently made available as printed sheets for gallery shops and also affixed by the artist as interventions of sorts alongside conventional postage stamps on envelopes that she posted through international mail networks;104 finally, there was Judy Freya Sibayan’s Scapular Gallery Nomad (1997–2002) – a changing museum of artefacts displayed on Sibayan’s own body which, in effect, became a mobile exhibition as Sibayan walked through city streets taking art to the public, beyond the traditional confines of gallery walls (see Chapter 4). The discourses of movement and spatial interconnections inherent in these particular artworks are ones I explore further in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that these artworks served as rare critical interventions in the urban landscapes visited by ‘Cities on the Move’. Rather than being contained in the space of the gallery and quarantined from inter-cultural connections, these artworks sought to encourage critical dialogue between urban Asia and/or Asian artists and the international metropolitan visitors to the exhibition. This performance of critical dialogue arising from the artists’ self-defined critical positionings was one that many thought predominantly lacking in the overall scheme of ‘Cities on the Move’. Instead, the nightmarish vision of chaotic Asian cosmopolitanism perpetuated stereotypes of Asia as frenzied urban cool and a metropolitan hysteria devoid of critical intelligibility. Aside from the aforementioned artists, Southeast Asian representation also included socio-political installations and performance-art pieces by the Malaysian artists Wong Hoy Cheong and Liew Kung Yu, the Thai artists Navin Rawanchaikul, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Surasi Kusolwong, and Chitti Kasemkitvatana, and the Indonesians Heri Dono, Andar Manik & Marintan 102

Simryn Gill, “Untitled postage stamps/Interlopers,” in Hou Hanru & Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cities on the Move, sec. 14, np. 103 Simryn Gill, as quoted in Bullock & Hibberd, “Simryn Gill in conversation with Natasha Bullock and Lily Hibberd,” Photofile 76 (Summer 2006): 17. 104 See Russell Storer, “Simryn Gill: Gathering,” in Simryn Gill, ed. Russell Storer (Cologne: Walther König, 2008): 52–53.

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Sirait, and Arahmaiani. Many of the Southeast Asian artworks evinced themes relating to the new socio-political and socio-economic circumstances faced by Southeast Asians in the late-twentieth century, such as Liew’s installation Pasti Boleh/Sure You Can (1997), incorporating garishly kitsch renditions of Kuala Lumpur’s changing cityscape including its skyscrapers, then famed for being among ‘the tallest in the world’ and emblematic of Asia’s race for ‘bigger and better’. Significantly, the largely European context for ‘Cities on the Move’ also probably provided real opportunities for artists to present politically sensitive works which might have otherwise faced the controls of censors in their home countries. For instance, Wong Hoy Cheong’s Tapestry of Justice, which the artist began in 1998, is a bold visual petition made up of over 15,000 thumbprints of individuals opposed to Malaysia’s notorious I S A or Internal Security Act; and Heri Dono’s Inner City (1999) invites viewers to peer inside a lifesize mannequin’s penis to watch a recording of former Indonesian President Suharto’s televised resignation speech, while an additional video screen embedded in the mannequin’s chest plays footage of the ethnic riots which took place in Jakarta leading up to Suharto’s resignation in 1998.

Figure 39: Simryn Gill, Interloper (1997) [presented as part of the exhibition ‘Cities on the Move’]. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 40: Simryn Gill, Interloper (1997) [presented as part of the exhibition ‘Cities on the Move’]. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 41: Judy Freya Sibayan, Scapular Gallery Nomad (1997–2002) [presented as part of the exhibition ‘Cities on the Move’]. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Despite its shortcomings, ‘Cities on the Move’ figured Southeast Asia as part of a changing Asia, and through its inclusion of Southeast Asian artists, emphasized Southeast Asian contributions to a larger narrative of contemporary Asian art. It also left a lasting impression on another generation of artists. In 2001, Heman Chong and Isabelle Cornaro collaborated on a documentary video project entitled The End of Traveling (trip to Asiatown and back), first presented at Singapore’s The Substation gallery in 2002. Intrigued by the travelling rationale of ‘Cities on the Move’, the artists used their documentary to explore the influence of globalization on contemporary Asian art by recording interviews with several prominent Asian artists, including Wong Hoy Cheong, Heri Dono, Ken Lum, and Lee Wen. Among those selected, many were participants in ‘Cities on the Move’. Chong and Cornaro articulated their motivations as follows: We are trying to understand the meaning of the increasing interest in Asian artists with European curators, namely with the importance of the political in their works, their attitudes concerning their country’s history and relationships with international markets. Finally, we want to question the significance of the strong presence of Asian students in European art colleges.105

No doubt, for both, as contemporary artists working in an international art world, there was an element of self-interest in this project, particularly for Chong as a contemporary Asian artist. The method Chong and Cornaro employed for making the documentary was also inspired in part by the strategies of ‘Cities on the Move’. Mimicking the trajectories of the exhibition, Chong and Cornaro created their videodocumentary in the form of a ‘road-movie’ in which the artists travelled to meet and record their interviews with established Asian artists in the different capital cities in which they were based at the time, and also interviewed the ‘Cities on the Move’ curators Hou and Obrist. The theme of urban chaos and the idea of the city were also maintained in Chong and Cornaro’s film, particularly by questioning how cities are investigated by artists and transformed by them, how its future shape is influenced by the works and issues arising from con105

Heman Chong & Isabelle Cornaro, “The End of Travelling (Trip to Asiatown and Back),” artists’ statement, http://www.sparwasserhq.de/Index/H T M L ma03/H T M L EngA2.htm (accessed 3 December 2005).

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temporary art, and in which proportion museums and galleries attempt to evolve into spaces of production rather than just merely a site for consumption.106

Moreover, the editing technique of alternating images of different capital cities and combining these with voice-overs taken from interviews with the artists evokes a ‘behind-the-scenes’ audio-visual map of international contemporary art and the networked spaces that established Asian artists and their art inhabit as a result of their travels and global connections. Significantly, Chong and Cornaro drive home the point that the artists they interview are ‘megastars’ who are invited time and again to participate in ‘mega-exhibitions’ in ‘mega-cities’ that stake their claim as cultural centres for international art. Reflecting on the documentary, the Indonesian curator Rizki Zaelani ponders the relational character of contemporary art internationally and provocatively asks, “Are not the developments and advances now taking place in the countries in Asia also determined by their relationship to the advances happening in the developed countries of the West?” There is a multitude of challenging questions regarding the so-called internationalism of ‘global art practice’. For instance, how do artists and the curators who represent them maintain local specificity in their art and at the same time connect it to broader societal, political, and historical concerns? Alternatively, how do artists and curators inflect the globalized language of art in relation to the local? How might cultural distinction and heterogeneity be simultaneously registered in the representation of contemporary Southeast Asian artists, contingent with the movements these artists experience across various international audiences, cultural spaces, and temporalities? In short, how is the complexity of Asia invoked, if at all, in international surveys of contemporary art? The critique of the international mega-exhibition of the 1990s is strongly registered in the performance-art practices of Lee Wen, in particular his journeys of Yellow Man. The Yellow Man regularly featured in international exhibitions in the 1990s but, as I will argue in the following section, its significance lay in its potential to unsettle the global art exhibition’s differenceproducing effect by simultaneously revealing its essentializing multicultural logic, playing up to it, and subverting it.

106

Chong & Cornaro, “The End of Travelling (Trip to Asiatown and Back).”

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Interventions of Difference: The International Journeys of Lee Wen’s Yellow Man In his series of performances as the Yellow Man, the artist Lee Wen exploits stereotypes of the Asian Other by posing as the quintessential Asian – a ‘Yellow Man’. After painting his skin surface with a layer of luminous-like yellow paint, Lee carries out various acts of journeying. These take place in different locales internationally and are received to different effect, especially given the varied interpretations of ‘yellowness’ and ‘Asianness’ across cultures. More specifically, Yellow Man reveals Lee’s self-reflexive critique of the consumption of cultural difference in global contexts and, most pointedly, in international exhibitions. By deliberately creating a spectacle of his Asian identity, drawing attention to his perceived ‘yellow’ skin, Lee encourages his viewers to recognize the cultural (rather than biological) construction of Asianness and its related stereotypes. Representing Singapore along with his compatriot Amanda Heng, Lee presented ‘himself’ as Yellow Man for ‘A P T 3’ in 1999. In this Brisbane-based performance, Yellow Man began his journey beyond the modernist ‘white cube’ of the gallery space, inside a typical Queenslander-style house. It is here that Lee, wearing only briefs, covered his entire body with yellow paint and thus brought Yellow Man to life. Yellow Man subsequently proceeded on a walking journey through the suburban fringes of Brisbane city while carrying an ox’s heart in his hands, bewildering locals along the way before ending up at the Queensland Art Gallery, site of ‘A P T 3’. There Yellow Man dumped the heart, untied the threads holding the heart together, and uttered the words “open heart.” In the ‘A P T 3’ exhibition space, Lee showed a ten-minute film recording of this journey for ‘A P T 3’ visitors – as if to exaggerate his ‘yellowness’, the background throughout Yellow Man’s journey is seen in the final film as a darkened shade of blue-grey, making Lee’s Yellow Man a truly illuminating and unabashed ‘yellow’ presence. The obscene yellowness of Lee’s Yellow Man provides a tongue-in-cheek parody or ‘trickstering’ of colour-coded racist stereotypes of the yellowskinned Asian, particularly those of Chinese ethnicity.107 This is an especially 107

On the concept of ‘trickstering’, see Jean Fisher’s work on the Native American artist Jimmie Durham, in Fisher, Jimmie Durham (1989; New York: Exit Art, 1991): 292–313; Jean Fisher, “Toward a Metaphysics of Shit,” Documenta 11–Platform 5, ed. Documenta und Museum Fridericianum (exh. cat.; Ostfildern–Ruit: Hatje Cantz,

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significant intervention, particularly when viewed in the context of Queensland, where renewed anxieties about the ‘Yellow Peril’ took root in 1998 as a result of the divisive anti-Asian rhetoric and anti-immigration policies of Queensland-based Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party associates. In his unabashed yellowness, Lee defiantly highlights the fact that his is a body marked by discourses of race and racism – namely, a generalized Chinese ethnicity – and that while the materiality of his body might situate him passively as a carrier of pre-scribed cultural histories and geographies, he also shows the racialized body to be a site of agency in reconstituting Asian subjectivities as critical identities of situated and specific experience.108 Furthermore, Yellow Man demonstrates the special significance of the body in this, as the artist’s body enters into critical, wittily confrontative dialogue with the bodies of many of his viewers with their stock phenotypes of Asianness and/or yellowness and potentially transforming them. As the feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz argues, If the body is a strategic target of systems of codification, supervision and constraint, it is also because the body and its energies and capacities exert an uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to a regular, systematic mode of social organization. As well as being a site of knowledge / power, the body is thus a site of resistance, for it exerts a recalcitrance, and always entails the possibility of a counter-strategic re-

2002): 63–70. Notably, as Hal Foster points out, “postcolonial discourse now tends to

fetishise personae like the trickster and places like the in-between”; see Foster, The Return of the Real, 282 n.46. 108 Interestingly, during the conference accompanying the Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Lee Wen also presented himself as ‘a black man’. Lee’s black man was made apparent during a paper given by the participating ‘A P T 3’ Singapore co-curator Lee Weng Choy, in which the latter presented himself as a ‘white man performance’ without the need for the materiality of paint, but, rather, via the Euro-American ideological import of his role as a curator and art critic speaking at an international exhibition. Lee Wen’s ‘black man’ performance not only reinforced the multi-racial make-up of the Triennial’s artists but also referenced the racial policies internal to Australia at the time, marked by a resurgence of ultra-right racial discrimination, particularly against Asians, Asian-Australians, and Indigenous Australians. Lee Weng Choy’s ‘white man’ performance, by contrast, reflected the continuation of Euro-American models of curatorship within the biennale / triennale mega-exhibition of the 1990s.

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inscription, for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways.109

Echoing Grosz’ theorizing on the political potential of the corporeal,110 Yellow Man not only reminds us that the racialized body is a symbolic product of cultural signification and social inscription, but also demonstrates the subversive capacity of the body to contest and unsettle established power relations (for instance, of self /other, subject/ object). In a similar vein, Lucy Davis has described Yellow Man as a deliberate “political aesthetic strategy” of self-essentializing, marking the intersection of art and politics in a critical and transformative contemporary art practice. Through the re-appropriation of his own body, Lee acts as agent and as object in a form of reverse ethnography, mimicking and parodying this white colonial fantasy through self-fetishization. The artist makes obvious how yellow skin is fetishized in such a way that it is assumed to contain identity and, more precisely, Asian-ness, Singaporean-ness, Chinese-ness. Yellow Man thus shows the skin to be a paradoxical “site in which the desire for identification and the impossibility of identity is played out.”111 Moreover, this yellow skin represents a variety and multiplicity of already established meanings, among them colonial, racialized, and gendered histories of the yellowskinned body. Yellow Man thus reveals how the corporeal material of skin becomes meaningful and is made meaningful in different ways. Beyond the surface materiality of the body, skin becomes a marker of racial discourse, specifically Asian discourse by its stereotyped associations with ‘yellowskinned Asians.’ But, as Yellow Man implies, skin does not stand in for race alone; it is in relation to other biological markers such as so-called ‘slanted eyes’ (the epicanthic fold, or fold of skin of the upper eyelid) that Asian skin acquires its meaning.

109

Elizabeth Grosz, “Inscriptions and Body-Maps: Representations of the Corporeal,” in Feminine / Masculine and Representations, ed. Terry Threadgold & Anne Cranny–Francis (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1990): 64. 110 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1994). 111 Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey, “Introduction: Dermographies,” in Thinking Through the Skin, ed. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): 10.

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Figures 42–43: Lee Wen, Journey of a Yellow Man No. 13: Fragmented bodies/shifting ground (1999; video stills). Images courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

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We are at first taken in by Yellow Man’s seeming simplicity; then we are led to question what Foster has described as “the automatic coding of apparent difference as manifest identity.” 112 The generalization ‘Asianness’ and what it is to be or look ‘Asian’113 is cleverly reflected back at us as participant-spectators. In so doing, Yellow Man encourages us to rethink Asianness and frames of interpretation for Asian art beyond superficial readings of identity ‘at the skin-surface’. Moreover, through his self-appointed role as representative of all ‘yellow’ Asians, Lee also plays with and, indeed, makes transparent the notion of the contemporary Asian artist as ethnographic image-sign of Asia. Yellow Man makes explicit the contemporary condition of the Asian artist as a culturally consumable sign of fetishized exoticism and Otherness, strongly impressing the point that artists of Asian descent are often expected to reflect their ‘Asianness’ in their art. Yellow Man thus demands that we be wary of assumptions about identity and cultural positioning, particularly in the production and consumption of identity as part of the spectacle of contemporary art exhibitions. Rather than succumbing to the role of the Asian artist as exotic object of Western desire, Yellow Man subverts the cultural logic of the international spectacle by embracing and embodying essentialized Asian difference, but only to simultaneously displace it, investing it with new critical meaning – as Davis recognizes, this is, in Guy Debord’s sense, a situationist strategy of détournement.114 As well as challenging the spectacularization of ‘Asian difference’ in the ‘global’, the journeys of Lee’s Yellow Man highlight the 112

Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” 175. For the argument that the way one ‘looks’ is strongly influenced by processes of racism and racialization, see Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), and Julie Matthews, “Violent Visions and Speechless Days,” in Alter / Asians: Asian–Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law, & Mandy Thomas (Annandale, N S W : Pluto, 2000): 25–41. 114 Davis, “Making Difference (So Easy to Enjoy, So Hard to Forget).” Davis refers specifically to Debord’s concept of détournement in relation to Yellow Man, see esp. 78–79, in the section entitled “I I 1.4 The Journeys of Performance Artist Lee Wen – Subverting the ‘Colour-Coded’, ‘World Class’ Society.” See also Guy Debord, Internationale situationiste 3, December 1959, in Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Harrison & Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992): 693–700, esp. 697–98. Of course, an opposing argument might be that because Lee Wen relies on the logic of global art exhibitions he is never in a position – i.e. outside it – to contest it. 113

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movements, migrations, and displacements of artists, artworks, and audiences as they traverse multiple temporal and spatial borders. The conditions of translocal mobility and deterritorialization which they undergo in the international context reveal a discrepancy between the function of Southeast Asian art and artists as roving cultural objects of global desire, on the one hand, and the situated contexts of the artwork /artist/audience, on the other. As well as Brisbane, Yellow Man has been shown in other cultural contexts, each one to different reception and effect. As previously mentioned, Lee has performed various versions of the Yellow Man for audiences in London, India, Singapore, China, Thailand, and Japan. The specificity of ‘yellowness’ has been differently interpreted across each of these distinct cultural spaces. In India, Yellow Man was perceived to be a sadhu or shaman; in Thailand, the performances were interpreted variously as religious or royalist, on the one hand, or relating to the ills of modernity, on the other – particularly with regard to the sex industry and its diseases; yet others have even thought Yellow Man to be of extra-human or extra-terrestrial provenance.115 What becomes apparent from the sum of these various journeys – whatever their shade of meaning in specific contexts – is that Yellow Man as a migratory performance-piece comes to embody a plurality of significations via differently situated intersubjective relations with specific viewers. As we chart Yellow Man’s itineraries and its gathering momentum, we trace a gradual accumulation of meaning: a “complex collection of multiple, polyvalent and often contradictory narratives all relating to what on the surface might appear a most reductive and simplistic representation of ‘T H E Yellow Man’.”116 This involves a complex relationship to cultural authenticity and diversity recalling Benjamin’s notion of the original and its reproduction. As Lee reproduces Yellow Man in various contexts, any sense of an original art performance – T H E Yellow Man – is displaced. Instead, Yellow Man is uprooted from any authoritative field of creation as it circulates and gains diverse meanings from its multiple cultural spaces of performance and reception.

115

Lee Wen explains the various perceptions of Yellow Man in different contexts in “Multi-culturalism: In practice and on paper,” a paper presented at the Sept Fest Art Conference (Singapore: The Substation, September 1997). 116 Davis, “Making Difference (So Easy to Enjoy, So Hard to Forget),” 78.

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Figure 44: Lee Wen, Journey of a Yellow Man No 4: L I B I D O (1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 45: Lee Wen, Journey of a Yellow Man No 15: Touching China (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Importantly, Benjamin would not regard this as a cause for lamentation, but instead for viewing the process of reproduction as an occasion for reactivating the “object reproduced.”117 In his writing on “cultural translation and its limits,” Papastergiadis describes the critical value of Benjamin’s notion of the “object reproduced” as a process of reactivation: It is not a matter of seeing the fullness of an object’s meaning only in its original context and dismissing the reproduction of the object in a foreign setting as either the negation or dilution of meaning. Rather, reproduction and relocation demands a radical form of transformation […]. As images of an object circulate within the domain of the social, new interpretations can also disperse and multiply […] the authority of the object is jeopardized by reproduction, but paradoxically its authority is enhanced by the proliferation of translations that this process begets. This notion of translation allows us to see transformation as an ongoing process. To use the metaphor of the journey, a translation never arrives at its destined port, it is forever conscious of its place of departure and unable to rest in any abstraction of its own destination. Never quite there, the translation continues to reinscribe itself in the process of journeying.118

Apropos of Papastergiadis’ remarks, the Journey[s] of a Yellow Man take on added significance and may be further understood as journeys of translation. Importantly, as I intimated earlier, the voyage of translation, which is critical to Yellow Man, is shaped by the intersubjective events of translation between Lee as artist/Yellow Man and the various yet specific audiences for Yellow Man’s reception. Indeed, the nuanced subtitles conceived by Lee, which describe various Yellow Man performances, provide clues to these intersubjective experiences with viewers. Among these titles are Journey of a Yellow Man No. 2: The Fire & The Sun (Gullbarga, Karnataka, India, 1992); Journey of a Yellow Man No. 3: Desire (The Substation, Singapore, 1993); Journey of a Yellow Man No. 4: L I B I D O (Concrete House, Nontburi, Thailand, 1993); Journey of a Yellow Man No. 5: Index to Freedom (performance for the 4th Asian Art Show, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan, 1994); and Journey of a Yellow Man No. 11: Multiculturalism (performed in 1997 as part of The Substation 117

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970): 223. 118 Nikos Papastergiadis, “Cultural Translation and its Limits,” in Artspace Critical Issues Series 1 (Woolloomooloo, N S W : Artspace Visual Art Centre, 1999): 30.

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‘Multiculturalism’ conference in Singapore). The specific cultural connotations and localized significations of ‘yellowness’ in different contexts – a flame to Australian Hansonism or a sign of holiness in India – reveals the active interplay of artistic intent and audience subjectivities. This is crucial to understanding Lee’s work as a subversion of the (multi-) cultural spectacle propagated by global art exhibitions. Rather than merely reproducing stereotyped images of the Asian differential so as to reinforce what is actually often a flattening of difference into universal sameness in global art exhibitions, Yellow Man reveals an openness of meaning or critical untranslatibility in its capacity for multiple readings particular to different spectators. What initially appears as a reductive, one-dimensional sign of ‘yellowness’ is unhinged and becomes open to an array of incomplete, unfixed, and plural possibilities of meanings, none of which can ever be absolutely authoritative. Any abstract notion of Yellow Man, rather, is revealed as a site of differentiated meanings, in translative dialogue with spectator-participants who bring their own interpretations. Lee obviously recognizes the logic and limits of cultural translation in the mainstream art biennale /triennale model of exhibition. While he actively and reflexively positions himself differently, incorporating and appropriating contextual readings into his performances, he is at the same time able to impress the ongoing import of his yellow signature. Yellow Man is a work that demonstrates Lee’s awareness not only of the essentializing cultural logic of the international exhibition spectacle but also of the ways in which a certain kind of art production is engendered through such exhibitions; an art which, deceptively, must only appear to translate the untranslatable for the desiring eyes of a ‘global’ audience in expectation of difference. Yellow Man consciously and intelligently operates against this reductive and condescending logic by revealing what is untranslatable or what can be translated differently. As the art reviewer Wendy Shaw offers in reflecting on biennials and their relationship to globalism, The concept of a biennial [and likewise, triennial] preaches that art can exist as divorced from a particular context, or rather, that art can convey a message across context. For this to happen, context must either be irrelevant – the art must be purely self-reflexive and self-contained – eschewing all semantic dialogue with its external environment, or the context must be globally transparent. Alternatively, a smart artist might include a consciousness of this problem within a work designed for a “global” audience. Or a smart biennial might acknowledge the

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limits of its discourse as an elite venue for creative and intellectual interchange among artists.119

The push–pull of localism/globalism that the contemporary artist contends with in the biennale space is central to the motivations and effect of Yellow Man. Through Yellow Man, Lee demonstrates how the contexts informing art’s production and reception for the international scene must also be the object of self-reflexive, political-aesthetic negotiations by and between artist, curator, and/or viewer, in order to critically subvert the biennale’s differenceproducing effect. In this sense, Yellow Man also rises to the challenge, expressed by Jean Fisher, of being able to “express one’s world-view,” with all the multiple cultural inflections that inform it, without betraying either one’s historical or geographic specificity or art, and without being caught in the web of signs that are all too consumable as exotic commodity.120

Importantly, along with the politics of race, Yellow Man also emphasizes the notion of journeying itself. Following Lee Weng Choy, “it is precisely through the process of ‘journeying’ that ‘identity’ is constructed and deconstructed.”121 Indeed, if Yellow Man draws attention to different readings of ‘yellowness’ and the construction of the yellow Other, it also suggests a certain lack of identification through its ambulant aesthetic – as Michel de Certeau states, “To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.”122 Whether Yellow Man “lacks a place” is debatable, I would argue, but that it is not tied to an originary or authoritative place is what I am interested in here. Papastergiadis makes a related point in relation to the journeys of migrants. He argues the case for “see[ing] the migrant artist’s work not just as a representation of the place of origin and the place of arrival, but also as a metaphor for the process of journeying.”123

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Wendy Shaw, “Art Among the Myths of Globalism: The Istanbul Biennial,” Third Text 16.1 (March 2002): 95. 120 Jean Fisher, “Some Thoughts on Contaminations: Editorial,” Third Text 32 (Autumn 1995): 6. 121 Lee Weng Choy, “Singapore: Lee Wen,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia– Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 130. 122 De Certeau, as quoted in Gunalan Nadarajan, Ambulations (exh. cat.; Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery, 2000): 41. 123 Nikos Papastergiadis, “The South in the North,” Third Text 14 (Spring 1991): 46.

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Figure 46: Lee Wen, Lifeboat 3 (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 47: Lee Wen, Untitled (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 48: Lee Wen, Strange Fruit (2003). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Hence, in the case of Lee Wen, I would argue that it is only via the act of journeying that identities of Yellow Man can be played out and acted on. Like many other performance artists of late, Lee Wen travels not with but as his work and it is through the situated contexts of its multiple international performances that Yellow Man acquires its significance in critical dialogue with a biennale model which otherwise seeks to contain his identifications. Towards the late 1990s, as criticism increasingly circulated regarding the hegemonic identitarian frames of exhibition, a range of new exhibitions emerged that were intent on reconfiguring the dominant curatorial imaginaries for exhibiting Asian art. This was evidenced in major international exhibitions which strove for more nuanced modes of ‘multicultural’ representation, but also at the regional level as a number of more Asia-focused exhibitions emphasized the curating of Asian art produced on Asian terms and/or for Asian audiences. I turn to a discussion of such Asia-initiated exhibitions in the following section.

Shifting Curatorial Imaginaries for Asian Art: ‘Under Construction’ and ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ Importantly, the struggles of representation evinced by the three international exhibitions discussed earlier in this chapter were not confined to exhibitions outside Asia. Even in the major recurring exhibitions established in Asia during the 1990s, as Pastor Roces points out, the rules of engagement may have [had] more in common with those of the Western hosts of international art events than can be comfortably acknowledged. The key players at the hothouses share a common culture, and transit and live together in abstract modern space.124

In this sense, the actual models for international exhibitions can be largely unchanged even when repositioned in Asian contexts, and, as Niru Ratnam observes, often “retaining the core structures associated with exhibitionmaking and canonical art history while simply adding artists from regions that have previously been under-represented.”125 The following section explores two important exhibitions initiated from within Asia which sought to unsettle hegemonic Euro-American modes of 124

Pastor Roces, “Crystal Palace Exhibitions,” 244. Niru Ratnam, “Globalization and art,” Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordart online.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2086277 (accessed 25 October 2011). 125

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curating contemporary art – ‘Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art’ and ‘36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art’. The exhibitions sought to invoke different curatorial paradigms for representing contemporary Asian and Southeast Asian art respectively. They envisioned alternative approaches for curating Asian art so as to disrupt – or deterritorialize – conventional curatorial models and established categorizations of Asia and Asian art. While ‘Under Construction’ took on the more general task of re-mapping Asia (with a significant inclusion of Southeast Asian artists and curators), ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ focused exclusively on artworks by Southeast Asian artists. The former sought to test the parameters of Asia through experimental modes of curatorship, while the latter challenged the usual ‘official’ representation of Southeast Asian art in diplomatic contexts by offering a focused exhibition on art from the region, and by attending to artists’ individual art practices. Instigated and supported by the Japan Foundation Asia Center, ‘Under Construction’ promoted a new type of exhibition model premised on curatorial collaboration between a new, younger generation of Asia-based curators whose prerequisite for selection was their demonstrated attention to both the international and local art scenes reshaping contemporary Asian art practice in the twenty-first century. The multi-part project began in 2000 when the participating curators met each other for the first time in Japan. Following these initial group meetings there to decide on the project theme and exhibition framework, each curator was encouraged to undertake research trips to two or three Asian cities in the participating countries: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. This was in preparation for the collaborative production of a network of seven ‘local’ exhibitions126 which took place in each curator’s home country in 2001, before a final ‘collective exhibition’ across two venues in Japan (the Japan Foundation Asia Center in Akasaka and the Tokyo City Opera Gallery, Tokyo) in 2002–2003. The exhibition project drew involvement from curators and artists based in or from the participating countries, as well as participation by collaborating exhibiting

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Japan (Ashiya): ‘From the Sea of Trees’; Korea (Seoul): ‘Fantasia’; Indonesia (Bandung): ‘Under Construction: Dream Project’; Philippines (Manila): ‘Crafting Economies’; India (Mumbai): ‘Clicking into Place’; Thailand (Bangkok): ‘Sorry for the Inconvenience’; China (Beijing): ‘Fantasia’.

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institutions in these respective countries.127 The nine curators involved in the project reflected the Asian intraregional dynamic of the exhibition: Patrick D. Flores (Philippines); Gridthiya Gaweewong (Thailand); Ranjit Hoskote (India); Asmudjo Jono Irianto (Indonesia); Kamiya Yukie (Japan); Kataoka Mami (Japan); Kim Sunjung (Korea); Pi Li (China); and Yamamoto Atsuo (Japan). At the heart of ‘Under Construction’ was the question ‘What is Asia?’128 The exhibition coordinator, Yasuko Furuichi, of the Japan Foundation Asia Center first proposed the question as the theoretical motivation for the overall project in 1999, at a seminar hosted by the Center. Observing the proliferation of Asian artists in international art exhibitions through the prism of Western perceptions, Furuichi envisaged the project as a chance to investigate how Asians perceive themselves – “to show Asia through Asian eyes”129 – and to document this through the diversity of contemporary art in Asia. What art program could correspond to the changing scenes in Asia? […] Thus, the common theme throughout this project is ‘What is Asia?’ We aimed to create a collaborative space through which an exhibition would be centred around this most fundamental concept. We wanted to capture Asia as it is today, as well as how it will be in the future, through questioning our individual identity and relationships with neighbouring countries. This would provide us with a method to define a contemporary Asia – as we are the people living in the same space today – instead of an historical Asia depicted through memory.130

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The Japan Foundation, “Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art,” press release, http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/others/whats/0210/10_07.html (accessed 27 January 2004). 128 Furuichi Yasuko, “Asia: The Possibility of a Collaborative Space – Under Construction Project,” in Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art, ed. Kataoka Mami (exh. cat.; Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center & Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation, 2002): 13. 129 The Japan Foundation, “Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art.” 130 Furuichi, “Asia: The Possibility of a Collaborative Space – Under Construction Project,” 21.

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Figure 49: “Under Construction” exhibition project: “Sorry for the Inconvenience” (Project 304, Bangkok University Gallery, 2002). Image courtesy of the Japan Foundation.

Figure 50: “Under Construction” exhibition project: Alfredo Juan and Maria Isabel Aquilizan, Habitation Project: Picking Up (2002). Image courtesy of the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.

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The exhibition title signalled an acknowledgement of ‘Asia’ as an unfinished and evolving project of becoming; that the task of ‘constructing’ Asia and, more specifically, creating platforms for contemporary Asian art is a continuing endeavour, under construction. It is in this sense, too, that exhibition organizers viewed the project as the beginning of an ongoing and developing regional art network: “a cross-border curatorial effort to construct a basic framework that [would] enable curators and artists to further expand their network in the future.”131 Indeed, as well as developing their curatorial expertise, the exhibition project provided an invaluable opportunity for curators to meet each other (none had met previously) and to learn more about their respective Asian neighbours. Ironically, also valuable to such networking was the use of English as a common language for bridging cultural difference across Asia as well as the related use of global technologies of connection such as the Internet and e-mail, which enabled the continued exchanges and collaboration required between curators and between curators and artists, beyond their incountry visits. During 2001–02, the various curators collaborated in different ways with each other, within and outside their own countries, culminating in an exhibition in their respective local cities. The local exhibitions were to serve as “representations of the curators’ individual views of contemporary art in Asian countries, including their own, based on their survey of the region.”132 Their brief, as the participating Philippine-based curator Patrick Flores explains, was “to research territories apart from their own and explore possibilities of forging collaborations among themselves.”133 In so doing, the hope was to foreground a different mode of making Asia visible – and viable – in the field of contemporary art […] a model to serve as foil to the master narrative pursued by the dominant biennial/triennial circuit [… of] merely conjuring a simulacrum of global ghettoes subdivided in a theme park of difference.”134

The resulting local exhibitions, in the end, suggested a mixture of curatorial intentions, approaches and outcomes, as well as evincing differing models of collaboration in the curatorial process. The three curators Kamiya, Kim, and Li worked together on nearly identical shows in Beijing and Seoul “focusing 131

The Japan Foundation, “Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art.” “Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art.” 133 Flores, “Place and Presence.” 134 “Place and Presence.” 132

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on daily life and fantasies in the work of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai artists”; Flores and Yamamoto produced related exhibitions in Manila and Ashiya (Japan) “shari[ng] some of the same Filipino and Japanese artists dealing with issues of craft and transcending borders”; and, finally, individual curators mounted shows in Bangkok, Bandung, and Mumbai: Gaweewong curated exhibitions across three Bangkok spaces featuring Thai, Indian, and Chinese artists; Irianto curated the Bandung exhibition of Indonesian artists in a provisional gallery; and Hoskote “included Indian and Filipino artists dealing with postcolonial issues, media and the body.”135 Hence, the results of the various local exhibitions, as Flores suggests, was manifested in three types of curatorial platform: the single curatorship design, the cross-border exchange, and the traveling mode [… such that] within the omnibus framework, lateral vectors intersected to reconfigure the conventional geometry and traffic of curation.136

Following the series of local exhibitions in different Asian locales, the final “collective exhibition” across Tokyo and Akasaka marked a ‘convergence’ or ‘crossroads’ of sorts for the participating localities. Hoping to encourage new dialogue between the forty-three works shown across the local exhibitions, the curators decided to remix the various concepts and contexts for each ‘local’ show in the collective exhibition. From Flores’ perspective, the gains of the local exhibitions […] were not meant to add up to the Tokyo exhibition as a product subcontracted to and put together by migrant labour in an assembly line of curatorial sweatshop in Akasaka, but rather as a process of critique and reconstruction to refigure the national, the regional, or even the global in the conjuncture of the translocal.137

In post-exhibition reflections, Furuichi suggests that the re-presentation of artworks – originally shown in the local exhibitions – for the collective exhibition in Japan was one of the greatest challenges of the project. The collective exhibition involved the direct participation of all nine curators in all

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See John McGee, “City Guide – Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art,” exhibition review, http://metropolis.japantoday.com/Tokyo/460/art.asp (accessed 27 January 2004). 136 Flores, “Place and Presence.” 137 “Place and Presence.”

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aspects of the exhibition planning, preparation, and administration, truly testing the curators’ capacity for collaborative decision-making and curatorial practice towards a single exhibition across the two spaces in Japan. Furuichi elaborates: We found the aesthetic assessment of the collective exhibition in Tokyo the most problematic issue of the project. We were aware of the impossibility of integrating seven individually organised exhibitions into one show. The project’s theme, research, the local exhibitions and networking, was highly praised by many people. However, the structural problems of organising a collective exhibition, including, for example, the issue of whether or not it was necessary to organise one, and several other issues, remain.138

On the positive side, Furuichi suggests, What did exist was the will, solidarity and imagination of the members to put this exhibition together. It was here that we realised that we had actually created collaborative space of equal opportunity.139

However, the notion of “equal opportunity” must also surely be read in light of the Japan /Other relationship which underlay if not marked the project. Notwithstanding Japanese funding requirements and sponsor obligations, that the final collective exhibition took place in Japan, in the initiating country and principal organizing institution, might be seen to reinforce the historical conditions of Japan’s relative cultural and economic power in the late-twentieth century and its imperial ties with the region. By contrast, Flores positions the collaborative work of the collective exhibition through ‘translocal’ configurations which by definition disrupt the territorialization of any one Asian centre. Furthermore, he underscores the value of the translocal configuration in reflecting the changing and asymmetrical dynamics of Asian societies under globalization and also for indicating new models of curatorial relation: it is the translocal that scrapes together traces of mixed and uneven developments, images of overlapping modes of production, and vignettes of ethnographic field notes from a range of art worlds and practices. It is also the translocal that remakes the prerogatives of contemporary curation.140 138

Furuichi, “Asia: The Possibility of a Collaborative Space,” 22. “Asia: The Possibility of a Collaborative Space,” 22. 140 Flores, “Place and Presence.” 139

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This critical potential of translocality positions the participating countries of ‘Under Construction’ within a differentiated network of local nodes across Asia, helping decentre focus on any one country, including that of the initiating country, Japan. For Flores, the translocal is not necessarily configured as an uncomplicated smoothing out of centres and peripheries but, rather, as a space of critical negotiation and translation. Despite attracting young visitors, the final show was criticized by some for its lack of display organization, “jarring juxtapositions,” insufficient guidance, and lack of space.141 Flores interprets its mixed reception and, in particular, the “perceived difficulty in navigating the curatorial roadmap” as an affirmation of the project’s goal, which was to advance an alternative exhibitionary framework that resists the easy translation of cultures in contemporary art, the telos of the biennial model, and demands from audiences the unnerving necessity of the labor and at times the impossibility of understanding.142

If ‘Under Construction’ proved challenging to its viewers, the exhibition project was nevertheless successful in its twofold curatorial mission – first, in fostering an early contemporary art network for a new generation of cultural professionals across Asia; and, second, in its willingness to construct untried multi-level and multiple curatorial models for exhibiting contemporary Asian art regionally. Its emphasis on redrawing curatorial maps offered a unique opportunity for emerging curators from across the region to network, collaborate, and enter dialogue on new ways of curating Asian art in the future. Citing ‘Asia as Method’,143 this exhibition project looked to Asia not only for its content but also for its curatorial model and method – within Asia, by Asians, and on Asian terms, and was principally pitched at Asian visitors.144

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McGee, “City Guide – Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art.” Flores, “Place and Presence,” endnote 1, np. 143 Furuichi specifically cites Takeuchi Yoshimi’s coinage of the phrase ‘Asia as Method’, from Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Houhou to shite no Asia” [Asia as method], in Nihonjin to Asia [Japan and Asia] (1961; Chikuma Shobou, 1993). 144 In a similar vein, the Asian Curatorial Network was formed in 2011, an initiative of the Hong-Kong based curator Oscar Ho Hing-kay with the support of the Asian Cultural Council Hong Kong. The network was set up for curators across Asia to share in curatorial dialogues, projects, and concerns specific to Asia and to experiment with alternative curatorial approaches for engaging with Asian art. See Asian Cultural 142

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Regarding the curatorial shift to Asia, the participating Thai curator Gaweewong remarked: “As Asian kids from the ’60s and ’70s, we always look toward America and Europe, but this was a chance to look at our neighbors.”145 Similarly, the Japanese curator Kamiya concluded: We created a network through which we can understand our positions as Asians. We are all the same level physically. We don’t have to look up like we do when we collaborate with Europeans or others.146

Indeed, the exhibition can be regarded primarily as a curatorially driven project which sought to develop and test new models of curating in and for the region, encouraging new relational modes of curatorship (which ‘look to and across Asia’ rather than ‘look up to’ Euro-America) and ultimately, new regionally networked and regionally informed art histories. As Furuichi summed it up, The three-year project was, to put it boldly, a trial to conceptualise the identity of Asia today through the visual arts [… as well as] a trial to explore self-constructive Asia, as opposed to Asia’s being an object to be viewed by the rest of the world […] [so] Asia will emerge as the subject of its own identity.147

Precisely what that identity is was revealed as a subjective articulation, differently imagined by each curator – each had very different ideas about Asia, its art, and the process of curating Asian art. The emphasis on the curatorial enterprise (a collaborative model of cocuratorship between Asian curators) suggests less interest in the collaborative processes between artists and curators, and among artists themselves. Certainly, the resulting emphasis on ‘translocal’ research and outcomes was generative of more complicated maps reflecting the reality of Asia. The project also pointed to Japan’s capacity at the time, through the Asia Center, to forge networks of art across Asia and signalled the regional ‘Asian’ paradigm as

Council, Hong Kong & Oscar Ho, Asian Curatorial Network, https://www.facebook .com/AsianCuratorialNetwork (accessed 3 January 2012). 145 Gridthiya Gaweewong, in John McGee, “Asia, in a nutshell: ‘Under Construction’ curators try to cram it all in,” The Japan Times Online (18 December 2002), http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fa20021218a1.html (accessed 27 January 2004). 146 Kamiya Yukie, in McGee, “Asia, in a nutshell: ‘Under Construction’ curators try to cram it all in.” 147 Furuichi, “Asia: The Possibility of a Collaborative Space,” 23.

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being central to new programmes for developing contemporary art and culture for Asia. As I have previously suggested, Japan’s cultural institutions were instrumental throughout the 1990s in developing platforms, networks, and dialogue for exhibitions of Asian art. The Japan Foundation Asia Center was certainly a key force throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s in providing avenues for international exposure of Asian art – including Southeast Asian art – and supporting its development locally.148 How was Southeast Asia configured within ‘Under Construction’? While ‘Under Construction’ included Southeast Asian curators and artists from the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, the Southeast Asian imaginary did not figure as the driving force for the inclusion of these curators and/or artists. Rather, the local (city/nation) figured within translocal intersections that inform a larger ‘inter-Asia’ imaginary. Rather than attending to the usual national narratives that regulate the selection of artworks for international survey exhibitions, the nationally identified curators sought to gather artists with affinities across their art practice. Generally, the artists were a mix of those from the curators’ own country of affiliation and artists from other locales. Hence, there was less interest in delineating ‘Southeast Asia’ as a distinct art territory and a concern, rather, to register larger ‘inter-Asia’ crossings and collaborations between Philippine and Japanese artists /curators, Indian and Philippine artists /curators, Chinese, South Korean, Japanese, and Thai artists /curators. However, country-/city-based themes continued to be invoked through the Bandung-based Indonesia-focused exhibition. Asia’s conventional sub-regions (Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia, etc.) were therefore less influential mapping coordinates than the networks of Asian urban cities forming a larger Asian imaginary for the twenty-first century. Thus, while a number of Southeast Asian cities were designated as key art centres for the project, the mapping of Asia via its sub-regions was ultimately shown to be merely one design for imagining Asia. Rather, Southeast Asia was configured as a place of renewed inter-Asia creativity, belonging, and collaborative possibilities. Like ‘Under Construction’, the exhibition ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ suggested new curatorial maps for contemporary Asian art, but its further innovation was to refocus the curatorial lens on individual Southeast Asian artists and their individual artworks, suggesting less interest in the composition of the 148

The Japan Foundation Asia Centre was set up in 1995 and disestablished in 2004 following revisions to the Japan Foundation’s organizational priorities.

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curatorial membership and process per se, and more emphasis on art itself. Furthermore, while ‘Under Construction’ sought the participation of artists and curators from wider Asia so as to reflect the Asian region inwardly back to itself, ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ gathered thirty-six A S E A N country artists to expose Southeast Asia to those outside the region: namely, in select countries in Europe and then, finally, in Japan, in the modified version entitled ‘15 Tracks’.149 Organized by the Singapore Art Museum under the auspices of A S E A N ’s Committee on Culture and Information (C O C I ), ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ was launched in Duisburg, Germany in March 2002. The thirty-six artists featured in the exhibition were from the ten A S E A N countries of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos P.D.R., Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Ten curators were selected – one from each country – who in turn decided on a selection of artist/s and artworks from their respective countries for inclusion in the exhibition.150 In the foreword to the catalogue for ‘36 Ideas from Asia’, then SecretaryGeneral for A S E A N , Rodolpho C. Severino, in keeping with the conventions of such introductions, delineates the diplomatic mission of the exhibition, positioning it as an “extra-regional traveling project to promote greater international awareness and appreciation of the regional cultural heritage and con-

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‘36 Ideas from Asia’ travelled to Germany, Hungary, Spain, Finland, and Italy. During the A S E A N –Japan Exchange Year of 2003, the Japan Foundation hosted the exhibition ‘15 T R A C K S : Contemporary Southeast Asian Art’. This exhibition was a modified version of the earlier show ‘36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art’ and, among other aims, sought to “contribute to greater mutual understanding between Japan and the A S E A N countries.” It was jointly organized by the Singapore Art Museum, the Japan Foundation, the Tama Asian Art Museum and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, with the narrowed selection of artists reflecting the respective institutional collections and the assumed interests of Japanese audiences among other considerations. See “Foreword,” to Singapore Art Museum, The Japan Foundation, Tama Art University Museum & Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 15 Tracks: Contemporary Southeast Asian Art (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2003): 6. 150 The participating ‘Country Curators’ were: Pg. Hj. Mohd. Yamin Bin Psj Pg. Hj. Abdul Momin (Brunei Darussalam); Hab Touch (Cambodia); Dwi Marianto (Indonesia); Bounthieng Siripaphanh (Laos P .D.R.); Niranjan Rajah (Malaysia); Daw Nang Lao Ngin (Myanmar (Burma)); Joanna Lee (Singapore); Nonthivathn Chandhanaphalin (Thailand); Patrick Flores (Philippines); and Ngo Quang Nam (Vietnam).

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temporary developments in the arts and culture.”151 By contrast, in his accompanying curatorial essay Sabapathy reveals a more self-reflexive approach, examining critically the diplomatic premise and mission of the regional exhibition, pointing to its institutionalized history and, importantly, emphasizing the twin innovations of ‘36 Ideas from Asia’: “this is a new initiative and the first, from the region, to assume a regional scope and intended for publics outside the region.”152 Indeed, the exhibition marks a shift in intended audiences (from A S E A N audiences to international audiences beyond the region), as well as in curatorial design. The latter is underscored by the will to a more conventional sense of the collective or group exhibition – a gathering of individual artists and individual artworks for a single exhibition. In this case, the collective of artists also reflects their membership in individual A S E A N nations. This is unlike the usual programme of A S E A N exhibitions, which traditionally operate as the sum of individually curated country efforts where each country organizes its own selection of artworks and artists, with differing aims and outcomes. In this light, I suggest that ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ effects another shift in the register of the A S E A N exhibition: from intra-regional exploration and familiarization with the contemporary art of the region in earlier exhibitions, to a confident assertion of the contemporary art of the region at the beginning of the twenty-first century for consolidated presentation to international viewers. In other words, ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ suggests increased familiarity among A S E A N art professionals and their shared knowledge of art from across the region since the inaugural A S E A N art exhibitions of the late 1960s. Despite the operational framework of ‘nations within region’, ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ foregrounded the individualism of artworks as an important interpretative frame. In his catalogue introduction, Sabapathy stresses the curators’ intention not to present a falsely homogeneous sense of the Southeast Asian region and its artists, and, instead, to draw attention to the individual concerns of artists. This is made clearer in his explanation of the title of the exhibition: 151

Rodolfo C. Severino, “Foreword,” to 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary SouthEast Asian Art, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information & Singapore Art Museum (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2002): 7. 152 T.K. Sabapathy, “Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art,” in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information & Singapore Art Museum, np (emphasis in original).

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36 is a designation that is intended to refer to the number of artists

whose productions are featured in this exhibition. The term ideas, underlines a particular curatorial disposition; it calls attention to conceptual aspects in the works […]. In framing this exposition from Southeast Asia in terms of individual artists is tantamount to underlining its reception in markedly individual terms. That is to say, in this instance, endeavours to appraise Southeast Asia artistically as a region is to be undertaken along perspectives proposed by individual artists. And there are 36 such proposals.153

‘36 Ideas from Asia’ introduces a radically different curatorial vision for re-

presenting Southeast Asian artists to international audiences by encouraging attention to the individual concerns of artists and the issues specific to their art in a wider regional frame. Rather than continuing to operate in overtly nationalistic frameworks of representation which obscure the individuality of artworks, ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ defended “the necessity for the construction of a new paradigm for contemporary art in Southeast Asia.”154 By the time of the exhibition in 2002, there was therefore a transformation even in the kinds of ‘officially supported’, regionally focused exhibitions which offer more nuanced and aesthetically attuned views of the region’s art, encouraging critical attention to the specificities of art practice and art context in the larger Southeast Asian imaginary.

153

Sabapathy, “Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art,” np. The individual artists spanning the ten A S E A N member countries were: Apotik Komik Group (Samuel Indratma, Popok Tri Wahyudi, Arie Dyanto, Bambang Toko Witjaksono), Baet Yoke Kuan, Brenda Fajardo, Bunga Jeruk, Chen KeZhan, Dinh Thi Tham Poong, Do Minh Tam, Ha Tri Hieu, Hayati Mokhtar, Hedi Hariyanto, Heman Chong, I Nyoman Masriadi, Jakapan Vilasineekul, John Low, Jose Legaspi, José Tence Ruiz, PG. Khamarul Zaman Bin PG. HJ. Tajuddin, Khamsouk Keomingmouang, Krisna Murti, Kumbu Anak Katu, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Matthew Ngui, May Chandavong, M.P.P. Yei Myint, Nasir Baharuddin, Nguyen Huy Hoang, Nguyen Nhi Yi, Osman Bin Bakir, Phy Chan Than, Pinaree Sanpitak, Prasong Luemuang, Panya Vijinthanasarn, Roderico Jose Daroy, Saudi Ahmad, Soe Naing, Soeung Vannara, and Svay Ken. 154 Niranjan Rajah, “Towards a Southeast Asian Paradigm: From Distinct National Modernisms to an Integrated Regional Arena for Art,” in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art, ed. A S E A N Committee on Culture and Information & Singapore Art Museum (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2002): 35.

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Indeed, the very range of art represented in ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ reflected the diversity of ‘contemporary art’ practices across a vast landscape of Southeast Asian territories, some situated within craft-based or so called ‘folk art’ practices, others evincing more modernist or postmodernist motivations. Thus, the artforms ranged from mixed-media installation art, multimedia filmic works, photography, and sculptural installations to ink, watercolour, oil and lacquer paintings in realist, abstract, and allegorical styles, as well as woven baskets and wooden carvings. Rather than attempt to falsely map a uniform story of contemporary art-making across the region, ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ instead revealed the particularities and specificities of art practice across Southeast Asia, revealing the plurality of ‘contemporary art’ for the region across differing art-historical and socio-political contexts. While ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ may be understood as a political project in its assembly of A S E A N members, it was also intended as a gathering of contemporary Southeast Asian art on artistic terms. In very different ways, both ‘Under Construction’ and ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ represent a shift in the regional curatorial imaginary from one based on crystallization to one based on radiation;155 exhibition constellations, over geographically and chronologically circumscribed approaches.156 Put differently, rather than replicating sedimentations of meaning regarding the constitution of Asia and Southeast Asia, these exhibitions were attempts to realign our perspectives on contemporary Southeast Asian art through alternative maps of aesthetic experience and cultural belonging. Notably, the new models of curatorship which were being tested through exhibitions such as ‘Under Construction’ and ‘36 Ideas from Asia’ reflected the influence of new kinds of ‘spatially’ focused discourses which became prevalent in the 1990s. Exhibitions invoked plural, interlinked, and multi-directional models of curatorship, echoing a new acknowledgement of shifting Asian conditions of belonging. Such radical rethinking opens the way for regeneration of the curatorial imagination and a questioning of established patterns for representing Southeast Asia and its art.

155

Flores, “Place and Presence.” Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Constellations: Toward a Radical Questioning of Dominant Curatorial Models,” Art Journal 59.1 (special section “Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Contemporary Art Exhibitions,” Spring 2000): 14–16. 156

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Into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Identitarian Art In this chapter, I have sought to probe the question of how and in what ways notions of Southeast Asia were highlighted or occluded in key international exhibitions of contemporary art in the 1990s, including major exhibitions which focused on presenting Asian art to audiences outside Asia. The foregoing overview of key international contemporary art surveys and mega- or blockbuster shows of the 1990s reveals much about changing perceptions of Asia in the world at the close of the twentieth century, and the new agencies which helped carve a space for the international recognition of contemporary Asian art and, within this, contemporary Southeast Asian art. By contrast I have also sought to highlight initiatives from within Asia itself which strove towards new models of Asia-driven curatorship as a counter to exhibitions of Asian art defined by Euro-American interests. Such exhibitions as we have seen also served as a means of strengthening Asian partnerships and as meeting points for diverse and otherwise dispersed Asian art interests. If, during the decade of the 1990s, the socio-political was delineated as a hegemonic representational theme framing international perceptions of contemporary Southeast Asian art, towards the turn of the century, in the context of increasing critique of international exhibitions and their representational strategies, alternative and more experimental frames for contemporary Southeast Asian art gained traction. As artists became increasingly ‘freed’ to explore the spectrum of art’s possibilities, the first decade of the twentieth century saw a shift of focus in international exhibitions of contemporary Southeast Asian art – from exclusively identitarian themes to diverse issues and subject-matter, increasing attention to the aesthetic (formal and affective) processes of art’s production and reception, as well as the connective currents that draw humanity’s difference into dialogue under twenty-first-century globalization. Thus, with hindsight, the discourses of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, internationalism, and globalism in the arts can be seen to have served as a prerequisite of sorts for the current conditions of art and exhibition practice which witness the advent of a new generation of artists who are now able to push their practices beyond racial expectations into wider discursive and aesthetic arenas. Perhaps not surprisingly, in more critical curatorial approaches Southeast Asia is revealed as a dynamic field of contemporary art production, a region marked by vast differences in art-historical conditions and impulses but one increasingly drawn together under new regional impulses as well as via the

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new socio-political conditions for wider Asia in the twenty-first century with its attendant economic prosperity and cultural growth in postcolonial, globalizing currents. Southeast Asia is increasingly shaping itself as a region of translocal creative affiliations and intersection with other Asias and other locales in the world; it is also clearly a zone of individual and diverse artistic forms of expression that resist homogeneous national/regional inscriptions. What has been consistently debated and articulated as part of the representation of ‘Asian’ art is the sheer diversity of definitions and images of Asia that are made manifest through contemporary art practice and exhibition. There is general agreement on how much more complex and textured the categories of ‘contemporary art’, ‘Asia’, and ‘Southeast Asia’ have become as artists become increasingly absorbed into the cross-cultural fabric of twentyfirst-century globalization. Their art, not surprisingly, comes to invoke translocal themes of mobility. These issues are further explored in the next chapter with particular attention to Southeast Asian art.

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P ART III C OUNTERPOINTS : S OUTHEAST A SIA IN P RACTICE Trans/Localities? • Memoryscapes • Corporeographies

4 Trans/Localities? Between Dwelling and Movement

Figure 51: Heri Dono, Flying in a Cocoon (Terbang di dalam Kepompong) (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

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PA R T I I I , in which I shift to a more focused art-analytic engagement with contemporary Southeast Asian art practice itself – in this chapter through the broadly defined tropes of mobility and translocality. As foregrounded in the previous chapter, these HIS CHAPTER BEGINS

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themes came to prominence in international art exhibitions of the 1990s as part of intensified currents of globalization. Increasingly, Southeast Asian artists came to be regular peripatetic participants in international art exhibitions, reflecting the new quotidian conditions of contemporary globalized art. Related to this, a number of artists chose to migrate and take up residency in other countries.

Figure 52: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, In-flight (Project: Another Country) (2009). Reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

Thus, as Southeast Asian artists and their art acquired unprecedented international exposure in these new currents of globalized art practice, they also experienced a renewed capacity for multiple, fluid, and shifting patterns of ‘translocal’ movement across a variety of spaces, including the virtual. Importantly, however, they continued to be marked by real experiences of belonging and attachment to particular localities and not, as some would have it, to be participants in a new free-floating, nomadic existence. Moreover, national membership continued to be reinforced in international exhibition representations, supported by nationally defined passports and sources of funding, for instance. By the end of the 1990s, however, the palpable presence of newly

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configured translocal Asian identities compelled a re-evaluation of conventional forms of exhibition representation apropos of identity and locality – identities could no longer be adequately framed via bounded notions of place as they increasingly came to be, “if not wholly deterritorialized, at least differently deterritorialized.”1 With this background in mind, in this chapter I highlight the increased ease with which international artists shift from familiar to unfamiliar environments, and I interpret the increased global mobility experienced by these artists and the implications this has for identifying Southeast Asian art in a cosmopolitan milieu of international art practice. I additionally focus on artistic explorations of movement and mobility in the globalized art context. In so doing, I engage with recent theories of movement and reflect on the new mobilities that are reshaping Asia and Asian art. Issues of contemporary movement, speed, and disappearance have marked the work of many artists since the 1990s. Signifiers of mobility such as suitcases and boxes, modern transport, roads, wheels, maps, stamps, and postcards have become tropes of contemporary art through which artists attempt to communicate, complicate, and question diverse issues such as colonial encounter and postcolonial change, tradition and modernization, diaspora, migration, and hybridity, national and global belonging. For example, the iconic jeepney finds its way into Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizans’ Project M201: In God We Trust (2003); the tuk-tuk motorcycle taxi in work by Navin Rawanchaikul and Rirkrit Tiravanija; and bicycles in the performance-art piece Animal Journey (1997) by Heri Dono. Exploring various examples of contemporary Southeast Asian art, in this chapter I reflect on how such art practices and their tropes of mobility contest stereotypically ‘static’ (bounded, homogeneous) concepts of ‘Southeast Asian’ identity. I demonstrate artists’ engagements with both local and translocal concerns, indicating more fluid forms of contemporary Southeast Asian subjectivity. To this end, I engage with terms such as nomadism, migration, mobility, immigration, diaspora, hybridity, syncretism, and cosmopolitanism, which have, in various ways, come to be regularly associated with the new interconnected but also disconnected patterns of being under globalization. Contemporary art exhibitions have been a regular site for exploring such issues. Importantly, while all these issues may, in some way, relate to the ex1

Akhil Gupta & James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (February 1992): 9.

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periences of contemporary Southeast Asian artists of international reputation and experience, they have, quite problematically, often been used interchangeably to describe artists of differently situated cultural positions and trajectories of mobility. For instance, ‘diaspora’ has often been used to describe those artists who have settled outside of their country of origin of their own accord (in the usual sense of being ‘immigrants’), at the same time as it has been used to describe those artists who have experienced enforced exile as political refugees. I attempt to unpack some of these scenarios and the prevailing labels for describing the internationally exhibiting artist, finding particular value in the ‘cosmopolitan’ frame. Through the art analysis offered, the material and affective dimensions of dwelling and mobility as expressed in art are also brought to the fore. Indeed, beyond the ideological or discursive interest in changing Southeast Asian subjectivities, I also explore art that is a literal ‘moving’ representation and which is concerned to activate the otherwise static art object into dynamic forms, often eliciting a sensorial or affective response via its reception. Such art purposefully engages with the real effects of movement via art’s materials and forms to invigorate the art object and test its affective potential in new ways.

Globalizing Currents As with globalization, the practice of mobility has had a long history. With the current resurgence of artistic and intellectual interest in mobility, it is all too easy to forget that movement is not just a phenomenon of our times attendant on that other supposedly new phenomenon, ‘globalization’. As Masao Miyoshi notes, if globalization means merely that parts of the world are interconnected, then there is nothing new about this so-called globalization: it began centuries ago, as Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, if not earlier. The only novelty is in the degrees of expansion in the trade and transfer of capital, labor, production, consumption, information, and technology, which might be enormous enough to amount to a qualitative change.2

2

Masao Miyoshi, “‘Globalization,’ Culture, and the University,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson & Masao Miyoshi (Post-Contemporary Interventions; Durham N C : Duke U P , 1998): 248.

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As Yee I-Lann’s Sulu Stories evokes (see Chapter 2 above), the history of mobility in Southeast Asia has included various pre-colonial waves of migration and trade routes since the sixteenth century,3 religious and cultural transfers, and, of course, colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Forms of contemporary mobility, however, are markedly different in many respects from their predecessors, including the ways in which space has been deterritorialized and reterritorialized in postcolonial, globalizing contexts. Moreover, while movement and migration have been constant motifs of modernity throughout the twentieth century, their contemporary significance lies particularly in their unparalleled capacity for speed, fluidity, and frequency as a result of intensified globalization and its new technologies of mobility. As has been well rehearsed in the writing of various global theorists, the background to this intensified order of globalization is the remarkable growth of global trade, the expansion of international transport networks, and technological innovations in electronic communications since the 1980s. As a result of such changes, new passages of accelerated movement and interaction have effected different global currents of cultural production, meaning, and exchange. Many theorists have discussed the globalization of culture that occurs as people, art, and information circulate in new global flows of communication, distribution, and access from various centres around the world.4 Roland Robertson, for instance, describes globalization as “the twofold process of the particularization of the universal and the universalization of the particular.”5 Fredric Jameson extends this definition, globalization being an untotalizable totality which intensifies binary relations [especially of tension and antagonism] between its parts – mostly nations, but also regions and groups, which, however, continue to articulate themselves on the model of “national identities.”6

3

See Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London & New York: Verso, 1998); Nicholas Tarling, Nations and States in Southeast Asia; Milton Osbourne, Southeast Asia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993). 4 See, for instance, theories of globalization in Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1991); and Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1994). 5 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1992): 177–78. 6 Fredric Jameson, “Preface” to The Cultures of Globalization, xii.

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In the field of art practice, the effects of globalization are especially manifest in the intensive movement of artists and artworks in an overall international art milieu newly characterized by increased transit and itinerancy, speed, and transformation. Contemporary Southeast Asian artists are no exception to this, experiencing greater human mobility through their international travels for art and greater exposure to international currents even from ‘home’. Thus, global mobilities have facilitated new politics of location for Southeast Asian artists, as they have come to experience new physical ‘homelands’ and ‘hostlands’ and new conditions of cultural belonging. As artists move across and within new trans/local spaces, drawing their influences from both the localized and the globalized circumstances of their lives, they also challenge mainstream socio-spatial characterizations of Southeast Asian art and artists as bound to essentializing categories of nation and region. Significantly, along with transformations in the contexts and conditions for art practice and exhibition, globalization’s translocal patterns have also facilitated new expressions and representations of identity in art itself. As many art critics and historians have noted, “art production is increasingly being undertaken on the move, literally and figuratively, in our world of mobility, speed and quick morphing.”7 Recognizing the translocal geographies that are navigated in these movements, some have even gone so far as to define the particular kind of art that is produced under these new conditions as a “nomad aesthetic.”8 Indeed, putting maps in motion through their art, contemporary Southeast Asian artists offer stimulating artistic scripts for rethinking the relationship between space, place, and subjectivity and for contesting stereotypically static concepts of ‘Southeast Asian’ identity. They suggest alternative forms of art expression and subjectivity based on the multi-spatial, mobile, and temporal experiences of performing translocal belonging and translocal art. Localized expressions of Southeast Asia are reconfigured as dynamic manifestations of relation, with simultaneous correspondences in national and international art contexts. The impact of movement is often downplayed in the construction of place and identity. Movement, speed, and circulation, it is sometimes argued, are antithetical to place, locale, and history, of no consequence in determining

7

Combinatoria, “The Nomad Aesthetic,” http://digital–log.hfg–karlsruhe.de /combinatoria/archives/000267.html (accessed 15 April 2004). 8 Combinatoria, “The Nomad Aesthetic.”

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“sensory regimes” of place.9 By contrast, I argue that acts of movement are always political and constitutive of place/s and their histories. The kind of pathways and routes that are made accessible or denied in such movements, and the pace at which they are traversed, necessarily shapes the constitution of place.10 Mobilities and localities collide and diverge to create a dynamic sense of ‘being-in-becoming’ in which pathways of movement and the speed at which they are traversed are always constitutive of place and thus always political and determining forces. As Sara Ahmed observes, spaces are claimed, or ‘owned’ not so much by inhabiting what is already there, but by moving within, or passing through, different spaces which are only given value as places (with boundaries) through the movement of “passing through” itself.11

I now turn to an exploration of movement in relation to contemporary Southeast Asian art, considering the new trajectories and transits of artists and their art in the 1990s, as well as reflecting on the themes and tropes of global movement that came to be reflected in moving forms of art production. In so doing, I also consider the relationship between contemporary art and shifting notions of subjectivity and belonging, particularly within new cosmopolitan frames. I also explore art which is less interested in the transforming Southeast Asian subject per se and which engages, rather, with the material and formal effect of mobility in art and generates moving, sensory effects and affects.

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9

Meaghan Morris, “At Henry Parkes Motel,” Cultural Studies 2.1 (1988): 3. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York: Semiotext(e), 1977). 11 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 32–33. (My emphasis.) 10

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‘A Border Crosser with Good Ballast’: The Consummate ‘Hybrid’ Artist, Heri Dono12 You see Heri Dono everywhere.13

Based in Yogyakarta, the popular Indonesian artist Heri Dono has become a distinguished international artist who has regularly participated in art exhibitions all over the world in recent decades. Indeed, he stands out as one of the most prolific contributors to what the international art community over the last twenty-five years has chosen to term ‘New Internationalism’: a new generation of artists challenging the Western hegemony over contemporary art. Dono is an internationally successful representative of a new generation of Indonesian artists that respects and represents the local, while fusing it with the global.14 In Indonesia, his steady rise to international prominence has been acknowledged in the affectionate monicker ‘Donosaurus’.15 Dono was one among a number of pre-eminent Asian artists invited for The Fourth Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (‘A P T 2002’) which reflected on the maturation of contemporary art of the Asia–Pacific, particularly since the inception of the ‘A P T ’ exhibitions in 1993. Dono had previously featured in both the first and the third ‘A P T ’ ; his inclusion in the fourth was an acknowledgement of his international success and confirmation of his established reputation as a contemporary Asian artist.16 12

I borrow this description of Dono from the art historian Astri Wright; see Astri Wright, “Heri Dono. Indonesia: A Rebel’s Playground,” in 12 A S E A N Artists, ed. Valentine Willie (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara, 2000): 92. 13 Alfredo Aquilizan on his fellow contemporary artist Heri Dono, from the author’s interview with Alfredo Aquilizan, Manila, Philippines, 2 July 2002. The obvious irony is that Alfredo Aquilizan is himself now one of the most internationally represented artists from the Philippines since the 1990s. His representation (alongside that of his partner in art and life, Isabel Aquilizan) in major exhibitions such as the ‘A P T ’ , the Fukuoka Triennale, and the Havana Biennale may also explain why he frequently meets Dono, who has also featured in these shows. 14 Brynjar Bjerkem, “Heri Dono: Installation,” Du Store Verden, http://du-storeverden.no/artister/artist.php?2007012309142494552 (accessed 3 March 2010). 15 Hendro Wiyanto & Farah Wardani, “Who’s Afraid of Donosaurus?” (exh. cat.; for Heri Dono solo art exhibition at Nadi Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2–12 March 2004). 16 Heri Dono’s work was presented in A P T 2002, the fourth in the series of ‘A P T ’ s at the Q A G , Brisbane, 12 September 2002–27 January 2003. Dono’s work had

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Among other works re-presented by Dono in 2002 was his installation Angels Caught in a Trap (1996), which visitors encountered in the entrance hall of the gallery. It recalled his earlier installation Flying Angels (Bidadari) (1996) and the installation-performance piece Fake Human Being (1999). In all three artworks, mechanized, angel-like winged dolls form the focus of the piece, each angel suspended from the ceiling. As their fragile wings flap and whir, the angels appear to take flight and hover in the air. These wayang puppet-like dolls wear helmets on their delicate, humanoid heads and pointed red boots on their little dangling feet; gender is denoted by the absence or presence of a penis attachment, and the rudimentary, heart-like mechanism embedded in their chests propels their movement. It was in the stories Dono was told in his childhood that the character of the angel first captured his imagination. Since then, angels have symbolized for him the freedom to dream and imagine. “Without imagination, life would be very dull. Angels are free to fly wherever they want.”17 already been exhibited in both ‘A P T 1’ (1993) and ‘A P T 3’ (1999). By the time of ‘A P T 2002’, the Q A G had acquired artwork by Dono for its own Contemporary Asian Art collection, including Glass Vehicles (1995), Eating Bullets (Makan Pelor) (1992), and Campaign of the Three Parties (1992). In the context of ‘A P T 2002’, the task of the museum (Q A G ) in bestowing status on particular artists is all the more relevant. ‘A P T 2002’ exhibited an older generation of well-established modern Asian artists with international reputation (working around the late 1960s) alongside a newly established generation of contemporary ones which included Dono (prominent in the 1990s). The parallel exhibition of these artists helped to contextualize a younger generation of artists from Asia within international avant-garde currents of the older generation; the latter, many of whom lived and worked abroad first and foremost as international artists, were recontextualized within their Asian countries of origin by reference to these younger artists, whose artwork was distinguished primarily for its cultural basis and links to specific Asian art histories. For a complete list of artists, see the accompanying exhibition catalogue, A P T 2002: Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Seear (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2002). This was also the case with ‘A P T 2006’, which showcased Q A G ’s impressive collection of contemporary Asian and Pacific art in the new exhibition space of Q A G ’s partner gallery, G O M A , launched alongside ‘A P T 2006’. On ‘A P T 2006’, see Michelle Antoinette, “ ‘ On Collecting’: The 5th Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,” Artlink 27.1 (2007): 97–99. 17 Heri Dono, as quoted in Cynthia Webb, “Heri Dono at the Asia–Pacific Triennial Art Exhibition,” http://www.aiaa.org.au/gallery/heri/heridono43.html (accessed 19 January 2004).

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Figure 53: Heri Dono, Flying angels (2006). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia.

The angels have since become emblematic for Dono and seem an apt visual metaphor for the type of cosmopolitan art practice and more mobile life experiences that his prolific international art career has afforded him. Uncannily, they visualize the kind of cosmopolitan life which Ulrich Beck describes as a condition of “having ‘roots’ and ‘wings’ at the same time.”18 Reflecting on this concurrent rooted and mobile experience, Dono remarks: I am an Indonesian, but I am also a person who lives in an international world. So I belong to the world. In art I feel I am a mediator, because art is not just concerned with the concept of beauty, but is also meant to raise the consciousness of others.19

18

Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies,” Theory, Culture & Society 19.1–2 (February 2002): 19. 19 Larry Polansky, “Interview with Heri Dono,” tr. Larry Polansky (7 October 1997), http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/misc_writings/jew_indonesia/heri.dono.interview. html (accessed 19 January 2004).

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Figure 54: Heri Dono, Angels caught in a trap (1996; detail). © Heri Dono. Reproduced by courtesy of Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, and the artist.

Indeed, like his angels, Dono has experienced a new-found freedom since his rise to fame on the international art scene. Dono’s international travels only began in 1990, when he left Indonesia for the first time for an exhibition in Switzerland at the Völkerkunde Museum. Since then he has participated in numerous overseas artist residencies and exhibitions abroad – including in Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia, England, and New Zealand. Thus, in Dono’s case a direct correlation may be traced between his increased global mobility and the development of his hybrid contemporary art practice. While his art demonstrates a persistent interest in conveying Indonesian concerns, it is also deeply informed by wide-ranging international experience and reflects a broad set of cross-cultural issues. It is thus a complex interweaving of his ‘glocal’ realities, combining local Indonesian issues and aesthetics with more worldly concerns and global aesthetics. Relating Dono’s personal freedom to the kinds of motifs of mobility that he engages with in his art, the art historian Astri Wright comments:

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Heri Dono is also one of the most free individuals I know, inside and outside of the contemporary Indonesian art world. With this, I mean freedom from constrictions while at the same time, being centred and morally/ethically informed by a philosophy all of his own. This is what allows him both freedom and connections across conventional categories and boundaries. Heri’s freedom from being tied down in his personal and professional life-style, vis-à-vis both tradition and the machinations of contemporary art institutions, is evident also in his art. If his figures are not flying, in any number of contortionist positions, their sitting or walking is not bound or hampered by gravity. Feet – whether of the mythological lion-yak beast Heri calls a Barong in “The King who is Scared of the Approaching Barong” (2000) or the spiked boots in “Flower Diplomacy” (2000), barely even touch the ground.20

Importantly, the freedom Wright alludes to suggests that while Dono has fostered an independent space for himself, he is not disconnected from his Indonesian context or participant in a free-floating international existence. Rather, his freedom relates to a more expansive and flexible approach to his art and life practice that provides for access to locally and globally rooted influences and experiences. In this sense, he exemplifies Robbins’ idea of cosmopolitanism as “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance […] Habitation that is complex and multiple [but …] does not cease to be a mode of belonging.”21 For example, while Dono continues to exhibit internationally he also remains deeply engaged in the everyday life of his home community in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, returning there between trips abroad and maintaining grass-roots connections with artists, intellectuals, activists, friends, and general members of the local community. Moreover, Dono often involves the everyday people of his hometown (such as mechanics, grave-diggers, children, electricians, and wayang performers) in forms of collaborative art practice, from production of the work through to reception. Furthermore, in tandem with the forms, genres, and styles of a Westerninfluenced modern art, Dono draws on locally recognizable Indonesian cultural forms, traditions, and beliefs in his art as a means of communicating with Indonesian audiences on particular issues. 20

Wright, “Heri Dono. Indonesia: A Rebel’s Playground,” 87–88. Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah & Bruce Robbins (Cultural Politics Series vol. 14; Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1998): 3. 21

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Figure 55: Heri Dono, The King who is Afraid of the Approaching Barong (Sang Raja yang Takut Ketika Barong Datang) (2000). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

Figure 56: Heri Dono, Flower Diplomacy (Diplomasi Bunga) (2000). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 57: Heri Dono, Kuda Binal (Wild Horses) (1992). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

Thus, while Dono’s art communicates easily with most audiences worldwide, finding correlation with the formal and stylistic qualities in international formulas of contemporary art, there remain significant locally embedded connections, motivations, and materials in his art that may sometimes elude foreign audiences; he often takes on the task of acquainting himself with Javanese rituals, customs, beliefs, practices, and people as part of his art process and inspiration. In this sense, it may be argued that Dono continues the chain of a localized, Southeast Asian installation and performance-art practice which precedes their emergence in contemporary international art practice.22 Dono’s engagement with ‘the everyday’ or popular, localized activities of Indonesian communities was shown, for example, in his collaboration with people from a village in Yogyakarta in the performance of Kuda Binal (Wild Horses) (1992). This performance was presented as part of the exhibition ‘Pameran Binal Experimental Arts’, a counter-exhibition to the state-funded Third Yogyakarta Art Biennial of July–August 1992. The latter competition, 22

See varying perspectives on this issue offered by Julie Ewington, “Between the Cracks: Art and Method in Southeast Asia,” A R T AsiaPacific 3.4 (1996): 108–15, and Lee Weng Choy, “Local Coconuts: Simryn Gill and the Politics of Identity,” A R T AsiaPacific 4.16 (1997): 56–63.

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as the Indonesian art critic Sumartono explains, “set up criteria that young and alternative artists could not meet […] that participants must be at least thirtyfive years old, and […] must produce ‘painting works.’ Contemporary art was consequently excluded.” In response to this, the exhibition Pameran Binal was organized as a protest at the restrictions placed on artists in the ‘official’ biennale.23 Dono’s contribution to Pameran Binal was based on a traditional Indonesian horse-dance trance (Jaran Kepang) which took place just outside the Sultan’s palace complex, and incorporated visual devices from both Indonesian folk-dance theatre and contemporary ‘performance-art’ practice. It involved an evening fire-dance in which ten dancers (instead of traditional puppets) wore strange-looking tear-gas masks on their heads and underwear over their trousers. The dancers – children, housewives, and becak drivers from Kleben, a kampong (village) in Yogyakarta – then became animal/human hybrids as they sat astride the sculpted forms of horses, humans, and other animals. They evoked traditional trance rituals of kuda lumping, in which people come to assume animal-like states as snakes, pigs, monkeys or horses, for instance. Accompanying the dancers’ movements was contemporary music by the Indonesian instrumentalist Joseph Praba. Dono’s contemporary art-take on the kuda lumping ritual involves an appropriation of elements of traditional mythology which uphold the sacredness of animals, to comment on the hypocrisy of contemporary Indonesian society in which the destruction of the natural environment and endangered animal species occurs as a result of human greed. Forms of traditional trance dancing were considered taboo under the Suharto government on account of their animist associations; when Suharto’s New Order took over in 1965, Indonesians were forced to adopt an official religion. Similarly, trance dancing represented an anomaly in the earlier Sukarno government’s nation-building agenda, in particular its state-defined version of civil religion based on the official philosophy of Pancasila – the five-point national creed introduced by President Sukarno which forms the philosophical foundations of the modern 23

Interestingly, “binal” was also a play on the Indonesian word for ‘wild’, at the same time as it closely referenced the English word ‘biennale’; see Sumartono, “The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art,” in Jim Supangkat, Sumartono, Asmudjo Jono Irianto, Rizki A. Zaelani & M. Dwi Marianto, Outlet: Yogyakarta within the Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene (Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art Foundation, 2001): 33–35.

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Indonesian nation, guiding the republic and its citizenry.24 The sort of ‘NeoJavanist’ revivalism in which Dono participates suggests, as Clifford Geertz argues for other popular artforms, an attempt to revitalize traditional Javanese beliefs and expressive forms, to return them to public favor by demonstrating their continued relevance to the contemporary world.25

This revivalism contrasts with the effects of ‘Pancasila-ism’, which was intended to “muffle particularistic cultural expressions, to thin them out in favor of a generalized moralism of a developmentalist, pan-Indonesian sort.”26 Dono’s reminder of local animist traditions is also, therefore, a critical reminder of particular Javanese cultural histories prior to the establishment of a state-driven and prescriptive modernist national culture. In his crossings of local and global experience, Dono’s hybrid art practice provides for an examination of a new kind of cosmopolitan contemporary artist, poised somewhere between worldly and homely interests, universal but by no means postnational in their artistic inspirations and motivations. Previously cosmopolitanism referred exclusively to ideas and experiences of universality and an elitist sense of free-floating “detachment from the bonds, commitments, and affiliations that constrain ordinary nation-bound lives.”27 While the influence of globalization has potentially weakened the notion of culture as exclusively rooted in the nation-state, there remain strong ties to the ‘home’ nation for those artists with international art representation and for 24

The five points are: belief in one supreme God; justice and civility among peoples; the unity of Indonesia; democracy through deliberation and consensus among representatives; and social justice for all. The Pancasila is further underpinned by the state doctrine of cultural ‘unity in diversity’ (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika) across the Indonesian nation. However, under this motto, history has shown that the modern Indonesian government has selectively and actively encouraged some local cultures, while actually suppressing others under the rubric of national identity. 25 Clifford Geertz, “ ‘ Popular Art’ and the Javanese tradition,” Indonesia 50 (1990): 80. On the tensions between the development of a single nationalist against diverse local cultures in Indonesia, see also Keith Foulcher, “The Construction of an Indonesian National Culture: Patterns of Hegemony and Resistance,” in State and Civil Society in Indonesia, ed. Arief Budiman (Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990): 301–20. 26 Geertz, “ ‘ Popular Art’ and the Javanese tradition,” 80. 27 Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” 1.

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those that have physically left their ‘home’ nation for elsewhere. In art itself, this is most obviously demonstrated through the use of visual motifs, cultural concepts, or other issues and materials that relate to artists’ national contexts. However, recent social theorists have called for more complex and diverse notions of cosmopolitanism that might take into account the blurring boundaries between national and transnational affiliations in lieu of intensified forms of contemporary globalization. This includes the boundaries traversed and maintained by contemporary artists such as Heri Dono, whose allegiances, influences, and experiences in art and life are recognizably plural and particular in their outlook and attachment and, therefore, complicate any easy cultural categorization of their art. Significantly, Dono’s vision of ‘culture’ is not one that is static and closed to external cultural influences but, rather, open and adaptable to transformation and synthesis. In this respect, his reflections on Javanese culture under the influence of westernization are illuminating: I am not worried about Javanese culture disappearing because of the influence of Western culture […]. In my opinion it is not possible for a culture to fade or disappear, as long as there are people who are actively creating. If there are no such people, why then, the culture is already dead!28

Reflecting on his participation at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, in 2009, Dono elaborates on his view of “dynamic culture”: Exhibiting in an ethnography museum is important to me because I want to prove that dynamic culture and art exist outside Europe. A museum of ethnography should present both traditional and contemporary art. I think it is very important to show the value of ancient objects, as well as the continuity of the new. If we just choose for the contemporary, the museum’s significance becomes lost. At the same time, we must include life as it is lived today or people may draw the conclusion that nothing has changed since the old culture that is being shown. When you see traditional art in a contemporary context you can see the changes too. [...] The museum as a laboratory should educate the public regarding the dynamism of the cultures that are showcased. People think that art outside Europe is static. They think there’s no dynamic in Indonesian

28

Heri Dono, as quoted in Wright, “Heri Dono. Indonesia: A Rebel’s Playground,”

87–88.

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art, that it’s not influenced by art elsewhere in the world – in Europe, North America or other continents. Europe today is different from Europe in the 1920s. People from Africa, Asia and America, all come together in Europe, and Europeans emigrate to other countries. That was and is the same for Dutch artists. Take Mella Jaarsma; she lives in Yogyakarta and started an important art centre with Nindityo Adipurnomo. There is cultural diaspora in the Netherlands as well as in Indonesia.29

The kind of “organic hybridities”30 and convergences of influence and form which Dono alludes to partly explain his particular style of appropriation in art. A consummate hybrid in art and life, Dono’s art is a coming together of multiple and diverse artistic influences: this is culture we have to share. I don’t want to claim things, and say that other people cannot express themselves through this style. It belongs to everyone. It’s like Balinese sculpture […] when I was a student in art school, I saw many European painters, like Paul Klee, Miro, Picasso, Kandinsky. So in the medium [of painting] I was influenced I guess. But at the same time I also did research about wayang beber [Javanese wayang stories on painted scrolls] […] and also lukisan kaca [reverse glass painting, typically from Cirebon, in north 31 west Java].

Thus, as well as the physical border-crossings of geography that Dono performs as he moves around the world for his art, there are the crossings he makes as he melds and shifts between ideas, forms, and media in his actual art practice. At the same time as presenting culturally specific Indonesian elements, Dono’s art indicates that his exposure to the translocal cultures of globalization have contributed to his distinctive brand of hybrid art practice 29

Dono, in Wouter Welling, “Beware of the Joker! A Conversation with Heri Dono,” in The Dono Code: Installations, Sculptures, Paintings, ed. Wouter Welling & Helena Spanjaard (Amsterdam: K I T , 2009): 41. 30 See Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on hybridity, especially his separation of an “organic hybridity” and “intentional hybridity.” In the former, hybrid forms emerge as unconscious evolutions and mutations and are the result of organic convergences; ‘intentional hybridity’, on the other hand, involves politically intended orchestration of otherwise separate entities, in order to produce irony, contestation, and collision. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). 31 Polansky, “Interview with Heri Dono.”

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which appears to defy any one or authoritative original culture of influence and, rather, encapsulates intersecting cultural influences. Dono’s hybrid artforms, in a sense, prompt us to question the supposed boundedness and authenticity of culture, revealing the logical effect of global cultural mobility, mixing, and exchange. As with the formulation by the cultural-studies theorist Stuart Hall of cultural identity as production, cultural identity in Dono’s art is revealed as a dynamic and constantly shifting process – not as an already accomplished truth, but as something in process. As such, there can be no assumption of an authoritative ‘original’ culture, for cultural identity is necessarily a hybrid process.32 Some have been critical of the hybrid model as a means for assessing new forms of art practice in globalizing contexts. It is worth pondering, for instance, whether Dono’s ‘hybrid’ art practice merely combines essentialist cultures into an ‘essentially hybrid’ configuration. The performance-studies theorist Jacqueline Lo describes this as the “happy hybrid” model, in which hybridity simplistically presupposes essentialist notions of categorization. Through its popular usage and through the regular denial of the uncomfortable tensions, resistances, and ruptures that also surface with intercultural contact and cultural displacement, “happy hybridities” deny the specific cross-cultural experiences of hybridity which distinguish one artist or culture from another.33 Dono, however, appears to be one of the few artists whose hybrid formula might still bring together seemingly disparate issues and materials in art to critical effect. For, to follow Hall, the sort of hybridity Dono engages with in his art is also determined by “very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation.”34

32

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 21–33. 33 Jacqueline Lo, “Beyond Happy Hybridity: Performing Asian Australian Identities,” in Alter/Asians: Asian–Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law, & Mandy Thomas (Annandale, N S W : Pluto, 2000): 152–68. 34 Stuart Hall, as quoted in Chen Kuan–Hsing, “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley & Kuan–Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996): 502.

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Figure 58: Heri Dono, Talking of Nothing (1991). Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Figure 59: Heri Dono, Makan pelor (Eating bullets) (1992). © Heri Dono. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

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Figure 60: Heri Dono, Badman (1991). Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Figure 61: Heri Dono, Political Clowns (Badut-Badut Politik) (1999). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 62: Heri Dono, A Magician Who Never Killed (Tukang Sulap yang Tidak Pernah Bisa Dibunuh) (2000). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

Figure 63: Heri Dono, Superman Still Learning How to Wear Underwear (Superman Baru Belajar Memakai Celana Dalam) (2000). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

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Dono’s art education and influences are telling in this regard. While he has been well-acquainted with the forms and ideas of modernist art since his time at the Institute of the Arts (I S I ) in Yogyakarta, he has also become fluent in the art of wayang kulit – traditional Indonesian shadow plays – following his apprenticeship to the renowned shadow-puppet master Sukasman. Like the multi-media forms that are undertaken in wayang kulit, Dono is a crossdisciplinary artist engaging in painting, sculpture, music, and performance. And certainly there is a theatrical sensibility that we find in Dono’s work, whether in his moving and audible ‘cinematic sculpture’ or in his forays into performance and puppetry. Moreover, there is also a certain blend of tragicomedy, political satire, and playful humour that is characteristic of Javanese wayang – this also comes through in Dono’s art. For instance, cartoonish wayang-like authority-figures point deadly guns in paintings such as Talking of Nothing (1991) and Eating Bullets (Makan pelor) (1992), and the absurdities of political repression are evoked in works such as Badman (1991), Political Clowns (1999), A Magician Who Never Killed (2000), and Superman Still Learning How to Wear Underwear (2000). In these and other artworks, Dono demonstrates his skill in achieving a confluence of Western-influenced modernist art with specific Indonesian cultural and aesthetic practices. Dono’s art throughout the 1990s, like that of many other Indonesian artists, was mostly grasped by foreign audiences for its political significance, interpreted as symbolic political statements against the dictatorship of the then ruling Suharto regime. In well-known installations such as Gamelan of Rumour (1992–93), Fermentation of Mind (1994), Ceremony of the Soul (1995), Glass Vehicles (1995), and Watching the Marginal People (2000), a social critique of the authoritarian political climate in Suharto’s Indonesia appears to be at work. Fermentation of Mind, for instance, evokes the New Order’s manipulation and control of the minds of the masses. Fibreglass heads (modelled from Dono’s own) are mounted on the seats of wooden school desks and each head is motorized so as to nod up and down (or nod off) as if in hypnotic agreement with state policies and propaganda. Accompanying the rhythmic movement of the nodding heads is a grainy, recurring soundtrack that emanates from the worn speakers. The education of these robotic students appears to be one of brainwashing and unthinking obedience to authority, like puppets under the control of a puppeteer’s misused power.

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Figure 64: Heri Dono, Fermentation of Mind (Peragian Pikiran) (1994). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

Figure 65: Heri Dono, Ceremony of the Soul (1995). Collection: The artist. © Heri Dono. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 66: Heri Dono, Glass Vehicles (1995). © Heri Dono. Image courtesy of the artist and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

While those following Indonesian politics could find oblique criticism in Dono’s work relating to the dictatorial leadership of the New Order, like other works of Dono’s during this time, it nonetheless remained indirect in its condemnation. One could conjecture that such avoidance of overt political criticism was a means of escaping the direct attention of Indonesian authorities. Another explanation for this approach might be the kind of oblique political critique adopted in traditional wayang theatre and puppetry.35 Since the fall of the regime, however, in Indonesia’s changed political climate, Dono’s art began to suggest more overt political associations, leaving “symbolic speech”36 behind for more direct political expression. It evinced a turn to more direct expression of political issues, shifting in particular from themes of domestic to those of international politics. For instance, at the 50th Venice Biennale of 2003, Dono presented the installation entitled Trojan Cow (2003) as part of the ‘Zone of Urgency’ exhibition, curated by Hou Hanru – a 35

See Benedict Anderson, “Cartoons and Monuments: The Evolution of Political Communication under the New Order,” in Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1990): 152–93. 36 Anderson, “Cartoons and Monuments: The Evolution of Political Communication under the New Order.”

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specially curated thematic section of the Biennale, separate from the countrybased pavilion exhibitions, in which Hou continued the themes of his exhibition ‘Cities on the Move’ conveying the effects of rapid globalization and urbanization in Asian societies. Dono’s Trojan Cow, based on his Trojan Horse series, was made up of a painting and a gigantic shadow puppet in the form of a cow. Depicted in the painting are prominent international political figures such as a diminutive former Iraqi president (Saddam Hussein) and the towering alliance of U S President George Bush in the form of “Superman” and Prime Minister Tony Blair as “Badman”; meanwhile, an airplane blazes in the skies above. Thus, a shift appears to be evident here in the choice of subject-matter with which Dono engages. In Trojan Cow, issues of world politics take centre stage in a way not often registered in the artist’s oeuvre prior to the fall of the New Order regime, with the Trojan Horse of Greek political mythology providing an historical reference to global conflicts in the Middle East involving the U S A and its allies. Read against his other, more localized works with their references to Indonesian socio-political issues, Trojan Cow perhaps becomes a marker for a loss of local political resistance as regular subject-matter for Dono’s art and instead reveals a differently focused attention to socio-political issues of international relevance. This shift likely also reflects Dono’s more familiar habitus of international art practice by this time. It reinforces his established international reputation by the time of his participation in the Venice Biennale, which, significantly, is the first time a contemporary Indonesian artist was invited to participate as an individual artist in the central exhibition at Venice (and as only the second artist from Indonesia to participate in the Venice Biennale since 1954, when the modern art of Affandi was shown). In the same year of Dono’s participation, the first Indonesian pavilion for the Venice Biennale was also presented. Under the theme of ‘Paradise Lost: Mourning the World’, adapted from Nehru’s reference to Bali as the ‘Morning of the World’, artists including Dadang Christanto and Arahmaiani commemorated the Bali bombings of 2002 and artworks alluded to the grief surrounding the terrorist bombings in Bali the year before. The artworks not only commemorated the deaths as a result of these bombings but also their effect on the world in the context of transformed world politics following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. As the pavilion curator Amir Sidharta

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explained of the Bali bombings, “What has happened is a tragedy for the whole world.”37 The shift to a more direct and open political commentary in Indonesian art in the post-reformasi climate marks a pivotal art-historical moment in the country’s contemporary art. Many politically motivated artists faced limited exposure of their art in Indonesia and were pressured by censorship laws and fear of imprisonment under the New Order regime. Against this local background, the international popularity of contemporary Indonesian art throughout the 1990s was brought about largely as a result of foreign interest on the part of visiting international curators who were able to facilitate the exhibition and sale of Indonesian art abroad. In 1999, Damon Moon, co-curator of the contemporary Indonesian art exhibition ‘A W A S ! ’ , writes: Indonesia has been in the news and the combination of good art and turbulent change makes for an interesting destination. And many Indonesian artists know it. They talk about it, are amused and annoyed; some are chosen and others are not and they wonder if the momentum will continue, or if next year a new and more exotic destination will beckon.38

Politically and socially motivated art from Southeast Asia doubtless proved to be a hot topic that caught the attention of international curators. In a work by the Yogyakartan artist Samuel Indratma, international curatorial politics is suggested in a painting entitled Watch Indonesia (1999). The wry inscription at the bottom of the painting reads “Mr ‘Kurator’… Mr ‘Kurator’ I am waiting for you. I bring package from Indonesia.” Similar sentiments are expressed in Who Wants to Take Me Around? (1999) by fellow ‘A W A S ! ’ artist Nindityo Adipurnomo. Adipurnomo’s own head is used as the model for the three faces which emerge out of the wheeled and winged rattan transportation vehicle. Across each face painted labels and catchphrases relating to the Asian artist in the global art economy reverberate in golden letters: ‘biennial’, ‘collector’, ‘sold out’, ‘global’, ‘ethnic’, ‘political’, and ‘exotic’. While the front head is tied with a leash, the back legs which propel this traveller suggest that 37

See Amir Sidharta, “50th Venice Biennial, Indonesia,” press release, http://www .universes–in–universe.de/car/venezia/bien50/idn/e–press.htm (accessed 20 January 2004). 38 Damon Moon, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Some Observations on TransCultural Curation,” in A W A S : Recent Art from Indonesia, ed. Hugh O’Neill & Tim Lindsey (exh. cat.; Melbourne: Indonesian Arts Society, 1999): 11.

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while there might be aspirations towards fantasies of modern technology and flight, art remains a feat of human labour and, at least for Indonesia at that time, is largely low-tech in its materials. Dono is aware of such economic and ideological disparities as he travels between Indonesia and other countries, and is often critical of the ill-effects of modernization and the destructive technologies that it has produced. He points to the discord between the natural and constructed worlds and, by contrast, attempts to create an ecology of inspiration, forms, and outcomes in his art practice, from production to reception. He thereby disregards old art-historical divides between high and low art, or insistence on purity of forms and ideas, leaning instead towards a postmodern aesthetic of purposeful ambivalence. For instance, in works such as Gamelan of Rumour (1992–93), Ceremony of the Soul (1995), Fermentation of Mind (1994), Flying Angels (1996), and Watching the Marginal People (2000), Dono employs low-tech mechanical measures to create kinetic installations of material and symphonic energies. In the installation Gamelan of Rumour, the sounds of Javanese musical instruments are generated electronically by an invisible gamelan orchestra. This electronic gamelan is presented in the form of several electronic sound devices propped on low wooden blocks, each connected by wire to a central power station. Their scattered placement and low-level dimensions echo the configurations of a traditional gamelan orchestra but, unlike the identifiable members of the gamelan, the musicians behind these sounds remain faceless. Accountability for noise is difficult to identify, much like everyday rumours in public life, particularly those that are a result of ‘anonymous’ actions in bureaucracies. In his use of electronic and mechanical apparatus, Dono is described as “a low-tech magician” bringing to life the unwanted junk stuff of Yogyakartan rubbish tips and roadsides in buzzing, whirling, and humming audio-visual installations. Commenting on the processes of recycling that are common to Yogyakarta, Dono points to the resourcefulness that underlies his own work and that of the everyday practices of reappropriation in his Yogyakartan community: You can find thousands of small radio shops in Yogyakarta repairing used transistor radios. After [being] repaired these radios [are] sold cheaply […]. The used radio business is a culture. The mechanics recycle goods that were thrown away. They make a device out of in-

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valuable things that could spread information among the grassroots and also provide entertainment.39

Dono’s “low-tech magician” skills produced dramatic effects in his performance-installation piece Animal Journey (1997), presented at the Harima Sounding Sphere Festival, Japan. For this project, Dono built on his earlier explorations of sound in works such as Gamelan of Rumour and Ceremony of the Soul. The piece consisted of twenty-five bicycles turned into instruments of sound. A tape recorder attached to each bicycle played the pre-recorded sounds of various Indonesian animals. By pedalling the bicycles, riders activated the different animal sounds and, depending on the speed at which they pedalled, the animal sounds were either slowed down or quickened. Accompanying the installation proper, a performance was also orchestrated in which five bicycles were positioned in one of five lanes in a circular racetrack.

Figure 67: Heri Dono, Animal Journey (Perjalanan Binatang) (1997). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

39

Dono, as quoted in Jim Supangkat, “Breaking Through Twisted Logic: Heri Dono’s Critical Eye,” A R T AsiaPacific 32 (2001): 60.

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Once the ‘conductor’ of the performance gave a signal, the animal sounds were heard as performers began pedalling around the track. At one point in the track, performers were requested to don animal masks and then continue on their way. Pointing to the inspiration behind this project, Dono explained: Everyday in Yogya, I use a bicycle, and I go everywhere with it. This makes me think of people, especially the people in Harima [Japan] because Harima is a “technopolis,” a new city. I wanted to remind them that the bicycle is still important.40

Certainly, while Dono’s aim is to remind others of Indonesia’s different socioeconomic and technological conditions, it is worth noting that the bicycle is just as important in technologically advanced and modern localities such as Amsterdam, and coexists alongside other transportation modes in newly prospering contexts such as China. Like other works of Dono, Animal Journey becomes a reminder of the common technologies and means of transport which define the lives of everyday people living in developing countries such as Indonesia, even after its newly prosperous conditions in the twenty-first century. However, there is also a reminder of the destruction of nature, including animal life, on the march to modernization. Misinterpretation and misuse of advanced technologies has seen an increase in pollution and the marginalization, if not elimination, of natural habitats. The bicycle and the animal face similar kinds of extinction in the race to modernity. Dono remarks: “In the modernization process, the bicycle has no place to go; it’s dangerous because of motorbikes and cars. For the animals it is the same: there is no space for them.”41 For Dono, the (re-)animation of bicycle into animal is in line with his beliefs on the soul and spirit to be found in all things. Dono believes that “everything has a soul” and, as such, there is a plea for realizing the connectedness of things in the world, especially through Dono’s art processes of recycling and reincarnation. Notably, it was Dono’s childhood fascination with Western cartoons that led him to imagine the likenesses between the world of cartoon animation and that of animistic spirits, finding links between animation and animism: “In my 40

Dono, as quoted in Ian Campbell, “Heri Dono: installation, technology, presence and absence,” http://www.hybrid.concordia.ca/~ian_camp/texts/heridono.htm (accessed 25 November /2004). 41 Pat Binder & Gerhard Haupt, “Heri Dono – Statement (Written down by Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt, based on an interview),” http://www.universes–in– universe.de/car/habana/bien7/pab–cuba1/e–dono–2.htm (accessed 19 January 2004).

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mind the cartoon world is similar to an animistic world where everything has soul, spirit and feelings. In this kind of world, communication has no barriers.”42 In many senses, Dono’s art defies simplistic cultural readings. Rather, the critical hybridities he enacts in his art and life43 evoke matters of shared human experience informed by both Indonesian and international influence. Moreover, it expresses the perpetual condition of social change and transition, of art’s organic process, its link to the past but also its continual transformation. There is a sense of becoming that belies the traces of an origin or final destination. So, too, counter to stereotypes of the ‘high-flying’ itinerant contemporary artist, Dono’s art foregrounds the hybrid possibilities for a rooted cosmopolitan art practice with continuing connection to local realities. Dono’s mode of expression is certainly part of a critical mass of contemporary Southeast Asian art practice which has prompted a rethinking about longheld misconceptions of Asian art as unchanging cultural traditions which lie outside the currents of modernity. It reflects the new kinds of art practice emanating from Southeast Asia in the 1990s, simultaneously rooted in the realities of Southeast Asian and global experience and reflecting cultural pasts and presents. In the next section, we see how the new spatio-temporal and cultural tensions of this period were brought to the fore by a new generation of artists engaged with the emerging global technologies of ‘new media’ art and its ‘virtual’ potential for translocal mobility from Southeast Asian perspectives.

Netscapes: tsunamii.net’s Translocal-Locative Aesthetic The 1990s witnessed the international proliferation of contemporary ‘new media’ art projects – electronic or digital art which often harnessed the new connectivity of the internet, hence prompted radical redefinitions of spatial and temporal belonging in ‘virtual’ worlds. While these types of project are not found as extensively in contemporary Southeast Asian art of the period as in other Asian art, a number of artists embraced the new technologies, in42

Dono, as quoted in Jim Supangkat, “Context,” in Heri Dono: Dancing Demons and Drunken Deities, ed. Heri Dono (exh. cat.; Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2000): 101. 43 On the avoidance of ‘cosmopolitan essences’, see James Clifford’s chapter “On Orientalism” in The Predicament of Culture, Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1988): esp. 274–75.

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cluding Hasnul Jamal Saidon and Niranjan Rajan (the Malaysia-based founders of E - A R T A S E A N O N L I N E , established in 1999), and artist collectives such as tsunamii.net based in Singapore (2001–2005) and the Bandung Center for New Media Arts in Indonesia (2001–).44 These artists sought to integrate the newly available electronic technologies into contemporary art practice, often as a means to collaborate creatively with others and/or explore the parameters of and possibilities for Southeast Asia-based forms of artistic and social expression. The new technology-driven artforms which emerged further challenged the idea that Southeast Asian art should be viewed with a territorialized paradigm which roots the identity of individual artists (and their national and regional community) to a specific spatial topos, an ‘original location’. This is because new web-based digital arts involve practices of deterritorialization which transcend local physical borders through new ‘mobile’ networks and connect people around the world in new virtual ways. To quote Irit Rogoff, these might be described as “unhomed geographies” which make possible the “redefin[ition of] issues of location away from concrete coercions of belonging and not belonging determined by the state.”45 However, such projects also raise questions about the indexation of cultural boundaries in the domain of the supposedly unbounded internet. The innovative web-based art practice of Singaporean multimedia collective tsunamii.net brings precisely such issues of locality to the fore, testing the boundaries and connections between physical space and cyberspace. Founded by the artists Woon Tien Wei and Charles Lim Yi Yong and the scientist Melvin Phua Yang Chien, tsunamii.net was established in 2001 just as the ‘dot.com bubble’ burst.46 This was the “speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–

44

The Bandung Center for New Media Arts was founded in 2001 by Gustaff H. Iskandar and R.E. Hartono. The B C N M A established the Common Room Networks Foundation in 2003, as a public platform for dialogue, collaboration, and experimentation in a range of creative activities. See The Bandung Center for New Media Arts. “Common Room Networks Foundation,” http://bcfnma.commonroom.info (accessed 29 March 2012). 45 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 4. 46 The tsunamii.net collective was active in the period 2001–2005. Since then, Woon Tien Wei has been involved in other collaborative art projects in Singapore such as p-10, Post-Museum, and the Artists’ Village; Charles Lim Yi Yong has developed

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2000 […] during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their

equity value rise rapidly from growth in the Internet sector and related fields.”47 tsunamii.net, as Woon explains, “operated as a critical inquiry into the internet marketing rhetoric of the time, which was about establishing a new virtual world order.”48 In an email exchange with tsunamii.net’s Woon Tien Wei, the artist explained the origins of the collective’s name: We are named tsunamii.net – because it was an adopted “pre-registered” domain name which [fellow tsunamii.net artist] Charles had at that time. The original use for that domain name was for some “dot.com” business thing for games which he was engaged to set up (this was before the dot com bubble burst). Before it got set up, the dot-com bubble burst and the plans stopped. Thus, we thought that was a cool thing to adopt something which was part of this “dot-com” wave … the best part of it was the fact that it was a plan which never got around catching the dot.com wave. So that’s how it came about … oh yes, the “tsunamii” with a double “i” was because the single “i” tsunami was unavailable – again someone got to that first.49

For their project entitled alpha 3.8: translocation, tsunamii.net electronically migrated their site from webserver to webserver in various countries around the world over the course of one year, starting on 31 March 2003.50 In so doing, the artists sought to “document and challenge the extent to which a frictionless, borderless economy ‘really’ exists independent of national boundaries, international regulations, and local customs […] translocally.”51 In his independent art practice through filmic and photographic projects, including his S E A S T A T E series exploring Singapore’s maritime geography and histories. 47 Wikipedia, “Dot-com bubble,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble (accessed 29 March 2012). 48 Woon Tien Wei, in Amanda McDonald Crowley, “Roundtable on New-Media Art in South and Southeast Asia: Crossing Open-Source Frontiers,” ArtAsiaPacific 64 (July & August 2009): 96. 49 Michelle Antoinette, personal communication with the artist Woon Tien Wei, 22 January 2005. 50 The work was commissioned by the Walker Art Center as part of the “Emerging Artists / Emergent Medium: Translocations” program and presented as part of the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age of 2003. 51 tsunamii.net, “alpha 3.8,” Emergent Media / Emerging Artists: 3 New Net Art Commissions, http://www.tsunamii.net/concept.htm (accessed 21 January 2004).

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order to test their theories, the website interface for alpha.3.8: translocation was intentionally ‘neutral’. As the artists explained, this was intended “to challenge the audience’s usual perception of ‘net art’ ” and perhaps, too, it could be argued, to avoid overt visual suggestions of any cultural affiliation: “No Flash design or any interactive haven, nothing but the plain tsunamii.net website.”52 In this way, the artists argued, “the work operates beyond the visual aesthetics and beyond code as it is based on the conceptual notion of its location.”53

Figure 68: tsunamii.net, alpha 3.8: translocation (2003; ‘Visual traceroute’). Reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

To further explain: users were initially prompted to participate in plotting the internet path between their computer and the alpha 3.8 site. Following this, they registered their electronic positioning so as to generate a “visual traceroute” of the internet path, marking the site’s electronic migrations. During this entire process, the tsunamii.net website appeared to remain the same with no indication of its shift in physical location – “unchanged but translocated.”54 Only through “traceroute /ping” commands and the “visual traceroute” could the audience ‘see’ the location. Ironically, the conceptual notion

52

tsunamii.net, “alpha 3.8.” “alpha 3.8.” 54 “alpha 3.8.” 53

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Figure 69: tsunamii.net, alpha 3.4 (2002) (installation view). Reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

Figure 70: tsunamii.net, alpha 3.4 (2002) (performance view). Reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

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of the work’s location, although ‘hidden’ from immediate view, is pivotal to the project. Yet it is translocality and the merging of real space and web space, with which the artists are concerned.55 In this way, tsunamii.net blur the boundaries between the spaces of cyberart and the geopolitical spaces of nations and regions. Importantly also, they complicate utopian ideas of ‘virtual’ belonging – that sphere of twenty-first-century connectivity described by the digital-arts specialist Sean Cubitt as “a new and universal spatial system whose organization is not […] grounded on the earth’s surface but in a network of satellites.”56 Indeed, because of their various negotiations with the individual countries which host the relevant international webservers, tsunamii.net’s ‘locative art’ instead affirms the existence of various forms of grounded, territorialized politics which regulate and govern such satellites. Moreover, these points of real geography suggest that even in virtual spaces the world is nevertheless a mapped territory anchored by physical and cultural parameters and positionings. Also part of the alpha series, alpha 3.3 (2001) was an earlier exploration by the tsunamii.net artists of the boundaries and intersections between virtual (“net space”) and physical (“actual geographical”) spaces. Together with Melvin Phua Yang Chien and Tan Kok Yam, Charles Lim and Woon Tien Wei set up a “webwalker” project whereby one of the artists carries a Global Positioning System (G P S , originally a military tracking device) on their person. The artist’s actual physical movements, transmitted via mobile phone, simultaneously set off a sequence of web-browsing movements / operations in netspace. Thus, through the interface of human and technological apparatus in ambulant relation, alpha 3.3 charts the physical journeys undertaken by the artists in real space into visible and traceable, virtual maps. The art theorist and curator Gunalan Nadarajan suggests the significance of the project in elucidating new geographies: The webwalker, as the specially created programme is called, ensures that physical walking is the only way to surf/browse the net where the walk is across different I P addresses, themselves clearly issuing from specific geographical spaces. The work examines the ways in which technological devices/tools, conflate and expand conventional notions

55 56

tsunamii.net, “alpha 3.8.” See Sean Cubitt, “Orbitus Tertius,” Third Text 47 (Summer 1999): 4.

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of geographical space, distances and the bodily engagements implied by them.57

In particular, alpha 3.3 reveals the new aesthetic and social consequences of the ‘locative’ or ‘G P S ’ technologies, and their mediating facility between the parallel worlds of the real and virtual. Cubitt elaborates on these functions and effects of the G P S : Firstly, it instigates an era of absolute location, without reference to any terrestrial landmark […]. G P S abstracts us from the visible, replacing a relation to the world with a relation to space-borne machinery and thence to an immaterial geodesic grid. Secondly, since jamming effectively excludes an enemy from knowing where they are, what shall we say of those who are never included in the community of G P S users? In some sad sense, they are left outside the new, universal spatial coordinates, abandoned to a relationship with the visible, material planet on which they toil, themselves invisible and unac58 counted for in the grand reasons of strategic geography.

The web-based projects of tsunamii.net form part of a network of planetary communications and in this sense may be seen to belong to a global geography of art. However, through the physical relationship the artists forge with the actual world in the processes of making their virtual art, they complicate idealized visions of a universal cyber-art; so, too, they interrupt essentialist narratives of localized culture. Rather, tsunamii.net reveals notions of cultural space to be simultaneously fragmented and multiple, and made newly complex through the intersection of actual and virtual mapping. In Rogoff’s sense, their projects evince a suspension of belief in the possibility of either coherent narratives or sign systems that can actually reflect straightforward relations between subjects, places and identities.59

tsunamii.net’s negotiation of multiple spaces – real geographical space, a G P S map space, and netspace – challenges the ways in which spaces are mapped and experienced, at the same time as it questions narratives of ‘space’ itself. In so doing, the artists interrupt homogenizing, territorialized spaces – 57

Gunalan Nadarajan, “Cyberarts: Intersections of Art and Technology,” in Nokia Singapore Art: Histories, Identities, Technologies, Spaces, Singapore Art Today (exh. cat.; Singapore: National Arts Council & Singapore Art Museum, 2001): 50. 58 Cubitt, “Orbitus Tertius,” 5. 59 Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, 6.

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including the ‘territorialized’ spaces of virtual geography – practising instead ‘lines of flight’ and processes of ‘becoming’. For the international exhibition Documenta 11 (2002), tsunamii.net further explored the issue of locality in their project alpha 3.4 – a development of ideas generated in alpha 3.3. Specifically, Charles Lim Yi Yong walked from Kassel (the site of the exhibition) to a server in Kiel, where the Documenta website physically exists – a six-hundred-kilometre journey walked in one month beginning 4 June 2002 – from Documenta 11 to documenta.de. Lim carried a webserver in his backpack while en route to his destination, and his real-time movements and locations could be tracked at any moment via the “web walker” programme that tsunamii.net had developed with other programmers. The G P S built into the programme allowed Woon to track his partner’s expedition by monitoring the changing I P numbers (identification numbers assigned to every computer linked to the Internet) on the first screen of the installation. This then cause[d] changes on the other three monitors: the browser, the mapping software, and the pinging tracer program.60

Woon elaborates: The logistics are similar to that of an expedition, and Charles is an ‘explorer.’ He’s carrying a server in his backpack, so at the same time he is this [the embodied server], too, which is how we are tracking him.61

Upon finally arriving in Kiel, Lim set up a webcam enabling viewers “to see ‘documenta.de’ as a webserver, a real object in real space,” making visible on the internet the otherwise hidden physical realities of webservers. In the processes of journeying, location, and exploration, the technology of the webwalker and Lim’s physical being act in synergetic relation, merging at the hybrid cyborg interface of human and machine, each in a sense embodying the other. As with alpha 3.3, the intersection of virtual and physical ambulations was integral to tsunamii.net’s investigations of translocality in their Documenta exhibition project. Alongside the virtual tracking of Lim’s movements, his physical journeying is also a reminder of real time and space. As 60

Pat Binder & Gerhard Haupt, “Tsunamii.net: Interview (From an interview by Pat Binder and Gerhard Haupt with Tien Wei Woon),” http://www.universes–in–universe .de/car/documenta/11/brau/e–tsunamii–2.htm (accessed 7 January 2005). 61 Binder & Haupt, “Tsunamii.net: Interview.”

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part of this process, mobility is revealed as an integral component of their project and it is only through the practices of movement that nuances of location, space, and speed are revealed. In this regard, the remarks by the cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas on speed and disappearance in Hong Kong come to mind. Borrowing from Paul Virilio’s work at the intersection of contemporary mobility and politics, Abbas associates the new electronic technologies with the extraordinary capacity to traverse physical geographical spaces with unprecedented speed and to re-imagine spatial maps of engagement: the relationship of disappearance to speed, the kind of speed that comes in the wake of electronic technology and the mediatization of the real, and the spatial distortions produced by this kind of speed.62

In short, Abbas contends, “speed undoes place.”63 By contrast, in tsunamii.net’s projects, the real is compressed and mediatized through electronic mappings and navigations of space using the eye of the webcam, but, at the same time, these virtual spaces remain connected to the actual geographies that are traversed by Lim in his real-world journeying. The projects of tsunamii.net remind us that in a world in which territorial borders continue to be guarded and defined by the might of nations, movement and its repercussions are never devoid of political ramifications. As Balibar suggests, “borders have stopped marking the limits where politics ends because the community ends”64 and have, rather, become reframed as the very sites of political contestation. The work of cyber-artists further complicates accepted notions of borders, not only revealing the ways in which new spatial maps are being redrawn across conventional boundaries but also confirming existing borders and territorial designations. In so doing, they also elucidate how the new intersection of the physical and virtual worlds has effected new configurations of belonging and modes of attachment to place, but has also contributed to the continuation of national and regional identifications.

62

Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong: Hong Kong U P , 1997): 9. See also Virilio, Speed and Politics. 63 Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 9. 64 Balibar, Étienne. “The Borders of Europe,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah & Bruce Robbins (Cultural Politics 14; Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1998): 220.

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‘A Map to My Own Becoming’: Judy Freya Sibayan’s Nomadic Aesthetic The ambulant, migratory aesthetic evoked in the ‘Web Walker’ projects of tsunamii.net may be contrasted with that of Judy Freya Sibayan and, in particular, her ‘walking gallery’ project ‘Scapular Gallery Nomad’ (‘S G N ’)¸ previously mentioned as part of the international exhibition ‘Cities on the Move’ (see Chapter 3 above). Through this performance-art project, mobility and sedentariness and their attendant politics of location are interrogated as the artist negotiates institutional and personal politics, transgressing institutional borders and mapping independent movements in public space. Sibayan elaborates thus on her motivations: My faith in the criticality of art practice shaken and eroded, I left the museum, stopped making art and withdrew from the artworld. Selfexiled, disillusioned, my disengagement marked the beginning of the crucial process of individuation. A process so stunningly providential, its poetic logic no longer escapes me. If my dis-ease with the monolithic circuit of production, circulation, and reception of art had largely to do with its ecology of mere spectacle and monuments, of confinement, dependency and co-optation (infrastructural, institutional, historical, economic, discursive), of privilege and exclusivity, of universals and homogeneity, the path to restoring my health was a movement away from this circuit. Precisely, the intimate process of individuation and integration called for a move towards quietude, humility, a forsaking of the socialized, canonized-self and an embracing of the deeply personal; a move away from the comforts of being privileged and accommodated towards selfdetermination [sic] and sufficiency, self-truth and autonomy. This line of flight, a process of de-centering, brought me straight to the border, the margin, the periphery, perhaps even beyond the limits of the center of art production, circulation and reception of art.65

About a decade before her performances of ‘S G N ’, Sibayan was the director of the Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines (C A M P ). Unhappy with what she experienced as the co-opting force of a state-run cultural institution, Sibayan left the establishment, seeking autonomy from the prescriptions and 65

Judy Freya Sibayan, “Scapular Gallery Nomad: Beyond the Limits of the Center and Into One’s Own,” http://www.asa.de/magazine/iss4/17sibayan.htm (accessed 25 November 2004).

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hegemonic ideologies which often accompany such institutions. In so doing, Sibayan sought to recuperate her experience of art practice and representation as a self-determining subject: “I was deeply entrenched in the center,” she explains. “I was not only producing art that fed into the system, I was now part of the system that canonized persons and objects as art and artists.”66 Seven years later, after a period of serious introspection and having found a renewed devotion to art, Sibayan created her living “body gallery,” ‘Scapular Gallery Nomad’. For five years, every day from May 1997, Sibayan wore two strung-together cloth pouches on her chest and back, a garment traditionally associated with the religious apparel of a scapular – the brown pouch or miraculous Scapular of Carmel, said to have been “placed upon the shoulders of one Simon Stock.”67 Each pouch contained minuscule art exhibits collected from artists whom Sibayan had met in her daily life, including Fernando Modesto, Simryn Gill, Adrian Jones, Sunil Gupta, Varsha Nair, Xin Xiuzhen, and Agnes Arellano. “My work is the performance of the gallery,” Sibayan explains, “and I am exhibiting the work of others.”68 “What you can see are artifacts of this little museum that I carry everywhere I go. It’s a gallery inside a gallery […] it’s like a gallery on the move.”69 Through these performances, Sibayan herself becomes a living, walking museum and epitomizes the recent attempts made by independent artists to create for themselves new spaces for working outside the confines of mainstream art institutions (see Chapter 2 above). In particular, Sibayan’s ‘independent’ strategies of transgression may be compared to alternative art spaces and independent artist initiatives that have developed outside of art establishments: on a very individual level, Sibayan attempts to disrupt the order of institutionalized exhibitions and their spaces by moving her art to public spaces. The usual temporal and spatial structures for engaging with art in institutionalized spaces are interrupted by Sibayan’s own more fluid and flexible practice of space and time in ‘S G N ’. The performance project may therefore be read as a more direct engagement with the everyday world and public sphere beyond the art museum. 66

Sibayan, “Scapular Gallery Nomad.” “Scapular Gallery Nomad.” 68 Michelle Antoinette, interview with Judy Freya Sibayan, Manila, 3 July 2002. 69 Sibayan with Obrist, Hou et al., as quoted in Hou Hanru & Hans–Ulrich Obrist, “Cities on the Move: A Dialogue,” A R T AsiaPacific 25 (2000): 71. 67

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Figures 71–72: Judy Freya Sibayan, Scapular Gallery Nomad (1997–2002). Images courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 73: Judy Freya Sibayan, Scapular Gallery Nomad (1997–2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

In the context of the ‘Cities on the Move’ exhibition, Sibayan’s project reflected the curators’ interest in ‘Museums on the Move’ – defined by the curators Hou and Obrist as “extremely flexible museums without fixed locations which migrate within the city and permanently question their own parameters […] situated inbetween situations.”70 The portability of Sibayan’s ‘body gallery’ demonstrates the physical disruption of the centre as the artist literally takes herself and her gallery of art to alternate, everyday audiences beyond the traditionally fixed confines of the museum. In this regard, the art theorist Miwon Kwon illuminates the transformative effect of new contemporary art projects which seek direct public engagement through bypassing the space of the art museum: Concerned to integrate art more directly into the realm of the social, either in order to redress (in an activist sense) urgent social problems such as the ecological crisis, homelessness, A I D S , homophobia, racism, and sexism, or more generally in order to relativise art as one among many forms of cultural work […]. Deeming the focus on the 70

Hou Hanru & Hans–Ulrich Obrist, “Cities on the Move,” in Cities on the Move, ed. Hou Hanru & Hans–Ulrich Obrist (exh. cat.; Ostfildern–Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997): section 4, np.

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social nature of art’s production and reception to be too exclusive, even elitist, this expanded engagement with culture favors “public” sites outside the traditional confines of art in physical and intellectual terms.71 the site is now structured (inter)textually rather than spatially, and its model is not a map but an itinerary, a fragmentary sequence of events and actions through spaces, that is, a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of the artist (original emphases).72

With its strong echoes of DeleuzoGuattarian philosophy, ‘S G N ’ encourages a “space of nomad thought […] qualitatively different from State space.”73 As the philosopher Brian Massumi explains further, the space of nomadic thought is “air against earth”: State space is “striated’, or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad space is “smooth,” or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomas: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort).74

Reflecting the political potential of mobility, S G N is also generative of nomadic space – more precisely, of alternative art contexts and sites for the production and reception of art which are the direct consequence of mobility and shift. Sibayan elaborates: My body clothed with the gallery becomes a specific site for art. At the same time once clothed with the gallery my body can constantly create specific spatial and temporal sites for the performance at that moment someone holds and views the artworks in elevators, in planes, in funeral parlors, at theatre lobbies during concert intermissions, while queuing in banks and supermarkets, during lunches in cafeterias,

71

Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 91. 72 Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” 96. 73 Brian Massumi, “Foreword,” to Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, 1980; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1987): xiii. 74 Massumi, “Foreword,” xiii.

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in church weddings, dental clinics, taxis, in beauty parlors, restaurants, shopping malls, classrooms, picnics by the sea and so on.75

The everydayness of ‘S G N ’ is emphasized not only by Sibayan’s unobtrusive and accidental interventions into the real public and private spaces of her everyday life, but also through the intimacy of her performances. From the personal exchanges of the artist with prospective exhibiting artists and inquiring spectators, to the second skin she herself sews and wears on her person with almost sacred devotion, Sibayan’s performances stress intimacy and simplicity over spectacle. I am not a spectacle … I am just carrier of the works … The performance is never a spectacle. The artworks are now removed from the context of the pure-gaze … I would like to believe there are no heroics in performing Scapular Gallery Nomad, just the wearing of a piece of cloth and a constant sensing of my own scale and order of things daily; intimate, liminal, fragile and finite …. Performing beyond the limits of the center, I have empowered myself proportionate to and within the limits of my own energies and my subjectivity.76

This reveals Sibayan’s recognition of the parameters of her individuated body and, as Cajipe–Endaya observes, a “succinct declaration of her own topography.”77 Judy Freya Sibayan is ‘S G N ’ – the embodiment of art production, curatorship, and exhibition. For this artist, the use of her body as a nomadic gallery is an act of autonomous and active self-determination against the more stultifying body politic traditionally reflected in the state-run art institution and the economic imperatives of commercial art spaces. Related to this, ‘S G N ’ brings into stark distinction the intersubjective, personalized relations between Sibayan as individual artist, curator of and carer for borrowed artworks belonging to others, against the larger and comparatively impersonal relations between art bureaucracies and their stakeholders. She reveals the capacity of ‘S G N ’ to curate art intimately and achieve oneon-one spectator engagement with art, but also lays bare the limits of ‘S G N ’. For instance, Sibayan is unable to insure borrowed artworks, a fact which

75

Sibayan, “Scapular Gallery Nomad.” Antoinette, interview with Judy Freya Sibayan. 77 Imelda Cajipe–Endaya, “bone, muscle and soul: curator’s notes,” in Who Owns Women Bodies? ed. Rochit I. Tañedo (exh. cat.; Quezon City: Creative Collective Center, 2001): 21. 76

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lenders understand by written contract with Sibayan.78 In so doing, Sibayan raises the question of “the preciousness of art,” revealing the dual meaning of art’s high value as symbolic worth and/or monetary worth. Commenting on the limited financial returns of ‘S G N ’, Sibayan cites an email from India, in which she was asked, “How can you artists survive doing what you do?”79 Sibayan explains further: I know what he meant – he meant financially … I said the kind of survival that I refer to is not financial it has to do more with the given situation I’m in. But certainly I have to have a day job. If I sold a painting, I give 30 or 50 percent back into maintaining the [scapular] gallery … I don’t have any profits really.80

Along with the potential of ‘S G N ’ to recuperate art from economic interests, the performances also suggest a further intervention in mainstream art relations: namely, that between artist and curator: For each exhibition, I do what every respectable art gallery does for its artists: the writing and publishing of exhibition notes, curatorial design, publicity, documentation, archiving, openings, shipping logistics, artist-gallery contracts, the cultivation of an audience, and the design and construction of the gallery.81

By carrying out such administrative and curatorial tasks, Sibayan merges the creative roles of curator and artist in such a way that the two become inseparable. “Scapular Gallery Nomad, a piece of clothing, a habit, is a space I have created where I can essentially curate upon my body” (my emphasis). Moreover, along with the roles of curator and artist, Sibayan is also manager, vehicle, and site of her nomadic gallery. In short, ‘S G N ’ is indicative of individual creative agency. While some of the usual conventions of art practice, curatorship, and exhibition are paralleled in Sibayan’s gallery, ‘S G N ’ is distinguished by its simplicity, small scale, minimum fuss and preparation, as well as intimacy, attention to detail, and absolute care in the handling and presentation of objects. Sibayan elaborates:

78

Antoinette, interview with Judy Freya Sibayan. Interview with Judy Freya Sibayan. 80 Interview with Judy Freya Sibayan. 81 Sibayan, “Scapular Gallery Nomad.” 79

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Scapular Gallery Nomad’s maintenance and integrity are dependent on the resources and reality of my daily living. It has no demands beyond the small-scale of my life. I hand sew the scapulars; write and desktop publish the exhibition notes in my bedroom; print them low-tech, each copy costing from 10 to 15 U S cents. I only carry small, light delicate artworks: photographs, prints, books, computer diskettes, egg white merengue and textile sculptures, oil paintings on paper. They are unframed, unpropped on pedestals; protected, wrapped only in cloth, never a burden on my shoulders. My movements too are conservative. Except for the intimate dinners hosted by the artists during their opening events, I hardly go out of my way to make a separate event of it, separate from the usual flow of my life that is. Some openings were quiet, unattended, unseen events. On three occasions it was just the simple undonning of the old scapular and the donning of the new one with the new works on the set date wherever I was.82

Despite the initially transgressive politics of ‘S G N ’, its presence in mainstream art exhibitions around the world, including ‘Cities on the Move’ suggests a paradox which the artist herself if very well aware of: “What am I doing back in the cube right? Have I been co-opted?,”83 she asks, noting the irony of the situation. Elsewhere she explains: Finally, having accepted the reality of my inevitable relationship with the very same system I profess to work without and secure in my autonomy as an agent critically aware of the coopting discursive powers of these institutions, I have performed briefly within … major museums.84

Sibayan maintains that it would be naive to think that a project such as ‘S G N ’ could completely overturn the established art system, but asserts that “it is she who maintains control over the enterprise and her body”; “I sincerely feel that I have not compromised the integrity of the work since it existed and continues to exist independent of these institutions.”85 The autonomy of ‘S G N ’ might be further probed in the light of its replication of gallery organizational, curatorial, and brokering practices, but also in 82

Sibayan, “Scapular Gallery Nomad.” Antoinette, interview with Judy Freya Sibayan. 84 Sibayan, “Scapular Gallery Nomad.” 85 Eileen Legaspi–Ramirez, “judy freya sibayan: self-healing and rib-poking,” in Who Owns Women Bodies?, ed. Rochit I. Tañedo (exh. cat.; Quezon City: Creative Collective Center, 2001): 128. 83

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its oppositional (binary and binding) position in relation to the establishment. In opposing the centre, does ‘S G N ’ simply reaffirm the centrality of art establishment politics? And is the attempt by ‘S G N ’ to carve a new autonomous space in any way compromised by its adoption of another centre’s icon – the scapular of the Catholic Church – with ‘S G N ’ merely signifying a move from one centre to another? The artist admits that she has “not fully shed the ways of the center,” and cites, in particular, her difficulty in communicating her concerns to lay audiences – the ideal public to realizing the transgressive politics of ‘S G N ’. These issues (margin and centre, local and global, the intimate and the spectacular, mis/communication) are not exclusive to Sibayan’s practice; as previously mentioned, they also surface as considerations for artist-run spaces and initiatives with their focus on forms of collective participation that also strive to be autonomous, free of the homogenizing or commercializing impetus of mainstream exhibitions. Importantly, in the case of ‘S G N ’, Sibayan’s ‘mobile aesthetic’ is integral to the artwork’s significance as a political-aesthetic project beyond the parameters of the museum. It also offers a potent instance of how specific (here, mobile) forms and media of art practice are integral to their discursive significance (challenging the static museum). Other kinds of contemporary art which pursue ‘moving aesthetics’ – that is, ‘art on the move’/ ‘moving art’ – are explored further in the following section.

Simryn Gill’s Moving Representations

Figure 74: Simryn Gill, Roadkill (2000; detail of installation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002). Photo: Jenni Carter. Image courtesy of the artist.

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The scene: a scrambling, bustling commotion of activity suggestive of an exodus. In Simryn Gill’s art installation Roadkill (2000), crushed items of roadside litter, collected from the roads of various cities, are mounted on toy wheels and seem poised for a sudden rush of collective movement. Like a moment frozen in time arrested for our pause and reflection, this mass of wheeled roadkill is evocative of the real-world urban pace and global congestion of late modernity. It is at once both an embodiment of stasis and a play on movement. For these wheeled bits of litter do not actually move on the space of the gallery floor, they only evoke such movement. Despite the significations of movement connoted by the mobilizing apparatus of the wheels in Roadkill, the installation also implies a certain stasis, in that the wheeled objects do not actually move, evoking a sense of stasis-in-motion or motionin-stasis. While the particular roads on which they once travelled are not known, the roads are, nevertheless, imprinted in the flattened shapes and scuff marks of this collection of junk. Moreover, the refuse collected references modern-day global capitalism and consumer culture – the cultural production of commodities, their consumption and waste: old beer cans, cigarette packets, and drink containers, for example, bear globally represented logos in motion, not unlike the transport vehicles of modern life. Here, in small-scale representation, clustered in a traffic sprawl of sorts on the gallery floor, the previously ‘dead’ refuse is given new mobility and another (re)cycle of life. In its witty animation of roadside detritus, recycled and brought to life again for art, Roadkill demonstrates the material and affective consequences of twenty-first-century global capitalism and its imprint on our everyday environmental landscape. There is, moreover, an aesthetic interest in the dynamics of movement and mobilization, most obviously as an echo of the mobilities associated with road networks. As Susan Best has noted of this and other artworks, there is a “pleasurable corporeal engagement [in which] the body quite literally moves or is moved to the shape of the work when interest is ignited.” This “moving aspect of art,” Best states, “is often ignored or taken for granted in art history and criticism.”86 Gill’s earlier work Self-seeds (1998), first installed at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland in 1998, bears both a visual and a thematic resemblance to Roadkill and we might therefore infer a strong link 86

Susan Best, “What is Affect? Considering the Affective Dimension of Contemporary Installation Art,” Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art 2.2–3.1 (special issue, “Affect and Sensation,” ed. Toni Ross, 2002): 209.

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between the two artworks. Rather than the animation of crushed roadside litter, in Self-seeds the organic, tropical seed-pods of various fruits and nuts appear to come to life. Their dynamic growth-patterns are again imaged comically through the playful addition of toy wheels to the base of each pod. Counter to a hierarchical pattern of vertical growth, they appear to proliferate horizontally, even rhizomatically, through their wheeled mobilization across the gallery floor. This lively army of whirring seed-pods conveys the lifeforce which propels budding arboreal seeds into fully sprouted life-forms. Their swirling configurations on the floor are evocative of the dynamic patterns of stasis and movement to be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic networks of germination and growth: multiplication, displacement, and mobilization. These seeds are also suggestive of ‘roots’, ‘territory’, and ‘emplacement’, but in their rhizomatic movements are also necessarily ‘mobile’, ‘multiple’, and ‘scattered’ in their trajectories of growth. As with the wheeled detritus of Roadkill, we might assume that there is a destination for them because of their movement – these seeds are ‘going places’ – but where exactly is less predictable. There are too many possible routes for these seeds to travel and too many possible places to secure their rhizomatic roots. In relation to this, Gill remarks: “Seeding” opens up a lot of possibilities; the seed as in stock; or to introduce a species to a place; or the seeding of ideas. Seeding is a subtle, almost invisible kind of invasion, so that the results are woven into the local landscape. New ideas become “natural” to a place. Seeds are insidious invaders; remember The Day of the Triffids and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers – seeds and plants establish themselves before we even notice that they are there.87

We might also link the trajectories of these seeds to another kind of metaphoric work – that which recalls the social practice of culture as one of dynamism, shift, growth, and transformation. Through Self-seeds’ evocation of the trope of the ‘root/route’, we might interpret a visual play on the cultural politics of migration as a concurrent movement between locatedness and detachment, as with the process of ‘seeding’. This kind of fluid relation is suggested by much of Gill’s art practice, with its diverse evocations of location and trans/location, movement and emplacement.

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62.

Gill, as quoted in Lee, “Local Coconuts: Simryn Gill and the Politics of Identity,”

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Figure 75: Simryn Gill, Self-seeds (1998). Photo: Michele Bruet. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 76: Simryn Gill, Self-seeds (1998; detail). Photo: Petri Lagus. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 77: Simryn Gill, Wonderlust (1996; detail). Photo: Michele Bruet. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 78: Lee Weng Choy on Mass Rapid Transit train, Singapore, wearing coconut-bark suit from Simryn Gill’s Wonderlust (1996). Photo: Nicholas Leong. Image courtesy of Simryn Gill.

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As the anthropologist James Clifford argues in his work Routes, the route is suggestive not only of (arboreal and/or cultural) ‘roots’ but also ‘routes’ as pathways. In employing this metaphor, Clifford attempts to convey a sense of social belonging that emerges from practices of movement rather than from notions of static habitation or “dwelling” with their associations of fixed identity: Dwelling was understood to be the local ground of collective life, travel a supplement; roots always precede routes. But what would happen […] if travel were untethered, seen as a complex spectrum of human experiences? Practices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension […] Cultural centres, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through their appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things.88

Seeds may also serve as signifiers for that other real colonial legacy – nationalism – in particular, the essentialist cultural discourse on which it is often predicated. However, as the implied mobility of Self-seeds might suggest, such essentialisms neglect the realities of cultural shift and change. They conceal the very transformations, transplantations, and transgressions of the seeds of culture, the latter’s metamorphoses in different times and spaces, and its ability to move through and beyond borders, albeit with historical traces. As Stuart Hall argues, searching for one’s cultural roots or “seeds” in pursuit of cultural identity misses the point of cultural identity as being something in process and production, “a matter of becoming rather than of essentially being.”89 Recalling her earlier installation Wonderlust (1996), Gill expresses her fascination with and joy at the symbolic and, in other circumstances, real ability of the coconut seed to interrupt and rethink notions of locality and translocality:

88

James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1997): 3. 89 Kitty Zijlmans, “East West Home’s Best: Cultural Identity in the Present Nomadic Age,” in Grid: Tiong Ang, Fendry Ekel, Mella Jaarsma, Remy Jungerman, ed. Tiong Ang, Fendry Ekel, Mella Jaarsma, Remy Jungerman & Zwaan Krijer (exh. cat.; Yogyakarta, Cemeti Art House, 2003): 83.

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I wouldn’t categorically say that it’s impossible to establish the “origins” of coconuts, but from what I’ve read it seems they are “native” of the whole Tropical belt, rather than any geographically localised region. Why am I so fascinated by coconuts? I think for many of us our childhoods are a kind of paradise lost – a sort of rotten paradise I suppose … for me coconuts evoke that landscape. Only later have I realised how ridiculously apt the coconut is to my dreaming; its seed is spread by water, and will grow wherever it is beached; it moves by its own rules, and certainly not by those of any border and immigration or customs and excise police. I love the image of “seeding” a place, of the way in which coconuts are naturalised to every place which can sustain their growth.90

Figure 79: Simryn Gill, Washed Up (1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

The evocation of fluid movements and seeding continues in Gill’s installation Washed Up (1993–95), first presented for ‘TransCulture’, an exhibition held in association with the 46th Venice Biennale of 1995. The installation was 90

Gill with Lee, as quoted in Lee, “Local Coconuts: Simryn Gill and the Politics of Identity,” 62.

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made up of an array of broken glass shards gathered from Gill’s own beachcombing and scattered along the gallery floor to replicate the swirling linear patterns of shells, seaweed, rocks, debris, and other objects usually found strewn by the seashore. (In other instances, the glass shards have been piled in low heaps on the floor or presented in alternate configurations.) The glass shards had been collected on beaches on the west coast of Malaysia and the southern islands of Singapore. Worn by the sea, the smoothed glass fragments were also adorned with single, delicately scripted English words which Gill had etched onto their surface and which appeared to transform the glass debris into precious individual pieces of stone.

Figure 80: Simryn Gill, Washed Up (1993; detail). Photo: Hiram To. Image courtesy of the artist.

Seemingly unconnected individual words formed complete but multiple and ever-changing narratives in the eyes and minds of ‘reading’ participantobservers at the installation: “truely,” “falling,” “affair,” “incentive,” “translucent,” “grasses,” “people,” “symbolic,” “running,” “ecstasy,” “zipper,” “gulped,” “play,” “closet,” “wear.” Another search reveals a potential chain of “appetite,” “bubbles,” “sin,” “sucker,” “estranged,” “obscure,” “plagued,” “welded,” “persimmon,” “harvest,” “cloth,” “muslin,” “fairy,” “despicable,” and “hum.” And yet another: “tempered,” “ferried,” “slump,” “trim,” “warning,” “blow,” “flags,” “clitoris,” “sophisticated,” “powder,” “metal,” “happens.” Not only do these narratives multiply, shift, and change in the indivi-

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dual experience of the participant-observer but also, of course, from one participant-observer to the next. Moreover, there is no straightforward or ordered reading that Gill offers us, hence no prescriptive interpretation or translation. Instead, Washed Up draws attention to the fluid movements of interpretation or translation that occur in the production of meaning, as well as in its different contexts of reception. As Rosi Braidotti has noted in her own formulation of a polyglot, nomadic writing, “Words have a way of not standing still, of following their own ways.”91 Writing that engages in a polyglot practice is, for Braidotti, about disengaging the sedentary nature of words, de-stabilizing common-sensical meanings, deconstructing forms of consciousness. […] Writing is not only a process of constant translation, but also of successive adaptations to different cultural realities.”92

Reflecting on her inspiration for Washed Up, Gill comments: I remembered as a child standing on those beaches wondering what was on the other side [… in making this work] I was interested in the way when language leaves one place and washes up at another, something happens to it and […] the meanings of the words change.93

That Gill has chosen the English language to make this point evokes the universalizing force of the lingua franca of the modern world. However, in the multiple word-strands that are possible, Washed Up also implies the various adaptations and mutations of the English language across the diverse geographies of the English-speaking world, calling to mind the organic flows of language transfer and transformation. Under the aegis of the Japan Foundation and the Fukutake Science and Culture Foundation, the ‘TransCulture’ curators Fumio Nanjo and Dana Friis– Hansen sought to reflect issues of contemporary transcultural movements across national borders, especially those concerning trade and exchange. Gill was included among the fifteen artists for the ‘TransCulture’ exhibition and, 91

Rosi Braidotti, “Nomads in a transformed Europe: Figurations for an alternative consciousness,” in Cultural Diversity in the Arts: Art, Art Policies and the Facelift of Europe, ed. Ria Lavrijsen (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1993): 34. 92 Braidotti, “Nomads in a transformed Europe, Figurations for an alternative consciousness,” 34. 93 Art Gallery of New South Wales. “Simryn Gill: Selected Work,” press release, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media/archives_2002/simryn_gill (accessed 14 November 2002).

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revealing much about Gill’s international reputation at the time and the curatorial motivations for the 1995 exhibition, was situated as part of a new stream of internationally mobile contemporary artists, “a twentieth-century nomad.”94 Significantly, while Gill’s artwork Washed Up echoed issues of nomadism with its references to the sea and sea travel, it did not directly reflect Gill’s own life passages; in fact, direct self-imagery rarely figures in Gill’s artwork. However, ‘TransCulture’, as with many other curatorial exercises in framing Gill’s art practice, directly linked Washed Up with her biography and her ‘nomadic’ life history, with an emphasis on Gill’s ‘Asianness’ and the different localities of residence and work that she had experienced in her life up to then.95 The individual description of Gill’s work in the ‘TransCulture’ exhibition catalogue is telling in this regard: Simryn Gill is a twentieth century nomad. Although her family is originally from India, she was born in Singapore, raised in Malaysia in a small coastal town off the Straits of Mallacca [sic], educated partially in the U K , has lived in Australia and now resides in Singapore. Taken together, her work, which often engages the metaphoric possibilities of common, locally available objects, reflects upon the shifting constructions of order, categories, and meaning – part of the complex, layered 96 experience of so many Asian lives.

We must assume, therefore, that for the ‘TransCulture’ curators the different cultural geographies that define Gill’s biography are also the primary means for engaging with Washed Up. They take precedence over the more complex issues of trans/culture, dislocation, and translation that are investigated in Washed Up, specifically that relating to linguistic translation, so central to the installation. Thus, the kind of empty labelling Gill may be referring to in Washed Up is, ironically, the very sort that is often used by others in foregrounding her artwork in terms of her person, and in likening her experience to the lives of other Asians. Moreover, the kind of geographical determinism expressed in these one-dimensional interpretations denies the playful shifts of 94

Dana Friis–Hansen, “Artists and Works,” in TransCulture: La Biennale di Venezia

1995, ed. Fumio Nanjo, Dana Friis–Hansen, Akiko Miki, Yukie Kamiya, Anne Long-

necker Dodds & Yoko Miyahara (exh. cat.; Tokyo: The Japan Foundation & Fukutake Science and Culture Foundation, 1995): 114. 95 Friis–Hansen, “Artists and Works,” 114. 96 “Artists and Works,” 114.

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meaning that are central to Gill’s art practice and life and also excludes the significance of movement as a constitutive force in the shaping of localities, subjectivities, and art itself – as if geographies, people, objects, and art practice exist independently of the cultural movements that shape their existence, and as if movement itself is without its experiential politics. The tendency to refer to Gill’s life experience as the primary source for exegesis of her art is not uncommon in the case of contemporary Southeast Asian artists. As Lee observes, Gill “is of course not the only artist to get such treatment. Biography has reappeared as the material and means for criticism, after decades of Marxist, then structuralist, modalities.”97 As with other prominent Southeast Asian artists living abroad, Gill’s cross-cultural biography is regularly invoked as a source of explanation for the fluid cultural identities she presents in her art: You were born in Singapore, grew up in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and were educated in Jaipur, India and the U K . You then married a Chinese-Australian with whom you have two children. Your son was born in Kuala Lumpur and your daughter in Adelaide, which meant that initially your family has had to negotiate an existence between Malaysia and Australia, with a more recent return to Australia, where you now reside.98

It is true that a significant proportion of writing about Gill’s work seeks to explain her art through her biography, if only as an identity foregrounded in cross-culturalism, nomadism or dislocation. Lee elaborates: While self-images have not figured much in Gill’s work, there has been a tendency by curators and writers to view her art in terms of her person. References to her ethnicity and nomadic history are like an ineluctable preface to many an interpretation of her work. It is not that these details of life do not matter, but Gill is far more deft – and mischievous – than such frames let on.99

97

Lee, “Local Coconuts: Simryn Gill and the Politics of Identity”. Suhanya Raffel, “Suhanya Raffel in conversation with Simryn Gill,” in Simryn Gill: An O V A Touring Exhibition, ed. Sharmini Pereira (exh. cat.; London: Organisation for Visual Arts (O V A ), 1999): 6. 99 Lee Weng Choy, “Simryn Gill: The spectre of comparisons,” A R T AsiaPacific 37 (2003): 65. Gill expresses her exasperation with the continuing interest in her ‘identity’ as a theme for the interpretation of her art: “it’s not even that these kinds of anthropological or sociological readings are limiting; it’s not even that, it’s just 98

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Gill’s art, indeed, reveals identity to be not as self-evident as it is often supposed to be and instead encourages a more complex yet playful understanding of culture and art. Lee argues that to “see [Gill’s] work as an expression of identity is to take it too earnestly, and not to recognise it for what it might be: a flirtation.”100 Instead, borrowing from Adam Philips, Lee suggests that we view Gill’s art as a “ ‘ calculated production of uncertainty’ and a ‘transitional performance’, flirtation is not about origins or essences, but possibilities.”101 Although Gill has since taken up residence in Australia, her life continues to be marked by her itinerant existence, as she continues to spend her time alternately between Malaysia and Australia but also elsewhere as an internationally exhibiting contemporary artist. In 2013, Gill participated in the Venice Biennale, representing Australia, thus registering recognition by the nominating Australian art curators of Gill’s contributions to contemporary Australian art. Significantly, Gill prefers not to identify herself as an artist who is “neither in nor out” but, instead, as one who goes “back and forth,” maintaining that a sense of “rootedness” to a particular time, place or culture is of no interest to her or, perhaps more specifically, as having no conscious place in her artmaking process.102 The seeming paradoxes and contradictions in Gill’s thinking and art practice – stasis and movement, here and nowhere, indigenous and alien – are, rather, for her, the organic effect and practice of life. The identitarian logic is turned on its head in Gill’s photographic series A Small Town at the Turn of the Century (2001). In the thirty-eight individual photographs making up A Small Town, the masked subjects are situated in various interior and exterior settings around the town, always facing the viewer and formally posed in the style of traditional portraiture, save for the peculiar absence of their faces. Across the images, the viewer is deprived of the visceral pleasure of knowing who stands behind the amusing headdresses103 worn by the individuals depicted, and, more generally, about what boring.” Author’s interview with the artist Simryn Gill, Sydney, Australia, 6 September 2002. 100 Lee, “Local Coconuts: Simryn Gill and the Politics of Identity,” 59. 101 “Local Coconuts: Simryn Gill and the Politics of Identity,” 59. 102 Author’s interview with the artist Simryn Gill, Sydney, 6 September 2002. 103 Yao Souchou, “Perilous Vision,” in A Small Town at the Turn of the Century, ed. John Barrett-Lennard & Yao Souchou (Perth: Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2001): np.

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kind of people make up the community represented, located somewhere but nowhere in particular, at the turn of a century. What immediately strikes us about these photographs is not their setting but the apparent absurdity of the strange yet witty headdresses fashioned from various exotic fruits of the region and which veil the faces of their wearers. In a substitution of the typology of people for a typology of fruits104 these wonderful headdresses stand in for the faces of this unidentifiable community and suggest both the absurdity and arbitrariness of social codes of belonging. Denied the opportunity to identify these faces, we are obliged to search for other clues in the photographs which might inform us of the identity and geography of these people. Gill’s play with absence and presence prompts us to reassess our conventional readings of the subject and settings of portraiture, but also our usual strategies for classifications of people and how we come to ‘know’ them and even ‘represent’ them. There is a sense of being taken by surprise, a discombombulation in realizing the contradiction in the usual conventions of portraiture and in our expectations of ‘face-to-face’ encounter with an ‘identifiable’ subject. As the curator Stuart Koop states, Like people that have been classified through the process of physiognomy these people have in a sense been relegated to a type, which is something that everybody does immediately when they view another human being. By tapping into the human instinct to judge by appearance, Simryn’s images have the uncanny knack of giving us insight into an intrinsic human behaviour.105

Aside from their domestic belongings and personal garments, one other possible clue to the identifications of these people is perhaps the fruit-masks themselves. Across the photographs, we may recognize tropical fruits – of rambutan, papaya, durian, coconut, banana and others – which together appear to present a declaration of the community of fruits found across some tropical regional topography, as if suggesting an alternative category of belonging.

104

Stuart Koop, “The Wrong Head on the Right Body,” in Your Place or Mine? Fiona Foley, Simryn Gill, ed. Michael Snelling (exh. cat.; Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2002): 7. 105 Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane). “Your Place or Mine?,” press release, 23 August 2002, http:www.abc.net.au/message/blackarts/visual/s656707.htm (accessed 14 November 2002).

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The fascination behind the photographs is perhaps further explained via their ability to convey an ambiguous sense of community and place, allowing the viewer to recognize these ‘local identities’ as part of almost any community, in almost any place in the world but nevertheless specific to somewhere. In fact, the series portrays various members of the artist’s old hometown community of Port Dickson, in the state of Malacca, on Malaysia’s west coast. Certainly, the people represented in Gill’s photographs are specifically emplaced, surrounded by actual tropical landscapes and real idiosyncrasies of architecture and domestic interiors around the town, but the scenes also evoke resemblance with numerous other possible localities. Consequently, this town’s links are both near and far, not only within the region but also globally, with its simultaneously unfamiliar and yet similar signs of communal place and belonging in the world.

Figure 81: Simryn Gill, A small town at the turn of the century, #1 (1999–2000). Photo: Hiram To. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 82: Simryn Gill, A small town at the turn of the century, #34 (1999–2000). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 83: Simryn Gill, A small town at the turn of the century, #13 (1999–2000). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 84: Simryn Gill, A small town at the turn of the century, #28 (1999–2000). Image courtesy of the artist.

In another photographic series by Gill entitled Dalam (Malay for ‘interior’, ‘inside’ or ‘deep’), people are nowhere to be seen. The homely contents of these interiors are our only clues to the kinds of people inhabiting these domestic spaces. This series is a result of Gill’s eight-week trip across the Malaysian Peninsula in 2002, during which time she “knocked on the doors of strangers and asked if she could enter their house to photograph their living rooms.”106 The final set of two hundred and fifty-eight photographs making up Dalam recall A Small Town through the standardized size and repetitive arrangement of the photographs, as well as through their formally composed settings.107 The calculated size of each frame (23.5 cm by 23.5 cm) adds to the affective experience, encouraging the viewer “to peer into” these living rooms to register their details.108 106

Art Gallery of New South Wales. “Simryn Gill: Selected Work.” Dalam was first exhibited at the distinguished Galeri Petronas, which also commissioned the artwork. The gallery is situated on the top floor of Malaysia’s tallest building, the Petronas Towers. “The ‘grand view’ from one of the world’s tallest buildings contrast[ed] with the ‘ordinary interiors’ of Malaysian homes.” See Galeri Petronas, “Dalam,” press release, http://www.biotechnics.org/1simryngill.html (accessed 14 November 2002). 108 Lee, “Simryn Gill: The spectre of comparisons,” 65. 107

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Figure 85: Simryn Gill, Dalam (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 86: Simryn Gill, Dalam (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 87: Simryn Gill, Dalam (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

Revealing her motivations for Dalam, Gill explains that the series was a response to a question she had posed to herself about the spaces of habitation across particular communities: “Can I see what a collective ‘inside’ defined by nation might look like?”109 Gill elaborates: In conceiving the work I had wondered what the “inside” of a place might look like. Do lots of people held together by geography add up to the idea of a nation or single unified group? The place that I chose to look at is one that is inside me, but also one that I have been removed from for a very long time. In this respect, embedded in this work was a demand that I made on myself to confront the conflicting experience of being both insider and outsider, by requiring myself to persuade people, strangers, locals, to trust me and to let me into their homes.110 109

Simryn Gill, as quoted in Natasha Bullock & Lily Hibberd, “Simryn Gill in conversation with Natasha Bullock and Lily Hibberd,” Photofile 76 (Summer 2006): 17. 110 Simryn Gill, ed. Simryn Gill: Selected Work (exh. cat., Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2002).

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Upon entering their households, Gill would say to the occupants, “If you don’t mind, I would love to just get the texture of how you live.”111 The varied textures of the individual homes Gill represents in Dalam range from the opulence of Pan-Asian modernist interior design to the modest interiors of local cottages. The inclusion of personal and everyday objects – fold-out sunchairs, backpacks, a stray shoe, a swinging baby’s cloth cradle, the scattered frames of family photographs, a Buddhist altar, unpacked boxes – further incite the viewer’s curiosity and stimulate their imagination about the kinds of subjects which inhabit these homes.

Figure 88: Simryn Gill, Dalam (2001). Image courtesy of the artist.

111

As quoted in Rosalie Higson, “Rooms with a viewfinder,” Weekend Australian Magazine (20–21 July 2002): 39. (My emphasis.)

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While the photographs are devoid of their occupants, the living rooms depicted bear an irrefutable trace of their occupants’ presence. As with Small Town, the details of each interior provide us with clues to the peculiarities of the absent inhabitants. Rugs, furniture, family photographs, and religious icons, for example, serve as markers of taste, class, and wealth distinguishing one household from the next.112 To echo the sociological observations of Pierre Bourdieu: a political economy of symbolic capital is apparent across the photographs as the varied consumption and living practices of the various home-owners is uncovered. The cultural and symbolic goods of one household distinguish them from the next. Viewed as a collection, Gill’s photographs suggest the ways in which these households serve as self-representations of social distinction – a means by which humans organize themselves from one another in the context of modern-day life in twenty-first-century Malaysia. Unlike Small Town, the sitter has very obviously altogether disappeared in Dalam in a way that, as the anthropologist Ashley Carruthers argues, paradoxically evokes a haunted unhomeliness. “In these images,” Carruthers astutely observes, “the subject is unhoused: condemned to homelessness, wandering and travel.”113 Indeed, the lack of the subject is a striking absence for any anthropologist who seeks stories of direct human encounter and connection to place. Despite the absent subject, however, I would suggest that homeliness and situatedness may potentially be reinforced in the series. Indeed, if there is an anthropological impetus to know the subject, there is also an archaeological one at work in sifting through Dalam. For, if part of the process of Gill’s practice is to take on a quasi-anthropological role – in her negotiation with home owners to photograph their private living spaces – then Dalam consequently also encourages a fictional archaeology of sorts, prompting us to study the texture of these homes as if their owners had disappeared, and urges us to search through these interiors as material and aesthetic practices of domestic life which invoke a ‘feeling’ for place, or, to paraphrase Gill, a ‘texture of living in place’. As with the Small Town series, the conventional logic of portraiture is put in question – for these, I would argue, function as unpeopled portraits rather 112

See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1984). 113 Ashley Carruthers, “Simryn Gill, Dalam,” F O C A S : Forum on Contemporary Art and Society 4 (2002): 247.

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than as mere documentation of private interiors. If portraiture often conveys a sense of its subject by situating the latter in place, Dalam reveals how the absence of the subject-in-place greatly unsettles our expectations of human identification and connection. If we are prompted to ask the questions ‘where and, more importantly in this series, who are the people that inhabit these households?’, we are also confronted with our learnt practices of searching for and expecting to see the subject in such contexts. In their individual differences and coherence with the larger dynamic of the series, the Dalam photographs also echo the cultural stratifications and codependencies of individuals and groups constituting the fabric of Malaysian society. On this, Lee remarks: If the pictures differ wildly in content, as different as one home can be from the next, they are also strangely consistent […. However, this] particular consistency does not mean that one picture is like any other […] if they are all typical, they are also singular. While the relatively large number of images in the series seems to guarantee a good representation of the diversity of Malaysian society, it becomes apparent, when trying to select an image or two […] that a single picture fails to suggest the whole dynamic of the series.114

While Gill finds direct inspiration from her Malaysia-based experiences for both A Small Town at the Turn of the Century and Dalam, the images in themselves are not explicitly autobiographical; nor are they didactic in their suggestions of local and global connectivity and disjuncture. Rather, in their ambiguity, Gill’s photographs present multiple possibilities for imagining and visualizing notions of belonging. They function not as hegemonic representations of Malaysia, Southeast Asia or Asia but, rather, as catalysts for seeing, thinking, and feeling the idea of cultural identification anew. These images thus suggest alternatives to conventional notions of identity and place, revealing both to be dynamic, organic, and aesthetic practices of life. In this sense, they are less a mirror to particular communities than an invocation of the generative and imaginative possibilities of being human in place. Indeed, Gill’s art is, in more general terms, concerned with the materiality of human life – the texture and fabric of people’s everyday lives and surroundings – and what this reveals about the making and significance of selves in different spatial and temporal contexts. As the curator Jessica Morgan observes, while human life is largely invisible in Gill’s practice it is also central 114

Lee, “Simryn Gill: The spectre of comparisons,” 65.

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to it, “conspicuously present through its absence.”115 The deliberate obscuring of human life turns our expectation of straightforward identification with other human subjects and their surrounds into a self-reflexive examination of the construction and representation of identity, which in turn challenges our assumptions of people-in-place. Culture matters in Gill’s art, but it is a critical, nuanced, and questioning approach to culture that is evoked rather than mere reflection or description. Moreover, Gill’s art directs playful aesthetic attention to the myriad visual clues, details, patterns, and tactility of how life is lived in situated place. It reveals the significance of the aesthetic as a key means of elucidating new perceptions of belonging in the world. Consequently, we are moved to consider humanity in the world from different perspectives through art’s affective provocation and engagement. This chapter has sought to highlight the relationship of ‘moving’ artforms to themes of dynamism, shift, and movement in the world. As I have described throughout this chapter, such themes gathered momentum in Southeast Asian art practice and exhibition of the 1990s alongside the increased experience of physical, psychical, and virtual mobility of artists and the critical transformations in cultural and spatial identification that these movements effected in art. As the boundaries of Southeast Asian nation and region were rendered increasingly mobile, elastic, transient, and translocal, artists also engaged with issues of movement and mobility as the subject-matter and form of art, and curators ventured to adopt new models of exhibition representation beyond national frames. The next chapter continues to explore the effect of these new mobilities by investigating the topic of ‘memory’ in contemporary art.

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115

Jessica Morgan, “No Place Like Home,” in Simryn Gill, ed. Russell Storer (Cologne: Walther König, 2008): 59.

5 Memoryscapes Present Pasts Revisioned

Figure 89: Wong Hoy Cheong, In Search of Faraway Places (1996). © The artist. Image courtesy of the artist. I grew up listening to stories. Stories told by my father and mother, grandmothers, aunties and uncles. They were stories of remembrance layered with wonder and pain, conflict and reconciliation, mystery and miracle. My drawings take these stories, rich with images, as a starting point. I am interested in how the histories of people are made; how the individual “I” becomes the collective “I” and the easily forgotten dreams of one person become the dreams of a people.1

1

Wong Hoy Cheong, artist’s statement, in Wong Hoy Cheong: Of Migrants & Rubber Trees: an exhibition of drawings and installations, ed. Valentine Willie (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Five Arts Centre & Valentine Willie Fine Art, 1996): 6.

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Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past.2

Figure 90: Wong Hoy Cheong, In Search of Faraway Places (from ‘Migrants’ series) (1996; detail). Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

2

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 23.

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of late-nineteenth-century family albums, Wong Hoy Cheong’s charcoal drawings In Search of Faraway Places (1996) communicate the histories of migration to and emigration from Malaysia. Through the serialized narrative of the triptych, the late-twentieth-century migratory experiences of families from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds are depicted as they make their way from different corners of Asia, including China, India, Indonesia, and Burma (Myanmar). Despite their differences, they are shown to be connected in their status as migrants, all traversing common seas in search of someplace else to make home. Among the families represented are those of privilege – well-dressed, equipped with certificates to prove their education, and sufficiently moneyed to head off overseas to places such as Australia, in search of new life opportunities; others from poorer backgrounds and more perilous life circumstances make their way to what is for them a prosperous Malaysia, in the hope of brighter prospects there for themselves. With its referencing of early monochrome photography, these drawings strongly evoke the visual archives of history and the cultural traditions behind such histories in present-day Malaysia. Encouraged is recollection of Malaysia’s long and diverse cultural histories of migration. An alternative narrative is offered to that held up by the Malaysian State in its recent privileging of bumiputera (Malay race and Indigenous) ethnicities (following the earlier reforms of the 1971 National Cultural Congress) as the authentic cultural foundation of the nation above other Malaysian ethnic groups. In Search of Faraway Places thus offers an intervention in this narrative, as the historical assimilation of Other ‘migrant’ cultures is revealed as equally significant in establishing the Malaysian nation; far from being Other, these diverse migrant cultures are all shown to be integral elements of Malaysia’s cultural histories, presents, and futures. The art of Wong and other contemporary Southeast Asian artists of the 1990s constitutes a critical site for remembering and re-presenting the past and its identifications, not only their own but also that of their various entangled social communities. As the memory theorist Marita Sturken argues, E M I N I S C E N T O F T H E S E P I A - TO N E D P H OTO G R A P H S

as the means by which we remember who we are, memory provides the very core of identity [… it] establishes life’s continuity [… and …] gives meaning to the present, as each moment is constituted by the past.3 3

Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P, 1997): 1.

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In offering an alternative reading to the official, state-defined accounts of Malaysian culture with their privileging of bumiputera ethnicities, In Search of Faraway Places recuperates and reinscribes the multiple and diverse histories of migration which are the very fabric and constitution of the contemporary Malaysian nation. It also suggests the importance of the artist’s personal recollections of his family’s memories of migration to the reclamation of his identity and the identity of his fellow non-indigenous and indigenous Malaysians alike; indeed, Wong cites this as the inspiration for his drawings. The sudden illness of his mother was the initial motivation for In Search of Faraway Places, with Wong reflecting on his family’s cultural movements, attachments, and aspirations as they travelled from various parts of the world to be by his mother’s bedside.4 In this chapter, I consider some other examples of Wong’s art, and that of several other contemporary Southeast Asian artists as lieux de mémoire or “sites of memory.”5 Like In Search of Faraway Places, other instances of artas-memory not only serve to document the past but also act as important sites for the recovery and praxis of individual and communal agency in the constitution of subjectivity. Further, they are markedly diverse in their artistic expression of different kinds of memory through art: traumatic memory, public and private memories, and memories which recall specific socially and geographically situated pasts. These instances of artistic “memory-work”6 also adopt different aesthetic approaches. Contemporary Southeast Asian art, in its re-creation of pasts, performs a kind of “memory-work” akin to the historicizing role of the museum, public monuments, and memorials.7 The prevalence of contemporary art which concerns itself with histories and memories is seen by some as motivated by a contemporary angst about historical loss and the desire for cultural preservation in the face of rapid 4

See Queensland Art Gallery, “Wong Hoy Cheong: About the Work,” in Lines of Descent: The Family in Contemporary Asian Art, exhibition website, http://www.qag .qld.gov. au/linesofdescent/works/wong.html (accessed 3 November 2004). 5 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. 6 I borrow the term “memory-work” from James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1993). 7 On the role of contemporary art in eliciting memory-work, see, for instance, James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 2000).

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social change and instability. However, more than just representing fin-desiècle anxieties concerning “a future without pasts,” the art I examine in this chapter also reflects the modern interest in “present futures” as well as postmodern and postcolonial concerns with “present pasts,” for contemporary Southeast Asian art often demonstrates the concerns and anxieties of a forward-looking modernist culture at the same time as it increasingly concerns itself with the past as a means of understanding the present and the future. In the process of articulating memory via contemporary art, artists often test the limits of established histories, revealing what is assumed to be their collectively defined basis to be, rather, one of particularized making with relevance for some and not others. Thus, a singular authoritative memory often merges and comes into conflict with the possibility of manifold memorynarratives. Memories not only demand constant confirmation through rehearsal but also open themselves to cultural contestation, revision, and even untranslatability. As Andreas Huyssen has argued with regard to the memorywork performed by museums, No matter how much the museum, consciously or unconsciously, produces and affirms the symbolic order, there is always a surplus of meaning that exceeds set ideological boundaries, opening spaces for reflection and counter-hegemonic memory.8

This is bound up with the fact that memory production is a spatio-temporal encompassing of intersecting agencies and subjectivities at the level of both official meta-narratives and more personalized discourses. It is “neither a property of the individual nor of history” and instead “a product of the intersection of the global and the local, the collective and the lived bodily experience.”9 My considerations of contemporary art as performative sites of memory necessarily recognizes both the spatial and temporal conditions that underpin the formation of memories and thus also the contexts of art’s production and its differently sited contexts of reception. As I indicated above, space and time are dually significant considerations in the interpretation of contemporary Southeast Asian art, something that is particularly evident in artistic memory8

Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York & London: Routledge, 1995): 15. 9 Jill Bennett & Rosanne Kennedy, “Introduction” to World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time, ed. Jill Bennett & Rosanne Kennedy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 15.

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focused projects. With specific reference to memory production itself, Bergson positions memory as the relationship of specific socio-temporalities as well as particular geographies.10 Similarly, Huyssen observes: Time and space are always bound up with each other in complex ways, and the intensity of border-crossing memory discourses that characterize so much of contemporary culture in so many different parts of the world today proves the point.11

There is, indeed, a necessity for a sense of space–time where the two are not inseparable.12 In these kinds of theoretical approaches to understanding memory, time is a set of dynamic and active, spatially informed temporalities in contrast to a static and generalized continuum.13 Accordingly, memories of Southeast Asia as expressed in art are foregrounded in this chapter as dynamic re-presentations which register places as “becoming, with multiple temporalities.”14 Nevertheless, memories are also positioned and reflected in art as the expression of specific moments and places concerned with both the past and the present. Moreover, while memory and forgetting are always co-dependent processes, the instances of artistic memory-work I explore are concerned less with the representation of already legitimized histories than with purposeful practices of “counter-memories.”15 They express the possibility of alternative individual or collective pasts. Art becomes a manifestation of the subjugated historical knowledges of individuals and communities whose memories have been repressed or discounted in official histories, including official art histories. Acts of artistic expression reveal the political consequences of selectively remembered and forgotten histories, so that the political capacity of 10

See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, tr. Nancy Margaret Paul & W. Scott Palmer (Matière et mémoire, 1908; tr. New York: Zone, 1991). 11 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2003): 12. 12 Doreen Massey, “Politics and space / time,” New Left Review 196 (1992): 71. 13 Bergson, Matter and Memory. See also Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone, 1988). 14 Mike Crang & Penny S. Travlou, “The city and topologies of memory,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2001): 161–62. 15 I borrow the term “counter-memories” from Michel Foucault to describe alternative narratives to official versions of history. See Foucault, Language, CounterMemory, Practice (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1978).

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memory is also registered through artistic agency. Art as a site of memory is a political site of power-struggles and negotiation over the construction of memory and its meaning16 – memory is a “changeable script”17 open to contestation in its production, representation, and reception. What is included as worthy knowledge of the past, who defines this past, and what this past means are all open to struggle and change, particularly considering memory’s inherent openness to subjective determination and its possibilities as a “changeable script.” Even when art illuminates alternative memory scripts, it battles against, and can itself succumb to, subjective distortion, which, in turn, can bleed into modes and fields of exhibition in different spatial and temporal contexts (for instance, the varied curatorial narratives which position artworks and the wide-ranging reception and interpretation of art by differently positioned audiences). As Antze & Lambek have argued, memories are never simply records of the past, but are interpretive reconstructions that bear the imprint of local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions, discursive formations and practices, and social contexts of recall and commemoration.18

With this theoretical context in mind, in this chapter I propose that the performative site of art as ‘memory-work’ is yet another significant space for renegotiating questions of belonging and subjectivity, of investigating how issues of memory emerge in contemporary Southeast Asian art. Art here functions not as a mere receptacle or embodiment of memory but actively articulates the processes and subjects of remembering and forgetting. As Huyssen points out, “the past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory.”19

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See Michel Foucault’s key works on the relationship between knowledge and power, especially regarding the notion of subjugated knowledges, including “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980): 63–70, and Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972). 17 Sturken, Tangled Memories, 17. 18 Paul Antze & Michael Lambek, “Preface,” Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, ed. Antze & Lambek (New York & London: Routledge, 1996): vii. 19 Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, 2–3.

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Gathering Memories: The Aquilizans’ Projects of Belonging and Remembrance Across Borders As artists more regularly traverse spatio-temporal borders under the new conditions of globalization, memories of the past are often triggered by experiences of uprooting and resettlement. Diasporic artists participate in forms of memory production which sometimes reinforce originating cultures and affiliations, while others seek to forge new memories and modes of belonging via migration to new locales. Indeed, for a number of Asian artists now living outside Asia and who first came to fame in the early 1990s, the boundary between Asia and their new geographies of residence is a critical marker for probing issues of memory and belonging, cultural distance and proximity, dislocation and connection. The art practice of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan illustrates well these manifold tensions of locality and belonging. Often working in partnership, the Aquilizans have become well-known on the international art circuit for their community-engaged, site-specific installations, which incorporate and transform their own and others’ personal, everyday objects into the stuff of art. Their installations often reflect the local contexts of their production and, more specifically, the memories of those with whom they engage in these environments. Originally from the Philippines, the artists have been living in Brisbane since October 2006. Nevertheless, as Pat Hoffie points out, “their work has continued to be presented in a score of international survey exhibitions with the assumption that they are from the Philippines.”20 The Aquilizans reveal through their art how everyday objects can become powerful evocations of memory. Their installations explore how the otherwise often elusive, ideologically coloured materia of memory is activated through the materiality of specific objects reconfigured in discursive and aesthetic frames of the artists’ making. Here, the (art) object performs the work of the trace, inscribed with the memory of past temporalities and spatialities which relate to specific subjectivities and notions of belonging. Through their literal re-collection and reconfiguration of objects into art installations of affective experience, the artists emphasize the capacity of everyday artefacts and objects not only to serve as containers for memory but also to spark memories of people, place, and belonging. 20

Pat Hoffie, “Accruing Invisibles: Alfredo + Isabel Aquilizan,” Broadsheet: Contemporary Art + Culture 38.4 (December 2009): 253.

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Figure 91: Alfredo J.D. Aquilizan, Presences and Absences (1999). Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Figure 92: Alfredo J.D. Aquilizan, Presences and Absences (1999). Image courtesy of the artist.

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In many of the Aquilizans’ projects, the personal belongings of others are featured – used shoes, toothbrushes, and blankets, for instance. The various objects are collected by the artists and subsequently reconfigured in their installations in ways that highlight the objects’ significance as embodiments and receptacles for the memories of their owners. Moreover, the artists are often interested in evoking the conceptual and emotional processes involved in object accumulation – the affective significance of collecting personal objects and gathering the memories associated with them. This is revealed in works such as Erasure and Remembrance (1997) and Presences and Absences #6 (1998), in which the artists installed an assortment of discarded toothbrushes belonging to people from all sorts of social backgrounds, and the installation Belonging 2: the Party (1999) in which five hundred casts of the insides of used shoes were presented. The significance of the material object as an evocation of social memory is registered as individual and collective memories of personal and shared experience are brought to light. “I like the idea of collecting histories,” remarks Alfredo, “because often the object is about telling stories […] because it releases memory.”21 As he explains, “objects that have been used by someone else before […] are loaded with history and memories.”22 For instance, “collecting toothbrushes is also about collecting identities and collecting memories.”23 For the Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1999, the artists created Project Be-longing #2 (1999), which engaged with the Philippines diaspora residing in Australia, inviting them to contribute objects or souvenirs that evoked memories of the Philippines. For the initial phase of Project Be-longing #2, Alfredo (then based in the Philippines) called on the participation of a cousin of his – Ricardo Aquilizan – whom he had met only twice before and whom he knew was living in Brisbane, after having left the Philippines at a very young age. They explained: “We know somebody who lives in Brisbane. His name is Ric Aqui and we are working together for the project ‘Be-longing’.’’24 With Ricardo’s assistance, the Aquilizans negotiated

21

Author’s interview with Alfredo Aquilizan, Manila, Philippines, 2 July 2002. Flaudette May V. Datuin, “Home, Family, Journey: Alfredo Juan and Ma. Isabel Gaudinez–Aquilizan,” transit 1.2 (April–July 1999): 5. 23 Datuin, “Home, Family, Journey,” 5. 24 Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, “Artists’ Statements: Postscript,” http://www .visualarts. qld.gov.au/apt3/artists/artist_bios/alfredo_aquilizan_a.htm (accessed 21 April 2012). 22

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to have objects borrowed from families of the Filipino community in SouthEast Queensland and presented these in their installation. The negotiation between Ricardo and the artists offered them an opportunity to get to know each other. As the artists explained, We asked him to hunt and gather various Filipino mementos from the households of relatives and friends in Australia because we think that collaborating on this piece will give us a good venue to know more about each other… to us he is Ricardo Aquilizan, our cousin in Australia, our collaborator.25

Figure 93: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Wings (2009). Image courtesy of the artists.

The participation of the Filipino community was sought through advertisements published in local Filipino community newspapers. After meeting with and interviewing hundreds of Filipino families who responded to the invitation, Ric settled on particular families and borrowed one object from each – something brought with them from the Philippines – returning the objects to their owner/s at the close of the exhibition. “The objects were then 25

Aquilizans, “Artists’ Statements: Postscript.”

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individually labelled by Ric to include descriptions of where the object was originally from, where the family lived now, and the names of the owners.”26 Commenting further on Ric’s involvement, Alfredo explains that the project also served as a means of reintroducing Ric again to the [Philippine] culture […] it help[ed] a lot for him to be able to understand deeper by collecting himself […] he was able to collect and meet a lot of Filipinos which I think for him were totally, culturally strangers.27

Along with the objects, an audio component also formed part of the final installation which narrated the stories associated with each of the objects. Ric had gathered these stories as he “interviewed each family about the reasons for their choices in bringing each particular object to Australia.” On this process, Alfredo remarks: Ask them where they bought it [the object], and when they brought it and they start talking about their community, their family back home, and they start talking about memories, brings them back.

Alfredo elaborates on one such occasion which demonstrates the powerful emotional and symbolic significance invested in material artefacts associated with memories of home: there’s this old lady who gave us a metal cup, [a] black metal cup. She said, “this is the cup of my son […] when I mixed his medicine 13 or 15 years ago. He died 13 years ago, so this is the object I’m going to lend you’, and she started crying.

Pursuing particular questions throughout this project about family, belonging, and diasporic memory, the final installation presented by the Aquilizans for ‘A P T 3’ brought together various household items and mementos of Brisbane’s Filipino community, forming a ‘memory sculpture’ of cultural identification. The objects were presented in an enclosed room, built with a curtained entrance and exit at opposite ends, which seemed to replicate the architecture of a household thoroughfare; an adjoining bridge formed a passageway from which the spectators stood to view the objects as they 26

Rhana Devenport, Asialink Arts Forum 2000: Transcripts; Art and Community: Interaction between Australia and Asia Report, http://www.asialink.unimelb.edu.au /arts/projects/forum2000/transcript.html (accessed 5 July 2002). 27 Author’s interview with the artist Alfredo Aquilizan. Further quotations on this page are from the same source.

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‘passed through’ the display. As the viewers’ eyes touched on baskets, wooden sculptures, a flamboyant light fixture made of shells, woven tapestries, costumed dolls, a kitsch tropical landscape painting, and other souvenirs of the Philippines which adorned the room, the exotic scent of the Sampaguita flower (the national flower of the Philippines) wafted, and various Philippine melodies filled the air. The individual objects, when placed together, not only formed a collective act of remembering and nostalgia for the Philippines but also urged a strengthened imagining of the Filipino diaspora community in Australia – a manifestation of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community,” in which the mental and affective construction of the homeland continues to take place in other spaces as cultures travel.28 As Alfredo has commented, “in a way, it’s the same thing as creating a portrait of a particular community, through this collective thing, collective memory.”29 Significantly, through the strong evocation of prior ownership of these objects and their relative foreignness to the ‘A P T ’ viewers, the installation prompts such questions as ‘Who do these objects belong to?’ and ‘Why are these objects gathered here (in Australia)?’ The suggestion is that they must have had prior owners and belonged to someone or some community of people, gathered together here through some logic of shared relation. As markers of relations to place, these objects are shown to access strong cultural memories of the Philippine ‘homeland’ and to evoke a continued sense of national belonging from a distance. In the words of the artists, they “evok[e] memories which help define being part of a particular community.”30 In this sense, objects such as these “circulate in culture as the cipher of memory, of that which is lost and to which one has no direct or easy access.”31 Importantly, Project Belonging #2 forged connections not only between the Filipino community in Australia but also between the PhilippineAustralian community and Filipinos in the Philippines. Indeed, things were quite different, much closer, between Ric and his cousins in Manila afterwards. 28

James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson & Paula A. Treichler (New York & London: Routledge, 1992): 112– 16 (discussion section at end of paper, response to Homi K. Bhabha). 29 Author’s interview with Alfredo Aquilizan, 2 July 2002. 30 Aquilizans, “Artists’ Statements: Postscript.” 31 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 38.

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Figure 94: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Project Be-longing #2 (1999; installation view, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane). Image courtesy of the artists.

Figure 95: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Project Be-longing #2 (1999; installation detail, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane). Image courtesy of the artists.

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Thus, we see how Project Be-longing #2 offers a forceful demonstration of memory production with reference to diasporic experiences of cultural displacement, nostalgia, longing, and belonging. First, it involved the gathering of artefacts of memory – that is, the artists engaged in collecting activities, gathering the cultural mementos belonging to the Philippine diaspora residing in Australia. In the process of collecting these mementos, there was also a symbolic gathering of the memories associated with the physical objects. Further layers of memory were evoked in the reassembling of these individual mementos in their collective form of art installation, as well as through visitors’ responses to the installation. Through these layered and multiple processes, the artists investigated the power and significance of objects as important sites for memory production and exchange, aiming to show how the most ordinary objects evoke powerful personal memories which also assist in the imagination of both national and transnational Filipino communities. While the project demonstrates how material objects are signs of belonging and attachment to place, it also indicates cultural disjuncture through the renewed or changed significations of the object in uprooting it and reanchoring it in a foreign time and space. In this respect, Rogoff’s scholarship on the geographies of visual culture is illuminating, and, in particular, her reflections on shifting image signs under globalization. For Rogoff, the dislocated object, signifies the moments of rupture, the instance in which the subject is torn out of the web of connectedness that contained him or her through an invisible net of belonging. This equation of the [object] with some thing, some part of the self’s being or history which has been left behind, both affirms and celebrates feelings of loss and of nostalgia.32

Project Be-longing #2, moreover, intimates the object’s concurrent trajectories of relation across space and time – in Rogoff’s terms, it performs “a semblance of being able to maintain a presence in several cultures and historical moments simultaneously.”33 In these border-crossings of memory, the translocal is not only registered via the multiple localities or geographical spaces of belonging but also through the capacity for concurrent attachments across spaces. Thus, the translocal dimension of the project assists to interrupt traditional notions of fixed time and space. As we see in the case of Project Belonging #2, the imagined community of nation for instance, is revealed as a 32 33

Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, 37–38. Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, 38.

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flexible construct under globalization, sometimes defied and at other times reinforced through the dislocations of people, objects, and signs. Related to this, Huyssen has argued that under intensely globalized conditions, the weakening of national borders has provided a space for the articulation of memory across diverse spatio-temporal and geographical spaces: The form in which we think of the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national history within borders. Modernity has brought with it a very real compression of time and space beyond the local, the national, and even the international.34

I suggest that Project Belonging #2 instances a reconfiguration of the borders of remembering nation rather than their erasure. Through the act of migration – including the psychological and material ‘baggage’ of migration – new spaces of forgetting/remembering may be forged across borders. Communal identification and the borders they delineate remain important within Project Belonging #2, even as they are differently configured from the space of their diasporic geographies. Reinforcing the notion of continued attachments to a ‘homeland,’ Rogoff articulates the signification of luggage in visual culture, arguing that such cultural signifiers often remain suspended between an unrecouperable past and an unimaginable future and bear the entire weight of those longings, to a point that it will not allow for any form of reflection on the textures of life in the present, on the new cultural artefacts that are being constituted out of life among other peoples and languages and objects.35

From this perspective, we might argue that Project Belonging #2 places its emphasis on Philippine pasts. The contextualization of ‘Philippine’ objects in the programme of Project Belonging #2 perhaps more strongly reflects a desire to recall memories of the Philippines and less of a concern with illuminating new Australia-based recontextualizations of the object and their social implications. Nevertheless, at least for Ric, the project provided the necessary impetus to reconnect with the Philippines from within the Brisbane context, enabling a new focus on Philippines–Australia relations and Philippine-Australian identities. 34

Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, 4. (My emphasis.) 35 Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, 39.

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I suggest that, ultimately, Project Belonging #2 points to ways in which narratives of Filipino identity may be unwritten and rewritten, shifting in response to new conditions of experience. Significantly, the memories of objects may only be articulated because of their movement between cultures, that is, through their dislocations and intertextual weavings between Filipino and Australian cultures or, in Homi Bhabha’s sense, through their “in-betweenness.”36 A number of the Aquilizans’ more recent projects, not surprisingly, register a cultural shift which acknowledges Australia as their new home. The Aquilizans’ installation Address, presented for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art in 2008, was an arrangement of their own belongings, reminiscent of the balikbayan boxes of goods that are brought or sent to the homeland by Filipinos abroad. These belongings were initially to be left behind in the Philippines upon the artists’ move to Australia in 2006 but have since been travelling the world and presented in a number of exhibitions. In 2009, the Aquilizans presented In-flight (Project: Another Country) for the Sixth Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, ten years after their inclusion in that same exhibition series for ‘A P T 3’ in 1999 (when the artists were still living in the Philippines) and presented Project Belonging #2. For their ‘A P T 6’ (2009) installation, the artists invited thousands of people, mostly children, to create model planes from simple, unwanted materials such as paddle-pop sticks, cardboard scraps, plastic containers, and other found materials. The end results were wondrous and imaginative creations, with most of the planes piled high in a precipitous mass and others hung as if ‘in flight’. Grasped in the light of their previous installations, both Address and In-flight (Project: Another Country) appear, on the one hand, to signify migration, journeys, and travel but, on the other, also register the Aquilizans’ new home address as part of their Brisbane-based community, and as reflected by their positioning in these later exhibitions: in the 2009 ‘A P T ’, as ‘Philippine /Australian’ artists, and in the Adelaide Biennale, significantly, as ‘Australian’ artists.

36

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge,

1994).

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Figure 96: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Address (2008; installation view). Image courtesy of the artists.

Figure 97: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Address (2008; detail). Image courtesy of the artists.

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Figure 98: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, In-flight (Project: Another Country) (2009; installation view). © The artists. Image courtesy of the artists.

Figure 99: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, In-flight (Project: Another Country) (2009; detail of installation view). © The artists. Reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

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Figure 100: Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, In-flight (Project: Another Country) (2009; detail of installation view). © The artists. Reproduced by courtesy of the artists.

While the Aquilizans have explored notions of continuing communal belonging across cultural borders and other social divides, other artists have sought to recover alternative local histories within their modern-day national borders. Increasingly, official accounts of history, especially those relating to nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism, have been questioned in contemporary art practice, particularly through recalling indigenous or other forms of cultural knowledge and power as histories alternate to those prescribed by colonial rule and its legacies. For instance, via his art, the artist Santiago Bose (1949–2002) argued passionately for the continued relevance of indigenous cultures in the Philippines despite the long duration and aftermath of EuroAmerican colonization.37 In particular, after a period away from the Philippines in the U S A , Bose worked closely with the Baguio community of Luzon 37

See Pat Hoffie, “Santiago Bose: Magic, humour and cultural resistance,” in Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights, ed. Caroline Turner & Nancy Sever (exh. cat.; Canberra: A Humanities Research Centre Project, Australian National University, 2003): 64–67.

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in his home region of the Cordilleras, exploring the region’s folk traditions in his art especially via locally available indigenous media.

Figure 101: Santiago Bose, Remapping the Colonized Subject (1996). Reproduced by courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum and the artist’s estate.

Figure 102: Santiago Bose, Of Martyrs and Nationhood (1997). Reproduced by courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum and the artist’s estate.

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By contrast, Wong Hoy Cheong has been concerned to critique the cultural bias inherent in present-day nationalist histories of Malaysia by retracing the diverse multicultural fabric of the Malaysian nation. Despite the differences in their objectives, a shared impetus among such artists is a powerful desire to re-envision pasts linked to their respective communities of cultural identification, as a means of asserting counter-memories. In the next section, I return to the examination of Wong Hoy Cheong’s Migrants series, focusing on his re-visioned histories of national belonging for contemporary Malaysia.

Re-Searching History in the Present: The Memory-Work of Wong Hoy Cheong Some people certainly make judgements that reflect primarily the perspective of historians toward the past, but for most of us it is the intersection of personal and national history that provides the most vital and remembered connection to the times we have lived through.38 We are talking, with neo-colonialism, about the legacies of history, not as a textual archive, but as the continued productivity of history in the present.39

One of the key objectives of Wong Hoy Cheong’s art practice has been to explore the links between social history and migration. In particular, he has traced the migratory flows of people, plants, language, and ideologies as a means of questioning essentialist accounts of social history. In so doing, his art offers a space for the critique of cultural essentialism, particularly through observing cross-cultural parallels and intersections, and pointing to the constantly shifting social conditions under modernity. These concerns are addressed, for instance, in the series of works making up Of Migrants and Rubber Trees (1994–96). In this multi-part installation, we are witness to epic stories that narrate the historical migrations of people who have made Malaysia their home. By linking the migration and indigenization of rubber plants in Malaysia to the waves of migrant Indian, Chinese, and Javanese labour in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Malaya at the height of British colonial expansion, the series suggests the diverse migrant contributions to Malaysia’s modern economic growth. Hence, the supposedly 38

Howard Schuman & Jacqueline Scott, “Generations and Collective Memories,” American Sociological Review 54.3 (June 1989): 380. 39 Robert Young, “Neocolonial Times,” Oxford Literary Review 13.1–2 (1991): 1–3.

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indigenous plant is more accurately revealed to be a product of ‘uprooted’ labour and ‘trans-plantation’. This is a controversial re-presentation of history, for the ‘indigenous’ rubber plant (smuggled in from South America) may be likened to the bumiputera (Malay race and indigenous) population of Malaysia whose social history has become privileged in recent times, above other ethno-cultural histories (especially Chinese, Javanese, and Indian) in Malaysia.40 The extensive sequence of works that make up Of Migrants and Rubber Trees is configured in three parts. The first component, the Migrants series, focuses on the early history of migration to Malaysia. The second, History of Rubber and Labour, consists of an installation of historical dioramas which draws correspondences between the migration of rubber with that of human labour. The final component, New Migrants, consists chiefly of ten black-andwhite portraits of recent migrant workers in Malaysia accompanied by short oral histories relating to the workers’ histories of migration, presented alongside a “reading corner” for researching the histories of rubber and migrant labour in Asia. The reading corner offers a library of texts relating to the histories and circumstances of the new migrants (such as their legal status in Malaysia), linking them to universal flows of migration over thousands of years. In short, the New Migrants exhibition suggests the civil rights of new immigrants and invokes the memory of Malaysia’s earlier immigrant histories. Collectively, the three components forming Of Migrants and Rubber Trees trace an historical narrative concerning migration to and from Malaysia, from past to present. I shall now discuss in depth the first component, the Migrants series drawings, in which the artist references the personal history of his own family’s migration from China to Malaysia, exploring their significance in the making of Malaysian history. The Migrants series tells the story of the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia and reminds us of their constitutive role in developing the country. As Piyadasa once remarked of the artwork, “Bearing in mind the overt Malay-Islamic proclivities of the 1980s, Hoy Cheong’s Migrant Series .

40

See Abdul Rahman Embong, “The Culture and Practice of Pluralism in Postcolonial Malaysia,” in The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Honolulu: U of Hawai‘i P , 2001): 59–85.

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[sic] […] may be viewed as emphasizing the ‘Other’”41– that is, the ‘Other’ ethnic histories making up Malaysian society. Alongside In search of faraway places (1996), described at the outset of this chapter, the Migrants series consists of four other large-scale, black-andwhite charcoal drawings evoking the family photo albums of past generations: Some dreamt of Malaya, some dreamt of Great Britain (1994); She was married at 14 and had 14 children (1994); Marriage of a rubber tapper to a girl dressed as the Virgin Mary in a school play (1994); and Aspirations of the working class (1994). For this set of drawings, Wong takes inspiration directly from his family’s past as assimilated migrants so as to explore immigration in the overall Malaysian context, from the first wave, around the turn of the century, to the present day.

Figure 103: Wong Hoy Cheong, Some dreamt of Malaya, some dreamt of Great Britain (1994). Image courtesy of the artist.

In the first drawing, Some dreamt of Malaya, some dreamt of Great Britain (1994), the arrival of Wong’s paternal grandmother as a new Chinese migrant dreaming of a better life in Malaya is contrasted with his maternal grandmother’s life in Malaya as a wealthy, westernized Peranakan woman dream41

Redza Piyadasa, Masterpieces from the National Art Gallery of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara / National Art Gallery, 2002): 154.

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ing of Great Britain. His paternal grandmother wears a simple samfu (Chinese women’s trouser suit) and clutches a basket, her only possession, as she makes the arduous journey via sea on a small wooden boat with her husband, Wong’s paternal grandfather (faceless, for Wong has no picture of him). Wong’s maternal grandmother, by comparison, is a wealthy racehorse-owner with binoculars in hand, immaculately dressed in her Peranakan-print sarong and Western-style shirt; her better-off status has enabled her to send her son, pictured at the lower left of the frame, off to be educated in the U K .

Figure 104: Wong Hoy Cheong, She was married at 14 and had 14 children (1994). Image courtesy of the artist.

This story is continued in the second drawing, She was married at 14 and had 14 children (1994), in which Wong’s paternal grandmother is shown surrounded by her fourteen children. The drawing commemorates the hardships undergone by Wong’s grandmother in raising her fourteen children. Placed at the centre of the frame, she is depicted as a sturdy figure of familial authority, staring directly ahead to meet the gaze of the viewer. She squats, holding firmly to a rubber tree with her right hand, while her left grasps a cutting knife – the emblematic tool of her labour as a rubber tapper. The children are shown around her, wriggling in their worn swaddling and represented as infant bodies with adult heads, perhaps suggesting their need to mature quickly in

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the face of harsh life circumstances. Indeed, her children, too, underwent a great deal of difficulty and suffering; we know this because, to the left of the drawing, a perforated frame encases a note which tells us the troubled fate of the children and that only one of the fourteen left the working class by becoming a schoolteacher. At the top of the scene, British-stamped and Japanese-stamped money notes suggest the dictates of colonial capitalist expansion and the wealth brought to British and Japanese economies as a result of their spoils from Malaya. To the right, a bespectacled, bourgeois gentleman perforates the frame, depicted in the act of sipping tea. He represents a new class of wealthy Chinese-Malayan who also stands to benefit from the new colonial social order. At the same time, he is a reminder of the overseeing British colonial administration and communicates, via his actions, the newfound British wealth in the commodity of tea and its exchange as well as the new and privileged leisure activity of tea-taking. Finally, below, a bar of Yardley lavender soap signifies not only new colonial commodities brought with the new British administration but also, metonymically, British colonial cleansing and civilizing of the new Malaysian colony. As Anne McClintock has shown, soap as part of the imperial civilizing mission promoted racial and class difference in a new commodity culture of mass consumption.42 More specifically, soap advertisements projected an elite, civilized, British society, against a colonized race of unwashed proletarians. In Wong’s drawing, then, the bar of Yardley soap becomes an emblem of Victorian paternalism, the fetishization of social and racial privilege. The hardship undergone by Wong’s grandmother in her work as a rubber tapper – and that undergone by workers on Malayan plantations of palm oil, coconut oil, and cottonseed oil, oils used in the production of soap – was the working-class labour that helped build colonial fortunes and the new colony of Malaya. This story, then, is a tale both specific to Wong’s personal history and familiar to all Malaysians of every race who have played their part in building the Malaysian nation. In the third drawing, Marriage of a rubber tapper to a girl dressed as the Virgin Mary in a school play (1994), the marriage of Wong’s parents recalls the stereotypical class-based arrangement of marriages between the wealthier, westernized, hybridized, and assimilated Peranakan woman (Wong’s mother) 42

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London & New York: Routledge, 1995).

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and the recently migrated working-class Chinese man (Wong’s father). On the extreme right, Wong’s paternal grandmother is depicted carrying a bucket (a tool of her rubber-tapping labour) and with her son by her side. Wong’s father is dressed in his rubber-tapper work clothes – a modest singlet and long pants – and in his hand the cutting knife once held by his mother is now firmly clenched by him, signifying inter-generational continuity in the rubber-tapping occupation. On the extreme left, Wong’s maternal grandmother returns to the story as a continuing picture of wealth and privilege with a horseracing trophy in hand and her prize-winning horse immediately behind her. Her daughter is dressed as the Virgin Mary, perhaps revealing the practice of Christian faith on her side of the family.

Figure 105: Wong Hoy Cheong, Marriage of a Rubber Tapper to a Girl Dressed as Virgin Mary in a School Play (1994). Image courtesy of the artist.

The eventual marriage is conveyed via a framed photograph of Wong’s parents’ wedding day, centrally positioned in the drawing as a point of both visual and symbolic intersection. Importantly, the marriage represents the traditional union between the less privileged new Chinese male migrant (Wong’s father) and the assimilated, wealthy Peranakan woman (Wong’s mother) in a coming-together of classes – “the landed and the landless, the

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sacred and the profane.”43 By the time of Aspirations of the working class (1994), however, Wong’s father has discarded the cutting knife, pictured at the bottom left, and now wears the business shirt and tie of his landed middleclass status. Wong’s mother is dressed immaculately in a striking modern-day striped dress, and Wong himself enters the family scene as a young boy pictured in an inset with his older sister. Both Wong and his sister are dressed in Western-style clothing – Wong, in white-collar shirt, pants, and braces, and his sister in her pretty embroidered dress. Postcards at the top right and left are reminders of exotic, ‘primitive’ peoples of Southeast Asia which the new middle classes have left far behind in their newly civilized status.

Figure 106: Wong Hoy Cheong, Aspirations of the Working Class (1995). Image courtesy of the artist.

In the final drawing of the series, In search of faraway places (1996), described at the outset of this chapter, the continuing histories of human migration into and emigration out of Malaysia are invoked. This image connects the artist’s own diasporic family history to the journeying and resettlement of all 43

Valentine Willie, “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Wong Hoy Cheong,” in Wong Hoy Cheong. Of Migrants & Rubber Trees: An exhibition of drawings and installations, ed. Valentine Willie (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Five Arts Centre & Valentine Willie Fine Art, 1996): 8.

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present-day migrants. Modern-day travellers are pictured traversing the same seas to and from Malaysia that were once crossed by migrants of long ago. This last drawing in the series thus brings the story of migration full circle. In short, the triptych In search of faraway places suggests a disarticulation or deconstruction of official representations of contemporary Malaysia by recollecting the country’s migrant histories and revealing their continuities with and legacy for the present-day nation. The contentious topic of contemporary movements of people in and out of Malaysia is highlighted, and, in the context of the entire Migrants series, there is an emphasis on migratory diversity and new ethnicities. This long history of the migration of people, trade, and ideas is testimony to fluidity, cultural pluralism and exchange within the region.44 As Wong rightly suggests, migration and the constitution of local identity began well before Western colonization and the rise of nationalism, with such different cultural groups as Malabars, Persians, Acehnese, and Javanese settling in the area long before the European invasion. Malaysia has always had a culturally complex and hybrid history, and the Migrants series invites this re-reading of the country’s past against the more recent homogenizing discourse of Malaysian identity which privileges some cultural groups over others in narrativizing the postcolonial Malaysian nation. As mentioned previously, during the Malaysian government’s exercise of the New Economic Policy (1970–90), the nation’s cultural mix was downplayed in favour of a privileging of the social position of Malay and indigenous ethnic communities in a form of “ethnically differentiated citizenship.”45 This involved a privileging of bumiputera culture in shaping the Malaysian nation. Such policies often echo the colonial past, reappropriating inherited colonial racializations which have historically served to divide Malaysia’s people into distinct racial groups. The Migrants series undoes or disarticulates such divisive notions of Malaysian culture. The legitimacy of bumiputera-centric policies are called into question, with the historical assimilation of ‘migrant’ cultures of ‘the Other’ revealed as just as significant in establishing the Malaysian nation; far from being the Other, these once migrant cultures are shown to be a crucial element in the region, part of the plurality of cultures making up the Malaysian nation. This alter /native history of Malaysia stands 44

Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680 (New Haven

C T : Yale U P , 1993). 45

See Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000).

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in sharp contrast to state valorization of bumiputera peoples and islamicization, and, at the other extreme, to policies that deny difference through strategies of anti-racialization. The Migrants series, conversely, encourages a more inclusive, multicultural vision of Malaysian nationhood by recognizing, rather than disavowing, Malaysia’s intercultural histories and its new ethnicities. The Migrants series also illustrates Paul Gilroy’s thesis of the connected histories of race and class – racism and capitalism – in the way in which this is mis/remembered in the Malaysian context.46 It is an intervention in the distortions of history and reminds us, against the Malaysian government’s economic programme ‘Vision 2020’ (see Chapter 2), that the links between race and class are central to Malaysia’s past, present, and future. ‘Vision 2020’ is analogous to liberal antiracism in Britain in the 1980s in attempting to defeat racism by emptying out race and whitewashing everything else, rather than facing up to the links between race and class.47 The Migrants series, by contrast, purposefully re-inscribes both race and class so as to recall their historical intersection in the making of Malaysia’s social histories and (not least with regard to the contribution of ethnic Chinese) its modern economy. As well as recalling his own family’s history of migration, Wong communicates the broader experiences of the Nonya Straits Chinese, of the Malaysian Chinese community, and of all migrants. Stressing the relation between memory of individual migrant experience and collective imagination and communal agency, Wong comments: since the liberation of post-colonial societies in the 40s and 50s, the creation of geo-political national states in this part of the world make the movement of people illegal […] So, I’m interested in using my family, the migration issues and the working class issue. I don’t want to be caught in a fragment of history. I think that the personal voice is irrelevant here, and my personal family history is relevant only in so far as that it represents a larger societal fabric. It’s not my voice in the drawings. I’m only a conduit for a collective voice of the thousands of rubber estate workers of my father’s generation. […] 46

Paul Gilroy, “The End of Antiracism,” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed & David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 249– 64. 47 See Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in ‘Race’, Culture and Difference, ed. James Donald & Ali Rattansi (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1992): 252–59, and Cohen, “Through a Glass Darkly: Intellectuals on Race,” in New Ethnicities, Old Racisms?, ed. Phil Cohen (London: Zed, 1999): 1–17.

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I am interested in the migration of people, their paths, their continuous ebb and flow, from land to land searching for a better life and their eventual indigenisation in a new homeland. I am interested in the rude ironies of British colonialism and the emergence of a modern Malaysia, the clash and convergence of cultures and classes, the hopes and failures of a society.48

The work of Maurice Halbwachs on “collective memories” is useful for elucidating autobiographical and historical memory in Wong’s art.49 Halbwachs proposes the term “collective memory” to describe those memories maintained by a collective of people who share common experience of a particular historical event. This is distinguished from personal memory, which, while a manifestation of individual experience, is nevertheless also forged in connection with the memories of others. Subsequently, Schumann and Scott50 have argued for more complex approaches to theorizing collective memory, seeing collective memory as constituted by the interconnected remembrances of individuals and groups, as well as being the product of direct experience and/or generational inheritance. Collective memory thus becomes an entangled web of autobiographical and communal cultural histories, whether personally lived or as received historical knowledge. Commenting on Wong’s drawing She was married at 14 and had 14 children, the Malaysian arts writer Karim Bin Raslan makes a similar point regarding Wong’s interest in communicating the entangled web of individual and collective experience: Hoy Cheong has taken the story of his paternal grandmother and turned her tale into one that belongs to all Malaysians. The image of a woman in a samfu [Chinese woman’s trouser suit] whilst particular to him is more, much more. She is every woman, every mother, every grandmother, every migrant: selfless, uncomplaining and productive. What had at first seemed specific, leaden and unrelenting has become charged with meaning, enriching and universal.51

48

Wong, artist’s statement, in Queensland Art Gallery, “Wong Hoy Cheong: About the Work.” 49 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, tr. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. (La Mémoire Collective, 1941; New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 50 Schuman & Scott, “Generations and Collective Memories,” 359–81. 51 Karim Bin Raslan, “Wong Hoy Cheong – from Urban Guerilla to Country Farmer,” in Wong Hoy Cheong: Of Migrants & Rubber Trees: An exhibition of draw-

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Significantly, in articulating a relation between the individual and the collective, the Migrants series engages in a precarious politics of representation which risks generalizing the experience of all migrants. As Langenbach points out, in Wong’s self-ethnographic approach there is a danger in drawing on his family’s experiences and then relating these not only to his own life but also to that of others. In conversation with the artist, Langenbach comments: In a sense you seem to be assigning yourself a meta-agency, as the artist–spokesman who speaks for millions of immigrants. Aren’t you in danger of essentialising your own voice by association, while subsuming theirs, in a sense, erasing the real class divisions between you, a member of the middle class and them, uneducated labourers? You are not your father. There seems a great distance between you and your father and his generation. In a sense you empty yourself out to “become” the cause, by an act of intellectual identification, rather than out of economic necessity.52

Wong is alert to the problem and recognizes this as a continuing struggle in his work. In response to Langenbach, he remarks: Of course I am middle class and there is a tendency to romanticise the other. There is a great tendency in my work to create the heroic, whether the heroic is the native, the working class or the bourgeoisie. However, they are filtered through my own personal experiences which I think is unavoidable. In comparison, actors in a scripted play are able to interpret and shape their characters using their own voice and body. In visual art, the figures/characters are always filtered through an individual artist. It can’t be helped. Despite what the artist might claim, ultimately they filter through the artist’s aesthetic and political ideology.53

Wong’s comments are an interesting reflection on the role of the individual artist as a conduit for the memories of entire groups of people such as the working class, migrant communities, and Malaysians of Chinese ethnicity.

ings and installations, ed. Valentine Willie (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Five Arts Centre & Valentine Willie Fine Art, 1996): 13. 52 Ray Langenbach, “In Conversation with Wong Hoy Cheong,” in Wong Hoy Cheong: Of Migrants & Rubber Trees: An exhibition of drawings and installations, ed. Valentine Willie (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Five Arts Centre & Valentine Willie Fine Art, 1996): 34–35. 53 Wong in Langenbach, “In Conversation with Wong Hoy Cheong,” 35.

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This is particularly significant for the representation of Southeast Asian artists in international exhibitions, in which the individual artist has often come to stand for entire ethnicities, races, and nations. Moreover, Wong’s self-ethnography – his visual positioning of his own subjective experience as the focus of an historical tracing of migration to and from Malaysia – produces an interpellation of his own subjectivity via wider memory discourses and praxes of identity; in particular, those concerning postcoloniality, geography, nation, race, and power. In sum, the Migrants series provides a strong context for destabilizing the officially prescribed discourses of Malaysian history, race, and migration, even with its basis in a self-ethnographic approach. It reminds us that the history of migration and the constitution of a local identity in Malaysia began well before Western colonization and the institutionalization of nationalism, with different cultural groups making their way and settling in the area before European invasion. Indeed, Malaysia has always had a culturally complex and hybrid history and Wong’s art invites such a re-reading of Malaysia’s past against more recent homogenizing and partial cultural discourses of Malaysian identity in the scripting of the nation and its future. In this sense, if Wong’s art risks essentialism, it is nevertheless an instance of critical essentialism as strategy – an essentialism that foregrounds counter-memories as a critical means of exposing the discriminatory limits of the Malaysian state. While Wong employs the same apparatus of ‘history’ as the nation-state, he re-members the past for a critical re-evaluation and re-visioning which is different from that memorialized by the state. In the following section, I continue to explore the relations between personal and collective memories with a particular focus on contemporary art which engages with memories of trauma.

Contemporary Aesthetics of Traumatic Memory if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.54

In a now oft-quoted passage, the German cultural critic Theodor Adorno once claimed that, after the trauma of Auschwitz, there could be no more lyric poetry. This, Adorno argued, was because the “aesthetic principle of stylization” served only to remove the horror and violence of the event in a way that 54

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. Walter Kaufman & R.J. Hollingdale (1887; New York: Vintage, 1967): 61.

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does an injustice to the victims.55 However, some time later he conceded that if “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric […] literature must resist this verdict […]. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can find its voice.”56 In the following section, I explore how ‘suffering finds its voice’ in the art of Dadang Christanto and José Legaspi. Specifically, I contextualize Christanto’s and Legaspi’s art in the discourse and practice of repressed or traumatic memory. In so doing, I again explore the relation between personal and collective memory in art. In the artworks of Christanto and Legaspi, their personal experiences of suffering are expressed as testimony to the dehumanizing effect of larger societal acts of oppression. Personal memory is presented as a counter to official histories, with traumatic experience being a key motivation for their respective retracings of History. I explore these artists’ expressions of memory, at all times attentive to how particular repressed and traumatic memories are grounded and reprised in specific times and spaces. Likewise important is how the performative dimension of the production and reception of these artists’ works induces a form of healing and re-membering (the reconstitution of embodied subjectivities and their histories) of otherwise violent and untold histories. As Adorno’s remarks make clear, part of the late-twentieth-century attention to trauma and its representation emerges from earlier, horrific world conflicts. In particular, the Holocaust has figured as a paradigmatic leitmotif for understanding memories of pain, torture, suffering, and loss. However, as Bennett and Kennedy have asked, [if] the Holocaust [has] become paradigmatic within trauma studies […] can the methods used to study its traumatic legacy be generalized to other instances of trauma? […] How does cultural difference affect the manner in which trauma is both expressed and communicated – and what methods are needed to ensure that cultural difference is acknowledged?57

55

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, tr. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973):

362. 56

Theodor W. Adorno, “An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Adorno, Prisms, tr. Samuel & Shierry Weber (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1967): 19. 57 Bennett & Kennedy, “Introduction” to World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time, 4.

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Coinciding with the burgeoning interest in trauma studies since the 1990s a new kind of contemporary identity emerged, epitomized by the traumatized subject. As Huyssen remarks, “if the 1980s were the decade of a happy postmodern pluralism, the 1990s seemed to be haunted by trauma as the dark underside of neoliberal triumphalism.”58 In the international arena of art, too, numerous contemporary artists have explored experiences of trauma, both as the subjects of such trauma and as observers or inheritors. However, in the slippery space of international art exhibition, experiences of trauma have sometimes been deprived of their gravity in the desire for the spectacular and in their disarticulation from the very local contexts and issues they speak to; pain and suffering, rather, may be returned as fodder for mass consumption. Related to this is the political appeal and translatability of contemporary art focused on traumatic topics, given the attention paid to universally prevalent themes of social injustice, suffering, and violence. Nevertheless, the prevalence of traumatic themes in art and exhibitions may also be seen as a powerful affective response to the horrors of the past, conveying empathy with others and bearing witness to suffering, so as not to repeat the wrongs done in history. In the following discussion I seek to highlight the particular narratives of trauma and repressed subjectivities in contemporary art as they relate to specific cultural events, histories, and contexts, as well as to point to the crosscultural empathic connections made possible by the affective engagement with art.

Dadang Christanto’s ‘Counter-Monuments’ to History So, remember history well because history offers humankind an opportunity to grow wise and compassionate, or history can transform humankind into cowards, liars and barbarians.59

Dadang Christanto is no longer fearful of identifying the subjects of history that inform his art practice. Since the fall of Suharto, Christanto and other Indonesian artists have discovered a freedom of expression to explore in their art previously taboo and censored subjects of atrocity. Once considered too politically sensitive for the authoritarian dictates of the Suharto regime, these 58

Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, 8. Dadang Christanto, ‘A P T 3’ artist’s statement (1999), http://visualarts.qld.gov.au /apt3/artists/artist_bios/dadang_christanto_a.htm (accessed 12 April 2012). 59

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artistic recoveries of violent pasts, or “counter-monuments,”60 serve as powerful testimony to the unauthorized and brutal histories of modern Indonesia. In particular, they make visible the painful, long-silenced memories of trauma associated with the massacre of some half a million Indonesians at the hands of the New Order regime in 1965–66, and, subsequently, just before the New Order’s end in May 1998. Christanto’s art throughout the 1990s and until now has been characterized by an aesthetic that insists on recalling such violent histories and social injustices, both as a means of asserting the political right to oppressed memories and to provide a space of mourning and healing for those usually denied such an outlet. While it prompts us to recall the horrific events of Indonesia’s history, it more specifically encourages us to recall the victims of such horrors.61 Notably, Christanto’s sculptural installations, in form and affective function, call to mind the visual and commemorative role of public monuments and memorials of mourning. However, as Hendro Wiyanto observes, Christanto’s installations are more akin to a “counter-memorial” in their allusions to marginalized communities and repressed histories otherwise obscured by the kinds of official memory glorified in the public monument.62 In this sense (like the art of Wong Hoy Cheong), Christanto’s art, it may be argued, is a contestation of official memory in its uncovering of suppressed histories. Reinforcing this notion of (counter-)memorialization, Christanto often also carries out accompanying performance art events which may be likened to ritual or spiritual ceremonies of commemoration. In 1993, Christanto carried out a performance alongside his dual installations For those who have been killed (1993) and For those: Who are poor, Who are suffer(ing), Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who are victims of a dupe, 60

On the notion of the ‘counter-monument’, see James E. Young, “The CounterMonument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18.2 (Winter 1992): 267–96. 61 See Caroline Turner, “Artists and human rights: witnessing to silence,” in Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights, ed. Caroline Turner & Nancy Sever (exh. cat.; Canberra: A Humanities Research Centre Project, Australian National University, 2003): 7–11, and Christine Clark, “Dadang Christanto: Keeper of Memories,” in Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights, 52–55. 62 See Hendro Wiyanto, “The Meaning of Memory,” in Dadang Christanto, Wiyanto & Bentara Budaya Jakarta, Dadang Christanto: Kengerian tak Terucapkan [The Unspeakable Horror] (exh. cat.; Jakarta: Mahameru Offset Printing, 2002): 24–32.

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Figure 107: Dadang Christanto, Bureaucracy (1991–92). Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Who are victims of injustice (September 1993) for the First Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (hereafter referred to jointly as For those…). The latter installation consisted of a mass of thirty-six pole-like structures suspended vertically from the ceiling, crafted from bamboo, palm leaf, and other organic materials. One additional pole structure – representing For those who have been killed – was laid horizontally and propped up by metal supports, as if levitating at the centre of the installation.63 The poles appeared to echo the form of individual human bodies with their rounded, head-like tips. Piercing their sides were a number of dart-like sticks that evoked repeated 63

Cynthia Webb reported that “The horizontal figure was inspired by a story told to [Dadang Christanto] by a childhood friend. Dadang's young friend had been standing on a bridge in East Java in 1965, and she saw many dead bodies floating under the bridge. Dadang explained that the figure is raised above the ground, supported by fine sticks, recalling the way the body of Mahabarata hero, Bisma’s body did not fall to the ground but was held up by the many arrows which had pierced it.” Webb, “Artist, Dadang Christanto recalls 30 September in Brisbane,” Jakarta Post (21 October 2007), http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2007/10/21/artist-dadang-christanto-recalls30-september-brisbane.html (accessed 21 October 2007).

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stabbings and bodily harm. En masse, the vertical corpses alluded to multiple acts of death by hanging, or even corporeal and spiritual ascension into heavenly spaces; by contrast, the single pole which lay at the foreground of the installation urged attention to the uniqueness of the individual among the seemingly undifferentiated mass of symbolic corpses.

Figures 108–109: Dadang Christanto, For those: Who are poor, Who are suffer(ing), Who are oppressed, Who are voiceless, Who are powerless, Who are burdened, Who are victims of violence, Who are victims of a dupe, Who are victims of injustice (1993). © The artist. Images courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

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Alongside the installations, Christanto presented a stirring performance piece. Covered in white clay, his body took on a spectral aspect, moving through the suspended poles in a performative ritual of mourning and prayer. Emitting high-pitched, animal-like cries of suffering, Christanto spun each pole to create a sense of restless movement and tension throughout the installation. A card on the floor revealed the artist’s intentions behind the work as “an expression of empathy for those whose lives have been lost or are tormented.” At the conclusion of the performance, Christanto invited his audience “to leave flowers and poems in memory of those who had suffered in every time and every place.”64 The then Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, Caroline Turner, recounts that “at the end of the exhibition the floor was piled with such tributes (historical and contemporary, and about world issues and personal pain).”65 Of such responsive acts from the audience, one arts writer noted that “Dadang Christanto’s For those… is about more than Indonesian mourning rituals.”66 Indeed, this touching installation-performance piece revealed Christanto’s desire to open his work not just to his own recollections of suffering but also to those of others. It sought to open a space for other histories invoking victims of oppression and human injustice. In this regard, Wright observes: “Dadang’s work is not primarily about himself, his own feelings or experience. Its scope is much broader.”67 Apropos of the Australian context in particular, Christanto’s installation and performance coincided with the death, in an encounter with Brisbane police just prior to the ‘A P T ’, of a young Aboriginal dancer, Daniel Yok. The incident had especial poignancy against the background of the report by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody issued just two years earlier, in 1991. Thus, many of the tributes left in front of For Those… were about Australia and specifically in memory of Daniel Yok.68 64

Christine Clark & Caroline Turner, “Dadang Christanto. Speaking for Humanity: Art and Social Justice,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999): 200. 65 Clark & Turner, “Dadang Christanto, Speaking for Humanity,” 200. 66 Joanna Mendelssohn, “Refocusing the Gaze: First Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’, Queensland Art Gallery, 17 September–5 December 1993,” Artlink 13.3–4 (1993): 10. 67 Astri Wright, “A Taste of Soil: Dadang Christanto on Systemic Violence,” A R T AsiaPacific 3.1 (1996): 77. 68 Clark & Turner, “Dadang Christanto, Speaking for Humanity,” 200.

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The audience participation encouraged by art projects such as For Those… is a crucial element; without such participation, Christanto considers his art to be incomplete. Indeed, his art engages with spectators as embodied (thinking, feeling, viewing) subjects. Hence, collective remembering in Christanto’s works is dependent on an audience that is willing to partake in such remembrances, stressing a dialogic relation. As Christanto himself explains, Audience reaction represents a part of the process in these works. At the time A P T 1 opened, it may be said that my works were not yet in their final form. Like they were still in a coma. It was the audience who were to bring the works to completion through their contributing the finishing touches to the works during the exhibition.69

While For those… registers the shared affective response to traumatic memories, these remembrances are, nonetheless, specific and individual, encapsulated, for instance, in the various emotional offerings of poems, flowers, and other mementoes laid at the floor of the installation. Christanto’s installations themselves are often composed of differentiated repetitions and multiple, albeit similar, forms, suggesting both individual and communal violence and shared but also distinct experiences of suffering. In this installation and many of his other artworks, Christanto is able to engage us in an empathetic conversation relating to human suffering. Harnessing the universal aspect of suffering, it extends an invitation to its viewers to connect with the stories of others who have suffered by also being able to recognize their own experiences of suffering. Christanto’s art thereby registers human connection and empathic relation via the interplay of personal and collective suffering. In so doing, it also intimates the cross-cultural experiences of suffering, the suffering of victims of systematic violence everywhere. Through its invitation to active recollections of the past, Christanto’s art may also be seen as a ‘counter-monument’ to the anesthetizings of official memory with their didactic symbolism and tendency to ‘forgetting’. In the current quest to remember the past, our contemporary landscapes have become filled with monuments and memorials meant to serve as permanent reminders of the past. However, in this hypertrophy of memory and the triumphal return of the monument, the past may actually become increasingly invisible and easier to forget.70 Monumental invisibility or amnesia may easily 69

Dadang Christanto, as quoted in Clark & Turner, “Dadang Christanto, Speaking for Humanity,” 200. 70 Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, 32.

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ensue in the case of disgraceful or shameful pasts for which the monument serves as an all-too-easy outlet for “public disposal of radiating historical waste.”71 While the monument may symbolically index the past, it can sometimes do little to actively encourage the remembrance of that past. By contrast, through its immediate, dialogic engagement with audience-participants, Christanto’s art encourages a fully aware act of ‘remembering’ rather than the kind of ‘forgetting’ which ironically accompanies the official memorial.72 Indeed, his art may even be regarded as contingent upon the affective response of his audiences and in particular, their capacity to engage in memory-work.73 Continuing the themes of suffering through violence, in 1995 Christanto produced the sculptural installation Kekerasan I (Violence I), a display of 221 hollowed-out terracotta heads without bodies, stacked hierarchically. In this work, partly inspired by Peter Berger’s book Pyramids of Sacrifice,74 Christanto suggests the effects of authoritarian power and its abuses. In this connection, he elaborates on the aesthetic form of the installation as follows: This kind of pyramidical construction [is] very strong. A social construct like this is the (general) idea of pure power. But unfortunately there are too many victims for me to build it [in a representative way]. Foremost among the victims are those who are at the lowest levels. And that one at the pinnacle at the top? He does not absorb any of the burden, not like those who are below. The lower down they are, the greater their suffering.75 71

Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, 32. In her study of the artwork of Dadang Christanto, Allison Gray also takes up the notion of Christanto’s art as ‘counter-monument’, providing a critical analysis of his practice that is distinctive and refreshing in its attention to the specificities of aesthetic forms and materiality, as well as through its addressing of the contexts of production and reception. See Gray, “From Cultural Activism to Counter Memorial: The Artwork of Dadang Christanto 1975–2005” (M A thesis, Charles Darwin University, 2008). 73 On this ‘openness’ to dialogue in contemporary art including that by Christanto, see also Marsha Meskimmon, “Response and Responsibility: On the Cosmo-politics of Generosity in Contemporary Asian Art,” in Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making, ed. Michelle Antoinette & Caroline Turner (Canberra: A N U Press, 2014). 74 Peter Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1974). 75 As quoted in an interview with Astri Wright, “A Taste of Soil: Dadang Christanto on Systemic Violence,” 76. 72

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While the mass of heads may evoke a sense of community, individuality rather than sameness is also suggested, as each face is different from the next. While those at the bottom of the pyramid structure, with their large ears and small mouths, are repressed, unable to speak and only ever capable of listening, those at the top articulate their control loudly and authoritatively with mouths wide open, and with little regard to the voices below; their empty heads signify an inability to think, speak, and hear independently of such controlling forces, inducing a state of debilitation and even numbing submission. For Dwi Marianto, the hollowed-out heads also suggest the “socio-culturalpolitical condition where individual brains and brains of communal society are being disempowered and having their function taken away.”76

Figure 110: Dadang Christanto, Kekerasan I (Violence I) (undated; installation view). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Christanto here establishes a space of political activism, urging our attention to the injustice suffered by the masses (orang kecil ‘little people’) under the oppressive control and power-structures of Suharto’s authoritarian regime. In this “deaf culture,” as the artist describes it, those at the top have no ears for the voices and concerns of the people. Beyond its specific Indonesian con76

As quoted in Apinan Poshyananda, “Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition,” in Poshyananda et al., Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions (exh. cat.; New York: Asia Society Galleries & Sydney: Fine Arts Press, 1996): 32.

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text, Kekerasan I has likely resonated with international audiences77 for its ability to suggest the more generalized social effects of authoritarian control and hegemonic ideologies of all kinds, in all places, speaking to people across cultures. It visualizes the consequences of authoritarian power as an omnipresent and debilitating force which systematically empowers those at the top while crushing the spirit and sensibilities of those at the bottom.

Figure 111: Dadang Christanto, Kekerasan I (Violence I) (undated; detail). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Kekerasan I was first exhibited in Yogyakarta in 1995 for the exhibition ‘Perkara Tanah’ (‘Land Issues’) during Indonesia’s 50th anniversary since Independence. It was one of a series of four installations in which similar terracotta heads or busts were presented, each taking on different configurations to evoke different notions of power-relation and their abusive effects. In particular, the series of installations referred to the violence done to the rural poor of Indonesia under the New Order regime, through the State’s lack of concern for the former’s land rights and livelihoods in a context of rapid 77

Kekerasan I was included in the Asia Society’s travelling exhibition ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions’ of 1999 (see Chapter 3 above).

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urbanization and land exploitation. Rural farmers and homeowners were increasingly denied their land in the 1990s as government and governmentsupported developers carried out ‘land grabs’, seeking to make quick profits from Indonesia’s natural resources and urban development. As Kekerasan I demonstrates so evocatively, a rich elite of politicians and business interests is empowered by the exploitation and suffering of the marginalized, poorer classes in Indonesia’s rural communities. The texture of rural life is evoked in the commonplace terracotta clay material – the land itself – and by the characteristic roughness and simplicity of Christanto’s signature sculptural style with its allusion to everyday earthenware and cheaply made crafts of the rural class.78 The scale of Kekerasan I (Violence I) increases in later works by Christanto, assuming more dramatic, large-scale proportions. One of his most familiar installations, Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence), demonstrates more forcefully a shift in Christanto’s installations to artworks of more ‘memorial-like’ magnitude and significance. While this work has been shown in a number of contexts, including Fukuoka, Jakarta, and Sydney,79 perhaps its most evocative showing was on the very grounds of the artist’s own home in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 1997. There again, the work became more directly site-specific and ‘rooted’ in local histories of suffering. This version of They Give Evidence consists of twenty standing sculptures made of clay, recalling both male and female human forms, rooted into the excavated, multi-tiered countryside of Christanto’s Yogyakarta home. In the outstretched arms of each of these otherwise naked figures were empty individual shells of clothing recalling the outline of an absent human being.

78

See M. Dwi Marianto, “Metafora Kritis: Dadang Christanto Melalui Terakota,” as quoted in Astri Wright, “A Taste of Soil,” 76. 79 Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence) was shown at F A A M as part of the exhibition ‘Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses into the Future’. In 2002, the work was exhibited for a short time at the Bentara Budaya Gallery, Jakarta (the exhibition space of the Indonesian newspaper Kompas). As I explain later in this chapter, after much controversy and protest from local Muslim communities the installation was dismantled only days after the opening of the exhibition. They Give Evidence (Mereka Memeri Kesaksian) (1996–97) forms part of the Asian Art Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, purchased in 2003. The installation consists of 16 standing figures holding clothes (figures made from terracotta powder mixed with resin / fibreglass; 22 pieces of clothing made from cloth and resin).

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Figure 112: Dadang Christanto, Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence) (2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

These ghostly skins came to signify the only material evidence left from those killed through acts of violence, and they appear to have been just unearthed or even to have risen from the ground below them. The life-sized standing figures of the bearers of this evidence, though motionless and silent, are commanding in their collective offering and symbolic witnessing to violence. In the words of the artist, “they present evidence [… saying] ‘Look at the results of your acts’.”80 Christanto’s presentation of They Give Evidence on Indonesian soil is particularly significant in the light of Indonesia’s ‘buried pasts’ concerning the massacres of 1965–66, which continue to haunt the artist’s life as well as the lives of many others who were affected. The massacres saw thousands killed

80

Dadang Christanto, artist’s statement in Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses into the Future, ed. Ishida Tetsuro, Shioda Junichi, Kumagai Isako, Fukunaga Osamu & Okamoto Yoshie (exh. cat.; Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997): 192.

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Figure 113: Dadang Christanto, Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence) (2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 114: Dadang Christanto, Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence) (2003). Image courtesy of the artist.

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on the basis of their communist or assumed communist support, Chinese ethnicity or for other reasons. As well as the general public silence surrounding these events, the remains of those who were killed have been mysteriously hidden and secreted. The archaeologist Denis Byrne writes: And what of the mass graves? Robert Cribb [an Indonesia specialist] had found it ‘a little puzzling’ that in the years after 1965–66 there had been no reports of mass graves being discovered in Indonesia. He speculated that the sites were known but were avoided by construction projects and he mentioned ‘sporadic accounts’ from Central Java of rice fields no longer tilled because they concealed mass graves. Anyone who happened to come upon such a place, he observed, would ‘think carefully’ before reporting it. Similarly in Bali where the mass graves were not publicly acknowledged.81

They Give Evidence may therefore represent a protest against such a ‘coverup’, revealing how the artist’s local Indonesian landscape has been transformed into a “minefield of memory sites”82 following the 1965–66 massacres. While these memories are possibly invisible to outsiders, for those like Christanto with direct experiences of the events and/or connections to those killed, the buried lives and suppressed suffering which is literally buried in the landscape rises through the painful sediments of history and reveals itself as memory. More recently, Christanto has summoned the courage to acknowledge the direct relationship of his art with his own family’s suffering as well of that concerning the Communists and alleged Communists, ethnic Chinese, and other marginalized groups who were victimized, tortured, and killed under the New Order regime. In the context of an interview with the curator Christine Clark, Christanto states: I could not talk of my memories during the New Order period as this would have been the same as suicide. After I moved to Australia in 1999 and started living here for a while, I gradually realized I wasn’t stigmatized by the general public and I began to grow courageous for giving testimony about these previous events.83 81

Denis Byrne, “Traces of ’65: Sites and Memories of the Post-Coup Killings in Bali,” U T S Review 5.1 (special issue, “The Archaeology of Feeling,” ed. Meaghan Morris & Stephen Muecke; 1999): 42. 82 Byrne, “Traces of ’65: Sites and Memories of the Post-Coup Killings in Bali,” 41. 83 As quoted in Clark, “Dadang Christanto: Keeper of Memories,” 52.

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As Wright has argued in relation to the changes in contemporary Indonesian art more broadly, “the specific reference to particular political events is new to the post-Suharto era.”84 As I noted above in relation to the changing themes of Heri Dono’s art, up until the post-Suharto era much politically motivated art in Indonesia took the form of “symbolic speech”85 – oblique, allegorical forms of criticism and parody which sought to provide social commentary in the face of strict governmental controls and censorship of political expression. Together with the new political freedom enjoyed by Christanto since taking up residence in Australia in 1999, the climate in Indonesia of relatively reduced fear from persecution in the post-Suharto era brought new courage in art production to deal more openly with controversial and politically sensitive issues which also often constitute the repressed or forgotten memories of traumatic pasts. Underlying this is a belief in the capacity of art as agent and catalyst for social change – in a letter to Wright, Christanto remarks: I also understand that works of art are not the only cause of change in the individual or beyond, in his or her society. […] But I believe – I am even optimistic – because the history of change has always drawn in and involved the arts. Art contributes to the conditioning and maturing of social change. Art is always present, playing a role in any change which liberates.86

In 1999, Christanto presented the artwork Api di Bulan Mei 1998 (Fire in May 1998), (1998–99) at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. It was the second time Christanto was invited to participate in the ‘A P T ’ following his selection for Indonesia in the first ‘A P T ’ , of 1993. On this occasion, Christanto’s art was foregrounded through the exhibition platform ‘Crossing Borders’ (see Chapter 3 above), following his migration to Australia and confirming his international fame. Nonetheless, Api di Bulan Mei reflected in the first instance on Indonesian issues, seeking to remember the surge of rioting and violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in May 1998 – the worst incident of large-scale violence in Indonesia in over thirty years. In the light 84

Astri Wright, “Red and White Refigured: Indonesian Activist Art in Progress,”

A R T AsiaPacific 26 (April 2000): 64. 85

See Benedict Anderson, “Cartoons and Monuments: The Evolution of Political Communication under the New Order,” in Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1990): 152–93. 86 As quoted in Astri Wright, “Resistance and Memory in the Visual Field,” Jakarta Post (9 July 1995): 10.

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of the escalating violence in East Timor occurring at the time of ‘A P T 3’, Api di Bulan Mei also elicited memories of the violence committed in East Timor under the New Order regime, in the local struggles for Independence from Indonesia.87 As the artist later explained, “I’m concerned with suffering anywhere in the world, yesterday Kosovo, today East Timor.”88

Figure 115: Dadang Christanto, Api di Bulan Mei 1998 (Fire in May 1998) (1998–99). Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the artist.

87

Caroline Turner and Glen Barclay report that “in the words he spoke to the audience before the performance Dadang also referred to the events then occurring in East Timor where mobs supported by the Indonesian Government were wreaking havoc after the vote for Independence and before the U N intervened.” “Dadang Christanto: Wounds in Our Heart,” in Dadang Christanto: Wounds in Our Heart, ed. Turner & Nancy Sever (Canberra: A N U Drill Hall Gallery, 2010): 13. See also Allison Gray’s discussion of this in “From Cultural Activism to Counter Memorial.” 88 Dadang Christanto, in Mireille Vignol, “postcard from apt3/M A A P ,” http://www .abc.net.au/arts/headspace/postcards/vignol/vig_day5.htm (accessed 10 August 2003).

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Not unlike the installation They Give Evidence, for Api di Bulan Mei, human forms were evoked through forty-seven89 life-size sculptures. While their arms were also outstretched, for this presentation in Australia there was no evidence being offered in the empty arms of these figures. Instead, they appeared to offer themselves as evidence, pleading their presence in history before being reduced to the ashes of history. For the performance component of the installation on the evening of 10 September 1999, Christanto lit each of the papier-mâché figures, one at a time, in a ritualistic burning ceremony, weaving his way in and out of the symbolic blaze of bodies. While the May 1998 riots focused on income inequality, corruption, and food shortages, they were, more generally, a cry for political reform. Protests took place in Yogyakarta, Medan, and Jakarta, with ethnic Chinese, some of the country’s wealthiest people and often used as a scapegoat for serious political and economic problems, becoming the main victims of related acts of violence. Specifically, this violence involved the “burning of shops owned by Chinese and the plunder and rape of children, teenagers and adult women of Chinese families.”90 In Medan, students were severely beaten by the army, shot at with rubber bullets, and exposed to tear gas, and a number of Chinese women were gang-raped by soldiers and students alike. Six student protesters were shot dead and others wounded by army troops at the Trisakti University campus in Jakarta. Eventually, what began as a protest soon boiled over into anti-government rioting and looting. As was widely reported in the international media, some looters were trapped in burning buildings and the deathtoll quickly rose to over a thousand.91 Through his installation performance, Christanto urged his viewers not to forget these atrocities and instead to recall them as the sordid legacy of earlier acts of violence under the New Order regime: Remember these events, even though the totalitarian regime did not wish such events to occur: In May 1998 Jakarta was set ablaze. In May 1998 Solo was set ablaze. The scorching of the earth in certain parts of 89

Forty-seven is a reference to the dates of the violence: May 13+May 14+May

15+5 (for the month). 90

Artist’s statement, as quoted in Wright, “Red and White Refigured: Indonesian Activist Art in Progress,” 64. 91 For a brief summary of events surrounding the May riots, see Damien Kingsbury, The Politics of Indonesia (Melbourne; Oxford U P , 1998), especially the section “Epilogue: The Fall of Suharto,” 250–55.

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these cities is just one of the many “blazes” that had been lit beforehand […]. The flames and the arsonists originate in the rotting of history emanating from the regime of the New Order.92

Christanto here appeals for spectators to grasp the social repercussions of 1965–66 played out thirty-two years later in similarly predicated acts of violence. He finds the courage to return to the life-size figures of They Give Evidence, with its evocation of the violence of 1965, and recontextualizes these figures in the fires and violence of May 1998. Rather than evoking passive contemplation of these instances of violence and suffering, the burning ceremony in Api di Bulan Mei seeks to elicit “a shock capable of illuminating our sense of humanity.”93 In this sense, the work functions as a disturbing affective reminder of the mortality of human life and the senseless acts of violence which end it. In the aftermath of the burning, what remains is a horrifying display of dismembered bodies, sometimes even heads on poles. Significantly, a number of letters were sent to the Q A G requesting a boycott of the Indonesian artists as a show of solidarity with the East Timorese movement for independence. However, with the Q A G ’s backing, Christanto and his fellow Indonesian artists remained part of the exhibition, the Q A G recognizing the artists’ sympathy for the East Timor tragedies and their own aesthetic critiques of the New Order regime.94 Indeed, in Christanto’s performance the artist recalls the suffering and violence of people everywhere, including East Timorese victims. However, it is interesting to note that throughout Christanto’s performance the artist Lee Wen (who presented his Yellow Man performance in the same ‘A P T ’) offered his own interventions, performing as himself and not as Yellow Man. Interjecting with the provocative question, “Are there any East Timorese here at all?,”95 Lee sought to highlight the aestheticization of ‘the 92

Christanto, ‘A P T 3’ artist’s statement. Dadang Christanto, as quoted in Jeremy Eccles, “Not for Thin Skins: From the complexities of being Chinese to atrocities in Indonesia, Asian works venture into touchy territory,” Asiaweek.com magazine 26.5 (11 February 2000), http://www .asiaweek.com /asiaweek/magazine/2000/0211/as.triennial.html (accessed 10 February 2003). 94 See Christanto’s reflections on the potential boycott of the Indonesian artists in Gray, “From Cultural Activism to Counter Memorial,” 122. 95 See Lucy Davis, “Making Difference (So Easy to Enjoy, So Hard to Forget): Looking at Culturalisms, Visual Culture & Political Aesthetic Strategies in Singapore” (Magister thesis, Roskilde University, Denmark, 2001): 83. 93

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victim’ in the context of an international mega-exhibition, and, related to this, the aestheticization of violence and suffering, prompting us to ask: For whom is this artistic act of empathy? The East Timorese or Indonesians, Australians and/or the international art audience? Davis suggests that Lee’s interjections “ ‘ cut through the crap’ of a spectacular aestheticisation of the East Timor problem […] the desire for the victim.”96 The art critic Lee Weng Choy has also questioned the role of this kind of art in international mega-exhibitions: “Is this what we seek release from [in] our twentieth century, not so much the horrors themselves, but our sense of defeated self-reflexivity?” In the context of Documenta 11, Lee Weng Choy observes: many of the privileged works in [the show] weren’t that demanding – or rather, what Documenta 11 as a whole seemed to demand most from its viewers was guilt. A peculiar guilt – guilt as a defensive reflex, an admission of not knowing how or not being able to confront our historical burdens; as a screen for the desire to escape from the ghosts of the nineteenth century; guilt as a symptom of the twentieth century’s defeated self-reflexivity.97

It is possible, however, to see that such critique denies the potential for individual agency and affective experience on the part of both the artist – in creating art which responds to tragedies of direct or indirect experience – and the audience – in responding to forms of contemporary art which engage with human tragedy of all kinds, even within the spectacularized context of global exhibitions. Prior to Api di bulan Mei 1998, Christanto had taken up a residency at the Canberra School of Art, where he produced another installation on the theme, more directly concerned with the physical brutality inflicted on fellow human beings in such acts of violence. Entitled Cannibalism: The Memory of Jakarta – Solo 13, 14, 15 May 1998, this work more sickeningly related the barbaric dehumanization of life through the “burning of bodies.” “I made saté out of the human body,” recalled the artist: “There were intestines, livers, ears, noses, vaginas, bones with tiny bits of meat attached, penises, nipples and so on.”98 Made of ceramic, the body parts were threaded onto one hundred saté 96

Davis, “Making Difference (So Easy to Enjoy, So Hard to Forget),” 83 (emphasis in original). 97 Lee Weng Choy, “Biennale Time and the Spectres of Exhibition,” F O C A S : Forum on Contemporary Art and Society 4 (2002): 330, 335–36. 98 Artist’s statement, as quoted in Wright, “Red and White Refigured,” 64.

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skewers and placed over a lit grill, with the addition of sausage meat between the coals used to evoke the smell of burning bodies. Relating the historical event itself to the theme for his installation, Christanto remarked: “this was truly a form of cannibalism that was organized and systematic. The strong eating the weak.”99 As the art reviewer Helen Musa reported, “Christanto saw [this] barbecue of life not as spontaneous but rather [as] something very organised.”100 The systematic preparation, threading, and grilling of ‘body parts’, laid in organized sequences on top of the grill, is suggestive of a strategic destruction of life. More generally, in this artwork Christanto returns to issues concerning the distribution of political agency: “I have used cannibalism to represent those who have power; they eat the powerless.”101 As I intimated earlier, at the same time as Christanto’s art has, in recent years, become more explicit in its political references, it has become more overtly personal in its references to his own family’s suffering. In 2000, Christanto revealed publicly for the first time his family’s traumatic experiences during the violence of 1965. Christanto’s own father – an ethnic Chinese – was taken away one fateful morning in 1965, disappearing without trace: At that time, I was eight years old and living in a village. I did not understand about anything, and I know in 1965 early one morning my father was taken away in an army truck. The five of us (children) were still sleeping [...]. Since then I have never seen my father again.102

This personal account of the artist’s own victimization has been directly addressed in two of Christanto’s installations – Red Rain (1999–2000) and The Pain of the Trees (2003). In both of these works, Christanto communicated the memories of violence and pain associated with the massacres of 1965–66 in Indonesia. Unlike many others affected by these acts of violence and their echoes in the resurgence of violence towards ethnic Chinese in 1998, Christanto has acquired the courage to make his suffering public on a subject that, in many respects, continues to be silent and silenced. As Denis Byrne explains,

99

“Red and White Refigured,” 64. Helen Musa, “Biting into Politics and Power,” Canberra Times (20 August 1998). 101 Musa, “Biting into Politics and Power.” 102 Artist’s interview with Hendro Wiyanto in Wiyanto, “The Meaning of Memory,” 26. 100

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A peculiar silence had quickly settled over the events of 1965–66, a silence which was a product of fear, censorship and the disappearance (by death and imprisonment) of the Left intelligentsia. The impression was encouraged that the murkiness of this little visited realm of history was somehow natural to it rather than a product of official obfuscation.103

Figure 116: Dadang Christanto, Red rain (Hujan merah) (2003). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia. 103

Byrne, “Traces of ’65: Sites and Memories of the Post-Coup Killings in Bali,”

36–52.

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In a similar vein, Christanto observes: Authority that oppresses does not want dialogue to take place. They recognize only friend or foe. And this foe, notwithstanding that the foe is a fellow human being, is a valid target to be whipped, put away, murdered. They lack all desire to remember, let alone to keep a record of, the many millions of people who have been butchered since the regime of the New Order was established.104

Figure 117: Dadang Christanto, Red rain (Hujan merah) (1999–2000; detail). Image courtesy of the artist.

It is in this sense that Christanto’s art is seen to give voice and representation to the ideas of a silenced populace. His art attempts to fill the vacuum of silence and stigma which surrounds this still-taboo topic of political discussion. Thus, following Byrne, it is 104

Dadang Christanto, as quoted in Clark & Turner, “Dadang Christanto, Speaking for Humanity,” 200.

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possible to see how the memory of individuals can preserve an account of events subversive to the official version. Not available to surveillance, these private memories constitute a type of noise in the officially imposed silence.105

This figuring of personal memory as subversive noise is pertinent to Christanto’s art in its dual invocation of authoritarian silencing and the pained cries of the victims of violence which always threaten to break such silence. This begins with the open mouths of Kekerasan I (described above), which, with their suggestive howls, moans, and cries, cut through the imposed silence of authoritarian control.106 So, too, in the downpour of suffering communicated in Christanto’s later installation Red rain (Hujan merah) (1999–2000), there is yet again no actual sound to be heard in the experience of the installation, but only that which we are urged to imagine hearing as the screams and howls of the suffering victims of violence. 1,965 black-and-white outlines of anonymous tortured heads are repeated in a ceiling installation evoking the departure of earthly mortals to a heavenly existence. The heads are typical of Christanto’s style of figuration, drawn with a characteristic simplicity that is evocative of the masses and imbued with a minimal palette of black, red, and white. The number of heads depicted refers directly to that year of catastrophic turmoil in twentieth-century Indonesian history, with each face seeming to barely surface from the Chinese joss-paper cards they are sketched on, as though ghostly, spiritual traces to be recalled in Buddhist prayer. Each card is laminated, recalling the official identity cards that Indonesian citizens are obliged to carry with them and, in Red rain, signifying the discriminatory and ultimately bloody racial politics of Indonesian history, especially for ethnic Chinese.107 Suspended from each head is a single red woollen thread, as if dripping from each face; when viewed collectively from a distance, these teardrops appear to shower the gallery space in a haze of brilliant red. Each blood-red strand flows from the centre of the brow of each head at the point where a stain of black can be seen – possibly a metaphoric marker for identifying those to be killed, the shooter’s target, the site of the wound which bleeds, the Buddhist sign for the

105

Byrne, “Traces of ’65: Sites and Memories of the Post-Coup Killings in Bali,” 48. This ‘aural quality’ in the Kekerasan series is described by Astri Wright. See Astri Wright, “A Taste of Soil,” 77. 107 See Clark, “Dadang Christanto: Keeper of Memories,” 53. 106

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‘Third Eye’,108 or, as Christanto suggests, the blackened memories of history.109 The blood-like strands eventually meet the floor to suggest clotted pools of blood, evoking the pained history of these departed souls which continue to seep and bleed into the hearts of the living – in the artist’s words, “a pain without end for families associated with those who died.”110 The head is signified as a container for memory, but the blood spilt in the name of violence is suggestive of these memories as embodied in the blood of the living. Gathered en masse, the multiple faces register the individualized suffering of each of the nameless faces and of Christanto’s own pain but also evokes the collective grief of the numerous victims of violence. Moreover, while Christanto has intended his work as a way of reflecting on the wounds of his personal history – particularly with regard to his Chinese ethnicity and his father’s ‘disappearance’ during the 1965 massacre of suspected communists – the work’s universal aspect is also crucial to its meaning and any viewer’s experience of it. As with other artworks by Christanto, the human is invoked by way of nonspecific figurative portrayals which allude to the suffering of humanity everywhere. In this way, Christanto yet again opens the possibility for crosscultural, affective engagements from participant-observers who are encouraged to register their own narratives of suffering within the mass of undefined faces. However, the specific reference to Christanto’s Chinese ethnicity marks a significant turning point in Christanto’s oeuvre, orienting our reading of the artwork to themes more directly related to Christanto’s personal biography. As Allison Gray has suggested, the shift to tracing personal memories of Chinese ethnicity is likely also a consequence of Christanto’s renewed memories of home as a ‘diaspora’ artist newly migrated to Australia at the time Red Rain was in the making.111

108

See Christine Clark, “Still counting and still healing: the recent art of Dadang Christanto,” in di ujung kelopak daunnya tetap ada airmata (on the edge of the petal there are still tears) (Yogyakarta: Penerbit BukuBaik, 2005): 106. 109 As Wiyanto offers, “‘The red are wounds, the black is obscurity, the history that is obscure, the evidence that is black, there is no connection with race, nor does it blossom or contain other colours.’ These words immediately remind us of the hyperbole in the official film version of G 30 S [30 September Movement] P K I Tragedy repeatedly played every 1 October during the period of the New Order.” See Wiyanto, “The Meaning of Memory,” 29. 110 Dadang Christanto, as quoted in Wiyanto, “The Meaning of Memory,” 29. 111 See Gray, “From Cultural Activism to Counter Memorial,” ch. 4.

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As with his installation For Those…, Red Rain speaks powerfully not only as a counter-memorial to the grief of those affected by the horrors of 1965–66 and that of May 1998 but also to the victims of oppression and social injustice at any time and any place. In the artist’s own words, If I speak of victims, this just not means the members of P K I [Communist Party of Indonesia] but everybody who has suffered the misfortune of systematic violence. It is not limited to the events of ’65.112

It is in this sense that Christanto is able to engage us in affective dialogue about human suffering; a conversation which allows us to recognize the suffering of others at the same time as we recall or imagine our own. Here, memory is seen to play a role in communicating the differentiated but shared experiences of human suffering. The collective memories aroused in Christanto’s art allow us to feel human connections grounded in personal experiences of suffering, not only between the past, present, and future, but also between suffering victims of systematic violence wherever they may be. In 2002, however, Christanto met hostility to his artwork in the Indonesian context. In that year, the artist included the work They Give Evidence in a solo exhibition at Bentara Budaya Gallery in Jakarta. The exhibition, entitled ‘The Unspeakable Horror’, also included the artworks Red Rain and Cannibalism: The Memory of Jakarta – Solo 13, 14, 15 May in addition to a series of drawings. Interestingly, the fourteen bare statues presented there as part of They Give Evidence caused protests from local residents of Islamic faith living near the Bentara Budaya gallery, who interpreted the statues as offensive to Islamic law for their representation of naked human forms; added to this perhaps was knowledge of Christanto’s own Christian background as an Indonesian of Chinese ethnicity. As a consequence, Christanto was pressured to modify his installation by wrapping the statues in black covering. In addition, a red rope was tied around the neck of each statue. The resulting installation was dramatically transformed and came to signify a range of new meanings. Despite the changes to the installation, however, the local Palmerah residents demanded that the statues be removed from the gallery, and the exhibition was subsequently dismantled only days after the opening of the exhibition.113 As one local arts reviewer noted, “The reaction shown by Palmerah’s residents opens 112

Christanto, as quoted in Wiyanto, “The Meaning of Memory,” 29. For more on this incident, see Susan Helen Ingham, “Powerlines: Alternative art and infrastructure in Indonesia in the 1990s” (doctoral dissertation; Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2007): 261–62. 113

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our eyes to the fact that it is not always easy to make use of art to arouse our collective memory,” adding, “of course, this does not mean that artists should give in or give up.”114 Thus, the re-presentation of They Give Evidence in Indonesia in 2002 revealed shifting hegemonies within Indonesian society but with similar consequence in silencing the events of 1965–66: from the New Order’s authoritarian oppression to the post 9/11 hyper-sensitivity to Islamic belief. While the issues of political violence at the heart of Christanto’s artwork may not have been grasped by the local Muslim residents, one might argue that the lack of direct victimization of one’s own friends and family (i.e. ethnic Chinese, Christians, communists et al.) may have hindered collective empathy on the issue. Christanto has certainly demonstrated, however, that he is not one to give up on the task of recalling forgotten histories even in the face of such challenges. Ultimately, he has declared, I want to initiate communication that liberates. Liberation from what? Liberation from the burden of history filled with wastelands of blood and tears. A history that is played out in the homeland of humankind.115

Not unlike Christanto’s art, José Legaspi’s evokes themes of suffering and anguish and serves as an adamant counter-memorial to the painful and repressed histories in the artist’s life. Pain surfaces in the form of release, as pasts are liberated through the medium of art. In Legaspi’s artwork, however, the traumatic biographical memories conveyed are often brutally confrontative in their blunt expression of sexuality, excess, perversity, abjection, and torture.

José Legaspi’s Dark Pasts – Resurrected and Released Like a fecund psychopath, he lasciviously licks his lips at some nubile, although slightly cadaverous […] young woman who hangs from a cross, writes mama on the wall as if in the final few frames of an Italian new realism film, chews away at somebody’s breast, or maybe heart, who complicitly lies prone (dead) on a bed, flushes babies down 114

Yusuf Susilo Hartono, “Artist relives 1965 tragedy, May riots,” Jakarta Post (11 December 2005), http://www.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20020709 .R02 (accessed 11 December 2005). 115 Christanto, ‘A P T 3’ artist’s statement.

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the john, kinkily undresses young women leaving them in high heels & a necklace, is prone to fart, drowns without trace under the sea, couples with a Werewolf, howls at the night, recovers his childhood whilst his mother lies dead on the bed, […] sodomises and slays, sections bodies into transportable limbs, disposes of them in rubbish bins, leaves somebody strangled in a cell vomiting blood, cuts off somebody’s penis, indulges in homosexual or bisexual […] pleasures, dresses as a nun in underwear leaving his genitalia exposed, burns the house down, wear’s the devil’s crown.116

Often autobiographical in nature, José Legaspi’s installations, sculptures, and drawings repeatedly record explicit depictions of his own sexuality, sardonic critiques of religious repression, and anguished reflections on the life and death of those most dear and hateful to his heart. A perverse mélange of recurrent themes – religiosity, eroticism, abjection, and violence – is underscored by a macabre tragi-comic sensibility. And while Legaspi’s art may at times provoke rage, repulsion, and disgust, it also offer moments of sorrowful beauty and aching tenderness, particularly in his later works, which are increasingly controlled in their execution, offering refinement and elegance in their meticulous attention to detail. Legaspi’s art is a private chronicle of his own suffering and the suffering of those closest to him, a suffering largely to do with his oppressive family upbringing in the Catholic Philippines. His art surfaces from within a society that is generally still grimly opposed to the idea and practice of homosexuality; more specifically, it emerges from his own sexual alienation and repression in the context of the Catholic orthodoxy of the Philippines. What has been habitually suppressed and unspoken in Legaspi’s life in obedience to Catholic dogma finally surfaces in his art in often gruesomely visible forms of protest. Moreover, the pain of the artist’s past is brazenly expressed alongside taboo acts of sexual pleasure and a mocking of the traditionally sacred. The issue of homosexuality is made manifest, for instance, in the grey-tone pastel drawing Lovers (1997), in which two men are depicted in the act of fellatio. In an otherwise dim and empty room, this intimate act of homosexuality is the focal point of the image. The standing figure appears to be a strange hybrid of man and beast – his naked body upright, his bestial head gazing 116

Kevin Power, as quoted in Lynne Seear, “José Legaspi – ‘Mother, Utopia, Burning House’,” in A P T 2002: Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Seear (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2002): 66.

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down at his lover, the latter crouched below him in the act of performing fellatio. The forehead of the standing figure bleeds from an incision made by the point of the knife that the same figure is now holding against the temple of the crouching man – the only spot of colour in the drawing. Beyond the theme of homosexuality, other questions surface. For instance, are we to interpret this as an act of sexual violence or, as the title suggests, one of love? Are these two figures enjoying mutual sexual pleasure or is one the bearer of sexual threat and pain? While Legaspi’s drawing might serve here as a loving and pleasurable remembrance of his own sado-masochistic homosexual experiences, he might also be communicating the memory of an oppressed sexual existence, his personal history of sexual grief and frustration, and the violence done to him by discriminatory sexual orthodoxy. The consequence may well be (as in the drawing On Suicide) willed self-destruction.

Figure 118: José Legaspi, Lovers (1997). Image courtesy of the Hiraya Gallery, Manila.

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Figure 119: José Legaspi, On Suicide (2000). Image courtesy of the Hiraya Gallery, Manila.

Yet another important element appears in this and other drawings of Legaspi’s – such as Birth (1997), Greed (1997), Dog eating a woman (1997), Job (1997), and Prayer for the dead (1998) – which reinforces the autobiographical nature of his artwork. In the top and bottom sections of Lovers and underneath the figure in On Suicide, Legaspi’s trademark illegible script borders the pictorial field. This use of script punctuates Legaspi’s drawings with a stronger sense of narrative, as if, through the combination of visual and written textual devices, a narrative is being told much as in the pages of an illustrated storybook. Here the use of written text performs an elusive, evidentiary function, suggesting a discursive narrative to accompany the images Legaspi confronts us with. At first, the viewer is most likely gripped by an urge to read the text. On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the script is unintelligible, a nonsense scribble. The Philippine art historian Ana Labrador offers the following explanation:

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The words written on these works, Legaspi explains, are there for aesthetic reasons and must not be taken literally. [...] Legaspi cites as influences television cartoons, his inability to read Islamic calligraphy, and letters from his former Japanese boyfriend. In this sense, the power of his narratives arises out of their disconnection with the images.117

Indeed, the inability to understand the written cursive text produces an unsettling and frustrating state of incomplete knowledge on the part of the viewer, who, once compelled by the dramatic strength of Legaspi’s images, seek to share in the totality of the memories they invoke. However, the provocative events remembered in these drawings, it seems, are ones that Legaspi wants to remain personal to him to some degree, for he delivers stories of his past that only he will know in their entirety. Nevertheless, like history writing itself, even in its incomprehensibility, the symbolic power of the written word is seen to perform a secondary legitimating function, seeming to authorize Legaspi’s story in the book of history. The way in which Legaspi arrives at his drawings is also significant with respect to ‘tracing his past’. The artist’s work process involves the technique of automatic drawing. Rather than producing preparatory sketches towards a finished product, Legaspi fills the delicate pages of his sketchpad with numerous drawings which serve as experiments or even final pieces. In this way, the temporal nature of recalling any single idea, feeling or experience, arising from the spontaneous recollection of repressed histories, is captured with a powerful immediacy and frankness. Legaspi explains that his inspiration comes in “quick flashes” and is based on his real-life experiences, even if his works are, to a certain degree, embellished in the end.118 In addition, because of the fragility of his sketch-paper material, not all of Legaspi’s drawings make it to documentary form – many become damaged or misplaced. Thus, the initial stages of Legaspi’s production process suggests an immediacy in the recording of his thoughts and recollections. As a form of automatic drawing, Legaspi’s sketches may also be manifestations of his unconscious memories. Borrowing from the work of Joseph 117

Ana Labrador, “Eating their Words: A Filipino Narrative,” A R T AsiaPacific 29 (2001): 51. 118 Maria Cheng, “Where Sadism Rules: José Legaspi explores the fascination of shock,” Asiaweek.com magazine (13 August 1999), http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek /99/0813/feat4.html (accessed 13 November 2003).

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Delboeuf, Sigmund Freud argues in The Interpretation of Dreams that “every impression, even the most insignificant, leaves an ineradicable mark, indefinitely capable of reappearing by day.”119 It is in this sense that Legaspi’s drawings may be understood as a ‘reappearance’ or ‘resurrection’ of unconscious memories into their conscious realization. Describing the work of Freud, Victor Burgin observes: memory itself cannot be a conscious phenomenon; if it were then the system perception-consciousness would be overwhelmed with the sheer number of fresh impressions. All memory, then, is unconscious in the ‘descriptive’ sense.120

Figure 120: José Legaspi, Dog eating a woman (1997). Image courtesy of the artist. 119

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. A.A. Brill (1900; tr. 1911; London: Allen & Unwin, 1922); http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/chap01a.htm. (accessed 3 December 2005). 120 Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1996): 217.

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Figure 121: José Legaspi, The Crucifixion (1999). Image courtesy of the Hiraya Gallery, Manila.

Figure 122: José Legaspi, Crucifixion (1998). Image courtesy of the Hiraya Gallery, Manila.

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Freud’s idea of the resurrection of memory is pertinent to Legaspi’s religiously inflected work. The Christian theme of redemption and salvation through suffering and martyrdom becomes yet another central issue that Legaspi rebels against in his art. The crucifix and the crown of thorns are among the emblematic Christian motifs of such suffering, and in works such as the sculptural installation piece Crucifixion (1995), the two are vehemently mocked. The crown of thorns is instead turned into a length of barbed wire and wrapped around the face of a bleeding, crucified, Christ-like figure; atop his head, three golden metal spikes suggest a teasing glory in death. In a pastel drawing of the same title, the figure of a plump woman is hanging upside-down on a cross, her feet nailed at either end of the horizontal axis in a way that leaves her body vulnerable to penetration. With hands pinned down one on the other at the bottom end of the cross, she is helpless flesh to the knife that stabs brutally into her bleeding vagina. Sickening boils infest her skin and again the dark staging of this event is interrupted by margins of nonsensical scribble. In both these versions of ‘the crucifixion’, as well as such variants as a scatalogically inflected rendering of a farting nun with ‘animalized’ crucified victim in the background, the obsession with penitence and redemption through suffering is demystified and literally upturned through Legaspi’s nonchalant treatment of the otherwise sacred icon of the cross. Robbed of their symbolic sanctity, crowns, haloes, crucifixes, and images of Christ and the Holy Mother are appropriated to sacrilegious effect by Legaspi. Suggestive of his indifference to the sacred significance of these icons, the artist has said: “Growing up with those symbols – the crucifix, the halo, all of them very important – you wonder, ‘what would happen if I spat on them?’” Indeed, through his imagery Legaspi is seen to rebel against his strict Catholic upbringing and its repressive hold on his life. As the art historian Emmanuel Torres remarks, “For José Legaspi, institutional religion is a bad trip, bringing memories as utterly bleak as his drawings.”121 That the figure on the cross or in the foreground is a woman might also be telling of Legaspi’s trying relationships with the women in his life, including his mother. Indeed, the Madonna figure is also one that recurs in Legaspi’s work as maternal memory, albeit hardly beatific in her representation. In 121

Emmanuel Torres, “Faith and the Pinoy,” in Faith + the City: A Survey of Contemporary Filipino Art, ed. Valentine Willie (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Valentine Willie Fine Art, 2000): 12.

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1995, for instance, Legaspi presented an exhibition in the Philippines which

“included a sculpture of the Madonna vomiting onto the Christ child.”122 There is certainly a personal conflict registered, between reverence, pity, and contempt for his late mother, in artworks such as La Muerte de Justo (The Death of the Just) (c.1998). For this sculptural installation, Legaspi has carved the frail, life-size image of his elderly mother seated in a chair and framed by a wooden, shrine-like enclosure. At the centre, a knife cuts through her bleeding chest and her wrinkled hands firmly grip the arms of the chair for her dear life. The white lace of the delicate dress she wears is indelibly stained by a pool of red blood, which pours out of the wound in her chest and onto her lap; perhaps an intentional resting-place, for this Holy Mother is represented here without Child but her lap is also the site of the maternal blood she once shed in giving birth to her son. She is in pain from the knife held to her chest; her eyes well with tears, which gush down her cheeks, and she stares in distress directly ahead of her with vacant unknowing, struck by the fear of death. Her cry of pain seems almost audible as her face draws taut in agony. The image of Legaspi’s tormented mother is nonetheless imbued with respect and reverence for her quiet suffering, as suggested by the artist’s delicately crafted form and the venerable air of his mother’s enshrinement in death. It is significant that Legaspi was absent from the Philippines when his mother was dying of cancer – tragically, not that much longer after his father suffered a similar fate.123 As a result, Legaspi actually missed his mother’s dying and had no direct access to its ineluctability. The artwork, then, might be regarded as a performative act of memory, by which Legaspi attempts to recall the moment of his mother’s death. So, too, it might serve as atonement for Legaspi’s absence, or an expression of her release from earthly suffering. For hers, as it turns out, was also a painful life filled with betrayal by her husband and angst on the part of her homosexual son.124 On Legaspi’s relationship with his mother, the curator Lynne Sear writes: Legaspi’s mother is dead and his relationship with her was passionate but conflicted. As a young boy, he vandalised her shrines, her storehouse of saints, imposing devil’s horns on the Madonna figures, revealing, he believed, their true nature.125 122

Maria Cheng, “Where Sadism Rules.” Author’s interview with the artist José Legaspi, Manila, Philippines, 5 July 2002. 124 Interview with the artist José Legaspi, Manila, Philippines, 5 July 2002. 125 Seear, “José Legaspi – ‘Mother, Utopia, Burning House’,” 66. 123

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Figure 123: José Legaspi, La Muerte de Justo [The Death of the Just] (c.1998). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 124: José Legaspi, Phlegm (2000–2002; detail). © The artist. Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Figure 125: José Legaspi, Untitled (12) (2009). Image courtesy of the Drawing Room Gallery, Manila.

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Figure 126: José Legaspi, Untitled (13) (2009). Image courtesy of the Drawing Room Gallery, Manila.

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Interestingly, Legaspi here enshrines his mother as a saint-like Madonna figure, but her saintly suffering is made unashamedly brutal and far from heavenly. Recalling Saint Augustine’s words, “As long as we are in the body, we are absent from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight,”126 Legaspi’s mother’s body becomes sacrificial lamb to the Catholic faithful; her suffering is unmistakably in and of the body. Moreover, in this, as well as in works such as Hanged Man (2001), the reverential aspect of Legaspi’s installations recalls again – as with Christanto’s art discussed above – the function of public monuments and memorials of suffering. They are shrines of remembrance to the victims of both physical and ideological violence and suffering that the artist has known in his life. The suggestion of a memorial to suffering also comes through when Legaspi arranges his individual pastel drawings en masse. Phlegm (2000– 02), for instance, is an installation of a thousand small, charcoal drawings arranged randomly but assembled to form a larger quilt-like pattern on the gallery wall. Viewed from a distance, the imposing panels encourage one’s eyes to move feverishly through the haunting but intense palette of grey, black, and white. In this way, Legaspi disrupts the authority of any single continuous narrative across the individual drawings and, instead, reinforces the maelstrom of his nightmarish memories. With regard to this, Legaspi asserts, “Art cannot order people around. Art dies the moment it acquires authority.”127 Beyond the impact of this larger quilt of memories, the intimacy of each individual image remains sensitively compelling and reinforces the economy of excess with which Legaspi engages. At the corner of a dark street a naked man reaches for the penis of another; at a different corner, a plump woman adorned with a crown crouches over gleefully as a dog sodomizes her; in the spirit of slapstick comedy, a naked man – perhaps Legaspi himself – bends over, hands either side of his buttocks, performing an unashamed act of farting; a mother stabs the head of her newborn infant, still attached to her body by its umbilical cord; a man appears to be gouging out his eyes to the point of bleeding tears; a crucifix is inserted between a person’s buttocks. Weaving across these drawings, pleasure meets pain, sex intersects with death, and beauty and happiness are found in acts of evil and violent suffering. The body 126

St Augustine, The Trinity, book 14, chapter 4 (Washington D C : Catholic U of America P , 1963): 414 (2 Cor. 5:6–7). 127 José Legaspi, quoted in Wilfred Marbella, “The Knives of José Legaspi,” Transit: A Quarterly of Art Discussion 1.1 (January–April 1999): 22.

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– more specifically, the abject body – is repeatedly shown and suggested, signifying an attempted interruption of an imposed bodily purity and corporeal order. Moreover, borrowing from Arnaud Lévy’s psychoanalytic theory, the body might be interpreted as symbolic of Legaspi’s present-pasts in which time is linked to “the usual temporal structure of subjective space,” […] with the future situated ahead, the past behind. But, further to this, the future is linked to the mouth, the past to the anal orifice. The anterior–posterior axis of subjective space is the axis of the digestive tube. Time is, at the same time, food and excrement, oral object and anal object; it is, in fact, the digestive object.128

It is apposite that Legaspi should entitle this set of works Phlegm. For, if the body, as Lévy suggests, is also a space that embodies time, and the abject body a further marker of time, then Phlegm records an expulsion of accumulated bodily waste and embodied histories. Through his visual reflections, Legaspi releases the torment which has plagued his body, clearing the congestion of his past in order to make passage for the future. As with Freud’s psychoanalytic technique, Legaspi’s drawings and sculpture provide a means of processing his embodied fears and desires and serve as cathartic release for the artist’s repressed experiences of traumatic suffering. Moreover, as Flores observes, they present as “a visual diary in progress that chronicles the many ways in which a person’s body is desecrated and redeemed at the altars of a suffering spirituality.”129 In their autobiographical subject-matter, they relate to the ‘recovery’ of the artist’s past and his sense of self, while at the same time offering a critique of the oppressive and discriminatory social mores which have influenced his life-history, with their basis in the Catholic faith. Art, Jojo feels, is a form of release for all his experiences, emotions, fantasies, thoughts, and perversions; he even sees it as a cheap thrill. He respects it only because it has been his companion for such a long time. It is art that gets him through his everyday existence, either for economic or therapeutic reasons. It is what keeps him sane, the embodiment of the soul that his writings cannot capture.130

128

Arnaud Lévy, “Devant et derrière soi,” Nouvelle revue de psychoanalyse 15 (Spring 1977): 93–94. 129 Patrick D. Flores, “José Legaspi,” in Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art, ed. Kataoka Mami (exh. cat.; Tokyo: The Japan Foundation Asia Center & Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation, 2002): 107. 130 Roselle Pineda, “Of Gay and Desolate Gods: The Art of José Legaspi,” in

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Figure 127: José Legaspi, Untitled (2011). Image courtesy of the Drawing Room Gallery, Manila.

Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts I I , ed. National Commission on Culture and the Arts (Manila: National Commission for Culture & the Arts, 1998): 73.

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Figure 128: José Legaspi, Untitled (9) (2010). Image courtesy of the Drawing Room Gallery, Manila.

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Recording a gruesome and agonizing personal history, Legaspi’s drawings are compelling in their ability to trigger affective responses of loathing, pain, sympathy, and empathy. However, compared with Christanto, the process of engaging memory in Legaspi’s art is premised on a deeply voyeuristic experience, daring the viewer to delve into the artist’s innermost thoughts and desires. Through its stress on personal reflection and its array of challenging images, there is a certain sense of foreclosure in the reception of Legaspi’s art, inviting “only those who wish to share [in the artist’s] torment.”131 Here I lay bare my true, satanic self, all the corruption in my soul. Only those who wish to share my torment Can look at my sketches and be just as lost. I do not care to draw pretty pictures All I want is to show things in me that, Otherwise, I prefer to hide.132

The seduction of Legaspi’s art draws us into the dark depths of the artist’s soul. There we discover the artist’s buried subconscious, the repressed and silenced pasts revealed in his art. It is here that the personal is exposed as deeply embedded in the social – the repressed a social consequence of a religious imposition, imposed twofold via colonial conversion and postcolonial preservation in the Philippines. Art is an instrument for expressing the otherwise invisible histories of his repressed subconscious. The following discussion continues to explore contemporary art which illuminates the concealed and the obscured. However, in discussing the art of Lim Tzay Chuen, a rather different set of hidden social effects are revealed, and to very different ends.

Making the Invisible Manifest: The Art of Lim Tzay Chuen A public sculpture stands on the United Overseas Bank (U O B ) plaza in Singapore – the renowned surrealist Salvador Dalí’s Homage to Newton, erected in 1985. The sculpture is, in turn, a reflexive homage to Dalí himself as one of the great modernists of twentieth-century Western art. However, 131 132

José Legaspi, as quoted in Marbella, “The Knives of José Legaspi,” 25. Legaspi, as quoted in Marbella, “The Knives of José Legaspi,” 25.

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what I am interested in pursuing here is not the ‘original’ sculpture itself but a related ‘unrealized’ project by Lim Tzay Chuen which would have involved an appropriation of Dalí’s sculpture. Entitled Alter #1, the project began with Lim approaching the U O B in 1999 for permission and financial support to move the sculpture one metre to the side of its original position and then to move it back to its original position a year later. It is characteristic of Lim’s conceptually oriented art with its minute interventions in public space that the artist had hoped regular passersby might notice the slight physical changes in this public space. Preferring not to declare the change openly by way of any explicit labelling, Lim thought members of the public might instead discover for themselves the shift in position through their own embodied sensory memory and re-cognition. The reaction might be: “ ‘ hey, didn’t that ugly sculpture used to be over there?’.”133 Such recognition would require both a visual and a physical memory of the original position of the sculpture and an embodied realization on the part of the public that its location had changed. As Langenbach has remarked, there is a “performative aspect of [this] work, this focus on the subtle relationships of the body in space and [Lim’s] use of the human body as the tool of measurement of space.”134 But, along with this, the body is also registered by Lim as a medium by which memories are formed; Lim’s plan depends on the production of memory as an embodied performance, and on the public’s embodied registration of a departure from what they recall was there before. Perhaps not surprisingly, the bank could not see the point of this ‘invisible’ project, particularly because there was not much to be gained for itself. As Lee comments in relation to Lim’s project, Corporations of course want something in return for their pains. But what kind of symbolic capital is there to be gained, if the whole point of the work is to remain invisible?135

133

Lee Weng Choy & Ray Langenbach, “Athens, Singapore,” in Polypolis: Art from Asian Pacific Megacities, ed. Claus Friede & Ludwig Seyfarth (exh. cat.; Freiburg im Breisgau: Modo, 2000): 105. 134 Langenbach, in Lee & Langenbach, “Athens, Singapore,” 105. 135 Lee, in Lee & Langenbach, “Athens, Singapore,” 105.

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Figure 129: Lim Tzay Chuen, A L T E R # 1 ( P R O P O S A L / V I S U A L ; unrealized, 1999–2003).136 Image courtesy of the artist.

Hence, the project remains unrealized without the necessary support of the bank and brings to mind issues concerning the relationship between contemporary art and the logic of capitalism. Importantly, the ‘value’ of Lim’s proposed art project does not reside in the object itself – the Dalí sculpture – but, rather, in the conceptual possibility of its unhinging and re-hinging through acts of bureaucratic negotiation. In its conceptual basis, Lim’s project refutes a capitalist logic which emphasizes the production of art as commodity and which ultimately returns economic value, albeit through symbolic cultural capital. From the bank’s perspective, Lim’s proposal adds no further value to the Dalí sculpture – there is nothing more to be gained from what is presently 136

“In 1999, Lim first proposed shifting the sculpture Homage to Newton by Salvador Dalí one metre from its original position. In 2003, he proposed rotating it 10 cm to the left. As of this writing, neither proposal has been accepted by the United Overseas Bank.” See “Fig. 3, A L T E R A T I O N #1. (U N R E A L I S E D ). United Overseas Bank, Singapore. Proposal / Visual,” in A Work by Lim Tzay Chuen, ed. Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, L A S A L L E - S I A College of the Arts, 2005): 68.

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offered, neither in the sculpture’s monetary worth nor in its already inscribed representational value as modern art with its allusions to scientific progress, rationalism, and enlightenment. For Lim, however, the interest lies in testing the limits of negotiation itself, probing the parameters of art in relation to bureaucratically defined conventions. The negotiation reveals latent values – about what art is worth, so to speak, and, more to the point, about what makes for worthwhile art from the point of view of a banking establishment that is symbolic of the wider capitalist rationale which governs Singapore society. Incidentally, in 2003 Lim suggested a variant of his original project, proposing to the U O B that the Dalí sculpture be rotated 10cm to the left. This proposal was not taken up, either. Lim’s art practice often tests the limits of what is deemed possible and impossible as art, revealing these limits as the hidden effect of socially inscribed conventions, normalized by institutional ideologies, bureaucratic order, and everyday acceptance. The artist’s alteration projects challenge such norms and bring to light the “hidden things”137 which govern our thoughts and actions, uncovering the latent rationales for why things are the way they are. Visiting The Substation art gallery in Singapore in 2001, one could experience another ‘revealing’ project by Lim. Surprisingly, Brian O’Doherty’s account of the modernist white cube was not the experience of the gallery (“We see not the art but the space first,” argued O’Doherty in his now notorious essay describing the architecture of the modernist gallery. “White, ideal, space […] more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th century art”).138 By contrast, The Substation gallery floors were concrete grey, one wall interrupted by an oddly positioned windowpane, and fluorescent light systems created a flat light. Yet, like Doherty, one had to strain to find the ‘art’ in the space, inasmuch as the gallery was in the process of exhibition change-over – an explanation for the lack of things to ‘see’. However, the seemingly ‘empty’ gallery’s architectural structure and interior design themselves amounted to an artwork by Lim. The artist had renovated and refashioned The Substation gallery for his project entitled Alter #7, which he presented as part of the ‘New Criteria’ exhibition series at The Substation gallery in May 2001. Apart from his contribution to ‘New Criteria’, Lim’s motives 137

See Ray Langenbach, “Hidden Things,” in A Work by Lim Tzay Chuen, 7–64. Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: notes on the gallery space,” Artforum 24 (March 1976), http://www.societyofcontrol.com/whitecube/insidewc.htm (accessed 3 December 2005). 138

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for reworking the gallery space were many and complex, but rested in particular on a continuing interest in investigating perceptions and experiences of space and their affective consequences. Established in 1990, The Substation has played an important role in fostering contemporary art in Singapore. This independent arts organization is also an alternative art space for the development and display of experimental art. However, by 2001 the “gallery was beginning to be taken for granted”: Its design did not help: the gallery space was easily traversed through light swing doors by pedestrians taking a short cut to the next street, or by those seeking easy entrance to the cafe that opened from the gallery to the courtyard.139

Lim had long been intimately acquainted with The Substation space and the organization’s activities before his intervention in 2001 (and after the renovation of the gallery, he continued to study the space as an artist-inresidence). This would certainly have afforded him unique access to the daily goings-on in the gallery and its adjacent spaces, and an opportunity to observe at first hand the encounters of different viewers with art in the gallery’s changing exhibition programme. Addressing not only the visual but also the behavioural politics of gallery spaces and their displays and the effect of how we are encouraged to move within them, Lim’s subsequent transformation of the gallery might be viewed, with Peter Schoppert, as “a practical attack on [the] lack of engagement and interest in the qualities of the space itself” among artists, administrators, and general public.140 Schoppert details the spectrum of Lim’s modifications to The Substation gallery and their related effect: Tzay Chuen’s configuration of The Substation’s window, which he placed below eye-level, was precisely calculated to force curious observers to bend their bodies and crane their necks upwards, perhaps seeking balance by resting their hands on a conveniently placed ledge […] The main gallery door was repositioned, affording the space a more prominent entrance point and forcing the visitor to ascend up to the gallery rather than descend into it. The glass wall leading from the café to the gallery was bricked over, and the wooden swing doors replaced by heavy glass ones that required real effort to open – the gallery was no longer simply a passageway. 139 140

Schoppert, “Reviews: Singapore: New Criteria,” A R T AsiaPacific 35 (2002): 93. Schoppert, “Reviews: Singapore: New Criteria,” 93.

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141

Figure 130: Lim Tzay Chuen, A L T E R # 7 (T H E S U B S T A T I O N G A L L E R Y , 2001). Image courtesy of the artist. 141

“In 2001 Lim transformed the exhibition and rental gallery at The Substation, an art centre in Singapore. By removing the conveniences usually provided for artists, such as hanging tracks and adjustable track lighting, etc., Lim not only carried out structural alterations, but also compelled its future artist-tenants to be more conscious of the particular characteristics of the ‘white cube’ when installing their exhibitions.” See “Fig. 5, A L T E R A T I O N #7. The Substation Art Gallery, Singapore,” in A Work by Lim Tzay Chuen, 70.

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The floor was refinished in concrete with a glossy grey polyurethane industrial finish, hiding the scars of years of exhibition activity. The plywood wall coverings were removed and the columns replaced with solid walls finished in a matt white. Finally, the gallery spotlighting system was replaced with a series of fluorescent tubes producing a flat and unsentimental light.142

Alter #7 evokes an architect’s modifications. But, unlike the conventional architect’s intentions, the conceptual critique underlying Alter #7 separates Lim’s practice from mere design, revealing, rather, the invisible or “hidden constructions” built into space and suggesting our unconscious acceptance of such constructs as environmental givens. It prompts recognition of the physical, psychological, and emotional effects of spatial design on our experiences of art, registering an affective engagement that is often invisible: I am interested in studies of psychological, cognitive and physical behaviour to space and situations. What the public doesn’t see are the “hidden constructions” that are part of the project.143

The pioneering ‘spatial’ theories of postmodern political geographer Edward Soja come to mind in analysing Alter #7. Following the theorist Henri Lefebvre,144 Soja argues: We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology.145

As with Soja’s theory of spatiality, Lim’s art registers that space “is not an innocent backdrop to position, it is itself filled with politics and ideology.”146 Alter #7 encourages a deliberate moment of pause and reflection in the effort to pull the gallery’s entrance doors outwards (rather than the original more effortless push inwards) and then to ascend into the gallery space; it 142

Schoppert, “Reviews: Singapore: New Criteria”, 93. Lim, in Matthew Ngui (Mingfook), “Lim Tzay Chuen: About the Artist,” in Matthew Mingfook Ngui, Chua Ekkay & Joyce Fan, The President’s Young Talents Exhibition 2003 (exh. cat.; Singapore Art Museum, 2003): 33. 144 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson Smith (La Production de l’espace, 1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 145 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London & New York: Verso, 1989), 6. 146 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 6. 143

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suggests a transparency in the activities inside the gallery and their porous relation to public space through the addition of a quirky, low-level window inviting passersby on the street to bend and peer inside the gallery; and it pares back the spectacle of exhibition by encouraging us to see the art simply for what it is, without the exaggerated effects of lighting and other special effects. More than simple physical or aesthetic modifications, Alter #7 encourages awareness of hidden assumptions about how gallery spaces behave (for example, the expected provision of attractive spotlighting systems) and what kinds of behaviour and ideologies they engender of art, artists, curators, and spectators through practices of exhibition production and audience reception. It is in this sense that Lim also seeks to construct a more ideologically and physically ‘neutral’ space for the exhibition of artworks in the gallery space. While acknowledging the impossibility of complete neutrality within the exhibition conventions of the gallery space, the artist argues that, all too often, the structural design of the gallery space unnecessarily dictates how we see and interpret art.147 I would also suggest that Lim attempts to establish a space which sharpens our senses to art itself in the contemporary art gallery of the twenty-first century (undistracted by adjacent coffee-shop activities and the historical legacies of Singapore’s colonial architecture, for instance). The other main actor involved in realizing Alter #7 is The Substation arts centre itself – the institution with which Lim undertook negotiations to bring the project to fruition. Indeed, Lim’s Substation modifications can be seen as part of his recurring interest in conceptual art projects which rely on strategies of negotiation to reveal and test the conventions and rationales of modern institutions and their bureaucratic impulse.148 This is particularly relevant to the 147

Author’s interview with the artist Lim Tzay Chuen, Singapore, 11 June 2002. Other projects by Lim not mentioned here and which rely on similar conceptual art strategies of negotiation include “Alter #11. 2002. (U N R E A L I S E D ),” proposed for the exhibition ‘Site + Sight’ at the National Institute of Education Gallery, Singapore: “Lim proposed to release a single shot of a 7.62mm bullet from a sniper rifle, to be fired across a 1000 metre range, through the glass window into the gallery”; and A proposition that you may want to consider (2004): “Consists of an open proposition to the public to get hold of certain pages from the 2004 Biennale of Sydney catalogue with terms and conditions on reverse page. Left margin of the pages are perforated to facilitate tearing. ‘Please tear the following pages and give them to friends who may be interested’.” See “Fig. 7, ALTER #11. 2002 (U N R E A L I S E D )” in A Work by Lim Tzay Chuen, 72; and Lim Tzay Chuen, A proposition that you may want to consider (Singapore: Lim Tzay Chuen, 2004). 148

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Singapore context, in which bureaucracy and economics have spurred recent government attention to contemporary art and cultural industries more generally, but it is also a concern for art practice and curatorship in institutions the world over. The curator Hou Hanru expresses similar sentiments in his role as a curator of contemporary art: [artistic / curatorial] ambitions are very often confronted with the limits of these artistic spaces. Even now, it is still difficult to serve coffee or meals in an artistic space, for instance. […] They always constitute an intellectual, cultural and even politico-ideological problem. For instance, […] why couldn’t an exhibition space stink? This is, in reality, a practical as well as an extremely ideological question, the same as how you deal with something obvious such as security. All too often, creative interventions are blocked by all sorts of regulations applied to the exhibition space.149

It could be argued, however, that in his modifications of The Substation gallery space, Lim replaces one set of hegemonic spatial relations and ideologies with another – that of his own as artist. Are the issues of spatial control and manipulation that Lim encourages us to recognize in the former design of the gallery continued in his own subsequent architectural manipulations? Does Lim’s Alter #7 offer something more than self-interested artistic control over the gallery space? Probing further into Lim’s work process reveals the artist’s conceptual proposals as a complex web of exchanges and negotiations. As Matthew Ngui explains of his fellow artist’s work, while Lim has clear intentions to affect the status quo of selected physical or organised spaces in some way [,] the effect these works have can be seen as the end result of an often intricate but always collaborative venture between the artist and organization or individual. In order to create the most effective piece, Lim must therefore gain deep insight into the space and the organization responsible for that space.150

149

As quoted in Wouter Davidts & Tijl Vanmeirhaeghe, “Information and Critical Space: Conversation with Hou Hanru,” in On The Mid-Ground: Hou Hanru, ed. Yu Hsiao-Hwei (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2002): 265. 150 Matthew Mingfook Ngui, “Lim Tzay Chuen: The work process,” in The President’s Young Talents Exhibition 2003 (exh. cat.; Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2003): 35.

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Suggesting the relevant organization’s necessary responsibility and commitment to realizing Lim’s ideas, Ngui explains further: Lim Tzay Chuen introduces projects to these organisations or institutions in the attempt to, while persuading them to entertain possibilities, secure an acceptance of an amount of risk-taking. This is almost always the case as the artist and the organization operate in different contexts and the ensuing exchange of ideas is important. This interface between artists and organisation is seen by the artist as part of the artwork, and forms a necessary preamble to the development of the art project […]. The artist’s method is generally consensual rather than antagonistic, and is underpinned by cooperation, understanding and mutual respect in achieving a common goal. There is often considerable face giving and saving.151

The sorts of collaborations and negotiations Lim undertakes are constitutive of much contemporary art practice. As Hou argues from his perspective as a curator of Asian art, it’s up to a curator to negotiate with museums and public organizations, but also with artists who want to implement their ideas after all. Almost every artist today will admit that art today has become a matter of collaboration and negotiation.152

I suggest, too, that an important component of such negotiation in Lim’s practice is the kind of persistence, patience, and continuity required of projects underscored by delay and duration rather than instantaneity. That Lim’s projects often necessitate lengthy, involved, and repeated discussions and planning based on proposals which often encourage longer-term and even permanent institutional change necessarily inserts his practice into the protracted negotiations and procedures associated with modern bureacracies. It is also an act of ‘after-effect’. In other words, Lim’s practice is marked by a sense of longevity and legacy (much like institutional practice itself), often relying on the public’s ongoing encounters with his art projects well after their initial conception to realize their intended effect. As well as processes of collaboration and negotiation, important to Lim’s practice is the possibility of public ownership of his art projects. In their subtlety and quasi-invisibility as ‘artworks’, it is Lim’s hope that his spatial alterations are “discovered by the public themselves who, on stumbling upon 151 152

Ngui, “Lim Tzay Chuen: The work process,” 35. Davidts & Vanmeirhaeghe, “Information and Critical Space,” 265.

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[them], may feel a sense of ownership of that discovery.”153 The artist further explains the processes undertaken: investigating the sites, studying the details, the smallest elements that people usually ignore. I then try to create traps, pocket or clues, or to simply amplify elements with slight alterations or devices – something that the public will stumble upon, or eventually might. I don’t wish for the public to view my work in a straightforward way, with the presumption that it’s a piece of “art.” What is most important to me is whether they react differently when they pass by the same space after my intervention, not always consciously, or visually, but bodily and psychologically – to get a hold of their attention, to hold them back a little, to get them to rethink something that is forgotten or neglected and [to create] ownership of the space. And it’s very important that there’s a sense of self-discovery on the part of the audience – maybe it’s not so obvious at first, but somehow it catches up [with] you.154

Indeed, a number of Lim’s projects are more concerned with ‘invisibly’ deconstructing presumptions about the use of spaces than they are with actual and ‘visible’ manifestations. To this end, public disclosure of Lim’s aims and processes, and the timing of this, is also paramount in his art: Lim prefers to place the onus on the actual encounter between the public and the work [… with] disclosure of aspects of the project, fettered by what the project is trying to achieve, […] happen[ing] at a later date.155

The public eventually caught up with Lim’s project for the 2002 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. In Alter #10, Lim re-organizes the exhibition maps of the Gwangju Biennale with the assistance of gallery staff, to confusing and bewildering effect.156 Initially, many were left guessing as to what the artist was actually presenting for the exhibition. The catalogue entry for the artist was not particularly helpful, its pages blank save for the artist’s name. However, key members of the Biennale staff and all the other Biennale artists involved knew about the intent of Lim’s project.157

153

Ngui, “Lim Tzay Chuen: The work process,” 35. Ray Langenbach, “Ratio and Proposition, Lim Tzay Chuen,” ish 3.3 (2002). 155 Ngui, “Lim Tzay Chuen: About the Artist,” 33. 156 Author’s interview with the artist Lim Tzay Chuen, Singapore, 11 June 2002. 157 Author’s interview with the artist Lim Tzay Chuen, Singapore, 11 June 2002. 154

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Figure 131: Lim Tzay Chuen, A L T E R # 10 ( G W A N G J U B I E N N A L E , 2002).158 Image courtesy of the artist. 158

“Lim convinced the Biennale organizers to change the exhibition maps in all their published materials, and to rename the floors of the exhibition space and the lift buttons to correspond with the doctored maps. The ground floor of the main biennale hall was renamed the ‘second floor’, with subsequent levels renumbered accordingly. A new floor – the ‘first floor’ where Lim’s work was supposedly located in ‘Gallery 6’ – was added to the floor-plans. Being entirely fictitious, the underground floor could not be accessed by the public. The lift and stairs both terminated at the ‘second’ floor.” See “Fig. 11, A L T E R #10. Gwangju Biennale, 2002. South Korea,” in A Work by Lim Tzay Chuen, 78.

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As Lee Weng Choy, one visitor to the Gwangju Biennale, observed: while others were frantically installing or trying to install their works, there was Lim, lurking about. One could not say what he was doing. The result of about four weeks of waiting and meeting and negotiating with the curators, mediators and the whole hierarchy of officials was this: Lim was able to change the exhibition maps, and to re-name the floors and the corresponding lift buttons. The ground floor of the main biennale hall was re-named the “second floor,” subsequent levels were re-named accordingly, and a new floor was added to the map – the “first floor” – however, being entirely fictitious, one could not access it. The lift only went down to the second, and no stairway existed leading to the first … what Lim did for the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, one of the largest art events in the region, was the smallest meaningful intervention he could imagine.159

One clue to Lim’s project was a “Frequently Asked Questions” list which the artist had devised for inclusion in the exhibition docents’ training manual. This was information that could be given to members of the public if ever they should approach exhibition staff for directions to exhibition F-1, otherwise known as Alter #10. The F A Q list read as follows: Question: Where is Gallery 6? Answer: Gallery 6 is below Gallery 5, but it is closed because the artist is waiting for health and safety approval for his work to be open to the public. Question: Where is the entrance to Gallery 6? Answer: The entrance is in Gallery 5 but, because of approval problems, it has been decided by the artist and Curators [sic] to seal the entrance off completely. Question: What is the picture on the exhibition floor plan in Gallery 6[?] [The map of Gallery 6 has one diagram labelled “F-1” and another labelled “Pool.”] Answer: There is Lim Tzay Chuen’s work in Gallery 6, and behind the Gallery there is a swimming pool, Jacuzzi and sauna facility. Unfortunately, due to the lack of approval for Lim Tzay Chuen’s work, the pool, Jacuzzi and sauna are closed too. Question: I didn’t know that there was a swimming pool in the biennale.

159

Lee Weng Choy, “Lim Tzay Chuen: An inordinate faith in maps,” A R T AsiaPacific 37 (2003): 64.

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Answer: It was constructed late last year […]. It is only open for the staff of the biennale and other government employees. During the biennale, all these facilities will be closed to everyone because of the approval problem with Lim Tzay Chuen’s work.160

There is an element of humour which becomes apparent upon knowing Lim’s overall project intentions and recognizing the devices, such as the F A Q list, which he employs in his artwork. The invisibility of the artist and his art becomes a playful game of sorts. Yet Lim’s games have serious repercussions for, and prompt reflection on, the ways in which we use space and our expectations of certain kinds of spaces, such as the art gallery – in this case, a major Asian biennale exhibition arena. The artist predicts that his redesigned maps of the exhibition layout may pose a problem for future curators and exhibition organizers, who may be unaware of the project and might rely on Lim’s maps of the gallery spaces. And while public disclosure of Lim’s Gwangju Biennale project has now occurred, it was Lim’s hope that, during the course of the exhibition, visitors would notice the odd happenings and explanations surrounding his project, effectively again making this a project encouraging public realization and experience of the dynamics and architecture of public spaces. It is probably fair to say that Lim’s project was not really fully known until after the Gwangju Biennale event itself, assisted by post-exhibition publicity, particularly Lee’s documentation of Alter #10 in the international contemporary art journal A R T AsiaPacific.161 Langenbach further enlightens us on the fuller extent of the Alter#10 proposal in his essay of 2005, “Hidden Things,” published alongside Lim’s solo exhibition ‘A Work by Lim Tzay Chuen’ held at the Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore, in 2005. In his essay, Langenbach reveals that Lim had also proposed to the organizers of the Gwangju Biennale: (1) altering the size of the pillars in the Biennale Hall (2) removing a step from the staircase, and adding a step in the middle of the ramp between floors (3) adding another button to the elevator.162 160

Excerpts from Lim Tzay Chuen’s “Questions and Answers, 25 March, 2002,” for Alteration #10, 2002–Project 1 – Pavilion, Gallery 6 (1F), in Gwangju Biennale 2002: Pause: Conception, ed. Sung Wan-kyung (exh. cat.; Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Press, 2002): 204–205. 161 See Lee Weng Choy, “Lim Tzay Chuen: An inordinate faith in maps,” 64. 162 Langenbach, “Hidden Things,” 43, 45.

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These initial proposals were rejected as impracticable and expensive by the Gwangju Biennale organizers and it was only in the light of these failed proposals that Lim arrived at the idea of his fictional maps, “mak[ing] it S E E M as though structural interventions had taken place.”163 As Langenbach suggests, knowing the background to Lim’s final map project reveals Alter#10 to be less about calculated and strategic intention than the culmination of a set of experiments in trial and error, an organic process in negotiating possibilities of becoming. In 2004, Lim proposed another ambitious project – to shower love upon the romance capital of the world. This project, Alter #16, proposed for the ‘Nuit Blanche’ festival in Paris, was to occur on the evening of 2 October 2004. For that night, Lim envisaged the following: From clouds, create rain with added pheromones, in collaboration and consultation with meteorologists, health institutions and related agencies. Identify and track clouds over central Paris. A cloud seeing equipped aircraft will fly above select clouds and introduce silver iodide. A safe amount of organic pheromone mix will also be released. A light drizzle of ‘fragrance-free attractor scent rain’ will consume the entire area of central Paris. As rain and evaporation occurs throughout Paris, all will be encapsulated with ‘jouissance’, rejuvenating the love, in the love capital of the world.164

The project of love was never realized for ‘Nuit Blanche’, “deemed impossible to carry out by the exhibition curators.”165 Through its failed realization, Lim’s seemingly dreamy vision in fact tests the limits of ‘romantic’ possibility in the so called ‘romance capital’ of the world. There is a certain sense of dejection in realizing that, even in the city of love, there are limits to the expression of passion and romantic imagination. We can only deduce that, despite Lim’s highly researched, practical, and feasible proposal, the parameters of creative possibility were probably foreclosed by ideological constraints on the possible, testing how far the Parisian imagination will really go in the name of love. Part of this is possibly curatorial anxiety at bearing ethical responsibility 163

Langenbach, “Hidden Things,” 45. Lim, in A Work by Lim Tzay Chuen, 71 165 Lim, in A Work by Lim Tzay Chuen, 71. 164

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for the orchestration of this social experiment, however predicated on the ‘warm and fuzzy’ notion of love. For what is actually being proposed is an experiment in imposed human attractions, artificially engineered by a chemical cloud of introduced pheromones – hormones that are thought to move humans to certain forms of social behaviour or physiological actions, including sexual attraction. Notably, the social effect of naturally occurring human pheromones is still debated, with much speculation remaining about their role in influencing human behaviour. Remarkably, another iteration of the pheromone project was actually realized in Singapore as part of the inaugural Singapore Biennale, ‘Belief’, of 2006. In a significant turning point of sorts in the artist’s career activities in Singapore, Lim was able to negotiate bureaucratic clearance to infuse the courtroom atmosphere of Singapore’s City Hall with attractor pheromones. Jeannine Tang observed: the building was sprayed full of pheromones, subliminally conditioning audiences wandering through an interior of orchestrated desire, adding a menacing undercurrent to Biennale fever.166

Perhaps Lim’s reputation had been adequately established and his mode of conceptual art practice by that time understood, trusted, even normalized in his home city-state, especially in the context of the rapidly developing contemporary art economy of Singapore and the artist’s international renown by the time of this first Singapore Biennale.167 The irony is that Lim’s sensory aesthetic is here authorized by the state, leading us to ask whether the official permission granted Lim to carry out his project undermined the very politics of negotiation and revelation inherent in Lim’s practice. Or perhaps Lim’s intervention here can be seen as a history of negotiations with the Singapore state, finally realized and revealed. Lim’s art projects encapsulate in a more subtle way the various aspects of memory-in-art that I have sought to foreground throughout this chapter, including: the political negotiations which determine what kinds of narratives may be forged as memory, and whether certain narratives may be forged at all; that, along with the temporal nature of memory production, memory 166

Jeannine Tang, “Spectacle’s Politics and the Singapore Biennale,” Journal of Visual Culture 6.3 (2007): 372. 167 By the time of the Singapore Biennale of 2006, Lim had participated in major international exhibitions such as the Gwangju Biennale (2002), the Biennale of Sydney (2004), and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005).

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narratives are also always characterized by the spaces of their making; that the uncovering of alternative memory narratives is a project of risk-taking; that while some memory narratives are made easily visible, others may never be realized visually for one reason or another; and that authorship of memory narratives is negotiated, shared, and contested among artists, curators, artviewing audiences, and other stakeholders. Indeed, the contemporary visual art of Southeast Asian artists reveals markedly diverse means and experiences of ‘art-as-memory’ sites, seeking to uncover forgotten histories, alternative memories, and invisible narratives. Throughout the preceding discussions I have explored, for instance, art which engages with diasporic nostalgia, traumatic memories of pain and loss, colonial and postcolonial forms of remembrance, and art that uncovers or recalls the hidden aspects of the everyday. These kinds of performative memory production show memory to be contingent on the temporal and spatialized contexts of its making. Moreover, although often linked to mindful intellectual activity, memory is also often registered in contemporary art as a consequence of embodied, affective engagement with the world. The next chapter explores further this theme of embodiment, navigating the geographies of bodies, or ‘corporeographies’, as expressed in contemporary Southeast Asian art.

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6 Corporeographies Locating Intimate Spaces of Art

the body is that “pre-post-erous space,” the site of a corporeography that conjoins the dynamic political economy of signification – its written surface and writing surface.1

C

of alternative themes of art expression beyond the exclusively racialized lens, this chapter explores the theme of corporeality in contemporary Southeast Asian art. It traces how contemporary Southeast Asian artists have explored corporeal representation in art beyond mere significations of race, presenting the body as a complex sign and form for myriad identifications and aesthetic purposes. In exploring such artworks, I posit the body as a kind of critical geography of identification – a “corporeography”2 that has been regularly ‘fleshed out’ by artists in their contemporary art practice. As a corporeography, the bodyin-art represents a discursively produced site and space offering multiple embodied identifications. In particular, I consider how the body features as a key site for affective encounter and renewed definitions of subjectivity in contemporary Southeast Asian art. By engaging with expanded definitions of the body, beyond biological materiality, not only do I explore more obvious visual ‘figurations’ but also investigate how artists foreground the body as performa1

O N T I N U I N G M Y E X A M I N AT I O N

Vicky Kirby, “Corporeographies,” Inscriptions: Journal for the Critique of Colonial Discourse 5 (special issue, “Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists,” ed. James Clifford & Vivek Dhareshwar; 1989): 118. 2 Vicky Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York & London: Routledge, 1997).

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tive idea, gesture, and discourse. Accordingly, I explore a range of corporeal issues in art, including cultural abjection, human figuration, the exotic body, bodies of political activism, and im/material bodies. Central here is the interplay between the artist’s embodied practice and the viewer’s embodied engagements as these register the porous relations between bodies and subjectivities. Such art presents us with a complexity of corporeal experience which is often missed in the over-inscription of race in reviewings of contemporary Southeast Asian art. It highlights the ways in which Southeast Asian artists actually complicate bodily matters and therefore defy the inscription of exclusively racialized discourses. In exploring these issues, I sketch two dominant angles of artistic engagement with the body. First, there are realist representations that are literally figured in a variety of two and three-dimensional artforms, particularly to communicate issues of subjectivity and identity or to present the body as a socio-political force to be reckoned with. Secondly, there is art that abstracts the body, rendering it only partly visible or sometimes even as an invisible or ephemeral presence; ironically, these latter representations often also take account of the body’s materiality – of ‘skin’, ‘hair’, and ‘breath’, for instance – in conceptual, spiritual, performance-oriented, and/or installative artforms. Again, what emerges from these diverse explorations of contemporary art is the diversity of what is defined as contemporary art itself. The art I explore reveals bodies and spaces as the effect of both their social construction and their sensual materiality – particularly pertinent to recognizing art’s affective function as both a sensory and a discursively produced effect. As cultural theorists such as Mike Featherstone and Bryan Turner have suggested, in late modernity the body has become the primary means of selfexpression, the writing of one’s identity, whether as exclusively discursive or material inscriptions. However, in reality, the body is constituted by a complex intertwining of both its physical matter and the social discourses that organize it. Bodies are “the physical sites where the relations of class, gender, race, sexuality and age come together and are embodied in practice.”3 In this intersection of the corporeal and the discursive, bodies, rather than being biological givens, “are also always in a state of becoming”4 and polysemous. 3

Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1997): 82. 4 Robyn Longhurst, Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): 5.

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Figure 132: Amanda Heng Liang Ngim, Another Woman (1996). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Admittedly, there is a particular contradictory effect in highlighting the body’s significance in art. Bodies, as much as territorialized nationalisms, have become markers of (auto-)biographical and cultural affiliation. Southeast Asian bodies (viz. Lee Wen’s re-incorporation as Yellow Man) are burdened with stereotyped narratives of racialized difference. Race is inscribed on the body and even overwrites it. Such stereotypings, in which Southeast Asian bodies are posited as ‘Other’, are seen to function as acts of fetishization which afford agency to some – in modernity, white, Western bodies – while denying it to Others. As the art historian Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, certain bodies have become the subject of a discursive inscription so thorough that they are invisible in any other way. This overwriting has rendered the body of the Jew, the African and others as “visibly” different confirming the perfection of the Western subject by this “selfevident” difference of race.5

However, as we will see, to foreground the human body in art is often to configure it as a site of performative resistance. In the case of Lee Wen, this constitutes an undermining of essentialist racial stereotypes. Other art discussed 5

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): 3.

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throughout this chapter engages in bodily resistance in order to challenge the hegemonic ‘body politic’ of the State on other issues, often at the risk of political and, even, corporeal marginalization. In such instances, art becomes an image of contestation, a counter-image. Art of this kind often reveals the discrepancies between the individual body and that of the body of the State: At different times, different kinds of beings have been excluded from the pact [between the individual and the political body], often simply by virtue of their corporeal specificity.6

At the level of local exhibitions in Southeast Asia, there is a similar logic of the state-defined body politic which privileges and idealizes images of and images by some members of the national polity, while excluding others. Artists who prioritize the task of image-making in their life practice are often in creative tension with the state and its preference for official images. More direct or realist figurations of the body in art are often strident political representations that stress the power of the individual and of the masses as social forces to be reckoned with. They also figure the body in art in order to explore questions of the human condition, especially in relation to social change.

Art of the People, for the People: The Politics of Figuration In Bayu Utomo Radjikin’s striking sculptural installation Lang Kachang (1991), the figure of a tribal warrior is pieced together with rusting metal scraps and cement in the form of an indigenous warrior, head raised to the sky as if in anguished response to modernity’s destructive effects. As this disfigured warrior without arms attempts to keep his balance in a half-squat of sorts, his mouth gapes, suggesting an enraged or tortured screaming. The powerful effect of the expressive plaster-cast head is to prompt us to imagine the sound of “a long cathartic scream”7 that fills the surrounding air with its 6

Moira Gatens, “Corporeal representation in/and the body politic,” in Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the mapping of bodies and spaces, ed. Rosalyn Diprose & Robyn Ferrell (North Sydney, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1991): 82–83. For Gatens, the modern ‘body politic’ has itself been “constituted by a creative act, by a work of art or artifice, that uses the human body as its model or metaphor.” 7 Joanna Lee, “Self-Portraits: Imag(in)ing the ‘I’,” in Imaging Selves: Singapore Art Museum Collection Exhibition Series 1998–1999, ed. Joanna Lee & Bridget Tracy Tan (exh. cat.; Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1998): 33.

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Figure 133: Bayu Utomo B. Radjikin, Lang Kachang (1991). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Figure 134: Bayu Utomo B. Radjikin, Lang Kachang (1991; detail). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

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frustrated reverberations. The armoured body of this warrior is given shape by melded metal parts, and a stylized feathered headdress suggests his indigeneity as an Iban warrior. While the sculpture may relate to the artist’s own experiences of cultural displacement as an effect of his migration from rural Sabah to urbanized Kuala Lumpur, it also alludes to the general social dislocation that follows rapid destruction of indigenous habitats and life-styles. Radjikin’s use of the figurative form in this sculpture is significant in modern Malaysian art history, for, until the late 1980s, it was the abstract styles of Malay-Islamic artists that dominated the scene.8 The return of figuration in Malaysian contemporary art practice is exemplified in the art of Redza Piyadasa and Wong Hoy Cheong: Piyadasa’s The Haji Family (1990) delves into Malaysia’s photographic archive to recuperate alternative ‘Malaysian’ family portraits at a time of heated debates over national identity. Similarly, Wong’s charcoal drawings of the seminal Migrants series of 1994 (see Chapter 5 above) forcefully re-assert the importance of figuration in art that is relevant to all social groups in Malaysia, indigenous and non-indigenous alike; his earlier The Nouveau Riche, the Elephant, the Foreign Maid, or the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1991) portrays Malaysia’s rising middle class and the insidious pull of consumerism at a time of economic prosperity coupled with growing social inequality. The art of Piyadasa and Wong was an enormous influence on another generation of Malaysian artists, including Radjikin, who were influenced both by this turn to figuration in the face of dominant abstract tendencies and by a clear artistic commitment to the socio-political. Indeed, modern Malaysian art – of the ‘fine art’ tradition – was hitherto largely devoid of figurative forms, and was shaped by abstract expressionist, conceptualist, and Islamic-inspired movements.9 The emergence of figuration

8

See Michelle Antoinette, “Different Visions: Contemporary Malaysian Art and Exhibition in the 1990s and Beyond,” in Art and Social Change, ed. Caroline Turner (Canberra, Pandanus, 2005): 229–52; republished in Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume 2: Reactions – New Critical Strategies, ed. Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2013): 166–85. 9 The Malaysian art historian Sarena Abdullah explores figurative forms within a wider field of modern visual culture practice (e.g., popular cartoons) in Malaysia, beyond the fine-art tradition which until now has been the hegemonic focus of modern Malaysian art history. Abdullah, “Contesting the Narrative: Modern Malaysian Art in the Early 20th Century,” paper presented for “Tilting the World: Histories of Modern

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Figure 135: Wong Hoy Cheong, The Nouveau Riche, the Elephant, the Foreign Maid, or the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1991). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Figure 136: Redza Piyadasa, The Haji's Family (1990). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. and Contemporary Asian Art: A Symposium in Honour of Professor John Clark,” Sydney, 29 November 2013.

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in late-twentieth-century practices in Southeast Asia may thus be viewed as “a reaction against the formalism of abstraction in the local art scenes”10 and against the presumed emptiness of abstract art styles with their seemingly depoliticized representational forms. In Indonesia and Malaysia especially, abstraction was seen to offer possibilities for engaging with local, Islamic aesthetic traditions, which otherwise disallow figurative representation.11 However, there was growing unease with the hegemony of abstract artforms and its presumed silencing of social issues and political expression. After returning to Malaysia in 1986 after study in the U S A , Wong Hoy Cheong reflected on a new generation of Malaysian artists: “They are not against Islam as much as they are against the non-orthodoxy of the figure.”12 Stressing the importance of figuration to his own politically motivated art, he asked: “How does one represent injustice and the violation of human rights through abstract art?”13 The art curator Ahmad Mashadi argues that artistic explorations of the human condition are not limited to realist figurative conventions and that formal abstraction in contemporary Southeast Asian art does not necessarily always mean a negation of the human body or other thematic content. Rather, they can offer powerful sensory and affective connection between the body of representation and the body of the audience-participant: Figurative abstraction re-deploys the formalism of “sensations” to make them complicit with a description of the human figure. By connecting the figure to the unutterable, the observed and the literal are released from the binding categories of meanings and freed into forms of “virtualities.’’14 10

Joanna Lee & Lindy Poh, “Introduction,” in Imaging Selves: Singapore Art Museum Collection Exhibition Series, 6. 11 See Kenneth George, “The Cultural Politics of Modern and Contemporary Islamic Art in Southeast Asia,” in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, ed. Nora A. Taylor & Boreth Ly (Ithaca N Y : Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012): 53–67, and Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld (Malden M A : Wiley–Blackwell, 2010); and Virginia Hooker, “Mindful of Allah: Islam and the visual arts in Indonesia and Malaysia,” Artlink 33.1 (March 2013): 70–73. 12 Wong Hoy Cheong, in Krishen Jit, “New Art, New Voices: Krishen Jit talks to Wong Hoy Cheong on Contemporary Malaysian Art,” in What About Converging Extremes? (exh. cat.; Kuala Lumpur: Galeri Wan, 1993): 7. 13 Wong Hoy Cheong, in Jit, “New Art, New Voices: Krishen Jit talks to Wong Hoy Cheong on Contemporary Malaysian Art,” 6. 14 Ahmad Mashadi, “Figurative Abstraction: Concealed Identities,” in Imaging

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the interest is in providing an intimation of the unutterable, “outside” of the physical realm. Mental states that are not extended in actual space are thus suggested through meditating elements of the disfigured, fractured and fragmented figure often continuously shapeshifting, incomplete or displaced anatomies and the overbearing envelop of space that sites and consumes. Such sites are parallel realms, connected but not necessarily contingent on physical realities.15

Mashadi points to the affective dimension of abstraction and its ability to elicit human experience especially via the sensory connection with abstract art and its ability to articulate what cannot always be conveyed as forcefully via the conventional mimetic codes of realistic artistic representation – namely, the feelings, sensations, ideas, and beliefs of human experience. Moreover, Mashadi underlines the alternative possibilities of articulation through the abstracted or fragmented body. The latter is often a powerful presence in contemporary Southeast Asian art, particularly as a vehicle to focus attention on the human condition and in cultural contexts which otherwise restrict or limit full-body figuration. It is interesting to observe, with regard to representations of the body in international exhibitions of contemporary Southeast Asian art, that it has more often been demonstrably figurative artworks that have been foregrounded and less so the kinds of “figurative abstraction” which Mashadi describes (including, for instance, indigenous or spiritually inspired paintings and sculptures conveyed via geometric or abstract forms, such as the Islamic art described above, as well as calligraphic, abstractionist ink paintings in Chinese traditions).16 I suggest that this is entangled in at least two key issues: first, the relationship of abstractionist styles to spiritual contexts, where artworks serve (particularly for Islamic sensibilities) as meditative or ritualistic devices, seem to not meet expectations about the function of art in prevailing international avant-garde currents, and therefore struggle to be recognized as ‘contemporary art’; second, the popular appeal of political art from the region, especially through internationally recognizable forms of installation and peformance art17 and, related to this, the appeal of artforms that engage in more direct figSelves: Singapore Art Museum Collection Exhibition Series, 38. 15 Mashadi, “Figurative Abstraction: Concealed Identities,” 38. 16 “Figurative Abstraction: Concealed Identities,” 38. 17 Prominent contemporary artists from Southeast Asia associated with contemporary performance art traditions or who have a strong performative element in their

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urative representations of ‘the people’ and prevailing social concerns (e.g., through photography, paintings, and drawings), and which therefore more readily convey these themes to outside audiences. Striking examples treating the theme of ‘the people’ – the rakyat in Indonesia, ‘people power’ in the Philippines – suggest the powerful significance of figurative representation in contemporary Southeast Asian art. While different in their various ways, the modern art of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore has undergone a similar turn to figuration as a means for expressing socio-political concerns that are at the heart of the everyday realities of ‘the people’. In the earliest forms of modern art this was especially evident in social-realist styles with anti-colonial, nationalizing themes. The continuing influence of social realism can be detected in, for instance, the art of collectives such as Taring Padi and Apotik Komik in Indonesia and Sanggawa in the Philippines, who have taken up socio-political themes of ‘the people’ in murals or mural-like paintings and installations employing figurative techniques of bodily representation. In the Philippines, the ‘People Power’ slogan has become synonymous with the E D S A (Epifanio de los Santos Avenue) uprising in February 1986 which led to the ousting of then President Ferdinand Marcos and, following this, with the public demonstration of People Power II in January 2001 against President Joseph Estrada. In Indonesia, the obvious parallel is the strengthening power of the people in the years leading up to Suharto’s eventual resignation in 1998. The socio-political histories of both countries towards the close of the twentieth century record similar stories of social unrest. Struggles for democracy, freedom from corruption, economic recovery and relapse, and socio-economic disparity have occupied both countries in recent times and provide a context for comparative discussion of the contemporary art produced there. It is not surprising to find that, amid the social turmoil and chaos of recent decades in these two countries, many artists have found a common purpose in a politically focused, socially engaged or even activist art which communicontemporary art practice include Tang Da Wu, S. Chandrasekaran, Lee Wen, Amanda Heng, Vincent Leow, Jason Lim, Jeremy Hiah, Juliana Yasin, Kai Lam, Rizman Putra (Singapore); Heri Dono, Dadang Christanto, FX Harsono, Arahmaiani, Mella Jaarsma, Iwan Wijono, Melati Suryodarmo (Indonesia); Liew Kung Yu, Ray Langenbach (Malaysia); Judy Freya Sibayan, Yuan Moro O’Campo, Mideo Cruz, Ronaldo Ruiz, Racquel de Loyola, and Bea Camacho (the Philippines).

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cates the concerns of ‘the people’. Highlighting the desire to integrate art in society, many artists have felt compelled to use their art as a means of critiquing social and political injustices, to highlight community concerns and issues, and to encourage social reflection and action. What becomes evident is a commitment by various artists to the social welfare of their fellow human beings and the immediate communities in which artists live, and the ways in which art might serve society on both the local and the national level. Thus, while ‘art for the people’ has been a preoccupation of modern artists in both Indonesia and the Philippines in the context of anti-colonial and related nationalist struggles, contemporary artists also engage with the theme, but now in relation to present-day social and political issues and often directly engaging communities in participatory or socially engaged artforms. The collective Taring Padi (meaning ‘teeth of the rice plant’) was formed six months after the resignation of Suharto in 1998. Best known for their street art, these politically conscious artists had also been active in the radical student demonstrations protesting for reform in Indonesia while Suharto was still in power. In its social engagement beyond the gallery, Taring Padi’s activist art seeks to give voice to marginalized, socio-economically disadvantaged communities in Indonesia and often does so via the political immediacy of bold, figurative representations. Their choice of multi-disciplinary, popular culture media – including posters, banners, brochures, performances, music, and puppets – is integral to their belief in the relationship between art and society and the necessity to create art which is easily communicated. Echoing the flourishing activist art of the 1950s and 1960s in Indonesia which was subsequently suppressed under the New Order, Taring Padi’s visual art is often carried out in a social-realist style which utilizes the bold graphics of traditional woodblock printing to narrativize stories of social injustice and suffering. The group’s large-scale banners and posters are usually packed to the edges with iconic social figures of all kinds typical of Indonesian society: corrupt government and military officials, poor farmers and factory workers, the urban rich, the rural poor, men and women, the young and old. Importantly, Taring Padi’s art extends beyond the visual to embrace communitybased activities such as music performances, assisting farmers in developing sustainable agricultural practices, and hosting educative workshops incorporating their multi-disciplinary artforms.

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Figure 137: Taring Padi, Land and Farmers are Free when United (undated). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

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Figure 138: Apotik Komik, Under Estimate (1999). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

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In the Philippines, Lazaro Soriano painted Jak en Poy (local child’s play: Stick and stones) in 1987 following the E D S A uprising, the removal of Ferdinand Marcos from power, and the subsequent appointment of Corazon Aquino as President. In his typically cynical manner, in this painting Soriano provides a satirical commentary on the first people-power revolution and the failed aspirations of the Aquino government to restore democracy and freedom. Most recognizably, the figure of Cory Aquino is pictured at centre, while Cardinal Jaime Sin, the spiritual leader of the majority Catholic population, stands behind the new President. The association of religion and politics alludes to the power of the Catholic Church as the ‘ethical instance’ behind the political leadership. All around, ‘people-power’ supporters are swarming, looking at and praying to the Aquino /Sin partnership in the hope of change. Party balloons colour the sky in celebration, but, tellingly, amidst the frenzy, a single monkey floating above the figure of Aquino scratches its head, its form suggesting a question mark, as if it is wondering what positive change, if any, the Aquino government will bring. Likewise, political commentary was a key motivation for the Philippinesbased Sanggawa group of artists, with their trademark socio-political murals and large-scale canvases. Formed in 1994 but now disbanded, Sanggawa consciously developed a collaborative art practice underscored by social issues, with their art employed as a means of communicating their concerns to wider audiences. Its founding members were Elmer Borlongan, Federico Sievert, Mark Justiniani, Karen Flores, and Joy Mallari. Each of the artists in the group has been affiliated with sociopolitical art groups in Manila including A B A Y (Artista ng Bayan, or Artists for the Nation), and Grupong Salingpusa, an inofficial collective of socially aware student painters. The Sanggawa group’s preferred choice of medium, collaborative mural-making, suggests the artists’ commitment to sharing in social concerns and raising social awareness. Indeed, in their art, the social body of the masses is paramount. For Sanggawa, producing art through a collaborative process sharply reduced the authority and therefore ideology of any one artist. The group’s name itself indicates a desire for oneness through collaboration: ‘Sanggawa’ is a contraction of the Filipino phrase ‘sang gawa’, meaning ‘one work’. Likewise, in its painting process, Sanggawa often strove to conceal the individual contributions of each artist, making it difficult to see where the work of each artist begins or ends. Instead, through the collaborative painting process, the individual contributions become anonymous, and the painting an apparently

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Figure 139: Sanggawa, The Second Coming (1994). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Figure 140: Sanggawa, Palo-sebo (1995). Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

seamless work of art. Not unlike the practices of Taring Padi, these practices are a commitment to the communal body, the social body, which engages with others in art and life. Sanggawa’s painting The Second Coming (1995), perhaps one of the group’s best-known socio-political murals, is a critical response to Pope John Paul I I ’s visit to the Philippines in January 1995. Part of a narrative series entitled Vox Populi Vox Dei (1994–95), meaning ‘The Voice of the People is the Voice of God’, this work comments on the role of Christianity in shaping the beliefs

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and ideologies of the Philippine people. The powerful influence of the Roman Catholic Church was evident in the massive turnout of Filipinos who arrived to welcome the Pope. In this characteristically bustling painting, the Pope’s authoritative figure stands centre stage as star of the show, the living personification of Catholicism, while his huge following of loyal fans applaud him in a state of mass hysteria. Moneybags circulate among the crowd, as the Pope urges his following to give generously. Cardinal Jaime Sin stands at the Pope’s side while political figureheads, seen in the background, intimate the close association between religion and politics in Philippine society. Shifting to a different political theme, the sexualization and the exploitation of women, Salubong (Encounter) (1994) shows the Sanggawa group bringing together issues of religion, sexuality, and popular culture in the meeting of two contemporary female icons of Philippine society: the Virgin Mary and the Filipina beauty queen. The setting is the beauty pageant stage where the scantily clad successful competitor is being crowned by approving male judges, Ferdinand Marcos’ son being one of them. Meanwhile, the Virgin Mary seems, iconoclastically, to be leering down at the multitude who have come to worship not her body but that of the other most beautiful woman in the country, the national beauty queen. There is an oscillation between the sexed female body and the etherialized, maternal virginal body in Sanggawa’s Salubong that is not unlike themes explored by José Legaspi in works such as La Muerte de Justo (The Death of the Just) (c.1998) (see Chapter 5 above), but Sanggawa explores these themes in a much lighter yet biting political commentary with a populist feel. Sanggawa’s artwork, like that of Legaspi, relates the hold of Catholicism in the Philippines and its influence in defining the pure, sacred, and ordered social body. While Sanggawa here present the popular discourses of womanhood and femininity in tension with that of the Catholic faith, the sexed and gendered body in Legaspi’s work is interrogated through the abjected and taboo homo-sexual subject that is denied in Catholicism. What is common to both, however, is the interest in employing figurative representations in conveying issues of social concern. In the following discussion, I further explore the body as a site for expressing issues of social concern. In particular, I turn to the Indonesian context and the artwork of Mella Jaarsma, whose performances and installations foreground the body as the very site of sociality and impetus for inter-corporeal social encounter and exchange.

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Exchanging Skins: The Art of Mella Jaarsma My works are bodily modifications of the social space in between the layers of skin, clothing, sartorial inhibition and housing / architecture.18

Dari mana? Mau ke mana? Asli mana? Where are you from? Where are you going? Where are you from originally? So goes the customary Indonesian call to travellers passing through the archipelago, also adopted as the title for one of the most celebrated Orientalist paintings by the French modernist artist Paul Gauguin.19 It is an appeal that suggests a presumed trajectory of movement and cultural shift as a traveller and, moreover, evokes an encounter of unfamiliarity between two strangers: one a foreigner, the other a native. Hence, it is also a proposal from one stranger to another to overcome the distance between them – of cultures and life-histories – now that their bodily proximity makes them at least physically intimate strangers. Drawing on her real-life circumstances of migration to and resettlement in Indonesia, the art practice of the Dutch-born Indonesian artist Mella Jaarsma reveals the nuances and complexities of new notions of home and belonging in transnational spaces. Her art is often a questioning of cultural authenticity at the skin surface. As we will see, Jaarsma’s art is also deeply connected to the movements and mobilities explored above in Chapter 4, but in positioning her art in this chapter, I seek to highlight Jaarsma’s artistic interest in the body as a site for exploring notions of home and belonging. Encountering embodied otherness during experiences of travel and migration has been a key theme of Jaarsma’s art ever since her move to Indonesia and the subsequent course of her international career as a contemporary artist. Jaarsma has been resident in Java since 1984 and has become internationally recognized for her elaborate and often, intricate fabrications of ‘second skins’ which she developed in Indonesia. Adopting the epidermal motif, she has created numerous bodily coverings which often resemble the jilbab – the traditional robe worn by Muslim girls that hides everything but the eyes.20 18

Jaarsma, artist’s statement, July 2011. Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897) is the title of one the most famous paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist, Paul Gauguin. Interestingly, the paintings and sculptures of Gauguin were deeply influenced by his time in the Pacific but also by photographs of carved reliefs decorating the ancient Buddhist temple of Borobodur in Java. 20 Mella Jaarsma & Remy Jungerman, “Interview: Mella Jaarsma interviewed by 19

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However, Jaarsma’s skins have taken on many forms and shapes, evoking all kinds of subjectivity. Despite this diversity, Jaarsma observes: “Since September 11th the veils suddenly got a one-sided interpretation, which [she] is not very happy with.”21 Jaarsma’s skins have been made from a variety of materials, animal, plant, and artificial, where the choice of material often relates to specific cultural identities and contexts.22 For instance, Saya Goreng Kamu I /I Fry For You I (2000) is made of squirrel skins; Saya Goreng Kamu I I /I Fry For You I I (2000) snakeskin; S A R A -swati (2000) dried banana-tree trunks; I am ethnic I (2001) goatskin; Shameless Gold (2002) gold-painted cocoons; and Bolak – balik (2002) buffalo skin and horn; for The Follower (2003), Jaarsma sewed together badges, collected in Yogyakarta, from all manner of organizations ranging from religious groups, political parties, and schools to separatist groups and sport clubs; for The Healer, Jaarsma created cloaks using seaweed, squid, seahorses, and medicinal plants to comment on hunting, killing, feeding, and healing. More recently, she has reconceptualized her cloaks as ‘flexible housings’ that form protective shelters or constrictive tents of asylum. Jaarsma explains thus her interest in the ‘skin’ as artistic subject-matter: We wear a second skin every day that indicates, for instance, our membership of specific groups in our cultural, social and religious surroundings. Wearing a veil, covering the body and face, on one hand can be seen as a dress code that signifies the group to which we belong. On the other hand, it conceals identity much in the way camouflage does. In both cases, it is about giving up individuality and personal identity for the sake of becoming unapproachable and untouchable – the person’s identity becomes totally blurred.23

In effect, Jaarsma investigates the different cultural skins we inhabit and come across in our travels and the kind of outcomes of such encounters. She urges us to consider how our dealings with strangers take place at the level of the Remy Jungerman,” in Grid: Tiong Ang, Fendry Ekel, Mella Jaarsma, Remy Jungerman, ed. Tiong Ang, Fendry Ekel, Mella Jaarsma, Remy Jungerman, & Zwaan Krijer (exh. cat.; Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art House, 2003): 55. 21 Jaarsma & Jungerman, “Mella Jaarsma interviewed by Remy Jungerman,” 55. 22 See Valentine Willie Fine Art, Mella Jaarsma: The Shelter. 23 Mella Jaarsma, artist’s statement in Identities versus Globalisation, online exhibition catalogue http://www.hbfasia.org/southeastasia/thailand/exhibitions/identities versusglobalisation/ivg_cat/art/Eng/ivg_p_follower.htm (accessed 12 December 2004).

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Figure 141: Mella Jaarsma, Hi Inlander (Hello Native) (1999). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 142: Mella Jaarsma, Hi Inlander (Hello Native) (1999; face detail). Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

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body, as well as how skin performs a peculiar interplay of containing and exposing the subject, “paradoxically protect[ing] us from others and expos[ing] us to them.”24 Hence, at the same time as Jaarsma’s veilings mask the racial background of the wearer, both the wearer (the stranger within) and the viewer (the stranger without) are also encouraged to experience ‘another skin’. Throughout this process, Jaarsma asks us to consider questions such as: what might it be like to inhabit and move in another’s skin? Does taking residence in another body create an alter /native subjectivity? In adopting the skin of another, can skin become comfortable shelter or is it always an altogether foreign experience? Is skin a porous interface for or an impermeable barrier to passages of intercultural dialogue? The artist regards these as important questions in what she feels is a waning tolerance for multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies in particular: Everyone who confronts my work is coming at it from different backgrounds and cultures, dealing with highly personal sets of taboos and therefore experiencing the work in different ways. I want my work to relate to these specific audiences, to deal with some of their taboos and interpretations. This takes great sensitivity, and therefore I try to find ways to open up dialogue, rather than work in a more confrontational way.25

An obvious source of inspiration for the kind of inter- and crosscultural investigations Jaarsma undertakes in her installations and performances is her own diasporic existence. While the artist grew up in the Netherlands, she has since put down fairly solid roots in Indonesia. Following her art education in the Netherlands at the Fine Arts Academy ‘Minerva’, Groningen, between 1978 and 1984, Jaarsma undertook further art training in Indonesia at the Art Institute of Indonesia, Yogyakarta (1985–86) and at the Art Institute Jakarta (1984). She has chosen to live, work, and raise a family from Java, and shares her life with her husband and fellow artist, Nindityo Adipurnomo, with whom she established the independent art space Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta in1988. Reflecting on her experience of migration from the Netherlands and resettlement in Indonesia, Jaarsma comments:

24

Sue L. Cataldi, Emotion, Depth and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space (Albany: State U of New York P , 1993): 145. 25 Jaarsma, artist’s statement, July 2011.

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Figure 143: Mella Jaarsma, S A R A -swati (2000). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 144: Mella Jaarsma, The Warrior, The Healer, The Feeder (2003). Image courtesy of the artist.

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R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾ By choosing to live within a totally different culture, after having grown up in the Netherlands, I became more aware of the values and norms of my own cultural background. This process made me conscious of differences between cultures and also taught me how to identify these differences. What we consider reality comes to us by means of contrasts in experiences.26

Jaarsma here affirms that the experience of migration often produces a condition of strangeness that is contrasted with a more familiar place which one associates with ‘home’. Jaarsma believes that her “work focuses on an awareness of these experiences – ideas about our own existence in a certain place in a particular world.”27 In leaving her ‘home’ nation, Jaarsma becomes a stranger, “a body out of place” in the everyday world and communities she initially encountered and came to inhabit in Indonesia. In the words of the culturalstudies theorist Sara Ahmed, “here, the condition of being a stranger is determined by the event of leaving home.”28 However, as Ahmed also points out, in this formulation home is implicitly constructed as a purified space of belonging in which the subject is too comfortable to question the limits or borders of her or his experience, indeed where the subject is so at ease that she or he does not think.29

Thus, the home territory induces identity as a familiar and stable experience. By contrast, the experience of displacement through processes of migration often reawakens a sense of the self in relation to others, as reflected in Jaarsma’s relocation to Indonesia: I question my own existence in the hybrid feudal society in Java, where every day I have to deal with the stereotyped roles of a foreigner as post-colonialist and explorer. My work is also about positioning ‘the native’ and ‘the ethnic’ and the acknowledgement that these groups could be reversed, depending on their surroundings.30 26

Mella Jaarsma, artist’s statement in Site+Sight: Translating Cultures, ed. Binghui Huangfu (exh. cat.; Singapore: Earl Lu Gallery, L A S A L L E – S I A College of the Arts, 2002): 167. 27 Jaarsma, artist’s statement in Site+Sight (2002), 167. 28 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London & New York: Routledge, 2000): 87. 29 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 87. 30 Jaarsma, artist’s statement, July 2011.

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But when does a stranger begin to acquire the status of less strange and more familiar and what does ‘home’ come to mean as diasporic peoples such as Jaarsma come to know different experiences of locality? Jaarsma’s accumulated experiences and lived connections with Indonesia would suggest that she is, at least now, not a complete stranger. Instead, she is likely to tread a continuum of alienation and intimacy, distance and proximity, in which degrees of strangeness and familiarity depend on specific encounters with strange or familiar Others. Here two contrasting definitions of home emerge: home as ‘where one lives’; and home as ‘where one comes from.’ In her work on diasporic communities, Avtar Brah astutely observes that while the concept of diaspora implicitly inscribes the notion of a mythic homeland, “not all diasporas inscribe homing desire through a wish to return to a place of origin.”31 In Jaarsma’s case, for example, home is also inscribed as the lived experience of her Yogyakartan-Indonesian locality. As Ahmed further explains, Home as “where one usually lives” becomes theorized as the lived experience of locality […] the locality intrudes into the senses: it defines what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remembers. The lived experience of being-at-home hence involves the enveloping of subjects in a space which is not simply outside them: being-at-home suggests that the subject and space leak into each other, inhabit each other.32

Since her move to Indonesia Jaarsma has participated in a number of international exhibitions, including ‘A P T 3’ (see Chapter 3 above), in which her art has been presented as representative of contemporary Indonesian art practice. Like that of the growing number of other international artists who have taken up residence in a place other than their country of origin, her inclusion in these exhibitions has brought to the fore the cultural logic of international exhibition representation.33 Jaarsma elaborates on this:

31

Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 193. 32 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 89 (emphasis in original). 33 “Interview: Mella Jaarsma interviewed by Remy Jungerman,” 54. Jaarsma also reports how the Indonesian curator Jim Supangkat “wrote about [her] work for a book published in Singapore in 1994, but the article was banned because [she] wasn’t an Indonesian” (54).

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Figure 145: Mella Jaarssma, Bule Bull (2002). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 146: Mella Jaarsma, Shelter Me (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 147: Mella Jaarsma, The Trophy (Animals have no religion) (2011). Image courtesy of the artist.

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R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾ Up until the end of the 1990s, most foreign curators passing through Cemeti Gallery [the Gallery for which Jaarsma is Co-director and in which her work is sometimes shown, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia] didn’t consider my work for two reasons: because they were searching for ‘authentic’ Indonesian artists and because I found it difficult to be a promoter of the other artists at Cemeti and promote my own work at the same time. Since 1998, entering the era of globalization, thanks to curators like Joanna Lee, Hou Hanru, Apinan Poshyananda, Julie Ewington and others, I have been invited to join international exhibitions and events in countries such as Japan, Australia, Singapore and Thailand, mainly representing ‘Indonesia.’ I am established in the curatorial system that selects artists to represent a country. Although finally accepted in the international circuit, I still have mixed feelings about representing Indonesia; I always feel that I have to excuse myself for being white, as if I have stolen an opportunity for a ‘native’ artist. When I was picked up at the airport in Ireland to go to EV+A at Limerick, I got the reaction ‘Oh, I thought you’d look more oriental.’34

Quite tellingly, in her catalogue essay for ‘A P T 3’, the curator Julie Ewington foregrounded Jaarsma’s art within this “problem of location.”35 For the ‘A P T 3’ curators, Jaarsma’s Dutch heritage was regarded as less important than her contributions to Indonesian art and, in this sense, also disrupted traditional models that place diasporic communities on the periphery of their ‘receiving’ or ‘host’ country. Controversially, she was presented in the “Indonesia” section of the exhibition, raising questions about her suitability for this category in the light of the ‘Crossing Borders’ section of ‘A P T 3’. As I discussed in Chapter 3, the ‘Crossing Borders’ section sought to include “Artists who cross borders in their life and work […] and who have a direct relationship and involvement with the Asia–Pacific region today.”36 For some, Jaarsma was considered better suited to ‘Crossing Borders’ with its themes of diaspora and cultural mobility. Confusingly, the separation of a ‘Crossing Borders’ section from the remainder of the nationally defined exhibition framework 34

“Mella Jaarsma interviewed by Remy Jungerman,” 54. Julie Ewington, “Mella Jaarsma: the problem of location,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999): 62. 36 Caroline Turner, with Rhana Devenport, Suhanya Raffel, Pat Hoffie, Dionissia Giakoumi, Julie Walsh & Jen Webb, “Crossing Borders,” in Beyond the Future: The Third Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 188. 35

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also implied the presence of homogeneous national groupings beyond that section. In this respect, her inclusion in the ‘Indonesia’ section was an inadequate representation, not reflective of Jaarsma’s hybrid status. Thus, Jaarsma’s inclusion was regarded by some as a perplexing decision with contradictory implications for the curatorial frames of ‘A P T 3’. Was this curatorial strategy a case of reflecting contemporary Indonesian cultural heterogeneity, an intentional prioritizing of Jaarsma’s Indonesian home base over her continued diasporic identifications37 and travels as an international artist, or the result of a conscious contradiction of the nation/ crossing-borders binary? Whatever the reasoning, these questions strike at the very heart of Jaarsma’s own cultural investigations, and her attempts through her art “to reject the question of origin and actually deconstruct identities by producing renewable identities, seeing identity as a transient invention.”38 For a performance in Yogyakarta in July 1998, Jaarsma invited several foreigners living in Yogyakarta at the time to cook and share frogs’ legs with passersby in a prominent public street in Yogyakarta. Entitled Pribumi (literally, ‘son of the soil’ – hence, ‘indigenous person’), the performance attempted to open up a space for dialogue between people of different races through the culturally codified medium of (animal) food. Frogs’ legs, while a Chinese delicacy in Indonesia, are usually considered unclean (haram) by Muslims. However, in this culinary performance, many Muslim Javanese were made sufficiently curious to try the hitherto unfamiliar cuisine, prompting the question of how the literal consumption of strangers (and their strange food) might bring about a transformation in the subject who consumes.39 The timing of this performance is significant in coming after the riots of 13–14 May in the neighbouring city of Solo, in which numerous Chinese Indonesians were raped and killed. The title of the performance referred to the notes that many people placed on their front doors as a precautionary declaration of their indigenousness or even Muslim indigenousness.40 37

‘Pribumi, Pribumi asli’ or ‘Pribumi asli Moslem’. As well as having exhibited in the Netherlands numerous times, Jaarsma is also a board member of the Cemeti Art Foundation and, as one of the representatives for Indonesia, she advises on the general policy of the programme in the Erasmus Huis, the Dutch Cultural Centre in Jakarta. 38 Mella Jaarsma, artist’s statement in Valentine Willie Fine Art, Mella Jaarsma: The Shelter, 3. 39 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 115. 40 The cultural-studies theorist Ien Ang provides an interesting personal account of

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Jaarsma further considered these issues in her installation and performance for ‘A P T 3’, Hi Inlander (Hello Native) (1999). A follow-up work to Pribumi, Hi Inlander continues Jaarsma’s engagement in a kind of socially committed, dialogic art that would again attempt to promote crosscultural negotiation through the exchange and consumption of cooked animal food. Looking back on the project, she explains: I really wanted to create a work which could open up discussions between different kinds of people and to get people interested in different cultures, different religions and so on.41

Alongside the creation of four of her now iconic robes – on this occasion made from Javanese gurami fish skins, frog skins, chicken skin (and feet), and kangaroo hide – Jaarsma also directed two performances. The first involved four people who modelled the robes on the opening night of the exhibition as they intermingled with inquisitive exhibition visitors. Given the Australian context of this exhibition, the robe made of kangaroo hide suggested a cultural skin particular to Australians. The second and principal performance involved the participation of these models as cooks for yet another culinary performance in which different animal meats were fried and offered to gallery visitors, with the visitors in effect consuming strangers. The models, unrecognizable except for their eyes and bare hands and feet, performed the role of hospitable strangers in a foreign land; a metaphor for cultural trust and understanding through sharing and ingesting the gift, but also human necessity, of food. On another level, the animal associations – particularly that of humans dressed in animal skins – was a humbling reminder of our connectedness across cultural differences through the shared condition of animality.42

this sense of cultural divide in Indonesia between pribumi and ‘Others’, from her own position as an Indonesian of Chinese ethnicity; see Ang, “Returning to Indonesia: Between Memory and the Present,” in Grid: Tiong Ang, Fendry Ekel, Mella Jaarsma, Remy Jungerman, ed. Tiong Ang, Fendry Ekel, Mella Jaarsma, Remy Jungerman & Zwaan Krijer (exh. cat.; Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art House, 2003): 95–103. 41 Mella Jaarsma, quoted at Queensland Art Gallery website, Queensland Art Gallery, “‘Hi inlander (Hello native)’ No 1,” interview with Mella Jaarsma, video recording, http://www.apt3.net/apt3/video/default.htm (accessed 14 December 2004). 42 On human animality and the connected subjectivities of ‘human beings’ and ‘animal beings’, see Elaine Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2002).

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Figure 148: Mella Jaarsma, Pribumi – Pribumi (1998). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 149: Mella Jaarsma, Pribumi – Pribumi (1998). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 150: Mella Jaarsma, Hi Inlander (1999) (performance). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 151: Mella Jaarsma, Hi Inlander (1999) (performance). Image courtesy of the artist.

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The title alone was evocative of the politics of social positioning with its reference to the Dutch word ‘inlander’ – a derogatory and now taboo term for ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ Indonesians that is also suggestive of their colonized and, therefore, lowlier status. While Jaarsma’s use of the term was an attempt to disrupt the taboo associated with it, her own Dutch heritage provoked some discomfort for at least one Indonesian-born artist.43 By contrast, the joy of discovering unexpected cultural affinities and connections also provided for positive cultural engagements. Recalling one such episode, Jaarsma explains: The exhibition organizers promised me an Aboriginal model, who would walk around in my veil, made of chicken feet, during the press conference at the A P T 3. I had never met the model, Rodney, and when I arrived he was already wearing the veil. He was surprised to see a white person representing Indonesia and when we started to whisper, because the press conference had already started, he whispered through the veil and I only could see his dark eyes surrounded by all the chicken feet. Hearing my Dutch accent he suddenly started to speak Dutch to me, a big surprise! We exchanged information about where we were born, where we grew up and where we lived now. Rodney turned out to be an Aboriginal from the stolen generation; a generation of indigenous children that were taken away from their parents, to grow up in a ‘white’ family. I already knew about this stolen generation, because I was in Australia when it was hot news on the television at that time. The Prime Minister didn’t want to apologize for what had happened and he was getting a lot of protests. Rodney grew up in a Dutch immigrant family, who moved back to the Netherlands when he was eleven. As an adult, he decided to go back to Arnhemland searching for his indigenous background. Isn’t it a moment of exchange like this that I had made the artwork for?44

Ultimately, Jaarsma’s visual investigations into the relationship between culture and belonging are compelling demonstrations of identity as process. They reveal how the experience of diasporicity, cultural displacement and experiences of otherness, can potentially open up new possibilities for being-inbecoming, questioning notions of authenticity and the very concept of cultural identity itself. Crosscultural citizenship, belonging, and exchange configure identity as a dynamic process. In this way, the fragmentary and dislocatory ef43

Specific artist not identified in the related statement by Mella Jaarsma; see Jaarsma in Queensland Art Gallery, “ ‘ Hi inlander (Hello native)’ No 1.” 44 “ ‘ Hi inlander (Hello native)’ No 1.”

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fects of diasporicity and its implicit movements also signal the possibility for new critical cultural imaginings and expressions unencumbered by racially essentialist definitions of subjectivity. In the case of her strange but familiar encounter with the Dutch-speaking, Aboriginal model, the notion of skin as both bodily contour and porous opening is revealed. In this instance of inhabiting a second skin, as Ahmed suggests: the skin does not simply contain the homely subject, but […] allows the subject to be touched and touch the world that is neither simply in the home or away from the home. The home as skin suggests the boundary between home and away is permeable, but also that the boundary between home and away is permeable as well.45

Thus, in Jaarsma’s encounter with the Aboriginal model, a remarkable story of connection is revealed in the process of daring to converse across the boundaries of difference. Jaarsma’s creative bodily coverings demonstrate that the specific historical and cultural circumstances in which “skin comes to matter” is one of “mediat[ion] by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies.”46 As with Lee’s Yellow Man (see Chapter 3 above), they not only show how skin is marked by cultural differences, namely race and gender, but also make obvious how skin is politically located and how the body matters in relation to lived spaces and places. So, too, they highlight the permeability of bodies and the ideological boundaries which otherwise seek to contain them. This interplay of corporeal porosity and containment is also pertinent to contemporary art in the Singapore context. As I discuss in the following section, the body has been a site of much contestation in Singapore’s contemporary art history. Suzann Victor’s art practice and its relationship to the abject body exemplifies the particular consequences of the performing body, as do other artists’ negotiations of bodily presence in contemporary Singapore art.

45

Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 89. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey, “Introduction: Dermographies,” in Thinking Through the Skin, ed. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): 5. 46

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Figure 152: Mella Jaarsma, Hi Inlander (Hello Native) (1999). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 153: Mella Jaarsma, Hi Inlander (Hello Native) (1999; face detail). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Presencing the Abject Body in Singapore: Suzann Victor’s Bodies by Proxy47

Figure 154: Suzann Victor, Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation) (1998; performance installation). Image courtesy of the artist.

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This title is adapted from Susie Lingham’s essay “Suzann Victor: the body by proxy” in New Criteria I I I , ed. Lee Weng Choy (exh. cat.; Singapore: The Substation, 1995): 22–25.

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Figure 155: Suzann Victor, Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation) (1998). Image courtesy of the artist. It is very narrow, this space, fissured into being out of sheer necessity. Interstitial. […] Barefoot, she folds, folds, folds the photographs of beloved faces, creasing eyes, eyelids, lips and cheeks into boats, memory boats. She puts her ear to each carefully folded boat, intently listening. […] The gap between the outside humid world and the protected space of the museum she has flooded, flooded, flooded with her metaphorical tears. […] The photographs folded and the moat filled, she squeezes between the glass wall and the wall of the building and sets the boats out and they float. The ends of her hair drip wet. She lays herself down slowly, the jewelled water embracing her quickly, and half-wades-half-crawls her way along the length of what appears now like an aquarium with aquamarine – water. And barely an inch away, her audience watch her and their surreal-istic reflections from the dry other-side. […] Both her white tunic and her reflection cling wetly to her against the glass in perfect symmetry. […]

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R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾ When she leaves that narrow corridor of tears, the aquamarine water on which the memory boats had been bobbing, quietens down, jewelled, stilled.48

Multiple bodies interconnect, reflect, separate, diverge, and reconfigure in Suzann Victor’s site-specific performance-installation piece Still Waters (Between Estrangement & Reconciliation) (1998). First, the narrow, waterfilled space described above is contained within the architectural body of the Singapore Art Museum – an official cultural arm of the Singaporean State, the body politic, and a key instrument in the present-day legitimation and propagation of local cultural histories. There is also Victor’s own performing body – the artist’s body – and what it signifies as an Asian, woman performance artist in Singapore. Finally, there is the representative public, viewing body /bodies who observe and engage with Victor’s performance from the other side of the glass façade; they both receive and re-produce Victor’s anxiety and struggle as they observe her moving through the constricted space and, in turn, partake in their own act, navigating through the narrow passageway, enticed by the opportunity to peruse a diary placed on the balustrade in the far corner of the glass partition. The Museum itself – the site of Victor’s performance – is a colonial relic, serving previously as a Catholic boys’ school known as St Joseph’s Institution. Today, much of the building’s original design has been retained and the Western religious education of boys has been replaced with a generous public education in modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art. In order to perform efficiently in its more recent role as museum, however, a thick floor-toceiling glass partition has been installed around the entire perimeter of the building’s otherwise open-air upper floor, keeping moisture and other impurities outside the Museum for the sake of art conservation. In effect, a one-footwide drainage space has been fenced off from the inside of the Museum, and is flanked, on its other side, by a balcony balustrade.

48

Suzann Victor & Susie Lingham, on Suzann Victor’s performance-installation piece Still Waters (Between Estrangement and Reconciliation) (1998), in Suzann Victor & Susie Lingham, An Equation of Vulnerability, A Certain Thereness, Being (Singapore: Contemporary Asian Arts Centre, 2002): 70 (italics in original).

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Figure 156: Suzann Victor, Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation) (1998; detail). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 157: Suzann Victor, Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation) (1998). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 158: Suzann Victor, Still Waters (between estrangement & reconciliation) (1998; detail). Image courtesy of the artist.

For her performance-installation, Victor negotiated with the Museum’s conservation department to be permitted her own intervention in and revelation of this newly created liminal space. The artist “block[ed] up the drainage holes and situated custom glass dams at existing entry points to build up a volume of water up to eight inches high […] undermin[ing] the architecture’s original purpose of draining water away.”49 In this contained and transparent pool of blue-tinged water, Victor immersed her-self, her body so as to set off in sailing motion little sampans (boats) folded out of photographs of children – a reminder of the building’s previous function as a school. While Victor’s individual body seemed to perform at the literal periphery of this building, she was in fact neither completely outside nor inside the Museum. In this in-between space of drainage /blockage /flow /oxygenation, the drain-water and Victor’s performing body were art objects both within and beyond the Museum, displayed as they were as simultaneously outside of the glass-encased Museum

49

Suzann Victor, “The Image Stammers” (Honours thesis, University of Western Sydney, 1999): 9.

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and inside its concrete walls.50 Thus Still Waters evokes the slippery margins which separates individual agency from state-defined order. The seemingly impenetrable and controlling mechanisms of the Singaporean State are revealed in Still Waters to be porous and mutable in the light of the Museum’s inability to exercise absolute containment of art even within the space of the institutionalized museum itself – the symbolic and real site of the State’s cultural order. Significantly, Still Waters also points to broader artistic and societal concerns in the Singapore of the 1990s. First, there is the marginalization of performance art (albeit seen here in the interstitial space within /beyond the Museum); second, the expulsion of the critical performing body of performance art; and, third, the subordination of women’s bodies generally. Further, it makes visible the common figuration of these issues by the Singaporean State as subjects of abjection and, therefore, necessary cultural expulsion or drainage. As I will discuss below, all three – the body, performance art/artists, and women – have been deemed abject elements which threaten the ideological purity and integrity of the Singapore State. However, products of abjection, as Victor embodies and performs them in Still Waters, may be critically recuperated via art as “signifiers of resistance for [their] reconstitution into allies of the artist.”51 Indeed, the recovery of space initially used to drain away the abject, the reinsertion of performance art (performed by one of its preeminent supporters), and the reassertion of the visibly performing body of woman, may all be regarded as performative acts of resistance in this period of Singapore’s art history. Together with Tang Da Wu’s performance Tiger’s Whip (1991), the beginnings of contemporary performance art in Singapore are often associated with ‘Body Fields’ – a twelve-hour festival of art held on New Year's Eve 1991–92 and organized by the then operating independent art collective known as ‘Fifth Passage Artists Ltd’.52 ‘Body Fields’ continued the series of annual art events organized by the Fifth Passage collective since 1989 as part of the 50

Victor, “The Image Stammers,” 9. “The Image Stammers,” ii. 52 Fifth Passage Artists Ltd was established in 1991 and disbanded in 1994. It was run by Suzann Victor, Henry Tang, Susie Lingham, and Iris Tan. During its brief life, the collective paid special attention to developing the work of women artists, encouraged explorations of gender and identity in art, and strongly supported performance art as well as alternative music. 51

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Artists’ General Assembly (A G A ). Vincent Leow’s performance Coffee Talk is perhaps one of the more memorable performances for the 1991–92 festival, since the artist – somewhat controversially in the Singapore context – drank his own urine as part of the performance. Describing this part of the performance, Leow dispassionately writes: After my address to the audience, I got up from my chair picked up a coffee cup and pissed into the cup on the stage. With the cup full of urine, I made a toast to the audience and drank. After consuming the urine, I sat down and started cutting locks of my hair and placed them in several envelopes addressing it to several people in the art scene, distributing them to the audience, ending the performance. The performance was a raw, random event and appeared meaningless. I was concerned with the issue of self-consumption, using the urine as a metaphor for the artist as both producer and the consumer. At the end of the performance the audience applauded.53

Langenbach remarks that “ ‘Body Fields’ brought the issue of experimental and performance art into not only public view, but also into view of the government security apparatus.”54 Notably, however, no reprimanding action was taken by the state authorities against Leow or Fifth Passage Artists Ltd for carrying out this unconventional performance. Coffee Talk would gain further notoriety in the light of the A G A events of the following year. The A G A of 26 December 1993 to 1 January 1994 was jointly organized by the two artist collectives Artists’ Village55 and Fifth Passage Artists Ltd and held at the Fifth Passage Artists Gallery. While a number of important works were presented during this A G A , yet again, only one has become especially memorable and forever stamped in the annals of art history in Singapore for the controversy that ensued: Josef Ng’s now infamous performance art piece Brother Cane.56 In this performance, Ng sought to make a point about the 53

Email correspondence from Vincent Leow to Ray Langenbach, as quoted in Ray Langenbach, “Performing the Singapore State 1988–1995” (doctoral dissertation, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, 2003): 192. 54 Langenbach, “Performing the Singapore State 1988–1995,” 192. 55 Tang Da Wu and several other younger artists established Artists’ Village in 1989. Today, the artist collective includes well-known Singaporean artists such as Amanda Heng, Han Sai Por, Jailani (Zai) Kuning, Lee Wen, and Vincent Leow. 56 For detailed accounts of the Josef Ng controversy, its aftermath, and other information regarding the Artists’ General Assembly (A G A ), see Ray Langenbach, “Annotated Singapore Diary: 26 December 1993 – 17 May 1994,” A R T and

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arrest and sensationalist reportage concerning twelve men who were allegedly carrying out homosexual activities, illegal in Singapore – six of these men pleaded guilty and were punished by caning and imprisonment. Ng’s twentyminute performance involved several actions, but the one remembered took between only thirty to sixty seconds for the press to register. As a witness to the entire performance, Langenbach recalls that, in that particular minute, Ng said, “I have heard that clipping hair can be a form of silent protest” [not verbatim quotation], and walked to the far end of the gallery space. Facing the wall with his back to the audience, he then lowered his briefs just below the top of his buttocks and carried out an action I could not see. He returned to the performance space and placed a small amount of hair on the centre tile […] At no time did Josef Ng expose his genitals to the audience. He carefully faced the back wall of the performance space, about 10–15 meters from the main audience group. No members of the audience were between Ng and the wall he faced. No one actually observed him cut his pubic hair. The audience only became aware of what appeared to be cut hair when Ng placed it on a plate before us.57

As with ‘Body Fields’, only one artwork was highlighted by the press – the one in which the abject was regarded as a potential threat to state order and thus became sensationalized. While Leow’s performance was a clear display of the artist drinking his own urine, Ng’s performance, involving the cutting of pubic hair, merely alluded to his naked genitals and buttocks, as Langenbach makes clear. After much public controversy surrounding the incident, Ng was charged with committing an obscene act in public and released on AsiaPacific 1.3 (1994): 82–91; Ray Langenbach, “Looking Back at Brother Cane: Performance Art and State Performance,” in Proceedings of the Symposium: “Space, Spaces and Spacing,” ed. Lee Weng Choy (Singapore: The Substation, 1996): 132–47; Langenbach, “Performing the Singapore State 1988–1995”; Lee Weng Choy, “Chronology of a Controversy” (March 1996), http://www.biotechnics.org /Chronology %20of% 20a%20controversy.html (accessed 2 September 2005); Susie Lingham, “Transcending Space,” http://www.happening.com.sg/commentary/space.html (accessed 11 June 2003); Susie Lingham, “A Quota on Expression: Visions, Vexations & Vanishing: Contemporary Art in Singapore from the Late 1980s to the Present,” in Negotiating Home History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991– 2011, ed. Iola Lenzi (exh. cat.; Singapore: S A M , 2011): 55–70; and Victor, “The Image Stammers” (see especially ch. I I : “The Patriotic Penis”). 57 Langenbach, “Looking Back at Brother Cane,” 135–36.

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S G $3,000 bail. Other outcomes were described in the national newspaper,

the Straits Times: Police will reject all future applications by the group 5th Passage for a public entertainment licence to stage any such performance without fixed scripts. [Josef Ng and another artist, Shannon Tham] will be barred from future public performances. The police will reject applications for public entertainment licences for any performance or exhibition by 5th Passage or any other group involving artist Josef Ng Sing Chor, 22, and art student Shannon Tham Kuok Leong, 20. The N A C will bar 5th Passage from getting any grant or assistance. It will also not support “performance art” or “forum theatre” staged by other groups, but their other projects will be considered.58

Thus, the political stage is set for Suzann Victor’s performative-installation piece His Mother is a Theatre (1994), created by the former Fifth Passage member as a direct response to the Josef Ng controversy and its repercussions for art practice in Singapore. As Victor and Lingham reflect, Performance. And this is where, a year later, “performance” would become a target, and it would take close to a decade before it could begin to wrench itself free from all the misinterpretations that it became cast in. Misinterpretation and injustice that resulted in multiple losses – from the passage-space we had shaped into an artspace to the loss of funding, to that infinitely irreplaceable loss of optimistic belief in ideals – loss, yes, trite as it may sound, of innocence.59

In her thesis “The Image Stammers,” Victor demonstrates how performance art and contemporary artists more broadly come to be configured as “abject” elements in Singapore society, the two “defined, loathed and expelled by the State.”60 The controversy triggered by the Ng performance reveals how

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Straits Times (22 January 1994), as quoted in Lee, “Chronology of a Controversy.” Shannon Tham Kuok Leong also performed during the A G A event. Tham’s performance related to the sensationalized press publicity of the A G A by The New Paper. 59 Victor & Lingham, An Equation of Vulnerability, 13. 60 Victor, “The Image Stammers,” ii. In her study Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock explains: “Abjection (Latin, ab-jicere) means to expel, to cast out or away. In Totem and Taboo and Civilizations and its Discontents Freud was the first to suggest that civilisation is founded on the repudiation of certain pre-oedipal pleasure and

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the artist’s performing body became resignified by the State as an uncontained and uncontrollable body, a perceived threat to legitimacy and order, and therefore requiring State intervention and regulation. With its direct reliance on the body for its transmission and its aura of immediate communicability, the threat of performance art most probably resides in its ability to exceed its ideological import as it straddles the real and symbolic worlds with powerful representational force. Through artworks such as His Mother is a Theatre, Victor seeks to “retrieve the abject as markers of the limits of state power to become signifiers of resistance for its reconstitution into allies of the artist.”61 Against the controversial history of performance art in Singapore, Victor creates art which recuperates the performing body and the abject, suggesting the agency of the artist and the limits of state governance: He forgets that as periphery, she defines the limits of the centre. Relegated to the edge she engulfs it. Out of the way, she envelops it with the viscosity and stickiness that he fears – Semen, saliva, menses, milk, phlegm, tears, placenta, amniotic fluid, sweat, shit, pus and piss.62

For Victor’s installation His Mother is a Theatre, a pair of long black-velvet gowns hang on opposite walls, joined seamlessly at their ends, and find convergence as they stretch to clothe a long, narrow table. At the centre, four loaves of bread are laid atop and glow from within; their mild burning aroma fills the room with an air of domesticity. Beside them, three small woks are mechanized so as to endlessly lift and clang their lids intermittently, creating an atmosphere of restlessness and agitation. On the floor beneath, a series of concentric circles have been formed from discarded human hair and appear to reverberate in golden light. Although separated from the body and therefore usually regarded as unclean, hair has here been carefully crafted into elegantly fashioned script that respectfully writes the woman’s sexed body: the words “clitoris,” “orgasm,” “vagina,” “labia,” “mammary glands,” “uterus,” “amniotic fluid,” “placenta,” “umbilical cord,” and “fallopian tubes” are among those that rise defiantly from the grainy floor surface to invoke woman. incestuous attachments.” See McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): 71. 61 Victor, “The Image Stammers,” ii. 62 “The Image Stammers,” 57.

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Figure 159: Suzann Victor, His Mother is a Theatre (1996; installation view). Singapore Art Museum. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 160: Suzann Victor, His Mother is a Theatre (1996; front view: words written with human hair). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Once physically connected to bodies, hair is here shown to be as always in relation to bodies, especially the “inner theatre” of the female body.63 For Victor, to show the inner nudity of the female body is to show the inner theatre of that body in order to complicate and problematize the issue of the voyeured, idealized, and desired female body.64

Hair resurfaces here as embodiment of the woman’s sexed body and activates the art audience into imagining and imaging such a body. Victor elaborates: At this textual but highly virtual site (where the body is imagined or conjured from the hair text and remains framed within the reader’s mind) I composed a work based upon both the individual and the collective female body. As such, the responsibility of image-making remains that of the viewer/reader.65

That there is a performative engagement with Victor’s work on the part of her audience to imagine the female body can be read against the new restrictions placed on performance artists in Singapore following the Fifth Passage events of 1993–94, especially in relation to the naked performing body. As Victor explains, “His Mother is a Theatre was created as a mis-take on the [then] recently outlawed performing body in order to reclaim that body.”66 Along with its associations with the female body, Victor’s use of hair also bears 63

Victor’s exploration of the sexed, sexual and gendered body might be viewed as part of the development of a feminist aesthetic in contemporary Southeast Asian art. Southeast Asia-based exhibitions such as Who Own’s Women’s Bodies? (a travelling exhibition which toured Batangas, Ilcos Sur, Manila, Visayas, and Mindanao in the Philippines in 2000–2001) and Text and Subtext: Contemporary Art and Asian Woman (curated by Binghui Huangfu and exhibited in Singapore at Earl Lu Gallery in 2000) demonstrate further examples. For scholarly references, see Asian Women Artists, ed. Dinah Dysart & Hannah Fink (Roseville East, N S W : Craftsman House, 1996; and Women Imaging Women: Home, Body, Memory, Papers from the Conference on Artists from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, ed. Flaudette May V. Datuin & Patrick D. Flores (Manila: Art Studies Foundation, the Ford Foundation & Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila, 1999). 64 Joanna Lee, “Suzann Victor: An Interview, with Joanna Lee,” in Ahmad Mashadi & Joanna Lee, Singapore: Venice Biennale 2001, ed. Singapore Art Museum (exh. cat.; Singapore Art Museum, 2001): 85. 65 Lee, “Suzann Victor: An Interview, with Joanna Lee,” 86. 66 Victor, “The Image Stammers,” 28.

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correspondence to Josef Ng’s “pub[l]ic snipping of hair,” the suggestion of nudity invoked in his performance and the effective ban on performance art through the withdrawal of funding for it. As Victor registers in her performative-installation piece, the naked body may be suggested by proxy, even in artforms which appear to still life (in an illusion of non-performance) or in art forms which avoid overt or ‘explicit’ reference to the human body. Moreover, creative agency, as Roland Barthes has argued, does not always lie in the hands and mind of the authorial artist; rather, there is an interplay of creative possibilities between author and reader, artist and audience, as the reader / audience takes on the task of imagining the work of art and making meaning about it, for themselves.67 Indeed, there is a performative agency that lies with the audience for Victor’s work, in their capacity to imagine the body evoked in the materiality and symbolic codes of the installation. Thus, the performing body does not depend exclusively on its literal visibility to be imagined and exercised. Rather, there is an (invisible) presencing of the body which recalls Peggy Phelan’s work on the “generative possibilities of disappearance” that is distinct from modes of performance art: Performance is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance. Poised forever at the threshold of the present, performance enacts the productive appeal of the nonreproductive.68

Moreover, the body-as-script in His Mother is a Theatre may be read as a challenge to the public-entertainment licencing laws newly introduced by the Singapore State following the Ng controversy, and which enforced the submission of performance scripts by artists ahead of their proposed performances: “Police will reject all future applications by the group 5th Passage to stage any such performance without fixed scripts.” His Mother is a Theatre offers a protest script in its reconfiguration of the performance-art script and in its allusion to the already active texts that are women’s bodies: In using hair to “write” the body, the central script operated “literally” as the expelled performing body submitting itself as the performance

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See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, sel. & tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977): 142–48. 68 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 27.

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script, the new conditions for all applications for a license to perform.69

In re-writing the body, Victor activates corporeal presence within the field of contemporary installation art in Singapore. As she asserts, the body is far from dead as I feel that it serves up a challenge on several levels. It is “bodily” first and foremost because, hair, a product of the body, is issued to signify the female “essence.” As a script composed with hair, the body discloses itself and the relationship to its context, addressing its own functions. The concentric circles of hair text, formed from anonymous donation, declare the body’s presence inscribed with all its inner and outer nudity.70

The idea of performance script is not the only device that is suggestive of performance. The drama of His Mother is a Theatre is created through a number of theatrical devices that entice our senses into embodied spectatorship.71 Our viewing bodies are acknowledged as sentient beings through the dramatic lighting which illuminates the stage for the installation; the symmetry of objects, such as the curtain-like robes tending towards the centre, evokes the space and design of the theatre stage; sound is deployed in the clashing of lids and pots that also permeates our bodies as rhythmic pulsations; smell is prompted by the aroma of toasted bread and in turn, encourages our culinary taste-memories of comforting, homely food; imagining the felt-like touch of the eloquently scripted hair prompts our desire to caress these textual markers of body with the touch of our own hands and fingertips. Significantly, Victor’s own sensual and somatic body is also evoked in the knowledge that she herself has sewn these garments, baked this bread, and sculpted these words of hair into being through the use of her own hands. But the collective of anonymous hair also suggests the presence of multiple bodies. Through these theatrical devices, Victor’s seemingly inanimate installation takes on imagined performative dimensions and in this sense abides by the State’s rules, but only so as to show their inadequacies. His Mother is a Theatre thus reveals the

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Lee, “Suzann Victor,” 84. “Suzann Victor,” 84–85. 71 Langenbach describes the prevalence of these techniques of theatre in Victor’s work in terms of a “proxy performance of kinetics,” suggesting the implied movement of the performing body. See Langenbach, “Performing the Singapore State 1988– 1995,” 188. 70

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illusion of State regulation in fully capturing and containing the performative agency of the State’s subjects.72 In His Mother is a Theatre, hair also defies “the taboo of the abject (and the abjection of the feminine) in the context of Asian society”73 through Victor’s transformation of the abject material of hair into an aesthetic object of desire and agency. As Victor explains, My work openly confronts the abject, so as to retrieve it – material, concept or form – thus transforming into allies of the artist. I see my work as more about what I reveal than what I “contain” or “conceal.” As a spectacle, my work does not await approach but rather, invites the audience through visual and conceptual seduction that overcomes the audience’s enculturated revulsion of the abject by playing up its morbid curiosity and fascination with it.74

The materiality of the abject body is re-inscribed here to political effect, reasserting the importance of the abject to subjectivity. The abject threatens the State-defined purity of the subject by exposing the border between self and other, revealing it to be fragile, permeable, porous. In this case, the ‘unclean’ stuff of hair disrupts the boundaries of purity defined by the Singapore State. Citing Julia Kristeva’s work on the abject, the body theorist Robyn Longhurst further explains: The cost of the clean and proper body emerging is what Kristeva calls abjection. Abjection is the affect or feeling of anxiety, loathing and disgust that the subject has in encountering certain matter, images and fantasies – the horrible – to which it can respond only with aversion, nausea and distraction.75

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A similar ‘performative’ tension is at work in Victor’s Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (1994), in the collection of S A M – a mesmerizing kinetic installation of light and mirrors, which is also a political response to the then newly introduced prescriptions on performance art in Singapore. Yet again, Victor evokes the absent body of performance, this time through a Foucauldian ‘performative’ theatre of light and reflectivity, sound, and action: light bulbs hang in a row from a mechanized rocker descending to meet an elliptical mirror and ascending again, clanging as they touch and meet their self-image in the mirror surface and always threatening to shatter. 73 Lee, “Suzann Victor,” 86. 74 “Suzann Victor,” 89. 75 Longhurst, Bodies, 28.

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Kristeva argues that social beings are created and defined through the force of expulsion – a purging of elements deemed socially impure, improper or unclean. In the sanitized city-state of Singapore, the State seeks distinction from those objects it configures as impurity, evoked in His Mother is a Theatre through the ‘filthy’ matter of hair. For the State, the separation of hair from the body is a threatening transgression of the body’s limits and assumed ‘natural’ order, and the materiality of hair is signified by the State as unclean matter which must be fully expelled. However, this is never wholly possible, for, as Kristeva argues, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws [one] toward the place where meaning collapses […] from its place of banishment the abject does not cease challenging its master.76

These undesirable elements stubbornly persist; “they haunt the edges of the subject’s identity with the threat of disruption or even dissolution.”77 Further describing this dynamic ambiguity, Elizabeth Grosz proposes: The abject is what of the body falls away from it while remaining irreducible to the subject / object and inside / outside oppositions. The abject necessarily partakes of both polarized terms but cannot be clearly identified with either.78

Abjection is thus an interplay between inside and outside, such that “ingested /expelled objects are neither part of the body nor separate from it.”79 The consequence of this indeterminability is the subject’s always shifting identity and bodily parameters. As Kristeva concludes, “Abjection is above all ambiguity.”80 Continuing her aesthetic acts in recuperating the abject, for her installation Third World Extra-Virgin Dreams (1997) Victor makes use of that purest and most precious, but also most dangerous and horrifying, of bodily fluids: 76

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia UP, 1982): 2. (My emphasis.) 77 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 72. 78 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (St Leonards, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 1994): 192. 79 Longhurst, Bodies, 29. 80 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9.

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blood. This installation was mounted in a long cell at the Fortress de la Cabana for the 6th Havana Biennial in Cuba. For it, Victor sourced blood from a member of the local Cuban family she was staying with at the time and mixed these bloody donations together with her own. The collecting and mingling of blood suggests a will to human connection and commonality.

Figures 161–162: Suzann Victor, Third World Extra Virgin Dreams (1997). Images courtesy of the artist.

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Individual droplets of this blood fusion were placed between two small sheets of clear glass, each sheet no more than five centimetres square. Over two thousand of these glass plates were then conjoined to form a dazzling tenmetre glass quilt which hung over a suspended iron-frame bed. The extended length of the quilt allowed it to cascade evenly over each side of the bed, reaching to and across the floor beneath. Immediately above the bed, a skylight caused shards of light to individually reflect the glass-encased blood drops with a shimmering aspect – the blood droplets coming to resemble tiny jewels in their new glassy brilliance. Again, Victor (re)turns the abject body to a highly visible and material corporeal site with shifting meaning. For Victor, “The transparency of the glass quilt appear[s] to hover between states of appearance and disappearance; visibility and invisibility; intrusion and expulsion.”81 This ambivalent state of ‘being there’ and ‘not being there’ is also what defines abjection and its complex interplay in the constitution of subjectivity. In this case it is blood that marks the abject body, separated from the individual internal dynamics of Victor’s body and that of her Cuban friend. It marks the body as porous, permeable, and susceptible to collapse and woundability. Grosz’s work offers further illumination: Body fluids attest to the permeability of the body, its necessary dependence on an outside, its liability to collapse into this outside (this is what the death implies), to the perilous divisions between the body’s inside and outside. They affront a subject’s aspiration toward autonomy and self-identity. They attest to a certain irreducible “dirt” or disgust, a horror of the unknown or the unspecifiable that permeates, lurks, lingers, and at times leaks out of the body, a testimony of the fraudulence or impossibility of the “clean” and “proper.” They resist the determination that marks solids, for they are without any shape or form of their own. They are engulfing, difficult to be rid of; any separation from them is not a matter of certainty, as it may be in the case of solids. Body fluids flow, they seep, they infiltrate; their control is a matter of vigilance, never guaranteed.82

In its associations with the work (quilt-making) and private space of women (domestic bedroom), blood also becomes framed in terms of women’s blood –

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Lee, “Suzann Victor,” 88. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 193–94.

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whether hymeneal or menstrual; in fact, Victor had first envisioned the piece as “an imaginary collection of hymeneal fluid.”83 She imagined each child / woman, as signified by a single glass slide [… and] reduced to her most valuable commodity – a single drop of virginal blood – the ultimate essence of desirability / desire value in a patriarchal society.84

The abject corporeal material of blood is here transformed into a dazzling aesthetic object; rather than evoking feelings of disgust and expulsion, Third World Extra-Virgin Dreams returns virginal and maternal blood to us as both precious and fragile. The metal bed and the metaphor of the quilt in this installation are also meaningful in signifying women’s desiring /desired bodies. In particular, women’s bodies are suggested by casting the bed as the symbolic site for the spilling of women’s virginal blood in sexual activity; the blood-quilt becomes a marker of the female through its dual associations with domestic labour and life-blood. Commenting further on the metaphor of the bed, Victor explains: The single metal bed I used was intended to function metaphorically as a site of both beginnings and endings, birthing and death, sex and sleep, solid and physical, yet vulnerable and abstract. A place of pleasant dreams and fevered nightmares, it is an object that is permanently imprinted with the human form, both at rest and in restlessness. Our sentient bodies imprint the bed with corporeal thresholds marking bodily events. In turn, we imbue its surface and depth with the flushes and seepage emanating from our interiority, a silent witness to our confessions, betrayals, desire and “woundability.”85

It is not hard to imagine that one reason Victor left her home state of Singapore for Australia in 1996 may have been wounds inflicted on her spirit as an artist, and her high hopes for the future of performance art in Singapore. In this sense, Victor herself might be positioned as an abjected subject of the Singaporean State, an artist whose practice and ideals are at variance with that State’s programme for art. However, the fact that Victor has continued to exhibit works in and for Singapore is testimony to the ambiguous relationship of

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Lee, “Suzann Victor,” 87. “Suzann Victor,” 88. 85 “Suzann Victor,” 87. 84

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the abject object/subject in relation to the State86 (and the changed conditions surrounding performance art practice in Singapore since 2003). Each is in constant tension between attraction to and repulsion from the other. The State recognizes the import of Victor’s contribution to contemporary art in Singapore and situates her art in institutionalized practices of (national) cultural legitimation; Victor’s art tests the limits of the State centre by her abject aesthetic of resistance.

Figure 163: Suzann Victor, Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (1994). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

The politics of the performing body was also witnessed at this time in the two-part S A M exhibition ‘Imaging Selves’ (1998–99) launching the Museum’s series of displays of its collection. The exhibition highlighted artists’ engagement with identity in art, and forms of artistic figuration were highlighted as 86

For example, Victor has major works in the collections of the S A M and the National Museum of Singapore, and Victor was represented in the Singapore pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale alongside Chen KeZhan, Matthew Ngui, and Salleh Japar. See Kevin Chua’s review, “In Venetian Waters: Singapore at the 49th Venice Biennale,” F O C A S : Forum on Contemporary Art and Society 3 (2002): 273–87.

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an important means of conveying such concerns. Dr Earl Lu, then Chairman of the Museum, explained the motives of the exhibition as such: Imaging Selves alludes to visual artists as image makers as well as to the representation of the human subject. We introduce […] the practices of Southeast Asian artists, their perceptions of themselves and others in their environment, their notions of identity, and their artistic approaches and attitudes to the human figure.87

These concerns were especially addressed via portraits and the media of painting and sculpture. Notably, the more complex and challenging representations of the human body in live performance were absent and only alluded to by the inclusion of performance-art documentation. For instance, the suit presented in the installation Money Suit was originally created and worn by the artist Vincent Leow for his performance of The Three-Legged Toad (1992) at the Hong Bee Warehouse, Singapore, but in the context of the ‘Imaging Selves’ exhibition became representational artifact and an art object in itself.88 The curators acknowledged the altered meaning of the work, registering its value as historical signifier: “a residue of the performance […] an empty shell where once a body filled and lived in it.”89 In the context of ‘Imaging Selves’, Money Suit becomes a representational art object, different from the antirepresentational force of performance art. Peggy Phelan further elucidates the particular distinction of performance art as such: Defined by its ephemeral nature, performance art cannot be documented (when it is, it turns it into that document – a photograph, a stage design, a video tape [a “money suit’] – and ceases to be performance art).90

Hence, witnessing a live performance – in flesh-to-flesh encounters – rather than experiencing the artwork vicariously through secondary documentation, is an altogether different experience of the artwork, the former asserting the visibility of the performing body in the present.

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Earl Lu, “Foreword” to Imaging Selves: Singapore Art Museum Collection Exhibition Series 1998–1999, 5. 88 Notably, S A M records 1992 as the year of the Money Suit’s ‘creation’, which is the date of the ‘original’ performance of The Three-Legged Toad at the Hong Bee Warehouse and the original context of the Money Suit, in performance. 89 Karen Lim, “The Body,” in Imaging Selves: Singapore Art Museum Collection Exhibition Series 1998–1999, 53. 90 Phelan, Unmarked, 31.

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Figure 164: Vincent Leow, Money Suit (1992). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

For Phelan, Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than the performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance [...]

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As Phelan goes on to argue, “The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the laws of the reproductive economy are enormous.” This can be seen in, for instance, the art museum’s documentary and archival impulse – to document, store, and exhibit traces of the past – instrumental to legitimizing the art museum and its histories. In the case of ‘Imaging Selves’, what is significant is the S A M ’s desire to record and trace local art histories in Singapore, including performance art, even against the concurrent backdrop of ongoing political tensions underlying restrictions on performance art at the time of the exhibition. Through ‘Imaging Selves’ we see the S A M ’s recognition of the importance of performance art not only in artistic production concerned with ‘imaging selves’ but also to further develop the narrative of contemporary Southeast Asian art histories, integral to the mission of the S A M to be a leading collecting institution in the area of contemporary Southeast Asian art. However, while performance art is acknowledged in ‘Imaging Selves’ it is not actually present, given the restrictions on performance art at the time. The exhibition could only offer suggestions of performance art through relics of performance, rather than performance art itself: “the transition from painting to performance [was] traced using mixed media and residues of events.”92 In this context, the ‘absent’ body in the presentation of Vincent Leow’s Money Suit might be read as part of a silent or in/visible ontology of performance. As with Victor’s own ‘bodies by proxy’, Leow’s absent body, ironically, might be the most pointed of disappearing acts, suggesting the threat to and denial of the visible performing body in Singapore. While the absent human body is invoked in the exhibiting of the suit as performance artifact, we are also reminded of the controversial absence of the performing body in exhibitions at this time. Likewise, Zai Kuning’s two-dimensional series of self-portraits, also included in ‘Imaging Selves’, may be read as bodies of performative resistance. Entitled Still Performance (1994), the drawings initially seem to present themselves as straightforward renderings of the artist’s own figure. However, 91

Phelan, Unmarked, 146 (emphasis in original). Singapore Art Museum, Imaging Selves: Singapore Art Museum Collection Exhibition Series 1998–1999, 48. 92

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live, performative movement is suggested by the shifts between the distinct movements captured within each portrait, evoking the moving images of the cinematic viewing experience. Each representation is a figure poised in similar action, but there is something slightly different in each. In addition, the emaciated, masculine figure is thrown into relief in each frame by a vibrant red background, his face is always of a ghoulish demeanour, and his arm appears cautiously positioned to cover his genitals – perhaps another reference to the Josef Ng controversy concerning the public snipping of pubic hair. As Lee suggests, “Still Performance is testy parody of performance art played out in two dimensional space where its practice in three dimensional space was delimited and difficult”; thus, Lee argues, “The work is Kuning’s stance of ironic defiance as a performance artist whose practice had become circumscribed by conditions beyond his control.”93 Indeed, Kuning is better-known in Singapore for his performance-art practice. Through its two-dimensional form, Still Performance ironically reminds us of the political significance of the body in live performance art at this time in Singapore. The wounds inflicted on performance art in Singapore were to some extent assuaged at the close of 2003. After ten years without State ideological and financial support, performance art in Singapore was once again recognized as a legitimate contender for funding from the National Arts Council. In response to this policy change, a one-day series of performances and discussions entitled ‘The Future of Imagination’ was held at The Substation gallery on 6 December 2003.94 The following year, the more extensive ‘Future of Imagination #2’ ran at Sculpture Square from 8 to 12 December 2004, bringing together international performance artists from Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia. Significantly, the established Singaporean performance artists Lee Wen and Jason Lim presented a bold opening piece, incorporating a symbolic shaving of hair, that referenced Josef Ng’s controversial performance of Brother Cane almost ten years before.95 Perhaps most importantly, the artists made the crucial point that despite the return of funding, performance art in Singapore remains a highly monitored activity. Censorship is still 93

Lee, “Self-Portraits: Imag(in)ing the ‘I’,” 30. “The Future of Imagination,” http://www.futureofimagination.org/ (accessed 7 March 2005). 95 For further details on this performance, see the participating artist Alwin Reamillo’s account in his review of ‘The Future of Imagination #2’: Reamillo, “Performance resurrected,” http://www.realtimearts.net/rt65/reamillo.html (accessed 7 March 2005). 94

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very active in the field of contemporary art, even as the State attempts to redefine itself as part of cutting-edge currents in international art.96 As I have previously discussed, cultural production in Indonesia of the 1990s, as in Singapore, was often a highly regulated activity, both in the sense of policing and censoring art activity and in privileging and maintaining Stateinscribed versions of the ‘nation’. For instance, police reaction to Iwan Wijono’s socio-politically motivated performance of The Green Man (Manusia Hijau) (1997) reveals the tension between State and society in Indonesia at that time.97 Similar to Lee Wen’s Yellow Man, but with different intent and effect, Wijono’s performance saw the artist paint his body green and then walk the streets of Yogyakarta. Green Man made his way to the famous Malioboro Mall as well as the Tugu Railway Station but upon arriving at each of these venues was driven away by security on the grounds of public nuisance. As Wijono headed towards Yogyakarta’s U N I S I radio station, a group of policemen were already awaiting him. There, as Sumartono reports, He was arrested and taken to police headquarters and interrogated. Iwan Wijono tried to explain that he was only an artist presenting a work. The police argued that he was disturbing public order. They were concerned that the colour green might be interpreted in various ways. It might be seen as referring to the major Islamic political party P P P (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan– the Development Union Party), whose symbolic colour was green, or as parodying the military.98

It turns out that Wijono was actually using his ‘green performance’ as a means of protesting against the destruction of the environment in Indonesia. Through the use of his own body, Wijono attempted a corporeal appeal to government agencies and corporate businesses, to pay heed to the damage they were causing to the natural environment. 96

For an historical tracing of contemporary art censorship in Singapore including that surrounding performance art, see Susie Lingham, “Art and Censorship in Singapore: Catch 22?,” ArtAsiaPacific 76 (November–December 2011): 100–109. 97 Interestingly, Iwan Wijono has also painted himself yellow for the performance The Yellow Man With the Red and Green Boots (Manusia Kuning Dengan Bot Merah Dan Bot Hijau) (1997), presented at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta. 98 Sumartono, “The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan art,” in Jim Supangkat, Sumartono, Asmudjo Jono Irianto, Rizki A. Zaelani, and M. Dwi Marianto, Outlet: Yogyakarta within the Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene (Yogyakarta: Cemeti Art Foundation, 2001): 36.

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In post-reformasi Indonesia, the body continues to be a powerful medium in performance art. Melati Suryodarmo’s mesmerizing performances of Exergie-Butter Dance (first acted out in 2000) may be positioned in that tradition of performance art, especially its feminist-inspired foregrounding of the specific materiality and form of the body. For this performance, Suryodarmo wears a simple black cocktail dress and dons a pair of shiny red heels. She then begins the performance by taking centre stage, placing her heels atop twenty blocks of butter laid out flat in a grid on the floor before her. As the sound of rhythmic drum beats begins, she starts to perform the graceful, sinuous dance movements stereotypically associated with various classical Indonesian dance forms, her hips swaying, her arms and hands twirling. However, her performance is doomed to failure from the outset, as she repeatedly slips and falls on the gradually softening, buttery floor-surface. Nevertheless, with each fall she stubbornly gets up again and struggles to maintain elegant and flowing lines in contrast to her stocky body frame. The seemingly senseless act turns into a deeply moving performance as audience-participants observe her struggle and sense her pain as she attempts to carry out her dance movements to the degree of perfection they require. The absurdity of the situation reflects the real-life farcicalities of cultural conformity, especially that pertaining to stereotyped images of women and the idealization of their bodies in the Indonesian context.

Figure 165: Melati Suryodarmo, Exergie – Butter Dance (São Paolo) (undated). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

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Along with artistic censorship under Suharto’s New Order, Indonesian culture staggered under the weight of Javanese-centrism, something that Suryodarmo also alludes to in her performances (see also discussion of Heri Dono, Chapter 5). Javanese cultural traditions were privileged by the State and imposed as cultural ideals for the diverse Indonesian archipelago. The next section deals with the art of Nindityo Adipurnomo – a Javanese-born artist who problematizes this essentialist version of Indonesian culture through the corporeal substance of hair. Like Victor, hair becomes a means of interrogating State inscriptions of culture. In Adipurnomo’s work, however, there is a questioning of the privileging of ‘Javaneseness’ and a concern, rather, to acknowledge Indonesia’s rich cultural diversity.

Nindityo Adipurnomo: The Cultural Matter of Hair Unfortunately a hairpiece can get out of place sometimes. Then it slips in front of our mouth and threatens to choke us. Actually the hairpiece is more like a prison – that is how I show it in my pictures.99 After we have gazed at our reflection to our satisfaction, let’s see if what we observe in the mirror compares with our own view of ourselves as Indonesians. Our personalities, characteristics, attitudes and values are all moulded by the surrounding society and various symbols. These influences result in an Indonesian who shows one face to the world another, which he often denies, to himself.100

Like that of Victor, the oeuvre of the Indonesian artist Nindityo Adipurnomo traces multifaceted manifestations of performance and performativity and may be read against State-inscribed versions of national culture – in Adipurnomo’s case, that of Suharto’s New Order regime. He highlights the New Order’s postcolonial re-invention of Indonesian tradition through the hegemonic cultural narrative of ‘Javaneseness’; the privileging of Javanese ‘high’ culture over that of Indonesia’s other numerous ethnic cultures towards forging a modern Indonesian identity for the nation.

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Nindityo Adipurnomo, artist’s statement in Alexandra Kuss, “Beyond the Modesty,” exhibition press release (2002), http://www.biotechnics.org/Nexus/2002 _10_01_nexusarchive.html (accessed 14 March 2005). 100 Mochtar Lubis, The Indonesian Dilemma, tr. Florence Lamoureux & Graham Brash (We Indonesians, Honolulu, 1979; Singapore: Graham Brash, 1983).

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Figure 166: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Portraits of Javanese Men (2001). Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Specifically, in his art practice Adipurnomo has developed a particular fascination with the konde – a traditional Javanese hairpiece which takes the form of a fake hair knot. This is worn by women as part of the kain-kebaya – the traditional Javanese costume ensemble consisting of a “tightly wrapped batik sarong and fancy, lacy or silky, tightly tailored long-sleeved blouse.”101 101

Wright, “Nindityo Adipurnomo: From solo to mass, spiritual to social,” 63.

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Through use of the konde Adipurnomo has serially investigated the intersecting issues of Javanese culture, gender, sexuality, and the body. Hair traditionally functions in the signification of the konde as a marker of social beauty, grace, refinement, and distinction and Adipurnomo often appropriates this signifier in order to reveal the contradictions and hypocrisies at work in the Javanese cultural imaginary; this is very different from the function of hair in Victor’s work, where it is the stuff of recuperated abjection. Fallen hair in traditional Javanese culture is a precious commodity, able to be cleansed, styled, and respected as wearable hairpieces. The specific styles of these hairpieces are also symbolic of the cultural status of the wearer – for instance, they may serve as signifiers of a woman’s class, age, and marital position. In his selective deconstruction of the body (as constituted by hair), Adipurnomo investigates the legitimacy of postcolonial cultural discourses of identity in the light of the actual practices of ‘Javaneseness’ in contemporary Indonesia. The konde has been a recurring motif in Adipurnomo’s art practice from the early 1990s, following his impassioned study of classical Javanese dance in the Netherlands.102 During this intensive period of self-searching, Adipurnomo’s training in the dance of bedoyo fostered in him a fascination with the body. Works at this time saw his performing body translated into two-dimensional paintings and drawings of the moving human form; from here, Adipurnomo began to experiment with sculptural forms that eventually led to the types of installation art that have dominated his practice in more recent decades. Notably, while Adipurnomo has explored the human figure and the konde in exquisite oil and gouache paintings, these have had less international circulation, perhaps because of a predilection for installation and performanceartforms in contemporary art exhibitions.103 Astri Wright describes these transitions in Adipurnomo’s artistic engagements with the body as signaled by a departure from focusing on the human body as dancer, or as mythological figure, or as individual artist-auteur, to focusing on

102

For a more detailed account of Adipurnomo’s dance training in the Netherlands, see Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (Kuala Lumpur & New York: Oxford U P , 1994): 99–108. 103 For example, his series Portrait of residency in Cardiff (1999); Sanggul Jawa seperti Linnga dan Yoni (1993); oil series for Portrait of a Javanese Man (2000–01); gouache series on the theme … doesn’t know what to do with his passion (2000–01); This man doesn’t know what to do with his passion (2000); and Passion in my hands (2001).

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fragmented, de-(re?-) contextualized parts […]. Deconstruction, the mode of the last two decades of the twentieth century, had entered Nindityo’s work across a bridge of a few strands of straight, black hair.104

Notably, through these artistic explorations, Adipurnomo came to be increasingly fascinated by the formal qualities and patterns that are expressed in and through the human body as well as with the body’s symbolic cultural significations. Adipurnomo’s subsequent obsession with the konde, as a marker of corporeal exoticism, was born out of this. Adipurnomo’s dance studies also provided him with a sense of the ‘introverted’ or ‘hidden’ patterns and structures of Javanese culture that he suggests is informed by a cultural tendency towards “introspection.”105 As Poshyananda recounts in his catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘Traditions /Tensions’ (see Chapter 3 above), Adipurnomo “noticed that the suppression of emotions in classical dance is closely associated with the introversion of the Indonesian people.”106 Similarly, the Indonesian art writer Raihul Fadjri suggests the contradictions and hypocrisies that underlie Javanese culture: A culture that gives priority to harmony and respect, represents, for the Javanese, a society that is both closed, and to a certain extent, even artificial. Outward appearances are more important than actual content.107

It is in this context that Adipurnomo’s adoption of the konde becomes symbolic of the ambivalence characterizing Javanese culture, or at least the kind of ambivalence that Adipurnomo experiences or observes in Javanese values and the related social order they describe and foster. Through the metaphor of the konde Adipurnomo makes visible the concealed nature of state-inscribed 104

Astri Wright, “Nindityo Adipurnomo: From solo to mass, spiritual to social,” in Witnessing to Silence: Art and Human Rights, ed. Caroline Turner & Nancy Sever (exh. cat.; Canberra: Humanities Research Centre Project, Australian National University, 2003): 62. 105 Nindityo Adipurnomo, in an interview with Enin Suprianto. See Enin Suprianto, “The Burden of Javanese Exotica,” A R T AsiaPacific 3.4 (1996): 91. 106 Apinan Poshyananda, “Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition,” in Poshyananda et al., Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions (exh. cat.; New York: Asia Society Galleries & Sydney: Fine Arts Press, 1996): 40. 107 Raihul Fadjri, “Nindityo Adipurnomo,” in The Second Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Queensland Art Gallery (exh. cat.; South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996).

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‘Javaneseness’, revealing its Janus-faced substratum and positing it as a form of cultural burden.108 While the konde is an outward visual expression of beauty and exquisite form, Adipurnomo’s art reveals its underlying, contradictory significations. Sumartono elucidates the specific hypocrisies behind the kind of Javaneseness encouraged by New Order elites, including former President Suharto, and reflects on their relevance to Adipurnomo’s art: On the face of it, the Javanese still revere their traditional culture, but in their personal lives they have unconsciously adopted Western ways. Some members of the Indonesian administrative top brass implore others (even, implicitly, the non-Javanese) to internalize and actualize traditional Javanese teachings, while running counter to these values in the way in which they conduct their own lives. Soeharto provides the most convincing example of such hypocrisy. While he was in power, he claimed to have actualized some of the most virtuous aspects of Javanese philosophy, which were then published as a book, edited by Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, one of his daughters. Since his fall, people have begun to note that Soeharto has violated many of the Javanese teachings outlined in this book. Through his art, Nindityo simply asks whether such traditional values are sufficiently relevant to be retained.109

In The Burden of Javanese Exotica (Beban Eksotika Jawa) (1993), five konde have been carved into wooden sculptural forms, each resting on ornate Dutch-colonial-style stools of varying height. Each of the five hairpieces has been carved into individual styles and, except for one, opens up slightly to reveal a reflected image of an object fixed to the inside. Among these hidden objects are a golden crucifix, a chiselled penis with bowtie penetrating a vagina-like opening, a representation of a traditional Javanese kelama topeng mask, and an array of jewels. Various taboo subjects relating to human desire such as avarice, sexual obsession, and alcoholism, along with Christianity, are revealed as contradictory undersides of Javanese culture. Beban Eksotika Jawa presents a scenario of self-inspection and introspection and in so doing, reveals the hypocrisy which ensues when the values of Javanese culture are lived merely on the surface level of ideology and rhetoric. The title also suggests that living up to the ideals of “Javanese Exotica” 108 109

Sumartono, “The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art,” 40. “The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art,” 40.

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may be a burdensome task. This may be even more so in terms of international contexts in which Adipurnomo feels the burden of ‘being cultured’, particularly in his exchanges with foreign curators and critics.

Figure 167: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Introversion (April the Twenty-First) (detail; 1995–96). Image courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Figure 168: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Beban Eksotika Jawa (1993). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

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Adipurnomo relates one such experience: She was observing me when I was involved in working with a konde. She said, “I’m really jealous of artists from Indonesia, because Indonesia is so rich with types of culture. What’s more, with you, Javanese culture is quite old and has attracted the attention of a lot of people.” I answered, without any intended aggression: “When you think about it I feel jealous too, of people who can take off without having the background of a strong culture.” Sometimes I feel like I have a burden.110

Adipurnomo continues his reflections on the burden of culture. He suggests foreign art curators and critics contribute to the privileging of elite Javanese culture over the otherwise diverse spectrum of Indonesian experience: For the moment, I certainly agree with critics who say that the strength of contemporary artists in Asia, including Indonesia, lies in their “local colour” or “local identity.” Even more so if these critics are foreigners. They try to evaluate what is “Indonesian,” so they’re looking for something exotic. An exotic which is elitist.111

Who Wants to Become Javanese? (1994–95), Introversion (April the twentyfirst) (1995–96), The Beauty and the Introversion of Hair Pieces (1996), Hiding Rituals of My Own Hairpiece (1997), Helmet Your Art (1998), Portraits of Javanese Men (2001) and Step on Heirloom (2001) are other works in which Adipurnomo has employed the iconography of the konde to interrogate assumptions and hypocrisies regarding presumed Javanese cultural essences. For Step on Heirloom (2001), thirty-five stone-sculpted kondes in different bun styles are laid out as a floor installation. The engagement of audience bodies is compelled, inviting visitors to step on the stone hairbuns so as to view the konde from above while experiencing it from below with their feet, to feel their stone curvatures beneath their soles. As with many other cultures, touching someone else’s head or hair is generally considered disrespectful in Javanese society. Hence, as visitors to the installation trample on these heirlooms, they symbolically quash the sanctity and sacredness of the idealized konde, and by association traditional Javanese culture. In so doing, Step on Heirloom reconfigures the status of the konde to a physically lower and therefore also symbolically lowlier status.

110 111

Suprianto, “The Burden of Javanese Exotica,” 92–93. “The Burden of Javanese Exotica,” 92–93.

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Figure 169: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Step on Heirloom (2007). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 170: Nindityo Adipurnomo, My Ancestors Were Traders (2010). Image courtesy of the artist.

It is noteworthy that Adipurnomo is himself from a lineage of elite Javanese, born in Semarang, Java, to a priyayi family of mixed descent – his father from Surakata and his mother from Yogyakarta, the two major cultural centres of Java. As Marianto has researched, his paternal priyayi lineage derives literally “from the words para yayi, meaning younger relatives of the King, but means anyone remotely connected to the Java royal family.”112 This 112

Quoted in M. Dwi Marianto, “Tamarind From the Mountain, Salt From the Sea, Meet in the Cooking Pot,” in Kopi-Susu: Mella Jaarsma, Nindityo Adipurnomo,

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personal experience of class-based difference which runs parallel to Adipurnomo’s ethnic difference as Javanese may also be read as a point of interest in his art. As Poshyananda observes, there is also an interest in exploring “the privileging of the ‘high’ [adiluhung] culture of Java over the ‘low’ Indonesian culture of the regions.”113 Portraits of Javanese Men (2001) highlights the historical importance of portraiture as a key medium of expression for investigations into identity and the human body. In these black and white head-and-shoulder shots, Adipurnomo employs the genre of photographic portraiture to reveal the interplay of subjectivity and culture. Curiously, the faces in these portraits are obscured by the ever-present konde and suggest a layered complexity of subjectivity that is ‘masked’ by cultural factors – reminiscent of the masked explorations of subjectivity previously explored in Simryn Gill’s A Small Town at the Turn of the Century (2001) (see Chapter 4). In Adipurnomo’s portraits, there is a suggestion of the gendered aspect and layers of Javanese identity: men, as represented by the male bodies shown, and women through the feminine connotations of the konde. The traditionally female konde hairpiece is strapped across the face of a Javanese man, covering the entire face and suggestive of cultural burdens but also, as Kuss offers, of “non-communication, prejudice and intolerance.”114 That the konde ‘faces in’, towards the Javanese men, may also allude to a level of intra-cultural Javanese communication not open to outsiders but perhaps, also, to the idealized feminine image of Javanese culture which the Javanese man is here forced to acknowledge, to look back at and look into, so as to see himself as the consequence of a suffocating imposition of culture. Adipurnomo’s fetishization of the sign of the konde is also closely connected to his personal experiences of gender. Wright highlights “the artist’s obsession with his mother and grandmother’s generations” in the context of “the traditionally socialized Javanese feminine.”115

ed. Mella Jaarsma & Nindityo Adipurnomo (exh. cat.; Yogyakarta: Cemeti Gallery, 1998): 8. 113 Poshyananda, “Roaring Tigers, Desperate Dragons in Transition,” 40. See also Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1983). 114 Kuss, “Beyond the Modesty.” 115 Wright, “Nindityo Adipurnomo,” 62.

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Figure 171: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Portraits of Javanese Men (2001). Image courtesy of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

Figure 172: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Hiding Rituals and the Mass Production I I (1997/1998). Image courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

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Figure 173: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Dzikir (2008). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 174: Nindityo Adipurnomo, Boom Out of the Ground (2008). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Indeed, revealing his intergenerational matrilineal motivations, Adipurnomo incorporates the following words in his artwork My Grand-mother (1998): Because when my mother was young, she collected her fallen hairs to sell, to make into various kinds of hairpieces, that was something very normal. My grandmother still does that.116

Notably, Adipurnomo has even collected his own pubic hair for his kondeinspired installations and, like Victor, appropriates the abject materiality of pubic hair in order to undo assumed cultures of purity, as well as to deconstruct the gendered basis of institutionalized practices. For instance, for the enormous rattan-sculpted konde entitled Hiding Rituals and the Mass Production I (1997–98), Adipurnomo used as artistic material his own pubic hair, which he collected and placed in tiny plastic bags along with newspaper clippings invoking corrupt figures of Indonesian society. The association of pubic hair (as corporeal abject object) with corrupt Indonesian notables registered both as objects of filth. The plastic bags were attached to protruding lengths of rattan that frayed at one of the two holes of the konde’s exterior, as if ‘airing dirty laundry’ beyond the cover of the konde. Evidently, even this protective cultural layering was porous and penetrable; the protection and sheath of tradition signified by this enormous rattan konde was susceptible to unravelling. Moreover, with the konde developing to such large proportions, it rather humorously even suggested the form of buttocks, again unsettling the symbolic sacredness of the konde. The use of male pubic hair may also suggest that the vulgar aspects of society Adipurnomo critiques are born of patriarchal values and social systems that corrupt the purity of female traditions. Adipurnomo’s installation Beyond the Modesty (2002) further explores the ‘massage’ and manipulation that are performed when the purity of cultural traditions is enlisted for politically strategic ends. This is achieved by asking visitors to, quite literally, feel Adipurnomo’s kondes, which are yet again laid out on the floor to be walked upon. In this instance, however, a more involved tactile experience is encouraged through the installation of several oversized wooden kondes whose surface is covered with the kneading beads of massage sandals. People are invited to take their shoes off and walk over the konde so as to experience the pleasure of a foot massage. Adipurnomo’s investigations of Javanese culture are not only a questioning of the legitimacy and relevance of Javanese culture for contemporary Indo116

Text by the artist Nindityo Adipurnomo, as included in his artwork My Grandmother (1998).

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nesian society but also a means of revealing the constitution of the Indonesian subject as one who can only come to understand him- or herself in relation to others. As the Indonesian curator Rizki Zaelani suggests, The Javanese subject becomes a subject at the cost of power relations, which strives for the balance of harmony. The art of Nindityo lies amidst these interactions between the very personal space of individual will and what is defined as the realm of public property, such as societal norms, mores and taboos. […] What lies at the heart of Nindityo’s work indeed is not the articulation of the loss of artist’s subject-hood, but rather, it is a refinement of the subject through the reconsideration of the equilibrium between individual will and public property through a dialogue.117

Thus, we might also note the dialogic relations invoked by Adipurnomo’s art, in particular the interdependent space of social belonging between self and other, which necessarily situates the subject as part of an entangled web of social relations. The different art practices of Nindityo Adipurnomo and Suzann Victor converge in their mutual interest in corporeal investigations. Through artistic explorations of the deconstructed body (hair, blood, etc.), they show the body’s porous, flexible, and detachable contours, revealing the whole in relation to its parts and to other bodies. While Adipurnomo and Victor’s art is often a creative abstraction or deconstruction of the body so as to suggest the potency of its corporeal whole, other instances of contemporary art play with the body’s invisibility and ephemerality, particularly via spiritual or animist traditions, or forms of conceptually based contemporary art practice. In these kinds of practice, there is often a conjuring of the body as invisible spirit, as ephemeral presence or idea rather than a literal rendering of the human figure.

Ecologies of ‘Being-in-the-World’: Performing the Body in Art (Roberto Villanueva, S. Chandrasekaran) The invisible, ephemeral bodies featured in the performance-installation art practices of the late Roberto Villanueva are inspired by animist traditions of Philippine provenience. In 1980, Villanueva moved to the northern highlands 117

Rizki A. Zaelani, “Nindityo Adipurnomo,” in The 2nd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2002: Imagined Workshop (exh. cat.; Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2002).

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of Baguio, and it was there, in the Cordillera region, that he found inspiration for his indigenous-influenced, organic artforms. Not unlike Christanto’s trance-like performances (see Chapter 5 above), Villanueva’s performance-installations, such as Archetype (1989), Atang Ti Kararua (“Soul offerings”) (1990), and Ego’s Grave (1993), conjured “shamanistic rituals of purging and remembrance”118 in which the human body interacts with spirit bodies in communicative acts of creation, renewal, and purging. Villanueva’s Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth (1989) was a monumental spiral maze, forty-five metres in diameter and 600 metres in length, installed on the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila. Constructed from locally available bamboo and reeds, Archetypes invited its visitors through a winding labyrinth before arriving at a central clearing, modelled on the Cordillera dap-ay, or ritual ground. At the centre of the clearing stood an abandoned well filled with rocks and bulul or spirit figures, hence also serving to mark the site of “an archaic guardian spirit.”119 In Archetypes and other artworks by Villanueva there is an invitation to corporeal and spiritual movement in, through, and around the art installation. Such works also foreground an ecology of being-in-the-world which recognizes the immanent interdependencies of the human and the natural. In using indigenous materials and idioms for his art, Villanueva recycles and returns the life-giving energy of the natural world through his own creative interventions (as human being) in the natural and spiritual worlds. The art writer Ramon Lerma regards this as [an] address [of] the irony of [Villanueva’s own] practice by invoking: (a) the spiritual/utopic/mystic dimension of [his] works, which correlates to (b) the possibility of re-assimilating [his] works with the earth, thus producing an art that truly acts not simply on, but also with and for the environment.120 118

Eileen Legaspi–Ramirez, “Crossbred and Émigré: Visual Art in a Flux” (2002), National Commission for Culture and the Arts (Philippines) website, http://www.ncca .gov.ph/culture&arts/cularts/arts/visual/visual-crossbred.htm (accessed 7 March 2005). 119 Alice Guillermo, “The Use of Indigenous Materials,” in Jeannie E. Javelosa, “The Eighties and Beyond: Exploring Alternative Ways,” in Art Philippines, ed. Juan T. Gatbonton, Jeannie E. Javelosa & Lourdes Ruth R. Roa (Manila: Crucible Workshop, 1992): 318. 120 See Ramon E.S. Lerma, “Roberto Villanueva & Junyee: The Nature and Art of Intervention,” http://www.artwrite.cofa.unsw.edu.au/0021/robertoV_Lerma/richie _roberto3.html (accessed 21 February 2005).

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In other words, Villanueva addresses human corporeality as being in dynamic relation with other organic materials and natural environments, as well as spirit worlds. There is an ecology of life invoked in the re/cycling of natural materials and their reintegration into earthly artistic landscapes. Like his contemporary Santiago Bose, he sought, in his contemporary installation and performance art practices, to activate the communal and spiritual function of creativity that persists in Cordillera cultures.

Figure 175: Roberto Villanueva, Ego’s Grave (1993). Reproduced by courtesy of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and Napoleon Abundo Villanueva.

Archetypes drew real, living bodies of its audience-participants into its apex while also prompting their spiritual reflection as they moved towards the site’s spiritual ‘heart’. In this simultaneously grounded and earthly yet moving, even spiritual experience of the installation, the viewer could only come to know the intricacies of the maze through direct bodily engagement with it; the overall formal patterns of the maze could only be observed from a ‘celestial’ vantage point above the work. Further affective dimensions to this work opened up through the sheer marvelling at the artist’s own hand-craft and his physical

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weaving of these natural materials into a highly textured sitework of commanding and wondrous proportions. Villanueva’s art installations may be contrasted with a different type of contemporary engagement with the body that aligns more strongly with conceptual art traditions, expressly interested in tracing the body’s particular significance as medium, form, and site. For instance, S. Chandrasekaran foregrounds his own body in a performance art that tests the limits of the material physis /soma with reference to Indian spiritualist icons and philosophies which have informed his own life experiences as an artist of Indian ethnicity in Singapore; this occurs with early works such as Yogi (1990), Kala Chakra (1991), Atman (1992), and Duality (1993). In his later ‘Bioalloy’ performances, including the work Bleeding Angel (2006), he emphasizes crosscultural, posthumanist issues that investigate the body as cyborg through an aesthetic of scientific experimentation. While there are spiritual influences in Chandrasekaran’s performance art, these are harnessed for conceptual explorations that test the body’s materiality and ideological bases as a performative medium and locus. Integral to this is the artist’s dialectical engagement with audiences, by which he tests cultural boundaries and crosscultural sympathies between self and other, specifically via the intercorporeal encounters between the artist’s performing body and those of his participant-audiences. This occurs particularly in performances in which the artist deliberately initiates aesthetic acts that test the limits of physical pain and endurance and elicit different kinds of audience engagement and response – from awe, wonder, and reverence to solemnity, unease, shock, and anger.121 In the art of both Villanueva and Chandrasekaran, the material body is presented in dialogic relation with spiritually inspired and conceptual concerns. Their art ultimately registers the physical body as one that is also informed by ideology and belief. Ironically, the visible bodily presence of the artist and the spectators is central to this illumination. By contrast, other artists consider the invisible materiality of bodies, such as the corporeal matter of ‘breath.’

Breathly Presence (Ye Shufang, Susyilawati Sulaiman) Inhale. A breath of air. An invisible, life-sustaining substance that moves in and through the body. When that air is denied our bodies, we are reminded of 121

See S. Chandrasekaran, “Locating Self through Performance Art” (doctoral dissertation; Perth: Curtin University of Technology, 2008).

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our corporeal materiality and the ephemeral nature of our physical existence. Exhale. As air infuses our lungs and filters through our skin, our bodies, conversely, return air as emission, permeating the atmosphere in a cyclical ecology. In this way, air is possibly the most communal substance, a shared lifegiving and life-sustaining force. But it is also the conduit of contagion and public harm, the carrier of airborne viral disease, passed on in the exchange of breath from one body to another, and from which we seek quarantine. To bring to life her installation Orientations: A Layer of Breath (2002), the artist Ye Shufang invited audience-participants to inhale deeply and blow into a single, transparent inflatable balloon.122 Oxygenating the stubborn cubeshaped inflatables into their complete shape to realize their full, air-filled capacity required bodily effort, the chest heaving as it drew breath. Through the stuff of corporeal breath the lifeless balloons were given new rubbery and artistic shape, air given new ‘visibility’ by the contours of a balloon, the everyday performance of breathing air transformed into a performance and object of art. Throughout the course of the installation, as the individual balloons amassed in a pile in the depths of a stairwell, so, too, did a collection of human breath come to fill the space. The seemingly invisible and absent body, the apparently shifting and immaterial stuff of breath, had been transformed into an altogether different kind of tangible and observable art object. Susyilawati Sulaiman’s A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room (2003) also responds to these contradictions of breath. In this performative installation, the artist offers her own breath, the air of her own living room in Kuala Lumpur, during the atmosphere of international paranoia accompanying the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (S A R S ) Coronavirus across parts of Asia in 2003. Numerous plastic balloons were filled with the artist’s lived-in air in Kuala Lumpur and sealed tight before being flown to Italy, where they were presented as part of Sulaiman’s installation for the Florence Biennale of 2003. There the inflated bags appeared as a pile on the floor alongside a rickety wooden wall panel taken from the artist’s home, a further container for all manner of living organisms. In addition, a line of text was scrawled along the gallery walls as part of the installation, inviting audience participation: “Release the air if you wish,” “Malaysia.” An arrow on the wall pointed to the availability of needle-sharp objects which could be used to 122

Presented as part of the exhibition ‘Site + Sight: translating cultures’, installed at the Asian Civilisations Museum (Empress Place), Singapore, 7 June–26 July 2002 (curator: Binghui Huangfu).

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puncture the bags. However, confirming her expectations, Sulaiman reports, “not one audience member responded to [the] provocation [to puncture the bags] throughout the entire course of the biennale.”123

Figure 176: Susyilawati Sulaiman, A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room (2003) (installation, Florence Biennale 2003). Reproduced by courtesy of the artist and photographer Brent Hallard.

By giving real presence, materiality, and visibility to the potential of viral contagion, A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room sought to evoke the panic surrounding the emergence of the S A R S virus in parts of Asia including Malaysia at the time, and its potential for global spread, revealing “how quickly air had become a common enemy.”124 While it was not certain if the air in the installation was infected or not, the viewers would obviously remain safe if the air remained sealed in the bags. The seemingly benign materials of air-filled balloons, wooden slats, and scribbled text were transformed into provocative and threatening signs of the embodied Other. In its signifier of contagion, Sulaiman’s artwork sought to register an affective re123

Susyilawati Sulaiman, artist’s statement for A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room (2003), Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea, Fortezza de Basso, Florence, Italy (Florence Biennale), 2003. 124 Sulaiman, artist’s statement for A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room (2003).

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sponse in audience-participants, not only as sensory reaction to the work but also that they might think through its potential discursive significations as sign of the Asian Other – if audiences followed its cues to engage with it through the lens of its Malaysian associations. Audiences were also informed that the air that filled the balloons was taken from a room in which Sulaiman exchanged words with a friend. Against the impulse to over-write the racialized, S A R S -infected, Asian body onto this work, one audience-participant described his own personal affective and embodied engagement as follows: There is a simple text inviting us to pick up one of these vinyl bags and open it by releasing a stopper from a small nozzle. Inside we are told is air from a room where conversation took place between a friend and Susilawati [sic] Sulaiman, back in Malaysia, perhaps. The piece incrementally gathers roaring majestic silence from its humble beginnings – a few boards nailed together, puffed up vinyl bags, and a line of writing that borders instructional, or monastic. As instructed, as I bent over and picked up a bag of moving fingers to the nozzle, I thought about who the friend was, what conversation went down, and admittedly, most curiously, how did the air get in the bags. I am sure there are simple answers, though I am not sure I need them as what there was aroused enough – a sense of mystery, everydayness, and a touch of art.125

For some audience-participants, the S A R S was perhaps a distant, even nonexistent reference-point for A wall with 8 hours air. Perhaps the installation in Italy was lost in translation. Perhaps the poetics of an intimate space in which air is shared between the artist and her friend in Malaysia is far more affecting and compelling in its reminder of human connection than any invitation to puncture the bags and release the air, to ‘absence’ the bodies made present in the installation. But, of course, the fact that Sulaiman’s provocation was not taken up by even one participant may suggest the stronger threat of cultural contamination, as well as the orientalizing inscription of racialized narratives.

125

Brent Hallard, “Project 131: Florence Biennale: Susyilawati Sulaiman, Malaysia, Installation,” 2003–2004, Tokyo Note, http://www.brenthallard.com/tokyo_note/flo /flo_1.shtml (accessed 03/03/2005). Corresponding to Sulaiman’s report, this audience-participant must not have actually released the air, even if deeply moved to imagine the atmosphere of conversation shared between the artist and her friend in Malaysia as an affective poetics of the everyday.

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Figures 177–178: Susyilawati Sulaiman, A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room (2003) (preparations in Malaysia). Images courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 179–180: Susyilawati Sulaiman, A wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room (2003) (preparations in Malaysia). Images courtesy of the artist.

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I would suggest that the transcultural import of Sulaiman’s conceptual-performative- installation piece resides not in its irreverent register of race, but in its transcultural, affecting aesthetic. When audience-participants are enlisted to register their corporeal presence and embodied cognition by engaging with the art of an/Other, transforming both the art and themselves, they participate in art’s transcultural connective capacity as a site of affective provocation. As with Sulaiman’s art, this chapter has sought to show how contemporary Southeast Asian art takes up corporeal themes through a variety of modes in order to convey matters of the human condition. These include: actively performing bodies of protest; the literal figurative and material body; and invisible and ephemeral bodies. In all of these, the body is figured as an important site for challenging hegemonic narratives and relating multiple Southeast Asian identifications, as well as for conveying issues of deep social and political significance to present-day Southeast Asian societies. Such art presents us with a complexity of corporeal experience often lacking in the racially centred discourse of contemporary Southeast Asian art. They highlight the ways in which artists actually complicate bodily matters and thus defy exclusively racialized discourses in this art. Indeed, they suggest that the discursively produced body is one that is a contested site of meaning and open to a variety of re-inscriptions. They offer the body as a site of connective potential, engaging with the bodies of others in dialogue with the self through an aesthetic of affective relation. The body coded by Southeast Asian experience is also generative of intercorporeal connection across differences and borders of all kinds, evincing a characteristic condition of contemporary art in the world.

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Epilogue Origins, Futures, Becomings

History is always written from a sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.1 All history does is to translate a co-existence of becomings into a succession.2

Southeast Asia and Contemporary Art History’s Contingent Imaginaries

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Southeast Asian art history contribute to current and future debates on a developing contemporary art history, particularly in an increasingly globalized, homogenizing art world with its propensity to ‘Oneness’? How might contemporary Southeast Asian art reinforce an historiography that situates Southeast Asia as a distinct regional space and identity with its own art trajectories but which at the same time has relevance for the world? Can contemporary Southeast Asian art offer ways of rethinking the conventional frames of art history, revising established epistemologies and methodologies for researching art and for researching Asia? How might this art help shape the future of art? Whither the projects of contemporary Southeast Asian art at the dawn of the ‘Asian century’? 1

OW DOES CONTEMPORARY

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, 1980; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1987): 23. 2 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 430.

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These are some of the central questions and concerns behind my engagement with contemporary Southeast Asia art throughout this book and which I hope will resonate with art-historical work being pursued by others. While the present volume, it is hoped, may have shed some light on these matters, many of these questions underline the fact that defining contemporary art is necessarily a work in progress, of futures and of becoming rather than a tracing of narratives already played out. These questions, along with others, might therefore serve as prompts and cues in the project of contemporary art history. Significantly, contemporary Southeast Asian art –its multiple forms, cultural and historical contexts, influences, audiences, and exhibiting contexts, as well as its high degree of self-reflexivity and the kinds of ‘art criticism’ this elicits – is itself an immediate and driving force in imagining and imaging the future shape and problematics of art historiography. It is already playing a role in prompting re-examination of what we mean by art and art history, their methods, forms, subject-matter, and reception. It demands different ways of seeing from the established Western models of art-historical practice. A contemporary art history for the world faces the challenge of recalibrating Western art history’s traditional tools, methods, and scope to register the manifold currents of contemporary art-making in diverse yet specific temporal and spatial contexts. In addressing this task, contemporary Southeast Asian art demonstrates the plurality and diversity to be found in the world’s contemporary art, not only through the multitude of artistic expression seen within the region itself and throughout the region’s diasporas, but also in its function as a marker and model of the rich modern and contemporary art histories existing in locales beyond the art centres of Europe and the U S A . The particular significance of contemporary Southeast Asian art to a growing discussion of contemporary art globally is to reveal the plural, conjunctive, and overlapping histories that come into view in art’s globalized context and which demand that we recognize art history as a differentiated field even within the shared space–time of the global. To borrow from Huw Hallam’s reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism for art history, this is to recognize the latter not as “a singular, everexpanding yet concentric” project but one that is “multiple overlapping [and] polycentric”3 in its design, dependencies, and trajectories. Contemporary 3

Huw Hallam, “Globalised Art History: The New Universality and the Question of Cosmopolitanism,” Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art 9.1–2 (special issue, “21st-Century Art History,” 2008–2009): 86.

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Southeast Asian art, in other words, plays a vital role in disrupting the universalizing impulse to institutionalize contemporary art in a singular, unified, homogenized perspective, in line with the twenty-first century’s institutionalization of the global (most pronounced in the frame of the world circuit of international art biennales and the proliferating commercial art fairs). Even as we might gain generative value from considering the region’s art regionally – that is, as a heuristic device for mapping currents of continuity and connection situated in place – at the same time, Southeast Asia has always been a site for the coexistence and overlap of heterogeneous elements, a locale marked by diverse indigenous and foreign experience, which has adapted to and been transformed by the tides of history and cultural influence but which nonetheless retains individuality in its particular historical and cultural crossings. This story is one that reverberates with the present-day dynamics of globalization; for this reason, too, Southeast Asia can serve as a particularly instructive reference-point for continuing global discussions of contemporary art, here argued as distinctively situated manifestations of specific local and global crossings with relevance for the world. For some, this situation prompts discussion of contemporary art history as a potentially global project, part of a new ‘global art’. However, my aim has not been to suggest a ‘world art’ or ‘global art’ that reverts to a Westerncentric universalizing agenda but, rather, to encourage art histories that acknowledge the diversity of the world’s modern and contemporary art and their cultural and aesthetic intersections and the importance of this to global dialogue on contemporary art. As Terry Smith has suggested in thinking through the distinction of contemporary art and its seeming antinomies, At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, art seems markedly different from what it was during the modern era: it is now – above all, and before it is anything else – contemporary. What kind of change is this: illusory or actual, singular or multiple? Why did it happen? How deep does it go? Has it, yet, a history? […] While having some shared characteristics, this shift occurred in different and distinctive ways in each cultural region, and in each art-producing locality within these regions. Cultural patterns with quite distinct temporalities co-exist, develop separately or together, connect then part ways. Precisely in its grasp of this experiential complexity, contemporary art is – perhaps for the first time in history – truly an art of the world.4 4

Terry Smith, conference abstract, “Contemporary Art: World Currents,” for the Humanities Research Centre conference ‘The World and World-Making in Art’,

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Attentive to contemporary art’s differentiations, what I also hope to have encouraged through the present book is critical engagement with the notion of Southeast Asian regionalism as an art-historical framework – recognition of its critical and generative possibilities for contemporary art history and its utility as a framing device for recognizing the difference and specificity of contemporary art by Southeast Asian artists in the international art context. In so doing, I have also sought to argue for the value of such difference in expanding our knowledge both of Southeast Asia and of contemporary art. The criticality of Southeast Asian regionalism lies in its contingent relations – it is this condition that enables resistance to the otherwise essentializing and totalizing tendencies of the regional frame. By recognizing Southeast Asia’s contingent reality – its web of multiple temporalities and cultural contexts – we are encouraged to adopt critical perspectives when seeking to describe the art of the region. Moreover, ‘Southeast Asia’ has offered a point of entry to engage critically with Southeast Asian regionalizing discourses, including the political framing of A S E A N and its cultural projects, the legacies of art-historical work tied to the Nanyang school, regionalizing efforts emanating from Singapore in that country's recent efforts to position itself as a cultural hub for the region, institutional regionalizing projects in Singapore (S A M ), Japan (F A A M ), and Australia (Q A G O M A ), new artist networks across the region, including the proliferation of independent art spaces and collectives which share resources and collaborate on projects and which have been particularly instrumental in developing contemporary Southeast Asian art and forging new professional networks for art which cross national borders, as well as the new ways in which arts professionals are engaging with each other across the region. I have accordingly described how Southeast Asian countries now commit themselves to forms of intraregional contemporary art exchange and collaboration that are shaping new kinds of regionally based art dynamics. At the same time, contemporary artists in Southeast Asia have also been important to

Australian National University, Canberra, August 11–13, 2011 (co-convenors Caroline Turner, Michelle Antoinette, Zara Stanhope & Jackie Menzies). See also Terry Smith, “Worlds Pictured in Contemporary Art: Planes and Connectivities,” Humanities Research (special issue, “The World and World-Making in Art,” ed. Caroline Turner, Michelle Antoinette & Zara Stanhope) 19.2 (July 2013): 11–25; and Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King & Thames & Hudson; Upper Saddle River N J : Pearson / Prentice Hall, 2011).

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the revitalization of community-based art practices which emphasize localized participation at the sub-national level. As this wide array of initiatives continues to gain strength, a new set of intra-Asian regional artistic projects embracing Southeast Asia are also gaining momentum, emphasizing the need to explore Asia itself for points of reference and collaboration, rather than continuing to seek to validate Asia via the West. So, too, ‘Southeast Asia’ is increasingly a space for the institutionalization of Southeast Asian art itself – through museums and galleries and their collections and exhibitions, the growth of biennale exhibitions, commercial art activities, curatorial positionings, archival tracings, and discussion of art’s future directions, as well as through academic work, such as the present book, that seeks to situate Southeast Asian art histories as a regular part of art-historical and Southeast-Asia-focused studies. Indeed, as Southeast Asia, and Asia more broadly, secures its own position in contemporary art, the terms of curatorship, exhibition design, and art history already show signs of a shift from Westerncentric models or viewpoints to affirming the agency of Southeast Asians themselves as part of the developmental logic of contemporary art projects.5 As Southeast Asian locales have further developed their own art infrastructure, they have increasingly challenged the hold of Western-centric histories of art. In short, for the current book ‘Southeast Asia’ has provided a critical framework for foregrounding and exploring the work of various contemporary artists from Southeast Asia whose rise to prominence in the 1990s intersected with broader global interest in contemporary art from Asia. In homing in on the specific geography of Southeast Asia and its art, I have sought to critically probe the value of continuing isolations of geography in discussing contemporary art. What is to be gleaned from or denied in channelling currents of ‘the contemporary’ through the regional frame of ‘Southeast Asia’? I hope to have shown that the Southeast Asian regional frame as ‘contingent device’ offers another productive point of entry into and even intervention in the developing ‘world’and ‘global’ histories of contemporary art. It offers a different basis for recognizing the specificity of contemporary art with connection to Southeast Asia, thereby resisting absorption by, and claim5

For instance, the 4th Singapore Biennale, ‘If The World Changed’, for the first time in that Biennale’s history invited the exclusive participation of Southeast Asiabased curators and artists so as “to respond to and reconsider the worlds we live in, and the worlds we want to live in.” See S A M website, “Singapore Biennale 2013,” http: //www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/sb2013/ (accessed 12 April 2013).

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ing space apart from, the homogenizing and institutionalized patterns of twenty-first-century globalization and its consequence, ‘global art’. The present examination of contemporary Southeast Asian art has, I hope, shed some light on how Southeast Asia not only stands for a regional physical space or geography but also serves as a specific locus of art practice and art-historical knowledge-production – a ‘geography of knowing’ which better exposes and counters the current ‘geographies of ignorance’ that underlie the world’s knowledge of ‘contemporary art’ (particularly through the latter’s relationship to ‘the (Western) modern’), to show it as a movement of worldly relevance but with specific and localized histories.6 Ultimately, I have argued that contemporary Southeast Asian art offers a means to refocus the global art-historical lens and re-stage our future visions for contemporary art historiography as a field of differentiated perspectives.

Contemporary Tracings: Repetition and Difference Among the most recent generation of contemporary Southeast Asian artists, there is a new confidence in negotiating their local art histories and art practices. These historically aware artists emphasize the particular relevance of their own local context in contributing to a global discourse regarding modern and contemporary art. In 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art (2005), the artist Ho Tzu Nyen probes Singapore’s art through a series of four short films, scripted and directed by the artist and broadcast on Singapore’s public television channel, Arts Central. The four films or “episodes” resurrect four important works of art from four distinct periods in Singapore’s art history, works that at the same time encapsulate four specific modes of art practice – painting, conceptual art, performance art, and post-conceptualism. Episode 1: Cheong Soo Pieng: A Dream of Tropical Life references the celebrated painting Tropical Life (1959), regarded as a pioneering example of Singapore’s modern art and celebrated for its innovative Nanyang or ‘Southern Seas’ regional painting style (see also Chapter 2 above); Episode 2: Cheo Chai Hiang: A Thousand Singapore Rivers refers to the iconic status of waterways in Singapore’s painting traditions and in the artist Cheo Chai-Hiang’s conceptual art intervention in this through his 6

Van Schendel’s threefold definition of how ‘Southeast Asia’ finds meaning has been instructive for mapping my thoughts here (“Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance,” 647–68).

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proposal 5 x 5 ft Singapore River, submitted to the Singapore Modern Art Society in 1972 but rejected by the Society for their exhibition of that year; Episode 3: Tang Da Wu – The Most Radical Art Gesture references the political intervention of the pioneering performance artist Tang Da Wu in his ‘performative’ gesture Don’t Give Money to the Arts, carried out during the Singapore Art ’95 art fair as a protest at the government’s funding support for less critical, commercial art practices following the effective ban on performance art in Singapore in 1994 (see Chapter 6 above); Episode 4: Lim Tzay Chuen: The Invisible Artwork refers to the unrealized project Alter #11 (2002) by Lim Tzay Chuen, a proposal which in its most basic design intends that a single rifle-shot be fired into a gallery space, but actually evinces more complex processes of bureaucratic convention and negotiation in modern-day Singapore (see Chapter 5 above). Each episode in 4 x 4 is a dramatic scenario which, in the artist’s words, aims “to shift the practice of art from the manufacture of objects to the production of ‘discursive events’.”7 Within these episodes, presenters, hosts, celebrities, and actors take on educational roles, performing the work of art criticism. We might in turn read the 4 x 4 production as Ho’s own twofold ‘performance’ of art practice as art criticism. Indeed, the 4 x 4 films spring from Ho’s scholarly investigation into Singapore’s modern art history, tracing its legacies and its affinities with other histories.8 The multiple contexts for the films – within predictable visual art exhibition settings but also the less conventional space of public television – revealed a desire to harness the possibilities of contemporary art for art education and criticism, to address a wider public spectrum, and to situate contemporary art along a longer arthistorical trajectory. Besides the films, Ho delivered related papers at conferences and workshops and a series of lectures, all of which generated a discursive effect for the project. Returning to the first episode in the series, Ho’s reconstruction and analysis of Cheong Soo Pieng’s 1959 painting Tropical Life, we begin to see a further set of intentions across the various discursive events which together make up 4 x 4 – namely, Ho’s interest in tracing lines of historical repetition and dif7

Artist’s description of the artwork. Ho’s “Afterimages” is an intellectual examination of these four seminal moments in Singapore’s modern art history and is the precursor to the filmic works of 4 x 4. See Ho Tzu Nyen, “Afterimages: Strands of Modern Art in Singapore” (M A thesis, Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2007). 8

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ference. In recalling Tropical Life, famously regarded for its epitomizing of the ‘Nanyang’ or ‘South Seas’ style which Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi, Liu Kang and other artists helped to establish in the 1950s,9 Ho also sets up an art-historical correspondence between the earlier ‘trip to Bali’ by these four pioneering modern artists of Singapore and a more recent re-enactment of that trip by the contemporary Singapore artists Agnes Yit, Kai Lam, Jeremy Hiah, and Woon Tien Wei of the Artists’ Village collective. Entitled The Bali Project (2001), the Artists’ Village project sought to reenact the Nanyang artists’ trip to Bali of forty-nine years before as a means of exploring the foundations of Singapore’s modern art history.10 The artists redramatized the scenes of Liu Kang’s paintings while on their own trip to Bali in September 2001, mimicking their basic compositional elements and settings and inserting themselves in place of Liu’s original models. These performative moments were captured in a series of photographic stills which have an uncanny resemblance to Liu’s original paintings but could certainly not be read as replicas of the earlier paintings (the elements are similar but clearly not exactly the same). Their motivation, the artists explain, was to engage in research on their “cultural predecessors and the local modern art history’s current influence on the contemporary art scene here in Singapore.”11 Thus, by in turn comparing these two ‘trips to Bali’, Ho’s intention is to point to historical correspondences and differences, suggesting the comparability but also spatiotemporal specificity of different historical events. In his related ‘performance-lecture’12 entitled Insomnia: Tzu-Nyen Ho 2 South Seas, 3 Chairs, 4 Suits (1 March 2005), Ho again recalls the Nanyang 9

See T.K Sabapathy, “Traditions and modernity: The Nanyang artists I,” Straits Times (4 October 1980), Sec. 2: 6–7; and “Pictorial Vocabulary: The Nanyang artists I I ,” Straits Times (6 October 1980), Sec. 2: 8–9. 10 On these two ‘trips to Bali’, see also Wang Ruobing, “The Quest for a Regional Culture: The Artistic Adventure of Two Bali Trips, 1952 and 2001,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 12.5 (September–October 2013): 77–87. 11 The Artists’ Village, T A V Newsletter (undated), http://tav.org.sg/, as cited in Ho Tzu Nyen, in Lee Wen & Ho Tzu Nyen, “Interview with Ho Tzu Nyen, August 14, 2005, Singapore,” in The Future of Imagination 3, 31, http://www.foi.sg/files /foi3catalog.pdf (accessed 9 November 2007). 12 Ho considers his lectures as performances that “resurrect” the installation components of his art practice. This particular performance-lecture was given at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (I C A ), London on 2 March 2005. For details of this performance-lecture, see Institute of Contemporary Arts (U K ), “Insomnia: Tzu-Nyen

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artists’ ‘trip to Bali’ but in this context their story of travel is compared with another legendary visit to the ‘Southern Seas’ of Tahiti sixty years earlier, that undertaken by the European modernist Paul Gauguin. In recounting this story of relation, Ho seeks to probe histories – and his inherited stories – of repetition and differentiation. He asks, for instance, when one of Singapore’s so-called pioneer generation of painters travel ‘down south’ to Bali, in search of new motifs, and a new style to differentiate themselves from the post-impressionism of Paris – to what extent do they repeat the journey by Gauguin to the ‘south seas’ of Tahiti? What is their mode when they repeat the journey? Were they self conscious about their repetition or were they convinced of their own ‘originality’? And most importantly how did this self-consciousness (or lack of) manifest itself in their paintings and their painting’s mode of addressing their viewers?13

Figure 181: Ho Tzu Nyen, 4 x 4 - Episodes of Singapore Art, Episode 1, Cheong Soo Pieng – A Dream of Tropical Life (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

Ho 2 South Seas, 3 Chairs, 4 Suits,” press release, http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm ?articleid=13971 (accessed 9 November 2005). 13 Ho Tzu Nyen, in Lee Wen & Ho Tzu Nyen, “Interview with Ho Tzu Nyen, August 14, 2005, Singapore.”

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Figure 182: Ho Tzu Nyen, 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art, Episode 2, Cheo Chai Hiang – A Thousand Singapore Rivers (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 183: Ho Tzu Nyen, 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art, Episode 3, Tang Da Wu – The Most Radical Gesture (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 184: Ho Tzu Nyen, 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art, Episode 3, Tang Da Wu – The Most Radical Gesture (2005). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 185: Ho Tzu Nyen, video-stills from Every Name in History is I: Film and Paintings about the Other Founder of Singapore (2003). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Thus, in his own re-telling of these histories, Ho throws into question the particular authenticity of one historical event over another. He unsettles our take on history as fait accompli and thereby also, on history’s claims to irrefutability, instead revealing the fragmentary, interconnected, multiple, and repetitive nature of historical events. Ultimately, he traces the selective passages of his own inherited art histories and lays bare the multiplicity of other possible historical trajectories which might have been sedimented. While the project looks to the past, it also directs us to thinking about the prospects of contemporary art – for Singapore, Southeast Asia, and the world – as a space of plural possibilities, trajectories, and becomings. Ho’s citing of this historical moment and its art-historical consequence reveals the legacy of the trip to Bali for Singapore’s modern art history and present-day practices of Southeast Asian art. In marking this as a discursive moment for contemporary Southeast Asian art, and an object of Southeast Asian art history, Ho attunes us – as Piyadasa and Sabapathy did for an earlier generation – of the processes of art-historical making and offers an education in art criticism. Through its close analysis of Cheong’s Tropical Life, 4 x 4 is a self-reflexive investigation into the art-historical narrative legacy inherited by contemporary Southeast Asian artists. By revealing the production of history itself as the object of critical inquiry, Ho offers a rare ‘look back’ at local modern art histories. The work thus becomes a means of re-evaluating the past in order to better understand the present. Indirectly, it references the foundational albeit largely uncontested terrain of Southeast Asian art historiography to date, particularly that concerning the development of the Nanyang School of painting and its defining attributes. As the Malaysian arts critic Eddin Khoo has remarked of the situation in Malaysia, Several decades on, the work resulting from [… the Piyadasa-Sabapathy] partnership remains the only credible effort at creating a sustained meditation on the meaning of art movements in Malaysia while sowing the seeds for the beginnings of a systematic art history tradition for this country.14

14

Eddin Khoo, “The Problem of Writing Malaysian Art,” Art Corridor 11 (2003): 11–12. See also Michelle Antoinette, “Different Visions: Contemporary Malaysian Art and Exhibition in the 1990s and Beyond,” in Art and Social Change, ed. Caroline Turner (Canberra, Pandanus, 2005): 229–52; republished in Narratives in Malaysian Art Volume 2: Reactions – New Critical Strategies, ed. Nur Hanim Khairuddin & Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2013): 166–85.

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By reconstructing this formative moment in Singapore’s art history, 4 x 4 not only offers an art-historical lesson in modern Southeast Asian art history but also encourages the adoption of a critical mode of engagement with these established art histories. The very act of undertaking such an inquiry reveals art history not as a singular, fixed, and settled project, but as one marked by and open to ambiguity and multiplicity, invention and re-invention, repetition and difference. One might speculate whether it is the “spectres of comparison”15 and, more specifically, of origins that haunts and motivates Ho’s endeavours as a contemporary artist working within the art and cultural legacies of multiple temporalities and spatialities.16 His art critically negotiates the plural discourses and points of entry that situate him as a ‘Singaporean’ and ‘Southeast Asian’ artist working in and across ‘international’ contemporary art contexts. Ho is not alone in such endeavours in the developing contemporary art history of the region. Other contemporary Southeast Asian artists have looked to the local histories of modern art before them, especially through forms of conceptually driven art projects which seek to probe the historicization of particular modern artists and their artistic legacies for more recent art practice. I earlier mentioned The Bali Project (2001), by Agnes Yit, Kai Lam, Jeremy Hiah, and Woon Tien Wei of the Artists’ Village, which sought to re-enact the Nanyang artists’ trip to Bali forty-nine years earlier as a means of exploring the foundations of Singapore’s modern art history.17 Herra Pahlasari’s Potret diri di depan kelambu terbuka (Self portrait before the open mosquito net) (2009) appropriates the iconic portrait Di depan kelambu terbuka (before the open mosquito net) of 1939 by the ‘father of modern Indonesian painting’, Sudjojono, to explore the artist’s relationship to the women in his life and, more broadly, to investigate the position of women throughout modern Indonesian art history. Similarly, both Agus Suwage and the Taring Padi artist Muhamad ‘Ucup’ Yusuf, in their own more recent works, reference the student activist depicted in Sudjojono’s much earlier painting Maka Lahirlah Ang15

See Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London & New York: Verso, 1998); 16 Ho graduated in 2001 from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, with a Bachelor of Creative Arts degree. 17 See the Artists’ Village, “The Bali Project, 2001,” in The Artists’ Village: 20 Years On, http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/bien/singapore_biennale/2008/parallel/the _artists_village/08 (accessed 11 October 2009).

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katan ’66-an (So Was Born The ’66 Generation) (1966) – Suwage in Maka Lahirlah Angkatan ’90-an (So Was Born The ’90s Generation) (2001) and Yusuf in Penyelewengan Sejarah (The Deviation of History) (2010) – to relate the changing role of Indonesian art in representing Indonesia’s social and political realities.18 Investigating the legacy of modern art in Malaysia, Yap Sau Bin’s …who gave birth to the Great White One?: (coated /coded / loaded) canvas on which many meanings have f(r)ailed (2002) ‘encodes’ the conceptual artwork Empty canvas on which so many shadows have already fallen (1978) by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, originally presented in their seminal exhibition ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’ (1974) (see also Chapter 2 above) – Yap’s installation is also evocative of Piyadasa’s conceptual interest in the legitimizing device of the frame. Similarly, in his fictional story Monument For A Mystical Reality (2013), set on three sheets of A4-size paper in the form of a sculptural installation, contemporary artist Heman Chong investigates the photographic archive which documents the ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’ exhibition of 1974, re-creating three of the exhibition’s conceptual works of art (see Chapter 2 above) – Empty canvas on which so many shadows have already fallen, Empty Chair On Which Many Persons Have Sat and Burnt-out Mosquito Coils Used To Keep Away Mosquitoes On The Night Of 25 March 1974 – all destroyed and discarded following the 1974 exhibition. So, too, in The Great Non-Malaysian Portrait (2009), Roopesh Sitharan investigates the historical and ongoing identitarian politics of representation in Malaysia by exploring the art practice of three Malaysian artists before him – Redza Piyadasa, Ismail Mohd Zain, and Niranjan Rajah. In Cane (2011) and Cane (2012), Loo Zihan re-enacts Josef Ng’s performance of Brother Cane of 1993 based on an eyewitness account by Ray Langenbach, so as to “recuperate the public memory of Brother Cane” (see Chapter 6 above). John Low’s archival installation I have been Skying (2011) is a methodical tracing and historicization of the Singapore River in modern Singapore art history, registering Cheo Chai-Hiang’s conceptual-art piece 5' x 5' The Singapore River of 18

Notably, these artworks were presented in the exhibition ‘Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art’, which sought to trace the legacy of S. Sudjojono for present-day currents of aesthetic realism in contemporary Indonesian art. Thus, the narrative nexus between the modern and the contemporary is one marked by the exhibition itself. See National University of Singapore Museum, Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art (exh. cat: Singapore: N U S Museum, 2008).

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1972. The conceptual-art legacy of the Philippine artist Roberto Chabet is

evoked not only in the continuation of his conceptual concerns in the art practice of his many students but also in the conceptual practice that is historicizing and archiving his legacy for generations to come: as part of the 2009 exhibition ‘Archiving Roberto Chabet’,19 the artist Ringo Bunoan presented Untitled (Work after Chabet #1) (2009), in collaboration with Chabet himself, her former art teacher.20 The exhibition itself then formed a platform for Bunoan’s subsequent work in archiving Chabet’s art in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive, and for further exhibitions throughout 2011–12 exploring Chabet’s art and its legacy.21 These contemporary tracings are more than the mere transfer of art history into new artforms, more than nostalgic echoes or simplistic venerations of the past. Rather, there is a conscious search by artists for clues to the constitution of ‘the contemporary’ in Southeast Asia, an inquiry into the present condition and position of artists against the passage of history, a hope for answers to questions left unresolved in the history of modern art in Southeast Asia, a probing of the fissures and gaps of history to interrogate and reveal its misconceptions and burdens. Art’s histories are also evoked in order to draw lines of connection between past, present, and future, to reveal new insights and to restore what was previously learnt and known but forgotten or erased, to uncover knowledge made dormant or obscured in the layers and sedimentations of history, and to reveal new perspectives through alternative points of entry 19

The exhibition ‘Archiving Roberto Chabet’ was held at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum in Quezon City, 2009. 20 The artwork, a network of recycled wooden planks resting on empty paint cans, was suggestive of the temporary elevated pathway structures that become part of Manila’s urban architecture during times of flooding. It was a project which, Bunoan recalled, her teacher had discussed but never actually produced until the 2009 exhibition with Bunoan. 21 See Asia Art Archive, “Roberto Chabet’s Archive: Covering Fifty Years of the Artist’s Materials,” initiated by Ringo Bunoan as Asia Art Archive Researcher for the Philippines, AAA Online Collection: Search Results, http://www.aaa.org.hk/collection _detail.aspx?media_id=29789 (accessed 10 July 2010); Ringo Bunoan, “Introduction: The Chabet Archive: A Conversation,” Asia Art Archive Current Projects: Roberto Chabet’s Archive Covering Fifty Years of the Artist’s Materials, http://www.aaa.org.hk /research_currentprojectsdetails_05.aspx (accessed 26 July 2011). See also related exhibitions undertaken as part of the year-long series of ‘Chabet: 50 Years’ exhibitions held in various venues in Manila, Hong Kong, and Singapore throughout 2011–12.

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and cultural coordinates. In so doing, art history provides fertile ground for the exploration of the contemporary artist’s own self-positioning within overlapping currents of the local and the global in modernity and postmodernity, for the reclamation of subjectivities in contemporary art, and for recalling the particular local contexts of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art history in twenty-first-century globalization. What also becomes evident is that our education in Southeast Asian art histories is increasingly mediated by contemporary Southeast Asian artists themselves, who return art to us not as mere object but as an art-historically rich, discursive utility, echoing the motivations of some of the earliest forms of conceptually driven contemporary art in the region of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, as discussed above, the multiple and interdisciplinary roles of the contemporary Southeast Asian artist – the artist– curator–critic–historian – is not an unusual feature of contemporary Southeast Asian art scenes where artists also often participate simultaneously across different local and international art worlds and their making.22 Such self-reflexive endeavours indicate contemporary Southeast Asian artists’ own intellectual engagement with the project of Southeast Asian art history that they are helping to write – a history of an art that is in becoming. In its manifold layers, beginnings, intersections, and contingencies, contemporary Southeast Asian art resists the grasp of totalizing discourses and sedimentations of meaning – what Ho describes as “the violence of the One.”23

Reflections, Projections, Vectors Writing in 1988, James Clifford foresaw the major trends in Western intellectual currents of the twentieth century: An intellectual historian of the year 2010, […] may even look back on the first two-thirds of our century and observe that this was a time when Western intellectuals were preoccupied with grounds of meaning and identity they called “culture.”24

22

See Patrick Flores, “Position Papers: Turns in Tropics: Artist–Curator,” in The 7th Gwangju Biennale: Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2008): 262–85. 23 Ho Tzu Nyen, in Lee Wen & Ho Tzu Nyen, “Interview with Ho Tzu Nyen, August 14, 2005, Singapore.” 24 See James Clifford’s elaboration on this in his chapter “On Ethnographic Authority” in The Predicament of Culture, Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature,

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Clifford’s speculations seem to have come true, with the interest in ‘culture’ a prevailing current in shaping the production of the world’s knowledge in that period. Asia was no exception to this, offering a rich field for Western studies of distant, foreign cultures perceived as exhibiting ways of life radically distinct from those being pursued in Europe and North America at the time. While the early-twentieth century saw a Western-defined interest in positioning Asia as ‘exotic Other’ and an ethnographic privileging of Asia’s classical, craft or folk-artforms within this frame, late-twentieth-century perspectives finally began to acknowledge the coexistence of Asian modernities with other modernities in the world. This acknowledgement of a larger notion of modernity – of fluid making and outcomes, at intersections and overlappings with other ‘con-currents’ of modern art-making in the world – unsettles the claims of singular origins and authenticity of modern art as an exclusively Western enterprise. It reveals the hybridities already at work in Western modern art, which drew its inspiration from elsewhere while simultaneously claiming original invention; the aesthetic of a ‘Western’ modern art that took inspiration from its Others but also set itself up as uniquely, authorially different from those sources, particularly under the aegis of larger imperial and colonizing projects. It is precisely this crosscultural inspiration that has often been denied ‘Others’ in shaping their own histories of modern and contemporary art, with theirs being often characterized, rather, as mere replica, tracing, or appropriation, devoid of specificity, innovation, and agency. By contrast, in the early decades of the twenty-first century it has become increasingly impossible to ignore the new centrality of Asia in global currents of contemporary art. The remarkable economic and political development taking place across Asia, with effects on the world, is paralleled in the artistic sphere. As governments across Asia gradually attune themselves to the profitability and cultural capital of the aesthetic, contemporary art has increasingly become part of the concerns of growing cultural industries across Asia. The newly dubbed ‘Asian century’ before us heralds a new prosperity across Asia, including Southeast Asia. The attention being paid to these developing cultural industries, especially in Singapore and, more recently, in Indonesia, suggests a new role for contemporary art in government-supported institutions and projects, and the mainstreaming of contemporary art – from being ‘alternative’, radical, and often oppositional practices to being an increasing part of the everyday public sphere, cultural economies, and popular imaginary of and Art (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1988): 95.

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Southeast Asian societies. As contemporary art becomes an increasing presence in the Southeast Asian public realm, contemporary artists are becoming more familiar in their own ‘home’ contexts where previously many were better recognized in international art circles. With all this, art remains vulnerable to the spectacularization of cultural difference. Nevertheless, contemporary art also has a growing capacity to draw our attention away from the spectacles of cultural difference which pervaded the twentieth century towards individual yet shared concerns and histories of human experience and belonging that are concurrently grounded in the specificities of locality and everyday realities. Indeed, this is, of course, a feature of much contemporary art worldwide, particularly as it becomes increasingly conditioned by globalization and the latter’s capacity to draw the distant concerns and histories of others into ever-closer proximity and sharper focus, at the same time as it brings differences into stark relief and juxtaposition. New global connectivities across time and space enable the recognition of crosscultural processes of relation and exchange which have contributed to the shape of modern and contemporary art everywhere. In this process, we are necessarily confronted with the heterogeneity of artistic modernities previously obscured by the hegemonic discourses of modern Western art history. At the same time, contemporary art also affords us an occasion to ponder artistic connections and affinities in a space of simultaneously expanding and shrinking concerns. While the issues and discourses of race, ethnicity, culture, and identity pervaded curatorial aspirations for contemporary Southeast Asian art of the 1990s, one could argue that this was a necessary prerequisite for the current conditions of art and exhibition practice, where a new generation of artists are now able to push beyond racial expectations into wider and more experimental discursive and aesthetic realms of possibility. This new creative freedom marks a transition from the multiculturalist identity-politics of the 1980s and 1990s to a contemporary generation of Southeast Asian artists who are more mobile, more culturally flexible, and readier to exercise this new creative freedom as part of their contemporary art practice both locally and abroad. They are mobile artists not only in their movement within international art circuits but also in terms of self-determination, less hampered as they are by the burdens of international cultural representation carried by the generations before them – even if those pressures linger while new ones take their place. We begin to see new kinds of curatorial attention being paid to individual artistic expression, localized community and participatory efforts with trans-

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formational potential, and patterns of linkage between artists the world over in their mutual attention to conjunctures of locality and worldliness, diversity and sharedness, in pasts and presents. In Splash (2003), Lee Wen’s iconic Yellow Man persona is documented in an act of becoming, as if revealing to us the ritual of transformation Lee must undergo in becoming that persona. The series of photographs show the artist’s torso pressed up against a wall, as a liquid force of yellow paint assaults his face. In the split-second freeze of the frame, as Ho observes in his role of art critic, Splash 1 “offer[s] an image of wild becoming”; confronted with a face erased, “we are looking at something more than a man but not yet the ‘yellow man’ – a strange hybrid, an elephantine visage, a yellow Ganesh.”25 Splash 2, by contrast, reveals Lee’s further immersion in yellowness, the artist’s body becoming one with the yellowing wall behind him, but while Lee’s body becomes further drenched, the outline and folds of his face emerge in an intensity of visible expression – the violent onslaught of yellow written on his face suggesting more than a mere ‘splash’. It is ironic that it is in the stillness of the photographic frame – and not in the iconic figure of Yellow Man in performance – that Yellow Man is more acutely expressed as an identity of becoming, transition, and transformation. In pausing on the journeys of Yellow Man, we are offered a frozen moment that is paradoxically full of movement, fecund and flowing, rich in its possibilities of becoming. The identitarian caricature of Yellow Man is revealed as an ambiguous and risk-taking process of self-transformation. Perhaps, as Ho suggests, this represents Lee Wen’s “reflexive struggle against the ossification of the ‘yellow man’ into a stable iconic status,” to remind us “that masks can be changed” – that “identity is something like a mask [that] expresses even as it represses, conceals even as it reveals.”26 Perhaps, in the suffocation of yellow, there is also a cathartic deconstruction and transparency of the identitarian mask, an unmasking of spectacles of difference which invites connection in place of the distantiating effect of Otherness. In stripping away the racialized mask of an imposed identitarian politics, Splash! registers a space for recalling the crosscultural, affective, and intersubjective potential for engaging with art by contemporary Southeast Asian artists. It is a space which means that, as well as difference, there is a connec25

Ho Tzu Nyen, “‘Strange Fruit’ – L E E Wen (Singapore). Review,” Art Asia Pacific

40 (Spring 2004): 81. 26

Ho, “‘Strange Fruit’ – L E E Wen (Singapore). Review,” 81.

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Figures 186–187: Lee Wen, Splash! (Series #1 and #2) (2003). Images courtesy of the artist.

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tivity, commonality or mutuality at work in contemporary art practice, its defining discourses and ideas, which reverberates in the global currents of contemporary art-making and its reception. Indeed, there is an aesthetic vocabulary and condition which Southeast Asian artists share with other contemporary artists internationally and which thus also situates them within these global currents. This does not necessarily equate with global homogenization; rather, it opens up the prospect of connection-in-difference, a global connection that is also attuned to and firmly situated within local specificities of artmaking and local art histories. Reflecting the intensely globalized practices and conditions of being-inthe-world which have marked humanity since the late-twentieth century, Marsha Meskimmon’s probing of the “cosmopolitan imagination” reminds us, in particular, of the intersubjective affective currents of connection, relation, and dialogue that are constituent elements of contemporary art, and which see art not only as a site for revealing our situated difference but also as an agent in eliciting crosscultural curiosity and experience, connecting people across borders of all kinds.27 With this in mind, we should, on the one hand, be attentive to the critical distinctiveness of contemporary Southeast Asian art and, on the other, mindful of occasions when the label ‘Southeast Asia’ might operate as an obstructive political counter or essentialist valorization of difference which blinds us to experiences of global affective and aesthetic connection. In our engagement with contemporary art in global currents, we must keep asking: What is to be gained or lost politically in stressing particular cultural regimes of art, including geographical ones? And what might we gain or lose from asserting universal and/or global aesthetic relation and cosmopolitan imaginaries? How does Southeast Asianness encourage or obscure efforts to produce crosscultural aesthetic knowledge in the world frame of contemporary art? For Southeast Asian art, there is the further challenge of specific recognition vis-à-vis the contemporary art emanating from other Asian art centres such as China, Japan, Korea, and India, which continue to dominate ‘international’ exhibitions of ‘Asian’ art. If, on the world’s stage, Southeast Asian art has historically fallen under the shadow not only of Western art but also of other ‘Asias’, then a certain peripheralization of areas within Southeast Asia itself has also been witnessed, with the art of its particular centres assuming a 27

Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London & New York, Routledge, 2011).

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stronger presence both within the region and internationally: Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore have certainly dominated internationally, with Vietnamese and Malaysian art being represented by a mere handful of individual figures. By comparison, Brunei, Burma / Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos have, up to now, been given much less prominence; but this situation is also gradually changing.28 Given this, perspectives from urban centres also dominate our knowledge of contemporary Southeast Asian art – the artistic practices of rural and village communities, border-dwellers, mountain peoples, and nomadic sea travellers remain relegated to the margins. Of course, this situation arises from basic infrastructural and resource-based inequities throughout the region but is also a result of discrepancies in what counts as contemporary art. Hence, the future of Southeast Asian art might also include these hitherto marginalized geographies of contemporary Southeast Asian art practice, areas effectively absent from international art exhibitions. Much research remains to be done on the contemporary art of these other Southeast Asian locales. With their different practices of contemporary art, often elusive to Western-centric avant-garde traditions, they suggest new definitions for contemporary art itself. Indeed, ‘contemporary art’ registers distinct modes of art-making, including some but continuing to exclude others. Thus, as Southeast Asia continues to gain recognition in the world, religious or spiritually inspired art and current practices of folk or craft-based art across the region remain largely excluded under the sign of ‘the (global) contemporary’ and provide key areas for further contemporary art research. As Lee’s Yellow Man reminds us, the authority of a hegemonic ‘Asia’ as defined by Chinese and/or Indian influence in particular will remain a challenge in differentiating Southeast Asia, given the historical influence of these great Asian civilizations in Southeast Asia in the past and their renewed 28

For instance, the Cambodian artists Sopheap Pich, Svay Ken, and Vandy Rattana featured in the ‘A P T 6’ ‘Mekong River’ project of 2009 alongside Tun Win Aung & Wah Nu of Myanmar (Burma). Vandy Rattana and Sopheap Pich were also included in the Documenta 13 exhibition of 2012 with fellow Cambodia artist Vann Nath – the first Cambodian artists to be exhibited at Kassel. Sa Sa Bassac is a contemporary art gallery and resource centre based in Phnom Penh. It was established in 2011, an extension of the Sa Sa Art Gallery (established in 2009 by Cambodian artists) and a merger with Bassac Art Projects (established in 2007 by Erin Gleeson). It is home to the Cambodian Visual Art Archive. On these developments, see Robert Turnbull, “Cambodian Contemporary Art,” Asian Art (26 April 2012), http://www.asianartnewspaper .com /article/cambodian-contemporary-art (accessed 30 November 2012).

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authority in the twenty-first century. Immediate challenges will lie in balancing the unprecedented attention being paid to contemporary Asian art in the global art world (especially via its homogenizing institutionalization) against the new commercial interest sustaining this. The new markets for Asian art, now to be found in Asia itself as well as internationally, have prompted a strong concern throughout the region that commerce now holds excessive sway over the production of art itself and therefore over the kinds of art and artists who receive exposure in the international art world. Central to this is a tension between, on the one hand, upholding the cultural integrity of art that is able to reflect societal issues and to enact political and social change, and, on the other, an art that is merely responsive to material interests reflecting a commercially defined aesthetic. But is the return to an ‘art for art’s sake’ sensibility in some sectors exclusively the effect of market forces or symptomatic of changing concerns among artists in the early-twenty-first century who are perhaps less interested in exploring the socio-political, since they operate in different social climates from that of the generation before them? Or are present-day artists less hampered by the baggage of cultural or ethnographic representation and the burden of representing local politics which pervaded the internationalism of the 1980s and 1990s? As I have encouraged throughout the present book, renewed attention to the formal, and related material and affective, concerns of artistic practice would also provide a critical escape from the hegemony of socially or culturally inscribed discourses of Southeast Asian contemporary art; a relational critical framework which recognizes both the artistic and the cultural contexts that inform Southeast Asian art continues to be an important project for the future of that art and accounts of it. More nuanced representational paradigms are required if we are to render visible the critical difference and contributions of contemporary Southeast Asian artists in the developing field of international contemporary art and its histories. The particular questions that contemporary Southeast Asian art prompts us to pose involve the re-examination of the larger project of art history, particularly its Western-centric biases, elisions, and chasms in the mapping of modern and contemporary art. In effect, they demand a recalibration of what we recognize as art history, its methods, forms, subject-matter, and spectatorship. A remapping of art history’s coordinates is already underway as the modern and contemporary art practices of locales traditionally outside the purview of the Western imagination make their art histories known. The predicted centrality of Asia in the coming century, along with intensifying global dynamics,

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suggests that maps of cultural difference and connectivity will be radically redrawn for contemporary art and, in turn, for its history, and these maps are in fact already emerging in outline. Contemporary art insists on a plurality of perspectives that do not necessarily fall into the neat categories of established art history and its institutions. A focus on the relatively underexplored modern and contemporary art histories of Southeast Asia shows that this art invites us to ask how we can better understand new currents in art practice as an effect of specific cultural and historical contexts, which, in turn, add to the world’s knowledge of art history. How can we better understand the changed region of Southeast Asia and its new cultural and aesthetic objectives in a world order marked by new Asian centres and new Asian social contexts? Even as contemporary Southeast Asian art remains an ongoing project, surely its legacy will be tied to the momentous reworlding of art history occurring in our current times.

Figure 188: Lani Maestro, a book thick of ocean (1993). Image courtesy of the artist.

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Interviews & Correspondence Cited (all Michelle Antoinette) Personal communication with Lani Maestro, 27 September 1999.

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Interview with Amanda Heng, Singapore, 4 June 2002. Interview with Wong Hoy Cheong, Singapore, 5 June 2002. Personal communication with Santiago Bose, 8 June 2002. Interview with Lim Tzay Chuen, Singapore, 11 June 2002. Interview with Alfredo Aquilizan, Manila, Philippines, 2 July 2002. Interview with José Legaspi, Manila, Philippines, 5 July 2002. Interview with Judy Freya Sibayan, Manila, Philippines, 3 July 2002. Interview with Simryn Gill, Sydney, Australia, 6 September 2002. Personal communication with Santiago Bose, 30 September 2002. Personal communication with Woon Tien Wei, 22 January 2005. Personal communication with Caroline Turner, 21 November 2005. Personal communication with Caroline Turner, 2 December 2005. Personal communication with Patrick Flores, 5 October 2011, post-conference summary for the Humanities Research Centre conference, “The World and World-Making in Art,” Australian National University, Canberra, 11–13 August 2011. Interview with Raiji Kuroda, Fukuoka, 19 June 2012. Personal communication with Lani Maestro, 16 March 2014.

Electronic Resources Alba, Reineiro. “Immortality in an ‘Ephemeral’ Art,” National Commission for Culture and the Arts (Philippines), http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:ZrL8oVVVGs MJ:www.ncca.gov.ph/culture%26arts/perspectives/villanueva.htm+roberto+villanue va+ego&hl=en (accessed 15 March 2005). Aquilizan, Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. “Artists’ Statements: Postscript,” Queensland Art Gallery, http://www.visualarts.qld.gov.au/apt3/artists/artist_bios/alfredo_aquilizan _a.htm (accessed 21 April 2012). Aranda, Julieta, Brian Kuan Wood, & Anton Vidokle, ed. “What is Contemporary Art?: Issue One” e-flux 11:1 (December 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/what-iscontemporary-art-issue-one/; “What is Contemporary Art?: Issue Two” e-flux 12 (January 2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/what-is-contemporary-art-issuetwo/ (accessed April 2010). Aristarkhova, Irina. Cyberarts Research Initiative, http://www.cyberartsweb.org/ccri /index.html (accessed May 2012). Art Gallery of New South Wales. “Simryn Gill: Selected Work,” press release, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media/archives_2002/simryn_gill (accessed 14 November 2002). A R T Singapore. Contemporary Asian Art Fair October 2006, http://www.artsingapore .net/index–as.htm (accessed 11 November 2005). Art Stage Singapore. “Art in Context,” http://www.artstagesingapore.com/about-us/artin-context/ (accessed 29 November 11).

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½™¾

Index

NOTE: pages with Figures are in boldface ‘15 Tracks: Contemporary Southeast Asian Art’ 116, 117, 231 ‘36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art’ 86, 160, 221, 222, 234 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art (Ho Tzu Nyen) 488, 489, 494, 495; 491–93 5' x 5' The Singapore River (Cheo ChaiHiang) 489, 496 Abbas, Ackbar 277 Abdullah, Sarena 406 abject body (Kristeva) 380, 432, 439, 441, 442, 443, 448, 449, 451, 452, 453, 471 Aboriginal, Australian 347, 431, 432; art 177

Address (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan) 325–26; 326 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 325 Adipurnomo, Nindityo xliii, 129, 175, 192, 256, 265, 420, 460–72 —WORKS: The Beauty and the Introversion of Hair Pieces 466 Beyond the Modesty 460, 468, 471 Boom Out of the Ground 470

The Burden of Javanese Exotica (Beban Eksotika Jawa) 464; 465 Dzikir 470 Hiding Rituals and the Mass Production I 471 Hiding Rituals and the Mass Production II 469 Hiding Rituals of My Own Hairpiece 466

Introversion (April the Twenty-First) 466; 465 My Ancestors Were Traders 467 My Grand-mother 471 Passion in my hands 462 Portrait of a Javanese Man 462 Portrait of residency in Cardiff 462 Portraits of Javanese Men 466, 468; 461, 469 Sanggul Jawa seperti Linnga dan Yoni 462 Step on Heirloom 466; 467 This man doesn’t know what to do with his passion 462 Who Wants to Become Javanese? 466

Who Wants to Take Me Around? 265 Adorno, Theodor 341, 342 aesthetics (including aesthetic / artistic form, style, media) xxxix, xlii, l–lv, 3, 7, 9, 46–50, 54–57, 65, 100, 158,

562 162, 166–67, 169, 177, 179–80, 189, 197, 230–31, 233–35, 286–87, 305– 307, 316, 349, 359–60, 371, 390, 481, 485, 500, 503, 506

—See also: context; cultural context Affandi 8, 18, 32, 264; Food Stall under the Banyan Tree 124 affect / affective engagement xxxix, xlii, xlvii, l, li, liii, lv, 7, 9, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 64, 67, 160, 166, 167, 235, 242, 287, 301, 307, 316, 318, 321, 343, 344, 348, 349, 359, 360, 365, 366, 383, 387, 389, 399, 401, 402, 408, 409, 474, 477, 478, 481, 501, 503, 505 Ahmad, Saudi 233 Ahmed, Sara 245, 422, 423, 427, 432; & Jackie Stacey 211, 432 Aichi Triennale 181 Akasaka 222, 226 Albano, Raymundo R. 20, 21, 104, 109 allegory 17, 195, 234, 356 alpha 3.3 (tsunamii.net) 274, 275, 276 alpha 3.4 (tsunamii.net) 273 alpha 3.8: translocation (tsunamii.net) 271, 272, 274; 272 Alter #1 (Lim Tzay Chuen) 384; 385 Alter #10 (Lim Tzay Chuen) 393, 395, 396, 397; 394 Alter #11 (Lim Tzay Chuen) 489 Alter #16 (Lim Tzay Chuen) 397 Alter #7 (Lim Tzay Chuen) 386, 389, 390, 391; 388 alternative art spaces —See: independent art spaces Alternatives: Contemporary Art Spaces in Asia (annual publication) 131 Aman Sulukule Canim Sulukule (Oh Sulukule Darling Sulukule) (Wong Hoy Cheong) 156

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾ Anak Alam (‘Children of Nature’) artists 136

Anderson, Benedict 90, 157, 161, 243, 263, 321, 356, 495 Ang, Ien 428 Angels Caught in a Trap (Dono) 247; 249

Animal Journey (Perjalanan Binatang) (Dono) 241, 267, 268; 267 Another Woman (Heng) 403 anthropology (including anthropological interpretative approaches) xlii, 50, 51, 53, 90–91, 166, 168, 177, 179, 291, 296, 305 anti-colonialism 16, 17, 30, 410, 411 Antoinette, Michelle 110, 247, 406, 494; & Zara Stanhope 40; & Caroline Turner 36, 40, 349; & Caroline Turner, Zara Stanhope xlvii, 45, 486 Antze, Paul, & Michael Lambek 315 Anusapati 109 APA

—See: Artis Pro Activ ‘Apa? Siapa? Kenapa?’ 135 Api di Bulan Mei 1998 (Fire in May 1998) (Christanto) 356, 359, 360; 357–58 Apotik Komik group 129, 233, 410; Under Estimate 413 Appadurai, Arjun 94 A P T (Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art) xxxii, 31, 33, 61, 63, 66, 85, 86, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 159, 165, 172, 180, 181, 182–90, 194, 197, 198, 209, 210, 246, 247, 318, 320, 321, 325, 343, 345, 347, 356, 357, 359, 423, 426, 428, 431 Aquilizan, Alfredo (Juan) 160, 241; Fig.: 317; & Isabel Aquilizan xliii, 63, 175, 189, 246, 316–28; 224, 240, 319,

½¾

563

Index

322, 326, 327–28

—W O R K S (Alfredo Aquilizan): Presences and Absences #6 318 Presences and Absences 317 —W O R K S (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan): Address 325–26; 326 Belonging 2: The Party 318 Erasure and Remembrance 318 Habitation Project: Picking Up 224 In-flight (Project: Another Country) 240, 325; 240, 327–28 Project Be-longing #2 318, 323–25; 322

Project M201: In God We Trust 241 Wings 319 Aquilizan, Ricardo 318, 319, 320, 321, 324

Aquino, Corazon 414 Araeen, Rasheed 179 Arahmaiani 185, 192, 205, 264, 410 Aranda, Julieta, Brian Kuan Wood & Anton Vidokle 35 Archetypes (Villanueva) 473, 474 Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth (Villanueva) 473 archives (for contemporary Southeast Asian art documentation) —See: Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong); Cambodian Visual Art Archive; Fukuoka Asia Art Museum; Indonesian Visual Art Archive (I V A A ); Malaysian Art Archive and Research Support; Planting Rice; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Q A G O M A ); RogueArt; S E A R C H (Southeast Asian Art Resource Channel); Thai Art Archives ‘Archiving Roberto Chabet’ 497 area studies 4

Arellano, Agnes 63, 192, 279; Vesta, Dea, Lola 196 Aristarkhova, Irina 87 A R T and AsiaPacific journal (also Art AsiaPacific, ArtAsiaPacific) xxxiii Art Basel 126, 173 Art Basel Hong Kong 126 art corridor (journal, Malaysia) 29 art history —See: Asian art history; contemporary art history; modern art history; Southeast Asian art history ‘Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses into the Future’ 86, 117, 352 Art Institute Jakarta 420 Art Institute of Indonesia 420 Art Manila Quarterly (Philippines) 29 ‘Art Singapore’ (art fair) 125 ‘Art Stage Singapore’ 126, 173 ArtAsiaPacific journal xxxiii Artis Pro Activ (A P A ) 129, 131, 135 Artist and Model (Liu Kang) 103 Artista ng Bayan 414 Artists Front 20 Artists’ General Assembly (Singapore) 440

Artists’ Regional Exchange (A R X ) xxxii, 86, 185 artists (Southeast Asian) —See individual entries by artist name Artists’ Village, The (T A V ) (Singapore) 129, 440 490, 495 ARX

—See: Artists’ Regional Exchange A S E A N xliv, 5, 17, 22, 41, 81, 85, 86,

100, 104, 106, 116, 160, 231, 232, 233, 234, 270, 486; support for the arts 106–109 A S E A N Culture Center 117 ‘A S E A N Masterworks’ 127

564

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

A S E A N –Japan Exchange Year 231

‘Asianness’ 65, 159, 162, 209, 210, 213, 295, 503 Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art —See under: A P T Aspirations of the Working Class (Wong Hoy Cheong) 332; 336 Association of Southeast Asian Nations —See: A S E A N Atang Ti Kararua (Villanueva) 473 Atman (Chandrasekaran) 475 audience-participants 349, 459, 474, 476, 478, 481 Aung, Tun Win 504 Auschwitz 341 Australia xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 31, 33, 37, 47, 53, 55, 63, 71, 86, 109, 113, 117– 22, 129, 145, 174, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182–90, 210, 248, 249, 295, 296, 297, 311, 318, 319, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325, 347, 352, 355, 356, 358, 365, 426, 431, 452, 486, 513; and Asia xxxi–xxxiii, xxxviii, 116, 118– 21; 182–90; and Southeast Asia 116– 19, 185 Australia and Regions Exchange (A R X ) xxxii —See also: Artists’ Regional Exchange avant-garde art practices 9, 19, 21, 23, 35, 115, 177, 247, 409, 504 ‘A W A S !’ 265 Ay Tjoe, Christine 124

Ashiya 222, 226 Asia, contemporary art of xxxii, xxxiii, xxxviii, 118, 157–60, 170–82, 192– 200, 221 Asia, imagination of / construction of 15, 16, 33, 138, 223, 225, 229 Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong) xlix, 25, 28, 35, 47, 87, 116, 170, 497 ‘Asia as Method’ (Takeuchi Yoshimi) xlii, 14, 228 Asia Center 12, 86, 117, 131, 222, 223, 229, 230, 380 —See also: Japan Foundation Asia Centre Asia–Pacific xxxii, 119–20 Asia Society (New York) 10, 118, 175, 181, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 351 Asialink xxxii, 91 Asian art history and theory —See especially: John Clark; Patrick Flores; Geeta Kapur; Lee Weng Choy; Marian Pastor Roces; Redza Piyadasa; Apinan Poshyananda; T.K. Sabapathy ‘Asian Art Show’ 114, 116 Asian art markets 122–27 ‘Asian Century, the’ 32, 483, 499 Asian Civilisations Museum (Singapore) 110, 476 Asian Cultural Council Hong Kong 228 Asian Curatorial Network 228 ‘Asian differential’ (Flores) 162, 165, 217

‘Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand’ 117 Asian studies xlii, 4 ‘Asian values’ doctrines xlii, 106, 138, 140, 141, 143

Badman (Dono) 261, 264; 259 Baet Yoke Kuan 233 Baguio Arts Guild 129 Baharuddin, Nasir 233 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 256 Bakir, Osman Bin 233

½¾

565

Index

Bali 101, 264, 355, 362, 364, 490, 491, 494, 495 Balibar, Étienne 277 Bandung 21, 26, 222, 226, 230 Bandung Center for New Media Arts 129, 270 Bangkok 20, 21, 106, 181, 199, 222, 226

Barthes, Roland 446 Bassac Art Projects 504 ‘Beautiful Indies’ (Mooi Indie) style (Indonesia) 18 Beauty and the Introversion of Hair Pieces, The (Adipurnomo) 466 Beban Eksotika Jawa —See under: Burden of Javanese Exotica Beck, Ulrich 248 Beijing 127, 222, 225 ‘being-in-becoming’ li, 245, 431 Belonging 2: The Party (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan) 318 Belting, Hans xlix, 22, 35, 36, 37, 43 Benjamin, Walter 62, 216 Bennett, Jill 54, 55; & Rosanne Kennedy 313, 342 Bennett, Tony 130 Bentara Budaya Gallery (Jakarta) 352, 366

Berger, Mark T. 90 Berger, Peter 349 Bergson, Henri 314 Best, Susan 55, 56, 287 Beyond the Modesty (Adipurnomo) 460, 468, 471 Bhabha, Homi K. 146, 147, 321, 325 Bharucha, Rustom 83, 108, 143 Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art 20 biennials: CP Open Biennale 180; Florence Biennale 476, 478; Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 325;

Gwangju Biennale xxxvii, xxxviii, 21, 120, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 144, 180, 393, 394, 395, 396, 398, 498; Havana Biennale 32, 171, 174, 246, 450; Jakarta Biennale 180; Jogya Biennale 180; São Paolo Biennale 32, 171, 173, 174; Shanghai Biennale 120; Singapore Biennale 110, 111, 176, 180, 398, 487; Sydney Biennale 32; Taipei Biennial 156, 180; Venice Biennale 32, 156, 164, 165, 173, 174, 180, 187, 263, 264, 292, 297, 398, 453; Yogyakarta Art Biennial 96, 252

—See also: triennials Big Sky Mind 129, 131 Binder, Pat, & Gerhard Haupt 268, 276 Bjerkem, Brynjar 246 blockbuster exhibitions lii, 158, 162, 171, 173, 181, 208, 210, 235, 360 ‘Body Fields’ 439, 440, 441 body politic 283, 404, 436 body, the xliv, li, liv, 29, 54, 104, 194, 204, 209, 210, 211, 212, 226, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 287, 333, 340, 345, 347, 349, 358, 359, 360, 361, 368, 374, 379, 380, 384, 387, 399, 401–81, 501 —See also: breath; corporeal / corporeality; corporeography; embodiment; hair; skin Bolak – balik (Jaarsma) 418 Bonami, Francesco 174, 175 book thick of ocean, a (Maestro) 58–66, 76; 59–60, 62, 66, 506 Boom Out of the Ground (Adipurnomo) 470

Boonma, Montien 33, 109, 119, 192 Borlongan, Elmer 414 Borobodur (Javanese temple) 417 Borobudur (auction house) 124, 126

566

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Bose, Santiago 85, 109, 175, 328, 474; Of Martyrs and Nationhood 329; Remapping the Colonized Subject

Cambodia xliii, xliv, 107, 115, 119, 174, 203, 231, 504 Cambodian Visual Art Archive 88, 504 Campaign of the Three Parties (Dono)

329

Bourdieu, Pierre 305 Bourdon, Thérèse 63 Bourriaud, Nicolas 20, 122 Brah, Avtar 139, 213, 423 Braidotti, Rosi 294 breath 402, 475, 476 Briggs, Cecily, & T.K. Sabapathy 20 Brisbane 320, 325 Brother Cane (Josef Ng) 440, 441, 457, 496

Brunei xliii, xliv, 74, 106, 116, 231, 504 Buckingham Street and its Vicinity (Wong Hoy Cheong) 145; 147 Buddhism 10, 17, 95, 304, 364, 417 Buell, Frederick 243 Bujono, Bambang, & Micaksono Adi 29 Bule Bull (Jaarsma) 424 Bunoan, Ringo 497; Untitled (Work after Chabet #1) 497 Burden of Javanese Exotica, The (Beban Eksotika Jawa) (Adipurnomo) 464; 465

Bureaucracy (Christanto) 345 Burgin, Victor 372 Burma (Myanmar) xliii, xliv, 32, 106, 119, 231, 311, 504 Buyong, Dzulkifli 18 Bydler, Charlotte xlvi, xlvii Byrne, Denis 355, 361, 362, 363, 364 Cabrera, Ben 109 Cai Guo-Qiang 160, 170 Cajipe–Endaya, Imelda 109, 185, 192, 283

Calhoun, Craig 138 Camacho, Bea 410

247

Campbell, Ian 268 Cane (Loo Zihan) 496 Cannibalism: The Memory of Jakarta – Solo 13, 14, 15 May 1998 (Christanto) 360, 366 Carruthers, Ashley 305 C-Arts: Asian Contemporary Art and Culture magazine 29 Cataldi, Sue L. 420 Catholicism 286, 368, 374, 379, 380, 414, 416, 436 Cemeti Art Foundation 22, 29, 129, 427 Cemeti Art House (Cemeti Gallery) 129, 130, 131, 132, 420, 426 Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore 125

centre–periphery models xliii Centres Georges Pompidou 177 Ceremony of the Soul (Dono) 261, 266, 267; 262 Certeau, Michel de 218 Chabet, Roberto 127, 497 ‘Chabet: 50 Years’ 497 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 16, 34 Chandavong, May 233 Chandhanaphalin, Nonthivathn 231 Chandler, Lisa 121, 184, 188 Chandrasekaran, S. 410, 475; Atman 475; Duality 475; Kala Chakra 475 Chen Chiehjen 170 Chen Chong Swee 18, 101, 490 Chen KeZhan 233, 453 Chen Kuan–Hsing xlii, 14; & Chua Beng Huat xlii; with Kuo Hsiu-Ling, Hans Hang & Hsu Ming-Chu xlii

½¾

567

Index

Chen Wen Hsi 18, 97, 101, 490 Chen, Georgette 18, 97 Chen, Patricia 126 Cheng, Maria 371, 375 Cheo Chai-Hiang 20, 127, 488, 496; 5' x 5' The Singapore River 489, 496 Cheong Soo Pieng 18, 97, 101, 488, 489, 491; Tropical Life 488, 494; 103

Chia Yu-Chian, Riverside Scene xxxvii China 5, 10, 13, 14, 17, 28, 32, 33, 37, 40, 44, 71, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 111, 113, 118, 119, 123, 127, 128, 156, 160, 170, 172, 174, 178, 180, 185, 186, 193, 198, 203, 209, 210, 211, 214, 222, 226, 230, 268, 296, 311, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 338–40, 356, 409, 490, 503, 504 Chinese Indonesians 343–67, 427, 428 Chinese Malaysians 330–41 Ching, Isabel 47 chinoiserie 11 Chiu, Melissa 184, 188, 189 Chong, Heman 207, 233, 496; & Isabelle Cornaro, The End of Travelling 207–208; Monument For A Mystical Reality 496 Christanto, Dadang xliii, 160, 189, 192, 264, 342, 343–67, 410, 473 —WORKS: Api di Bulan Mei 1998 (Fire in May 1998) 356, 359, 360; 357–58 Bureaucracy 345 Cannibalism: The Memory of Jakarta – Solo 13, 14, 15 May 1998 360, 366

For Those who have been killed… 344, 345, 347, 348, 366; 346 Kekerasan series 364; Kekerasan I (Violence I) 349, 352, 364; 350– 51

Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence) 352; 353–54 The Pain of the Trees 361 Red Rain (Hujan merah) 361, 364, 365, 366; 362–63 They Give Evidence 352, 355, 359, 366

Christianity 415, 464 Christie’s auction house 49, 124, 125 Chua, Beng–Huat 138 Chua, Kevin 101, 453 Chuah Thean Teng 18 ‘Cities on the Move’ 33, 159, 165, 181, 198–207, 264, 278, 281, 285 Clark, Christine 130, 344, 355, 364, 365; & Caroline Turner 347, 348, 363

Clark, John xxxiii, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 30, 36, 37, 48, 135, 170, 172, 173 Clarke, David 125 Clifford, James 53, 179, 269, 291, 321, 498, 499; & George Marcus 91 Clough, Patricia 54 Coedès, Georges 95 Coffee Talk (Leow) 440 Cohen, Phil 338 colonialism 15, 16, 18, 42, 85, 184, 243, 328, 339 —See also: postcolonialism Colonies Bite Back, The (Wong Hoy Cheong) 137 colonization 15, 16, 88, 90, 195, 328, 337, 341 Combinatoria 244 commercial art spaces 122–27; compared to independent art spaces 128– 36

—See also: Art Basel Hong Kong; Art Singapore; Art Stage Singapore; Borobudur (auction house); Christie’s auction house; Espace Culturel Louis

568

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Vuitton; Hong Kong Art Fair; Gillman Barracks; Larasati (auction house); Osage (gallery); Saatchi gallery; Sotheby’s auction house; Valentine Willie Fine Art Common Room (Bandung) 129 conceptual art 27, 47, 127 contemporaneity (Terry Smith) xlviii ‘Contemporaneity: Contemporary Art of Indonesia’ 96 contemporary art, history and theory 19– 22, 25–32, 34–36 —See also: Hans Belting; James Elkins; Patrick Flores; Hal Foster; Miwon Kwon; Lee Weng Choy; Francis Maravillas; Redza Piyadasa; T.K. Sabapathy; Terry Smith; Jim Supangkat ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions’ 33, 118, 159, 175, 181, 190–98, 199, 351, 463 Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines 278 contemporary art, Southeast Asian, definition of 25 ‘Contemporary Paintings of Malaysia’

contingency xxxviii, xxxix, xli, lii, lv, 4, 7, 16, 30, 57, 89, 104, 156, 349, 409, 483, 486, 487 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 95 Cornaro, Isabelle 207 corporeality 57, 211, 287, 346, 380, 401, 402, 404, 416, 432, 447, 451, 452, 458, 460, 463, 471, 472, 473, 475, 476, 481 corporeography (Kirby) 58, 401 cosmopolitanism xlv, xlvi, xlvii, 40, 45, 98, 141, 167, 203, 204, 241, 242, 245, 248, 250, 254, 269, 484, 503 counter-monument (James E. Young) 344, 348, 349 Cox, Matt 76 CP Open Biennale 180 Crang, Mike, & Penny S. Travlou 314 cross-culturalism 48 ‘Crossing Borders’ (subsection of A P T 3 exhibition ‘Beyond the Future’) 61, 63, 165, 187, 188, 189, 198, 356, 426 Crowley, Amanda McDonald 271 Crucifixion (Legaspi) 374; 373 Crucifixion, The (Legaspi) 374; 373 Cruz, Mideo 410 Ctrl+P: Journal for Contemporary Art

24

‘Contemporary South-East Asian Art’ 230–34 context (for art, especially socio-political, cultural, and historical) xxxi, xxxvii, xxxix, xli, xliv, xlv, xlii, 3, 9, 13, 20, 21–23, 30, 41, 43, 47, 53, 70, 84, 91, 93, 100–101, 103, 107, 110–11, 140, 143–44, 151, 158–59, 166, 174, 182, 190, 205, 214, 217, 233, 241, 250, 255, 305, 324, 332, 338, 347, 360, 366, 391, 398, 411, 416, 428, 432, 440, 447–48, 459, 463, 468, 484, 486, 488 —See also: cultural context

29

Cubism 11, 49, 98 Cubitt, Sean 274, 275 Cultural Center of the Philippines 473 cultural context (including socio-political and historical) xlvii, liv, 15, 36, 37, 44, 50, 51, 168, 184, 214, 409, 486, 505

cultural economies 125, 499 culture liii, liv, 4, 46, 50, 53, 57, 63, 74, 91–94, 106, 109, 111–12, 119–20, 125, 139, 142, 147, 164, 166–69, 179, 187, 190, 232, 243, 254–57, 275, 282, 287–88, 291, 297, 307, 312–14,

½¾

569

Index

320, 334, 337, 350, 422, 431, 460, 462–66, 468, 471, 498–500 culture, studies of 91 culture industries 125

curators and curatorship xxxvii, xxxviii, xliii, xlvi, xlix, lii, liii, 4, 12, 14, 19, 21, 24, 29, 31, 32, 33, 42, 46, 47, 48, 53, 63, 76, 82, 83, 85, 88, 106, 108, 109, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 134, 135, 137, 156, 158, 161, 163, 165, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208, 210, 218, 221, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 264, 234, 235, 265, 274, 281, 283, 284, 285, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 306, 307, 315, 355, 375, 390, 391, 392, 395, 396, 397, 399, 408, 423, 426, 427, 454, 465, 466, 472, 476, 487, 498, 500 cyber-art li, 86, 87, 269–77 Cyberarts Research Initiative 87 Dalam (Gill) 260, 301, 303, 304, 305, 306; 302–304 Dale, Richard 186 Dalí, Salvador 383, 384, 385, 386 Danto, Arthur C. xlix, 35, 36 Darling Street and its Vicinity (Wong Hoy Cheong) 145 Daroy, Roderico Jose 233 Datuin, Flaudette May V. 27, 82, 318; & Patrick D. Flores 445 Davidts, Wouter, & Tijl Vanmeirhaeghe 391, 392 Davis, Lucy 213, 214, 359, 360 Debord, Guy 213 de-colonization 166

‘Delays and Revolutions’ (Bonami) 174 Deleuze, Gilles 314; & Félix Guattari xliv, li, 92, 143, 145, 148, 288, 483 —See also: deterritorialization; rhizome Desai, Vishakha N. 181, 190, 191, 192, 193, 197 deterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari) li, 6, 83, 143, 145, 147, 148, 214, 222, 241, 243, 270 Devenport, Rhana 183, 186, 187, 320, 426

Dharma Art Group 20 Di depan kelambu terbuka (Sudjojono) 495

diaspora xli, xlv, lv, 63, 83, 120, 121, 159, 165, 172, 187, 188, 193, 241, 256, 318, 320, 321, 323, 324, 331, 336, 365, 399, 420, 423, 426, 427, 484, 524 différance (Derrida, Kristeva) 65 difference (especially cultural / ethnic / racial / Asian/ critical) xlvii, li, lv, 24, 45–47, 50, 57, 64, 65, 82, 105, 112, 160–64, 166, 168–69, 171–72, 195, 209, 213, 217, 225, 235, 334, 338, 342, 403, 432, 468, 486, 488, 495–501, 503, 505–506 Dinh Q Lê 174 Dinh Thi Tham Poong 233 Dirlik, Arif xl Documenta exhibitions 42, 173, 174, 180, 209, 276, 360, 504; Documenta 5 174; Documenta X 174; Documenta 11 42, 209, 276, 360; Documenta 12 174; Documenta 13 174, 504

documentary film 207, 208 Dog eating a woman (Legaspi) 370; 372

Do Minh Tam 233

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

570 Don’t Give Money to the Arts (Tang Da Wu) 489 Dono, Heri xliii, xlv, 33, 119, 160, 170, 175, 192, 204, 205, 207, 241, 246– 69, 356, 410, 460; Fig.: 239, 248, 249, 251, 252, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263, 267 —WORKS: Angels Caught in a Trap 247; 249 Animal Journey (Perjalanan Binatang) 241, 267, 268; 267 Badman 261, 264; 259 Campaign of the Three Parties 247 Ceremony of the Soul 261, 266, 267; 262

Eating Bullets (Makan Pelor) 247, 261

Fake Human Being 247 Fermentation of Mind (Peragian Pikiran) 261, 266; 262 Flower Diplomacy (Diplomasi Bunga) 250; 251 Flying Angels (Bidadari) 247; 247– 48, 266 Flying in a Cocoon 239 Gamelan of Rumour 261, 266, 267 Glass Vehicles 247, 261; 263 The King who is Scared of the Approaching Barong 250; 251 Kuda Binal (Wild Horses) 252; 252 A Magician Who Never Killed 260– 61

Makan pelor (Eating bullets) 258 Political Clowns (Badut-Badut Politik) 261; 259 Superman Still Learning How to Wear Underwear 261; 260 Talking of Nothing 261; 258 Trojan Cow 263, 264 Trojan Horse series 264

Watching the Marginal People 261, 266

Downing Street and its Vicinity (Wong Hoy Cheong) 149 drawings 6, 57, 58, 95, 104, 145, 209, 244, 309, 311, 312, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 366, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 374, 379, 380, 383, 406, 410, 456, 462 ‘Dreams and Conflicts’ (Bonami) 175 Duality (Chandrasekaran) 475 Dubai 128 Duisburg 231 Dutch Cultural Centre (Jakarta) 427 Dyanto, Arie 233 Dysart, Dinah, & Hannah Fink 445 Dzikir (Adipurnomo) 470 86, 270 Earl Lu Gallery 6, 87, 91, 218, 396, 445 East Timor xliii, 139, 357, 359, 360 Eating Bullets (Makan Pelor) (Dono) 247, 261 Eccles, Jeremy 359 Echigo-Tsumari Triennial 180 Edades, Victorio 18 Ego’s Grave (Villanueva) 473; 474 Eko Nugroho et al., Hidden Violence (Eko Nugroho et al.) 132 Elkins, James xlix, 14, 37, 43, 44, 98; Zhivka Valiavicharska & Alice Kim xlix, 37 Emmerson, Donald 89 Empty canvas on which so many shadows have already fallen (Piyadasa / Sulaiman Esa) 496 End of Travelling, The (Chong & Cornaro) 207–208 Entry Points (Masa Penerimaan) (Piyadasa) xxxvii–xxxix, 19 E-ART ASEAN ONLINE

½¾

Index

Enwezor, Okwui xxxvii Erasure and Remembrance (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan) 318 Esche, Charles 131 Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton 124 essentialism xli, l, li, liv, 6, 7, 23, 138, 139, 164, 166, 208, 211, 217, 244, 330, 341, 486 essentialization xliii, xliv, 161, 169, 213 ethnicity l, liv, 46, 63, 65, 121, 140, 165, 168, 209, 235, 296, 340, 355, 365, 366, 428, 475, 500 —See also: Chinese Indonesians; Chinese Malaysians; race; racism ethnography xliii, liii, 3, 54, 148, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 176, 177, 179, 213, 227, 340, 341, 498, 499, 505 ethno-mapping 164 Euro-American tradition xxxii, xl, xlii, xlv, xlviii, xlix, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 49, 94, 95, 60, 164, 166, 167, 172, 180, 184, 192, 195, 199, 210, 221, 235, 328 —See also: eurocentrism eurocentrism 171, 191, 195, 200 —See also: Euro-American tradition; hegemony; Orientalism; Westerncentrism Europe and Asia xxxii, 15–17, 26, 34, 43, 47, 101, 175–78, 229, 231, 255– 56, 499; and Southeast Asia 124, 174–78, 203, 229, 231 Every Name in History is I (Ho Tzu Nyen) 493 Ewington, Julie 20, 53, 101, 102, 104, 183, 252, 426 Exergie-Butter Dance (Suryodarmo) 459; 459 exhibitions: ‘15 Tracks: Contemporary Southeast Asian Art’ 116, 117, 231;

571 ‘36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art’ 86, 160, 221, 222, 234; ‘Apa? Siapa? Kenapa?’ 135; ’Archiving Roberto Chabet’ 497; Armory Show 173; ‘Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses into the Future’ 86, 117, 352; ‘Art Stage Singapore’ 126, 173; ‘Asian Art Show’ 114, 116; ‘Asian Modernism: Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand’ 117; ‘A W A S !’ 265; ‘Body Fields’ 439, 440, 441; ‘Chabet: 50 Years’ 497; ‘Cities on the Move’ 33, 159, 165, 181, 198–207, 264, 278, 281, 285; ‘Contemporaneity: Contemporary Art of Indonesia’ 96; ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions’ 33, 118, 159, 175, 181, 190–98, 199, 351, 463; ‘Contemporary Paintings of Malaysia’ 24; ‘Contemporary SouthEast Asian Art’ 230–34; ‘Delays and Revolutions’ (Bonami) 174; ‘Dreams and Conflicts’ (Bonami) 175; ‘Faith + The City’ 127; ‘Figuring the Contemporary Body’ 127; ‘Future of Imagination #2’ 457; ‘The Future of Imagination’ 457; ‘Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s– 1980s’ 47; ‘If The World Changed’ 487; ‘Imaging Selves’ 453, 454, 456; ‘Indonesian Eye: Fantasies & Realities’ 124; ‘Inside Out: New Chinese Art’ 181; ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Hubert–Martin) 177–80; 178; ‘Multiculturalism’ (The Substation, Singapore) 217; ‘Narrative Visions in Contemporary Asean Art’ 117; ‘New Art from Southeast Asia 1992’ 117; ‘No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia’ 175; ‘Nuit

572

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Blanche’ 397; ‘Perkara Tanah’ (‘Land Issues’) 351; ‘“Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’ 178; ‘Site + Sight’ 390, 476; ‘S P A C E [ S ] Dialogue and Exhibition’ (Rumah Air Panas) 132; ‘Spaces and Shadows’ 176; ‘Telah Terbit (Out Now)’ xxxvii, 19, 110, 112; ‘Thermocline of Art’ 175; ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’ (Piyadasa / Sulaiman Esa) 19, 496; ‘TransCulture’ 165, 292, 294, 295; ‘Transfigurations: Indonesian Mythologies’ 124; ‘Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art’ 86, 160, 222–30, 234; ‘Utopia Station’ (Bonami) 175; ‘Vision 2020’ 141, 338; ‘Zone of Urgency’ 174, 263 —See also: A P T ; biennials; Documenta exhibitions; Florence Biennale; Gwangju Biennale; triennials; Venice Biennale exoticization liii, 18, 27 Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame (Victor) 453

film 70, 198, 207, 209, 234, 271, 365, 367, 488, 489 fine arts vs folk arts 9 Fink, Hannah 188 Fisher, Jean 163, 209, 218 Fitfield, Russell H. 89 Florence Biennale 476, 478 Flores, Karen 414 Flores, Patrick D. xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, 21, 25, 27, 40, 41, 49, 82, 88, 158, 162, 172, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 234, 380, 498; & David Bromfield

Fadjri, Raihul 463 ‘Faith + The City’ 127 Fajardo, Brenda 109, 233 Fake Human Being (Dono) 247 Farquharson, Alex 201 Fastigium (Wong Hoy Cheong) 156 Featherstone, Mike 402 Feleo, Roberto 32, 63 Fermentation of Mind (Peragian Pikiran) (Dono) 261, 266; 262 Fifth Passage collective 439, 440, 442, 445

‘Figuring the Contemporary Body’ 127 Filipiniana Heritage Library 74

52

Flower Diplomacy (Diplomasi Bunga) (Dono) 250; 251 Flying Angels (Bidadari) (Dono) 247; 247–48, 266 Flying in a Cocoon (Dono) 239 F O C A S : Forum on Contemporary Art & Society 29 Fogle, Douglas 201, 202 folk arts 9 Follower, The (Jaarsma) 418 Food Stall under the Banyan Tree (Affandi) 124 For Those who have been killed… (Christanto) 344, 345, 347, 348, 366; 346 formalism xxxix, li, liii, 7, 9, 23, 25, 26, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 160, 166, 167, 408 Foster, Hal xlix, 34, 38, 136, 167, 168, 210, 213 Foucault, Michel 314, 315 Foulcher, Keith 254 Francisco, Carlos 18 Freud, Sigmund 372, 374, 380, 442 Friis–Hansen, Dana 164, 295 Fukuoka Art Museum 31, 114, 216 Fukuoka Asian Art Museum 8, 31, 33, 86, 109, 114, 115, 116, 117, 176, 231, 352, 486

½¾

573

Index

Fukuoka Asian Art Show 33, 180 Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 86, 180, 246

Fumio Nanjo 21, 111, 117, 170, 172, 294 funding 86, 128, 162, 227, 240, 442, 446, 457, 489 Furuichi Yasuko 86, 114, 223, 226, 227, 228, 229 ‘Future of Imagination, The’ 457 ‘Future of Imagination #2’ 457 galleries (for contemporary Southeast Asian art) —See: independent art spaces; museums Gamelan of Rumour (Dono) 261, 266, 267

gamelan orchestra 266 Gao Minglu 181 Gatens, Moira 404 Gauguin, Paul 11, 417, 491 Gaweewong, Gridthiya 223, 229 Geertz, Clifford 53, 254 gender 26, 27, 93, 195, 247, 402, 432, 439, 462, 468 geo-cultural frameworks xxxi, xxxviii, xlviii, liv, 6, 17, 108, 118, 160, 184 George, Kenneth 26, 408 Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement) 19 Germany 175, 231, 249 —See also: Duisburg, Karlsruhe, Kassel, Kiel Giakoumi, Dionissia 187, 426 Gibson, Ross 56 Gill, Simryn xliii, 163, 174, 185, 189, 190, 204, 279, 286–307, 468; Fig.: 188, 205, 206, 286, 289, 290, 292, 293, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304; Natasha Bullock & Lily Hibberd 303 —WORKS:

Dalam 260, 301, 303, 304, 305, 306; 302–304 Interloper 204; 205–206 Roadkill 287, 288; 286 Self-seeds 287–89, 291; 289 A Small Town at the Turn of the Century, series 297, 30 Vegetation series 189, 190; 188 Washed Up 292, 294, 295; 292–93 Wonderlust 290 Gillman Barracks (Singapore) 125 Gilroy, Paul 338 Glass Vehicles (Dono) 247, 261; 263 Gleeson, Erin 504 global art 46, 47 —See also: contemporary art; international art; world art ‘Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s’ 47 globalization xxxv, xl, xli, xlii, xlvi, xlviii, 3, 5, 6, 7, 17, 33, 37, 40, 42, 77, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 104, 111, 147, 149, 157, 159, 161, 165, 167, 169, 173, 181, 187, 193, 194, 198, 207, 208, 217, 218, 227, 235, 236, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 254, 256, 257, 264,316, 323, 324, 426, 483, 484, 485, 488, 498, 500, 503 Goh Chok Tong (P M , Singapore) 112, 113, 138 Goodman, Nelson 41 Graham, Elaine L. 428 Gray, Allison Patricia 349, 357, 359, 365

Grayground (Ventura) 124 Great Non-Malaysian Portrait, The (Sitharan) 496 Green, Charles 188 Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce W. Ferguson & Sandy Nairne 159

574

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Green Man, The (Manusia Hijau) (Wijono) 458 Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila) 129 Grosz, Elizabeth 210, 211, 449, 451 Grupong Salingpusa 414 Guan Wei 189 Guangzhou Triennial 156, 180 Guggenheim U B S M A P Global Art Initiative 175 Guillermo, Alice G. 9, 11, 12, 18, 81, 109, 473 Gunawan, Hendra 18 Gupta, Akhil, & James Ferguson 241 Gwangju xxxvii, xxxviii, 21, 120, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 144, 171, 180, 393,

Hau, Caroline S. 95 Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) 176 Havana Biennale 32, 171, 174, 246, 450 Healer, The (Jaarsma) 418 Heartney, Eleanor 195 hegemony, Chinese/Indian 504; internationalist 25; Javanese 460; of museum as institution 279; political 404; Western xlviii, xlix, lii, liii, liv, 7, 14, 15, 27, 34, 37, 46, 49, 51, 54, 107, 130, 137, 138, 158, 166, 167, 168, 173, 182, 221, 235, 306, 313, 351, 391, 500 Helsinki 181, 199, 202, 287 Heng, Amanda 111, 115, 209, 410, 440; Another Woman 403 Hi Inlander (Hello Native) (Jaarsma) 419, 428; 419, 430, 433 Hiah, Jeremy 410, 490, 495 Hidalwa, Sid Gomez 185 Hidden Violence (Eko Nugroho et al.)

396

Gwangju Biennale xxxvii, xxxviii, 21, 120, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 144, 180, 393, 394, 395, 396, 398, 498 Ha Tri Hieu 233 Habitation Project: Picking Up (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan) 224 Hanged Man (Legaspi) 379 hair 402, 440, 441, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 457, 460, 461, 463, 466, 471, 472 Haji Family, The (Piyadasa) 406; 407 Halbwachs, Maurice 339 Hall, Stuart 257, 310, 338 Hallam, Huw 37, 484 Hallard, Brent 478 Hamashita, Takeshi 95 Han Sai Por 440 Haq, Nav 168 Harima 267, 268 Harima Sounding Sphere Festival 267 Hariyanto, Hedi 233 Harris, Jonathan 26 Harsono, FX 20, 111, 185, 192, 410 Hartono, Yusuf Susilo 270, 367

132

Hiding Rituals and the Mass Production I (Adipurnomo) 471 Hiding Rituals and the Mass Production II (Adipurnomo) 469 Hiding Rituals of My Own Hairpiece (Adipurnomo) 466 Higson, Rosalie 304 Hill, Peter 85 Hiller, Susan 179 Hinduism 10, 17, 95 Hirschman, Charles, Charles F. Keyes & Karl Hutterer 90 His Mother is a Theatre (Victor) 442, 443, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449; 444 History of Rubber and Labour (Wong Hoy Cheong) 331 Ho Hing-kay, Oscar 228 Ho Tzu Nyen xliii, 488, 489, 490, 491, 494, 498, 501; Every Name in

½¾

575

Index

History is I (Ho Tzu Nyen) 493; 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art 488, 489, 494, 495; 491–93 Ho, Liza 127 Hoang, Nguyen Huy 233 Hobsbawm, Eric, & Terence Ranger 468

Hoffie, Pat 172, 187, 316, 328, 426 Holt, Claire 12 HOM

—See: House of Matahati Hong Bee Warehouse 454 Hong Kong xxxiii, xlv, 32, 87, 119, 124, 126, 127, 128, 173, 198, 277, 497 Hong Kong Art Fair (Art Basel Hong Kong) 126 Hooker, Virginia 408 Horne, Stephen 62 Hoskote, Ranjit 223, 226 Hou Hanru 21, 131, 170, 172, 174, 202, 263, 391, 426; & Hans–Ulrich Obrist 181, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 207, 279, 281 House of Matahati 129 House of Natural Fiber (H O N F ) 129 Howard, Ian 163 Huang Yong Ping 170 Huangfu, Binghui 445, 476 Hubert–Martin, Jean 177, 178, 179 Hujatnikajenong, Agung 27 Hussein, Saddam 264 Huyssen, Andreas 313, 314, 315, 324, 343, 348 hybridity xlvi, 21, 97, 120, 145, 146, 149, 161, 165, 187, 241, 249, 254, 256, 257, 268, 269, 276, 337, 341, 368, 422, 427, 501 Hylton, Richard 163 I am ethnic I (Jaarsma) 418 I have been Skying (John Low) 496

Ibrahim, Anwar (Deputy P M , Malaysia) 135

identitarianism l, li, liii, liv, 65, 124, 137, 156, 158, 160, 161, 162, 165, 167, 168, 201, 221, 235, 297, 496, 501 ‘If The World Changed’ 487 ‘Imaging Selves’ 453, 454, 456 In Between Betelnut Palm and the Sphinx (Wong Hoy Cheong) 149 In Between Malayan Railway Building and Eleanor Cross (Wong Hoy Cheong) 149; 151 In Between Masjid Kapitan Keling and Narcissus (Wong Hoy Cheong) 149; 150

In Search of Faraway Places (Wong Hoy Cheong) 311, 312, 332; 309–10 independent art spaces (function of, in Southeast Asia) 127–36 India 11, 17, 28, 32, 33, 40, 94, 95, 96, 111, 123, 128, 145, 192, 193, 198, 214, 216, 222, 226, 230, 284, 295, 296, 311, 330, 331, 475, 503, 504 indianization 95 Indigenous Skins (Wong Hoy Cheong) 137, 144, 152 indocentrism 95 Indonesia xliii, xliv, xlv, l, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22–24, 26, 29, 32, 40, 53, 69, 74, 84, 85, 86, 93, 96, 106, 115, 116, 119, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 160, 162, 170, 174, 175, 180, 185, 192, 193, 197, 198, 205, 208, 222, 223, 226, 230, 231, 246–69, 270, 311, 343–67, 408, 410–11, 416– 32, 445, 458–72, 495, 496, 499, 504 Indonesian art history —See especially: Claire Holt; Agung Hujatnikajennong; Asmudjo Jono Irianto; Werner Kraus; M. Dwi Marianto; Jim Supangkat; Sumartono;

576

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Hendro Wiyanto; Astri Wright; Rizki A. Zaelani ‘Indonesian Eye: Fantasies & Realities’

intraregionalism 14, 84, 85, 91, 93, 131, 223, 486, (including intra-regional) lv Introversion (April the Twenty-First) (Adipurnomo) 466; 465 Irianto, Asmudjo Jono 22, 25, 27, 223,

124

Indonesian Institute of the Arts 458 Indonesian Visual Art Archive (I V A A ) 29, 87, 128 Indratma, Samuel 233, 265; Watch Indonesia 265 In-flight (Project: Another Country) (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan) 240, 325; 240, 327–28 Ingham, Susan Helen 366 ‘Inside Out: New Chinese Art’ 181 installation art 20, 21, 22, 27, 51, 55, 56, 58, 61, 101, 102, 104, 124, 137, 139, 178, 195, 197, 198, 203, 204, 205, 234, 246, 247, 252, 261, 263, 266, 267, 268, 273, 276, 286–307, 316– 28, 330–41, 344–98, 404, 409, 410, 416–32, 434, 436, 438, 442, 443, 444, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 452, 454, 462, 466, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 481, 490, 496 inter-Asia (as method for Asian Studies) xlii, 5 inter-Asia imaginary xlii, 5, 230 Interloper (Gill) 204; 205–206 Internal Security Act (Malaysia) 135, 205

International Art 33, 42–43, 85, 94, 98, 110, 123, 125, 127, 128, 133–34, 143, 158, 161, 163, 167, 171–73, 181, 208, 223, 240–41, 246, 249, 252, 254, 343, 360, 458, 485–86, 498, 500, 504–505 —See also: contemporary art; global art; world art internationalism xlvi, 9, 20, 25, 26, 42, 171, 208, 235, 505

226

Ishihara, Shintaro 138 Iskandar, Gustaff H. 270 Islam 4, 17, 26, 70, 71, 149, 156, 331, 352, 366, 367, 371, 406, 408, 409, 417, 427, 458 Ismail Mohd Zain —See under: Zain, Ismail Mohd Istanbul 156, 171 Jaarsma, Mella xliii, 126, 129, 130, 175, 256, 410, 416–32; & Nindityo Adipurnomo 123, 130; & Remy Jungerman 418, 423, 426 —WORKS: Bolak – balik 418 Bule Bull 424 The Follower 418 The Healer 418 Hi Inlander (Hello Native) 419, 428; 419, 430, 433 I am ethnic I 418 Pribumi – Pribumi 427–28; 429 S A R A -swati 418; 421 Saya Goreng Kamu I/I Fry For You I 418

Saya Goreng Kamu II/I Fry For You II 418 Shameless Gold 418 Shelter Me 425 The Trophy (Animals have no religion) 425 The Warrior, The Healer, The Feeder 421

Jackson, Peter A. 90

½¾

577

Index

Jak en Poy (local child’s play: sticks and stones (Soriano) 414 Jakarta xlv, 23, 129, 131, 205, 352, 358, 366, 427 Jakarta Biennale 180 Jamal, Syed Ahmad 18, 109 Jameson, Fredric 243 Jansen, Gregor 202 Japan 10, 11, 31, 32, 33, 40, 49, 86, 94, 97, 109, 111, 113–17, 119, 160, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 189, 193, 198, 203, 214, 216, 222, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 249, 267, 268, 294, 334, 371, 380, 426, 486, 503; and Asia 221; and Southeast Asia 112–16 Japan Foundation, The 31, 86, 117, 223, 230, 231 Japan Foundation Asia Center, The 117, 230

Japar, Salleh 453 japonisme 11 Jaran Kepang (horse-dance) 253 Java 18, 252, 254, 255, 256, 261, 330, 331, 337, 345, 355, 417, 420, 422, 427, 428, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 466, 467, 468, 471, 472 Javanese culture 252; music 266 Javanese-centrism 460 Javier, Geraldine 124 Jeruk, Bunga 233 Jit, Krishen 50, 51, 109 Jogya Biennale 180 Jolly, Margaret 120 Journey of a Yellow Man (Lee Wen) 216; 212, 215 Jurriëns, Edwin, & Jeroen de Kloet xlv Justiniani, Mark 163, 414 Kafka, Franz 148 Kaisahan Group 19

Kala Chakra (Chandrasekaran) 475 Kamiya Yukie 223, 229 Kapur, Geeta 11, 192 Karlsruhe 37, 158, 175 Kasemkitvatana, Chitti 204 Kassel 174, 276, 504 Kataoka Mami 114, 223, 380 Kee, Joan xlvi, 4, 47, 165, 199 Kekerasan series (Christanto) 364; Kekerasan I (Violence I) 349, 352, 364; 350–51 Ken Lum 207 Keomingmouang, Khamsouk 233 Khamarul Zaman Bin PG. HJ. Tajuddin, PG. 233 Khoo Boo Teik 143 Khoo, Eddin 494; Ramdas Tikamdas & Elizabeth Wong 136 Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art 287

Kiel 276 Kim Soo-Ja 160, 170 Kim Sunjung 223 King who is Scared of the Approaching Barong, The (Dono) 250; 251 Kingsbury, Damien 358 Kirby, Vicky 401 Koh Cheng Foo 13 Kompas (Indonesian newspaper) 352 Koop, Stuart 298 Korea 32, 33, 40, 49, 94, 111, 118, 119, 160, 170, 175, 180, 192, 193, 198, 222, 226, 230, 393, 394, 503 Kota Kinabalu 71, 74 Kraus, Werner 18 Kristeva, Julia 448, 449 —See also: abject body Kuala Lumpur xlv, 12, 48, 50, 98, 100, 127, 129, 205, 296, 374, 406, 476, 494

Kubler, George xxxvii

578

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Kuda Binal (Wild Horses) (Dono) 252;

Lee Weng Choy 25, 27, 28, 29, 37, 120, 123, 125, 135, 162, 163, 164, 173, 210, 218, 252, 288, 292, 296, 297, 301, 306, 360, 395, 396, 441, 442; 290; & Ray Langenbach 384 Lee Yip Fong 127 Lee, Joanna 49, 231, 404, 426, 445, 448, 451, 452, 457; & Bridget Tracy Tan 49, 112; & Lindy Poh 408 Lefebvre, Henri 389 Legaspi, Cesar 18 Legaspi, José xliii, 119, 233, 342, 367– 83, 416 —WORKS: Crucifixion 374; 373 The Crucifixion 374; 373 Dog eating a woman 370; 372 Hanged Man 379 Lovers 368–70; 369 La Muerte de Justo (The Death of the Just) 375, 379, 416; 376 On Suicide 369, 370; 370 Phlegm 379–80; 377 Untitled 377 Untitled (9) 382 Untitled (12) 377 Untitled (13) 378 Legaspi–Ramirez, Eileen 285, 473 Lenzi, Iola 21 Leow, Vincent 410, 440, 454, 456; Coffee Talk 440; Money Suit 454, 456; 455; The Three-Legged Toad

252

Kumbu Anak Katu 233 Kuroda, Raiji 117 Kusnadi 12 Kusolwong, Surasi 170, 175, 204 Kuss, Alexandra 460, 468 Kwok, Kian Chow 12 Kwon, Miwon xlix, 38, 39, 281, 282 Labrador, Ana 371 Lalang (Wong Hoy Cheong) 144, 152 Lam, Kai 410, 490, 495 Land and Farmers are Free when United (Taring Padi) 412 Lang Kachang (Radjikin) xxvi, 404; 405

Langenbach, Ray 27, 31, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 146, 194, 340, 384, 386, 393, 396, 397, 410, 440, 441, 447, 496

Laos xliii, xliv, 106, 115, 203, 231, 504 Larasati (auction house) 126 Latin America 47, 76, 169, 170, 174, 175, 331 Lee Bul 160 Lee Wen xliii, 111, 113, 189, 207, 208– 21, 359, 403, 410, 440, 457, 458, 501

—WORKS: Journey of a Yellow Man 216; 212, 215

Lifeboat 3 219 Splash 1 cover; 501, 502 Splash 2 501, 502 Splash! 501; 502 Strange Fruit 220 Untitled 220 Yellow Man 189, 208–21, 359, 403, 432, 458, 501, 504; 212, 215, 219–20

454

Lerma, Ramon E.S. 473 Lévy, Arnaud 380 Lewis, Martin W., & Kären E. Wigen 90, 91 Liew Kung Yu 204, 410; Pasti Boleh (Sure You Can) 205 Lifeboat 3 (Lee Wen) 219 Lim Hak Tai 18, 97

½¾

579

Index

Lim Tzay Chuen xliii, 383–98, 489 —WORKS: Alter #1 384; 385 Alter #7 386, 389, 390, 391; 388 Alter #10 393, 395, 396, 397; 394 Alter #11) 489 Alter #16 397 Lim Yi Yong, Charles 270, 276 Lim, Jason 410, 457 Lim, Karen 454 Lin Minghong, Michael 170 Lingham, Susie 6, 15, 16, 17, 27, 91, 434, 436, 439, 441, 442, 458 Liu Kang 100, 101, 490; Artist and Model 103 Lo, Jacqueline 257 Long, Richard 177, 178; Red Earth Circle 177; 178 Longhurst, Robyn 402, 448, 449 Loo Zihan, Cane 496 Lost Generation Space 129 Lovers (Legaspi) 368–70; 369 Low, John 233, 496; I have been Skying 496

Loyola, Racquel de 410 Lu, Earl 454 Lubis, Mochtar 460 Luemuang, Prasong 233 Ly, Boreth 26, 29, 408 M A A P xxxii, 357

—See: Media Art Asia–Pacific Maestro, Lani xliii, 32, 57, 58–66; a book thick of ocean 58–66, 76; 59– 60, 62, 66, 506 Magician Who Never Killed, A (Dono) 260, 261 ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ (Hubert–Martin) 177–80; 178 Maharaj, Sarat 163 Mahathir, Mohamad 138, 139, 141

Maid in Malaysia (Wong Hoy Cheong) 156

Maka Lahirlah Angkatan ’66-an (So Was Born The ’66 Generation) (Sudjojono) 496 Maka Lahirlah Angkatan ’90-an (So Was Born The ’90s Generation) (Suwage) 496 Makan pelor (Eating bullets) (Dono) 258

Malaya 10, 13, 18, 330, 332, 334 Malaysia xxxviii–xxxix, xliii, xliv, l, 4, 12, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 29, 32, 48, 50, 67–77, 84, 85, 86, 87, 93, 100, 104, 106, 116, 119, 123, 124, 125, 129, 131, 135, 137–56, 162, 174, 175, 185, 189, 194, 198, 204, 205, 231, 270, 293, 295, 296, 297, 299, 301, 305, 306, 311–12, 330–41, 404–408, 410, 475– 81, 494, 496, 504 Malaysian art history —See: Ray Langenbach; Lee Weng Choy; Nur Hanim Khairuddin; Adeline Ooi; Redza Piyadasa; Niranjan Rajah; T.K. Sabapathy; Hasnul Jamal Saidon; Wong Hoy Cheong; Beverly Yong; Ismail Mohd Zain; Abidin Ahmad Shariff Zainol Malaysian Art Archive and Research Support 88 Mallari, Joy 414 Manansala, Vicente 18 Mandal, Sumit 140, 141 Manik, Andar 204 Manila xlv, 29, 41, 52, 61, 64, 74, 76, 85, 127, 129, 222, 226, 321, 369, 370, 373, 375, 377, 378, 381, 382, 414, 445, 473, 497 Maravillas, Francis xxxviii, 120, 184 Marbella, Wilfred 379, 383 Marcon, Marco 86

580

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Marcos, Ferdinand 139, 140, 410, 414, 416; & Imelda 70 Marcus, George E., & Michael M.J. Fischer 91 marginalization 9, 42, 94, 164, 169, 171, 344, 352, 355, 411, 504 Marianto, M. Dwi 22, 25, 27, 123, 124, 231, 350, 352, 467 Marriage of a Rubber Tapper to a Girl Dressed as Virgin Mary in a School Play (Wong Hoy Cheong) 332; 335 Mashadi, Ahmad xxxvii, 19, 27, 49, 408, 409 Masriadi, I Nyoman 124, 233 Massey, Doreen 314 Massumi, Brian 282 Matisse, Henri 11 Matthews, Julie 213 Mayo, Rachel 125 McClintock, Anne 15, 334, 442, 449 McEvilley, Thomas 179, 180 McGee, John 226, 228, 229 McGovern, Eva 127 Medan 358 Media Art Asia–Pacific (M A A P ) xxxii memory li, liv, 58, 64, 71, 74, 223, 307, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325, 330, 331, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 344, 347, 348, 355, 356, 357, 361, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 371, 372, 374, 375, 379, 383, 384, 398, 399, 435, 436, 447, 456,496 memory-work (James E. Young) 312, 313, 314, 315, 349 Menanti Godot I – Waiting for Godot (Sulaiman Esa) 10 Mendelssohn, Joanna 347 Mereka Memberi Kesaksian (They Give Evidence) (Christanto) 352; 353–54 Merleau–Ponty, Maurice 55

Meskimmon, Marsha xlvii, 44, 45, 54, 55, 349, 503 migrancy xli, xlv, 63, 214, 218, 226, 278, 311, 330, 331, 332, 335, 337, 338, 339, 340 Migrants series (Wong Hoy Cheong) 141, 144, 152, 330, 331, 332, 337, 338, 340, 341, 406 migration 15, 189, 199, 241, 242, 243, 288, 311, 312, 316, 324, 325, 330, 331, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 356, 406, 417, 420, 422 Mindanao 445 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 54, 403 Miwa, Kenjin 49 mixed media 234 Miyazaki Ichisada 15 Miyoshi, Masao 242 mobility xlvi, li, liv, 42, 58, 104, 159, 165, 173, 187, 194, 198, 199, 204, 214, 236, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 248, 249, 257, 267, 269, 270, 274, 277, 278, 282, 286, 287, 288, 291, 295, 307, 426, 500 —See also: translocality modern art (Asian, history and theory of) 12, 17–19, 21 —See especially: John Clark; Geeta Kapur; Alice G. Guillermo; Claire Holt; Kusnadi; Kwok Kian Chow; Redza Piyadasa; Apinan Poshyananda; T.K. Sabapathy; Jim Supangkat; Emmanuel Torres; Astri Wright modernism 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 25, 30, 31, 35, 96, 172, 177, 179, 184, 201, 202, 209, 234, 254, 261, 304, 313, 386, 417, 491 modernity xxxvii, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 36, 37, 43, 50, 95, 96, 138, 179, 199, 214, 243, 268, 269, 287, 330, 402, 403, 404, 498, 499; and

½¾

581

Index

tradition 8–11; and the contemporary 21–22 modernization 9, 11, 13, 45, 137, 198, 199, 241, 266, 268 Modesto, Fernando 279 Mohd. Yamin Bin Psj Pg. Hj. Abdul Momin, Pg. Hj. 231 Mohidin, Abdul Latiff 18 Mokhtar, Hayati 233 Money Suit (Leow) 454, 456; 455 Mongolia 115 Monument For A Mystical Reality (Chong / Heman) 496 Moon, Damon 265 Morgan, Jessica 306, 307 Mori Art Museum 117 Moro National Liberation Front 71 Morris, Meaghan 245 Morris–Suzuki, Tessa 90, 91, 108 Mosquera, Gerardo 169 Mowelfund 131 M.P.P. Yei Myint 233 Muerte de Justo, La (The Death of the Just) (Legaspi) 375, 416 multiculturalism xxxii, 4, 83, 113, 118, 141, 156, 159, 162, 166, 167, 168, 171, 177, 191, 193, 208, 221, 235, 330, 338

‘Multiculturalism’ (The Substation, Singapore) 217 multimedia 234, 270 Multimedia Art Asia–Pacific —See: Media Art Asia–Pacific Mumbai 222, 226 Munroe, Alexandra 195 Murti, Krisna 233 Musa, Helen 361 Museum of Contemporary Art (Shanghai) 96 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 178

museums (for contemporary Southeast Asian art) —See: Balai Seni Rupa Negara (National Art Gallery of Malaysia); Cultural Center of the Philippines; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka Art Museum); Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (G O M A ); Singapore Art Museum —See also: independent art spaces Muzium Seni Negara Malaysia (National Art Museum Malaysia) 48 My Ancestors Were Traders (Adipurnomo) 467 My Grand-mother (Adipurnomo) 471 Myanmar (Burma) xliii, xliv, 106, 115, 119, 231, 311, 504 Nadarajan, Gunalan 218, 275 Nang Lao Ngin 231 Naing, Soe 233 Nanjo, Fumio 172, 187 Nanyang (South China Seas) 17 Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore) 13, 20, 97, 100 Nanyang School (Malaya/Singapore) xxxvii, xxxviii, 13, 48, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 486, 488, 490, 494, 495 ‘Narrative Visions in Contemporary Asean Art’ 117 National Art Gallery Singapore 110, 116 National Museum of Singapore 453 National University of Singapore 87 nationalism xxxv, 6, 16, 17, 18, 19, 30, 48, 52, 85, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 139, 140, 141, 161, 185, 192, 195, 233, 254, 291, 328, 330, 337, 341, 411 nation-building 18, 30, 77, 141, 161, 166, 253

nation-state 42, 85, 90, 91, 93, 106, 162, 254, 341

582

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Nepal 115 Nesbit, Molly 175 Netherlands 28, 53, 175, 249, 256, 417, 420, 422, 426, 427, 431, 432, 462,

Nye, Joseph S. 107

464

‘New Art from Southeast Asia 1992’ 117 ‘new art history’ 26 New Migrants (Wong Hoy Cheong) 331 New Order regime (Indonesia) 20, 253, 261, 263, 264, 265, 344, 351, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 363, 365, 367, 411, 460, 464 New Zealand 37, 47, 55, 71, 119, 183, 249

New York xviii, xlv, 47, 52, 117, 173, 175, 178–79, 181, 190 Ng, Josef xxxiii, 440, 441, 442, 446, 457, 496; Brother Cane 440, 441, 457, 496 Ng, Snow 127 Ngui, Matthew (Mingfook) 111, 174, 185, 189, 203, 233, 389, 391, 392, 393, 453; Will You Talk to Me? 203 Nguyen Nhi Yi 233 Nguyen–Hatsushiba, Jun 33, 170 Nietzsche, Friedrich 341 ‘No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia’ 175 nomadic aesthetic 278 nomadism 241, 244, 282, 295, 296 Non-Indigenous Skins (Wong Hoy Cheong) 137, 152; 152–53 Nora, Pierre 312 Nouveau Riche, the Elephant, the Foreign Maid, or the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The (Wong Hoy Cheong) 152, 406; 407 Nugroho, Eko et al. 131 ‘Nuit Blanche’ 397 Nur Hanim Khairuddin, Beverly Yong & T.K. Sabapathy xxxix, 29

O’Campo, Yuan Moro 410 O’Doherty, Brian 386 Obrist, Hans–Ulrich 175 Ocampo, Galo B. 18 Ocampo, Hernando R. 18 Ocampo, Manuel 175 Of Martyrs and Nationhood (Bose) 329 Of Migrants and Rubber Trees (Wong Hoy Cheong) 330, 331 On Suicide (Legaspi) 369, 370; 370 Ong, Aihwa xl Ooi, Adeline 67, 127 Operation Lalang 135 Oren, Michael 191 Orientalism liii, 10, 14, 18, 124, 196, 197, 198, 417 Orientations: A Layer of Breath (Ye Shufang) 476 Osage (gallery) 126, 127 Osbourne, Milton 243 p-10 129, 270 Pahlasari, Herra 495; Potret diri di depan kelambu terbuka (Self portrait before the open mosquito net) 495 Pain of the Trees, The (Christanto) 361 painting xxxvii, 11, 15, 17, 18, 26, 44, 52, 97, 98, 100, 101, 104, 124, 125, 166, 177, 178, 195, 197, 209, 234, 253, 256, 261, 264, 265, 284, 285, 321, 409, 410, 414, 415, 417, 454, 456, 462, 488, 490, 491, 494, 495 Palo-sebo (Sanggawa) 415 Pameran Binal 252, 253 Pancasila (Indonesian ideology) 253, 254

Papastergiadis, Nikos xlvi, 147, 148, 216, 218 Papua New Guinea 119

½¾

583

Index

parallel modernities (Clark) 13, 14 Paras–Perez, Rod 51, 52, 102 Parekh, Bhikhu 337 Parr, Mike 52 Passion in my hands (Adipurnomo) 462 Pasti Boleh (Sure You Can) (Liew) 205 Pastor Roces, Marian 27, 63, 66, 88, 157, 171, 185, 192, 221 Patton, Paul 143 Paul, Delia, & Sharifah Fatimah Zubir 109

Peckham, Senga xxxii Penang 146, 148 Penyelewengan Sejarah (The Deviation of History) (Yusuf) 496 performance art 20, 22, 25, 27, 52, 53, 56, 104, 124, 189, 204, 208, 209–21, 241, 247, 250, 252, 253, 257, 261, 267, 268, 273, 278–86, 297, 344, 347, 357, 358, 359, 384, 402, 409, 411, 416, 420, 427, 428, 430, 434, 436, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 445, 446, 447, 448, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 462, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 488, 489, 490, 496, 501 ‘Perkara Tanah’ (‘Land Issues’) 351 Perth xxxii, 86, 181, 185, 190, 297 Phaosavasdi, Kamol 185, 192 Phelan, Peggy 446, 454, 455, 456 Philippine art history —See especially: Ray Albano; Patrick Flores; Alice G. Guillermo; Ana Labrador; Marian Pastor Roces; Flaudette May V. Datuin; Emmanuel Torres Philippines xliii, xliv, l, 9, 11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 29, 32, 40, 41, 47, 51, 52, 61, 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 74, 84, 85, 86, 88, 93, 102, 104, 106, 116, 119, 120, 124, 127, 129, 131, 162, 163, 174, 175,

185, 192, 193, 197, 198, 222, 225, 226, 230, 231, 278–86, 316, 318, 319, 320, 321, 323, 324, 325, 328, 368–83, 410, 411, 414, 415, 416, 445, 472–75, 497, 504, 515 Philippines/Australia 316–28 Phlegm (Legaspi) 379–80; 377 Phnom Penh 88, 504 photography 58, 67–77, 84, 189, 190, 198, 234, 271, 285, 297, 298, 299, 301, 304, 305, 306, 311, 406, 410, 417, 435, 438, 468, 490, 496, 501 Phua Yang Chien, Melvin 270, 274 Phy Chan Than 233 Picasso, Pablo 170, 172, 179, 256 Pich, Sopheap 504 P I C N I C K I T (Ruangrupa) 133 Pineda, Roselle 380 Pirous, A.D. 23, 109 Piyadasa, Redza xxxvii–xxxix, 4, 12, 13, 19, 21, 24, 48, 84, 97, 104, 105, 109, 183, 331, 332, 406, 494, 496; & Sulaiman Esa 19, 104, 105

—WORKS: Entry Points (Masa Penerimaan) xxxvii–xxxix, 19; xxxvi The Haji Family 406; 407 (with Sulaiman Esa) Empty canvas on which so many shadows have already fallen 496 Planting Rice 88 Plastique Kinetic Worms (P K W ) 128, 130

Poison (Wong Hoy Cheong) 154–55 Polansky, Larry 248, 256 Political Clowns (Badut-Badut Politik) (Dono) 261; 259 Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge & Dipesh Chakrabarty xlv popular culture 411, 416, 428

584 Portrait of a Javanese Man (Adipurnomo) 462 Portrait of residency in Cardiff (Adipurnomo) 462 Portraits of Javanese Men (Adipurnomo) 466, 468; 461, 469 Poshyananda, Apinan 11, 12, 13, 21, 47, 84, 107, 109, 114, 181, 185, 190, 191, 192, 195, 196, 350, 426, 463, 468 postcolonialism 15, 17, 30, 40, 41–42, 69, 90, 94, 144, 146 postmodernism 19, 23, 25, 30, 32, 35, 98, 100, 159, 164, 167, 170, 177, 234, 266, 313, 343, 389 Post-Museum (Singapore) 129, 270 post-nationalism (Appadurai) 94 poststructuralism 6, 92 Potret diri di depan kelambu terbuka (Self portrait before the open mosquito net) (Pahlasari) 495 Power, Kevin 368 Presences and Absences #6 (Alfredo Aquilizan) 318 Presences and Absences (Alfredo Aquilizan) 317 Pribumi – Pribumi (Jaarsma) 427–28; 429

‘“Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’ 178 Project Be-longing #2 (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan) 318, 323–25; 322 Project M201: In God We Trust (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan) 241 pubic hair 441, 457, 471 —See also: hair Puipia, Chatchai 192 Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Q A G O M A ) 31, 33,

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾ 109, 117, 118, 122, 176, 182–90, 246, 247, 347, 356, 359, 377, 486

race l, liv, 26, 50, 63, 137, 140, 141, 164, 166, 168, 189, 205, 210, 211, 218, 235, 311, 331, 334, 337, 338, 341, 364, 365, 401, 402, 403, 420, 432, 481, 500 racism 210, 281, 338 Radjikin, Bayu Utomo B. 404, 406; Lang Kachang xxvi, 404; 405 Raffel, Suhanya 121, 187, 296, 426 Rahman Embong, Abdul 331 Rajah, Niranjan 27, 81, 85, 86, 87, 88, 231, 233, 496; & Hasnul Jamal Saidon 86 Ramirez, Mari Carmen 169, 234 Rasdjarmrearnsook, Araya 192 Raslan, Karim Bin 339 Ratnam, Niru 221 Rattana, Vandy 504 Rawanchaikul, Toshiko 33, 97, 170, 192, 204, 241 Rawson, Philip 8 RE: Looking (Wong Hoy Cheong) 137, 156

realism 17, 19, 26, 27, 234, 402, 404, 408, 410, 411 Reamillo, Alwin 192, 457 Red Earth Circle (Richard Long) 177; 178

Red Rain (Hujan merah) (Christanto) 361, 364, 365, 366; 362–63 regionalism xxxii, xxxix, xl, xli, xlii, xliii, xliv, l, li, lii, liii, liv, lv, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 17, 20, 21, 39, 43, 47, 48, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 122, 126, 127, 136, 138, 147, 148, 158, 159, 174,

½¾

585

Index

184, 189, 192, 221, 225, 226, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 270, 277, 298, 483, 486, 487, 488 Reid, Anthony 337 re-mapping 145

136, 185, 232, 233, 490; & Redza Piyadasa 12 Said, Edward W. 14, 140 Saidon, Hasnul Jamal 270 Salubong (Encounter) (Sanggawa) 416

Remapping the Colonized Subject (Bose)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

329

reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari) li, 145 rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari) li, 91, 92, 288

Riverside Scene (Chia Yu-Chian) xxxvii Rizal, José 52, 157 Roadkill (Gill) 287, 288; 286 Robbins, Bruce xlvi, 94, 250, 254 Robertson, Iain 124, 126, 128 Robertson, Roland 243 Roe, Jae-Ryung 192 Rogoff, Irit 54, 79, 270, 275, 321, 323, 324

RogueArt 29, 87, 127 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 347 Ruang Mes 56 129 Ruangrupa 129, 131; P I C N I C K I T 133 Rubber Trees (Wong Hoy Cheong) 144 Rubin, William 179 Ruiz, José Tence 233 Ruiz, Ronaldo 410 Rumah Air Panas 129; 132 Rumah YKP 129 Sa Sa Art Gallery 504 Sa Sa Bassac 88, 504 Saatchi gallery (London) 123 Sabado, John Frank 63 Sabah 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 406 Sabah State Archive 74 Sabapathy, T.K. xxxvii, xxxviii, 4, 8, 11, 13, 19, 20, 49, 82, 84, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 107, 110, 112,

181

Sanggawa group xliii, 192, 410, 414, 415, 416; Palo-sebo 415; Salubong (Encounter) 416; The Second Coming 415; Vox Populi Vox Dei 415

Sanggul Jawa seperti Linnga dan Yoni (Adipurnomo) 462 Sanpitak, Pinaree 185, 233 São Paolo Biennale 32, 171, 173, 174 Saprid, Solomon 32 S A R A -swati (Jaarsma) 418; 421 S A R S virus 476, 477, 478 Sarung (Yee I-Lann) 70; 92 Sassen, Saskia 243 Saya Goreng Kamu I/I Fry For You I (Jaarsma) 418 Saya Goreng Kamu II/I Fry For You II (Jaarsma) 418 Scapular Gallery Nomad (Sibayan) 204, 278, 279, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286; 206, 280–81 School of Paris 97, 98, 99, 105 Schoppert, Peter 387, 389 Schuman, Howard, & Jacqueline Scott 330, 339 sculpture xxxvii, 20, 52, 104, 179, 234, 256, 261, 285, 321, 344, 349, 352, 358, 368, 374, 375, 380, 383, 384, 385, 404, 406, 409, 417, 454, 462, 464, 496 S E A R C H (Southeast Asian Art Resource Channel) 29, 87 Second Coming, The (Sanggawa) 415 Seear, Lynne 247, 368, 375

586

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Seigworth, Gregory J., & Melissa Gregg

Singapore History Museum 110 Singapore Modern Art Society 489 SingaporeArt.org 29 Singaporean art history —See especially: Lucy Davis; Kwok Kian Chow; Ray Langenbach; Lee Weng Choy; Susie Lingham; Redza Piyadasa; T.K. Sabapathy Sirait, Marintan 204 ‘Site + Sight’ 390, 476 Sitharan, Roopesh, The Great NonMalaysian Portrait 496 Skeggs, Beverley 402 skin 209, 211, 213, 283, 353, 374, 402, 417, 418, 420, 428, 432, 476 Small Town at the Turn of the Century, A, series (Gill) 297, 301, 305, 306, 468; 299–301 Smith, Terry xxxix, xlviii, 35, 39, 42, 45, 180, 486; Okwui Enwezor & Nancy Condee 35 social body 415, 416 social realism 27 socialist realism 18 Soeung, Vannara 233 Soja, Edward W. 389 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) 175 Some dreamt of Malaya, some dreamt of Great Britain (Wong Hoy Cheong) 332; 332 Song dynasty 15 Song of the Keris (Yee I-Lann) 70; 75 Soon, Simon 107 Soriano, Lazaro, Jak en Poy (local child’s play: sticks and stones) 414 Sorry for the Inconvenience (‘Under Construction’ project) 224 Sotheby’s auction house 124, 125 Southeast Asia (regional frame) xlii, xliii, xliv, xlviii, li–lii, lv, 4, 6, 7, 17,

55

Self-seeds (Gill) 287–89, 291; 289 sentAp! (journal, Malaysia) 29 Seoul 130, 222, 225 Severino, Rodolfo C. 231, 232 Shameless Gold (Jaarsma) 418 Shanghai xlv, 96, 97, 127, 171, 180 Shanghai Biennale 120 Shanmughalingam, Nirmala 185 Sharjar 171 Shaw, Wendy 218 She was married at 14 and had 14 children (Wong Hoy Cheong) 333 Shell (Yee I-Lann) 70 Shelter Me (Jaarsma) 425 Sibayan, Judy Freya xliii, 204, 278–86, 410; Scapular Gallery Nomad 204, 278, 279, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286; 206, 280–81 Sidharta, Amir 264, 265 Sievert, Federico 414 Singapore xliii, xliv, xlv, l, 6, 13, 18, 19, 21, 29, 33, 41, 47, 49, 50, 82, 84, 86, 93, 97, 100, 101, 106, 110–13, 116, 119, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 138, 143, 162, 171, 173, 174, 175, 181, 185, 189, 194, 198, 207, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216, 218, 231, 270–77, 293, 295, 296, 383–98, 403, 410, 426, 432, 436–58, 475, 486, 489, 490, 491, 494, 495, 496, 497, 499, 504 “Singapore 21” website 112 Singapore Art Fair 125, 489 Singapore Art Museum xxxvii, 12, 21, 33, 49, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 122, 176, 231, 436, 448, 453, 454, 456, 486, 487 Singapore Biennale 110, 111, 176, 180, 398, 487

½¾

587

Index

81–105, 155, 158, 230–34, 236

—See also: A S E A N Southeast Asia, as Western invention 90; implications of concept 91, 94, 230

Southeast Asia, contemporary art of 3– 5, 31, 33–34, 53, 58, 81–89, 92–96, 99, 101–105, 108, 117–19, 157–60, 170, 174–76, 181, 184–86, 192–94, 203–207, 230–34, 236, 483–506 Southeast Asian art history and theory —See especially: Patrick Flores; Joan Kee; Lee Weng Choy; Susie Lingham; Ahmad Mashadi; Redza Piyadasa; T.K. Sabapathy; Jim Supangkat; Eugene Tan; Nora A. Taylor Southeast Asian Art Resource Channel 87

‘S P A C E [ S ] Dialogue and Exhibition’ (Rumah Air Panas) 132 SpaceKraft 129 ‘Spaces and Shadows’ 176 Spanjaard, Helena 26 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 138 Splash 1 (Lee Wen) cover; 501; 502 Splash 2 (Lee Wen) 501; 502 Splash! (Lee Wen) 501; 502 Sree, Kumar, & Sharon Siddique xli Sriwanichpoom, Manit 233 Stanhope, Zara, & Michelle Antoinette 40

Step on Heirloom (Adipurnomo) 466; 467

Still Performance (Zai Kuning) 456, 457 Still Waters (Between Estrangement & Reconciliation) (Victor) 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439; 434–35, 437– 38

Stolen Generations (Australian Aboriginal) 431 Storer, Russell 204

Strange Fruit (Lee Wen) 220 Sturken, Marita 311, 315 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 4, 90 Substation, The 129, 207, 214, 216, 386, 387, 388, 390, 391, 457 Sudjojono, S. 18, 495, 496; Di depan kelambu terbuka 495; Maka Lahirlah Angkatan ’66-an (So Was Born The ’66 Generation) 496 Suh, Jin-suk, Yun Chea-gap, Moon Heechae, Hee Juhl & Lee Hee-Young 130

Suharto 20, 205, 253, 261, 343, 350, 356, 358, 410, 411, 460, 464 Sukarno 253 Sulaiman Esa 19, 109; Menanti Godot I – Waiting for Godot 10 Sulaiman, Susyilawati xliii, 174, 476– 81; a wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room 476–78; 477, 479–80 Sullivan, Michael 98 Sulu Stories (Yee I-Lann) 57, 67–77, 92, 243

Sulu Stories: The Archipelago (Yee ILann) 69 Sulu Stories: Barangay (Yee I-Lann) 70; 68

Sulu Stories: Borderline (Yee I-Lann) 77

Sulu Stories: Brothers in Arms (Yee ILann) 70; 73 Sulu Stories: The Ch’i-lin of Calauit (Yee I-Lann) 70; 72 Sulu Stories: High Noon (Yee I-Lann) 70; 75 Sulu Stories: The Landmark (Yee ILann) 70; 72 Sulu Stories: Map (Yee I-Lann) 70; 71 Sulu Stories: Sarung (Yee I-Lann) 70; 92

Sulu Stories: Shell (Yee I-Lann) 70

588

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Sulu Stories: Song of the Keris (Yee ILann) 70; 75 Sumartono 22, 27, 253, 458, 464 Sung Wan–kyung 130; Charles Esche & Hou Hanru 131, 134 Supangkat, Jim xlviii, 9, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 21, 23–24, 25, 84, 185, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 267, 269, 423 Superman Still Learning How to Wear Underwear (Dono) 261; 260 Suprianto, Enin 463, 466 Surrounded by Water (Manila) 129 Suryodarmo, Melati 410, 459, 460; Exergie-Butter Dance 459; 459 Sutherland, Heather xl, 4 Suwage, Agus 124, 495; Maka Lahirlah Angkatan ’90-an (So Was Born The ’90s Generation) 496 Svay Ken 233, 504 Swinson, James 200 Switzerland 249 Sydney Biennale 32 Syjuco, Jean Marie 185 syncretism 241

Tani, Arata 114 Tanpa Tajuk (journal, Malaysia) 29 Tantisuk, Sawasdi 32 Tapestry of Justice (Wong Hoy Cheong)

Taipei 156, 171, 180, 181, 190 Taipei Biennial 156, 180 Taiwan 32, 156, 171, 180, 181, 190 Takeuchi Yoshimi 228 Talking of Nothing (Dono) 261; 258 Tama Asian Art Museum 231 Tan Boon Hui 21 Tan, Eugene 127 Tan, Iris 439 Tan, Joseph 32 Tang Da Wu 20, 410, 439, 440, 489; Don’t Give Money to the Arts 489; Tiger’s Whip 439; 28 Tang, Henry 439 Tang, Jeannine 398

205

Taring Padi 129, 410, 411, 415, 495; Land and Farmers are Free when United 412 Tarling, Nicholas 90, 243 Tatehata, Akira 48, 49 Taylor, Nora A. 168; & Boreth Ly 26, 29, 408

‘Telah Terbit (Out Now)’ xxxvii, 19, 110, 112 territorialization xliv, li, 6, 69, 83, 93, 145, 148, 227, 270, 274, 275, 276, 403

Text Tiles (Wong Hoy Cheong) 137, 139–45; 142 Thai Art Archives 87 Thailand xliii, xliv, 5, 11, 13, 16, 20, 21, 32, 37, 40, 84, 86, 90, 106, 116, 119, 170, 174, 181, 185, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198, 204, 214, 216, 222, 226, 229, 230, 231, 426, 445, 504 ‘Thermocline of Art’ 175 They Give Evidence (Christanto) 352, 355, 359, 366 Third World Extra-Virgin Dreams (Victor) 449, 452; 450 This man doesn’t know what to do with his passion (Adipurnomo) 462 Thomas, Nicholas 9 Thongchai, Winichakul xliv, 90 Three-Legged Toad, The (Leow) 454 Tiananmen massacre 139 Tiger’s Whip (Tang Da Wu) 439; 28 Timor-Leste —See: East Timor Tiongson, Nicanor G., & Jovenal Velasco 109

½¾

589

Index

Tiravanija, Rirkrit 20, 33, 170, 175, 204, 241

Tokyo xlv, 11, 49, 117, 138, 226, 227, 380

Tokyo City Opera Gallery 222 Torres, Emmanuel 12, 32, 52, 84, 109, 183, 184, 374 Touch, Hab 231 ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’ (Piyadasa / Sulaiman Esa) 19, 496 tradition (and modernity / the contemporary) 8–11, 19, 190–200 ‘TransCulture’ 165, 292, 294, 295 ‘Transfigurations: Indonesian Mythologies’ 124 Transit (journal, Philippines) 29 translocalism 159, 214, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 236, 239, 240, 241, 244, 256, 269, 274, 276, 291, 307, 323 transnationalism xli, xlvi, xlvii, lv, 69, 91, 114, 149, 160, 165, 166, 193, 255, 323, 417 trans-regionalism 92 travelling exhibitions 47, 181, 190, 198, 222–34, 351, 445 Triennale-India 32 triennials: Aichi Triennale 181; A P T (Asia–Pacific Triennial) xxxii, 31, 33, 61, 63, 66, 85, 86, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 159, 165, 172, 180, 181, 182–90, 194, 197, 198, 209, 210, 246, 247, 318, 320, 321, 325, 343, 345, 347, 356, 357, 359, 423, 426, 428, 431; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 86, 180, 246; Guangzhou Triennial 156, 180; Triennale-India 32

—See also: biennials trip to Bali (Nanyang School) 101, 207, 490, 491, 494, 495 Trojan Cow (Dono) 263, 264

Trojan Horse series (Dono) 264 Trophy (Animals have no religion), The (Jaarsma) 425 Tropical Life (Cheong Soo Pieng) 488, 494; 103 tsunamii.net xliii, 269–78; alpha 3.3 274, 275, 276; alpha 3.4 273; alpha 3.8: translocation 271, 272, 274; 272

Turnbull, Robert 504 Turner, Bryan 402 Turner, Caroline 12, 25, 114, 116, 118, 183, 187, 344, 426; & Glen Barclay 357

Ukiyo-e 11 ‘Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art’ 86, 160, 222–30, 234 Under Estimate (Apotik Komik) 413 University Bangsar Utama 131, 136 Untitled (Lee Wen) 220 Untitled (Legaspi) 381 Untitled (9) (Legaspi) 382 Untitled (12) (Legaspi) 377 Untitled (13) (Legaspi) 378 Untitled (Work after Chabet #1) (Bunoan) 497 U S A and Asia 47, 52, 117, 173, 175, 181, 199; and Southeast Asia 174–76, 181, 190–98 —See also: ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions’; New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center; Whitney Biennale Ushiroshǀji Masahiro 49, 115 ‘Utopia Station’ (Bonami) 175 Valentine Willie Fine Art 123, 126, 127, 144

Van Schendel, Willem 488

590

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Vancouver 181, 190 Vann, Nath 504 Vegetation series (Gill) 189, 190; 188 Vehicle (journal, Singapore) 29 Venice Biennale 32, 156, 164, 165, 173, 174, 180, 187, 263, 264, 292, 297, 398, 453 Ventura, Ronald, Grayground 124 Vesta, Dea, Lola (Arellano) 196 Victor, Suzann xliii, 185, 189, 436–39, 442–53, 456, 460, 472; & Susie Lingham 442 —WORKS: Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame

Völkerkunde Museum 249 Vongpoothorn, Savandhary 189 Vox Populi Vox Dei (Sanggawa) 415

453

His Mother is a Theatre 442, 443, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449; 444 Still Waters (Between Estrangement & Reconciliation) 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439; 434–35, 437–38 Third World Extra-Virgin Dreams 449, 452; 450 video art 205, 207, 454 Vienna 181, 198, 199, 201 Vietnam xliii, xliv, 32, 85, 106, 119, 139, 170, 174, 175, 185, 198, 203, 231, 445, 504 Vignol, Mireille 357 Vijinthanasarn, Panya 233 Vilasineekul, Jakapan 192, 233 Villanueva, Roberto xliii, 472–75 —WORKS: Archetypes 473, 474 Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth 473

Atang Ti Kararua 473 Ego’s Grave 473; 474 Virilio, Paul 245, 277 Visayas 445 ‘Vision 2020’ 141, 338 visual culture 177, 323, 324, 406

Wah Nu 504 Wahyudi, Popok Tri 233 Walker Art Center 271 wall with 8 hours air filled from a living room, A (Sulaiman) 476–78; 477, 479–80 Wallace, Keith 64 Walsh, Julie 187, 426 Wang Hui 15 Wang Ruobing 490 Warrior, The Healer, The Feeder, The (Jaarsma) 421 Washed Up (Gill) 292, 294, 295; 292– 93

Watch Indonesia (Indratma) 265 Watching the Marginal People (Dono) 261, 266 wayang kulit (shadow puppet play) 20, 53, 247, 250, 261, 263 Webb, Cynthia 162, 247, 345 Webb, Jen 162, 187, 426 Wee CJ Wan-ling 111, 112, 138 Weibel, Peter, & Hans Belting 42, 158 Welling, Wouter 256 Western-centrism xli, 14, 15, 34, 167, 177, 183, 485, 487, 499, 504, 505 westernization 255, 332, 334 Whitney Biennale 180, 193 ... who gave birth to the Great White One? (Yap Sau Bin) 496 Who Wants to Become Javanese? (Adipurnomo) 466 Who Wants to Take Me Around? (Adipurnomo) 265 Wijayanti, Rismilliana 127 Wijono, Iwan 410, 458; Green Man, The (Manusia Hijau) 458; Yellow

½¾

591

Index

Man With the Red and Green Boots (Manusia Kuning Dengan Bot Merah Dan Bot Hijau) 458 Will You Talk to Me? (Ngui) 203 Willie, Valentine 123, 127, 336 Wilson, Rob xli; & Christopher Leigh Connery xl Wings (Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan) 319 Witjaksono, Bambang Toko 233 Wiyanto, Hendro 27, 344, 361, 365, 366; & Farah Wardani 246 Wonderlust (Gill) 290 Wong Hoy Cheong xliii, 22, 109, 136, 137–56, 175, 185, 194, 204, 205, 207, 309, 311–12, 330–41, 344, 406, 408 —WORKS: Aspirations of the Working Class 332; 336 Buckingham Street and its Vicinity 145; 147 The Colonies Bite Back 137 Darling Street and its Vicinity 145 Downing Street and its Vicinity 149 Fastigium 156 History of Rubber and Labour 331 In Between Betelnut Palm and the Sphinx 149 In Between Malayan Railway Building and Eleanor Cross 149; 151

In Between Masjid Kapitan Keling and Narcissus 149; 150 In Search of Faraway Places 311, 312, 332; 309–10 Indigenous Skins 137, 144, 152 Lalang 144, 152 Maid in Malaysia 156 Marriage of a Rubber Tapper to a Girl Dressed as Virgin Mary in a School Play 332; 335

Migrants series 141, 144, 152, 330, 331, 332, 337, 338, 340, 341, 406 New Migrants 331 Non-Indigenous Skins 137, 152; 152– 53

The Nouveau Riche, the Elephant, the Foreign Maid, or the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 152, 406; 407 Of Migrants and Rubber Trees 330, 331

Poison 154–55 RE: Looking 137, 156 Rubber Trees 144 She was married at 14 and had 14 children 333 Some dreamt of Malaya, some dreamt of Great Britain 332; 332 Tapestries of Justice 205 Text Tiles 137, 139–45; 142 Wong, Beverly 144 Woon Tien Wei 270, 271, 274, 276, 490, 495 world art 46 —See also: contemporary art; global art; Terry Smith worlding xl, xli, 40, 41 (Aihwa Ong); xxxix, 38, 39, 41, 42 (Terry Smith); 40, 41 (Patrick Flores); xl, xli (Rob Wilson) world-making (Nelson Goodman) 41 Wright, Astri 12, 246, 249, 250, 255, 347, 349, 352, 356, 358, 360, 361, 364, 461, 462, 463, 468 Xu Bing 160, 185 Yamamoto Atsuo 223 Yang Fudong 170 Yao, Souchou 297

592

R E W O R L D I N G A R T H I S T O R Y ½™¾

Yap Sau Bin, ... who gave birth to the Great White One? 496 Yasin, Juliana 410 Ye Shufang 475, 476; Orientations: A Layer of Breath 476 Yee I-Lann xliii, 57, 67–77, 92, 243 —WORKS: Sulu Stories 57, 67–77, 92, 243 Sulu Stories: The Archipelago 69 Sulu Stories: Barangay 70; 68 Sulu Stories: Borderline 77 Sulu Stories: Brothers in Arms 70;

Yogyakarta 26, 87, 127, 129, 131, 180, 246, 250, 252, 253, 256, 261, 265, 266, 351, 352, 358, 365, 418, 420, 423, 426, 427, 458, 467 Yogyakarta Art Biennial 96, 252 Yok, Daniel 347 Yokohama 171, 180 Yong, Beverly xxxix, 29, 74, 76, 127, 144, 494 Young, James E. 312, 344 Young, Robert 330 Yusuf, Muhamad ‘Ucup’ 495; Penyelewengan Sejarah (The Deviation of History) 496

73

Sulu Stories: The Ch’i-lin of Calauit 70; 72 Sulu Stories: High Noon 70; 5 Sulu Stories: Landmark 70; 72 Sulu Stories: Map 70; 71 Sulu Stories: Sarung 70; 92 Sulu Stories: Shell 70 Sulu Stories: Song of the Keris 70; 75

Yellow Man (Lee Wen) 189, 208–21, 359, 403, 432, 458, 501, 504; 212, 215, 219–20 Yellow Man With the Red and Green Boots (Manusia Kuning Dengan Bot Merah Dan Bot Hijau) (Wijono) 458 Yeoh Jin Leng 18 Yit, Agnes 490, 495

Zaelani, Rizki A. 22, 25, 27, 208, 472 Zai Kuning Jailani 440, 456; Still Performance 456, 457 Zain, Ismail Mohd xxxix, 4, 5, 6, 24, 50, 87, 109, 185, 496 Zainol, Abidin Ahmad Shariff 125 Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe 37, 42, 157, 158, 176 Zeplin, Pamela xxxii, 86 Zijlmans, Kitty 291 ZKM

—See: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie ‘Zone of Urgency’ 175, 263