About

Art and Action: Contemporary Art and Discourse in Southeast Asia 

New modes of artistic production have come to the fore in Southeast Asia since the 1970s. Often responding to fractious social contexts, art has expanded from its officially-circumscribed institutional settings and discourses, intervening into public spaces, tackling social issues, and engaging new audiences. However, while artistic practices have evolved in more critical directions formally and conceptually, art historical debates, mostly borrowed from Euramerican academia and tinged with market deference, have yet to fully consider these developments.

Nearly five decades after the emergence of these artistic discourses, this conference develops methodologies from the region in order to provide new insights into seminal artworks, as well as more recent artistic expressions, which build upon the innovative trajectories established in the 1970s. These frameworks can be expanded from an earlier 1990s genealogy articulated by art historical writings and exhibitions in Japan, Australia, Singapore, and elsewhere.

To this end, the conference programme is structured around thematic panels that address specific issues and discourses arising from the particularities of Southeast Asian artistic practice. By connecting visual practices through empirical observation and contextual understanding (involving a grasp of regional peoples, politics, histories, and cultures), each of these panels represents a vantage-point from which to advance knowledge and the writing of recent art histories.

PANEL 1
Old Codes New Meanings:
Aspects of tradition in contemporary Southeast Asian art
The interrogation of the tradition/modern binary has remained a consistent preoccupation of the field, as underscored by Apinan Poshyananda’s 1996 exhibition Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions. This highlights that modernity and tradition are not antithetical in Southeast Asia.

Drawing from these ideas, this panel re-examines the relevance of tradition to the study of Southeast Asian contemporary art. During the period of nation-building, tradition was often integrated into art as a positive emblem of national identity. Given the relationship between artistic practices and social realities, how can we evaluate contemporary artists’ critical engagement with aspects of tradition, particularly when the latter have been exploited to represent nationalist ideologies? And how can claims of cultural genealogy to be appraised in light of developments in international exhibitionary discourses, and Southeast Asia’s would-be integration into a “global canon”?

PANEL 2
‘Stealing’ Public Space:
How Southeast Asian contemporary art engages with the city
In modernising Southeast Asia, the city has been represented either as an embodiment of progress, prosperity, and pluralism, or as a locus of moral decadence and social inequality, opposed to rural self-sufficiency and cultural ‘authenticity.’ Beyond this representational duality, the city remains a site of competing ideological interests. This is often manifested in conflicts between citizens and governments over ‘ownership’ of public space. Practitioners are engaged in these debates through various expressive genres, including the performative. In so doing, they often co-opt the city—its physical zones and intangible institutions— in order to directly engage fellow citizens in a collaborative questioning of dominant social-political discourses. This panel’s papers examine the ways in which contemporary art critically engages with the city, and all it represents, as res publica.

PANEL 3
Word-play as Clue and Cue:
The place of text in contemporary Southeast Asian art
In recent decades, text has appeared as a recurring component of regional art practice. In such works, locality is registered through the use of words or characters as decorative devices, the deployment of text within the image as a counterpoint or expansion of pictorial narrative, or the use of writing to invite audience involvement. Works that utilise text as a critical tool through word-play or local idioms may also use other languages, especially English as lingua franca, thereby adding a semantic layer. This panel’s papers explore usages and forms of textual integration in visual practices.

PANEL 4
Direct Dissemination:
Comics and popular media as social practice in Southeast Asia
In Southeast Asian cultures, images, gestures, narratives and audience participation are frequently conflated into a single expressive genre. Extending from the panel Public Space and Social Interventions, this session addresses a lacuna in regional art histories which have yet to analyse the significance of mass media forms as flexible creative expressions that include both visual and textual elements. Papers in this session could address the contemporary relevance of comics, posters and murals, as well as new and digital media forms as conduits of social artistic expression.

PANEL 5
Not Lagging, sometimes Leading:
Tracing the implications of technological parity
There is no doubt that modern art in Southeast Asia owes a debt to centuries of European representational painting. However, such a lag does not apply to photography, video and film, since these mediums were adopted in several Southeast Asian centres not long after their popularisation in Euramerica. Extending John Clark’s theory of the decentered modern, this panel’s papers explore works produced with visual technologies, including film, video, and photography. To what extent are the aesthetic visions, thematic concerns, and technical virtuosity of producers contingent on local contexts? Do we need a contextually-informed understanding of visual technologies from the region?

PANEL 6
Daring Canon:
Assessing art historical narratives of Southeast Asian contemporary art
In this “Asian Century”, historiographies of twentieth-century Asian art still contend with the problematic dominance of the Euramerican canon. However, if one subscribes to contemporary art being informed by context, is it legitimate to look explicitly at Southeast Asian practice to discern shared formal, conceptual, and processual traits across the region? If such characteristics are found, and these works retain meaning as they move beyond locus or era of production, could one speak of a Southeast Asian contemporary canon? Papers presented in this panel examine canon-making in Southeast Asia from a range of perspectives.

Art and Action: Contemporary Art and Practice in Southeast Asia is convened by:

Iola Lenzi (Co-chair)
Curator and Critic;
Adjunct Lecturer, MA Asian Art Histories Programme, LASALLE College of the Arts

Jeffrey Say (Co-chair)
Programme Leader, MA Asian Art Histories Programme, LASALLE College of the Arts

Dr Clare Veal
Lecturer, MA Asian Art Histories Programme, LASALLE College of the Arts

Sally J Clarke
Curator and Arts Writer
Founder, Asian Arts Advisory

Paul Khoo
Adjunct Lecturer, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University

The event is generously hosted by the MA Asian Art Histories Programme, McNally School of Fine Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts.