Image credit: Amanda Heng
Let's Chat
Ongoing from 1996; this version 2015, Goethe Institut, Hanoi
Participative performance
Photograph: Iola Lenzi
Contemporary Art and Discourse in Southeast Asia
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 it has been exploited to represent nationalist ideologies? And how are 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”?
Not to Ignore Artists:
Tang Chang as Recluse and Cultivator of the Audience and an (Alternative) Art Scene in Bangkok
Orianna Cacchione, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
In the 1970s, Tang Chang, already known for both his innovations in abstract painting and poetry throughout art and literary circles in Bangkok, wrote a poem addressing the relationship between art, the audience and politics. Using his self-developed style of “concrete poetry,” Chang astutely observed how journalists ignored artworks and artists at exhibitions, focusing instead on the politicians at the events. Throughout his career Chang consciously dwelled on the periphery of the Thai art scene, cultivating an idiosyncratic and often contradictory relationship to the emerging gallery and national exhibition systems. He was self-trained, distinguishing himself from the mainstream of modern art in Thailand that was dominated by artists schooled at the art academies. Yet he participated in exhibitions with his academically trained contemporaries. He refused to submit his work to be considered for the national exhibition. He also refused to sell his work. He cultivated an alternative artistic community by hosting exhibitions of his work (and often his children’s) at his house. These gatherings focused on bringing together artists, poets and writers, instead of collectors and politicians. This paper analyses these contradictory forces operating throughout Tang Chang’s practice by asking: How did Tang Chang think about the audience and cultivate the right audience for his artwork and poetry in Bangkok? What did it mean for Chang to simultaneously take part in the art scene and reject it? How does reclusiveness play into this? By considering the relationship between art and audience, the paper more broadly analyses the Thai government’s use of art as a tool for the national project of modernisation.
Biography
Orianna Cacchione is Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Her curatorial practice is committed to expanding the canon of contemporary art in response to the global circulations of art and ideas. At the Smart Museum, she recently curated the exhibition, Tang Chang: The Painting that Is Painted with Poetry Is Profoundly Beautiful, and is currently developing a project with Samson Young. Previously, she was a curatorial fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she curated the exhibition, Zhang Peili: Record. Repeat. Cacchione holds a Ph.D. in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego, a MA with Distinction from Goldsmiths College, and a BA from the University of Michigan. Her scholarly research explores the transnational, cross-geographic flows of art and art history that characterise the global art world, and has been published in The Journal of Art Historiography, Yishu, and the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.
A Debate between Tradition and Future:
Art in Laos from 1991.
Anna Koshcheeva, MA graduate, LASALLE College of the Arts
A revolution is a promise of a better future for the nation. That was a precondition of power for the Communist party upon the establishment of the Lao PDR in 1975. The fall of the Eastern Bloc meant that “applied socialism”, which was the third state ideology adopted in Laos within a century, became bankrupt, much like the previous ones, and the country thus progressed into a post-socialist condition. This also meant that while the party maintained socialist language in the rhetoric of rule, its mandate to envision the nation’s future in the new era became deficient.
Historically, the hegemony of state institutions in the art infrastructure of Laos resulted in a co-option of official artistic discourses by a rhetoric of power. Since post-socialism, these discourses have become overwhelmingly neo-traditional, with the gaze into the past and the glorification of a traditional Lao culture. Visual production in the country has become characterised by the dominance of dreamy landscapes, elephants and female bodies of the Lao majority and ethnic minorities, both clad in traditional costumes. Such imagery presents the nation as gendered, passive and reliant on tradition. These images also assert the party’s patriarchal role as a protector of the nation’s heritage in an exercise of re-legitimising its authority.
From the late 2000s, contemporary art practices emerged in Laos and formed an alternative artistic discourse. These practices share the criticality and the materiality emblematic to contemporary art in Southeast Asia and deal with urgent socio-political issues. Claiming the agency to imagine the nation in the present, these practices became a site of critical citizenry and contestation to neo-traditional art. Based on interviews with Lao artists this paper outlines the debate between official art discourse and recent contemporary practices in Laos regarding artistic rights and ways to imagine Lao’s future.
Biography
Anna received her MA in Asian Art Histories from LASALLE in 2018 with the thesis “Art of Post-Socialist Laos: Contesting the Motherland, her Past and Future.” She advances research and critical thinking on visual arts of one of the least studied counties in Southeast Asia – the Lao PDR. She is interested in the ways that global ideologies intersect with vernacular agency and Buddhist subjectivities in spaces of national imagination and visual arts. Her approaches are informed by cultural histories, theories of decolonisation, political modernities and iconographic analysis. Anna also holds an MA in World Economics (UdSU, Russia) which helps her situate Lao cultural processes in an international context, while advancing Lao-centric perspectives. Anna has presented at numerous conferences including “Possession and Persuasion”, Cornell Southeast Asia Program’s “20th Annual Graduate Student Conference” in 2018.
Not Nostalgia:
How Tradition is Coopted for Critical Function in Southeast Asian Contemporary Art– Comparative Assessment, 1990–2017
Iola Lenzi, Art Historian and Curator, adjunct lecturer, LASALLE College of the Arts
From the 1970s, visual art languages in Southeast Asia changed as practices responded to evolving socio-political environments. Methodologies and degrees of directness for interrogating the status-quo varied, but a recurring feature of innovating Southeast Asian practice has been its creation of dynamic relationships with audiences, drawn into exchange on critical topics. To this end, artists have developed expressions that expanded conceptually, materially and thematically from officially-approved art discourses. Among devices artists deployed for facilitating audience rapport with works grappling with tension, was local tradition.
In this paper I examine artworks from six regional countries spanning 1975 to 2015. Using these as case-studies, I ask why, and by what means, artists, even as they engage contemporary situations, have forged alliances with tradition for critical purpose. I distinguish studied art’s critical goals in borrowing selected aspects of tradition, from neo-traditional art, or art imaging tradition to endorse national ideologies. Unpacking artistic strategies, I show how artists incorporated selected elements of tradition into works to entice viewers through familiarity, but once recontextualised or subverted, these elements assumed new meaning. I argue that these cues from tradition, rather than fostering nostalgia, opened sometimes complex contemporary topics to viewers. The utilisation of tradition as a coded lingua-franca legible to non-elite audiences, I argue, furthered critical interaction with ideas underpinning works’ aesthetics.
This study of Southeast Asian examples over decades in centres with different political, cultural, and economic systems reveals parallels across the region in the handling of tradition for artistic communication. This suggests tradition-as-coded-critical-tool is a characterising trait of contemporary Southeast Asian art.
Biography
Iola Lenzi is a Singapore-based curator, historian and critic of Southeast Asian art. Also holding a law degree, through her exhibitions and writings, Lenzi charts transnational Southeast Asian art historical discourses predicated on regional practices’ critical dialogue with history, society, faith and power. She has conceptualised numerous institutional exhibitions of Southeast Asian art, including curatorial/symposia/publishing projects, Concept Context Contestation art and the collective in Southeast Asia, BACC Bangkok, (travelling 2015–2019); The Roving Eye-contemporary art from Southeast Asia, ARTER/Koc Foundation, Istanbul; Negotiating Home History and Nation: two decades of contemporary art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011, Singapore Art Museum; La Vidéo Engagée d’Asie du Sud Est, Grand-Palais, Paris; and Masterpieces: Southeast Asian digital art, Samsung Projects. She has served as lecturer in the Asian Art Histories MA Programme of Lasalle-Goldsmiths, Singapore, since 2011. She is the author/editor of four research anthologies of Southeast Asian contemporary practice, and is the author of Museums of Southeast Asia.
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.
Visions of New Urban Space:
Hanoi as an Art Subject
Natalia Kraevskaia, Vietnam National University (International School), Hanoi
The relationship between art and the urban has a long pedigree. This paper analyses ideas about Asian cities through the investigation and conceptualisation of Hanoi in Vietnamese art. How Hanoi has been portrayed in art has been influenced first, by state management of artistic production, and then, in the doi moi era, by the ways in which artists have responded to the experience of the contemporary capital. Some artists express through nostalgia a rejection of the city of today, or look forward to a utopian future that will resolve urban ills. Others engage directly with the city and demand attention to its messes, its challenges, its hostility produced by the pressure of life in a densely-packed and intensely competitive urban environment, and its increasing neglect of traditional social and cultural practices. Though the majority of recent art projects focus on archiving rapidly disappearing values of the past, some raise concerns on the social-political dimensions of new urban space. The artworks discussed and the themes highlighted in this paper reflect the disparate, contradictory, multi-dimensional and complex ways in which artists have struggled to convey their ideas about Hanoi as a site, as an experience and as an ideal.
In the paper, I will discuss works by Dao Anh Khanh, Nguyen Van Cuong, Nguyen The Son, Tran Hau Yen The, P_art group (including Do Tuan Anh, Ha Manh Thang and Vuong Van Thao) as well as the new group multimedia virtual project curated by Manzi art space.
Biography
Natalia Kraevskaia is an associate professor of Vietnam National University, Hanoi. She is also an art writer specializing in Vietnamese contemporary art and independent curator. She holds a PhD in philology and has more than 130 publications on linguistics, ethnography, art theory and the art and culture of Vietnam. She is the author of the book, Nostalgia towards Exploration. Essays on Contemporary Art in Vietnam (2005). In 1990 she established the first independent space of contemporary and experimental art in Hanoi–Salon Natasha–together with the artist Vu Dan Tan. She also has organised and curated numerous exhibitions of Vietnamese art in Vietnam, Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Macao and Russia. At present she is involved in different international interdisciplinary research projects (culture–language–folklore–ethnography) supported by the Russian Fund for Humanitarian Sciences, the Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences and other international institutions.
Boundary Creeping in Anida Yoeu Ali’s The Buddhist Bug:
Intersections of the Body, Religion and the State in Singapore
Annie Jael Kwan, Independent Curator, London
In 2014, as part of the Malay Heritage Centre’s programme for Singapore’s national Art Week, US Khmer-Muslim artist Anida Yoeu Ali performed The Buddhist Bug in front of the main entrance of the Masjid Sultan. The mosque is both a historic place of religious worship and community, as well as a significant architectural monument in the heritage and tourist Kampong Glam area. The performance elicited unexpected mixed audience reactions, including angry remonstrations from a mosque worshipper and member of the Malay-Muslim community who denounced her performance as ‘haram’.
Thinking through the notion of the ‘architectural body’, this paper examines how state administration sought to constrain and reform the Masjid Sultan as the ‘architectural body’ of the Malay-Muslim community, where its radiating influence on the neighbourhood has coalesced with the rising Islamic piety in the region. The paper explores how Ali’s mutative, gender-fluid, human-organism hybrid performance triggered the underlying tensions at the nexus of complex relations and competing priorities between the religious community, state management, and economic and cultural tourism. It argues how the work, as an iteration of public performance art, cracked the narrative veneer of Singapore as an “advanced city” in the region with its global cultural sensibilities, economic success and cutting-edge architecture, which often glosses over the complex relationships between its state ambitions and diverse cultural and religious communities.
Biography
Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher based in London. She founded the curatorial initiative, Something Human, in 2012, to focus on her interests in the critical ideas surrounding movement across borders. While situating live art in multidisciplinary exhibitions and public events, she also researched the performance art scenes in Southeast Asia. In 2016, her residency in Cambodia generated a collection of digital materials, which would form a significant part of the pioneering Southeast Asian Performance Collection (SAPC). The SAPC was launched at the Live Art Development Agency in London in 2017. Most recently, she was also selected for the International Curators Forum’s “Beyond the Frame” programme, and for Outset and Arts Council England’s research trip for emerging curators, which resulted in her curated colloquium, Curating Radical Futures, at Tate Modern. She initiated and co-leads the Asia-Art-Activism research network that is currently in residence at Raven Row for 12 months.
Indonesian Environmental Art:
Intersecting Nature, Politics and Cultural Heritage
Edwin Jurriëns, Asia Institute of the Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, Visiting Fellow. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra
This presentation will analyse the actors, networks and socio-cultural and politico-economic forces shaping the production, distribution and reception of Indonesian environmental art. I will present examples of urban-rural creative collaborations, changing visual representations of and engagements with the natural environment, and reconceptualisations of the (home)land. I will focus on Indonesian artists who discuss the interrelations between culture, religion, politics and nature in their work. The artists demonstrate how social and natural environments have been affected by colonialism, the violence and ideology of the New Order government, the development of the tourism industry, recent land reclamation projects, and the canonisation of idyllic representations of the archipelago. They present local cultural heritage and religious traditions as both the victims and possible answers to the various types of environmental destruction. Some of them also represent explicit acts of resistance and defiance in their art works, or actively participate in environmental and socio-political protest movements. I will argue that the artists embody a specific type of agency and resilience in the age of the Anthropocene, by not merely reacting to environmental disaster, but by addressing the socio-political factors that put people in a position of vulnerability in the first place. In some cases, they also provide practical solutions and alternative scenarios towards more sustainable relations between humans and nature in the future.
Biography
Edwin Jurriëns is Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the Asia Institute of the Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, and Visiting Fellow with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra. Before joining The University of Melbourne, he was Lecturer in Indonesian Studies and Southeast Asian Social Inquiry at UNSW Canberra (2004-2012) and Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University (2001-2003). His monographs include Visual Media in Indonesia: Video Vanguard (Routledge, 2017), From Monologue to Dialogue: Radio and Reform in Indonesia (KITLV Press/Brill, 2009), and Cultural Travel and Migrancy: The Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java (2004). He is co-editor of Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence (ISEAS, 2017), Disaster Relief in the Asia Pacific: Agency and Resilience (Routledge, 2014) and Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters (Rodopi/Brill, 2007).
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.
Reading between the Lines:
The Arabic Script in Contemporary Indonesian Art
Luke Chua, Independent Researcher, Singapore
Written text communicates meaning through a system of symbols, which are arranged and understood according to linguistic rules. At the same time, the pictorial aspects of these symbols can be deployed as visual elements in artworks. This is especially apparent for languages such as Arabic, which has a long tradition of being calligraphically rendered in manuscripts and paintings. The resultant compositions are meant to be appreciated both linguistically and visually.
Although the Arabic language had already been in existence since pre-Islamic times, its usage in Islam as the sacrosanct language of the Quran contributed significantly to the spread and formalisation of the language, leading concurrently to the beautification of Arabic calligraphy as a form worthy to represent divine revelation. Thus, the Arabic script has frequently been associated, sometimes exclusively, with religious connotations, especially in regions where Arabic is not the lingua franca. Consequently, the usage of the script in contemporary art outside of devotional contexts may generate considerable discomfort and outrage, even if the artistic intention is not to disparage any religious group or belief system.
This paper examines the works of two Indonesian artists, A.D. Pirous and Arahmaiani, who have different artistic strategies, engage with different issues and whose artworks are substantially distinct from each other. Nonetheless, both artists have been negatively criticised as being irreverent towards Islam by a fiercely defensive public when they use the Arabic script in their artworks. Through a study of their works in relation to Indonesia’s socio-political landscape, this paper posits that such reactions are symptomatic of a sense of paranoia and anxiety towards Indonesia’s visual culture and that the interplay between the linguistic and pictorial qualities of the Arabic script is heavily mediated not only by latent religious sentiments, but also by socio-political specificities in Indonesia.
Biography
Luke Chua is an independent researcher based in Singapore. He received his Master of Arts in Asian Art Histories from LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore, and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English Literature from the National University of Singapore. His continuing research focuses on the role and significance of religion in contemporary Southeast Asian art, especially in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. He was conferred the LASALLE Award for Academic Excellence (MA category) in 2017.
Remembering Landscape:
Tang Chang’s Late Work
Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Tang Chang (1934-1990) turned towards landscape in the 1980s. In his practice of concrete poetry, Chang formed textual landscapes from repeated arrangements of Thai words, whether khon (person), prachachon (citizen), or padetkan (dictatorship). For works that portray such charged sites as the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, they have a strange tonelessness about them. Words pile and repeat without emotional resonance, revelling in an ambiguous noise, and countering expectations that commemorative poetry should imagine an affective community that shares in nationalistic fervour or mourning. Chang’s exploration of non-relational aesthetic form recurs in his paintings from the same period. These works conjure vivid vignettes, lush green vistas and lines of text rendered in energetic brushstrokes and bold oil colours. Yet imagistic intensity runs up against the material density of the inscribed surface that rebuffs entry into these scenes of memory. Chang’s late works address the difficulty of dwelling in the thicket of recent history, absent tonal clarity and proper distance. They also raise broader questions about how we deal with the opacity of artworks, their unwillingness to be viewed or read as metaphors of the past.
Biography
Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol is the 2018-2019 Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. He holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College and is completing a PhD in History of Art at the University of Michigan. Through the figures of Tang Chang and Fernando Zóbel, his dissertation proposes a new model of the avant-garde in Southeast Asia, one in which engagements with transnational religious currents were central to the production of modern art. Kenji’s work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American National Committee for the History of Art, Dedalus Foundation, Delfina Foundation, and Japan Foundation. An alumnus of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, he has worked on projects for the Tate, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Hood Museum of Art, National Gallery Singapore, Jim Thompson Art Center, and Bangkok Arts and Cultural Centre.
Panel 4
Direct Dissemination:
Comics and Popular Media
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.
Komiks in Campaigns:
Consuming the ‘Superhero’
Karl Ian Uy Cheng Chua, Director of the Japanese Studies Program and Assistant Professor of the Department of History of the Ateneo de Manila University
In studies on social practice theory, a popular theme in comic and popular culture studies is the “superhero” framework which, upon consumption, attempts to obfuscate negative feelings by creating positive association with the experiences of the superhero. [Reilly 2013] This paper will focus on materials oft ignored in comic and popular culture studies due to the nature of their creation and purpose. Political parties, in attempts to propagate their ideological and political messages, have long used comic books in their political campaigns. [Bratner, Lobinger 2014] However, unlike commercial comics, these campaign comics are often freely distributed and have no intrinsic monetary value. Nonetheless, these comics are interesting to analyse because they only have a consumptive lifespan within the campaign period, thus making the structure and message effective enough for such consumption. This study will look at campaign komiks in the Philippines and how this unique form of popular culture media reinforces the concept of weak states in the process of pursuing its purposed agenda
Biography
Karl Ian Uy Cheng Chua is currently the Director of the Japanese Studies Program and Assistant Professor of the Department of History of the Ateneo de Manila University. He attained his Masters of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore and his Doctorate in Social Sciences at Hitotsubashi University. His primary research interest involves the use of comics as a primary source for researching history.
Transformational in Form, Socialist in Content:
An Exploration of the Aesthetics and Content of Comics for Adults by Nguyen Thanh Phong
Bui Thi Thanh Mai, Lecturer and Researcher in Art History, Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts
From the 1990s onwards, comics have played an important role in Vietnam. Young Vietnamese comic-book artists have been increasingly prolific in recent years, and have been the subject of several studies. Among Vietnamese comic-book artists, Nguyen Thanh Phong is distinguished for his individual aesthetic contribution to the genre. While in Vietnam it is often assumed that comics are only produced for children, not for adults, Nguyen Thanh Phong creates comics especially appealing to adult readers, and his art is compelling in many ways not duplicated by other art or media genres. Thanh Phong’s comics not only examine Vietnamese history, but also contemporary social issues. Sat thu dau mung mu, Unidentified ship insurance, Pig when small–Cow when big, City tales blog Hanoi, Neighbours and other comics by Thanh Phong, through their inviting visuals, enlist readers to consider serious, complex and sometimes controversial social issues that might not interest them if communicated by other channels. Thus, Thanh Phong uses the comic genre and its accessible and attractive visuals as an effective tool to translate multifaceted topics. Moreover, it may be that Thanh Phong’s success with Vietnamese readers can be ascribed to his individual aesthetic style that is distinct from the Japanese Manga style that is pervasive today in Vietnamese comics.
Drawing on research about Phong’s comics conducted between 2011 and 2017, this paper examines the aesthetics and content of comics for adults by Nguyen Thanh Phong. It explores Phong’s view of comics as a single and enmeshed text-visual art entity and argues that Nguyen Thanh Phong’s work opens new possibilities for sensitising readers to critical Vietnamese contemporary issues. It also considers the possible influence of Thanh Phong’s personal and recognisable drawing style, as opposed to generic Japanese Manga style, on readers’ engagement with difficult ideas.
Biography
Bui Thi Thanh Mai is the Vice Director of the Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts and an Associate Professor of Art History (2013). She completed her BA in 1996 at Vietnam University of Fine Arts and her PhD in 2008 at the Vietnam National Institute of Cultural and Arts Studies. Her research projects include: Post Renewal Art in Relation to Vietnamese Contemporary Issues (2014); Periodization of Vietnamese Art History (2015); Art Theory and Criticism in Vietnam – The Actual Situation and Solutions of the Effect on the Artistic Life (2016); and Paintings from 1945 to 1975 from the Collection at Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts (2017). Her papers have been published in Art Research Journal, Fine Arts Journal, and Cultural and Arts Journal. Curatorial projects include In Dialogue With Đình (2013); and film scripts include “Festival in the Space of Cultural Communal House in the Northern of Delta, in Vietnam” (2013). She has been awarded grants including Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 2015; CIMAM Travel Grants, 2017; Danish Art Foundation: International Research Programme (Visual Arts) 2017 ; and CAA-Getty International Program, 2016.
Making the Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye:
Practical Applications of Comics Theory in the Formal and Narrative Experiments of The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
Sonny Liew, comic artist, painter and illustrator
Biography
Sonny Liew is a Eisner-winning comic artist, painter and illustrator whose work includes the New York Times bestsellers, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and The Shadow Hero (with Gene Luen Yang), My Faith in Frankie (Mike Carey) and Doctor Fate (with Paul Levitz), along with titles for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Image Comics, Disney Press, First Second Books, Boom Studios and IDW. He lives in Singapore, where he was the first cartoonist to be awarded the Young Artist Award and the Singapore Literature Prize.
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?
The Archive as Producer: Abednego Trianto’s Postcolonial Appropriation.
Alexander Supartono, Lecturer, Edinburgh Napier University
This paper will discuss three bodies of works by the Indonesian photographer Abednego Trianto: Sugar Lords in Java (2012), 1883 (2014) and What Am I Going to Be When I Grow Up? Raden Ayu of Course (2015). Exhibited in the Noorderlicht festival (the Netherlands), Singapore Art Museum, DECK (Singapore) and Chobi Mela festival (Bangladesh), Trianto’s works contest and reconfigure the use and truth-value of the colonial photographic archive.
The nature of the camera as an archiving machine (Enwezor, 2012) postulates the embodiment of archival ambitions and procedures (Sekula, 2003) in photographic practice and its artistic endeavours. Archival attributes and methods in photography generate diverse artistic forms, from Andy Warhol’s pop art, to Lorna Simpson’s code of racialised images; from John Heartfield’s photomontage, to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typology. Meanwhile, the (archival) discourse of colonial photographic material has taken a different route. The culture of imagi(ni)ng the colonies has gained scholarly attention since the 1980s but the debate around colonial photography has primarily taken place outside the art historical frame of reference. Anthropology, geography, history and museology have been the primary frameworks in which we encounter photographs produced within the colonial context. It is only fairly recently that photo historians, curators and photographers have begun to contest the premises of colonial photography by revisiting narratives, iconographies and cultural stereotypes classed as colonial, but also genres, such as vernacular photography that were not specifically included in previous readings of the colonial archive. In this light, this paper will first, survey works of Southeast Asian photographers that deal with the legacy of photography practices in the colonial era. Secondly, it will conduct a close reading of Abednego Trianto’s works that, in capitalising on the fluidity and versatility of digitalised archive, might propose an expanded postcolonial archive that moves from “archiving the colonial past to imagi(ni)ng a postcolonial future” (Supartono & Moschovi, 2016).
Biography
Alexander Supartono (PhD History of Photography, University of St Andrews, UK) is a curator and photo historian specialising in colonial photography. He lectures on photographic theories and histories at the Edinburgh Napier University and is an associate curator at Noorderlicht Photography in the Netherlands. Recent curatorial projects include From Singapore with Nature (2018); The Postcolonial Photostudio (2012-2017); Afterimage: Contemporary Photography in Southeast Asia (2014); and History of Boys: MES56 and Beyond (2017). Presently, he is completing a research project on the Scottish Photographic Albums in Colonial Southeast Asia, and starting a new research project on Photographic Modernism in 19th Century South and Southeast Asia.
Beyond Representation:
Action, Art, and Performance Art in Indonesia
Thomas Berghuis, Independent Researcher, The Netherlands
This paper will examine the position of action and art in Indonesia, in order to come to terms with the question of representation in relation to the question “When was performance, performance art in Indonesia?” The proposed paper will continue my research on discourses and practices of action, art and performance informing multifaceted histories of performance art in Indonesia. The paper challenges dominant discourses of performance art and contemporary art in the West that are predominantly led through representational, relational and visual art problems. The paper will instead examine the technical and aesthetic legacies of performance in relation to contemporary performance art in Indonesia.
Biography
Dr. Thomas Berghuis is a curator, consultant and art historian based in the Netherlands. An eminent scholar of modern and contemporary art in China and Indonesia, Berghuis previously served as the founding director of Museum MACAN in Jakarta Indonesia (2015–2016); The Robert H. N. Ho Curator of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, USA; and Lecturer in Asian Art History at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. Berghuis is currently a part-time lecturer in Art History with the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and a Principal Fellow (Honorary), School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Australia.
From Practice to Theory to History and Back, a Journey through Photographic time.
Gilles Massot, Lecturer, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore
In the summer 1977, prior to joining my photography school in Marseille, I did a work on paper titled Time Frame in which a visual dialogue between photography and painting explored their respective relations to and interpretations of time and space. This work laid the basis of a life-long practice, in which theoretical investigation became the basis from which pictorial photographic experiments developed through various styles and techniques.
In 2001, upon joining LASALLE as a lecturer, my teaching of photography spontaneously adopted the historical framework as a way to contextualise contemporary photographic practice. This new element of theoretical reflection was further emphasised in 2007 when I started the photography history course for the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University. By then, I had come to see photography as much more than a pictorial medium, but rather as a form of energy that had initiated what I called the Constant Self-recording Mode.
A curriculum requirement for the new ADM class was to make photography history in Asia a focus of the course. This is when I came across the work of Jules Itier, a French daguerreotypist known to have produced very early images of Asia. My research would establish that they were, in fact, the earliest existing and dated photographs of Asia. By combining practice, theory and history, Itier’s body of work made the perfect topic for a substantial development of mine.
Forty years later, the questions raised in Time Frame have found some credible answers with the exhibition The Probability of Veracity – part 2: the re-enactments (from analogue to digital), presented in September 2018 in Objectifs, Singapore. This paper will share the narrative of this journey through photographic time.
Biography
Gilles’ multidisciplinary process looks beyond disciplines to establish links between narratives, occurrences and parts of the world. Based in Singapore since 1981, his book Bintan, Phoenix of the Malay Archipelago (2003) deeply influenced his artistic work, which often deals with history and ethnology while being conceptually concerned with the theory of photography and the phenomenon of ‘recording’ it initiated, a phenomenon he now defines as ‘duplicording’. He recently completed research on Jules Itier and the first photographs of Asia completed in the 1840s, and is currently exploring the relations between the history of photography and that of quantum mechanics. A recipient of the French award Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, his work has been presented in over 50 exhibitions in France and Asia.
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 as 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.
The Russian Connection
Charles Merewether, Curator, Georgian National Museum
Robert Chabet is one of the seminal artists and figures in the history of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Over 50 years he produced an extraordinary body of work and, exerted a powerful influence over future generations of Philippine artists. In 1984 Chabet began a new and major body of work using plywood. He called this first group of four paintings ‘Russian paintings.’ Two of these four paintings were subtitled Tatlin at Sea and Tatlin in Egypt.
The opening part of my paper will explore the reasons for naming the first group of plywood-based work as such. The paper will explore at the correlations with Russian modernism, especially Tatlin, alongside other Russian artists of the pre-Revolutionary era. These artists challenged painting at the time, dominated by French Cubism in the second decade of the twentieth century.
The second part of the paper will look at the formation of Chabet’s practice beginning in the sixties with paper and collage, and his trips to Europe, North America and Asia. I will explore Chabet’s first use of plywood in his ‘environmental sculpture’ of the seventies which was followed by the development of his ‘Russian paintings.’ This body of work opened up what may be called Chabet’s ‘extended paintings’ which, with the use of plywood, continued to be developed over the following twenty years.
The third part of my paper will look at how Chabet’s ‘extended paintings’ challenged painting at the time in the Philippines and the significance of his body of work within the context of art in Southeast Asia and internationally.
Biography
Born in Edinburgh, Charles received his BA (literature) and PhD in art history at the University of Sydney. He taught European modernism at University of Sydney (1981–84), Universidad Iberoeramericana, Mexico City (1986–88) and Universidad Autonoma in Barcelona. He received a research fellowship from Yale University (1991), was Inaugural Curator for the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico, (1991–1994), Curator at the Research Institute, Getty Center, Los Angeles (1994–2003) and taught at the University of Southern California. He was Artistic Director of the Sydney Biennale (2004–2006), Deputy Director of the Cultural District, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi (2007), Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore, (2010-2013), Visiting Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2014), Baptist University, Hong Kong (2015) and Curator of Contemporary Art, National Art Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia (2016 –2017). His books include State of Play (2017), After Memory: The Art of Milenko Prvacki and Under Construction: Ai Weiwei (2008), He was editor of After the Event (2010), Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970, (2007) and The Archive (2006). He is currently working on a book on contemporary East European art and editing book on the Indonesian artist, Yunizar.
Revision–Artists who Readdress Art’s History
Vera Mey, PhD candidate, SOAS, University of London
In the field of Southeast Asian art history, recent decades have seen the responsibility for writing art history taken on largely by the art historian, and it is their vision of the historicisation of art that has contributed to an imaging of Southeast Asia. However, in recent years, artists have become more active in regional discourse alongside and apart from art historians and curators, and have taken a place at the forefront of creating contemporary art history, working closely on not only its production but also interpretation and circulation. These artists are well-aware of their role as subject and specimen of observation. Through the flexibility of artistic license, artists have drawn attention to canonical absences, challenged existing discourse, and addressed asymmetries and gaps in knowledge within the process of history making. Although their role differs to that of the art historian, artists raise questions about art history through intervention, drawing attention to our own motivations for what is included and excluded.
Looking at the crucial role of artists in creating and excavating art history, this paper explores three artistic practices complicating notions of art-historical patrimony. Firstly, is the salvaging and foraging of artist Koh Nguang How. In light of the existing canonisation of the Nanyang painters, Koh offers insight into other occurrences which have shaped the vision of Southeast Asian art. This contrasts with the work of fictional artist S. Raoul, a creation of the artist Shubigi Rao. In the vacancy of visible local premodernity in Singapore, Rao conjures into existence an artist-genius with Renaissance-style curiosity critiquing absences within the practice of canon-making. Finally, the work of choreographer Prumsodun Ok is placed within this regional trajectory. Ok’s practice continues the classical and highest national art form of Khmer ballet. His troupe adhere to tradition but their performances are reinscribed with all gender roles re-staged and performed by queer men. These case studies inspire thinking about how artists work with and against the canon. Art history in Southeast Asia is partially driven by artists attending to absences from a vantage point of gaze and perspective.
Biography
Vera Mey is a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London, in the Department of the History of Art & Archaeology, and an independent curator. She was recently part of the curatorial team for SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s – Now (2017) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo, Japan, which was the most extensive ever survey of contemporary art to focus on Southeast Asia. After leaving the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2016 as a curator on the founding team, she co-curated Anywhere but here (2017) at Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche in Paris and Singapore Art Archive Project @ SA SA BASSAC: Koh Nguang How and Shui Tit Sing in Phnom Penh. She is one of the co-founding editors of the scholarly journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.
Entry Points:
Resonating Histories of Punk & Performance in the UK and Southeast Asia
Stevphen Shukaitis, Senior Lecturer, University of Essex
During the late 1960s and early 1970s members of the performance art group EXIT, Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher, turned to finding spaces and ways to create outside of the usual constraints of the gallery system and artistic conventions. This could be seen for instance in the framing of events such as the International Carnival of Experimental Sound at the Roundhouse in 1972, which was organised under the thematic banner of “Myth, Magic Madness and Mysticism.” Here can be seen an attempt to draw from ‘eastern philosophy’ (particularly Buddhism and Taoism) as a way to escape from the limitations of Western art practices and rationalities. There are interesting overlaps here with Redza Piyadasa and Suleiman Esa’s manifesto/exhibition catalogue essay of 1974, Towards a Mystical Reality – though the difference being to find a way out of the constraints of modernist art practices and rationalities from different direction.
This presentation aims to take up the statement from Piyadasa’s 1978 painting “Entry Points” – that art does not exist in time but only has entry points. What entry points might we find in the resonances between different attempts to utilise conceptual and performative gestures as a way to escape from the constraints, aesthetically and politically, one is faced with? The guiding orientation is to disrupt the formation and continued reproduction of art historical canons that remain stuck within a national frameworks, instead finding resonances between different responses to the particular historical and social situations, and what practices were developed out of the constraints they contained. What will be teased out is approaching an approach to canons not of national frameworks, but rather of nationless or nomadic spaces, an art historical canon more fitting to that James Scott theorises as Zomia.
Biography
Stevphen Shukaitis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, Centre for Work and Organization, and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. Since 2009 he has coordinated and edited Minor Compositions (http://www.minorcompositions.info). He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009) and The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016), and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labour. During August 2017 he held a residency at Grey Projects and curated part of the Discipline the City exhibition at The Substation.
Panel 7
From the Rural to the Urban:
A Place for The Artists Village in the City
Convened by Adrian Tan, Researcher, Nanyang Technological University
This panel examines The Artists Village (TAV) and its shifting relationship to the city. In the late 1980s, TAV consciously situated themselves away from the urban centre in an attempt to rethink art-making in rapidly urbanising Singapore. The first paper posits the rural as a site for ‘alternative’ art practice and collaborative forms of art-making, examined in relation to engagement with the urban as a space for social and cultural action (Seng Yu Jin, National Gallery Singapore). When faced with a situation that was no longer rural, TAV’s relationship to the rural-urban conundrum shifted in an (after-all) city-state faced with a perpetual contestation for land use.
The second paper considers ‘how’ and ‘why’ TAV artists in the ‘Post-Ulu’ period engaged more directly with the city and its public spaces, for example, organising more critically engaged and issues-based public exhibitions (Adrian Tan, NTU ADM). In the last paper, a search for the ‘collective’ is mapped through the understanding of the interactions and friendship between members as important developments in the historical reading of TAV (Wong Tien Wei, Post-Museum). Through the discursive trajectories of each paper and considering the circumstances surrounding collective art-making–the socio-cultural contexts of a changing Singapore and the artistic strategies of The Artists Village–a place can then be found for TAV in the City.
The Artists Village:
The Rural as Fringe and Alterity
Seng Yu Jin, Senior Curator, National Gallery of Singapore
The Artists Village (TAV) was formed within a rural-scape (or kampung) at 61-b Lorong Gambas, Sembawang in 1988. TAV engendered radical shifts in generating new ways and manners of thinking and making art in the history of contemporary art in Singapore. They were art historically significant for producing work that is challenging, intellectually rigorous and dealing with current issues in the late 1980s, a period marked by a sense of urgency and impetus for artists to critically re-look and examine existing assumptions, values and concepts of art-making. This paper situates the location of TAV in a rural farm as a conscious artistic strategy to set themselves in tension and in distance away from the urban centres of Singapore. The deliberate intention to distance themselves by establishing a space for ‘alterity’ in the fringes of Singapore that was rapidly urbanising city-state in the 1980s, provided a site for ‘alternative’ artistic practices that were experimental in expanding the thinking and making of art. The concept of the ‘rural’ as a productive site and concept for collaborative forms of art making between forms of art making, nature and the performative is examined in relation to TAV’s continued engagement with the ‘urban’ as a new space for social and cultural action.
Biography
SENG Yu Jin is a Senior Curator at The National Gallery Singapore. He had previously been a Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts on the MA Asian Art Histories and BA Fine Arts programmes. Seng’s research interests cover regional art histories focusing on Southeast Asian art in relation to the history of exhibitions and artist collectives in Southeast Asia. His curated exhibitions include From Words to Pictures: Art during the Emergency (2007), Cheong Soo Pieng: Bridging Worlds (2010), and co-curated the Singapore Biennale, If the World Changed (2013), and FX Harsono: Testimonies (2010). He recently co-edited Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, Asia Institute.
The Artists Village:
Negotiating and Engaging the City
Adrian Tan, Research Scholar, Nanyang Technological University
The paper focuses on the ‘Post-Ulu’ period of The Artists Village (TAV) and the various art events, happenings and exhibitions from 1998 to 2008. The ‘Post-Ulu’ period in TAV’s history is marked by a period of negotiating and engaging the city, where the younger artists were faced with a situation where there was no longer the rural as an ‘alterity’. The artistic strategies of this younger grouping of artists leaned more towards engaging directly with the city and its public spaces. These new tendencies and approaches continued TAV’s engagement with the urban and marked a widening of the social practices of the younger artists. Together, they forged connections to international tendencies in curatorial and art practices, organised more critically engaged or issue-based public exhibitions and participated in large-scale projects or exhibitions outside of Singapore. The case studies enable the situation of TAV as negotiating and navigating its way around the city, expanding the thinking and making of art against a backdrop of Singapore’s rapid social and urban changes.
Biography
Adrian TAN is an artist-curator and a fine art graduate from Goldsmiths, University of London. He has exhibited in Singapore, the United Kingdom and South Korea. Adrian has focused his practice helming art research and curatorial projects The Artists Company and sungei.net projects. His curated exhibitions include 1 X 1 Metre Space (2016), What is Going On? (2017) and Got Your Name Or Not? (2018). Adrian was awarded the Research Scholarship in 2017 and is currently a research scholar at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media. His research area foci are public and socially engaged art practices in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
In Search of the Collective in The Artists Village
Woon Tien Wei, artist-curator, Singapore
The story of The Artists Village (TAV) often focused on the individual artists and their artworks, while the interactions between its members, friendships, art strategies, documentation work and other cultural activism-type activities are seen as ‘peripheral activities’ and found only in the form of captions, timelines, charts and documentation. The historicising of collectivity and collaborative practices is never straight-forward and easy because such practices invariably generate critique and question the modernist reification of the artist as an autonomous individual (Enwezor, 2006). This paper argues that these ‘peripheral activities’ of TAV need to be given a more thorough historical definition as it is the confluence of artists, friendships, circumstances and contexts rather than ‘pure artistic genius’ which shape the artistic identity of TAV. The ‘peripheral activities’ are central to understanding TAV as an art collective and from that, see their contribution to contemporary art in Singapore.
Biography
WOON Tien Wei is an artist/curator based in Singapore. His work focuses on cultural policies, collectivity in art, community engagement, land contestation, urban legends and social movements. In his practice, he works with independent cultural and social space, Post-Museum. In addition to Post-Museum’s events and projects, they also curate, research and collaborate with a network of social actors and cultural workers. With Post-Museum, Woon worked on Bukit Brown Index (2014–), an ongoing project which indexes the land contestation case of Bukit Brown Cemetery. He lectures part-time at LASALLE College of the Arts in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Woon received his Doctorate in Creative Art in the Arts from Curtin University of Technology, Perth.
Panel 8
Artist’s Panel
Arahmaiani (Indonesia)
Arahmaiani (b. Bandung, 1961) is one of the leading figures in the contemporary art scene in Indonesia, working in performance, painting, drawing, installation, video, poetry, dance and music. She was one of the artists in the Indonesia National Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. Her work has grappled with contemporary politics, violence, critique of capital, the female body and in recent years, her own identity, which although Muslim, still mediates between Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and animist beliefs. She often uses her public presence in order to attract attention to violence in general, and violence against women or female discrimination in Indonesia’s Islamic society, in particular. Since September 11, she has combined her critical attitude toward Islam with a fight against its general stigmatization. And since 2010 she has been working with Tibetan monks in Tibet Plateau dealing with environmental issues.
S. Chandrasekaran (Singapore)
Dr. S.Chandrasekaran is an accomplished artist, who has represented in major exhibitions, such as Havana Biennial (Cuba), 1st Asia Pacific Triennial (Brisbane), Asia-Pacific Performance Art Festival (Canada), International Performance Art Festival (Poland) and 49th Venice Biennale (organised by International Artist’s Museum). His performance titled Bioalloy and Body was nominated for APBF Signature Art Prize (Singapore). In 2015, he was invited as a keynote speaker for Cross Media Arts 2016 – 1st International Conference on Social Arts and Transdisciplinarity at University of Evora, Portugal. Currently, he is Head, McNally School of Fine Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts. He is a Founder/Artistic Director for Biological Arts Theatre (BAT).
Imelda Cajipe Endaya (Philippines)
Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s (b.1949) art focuses on women and people’s culture. Her life work has been consistently clustered along themes of cultural identity, gender, race, nation, migration, displacement, people empowerment, and globalization from the point of view of an enlightened Filipina. With womanly visual language from her specific social space, she has gained recognition in the Asia-Pacific contemporary art world. She co-founded the feminist organization KASIBULAN, the Kababaihan sa Sining at Bagong Sibol na Kamalayan in 1987 and was its first president.
Yee I-Lann (Malaysia)
Yee I-Lann (b. 1971, Kota Kinabalu) lives and works in Kota Kinabalu. Her primarily photomedia based art practice speculates on issues of culture, power and the role of historical memory in our social experience. Such layers necessitate an extensive and multi-layered visual vocabulary drawn from research, historical references, popular culture, archives and everyday objects. Yee graduated from the University of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia) with a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) in 1993 with a major in Photography and a minor in Cinematography. She has, in recent years, incorporated indigenous mediums such as batik as well as bamboo, mengkuang and pandanus weaving in her artwork. I-Lann has exhibited extensively worldwide and her artworks are in major public, corporate and private collections.
Closing Lecture
‘Tradition into Modern, Modern into Contemporary’, a Habitual Interpretation via Thai examples.
John Clark, Professor Emeritus, University of Sydney
Does ‘tradition’ correspond to an antithesis with ‘the modern’, or are these terms a historically dependent pair which proceed to develop or regress in tandem? The slipperiness of ‘tradition’ is due to its appropriation by official art discourses with supporting educational and exhibition structures, rather than ‘tradition’ claiming legitimacy from outside official discourses. ‘Tradition’ is defined by political and art historical contexts which have been highly selective in their choice of past examples, as in their acceptance of motivated exclusions. Art work which fits official and quasi-official notions of ‘tradition’ and its antitheses conceived as ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ makes it to exhibition. Since ‘contemporary’ art has frequently been the field for competing norms about the ‘real’, or about what is ‘ours’, re-excavation of occluded artists and works becomes one way of rethinking the ‘contemporary’. Such interpretation changes the datum set of works and artists by which the ‘contemporary’ is to be established.
These issues will be newly examined with examples from the life and work of Phaiboon Suwannakudt, with some consideration of Chang Sae-Tang and other Thai artists.
Biography
John Clark is Professor Emeritus in Asian Art History at the University of Sydney where he taught for twenty years until 2013. His Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai art of the 1980s and 1990s, Sydney, Power Publications, 2010, won the Best Art Book Prize of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2011. Modernities of Chinese Art, and Modernities of Japanese Art came out from Brill in 2010 & 2013. His Contemporary Asian Art at Biennials is scheduled for late 2018 from National University of Singapore Press. He has recently completed The Asian Modern, 1850s – 1990s, in two volumes which treat twenty-five Asian artists in five generations between the 1850s and 1990s and will appear from the National Gallery of Singapore in 2019.
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