Introduction: rethinking primitivisms in the modern art of Southeast Asia

Abstract

This essay introduces the special issue Rethinking Primitivisms in the Modern Art of Southeast Asia. We argue that the concept of ‘primitivism’ allows us to address an uneasy hierarchy of artist to subject, self to other, that arises in certain works of modern art in Southeast Asia, and to situate such artworks within an art-historical genealogy. Our introduction takes stock of the legacy of the term and concept of ‘primitivism’ in modern art and its critical discourses globally, and explores its applicability and limitations in the context of Southeast Asia. The papers in this volume consistently recognise that there was an awareness of the tropes of Western primitivism, even an outright appropriation of them, in the modern art of the region, suggesting that the term still has useful work to do. Interrogations of primitivism from within this region, as well as critical deployments of its forms by contemporary artists, have also been part of the history of this concept in the region.

Keywords:

• primitivism
• primitive art
• Southeast Asia
• modernism
• contemporary art

In the work Proximities (2021), by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee (b. 1991), the artist engages with the visual trope of the ‘Malay boy’ (Figure 1). One of the critical prompts behind Proximities was the oeuvre of the prominent Chinese émigré artist, Cheong Soo Pieng (1917–1983). Cheong’s modernism was forged by an encounter with his ethnic ‘others’ within the Malayan and broader Southeast Asian region, and the figure of the ‘Malay boy’ appears repeatedly in his body of work (Tan 2022). Engaging and choreographing perspectives from art, popular culture and social media, Proximities works to re-center this subaltern presence from within a long arc of Singapore art history and visual culture. In the unfurling commentary, Zulkiflee describes the self-othering effects of such representations (Figure 2), reframing Cheong’s work through his own lens as a contemporary Malay Singaporean, as well as via other interlocutors. In taking this approach, Zulkiflee’s work reflects a critical stance towards local modernism which, some have claimed, has been otherwise absent from Singapore’s art history (Chua 2017, 27–31; Ibrahim 2022, 1). Indeed, the catalogue notes to Proximities suggest that it was only by ‘exorcising [the Malay boy] from the framings of art history’ that such a critique could even be made (2022, n.p.).

Figure 1. Zulkhairi Zulkiflee. Malay Boy (Posterior) (after Cheong Soo Pieng). Lightbox with fabric print, 84.1 × 118.9 cm. 2020; and Zulkhairi Zulkiflee. Proximities. Single-channel video, 10:13. 2021. Installation view at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Photograph by Rifdi Rosly, courtesy of Zulkhairi Zulkiflee.

Figure 2. Zulkhairi Zulkiflee. Proximities. Single-channel video, 10:13. 2021. Installation view at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Photograph by Rifdi Rosly, courtesy of Zulkhairi Zulkiflee.

We begin this issue with the example of Proximities as a form of provocation. The artwork attests to the continued legacies of modernist discourses into the present in Southeast Asia. It also hints at the same discomfort felt by the editors and writers of this special issue when encountering certain works from within the ‘canon’ of modern Asian art: that there is a hierarchy of the gaze between the artist and subject, self and other that conveys uneasy messages about culture and difference.¹ For the editors of this issue, the concept of ‘primitivism’ offers a potential construct for addressing this unease, and for situating it within a modernist art-historical genealogy, as well as a body of existing critical discourse. This is despite the warning given by a well-meaning colleague that primitivism has become ‘a dirty word’, as well as our own residual caution in applying terms originating in Western modernism to Asian contexts, an issue discussed at further length below. Yet, in a recent and similarly regional project, the editors of a volume dedicated to Iberian and transatlantic primitivisms found that the term still had useful work to do (Leal and Santos 2024).² They also cautioned that the concept of ‘primitivism,’ closely entwined with the history of modernity and modernism, constitutes ‘a difficult legacy’ (Leal and Santos 2024, 1).

In framing this issue around primitivism, the intention is not to suggest that the term is unproblematic, nor to revive it for usage in a contemporary context. Rather, the purpose is to acknowledge this ‘difficult legacy’ directly, addressing primitivism as a period concept that – both as a term, and as a mode of thinking about the ‘Other’ – was active historically in the modern discourse of the region. Our aim is to open a discussion on the term’s troubled history and explore its applicability in the context of Southeast Asia; not to prescribe or rehash tired viewpoints, but to thicken the discourse through an exchange with the region’s scholars and artists, so as to increase our understanding of Southeast Asia’s experience of modernity. The essays in this volume explore how primitivism – or what could be interpreted as primitivism – was mobilised by modern and contemporary artists from Southeast Asia, and the political and aesthetic implications of this mobilisation. They seek to examine the discourse of primitivism beyond stylistic definitions, considering wider hierarchical and dialectical relations occurring internally, regionally and intra-regionally.

The opening pairing of essays – by Brigitta Isabella, followed by a jointly written text by Elly Kent, Wulan Dirgantoro, and in collaboration with the artists of Udeido Collective – spolights the relationship between modern Indonesia and West Papua, as performed and contested in modern and contemporary art. Meanwhile, a concluding trio of essays by Yvonne Low, Charmaine Toh, and Phoebe Scott centre their analysis on Singapore and Malaysia, and especially the gaze of the generation of diasporic Chinese artists in the region. These two geographic clusters are triangulated by the account of primitivism in modern Japanese art by Shinohara Hanako. Shinohara’s study of Japanese artists in the Second World War-era occupied Pacific and Southeast Asia raises the spectre of Japanese imperialism and its link with primitivising cultural discourses. Across the body of essays, primitivism collides with imperialism, resistance and post-colonial nation-states in formation, complicating its function within a regional art history.

Primitivism: contested, and at large

Within the history of modern art, the term ‘primitivism’ generally refers to the use of forms, approaches or subjects that were perceived as being ‘non-modern’ or ‘other.’ This otherness could be constructed culturally – in terms of external or foreign cultures which were perceived as ‘primitive’ or ‘less developed’ – as well as via internal ‘pre-modernities,’ such as archaic or folk cultures. ‘Primitive’ otherness was also imputed to populations who were perceived to live outside of the order of mainstream society, such as children, whose impulses had yet to be curbed by social constraint, or people with mental illnesses. Within this discourse, the domain of the ‘primitive’ was also linked conceptually to the domains of nature, the feminine and the irrational/unconscious (Antliff and Leighton 2003, 220–221). Thus, the term ‘primitive’ – which we render throughout the issue in quotation marks to indicate that it denotes a cultural assessment not shared by the authors – was a judgement made about other cultures, societies or groups, while primitivism might well be a self-conscious stance on the part of the artist towards the ‘primitive’, as expressed via the characteristics of the modern work of art (Goldwater 1967; McEvilley 1992, 33).³ The intellectual genealogy of the modern concept of primitivism has a longer-term history within Western thought, and was based on a comparative and developmental idea of civilisations, with various groups categorised as ‘primitive’ based on their distance from certain Western societal norms. As such, the idea of the ‘primitive’ is also linked to the colonising projects of the West, via the justifying proposition of the ‘civilising mission’ (Antliff and Leighton 2003, 226). Unlike the related term ‘Orientalism’, which specifically refers to a ‘Western’ view of the ‘East’, primitivism is not geographically tied, and may therefore be a more malleable concept (see also World Art special issue, by Christiansen and Payet 2023).

Despite this longer history, it was within Western modernism – especially modern art – that this notional category of the ‘primitive’ came to have a new and vital resonance. By appropriating from sources considered ‘primitive’, avant-garde artists of different persuasions sought to reinvigorate the practice of art and contest its traditional assumptions, often also alongside their rejection of other conventional behaviours and social norms, or critiques of modernity and industrial capitalism. Primitivism was not stylistically confined, but traversed Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism and beyond, as Robert Goldwater demonstrated in one of the earliest formulations on the topic, first published in 1938 (1967). Primitivism can thus be considered either a more unifying impulse in modernism than any other shared concern, or, as James Clifford suggests, as a concept used so indiscriminately that it risks incoherence (1988, 195). When allied to the critical aspects of Western modernism, primitivism could ostensibly celebrate ‘primitive’ cultures, which were held up as sites of greater authenticity, energy or communitarian values, against the supposedly constrained and morally debased character of modern society (Antliff and Leighton 2003, 219–220, 230; Phillips 2015, 6–8). Yet even this celebratory aspect of primitivism implied a hierarchy in relation to the putatively ‘primitive’ source culture.

A widespread revision of primitivism was triggered by the 1984 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art, which exhibited iconic works of Western modernism alongside ‘primitive’ objects, that were presented either as sources of inspiration or evidence of ‘affinity’ (Rubin 1984). While these critiques are now well-known and the literature is extensive, a brief overview is useful here as a reference for how this critical debate has developed in Asia. The reaction to the ‘Primitivism’ exhibition galvanised and reinforced a broader postcolonial turn in art history, within which primitivism was already being re-evaluated. The exhibition was criticised for its ethnocentrism and decontextualisation of the exhibited objects within a flattening, universalist projection of formalism (Clifford 1988; McEvilley 1992); its exclusion of any reference to the dynamism or modernity of the source cultures (Clifford 1988); and for its inability to deal curatorially with how modern Western artists’ access to ‘primitive’ cultural material was enabled by colonisation, although aspects of this were outlined in the catalogue (Clifford 1988, 196–197). Within the critical scholarship relating to primitivism, there have been various different tactics: from polemical positions re-assessing the hierarchies of race and gender conveyed in the work of canonical modern artists (Chave 1994; Duncan 1982; Pollock 1993; Solomon-Godeau 1989); studies of the connections between modernism, primitivism and colonial networks and projects (Eisenman 1997; Silverman 2011–2013); and engagements with the aesthetics and circulations of the African and Oceanic objects which were appropriated within modern primitivism (Cohen 2017; Thomas 2022).⁴

The reassessment of primitivism has also had a significant effect on how modernism is curated. A recent example is the multi-faceted approach taken by the curatorial team for the exhibition Kircher and Nolde: Expressionism, Colonialism (Tates 2021). The exhibition and catalogue situated Expressionism within Germany’s colonial interests in what is now Papua New Guinea, documenting the artists’ travels within this colonial network; the movement of objects from Papua and Palau with their own richly-engaging histories; the ‘entertainment cultures’ of modern Germany from which the artists drew their models; as well as engaging with contemporary Papuan interlocutors, curator Nancy Vrouwe and artist Dicky Takndare of Udeido Collective (also involved as a collaborator in an essay in this issue). Through these layers of interpretation, primitivism is not isolated as a formal concern. It is implicated – not only in colonialism – but also in a textured, messy, modern history of contact and appropriation, whose implications still resonate today.

Broadly speaking, these have been the tendencies in dealing with primitivism within the context of the Western academy and museums, in a form of internal self-reckoning. But for a concept that has been so explicitly related to the history of Western thought, primitivism has travelled beyond Western contexts to a remarkable degree. Ruth B. Phillips argues, not merely that primitivist modernism travelled, but that the global spread of modernism was actually enabled by primitivism, to the extent that:

aesthetic primitivism served […] as the primary engine of modernism’s global dissemination. More than any other constitutive component of modernism in the visual arts, the modernist appreciation of ‘primitive art’ accounts for its global adaptability. (Phillips 2015, 6)

In the settler-colony contexts studied by Phillips, diasporic European modernists connected with aspiring Indigenous artists, supporting the development and recognition of emerging Indigenous modernisms: interactions that were essentially primed by the ‘taste culture’ of modern aesthetic primitivism. Thus, she argues, the re-evaluation of primitivism is critical to developing ‘a more inclusive understanding of modernism as a period not just in Western but also in world art’ (2015, 9).⁵ Nicholas Thomas notes a similar phenomenon, where an early generation of scholars of Oceanic and Indigenous art actually did much to contest the primitive/civilised divide, thus supporting and acknowledging the modern arts of the cultures they studied, even where their studies still employed the term ‘primitive’ (Thomas 2022, 14–16).

While these instances above concern the potentially primitivising views of artists and scholars external to the culture, Partha Mitter’s scholarship describes an internal mobilisation of primitivism within Indian modernism. He argues that, in India, primitivism offered a resistant potential: its critique of Western industrial and capitalist modernity was reframed as an anti-colonial position, and artistic self-primitivisms could become strategies of empowerment (Mitter 2007, 29–122; 2008). Leal and Santos likewise conclude that within the Iberian and transatlantic context, the implications of primitivism are not fixed (2024, 5). The case of the antropofagia movement of 1920s Brazil, for example, demonstrates a paradox where an anti-colonial yet highly Europeanised elite of cultural producers mobilised the concept of ‘the savage’ as a self-defining strategy (Cardoso 2024). In many of these instances, the critical distinction between self and other, as expressed in the primitivist work of art, turned not on cultural or ethnic divides but in class-based or regional ones: in the appropriation of folk or popular cultural forms by the elite, or of rural/village cultures by the urban. Finally, we might see an empowering form of ‘self-primitivising’ in the tongue-in-cheek, ironic counter-appropriations of primitivist imagery deployed by contemporary artists, among them Yuki Kihara, Lisa Reihana and Yee I-Lann. This kind of revisionist gaze might be likened to the ‘strategic primitivism’ – following Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ – as proposed by Kent, Dirgantoro and Udeido Collective in their essay in this issue.

Generally, however, historians of Southeast Asian art have been reluctant to use the term ‘primitivism’. Scholars in the field have long called for a ‘calibrated terminology’, expressing an understandable reluctance to import the stylistic and conceptual terminologies of Western modernism without some form of critical re-appraisal (Roces, cited by Sabapathy 1996, 25; Nelson 2021, 213). With primitivism in particular, there is a sense in which persisting with the use of the term might inevitably reinforce hegemonies of Western art history, not to mention perpetuating its underlying assumptions. Thus, in a recent exhibition at the National Gallery Singapore, which featured modern art from the Global South as well as some works by European traveller-artists, including Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), the term ‘primitivism’ was a notable absence.⁶ Instead, the curatorial team opted for ‘tropical’ – noting its Southeast Asian vernacular variant tropika, as articulated by the painter-poet Latiff Mohidin – as a more capacious category, that was able to reference not only colonial-era ‘exoticism’ but forms of resistance against it (Shabbir 2023). Meanwhile, in relation to two Southeast Asian traveller artists, Roger Nelson proposes the term ‘encounterism,’ to reflect artworks that ‘dramatise and restage the artist’s subjective experience at the ephemeral moment of encounter,’ offering a vocabulary for representations of other cultures that lack the judgemental presumptions associated with primitivism (Nelson 2021, 214).

While ‘encounterism’ creates a necessary space for addressing alternative modes of inter-cultural relations within the modernism of the Global South, the question still remains of how to account for artworks that explicitly claim their lineage within primitivist modernism, or which offer images of ‘others’ that cannot fairly be described as non-judgemental. The early research of scholars from the region noted several such instances. Toshiko Rawanchaikul (2002) observed how the Nanyang artists’ admiration of Gauguin manifested in following the footsteps of the ‘civilised’ in their imposition of the gaze towards the ‘other’, whilst Yuko Kikuchi (2007) showed in her study of Taiwanese ‘vernacularism’ that it was first linked to the transfer of European Orientalism and primitivism in Japan. In the same anthology, Chia-Yu Hu (2007) explored the nuances about the impact and implications of such a transfer, describing how Taiwanese ‘aboriginal art/artifacts’ were subsequently imagined, categorised and ‘objectified’ by the Japanese colonial government (Hu 2007). Such scenarios also appear in the essays of Low, Scott and Shinohara, all of which include a discussion of artists who deliberately positioned themselves in relation to Western primitivism. In the essays by Isabella, Kent, Dirgantoro and Udeido Collective, the image of the ‘other’ exists within an intra-national hierarchy of political oppression, while those described by Shinohara were made in conditions of intra-regional imperialism. Primitivist tropes may also be deployed, paradoxically, in the postcolonial state to mitigate the anxieties of modernisation, as intimated in this volume by Toh. For these situations, there remains a nagging sense of an awkward history to be faced.

Regional primitivisms or a primitivist regionalism?

Reflecting on these developments, and the surprisingly limited engagement with these issues in the context of Asian art, we have asked the following questions: To what extent is the critique of primitivism described above also applicable to modernisms in Asia? How is this regional expression altered but often produced at a time when artists in the region were grappling with the histories and ongoing politicisation of Indigenous and other so-called ‘peripheral’ identities? How relevant is the term ‘primitivism’ itself to modern artists from this region? Can the formal and conceptual modes that seem to resemble modernist primitivism be attributed to stylistic and intellectual transfers from Western modernism, or do they have alternative sources and thereby signal broader, more plural engagements with formalist concepts and visual modalities?

Like the scholarship that has emerged in recent years that sought to rethink the meaning and impact of primitivism in modern art elsewhere, the essays in this issue also observed numerous paradoxes, ironies, and tensions. Indeed far from the West owning the term ‘primitivism’, what this issue shows is the rich and deep history of Asian artists engaging with cultures beyond their own, often subjecting the image (often a figure) to some degree of judgement or hierarchy in the service of their aesthetic or political agenda – that goes beyond the positive–negative valence debate which has dominated the primitivism discourse as highlighted in the previous section. Many of the case studies here, for instance, foreground the agency of the colonised subject, but also expose other aspects of power inequalities, and illuminate the problems of cultural hegemony operating ‘internally’ or ‘intra-regionally.’ In considering those relations, it would be an oversight to ignore the modern painters’ implicit desire and ambition to succeed or achieve parity with the ‘West’.

Grappling with primitivism’s engagement with colonialism in the postcolonial context, many of the essays took a revisionist approach to both trace and take stock of Western modernism. In particular, the authors had to consider how particular sources had impacted the reception, construction and reconstruction of the primitivist imaginary. One oft-cited source of influence is the life and works of French modernist Paul Gauguin, whose portrayals of the Indigenous peoples of Tahiti, regardless of how well or superficially absorbed and emulated, served nonetheless as a point of reference for signalling one’s modernist pursuit. In the works of diasporic émigré Chinese painters, Liu Kang and Yeh Chi Wei, we can variously observe aspects of Gauguin’s iconographic particularity and formal specificity, as well as ‘escapist’ project. Gauguin’s influence appears formative and significant in shaping their experience and depiction of the Indigenous communities of the wider Malay archipelago. Yet, as Low and Scott have demonstrated in their contributions, both artists’ primitivist projects revealed a more complex story about personal agendas and political anxieties, one which entailed a continuation of unfinished projects that began before they left China to live in Nanyang (literally ‘South Seas’), and take on citizenship in Malaya (Singapore after 1965). Gauguin’s influence could also be evoked strategically by artists themselves and others, to elevate their profile as modern and cosmopolitan. It soon became clear putting these essays together that the problem with such an association is not unrelated to primitivism’s legacy – following especially the trenchant feminist critiques of Gauguin’s life and art in which he was cast so far from the celebrated great Master he was perceived then in fifties Malaya, but more likely as a ‘racist’ and ‘misogynist’, participating in a ‘self-serving avant-garde gambit’ (Pollock 1993; Solomon-Godeau 1989). How much of Gauguin’s demons can be extended to the Asian artists who had ostensibly admired him and his work, and whose own works were paradoxically empowered to speak up for colonised communities through the use of modernist primitivist tropes?

Although none of the papers dwell extensively on these conundrums, addressing colonial legacies in an internationalising art world (beyond Gauguin’s troubles) emerges prominently in all the discussions. They therefore underscore the paradoxes that arise from the subaltern positions occupied by the newly independent countries, such as Singapore and Indonesia. In this issue, Isabella highlights the ethical dilemmas implicit in the staging and reception of ‘primitive images’ for an international art world context that was already deeply conditioned by colonial-modernist primitivism. Only by adopting a historical and speculative method, Isabella professes, may it be possible to both expose the horrors of primitivism’s aesthetic violence whilst taking stock of the political relationship between visual representation and audial organisation of Indigenous Papuan peoples. By extension, as the essay by Kent, Dirgantoro and Udeido Collective shows, it is through the employment of disruptive creative and exhibiting practice that it is possible to combat both the visual legacy brought about by Western colonisation and the daily struggles of the Papuan peoples, who have thus far been framed negatively as ‘primitif’ by the Indonesian state. If this is a compromise in the negotiation of a national cultural identity, it is one that is necessary and even strategic, as Kent and Dirgantoro explain.

Whilst Japan might be thought of as an exception to the negative legacies of the colonial gaze, having entered the global arena as an Asian imperialist, it too has long struggled with its modern identity. After all, Japanese people, Alicia Volk reminds us, had experienced a nearly half-century-long process of ‘defining themselves against the foreign and the native’ (2010, 13). It is in light of, or against, these problematics of Japanese modernity, that the ‘primitive’ (genshi) might be understood as both the native Self and the Other to itself. It is likely for these reasons that ‘primitivism’ needs to be viewed in distinction from its association with specific modernist movements such as Fauvism and Cubism. A critical reappraisal of ethnographic museum practice in Japan also noted how primitivist approaches to seeing the cultures of Africa and Oceania were originally received via Western models, prompting a new curatorial approach that allows for ‘intersecting gazes’ and ‘subjects who gaze back’ (Yoshida 1998), as discussed further by Shinohara in this issue. As Shinohara also demonstrates, Western primitivism figured prominently in the context of Japanese nationalist and colonialist ambitions. The context of imperialism, via Japan’s occupation of the southern territories (Nanyo gunto [South Sea Mandate]), supported ethnographic expeditions, and subsequently stimulated the production and exhibition of ‘primitive art’ as exemplars of Japanese modernity.

Outside of this context, Western primitivism was short-lived and its impact on Japanese academic circles unclear. Far more compelling results seemed to have emerged out from individual impulses seeking to locate a modern Japanese identity. The turn to the ‘primitive’ by avant-garde painter Tetsugoro Yorozu, though inspired by European modernists, took off in its own direction, similar to how art critic Yanagi Soetsu had constructed a Japanese and Oriental cultural identity by inventing a new tôyô (Orient) entity paralleling the ‘entities of classical, primitive and medieval Occident’ (Kikuchi 1997, 352). Such turns towards internal primitivisms further bring to mind the controversy centring the 1979 mural commission at the Beijing Capital Airport by artist Yuan Yunsheng. Yuan’s portrayal of a minority ethnic group in China, the Dai (Thai) women of Xishuangbana, depicted the figures as nudes. The subsequent backlash by the authorities and wider public exposed the double standards of Chinese culture, which is still underpinned by a Han-majority identity (Gladney, 1994). In a similar vein, the discussion of ethnically Chinese painters and photographers travelling and depicting the Southeast Asian region’s Indigenous women, by Low and Toh respectively, reveals their need to reclaim their emasculated ‘Self’. The eroticisation and exoticisation of an ‘other’ culture’s women became the arena in which artists and photographers could exercise, if not reclaim, masculine power. Whilst the photograph carries the weight of scientific objectivity, as a heavily instrumentalised tool by colonial agencies for controlling their narrative, Toh demonstrates that it too could be exploited for the primitivist re-imagination, as in the work of Chinese Singaporean pictorial photographers. Oftentimes, it is unclear where these new protagonists are positioned within the shifts in colonial politics itself: from viewing the Indigenous peoples as ‘primitives’ in order to justify their imperialism, to protecting and preserving their ‘primitive’ ways from the destructive effects of the twentieth century. What the last trio of essays have shown is that one may still partake in the primitivising project outside of the colonialist position.

A recurring theme across all the essays concerns an awareness of, if not, outright appropriation of Western primitivist tropes on the part of the artists. The redeployment of such iconographic particularity (as in Gauguin’s and others) or exoticizing stereotypes of Indigenous women (as in colonial ethnography) occur often as regionalising strategies, in service of grand nationalist agendas. There is ample evidence to suggest that primitivism has been used to construct images of the region that in turn support a nation’s project – for instance, as seen in Japan’s ambitious occupation of Asia-Pacific, or in Singapore’s awkward emergence as a racially Chinese-dominant city–state in a predominantly Malay region, or in Indonesia’s claim to diversity and divergence as central to their sovereign identity. Primitivism has occurred in each of these contexts and is part of the apparatus of identifying and linking populations, even where it also continues to reinforce racial and gendered hierarchies. If so, is it possible then to conclude that a history of primitivist regionalism is one that compels us to first face up to the demons of the past that continue to haunt the present, so as to critically open up a dialogue for a more aware, if not ethical future?

This may seem timely in light of the active reckoning of injustice to displaced communities and the implementation of self-correcting strategies towards Indigenous peoples and cultures across the world. In Australia, this was most viscerally presented in the 2020 Biennale of Sydney’s staging of NIRIN which had not only called forth the need to act, but further saw in art’s capacity to ‘resolve, heal, dismember and imagine futures of transformation for re-setting the world’ (22nd Biennale of Sydney 2020, website). This urgency to re-set is further underscored in the many papers presented at a recent symposium on ‘Art, Power, and Inequality’,⁷ that foregrounded and debated issues pertaining to Indigenous sovereignty, ways of recuperating cultural loss, and decolonising institutionalised practices from archives, libraries to museums. Far from unrelated to some of the underpinning exercises of ‘internal’ inequality highlighted in this issue, the point to note here is to be inspired by the energy to expose the manifold ways that power operates to control how we see, think and remember.

In this small collection of essays, the aim cannot be comprehensiveness or conclusiveness. One critical absence in the volume is that of the modern interlocutors of these forms of primitivism. This is a fertile area for future research, which might encompass histories of collaboration, contestation and reception, or perhaps might be expressed through interwoven forms of art history where the modernities that still remain peripheral in the current state of curation and scholarship come into more prominent view. As emerging archival sources facilitate the unearthing of new stories, such modern interventions could become the precedents to the contemporary critical positions on primitivism taken up by scholars and artists. We see the return to colonial archives by contemporary artists as an attempt to make sense of their inherited past as once-colonised peoples. For example, the art practice of Yuki Kihara who has ‘devoted her entire artistic career to deconstructing Western myths about the bodies and sexualities of Indigenous peoples of the South Pacific’ (Fusco 2022, 54). Kihara’s strategy of reinforcing primitivist tropes in order to revise them has pried open the heterosexist logic of the colonial paradigm, and for a brief speculative moment, offered yet another reading of Gauguin’s subjects, no more or no less true than the many that had come before. It was doubtlessly a powerful reminder to ‘decolonise our predilections as viewers and partake of a richer and more equitable exchange’ (Fusco 2022, 55). Whilst the authors of this volume have all employed different perspectives and theoretical methods, the aim of the essays to rethink primitivism, rather than to disavow it entirely, has shown it to still be useful as an approach and method to engage critically with Asian art and its histories.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their thanks to the peer reviewers for their incisive comments throughout this issue. Special thanks as well to World Art editor George Lau for his care and support from the inception. The idea for this special issue grew out from a jointly convened panel at The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand annual conference in 2021.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yvonne Low

Yvonne Low is an art historian in Asian Art. She is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, teaching Art History and Curating in the Undergraduate and Postgraduate programmes. She researches on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, with an interest in Chinese diasporic cultures, women’s history, and digital methods. A member of the editorial committee of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia journal (NUS Press), she is committed to advancing scholarship in the region. She is currently an advisory committee member for The Flow of History (AWARE/Asia Art Archive), The Womanifesto Way Digital Anthology (Power Institute, DFAT, 4A) and co-developer of digital tool, Artists Trajectories Map.

Phoebe Scott

Phoebe Scott is a Senior Curator and Curator of Research Publications at National Gallery Singapore. Her curatorial projects include Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (2015–ongoing), the inaugural exhibition of the National Gallery’s Southeast Asia galleries; Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond (2016); and most recently, Familiar Others: Emiria Sunassa, Eduardo Masferré and Yeh Chi Wei, 1940s–70s (2022–2023). She is also an Adjunct Lecturer in art history at the National University of Singapore. Prior to joining the Gallery, Phoebe completed her PhD on the subject of modern Vietnamese art.

Notes

1 This ‘discomfort’ was also the subject of a previous exhibition project at National Gallery Singapore by one of the editors of this issue, Phoebe Scott, titled Familiar Others: Emiria Sunassa, Eduardo Masferré and Yeh Chi Wei, 1940s–1970s. Certain of the ideas related to primitivism in Southeast Asia surfaced by that exhibition are revised and expanded here (Scott 2022).

2 The authors thanks Terry Smith for drawing this text to their attention.

3 Primitivism can also be rendered in quotation marks, but for the reasons outlined in relation to the distinction between ‘primitive’/primitivism, and for the readability of the text, we have chosen to omit them in this issue.

4 Broadly speaking, we might even see the new attention to non-Western modernisms within academic art history in the West in the last three decades as a reaction against a previous scholarly and intellectual tradition, in which the only connection between modernism and the non-West was via primitivist appropriation. Of course, that modern art long existed outside of the Euro-American centres was always perfectly obvious to those living and working there.

5 Where the editors depart from Phillips’ otherwise compelling argument is in her argument that ‘aesthetic primitivism’, in its modernist, celebratory incarnation, can be conceptually separated from ‘negative sociological primitivism’ (2015, 8–9). This is because the two positions were interdependent: even aesthetic primitivism relied on a hierarchical and developmentalist idea of culture and society, as implied by its very mobilisation of the term ‘primitive.’ Both versions were also implicated in colonial projects and systems.

6 One of the editors of this issue, Phoebe Scott, is a curator at National Gallery Singapore but was not involved in this exhibition, Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America.

7 This was convened by Nicholas Croggon and Tony Bennett, and presented by the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and the Power Institute at the University of Sydney.