Special issues: wilfully rethinking arts and their histories around the world

This special issue, entitled ‘Rethinking Primitivisms in the Modern Art of Southeast Asia’ and guest-edited by Yvonne Low and Phoebe Scott, continues World Art’s commitment to covering global developments in art making, history, and critique. The issue’s contributions, in particular, examine Southeast Asia and case studies focused on ‘primitivism.’ In doing so, they go to some length to dissect and contextualise the distinctly regional and artistic doings that comprised and/or led to the region’s own experience of ‘primitivism.’ We can sense old resonances (e.g. from Gauguin to ethnographic inspirations), at the same time that new patterns and sources for difference-making are revealed.

If World Art is about a more expansive but de-centred art history, the contributions in this issue treat ‘primitivism’ precisely not to shy away from its myriad implications and contestations. To quote an earlier World Art piece, this issue is about ‘taking the local seriously’ (Phillips 2014, 17–18; see also Batchen 2014). Clarifying the hierarchies, inequities and desires of the ‘primitivist’ gaze requires transparency, detailed description and reflection on local trajectories and understandings. Still, inflected as they are toward and by the worlds of Southeast Asia, the case studies make clear that many of the vectors for ‘primitivism’ are not that unfamiliar. Common spectres haunt(ed) its appearances and relations: networks of travel and exchange, political strife, diaspora, gender views, alterity and emulation, not to mention imperial and colonial practices and institutions.

Overall, this compendium sits alongside other World Art issues which problematise topical, if troubling and paradoxical, art-centric themes from regional or provincial perspectives, such as ‘Local Modernisms’ (Batchen 2014), ‘Challenging Orientalism: New Perspectives on Perception and Reception’ (Christiansen and Payet 2023) and ‘Contemporary Art Worlds and Art Publics in Southeast Asia’ (Antoinette and Maravillas 2020). By publishing concentrated regional coverage on such themes, the journal commits to their value in helping to make informed comparisons and critical engagements with wider discourses. What’s more, treating such content (‘special issues’) with, literally, whole special issues reveals the density of cases and experiences that cannot help but inspire fuller appreciation, and writing, of new histories of art in the world.

We are grateful to all of World Art’s past guest editors for shepherding their contributions to and for us. As is custom, the journal publishes at least one special themed issue per year (out of three); all enquiries and proposals for themed issues are welcome and considered on a yearround, rolling basis.