Regionalism as anti-colonialism: imaginaries of area in South East Asian omnibus film and database art

ABSTRACT

This article responds to debates about the complicity or outdatedness of regionalism in Area Studies by analyzing creative works by local artists that reimagine South East Asia as ‘area’: Ho Tzu Nyen’s interactive database The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) (2012–present); and two omnibus films – the Asian Film Archive’s Fragment (2015) and the former Luang Prabang Film Festival’s Mekong 2030 (2020), which feature acclaimed South East Asian filmmakers such as Lav Diaz, U-Wei Haji Saari, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit and Tan Chui Mui. Diverging from Caroline Ha Thuc’s earlier South East Asia Research article by revisiting vernacular concepts of sovereignty and collectivity such as mandala and zomia in subaltern historical and anthropological writings, it examines how these works highlight the commonality of motifs of ecology, performance, mobility and spirituality. While the digital artwork CDOSEA algorithmically rearranges constellations of images, words and sounds commonly associated with the region, the omnibus films Mekong 2030 and Fragment combine diverse, fragmentary narratives from different locations within a single anthology. Transforming ‘area’ from an object of neocolonial knowledge production to a source of autonomous collective agency, the article explores how these works visualize a provisional community defined by its plurality, fluidity and inclusiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Omnibus film
• interactive art
• South East Asian cinema
• South East Asian contemporary art
• regionalism
• decoloniality

Debates about the importance of a transnational perspective have criticized the outdatedness or complicity of regionalism in Area Studies. Proclaiming ‘The End of Area’, Walker and Sakai’s (2019) introduction to a special issue published in positions: Asia critique criticizes categories of geographic areas such as East Asia or South East Asia. According to them, such ‘areas’ are objects of dominant knowledge production, which were originally created by Area Studies programmes established with funding from the United States government to reinforce its geopolitical and military hegemony during the Cold War. Made visible from a remote distance, ethnic and cultural differences within and among these locations and their populations are ‘described’, ‘classified’ and ‘assessed’ (Walker and Sakai 2019, 3–4, 10, and 21). For Walker and Sakai (2019, 3), this operation by which an area is turned into a ‘natural’, static object of knowledge production reveals ‘an imperialist will to sovereignty’.

Denigrating regionalism, such critiques insist that ‘South East Asia’ is a concept whose unity is subject to a transcendent authority. Contrary to these accounts, the imagination of ‘South East Asia’ as an area has provided a provisional, non-essentializing frame for national governments and local populations to explore economic opportunities and geopolitical alliances. Although the supranational sovereign body the Association for South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) was founded by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand in 1967, during the period of neoliberal globalization in the 1990s it expanded to encompass Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, and this configuration typically represents how ‘South East Asia’ is defined today. Compromising the diversity of twelve different nations, the territorial borders of ASEAN now cover over 660 million people, 1,800 ethnic groups and 1,200 languages. The applications for membership by Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka at different stages in history unveil the contingency, fluidity and inclusiveness of South East Asia’s identity outside the direct influence of US hegemony. Proposals for Australia and New Zealand to join ASEAN suggest how the extension of regional borders to include ‘areas’ such as Oceania could be made flexible enough to address urgent issues of capital investment and maritime security. The indeterminacy of the term ‘South East Asia’ as a geographic marker has even allowed a wide range of financial analysts and cultural scholars to associate it with contested territories like Taiwan and Hong Kong.

While ‘South East Asia’ has been denigrated for being a colonial construct, Prasenjit Duara (2014, 273) has praised ASEAN for its loose, contingent organizational structure built on interdependent, semi-formal alliances and networks. For Duara, instead of being a liability that keeps it from enforcing discipline on violators of its statutes, its lack of an overarching political and legal authority gives individual member nations the autonomy to develop their own economic and cultural trajectories. Espousing diversity and consensus, ASEAN affords its members the flexibility to decide how to effectively address urgent threats to geopolitical security and the natural environment according to shifting conditions. Duara argues that this ethos of pluralism could offer a model for imagining a more inclusive form of regionalism.

Given the historical ambivalence of its regional identity in the face of geopolitical, economic and environmental uncertainties that demand international cooperation, the fiftieth anniversary of ASEAN in 2017 increased the aspiration among South East Asian citizens for further economic and cultural integration with increased capital and migratory flows. As the most affluent nation-state in ASEAN with significant financial and material resources, whose small size compels it to cultivate regional alliances, Singapore has public institutions such as the Singapore Art Museum and Singapore Film Commission that have initiated programmes to promote the knowledge production of South East Asia as a transnational community. Whereas the Singapore Biennial organized by the Singapore Art Museum has spotlighted South East Asian art for its 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2022 editions, the Singapore Film Commission under the Infocomm Media Development Authority offers grants to promote collaboration between Singaporean and South East Asian filmmakers. Delineating the terms of South East Asia’s identity from the privileged position of the Singapore government, these programmes have helped generate new avenues of investment for Singaporean businesses in burgeoning ASEAN markets.

Instead of illustrating its entanglement with imperialism and militarism, these contemporaneous examples highlight how the concept of ‘South East Asia’ has strong resonance as a source of identity and sovereignty for the populations of the region. Anti-colonial struggles have typically centred on the framework of the nation. Writing about anti-colonial revolutionaries in the Philippines, nationalist historians (Agoncillo 1956; Constantino 1975) describe how they fought the oppressive rule of Spain and the US because they deprived the local population of vital reforms that would guarantee them better opportunities for self-determination. Engaging in critical historiography, Postcolonial Studies scholars from the Subaltern Studies Group (Guha 1983; Guha and Spivak 1988) uncovered how colonial discourses produced and disseminated by bureaucrats and merchants in the British Raj denigrated the local population as lacking in civilization and reason to foster autonomous thought and agency. Arising from shared experiences of discrimination and oppression, such aspirations for a sovereign formation, which would create an equal space for marginalized voices and perspectives, have been shaped by the idea of belonging to a single administrative territory.

As anti-colonial struggles have shifted from political and economic sovereignty to cultural and epistemological autonomy, critical debates have emphasized the importance of uncovering new points of reference and frameworks of analysis. Refusing strict, normative understandings propagated by dominant sites of global knowledge production, such decolonial imaginaries could flexibly draw on vernacular keywords and conceptions from scholarly and creative work.

Looking at how the ‘area’ of South East Asia is imagined in works from and about the region by filmmakers and artists based in the region, I revisit conceptual frames of collectivity and sovereignty to explore how it is articulated in historical and anthropological scholarship and through genres of omnibus film and digital art. My article builds on two recent dossiers in leading scholarly journals (Chulphongsathorn and Lovatt 2021; Lovatt and Trice 2021) that examine conceptions of region in South East Asian cinema and video art. Responding to Caroline Ha Thuc’s earlier South East Asia Research article ‘What is South East Asia?’ (2021), which discusses Ho Tzu Nyen’s interactive platform The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2012–)¹, It analyze how the omnibus films Fragment (2015) and Mekong 2030 (2020) juxtapose fragmentary audiovisual narratives by different South East Asian filmmakers to unsettle the fixed, sovereign identity of ‘area’. These creative works help navigate the shift from area as an object of knowledge production to regionalism as a source of anti-colonial agency.

From rhizomatic to archipelagic

True to its name, multimedia artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s interactive digital work The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) explores how uncovering fluid commonalities among South East Asian vernacular cultures could provide a means for imagining a highly diverse subregion as a provisional community. Accessible via a website (https://cdosea.org), CDOSEA is an evolving audiovisual platform that displays variable constellations of keywords, sounds and images. Fed into an online database, these constellations are audiovisual fragments that Ho has identified as characteristic of the political, environmental and cultural conditions of South East Asia including colonialism, anarchism, fluidity, humidity, corruption and mobility. Each time a user performs the simple act of clicking one of the tabs at the bottom of the screen representing letters in the English alphabet, the platform’s algorithms play a new constellation of keywords and images that start with the letter.

Based in Singapore, Ho Tzu Nyen has an MA in South East Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore. His supervisor was influential subaltern historian Reynaldo Ileto, whose seminal work Pasyon and Revolution (1979) sought to identify Tagalog keywords from the indigenized passion play to uncover the political culture of peasant millenarians. Ho’s early video work from the 2000s, such as Utama - Every Name in History is I, explores vernacular myths about the founding of Singapore in relation to the histories of the founders of regional neighbours. Dwelling on iteration, his 2010s art installations Ten Thousand Tigers (2014), The Nameless (2015), 2 or 3 Tigers (2016), One or Several Tigers (2017) and R for Resonance (2019) were created using local source material from CDOSEA featuring vernacular understandings of tigers, spies and gongs.

CDOSEA’s database contains a range of audiovisual fragments from news reports, documentaries, b-movies, music videos, travel ads, visual ethnographies, cartoons and computer graphics, most of which have direct allusions to South East Asia. Different constellations include drone footage and computer graphics of oceans, rivers, paddies, jungles, mountains, skyscrapers and temples. CDOSEA displays recurrent images of kings, soldiers, guerillas, militias and crowds with intermittent snapshots of famous autocrats like Marcos, Suharto, Najib and LKY. Several keywords in CDOSEA are focused on animals with species native to South East Asia such as buffalos, tigers and jellyfish, as well as supernatural creatures intrinsic to its cosmology like pontianaks, vampires and weretigers. Satellite animation of flowing water and microscope photography of multiplying bacteria are juxtaposed with kaleidoscopic patterns of revolving and expanding spirals. These images are punctuated by chants of keywords, which overlap with a monotone voiceover reciting extracts from a historical or anthropological study. Across different algorithmic constellations, the same ideas are expressed through various syntaxes and intonations. Sometimes the lines are whispered, and sometimes they are sung.

Because of their similar encyclopaedic character, CDOSEA recalls Zhuang Wubin’s Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey (2016) and Roger Nelson’s Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z (2019), which aim to document the region’s diversity of visual cultures. However, overcoming the constraints of their print format, which causes the arrangement of their words and images to remain fixed, CDOSEA’s interactive, algorithmic configuration enables it to create different permutations of audiovisual fragments.

In its ‘About’ page, CDOSEA is presented as a response to the question: ‘what constitutes the unity of southeast asia — a region never unified by language, religion or political power?’ Ingawanij (2012, 1), in her introduction to her pioneering edited volume on South East Asian cinema, highlights the importance of delineating the grounds of comparability for seemingly unrelated cultural realities. The website of CDOSEA additionally explains: ‘each term is a concept, a motif, or a biography, and together they are threads weaving together a torn and tattered tapestry of southeast asia’.

In her article devoted to CDOSEA, Ha Thuc (2021, 13) observes that Ho Tzu Nyen is interested in the decolonization of knowledge. Shifting away from frameworks developed and imposed from a distance, CDOSEA focuses on vernacular concepts that are significant to local contexts in different South East Asian cultures such as tradition, mobility, ecology and performance.

Ha Thuc (2021, 1–2) discusses how CDOSEA’s endless inclusiveness and variation resonate with South East Asia’s ‘plurality, fluidity, complexity and intangibility … whose unity constantly and freely re-invents itself’. Because of this endless multiplicity over time, she emphasizes the ‘rhizomatic’ quality of CDOSEA: ‘Rhizomatic networks are not fixed but continuously unfold, transform and expand’ (2021, 10). Ha Thuc remarks how CDOSEA analogously operates as a rhizome by adding pre-existent fragments and forming unexplored connections. I would add that, like a rhizome, CDOSEA offers multiple entry points in that the platform can be accessed by clicking on any of the letters instead of having to follow the prescribed order of the alphabet from its beginning. Although typically associated with nomadism, the horizontal conception of the rhizome in scholarship overlooks the underground rootedness of its network of nodes, from which the metaphor originates. While Ha Thuc observes the ‘surprising’ conjunction of Ho Tzu Nyen’s interactive platform with Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome, I would argue that CDOSEA has greater resonances with the more salient keywords drawn from South East Asia culture that she references, such as mandala, zomia and archipelago, which might suggest more fluid and mobile formations.

Emphasizing it as a keyword in its digital platform, CDOSEA explores the importance of the mandala to sovereignty in South East Asia. Historians and anthropologists Tambiah (1977), Wolters (1999), Thongchai (1994) and Lieberman (2003) all see the mandala as a metaphor for the flexible configurations of suzerainty and tributary networks characteristic of the region. Departing from the centralized, hierarchical system of a modern state, the contours of a mandala-like territory would be loosely defined by a sovereign authority that, concentrating resources at its geographic centre, collected tributes from the vassals on its periphery. Instead of possessing fixed, strictly defined borders, the scope of power was subject to constant adjustment and reconfiguration according to intermittent flows of tribute and influence.

This conventional conception of the mandala as a social formation already suggests the intrinsic characteristic of variation. In CDOSEA’s algorithmic platform, the performance of clicking on the letter M juxtaposes Mandala with a variable combination of keywords including M for Map, M for Manpower, and M for Mobility, revealing their connections and cross-contaminations. One of the voiceovers describes how mandalas in South East Asia:

defined their power as an emanation from a centre that stretches without boundaries over the Earth, a centre occupied by an overlord who is a conduit or conductor of divine power while horizontally its power spreads across the territory without limits.

Their concentration of power in a sovereign authority at the geographic centre of a territory has caused this power to vacillate and recede on its periphery. Characterizing its contours as ‘not static’ with ‘no fixed boundaries’, the voiceover proclaims the mandala to be defined by the ‘uncertainty of geographic limit and political identity’ ‘with all kinds of irregularities’. According to this picture of mandala-like sovereignty, its centres, hinterlands, alliances and borders are constantly expanding and contracting.

Ha Thuc (2021, 9 and 11) also notes the resonance of CDOSEA’s refusal of hierarchical organization and authoritative knowledge with James C. Scott’s concept of zomia, which CDOSEA identifies as one of its keywords under the letter Z in its dictionary of South East Asia. Transnational and intraregional in approach, Scott’s seminal book The Art of Not Being Governed explores how the nomadic social forms of zomia, a highland zone stretching across Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Yunnan, are defined by their flight from centralized, hierarchical authority. Closely linked with the letter Z for Zomia to form a circular loop in signification, the letter A in CDOSEA is made to correspond with the keywords Anarchism, Altitude, Archipelago and Against, such that their meanings are intertwined. Scott (2010, 226) argues that these nomadic forms translate not only to flexible organization but also to fragmentary language, which is commonly disregarded for being primitive and undeveloped but which actually possesses a distinct stateless logic. Resonating with Scott’s ideas of nomadic migration and resistance, the fragmentary and flexible audiovisual constellations in CDOSEA imagine mobility in South East Asia to be characterized by a fluid withdrawal or departure from centralized authority and fixed hierarchy.

Such fragmentation and fluidity inform the endlessly iterable audiovisual fragments associated with the different letters of the Critical Dictionary. In an interview (Tay 2017), Ho Tzu Nyen described CDOSEA as ‘a river that one cannot step into twice’. The constellations of keywords, sounds and images that play never repeat, producing multitudinous combinations, arrangements and variations. Instead of being pre-programmed and anticipated by the artist, these constellations are contingently and algorithmically generated through CDOSEA’s digital platform. In one tab or letter, images recur in different constellations combined with various keywords and sounds. In other tabs or letters, the same images reappear in conjunction with other images. By juxtaposing seemingly disparate objects, these shifting constellations undo conventional understandings of sovereignty, ritual, climate and migration pertaining to the region to present alternate imaginaries of ‘South East Asia’.

For instance, clicking on the letter R would yield the chanted keywords ‘R for Rain, R for Region, and R for Resonance’, which unveil the affinities, connections and cross-contaminations between spirituality and ecology. Images and sounds of rituals of gongs of various shapes and sizes being struck, played and hammered are accompanied by a voiceover stating how the collection of gongs from around South East Asia reveals a ‘metallurgical difference’ that would encapsulate the distinct sound of South East Asia as an area. Words such as gong, metal and ritual are emblazoned at the centre of the screen like iconographs as the line ‘the symbol is inexhaustible in resonance’ is repeatedly chanted. The varying constellations of images show people in different locations and contexts hitting gongs from different positions and with different intensities. Linking this ‘metallurgical difference’ to meteorological information about precipitation in South East Asia through an overlapping voiceover, CDOSEA suggests how varied volumes and rhythms of rainfall can shape economic and political conditions such as agricultural output and monetary circulation. Highlighting how variations in rainfall across the region can combine to produce the same environmental conditions of humidity and decay, CDOSEA suggests that the commonality of diverse performances of gong playing can together form the distinct, collective resonance of ritual.

While using similar motifs, CDOSEA, as an interactive database, exponentially expands the range of motifs that can be combined and arranged. In the interview (Tay 2017), Ho explained that new audiovisual materials are constantly being added to CDOSEA’s database such that potential constellations of keywords, sounds and images are always new. The metaphorical resonances of images, objects and keywords are explored in the voiceovers, such as through the keywords of decay, erasure, evanescence, flooding and forgetting, which are associated with the disappearance of the past through the absence of historical and archeological objects. Writing about the database, Wolfgang Ernst (2012, 98–99) explains how it operates by being open and inclusive to the continuous addition, storage and retrieval of new materials, which allows it to perpetually renew itself. Ha Thuc (2021, 5) suggests that CDOSEA’s database does not aim to comprehensively fill gaps in knowledge but rather contingently accumulates seemingly marginal fragments, which would offer alternate perspectives and meanings. In generating algorithmic constellations, the platform draws not from a fixed archive but from an expanding database of audiovisual fragments such that the constellations of materials at one moment in time will be altogether different from those on another occasion.

By repeatedly generating variable algorithmic combinations of images, words and sounds commonly associated with South East Asia while citing flexible social formations such as the mandala and zomia, Ho’s work emphasizes the intrinsic character of an ‘area’ as being endlessly open, diverse, inclusive and archipelagic.

Area as omnibus

These ideas of social formations as being diverse, contingent and fluid could apply to other creative works that aim to reimagine ‘South East Asia’ as an area by combining analogous audiovisual fragments. Comprising short episodes or narratives contributed by several filmmakers on a single theme, omnibus films like Fragment (2015) and Mekong 2030 (2020) collect the works of artists from across the region who explore analogous perspectives on sovereignty, performance and mobility, which together evoke the collective resonance of a provisional community.

Diffrient (2014, 4) explains that the indeterminate, ensemble structure of the omnibus film allows a diversity of narrative perspectives and aesthetic styles to be accommodated within the same work. Some of the more critically and commercially successful omnibus films are distinguished by their setting in a single location such as a city or nation. If New York Stories (1989) and Tokyo! (2008) each has three segments with different filmmakers, Paris, Je T’aime (2006) comprises eighteen episodes set in Paris’s different arrondissements. These works explore the spatial environment of a single city, whose vibrancy and plurality require the genre of the omnibus film to visualize their multitudinous, diverse experiences.

Recent acclaimed omnibus films include the award-winning Hong Kong production Ten Years (2015), which features short episodes that speculate about political and social conditions in the city under greater Mainland dominion ten years into the future. The independently funded Ten Years international project was expanded across the North East and South East Asian regions with the production of Jû-nen: Ten Years Japan (2018) and Ten Years Taiwan (2018), which ruminate on similar social issues of digital consumption, nuclear power and population ageing. Like the original, Ten Years Thailand (2018) has a more overtly political tone by imagining a future Thailand under the even more pervasive control of an autocratic, pro-monarchy military junta. This collaborative work echoes how CDOSEA presents authoritarianism as a prevalent political condition among different South East Asian nations. Conveying the urgency of prevailing conditions through speculative science-fiction narratives, such omnibus films offer platforms for precarious artists to find commonality and solidarity amid their divergent perspectives in the face of censorship.

 One such omnibus film is Mekong 2030, which comprises episodes by filmmakers from Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, nations bordering the Mekong River. Spotlighting the dire impact of climate change and dam building on the culture of the transboundary area around the Mekong River as their ‘common life-source’, these narratives ruminate on the significance, to its diverse populations, of water, cosmology and mobility, all keywords present in CDOSEA. Like the digital platform of CDOSEA, the omnibus film of Mekong 2030 juxtaposes audiovisual fragments that are analogous yet distinct to generate new understandings about prevailing circumstances with an urgent ecological ethos shared by recent South East Asian cinema and video art (Chulphongsathorn and Lovatt 2021, 536). Although set on different sides of the river, these varied episodes gathered in a single work highlight the commonality of environmental, political and social conditions in the area through their collective resonance. Echoing the instalments of the Ten Years international project, the divergent science-fiction narratives of Mekong 2030, which is funded by Oxfam, together speculate about the urgency of imminent catastrophe. This incapacitating dread is encapsulated in the last episode, ‘The Unseen River’, in which two lovers travel downstream to a remote Buddhist temple in search of a cure for sleeplessness without dreaming, which they equate to an incapacity to imagine the future. The closing image of Mekong 2030 is his weeping visage, distraught and inconsolable about the inescapable bleakness of his fate.

Distinguished by glowing shots of the bank of the Mekong River, the omnibus film’s narratives explore how man-made environmental degradation has impacted the changing relationship between the river and its community. Juxtaposed with stark images of denuded forests and parched riverbanks, the characters across the different episodes lament the decreasing number of trees and fish in the river’s ecosystem as a form of dying, which leaves little food and livelihood for human inhabitants. Transpiring in the aftermath of an ecological cataclysm, the opening episode, Kulikar Sotho’s ‘Soul River’, which is about a dispute over a Buddha head, alludes to rain and flood from climate change that has caused the Mekong to overflow, displacing villagers. Mekong 2030 is book-ended by Phạm Ngọc Lân’s ‘The Unseen River’, which, consisting of two parallel narratives about young and elderly lovers, laments the destruction of the ecosystem of the area due to the construction of an upriver dam. With closeups of dead fish on the river juxtaposed with a massive dam, which engulfs human figures standing atop it, many shots visualize the catastrophe of low water levels marked by barren land overgrown with weeds. In ‘The Che Brothers’, the suggestion is that ecological disaster has resulted in a mysterious, invisible epidemic that plagues the planet without a known remedy.

Suggesting that this ecological destruction was caused by dam building and economic development, Mekong 2030 proposes a dichotomous trade-off between nature and progress. To draw commonalities among different South East Asian cultures, CDOSEA highlights the shared environmental experiences of humidity, rainfall and decay. Mekong 2030 reveals how typical weather conditions are dramatically shifting because of industrial production and the climate crisis. This dichotomy between nature and progress results in social disorder with betrayals among the characters, between siblings, acquaintances and villagers who look to monetize the natural resources available to them. Sai Naw Kham’s ‘The Forgotten Voices of the Mekong’ offers the most explicit condemnation of man-made ecological destruction from unbridled industrialization. This episode highlights the story of an idealistic village chief who strikes a deal with a gold-mining company to develop modern highways and facilities, which secures the approval of his fellow villagers who hope to improve their future livelihood. Despite being a vital source of employment for the nearby villages, the mining operations end up poisoning the river’s water and its children with its toxic waste. An elderly grandmother, who presented as the matriarch of the village, symbolizes its tradition and spirit, laments that capitalist development is causing the Mekong River’s death. One scene shows her walking along the river with the next generation contemplating its uncertain future. The closing voiceover features a grandmother and women scathing condemnation about how ‘devils’ have ‘devoured’ nature because they cannot satisfy their hunger.

Punctuated by a panorama of the Mekong River, the omnibus film highlights the mobility of characters who journey on the stream of the river or return to a village in its vicinity. Having congealed in the past through everyday encounters in the community, social bonds in the narratives have become unsettled because of the sudden arrivals and imminent departures of individuals seeking an opportunity for livelihood or a reconnection with their roots. Marked by images of a dying ecosystem, the two intertwined narratives in ‘The Unseen River’ feature two sets of couples at different stages of their lives travelling either upstream or downstream to visit a hidden temple or a forgotten home. In ‘Soul River’, the characters travel to the market via a houseboat on the river to sell a Buddha’s head, which they have uncovered in the mud, so that one character can migrate to Thailand. Set amid a deadly pandemic, Anysay Keola’s ‘The Che Brother’ features a young university graduate who returns to his remote village on a motorcycle with a plan to violently settle a dispute with his militia-leader brother about the fate of their ailing mother. Reflecting the changing fortunes of the Mekong, this motif of mobility reflects CDOSEA’s depiction of mobility as a flight from centralized authority and fixed hierarchy with narratives set on the margins of the city and its government.

Whereas CDOSEA highlights the persistence of tradition and spirituality in vernacular political culture, Mekong 2030 examines how ecological destruction has strained tradition and spirituality because of the increased scarcity of resources. Different episodes in the omnibus film explore how economic instrumentality can erode the local community. Desperate for money, the two strangers in ‘Soul River’ fight over the remnant of a Buddha statue buried in a denuded forest to profit from it in the black market instead of preserving its lost heritage. This episode signals a shift from the religious idolatry of the broken bust of Buddha to the mysterious spirituality of the natural environment of the Mekong River. Juxtaposed with majestic overhead images of green mountains, ‘The Forgotten Voices of the Mekong’ begins with disembodied prayer and singing about a dead mother who has returned to heaven, which is contrasted with the remorseless aspiration for capitalist development that would bring about degradation and death.

The motif of vernacular spirituality is developed most in ‘The Unseen River’ and ‘The Line’. In ‘The Unseen River’, two lovers who journey to a remote Buddhist temple to find a cure for insomnia are advised by monks to surrender to the current of the river. Looking at cosmopolitan creative workers and interns at an art gallery, Anocha Suwichakornpong’s ‘The Line’ focuses on Mandarin-language video art featuring images of an interracial couple projected on remediated, colour-enhanced images of the Mekong River and Khong Chiam, a nearby town. Incorporating theoretical ruminations about Object-Oriented-Ontology, which highlights the agency and incommensurability of the natural environment, the episode echoes the complex, posthuman ecology in the video art of Vietnam’s Nhà Sàn Collective (Lovatt 2020, 225) by concluding with images of everyday household appliances such as toasters and stoves accompanied by the mysterious, ambient hum of machinery. The episode suggests how any effort to appropriate the materiality of the environment through industrialization or representation is ultimately a failure because of its intangibility and elusiveness.

In the example of Mekong 2030, the genre of the omnibus film provides a venue for filmmakers and artists from different nations and cultures to collaborate on a single work. By bringing together diverse voices and perspectives that are often marginalized and denigrated, the omnibus film can foster the imagination of commonality and coherence amid a fragmentary region.

Commonality amid dissonance

The unity of ‘South East Asia’ as an area is explored in the omnibus film Fragment, which, commissioned by Singapore’s Asia Film Archive, features the contributions of ten filmmakers from the wider region, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. In contrast to Mekong 2030, whose episodes ruminate about the deteriorating ecology, spirituality and community of the Mekong River in the face of capitalist development, Fragment is loosely and unevenly structured without an overarching theme. Nonetheless, the various episodes in Fragment make visible urgent economic and social issues across South East Asia, like urban poverty, environmental degradation and geographic mobility, by exploring the tenuous conditions of transition.

To illustrate the diversity in the region, CDOSEA’s algorithmic database aesthetics emphasizes commonality and unity amid plurality and variation. Echoing Mekong 2030, Fragment explores how such common conditions are imminently shifting because of the impact of industrial capitalism and ecological disaster. Several episodes in Fragment visualize the experiences of listless young people who, craving better life opportunities, are confronted by the imminent development of their city. Set in an old hotel where two lovers meet for a final tryst, Kavich Neang’s ‘Goodbye, Phnom Penh’ pictures a restless urban setting with decrepit, low-rise buildings permeated by the promise of urban renewal. Grittier in their rendering of the South East Asian city, Lav Diaz’s ‘Ang araw bago ang wakas … ’ (‘The Day Before the End … ’) and Lucky Kuswandi’s ‘Serpong’ feature jarring images of filthy streets and clogged toilets. Both ‘Serpong’ and Phan Đăng Di’s ‘Rain’ vividly capture the uncertainty and despair of a rural landscape that, situated next to a clothing factory or shopping mall, awaits inevitable transformation, which may not necessarily be beneficial for its residents.

‘Rain’ depicts a moment of transition in the relationship of two young lovers in a burgeoning factory town in Vietnam who are forced to dine in an expensive bar as they seek shelter from a sudden downpour. Revealing how one of them is growing dissatisfied with her present situation, the film explores the impact on them of being bluntly exposed to a world beyond their immediate financial means. When she encounters the factory manager’s wealthy son, a playboy notorious for ‘sleeping with all the pretty girls’, he tries to seduce her. The girl is tempted to give in to his advances as a form of self-affirmation by abandoning her lover in a remote, empty field, where they have stopped for an emergency, but the factory manager’s son mocks her by leaving the door of his luxury sports car locked. Highlighting the intensifying disparities of rapid development, ‘Rain’ illustrates how even the most precarious, unethical opportunities remain foreclosed to some people.

Brash and provocative in its treatment of its subject matter, ‘Serpong’ is set in the shadow of Paradise Homes, a new housing development in Western Java that is surrounded by overgrown weeds and plagued by defective plumbing. Ironically framed by graffiti commemorating seventy years of Indonesian independence, the episode is marked by realistic closeups of shit to emphasize how a street food vendor’s cramped shanty lacks adequate, humane facilities for water and sanitation, which has led to sexual impotency. Highlighting the glaring insurmountability of poverty in the face of rapid urban renewal, a married couple speculates about their aspirations for their child to become a security guard or sales promoter in the nearby Aeon shopping mall while defecating in an empty field. With unflinching images of excrement and filth, ‘Serpong’ deploys audiovisual techniques of shock akin to the conventions of poverty porn in South East Asian visual culture to evoke the squalor and desperation of wealth inequality. Superimposing figures of the couple drifting through the escalators and corridors of the mall, the film uses noticeable green screen backgrounds to visualize their alienation from its affluent modernity. It concludes with fleeting portraits of residents and families who have presumably been displaced by the construction of the high-end residential and commercial complex, which has devoured their community.

The shock of uneven development in ‘Serpong’ contrasts with the horror of bureaucratic industrialization in U-Wei Haji Saari’s ‘Satu Nota Satu Fragmen’ (‘One Note One Fragment’). In ‘One Note One Fragment’, a man in a suit and tie abruptly wakes to discover himself alone in a vacant conference room. Frantically scrambling through the glass corridors of his sterile office building, he struggles in vain to find other living beings. Running outside to the empty streets of his surrounding environment, he is terrified to learn that he is all alone in a vast, abandoned city as he receives a series of text messages on his phone saying ‘KAMI BENCI AWAK’ (‘WE HATE YOU’). Despite the aspirations of local populations for the more propitious life opportunities that economic growth might possibly deliver, ‘One Note One Fragment’ suggests the suffocating, dehumanizing banality of life under conditions of capitalist progress. Unlike Mekong 2030, which imagines the destruction wrought by development on nature and spirituality, Fragment illustrates the existential anxiety and malaise it generates.

Fragment’s principal financier, the Asia Art Archive, was founded as a non-profit organization in Singapore in 2005 but later became a subsidiary of the Singapore government’s National Library Board in 2014. The Asia Film Archive has restored masterpieces of South East Asian cinema that are in deteriorating condition such as Mike de Leon’s Batch ‘81 (1981), Garin Nugroho’s Letter to an Angel (1994) and U-Wei Haji Saari’s Kaki Bakar (1995). As a key element of its public programming as a state institution, it now organizes annual festivals that feature films from its archival collection. Aside from preserving film prints and digital masters of works by independent Asian filmmakers, the Asia Film Archive declares on its website that its ‘mission’ is to ‘build’ the ‘cultural value’ of and ‘nurture’ a ‘passion[ate]’ ‘community’ for Asian cinema.² In this way, the Asia Film Archive has become an important component of the Singapore government’s neocolonial mission to build and nurture its image of ‘South East Asia’.

Akin to CDOSEA and Mekong 2030, water is an evocative metaphor throughout Fragment. In Mekong 2030, water is presented as the source of spirituality and life, which is being abandoned for the economic and material gains of capitalist progress. In Fragment, various episodes explore how flowing water can deliver uncertain, ambivalent changes, which may end up being beneficial or disruptive. The episode ‘The Warm Breeze of Winter’ exemplifies how movement across an ocean can signify the discovery of a new opportunity or the recovery of a lost heritage. Concluding with the tight closeup of a small leaf flowing along a light stream, ‘Making Art is F**cking Hard’ ruminates on the persistent feeling of destiny prodding the protagonist to change the conditions of her life. In ‘Rain’, the sudden downpour, which forces the young couple to seek refuge in an inhospitable café, signals the unsettling or demise of their illusions about their romance and life itself. ‘The Day Before the End … ’ imagines how the deluge brought by a catastrophic typhoon portends a destructive end, whose rupture violently creates the possibility of a new world divergent from the present oppressive situation.

CDOSEA sees mobility as characteristic of ‘South East Asia’. Historical and anthropological scholarship in South East Asian Studies (Amrith 2015; Constable 2007; Kuhn 2008; Lindquist 2008) has highlighted the importance of migration to the region in terms of diasporic settlement and temporary employment. Exploring motifs of mobility akin to Mekong 2030, different episodes in Fragment dwell on imminent departures and precarious arrivals. Evocative of the work of Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang, Kavich Neang’s ‘Goodbye, Phnom Penh’ is set in a decrepit hotel where two lovers meet for the last time as a woman prepares to abandon the city for more promising life opportunities overseas. Signalling the transitoriness of departure, this episode opens with hazy, fragmentary images of old clocks and telephones without revealing the faces of the lovers who listlessly spend their hours in an unkempt room for a final tryst. These meandering night scenes in the hotel contrast with melancholic daytime images of the characters tenderly riding a motorcycle together on the bustling streets of the city. In the wake of the woman’s absence, her former lover returns to the hotel to retrieve lost items he had forgotten as he desperately clings to her vanishing memory. Concluding at dusk with a voiceover of a rocket launch from behind television static, the episode suggests, despite its uncertainty, that change is inevitable, delivering nascent opportunities with vague promises.

Focusing on a pregnant Mainland Chinese woman who experiences racial discrimination at a medical clinic, clothing boutique and hawker centre, Wesley Leon Aroozoo’s ‘Umbilical’ uncovers the anguish experienced by new immigrants in Singapore. After the woman collapses while trying to hang Singapore flag on her parapet for National Day, the flag overdramatically falls from her housing estate building, causing the other characters who discriminated against her to salute it out of respect. ‘Umbilical’ features the two unborn twins in her womb dressed in white leotards arguing over the fate of their mother as a citizen in an inhospitable land. The episode raises significant issues about migration and race, especially in Singapore where many Singaporean citizens of Chinese ethnicity adopt a derogatory attitude towards migrants from the People’s Republic of China who, despite their aspirations for better life opportunities, are accused of possessing a distinct, incommensurable culture. Instead of representing withdrawal or flight from centralized authority, mobility in Fragment signifies the aspiration for a semblance of the stability of a home, which is not easily achievable. Whereas the transience of mobility tends to be disruptive in Mekong 2030, the resettlement in a new location in Fragment continues to be turbulent because of the trauma of the past and the anxiety of the present.

Expanding on the motif of diasporic departures and arrivals, Sherman Ong’s lyrical and melancholic ‘The Warm Breeze of Winter’ narrates a woman’s visit to a seaside village in Malaysia to return her ashes to her ‘homeland’. The episode opens with the figuration of the mother’s ghost traveling on a moving boat with her back to the ocean: ‘I lie awake with moonbeams on my bed / Glittering like frost to my wandering eyes / I raise my head towards the glorious moon / As I lay down with floating thoughts of my homeland’. This voiceover of the deceased mother narrates her tragic story of flight to the Nanyang, punctuated by her family’s tumultuous return to Mainland China during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother is obligated by her father to renounce her Malay lover for an arranged marriage with a member of the Red Guard. Lamenting how ‘[her] heart withered away’ because she ‘[felt] no affection for him’, she recalls how her ‘unbearable’ everyday life drove her to contemplate suicide. The episode is narrated in Mandarin, which has a precarious position in Malaysia because of the National Economic Policy privileging Bumiputera or Malays in education and employment, despite Chinese comprising half of the population. While focusing on a single narrative of displacement and loss, ‘The Warm Breeze of Winter’ reveals the anguish of ethnic minorities in South East Asia who have divided affections between two homelands, the one they left behind and the one that denies their presence. Permeated by the inescapable force of historical circumstances, the episode ruminates on how the trauma of migration continually haunts the memory of the migrant. If ghost movies in South East Asia typically foreground a buried, unresolved violence that has not found retribution and justice (Fuhrmann 2016, 108–109), the ghost in ‘The Warm Breeze of Winter’ adopts a wistful stance towards a lost past, which represents an alternate trajectory that needed to be abandoned.

In Fragment’s opening episode, ‘Making Art is F**cking Hard’, a young, aspiring actress of mixed race based in Los Angeles visits her white mother in their hometown Kuching in Borneo to reassess the difficulties of her chosen career trajectory. Lacking any knowledge about the people and culture of their destination, her platonic male companion is comically presented as believing her joke that the residents eat cats. Juxtaposed with footage of the characters undertaking a cave adventure in Gunung Mulu National Park, the film is punctuated by slow-motion images of them enjoying a bumpy truck ride and contemplating their future in a dark tunnel. Confessing to having expected more out of life, the protagonist is dissatisfied with her present situation. The protagonist’s friend, who is studying to become a lawyer in Singapore, says he envies her because his family would not support his decision to pursue an alternative career. As a retort, she sarcastically accuses him of being on ‘autopilot’ as his career path does not require him to make any risky decisions of consequence. The centrepiece of her mother’s home is a poster on the wall of the living area with the picture of a small boat moored on a pristine beach with a blue horizon underneath the word ‘DESTINY’ with the motto, ‘The choices we make, not the chances we take, determine our destiny’.

Ruminating on failed career choices and new life opportunities, Tan Chui Mui’s whimsical ‘The Beautiful Losers’ focuses on the experience of a former Mandopop singer who returns from Taiwan to Malaysia to open a café. Because her musical career ended up being unsuccessful, she has decided to shift to an alternate means of livelihood. The episode is set in a large junk shop where the protagonist searches for furniture and decorations for her new establishment while accompanied by a friend who was forced to sell his bar because the rent became unaffordable. Recognized by a fan, the protagonist denies her identity. The owner of the warehouse asks her friend if he has returned to buy back the fixtures of the bar he has pawned. The film concludes by transitioning into a music video of the protagonist’s song with the two characters playfully pretending that they are riding the discarded boat on an invisible ocean. The lyrics of the song describe a persona who struggles to locate her direction as the leaves of a tree quietly and continually fall to the ground and on her face. The episode ‘The Beautiful Losers’ suggests how not only choice but also performance significantly impacts personal trajectories. Amid the anxiety of the present situation, the construction and performance of a provisional, fledgling identity is vital for creating new beginnings.

Fragment’s title is significant because the omnibus film comprises audiovisual fragments of stories set in various cities across South East Asia. Diffrient (2014) explains that the vignette-like quality of the short narratives in an omnibus film gives the impression that they are fragmentary and incomplete. In contrast to Mekong 2030, however, the episodes in Fragment lack coherence as a single work. Pairing first-time filmmakers with award-winning auteurs, their unevenness in quality can be disconcerting. Imagining different South East Asian nations as belonging to a single region, Fragment is prefaced with the line: ‘The once broken can become whole again / Despite and because of its incompleteness’. According to its curatorial statement, disparate fragments of narratives representing divergent cultures and experiences ‘can embrace each other in [their] dissonance’.

Looking at the contingency of performance, some of the episodes suggest how performance might be important to the provisional coherence of disparate fragments. In the wake of an abortive career path, ‘The Beautiful Losers’ concludes with the performance of a music video by the two protagonists, who have each failed in their own entrepreneurial projects, playfully dancing on a discarded boat at a junk shop. Focusing on an aspiring young actress contemplating the precarity of her fledgling movie career, ‘Making Art is F**cking Hard’ reflexively acknowledges how the film being shot has no script or focus, relying on the immediacy and contingency of performance for its significance. Following shots of children performing a choreographed dance with paper cranes, the coda of ‘The Warm Breeze of Winter’ features an elegant, yearning dance performance by the mother’s ghost emulating the flight of a bird, which would simulate the freedom her life lacked. In the wake of the melancholy of being helplessly swept by historical circumstances, the belated dance performance of the ghost seeks to conjure a reality that has no place in the world.

Lav Diaz’s poetic ‘The Day Before the End … ’ imagines the end of the world as a deluge of rain from a horrendous typhoon, with solitary individuals chanting aloud overlapping lines from Shakespearean tragedies and Ilocano epics on the dark, flooded streets of a noisy, squalid and teeming metropolis. Despite the torrential onslaught, these orators persist in declaiming their lines while bystanders stare strangely at them as though they were possessed by an otherworldly madness. The episode concludes with the shaky, blurred image of a butterfly on the wall of a house with a voiceover describing its path-breaking silence on arriving in a new world: ‘His visit is without sound. / He arrived quietly. / He only brought colour. / He only brought life’.

These different examples reveal how performance can inaugurate a nascent world. Such a conception of performance as a stage for provisional possibility is expanded on in Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s ‘Scene 38’, which captures the shooting of a fragment of a scene in a film. In ‘Scene 38’, the camera remains fixed at a skewed angle outside the glass wall of a gambling room where a tearful actress quickly and indifferently puffs a cigarette next to a ‘No Smoking: 2,000 Baht Fine’ sign. It begins with a black screen with script directions in Thai describing the staging of the scene. After a stand-in with pantomime gestures enables the composition and lighting of the scene to be staged for the camera, extras are slowly led into the room, and then given instructions to play cards naturally as though in an illegal gambling den. The soundtrack features overlapping voiceovers with restless chattering about the agricultural industry, egg consumption and foreign investment. While chatting with someone off-screen, a young actress is assisted by film crew members who adjust the position of her hand holding up a lit cigarette. As the actress takes time to emote, a crew member carefully places eye drops in her eyes to create tears. The scene is then systematically dismantled just as quickly as it was assembled. ‘Scene 38’ highlights how seemingly stable representations and identities tenuously rest on the complex staging of performance. The episode suggests how the orchestration of the performance of disparate fragments can generate a provisional yet coherent whole.

In The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, the recurring voiceover for the keyword R for Resonance states how the performance of various types of gongs from distant locations across the region can generate a collective resonance. It echoes how the coherence of ‘South East Asia’ as an area in CDOSEA derives from the algorithmic iteration of constellations of images, words and sounds drawn from seemingly disparate cultures in multiple arrangements. Expanding on this idea, episodes in the omnibus film Fragment ruminate on the act of performance as inaugurating a nascent, fledgling reality that has no current place in the world. Because of its intrinsically pluralistic character, the genre of the omnibus film, with its divergent, fragmentary narratives, is said to imagine a fluid, horizontal form of community (Diffrient 2014, 24). Amid the uncertainty of geographic limit and political identity, the combination of these audiovisual fragments in a single work illustrates how a provisional regional community woven from a torn and tattered tapestry must rest on the performance of commonality amid dissonance.

Conclusion

In a region in flux, with shifting political, cultural, historical and environmental conditions, ‘area’ continues to bear potency as a frame for giving meaning and agency to its diverse communities. In a world dominated by a new Cold War between the US and PRC, ‘area’ can provide a critical space for navigating the ambivalent terrain between their dichotomous positions.

Instead of being static and hierarchical, the performance of ‘area’ in omnibus films and digital artworks such as Fragment, Mekong 2030 and The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia reveals how it is endlessly open to variation, inclusion and renewal. If ‘to know the object of Area Studies is also at the same time to know how to govern that particular population’ (Walker and Sakai 2019, 3), then to foreground the lack of comprehensive knowledge is to unveil the impossibility of complete control.

Instead of seeing the fragmentariness of diversity as a failure at unity, scholarly and creative works that reimagine South East Asia with the dissonance of a provisional community intimate how the plurality and fluidity of regionalism is a form of decolonial refusal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://cdosea.org/.

2 Available at https://asianfilmarchive.org/about/mission/ (accessed 13 June 2024).