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Abstract
In the last two decades, Southeast Asian contemporary art has secured its place in the global art world, becoming a fixture on the latter’s expanded exhibition circuits and a promising ‘emerging market’ for investors. This consolidation has engendered a burst of scholarly activity, in line with the improving prospects of Asian art history generally and notwithstanding a lack of dedicated academic structures where the region is concerned. But if Southeast Asia has firmed as a framework for organising contemporary art, it has not been favoured as a basis for interpreting or historicising it. As knowledge production in the region has surged, regionalism has waned. In this article, I review the historiography of Southeast Asian contemporary art to reveal a discontinuity between its pioneers, who were regionalists, and a new historicism whose premises are basically nationalist. Reflexive consciousness of region – and of contemporaneity as a regional phenomenon – is advanced as an under-utilised interpretive device and a bulwark against hegemonic and monolithic art histories.
Notes on contributor
David Teh is a writer, curator and Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, specializing in Southeast Asian contemporary art. His curatorial projects have included Returns (12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018), Misfits: Pages from a Loose-leaf Modernity (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2017), Transmission (Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2014), Video Vortex #7 (Yogyakarta, 2011), and Unreal Asia (55. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2009). Teh’s essays have appeared in Third Text, Afterall, Artforum International, Theory Culture & Society, and ARTMargins. His book Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary was published by the MIT Press in 2017, and he was co-editor (with David Morris) of Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 (2018), for Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series.
Notes
1 Singapore Biennale 2019: Every Step in the Right Direction, November 22, 2019 - March 22, 2020. The author was on the advisory Steering Committee for this exhibition.
2 These exhibitions’ curatorial structures and agendas have been detailed by Susie Lingham (Citation2019), who, as Director of SAM, was organizer of the first and Creative Director of the second.
3 Citing a series of solo retrospectives as a mark of SAM’s (and Singapore’s) growing confidence, Antoinette (Citation2014, 109–110) doesn’t dwell on the fact that the first was devoted to an Indonesian (F.X. Harsono, in 2010).
4 E.g., Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s-1990s (2018-19) was mounted by national institutions in Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The exhibition passed Singapore’s censors unmolested, but the 350-page catalogue was deemed unfit for public consumption.
5 Through the 1970s, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations comprised five states: Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. Brunei joined in 1984; all the socialist countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos) had been admitted by 1999.
6 Lingham’s assertion that biennials are ‘all about national representation’ (Citation2019, 35; her emphasis) may be a forgivable generalization, even from a nationally empowered biennale-maker, yet one wonders what Singapore’s might look like if this were a question rather than a given.
7 The publics these figures address are neither discrete nor mutually exclusive, but even as their discipline evolves, few art historians pretend to address a general public.
8 Anderson (Citation2005, 5) noted that the Philippines’ model patriot and ‘first novelist,’ José Rizal, wrote in a language not even five percent of his countrymen could read.
9 The Philippines’ news media today ranks 136th out of 180 countries for general press freedom; Thailand’s (140th) has been silenced by military coups, and draconian cybercrime and lèse majesté laws. No ASEAN nation ranks in the top 100. World Press Freedom Index (https://rsf.org/).
10 Sabapathy (Citation2018a, 233–235) credits the Fukuoka Art Museum’s second Contemporary Asian Art Show (1980) with initiating a modulation to the contemporary, yet it was no fait accompli by the time of his own 1996 survey show, Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art.
11 For delegates to the First Southeast Asian Art Conference and Competition in Manila in 1957, like Purita Kalaw-Ledesma (a Filipina) or Syed Ahmad Jamal (a Malayan), there was no contradiction between nationalism and internationalism. Three decades on, indigenous traditions held the same ambivalent currency for Imelda Cajipe-Endaya and Brenda Fajardo, whose ‘ASEAN Aesthetics’ (1993) Mashadi quotes (Citation2011, 61–62; Citation2017).
12 Cf Geeta Kapur (Citation1996, 63). For linguistic and political reasons, the three thinkers mainly covered the (quasi-)democratic polities fostered by the U.S. in the suppression of communism. While it seems natural that a contemporaneity expressed in exogenous idioms should take shape on this ‘Free World’ map, its structural common denominator, authoritarianism, was not confined to that terrain. But if the political divide began to dissolve in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the last ten years that it has been transcended editorially (e.g., Taylor and Boreth Citation2012).
13 Exhibition remains the better vehicle for garnering attention abroad, e.g., recent touring surveys like the Guggenheim’s No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia (2013-14) and the Japan Foundation’s Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1980s to Now (2017-19).
14 This is less a reflection of scholarly ability than of the weakness of tertiary art programmes. (Sabapathy Citation2010)
15 There have been incremental changes at Nanyang Technological University and Lasalle College of the Arts, and some Asian art history is now taught at Yale-NUS College. The National University of Singapore offers a desultory minor at undergraduate level, and nothing for graduate students. Art history is more developed, but also more nationally circumscribed, in other Southeast Asian countries (cf. Thompson Citation2012).
16 Also noteworthy is the renewed art historical focus of NUS Press.
17 All of Corey’s candidates practice beaux arts media as well as ‘new media forms’ (Citation2014, 63). Indonesian curator Jim Supangkat’s association of contemporaneity with local materials – made in a regionalist spirit in 1997 – is suggestive for her, but not decisive.
18 As evidence of the lack she cites Aung (Citation2017), for whom the term is indistinct.
19 Of our three ‘regionalists,’ she cites only one nationally-framed text by Sabapathy.
20 The results of the ‘Ambitious Alignments’ colloquium, sponsored by the Getty Foundation, were published in Whiteman et al. (Citation2018).
21 See Teh (Citation2017) for my own effort to balance ‘global’ and local determinants.
22 Significantly, the ‘emerging’ authors self-identify as art historians; few consider themselves curators, in contrast with the earlier generation (Antoinette Citation2014, 12, 27.)
23 Perhaps this explains Flores’ trenchant abstraction in his overture to Charting Thoughts (Citation2017), citing four of his own publications and several of Sabapathy’s. No one would accuse June Yap of being untheoretical. Though focused on Singapore and Malaysia, her monograph (Citation2016) cites Mashadi, Flores, and no fewer than eight texts by Sabapathy.
24 Mashadi has taught the least among them, but has trained numerous curators under the aegis of the NUS Museum.
25 Though theoretical, Flores’ monographs (Citation1998 and Citation2008, the latter published on Mashadi’s initiative) are products of formidable ‘primary’ art historical research.