Rewriting Asia: The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art

InFlux: Contemporary Art in Asia, 2013

What do we mean by the term 'Contemporary Asian Art' and how are we to represent it? With its varied histories, traditions and cultures, Asia can hardly be bracketed into one entity, yet the reception of its art is ridden with essentialisms and tropes. Meanwhile, the region's longstanding engagement with Modern and Contemporary art, globalisation and rapid economic changes has seen Asia's arts scenes change irrevocably. Influx - Contemporary Art in Asia explores the trends in and circulation of, contemporary art from Asia in the many International Expos, Biennales and Art Fairs that seem to be focusing increasingly on this region. Illustrated with works of leading artists from India, China, Pakistan, South-East Asia and the Middle-East, it brings together essays by 19 critical writers. They reflect on the diversity of Asia's self-perceptions, the historical bases for a category such as Asia and its political and cultural exigencies which inform various curatorial interventions.

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2023

The 1990s saw art exhibitions and biennials staged in East and Southeast Asia and Australia representing a contemporary rather than traditional Asia. These events were supported by region-wide fora on Asian contemporary art that promoted the discursive and imaginative capacity to curate such an Asia. The Japan Foundation Asia Center contributed to this capacity building via what could be called cultural infrastructural networks – their symposia on Asian contemporary art from 1994 to 2008. The concern was to increase a regional representational capacity based on sound art-critical and historical approaches and to ascertain the contemporaneity of present artistic practice. An emphasis on present-day art established a relational approach to temporality in which the recognition that contemporary artistic formations occupied a coeval time zone with contemporary western art in turn implied increased equality with the western metropole. However, the capacity to exhibit the regional contemporary of an Asia that has economically arrived did not overcome the apprehension of older modernizing ideologies linked with fraught ideas of Asia that had led to the Pacific War. Nevertheless, a multicultural Asia – the aspirational conjuncture of diverse regional locales with still disparate development levels and temporalities to produce a fictional totalized present – was projected in exhibitions that strove to rise above inter-Asian national clashes. These may have been performative projections of the contemporary, but such possibilities were not available during Asia’s colonial period.

World Art, 2020

Co-authored with Michelle Antoinette This essay positions the rapidly changing field of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and the shifting structure, dynamics and influence of the region's contemporary ‘art worlds' and ‘art publics’. It seeks to open up new horizons and frameworks for understanding the particular character of art worlds and art publics in Southeast Asia by being especially attuned to the local contexts and histories of contemporary art in the region and their particular ecologies. We contend that while contemporary art worlds and art publics in Southeast Asia might bear similar structures and dynamics to contemporary art worlds and publics elsewhere, they are nevertheless indicative of culturally specific and localised developments. Indeed, the various past and present practices and mediation of art and its publics in the region are suggestive of the ways in which art worlds take on nuanced character and meaning in Southeast Asia, are diversely configured and imagined, and are multiply located and complexly interconnected. The worldliness of these practices are, moreover, indicative of the ways in which Southeast Asian artists continue to respond to the exigencies of the everyday and the political economy of survival in an increasingly challenging world.

Asian Journal of German and European Studies, 2019

The expectations modern art has to fulfill are of various kind. Modern art is to be a seismograph of societal developments and thus sensitive to political and economic themes. Thus, Western (critical) contemporary art is in the dilemma to deal with and challenge capitalism in mostly bourgeois frameworks of musealized exhibitions, criticizing political leadership and social inequalities and presenting it largely to exactly the established classes. Here contemporary art's task lies in both the individual and arts self-reflection and self-critique. Creating awareness of individual and collective historical processes and being able to sense and experience societal antagonisms can be described as conscious making by the means of critical modern art. Taking in account that to learn (socio-historically) art and thus to be able to sense dissonances is a precondition to understand modern art the question arises: How to deal with contemporary art from foreign cultures and unfamiliar civilizations? How to understand Asian critical contemporary art with a Western sensual kind of sensing and understanding? It is the question of universality and uniqueness of modern art and/or the integrating power of Western capitalism and consumerism within the sphere of critical art. Is it possible to sense and understand Chinese or Japanese art with a Western education and different socio-historical and political-economical understanding? How to decipher and contextualize modern art without "cultural expertise"? This contribution deals with the contradictions between the (cultural) particular and the general serving as gatekeepers for sensing societal and historical grown antagonisms and sensing of cultural and social dissonances in modern art production. Is modern art by definition Western? By experiencing Asian modern art the purpose of this research is to find the particularities and the general of (Asian) critical modern art.

SUNSHOWER Exhibition catalogue: SUNSHOWER – Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, Date of Issue: August 9, 2017 >>Exhibition-catalogues are significant. However big the show, once taken down, it is primarily the catalogue, that speaks for the exhibition-artworks’ relationship with each other and the larger field. When the field is young and undecided, the catalogue, embodying the curator’s vision and position, matters more. This critic’s own knowledge of Southeast Asian art is grounded in the scholarship built through multiple-essay catalogues of historically relevant shows. A number of these were produced by Japan’s institutions, particularly with the opening of the Fukuoka Art Museum in 1979. Take for instance the principal text from the catalogue of one such regional exhibition, ‘Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses into the Future’, produced by The Japan Foundation Asia Centre in ‘97. Curator Junichi Shioda’s essay ‘Glimpses into the Future of Southeast Asian Art: A Vision of what Art should be’, constructed and cross-examined the idea of a regional canon, independent from Euramerican modernism, through the socially-rooted practices of artists from five Southeast Asian countries. Two other academic essays in this exhibition-catalogue further provided analyses of art in Southeast Asia and contemporary art in Indonesia. Around the same time, a similarly vital exhibition ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions’ was curated by Thai scholar Apinan Poshyananda. This exhibition’s catalogue included seven essays that built the discourse around the politically charged practices of various Southeast Asian artists among others from Asia. Such exhibition-catalogues sought intellectual contributions from field-scholars who connect socio-economic complexities, and ground artistic practices in their respective historical, cultural and political contexts. Such catalogue-essays, written two decades ago or today, are important to establishing the canon around Southeast Asian art because scholarly analyses of exhibition artworks, and their comparison with other pieces, permit the discerning of larger currents and parallels that give shape to the field. That artists from Southeast Asia have been potent voices for social change and reformation is established through scholars’ analyses of artworks presented in writing for exhibition-catalogues, past and present.<<

Curating Art, eds. Janet Marstine and Oscar Ho Hing Kay , 2022

Those familiar with the teeming, gridlocked megalopolises of Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila will be surprised to learn that urbanisation has been relatively slow in Southeast Asia; peoples' frame of reference remains the village. Hanoians, though based in the national capital for four generations, carry identity cards showing their ancestral rural enclave as locus of origin. Yet even discounting Manila, Jakarta and Bangkok as essentially colonial or Western creations, there is an ancient tradition of urbanism in Southeast Asia, as testified by Angkor, Hanoi, and Ayutthaya. 1 Southeast Asians, firmly attached to their traditions, still roam the world, reconciling rootedness with mobility. Heterogeneous, Southeast Asia is distinguished for its diversity of languages, religions, geographies and ethnic mixes. Indeed, establishing regional commonalities, even as the original Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) nears its fiftieth birthday in 2017, can seem forced, with ASEAN acknowledged as a geopolitical, security and economic convenience far more than a reflection of shared cultural baggage. But the region's peoples, however diverse, boast syncretic approaches to faith and diasporic social constructions. What's more, regional nations enjoy geographic unity through the sea, and, importantly, in the sea find a common source of foreign ideas, as explained by 0. W Wolters discussing Southeast Asia's open maritime communication " ... The consequence of the freedom of the seas was a tradition of hospitality to foreign traders ... ". 2 Lastly and fundamentally, colonial legacies directly marked all nations except Thailand, while in the post-colonial era, strong nationalist currents continue to run through the region. As the study of Southeast Asian visual art of the late twentieth century gains momentum, t~ose searching for the field's overarching idiomatic, aesthetic, processual and thematic connections may explore leads in local cultural history. The hunt for influences points inevitably to China and India, old history manuals making much of regional culture's Sino-Indian amalgam, overlaid with colonial European inflections. 3 But the story is not one of amalgamation. As Benedict Anderson observes in the introduction to his Spectre of Comparisons, 4 Southeast Asia, rec~ntly labelled, and named outside its own geography, has traditionally been spoken of. 1~ relation to" other large geo-political players. Anderson cites nineteenth century Filipino in e~e nd ence leader Jose Rizal's pinpointing of the malaise of comparison in his 1887 nationalist di nove Noli Me Tangere. A century later, art historian John Clark, referring to the building of Asian scourses 'b. 'prescn es a self-disentanglement involving Asian contextualisation.