Co-Chair, Re:Locations: Navigating Visions of the Asia-Pacific

Art Journal, 2022

Published in "Art Journal" 81:4 (2022): 146-149. Review of Pamela N. Corey, "The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia" (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021) and Viêt Lê, "Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

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.

Edited by Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner, this volume draws together essays by leading art experts observing the dramatic developments in Asian art and exhibitions in the last two decades. The authors explore new regional and global connections and new ways of understanding contemporary Asian art in the twenty-first century. The essays coalesce around four key themes: world-making; intra-Asian regional connections; art’s affective capacity in cross-cultural engagement; and Australia’s cultural connections with Asia. In exploring these themes, the essays adopt a diversity of approaches and encompass art history, art theory, visual culture and museum studies, as well as curatorial and artistic practice. With introductory and concluding essays by editors Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner this volume features contributions from key writers on the region and on contemporary art: Patrick D Flores, John Clark, Chaitanya Sambrani, Pat Hoffie, Charles Merewether, Marsha Meskimmon, Francis Maravillas, Oscar Ho, Alison Carroll and Jacqueline Lo. Richly illustrated with artworks by leading contemporary Asian artists, Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making will be essential reading for those interested in recent developments in contemporary Asian art, including students and scholars of art history, Asian studies, museum studies, visual and cultural studies.

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.

2015

While recent scholarship dealt with the economic and political historiographies of road systems, this book focuses on routes as stimuli of cultural transfer and artistic production. Framed in the historiography of longue durée, routes may be addressed as trajectories that cut across cultural geographies and periodizations. With focus on the early modern period, the volume foregrounds an unprecedented expansion and transformation of route-networks. New combinations of transcontinental routes profoundly affected cultural topographies and smbolic paradigms. The rise of Asian and European port cities as nodes of maritime systems and prosperous cultural contact zones is closely linked to these shifts; routes, hubs, and the fabrication of collective imaginations about them therefore constitute the central themes of this book. Contributors: Christian Kravagna, Monica Juneja, Eugene Y. Wang, Elizabeth Kindall, Sophie Annette Kranen, Julia Orell, Juliane Noth, Joachim Rees, Nora Usanov-Geißler, Evelyn Reitz, Ulrike Boskamp

Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making, 2014

In this research-based module, we will explore how urban spaces across Southeast Asia have been imagined through visual forms like cinema, painting, advertising, and digital media. Using historical, theoretical, and anthropological texts as models, we will inquire into the process by which images negotiate and redefine the contours and notions of the geographies they are made to replace. How do movies transform disregarded cityscapes into protagonists? How are photographs and postcards of abandoned or demolished structures incorporated into historical memory? How do territorial, tourist, and transit maps shape aspirations of citizens and migrants? Students can pursue one of several trajectories.

Book Review of Pamela N. Corey, The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia, and Viet Le, Return Engagements: Contemporary Art's Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh

Philippine Humanities Review, 2015

The essay attempts to identify aspects of problems that continue to confront art managers and curators who practice exhibition-making in contested territories perceived as critically determining a political construction such as Asia, a site and space for representation. The proposed exhibition, which initially propelled this research, was called United States of Asia (USAsia or US of Asia) and was primarily intended as a parody of a foolhardy mythic imaging of shared agendas whereas skewed power dynamics continue to prevail. Amongst the most prominent problems plaguing the proposal development phase of US of Asia was the dearth of resources lent to the key task of on-the-ground research as opposed to the mere assemblage of ‘international spectacle’ or superficially celebratory parading of national colours. Keywords: Curation, Mapping, Transcultural Research, ASEAN Economic Community (AEC)