Spatializing the Contemporary, Philippine-Style

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.

Symposium: “Asian Contemporary Art Reconsidered", 1998

1998 ‘Modern Asian Art: its construction and reception’ in Furuichi Yasuko, ed., Symposium: “Asian Contemporary Art Reconsidered”, Tokyo, The Japan Foundation, 1998. The institutional and intellectual construction of modern Asian art at its sites of origin will be summarized and comparison made with recent circuits of reception in other-than-Asian sites. In particular the role of receiving cultural formations-including funding bodies such as government and corporate foundations, museums, gatekeeper figures and gatekeeping functions, as well as the mediating function of artists themselves as major institutions of reception-will be examined in art historical perspective. A. The construction of a modern Asian art 0 The notion that there might be a modern art outside Euramerica is a beguiling but not necessarily a bewitching one. This paper will not discuss the interesting historical analogies between modern art in Asia and that in the Middle East, in Africa, or in Latin America, but will geographically confine itself to that area constructed as 'Asia' which is geographically East of the Indus valley, South of the Siberian tundra, and North of the Arafura Sea. To summarize briefly, Asian modern art can be constructed from various positions which include: 1. It is seen as a reflexive 'other' of Euramerican modernity, in some projection and extension of an'Orientalist' mis-construal of what might be the negative essence of Euramerican modernity. 2. It is seen as a 'local' or 'peripheral' modernity which negotiates a space within an overall modernism with its 'centre' in Euramerica. This is a realistic-if self-limiting-reinsertion of Asian modern art into a genealogy which privileges Euramerican origination and thereby unavoidably accepts its hegemony, if not its neo-colonial domination, as a basic premise. Elements of this modernity have been discussed as 'reverse Orientalism' or 'counterappropriation'. 3. It can be hermeneutically understood as a parallel case to the results of the transfer of Euramerican academy realism, where the 'modern' is an attribute of a stylistic penumbra the acceptance of whose various shadings can be historically traced. This approach treats modernism as a society and culture-neutral style, and tracks its distribution by art historical or quasi-archaeological methods. 4. It can be accepted as a series of discontinuous and heterogenous modernities arising from a specific structure of contact and conflict with Euramerican powers from about 1750 to 1950, where various conditions of contact, from absolute domination to precarious-if succesful-maintenance of state and cultural autonomy, led to mapping by local discourses themselves 5. It can be seen as a modality-among others-by which the world beyond Euramerica has resisted and finally overcome Euramerican impredations since the Renaissance. 6. It can be seen as a relatively isolated and autonomous series of phenomena which appear in the guise of transfers from Euramerican modernity, but are in fact reactions against it from deep strata of culture which always had their own dynamics isolated from Euramerica or indeed any other 'external' source. There is no space here to offer a critique of these six positions. My own lies between four and five. But one should note that these not purely intellectual constructs of discrete art historical data in works and artists' lives resting beyond them, just to be subsequently deployed as 'neutral' mapping constructs. These sorts of position underly the institutional practice of defining 'modern Asian art' by many modern artists and specifically many modern curators and critics since the 1950s. As such they are linked to the functions of those institutions which define them and-if it is not premature to make the Foucauldian extension-to regimes of practice which function in a broader sense as discourses of knowledge above and beyond any particular institution which may support them. Indeed if there were no institutions whose

archivists and museum administrators dissected, discussed and debated the issue of how to (and why) document contemporary Asian art. The international workshop entitled 'Archiving the Contemporary: Documenting Asian Art, Today, Yesterday and Tomorrow' brought together art professionals from Europe, Asia, Australia and America to respond to the urgent need not only to document the production and exhibition of contemporary Asian art, but also to create sustainable methods and institutions to preserve and maintain artists' work. Indeed, as contemporary Asian artists proliferate, produce and exhibit in ever-increasing numbers, the lack of serious research institutions collecting the massive amount of material emanating from within and outside of Asia is proving to be a problem. In this brief report, rather than summarize the content of each and every presentation, I would like to highlight the key points that were made from the point of view of a person who has researched an area of contemporary Asian art (Vietnam) for fifteen years, and then raise some questions about what can be done to remedy the situation. The title of this report comes from Jacques Derrida's own musings on the process of archiving and the laws of recording.[1] In this global era, the race to register, catalogue and sort out information is consistently matched by the drive to become informed, to read, to seek, sort and navigate through the maze of knowledge available to us through the internet, air travel and satellite dishes. To 'google' has become a verb, a search engine is a tool, and virtual journals and archives have become increasingly commonplace. As information devices proliferate, the challenge facing archivists is also matched by the challenge facing researchers in retrieving information. Although the workshop emphasized the creation of archives and the advent of new technology in helping to store and classify archival material, the re-conceptualization of the whole idea of an archive in the era of cyberspace was as important to researchers and curators alike in terms of finding new ways to conduct research and find information about individual artists. In the wide and varied geo-cultural space of Asia, the challenges of conducting research and documenting artists' works, I would say, is even greater. What to make of places like Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam where wars, politics and ethnic conflict destroyed books, censored exhibitions, and where record keeping was seen as potentially dangerous to artists? What about the Cultural Revolution in China or other great events in the twentieth century that forced artists to work underground? How do we begin to document these events, let alone research them? As Ly Daravuth (Director of Reyum in Phnom Penh) suggested at the workshop: How do we document the undocumented? Or, I would add, the undocumentable? This question is not just a problem that art professionals face in dealing with Asian art, but it also calls on museums, art researchers, curators and artists in Asia alike to be as creative, flexible, open and broad in their definitions of art as possible. Asian artists of the twentieth century have become accustomed to creatively challenging perceptions about art perhaps in reaction to the fragile notion of history. Unconventional forms of art leave unconventional traces. Researchers need to seek out documentation. Documentation makes the work visible, real, but sometimes the document needs to be created. The workshop did an excellent job of bridging hemispheres and linking the prevalent historical notions of archives in Europe with the imaginative ways in which art and archives appear in Asia. From my point of me, over the course of three days, the workshop saw the notion of archive evolve from an institution, with a capital I, that stores paper material documents, letters, notebooks and gallery accounts in a library-like arrangement that lists authors, titles and works, to a virtual space where artists lives and works are displayed like a journal, a personal memory bank, a record of time passing, and where various ephemeral events can be re-enacted and

Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 2018