The Third Avant-garde: Messages of Discontent (peer-reviewed) (original) (raw)
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The Third Avant-garde: contemporary art from Southeast Asia recalling tradition
The Third Avant-garde: contemporary art from Southeast Asia recalling tradition, 2018
The Third Avant-garde investigates radical art manifestations in Southeast Asia, which took place around the mid-1980s when postmodernism started to gain force in the region. It proposes that the advent of postmodernism in Southeast Asia is anchored in the materiality of traditional arts, an aspect that renders it different from its Western equivalent. The dissertation distinguishes two sets of postmodern manifestations: first, practices that use traditions in a celebratory way, and second, a set of works that use traditional arts radically. This study proposes that the second possibility manifests a double dismantle—first, against local patronizing forces that were enforcing artists to practice academic art and Western media (such as painting and sculpture), and second, a distancing attitude from Western art intelligentsia, who acted as ‘owners of the discourse’, and regarded ‘non-Western’ practitioners as followers rather than as trendsetters. For this investigation, the discipline of anthropology was called in, as was the art historical category of the avant-garde. The two approaches combined reveal how contemporary art from Southeast Asia that reprocesses traditional arts can be regarded as avant-garde. These gestures are novel, and result from practicing art in a certain location, and which is bound to a specific socio-political context. Keywords for Library Repository Avant-garde Tradition Southeast Asia Art History Anthropology Postmodernism Agency Multi-temporality
Negotiating Change in Recent Southeast Asian Art
Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 2018
2018 ‘Negotiating Change in recent Southeast Asian Art’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, vol.2, no.1 March. Preceded by a short disquisition on what is the "Asian" and the "Southeast Asian", I go on to examine the works of artists F.X. Harsono, Dacchi Dang and Dinh Q. Lê, historicising their work in relation to their predecessors including Sudjojono and Nguyen Tu Nghiem, as well as mentioning their peers Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Roberto Bulatao Feleo. I examine what unites these disparate practices in their nimble negotiation of personal and collective identities and histories, and discuss the insertion of a notion of resistance to political power or ideology into their artistic practice. Southeast Asian Regional Identity This article considers the works of artists F.X. Harsono, Dacchi Dang and Dinh Q Lê, historicising their work in relation to their predecessors, including Sudjojono and Nguyen Tu Nghiem, as well as their peers. What unites these disparate practices, in my analysis, is their nimble negotiation of personal and collective identities and histories, and their insertion of a notion of resistance to political power or ideology, into their artistic practice.
Modern Asian Art: its construction and reception
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
An Asian Avant-garde: a Lexicon of Asian Modernity
Globalizing Architecture: Flows & Disruptions (Washington DC: ACSA Press), 2014
At the heart of an argument for local modernism is an aesthetic and cultural impulse. Like Colin St John Wilson, Asian architect-theorist William S.W. Lim resurrects modernity as an architectural and cultural impetus for change by referring to a state of incompletion. The framework adopted for avant-garde positions is useful in teasing out the work of architects who operate on the thresholds. In the case of Lim, it is important to turn to his writings and a full lexicon of terms developed by him over the past five decades, rather than the obvious accomplishments of his architectural practice. Lim’s stance as a theorist-provocateur proves far more nuanced and influential, and this short analysis aims to illuminate a number of these avant-garde positions in the formation of Asian modernism.
2019
Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between “the West” and “Asia,” the authors of this volume re-examine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in this collection tackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production. By doing so, Beyond Imperial Aesthetics illuminates the aesthetic underside of critical theory to uncover alternative forms of political life in East Asia.
The Substation, Singapore, 2020
On Southeast Asian art's modern-to-contemporary shift: argues a distinctive Southeast Asian contemporary art methodology whereby public space and intangibles (money, national anthems, history, so on) are co-opted to engage audiences on social issues. Analysing seminal Southeast art from the 1970s onwards, author shows how these strategies emerged and persisted from contextual necessity, and are fundamental to Southeast Asian art's transition to contemporary modes.
Looking Out : How Queer Translates in Southeast Asian Contemporary Art
2015
1. Contemporary art in Southeast Asian has recently begun to come into focus as a field of scholarship, with discourse derived from criticism and curated exhibitions, amongst other sources, that explore the art of recent decades on its own contextual terrain.[1] Emerging from the study of art from the 1970s is an understanding of an oeuvre informed by and centring on social conditions, even as the notion of regional art has expanded in terms of geography. Politics, history, individualversus-state relationships, and the tense interplay of personal, group and national identities are examined critically by artists throughout the region. Indeed, visual practice and identity have been closely associated in Southeast Asia’s nation-building strategies as art is engaged as a driver of individual empowerment and social change in order to oppose authoritarian states that see social pluralism as threatening.[2] But in Southeast Asia, unlike European and American contexts, civil society is imma...
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.