Southeast Asia: Art History, Art Today
Patrick D. Flores
October 11, 2012
Consider the complexity of the category
“Southeast Asia” as a kind of theater. On one level, it is a stage on which a
great tradition is idealized, the spectacle of a storied past juxtaposed with
the speed and density of current urban life. The rubric also once embodied a
theater of operations for various 19th- and 20th-century imperialisms, in which
the empires of Europe and America extended their dominions across the world.
One might think of it too as a present-day platform for both the marketing of
goods and the migration of people and things.
Southeast Asia is also a specific locale or
region within Asia, the latter part of its name being the main coordinate. This
“southeast” is a distinct category, not merely an allusion to traces of the
great traditions of India and China, or the spiritual legacies of Hinduism and
Buddhism. Southeast Asia is neither India nor China—and certainly not the
West—but manifests significant inheritances from them, as may be seen in the
monuments of Angkor in Cambodia, Borobudur in Indonesia, Ayutthaya in Siam (now
Thailand), and the colonial churches of the Philippines.
Southeast Asia may further be regarded as a
geopolitical field, the scene of colonial expansion by the Portuguese in
Eastern Timor; the British in Malaya, Burma, and Northern Borneo; the Dutch in
Indonesia; the Spanish and Americans in the Philippines; and the French in
Indochina (Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos), with Siam as a buffer state. In an
earlier time, the region was vaster, encompassing parts of China, India, and
the Pacific. Southeast Asia may also be seen as a place where religions such as
Christianity and Islam have undergone localization, exemplified by the only
Catholic nation in Asia, the Philippines, and the world’s most populous Islamic
country, Indonesia. Links may be drawn from this colonial phenomenon to events
ranging from the Cold War era that began in the late forties to the
post-independence period, which spanned the rise of authoritarian states and
the struggle for representation and justice, through the 1990s; the Vietnam
War; the Asian financial crisis of 1997; and increasing terror and
counter-terror operations after 9/11. The establishment of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 clarified the status of Southeast Asia
as a geopolitical, not merely geographical, category—a distinction that remains
in place. Finally, Southeast Asia may be traced to a deeper Austronesian
history.
When considering the many contingencies of
Southeast Asian art history and its contemporary articulations, it is worth
pondering a line from Malaysian artist and curator Redza Piyadasa’s intermedia
work Entry Points (1978), which consists of a text inscribed on
the surface of a painting, in relation to an actual work of art. According to
the piece: “Art works never exist in time; they have entry points.” To replace
presence with trajectory leads us to think about how the category “Southeast
Asia” might figure in the mercurial logic of art history, a discipline that
emerged coincidentally with the birth of the museum and a certain phase of
capitalism. In Piyadasa’s scheme, it seems that art takes a nonlinear route,
taking place out of time, slipping past edges and limits, insinuating itself
into whatever discursive space renders it current or instills it with value.
What might we identify as some of the
“entry points” to which Piyadasa refers? First, there is the idea of the
modernity of art in Asia. This theme has preoccupied the Australian art
historian John Clark, who has written an extensive survey of Asian modern art
as well as comparative studies of contemporary phenomena such as regional
biennials, or the relations between modernities in Thailand and China. His
concept of the “worlding of the
Asian modern” (my italics) is instructive to the degree that it maps the histories
of Asia’s diverse art worlds, offering typologies, paradigms, and tendencies in
the mediation of the translocal. Clark’s ventures move beyond national art
histories, which tend to bypass living interactions in favor of national
imaginaries, but they are keenly attentive to local knowledge. He defines
worlding as a process that “implies a coherence other than that provided by
internal discourses: it posits an outside, and this depends on how the nature
and extent of the outside were reciprocally conceived.”1
The second entry point is the set of signs
that reveal the transfer of self-consciousness in Southeast Asian art and image
production. This includes the signature that validates the identity of an
artist and his or her claim on the work of art as a distinct category involving
the criteria of talent, quality, and social significance. This was observable
in the first time that Philippine engravers (Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay and
Francisco Suarez) signed their names on the maps they made in the 18th century,
and in the identifying mark stamped on pictures taken by a Javanese
photographer (Kassian Cephas) working for the sultan of Jogjakarta in the 19th century.
Allied with the signature are both the artist’s innate skill and the ability
derived from training through apprenticeship or art-school education. One such
ability was the kind of mastery of perspective discernible in early drawing
manuals from Manila (Elementos de
Perspectiva in 1828) and a midwifery book (Treatise on Midwifery in 1842) from Bangkok.
A third entry point is the face, a
representation of the self and its sense of belonging to the world. The
changing treatment of the face is concretized by the way in which Thai King
Mongkut (1851–1868) defied the Buddhist interdiction of reproduction and
allowed himself to be photographed so that his image could be disseminated to
the world. This rupture catalyzed a more fulsome modernity in the efforts of
his son Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), who invited Italian artists to Thailand to
adorn the country with art. Portraiture, therefore, was a cogent instance of
modernity, as evidenced in the self-portraits of two of Southeast Asia’s most
highly accomplished artists in the 19th century, Indonesian Raden Saleh and
Filipino Juan Luna, as well as in group portraits that prefigured the nation as
a filial system or network of affinities.
Together with the face, the historic event
as a subject for art is also a significant entry point, letting the artist act
critically in at once recording and offering comment—either allegorically, as
in the 1821 “Basi Revolt” series by Philippine painter Esteban Villanueva, or
politically, as in The Arrest of
Diponegoro (1857) by Saleh (who, incidentally, was the first major
Asian artist to exhibit at a European salon, in Amsterdam in 1834 and in Paris
in 1847). Related to this as a further entry point or index is the notion of
movement beyond locality, an exposure to others within a global setting of the
kind referenced by such instances of the universal expositions of art and
culture as Luna’s receipt of a gold medal for his painting Spoliarium in Madrid in 1884, or
the appearance of a Cambodian temple in Paris in 1900.
Tradition is a way in too. What are the
ties binding the modernity of art in Southeast Asia to a past, to an authentic
“precolonial” or “premodern”—or alternatively “civilizational” or
“ancient”—origin? The eminent scholar T. K. Sabapathy, who lives and works in Singapore,
dwells on how art historiography may be shaped by a strategically non-Western
epistemology. Sabapathy probes this problem through the oft-cited texts History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1957)
by Ananda Coomaraswamy and The
Indianized States of Southeast Asia(1968) by George Coedes. His main point
is that Southeast Asia gains the privilege of identity through India; he even calls the
region “Farther India.” Coedes for his part would reduce Southeast Asia to the
process of Indianization or Sanskritization, prompting Sabapathy to argue that
he “has imposed a programmatic design of Indian influence onto Southeast Asia.
. . . tantamount to propounding a colonial doctrine.”2 Here,
the true tradition is Indian, co-opting the kunstwollen of
the Southeast Asian, as may be intuited in the interpretation of the image of
Harihara (late 7th–early 8th century) from Prasat Andet in Cambodia.
Coomaraswamy describes the latter in terms of its diffusion of Pallava art of
the same period in India, not in terms of its peculiar translocal form.
This burden of context in Southeast Asian
art history leads us to Stanley J. O’Connor’s essay “Art Critics, Connoisseurs,
and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A Study in Cross-Cultural
Art Theory” (1983), in which he speaks of a mode of being and origin. Looking
at Southeast Asian ceramics, O’Connor marks the origin of an aesthetic that,
according to him, “seems to lead not to some special province reserved for an
affective response to privileged objects, but is instead rooted in social
customs concerning death and a speculative investigation into the nature and
destiny of the soul.”3 What
we see here is a turn to the ethnographic and the affective in the discussion
of art as well as the intimate connections between art and ethnology,
imagination and origin. As a pioneering mentor of scholars in the field,
O’Connor represents what may be characterized as the Cornell school in the
history of art in Southeast Asia. From this school came such influential names
as Claire Holt, Nora Taylor, Astri Wright, and Apinan Poshyananda. Taylor in
particular elaborates on this methodology in her recent book on Vietnamese art,
which takes a decidedly ethnographic approach in the writing of what may
already be a tenuous enterprise of art history.4
The final entry point is the consolidation
of art in Southeast Asia as a corpus, collected by museums, traded in the
market, historicized by discourse, subjected to connoisseurship, and studied in
schools. In this regard, survey and thematic exhibitions, biennials,
conferences, and publications testify to the body of work, which was
predominantly generated by certain centers such as Brisbane through the
Asia-Pacific Triennial, Fukuoka through the Asian Art Show and later the
Triennial, Singapore through its biennial (the first of its kind in the area),
and Tokyo through the Japan Foundation. That said, ASEAN’s initiatives to
convene art and specialists and develop regional discourse must be acknowledged.
The region’s grandest museum project, the National Art Gallery, Singapore
(slated to open in 2015), also has a role to play. But with such gains come
multiple pressures on the practice of Southeast Asian art history.
The entry points discussed here may be
regarded as tangential to the Southeast Asian contemporary, which gathers its
lineage from a nuanced history of relationships with the West and its systems
of artistic knowledge. Mediations of the modern and its critical appropriation
reside at the core of this contemporary condition. The process of belonging to
it, resisting it, or transforming it constitutes a significant aspect of art
making, and has yielded a body of works, texts, and practices. Another impulse
might be that of opposition to critique, an attitude that expresses a certain
comfort with the world and its relocations and dispersals; it is playful,
performative, unafraid of the foreign, and unburdened by the anxiety of
influence. The interplay of these tendencies may yet shape Southeast Asia as a
postcolonial, contemporary, and global artistic terrain, animated by the
integrities and idiosyncrasies of a region known for its cogent thought and
histories of struggle.
In terms of aesthetic practice, Southeast
Asian contemporary art also turns on multiple pivots. First, we must consider
its fraught tie with the image, whose potency stems from its promise of
salvation and relationship with authority. Whether religious or monarchical,
imbricated in dictatorships or capitalist regimes, the image is a central
“structure of feeling” that invites resistance by way of parody, iconoclasm,
scatology, and instructive social commentary. That said, the devotional or
heretical image appears open to exploitation by a market that peddles
“realism,” resulting in a mannerist approach to the figure and image.
Second, the Southeast Asian contemporary
exhibits a strong sense of the relational, advancing a spirited argument
against the fragmentation wrought by forces such as a patrimonial state
preoccupied with development and nation building, democracy and paternalism.
The search for a respite from this relentless instrumentalization of the “mass”
has sparked the formation of artist-initiated spaces and the emergence of the
artist-curator-historian. It also has fostered efforts in the fields of
performance, activism, and collaborative endeavors among dispossessed
communities from cities to rural villages—and, in the case of the Philippines, in
the context of an in-progress socialist revolution.
Finally, there is an instinct to re-purpose
the hybrid impedimenta of globalization and further intensify an already
ebullient post-colonialist drive. The effect is a vibrant, even baroque
challenge to the totality of the dominant order that lies somewhere between
ethnographic surrealism and everyday life.
Patrick D. Flores is an art historian and curator
based in Manila.
1. John
Clark, “The Worlding of
the Asian Modern” (paper, World and World-Making in Art Conference, Australian
National University, Canberra, 2011).
2. T. K.
Sabapathy, “Developing
Regionalist Perspectives in Southeast Asian Art Historiography,” in The
Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane: Queensland
Art Gallery, 1996), p. 16.
3. Stanley
J. O’Connor, “Art
Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A
Study in Cross-Cultural Art Theory,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies14,
no. 2 (September 1983), p. 408.
4. Nora
Taylor, Painters in
Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Singapore: National University of
Singapore, 2009). Taylor also co-edited with Boris Ly the anthology Modern and
Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2012).
