077

Chapter1

Singapore, is a geographic hub linking trade
between Europe and Asia, and it is the economic
center of the Nanyang islands . In terms of art it
has the attributes of a tropical atmosphere and acomplex ethnic consciousness. These attributes
are especially excellent factors in the exchange ofculture between East and West and the creation of
Nanyang art .... [Our purpose) is nothing less than to
use these especially excellent factors to promoteartistic exchanges between East and West, in orderto develop a new art that is characteristic of the
Nanyang region." Ql!He cites four points as the excellent factors inherent to Singapore: 1) its role as a hub
in East-West trade; 2) its position as the economic
center of the Nanyang islands; 3) its tropical atmosphere; and 4) its multicultural ethnic consciousness.
In 1949, the year before Lim made this statement, the Communist regime had taken over China,
and the overseas Chinese who had made their way
to Nanyang in order to escape the Sino-Japanese
War and the Chinese Civil War no longer had any
home to which they could return . On the other hand,with new countries establishing independence andembarking on new frameworks of nation buildingin Southeast Asia after the Japanese defeat in
World War II, Singapore and British Malaya would
repeatedly flirt with each other and with their neighboring territories in their search for a new nationalframework. ( Considerthe Federationof Malaya's
independencein 1957;the British granting Singapore
self-government in 1959;the merger of Singapore,Sabah
and Sarawakinto the Federationof Malaysiain 1963;
Singapore'sseparationand independencein 1965... )Under these conditions, the Nanyang Chinese
who originally saw themselves as belonging to theChinese sphere of culture came to discover a new"home" for themselves within the framework of
Nanyang . That is, they had to find their own identity
in Nanyang. There was a need to discover themselves
within the Chinese-barbarian hierarchy, or rather
to seek a national identity in the "savage other" of
Nanyang. In essence, there were multiple, contradictory aspects to the Bali field trip, as the four leading
artists were searching for themselves, and a newhome, even as they sought out the savage other .
As already mentioned, Cheong Sao Pieng went
to Sabah and Sarawak after the Bali trip. These areas,
which are now East Malaysia, would potentially havebeen part of the same country as Singapore. Evenas they were the savage other, they were also partof a shared identity for the citizens of the would-be
nation-state of the Federation of Malaysia. Cheongmust have felt a need to reposition the exotic andsensual other as being part of the "nation," andultimately he made work that was more subjective
and formalistic than that of Gauguin.
He brilliantly turned into painting the paradoxof finding the image of oneself in that of the other.
After he completed the highly finished paintings
mentioned above, /ban Girls and Balinese Girls,
Cheong would borrow from Gauguin to produce theimpressionistic works Pair of Women on the Beach(1955,NationalArt Galleryof Malaysia~ ) and TropicalLife (1959,NationalArt Galleryof Malaysia~ ). With its
pair of half-naked women on the beach, the former
is in the Gauguin style, as is made clear by the placement of a wooden bowl of bananas in the lower left
foreground of the picture, just as in la Grana Maria.
Here it appears that, rather than a scene from Bali,
Cheong was attempting to create an archetypical"Nanyang" landscape on the basis of his travels
to Bali and East Malaysia, but also one that did notbelong to any place in particular. The compositionof Tropical Life features an elongated arrangementof figures, so that at first glance the work recalls
Gauguin's Where Do We Come From. But instead of
the philosophical questions and symbolic languageof Gauguin, one senses here Cheong's warm gaze
directed toward fellow nationals, as opposed to one
that is exoticizing or sexualizing or savage.
Now we have examined the reception of
Gauguin in Southeast Asian modern art throughsome of its definitive works. There was a wideranging reception of Gauguin across all levels, fromthemes and style to symbolism . What should be
added here is that for the pioneering generation ofa nascent Southeast Asian modern art, the South
Seas painted by Gauguin provided the model andthe sanction of Western art for the use of familiar
customs and scenes in their own paintings, and it
was also a guarantee that such paintings would be
accepted into the institutional framework of "art ."This reception of Gauguin was an extensionof the construct that put the painter on the side ofcivilization and turned the subject into a savage
other. But behind this reproduction of the otherwas the nationalistic demand for the formation of anational identity and the creation of a national culture amid aspirations to cast off the colonial systemand establish a new multiethnic and multicultural
nation-state. The artists working in this context had
to overcome the image of the exotic and sensual
woman catering to foreigners' taste, and Gauguin's
formative approach, which was the paradigm of art
for them, provided an ideal mode for that purpose.
That is, the inherent problems and expressionof Southeast Asian modern art can be found in theway that the image of other and self were indivisibly
linked, and the Gauguin-inspired field trip in searchof the "savage" was part and parcel of the discoveryof the "nation" in the formation process of thenation-state.

fig.17
fig.16
Cheong Soo Pieng, /ban Girls, 1953,
Collection Shell Singapore (from Nanyang
1950--65, 2002).

fig.17
Cheong Sao Pieng, Balinese Girls, 1954,
Collection Shell Singapore (from Nanyang
1950--65, 2002).

fig.18

fig.18Cheong Soo Pieng, Pair of Women on the
Beach, 1959, Collection National Art Gallery,
Malaysia (from The Birth of Modern Art inSoutheast Asia, 1997).

fig.19Cheong Soo Pieng, Tropical Ufe, 1959,
Collection National Art Gallery, Malaysia(from The Birth of Modern Art in Southeast
Asia, 1997).

fig.192010

fig.16The Other as ~LostPure Self': Gauguinismin SoutheastAsian Art

071

ArtStudies_03

ShaplngtheHlatoryofArt
In SoutheutAala

PostcolonialPerils:
Art and NationalImpossibilities
Patrick D.Flores
Seep. 5 for author bio.

The essay tries to grasp the complexity of art as amechanism or modality through which the nation isrendered. It veers away from the tendency to regard art
merely as a derivation or a function of its historical orpolitical context; or the translation of the latter in aesthetic
form. It rather argues that art, with its aspirations toautonomy and at the same time its sensitivity to the socialworld around it, is pushed and pulled by interests that
expect its agency to perform identification with "culture"and "society" in a certain way. In the milieu of Southeast
Asia, the practice of art is necessarily Western, the notion
having been formed in the West. But inevitably it is also
postcolonial, transforming the Western in complicatedways. In the same impulse, the non-Western, or the
local or the colonial, is thoroughly mediated as well. The
mediation may yield hybridity as opposed to civilization.
The essay stresses, however, that the binary between
hybridity and civilization must be transcended . It is in thisdesire to transcend that three concepts are foregrounded.
These concepts are intimacy, improvisation and suffering,and they reference the postcolonial procedure to
surmount the local-foreign duality so that a more intricate
relationship can be made to play out between forces in a
postcolonial setting. Art as constitutive of the postcolony
is not reduced to merely representing the afterlife of thecolony that is the nation, which is always burdened byan elusive identity. It is instead seen as co-producing,
improvising and suffering the foreign with which it
has become so intimate that it is able to offer reflexive
representation of difference through the very means ofcolonial tutelage.
[PF]

Source: Originally published as"Post-colonial perils : art and national
impossibilities" in World An 1. no.1
(March 2011): 75-81 .

Chapter1

079

This reflection dwells on how art becomes politically formative in sensing the emancipation of thepostcolony and the longing for the nation in Asia . It
extends this theme to discuss how such modernity
refunctions what is presumed to be a non-Western
tradition and consequently to intimate the foreign
and the global in crafting contingent identifications. This sensing may elude the conventional
wisdom of "aesthetics"as the coveted techniqueof materializing the "word" through "art," whichis possessed in the long term by the state and its
culture as a measure of autonomy. This sensing ishighly mediated in social practice, embedded in thedesire for representation, and may be constantly
incipient, never settling, always stirred by boththe loss of authenticity and the resolve of the self
to prevail among others. Surely, in the schema of"world art," the postcolonial is more than a critique:
it is an entitlement to a different sensitivity to what
is material.
In colonial times in Southeast Asia in the
19th century, two paintings evoked a conditionof revision. In 1857, the Indonesian Raden Saleh(c.1811-1880)painted The Arrest of Diponegoro(1857),not to record the capture of national hero
Pangeran Diponegoro, a prince of Yogyakarta who
rebelled against his family and Dutch benefactors,
but to rectify the depiction in Nicolaas Pieneman's
Subjugation of Diponegoro (1830),in which thedissident figure is cast in a tableau of humiliating
submission. Diponegoro waged a war from 1825
to 1830, styling himself as an Islamic stalwart
and a revivalist of authentic Javanese values; hisapprehension by General Hendrik Merkus de Kock
was a tribute to Dutch control over the archipelagothat commenced in 1602. A scholar comments that
"Saleh's Diponegoro is not a subjugated warrior, heis a cheated person, a victim of Dutch treachery"
and that the painting "is a caricature, a bittercommentary on Dutch colonial rule." Ql Here, theartist reciprocates the disappearance of dignity inthe official commemoration with defacement, with
Diponegoro's captors slightly disfigured and hishead held high .
In 1884, a gold medal was conferred upon
the Filipino Juan Luna (1857-1899)at the Madrid
Exposition for his Spo/iarium, a historical canvas
that portrays the scene at the chamber in the
Roman Colosseum where dead or dying gladiators
are despoiled. Luna's fellow expatriates in Europe
cherished this triumph of a native subject being
acknowledged in Spain through his achievement inart, and at the same time discerned in the painting
an allegory of the suffering of the Philippines under
Spain, which encroached on the islands in 1521. It
was a critique that enabled them to prefigure thecolony elsewhere and the postcolonial as universal:
in Rome, the former master of Spain that was theerstwhile Hispania, and in the painter-patriot Luna,
who was hailed in the inflated oratory of his confreres as a genius who "knows no country ." ~2011

In these instances, art renders the politicalthrough the reflexivity of representation . It demonstrates the self in history, resisting its location inhegemonic historiography . It also ensures thatalterity can be transcended through sheer masteryof the civilizing narrative . Not only is the world on
hand through art, it altogether finds an exceptional
form in the European academy .
The modality of staging this history is central.
The role of artist-geniuses such as Saleh andLuna is resonant, and their acumen to exceed thedemands of naturalist documentation is exemplary.
We glean an equivalent articulation in the career of
the autodidact aristocratic Indian painter Raja Ravi
Varma (1848-1906),whose oeuvre and life animatedaspirations for a nation beyond the British Empire,
which possessed India in 1757.An academic painterwith no formal training, he was sought by both the
Raj and the Maharajas, and reconfigured Victoriansalon protocols to ratify an Indian past of epics
and classics as well as of princely courts . Reared
in a constellation of inspirations, from European
Orientalism to folk theater, he would conjure a prospect of an essential India as a sovereign polity acrossits vastly discrepant ethnic terrain . This imaginary
was to be condensed in the image of a Galaxy ofMusicians (c.1889),where a "national/cultural synthesis" is projected onto a mother nation of composite
feminine types: "a group of eleven oriental women
representing different regions of India (including
muslim nairtamil parsianglo-indianwomen) makes up aperfect anthropological vignette ." ~There are many strains in this scheme of art
and nation as a result of the shift from colony topostcolony in Southeast Asia, with the postcolonial
inscribed as a sign of a national emergence or theconsciousness of the self as opposed to otherness.
Representation, as has been mentioned, unravels as
an artifice of presence, a reality effect, lending itself
well as a testament to facture from which implications about technique, education, talent, value and aheightened awareness of the world and the history
accruing to it could be drawn. To represent and to
be represented is a stake in the inalienable privilege
to make manifest, to appear and materialize, to risk
being exposed, to contrive an image, and ultimately
to dispel belief in the image and to sometimes selfconsciously tear it apart .
In the cases of Saleh, Luna and Varma, thepostcolonial in its discrepant guises aspires to the
Enlightenment project of modernity, of the emancipatory potential from all impediments to humanamelioration. Art-specifically, the aestheticizationof public life and the ritualization of collectivity
in national melodramas of bi/dung, as well as theexercise of critique and reflexivity in contemporary
expression-feeds into a representational disposition
or structure of feeling. The latter may well be the very
politic of art and its immanent coloniality . This exhibitionary aesthetic leads us to a modality of theorizingon the postcolonial that may be able to veer away

PostcolonlalPertla: Art and NationalImpossibilities

01
Werner Krauss, "First Steps to Modernity:
The Javanese Painter Raden Saleh(c.1811-1880);' inEyeoftheBeholder
ReceptJOn,Audience, and Practice ofModern Asian Art, ed. John Clark et al.
(Sydney: Wild Peony, 2006), 48.

02
Patrick D. Flores. "'Nature Intervenes in
Strokes·: Sensing the End of the Colony
and the Origin of the Aesthetic," Filozofskl
Vestnik 28. no. 2 (2007): 235-251.

03
Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism:
Essays on Contemporary Cultural PractJcein India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 168

Shaping the History of Art
In SoutheutAsia

04

Nestor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures:
Strategies for Entering and Leaving
Modem,ty(Mmneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), 209.

05
Ibid.

06
Achille Mbembe. "Provisional Notes on
the Postcolony," Africa: Journal of thelnternatJonal African Institute 62, no.1: 3.

07
lbid.,29.

08
Ibid.

09
Fenelia Cannell, Power and Intimacy m
the ChristJan Phihppines (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 1999), 209.

080

from the more familiar themes of imitation, diffusion ,syncretism, adaptation and mimicry . The irresistible
trope that this reflection foregrounds at a very
provisional level is intimacy : it inflects the affect ofthe postcolonial in various practices, this sensing of
the world and intuiting its importuning art .
First, the postcolonial reduces the scopeof the national, its unknowable and sometimes
radical particularities, into a finite patrimony.
The Latin American critic Nestor Garcfa Canclini
discusses this through the National Museum of
Anthropology of Mexico, contending that in themuseum, culture assumes a monumental effectthrough the "agglomeration of miniatures," with the"simulated 'infinitude' of the museum" functioning
as a "metaphor of the infinitude of the national
patrimony ... [ and) also of the capacity of theexhibition to include it."~ This alteration between
monumentalization and miniaturization is related
to "linguistic operations dealing with alterity" asthese are '"ritual acts of the 'metabolization of theother,"' making it '"soluble,' digestible, when, in thesame act in which its grandeur is acknowledged, it
is reduced and becomes intimate:· ~ The task of themuseum in national formation, and the typologies it
spawns in the disciplines of fine art and ethnology,
for instance, has been pervasive in postcolonies, as
tellingly traced by the histories of national museums
instituted by colonial administrations that instilled
self-surveillance and self-regulation through an
exhibitionary habitus.
Second, the postcolonial engages in what theAfrican theorist Achille Mbembe calls a "distinctive
style of political improvisation, by a tendency
to excess and lack of proportion as well as bydistinctive ways in which identities are multiplied,transformed and put into circulation." 06 This effects
a banality within the hegemonic relationship, sothat the grotesque and the obscene ultimately
cease to be a sign of ascendancy on the part ofauthority and a gesture of resistance on the part of
the abject, but rather a source of powerlessness forboth. Mbembe argues that while there is agency
to be galvanized in the Bakhtinian moment of thecarnivalesque, this play nourishes an intimacy withpower that encourages "illicit cohabitation" by
virtue of the fact that competing interests sharethe "same living space." He tempers the politics ofhope that postcolonial theory has held out with thescenario of the masses partaking of the "madness
and cloth[ing) themselves in cheap imitations of
power so as to reproduce its epistemology; andwhen, too, power in its own violent quest for
grandeur makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its mainmode of existence ." M This disempowerment resultsin "situations of powerlessness that are the situations of violence par excellence." m!
Third, the postcolonial calibrates an idiom of
suffering through intimacy. In the Catholic cultureof the Philippines, intimacy translates into an internalization of Christ's passion in which the subject

Patrick O.Flores

Art Studies_03

becomes a co-sufferer, an intimate: the self istransformed, as it were, by bearing the same crossof the redeemer . An ethnography of a peninsula
south of Manila is instructive in the way it scansvarious revelations of this intimacy, from customsof bereavement to transvestite beauty pageants toamateur singing competitions . With regard to thelatter, it tries to understand how a contestant sings"Autumn Leaves" with so much sentimentality,
when the loss that is signified in it apparently
makes no immediate sense in the tropics . But theanthropologist reasons that the "idea of loss itself
does; in singing a song, part of whose meaning
escapes one, one evokes, among other losses,
the sadness at not having completely understood,at being excluded in relation to a cultural register
which, if one masters it, can open the doors ofpossibility and change one's life ." ~ For a countryof a million migrants and countless more leaving
every day for work and resettlement, and still others
dreaming of the same chance to depart so that they
may survive and conceive of a future, the nation has
truly become elsewhere.
In these provocative explications of thepostcolonial within a transdisciplinary frame, thepostcolonial navigates between the ludic and themelancholic, a mastery of the colonial code that
admits both idiosyncrasy and wistfulness over thevanishing of the integrity of a local moral world
and an anticipation of another beyond the dispossession of the present. We discern excess anddiminution . On the one hand, there is vulgarity, orat the very least, impropriety; on the other, there issacrifice and selflessness.
A theory of intimacy is challenging, ingrainedin affective practice, in sensing a more robust
dialectic of liberation and independence, in freeingthe "world" and its "art" from the tropes of culture
and representation . It addresses the problematics
of reification and alienation and at the same timeassures the recovery of the self and the otherintimations of the modern promise, belated though
its arrival may be. There is, therefore, a vacillation
here between a return to a perceived non-Western,non-colonial sphere that guarantees only idealization
and an "inclination outward," and an after-empire
discourse, which disrupts the advance of linear history and frustrates a lapse into the primitive. Indeed,something more sanguine must be lying between
civilization and hybridity .
This essay ends with examples from theneo-traditional strain in Japanese art, or nihonga,
which mediated Western -style painting in the early
20th century so that it could converse with a pastin the context of the modern, and later critique thispast and finally critique itself, and inevitably reach
the watershed of reflexivity in the contemporary.
Tsuchida Bakusen's Serving Girl at a Spa (1918)would
hover between what has been identified as mediation and "productive mistranslation," to use Walter
Benjamin's intriguing phrase: "the exotic South-Sea

081

Chapter1

figure within a luxuriant color scheme, and theJapanese bathhouse girl who Bakusen simultaneously inserts from a long Japanese discourse ofvernacular imagery in the European discourse of
exotic plenitude." !Q Japanese contemporary art
would follow this through when it rediscoverednihonga as a lasting force in its will-to-form, attested
to by the works of Matsui Fuyuko and Murakami
Takashi. The latter dares to even assert thatJapanese art is bound to a Superflat aesthetic, whichembraces screen paintings and manga, or Japanesecomics, where "space has turned Super Flat and theeye is but a spectral, anime sign." .!!
Another facet of this neo-traditional procedure
is cut from the angle of post-socialist, diasporicart from China through the work of Shen Jiawei,
formerly a farmer, soldier, border guard andpropaganda painter for Mao's Cultural Revolution(1966-76) . In 1989 Shen migrated to Sydney,
where he painted the mural Third World(2002),
which painstakingly accounts for the faces ofrevolutionaries and potentates in the dated Third

2011

World league, so to speak. This is from an artist
reared in the ways of rendering the abstraction ofideology intimate to the masses through "art forpeople's life," in the parlance of the party; and in
the current incarnation of his practice, he collects
personages of power in a family portrait of sorts. It
recalls the Maoist doctrine of the 1970s that China
should be a vanguard of the developing countries.
It mingles Western oil painting, the totalitarianpersuasions of the mural, and the parody of theswarm of icons of a world of nations, with Mao
pointing his finger at the dead Che Guevara and his
arm clutched by Imelda Marcos, who hoists one
golden shoe from her fabled collection of thousands .
Around them is a motley gathering of phantom
figures, from ldi Amin of Uganda to Pol Pot of
Cambodia to Osama Bin Laden of the "Axis of Evil."
It is part paean, part kitsch, part pre-posterity thathas wrought what may well be failed nation-states,
failed colonialisms, failed nationalisms, and, in fact,a failed international in an era of postcolonies caught
up in global intimacies.

PostcolonlalPerila: Artand NationalImpossibilities

10John Clark , Modern Asian M (Sydney:
Craftsman House & Honolulu : Universityof Hawai 'i Press. 1998). 80 .

,,Azuma Hiroki , "Super Flat Speculation, " inSuperflat, ed. Takashi Murakami (Tokyo:
Madra, 2000). 151.

012

ArtStudies_03

Shaping the History of Art

In SoutheastAsia

In Searchof a LostTotality:
TeachingAsianModernArt(inJapan)This essay is based on a paper that was presented in
English at the international symposium," Locus Redux:
Speaking Across Contexts, Learnings and Negotiations
in Writing and Teaching on Art," held in 2012 at the
Yuchengco Museum in Manila. Kuroda Raiji statesthat art education in Japan focuses on Japanese andEuropean art, and that there are barely any teachers
or students of Asian modern art. He questions how
it is even possible to teach the average person about ,Asian modern art when there are no textbooks
available on the subject in Japanese. He cites a biased
understanding of modern art as an important reason

KurodaRaiji
Kuroda Raiji is an art historian andcurator. He is currently Chief Curator
and Executive Director of Operations
and Management at th e Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum. Exhibitions he
has researched and organized while

for the lack of recognition for Asian modern art inJapan. When modern art was brought to Japan from
Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it wasviewed solely as a technical/stylistic innovation, which

working at the Fukuoka Art Museum(1985-99) and Fukuoka Asian Art
Museum(1999-present)

include thefirst retrospectivesof Kyushu-ha (1988),

Neo-Dadafl99 3 ), and Collective Kumo
(1997), and solo exhibitions of Rasheed

limited its understanding in Japan. He states that inraising awareness of other forms of modernity, suchas "modernity as resistance," it might be possible toappreciate Asian art in the context of social change

Araeen(1993), Lee Bui 120011.Lionel
Wendt 12003} and Long Chinsan 120111.
He also co-curated the 1st Fukuoka
AsianArtTriennale(FT 11999 ).F.T.:--~-----~-(2002}, FT3·(2005). FT4 (2009) and FT5(2014). In 1991 and 1995, he served asCommissioner of the Japanese sectionof th e fif th a nd seven th editions of
the Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh,
respectively. In 1995 he was awarded

J

the Japanese Contemporary Art ,

f
I

·-

2009 - 2014 (grambooks. 2014 1.

~

I

'i .

J

;.

•('

l,

'

in Asia. In Kuroda's assessment, although the elite"modernity as style" and the democratic "modernity as
resistance" exist in parallel in Asian modern art, only the 'former receives all the attention. He argues that this isdue to art critics, historians and curators concentrating
their attention on existing, saleable works that cary 'be discussed in relation to Euro-American history
and thought. But there are practices that have been
overlooked by this art-historical viewpoint . These

J;

Encouragement Award from the Japan

contemporary art, Behind the Globalism:
Sketcheson ContemporaryAsian Art
''

'

l'

• J

Arts Foundation, and in 2013 he wasawarded the Kim Bokjin Prize in Korea. l
His most recent book is a collection'of short essays on Asian modern and

I

',

i)

,

include things like printed matter and murats fromplaces like India and Korea, or even cartoons in popularmagazines. Kuroda says that it is a mistake to disregard
their broad social impact just because they were used
for political aims or not saved for posterity. He statesthat the modernity of Asian art was realized variouslyas technique, as style and as resistance, which heillustrates in a chart. He concludes that it is only when
we can understand the modernity of Asian art as thecomposite of diverse ideas and practices that Asian art
history might finally be able to constitute a part of Asiansocial history.
[KK]

Source: Adapted from a paper presented in English at the international
symposium "Locus Redux : Speaking ,Across Contexts, Learnings and
Negotiations in Writing and Teachingon Art," Yuchengco Museum, Manila,
May 19, 2012 .

, t

083

Chapter1

This paper is mainly based on my knowledge of
Asian modern and contemporary art obtained
through my experience as a curator of the Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum . However , having recently taught
at a university in Fukuoka, .Q! I have gained a newperspective on the current conditions for As ian art
in Japan-a positive sense that it might be possible
for the general audience in Japan to have a better
understanding of modernity in Asian art, and that the
number of students who want to learn about Asianartistic movements outside of Japan might increase
as a result .
The subject of my course at the univers ity
was the history of Asian modern art outside Japan .
Ironically , however , the course title provided by theuniversity was "History of Western Art ," as part ofthe " History of Cultural Representation " courses .
As this exemplifies, many universities in Japando not include the history of Asian modern art intheir curricula. The most common courses on art
history at the college level in Japan are: 1) traditional
Japanese art of the pre-Edo periods, followed bymodern Japanese art of the post-Me iji periods;
2) European art-mainly post-Renaissance Italianart , Flemish art , 19th-century French art, and so on;
and 3) traditional Chinese and Korean art . It comesas no surprise that the last group of courses areoffered far less frequently than the first two, andthat the number of scholars (and, hence,students) of
Asian art, aside from that of East Asia, is minimal.
Compared with the numerous scholars, students
and researchers of Japanese and European art,
the total of those working on Asian art other thanthat of Japan is extremely small. In fact, other than
Kyushu University's Ushirosh6ji Masahiro, who
was previously chief curator of the Fukuoka AsianArt Museum, there is hardly anyone who currently
teaches Asian modern art .
As a result of this absence of Asian modern art
in Japan's education system, there are no Japaneselanguage textbooks available for students. A few
books on Chinese and Korean modern art history
have finally been published in Japan recently , ~ butthere are none on Southeast and South Asian art. Art
museums in Japan have published catalogues pertaining to exhibitions of modern art from Southeast
Asia, East Asia, Vietnam and Mongolia, ~ and theJapan Foundation has also published exhibition
catalogues, such as Cubism in Asia,~ which areachievements of valuable inter-Asian collaborative
research. However, these catalogues are neither onsale at bookshops nor printed in large quantities,
meaning they are available only at the specific museums that published them and a limited number oflibraries . Publications on Asian modern art in English
include those by the University of Sydney's John
Clark, !!!! numerous anthologies on a diverse rangeof regions and periods in the history of Asian art,and catalogues for exhibitions that cover inter-Asian

2012

modern art, such as " Realism in Asian Art ,".Q§orga nized by the Singapore Art Museum and the National
Museum of Contemporar y Art , Korea, which are all
instructive in gaining a wid e knowledge of Asianart . But again, these are not easily accessible forstudents. Then, how can museums in Japanincluding the Fukuoka As ian Art Museum - teach
Asian modern art to a general public who cannot
read English (or other Asian languages)or get hold of
these publications?

21TheAbs~eof ''AsianModem Art"inJa~an- Whf?
These problems in teach ing /learning Asianmodern art result from the Japan-Europe dualism
pervading the Japanese univers ity pedagogy of art ,leaving no room for "Asian modern art " to enter the
curriculum . Another facto r in the lack of educationof Asian modern art , aside fr om that of Japan, isthe scarce opportunities t he Japanese audience
have to encounter the imp ortant achievements
of modern art from other parts of Asia . That is tosay, although there has been a recent increase in
exhibitions of Asian contemporary art, the numberof exhibitions of As ian modern art is st ill significantly
fewer. Unfamiliar ity with Asian modern art is further
exacerbated by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum's
location : the very museum wh ich has a permanent
display of Asian modern art is located on the periph ery of Japan . A more gene ral reason for the recent
unpopularity of Asian art in Japanese society could
also be the introvers ive (and sometimes nationalistic
as well) tendency of the yo unger generations, assuggested by the recent phenomenon in which 70
percent of the populace in t heir 20s are reportedly
satisfied with their current lives- with a correspond ing decrease in the numbe r of Japanese students
seeking to enroll in univers ities abroad . If this istrue , it would mean that members of the younger
generat ions are satisfied w ith their own preoccupa tions based on the biased information they find on
the Internet, and are comp lacently enclosed within
their own environments, w hich consist solely of
their circles of friends and family members. They
do not dare to face the harsh realities of other Asiansocieties or accept the historical responsibilities of
their nation .
A more conceptual reason that is of equal
importance may be the biased understandingof modern art in Japan . As is the case with othercountries in Asia, modernism in Japanese art has
mostly been understood as a technical and stylistic
innovation imported from Europe in the late 19thand early 20th centuries . However , the very spirit ofmodernity originally includ ed connotations of thequest for emancipation fro m feudalism , dictator ship, colonialism and patria rchy. The exploration of
freedom and equality as a human right is a collective
effort in European and non-European cultures alike.
Despite this , a narrow and limited understanding

In S.archof alost:Totalfty. Teaching Asian Modern Art (In Japan )01
SeonanGakuon University. September
2011 through January 2012.

02
KornYoung-na, K1mkoku kinda, bljutsu nohyaku nen IA Hundred Years of Korean
Modem Art). trans. Kanbayash,
Tsunem,chi (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2011);
K,m Hyeshin, Kankoku k1ndai biji.Jtsu
kenkyu: Shokummchi ki Chosen bJJutsu
tenrankai miru ibunka shihai to bunka
hyosho lStudy onKorean Modem Art:
Domination of Other Cultures and Cultural
Representations Seen in the Chosun Art
Competition Dunng the Colonial Penod)(Tokyo: Brucke, 2005); Lu Weirong,
Chugoku kinda, b,jtsu to N!hon [Chinese
Modem Art and Japan) (Tokyo: Akashi
Shoten, 2007); Lu Weirong, Chugoku
kmdai bljutsushi ron [ Essays on Chinese
Modem Art)(Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2010).

m

03
For East Asian art, see Shizuoka
Prefectural Museum of Art, ed., 01/
Pamtmg m the [sic] East Asia.·Awakening
and Development (Shizuoka: Shizuoka
Prefectural Museum of Art, 1999);
Rawanchaikul Toshiko and Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum, ed., China Dream:
Another Flow of Chinese Modem Art(Fukuoka: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum,2004); Rawanchaikul Toshiko andFukuoka Asian Art Museum, ed., Toward
the Modernity: Images of Self & Other in
East Asian Art Competroons (Fukuoka:
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum et al., 2014).
For Southeast Asian art, see Furuichi
Yasuko and Nakamoto Kazumi, ed , AsianModernism. DNerse Development inlndones,a, the Ph1hppmes,and Thailand(Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center,
1995);Ush1rosh6j1Masah1ro and Fukuoka
Art Museum, ed., The Birth of Modern Art
m Southeast Asia. Artlsts and Movements(Fukuoka; Fukuoka Art Museum, 1997),
Ushirosh6ji Masah,ro, ed., 50 Years ofModern Vietnamese Art: 1925-75 (Tokyo;
Sankei Newspaper Co., 2005). For other
Asian regions, see Tokyo Station Gallery
and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, ed.,Modern Paintings of Mongolia: Its Origin
up to Today(Tokyo: Sanke, Newspaper
Co., 2002).

04
The National Museum of Modem Art,
Tokyo, and the Japan Foundation, ed.,Cubism m Asia: Unbounded Dialogues(Tokyo: National Museum of Modem Art,
Tokyo/Japan Foundation, 2005).

05
John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu.
University of Hawai'i Press, 1998);and
Asian Modernities. Chinese and Thai Art
Compared, 1980 to 1999 (Sydney: Power
Publications, 2011).

06
Joyce Fan and Kim lnhye, ed.,Realism,n Asian Art (Singapore: National Gallery
Singapore & Gwacheon: National
Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea,

2010)

ShapinglheHlstoryofArt
inSoutheastAsla

07
Ushiroshiiji Masahiro, "Realism as an
Attitude: Asian Art in the 1990s" in The
4thAsianMShowFukuoka,
exh.cat.
(Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1994),

33-38.
08
Oh Yoon, Marketing V:Hell (1981), private
collection.

09
Kim Mikyung, Hanguk ui silhom misul(Experimental Art in Korea) (Seoul: S1gon
Art, 2003).
10

KuroDalaiJee, Nikutai no anakizumu:
1960 nendai mhon bijutsu ni okeru
pafiimansu no chika suimyaku [Anarchyof the Body: Undercurrents of
Performance Art in 1960s Japan] (Tokyo:
grambooks, 2010).
11

Christopher Pinney, "Photos of the Gods~·
The Printed Image and Political Struggle,n India (London: Reaktion Books, 2004),

68-69.
12

Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism:India's Mists and the Avant-Garde 19221947(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 84-90.

Essay13of modernity as a style was born from the elitist
notion shared only among the socially, culturally andeconomically privileged who had the means to study
Western art . However, it is obvious that the kind ofmodernity described above merely constitutes afraction of modernity in Asian art. If we examine twoother modes of modernity-modernity
as technique/technology and modernity as resistance ( including
UshiroshojiMasahiro's"Realismas an Attitude;· see pp.
24-29) QZ-we can expand the notion of Asian art
history to understand it as part of expansive socialtransformation in Asia (see chart).
My thoughts above derive, first, from theJapanese audience's quick dismissal of the masterpieces of Asian modern art as either epigones or
local versions of modern art based on the European
paradigm, with which they are overly familiar ( it mustbe saidthat Western art lovershavethe same tendency
regarding modern Japaneseart, but the Japaneseaudienceis oblivious to this) . Secondly, I think our taskof teaching should not consist only of conveying
knowledge or information from Euro-American
culture, but should also encourage people's awareness that Japanese culture is part of Asian culture .
Forthis, we need a newviewpointthatwill
enable us
to better understand Asian modernity more holistically among neighbors who live in similar social ,historical and cultural situations.

.3j Parallel HistQJ'.¥
The parallelism between modernism as an elitist
style and modernity as democratic resistance isoften found in the history of Asian modern art. It issurprising that modernist oil paintings from the early
1930s in Shanghai, represented by the Storm Society(Jielanshe, active1931-35),were contemporaneous to
the woodcut movement advocated and promoted by
Lu Xun and artists in the same city since 1931.
A more bewildering example is the parallel
between monochrome painting (Dansaekhwa) andPeople's Art (Minjung Misul) in 1980s Korea. OYun
(1946-1986),one of the leading artists of early
People's Art, depicted a monochrome painter as acriminal in hell, standing before a mirror and being
shown the sins of his life. Q!! Likewise, experimental
tendencies in Neo-Dada, Pop Art and performancefrom the late 1960s and early '70s in Korea, which
had been neglected as transitional between lnformel
painting and monochrome painting, have only
recently become a subject of art historical research,
Ql!. with the achievements of that research being displayed in exhibitions . However, it must be noted that
this re-evaluation occurred much later comparedwith People's Art, which has now been recognizedby the more democratized government .
In Japan as well, the minimalist tendency thatcame to be known as Mono-ha (School ofThings),
which emerged in 1968-an iconic year of worldwide
contestation by students and citizens-is now
discussed as an important art movement. However,Kuroda Ralji

084

Art Studies_0J

Mono-ha and other minimalist tendencies now
appear to be detached from the contemporaneous
popular culture and political movements incomparison to the street performances of collectives
such as ZeroJigen (Zero Dimension,active 1963-72).!Q
for example, which, despite being neglected bymainstream art historical discourse until recently,
occurred during the same period in Shinjuku, themecca of counter-culture in Tokyo at the time .
These examples of parallelism in contemporaneous art practices disclose the long prevailing
attitudes of art critics, art historians and museum
curators who spotlight only physical works-which
are therefore saleable and collectable-and admire
art which they can easily discuss in relation toWestern art history and theory.

4 I The Formationof a National Consciousness
via PrintArt
Print art is another example of Asian art that hasoften been marginalized in the understanding ofmodernity derived from the above-mentioned biased
view of art history .
The prints by Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906)canbe understood as a convergence of technical innovation (realistic depiction and print technology), style andresistance in Asian modernity . Varma is known forhis portraits, historical paintings and mythologicalpaintings commissioned by the maharajas, rulersof the Indian princely states, but from 1895 he also
gained pan-Indian popularity through mechanicalreproductions of his paintings (oleographs),which
promoted notions of "lndian-ness" and the spread ofnational consciousness . Sometimes incorporating
allegorical resistance to the British rulers throughconventional subjects from the Mahabharata, n
his images were also appropriated in embroidery,
postcards and interior murals . Varma's Japanesecounterpart-in terms of mastering the techniquesof oil painting without having attended a Western art
school-is Takahashi Yuichi (1828-1894). Takahashi
advocated the supremacy of oil painting, setting up
a private school and proposing the establishmentof an art museum, but he has never enjoyed thesame degree of admiration as Varma . Although
Takahashi's most famous work, Salmon, is often
reproduced in history textbooks, I cannot imagine
the painting encourages children's sense of national
pride in the way that Varma was able to achievethrough print media.
Varma is not an isolated example of an artist
who bridged technical innovation with popularity .
At Visva Bharati, an art college founded in 1901 by
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)in Shantiniketan,
India, artists Nandalal Bose (1882-1966)and
Benodebehari Mukhopadhyaya (1904-1980)encouraged their students to paint murals as art for thepeople-to create art for the public sphere .~ In Sri
Lanka, muralist Maligawage Sarlis (1880-1955)also
produced European-style prints of Buddhist motifs

Chapter1

085

with subjects depicted in classical Sri Lankan attire
and accessories, supposedly as part of the Buddhist
revivalist movement. If murals are also public interms of scale, then it follows that print art is public
in terms of quantity . The co-existence of these two
public media is also found in Korean People's Art.
Woodcut and linocut prints were reproduced innewsletters, brochures, flyers and book covers;
numerous large hanging paintings (korge kurim) andbanner paintings (kippal kurim) were created often incollaboration with students and laborers for politicaldemonstration and rallies, and thus called "on-siteart"(hyunjang misu/).

I do not mean to argue that political art issuperior to the "fi ne" art of elitist modernism, but itwould not be appropriate to ignore the enormous
social effects these forms of visual culture had in
the public sphere only because they were used-or
abused-for political purposes or were ephemeraland often destroyed or confiscated.
We can explore the importance of mass reproduced and ephemeral media-excluded from "art"history and/or unpreserved due to their low valuein modern Asian art in the less political, more vulgar
images carried in popular magazines, created byboth painters and professional cartoonists . In China,
popular magazines such as Shidai manhua ( Modern
Sketch,1934-37) and Shanghai manhua (Shanghai

Sketch, 1936-37) had cartoons which were highly

modern both in terms of style and subject matter,
conveying a different reality from that represented
in the oil paintings or woodcut prints of the same
period . Ni Yide (1901-1971) , one of the leading artistsof Jielanshe (The Storm Society), later participated in
the creation of an anti-Japan propaganda mural in
Wuhan; Liang Baipo (1911-19 87), another Jielanshe
member, became a magazine cartoonist with herpartner, Ye Oianyu (1907-1995) . She presented thelives of women in the modern city in Honeybee Girl,
carried in Libao magazine in 1935, and thereafter
painted anti -Japan propaganda murals . These
examples illustrate the situation whereby, in thesocial climate of the time, "modernity as style" wasinevitably caught up in the wave of "modernity as
resistance ." A similar example of a descent from highto popular art in Japanese modern art can be seen in
the artistYanase Masamu (1900-1945), who showedprominent talent in modernist , avant-garde (Mavo),
cartoons and proletarian art alike.
5 To Understand the Totalit of Asian Modernity_

To repeat, modernity in Asian art was manifested
variously as technique, style and resistance. The
accompanying chart may seem to be arranged inchronological order from top to bottom, but there

Chart of Asian Modern Art
A Modernity
as Technique

Technical Realism by oil, etc Traditional workshop by artisans(perspective, chiaroscuro)(fusion with traditional paintings)

2 Technical Realism+
Printing/ Photograohic
Technique

B Modernity
as Style

C Modernity
as Resistance- Trade Painting [China]-Company School Miniature [India]- Saya Chone et al. [Myamar]

Art education in Western style- Academ icism [China,India, andVietnam]

Academism + popularity by
printing= Nationalism- Raja Ravi Varma [India]- Sarlis (print/m ural ) [Sri Lanka]

1 European Modernism

Impressionism, Post-Impressionism , - Storm Society(Jie/anshe)[China]
Fauvism, Cubism- Group 43 [Sri Lanka]

2 Modernism + Nationalism

Revival and recycling oftraditional art-Bengali School [India]

1 Realism + Nationalism

Depict ion of the indigenous reality
and people- PERSAGI[Indonesia]- People's Art [Korea](Realityand Utterance)

2 Popular Art/ Printed Picture Print reproduction and popularity

3 Direct Action- Woodcut Movement [China]

Political struggle at rallies andstreet demonstrations, etc- Kaisahan [Philippines]- People's Art (On-SiteArt)[Korea]- Taring Padi [Indonesia]

Anti-institutional art- Street Performance[Japan, Taiwan.Korea, etc]

Engagement in community issues- Dispatch Art [Korea]etc©20 16 Kuroda Raiji

2012

In Search of al ostTotalfty: Teaching Asian Modern Art (in Japan)

Shaping the History of Art

Essaj' 13

lnSoutheastAola

13
In Raden Saleh's The Arrest of D,ponegoro(1857,collection lstana Negera, Jakar1a),
the ar1ist comically depicted the facesof the Dutch officers who captured therebellion leader O1ponegoro as too large
for their bodies; 1nJuan Luna's Spoliarium(1884, collection National Museumof the Philippines, Manila), the ar1ist
focused on fallen gladiators in the Roman
Colosseum.

were, in fact, two or three modes of modernity thatco-existed. Technical modernization is ongoing evento this day, and resistance can be found even in theearly stages of modern art in Asia, in the academic
paintings of the Indonesian painter Raden Saleh(c.1811-1880)and the Filipino painter Juan Luna
(1857-1899),11 for example. Moreover, there are
no clear distinctions between these three modes.
For example, if the oil paintings of Xu Beihong(1895-1953)or Fernando Amorsolo (1892-1972)-bothknown for their academic style-are disseminated as
reproductions, their images can spread beyond thelimited circle of privileged art lovers to become icons
representing a nationalistic spirit for the common
people. Likewise, a watercolor by Abanindranath
Tagore (1871-1951), Mother India (1905,collection
RabindraBharatiSociety), and a linocut by Nandalal
Bose depicting Gandhi's Salt Satyagraha (1930,
collection NationalGalleryof Modern Art, New Delhi),
both became icons of Indian nationalism throughprint reproductions.
In contrast to those in white, the parts of thechart that are shaded gray represent practices thatare either less discussed or sometimes entirely
ignored by the art historical discourse centered

Kuroda Raljl

086

Art Studies_0J

on the stylistic development of surviving unique
objects and their analysis in relation to Western art
history, while those in bold letters represent arts
made of cheap and/or ephemeral media. If we try tounderstand Asian modernity as consisting of a seriesof composites of elements such as realism andnationalism, isolated experimentation and popular
dissemination, professional and amateur art, highand low art (or subculture), the original and reproduction, the permanent and ephemeral, then art history
can be a part of the social history of Asia.
I emphasize the necessity of understanding
this structure of modernity and its differing layers
for deconstructing the cultural hierarchy within
Asia-for forming a commune that extends beyond
cultural and historical differences and hierarchiesin the hopes that this solidarity can overcome thehierarchical relationship between the original and its
epigone. Despite recent trends toward optimisticallycelebrating Asian contemporary art's supposed
borderless-ness and globalization while consuming
and abusing art for business purposes, this, I believe,
will contribute to the increase and growth of scholars
and students who are willing to teach and learn
Asian modern art as "our" own social history.

Shaping the History of Art

088

InSoutheast Asia

01
Parts of this text appeared previously in David Teh,"Recalibrating Media:
Three Theses on Video and Media Art,n Southeast Asia," in Video,an Art, aHistory 7965-2010, exh. cat. (Singapore:
Singapore Art Museum, 2011).

How should we begin to historicize video art inSoutheast Asia? The region itself is hard to define,comprising a wide spectrum of mixed modernities,
from economic laggards slow to emerge frompostwar socialist experiments to the hypermodern
financial services hub of Singapore. Originallya figment of the imperial-military imagination( British,Japaneseand USAmerican),what we now callSoutheast Asia is a creature of World War II and theCold War. But the area was linked up in other configurations, bridging the Chinese, Indian and Arabworlds for centuries before the Europeans arrived,
leaving a deep hybridity unique to the region, but one
that is far from uniform. Southeast Asia may now
be carved up into nation-states, but its art history
cannot be.
The region's video art may seem far removed
from this past, having only emerged since the endof the Cold War, in a period marked by quickening
global and intraregional exchange, both economic
and cultural. But conspicuous examples proveotherwise, revealing how media practices have been
shaped by those conflicted modernities, and how
much video -makers still draw upon local cultural
resources . Few may be traditionalists, yet fewer still
ignore their heritage altogether. In fact, tradition isoften the pretext-we might say the screen-for themost modern of gestures. Hence, Arahmaiani's
I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Legend (2004),
an eerie, feminist revision of an Indian epic
(the Ramayana)that is part of the DNA of narrative throughout the region. Similarly, in Araya
Rasdjarmrearnsook's Two Planets series (2008-09),
we observe what happens when an oral culture
confronts the stuff of a literary art history. Villagers
from the artist's neighborhood in northern Thailand
sit before reproductions of masterpieces of earlymodern painting. As they try to make sense of
the images, and frequently digress, art history is
demystified-its meanings refreshed-as it becomesa pretext for idle gossip and bawdy jokes.
Such works remind us that with globalization,
what might be shared between cultures is not simply
technology and capital, but also experience-thesense of nature and community, the struggles
of work, the pressures of social norms. These
sympathies no doubt underwrite the appeal, and thelegibility, of video art from diverse and distant places.
And yet these societies, even as they are increasingly
shaped by video culture, also sketch new contours
for the medium itself-determining what it can andcan't communicate, what it can and can't do-and
we must therefore pay close attention to the culturalcontingencies of each place . Video is not the same
medium everywhere.
The following thoughts emerged in an earlier
essay occasioned by a touring show of media art
from the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou,
entitled "Video, an Art, a History 1965-2010," hosted
by the Singapore Art Museum ..!U In the exhibition
catalogue, I offered three "theses" about video art in

DavldTeh

Art Studies_OJ

Southeast Asia. My intention was not to generalize
about this sprawling field of activity, much less tolay down exclusive regional criteria. Rather, my
propositions were speculative, designed to guidethe study of video art in this region by identifying
some distinctive formal, historical and politicalparameters. The present text offers a chance torevise my thoughts and try, with those parameters
in mind, to describe Singapore's somewhat unusual
position in this regional frame . For while its video art
is decisively conditioned by the island's geo-politicalsurroundings, it also departs from some prevailingaesthetic trends in the region .

Video in Southeast Asia:
Towards a RegionalTheory
The first of my theses was that video is (and isnot) film. The notion of "medium specificity"
was a guiding principle of much Euro-American
video art, bolstering its claims to experimentality
and its rejection of narrative and other cinematicconventions. But while this formal predisposition
can be discerned here and there in Southeast Asianvideo, it is by no means prevalent, and to assume
the same antagonism with film would be a mistake .
Having been exposed to the video art of the 1970s,
pioneering artists like Apinan Poshyananda and
Lee Wen were aware of the medium's specifictraits, but these were less important to them thanvideo's integration with other art forms, especiallyperformance .
Artists trained in the 1990s and since, inincreasingly cross-disciplinary environments, areperhaps more mindful of the medium 's specificity,
but are just as unlikely to confine themselves to it.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chris Chong and
Ho Tzu Nyen, for example, while attentive to the
distinctions between film and video, explore thecharacteristics and the genres of both. This suggests
one way that a theory of video might be recalibrated
for this part of the world: to emphasize remediation,rather than medium specificity. In the Malay world(which includesSingapore),we could start with video's
rechanneling of various performance traditions,especially those of the theater . Not only have these
traditions survived and absorbed colonizationand modernization, they also point to a shared,
pre-national heritage that bridges mainland andinsular Southeast Asia. This prehistory has shaped
even modern, mass media in locally specific ways.
For understanding video's place in this genealogy, a
regional theory of remediation will be more fruitfulthan any formalist approach.
My second proposal concerned video as
an oral medium . While McLuhan's global visionof a neo-tribal social connection is still a matterfor debate-revived now by the "social web" andportable media devices-in Southeast Asia video's
oral capacities are especially pronounced, anddo more to shape the medium's use here than in

-

---

--

-

-------------------

Chapter1

089

places where print literacy has prevailed. Despite
the rationalization of communications during
and since the Cold War, oral transmission is still
preponderant in everyday life. Important dialogues
occur face-to-face; telephone and voice remain
more tangible, and binding, than text or email;memories are embedded in narratives, more than in
objects. All this suggests that video should be seen
not primarily as a channel, but as a channeling-asocial process of mediumship. M Its amplitude asa medium rests on its valence among older, oral
forms: music, storytelling, dance, dramatic andspiritual traditions . While none of these emerged
from the 20th century unscathed, they still draw
from wells of cultural meaning and artistic ingenuity
that are pre-national, indigenous and cross-cultural.
As film studies struggles in the straightjacket of
national cinema, video studies will open up the prenational histories of the moving image, and perhaps
discover some regional coherence.
The third thesis was about the long shadow ofauthoritarianism. Whereas video art had emergedin the West along with upheavals in bourgeois civilsociety, its emergence in Southeast Asia has beenin dialogue-though not always directly-withauthoritarianism. This is perhaps the only structural
condition shared throughout the region, from the"soft" authoritarianism of Singapore or Malaysia;
through the strongman cronyism of the Philippines
under Marcos, or Indonesia under Suharto; to therepressive militarism of Myanmar or the postsocialist bureaucracies of Vietnam and Laos. The
Cold War saw media power jealously guarded bygovernment and the military, forces that still shape
the program of video to this day. History, insofar as
it took the form of moving images, thus conformed
more to the official than to the popular imagination .
It streamlined cultural and political differences,and in many cases effaced them altogether . But
media power has lately been decentralized-insome cases rapidly-with the arrival of corporate
and supra-national channels such as cable, satellite
and the web. And decentralization has coincidedwith the mass dissemination of digital video, withexciting results. Citizen journalism has taken root
online, challenging the official picture even where
there is no free press .~For artists, however, the state's stranglehold
had long cheapened the moving image's
epistemological value; and they now seemdisinclined to restore it, even where that grip has
been relaxed . Few use video to compete with, orcorrect, the official record. Instead, they pursue a
new immediacy, characterized by improvisation andplay, by found and "mixed" realities. The exemplarycase is certainly Indonesia since the fall of Suharto
in 1998 (reformasi), where video art's development
has been inseparable from a wider flourishingof DIY culture, activist media collectives andcommunity video initiatives. ~

2012

-

Video in Sin ~ ore: A Different Drummer

If Southeast Asia's art history is immature, its video
art history is embryonic . Developing a historicallyinformed discourse will demand the resources ofother, related histories. Yet cinema studies in theregion offers little; it has been slow to widen its
focus from the national-industrial core. Singapore's
film historiography is a case in point, and especially
impoverished : local production evaporated after
the country's accidental independence in 1965, andsince, a strong nationalist imperative has favoredblindness to both the rich film heritage it sharedwith Malaysia, and its close industrial and culturalaffinities elsewhere in East Asia .~ Indeed, perhaps
the most striking feature of Singapore's moving
image history is that it was always transnational.
Awkward attempts to nationalize a Straits Chinese
aesthetic-as in Kwok Kian Chow's would-be
canonical art history of the mid-1990s-would makeeven less sense with film history. Q§ Since the 1990s,
though, local production has restarted in earnest,
attracting state investment and encouraging anenergetic community of independent filmmakers
and researchers . 2ZAlong with this renaissance came a flourishingof experimental film and video , including somequite sophisticated forays into both formalist andnarrative video art. Notable practitioners may loosely
be divided into three groups: filmmakers with apenchant for experiment like Victric Thng, EvaTang,
Royston Tan and Malaysian-born Sherman Ong;
those more firmly rooted in the visual arts like Tan
Kai Syng, Ho Tzu Nyen, Michael Tan, Charles Lim,
Michael Lee and UK-based Erika Tan; and those withcloser ties to performance art and experimental
theater including Choy Ka Fai, Loo Zihan and, before
his marked turn toward cinema history in 2005, Ming
Wong . 2ll Thematically, their work covers all the chief
obsessions of Singaporean contemporary art: hypermodernity and the built environment; alienation andchanging social mores; postcolonial identities andmulticulturalism; and across all three groups, theexploration of performance and the performativebody. But much of this activity-while it articulatesintercultural anxieties shared across the region-in
fact distinguishes Singaporean video from its
regional counterparts.
As elsewhere, the affordability of DV cameras
and desktop editing platforms has had a dramatic
impact, but the outcomes have been quite different
to those in other countries. In general, Singaporeanartists strive for higher production values; their worktends to be neither observational, nor spontaneous;and they are more likely to work with specialist
and professional technical crews, in contrast withthe explosion of grass-roots collective and DIY
video-making in Indonesia, and with the more
personal, auteurial spirit prevailing in Thailand. These
distinctions may be attributed in part to Singapore's
affluence. Those emerging in the 2000s haveln1ularVl1lon1: NotesonVideoArti nSingapore

02
See Rosalind C. Morris, In the Place ofOrigins: Modernity and tts Mediums in
Northern Thailand (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2000).

03
For examples from two very different
nationalcontexts,compare the escapades of Singapore's Martyn See withthe clandestine video Journalism of the
Democratic Voice of Burma: Martyn
See, Singapore Rebel, accessed May
2016, hnp:/lsingaporerebelblogspot.
com; and Anders 0stergaard, Burma VJ:
Reporring from a Closed Country (2008).
film, 1 :26:34, posted to Vimeo by Anders
0stergaard, accessed May 2016, hnps://
vimeo.com/33160416.

04

See Knsna Murt1, Essayson Video Art
and New Media: Indonesia and Beyond ,trans. Marjorie Suanda (Yogyakarta :IVAA. 2009).
05
At time of wnting (2012), Wik1pedia's

account of Singaporecinema began
In 1991; see "Cinema of Singapore,"
Wikiped1a, hnps:/len.wikipedia.org/wikV
Cinema of Singapore. For a more thorough chronology see Raphael Millet,
Singapore Cinema (Singapore: Editions
Didier Millet. 2006) .
06
Kwok K1anChow, Channels &Confluences: A History of Singapore Art(Singapore: Singapore Art Museum ,1996).

07
Notable publications include Millet'sSingapore Cinema. the Asian Film
Archive's promotion of RaJendra Gouras Singapore's first "indie" filmmaker,
and Ben Slater's Kinda Hot. The Makingof Saint Jack in Singapore (Singapore:
Marshall Cavendish, 2006).

08
It Is notable that Singapore's pavilion at
the Venice B1ennale was devoted to video
work in both 2011 (HoTzu Nyen's Cloudof Unknowing) and 2009(M1ng Wong's
Ufe of lmitatton, which won a Special
Mention Prize from the Biennale's jury).

In-lhaplngtheHlotoryol Art

09
Eugene Tan,"Singapore: Too
Contemporary for Art?," in Contemporary
An m Singapore, ed.Gunalan Nadarajan,
Russell Storer and Eugene Tan(Singapore: Institute of Contemporary
Arts, 2007). 24.

090

enjoyed relatively easy access to art schools in theWest. Overseas experience has strongly informed
the work of Ming Wong, Ho Tzu Nyen, Erika Tan and
Tan Kai Syng, who practice and exhibit more abroadthan at home. We should also note the state's programmatic investment in training and development ,equipment and production in the cultural industries.
Digital animation was particularly encouraged , withgenerous incentives attracting high-profile corporate
players like Lucasfilm, which opened its Singapore
studio in 2005 . Yet this commercial activity has
had scant impact on video practice beyond the art
schools; if anything, it probably turned serious artists
away from animation.
Another salient feature of Singaporean video
art is sensitivity to the island 's historical and geographic peculiarities . This may be surprising, given
Singapore's awkward relations with neighboring
countries and its blinkered devotion to the future.
(Art history in particular has been comprehensively
suppressed and still lacks institutional footings , a cause ofgrovving embarrassment to those promoting Singapore
as a cultural and educational hub .) But artists clearlyfeel a responsibility to broaden and question the
narratives-and illuminate the historical blind
spots-propagated by the state, although certain
sensitive issues are still scrupulously avoided . Most
artists draw somehow on documentary aesthetics,
though artfully, as in the automatic videography of
Tan Pin Pin's80km/h(2005), a 10-yeartime -lapse
indexing the island's rapid urbanization. The standout here is surely Ho Tzu Nyen, whose theatricaldeconstruction of Singapore's foundation myths ,Utama-Every Name in History is I (2003), traced theuneasy seam between colonial and oral histories .
The work subtly sketched the precolonial political
geography into which Singapore was born , butwhich the paranoid state still prefers to conceal.
Ho is not the only artist putting video to this task.
Choy Ka Fai's research-based installation, Lan
Fang Chronicles (2010),surveyed an area in West
Borneo (now part of Indonesia) that was the seat of a107-year republican experiment by Hakka Chinese
from the late 18th century . Almost science-fictional
in its breadth and detail, this was not a subversive
exercise, and yet it threw an oblique , critical lighton Singapore's own imperfect political order anddiverse, diasporic foundations. Charles Urn's video
practice shows how Singapore's national imaginary-and its impressive built environment-arein fact structured by a hydrosphere and maritime
geography that have been erased from everyday
experience. Urn's ongoing SEA STATE project stems
from the earlier geo-informatic investigations oftsunamii.net(2001-05), his celebrated collaboration
with Woon Tien Wei and scientist Melvin Phua. With
their transnational scope and studiously unromantic
aesthetic, such projects suggest that the underlying program of video is a kind of documentarymaterialism, reinscribing Singapore 's geophysicalsurroundings in the insular national imaginary .

OavldTeh

Art Studies_OJ

Body,Voice,Authority
Returning to our three theses , we begin to see how
Singaporean video art does and does not fit in witha Southeast Asian video aesthetic . The city-state
probably generates more medium-specific workthan its neighbors, yet seeing video in historicalperspective as an "intermedia" form, a more
complex picture emerges . Though they remain
important records of artistic engagement withthe medium, few of Lee Wen's or Amanda Heng's
performance videos could be described as video
art. Indeed, there are few connections between
the Artists Village-the genesis of "contemporary"practice in Singapore in the 1980s, to which
performance was central-and the generation ofvideo -makers that emerged in the 2000s . And yet,the special bond between video and performanceseems to be still intact, and especially strong in thework of Singapore 's most successful artists . Thispersistence suggests not only the special and enduring currency of dance and theater , but also video's
position in a genealogy of moving images where
film and video are just two kindred mediums among
others , in no way opposed.
I have suggested that Southeast Asian video
is marked by an affinity with oral forms of transmission , but in Singapore this affinity is less apparent invideo works made for gallery contexts . Such worktends to lack the immediacy and spontaneity foundelsewhere in the region. Shots are usually set up, narratives usually scripted. The camera's role in public
space is no doubt conditioned by the state 's regulatory zeal, and a national allergy to the unplanned; andit yields a deliberately neutral videographic mode andan equivocal editorial posture that are quite peculiar
to Singapore. The documentaries of Tan Pin Pin are
exemplary of this staged orality, marked by a careful
effacement of any authorial or editorial stance. Mostof her work is not video art as such, but her use of
the medium speaks volumes about the spatial andpolitical constraints within which Singapore's artists
toil. Video-makers are keenly attuned to the ironies
and absurdities of "soft" authoritarianism, and arein this sense descendants of the non-oppositional
critique with which Eugene Tan characterized theconceptual ism of the 1990s. Ql!
Critical responses to broadcast culture havebeen a mainstay of video art, from Nam June Paik's
experiments and the video activism of the 1960sand '70s, through Bill Viola's Reverse Televisionproject in the 1980s, to the convergent on line
video channels of today . In Southeast Asia, artists
have largely been locked out of state-controlled
infrastructure, but this has not stopped them fromundertaking structural and generic engagementswith TV, such as Apichatpong 's Windows (1999)and
Haunted Houses (2001),Tad Ermitario's Cathode Jam(1992)and Jompet's grass-roots community media
project, Neighbors (2000). In Singapore, the state
still retains a tight monopoly on broadcasting, but

Chapter!

091

ironically, this has afforded video artists some limitedaccess . Ho Tzu Nyen's 4x4-Episodes of Singapore
Art (2005)- at once reflexive national history of art
and postmodern portrait of the artist and his tenuous
place in Singaporean society-is shot through with
implicit critique of the state, yet was aired on thegovernment -run Arts Central TV channel.
Notwithstanding the limitations on politicalexpression, Singapore 's contemporary art isconspicuously historical , and nothing if not discursive, traits that may be traced to the pioneering
conceptualism of artists like Tang Da Wu andCheo Chai Hiang . Moreover, art's own history , and2012

art discourse, rank among st its ch ief concerns, areflexivity hardly widespread in the region. As a form
favored by many of the co untry 's leading artists,
digital video has become an indispensible tool forpubl ic intellectual reflectio n. And , paradoxically, it isvideo 's affinity with the stage and the staged, rather
than the real, that lends it its critical amplitude-an
amplitude not enjoyed by photography, which
remains mired in a social realism more consonantwith state agendas . Video art opens w indows onto
the vexed psycho-geography of an island whose
past and future are inesca pably regional , however
insular its present .

lnaularVlalona: NotesonVldeoArtinSingapore

092

Art Studies_03

ShaplngtheHlatoryofArt
In Southeast Asia

The Shifting Art-Historical
Field for Southeast Asia:

Tradition,Modernityand"The Contemporary"Michelle Antoinette
Michelle Antoinette is a researcher
of modern and contemporary Asianart, based at the Australian National
University (ANU) in the Centre for Art
History and Art Theory at the School ofArt. From 2017, she is researching new
public participation in Asian art andmuseums, supported by an Australian
Research Council (ARC) flilMow;H!p.
From 2010-13 she was an ARC
Postdoctoral Fellow at ANU researching
the growth of regional and international
networks of contemporary Asian art
and museums. She has been Convener
and Lecturer at ANU for courses on
Asian and Pacific art and museums. Her
previous and ongoing research focuseson the contemporary art histories ofSoutheast Asia, on which she has
published widely. She is author of
Reworlding Art History: Encounters wfth
Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after1990(2015) and co-editor with Caroline
Turner of Contemporary Asian Art andExhibitions: Connectivities and Worldmaking(2014).

This essay is adapted from the first chapter of theauthor's book, Reworlding Art History: Encounterswith Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 7990,
published in 2015. It is a sprawling survey of positions
and practices that aims to reworld the discipline
and knowledge of art history through an analysis ofcontemporary Southeast Asian art in the 1990s andbeyond. Michelle Antoinette plots out an art-historicalfield for the region and regards it as shifting, constantly
unsettled and remapped by the contentious claimsof tradition, modernity and the contemporary. She
initiates the discussion by rethinking the relationshipbetween tradition and modernization and creates aconceptual space in which modern and contemporary
art in Southeast Asia could be seen in the context of
this relationship and not in the vise of dualism. This
complex re atiooship surfaces as a common groundbetween tradition and modernization as well as
between be rnodernand the contemporary. Sustaining
her argument are the views of what she calls the firstgeneration of scholars credited with "pioneering
attempts to activate and inspire new methods andperspectives, reflecting especially these scholars'
own locales, but some also considering the region asa whole:· In charting the world of the contemporary inSoutheast Asia, Antoinette looks into turning points
in the history of the shift from the modern to thecontemporary. These include the flashpoint of the
1970s, the time of uinitial ruptures ... with modernist
traditions" and the discourse of the postmodern;the emergenceof the artist-curator; the turmoil ofthe socio-politicalcontext;the increasing demands
for internationalism;
and the institutionalization ofpracticeand discourse,on the one hand, and theconsolidationof the art market, on the other. The locus
Qfthisinvestigationisthe 1990s, which in Antoinette's
imaginationunleashedan "unprecedented degree ofenergeticengagementwith contemporary Southeast
Asian.art."It was a hecticand turbulent time of global
i;irculation,assertiverepresentation of local subjectivity
andintensecommitment to cross the boundaries of thedifferentsocialworldsof a rt.
[PF}louroe:-"Conte· n' Art"8gional~-1in
ReworldingArt: Enctxtnterswith Contemporary Southeast
Asian Art after 1990, Cross/Cultures
178 (Amsterdam & New York: Brill
Academic Publishers, 2015), 8-16,~-33. ~ntBd
with permission of
Koninklijke Brill NV. Revised for thispublication by the author, 2016.