2017

vol03

Anttl!!!.9gy
the History of Art:,,otnrni,astAsia

:) .tr-·· TheJapanFoundation
AsiaCente(
ArtStudiesis publishedby·· theJapanFoundation
AsiaCenterwiththepurposeof..··de~.p~ningartisticexchanges
inSoutheast
Asia.
/' ....oLJrina:µguralissuein 2015,Cultural
Rebellion
inAsia1960: '1989,
we investigateddifferentaspectsoftheavant-garde
art.·JlJOVements
inAsiaspanninga periodfromthe1960sto thel9BQs.Foroursecondissue,The1990s:
TheMakingofArt· · ,-~wiftrContemporaries(2016),we reconsider·edtrendsinartistic..,exc~anges
intheAsia-Pacificregionfromthe1990sonward.·_,:.:.·th_rough-the·perspectives
ofcurators,
artistsandcultural· ·-adniinistrators.
Complementing
theprevious
issue,·.. thisthird:issue,Shaping
theHistoryofArt in SoutheastAsia,.rev,iews
thediscourse
onSoutheast
Asianartthatdeveloped
inconnection
with newartisticpractices
overthesame
periodbycompiling
15keytextsbyresearchers
and_curators· ··.fromtheAsia-Pacificregion.
TheJapanFoundation
beganto seriously
engageinartistic
exchanges
with Southeast
Asiaaftertheestablishment
ofthe· . JapanFoundation
ASEANCultureCenterin1990.
Concurrently,
Australianmuseums
andspecialists
expanded:.· theirengagement
withtheregionthroughinternational·.exhibitions,surveys/research,andsymposiums.
Thiswas· followedbytheopening
oftheSingapore
Art Museumin1996.
•··Withtheemergenceofthe ITindustrylaterinthedecade,the.··art infrastructureandAsia-Pacificnetworksthatgradually· emergedat thistimewouldspreaddynamicallythrough_.diverseactorsandpractices.Initially,
theseedsof artistic

Art
StudiesShagintheFlis o of
Artin
Southeast
Asia
Guest Editors

Authors

Patrick D.Flores
Kajiya Kenji

T.K.Sabapathy
John Clark
Ushiroshoji Masahiro
TatehataAkira
Julie Ewington
ShiodaJunichi
Apinan Poshyananda
SakaiNaoki
Ahmad Mashadi
Caroline Turner
Patrick D. Flores
Kuroda Raiji
DavidTeh
Michelle Antoinette

Art
Studies
03

TheJapanFoundationAsiaCenter

Art

Studies
03

Shaping the History of Art in Southeast Asia..

••
Furuichi Yasuko

Andrew Maerkle.. ...

HoashiAki
Kurokawa Ran
Nakano Tsutomu
Horiuchi Naoko. ..

Andrew Maerkle.. . ..

Hirayoshi Yukihiro
CheKyongfa
Hayashi Sumi
Kajiya Kenji
Teruyama Takako

Live Art Books

The Japan Foundation Asia Center
4-16-3 Yotsuya, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
160-0004, Japan
tel: 81.3.5369.6140
fax: 81.3.5369.6041
httpJ/www.jpf.go.jp/ www.jfac.jp
Published on March 31, 2017©2017
The Japan Foundation/ Authors
all rights reserved.

The texts presented in thisanthology are reprinted withthe permission of their authors
and publishers. The JapanFoundation Asia Center takes
responsibility for their editing.
The positions and affiliations
stated in the author profiles are
current as of February 2017.
With the exception of artist
names, names are written
according to rules established by
the Japan Foundation. Chinese,
Korean and Japanese names are
written surname first, followedby given name.
The authors of the summaries
introducing each text are
indicated by the initials inbrackets at the end of each text:
PatrickD.Flores [PF]Kajiya Kenji [KK]

Shapingthe Historyof Art
in Southeast Asia

Art
Studies
03

Contents Chapter1

005

Moments ofthe Modem inSoutheastAsia:
Art, Region,Art History
Patrick D.Flores

009

Leamingfrom Modem andContemporaryArt inSoutheastAsia
KajiyaKenji015

Premisesfor CriticalStudiesof Modem Art
inSoutheastAsia
T.K.Sabapathy

057

Moments of Regionality:
NegotiatingSoutheastAsia
Ahmad Mashadi

020

ModemArtinSoutheastAsia
JohnClark

063

024

Realismas an Attitude:
Asian Art in the 1990s
UshiroshojiMasahiro

CulturalTransformationsintheAsia-Pacific:
The Asia-Pacific Triennialof ContemporaryArt andthe FukuokaAsian ArtTriennale Compared
CarolineTurner

072

The Other as "LostPureSelf":
Gauguinismin SoutheastAsian Art
UshiroshojiMasahiro

030

Art as Criticism
TatehataAkira
078

035

FiveElements:
An AbbreviatedAccount of InstallationArt
in SoutheastAsia
JulieEwington

PostcolonialPerils:
Art and National Impossibilities
PatrickD.Flores

082

GlimpsesintotheFutureofSoutheastAsianArt:
A Vision of What Art Should Be
ShiodaJunichi

InSearch of a LostTotality:
TeachingAsian Modern Art (inJapan)
KurodaRaiji

087"ConArt"SeenfromtheEdge:
The Meaning of Conceptual Art in SoutheastAsia
Apinan Poshyananda

InsularVisions:
Noteson Video Art in Singapore
DavidTeh

092

The ShiftingArt-Historical Fieldfor SoutheastAsia:
Tradition,Modernity and "The Contemporary"MichelleAntoinette

040

047

052

Asia:Co-figurativeIdentification
SakaiNaoki

102

FuruichiYasuko

005

Chapter1

Introduction 01

Moments of the Modern
in Southeast Asia:
Art,Region,Art History
Patrick D. Flores

Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art
Studies at the Department of Art Studies
at the University of the Philippines,
which he chaired from 1997 to 2003,
and Curator of the Vargas Museumin Manila, as well as Adjunct Curatorof the National Gallery Singapore. He
was one of the curators of "Under
Construction: New Dimensions in
Asian Art" in 2000 and the Gwangju
Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008.
Among his publications are Painting

History:Revisions in PhilippineColonial
Art (1999 ); Remarkable Collection:
Art, History,and the NationalMuseum(2006); and Past PeripheraJ.-Curation
inSoutheast Asia (2008). He was a memberof the advisory board of the exhibition"The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds
After 1989"(2011), organized by theCenter for Art and Media in Karlsruhe,
and a member of the Guggenheim
Museum's Asian Art Council (2011and 2014). In 2011, he co-edited Third
Text's issue on contemporary Southeast
Asian art with Joan Kee, and in 2015 hecurated the Philippine Pavilion at the
Venice Biennale.

The texts in this anthology on Southeast Asia takeup the daunting task of marking that vulnerable
point at which a critique of the Western norm,or the norm universalized by the empire throughcolonialism, becomes a necessity for conceivinga productive afterlife of its conflicted aspirations.
That afterlife may only be, for better or for worse,
contemplated under the limit of the modern. Invokedunder erasure, it is the modern that enables thispressure of representation to persist, the very samechance at legibility that must be resisted so that the
project itself of representation, and critique, can be
altogether rethought. This is the inevitable longing ofmodernity, if it must live elsewhere beyond the trailof both an unimaginable violence and a sensuous
promise of progress. There may be no outside to thismodern, only an imbrication within, only intersecting
interiors, so to speak, only internal traversals. Its
critique is at once timely and untimely, in emergency
and in disruption, urgent and belated, in the thick ofthings and out of joint. The modern exasperates.
This critique is the negation of the West andsimultaneously the negation of the Orientalist
gesture to idealize, exoticize, marginalize,
provincialize, nationalize, internationalize, regionalize
and globalize . At the same time, the impulses of thisnegation-the ideal, the exotic, the marginal, theprovincial, the national, the international, the regional
and the global-are turned into the premises on
which to politicize or radicalize these same impulses.
The negation is finally able to expose the limit of theWestern, implicating it in the production of whatmight be other than itself, and harnessing critique
not only as a negative moment; it rather becomes a
productive force for transformation in general.
The very idea of Southeast Asia as a region
is an instance of this uneasy modern . Southeast
Asia as a region was significantly shaped byWestern colonial enterprises beginning in the 16th
century. It was through colonialism that contact
with the concept and practice of art as a distinct
and autonomous act and object was enabled, andfrom which institutions and styles were eventuallyformed. A key site of this formation was the art
school, in which the teacher and the student of art
who taught and learned the techniques of depicting
reality were reared and honed to become agents inan emerging art world of producers and receiversof art. Colonialism created the conditions for thecolony to come into being, but it also paved thepath of the postcolony. The postcolony prefigures
the desire to be modern, to be free from colonial
rule, and to aspire to a nation and a nation-state.
Such an aspiration in the 19th century set the scene
for an early modern world to find form and, with it,

MomentsoftheModemlnSoutheastAsla: Art,Region,ArtHistory

Shaping the History of Art

Introduction 01

In southeast Asia

an aesthetic expression through an imitation andthe mastery of the Western style; the critique of
idealization; and a presence in art history throughtranslations of the Western paradigm . In places
where colonialism was absent, modernity was
manifested in the reinvention of tradition andthe anticipation of being part of a wider worldconfigured by the expansion of empires . While thenation and the region are seen as indices of themodern, the seeds of the modern may have beensown elsewhere as well: in zones, routes and othercrossroads where diverse people generate relationships and communities .
The texts in this anthology patiently probe theproblematic of the modern as a complex mediationof the Western or the imperial, and refunction it asa critique of its hegemonic project . The modern,therefore, bears plural codes of disjunction andreconstruction, always holding out the guaranteeof a "space of appearance;' on the one hand, anddeconstruction, on the other. In this contentious
process, the work of art tends to complexity, its"intelligence" thickening in light of mediations but at
the same time lightening in the face of an "unfolding
ontology." This is how T.K. Sabapathy regards
the ties between expression, on the one side, andenvironment and expression, on the other. It is aninteraction that forges a consciousness of history,
a consciousness of art in history that is a symptomof the avant-garde, which should not be taken as
the exclusive foundation of the modern. John Clark
insists, however, on a "severe historical disjunction"effected by the modern, opening up a latitude to
be inhabited by an "innerness" and an "outside ."How the gap between the two is constantly crossed
becomes the social life of the modern. I speak tothis same problematic, only that I invest it with an
intuition that surmounts the dialectic between local
and Western through alternative idioms of exchange
and reciprocation.
Sakai Naoki is keen to further complicate thissituation by evoking Asia in the register of a "transitional predicament," freeing identity from the vise ofcultural typification. He replaces it with historicized,
co-figurative identifications and a considerationof postcoloniality as constitutive of an "irredeemable" colonial feeling, without which no "originalidentity prior to colonial reign" could be grasped
or fathomed . The challenge is for a theorization ofcontact and relationality that evades the seemingly
overdetermining postcolonial binary .
The modern in the course of time introduced
a critique of itself as an institution that merely
preserved allegiance to the Western model.
Modernism as a stylistic repertoire in Europe andNorth America became privileged exemplars ofmodernity and affirmed the talent for plasticity
and abstraction as markers of this technology. The
postwar nation-state in Southeast Asia became
increasingly authoritarian as it confronted thepressures of the Cold War and the need for it toPatrick D. Fk>rH

006

ArtStudies_OJ

mutate into a developed economy so that it could
be inserted into a new international order. These
forces formed the basis for rethinking and remaking
the modern . What lies beyond it? Is it the terminusof the legacy of art? Or is there something beyond
the promise of modern art? It is at this juncture thata turn in the 1970s would be effected, a turn thatprefigured the afterlife of the modern in ways thathave been described as postmodern or contemporary. Important elements in this particular process
were the manifestos of artist-led organizations thatcritiqued institutions of modern art; and the artistcurators who initiated exhibitions and wrote texts
about the prospects of a different imagination ofartistic practice. Several experiments with form andconcept took place in the period, too.
The contemporary art scene in Southeast Asia
is robust, animated by diverse practices of artists,publics, institutions, critics, curators, gallerists,
cultural workers and other art world agents. Since
the 1990s, the state and the market have invested
in staking out the ground for contemporary art tobe more sensitive to the demands of a changing
world at the same time that artists have on theirown explored models of action and sustained
engagement with their communities that are either
independent of the state and market or in criticalconversation with the agenda of the institutions .
Emerging from this lively interaction is a context that
produces and circulates art that seeks to respond to
the urgencies of the time. As a consequence of thisheightened activity, different matrices of practice,
relationship, commitment and reciprocation haveplayed out and continue to test expectations.
Increasingly, the art world has become transdisciplinary, with efforts in the field of object andimage making intersecting with installative andperformative gestures, video and cinema, andaspects of supposedly premodern but persistent
traditions of craft . Also, modes of interconnection
through peer-to-peer horizontal affiliations as well
as solidarities catalyzed by digital mechanisms havetransformed both the notion and the facture of art.
In light of the vitality of contemporary art there,art from Southeast Asia has generated interest andattentiveness in countries across the region, andbeyond. This awareness of art in Southeast Asia
can be gleaned in the various projects involving
the formation of artistic platforms and networks;
the initiation of curatorial projects; the movementof artists and curators across a global artscape;the activation of spaces beyond the perceived
centers of art within nation-states; the productionof discourses through symposia, conferences,publications and other gatherings; and the dialogues
between artists in the region and their peers who
have migrated abroad. All this has stirred theatmosphere of art, further inflecting the history ofmodernity; the representation of the region; theco -production of the extensive worldly locality
across global circuits; the cherished assumptions of

007

Chapter1

autonomy and mixture; and the efforts of the various
agents of the ecology to become current andresponsible in the at-once delicate and volatile worldof the contemporary sensible life. In this light, thequestion of presence must be foregrounded . Whataccounts for this recognition of Southeast Asianart? Is it part of the crisis of art history and therefore
a function of mere inclusion or expansion? Or must
the terms of belonging to and co-implication in thecontemporary world be altogether revised?
The region looms like a specter in the
production of the modern. Southeast Asia as acommon ground and a shared history is reckoned
in terms of a regionality, buttressed by a belief inaffinities. These come in the form of the geographic
and the geopolitical. By the former is meant therange of identifications with land and its yield andthe sea and its trade, water and forest; ancestry
through the Austronesian ethnoscape; the tropicalmonsoon, its storms, its ever-present decay andhumidity; and dispositions woven around animism .
The geopolitical, on the other hand, pertains to
the interstate precolonial system characterized
by the mandala; interregional trade; colonialism,
war, revolution; nationalism and regionalism.
Ahmad Mashadi, however, cautions us that such a
regionality needs to be negotiated and should not be
captured as a fully formed assemblage of disparities
that is finessed by a collective uniqueness. Caroline
Turner further fleshes out this regionality in acomparative study of institutions and initiatives inFukuoka, Japan, and Brisbane, Australia, that havespent time and insight in defining the coordinatesof the region through exhibitions that gather thediscrepancies and the similarities underlying thecountries in the region.
In faceting an aspect of regionality, Tatehata
Akira rethinks "oppositionality"as the medium
through which to define difference or otherness . He
strives for a strategy sustained by equivalence andrecovers the critique inherent in the modern, castingart in Southeast Asia as a mode of compelling
criticism, primarily through what is profiled as an
Indonesian avant-garde . Kuroda Raiji, for his part,
explicates the problem of the reception of Asian art
in Japan and the impediments of circulating it to a
public. He proposes ways to situate Japanese art
within a broader Asian sphere and to work towards
a pedagogical model around the knowledge andpractice of Asian modern art.
The worlding of forms requires a timely
response, of being in time for the retrieval of arepressed ecology of making things, of people
making and receiving things, of self-conscious thinkers writing about these things. Michelle Antoinette
lays out the contours of this worlding, of configuring
Southeast Asia as an art historical world, with its
own art-historical methodologies. David Teh, by wayof a seminal history of video in the region, calls out
particular articulations of this world, infusing forms
with "structuring structures" that make them distinct.

For instance, he calibrates notions of mediumspecificity with the concept of remediation; and herepositions the central role that orality performs invideo, a kind of mediumship that does not restrictvideo to artifice and its ceaseless innovations.
Ushiroshoji Masahiro's commitment to thestudy of Southeast Asian art as an art historian,a professor and a curator has been remarkableand exceptional. In his texts in this publication,
he posits a nexus between the modern and thepostmodern in Southeast Asia. Interestingly, heforegrounds "Gauguinism" and "realism"as thelanguages through which the art in Southeast Asia
instantiates a swerve away from its custom of image
making and towards something that resembles theWestern, from an academic tradition to the modern
and even against the modern . The highly mediatedform, therefore, becomes something almost but
not quite the customary or the Western, the sourceof tradition and the concretization of change . It is a
trace of both its provenance and its fantasy .
Finally, these forms in the world become art inart history . Julie Ewington identifies "installation"as an exemplary form in which condenses a gamutof interests: the urgency of the local; the desire to
be international; the materiality of the social; thetranslatability of the particular; the elasticity of the
global. In this regard, the manner by which Apinan
Poshyananda locates selected art works fromSoutheast Asia in the context of "global conceptualism" is instructive . It creates the domain within
which these works play out in an art history beyondthe "national" and come to reside in the realm of theso-called "global."
Shioda Junichi turns to the exhibitionary toaccommodate art in time and space, in other words
to curate it . Guiding him in this venture is not only
the politics to represent art in Southeast Asia but
also to offer interpretive schemas within which tounderstand it. In this way, Southeast Asia becomesa locus of delineated artistic production, embodied
by artists and art from the locale and made coherent
in terms of a coming together in an exhibitionin Japan. It thus ceases to be merely random
incidences of Western imitation or the scatteredphenomena of failed modernisms.
This anthology endeavors to sharply limn thesilhouette of Southeast Asia by dwelling on texts
that take risks in claiming a region, regardlessof how fraught that claim may prove to be in thelong haul. The risk is largely supported by theperspectives of art history, curatorial practice andcultural theory, and has to be historicized in termsof its exigencies, inadequacies and excesses. An
attentive look at the authors represented in thisvolume reveals that they come from varied intellectual persuasions. Clark is mainly a systematist,
parsing the language of the modern with rigor
and drawing up templates in which to lodge thespecificities of practice that materialize concepts
and logics. Sabapathy's knowledge in archaeology

MomentooftheMOMffllnSouthuatAola: Art,Region,ArtH istory

ShaplngtheHlsto,yof Art

Introduction 01

ln Southeast Asia

prompts him to subject the work of art to close
readings, distilling it as an iconographic substancein synchronic relationship with its multiple sympathies. Their Japanese colleagues are, on the other
hand, basically curators or art historians who haveextensively engaged in curatorial practice. Except
for Sakai, the Japanese contributors, along with theAustralians Ewington and Turner, are in one way or
another curators of museums, large exhibitions andbiennales. Apinan may be arrayed alongside them,although like Ushiroshoji he is a trained and accomplished art historian-one of the few in Thailand. The
younger writers Teh and Antoinette are professionalart historians, reared in academic programs on art
history and visual culture.
What surfaces in this set of texts are theprocedure of comparison and the potentials ofcomparativity. Comparing articulations fromdifferent contexts is a tricky undertaking, requiring
a firm grip on the articulations and the contexts
as well as a lively mind in setting up the hectic
relationships. This may start with a survey of works,a presentation of a horizon that would later be
deepened and textured by practices, which may
be by turns orthodox and idiosyncratic. Part of thiscomparativity is the constellative nature of curation ,which has increasingly represented Southeast
Asia in the global contemporary through curatorial

PatrickO . Flores

008

Art Studies_OJ

interventions. It is, therefore, the art historian andthe curator who have been responsible in sketchingout the forms of knowing the region in the terrain of
a postcolonial art history in crisis and the curation ofcontemporary art in flux. Finally, it is worth notingthat in this comparative project, a level of generalization is useful and indispensable in the theorization of
inveterate rubrics like the modern, the region and art
history. That said, the sediment of these rubrics islikewise dissipated by adverbs: they are loosened art
historically, curatorially and aesthetically.
How this regionality interrogates its relations
with formations like the national and the global;
with tropes such as the local, the Western and thecontemporary; and with shifts away from and acrosslifelong obsessions through the various guises of thetransregional, the hemispheric or the archipelagic
heralds the work in the years to come . The mediation of Japan is critical in this respect, because it
further performs Southeast Asia through a historyof Oriental colonialism and the difficult passage of
belonging to an Asia it had once occupied. Surely,
beyond this orbit of texts and their proposed
readings lie future elaborations to be carried out bya successor generation of scholars and intellectuals
in more pointillist, granular detail, and, we hope, inmore intimate interlocution with artists and the otherworkers in the vast field of contingent, present life.

Chapter 1

Introduction

009

02

Learning from
Modern andContemporary Art inSoutheas t Asia
Kajiya Kenji

Kajiya Kenji is Associateof Representation
UniversityofTokyo.

as a director
Archives

Professor

Studies at the
Kajiya also servesof the Oral Art Historyof Japanese Art. He obtained

a PhD in Art History at the Instituteof Fine Arts at New York University.
He has written
20th-century

many articles on
art in the United States

and Japan. He is a co-editor of From
the Postwar to the Postmodern, Art m
Japan 1945-1989: Primary Documents(2012) and the 12-volumeSe/ected
Art Writings of Nakahara YtJsuke(2011-2017).

His writings

on Asian art

include "Asian Contemporary

Art inJapan and the Ghost of Modernity,"in Count 10 Before You Say Asia: Asian
Art after Postmodernism (2009). and"Dansaekhwa

as Flatbed Picture Plane:

Nakahara Yusuke's Perception
Korean Contemporaryof

Art;· Journal of

the Association of Western Art History(Seoul) 45 (August 2016).

01

Shaping the History of Art in Southeast Asia brings
together essays on Southeast Asian modern andcontemporary art written primarily from the 1990s
onwards. Ql As co-editor, I will use this introductory
essay to address the significance of thinking about
Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art
in Japan, while also offering context on the background and scope of the compilation process, andintroducing the main features of the publication andcollected texts.
Interest in Southeast Asian modern andcontemporary art has been growing across theworld in recent years . In 1996, the Singapore Art
Museum was opened with a focus on modern art
from Singapore and Southeast Asia, while in 2015
the National Gallery Singapore was founded tocollect Singaporean and Southeast Asian modern
and contemporary art from the 19th century onward ,establishing in Singapore the world's largest collection of Southeast Asian modern and contemporary
art . And interest has been apparent not only inthe collection and display of works, but also in the
production of discourse. In 2011, the journal Third
Text,which approaches art and visual culture from a
global perspective, dedicated a special issue to thetheme of "Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast
Asia," ~ while in 2012 the Cornell University
Southeast Asia Program published Modern andContemporary Southeast Asian Art : An Anthology. ~It appears an anthology on Southeast Asian contemporary art is currently being prepared in Singapore,too. And this publication is itself a manifestation of
the interest in discourse.
In Japan, attention turned to Asian contemporary art in the 1980s.~ Interestingly , while China wasalways the focus of "Oriental art ," the emphasis of"Asian contemporary art" ended up on Southeast
Asia . In the 1990s, organizations like the JapanFoundation and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum(alongwith its predecessor,the FukuokaArt Museum)led the way in organizing exhibitions of Southeast
Asian contemporary art. These included "New Art
from Southeast Asia 1992"(1992),"Asian Modernism :Diverse Development in Indonesia, the Philippines,
and Thailand"(1995-96), "Art in Southeast Asia
1997: Glimpses into the Future"(1997), and "The
Birth of Modern Art in Southeast Asia : Artists andMovements"(1997). ~The focus subsequently shifted to Chinesecontemporary art, but recent years have seen arevival of interest in Southeast Asian contemporary
art . The reestablishment in April 2014 of the JapanFoundation Asia Center is still a recent event . 22 As
indicated by its resulting from the new Asian cultural
exchange policy announced at the ASEAN-Japan

LearnlngfromModemand~ontemporaryArtlnSoutheutAsla

There are a few exceptions: T.K.
Sabapathy's paper was published ,n1983, while Caroline Turner and Kuroda
Ra1J1
address Asian art rather thanSoutheast Asian art. and Sakai Naoki,
who deals with the self-awareness andperception of Asia, expands his discussion beyond art-related issues.

02"Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast
As,a;'Th,rdText25. no.111(July 2011).
The co-editors were Joan Kee and Patrick
D. Flores.

03
Nora A Taylor and Boreth Ly, eds.,
Modern and Contemporary Southeast
Asian Art. An Anthology (Ithaca:
Southeast As,a Program Publications,
2012)

04
For more on the reception and evolving discourse of Asian contemporary art
in Japan, see also: Kaj,ya KenJ1."AsianContemporary Art ,n Japan and theGhost of Modernity," trans. Edan Corkill,in Count 10Before You Say Asia· Asian
Art after Postmodernism, ed. Furuich,
Yasuko (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 2009),
208-221. On Japan's involvement with
Southeast Asian art during World War
II. see: Ushirosh6j1 Masahiro, "N,hon
gunse, to Tonan Ajia no b1Jutsu"(TheArt of Southeast Asia Under Japanese
Occupation 1942--45], ,n Tetsugaku
Nempo [Annual of Philosophy ], theGraduate School of Humanities. Kyushu
University, No. 72 (March 2013), 49-72.
Books published in Japan during the war
period tended to focus on the past arts ofSoutheast As,a. with one exception being
Kishimoto Saiseidojin's Nanpo ky6e1kenno mmgei IFolk Craft of the Southern
Co-Prospenty Sphere] (Tokyo: Zoke,
geIJutsu sha, 1943). which introduced
the writer's own collection of Southeast
Asian folk crafts. ( I am grateful to Kataoka
Mam, for telling me about Kish,moto'sbook). Publications such as Nanpo bunka
tenrankai mokuroku [The Catalogue ofthe Southern Culture Exhibit,on](Tokyo:
Imperial Household Museum, 1942) andKyoe,ken no bunka: Nanpo no by'utsu[The Culture of the Co-Prosperity Sphere:
Art ,n the South](Tokyo: Futami shobo.
1942). which was written by the French
literaturescholarNarita JUr6 in the manner of Elie Faure·sH1stoiredel'arr, dealt
exclusively with the arts of the past.
In the latter publication, Nanta states
that. "Setting aside the task of art history, the common cultural issue of the
Co-Prospenty Sphere ,s how to produce
a new culture in tandem with the establishment of a new Greater East Asianorder. This will be an undertaking for the
next millennium"(258). suggesting theauthor's ignoranceof and indifferenceto
the contemporaneous practices of people ,n Southeast As,a. After the war, theJapan branch of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, the Japan Cultural Forum, helda "Young Asian Artists Exhib1t1on"includ,ng Southeast Asian artists in 1957 at the
Toyoko department store, but suchinitiativeswere rare, and it must also be
acknowledged that they had an ideological context.

Shaping the History of Art

Introduction 02

ln-Aala05
Organized in 1992 by the JapanFoundation and collaborating institutions,"New Art from Southeast As,a" was heldat venues including the Tokyo
Metropolitan Art Space, the Fukuoka Art
Museum, the Hiroshima City Museum ofContemporary Art and Kinn Plaza Osaka.
Organized by the Japan Foundation Asia
Center, "Asian Modernism"was held ,n1995 at the Japan Foundation Forum
before touring in 1996 to the Metropolitan
Museum of Marnia, the National Gallery,
Bangkok, and the Art Gallery of theIndonesian Department of Education
and Culture in Jakarta. "Art in Southeast
Asia 1997"was organized in 1997 by theJapan Foundation As,a Center and collaborating institutions, and held at theMuseum of Contemporary Art Tokyoand the Hiroshima City Museum ofContemporary Art. 'The Birth of Modern
Art in Southeast Asia" was organizedin 1997 by the Yom,uri Shimbun, andtoured from the Fukuoka Art Museum tothe Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum,the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art
and the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art
Museum. Catalogues were published for
all the exhibitions.

06
In 1990 the Japan Foundation launched
the ASEAN Culture Center to introduce
the cultures of ASEAN member statesand deepen mutual understanding in
Asia. In 1995 the institution was reorganized as the As,a Center, and ,ts rem,texpanded to include places like China andIndia as well. The Center worked to promote regional exchange and collaborative projects in Asia, but in 2004 it was
reintegrated into the Japan Foundation,
which took on the aim of promoting
trans-regional cultural exchange.

07
Also of note ,s the exh1bit1on"Dinh
0. Le: MemoryforTomorrow," held,n 2015-16 at the Mori Art Museum
and the Hiroshima City Museum ofContemporary Art.

OB
One of the venues of the "Welcome to
the Jungle" exhib1t1on,the YokohamaMuseum of Art, has been pursuing collaborations with other regional art
museums as part of the Yokohama city
government's policy of deepening ties
with Asia. while the Contemporary Art
Museum Kumamoto hosted the same
exhibition in conjunction with the 11th
Asian-Pacific City Summit. Osaka Erikoand Sakurai Takesh,. "Foreword," inWelcome to the Jungle: Contemporary Art
in Southeast Asia from the Collection ofSingapore Art Museum(Yokohama: Mo
chuisle, 2013). 6.

09
The command was moved to Colombo
the following year

Commemorative Summit Meeting of 2013, this institution seeks to promote Japanese cultural exchangewith Asia, with a focus on ASEAN member states.
Among more recent exhibitions of Southeast Asianart is "Welcome to the Jungle: Contemporary Art inSoutheast Asia from the Collection of Singapore Art
Museum," organized in 2013 in collaboration with theSingapore Art Museum, and held at the YokohamaMuseum of Art and the Contemporary Art Museum
Kumamoto, respectively. And Tokyo's National Art
Center, Mori Art Museum and Japan Foundation
Asia Center are collaborating on an exhibition ofSoutheast Asian contemporary art that is scheduled
for the summer of 2017. .!!ZOf course, these signs of change in Japan andabroad are informed by political circumstances
related to the agendas of national and regional governments. fil! Rather than a resurgence of interest inSoutheast Asian art as such, it might be more accurate to say that the groundwork is being laid to fosterthat interest . But it is also undeniable that the appreciation for and understanding of Southeast Asian
contemporary art is advanced by holding exhibitions
where large amounts of people can encounter theworks . At the least, with opportunities to see works
by Southeast Asian artists at museums and in triennale exhibitions no longer so rare in Japan, this trend
will only continue to gain momentum. And since it
is being published in Japan, this collection of essays
can also take advantage of that momentum.
Our aim in compiling this publication has
been to present important discussions that may
be of use in thinking about Southeast Asian
contemporary art. Before proceeding to the detailsof the publication, I would first like to address theconcept of Southeast Asia itself. The region known
as Southeast Asia currently encompasses 11
countries: Brunei, Cambodia, East Timar, Indonesia,
Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma),the Philippines,
Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The prevailingtheory is that Southeast Asia is a relatively new
concept. When Southeast Asia was partitioned by
the Euro-American Great Powers, few people saw
the need for a comprehensive understanding of theregion. It is said that the term "Southeast Asia" only
came into use during World War 11,when the Allied
Forces Southeast Asia Command was established in1943 in Kandy, Ceylon (current Sri Lanka).m! However,Southeast Asia specialists have two reservations
about this explanation . First, Donald K. Emmersonof Stanford University argues that "Southeast
Asia" was already in use in the mid-19th century .
He states that, entering the 20th century, ethnologists in two countries without possessions in theregion, Germany and Austria, began to research
Southeast Asia as a cultural entity .1.2Although theestablishment of the Allied Command in Ceylon
certainly played a large role in popularizing the term
"Southeast Asia;· the fact that this academic interest provided an alternate perspective to the politicalsituation deserves better recognition.

KajlyaKenji

010

ArtStudies_0J

Second, according to Shimizu Hajime, aspecialist in the history of Japan and Southeast Asia
relations, the term TemanAjiya (essentially,Southeast
Asia, althoughthe transliterationdiffers from the current
TonanAjia) was used in elementary and middle school
geography textbooks following World War l,ll eventhough the area was more commonly referred to as
the geographically undefined Nanyo (South Seas),gand "Southeast Asia" only came into widespread use
after World War II. Shimizu writes that the occupation of the German-held Pacific islands north of theequator during World War I provided a new stimulus
to the Southern Expansion Doctrine (nanshin ron)advocated since the Meiji era, and encouraged viewsof Southeast Asia as the objective of further expansion. Geographically, the regions of "Indochina" andthe "Malay Archipelago"(orthe "East Indies"), eachbelonging to Asia and the Pacific, respectively, wereperceived as T6nanAjiya. Even if the appellation of
T6nanAjiya in wartime Japan may seem neutral due
to its use in geography textbooks, Shimizu makes
clear that it actually had political implications. It
is important to note that, beyond its international
usage, the term Southeast Asia has this additional
historical background in Japanese.
In examining these basic assumptions, I hopeto establish that the concept of Southeast Asia is
not neutral, and contains numerous issues within it.
In compiling a publication with the term Southeast
Asia in its title, we have striven to select essaysthat take a conscious and critical stance toward
the issues inherent in the category of Southeast
Asia, as opposed to viewing it as a self-evident andcohesive region .
Furthermore, this publication has two factorsthat distinguish it from the above-mentioned
anthologies on contemporary Southeast Asian art.
First, instead of newly commissioned and written
texts, the 15 essays collected here were all originallypublished in Japanese and foreign exhibition catalogues, journals and monographs between the years
1983 and 2015.J.~They span a wide range of articles,from the latest research to historically important
papers that are now hard to obtain. Of course, 15 ishardly an exhaustive number, and there were some
important texts that could not be included. Even so,
the essays collected here should provide the reader
a basic overview of research into Southeast Asian
contemporary art.
Second, all the essays in this volume are being
presented in both English and Japanese. Regardlessof whether they were originally written in English
or Japanese, all have been translated into the otherlanguage (although as some of the writers wrote inboth Englishand Japanese,this distinction is more of an
expedient).With all the essays available in English,
this volume should help international researchers
to deepen their knowledge of Southeast Asian art.
Although there are a number of articles on Southeast
Asian art in Japan, some were published in books
that are unobtainable to foreign researchers, while

Chapter1

011

others can be read only in Japanese . Albeit only
a fraction of the total, some of those essays areincluded here. Conversely, Japanese readers can
now read essays on Southeast Asian modern andcontemporary art that were written in English . To
date, although some of the English literature on
Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art has
been published in translation in Japanese exhibition
catalogues, there have been far too few transla tions of academic papers or essays from foreign
exhibition catalogues. Now Japanese readers can
get a glimpse into how Southeast Asian modern
and contemporary art is discussed in places like
Australia and Singapore or the Philippines andThailand . Most of the writers of the English essays
collected here are specialists in Southeast Asian andAsian art who were educated at English-language
institutions. In contrast, the Japanese writers wereeducated in Japan and include non-specialist critics
and curators . Yet irrespective of the differences inthinking and writing styles, reading the papers inchronological order reveals strong correspondencesin their arguments .
The lone essay from the 1980s included here waswritten in 1983 by the pioneering Singaporean
specialist in Southeast Asian modern and contem porary art, T.K.Sabapathy. In his essay, Sabapathy
advocates the need for an alternative approachto the avant-garde model of Western modern art
history when studying modern art in Southeast Asia,and stresses the necessity of thinking about both the"relationship between existence and expression"and the "relationship between environment andexpression ." That is, he says it is important toconsider both entities like the work and the artist
as well as contexts like society and social thought .
At a time when Western modernism was no longer
such an influence on how works were made, but
still had a strong influence over how they werediscussed, Sabapathy was investigating an alternate
methodology to modernism.
In his essay from 1993, one of the foremost
writers on Asian modern art, Sydney University's
John Clark, identifies the existence of traditional
European representational painting as acommonality linking Southeast Asia, even as hearticulates the difficulty in addressing Southeast
Asian modern art as a single entity due to the"severe historical disjunction" of the region. Clark
states that after the end of colonial rule, Southeast
Asian artists obtained "the sovereignty of consumer
choice" to use Europe and the United States as"an immense cultural warehouse." Taking back theforms of European representational painting forthemselves, they began to produce diverse creative
voices rooted in their own localities. This perspective
on Southeast Asian representational painting as aform of appropriation opens up the potential for analternative approach to Western modern art history.
In his essay for the catalogue of 1994's AsianArt Show, Fukuoka, Ushirosh6ji Masahiro, who
was then a curator at the Fukuoka Art Museum
and is now a professor at Kyushu University ,observes that since the late 1980s there has been
an increase in works based on social awarenessand an attention toward ordinary events-a
stance he calls "realism as an attitude:' Applied tocontemporary styles that emerged since the end ofmodernism , this term can be considered an early
instance of approaching trends in contemporary
Asian art from a conceptual perspective.
In her essay from 1995, the Sydney-based
contemporary art historian Julie Ewington notes
the prevalence of artists making installations
in Southeast Asia, which she considers "a fineexample of the successful indigenization of imported
cultural practice ." Arguing on the other hand that
art using indigenous mater ials "may support
political opposition to the established regime , ormay be invoked in the name of the state," she alsocomments on the ambivalent role of such art.
Statements regarding the prevalence of installation
art in Asia could also be seen in Japan in the 1990s,~
but Ewington's critical view of "indigeneity"
distinguishes her from the rest.
While fundamentally approving of multicul turalism, Tama Art Univers ity's Tatehata Akira uses
his catalogue essay for 1995's "Asian Modernism"to address the problems that can arise from cultural
relativism . Tatehata's concern is that, in its vigilanceagainst cultural exploitation, the relativistic stanceof multiculturalism could actually lead to reductive
claims that the only acceptable approach to understanding the culture of the other is by assessing it
in its original context . Tatehata says that in order toavoid this, Asia should not be upheld as a countervalue to the West . A warning about the "Asian
contemporary art boom" then happening in Japanagainst the backdrop of multiculturalism, Tatehata's
essay also echoes Ewington's caution regarding"indigeneity ."In 1999, Apinan Poshyananda, who wasteaching at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University
at the time and went on to become permanent
secretary of the Thai Ministry of Culture, wrote in
the catalogue for "Global Conceptualism : Pointsof Origin, 1950s-1980s" that the conceptual art
that emerged in Southeast Asia in the 1970s was
not driven solely by "inspiration from abroad or theneed to catch up to the West ." He explains that the
New Art Movement in Indonesia was galvanized by"social and political pressures within the local art
scene," and that artists used conceptual art projects
as "vehicles for critique and reflection on their rapidlychanging societies:' Apinan comments that despite
its origins in Western conceptual art, Southeast
Asian conceptual art follows a different trajectory ,even "dismiss[ing) Western versions of conceptualism ." At the same time that it historically traces analternate lineage of contemporary art in Southeast
Asia, this essay skillfully describes a postcolonial

Leamlngfn>mModemondContompcwa,yArtlnllou!MutAsla

10

Donald K. Emmerson," 'Southeast Asia'·
What's in a Name'· "Journal of Southeast
Asian Studies 15, no.1 ( March 1984). 1-21
However, as I w,11mentton later, Germany
possessed the Carolines, the Mananas.
the Marshall Islands and Palau. See
also lshtt Yoneo. "Thnan Ajia no sh1-tek1
rnnshikt no ayumi" [The Development ofHistorical Awareness rn Southeast Asia),
rn Koza 7onanAjia gaku dat 4 kan. 7onan
AJiano rek!Shi[Course on Southeast Asta
Studies, vol.4: The History of Southeast
Astal(Tokyo: K6bund6, 1991), 1-14; andlkehata Setsuho, 'Tonan A11ash, e no
apur6ch1" [Approaches to Southeast
Asian History), ,n Kawaru 7onanAJta
sh, z6 [The History of Southeast Asia rn
Transformation) (Tokyo: Yamakawa
shuppansha, 1994). 3-22
11

Shtmtzu Ha11me."Kindai Nihon nt okeru
Tonan AI1ya'ch11kigarnen no se,ntsu:
Sholchu gakk6 chin kyokasho ni mtru"[The Emergence of the Regional Conceptof 'Southeast Asia' rn Modern Japan:
A Study Based on the Geography
Textbooks of Japanese Elementaryand Middle Schools during the Prewar
PenodJ, rn AJiaKe,za,[Asian Economy).
vol. 28. no. 6 (June 1987). 2-15. and vol.
28, no. 7 (July 1987), 22-38.

12
It was also referred to as "nanp6" (theSouth) and "nanp6 ken" (the Southern
Sphere). Yano Thru, 'Nanshm'noketfu.·
Nihon no nanyo shtkan [The Genealogy of'Southern Expansion'· Histoncal Views of
Nany6 rn Japan) (Tokyo: Chtkura shob6,2009), 913
The exception ,s Kuroda Ra,ji's paper,
which 1sadapted from the English draft ofa speech grven at the international symposium "Locus Redux: Speaking AcrossContexts. Learnings and Negottatrons
rn Wntrng andTeachrng on Art," held rn
May 2012 at the Yuchengco Museum
rn Manila

14
Sugawara Norio, "Ajia genda, b1Iutsu:
Ka,ga ch6koku no waku koe, se1y6 ni
nai doku11sei"[As1an Contemporary Art:
Uniqueness That Transcends the Realmof Painting and Sculpture and Cannot Be
Found in the West], Yom,uriSh,mbun,
October 18, 1994, Tokyo evening editton;
Yamamon Eiji, "lnsutareshon: J1yuna
hy6gen, nihon ga tokui" [Installations·Free Expressions That Japan Presentswith Pride). Asahi Sh,mbun, November 6,
1999, evenrng edrtton.

Shaping the History of Art
In Southeast Asia

15

Ushirosh611Masahiro, 'Toe Labyrinthine
Search for Self-ldent,ty: The Art ofSoutheast As,a from the 1980s to the1990s," in New Art from Southeast Asia
1992(Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 1992),
21-24.

16
Patrick D. Flores, "Tums in Tropics: Art,stCurator," in The 7th Gwangju Biennale:
Annual Report. A Year in Exhibitions, ed.
Okwui Enwezor (Gwangiu: GwangJu
B,ennale Foundation, 2008), 262-285.

17
For the special feature, Ushirosh6Ji wrote
about not only modern art in Southeast
Asia but also that of the Indian subcontinent and China/Mongolia (the latter co-authored with Rawanchaikul
Toshiko). In addition to the above cited"Art of Southeast Asia Under Japanese
Occupation," the following paper is alsoof interest: Ushirosh6Ji Masah1ro, "Tonan
a11an, okeru 'bijutsu' no tanj6 to nihon
no sens6" [The Birth of 'Art' in Southeast
Asia and Japan's War], in Nihon bijutsu
zenshu dai 18kan: Senso to bijutsu [TheComplete Works of Japanese Art, vol.18:
War and Art] (Tokyo: Sh6gakukan, 2015),
215-217 .

Introdu ction 02

situation in which contemporary art becomes"ambivalent" through the process of "mimicry," touse Homi Bhabha's word .
In his capacity as the chief curator at theMuseum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Shioda Junichi(now director of the NiigataCity Art Museum)worked on
the exhibition "Art in Southeast Asia 1997: Glimpses
into the Future," which presented contemporary art
from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore
and Thailand . In his catalogue essay, Shioda divides
the participating artists into three categories : artists who reference local ethnic culture in the wakeof modernism; those who investigate their own
identities in fluid social environments ; and those
who actively engage with social and political issues.
The second of these categories perhaps referencesthe "search for self-identity," a tendency Ushiroshoji
found in Southeast Asian contemporary art in a 1992
paper. 1§ Like Apinan, Shioda identifies an alternative
modernism that seeks its basis in community , rather
than the individualism extolled by Western modern ism . Drawing upon the claims of multiculturalism ,Shioda's text is an attempt at a further reading ofmultiple trends in Southeast Asian art .
Entering the 2000s, research into contemporary Southeast Asian art began to expand both interms of subject matter and approach . Although it
concerns Asia rather than Southeast Asia as such,the paper by Cornell University's Sakai Naoki is ofgreat relevance for thinking about Southeast Asianart . It is adapted from the keynote speech Sakai
presented at the Japan Foundation Symposium in2002 . Sakai argues that the concept of "Asia" wascreated by Europeans as a means for distinguishingthemselves from the others to the east . Assertingthat the self-awareness of "Asia" results from
European colonization, he questions whether it ispossible to engage in self-referential interrogations
like "we Asians " without getting caught up in suchbinary oppositions and postcolonial genealogies .
While historically examining the same problematics
of "counter values" raised by Tatehata througha yet broader epistemological framework , Sakai
confronts the difficult challenge of considering thepotential of terms that could contain such values,
such as "we Asians."
In his paper from 2004 Ahmad Mashadi,
who was then senior curator at the Singapore
Art Museum, and is now head of the National
University of Singapore Museum, underscores thenegotiations entailed in considering Southeast Asia
as a region. Closely identified with nation building
projects at the time, abstract art was the rage at
the Southeast Asian art exhibition held in Manila in1957, but at the ASEAN art symposium held in thesame city in 1993, appeals for regional unity weremade through the use of traditional aesthetics .
Describing how such assertions are shaped within
political and economic relations, Mashadi reveals
the subtleties that are necessary for discussing theregion of Southeast Asia. Even when assumptions

Kajlya Kenjl

012

Art Studies_03

about regional identity based on some concept
or other have problems, it is important to gain ahistorical understanding of how such theories arearticulated . Historically evaluating discourses about
the region in terms of their political and economic
relations, Mashadi's text presents an effective
approach for thinking about Southeast As ia.
In her text from 2006, the Australian National
University 's Caroline Turner compares the Fukuoka
Asian Art Museum's Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale(along with its predecessor,the AsianArt Show, Fukuoka)
and the Queensland Art Gallery's Asia-Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art . She identifies multiple
parallels between the two, including their retentionof memories of war, their positioning on the margins
of Asia, their being held at art museums , and theirconnections to economics and politics. This kind ofanalysis of international exhibitions, including more
recent events like the Singapore Biennale, is increasingly important for thinking about Southeast Asian
contemporary art.
The co-editor of this volume, Patrick D. Floresof the University of the Philippines, has publishednumerous important articles - not least of which
is his analysis of the phenomenon of the "artistcurator " that emerged in the late 1970s and the1980s. ~ In the text chosen for inclusion here, hereflects upon how art in Asia was shaped by politicalfactors after independence and amid national fervor,
using painting in India, Indonesia and the Philippines
as examples. Flores pays particular attention to
intimacy, improvisation and suffering, describing
how they can disrupt both individual and collective
identity . Finally, turning to the contemporary paintingof Japan and China, he argues that postcoloniality
subverts the nation -state and nationalism by turningthem into hybrids . Understanding art as somethingwhich produces new political situations more sothan it responds to existing political situations,
Flores's argument opens up new perspectives on the
research of Southeast Asian art .
In 2010, Ushiroshoji edited a special feature on"Modernism in Asian Art" for the Japanese academic art journal Bijutsu Forum 21, as part of which
he wrote an article on the reception of Gauguin
in Southeast Asian art-his second article in ourcompilation . Expanding the scope of his researchfrom contemporary to modern art , Ushiroshoji has
published several fascinating papers in this vein,
although they could not all be included here.1Z
In his essay from 2012, National Universityof Singapore's David Teh addresses video art
in Southeast Asia and Singapore . According tohim , there are three characteristics of Southeast
Asian video art . First, given the number ofworks incorporating multiple media , it is definedby "remediation" in contrast to the "medium
specificity "of Western modern art . Second, italso has a role as an oral medium, and as suchconnects to oral traditions . Finally, it is often used
as a response to authority, giving it a political andChapter1013

social function. Teh says that these characteristics
do not apply to video art in Singapore. Already"always transnational," Singaporean video art isoften made with high-tech materials, and showsa concern for the geopolitics of the island . Suchanalyses of individual fields of practice will only beof increasing necessity going forward.
In the paper he presented in Manila in 2012,
the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum's Kuroda Raiji
attempted to rethink modernity as a target of rotecriticism. According to Kuroda, while everyone
knows about the elite "modernity as style," weshould also be aware of the democratic "modernity
as resistance." He is critical of the current stateof research, saying that works representing theformer category have commanded all the attention
because they are preserved in forms that can easily
circulate and are easy to discuss in terms of EuroAmerican discourses . Stating that the modernismof Asian art should be understood as the synthesisof diverse ideas and practices, Kuroda warns
against setting up modernity as a strawman .
Like Kuroda, Australian National University'sMichelle Antoinette also seeks to reevaluate
modernity . Her essay here is excerpted from thefirst chapter of Reworlding Art History : Encounterswith Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990,
published in 2015. Citing a range of discourses on
Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art,
Antoinette advocates the need to study the development of Asia's diverse modernities, which differ fromEurocentric modernity, and in so doing relativize thepositions of Europe and the United States. She comments that .the contemporary in Southeast Asia isjust one response to modernism rather than a resultof modernism, and that modern and contemporary
art exist together simultaneously .
This gives some sense of the background and scopeof the compilation process as well as the characteristics of the publication and its collected papers. In
response to the rising interest in Southeast Asianmodern and contemporary art both in Japan andabroad in recent years, our goal in assembling theseimportant texts was to present discussions that
may be of service in learning about Southeast Asianmodern and contemporary art .
The first thing one realizes from reading thecollected texts is that the discussions that emergedby the end of the 1990s all shared the following
points of emphasis: 11the importance of art's connection to the social context (Sabapathy,Apinan);
21the need to examine the category of Southeast
Asia itself (Clark); 3 Ithe difference in histories andrationales from the West (Sabapathy,Clark,Ushirosh6ji,
Apinan,Shioda);and 41 the need for cautious inquiry
into the problematics of difference (indigeneity)(Ewington,Tatehata).Although there is some overlap,

the papers from the 2000s onwards expand thediscussion by addressing the following points :11individual genres of expression (Apinan,Teh);
21the display context (Turner, Mashadi);3 Ipostcoloniality (Sakai,Flores); and 41 the reevaluation ofmodernity(Ushirosh6ji, Kuroda,Ewington).
What also becomes apparent is that in mostof the studies on contemporary Southeast Asianart that were written in English, both the arguments
and methodologies are Westernized, and academic
perspectives predominate . This is a key difference
even from the discussion of postwar Japanese art inJapan, where critics remain influential. This is not to
say there is no problem with the Westernization of
the discourse, but we can anticipate that the study
and discussion of Southeast Asian contemporary art
will be increasingly pursued and deepened withina Western academic discourse . That we could
assemble some of the most relevant discussions inthis vein is one of the achievements of this volume .
On the other hand, the discussions written
in Japanese are also evolving . Although we did
not include them here, there are more and more
examples of critics writing frankly about Southeast
Asian contemporary art in Japanese. With anincrease in the number of researchers and curators
now entering the field, the disparity with the English
literature is shrinking . Behind this is certainly theshift in emphasis of exhibit ions and events from
cultural exchange to research-based projects.
It goes without saying that , far from suggesting
cultural exchange is on the decline, these changes
are leading to deeper levels of exchange created byincreased opportunities to share issues and engage
in discussion. As one of its editors, I hope this volume can contribute to that process .
Finally, I would like to conclude by touching
upon the significance of studying Southeast
Asian art in Japan . To date, the interest toward
Southeast Asian art in Japan has had an economic
and political emphasis. Southeast Asia has beenvalued as a target of economic expansion and as acounterweight to China, and cultural exchange with
Southeast Asia promoted because it was thought
it would also reinforce the building of relations on
economic and political levels. But as we have seen,cultural interest is creative and diverse, and not justa facilitator for developing economic and political
relations. Building recognition through learning
about each other's thoughts and feelings can also
lead to the creation of other, new kinds of relations .
To that end we can find much guidance in the worksof the Southeast Asian artists who have pursued
their practices amid diverse social conditions . It is
our hope that this collection of essays can also help
to show the way forward .
Translated by Andrew Maer kle.

LeamlngfromModemandContemporaryArtlnSoutheastAsia-