The Japan Foundation Asia Center│Art Studies Vol.05

The Japan Foundation Asia Center

Art Studies Vol.05

About
Art Studies 05

In April 2014, The Japan Foundation launched the Japan Foundation
Asia Center with four “C”s as its guiding concept: to “Communicate,”“Connect and Share,” “Collaborate,” and “Create” in the Asian
region. Spanning from the establishment of the ASEAN Culture
Center in 1990 to the present, The Japan Foundation has planned andimplemented numerous regional exchange projects in the field of art
through activities that include exhibitions, symposia, and intellectual
exchange. The Asia Center has developed exhibitions and other projects
addressing the fresh challenges Asia is confronting in the age ofglobalization, and also engaged in the exchange, accumulation, anddissemination of art-related study and research. The Japan Foundation
Asia Center Art Studies series is published as part of this program.
The previous volumes in this series are as follows:— Vol. 01 Cultural Rebellion in Asia 1960–1989 (2015)
	The inaugural volume reported on “Cultural Rebellion in Asia
1960–1989,” an international seminar held in 2014 with researchers
from around Asia sharing insights into avant-garde art movements
in Asia from the 1960s through to the 1980s.
—	Vol. 02 THE 1990s: The Making of Art with Contemporaries (2016)
	This volume is a report on “THE 1990s: The Making of Art with
Contemporaries,” an international symposium held in 2015
assessing trends and significant developments in art exchange
in the Asia-Pacific region since the 1990s, from the viewpoints ofcurators, artists, and cultural policy makers.
—	Vol. 03 Shaping the History of Art in Southeast Asia (2017)
	This volume is an anthology of 15 essays by Asia-Pacific researchersand curators tracing discourse and currents related to contemporary
Southeast Asian art that have developed in conjunction with artistic
practices from the 1980s to the present.
—	Vol. 04 Condition Report: Shifting Perspectives in Asia (2018)	This volume is a curators’ book of essays related to art environments
and reflections on projects by curators who participated in the“Condition Report” series of programs developed collaboratively by
young curators from Southeast Asia and Japan, held from the end of2015 until 2017, with a focus on current art scenes.
This fifth volume follows on from its predecessor, once again focusing
on the role of the curator, one which greatly influences the shaping of
the art scene today. It collects together presentations and reflections
by curators who participated in “Curators’ Forum 2018: Imagining
New Ecologies,” which was held from October 17 to October 19,
2018 in Tokyo, and offers proposals for the future of curating and its
engagement with art and society.

Five years have now passed since the launch of the Asia Center in
2014. Over the course of that time, the construction of collaborative
spaces through joint projects has become a driving force in the fieldof art. “Media/Art Kitchen” (2013–14), “Run & Learn” (2014–15),” and“Condition Report” (2015–17) form a series of projects embodying
a process in which, within a context of not only the relationshipbetween Japan and Southeast Asia but also the relationships mutuallyintertwined in manifold ways through histories, politics, societies, andcultures across the Southeast Asian region, up-and-coming art curatorscame to recognize each other’s commonalities and differences while
exploring answers to questions of how a certain challenge could beinterpreted not as a task for others, but rather as “our” shared task, andhow we can then create environments that facilitate such empathy.
At “Curators’ Forum 2018: Imagining New Ecologies,” new participantsjoined curators who had taken part in the previous projects todiscuss across three separately themed sessions (Public, History, and
Education) the role of the curator, what it is they aspire to do throughtheir curatorial practices, and how their activities and knowledge cancontribute to the public. Along with sharing empirical knowledge
acquired from participants’ own on-site activities and elucidating
curatorial challenges facing contemporary art today, the forum searched
for ideas that can reform and steer the current situation in interesting
directions. This report is a documentation of the forum’s discussions
but we hope it will also help us to think about our art environments
in Asia so that we can move closer, one step at a time, toward the goalindicated by the title, “Imagining New Ecologies.”
In closing, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all those
who contributed to this project. Che Kyongfa, Horiuchi Naoko,
Kumakura Haruko, and Le Thuan Uyen played proactive parts inthe planning of “Curators’ Forum 2018: Imagining New Ecologies,”while the editing of this volume, as with the previous one, was greatly
supported by Horiuchi Naoko and Beverly Yong. In addition, we are
grateful to the curators for taking time out of their busy schedules
to participate in the forum and write their contributions to thispublication. We are truly indebted to everyone for their enthusiasm andgenerous efforts.

The Japan Foundation Asia Center
March 2019005

The Japan Foundation Asia Center
Art Studies 05
Curators Forum 2018 :Imagining New Ecologies
ReportEditor:Beverly Yong
Assistant Editors:
Furuichi Yasuko
Horiuchi Naoko
Translators:[Japanese to English]

William Andrews[Indonesian to English]

The Japan Foundation Asia Center would like to thankthe following members for their generous assistance in making
Curators Forum 2018: Imagining New Ecologies possible.

─

Che Kyongfa
Horiuchi Naoko
Kumakura Haruko
Le Thuan Uyen
Beverly Yong

Fuji Adriza

Contributors:

Art Director / Designer:
Kimura Toshimasa

Ayos Purwoaji
Che Kyongfa
Furuichi Yasuko
Goh Sze Ying
Hasegawa Arata
Horiuchi Naoko
Kumakura Haruko
Le Thuan Uyen
Leonhard Bartolomeus
Maung Day
Bill Nguyen
Nishida Maki
Vipash Purichanont
Shiraki Eise
Syafiatudina
Lisa Ito-Tapang
Selene Yap
Beverly Yong

Printed by:
SunM Color Co., Ltd
Published by:
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
https://www.jpf.go.jp
https://jfac.jp
Published on March 20, 2019©2019 The Japan Foundation Asia Center / Authors
All rights reserved.

Curators Forum 2018:
Imagining New Ecologies
ReportContents

Session 1

Public003

About Art Studies 05

010

Curators Forum 2018: Imagining New Ecologies

011

Forum Participants

016

A Note from the Editors and Forum Team

021

PublicChe Kyongfa

─023

How Low Can You Go ?
Ayos Purwoaji

─027

The Shaping of Myanmar Art Scene and Who Can Play Which Role in It
Maung Day

─030

Making Room for Reasonable Disagreements
Selene Yap

─036

The Role Required of the Art Museum
Kumakura Haruko

─040

Untimely Deaths, Undying Time
Goh Sze Ying─

Session 2

History

044

DISCUSSION

057

History
Beverly Yong─059

Microhistory / Alternative History:
Artistic Production in Looking at Identity, Political Struggle, and Expression
Le Thuan Uyen

─064

The Plurality of History: History and history
Nishida Maki

─069

A Commitment to Telling:
Curatorial Labor and Counter-Hegemonic Histories
Lisa Ito-Tapang

─073

A Ghost of Collectivity: Hauntology and Curation of the Future
Vipash Purichanont─
077

When the Exhibition Recurs
Hasegawa Arata─081

DISCUSSION

008

Session 3

Education

093

Education
Horiuchi Naoko─095

Can the Contemporary Art Museum be a New Place for Learning?
Shiraki Eise─
100

Ways of Negotiation
Bill Nguyen─106Collective as School
Leonhard Bartolomeus

─
110

School of Improper Education:
Education of the Heart, the Mind, and Everything in Between
Syafiatudina

─113

DISCUSSION124

DISCUSSION: Closing Thoughts

127

Afterword─Furuichi Yasuko009

Curators Forum 2018: Imagining New Ecologies
October 17–19, 2018, at The Japan Foundation Hall SAKURA, Tokyo
Organized by The Japan Foundation Asia Center

Session 1

October 17, 14:00-17:00

PublicModerators

Che Kyongfa
Horiuchi Naoko
Speakers

Ayos Purwoaji
Goh Sze Ying
Kumakura Haruko
Maung Day
Selene Yap

Session 2

October 18, 14:00-17:00

History
Moderators

Beverly Yong
Che Kyongfa
Speakers

Hasegawa Arata
Le Thuan Uyen
Nishida Maki
Vipash Purichanont
Lisa Ito-Tapang

Session 3

October 19, 14:00-17:00

Education
Moderators

Horiuchi Naoko
Beverly Yong
Speakers

Leonhard Bartolomeus
Bill Nguyen
Shiraki Eise
Syafiatudina

010

Forum Participants

Ayos Purwoaji

Hasegawa Arata

Independent Curator

Independent Curator

Born in Jember, East Java, Indonesia. Graduatedfrom the Department of Product Design, Sepuluh
Nopember Institute of Technology, Surabaya. Ayos
Purwoaji’s curatorial work lies at the intersection ofhistory, architecture, and contemporary art. In 2015,
he initiated an ongoing research/exhibition project
investigating the modernization of architecture inrural Java and co-founded Surabaya Contemporary
Heritage Council, a fictitious institution to critiqueheritage-related issues. Curated and co-curated
exhibitions include The 7th East Java Biennale(Surabaya, 2017), “Adu Doro” (c2o Library &Collabtive, Surabaya, 2017), “Almost There” (Vargas
Museum, Quezon City, 2017), and “Lecture on Cities”(Bozar Center for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2017). In 2018,
he became part of Kolektif Kurator Kampung. He
participated in the Japan Foundation Asia Center’s
curatorial development program, “Condition Report”
from 2015 to 2017. Lives and works in Surabaya.

Born in Salt Lake City, USA. Received BA (Social
Anthropology) from Kyoto University.
Curatorial projects include “Impurity/Immunity”(Tokyo Arts and Space, 2017, Barrak, Okinawa,
2018, and Barrak Pavilion, Bangkok Biennial 2018),“Chronicle, Chronicle!” (Creative Center Osaka,
2016 –2017), “Palais de Kyoto/Nothing But Sounds”(ARTZONE, Kyoto, 2015), and “On the Desert Islands:
Sculptures, 3D-works and Installations in the 1980s”(Gallery Aube, Kyoto, 2014). From 2017 to 2018,
Hasegawa Arata was guest curator for PARADISE
AIR. Catalogue essays include “On Walls, Walking on
Parallel Paths” (Roppongi Crossing 2019: Connexions,
Mori Art Museum, 2019). He is also an official
reviewer for the Architectural Institute of Japan. Lives
and works in Tokyo.

Goh Sze Ying

Born in Tokyo, Japan. Received MA from Tama Art
University. Curatorial projects with Mori Art Museum
include “Roppongi Crossing 2019: Connexions”(2019), “MAM Project: 023 Agatha Gothe-Snape”(2017), and “SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art fromSoutheast Asia 1980s to Now” (2017). Lives and works
in Tokyo.

Assistant Curator, National Gallery Singapore

Born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Received MA(Cities and Society) from Goldsmiths, University of
London in 2015. Previously involved in researchingand organizing artistic interventions in urban public
space in Kuala Lumpur, Goh Sze Ying’s current
research focuses on photography and visual art
in Singapore in the mid-20th century. Co-curated
exhibitions at the National Gallery Singapore include“Minimalism: Space. Light. Object.” (2018), and“Lim Cheng Hoe: Painting Singapore” (2018). Other
curatorial projects include “Between States” (OUR
ArtProjects, Kuala Lumpur, 2017) and “ESCAPE fromthe SEA” (co-curator, National Art Gallery and APW,
Kuala Lumpur, 2017), connected to her participationin the Japan Foundation Asia Center’s curatorial
development program, “Condition Report” from2015 to 2017. She is a curator for the upcoming
6th Singapore Biennale 2019. Lives and works in
Singapore.

011

Kumakura Haruko
Assistant Curator, Mori Art Museum

Le Thuan Uyen
Independent curator

Born Hanoi, Vietnam. Received BA (Politics) fromthe University of York, MA (Cultural and Creative
Industries) from King’s College London. Le Thuan
Uyen’s curatorial work investigates alternative
histories, and current socio-political contexts andtheir impact on artistic production in Vietnam.
Curatorial projects include “Chancing Modern”(Vietnam Film Studio, Hanoi, 2017 and The Factory,
Ho Chi Minh City, 2018), “Sindikat Campursari”(Gudang Sarina, Jakarta, 2016), “Embedded South(s)”(San Art, 2016), “Mien Meo Mieng” (Bildmuseet,Umea, 2015), and “Skylines With Flying People 3”(Nha San Collective, 2015 –17). From 2014 to 2016
she was general manager of Nha San Collective. She
participated in the Japan Foundation Asia Center’s
curatorial development program, “Condition Report”
from 2015 to 2017 and was also resident curator at Art
in General (New York City) from April to August 2017.
Lives and works in Hanoi.

Leonhard Bartolomeus
Independent Curator

Born in Depok, East Java, Indonesia. Received BA(Ceramics) from Jakarta Institute of Arts. Leonhard
Bartolomeus’s curatorial projects have mainly
addressed historical issues, but in recent years he has
started to focus on open education and collaborative
projects. Recent curated exhibitions include“Theoryless Painting” (Galeri Cipta III, Jakarta,2017). Co-editor of Publik dan Reklame di Ruang Kota
Jakarta (ruangrupa, 2013), and previously co-editorof KARBONjournal.org. Part of Jakarta collective
ruangrupa and Gudskul Ekosistem, he is also cofounder of curatorial collective Kolektif Kurator
Kampung. In 2018, he took part in the Artist andResearcher/Curator in Residence Support Program,
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Lives and works in Depok
and Jakarta.

Maung Day
ArtistBorn in Yangon, Myanmar. Received MA (International
Development Studies) from Chulalongkorn University.
Maung Day is an artist, poet, and development worker.
In 2008, with artist Moe Satt, he co-founded Beyond
Pressure International Performance Art Festival. Fora year in 2007, he was editor of Pan, a now-defunctart magazine focusing on the local art scene andintroducing international artists and movements.
Recent exhibitions include “Complicit: Maung Day”
(Myanm/art Gallery, 2018), “A Beast, a God and a Line”(TS1 Yangon, 2018), and “SUNSHOWER: Contemporary
Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now” (Mori Art
Museum, Tokyo, 2017). Lives and works in Yangon.

012

Bill Nguyen
Curatorial Assistant, The Factory

Born in Hanoi, Vietnam. Received BA (Fine Arts)
from the School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent
University. Bill Nguyen is an artist-curator interested
in developing an alternative, locally-driven method
and platform for curation in Vietnam. Projects
include “0395A.ĐC: A solo exhibition by Ly Hoang
Ly” (The Factory, Ho Chi Minh City, 2017), “Skylines
With Flying People 3” (Nha San Collective, 2016), “IntoThin Air” (Manzi, Hanoi, 2016), and interdisciplinary
education program “ARTLAB” (2012). In 2012, he cofounded non-profit art space Manzi. He participatedin the 8th Berlin Biennial Young Curators’ Workshop(2014) and CuratorsLAB initiated by Goethe-Institut
Jakarta (2017). Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.

Nishida Maki
Independent Curator

Born in Fukuoka, Japan. Received BA (History of Art
and Aesthetics) at Keio University, MA (History of Art)at University College London. Nishida Maki works as
an independent curator and writer. Selected curated
exhibitions include “On Line dot—Works on paperand other visible things, not necessarily viewed as
drawing” (Devi Art Foundation/The Japan Foundation
New Delhi, 2017) and “Kumi Machida” (Asia House,
London, 2015 –16). Writes for Art Asia Pacific, Bijutsu
Techo, and other magazines and platforms. Lives in
Nagoya and works across Japan and internationally.

Vipash Purichanont
Independent Curator

Born in Bangkok, Thailand. Received PhD (Curatorial/
Knowledge) from Goldsmiths, University of London,and is a lecturer at the Department of Art History,
Silpakorn University. Vipash Purichanont’s curatorialinterests lie in the relationship between art practiceand contemporary philosophy. He co-curated“Concept Context Contestation: art and collective inSoutheast Asia” (Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre,2013). From 2016 to 2018, he was an assistant curator

for the Inaugural Thailand Biennale, Krabi 2018,and he is a curator for the upcoming 6th Singapore
Biennale 2019. In 2016, he co-founded Waiting
You Curator Lab, a Chiangmai-based independent
curatorial initiative. Lives and works in Bangkok.

Lisa Ito-Tapang
Independent Curator

Born in Kumamoto, Japan. Received MA (Arts Policy
and Management) from Fine Arts Musashino Art
University. Shiraki Eise joined Mori Art Museum in2003 as a Curatorial Assistant, going on to work as an
Educator until 2017, when he assumed his current
position as Associate Curator of Learning. Co-curator
of international symposium “Can Contemporary Art
Museums Become New Places of ‘Learning’?” (MoriArt Museum, Tokyo, 2017), and co-editor of MAM
Documents 003: Can Contemporary Art Museums Become
New Places of “Learning”? (Mori Art Museum, 2018).
Lives and works in Tokyo.

Born in Manila, Philippines. Received BFA (ArtHistory major) from the University of the Philippines
College of Fine Arts (UPCFA); currently completing
Masters in Art Studies (Art History) at UP College ofArts and Letters, and teaches art history at UPCFA.
Lisa Ito-Tapang’s research and curatorial interests
explore intersections between art practice, politicalengagement, and ecology. Curatorial projects
include “Dissident Vicinities” (Bulwagan ng Dangal
Museum, University of the Philippines Diliman,
Quezon City, 2017) and “Almost There” (Vargas
Museum, Quezon City, 2017), connected to herparticipation in the Japan Foundation Asia Center’s
curatorial development program, “Condition
Report” from 2015 to 2017. She is current SecretaryGeneral of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines(CAP), an organization of progressive artists. She
lives and works in Quezon City, Manila.

Syafiatudina

Selene Yap

Writer and Curator, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center

Independent Curator

Born in Melbourne, Australia. Received BA(Communication Studies) from Gajah Mada
University. Syafiatudina has been developing her
curatorial practice at the intersection of art andpolitical organization. She is currently working on“School of Improper Education,” an experiment todevelop critical pedagogy models. Curatorial projects
include “Radio KUNCI” (ifa Gallery, Berlin, 2016),“Gloves in Action” (Green Room, Weltkulturen
Museum, Frankfurt, 2015), and “Made in Commons”(KUNCI, Yogyakarta, 2015). She has been curator in
residence at Art Center Ongoing (Tokyo, 2018), No
Man’s Land online journal and Nusantara Archivein Taipei (2017), and NTU CCA Singapore (2015);
and artist/researcher in residence with KUNCI for“Heterotropics” at Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam(2017). She participated in TRANScuratorial Academy
at HKW, Berlin and Goethe-Institut, Mumbai (2017).
Lives and works in Yogyakarta.

Born in Singapore. Received BSocSc (Hons)(Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies) from the
National University of Singapore. Selene Yap was cocurator of “opening day,” a four-part series of artistic
interventions (Upper Serangoon Shopping Centre,
2017–18). She was previously program manager forvisual arts at The Substation, where she provided
research and curatorial support for “Discipline theCity” (2017), “Is That All There Is?” (2016), and“Each Blade of Grass” (2016). From 2014 to 2015,
she participated in the Curating Lab program at NUS
Museum, Singapore. Lives and works in Singapore.

Shiraki Eise
Associate Curator of Learning, Mori Art Museum013

Moderators

AIR (2015/2016), and ARCUS Project (2013). She isassistant editor of The Japan Foundation Asia Center Art
Studies Vol.04. Condition Report: Shifting Perspectives in
Asia (2018). Lives and works in Tokyo.

Che Kyongfa
Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

Born in Hyogo, Japan. Received MA (Art History andTheory [20th century]) from Goldsmiths, Universityof London in 2000, and completed Critical Studies(Post MA) at Malmö Art Academy in 2006. Before
joining Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2013,
Che Kyongfa organized various exhibitions, discursive
events, and publication projects. Major curatorial
projects include “Almost There” (Vargas Museum,
Quezon City, 2017), “Time of others” (Museum ofContemporary Art Tokyo, 2015), “Omnilogue: Journeyto the West” (Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 2012),“Fog Dossier” (Artsonje Center, Seoul, 2010), “TheDemon of Comparisons” (Stedelijk Museum Bureau,
Amsterdam, 2009), “Recycled” (Unge Kunstneres
Samfund, Oslo, 2008), and OK Video Festival (Galeri
Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta, 2005). She was a curator
and project mentor for the Japan Foundation Asia
Center’s curatorial development program, “Condition
Report” from 2015 to 2017. Lives and works in Tokyo.

Horiuchi Naoko
Curator and Lecturer, Arts Initiative Tokyo (AIT)

Born in Nagano, Japan. Received MSc (Contemporary
Art and Art Theory) from Edinburgh College of Art in2005. Having worked as an independent curator in
Edinburgh and as an assistant curator of Metronome
Think Tank Tokyo (2006), Horuichi Naoko joined AITin 2008. Since 2016, she has been organizing AIT’s
program “dear Me,” an art-based learning platform
for children in alternative care. Selected curatorial
projects include “Shaping Voices, Silent Skies” (Tomio
Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, 2017), “Shuffling Spaces”(Seescape Gallery, Chiang Mai, 2015), “Invisible
Energy” (co-curator, St Paul St Gallery, Auckland,2015), and “Divided Against Ourselves” (Yamamoto
Gendai, Tokyo, 2013). She was a guest curator of
Kyoto Re-Search in Maizuru (2017), PARADISE

014

Beverly Yong
Director, RogueArt

Born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Received BA (English
and Art History) from Cambridge University, MA(Asian Art and Archaeology) from SOAS, Universityof London. Previously a gallerist, Beverly Yong cofounded RogueArt, a partnership working on art
projects, exhibitions, publications, and collections
in Southeast Asia, in 2008. Selected curated and cocurated exhibitions include “Chang Yoong Chia:
Second Life” (National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur,2018), “Thinking of Landscape: Paintings from theYeap Lam Yang Collection” (Institute of Contemporary
Arts Singapore, 2014), “Territories of the Real andUnreal: Photographic Practices in Contemporary
Southeast Asian Art” (Langgeng Foundation,
Yogyakarta, 2011), and “Wong Hoy Cheong” (National
Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, 2004). She is co-editorin-chief of ongoing series Narratives in Malaysian
Art (RogueArt, 2011–), and co-editor of The JapanFoundation Asia Center Art Studies Vol.04. Condition
Report: Shifting Perspectives in Asia (2018), and Today
and Tomorrow: Emerging Practices in Malaysian Art(Adaptus Design, 2013).

A Note fromthe Editors andForum TeamThis publication documents an exchange of ideas among a group of
curators from Southeast Asia and Japan. The original exchange was heldin the form of a three-day forum, “Imagining New Ecologies,” organizedby the Japan Foundation Asia Center at The Japan Foundation, Tokyo in
October 2018.
In his opening address at the forum, Japan Foundation Asia Center
director Shono Keiji talked of curating as an act of the imagination, andthe forum’s theme focused on the role of curators, and how curatorialideas and practices might expand to help change and shape art world
ecologies going forward.
The invited speakers from Southeast Asia included individuals The
Japan Foundation had encountered or worked with in their projects;
a number of them had previously taken part in the Asia Center’s“Condition Report” curatorial development program from 2015 to 2017.
Most were (or had been) independent curators who have establishedactive practices in the past three to 10 years in Indonesia, Malaysia,
the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Artist, poet, andorganizer Maung Day also came to speak on the situation in Myanmar
and the potential role of curators there. They were joined by independentand institutional curators from Japan from their peer group. Some,but not all, participants knew or had worked with each other, and thisgathering of passionate voices from very different contexts, and its
potential for building new networks, in itself represented or functioned
as the seeding of a new ecology.
The forum team identified three crucial topics for discussion,
based on their observations of evolving tendencies and urgencies inart practices and infrastructures both in Asia and globally. With theproliferation of community-based art projects and also questions
raised about the role and future of art institutions, the first topic,
Public, was to address the question of “for whom” exhibitions, or othercuratorial projects, are produced and presented. Recent discussions
had highlighted the importance of accumulating archives, a process
which invites or even necessitates the rediscovery or reinterpretationof art histories. As art histories are interconnected with history, andalso in light of a growing interest in historical subject matter among
practitioners and organizers, History was set as the second topic.
“Learning,” or pedagogical, practices were felt to be equally important as
exhibitions in the work of curators to engage with the public and history,
so Education was pinpointed as the final topic for the forum.

016

Participants prepared short presentations in response tomoderators’ key questions and/or broad brief, and these introduced
ideas and illustrations from the experience of their personal,
independent, or collective practices, or their work within the institutions
they represent. During each session, presentations were followed bylengthy discussions among panelists and with the larger group ofparticipants, with occasional questions from observers.
For this publication, participants were invited to rework theirpresentations into essays; many expanded on their original material afterreflecting on the forum discussions, and one or two found a new angle
or format they felt they wanted to pursue with their presented topic.
Syafiatudina’s presentation, however, owing to personal circumstances,
has been directly transcribed and edited for inclusion.
The transcripts of the session discussions reproduced here havebeen edited for readability and relevance. Readers may find that, withthe topics of Public, History, and Education being interconnected,
the discussions often overlap and inform each other. It should also be
noted that participants visited two major current exhibitions in Tokyo,“Catastrophe and the Power of Art,” Mori Art Museum’s 15th anniversary
exhibition, before the Public session on Day 1, and “Awakenings: Art inSociety in Asia 1960s–1990s” at the National Museum of Modern Art,
Tokyo before the History session on Day 2, providing some additional
context for the forum discussions. Many smaller discussions weregenerated, of course, after forum hours, and while we regret that these
could not be documented as well, it is hoped that the transcripts here
give a sense of the conviviality and openness of the exchange among
participants.
In the reflections and conversations that make up this volume, wefind a considerable range of perspectives and aspirations, and fresh
ideas applied to specific contexts that might give rise to developments
elsewhere. Participating curators working within or without institutions
and/or as part of collectives, or moving between different spheres ofpractice, focusing on home terrain and/or operating internationally, may
negotiate different conditions, but they seem clear on sharing the task ofcarving out spaces for engagement, criticality, and learning, in a world
where these seem to be narrowing. They remind each other too that withthe curatorial imagination comes curatorial responsibilities; and thatit may be useful to acknowledge and accommodate differences, and tokeep asking questions, going forward.

017

Session 1

PublicSession 1

Public─

Che Kyongfa

In the first session of the forum “Imagining New Ecologies,”
presenters discussed concepts of the “public” in their respective
curatorial practices. In our societies today where cultural
production is swayed by neoliberal systems and political control,
who might comprise a “public” beyond one of consumers or“administered” people? Taking the critical practice of art as
something with the potential to impact existing discourse, norms,
and values, and to bring about change, can curatorial practices
envision and generate concepts of the public that activate thosepossibilities? Moreover, how can they interact with the politicalpowers or the social divisions and discrimination that produce
people repulsed from the majority of the “public”?
The five invited curators in this session work in very different
sociocultural environments, and have worked on projects that
range significantly in scale and nature. The presenters sharedfrank attitudes and views towards the authorities and existing
infrastructures that shape received notions of a “public” in theirrespective societies, and ideas on the kinds of “public” they seek
through their practices.
Based in Surabaya, Indonesia, independent curator Ayos Purwoaji
noted that a curator reliant on conventional means and resources
is not able to respond adequately to today’s fast-changing society.
In order for a curator to engage fully with people, instead of only
speaking on their behalf about social problems, curation should
be an open system that forms itself through directly involving
them. Artist and development worker Maung Day looked at shifts
in Myanmar society and its art scene since the 1990s, explaining
the background and challenges of the current situation, wheremore curators and researchers are needed to expand the dialogue
between practitioners and the public, to move beyond nationalist
agendas and encourage criticality. Singaporean independent
curator Selene Yap searches for alternative forms of cultural
production in order to envision new concepts of the public distinct
from that targeted for the reproduction of values and meanings
that embody government-sponsored arts and culture to “enrich[one’s] quality of life, broaden their mind and encourage theircreativity.” She introduced her projects that explore the potential
for self-organization in Singapore as one means of achieving this.
Kumakura Haruko, an assistant curator at Mori Art Museum,reflected on the meaning of the public for her museum, which
is operated by a private enterprise. Ranging from large-scale
exhibitions that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors to smallscale exhibitions, and learning programs that involve only modest
numbers of participants each time, this diversity of scale andcontent is important to allow an art museum to respond to the021

needs and interests of different kinds of visitors. Born in Malaysia
and currently an assistant curator at the National Gallery Singapore,
Goh Sze Ying stressed the importance of envisioning a model of the
public that transcends a fixed time and place, not least the format of
the exhibition, and the significance of means and practices that cangenerate such a model. Tracing the trajectory of a certain artwork
removed due to political pressure, she argued for finding ways toextend the temporality of the exhibition frame and therefore its
discourse beyond the battlefield of the exhibition space.
The respective responses of the presenters in this session to
the question of how curators, who mediate the communication
between a subject and art, can today envision and shape conceptsof the public, related attitudes and strategies born out of a processof confronting the conditions within which they each operate, andtheir possibilities and restrictions. Their answers remind us that themodes of curatorial practice continue to expand, and underline theimportance of considering manifold conditions in which curatorial
practices are situated, and of reflexivity—to be fully aware of the
motivations and decisions curators take throughout.
(Translated by William Andrews)

Session 1: Public

022

How Low Can You Go?［01］─Ayos Purwoaji

We have to come onto the streets
Go into the villages
See for ourselves every indicator
And experience the real problems.
– W. S. Rendra［02］These days, it becomes more and more difficult for us to recognize
traditional boundaries. What were previously known as two different
territories can now easily intersect. Borderlines which in the past wereassumed rigid now easily melt, fuse, creating new territories which havenever been mapped.
And the world seems to go round faster with the shorter and moreahistorical cycle of popular culture. For the time being, we are more
intimate with temporality and mediocrity (as a consciousness developed
from the principle of hic et nunc, here and now) than things which aresteadfast and worthy. In discussing the waning power and influenceof the museum, Bambang Sugiharto, a philosopher of art, argues thattoday, daily life has become pivotal because it is considered to havereal context, replacing the historical roles of the past, which are nolonger perceived as holding the only significant value.［03］We start toquestion the constructions which have sustained us for so long. What
if the structures on which we were living suddenly collapsed? Whatwould happen if a museum—an institution of knowledge renowned
as authoritative—was burnt to ashes in one night?［04］What if a publicgallery was abolished within a minute, struck by an earthquake andtsunami?［05］What would happen if there was a global crisis forcing thegovernment to stop the funding of cultural works? And what if all theartists were kidnapped by extraterrestrial creatures?
What would curators do then? Will people in the future still need(the legitimation of) a curator in the conservative way, while out there
knowledge is more and more accessible and the algorithms of artificial
intelligence become more and more sophisticated?［06］How does acurator position himself amidst ever-changing society?

023

01
The title of this essay is borrowed fromthe tagline of a 1990s advertisement
for an Indonesian brand of cigarette.
The tagline reminds me of theprinciple of turun ke bawah (descendfrom above) which was one of thefoundational principles of Lekra(Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat/People’s
Cultural Institution), a radical culturalorganization in Indonesia from 1950 to1965.
02
From “Sajak Sebatang Lisong”(Song for a Cigar, 1977), in State ofEmergency, W. S. Rendra (Glebe: Wild
& Woolley, 1978), 12. Translationfrom Indonesian Translation Service,accessed January 30, 2018, https://indonesiantranslationservice.com.au/
category/ws-rendra/.
03
This essay owes a lot to Bambang
Sugiharto’s essay, “Estetika yang
Mengembara: Setelah Berakhirnya
Seni,” in The 3rd Asia-Europe Art
Camp 2005, eds Marie Le Sourd et al.
(Bandung: Asia Europe Foundation &Bandung Center for New Media Arts,
2005), 71-79.
04
See Ed Yong, “What Was Lost in
Brazil’s Devastating Museum Fire,”
The Atlantic, September 4, 2018,https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/brazil-rio-de-janeiromuseum-fire/569299/.
05
Just recently, the building of Taman
Budaya Provinsi Sulawesi Tengah
was destroyed by the earthquake andtsunami on September 28, 2018, three
weeks after the exhibition, “Pekan SeniMedia 2018: Local Genius.”
06
See Ben Davis, “Google Sets Out to
Disrupt Curating With ‘Machine
Learning’,” Artnet News, January 14,
2017, https://news.artnet.com/artworld/google-artificial-intelligence812147.

Ayos Purwoaji │ How Low Can You Go?

07
Amandla Thomas-Johnson, “Museumof Black Civilisations aims to‘decolonise knowledge’,” Al Jazeera,
December 5, 2018, https://www.
aljazeera.com/indepth/features/
museum-black-civilisationsaims-decolonise-knowledge181204221519936.html.
08This phenomenon has also been
noted in the research of Rifda Amalia,“Curating Socially Engaged Art inIndonesia: Reactivating Collaboration”(master’s thesis, Graduate School ofArts and Science, New York University,
2018).

Without an understanding of changing realities, the profession of
curator will lose its relevance. I admit that I myself have just realized
recently that, without the support of art ecosystems—along with theircomplicated networks and legitimation—the position of a curator withinsociety is actually very weak. Unlike artists, curators do not possessenough resources in terms of subjectivity and flexibility to enable themto move freely within the cultural epicenter–society itself.
I assume the consciousness of subjectivity and flexibility is not yet
developed because there is still an assumption that the curator’s domainof work is limited to the white cube, and that the activities of a curator
are naturally separated from society’s fluctuations. In the “Imagining
New Ecologies” forum, Vipash Purichanont told an interesting story
about how, during mass protests in January, 2014, Bangkok Arts andCultural Centre, which was built as a “public institution,” closed off
access to the public in order to protect the artworks which were being
exhibited.
In the meantime, the relationship between art and the public
has become a subject for complicated, never-ending debates. An art
institution unarguably needs the public; but how much does the public
need an art institution? What does the public mean to the work of acurator? Can the meaning of the public be reduced to exposure andvisitor targets? To what extent is a public institution public?
If we dig a little deeply, there are actually many art institutions
born from social turmoil. Without the French Revolution, we would
never have heard of the Musée du Louvre. Ars Aevi, a contemporary art
museum in Sarajevo, was initially built as a conceptual response fromartists to the breakout of the Bosnian War. Recently, the Museum ofBlack Civilization was inaugurated in Dakar, Senegal, supporting thestrengthening discourse of decolonization in the African region.［07］We must realize, however, that manifesting cultural works in theforms of traditional institutions or physical infrastructure will bring us
new challenges in the future. The bigger the scale of an institution, themore difficult it is for it to move freely to respond to the phenomena
surrounding it, that is, when the demographic composition of thesociety shifts and the public discourse suddenly takes a sharp turn, cantraditional art institutions react correspondingly, with the same speed?
Being usually bound to an art ecosystem reliant on traditional
institutions and infrastructure, it seems hard for a curator to actually
move in society. But is a curator truly unable to widen his domain ofwork and escape from the white cube? Could a curator start his workwithout any artworks? Furthermore, could a curator curate people?
Could a curator curate cities? Could a curator curate memories?
There has been an interesting phenomenon lately in the contemporary
Indonesian art scene. Despite the lack of art infrastructure and funding
from the government, 20 years after Reformasi in 1998, small cities are
witnessing the growth of their art scenes driven by “young curators” whouse various approaches involving socially engaged art.［08］Session 1: Public024I use the term “young curators” arbitrarily, meaning to frame themwithin a more general phenomenon, namely cultural activism. Mostof these “young curators” have had no specialized curatorial training,although basically they have been doing work similar to that of thecurator: sorting, selecting, organizing, and orchestrating art activities.
They mostly began from small-scale activities which have graduallydeveloped into larger programs involving society. We can say thatthese small groups build their own “spectacle vortex,” a self-generatingaudience or public which grows without the intervention of the market
or the involvement of the government. They have been able to survive
by depending on a strong relationship with the community as the social
context in which they are working.
We can take the example of Kalisat, a small town five hours awayfrom Surabaya. A group of Kalisat youth has been actively collecting thephoto archives of their neighborhood. Through this archiving activity,
they conduct many interviews with senior citizens, excavating the petite
histoire of the city. The collected photographs and stories are thencompiled and reinterpreted in an annual art exhibition. The production
budget is raised from the community. The creators and the visitors are
the people of Kalisat themselves, and the exhibition is held as a medium
to integrate, transfer, deconstruct, or reshape their collective memories.
They bridge the past and the present in a context upon which they are all
agreed, and this is what makes the exhibitions which have been held by
the “young curators” of Kalisat so original and intimate.
What is occuring in Kalisat is an illustration of the organic curatorial
practices which are now growing in the small towns of Indonesia—from
Salatiga to Kendari, from Padang to Flores. They are a form of curatorial
practice facing myriad complexities and tensions because it presents
itself on the borderline of what and what may not constitute curatorial
work, an area which, besides being an ideal base for creative process,is also a grey area of enquiry, challenging authority or long-establishedconcepts. To quote a term coined by Alia Swastika, this is where thepractice of “an individual as an institution”［09］occurs, in which a “young
curator” who is working in the middle of society is forced to always move
dynamically, challenge his position endlessly, and negotiate various
speculative strategies in order to adjust to the context and ever-changing
society.

09
Alia Swastika, “Praktik Kuratorial diIndonesia: Individu Sebagai Institusi,”
in Turning Targets: 25 Tahun Cemeti,
eds Mella Jaarsma et al. (Yogyakarta:
Cemeti Art House, 2014), 97–122.
10
In a discussion session during the“Imagining New Ecologies” forum,
Leonhard Bartolomeus differentiatedbetween “working in the public,”“working with the public,” and“working as the public.” I thank him
for proposing these interesting terms.
11
Nirwan Dewanto, “Kebudayaan
Indonesia: Pandangan 1991,” inSenjakala Kebudayaan: Refleksi Seni
dan Budaya (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Oak,2017), 13–53.

The idea of a curator “working for society” or “working with society” canoften be misleading. Such phrasing seems to put a curator in a heroic
position, one separated (or isolated) from the daily life of society andcommunity, and frame the public as merely an instrument for a curator’swork. I much prefer the idea of a curator "working as society" whichplaces him in an ordinary and casual position, where he is also a part ofthe everyday reality of the community with which he is living.［10］I agree with the proposition by Indonesian cultural thinker Nirwan
Dewanto in 1991 that “everyone is potentially a cultural creator.”［11］Curatorial practice needs to be viewed as a paradigm or an open circuit,

025

Ayos Purwoaji │ How Low Can You Go?

12
A play on the phrase “legislator of theworld” used by Percy Bysshe Shelley,
an English romantic poet, in his essay,“A Defence of Poetry.” It is very often
quoted in writings which glorify (ormock) artists.

where society can partake in a curatorial work which then becomes amechanism to work through existing problems. Therefore, these days,
it is important for the curator to dissolve his position as a gatekeeper or“legitimator of the world”［12］and begin venturing down, to set foot on
the border, to re-learn, as well as calibrate and make his work relevant tothe conditions of contemporary society.
(Translated by Fuji Adriza)

Session 1: Public

026

The Shaping of Myanmar Art Scene and
Who Can Play Which Role in It─

Maung Day

Myanmar, also known as Burma, has come out of a long period ofviolence, bloodshed, and failed revolutions. The history of Myanmar
art is closely tied to the country’s political history as Myanmar artists
have carried with them a strong sense of social engagement. Myanmar
modernism is said to have developed fully in the 1990s. However, its
early stages can be traced back to the 1960s and the 1970s with artists
adopting the principles and ideas of Western modernism. In thosedays, big cities such as Yangon and Mandalay were teeming with art
exhibitions and there was a lot of interest coming from the generalpublic and diplomatic communities, with the latter collecting local art
for their private collections. It was a thriving art scene.
Then came the days of General Ne Win’s socialist regime that kicked
the diplomats out of the country and drove the entire country into acomatose state culturally and politically. The regime imposed heavy
censorship on modern art and promoted socialist-realist literature andart that “served the interest of the people.” The art scene died slowly;
some artists left the country and only a small number of artists kept
practicing modern art. The era of censorship and dictatorship went on
through to the 1990s and 2000s, with power changing hands after the1988 Uprisings.
In the 1990s and 2000s, a new group of young artists emerged.
They executed avant-garde experimentations and adopted performanceart as key channels to express political opinions and to rediscover a
relationship with the audience. But because of threats from the censors
and the Special Branch, a large portion of the Myanmar art scene thenwas considered “underground.” Exhibitions were organized secretly
and performance artists performed in public spaces in a guerrilla style.
Despite the censorship and suppression, the art scene was alive andkicking again, and attracted attention from media and the generalpublic.
Many people were paying particular attention to this art scene
because they believed there was a kind of political resistance going onin this art community. People and artists were on the same side as they027

Maung Day │ The Shaping of Myanmar Art Scene and Who Can Play Which Role in Itshared the same discontent and fears. But their relationship was hiddenfrom sight. Almost all the art exhibitions in those days, except for theones that showcased traditional themes, were self-organized by artists invarious places that were deemed safe from the military police.
This also meant that not many people were interested to become
curators by profession, which makes sense because they would havebeen faced with a lot of challenges if they were to put on shows whichwere substantial and cutting-edge. This led to a disadvantage for thecountry. While other countries, including its neighbors, had developed
art scenes with trained and experienced curators, Myanmar had none.
This remains the case today. Most of the exhibitions in Myanmar today
are either organized by foreign curators or self-organized by artists
renting space from galleries. There may be a few local curators startingup, but they are extremely small in number.
Going back to the relationship between Myanmar artists and theaudience, in 2008, the organizers of Beyond Pressure Performance Art
Festival, the first international art festival in Myanmar, decided to bringthe artists and their works to public spaces. They invited the censors totalk to the artists, thus engaging the government officials in the processof interpretation and meaning-making. As a result, the festival wasallowed to be organized in public spaces. This marked the beginning ofa more open relationship between the general public and artists. Beyond
Pressure organized four more editions using public spaces and brought
the general public into social and cultural dialogue.
Since then, there have been other art festivals and events taking
place in public spaces. Now with a new government in office, censorshiphas loosened, but has not been entirely removed. We are seeing more
and more exhibitions, new trends in street art and thriving art scenes in
Yangon and Mandalay.
Here, I would like to take a moment to critique the breadth anddepth of these art scenes in terms of content and inventiveness.
Despite the newly found enthusiasm and opportunities to make andshow art, the language of art has not evolved much as the dominating
narratives are still governed by nationalism, patriotism, politicalnostalgia, and a lack of nuances. The emerging trends in nationalism
and the politics of fear still undermine experimentations and open
interpretation in art. Curators and institutions still marginalize artists
with a more experimental edge and a tendency to question the statusquo of the society, calling them “too dark” or “niche.” This is their way
of shaping the art scene by deciding what kind of art people should see
and expect to see. However, we also need to acknowledge that there areyoung artists—often associated with Myanm/art Gallery founded byAmerican art historian Nathalie Johnston—who have started making
art that displays boldness, freshness, bizarreness, experimentation,and criticality. They may not be a close-knit group of artists but rather
they are individuals who are capable of shaping a new, exciting art
scene.

Session 1: Public028

Speaking of the thematic content in Myanmar’s art scene, curators
and artists as a whole, with very few exceptions, have not so far shown
interest in working with ethnic art and artists or art that touches upon
the ethnic issues plaguing the country. When it comes to politics, a lot ofartists focus on the past and present situations of militarization, which isimportant, but it is not enough, because there are other pressing issues
such as marginalization of religious minorities, Burmanization of ethnic
communities, state-sanctioned erasure of plural identities and histories,
social and environmental injustice suffered by rural communities, andincessant urbanization with its effects on the urban poor.
There is an urgent need to open discussions into a broader range ofissues in Myanmar’s art scene, and cross-learning with curators outsideof Myanmar would also help remove this stagnancy. And there have to
be more opportunities and space for experimenting with a diversityof materials, techniques, narratives, and history. Most importantly,
there should be a way to encourage local people who aspire to become
curators. They would be instrumental in broadening the dialogue
between the artists, the audience, and the issues afflicting the collective
mindset of Myanmar society.

029

Maung Day │ The Shaping of Myanmar Art Scene and Who Can Play Which Role in It

Making Room for Reasonable Disagreements─

Selene Yap

01
Melissa Sim, “Growing audiences
for Singapore arts a key priority in
new 5-year plan from National Arts
Council,” The Straits Times, October 19,
2018, https://www.straitstimes.com/
lifestyle/arts/growing-audiences-forsingapore-arts-a-key-priority-in-new-5year-plan-from-national.
02
The Report of the Arts and Culture
Strategic Review (Singapore: National
Arts Council, 2012), https://www.nac.
gov.sg/dam/jcr:1b1765f3-ff95-48f0bbf9-f98288eb7082.
03
Lily Kong, “Ambitions of a Global City:
Arts, Culture and Creative Economy in'Post-Crisis' Singapore,” International
Journal of Cultural Policy 18, no. 3(January 2012): 279-294.
04
Carol Bacchi, Analysing policy: What’s
the problem represented to be? (Frenchs
Forest, NSW: Pearson, 2009).
05
Siau Ming En, “Arts, sports ‘canrally S’poreans, help overcome fault
lines’,” TODAY, March 7, 2016, https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/arts-sports-can-rally-sporeans-helpovercome-fault-lines.

Session 1: Public

I[The Minister] Ms Fu said that with the emergence of new fault lines
between foreigners and locals, the haves and have-nots and people who
hold different values, one of the Ministry of Culture, Community andYouth’s tasks is to strengthen Singapore’s social fabric. “We also wantto draw on the power of the arts in building a more caring, cohesive andconfident Singapore,” said Ms Fu.［01］Public discourse in Singapore on the arts and culture reads like aprescription for the general Singaporean malaise: a transformative
antidote to “enrich [one’s] quality of life, broaden their mind andencourage their creativity.”［02］Used in heavy rotation in cultural policy
papers and promotional material for art and cultural activities, thesestatements mark the language with which the arts has been entrenchedin popular consciousness. More critically, they point to larger conditions
governing the production and consumption of art in Singapore, where
curators, artists, and cultural producers are bound by implicit
assumptions about the forms of culture that are to be promoted and thekinds of outcomes that are valued.
Although policy attention in Singapore only began to turn more
fully to arts and culture in the 1980s, ambitions for the arts andcultural sector have accelerated within the last 20 years. By the 2000s,
we’ve heralded a new era of “cultural social policy”［03］drawing on
the innate, transformative quality of the arts. Under this vision, there
would be a formal and seamless integration of grassroots arts andculture participation and national development. Significant efforts andresources were channeled into policies, strategies, and infrastructuredevelopment for the operationalization of culture as a balm to all ofsociety’s problems［04］and a bridge for its fault lines.［05］Today, as
our Southeast Asian neighbors remain largely reliant on communal
resources or self-funding to build platforms for artistic production andcirculation, Singapore’s pursuit for cultural participation has driven it to030

mount a bureaucratically-managed cultural powerhouse.
The impetus driving cultural policy-making sets the ground fora discussion of the nature of the arts and cultural infrastructure in
Singapore and the ways in which curators, artists, and other producers
have responded to or participated in the production of meanings
within this kind of delimited field of knowledge production. The
dream or illusion of a single public sphere upon which the arts can beapplied is preceded by a neat model of cultural participation: where
the production, circulation, and display of art is fixated with limited
manifestations of the “public” as defined by official discourse. Inside thismodel, art is positioned as a “cultural offering”［06］by the state, in whichmass audience engagement is the main aim, consequently narrowing
the paradigm of what constitutes value in cultural participation.
II

06“Arts and Culture Strategic Review,”
in The Report of the Arts and Culture
Strategic Review.
07
Maibritt Borgen, “The inner andouter form of self-organisation,” in
Self-organised, eds Stine Hebert andAnne Szefer Karlsen (Bergen, Norway:
Hordaland Art Centre, 2013), 37–49.
08
Mika Hannula, The Politics of Small
Gestures: Chances and Challenges forContemporary Art (Istanbul: Art-ist,2006), 75.
09
Ibid., 80.

In this essay, I propose that the predominance of formal art and cultural
infrastructure in Singapore has resulted in an apparent “crisis ofrepresentative function,”［07］with the state determining the language ofvalue and experience in the field. Yet, this distortion has also opened
up paradigms for critical reflection—curators, artists, and independent
producers have responded by taking a step outside the prescribed
representational space for culture, pushing instead for other waysof structuring production. How might this “crisis” proffer a situatedparticipation and generate new languages of reasoning and productive
disagreements in the formation of meanings in contemporary art?
Having done curatorial work in and outside of an institution, I am
actively involved in questioning the complex systems that underpin
my work. The experience of moving between different platforms andoperating with multiple voices necessitate a form of what has been
described earlier by curator and critic, Mika Hannula, as “situatedparticipation,”［08］where one seeks to commit to and shape different
contexts in a meaningful and fruitful way.
This involves a presence that opens up rather than shuts down,i.e. the seeking of a contact that always exists on both the depth
and breadth axes, with our focus shifting from the general to theindividual, and vice versa… involves a reciprocity in which thedifferences discuss with and push up against each other and clap
each other on the shoulder, whispering and teasing, yet in a waythat by no means seeks to achieve synergy or complete mutual
understanding, but in which the goal, in the words of John Rawls
is —reasonable disagreements.［09］Rather than echo the essentialist view of institutions as ideological state
apparatus and necessarily operating in ways diametrically opposed toindependent practice, I pursue the unfolding trajectory of the cultural
field as a matrix of divergent exhibitions, practices, sites, and contexts

031

Selene Yap │ Making Room for Reasonable Disagreements

10
Jason Wee, “Whither Artists Spaces,”
Conditions of Production (2014), tumblr,
accessed October 1, 2018, http://
conditionsofproduction.tumblr.com/
essay-jasonwee?fbclid=IwAR286pLRDJMI7RAu9RUAaJZkgern5npoMk2
C8-d8oLxrlYmeu-4LQP6OOM.
11“opening day” was a series of four
two-week long artistic interventions
unfolding within a disused doublevoid common space in Upper
Serangoon Shopping Centre that ran
from December 2, 2017 to January 31,
2018. Gestated over a year throughconversation and discussion, thisproject invited four Singaporeanartists, Chua Chye Teck, Lai Yu Tong,
Susie Wong, and Sookoon Ang, torespond to the anomalous nature of
the space in relation to the constantly
maintained urban fabric of Singapore.
“opening day” was curated by Cheng
Jia Yun and Selene Yap.
12
The Substation was 26 years old when
the current artistic director, Alan Oei
was appointed.
13
Mayo Martin, “The Substation’s new
director Alan Oei announces changes
for the arts centre,” TODAY, December
11, 2015, https://www.todayonline.
com/entertainment/arts/substationsnew-director-alan-oei-anounces-bigchanges-arts-centre.

Session 1: Public

where art is commissioned, produced, and displayed. In this shift, selforganization occurs as a phenomenon; it is in what artist-writer, Jason
Wee, characterizes as “strategic, temporary alignments and aggregationsof individuals, collectives, and institutions”［10］that we find sufficient
force to reconfigure our notions of the public.
III
In an attempt to lend more specificity to the ways in which practices
have resisted presuppositions of participation and engagement that
dominate the cultural policy discourse in Singapore, I draw references tomy witnessing of and involvement in two separate but analogous events:
the displacement and negotiation of The Substation following the 2015
appointment of its incumbent artistic director where I was involved as astaff of the independent art space, and the organizing of “opening day,”［11］an independent curatorial project in 2018, of which I was co-curator.
The Substation
Founded in 1990 by the late playwright, director, and arts activist, Kuo
Pao Kun, The Substation is a notable pioneer in the artistic landscapeof Singapore. As a space, The Substation encompasses a spirit of artistic
experimentation and criticality: it is fondly known to have been thestarting ground for the practice of multiple generations of Singaporeanartists, filmmakers, writers, and activists and a key convening spacefor critical dialogue and interaction between diverse artists andaudiences. Much of this was thrown into disarray in 2015, when The
Substation’s appointment of a new artistic director, artist and curator,
Alan Oei, paved the way for seismic changes. Impelled by a desire tokeep the role and relevance of the ageing space from calcifying in thecurrent artistic climate,［12］laconic moves were made to streamline
facilities and operations, reshaping The Substation into a “research anddevelopmental space.” As a result, longstanding programs were axedand new programs would follow a unifying curatorial theme in order toanswer a larger cultural question each year.［13］This plan, seen as a rupture to a much beloved space, was met
with heightened resistance and criticism from the arts community,
resulting in a series of walk-in discussions and a larger town hall
specifically focused on issues of openness, transparency, and plurality.
Reflections on the pertinence of a “Home for the Arts” in Singapore
written by members of the arts community were drafted and shared, anda community resource project, “Terms of Engagement,” was initiatedby a group of independent cultural workers to document, archive, andexpand on conversations about the future of The Substation, borrowing
from discussions on the right to space. Responding to the pushback,
The Substation shelved its initial plans, dedicating a year to orientating
itself and reassessing its relevance amid the changing arts and culturallandscape.

032

What we have is a lot of people fearing and worrying about what isgoing to be taken away from them... Some of it I could have managed
a little better. I have apologized, I’m sorry that I didn’t understandthat The Substation was so much about the community and not justits own wherewithal to do whatever we wanted.［14］The account of how this period of reinvention transpired is worth
telling for it revealed an important thing: The community’s urge to selforganize in securing The Substation’s “survival” and The Substation’s
programming reaction can be seen as sibling domains of redress. Rather
than conceive of the self-organized reaction as a critical corrective of
the former, I see it as encompassing modes of negotiation and tentative
strategies from which the other might draw motivation. The Substation is
unique in the way it is regarded by the community—it provides physicaland psychological space for conversation, discussion, and debate; andit helps mediate between artistic community and community at large.
These opportunities in space for different strains of artistic creation/interrogation, become the same mechanism by which society andcommunity groups feel impelled to intervene in order to maintain andpropagate values and positions.
Within such a context, self-organization is not merely a response but
involves a certain dualistic dependency, between the meeting of wishes
and fears, attitudes and knowledge, of self and a larger organized body.
In the absence of clear change management strategies that would usually
be derived from formal art infrastructures, users “gathered towards
some semblance of community, acting collectively to protect sharedinterests.”［15］It is interesting to note here that the self-organized working
group behind “Terms of Engagement” went on to develop applicablemodels of activation and formation based on its initial approach withthe community resource project. The horizontal organization involvedin examining The Substation’s own history, vision, and relationshipwith the arts community was in large part fueled by what art historian
Maibritt Borgen describes as inner and outer forms of self-organization［16］underpinning the dynamics and ideology of the independent arts space.

14
Joy Fang, “The Substation’s Alan Oei
reverses some decisions on its revamp
plans,” TODAY, April 5, 2016, https://www.todayonline.com/lifestyle/substations-alan-oei-reverses-somedecisions-its-revamp-plans.
15
Godwin Koay, “We never owned thisspace,” Medium, February 7, 2016,
https://medium.com/@godwinkoay/
we-never-owned-this-space8f864dc05eed.
16
Borgen, “The inner and outer form of
self-organisation,” 37–49.
17
Cheng Jia Yun is an Assistant Curator
at the National Gallery Singapore
and Selene Yap was previously the
Programme Manager for Visual Arts at
The Substation.
18
Hannula, The Politics of Small Gestures,
80.

“opening day”
“opening day” was conceived with an intent of precipitating effects andtemporalities outside of the institutional exhibitionary settings that both
my co-curator, Cheng Jia Yun, and I were familiar with.［17］In referringto the project as a form of collective self-organization, we considered
the project from its working method: a moving about of micro-gesturesand flows of information, capital, attitudes, and desires produced andexchanged from a constellation of interest points. Thus, returning toHannula’s earlier proposition on situated participation, it was indeed
from the pockets of continual back-and-forth between the “depth andbreadth axes”［18］of our everyday making and working that the project
was born.

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Selene Yap │ Making Room for Reasonable Disagreements

19Jean Wong, “Curating contemporary art
in Singapore: young curators Cheng Jia
Yun and Selene Yap–in conversation,”
Art Radar, November 13, 2018, http://
artradarjournal.com/2018/11/13/
curating-contemporary-art-insingapore-young-curators-cheng-jiayun-and-selene-yap-in-conversation/.
20
T. Sasitharan, “Art here: what
price space?” in Space, Spaces andSpacing (Singapore: The Substation
Conference, 1995), 55.
21
Hannula, The Politics of Small Gestures,
82

Drawing its basis from a desire to return to the essential act ofmaking, expressing, and creating with nothing between audienceand the work, “opening day” acquired a diaphanous form through its
itinerancy and expressions. For one, the chosen site of the project, adisused common space in a local shopping center, extended beyond
familiar sites of holding exhibitions but still remained part of the orbitof the daily routine of Singapore urban life and speed. Each series of
expressions also expanded and contracted according to the artists andtheir personal readings of the space as told to us in conversations thatpermeated our many shared meals and moments of work and rest. We
took part in the production of meanings in the way that was closest to
us—through an invitation to a mode of working that was more openended, letting the preoccupations, methods, and sentiments of eachpractice speak in relation to the site. Seeing the project through was a
way to remind ourselves that the spaces held for art could extend beyond
what is familiar. As Jia Yun and I recall “opening day” a year on,［19］its
ideological underpinnings continue to welcome and occasion new life
into the project, allowing it to occupy a unique spot in an ever-growing
discursive terrain of blockbuster exhibitions and headlining art festivals.
In sharing the microcosmic example of “opening day,” I
acknowledge the smallness of ways in which self-organization behaves.
The same smallness can be found in the intimacy of artist-run spacesthat provide a counterpoint to a largely visitorship-driven cultural field.
In a country like Singapore where we are closely tied to notions of spaceor the lack of it, these spaces respond to the present cultural economy
by “reclaiming and fortifying [an] inner space.”［20］An example is theartist-run Peninsular that occupies and maintains an important subplot
in an increasingly flattened public sphere. The artists’ studio eases into
exhibition space every now and then, shape-shifting to accommodate
an occasional audience between private moments of dialogue between
artist and work. Visitor and artwork encounter each other through“sessions”—time devoted to a coming together of and making room
for reasoning and recuperating of values and positions. In so doing,
it partakes too in the production of meanings from its location in theinterstices of cultural space.
IV
In all its forms, self-organization is a strategy that reacts to an initialbinding condition. To self-organize is to coexist with the momentum andthe inertia of an existing context; of getting and giving, pushing away andinviting in.［21］As I proceed with curatorial work in the cultural climateof Singapore, my beginning is often a break with the conventional
separatist notion of self-organization. In recognizing temporalities andreferences that would see cultural participation through conditions ofpluralities and dissonance, perhaps we might write towards gesturesthat may have seemed too specific, too contingent, too obscure to havebeen considered through opaque measures of value and experience.

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The fixed contours of infrastructure explicitly foreground theshrinking margins around an authorized mode of organizing andconsequently, curators and artists are ostensibly made more aware of theinquiries that arise from the parameters they are operating in. Where thecentralization of cultural power, perspective, and administration prevails,
self-organization sees itself as being part of the overall structure within
which its task is to take part in the production of meanings within the
public sphere in the way that is closest to us. It carries a hope of shaping
the value-creation process, and does so by familiarizing itself with thespecific contours of the infrastructure and relocating points for entry.

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Selene Yap │ Making Room for Reasonable Disagreements

The Role Required of the Art Museum─Kumakura Haruko

What is the “public” nature of an art museum run and operated
by a private corporation? Mori Art Museum (MAM) opened in 2003
on the top floor of Mori Tower, the main structure in the Roppongi
Hills commercial facilities complex. Embracing the concepts of“contemporary” and “international” in its mission to introduce cuttingedge global creative endeavors in visual art, architecture, and design
through originally curated exhibitions and learning programs, Mori Art
Museum works towards its principle of “Art + Life” to realize an enrichedsociety where art relates to all aspects of life. The museum visitors aredemographically highly diverse, including people living and working
in the Roppongi Hills complex to local residents in the surroundingarea, people generally interested in contemporary art and culture, and,increasingly large numbers of tourists from abroad. The museum is nota standalone facility but a department within Mori Building Co., Ltd.
Naturally enough, there then exists a certain role expected of the art
museum as part of a private corporation that is a for-profit organization.
Put simply, this is to contribute to building an attractive community
and to draw a lot of visitors. While it may be problematic to define thisas the primary principle for running an art museum, it also does notnecessarily run counter to the conventional values of the art museum.
Many art museums seem to oscillate somewhere between having
significance as a specialized institution and appealing to a larger numberof visitors. In the case of a contemporary art museum, the specialized
significance surely encompasses not only collecting and preserving
but also urgency and criticality. I would like to consider the broader
theme of publicness from the question of how we, as a contemporary art
museum, can realize the two aims (having a specialized significance andappealing to a larger number of visitors) and whether it is possible toachieve a balance between them.
Main Exhibitions and Small Projects
During a given exhibition period, Mori Art Museum holds two types

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of concurrent exhibitions that can be roughly categorized as “mainexhibitions” and several “small projects,” together with learning
programs, implemented alongside the planning and running of theexhibitions, which are very important for the museum. Main exhibitions
have included exhibitions with a focus on a single artist, such as
Murakami Takashi, N. S. Harsha, or Leandro Erlich, regionally focused
exhibitions such as “Arab Express” or “SUNSHOWER,” and thematic
exhibitions like “All You Need is LOVE,” “The Universe and Art,” or“Catastrophe and the Power of Art.” The main exhibitions are, as thename suggests, the core events we organize; through flyers, posters,
and so on, they are publicized to members of the general public andthus form the “face” of the museum. As such, the main exhibition isrequired to be easier to understand, to be an event that large numbersof people can enjoy. For example, the Leandro Erlich exhibition held in2017 attracted 610,000 visitors, ranking fourth in terms of admission
numbers among all museum exhibitions in Japan that year.［01］An
influential factor in this was that photography was allowed for all the
exhibits, increasing the amount of content posted on social media about
the exhibition and leading to coverage in newspapers, television, andonline news. The recent “Japan in Architecture” exhibition in 2018 had
530,000 visitors.［02］Mobilizing large numbers of visitors makes it possible to operate an
art museum more sustainably. In order to share the social significanceof the art museum with more people, this “blockbuster” exhibition
model is highly important and naturally also has potential with regard
to developing the aforementioned “specialized significance” of an art
institution. That being said, as curators, we must avoid pursuing only
those things that large numbers of people can understand and enjoy,
resulting in the loss of the diverse, chaotic, new, experimental, andat times smaller endeavors. As such, alongside the main exhibition,
we also organize small projects and learning programs. The “small
projects” are divided into four further categories: MAM Collection,
featuring exhibitions of thematically selected works from the museum
collection; MAM Screen, comprising screenings of single-channel video
works; MAM Project, which focuses on experimental endeavors; andMAM Research, comprising archival exhibitions based on research into
specific topics.

01“Number of visitors to the exhibitionin 2017 (Heisei 29) BEST 30,” Art
Annual online, April 5, 2018, http://
www.art-annual.jp/news-exhibition/
news/70388/.
02“ ‘Japanese exhibition of architecture’closing in success!”, News, Mori
Art Museum, September 18, 2018,https://www.mori.art.museum/jp/
news/2018/09/1586/.

I would like to introduce a specific example.
MAM Project 023: Agatha Gothe-SnapeThe MAM Project series develops experimental endeavors with artists
from around the world, in many cases involving the creation of newwork. Born in 1980 and based in Sydney, Agatha Gothe-Snape’s practicehas a focus on improvised performance while encompassing a wide
range of other methodological approaches, including PowerPoint
slideshows, participatory workshops, text, and visual scores (including

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Kumakura Haruko│ The Role Required of the Art Museum

03
Uchida Shinichi, Shiraki Eise, etal, “Contemporary Art and Society:
The Practice of Artists,” in Can
Contemporary Art Museums Become New
Places of “Learning”? Uchida Shinichi,
ed. (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum, 2017),
292.

music scores and instructions). For her MAM Project, Gothe-Snape madea new installation called Oh Window, dealing with the theme of windows.
The title drew inspiration from the window of the Mori Art Museum highup on the 53rd floor, positioning the window as a medium or interface
between art (what is on the inside of the window) and life (what is on
the outside), and making it the central concept for the overall piece.
She poetically gathered various elements from around the Roppongi
Hills and brought them into the gallery space in order to create a virtual
window (that is, an installation) that connects a windowless spacewith the outside. And then, employing the installation as a stage ora score (instructions), she created and enacted three performances,each in collaboration with different artists. A range of discussions
has been taking place recently regarding exhibiting, screening, andcollecting works of art that do not rely on materiality. Gothe-Snape’s
performances were the first such performances staged as part of the
MAM Project series. They were examples of a practice reflecting theincreasing diversification of expression in contemporary art and also, forthe museum, a concrete case for us to consider how best to organize aswell as document and archive the performances. In addition, “Oh Walk”
workshops were held twice a week, where participants walked aroundthe Roppongi Hills with the artist and her written instructions.
Such individual endeavors, of course, do not involve thousands or even
hundreds of people, but rather mere dozens at a time. And yet, I think
the art museum is an institution where it does not necessarily follow thatthese small projects are somehow less important than the large-scale
exhibitions. These numerous experimental and dynamic endeavors are
implemented through cooperation between the exhibition curator andlearning program teams. When considering the roles of these activities
as well as art museums and learning programs, I recall what the artist
Pedro Reyes said at the international symposium “Can Contemporary
Art Museums Become New Places of ‘Learning’?,” which was held at
Mori Art Museum in 2017:
I believe there are two ways to think about the museum: as a fridgeor an oven. As a fridge, it’s like a perfect temperature. You keep
things forever for posterity. That’s the role of the museum as fridge.
But then, you have the museum as an oven, which is when you
produce new work and obviously, if you put something in the oven,you have to be watching because it may have too much heat, too
little heat, etcetera. It demands a lot of attention, but you can cook
up new realities.［03］In the case of an art museum, especially one that deals with
contemporary art, we must take on multiple roles. The first is theconventional role of the art museum as a place for preserving, archiving,and sharing with future generations. Another role is that of the oven,that of creating new artistic work, expression, and practice. When it

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comes to implementing projects and programs endowed with urgency
and criticality, it seems important for Mori Art Museum that these tworoles exist simultaneously. After all, if we don’t keep ingredients in thefridge, we can’t bake any bread in the oven.
I now want to think a little more about the significance of holding
both large-scale exhibitions and smaller programs. To us, who arethese people who visit the “blockbuster” exhibitions? Let’s call them
the “mass visitors.” Being unable to identify them individually, we canonly speculate that many of them are not particularly familiar with
contemporary art and find it hard to understand, and perhaps might
not even come back to visit the museum again. What is extremely
important, though, is that, out of the hundreds of thousands of visitors
to the exhibition, at least a few percent of them respond positively towhat they see, even if they don’t fully understand it, and perhaps spendsome time viewing the small projects, and then come back to visit themuseum again. They visit the museum as mass visitors, becoming oneof hundreds of thousands. However, they might become one of dozens
of attendees at a workshop or performance; they might become a “little
visitor,” an individual visible to the art museum.
We always want to implement inspiring ideas and experimental
projects in partnership with artists. Attracting large numbers of people
to the main exhibitions possibly enables the small projects also to be
seen by more people. When considering the potential publicness ofMori Art Museum as well as how it is characterized, one aspect is surelythat it is a place where various kinds of people with their own respective
interests can visit. And I think it should be an open place where anyone
can become both a “mass” and a “little” visitor, where they can comeand go as they like as either, where various differing opinions can beshared. No matter how significant, if the things we put into practice are
only ever shared with the same people, it cannot be considered public.
Moreover, conversely, regardless of how many people we bring together,it amounts to nothing unless there is some meaning behind what we aredoing. Addressing the issue of diversity is certainly no simple matter,yet by attempting to do so while embracing the multilayered practices
within ourselves, we can turn contemporary art and its museums into
something continually vivid and dynamic.
(Translated by William Andrews)

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Kumakura Haruko│ The Role Required of the Art Museum

Untimely Deaths, Undying Time─

Goh Sze Ying

01
Goh Sze Ying, “Giving Shape to Painful
Things,” in The Japan Foundation Asia
Center Art Studies Vol. 04: Condition
Report: Shifting Perspectives in Asia, eds
Beverly Yong, Furuichi Yasuko (Tokyo:
Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2018).

This essay consists of fragmentary notes drawn from periods before,
during, and after my presentation during the “Imagining New Ecologies”
forum organized by the Japan Foundation Asia Center in Tokyo from
October 17 to 19, 2018. Structured in a non-linear chronology as amethod of writing about time while thinking against it, these notes
present my contemplations on how curatorial practice may endure
beyond exhibition durations.
January 1, 2019
Two years ago, upon encountering a case of censorship, I wrote about
the removal of artwork as a sort of loss one experiences, as a death. Backthen, I had not considered that while such a loss could be sudden andmourning was long, rebirth was, in fact, possible—if not instant.
The pair of woodcut prints by Ranau-based collective Pangrok Sulap
first exhibited and then taken down at the exhibition “ESCAPE fromthe SEA” in February 2017 has since had not only one but two recent
rebirths. One pair, the fifth edition of Sabah Tanah Air-Ku, is on display
at the 9th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) in Brisbane.
A few months earlier, another pair was exhibited at Pangrok Sulap’s solo
show, “Lopung is Dead!” at a private gallery in Kuala Lumpur. I return tothis thought: a censored object just does not disappear.［01］On New Year’s Day this year, between plotting the death ofrecalcitrant patterns and resuscitating aborted enterprises, anopportunity for a second encounter with Sabah Tanah Air-Ku at APT9.
This encounter comes as a gentle assurance, a private moment ofvindication that there are second chances and new rebirths, resilience,in the life cycle of art objects. This assurance gets me reflecting on theway our reading of time is parsed through exhibitions.
Exhibition time is linear: it is discrete and divisible. Timescrubs back and forth a passage between the relentless trajectories
of exhibition-making enterprises and the retrospective, objectivist
writing of art history. But within linear time, events­—celebrations andSession 1: Public

040

controversies—are bracketed within specific temporal containers, each
in isolation across a progression where relationships are found only as
what happened before and what takes place thereafter. Old/new. Past/
present. Linear time frames our understanding and measurement ofchange through specific time markers just as we frame the first dayof a new year as a temporal threshold through and after which new
beginnings take place.

02
Terence Toh, “Malaysians finally get
to view art collective Pangrok Sulap’s‘controversial’ woodcuts in KL,” The
Star, October 5, 2018, https://www.
star2.com/culture/2018/10/05/pangroksulap-woodcut-print-sabah-artexhibition-rizo-leong-ranau/.
03
Ibid.

October 5, 2018
Shortly after the opening of “Lopung is Dead!” in Kuala Lumpur, a local
news article reads:
Malaysians finally get to view art collective Pangrok Sulap’s“controversial” woodcuts in KL. In the wake of Malaysia Baru (newMalaysia), many previously silenced voices and forms of expression,
are now finally being given their time in the sun [emphasis mine].［02］According to the gallerist, the exhibition provides “a platform for thework to be shown and be accessible to the public.”［03］January 2, 2019
In configuring the public in the art world, space often takes precedence
over time. The exhibition space is transformed into a temporary public
space. For a specific duration, the white cube becomes a site in which
private concerns meet public interests: who and what gets shown, how
works are arranged and displayed, how relationships between art andpublic discourse are developed. Exhibition durations are embedded
within particular rhythms, and artworks have assumed life cycles. Is
our time in the sun defined by our time around the sun, with each returnto full circle registering an arbitrary marker of change? This temporallinearity seems to skip a solemn examination of how recalcitrant
patterns are formed or how transformation is sustained. And when our
relationship to time is perfunctory, history risks repeating itself. Old
habits die hard.
October 17, 2018
What happens to curatorial practice when we move outside of the modelof self-contained, linear time? How else might the shape of time take andhow does it, in turn, shape our practice and politics? More specifically,
can this time not be contained spatially?
The spatial and temporal orientation within the white cube proceedsfrom a normativity which is regulated through schedules, calendars, timezones, deadlines. Elizabeth Freeman terms this as chrononormativity, atechnique of “organizing individual human bodies towards maximum
productivity” by which “institutional forces come to seem like somatic041

Goh Sze Ying│Untimely Deaths, Undying Time

04
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer
Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durhamand London: Duke University Press,
2010), 3.
05“Is the Museum a Battlefield,” onVimeo, accessed October 17, 2018,
http://vimeo.com/76011774.
06
Freeman, Time Binds, 9.

facts.”［04］The successes and failures by which exhibitions are measured
are thus projected upon specific actors—sponsor, curator, artist,
gallerists, et al.—working within specific durations, yet disembodied
from invisible forces like machinations of the market and currencies
and causalities of relationships, use value, and labour that go beyond
exhibition timelines.
In Hito Steyerl’s Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), a lecture firstshown at the 13th Istanbul Biennial, temporality takes the shape of anelliptical bullet path, drawing a reference to how the protagonist in themovie Wanted, played by Angelina Jolie, shoots a bullet on a circular path"killing all the villains” but eventually, even herself.［05］This analogy
is both ironic and instructive in revealing the complicity of various
stakeholders within the art world around which we circulate. Timetakes the shape of an elliptical curve, demonstrating along its path our
involvement in the art world. The distance of that path is measured notby how far or close we are from the center but how long the orbit of our
ethical and political work. The question here is of how this temporalorbit can be elongated, stretched for developing relationships beyond
durations fixed within the white cube.
January 8, 2019
While the re-circulation of Sabah Tanah Air-Ku in Kuala Lumpur andBrisbane may herald a triumphant feat of the circulatory channels of theart world, the diptych continues to tell a tale of tangled negotiation withchange and time.
In “ESCAPE from the SEA,” the two panels were displayed separately,
one at the National Art Gallery and the other at a privately-owned creative
hub, APW (Art Printing Works). The second panel, which was removed
from APW due to its “controversial” content, still bears indelible tracesof the troubled state of affairs between the East Malaysian state and thefederal government in Putrajaya even in the so-called New Malaysia.
The tableau vivant depicting scenes of corruption, border issues,climate disasters, exploitative depletion of natural resources, and socioeconomic precarity frames a present that is perpetually fragile, or what
Freeman characterizes as a present “always split, split by prior violence
and future possibility.”［06］In both the recent exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur and Brisbane, Sabah
Tanah Air-Ku has been placed side-by-side as a pair within the same
venue. Yet, in spite of and because of this proximity, the aspirational
futurity of an autonomous state that is no longer disenfranchized in thefirst panel is turned into an image of an impossible future, no longer a
critique of the distant institution.
This is why our imagination of and desire for a public must notcontend with visibility on a mere spatial level but be sustained overa temporal dimension. Freeman goes on to ask how one can form an“ethics of responsibility toward the other across time—toward the deador toward that which was impossible in a given historical moment,

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each understood as calls for a different future to which we cannot but
answer with imperfect and incomplete reparations.”［07］This ethicalcommitment towards making time sustain beyond timelines is a
productive approach, encouraging us not only to think of art not as a
circulation but to make curatorial practice durational.
What does it mean to develop a practice—both outside and now,inside an institution—within a temporality of undying time? It might
involve the task of prolonging the duration of discourse, of making it
more durable against time, and of considering multiple strategies whichelongate duration of practice: writing, speaking, recording, restaging,
relating, remembering, all of which extend the temporality of exhibitions
and exceed its circumscribed spatial context.
The possibility of grasping the true indeterminacy of time allows us
to approach change in less prescriptive ways. The show is over, but thediscourse continues.

043

07
Ibid., 9.

Goh Sze Ying│Untimely Deaths, Undying TimeDISCUSSION
October 17, 2018, The Japan Foundation, Tokyo
Moderators: Che Kyongfa, Horiuchi Naoko

Horiuchi Naoko

Sze, your presentation highlighted this very interesting question of, “Forwhom” [as a public is our work as curators intended]? For example, as a
curator touching upon very specific contexts and trying to reflect thosecontexts through an exhibition, I’m sure you’re imagining particular faces
or publics. Who are you looking at when you do an exhibition? Also Maung,
you mentioned the art scene in your country has been underground until
recently. Because of this and political pressure, for the public it could be very
challenging to understand the context of this situation. So a question to allof you, What would be the role of a curator as mediator between public andartist or artworks?
Goh Sze Ying

To answer the question of for whom or which public, I speak from a very
personal perspective. Within how we contextualize the public, there arevery visible publics—the art-conscious, art-initiate crowd who want toaccess culture or seek exhibitions—but in my practice, I always look out
for the invisible public. It changes, of course. I don’t want to say that I
specifically speak to a minority, but in my research I often look at howthat informs the practice/research—what has not been written in art
history or not prefaced already, rather than what we assume as things
that are given or normal.
Maung DayAs you say, until recently, the Myanmar art scene has been very
underground and under political pressure. Every single artist has been
followed by military special branch, with a whole department dedicatedto censoring art and literature. It was very risky, so artists always
resorted to doing things very secretly, or guerilla style—just go into the
public space, surprise the people, then go. But also, not a lot of people
were willing to risk imprisonment or things like that. For me [the role ofthe curator is] maybe creating a space that could make it easy to connect
with people, some kind of relational aspect of art we could apply. But it

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would depend on the concepts of artists. Artists should come together
and talk, to really get the public involved and also without seeming tothreaten the authority. That’s very complicated here, because people
disappear and might be imprisoned for years. It wasn’t that easy, buttoday it’s possible.
Horiuchi Naoko

Because it’s very risky for artists, you might sometimes have to interpret theideas of artists into something a little bit more accessible or safe. How would
you do that? What sort of language would you use?
Maung DayI can give you an example of these performance artists, Htein Lin andChaw Ei Thin: they went about town selling art, like art vendors—they
put art in baskets and asked the people to name their price and take it,
shouting “we sell art” and things like that. At the time, exhibitions were
almost not allowed so it’s a kind of resistance, but people got the idea,
it’s very simple and relatable.
Ayos Purwoaji

Your question of how curators make/relate art in public—this is a very
classical sense of how curators work. In Indonesia now, there’s lots ofcollectives and initiatives in lots of areas that are experimenting in theway they curate—people curate people, people can curate together andsee their work together. The question in my mind is, What’s the role ofthe curator in the public when the public can curate themselves? Whenearthquake and tsunami hit Palu recently, I was thinking, what cancurators do in that kind of disaster? I’m envious of artists who can easily
go there and make something. There’s a very different nature between
artists and curators. Artists can be very flexible and subjective, they can
go to the public easily and work there with the public. This morning,
we went to Mori Art Museum and we saw a great exhibition aboutcatastrophe, disaster. Can we as curators move out from the white cube
to the public, to the very center of the disaster? Curators work in safe,
normal conditions, but society doesn’t work like that. Society is everchanging, but the museum and gallery stand still. That’s why I present
this ephemeral curating. In Surabaya, my hometown, there’s a museum,
but there’s no director there. It’s run by the government. My friends andI needed to work outside the galleries, with the public, trying to makecollaborative curating with people, what people think, how people feel
about how we should shape our program or event.
Selene Yap

I believe the value of the curator in the Singapore context is that ofsomeone who understands the infrastructure. Instead of viewing it
as a limiting factor, what the curator does is understand the languagewith which to speak to the infrastructure. That’s much needed because
you can have resources, artists, the wealth to put together everything,

045

DISCUSSION

but finding the language to mediate between so many of thesedifferent elements and to bring them together is a different thing.
The value comes from being able to find the language to speak to [theinfrastructure] so that you can help artists to convey the kind of things
they want to put out.
It’s a bit like building cultural literacy, and this applies not justto your audience who comes to your space, but also to your marketing
team. I don’t mean a high level of understanding of a concept, but justhelping our teams to be able to express in nuances the context you aretrying to explore helps make our work that much more meaningful andeasier.
Kumakura Haruko

I want to add something about the show at Mori. Ayos, you talk about
differences between curators and artists. I think there is a differentrole for us. I fully respect the artists who went directly to where thedisaster hit, it’s not an easy choice. Showing their work as a curated
show is what we can do for the public who cannot visit these sites. We
had a discussion series before the show, where Hasegawa-san said
something important—there is always a discussion between someone
who experienced disaster directly and someone who did not. So I was
not in Fukushima but maybe you were there. This distance is always
the issue. Showing artwork, and that artwork is somehow connected toyou, to every one of you, this is what we can do. So when you show thoseartworks that are connected to everyone we can maybe go beyond that
distance. On your other question—I try not to picture individual faces
when I curate a show because faces I know are limited—and we have big
audience numbers so there are always invisible visitors. So I always try toremember that I don’t know most of them. But personally, I want to talkto people like high school students who are curious about not knowing
specific things about contemporary art. I want to talk to me when I was athird-grade high school student.
Horiuchi Naoko

Sze has mentioned the interesting point that censorship is part of thecirculation of art. If authority is also part of the public, how should we try toconvince the authorities not to censor the work of an artist in an exhibition?
The role of a curator is also to talk to authority—it may not be necessary to
oppose it, but perhaps rather change their definition or perception of art andculture. How do you deal with the pressure of censorship?
Maung Day

In 2008, me and a friend of mine organized Beyond Pressure
performance art festival. We just did it inviting people we know, behindclosed doors because we were afraid. We also had international artists
and we worried about their security. But in 2010, we thought about it andwe thought, No, we had to somehow work with the authority. Because theauthority is responsible for screening our galleries, censoring artworks,

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we went to them and said, We want to organize a festival, we want you
to come and censor us, or talk to us. They asked, Is it an art exhibition?
We said, No, it’s performance art. They didn’t know what performance
art is, so we explained only a little bit about it; they couldn’t reallywrap their heads around it. But they came to us and artists lined up to
pitch their ideas to the censors. They also wanted to frame art in a way
that’s not subversive or dangerous to the authority. Say, artists wanted
to burst balloons, censors would ask, What colors are the balloons,are there any red balloons you’re bursting, maybe you might consider
not consider bursting those? Things like that. It was a very interesting
conversation to me, at least we could understand what they didn't likeand they were iterating it to people that they didn’t like these things so
it was documented somehow. In the end, there was a list of things they
didn’t want us to do, so we sat with the artists and we told them, It’s up
to you. That’s the risk that artists and the organizer can take, I’m notgoing to judge. [It gave] space to decide. In my country now, censorshipis lifted but not entirely. Also I feel that censorship comes a lot from thepublic, especially today because of the rise of nationalism and Buddhist
fundamentalism. Between Buddhist factions, they are also doing theirwork spreading hate; if I comment on Facebook, my comment canspread quickly, so I can be in trouble. Authorities let people do it thatway because that's how they control things. So that’s another challengethat we are now faced with.
Kumakura Haruko

We are not a public institution, so it’s a little easier for us to broach
touchy issues. For example, the exhibition we are having now,
“Catastrophe,” could be quite difficult in a public institution. But
what we have to think about is self-censorship within the company
because the company people have a very different mindset from us in
the museum, yet we are one entity. We have to be careful how to talkto them; it’s important to build relationship with people working in
the Mori Building company who are not interested in art. I want to ask
Sze how the situation is in a public institution like National Gallery
Singapore.
Goh Sze Ying

I haven’t had that encounter yet but [I find] the question of censorship isoften masked in a confusing misinformed binary as if there is a censor
and the censored. I don’t think such a complex issue can be flattened
like that. It comes down to power relay and power manifests in various
spaces at various levels of hierarchy. We can often pinpoint who's got
the highest consolidation of power—a state, institution, someone who’s
rich and self-important. We can say that’s where the power lies, but thepower shifts as well and, as culture workers, we need to be aware whenit shifts, in what context and situation, and to see how we address thisso-called censorship. Censorship is just an event where something or
someone doesn’t like a work and doesn’t want other people to see this047

DISCUSSION

work, and so it is removed from the public gaze. My specific lesson from
“ESCAPE from the SEA” is to see how we can open up the space beyond
the removal or absence of the work, and to continue to talk about it, topersist the discomfort of what someone wants to remove, but in otherforms—discussions, forums, text, so that somehow then the work willfind itself again in the psyche and consciousness of the public. I likehow Maung described Htein Lin and his collaborator’s tactics—you can’t
show this like this, so we’re going to show it like this—it’s a mode ofsidestepping which is an important strategy. We can't always confront
power head on—I applaud all those who have, but sometimes it’s not
so easy. So each of us has to deal with this in our own ways—sometimes
we can confront it, sometimes it’s a longer turn. But for me it’s about
thinking about ways to open up the space and allow more people toenter that discomfort together.
Ayos Purwoaji

Can you imagine a society without censorship? That’s Indonesia—after
Reformasi in 1998, there is no censorship at all because censorship
happened during Suharto’s, or the New Order, regime. Today, censorshipis coming from the bottom and side, not from the top. When you say
censorship, you always think about government or who has power, buttoday censorship in Indonesia is happening from the public itself, fromInternet users—you can go to jail from your exhibition because people
force police to jail you. It’s a different kind of challenge.
Selene Yap

At The Substation, we work with punks and transgenders for someprojects [which can be a problem for the Media Development Authority(MDA) censors]. So the way we present their work, say a listening session
or a project, to MDA, is as human beings just trying to enact their lives.
We find that an effective language to use. As much as that it has to comedown to that kind of level before the state can decide they don’t have to
do anything about it, it’s still a useful way to think about things. We’renot sensationalizing the issue on behalf of the artists, we’re just saying it
is a part of their life, and this is how they’re going to present their work.
The other tactic good for mediating censorship authorities is to floodthem with information. Instead of giving them the bare minimum thatthey need to process your application, give them everything they could
possibly need and don’t need as well. It’s good to remember that the
government is not a unified body, that there are also individuals thatadminister things, and to them it’s just part and parcel of bureaucracy towant your information and as long as they have it with them they’re okay
for you to go ahead.
Che Kyongfa

Perhaps what Selene just told us, flattering them by giving them information
is effective because censorship is so systematized in Singapore, whereas inmost places including Japan, censorship comes very randomly, it’s a random

Session 1: Public048

form of power. So Ayos, though you were saying there’s no censorship, there
is censorship in Indonesia and it comes from peers, the people. How do you
avoid that, or try to convince them, or are you excluding these potential
people who could disagree with you? I think this question can apply to all of
us—who are you excluding from the public?
Ayos Purwoaji

When I go into the public, working with the public, I usually do a powermapping so I can see, say, if I make an exhibition like this, there is apotential threat from some communities or groups, and so I should do
my exhibition with the patron of another group. You need to sail throughthe rocks. Surprisingly, if we can see the threat, we always have a solution
for that—that’s the power of curators.
Che Kyongfa

Maybe that’s why you say [being a] curator is survival strategy.
Ayos Purwoaji

Yes, in the Indonesian context.
Goh Sze Ying

I had a conversation with an artist Sharon Chin in Malaysia, about
her experience of organizing a performance art festival at National Art
Gallery Malaysia, which ties back to what you were saying, Maung, about
inviting the censor to your turf and then asking them “what do you not
like to see?” Because often it is the other way around where we offer
them information or we show a work and get them to say whether they
like it or not. But they seldom get put into positions where they have toclarify what it is that they don’t like and what is wrong with this thing
they don’t like. So [Sharon was saying that] sometimes it would be great
if we go to exhibitions and we get the direct contact of the curators, andif we don’t like the exhibition we’re invited to email the curator and tellthem that specifically. It goes back to this concept of exclusion, but thegesture that is offered is that you also open up a space for people who
get to say what they don’t like and then have the power to proscribe andto state in a more public forum what it is that they don’t like and forthe curators to then have that conversation with them. I thought it wasa lovely strategy, though I haven’t tried it myself! There is this idea of
this dialogue with that imaginary public that we often talk about but wenever put into practice.
Bill Nguyen

Through your presentations, I have been thinking about notions of theopaque and the transparent—the opaque being something that is madesilent or suppressed and the transparent that is something like being
vocal and being in the light. So there is a power dynamics going on
between what is opaque and what is transparent. Who can make things
disappear, who can shine light on things? With the militarization that049

DISCUSSION

is going on in Southeast Asia and also where being political/vocal in
the context where I’m working in Vietnam could pose possible danger,
staying opaque is political and a means to survive, and staying opaquesometimes is a means to make things more invisible or visible. And I’mwondering, as public workers, towards a public sphere, with or for the
public, what do you imagine your responsibilities are to artists, yourpeers, or even yourselves when it comes to publicizing what is meant ormade to be opaque, what’s meant to be censored, when there are real life
death kind of consequences, not just to your peers but also yourself? In
your case, Ayos, for example you’re visibilizing what is supposed to beforgotten; in Maung’s case or the case of Myanmar, sometimes artists
have to completely avoid certain issues in order to stay alive. Do you haveartists talking about ethnic cleansing right now? In Sze’s presentation,
there’s this idea to continue the state of the artwork, the censoredartwork even after the artwork is not physically present anymore.
Goh Sze Ying

I’m not in that position to respond to situations of censorship which
would be life-and-death situations; I think these are very delicate. I thinkof it often as two sides of a coin: transparency, the need to talk, andsilence. I want to read this beautiful sentence written by Anne Boyer,“In silence, they clamor.” It basically means that there is a power tosometimes not saying something, and I think [this entails] tactics which
are sometimes necessary according to where you come from and whatsituation you face. At the end of the day, we do what we do because there
is a care for what we do, and care comes from care for the material, theartists, the relationships, but also care for the smallest things, not “ohI got this artwork for my exhibition”—it’s not these grand gestures. It’s
not as simple as we can all stand up together to power. But I think forevery one of us in everything that we do, as long as it’s informed by that
humility and that care, that’s [what’s] important, and it is about finding
where that care comes from. I don’t think that my approach is always
to publicize about it [the opaque]. But I think where you keep silent
because it’s convenient, that is an act of cowardice. But if we keep silent
because it’s necessary for us to survive, we sometimes just have to do it.
Maung Day

In my opinion, artists, public, authorities, we all are kind of testing eachother. I also feel maybe one reason artists don’t deal with these ethnic
issues in my country is that they are not informed about these things. In
my country, it’s quite messy now, a lot of things are happening, and also
I feel for some artists—trying to be safe has become their comfort zone,
or maybe they’re still struggling with self-censorship. With the issue of
Rohingya, also a lot of artists in my country are Buddhist Burmese andthey would be on the same side as the government on that. For me, I
also sometimes draw a line where and how I should do it. I have written
poems mentioning Rohingya in my work and hoped that some monks
in Mandalay would read them and do something about it, but nothing

Session 1: Public050

has happened. Sometimes I also want to test people, have conversations
about it. These things are quite tricky.
Syafiatudina (Dina)

I want to continue in line with what Bill asked—how being invisible issometimes also emancipating, which also reminds me of good quote
by Saidiya Hartman about the right to remain a secret. That in order
to be political the right to remain a secret must be protected. This is
why I started to think, would it be possible to curate outside of the
public gaze, to curate without a public? There is this one interestingquestion: Would you like to curate an exhibition no one can see? Or noone will see? The notion of curator as public worker is something that
I find strangely unfamiliar for me as a curator working in a small space
where visitors may number one a week. That creates possibilities for us
to think of other publics or audiences; it’s very liberating to be able toimagine a different public measurement or public interest. Of course,
I understand from friends who work in museums you have “publicness” being measured by how many people come to your exhibition,
how many receive your catalogue, but I also believe that there arecertain things that we need to do as curators, and I like to emphasize thepotential of curators as caretakers of knowledge, organizing knowledge
and sometimes things that haven’t been identified as knowledge yet.
So maybe that’s also in response to what Ayos asks: In times of disaster,what can curators do? I think what curators can do is prefigure disaster,
maybe there’s some mystical way of reading disaster without it being
publicized yet. My question would be: Is it possible to curate outside ofwhat is known as the public?
Leonhard Bartolomeus (Barto)

Another continuation actually. We’ve been talking about curatorial issues
when the profession of curator still doesn’t exist in Indonesia. If you’re
working for the government and try to register yourself as a curator,
you wouldn’t get paid. But then, of course, curating happens, following
through from what’s already there. One thing I’ve been figuring out as a
“pseudo-curator” working in Indonesia is that there is a certain amountof role-playing involved. Becoming a curator in Indonesia has become
something so powerful—you choose who's in and who’s out, who’s going
to be chosen to be presented in public or not. So the question I would
like to ask is, How do you consider these [issues of] power relations,what kind of resources could you share with the artists and the public interms of that?
Ayos, you could respond to Dina on working without the public. I dosome projects with Ayos working in a very secret area nobody can know
about because it’s really dangerous for the people living there. Suchprojects are bringing a lot of changes in our perspective on what is being
a curator. [What] if the public that you’re working with doesn’t reallyknow or doesn’t care that you are a curator? Like, I don’t care if you’rea curator or not as long as you can buy my artworks or you can do some051

DISCUSSION

programs in our villages. How should we consider the public—is it thatcurators are working in the public as a different entity or are we working
with the public as a partner or are we working as the public? These areimportant questions at least from my perspective, in the Indonesian art
scene.
Vipash PurichanontThrowing one more addition to the conversation: There was a part of the
discussion which made me feel quite uncomfortable—about the figureof the authorities perhaps because [it made me] look into myself and mywork, because I’m assistant curator with Thailand Biennale. The modelof this was that the authority wanted to do a biennale, which means thatthe censorship is internalized. So I started what I call my Wednesday
happy hour, where the curatorial team go to the committee of experts—
mostly modernists in their seventies, national artists—trying tonegotiate with the authorities every week, thinking about how to reframe
the way in which we interpret the artworks in such a way that would be
acceptable. I wouldn’t say I succeed in every attempt but it has been
an interesting experience over the past three to four months; it’s mademe realize how [the dynamics of] censorship and public are sometimes
very internalized. Censorship starts even before the exhibition starts.
The idea of presenting something to the public actually starts once
you encounter these barriers, sidestepping, coming back again, withdifferent ways of interpreting. And a lot of times it’s us as curators who
hold the ability to interpret, to change the way we let people see things.
Another model that is interesting for this discussion.
Che Kyongfa

There is a question to Sze from the floor, asking for examples of how to pushbeyond the boundaries of the exhibition.
Goh Sze Ying

This is more anecdotal than a suggestion of method, but something
I’ve been practicing the past three to four years is the idea of sustaining
a relationship. Every time I look at doing a commission, or inviting
an artist, I ask myself a question: How long I would like to sustain arelationship with the person who is making this art? It comes from thisquestion I was asked in school, which was, When we do our researchon someone or something, or a community, what sort of stories are wewriting? Are we emptying out other people’s personal lives to advance
what we desire in terms of our intellectual or social currency, or are wewriting a story that [we] can read together? So that’s where I find thedurational aspect of my curatorial labour.
Being able to be there for the artist in the process of making thework is quite crucial for me. That relationship allows me to see thatthe object or the art is just the tip of the cumulative nature of what isbeing exchanged, so it doesn’t become so transactional. It’s a way of
appeasing the turmoil of how fraught curating has become today, one

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052

way of thinking outside exhibitions. One lesson I’ve learnt—you can’t
have too many relationships with too many artists because time is finite.
This brings to the fore how fast production is in the exhibition world,in the art world. People just go through group show after group show,
exhibition after exhibition. We almost churn out lists, but the labor of
having relationships with artists actually takes a lot of time.
Hasegawa Arata

My suggestion is a bit abstract, but my suggestion is that every time wecurate some project or exhibition, we explore some of the audiences inevery single exhibition [every single exhibition redefines the public].
There are two methods of curating. One is expanding the definitionof the public, various kinds of audiences, creating many layers. And
then the other method is installing contingency in an exhibition—weshould make opportunities to make errors. But these two methods are[already] used by those have power, like government and institutions,those who want to control the public. As independent curators, weshould invite the third way of curating—expanding is very important,installing contingency is also important, but we should find another wayof curating.

053

DISCUSSION

Session 2

History

Session 2

History─Beverly Yong(with thanks to Le Thuan Uyen,
who led the development of
this session)

Session 2 of the forum “Imagining New Ecologies” turned to thesubject of history, recognizing it as an increasingly prevalent theme
in contemporary artistic and curatorial practices across the globe,
with a growing number of projects dealing with the making andunmaking of historical content, or revisiting history.
Looking at history can be seen as an attempt to make senseof the world, to discover alternative narratives to current existingsocio-political conditions. With rising nationalism and militarism,
and in a region where historical narratives may be tightly
controlled or remain contested, it can also inform a search forindividual or communal identity.
To attempt to look at history differently often requires orleads to identifying new methods of working, finding different
audiences, as well as alternative modes of knowledge production
and dissemination, thus effecting the formation of new knowledge,
or ecologies. Curators in Southeast Asia may find themselves in acomplex position where they are dealing with relooking histories
through art while also shaping and reshaping histories of art
through their work.
In this session, we investigated how different curators consider
and approach working with history, and how they negotiate its
representation to different publics. The presenters each spoke
about the role and treatment of history in the development of their
independent curatorial practices, introducing perspectives andprojects involving artists working with history, historical contexts
in which artworks are made/artists are practicing, or more directly,
history as a material and even methodology.
Hanoi-based Le Thuan Uyen reflected on the motivations for theinterest in history in the contemporary art world, as well as in her
own practice, and focused on microhistory and alternative history
as two modes of storytelling, looking at how artists reveal histories
through the stories of individuals and smaller communities, or
reinvent them to open up possibilities for how we engage withthe past. Nishida Maki, whose practice to date has been situatedmostly away from her home country Japan, shared thoughts on her
curatorial role as an outsider highlighting personal and less visible
histories contending with dominant narratives of “History.” Lisa
Ito-Tapang spoke more forthrightly on the role of curatorial labor
to counter hegemonic histories, and lessons learnt from projects
engaging with histories of the subaltern and of visual dissent, andconnecting archives, sites, and ecologies, in the Philippines.
Vipash Purichanont shared his experiences collaboratingwith an artist on an unrealized commission which attempteda hauntological approach, which seeks “not to perceive history
anew, but to pursue surrounding absences of historical moments057

which make history possible.” In his reflection for this publication,
however, he expands on the appeal of hauntology as a responseto the crisis of a present in which futures are being systematicallycanceled, particularly in Thailand, with the junta government
narrowing public space for criticism and collective consciousness.
The absences of the past suggest possibilities for thinking about
the future.
Hasegawa Arata expands on his presentation which highlighted
projects that look/have looked into the untold stories of artists,
and more broadly possible curatorial frameworks for expressing“a perspective that art changes society at the same time as societychanges art.” In discussing the ambitions and methodology of“Chronicle, Chronicle!,” an exhibition held twice at Creative Center
Osaka in 2017, involving over 100 different events held over theyear, he explores ways to rethink history, with its potential for
conflict and error, and time itself, in exhibition-making.
There is a certain sense of urgency permeating these engagementswith history. The past would seem to offer many different ways
to look at and confront the future, offering up hidden voices,knowledge, and potentiality, and opportunities for reflexivity,
which may form tools and strategies “to activate curatorial laborthat sparks some sense of radical imagination even as we are
running out of time.”

Session 2: History058

Microhistory/Alternative History:
Artistic Production in Looking at Identity,
Political Struggle, and Expression
─Le Thuan Uyen

From East to West, from large-scale international exhibitions to humble
local displays, across older and younger generations of art practitioners,
history seems to be an unavoidable subject. Browsing through various
artists’ biographies and speaking with a number of practitioners, I
have a sense that dealing with history—the making and unmaking of
historical content—has become an increasingly recurrent theme. For
many people, including art practitioners, dealing with history can beseen as an attempt to make sense of the surrounding world, to discover
narratives that are absent in official records, and to reflect on their own
identity. And perhaps history is indeed too broad a subject not to bereferred to, as historical implications are present in every one of oursocial activities. Here, I would like to share some recent observations
and reflections, and propose some assumptions on my part regarding
the relation between this growing interest in history and different formsof political struggle.
I became aware of my preoccupation with history about two years
ago, during a residency in New York City. In preparing my biography
for their website, the coordinator from the host organization asked me:“So, what is your work about?” It was the first time I had been asked
this question, and it took me a good few minutes to reply. I realizedthat the majority of my curatorial projects were concerned with history
and memory. And I soon noticed that I was not alone. Everywhere I
have been recently, the past appears to have a haunting impact onpresent societies. At the Whitney Biennial 2017, Documenta 14 and57th Venice Biennale, works exploring the historical past, memories,and experiences of political struggle were omnipresent. Funding
resources and exhibition organizers in the more developed art scenes
have seemed eager to support and showcase works addressing these
themes. Some commentators attribute this interest in history to
ongoing global political turmoil and economic instability and criticize
practitioners for capitalizing on key trends, while others consider theact of revisiting history to be crucial in understanding one’s own roots
and contexts, especially in the age of rapid social transformations (due059

Le Thuan Uyen│Microhistory/Alternative History: Artistic Production in Looking at Identity, Political Struggle, and Expression

to globalization, technological advancements, and so on). Regardlessof these different perspectives on why practitioners choose to deal withhistory, what is worth looking into are the various approaches they
undertake in dealing with such complex subject matter.
There are several ways of recounting history. I will focus on twomodes of storytelling: one deals with microhistory and the other withalternative history. These provide a more personal account of the past,weaving in personal story, memories, or individual imagination ofwhat could have happened from a particular point of view. History,
in common understanding, is often seen as a collective truth shared
amongst people living in the same geographically defined territory or
people who belong to one particular community. However, narratives ofindividuals carry their own significance. They are small fragments of alarger puzzle, which can enable us to see things differently.
Before I continue, I would like to clarify my perception of these twoterminologies within the context of artistic projects:—	Microhistory involves the study of a well-defined smaller unit ofresearch—a single event, a village community, an individual. It seeks
to investigate how macro-level decisions or events impact smallergroups and individuals; and vice versa how such a smaller accountcontributes to or interacts with the larger narrative. An example
would be the work of Oslo-based artist Damir Advagic, which
includes conversations and letters exchanged among the diaspora
community (to which the artist belongs) affected by the conflictin former Yugoslavia, reflecting on how history is passed between
generations as well as its implications on how one relates to others
and to oneself culturally and politically.
—	Alternative history embodies a larger, more evident degree of fiction.
The stories’ sources may be ambiguous or be an amalgamationof various fragments of other stories and often ask situationalquestions regarding the course of history—what if one or more
historical events were to be altered? Vietnamese artist Phan Thao
Nguyen’s Tropical Siesta, a moving image work, took inspirationand visual references from historical texts and other visual archival
materials. In her work, Thao Nguyen imagines an utopian world
where the main subjects—children living in rural Vietnam—create
their own educational curriculum using only one textbook, about
the journey of a French missionary in Vietnam called Alexandre de
Rhodes. The children are free to interpret the book, re-enacting thejourney in make-believe games, imagining a different version of thepast which may have created a different present.
What these two methods of content sharing have in common is that,quite often, they provide differing, occasionally disparate accounts tothe historical narrative that is officially or commonly circulated. I wantto consider the implications this may have on society in the present. By
referring to stories that may contradict mainstream records, artworks

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dealing with micro- or alternative history can potentially resist, andchallenge the mode of hegemonic historiography. Such works are
testimony to the claim that history is forever a multifaceted, complex,
and contested subject. They partially undermine the power of theauthority to dictate a narrative, and contribute more story units to thelarger picture, altering the orchestrated act of collective remembering.
Consequentially, the act of revisiting and unpacking historical content
can have an impact on how individuals relate to their community or
to their physical and non-physical surroundings. In the process, newly
acquired knowledge may result in the reconsideration or contestation ofexisting preconceptions of a group, a social landscape, or geographicalrelevance, thus changing their relationship accordingly and causing akind of disruption, even if it takes place on a very small scale. In short,
exploring narratives that are largely invisible and retelling them in thelanguage of art can create interesting encounters between personal/
micro-level questions and public/macro-level history.
How information and materials are presented to the public can havea considerable impact on how audiences see the work and interpret its
meaning. In many artistic projects, artists work with materials derivingfrom their personal archives or hands-on experiences and encounters.
This provides an interesting entry point in looking at the past due
to the individual sentiments and perspectives that are embedded inthese materials. Artistic articulation may differ tremendously fromhard-fact historical documentation as it is not limited to texts, images,
data but also includes emotions, personal and collective memories,
romanticization of the past, myths, often drawing from oral histories.
Historical exploration, therefore, in the eyes of the artist, may be quite
different from the study of history in the context of the social sciences.
Artistic projects offer a visual and sensual environment that embraces acertain degree of subtlety and ambiguity, encouraging reflexive thinking
and interpretation rather than hinting at a fixed story. They create aspace for interaction and interpersonal dialogue that differ from theexchange of academic knowledge or formal social debate.
This leads me to wonder whether the fascination with microand alternative histories has something to do with surviving change,
locating one’s value system, and expressing ongoing political struggle.
Perhaps working with history in these ways can be seen as an effort
to avoid disorientation in an era of impermanence. During a casualconversation with some friends and colleagues, a question was raised
about the growing interest in historical research in Southeast Asia. There
were a lot of case-by-case examples, listing out reasons why one didsuch and such. However, I felt they were a little too specific, and did notcontextualize how this preoccupation with history is positioned within
the broader social landscape. From my personal observation, the desire
for historical investigation seems to be more strongly felt in regionsthat have experienced recent conflicts, or in postcolonial states. I muststress that this is an assumption made on my part and that I have yet tofind concrete data or conduct thorough studies to ensure its credibility.

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Le Thuan Uyen│Microhistory/Alternative History: Artistic Production in Looking at Identity, Political Struggle, and Expression

Perhaps in places that experience historical fragmentation due to
conflicts, displacement, and political restrictions, causing the blurringout or erasure of former beliefs, ritualistic practices, and customs,
there is a need to excavate all the fragments and assemble them in an
attempt to form a shared identity and sense of belonging. This is further
complicated by colonial experiences, which may lead communities
to quest for a postcolonial identity by seeking to return to precolonial
systems of behaviour and practices.
Take Vietnam, for example. In the past century, it has witnessed
quite a number of major political events which have resulted invarious ideological shifts (as a country and society once feudal thencolonized then divided and now governed by a hybrid system where
Leninist-Maoist Communism meets market capitalism), displaced
people, and sidelined folk culture. The question of Vietnamese-ness isconstantly raised, and it is a very contested discourse as Vietnamesevalues and culture are understood and practiced differently in different
geographical areas (North versus South Vietnam) and by different
communities (54 different ethnic groups make up the population).
The postwar Vietnamese identity is a chaotic amalgamation of various
sources of influence: Confucianism, local culture, Western ideals. Rapid
development and the fast-paced invasion of new market-driven values
and aesthetics, to a certain degree, have led to a staggering evaporationof traditional culture. Economic pressure pushes the nation to identify
its “competitive advantages” or unique “selling points.” This demand
drives not only policymakers but also community members to search for
an identity/culture that is unique.
Previously, Socialist Realism dominated Vietnamese art as wellas thinking nationwide between 1975 and the 1990s, which privileged
positive collective spirit and narratives over individualistic conceptions
and emotions. National identity was constructed carefully based ona fixed set of Communist/anti-colonial values by the Central Party
Committee to unite and mobilize a poor, agrarian population, thussilencing all others. Having said that, this sometimes contradicted
deeply-rooted existing customs, belief systems, and values. In away, the highly controlling state apparatus unwittingly facilitated asense of urgency to “speak the truth,” to unveil opinions ignored informal records, counterbalancing the vast power vested in the central
authority. By looking for different versions of the past, micro- andalternative histories provide a platform for critical commentary on social
conditions, and for understanding the undercurrents, leftovers, byproducts of changing politics, looking at social structures and dynamics
at a deeper level.
While looking at history through artworks can potentially resist andprovide other narratives to existing mainstream historical knowledge,
and challenge the existing politics of historical documentation, it canalso be problematic as it raises a number of ethical questions includingthat of historical truthfulness. When history is told by an “outsider”
and not someone from the community itself, particularly when the

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language of storytelling is one based on symbolic objects, space, andmemories rather than statistics and straightforward facts, how can apractitioner correctly represent the issues of that particular group? Even
if the practitioner assumes an “insider” position, one perspective does
not reflect everyone else’s and therefore should not be understood asshared. Perhaps that is precisely why micro- and alternative histories
are valuable as they deliberately open up different entry points. For
they dismantle the institutional imposition of one single narrative
onto a group of people and remind us to look at history in a morecritical yet understanding and sympathetic way. Artistic productions
inspired by such types of historical research therefore do not necessarily
seek to uncover “the truth” but more importantly, they open up the
possibilities for interpersonal connection as well as encourage some sortof confidence in practitioners and viewers alike to reflect on and share
their own stories.

063

Le Thuan Uyen│Microhistory/Alternative History: Artistic Production in Looking at Identity, Political Struggle, and Expression

The Plurality of History: History and history
─Nishida Maki

It is said that history is written by the victors. History—that is, History
with a capital H—always belongs to power, to authority. It is Hi-story,or perhaps even his story—but what do we do with her story, theirstories, our stories? This is a question with which I have long grappled.
History is just one truth to the winning side, but there are countlesstruths around any fact, even an arguably singular fact. Those truths,
or stories, are sometimes actively talked about, sometimes unspoken,
in some cases suppressed, or even forgotten. While History is for me a
subject to question—what is it, how did it form itself, who does it cater
to?—my interest lies in histories that are very personal, with their own
interpretation of a situation and context.
This tendency is in no small measure influenced by the 10 years I
have spent in the UK as part of an ethnic minority. Spending a certain
amount of time abroad, you start to question your own identity andstart thinking that you want to know the history of your own country.
On the other hand, once you become used to living constantly within
the history of others, you come to realize the discrepancies that exist
between the history you have been taught, received, or possessed until
now and the history of those others, and you gradually learn to come toterms with these discrepancies. As the contexts and history of a foreign
place gradually seep into your flesh and blood, what becomes the norm isa state of coexisting with yourself as the Other, always with a perspective
one step removed, always questioning. You come to realize that thepeople all around are also living to no small extent saddled with two, oreven more, histories. Imperceptibly your interests gradually turn more to
the small stories or very personal histories of individuals, rather than the
grand problematics of society, offering the possibility of an alternative
history to existing History. Learning that, when it comes to History with acapital H, not everything is correct, you become more curious about how
people respond to this condition.
Some want to learn more about their own countries and explore thatpath for a range of reasons—the history of their own countries might beinterrupted or unformed, meaning they incline more towards making

Session 2: History064

that history. Some might even lose interest in the history of others.
This attitude also appears when dealing with or considering history
within curatorial practice. Among the Southeast Asian curators who
participated in the “Imagining New Ecologies” forum, there were many
enthusiastically engaged in history-making and research into the art
history of their own countries in ways related closely to political history
and rooted in the contexts of their home countries.
In my thinking and practice, I perhaps take an opposite perspective
and approach. Based in and from countries where the histories andinfrastructures of art are, to a certain extent, established, I feel no senseof vocation to shape something urgently. An independent curator likemyself moves around between countries, communities, and facilities
as specified by the needs of the current project. Frequently this entails
entering the contexts and histories of the people there, reflecting on andinterpreting them in my own way, and then presenting the results of thisprocess to them. We might say that what I am doing from a curatorial
standpoint is similar to what artists do at their residencies and research
locations. And I think my approach to history is highly personal, one
stemming from very personal interests.
As such, at the forum, I introduced two case studies that
demonstrated this process of entering someone else’s history as an
outsider and the question of how we can become involved with their
history (and, indirectly or accordingly, whether or not this means
involvement with History). The first was an exhibition in New Delhi
co-organized by the local branch of The Japan Foundation with Devi Art
Foundation, where I was the guest curator. The second was a joint artist
and curator residency project in Maizuru, north Kyoto, I participated in.
The Japan Foundation New Delhi held an open call for a curator toplan an exhibition at their basement gallery using the contemporary
art collection of Devi Art Foundation, a private foundation which holds
Bengal School art and craft as well as contemporary art from India andSouth Asia, as well as Iran and Central Asia, established by a motherand son who were collectors that played a major role in encouraging thecontemporary art scene in India. I was attracted by the sense in which thefoundation had contributed to shaping contemporary art history in India,
while the collection itself was reliant on a personal family history andindividual interests. I found out that Devi Art Foundation had initiatedthe collaboration with The Japan Foundation, deliberately requesting
for a Japanese curator to work with their collection. Presuming that thiscame from a desire to see how their collection might be interpreted andrepresented from an outside perspective (and one that just so happened
to be Japanese), I felt that this was something that I could do, given that I
had spent so long outside Japan.
I considered a few choices while preparing my proposal. The
political and feminist approaches that instantly came to mind for aplace whose national history and formation was so engrossing just did
not seem to work, particularly due to the time constraints, so I decided
to focus on listening to the personal voices of the collection that have065

Nishida Maki│The Plurality of History: History and historyformed within the contexts and atmosphere of India. I repeatedly
went through the list of works in the collection. In dialogue with theartworks, the significance of the drawings in the collection stood out,
and I gradually realized that there were other works in the collectionthat could also converse in the language of drawing. I decided to makea show focusing on the characteristics of drawing that cut across media
including painting, sculpture, and video. In other words, I made a twopronged attempt at negotiating with the framework of art history, at
one level exploring fragments of the country’s history through theform of personal histories, and at another dismantling art categories
and then reassembling them based around the properties of theartworks. The exhibition title “On Line dot—Works on paper and othervisible things, not necessarily viewed as drawing” borrows from thetitle of Mel Bochner’s seminal conceptual art exhibition, deliberately
reframing drawing as the conceptual focus. So I did not in the end
adopt a curatorial approach that dealt directly with politics or history.
However, what proved fascinating was that the project inevitably became
entangled with them.
Just as I was visiting India to do research for the exhibition andmove forward with the planning, political tensions between India andPakistan flared up. Since quite a few of the works I had selected wereby Pakistani artists or were implicitly political, I was told that, though
they wanted to respect my wishes as much as possible, it might benecessary to reconsider the balance and content of the show for various
reasons. Considerations had to be made as well with certain artworks
in the installation process. For example, with a work that used Pakistanibooks, I was unable to choose the pages which contained political terms
to be exhibited. But if I had pushed my curatorial decisions through,regardless of how prepared I was personally to face danger, I would
have been putting the lives and wellbeing of the other organizers at
risk. And so I came to know directly the considerable disparity between
trying one’s best to fight against power, strictures, and censorship underconditions of peace and safety, and what can actually be done or not
when not enjoying such circumstances.
In all, the project proved an opportunity to explore how you canrelate to the history of a place whose history differs from your own,
whereby I went to an unknown land, studied the people’s contexts andhistory within a limited amount of time, looking, listening, experiencing,reflecting, and then presented to them my version of what I had
understood.
In Maizuru, the project entailed doing research with an artist in
the form of a residency and then leaving the results behind as artworks
and documentation. Notwithstanding that it was in my own country
and I presumably should have known some of the contexts, I was once
again an outsider, not being personally familiar with the history of thisparticular region. Maizuru was the site of an Imperial Japanese Navybase from the Meiji period (1868–1912) onwards and developed as anaval port, becoming a key port for returning Japanese servicemen and

Session 2: History066

detainees from continental Asia after the war. This history is a major partof the city’s identity and is heavily emphasized in how it markets itself
to tourists. On my first visit to the city, I felt that this special history was
indeed noteworthy, though I also felt uneasy and dissatisfied that thisfocus was predetermined. I rather felt that I did not want the subject
matter of the project to be this history that was already something so
evident. I think the primary aim of art lies in its ability to make visible
what is invisible.
And so, when the opportunity came to nominate an artist to workwith in Maizuru, I first wanted to try doing something related to whatcannot be easily seen under the present circumstances in the area, eventhough it is obviously there. Moreover, if my work were to relate to thelocation through the project, rather than dealing with modern history,
I wanted to try pivoting it around the indigenous contexts of the site, likeits natural environment, ancient history, and folklore. In the course of myresearch in Maizuru and the surrounding area, I came to learn that wateris closely connected to people’s lives in various forms, not only because
the region is coastal, but also because of difficulties in controlling riverflooding. In both legends and actual history, I found various stories about
traveling across the sea.
With this approach towards Maizuru in mind, I nominated
SHIMURAbros, two Japanese siblings who live in Berlin and started
their career as filmmakers, to work with as artists. What we call film orvideo is closely related to the elements of light and time, and I sensed
an affinity here with the ideas of water and travel, and that we mightmake a curious discovery by combining them. However, after someresearch, SHIMURAbros came back to me with a proposal involving atheory they had heard that Jewish exiles from the Second World War
reached Maizuru, which they wanted to use somehow if it proved true.
I found their idea intriguing as it brought together various elements—
their empathy as fellow expatriates, sea and travel, and a not-so-distantinvolvement with current world affairs—and stemmed from interests
based on their own circumstances and perspectives. Because it was
hard to find reliable information about the exiles, we found there
was insufficient time to pursue the subject properly, and shelved this
proposal.
Eventually, we developed our research through the concepts oflight, water, and travel, starting from events and various things left
behind at an abandoned elementary school along the coast. We ended
up using a Meiji period house as the venue where we exhibited lighteffects employed during a film or video shoot, an installation of thingsand stories collected over the course of our research, and footage of the
nearby open sea, as well as a previous work created in Singapore, anotherplace that lies across that sea.
It was a great honor to hear from many residents that the exhibition
gave them fresh perspectives while making them aware again of theireveryday landscape. Someone said: “Watching the footage, I could
suddenly taste the tide in my mouth, like I have occasionally experienced

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Nishida Maki│The Plurality of History: History and history

since childhood. Perhaps it was also like this for people long ago whenreading stories or looking at pictures of the sea.” Yes, I thought, here is
the importance of art: to be able to create such a moment. In my view,art, or art with “true” quality, is a medium that can connect the personal
to the universal, even if it does not focus on big mantras and cultural
trends or address the world’s problems. Given the inseparability ofHistory and history, if we continue working with small perspectives andapproaches each in our own way, this surely then leads to negotiation
with History itself.
(Translated by William Andrews)

Session 2: History

068

A Commitment to Telling: Curatorial Laborand Counter-Hegemonic Histories
─Lisa Ito-Tapang

Why does history matter for both curatorial labor and imagination?
If curation is an act weighed and invested in reflexivity, how do its
practitioners engage with history as both material and message, recordand lens, principle and paradox?
The process of negotiating this complexity can be likened, by wayof a slightly biographical anecdote, to the irony of writing on walls.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote about an anti-vandalism campaign initiatedby the state agency Metro Manila Development Authority that was
tasked to cover up graffiti and slogans by protesters across public spaces
in Manila. They accomplished this “beautification” drive by hiringcontractual painters to whitewash and decorate any offending public
walls with geometric patterns or reliefs inscribed with nativist tropes.
For an operation where any curatorial impulse is largely driven by
the mandate to erase, the act of whitewashing is usually wrought tocompletion, completely obliterating any previous marks on the wall. But
not all cover-ups are successful. Sometimes even blanket blankness fails
to obscure, and outlines or trace markings of the writings beneath thesurface remain.
The historical impulse can be likened to these cycles of inscribing
and painting over—defined by turns of visibility and invisibility, which
we constantly navigate and take into account within our contexts ofpractice. What is seen, recorded, or written is not usually the entire
story, but rather the dominant dispensation’s assertion of its power ofrepresentation over it—an inflection of hegemony. And observation,
research, and reflection are necessary if one is to look further at whatlies beneath.
Lessons from Political Detainees, Plants, and Protests
I thread through several projects that I was involved in for the past years
as a means of accounting not only for curatorial labor but also on whatreflections these offered in terms of engaging history as material, site, or
strategy—and in conditions not always conducive to its inscribing.

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Lisa Ito-Tapang │A Commitment to Telling: Curatorial Labor and Counter-Hegemonic Histories

Surfacing subaltern stories. The opportunity to help out with two
exhibits on the subject of Philippine political prisoners, organized byPhilippine human rights organization Karapatan (Rights) beween 2015
to 2016, made me realize how often stories of the subaltern are dispersed
outside dominant structures of representation.
The prison system, for instance, is an example of state power
imposed on the body politic. Currently, there are close to 500 politicalprisoners around the Philippines, comprised of civilians, community
organizers, and activists arrested, criminalized, and detained, often on
false criminal or political charges, by the current administration. The
condition of incarceration enacts their invisibility within society; ourown curatorial response to this was exploring how their stories could beresurfaced through portraiture and handcrafted works by the detainees
themselves.
The first exhibit solicited portraits of the detainees as a form ofsolidarity, appropriating an art form associated with status, privilege,
and patronage into an assertion of visibility, personhood, and empathy.
It seems simple but producing the portraits entailed different degrees
of immersion: when it was not possible to visit and meet the subject,
the artists relied on other sources such as photos, case reports, legal
documents, and recollections, for instance.
Philippine political prisoners have made artworks as early as the
Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s. In the second exhibit, the politicaldetainees went beyond being the subjects of works to being theparticipating artists themselves, with 16 of them contributing around130 works. This body of humble objects should be handled with carebecause of the memories they represent. On the surface, they were a wayof passing time or a modest means of income generation; but beyond
that they also channeled catharsis, an expressive assertion of rights, anda means to connect to places for people cut off by their states of captivity.
Connecting archives, sites, and ecologies. The possibilities ofconnecting parallel histories of objects, places, and people formed alesson from exhibits that threaded through the subject of Philippine
native flora. Projects such as “Imaging Philippine Flora: 1877 to thepresent” (2014), co-curated with Ronald Achacoso, and Propagate,a contribution to the exhibit “Almost There” (2017), part of the
project “Condition Report,” stressed the potentials of natural history,
contemporary art, and archival materials in connecting histories,
environments, knowledge, and contexts within and beyond the museum
space. Through the juxtapositions of exhibition materials and public
programs (such as the holding of native tree walks in the environs), it
became possible to reference larger yet crucial moments of loss andinjustice, such as the death of ethnobotanist Leonard Co (1953 –2010),
killed on November 15, 2010 with two companions during an incident
involving the Philippine military in the forests of Kananga, Leyte in the
Visayas region.
Continuing presence and dissidence. The last set of projects that have
imparted interesting encounters in history-making revolves around

Session 2: History070

archived moments of visual dissent within Philippine social movements.
I pursue such initiatives as a member of the Concerned Artists of thePhilippines, an organization of artists and cultural workers founded in1983 as a response to the censorship of the Marcos dictatorship. As such,the motivation towards tracking and revisiting these archival encountersis also invested in contributing to the continuity of the practice.
Finding resonances between visual forms of protest across different
generations is possible. In the case of the exhibition “Dissident
Vicinities,” my contribution to the Japan Foundation Asia Center’s“Condition Report” project in 2017, the archival impulse connected thepractice of groups such as the NPAA (Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artista
at Arkitekto) active during the turn of the Marcos regime in the early
1970s to contemporary art collectives such as UGATLahi (Ugnayan at
Galian ng mga Tanod ng Lahi), founded in 1992 as a progressive artists’collective in the National Capital Region. As forms of mobile protests
and agitation propaganda, the NPAA’s public paintings, fashioned
from craft paper and daringly unfurled from buildings, connect to
UGATLahi’s papier-mâché effigies of presidents, representing systems
in need of radical overhaul. These visual histories of so-called objectsof demonstration and disobedient objects, salvaged from different
archives, also point to social and artistic practice persisting beyond andparallel to the art world, in the practice and production of broader social
movements.
Curatorial Labor and Countering Hegemony
Art historian James Elkins, in Stories of Art (2002), writes about how it isnecessary to “think about the shape of your imagination” in articulating
the historical: how chronologies can be framed by intuiting the shapeof stories and looking at modes of periodization. Thus, histories may
be articulated in various ways: as durations, oscillating relationships,
organic or life models, and paradoxical encounters with the present—but
also as developing in relation to existing models which are all intricately
embedded in politics, not occurring within a vacuum.
In reflecting on curatorial labor and its role in the shaping ofcounter-hegemonic histories and organizing networks of representation,a challenge would be how to embrace subjects and ecologies outside of
margins mapped, while never forgetting the following:
Answering the questions “for whom” and “why”? Kasaysayan, theFilipino word for history, is rooted in the term saysay (significance, orvalue), which emphasizes its importance, relevance, or role in meaningmaking. Translating an affinity for the subaltern into curatorial practice
is a challenge, as current models may reinforce structural conditions
and geopolitical turns. These questions, posed by the Marxist tradition
since the beginning of the 20th century, are as relevant as ever. For
precariousness is an everyday reality for people visually represented but
not always physically reached by such practice: the rural poor; workers,
unionized or contractual; indigenous peoples and national minorities;

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Lisa Ito-Tapang │A Commitment to Telling: Curatorial Labor and Counter-Hegemonic Histories

the urban poor; migrants and other mobile communities within the
global economy; broader movements for social and ecological justice.
Is this heterogeneous mass of subalternity engaged as publics within
histories of curatorial practice, across horizons of curatorial labor andimagination?
Taking the side of the subaltern requires knowledge and engagementwith its history, also considering the process and contexts of objects andthe social practice of their individual and/or collective makers. History is
not the sole domain of the monumental and the privileged. Even the
humblest and most transient of objects, people, and places have theirown narratives. It is a challenge to be able to hold, echo, or retell themthrough curatorial intervention. Conversely, there is also the challenge
to apprehend objects and narratives coopted by the status quo in thistime where historical revisionism, fake news, disinformation, neoliberal
hegemony, and Internet trolling of critical engagement flattens theimportance of truth-telling.
History is a continuum, from which we negotiate and respond to thepresent crisis: globally, regionally, and at levels closer to home. Whatpotential lies in activating historical archives, objects, and activities toconverse and critically engage beyond the exhibition space in the larger
ecology, community, and discursive space? Some plans in the making
include “memory projects,” continuing activation of archives, andmapping and interfacing moments of cultural and grassroots solidarity.
There is a need for mobilizing, educating, advocating, questioning, andactivating a longer process of discourse and interaction with publics.
Curatorial desire originates from material conditions and relationsof power. A materialist conception of curatorial practice recognizes how
it is shaped by particular historical conditions of access, networks ofgeopolitical production, and structures of cultural distribution. Beingaware of this process and its potentials—whether it involves research,
conceptualization, organizing, or mobilizing people around a particularvision—can contribute to a historization of reality and situations that
require our intervention as people concerned with the future of ourworld.
How to activate curatorial labor that sparks some sense of radical
imagination even as we are running out of time?

Session 2: History072

A Ghost of Collectivity:
Hauntology and Curation of the Future［01］─Vipash Purichanont

At the end of 2013, the PDRC (People’s Democratic Reform Committee),or “whistle-blower” mob, marched through Prayathai road and started
to occupy Pathum Wan Junction where Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre(BACC) is located. They demanded that then prime minister Yingluck
Shinawatra resign as the head of the government. After the PDRC
occupied the forecourt of the art center, the entire junction, and themain street of the shopping district, they set up a “market” that sold
PDRC-related goods and merchandise, typically with designs inspiredby the Thai national flag, map of Thailand, and the protestors’ whistle
symbol. They also set up stages shared by speakers and musicians. It
was a mixture of protest and festival. During the time of the protest, I
was installing the exhibition, “Concept Context Contestation: art andthe collective in Southeast Asia,” an art historical investigation of therelationship between conceptual practice and collectivity in Southeast
Asia.［02］Artists, curators, and art institution officers witnessed the rally
from BACC’s fifth floor balcony. Perhaps none of the protestors would
have known that in one of the high-rise buildings located on the same
street was a space hosting a contemporary exhibition that shared thesame common ground; it presented artworks and art projects thatderived from the kind of collective consciousness and social movements
the protest was based on.
The significant contrast between the festival-like protest in thestreet and the seriousness of an academic and art historical driven
exhibition in one of the biggest cultural institutions puzzled me greatly.
I could not sort out the relationship between the two. Nonetheless, it
did not take long for one event to override another. In the second weekof January 2014, the PDRC began their “shutdown Bangkok” campaign
by trespassing and occupying government-related buildings in thecapital, which included BACC, in order to prevent the government sector
from functioning. Out of fear that the art center would be damaged,
BACC chose to close the building the night before the protest. Thus, the“Concept Context Contestation” exhibition would not be available forthe protesters to see after they arrived at the exhibition space as I had

073

01
This essay is adapted from apresentation titled “The Crisis Would
Never Leave Us: Notes on Hauntology
and Artistic Intervention,” which I
presented at the forum “Imagining
New Ecologies.” The presentation was
based on notes from my collaboration
with a Thai artist, Anon Pairot, which
explored the concept of hauntology.
However, I have shifted the focus of theessay slightly in response to feedback
from the forum.
02“Concept Context Contestation: artand the collective in Southeast Asia”
was curated by Iola Lenzi, Agung
Hujatnikajennong, and myself. It was
first exhibited at Bangkok Art andCultural Centre from December 13,
2013 to March 2, 2014 before travelingto Hanoi in 2015 and Yogyakarta in
2016.

Vipash Purichanont │A Ghost of Collectivity: Hauntology and Curation of the Future

03
After repeatedly postponing theelections, the junta government has
set the date of the general election
as March 24, 2019. See Hannah EllisPetersen, “Thailand to hold elections
on 24 March,” The Guardian, January
23, 2019, https://www.theguardian.
com/world/2019/jan/23/thailandmarks-stilted-return-to-democracywith-march-election.
04
See Sonia Yu, “Thai Soldiers Censor Art
Exhibition in Bangkok,” Art Asia Pacific,
June 20, 2017, http://artasiapacific.
com/News/ThaiSoldiersCensorArtExhi
bitionInBangkok.
05
Asaree Thaitrakulpanich, “TheCity Actually Wants to Turn BACC
into a ‘Coworking Space’,” Khaosod
English, May 12, 2018, http://
www.khaosodenglish.com/news/
bangkok/2018/05/12/the-city-actuallywants-to-turn-bacc-into-a-coworkingspace/; also BK staff, “Bangkok
governor backs away from ‘BACC coworking space’ talk,” BK, May 14, 2018,https://bk.asia-city.com/city-living/news/bangkok-governor-backs-downbacc-takeover-talk.
06
See “Monumental movement,” Bangkok
Post, November 5, 2016.
07
Franco Bifo Berardi, After the Future(Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011) Kindle
Edition.
08
Ibid.

Session 2: History

hoped. The question of what would be the reaction of the protestors
when confronted with an exhibition that featured artworks from around
Southeast Asia that engage with the history of social movements was left
unanswered because that possible encounter was rendered impossibleby the institution’s decision.
The outcome of the PDRC protest affects the future of Thailand
tremendously. On May 22, 2014, the military seized power in a coupd’état while the movement remained active. The PDRC disbandedshortly after the coup, but the junta has remained in power until today.［03］Under four years of military rule, I have noticed three significant
changes which do not only affect the field of art and visual culture, butalso the contemporary life of the people and their view of history. First,
contemporary art, especially any exhibition that makes commentaryon the regime, has become subject to severe censorship.［04］Secondly,
alongside this reduction of freedom of expression, public space in aclassical liberal sense is declining, an obvious example of this being
an attempt by the Junta-appointed governor to convert BACC into a
co-working space.［05］In a sense, I think Thailand is experiencing aunique militarization of neoliberalism where all social spaces have beentransformed into semi-public spaces that belong to private companies
which support the regime. Thirdly, the public memory has beenslightly altered. Two examples are the relocation of Anusawari Lak Si
or Guardian of the Constitution Monument, and the conversion of the
Democracy Monument—which most social movements have historicallyused as their battleground—into unoccupiable space.［06］This third andlast change is very crucial here in this essay because it does not only deal
with the present directly but also attempts to manipulate the collective
historical consciousness to serve the militant capitalist present.
Taking all of these factors into consideration, I argue that Thailand iscurrently undergoing a social transformation in which the physiologicalperception of a future as a progressive development has been rendered
unthinkable by the reduction of public, social, and artist spaces thatare not directly connected to capitalism and the manipulation of publicmemory in relation to democracy. This phenomenon can be referred toas “the slow cancellation of the future,” a term coined by Italian media
activist and thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi.［07］The term originally refers
to the phenomenon in the zero zero decade when the modernist utopian
view of the future was slowly converted into dystopian imaginationby the forces of neoliberalism. One of the major effects of this sociopolitical development is the production of individuals who lackcollective consciousness, as Berardi puts it, “a generation of humanbeings lacking competence in sensibility, the ability to empathicallyunderstand the other.”［08］In other words, protests where people gather
together and form a united social body have became a thing of the past.
Although this process is happening slightly later than in the European
context and being activated by a different ideological drive, the reductionof collective consciousness regarding the “future” created by modern
liberal democracy movements in Thailand from the 20th century points074to a similar result to the European pattern. Unable to see the future, I
find my interest slowly turning back to history, or to be more precise, tothe continued eradication of political, social, and historical conscious
which makes the current understanding of history possible. Indeed, it isquite ironic to turn back to history in order to talk about the future. But
perhaps the past (or what should have happened in the past) is the only
access to unthinkable possibilities in the present.
Exploring the lack of a notion of the future from a cultural
perspective, I have been greatly inspired by Ghosts of My Life: Writings on
Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher, a British cultural
theorist. In his book, the author explores widely the current conditionof lack of development and a sense of a future in contemporary
culture—especially in music, fiction, and film—using hauntology as amethodology. Hauntology, a concept Fisher has borrowed from French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, is not a concept, but a lack of one. Its
approach toward history is not to perceive history anew, but to pursue
the absences surrounding historical moments that make history
possible. In a sense, one can think of hauntology as a philosophy ofabsences in comparison to ontology that seeks to study reality. MarkFisher explains, “it referred to the way in which nothing enjoys a purely
positive existence. Everything that exists is possible only on the basis ofa whole series of absences, which precede and surround it, allowing it topossess such consistency and intelligibility that it does.”［09］Elsewhere,
he discusses hauntology as “the agency of the virtual, with the specter
understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without(physically) existing.”［10］According to Fisher, there are two forms of
hauntology. The first refers to something does not exist anymore in
reality, but remains effective in a virtual realm—an obvious example isin mental symptoms such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The second
form refers to something that has not yet happened in actuality, but
affects the virtual, for example, the specter of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels’ communism that has not happened in the history of humancivilization, but continues to haunt it.
Using hauntology as a conceptual framework for his research,
Fisher draws the attention of his reader to the problem of why
contemporary cultures, especially music, are unable to produce anything
new, and tend to mix and match inspirations from existing genres. But
the greater question that Fisher asked was, How can hauntology becomea productive methodology in resisting the cancellation of the future? Hefound the answer in hauntological music, where melancholia—which is
the refusal to give up on the desire of future—develops into a politicalstrategy. Fisher noted:

09
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on
Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures(Winchester: Zero Books, 2014) Kindle
edition.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.

The kind of melancholia I’m talking about, by contrast, consists notin giving up on desire but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is tosay, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call “reality”—
even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in yourown time.［11］075Vipash Purichanont │A Ghost of Collectivity: Hauntology and Curation of the FutureIn a sense, melancholia here can be seen as an attitude, a condition ofliving or a mode of operation, where a subject continues to function in
the present as if alternate conditions are possible rather than retreating
or withdrawing from it. It can be activated by restlessly living a life
while continuing to recall and resurrect specters of possible futures that
reside in historical consciousness. However, it is important that it is
not read as a refusal to give up on history per se. Rather, it is the refusal
to give up on a practice of historiography that would continue to makeghosts visible. This struggle can be applied to both artistic practiceand curatorial practice as a mode of knowledge production, whether in
the act of making exhibitions, organizing talks, or even attempting tosustain the discussion. Furthermore, one can potentially pursue these
specters, or “bring them back” by making use of telecommunication,
cyberspace, and undercommon that are regimes of the specter, or of the
ontological absences. They are parts of the range of potentiality thatbelongs to the outcast.
Looking back into the field of the curatorial, I have come to accept
that my account of the clash between the political protest and thecontemporary art exhibition at the start of this essay is one of the ghostsof my life for two reasons. First, the “Concept Context Contestation”
exhibition might have already presupposed the loss of a utopian view ofthe future in Southeast Asia because it aimed to explore a relationshipbetween conceptual art in Southeast Asia and collectivity from the 1950s
until today as a historical phenomenon. Secondly, its existence generated
a specter of possible engagement between a knowledge event in the
exhibition space and its potential audiences when this possibility turned
into an absence due to highly complicated circumstances. Nonetheless,
it is important to not give up on this ghost of collectivity because it is its
absence which opens us to a new horizon. I am proposing that the futureof curatorial approaches in Southeast Asia should shift from historicalto hauntological, that they should be interested in the series of absences
which make Southeast Asian contemporary art possible rather than thehistory of Southeast Asian contemporary art itself. In other words, future
curatorial practice should aim to create spaces of knowledge productionthat are historiographical rather than historical and knowledge events
that bring back a disarray of specters not a singular historical moment,
and engage with public memory and historical consciousness of the
public as a haunting not an enlightening. Such a change in methodology
to explore the ghosts of modernity can lead to the rediscovery of thepassages from the past which are full of possibilities that can help us tothink of a better future than the present can offer.

Session 2: History076

When the Exhibition Recurs
─Hasegawa Arata

I’m finally catching up with the TV drama Sherlock on Netflix. It’s really
good. In terms of “communication” techniques in an exhibition, we
can learn much from current television drama, just as user interface
design has done from contemporary video games. “Your exhibition isreally interesting,” someone once told me. “While a charming Sherlock
appears in it, there’s no Watson.” Simultaneously harsh and highly
pertinent, the remark has since posed a major dilemma for me. In theparagraphs that follow, please allow me to unpack this problem. (But if
you still haven’t seen Sherlock, don’t miss it!)
Looking back on what I talked about in the curators’ forum,“Imagining New Ecologies,” I want to develop the discussion further.
I would like first to present the question of whether or not we can makea framework for considering something that corresponds to so-called art
history alongside modern and contemporary history in general. We canrephrase this as a perspective that art changes society at the same time
as society changes art. Let’s examine the issues in turn.
From 2016 to 2017, I curated the exhibition “Chronicle, Chronicle!”at Creative Center Osaka, which is based at the former site of Namura
Shipyard. The title was taken from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!,reflecting my desire to implement what could be called that novel’s
aberrant mix of voices, multiplicity of speakers, and complexity of tenses
and chronology. The exhibition took place twice. The same artists wereshown at the same time and in the same venue exactly one year after the
first exhibition. Moreover, during the year, more than a hundred otherevents were held. The exhibited artists included the Lumière brothers
Auguste and Louis as well as leading figures in Japanese modern andcontemporary art like Saito Yoshishige, Kiyomizu Kyubee, and Yoshihara
Jiro, and mannequin makers and sculptors such as Omori Tatsuro, JeanPierre Darnat, and Shimizu Yoshiko, and the painter Ogihara Issei,
who spent his life creating images of castles over the course of threeattempts, though all of these artists are now deceased. On the other
hand, there were also artists from the same generation as myself (Araki
Yu, Kawamura Motonori, Endo Kaori, Taninaka Yusuke, Makita Ai)

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Hasegawa Arata│ When the Exhibition Recurs

and artists who had already built up a substantial career (Ito Takashi,
Sasaoka Takashi, Suzuki Takashi, Tashiro Mutsumi, Mochizuka Miki,
Mishima Kimiyo).
At Namura Shipyard, a large number of laborers worked hard
day after day from the moment the site went into operation in 1911.
They drew up blueprints, cut out materials, assembled things, took
lunch, worked in teams, read the noticeboard, and then finished theirshifts when the siren sounded. I felt a keen sense of wanting to pay
tribute to the richness of this cycle. In some exhibitions, the keyword“everydayness” is used with a certain conscientiousness: instead ofsomething special, exhibition makers might define their shows as
something contiguous with daily life. However, an exhibition is indeed
something special, limited, and exclusive—or, at least, if it is too muchto say “exclusive,” it is nonetheless based on a process of rejection andselection. With this conundrum in mind, a plan to repeat the same
exhibition one year later was put into practice.
This plan to repeat the exhibition a year later was also a responseto the problem of exhibition reproduction with which people haverecently engaged in various ways. “When Attitudes Become Form,”
organized by Fondazione Prada, was an ambitious attempt to recreate a1969 exhibition in the year 2013. I felt uneasy that the time spent on the
project as well as the second exhibition itself were entirely subordinate
to the original exhibition. This is a largely structural problem; more
concretely, it is a problem inevitable and congenital to conceptual art.
I wanted somehow to change the way time is, whereby we are attracted
to something original, to something legendary, and are controlled by
the full-throttle desire to archive. In holding an exhibition one moretime, there is the idea of doing so without changing it. I wanted to aspire
toward an exhibition that, when the exhibition period ended, would
nonchalantly and openly inspire you to tackle tomorrow’s work. Thiscertainly does not mean making light of the weight of history. Rather itis the reverse, defending the true meaning of “contemporary,” whereby
the present is not the present, and the past not the past (as Agamben
says, the contemporary is the relationship between people and timethrough anachronism).
Another of the distinctive features of “Chronicle, Chronicle!” wasa resistance to the dichotomies of labor and production, or original
and copy. La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving theLumière Factory), the first film screened by the Lumière brothers, as
its title suggests, shows employees in the brothers’ own factory (DidiHuberman rightly identifies this as the origin of the extra in cinema),
ushering in the age of reproducible art, during which, ever since, wehave fixated upon the concept of the “original.” Yoshihara Jiro exhibited
reproductions of pictures he made for the drop curtains at the Asahi
Kaikan in Osaka, though the actual curtains had already been disposedof and no longer existed. Ogihara Issei twice lost his work due to an air
raid and typhoon respectively, but nonetheless continued with his castle
paintings for a third time. We exhibited Saito Yoshishige’s installations

Session 2: History078

of model reproductions and copies of plans, alluding to the fact that
Saito made on-site corrections to his work every time. Following theartist’s death, his students and colleagues continued to experiment withthe best ways to reproduce his installations and recreated models fromthe plans. Moreover, since the original plans are held by his gallery,when it came to assembling the installations on site, copies of the plans
were used, onto which further notes and re-drawings were added inpencil and so on. At this point, it made much more sense to interpret theplans as a sequence in the practice process, rather than framing the floor
plans in a hierarchy of original versus copy, or artwork versus materials
versus preparation document. It is an expression of the richness thatexists within repetition.
Almost all artists, both now and in the past, are unable to makea living through their practice alone and must do other work in orderto eat. The history of mannequins in Japan is, thus, also the historyof sculptors. In many cases, we keep our focus on their “works” asartists and the time spent on jobs to make ends meet is concealed likesomething embarrassing. However, refuting Arendt’s categorizationof labor, work, and action, we connect work and labor together as one,showing it is no mistake to assert that work as a mannequin maker andwork as a sculptor are both important practices.
The exhibition’s curatorial approach rejected the half-baked bashfultendency to internalize the oppositions of worker versus artist, theeveryday versus the special, and art history versus history, and accept
those arbitrary divisions, demonstrating rather that society and art
naturally influence one another. The various events that took place
during the exhibition period included lectures and talks (the lecture
by Fukuo Takumi on Deleuze’s Cinéma later caught the eye of an editor
and was published as a book), but also such activities as loading inand taking out, meals, and even fishing. At the workshop led by alighting professional, participants experienced the way lighting is usedin exhibitions merely as the optimal solution for current art museum
facilities, and how the method and type of lighting can give an artwork
a completely different appearance. An exhibition is never something
created by curators and artists alone. To my surprise, this workshop later
took place again at the Aichi Triennale and at Tokyo Zokei University.
Naturally, these events cannot help but lead us to suspect that an
exhibition could be turned into anything. And yet this is precisely where
the meaning of the actual and physical limitations of a period and venue
come in. The finitude is simultaneously a restriction and a condition
whereby we can start, and end, anything.
Rather than consuming an exhibition, how about if we were to waste
or squander it? What are the possibilities for a viewing experience that
isn’t satisfying just as a one-off, taking a snap on one’s phone, andthen posting it on social media? Is it possible to affirm the time spenton the train home days later, perhaps a year or more later, looking
back unhesitatingly at the exhibition, as a viewing experience? Herea perspective comes into view that can penetrate across the forum’s

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Hasegawa Arata│ When the Exhibition Recurs

categorized themes of “history,” “public,” and “education.” Thereis no need to be diffident about assembling a certain project in therather old-fashioned (or what Christov-Bakargiev more frankly calls“obsolescent”) framework of an exhibition. The ambivalent attitude toenlightenment, discussions about how much contextual information
to write in captions, and preparing a place for debating how to deal
with history and for making that position clear—these all come up for
debate through the perspective that an exhibition is repeatable. Whatis formidable about this perspective is that, in the moment when an
exhibition recurs, artists, curators, artworks, viewers, members ofstaff, people in the future, and of course those who have died, become
arbitrary and duplicate.
(Translated by William Andrews)

Session 2: History

080

DISCUSSION
October 18, 2018, The Japan Foundation, Tokyo
Moderators: Beverly Yong, Che Kyongfa

Beverly Yong

My first question to presenters is: What is your interest in history? In yourparticular context, how did you start [being interested in history] and what is
it to you?
Le Thuan Uyen

I think it started with art history. I studied abroad and when I came backto Vietnam, there was very little documentation on Vietnamese art history,
and when I was working, there were so many gaps. There is a need to fill in
those gaps to understand overall development and also the implications
that such development might have on contemporary art in Vietnam
nowadays. From then it just expanded, because we all are products ofsocial construction so the broader history of Vietnam also affects how
artists develop their practices and what can and cannot be said or raisedor asked.
Nishida Maki

I don’t really know where my history is. I guess that’s the point of
departure—which history I should take as my history, or which history
I belong to or have to deal with, because I studied in Japan then in myearly twenties went abroad so didn’t have a chance to work properly withJapanese art history or history until my return two years ago. Even afterthat I’ve been going out quite often to work, for example, on projects in
India, Spain, and so on. Which histories do I need to be working with, anddo I need to be working with all of them, are they all part of my history?
Lisa Ito-Tapang

My interest is also rooted in art history—my undergraduate course wasin fine art and art history, and now, that’s my profession—I’m teachingart history to undergraduates. Art history informed a lot of the thinking
that I wanted to explore as a curator. I also had to negotiate with anotheraspect of what I did [with] organizations which have an active stake inshaping history, so to speak. So it was trying to reconcile these two—being

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DISCUSSION

able to articulate what was documented but at the same time actively
pursuing some particular frameworks, agendas, ways of seeing history
that constantly inform the kind of problems that I want to take on. For
instance, when I was an undergraduate, I wanted to take on the study ofeffigies as protest art in the Philippines but at that time it wasn’t really
accepted as a proper topic for art historical research, so you had to fightfor that and assert its validity and its place in that whole story. So thoseare my entry points into this interest.
Hasegawa Arata

Actually, I majored in cultural anthropology so I didn’t learn art history
in university, but during college life I was told by professors to doubt
history so at least for me, history is very doubtful. As a curator, I always
think about how we can install plurality and plural flows of time in an
exhibition. An exhibition is a very physical existence, in very limited timeand space, so we have to simplify the complicated things. So we can use
history to make complicated [things] visible. History is something likethat for me.
Vipash Purichanont

A hard question for me. Perhaps it’s become not just an interest anymore
but more of a requirement. Once it becomes a requirement, I become
more interested in ways of thinking about it differently, the possibility ofhauntology and maybe the lack of history as possibility.
Hasegawa ArataI doubt history, so in my case I always start to find contradictions or
errors in history—that is my starting point for curatorial projects.
Beverly Yong

Linking back to yesterday’s session and thinking about audiences, What aresome of the issues surrounding representing artwork representing a particular
history to different audiences?
Le Thuan Uyen

When you’re telling a story that is about something that you may
not be a part of, like a community, then there’s always this questionof representation, so that is one of the biggest challenges. In my
experiences working with some of the artists, that comes up a lot. For
example, in Thao Nguyen’s work Tropical Siesta—there’s a part of her
that’s in the work, but at the same time people critique her as looking
back at the past, coming from a different context.
Beverly Yong

How do you try to resolve these issues?
Le Thuan Uyen

It’s a different approach each time, depending on where you show yourSession 2: History082

work, the geographical context and your audiences. In some places,
you have a very unique specific group of people who come and see yourart so it varies. I work a lot in spaces that are not designed to be an art
space—spaces of collective memories—so each time it’s completely
different. In the process, what I try to do is talk to the audience. I’mthere as my own exhibition invigilator, I’m there to talk to random
people and then listen to them and learn from that and try to addressthat in my next work.
Nishida Maki

I also tend to work outside of white cube, and so the audience usuallyaren’t really exhibition goers or art crowd—local people, for example,
or those who don’t necessarily come specifically to see the exhibition,
who may just walk in. So when there isn’t any art expected, the role ofartist and curator and art perhaps is to offer a new experience or new
perspective of something of their everyday life, to open up visibility tothose unknown worlds to them.
Lisa Ito-Tapang

Two issues which are very important. First is how the exhibition
connects to the audience’s experiences in everyday life. Not all would
be familiar with art or art history or have an interest in such. It’s quitea challenge to be able connect with what you think should be with howdifferent publics would experience the material. Connecting them witheveryday experience, like Uyen said, would also depend on having akeen sensitivity to what ecologies, what sensitivities are at work with theaudience. I like it when different people from different walks of life go to
the exhibition, and try to talk to them even before the exhibition starts,
to get ideas or ask people who are part of it what they think about thewhole process and what’s being shown, from the museum or gallery staff
to everyday people who are part of building the whole thing, like thecarpenters. So that’s how I start to build an idea of how different peopleview this thing that we have put so much work into.
Then second would be, particularly for our context, navigating
situations or milieus where there’s a lot of fake news, disinformation,questions of historical revisionism, especially with regard to martial law
history, history of dictatorship, these kinds of contexts where history iscontested in ways that are detrimental and not contributing to critical
discourse. One way of facing these kinds of situations would be ensuringthat one’s treatment of history is grounded in research, whether art
historical, sociological, socio-economic; that it’s a research-based project
which you can defend.
Che Kyongfa

So in your case, this curatorial process is really the process of historicization,[reviewing] the canon and what’s not talked about in the past, including the
moment of exhibitions.

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DISCUSSION

Lisa Ito-Tapang

Even the public programs are an important part of asserting that history
because the works, of course, will have to speak for themselves but a lot of
the context will be articulated from public programs—talks and activities
which help bridge and help us connect to audiences trying to enter thatconversation.
Vipash Purichanont

I have another way of doing it, which has been on my mind for a while.
I was thinking about, for example, this morning when we went to theMuseum of Modern Art, Tokyo—I find one of the ways in which we
curators are dealing with, let’s say, Southeast Asian contemporary art
history is that we replicate the flow of time so we start things quite
chronologically, we let people walk through the exhibitions with the flowof that time. The question is, would it be possible to open up to new, more
open structures—the structure of rapture, or perhaps a deconstructive
structure which allows people to interpret a moment in history—and how
would that change the way we approach the history of contemporary art?
Le Thuan Uyen

Besides the challenge of representation, a lot of the time artworks
don’t really touch directly on history as we understand it, not like adocumentary or a book where a timeline is laid out. It provides a setting
somewhere in the work where visitors will find references or symbols they
can relate to and then there’s a possibility of opening up conversation,interpreting the work, making sense of the work from their own
knowledge or background. It’s not a rigid piece of history, it’s very fluidand different people looking at it might have different narratives, and thatis absolutely the beauty of it.
Che Kyongfa

At the same time, when art deals with certain pasts and histories, or certain
unarticulated subjectivities embedded in them, there’s this problem of being
truthful to them. How can we be truthful to the past or the dead? How cancurators support artistic modes of historicization and re-historicization, while
keeping a critical distance from them, as part of their responsibility to the past
as well as to the public?
Vipash Purichanont

My presentation was about an exhibition that didn’t happen, partly
because once we got all the research done or sent the proposal to thecommissioners, there was a [tension] between telling the untold history
or absence of life in factories, and the ones that own the factories. There
were conversations after it was cancelled, and one important thing wefound was that we need to extend life of the exhibition, similar to what Sze
said yesterday about temporal turns. Even though an exhibition might nothappen, we still have the responsibility to present it, to talk about it, andmaybe to rethink about things that fail again and again.

Session 2: History

084

Che Kyongfa

I was also wondering, with Hasegawa-san’s show “Chronicle, Chronicle!,”you’re showing these objects that artists made but not as an artwork, so there’s
a whole load of stories behind it: How do you present these untold stories?
Hasegawa Arata

Actually my intention is a little different. In this discussion, we alltalk about accurate audiences I guess, accurate, good, understanding
audiences. So we should think about how we affirm misunderstanding
and inaccurate understanding. Of course, we should research in detail
and we have to tell tiny hidden facts, but audiences like to misunderstandand they can get some inaccurate but very interesting information fromthe exhibition. So in this perspective we can affirm audiences [who are]different, from other backgrounds, different from the background of theexhibition itself.
Che Kyongfa

You also wanted to say that there are contradicting histories behind an
artwork. How do you show these contradictions or multiple layers if you letaudiences misunderstand?
Hasegawa Arata

Ideally, I would like to just put artwork in exhibition space, that’s
it. I believe artwork has a lot of information, tells various kinds ofinformation and background. I want to believe that audiences can knowlots of various kinds of information from the artwork, the material
itself. But as a curator, I want to make artworks more visible or [create]contradictions—this is my direction.
For me, the events and the exhibition are equivalent. Text,
catalogue, video archive, exhibition itself, and talk session—theseelements are integrated into the exhibition project. My texts are written
in catalogue but in the space there is no text, for example.
Bill Nguyen

For me, the art of curation is the art of storytelling but when it comesto history, it is also the art of documenting, interrogating, representing
facts, fictions, what is considered concrete and what is considered
obscured. You can do that through the archive, the repertoire ofembedded memories, and whatever means of transportation and display.
The art of listening is the art of time, or how to produce this time spacefor listening. Both of these acts require care, attention, respect, andresponsibility from not just the makers but also the viewers, receivers.
How do you guys attempt to create the sense of urgency in the work thatyou do, and how do you deal with creating the time and space, for thelisteners, the viewers to have that sense of urgency?
I’m asking because, in the last two days we visited two exhibitions—“Catastrophe and the Power of Art,” and “Awakenings: Art in Society in
Asia 1960s-1990s.” “Catastrophe” for me was very celebratory in tone,

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DISCUSSION

and very spectacular in terms of the visual. Both of these exhibitions deal
with either natural or man-made violence, and so for catastrophes to be
consumed in a kind of fast and populist manner, I was highly troubled
by that. This morning at “Awakenings,” I was doubly disturbed by thedecisions made when it came to the including and excluding of certain
information or countries or representations, and felt that these were notaddressed. So for me both of these exhibitions are willing to compromise
these requirements of care, attention, respect, and responsibility.
Beverly Yong

Another question that comes up in relation to this, is about the agenda behindsuch projects: Who wants to address these histories and for what reason? It’s
not just about a lack of care, I think there are also agendas—how do curators
deal with those agendas?
Le Thuan Uyen

That’s a broad question that can be applied to curatorial practice ingeneral and not just to the theme of history. [Bill], is your question about
how do we create an environment where the viewers can also get thesense of the process that goes in [to the exhibition]?
Bill Nguyen

I guess so. What do you as a curator share with the audience about yourprocess of curating, and curating with limitations, and curating withpossible agendas? How are you willing to reveal this information, andalso [support] this idea of creating a space for viewers to stop and to
think and not consume but to look at the work with care and respect?
Horiuchi Naoko

Can I ask you about feminist art, gender-specific movements in yourregion? In Europe and America there was a big wave of feminist art
movements, and in Japan as well, though not as impactful. Continuingfrom Bill’s comments on the exhibition this morning, I noticed they
touched a bit on feminist art movements but the works were quite
limited, to [works from] Korea and the Philippines. Then I was having a
conversation with Sze about Simon Fujiwara’s work that was taken downin Singapore several years ago, so maybe [my question] has something to
do with subaltern and untold histories, that there are certain expressions
that are actually not really open for discussion or taken away fromofficial histories.
Lisa Ito-Tapang

There are a lot of rich entry points to that question, especially in thePhilippines, which has a rich tradition of women’s liberation movements
and movements for gender in recent years. For art production, there
have been records of women constantly participating in art production
throughout history, but that kind of self-conscious participation of
women as women, much of it is related to larger histories of social

Session 2: History086

movements in the Philippines. For instance in the exhibition earlier thismorning, there were several works by Filipina artists who belonged tocollectives like Kasibulan, which was founded in the 1980s and still exists,[which] can be connected to feminist movements in the early 1970s—
women’s organizations both legal and underground during the time ofdictatorship. During the 1980s, when resistance against dictatorshipbegan to grow, women artists became more vocal, founding their own
organizations or divisions within existing organizations. The Concerned
Artists of the Philippines had a women’s desk. Then of course there is also
the tradition of feminist scholarship in Philippine art history [and] there
is also the active participation of women curators, gallerists, art managers,part of a history which has not been written entirely—[the] big factor of
how women have also actively participated whether as artists or part ofthe infrastructure making exhibitions possible.
Le Thuan Uyen

We’ve had feminist figures but I don’t think we’ve had a feminist
movement in the art scene in Vietnam. As soon as Vietnam gained
independence, the Communist movement gave a lot of power to thewomen—or [rather], an extended role to women, so women werecelebrated as caretakers but also as national heroes contributing tonational salvation. At the same time, the same sets of duties and domestic
responsibilities are maintained, so it takes a strange form where women
both feel empowered and suppressed at the same time. As a woman
working in Vietnam I feel that.
Beverly Yong

With the exhibition this morning, I didn’t have an issue so much with thehistorical trajectory—the chronology helped us to make comparisons and thatwas quite interesting. I had more of a problem with the categorizations, like thelittle corner for the women, being applied to these very different contexts.
Leonhard Bartolomeus (Barto)

Touching on categorization, that kind of stuff, I followed that there aredifferent situations [depending] if you’re working with macrohistory or
microhistory. With macrohistory, it’s like you chew this big cake and you
try to spit it out in different forms, and expect the audience to taste it
the same as you chew it, but then working with microhistory, there is the
ethical part. When you’re borrowing someone’s stories or context froman event, artists can do anything that they want, but when you bring it to
the galleries, or present it to the public as a framework then as curators,
how could we be responsible to that ethical part? How can we deliverback the things we have taken as our advantage, at least to do research orpresentation?
Goh Sze Ying

I really like Barto’s analogy of taking a bite and spitting out the cake. The
kinds of strategies in creating an exhibition that deals with histories or

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DISCUSSION

a span of time that is quite large: I’m just curious as to whether or notthese kinds of ways of thinking—chronologically, or putting them into
specific categories—is perhaps just a bit of an outmoded lazy display
strategy. Because when you’re working with a space that is so large, orover a hundred works, you have to think about how they are placed inrelation to one another, and we can’t change the way in which a visitor
will flow from a start to an end, and that already is a kind of chronology
of experience through a space. So, in your practice, what are the ways
in which you have dealt with display strategies? Ultimately history is
about the passing of time, but how have you dealt with that in your own
projects? Even a solo show, like a breadth of the [an artist’s] work—weoften see this chronologically as well.
Lisa Ito-Tapang

Whether you’re dealing with the work of an individual artist or a morethematic selection of works, chronology is still important. I speak fromthe point of view of someone who needs to get facts in order. Before you
can go into imagining more shapes of history it’s important to at least
get the factual timeline and other factual information correct before you
can configure and start to reimagine where this can go. I agree that there
are many ways of how exhibitions can approach telling a story and it
need not always be linear in the sense that you tell it from chronologicaltime from start to finish, although it helps in many instances andsometimes that’s the most logical way to do it. But there are also otherinstances where opening up other aspects which appear across timeor at certain moments or points could be the best way to approach an
exhibition topic.
Selene Yap

My understanding is that there are official ways that you get written into
history. It’s great that you excavate these histories, microhistories, but at
the same time is it also one of your desires to have these histories written
in a wider space than exhibition-making? Because I feel that sometimes
exhibition-making may somehow just seem to remain a method to talkabout things. But then I also understand that academia has a very strong
gatekeeping force to keep what is official discourse, keeping out smaller
voices. So how do you get attention to the things you speak about inyour projects? After working with artists and getting the project done,
how does one get the history that gets excavated through your projects
written?
Le Thuan Uyen

For me, it’s not so much about writing that particular story into a larger
narrative but more an attempt to question this fixed approach to looking
at something, to be aware that there are so many other possibilities
that exist outside of what you see or read or get told. Trying to get theaudience to see that this is not an alternative history but that you can add[to history] or somewhere other people may have other stories to add.

Session 2: History088

Lisa Ito-Tapang

It’s important that curatorial research turns into knowledge
production—you go into a lot of research into artists, archives,
everything you need to understand a work, and it would really be awaste if after an exhibition there’s no afterlife of that knowledge. For us
in academe, that would translate into writing articles, texts of different
types in order for the research material to have translation apart fromexhibition. Parallel production is something that I would always aspire
to. Of course there would always be limitations in terms of how that gets
produced because translating research from an exhibition into a longerterm, more extended research initiative also entails being aware of thelimitations of your curatorial framework and there would be gaps which
you would need to fill on order to tell a story that is more comprehensive.
Syafiatudina (Dina)

I just realized that today’s presentations are all based on exhibitionmaking practices. I think if we put exhibition-making practices[against/together] with the practice of writing history, there are issues
where exhibition-making cannot fill the gaps of historiography—for
example, the problem of objectivity in history based on objects, onmaterial. There are things that cannot be or haven’t been documented
yet that cannot be easily fact-checked, for example, memory or effector embodied knowledge (knowledge that is attached to body) cannot
easily be materialized into another form like art form or archive. There
are limitations. To continue what Sze said about exhibition-making asa response to provide alternative historiography, I think this cannot be
separated from issues or politics of knowledge production—who canwrite, who can read, what voices can be heard and not—and that goes
into what Bill said about how to treat [our work] with care, which goesto checking what are the limitations, what privileged modes are working
around the practice of art-making, what art spaces are being used for
exhibition, for example. I want to respond lastly to Barto’s analogy of
cake-chewing, [to propose] that sometimes, in order to prove that thecake exists, it’s not necessarily based on what remains of the cake.
Sometimes the cake is already gone but what remains are the stories of
the cake. And we don’t need the picture of the cake to say the cake exists.
Sometimes the cake exists not in forms of materials we already know,
sometimes it’s in a way of working. Using the analogy of cake, what kindof materialization of cake can we think of not to fall back into the trap ofwhat is seen is what exists, which is the problem of historiography?
Le Thuan Uyen

When you’re talking about a piece or form of history, you can’t avoid acertain subjectivity. Listening to all this exchange, I think of two things.
One is text: A lot of artists don’t emphasize the need for text in the
exhibition space—how issues are raised in your curatorial text or evendescription of works is something to be aware of, how to speak aboutcertain things, not just what you see. Second is how you deal with space:

089

DISCUSSIONI haven’t had experience of working with large institutions or massive
spaces, but choosing the site for your artistic activity—exhibition,
workshop, performance—could also be a strategy to address yourown limitations or contradictions, a way you can try to visualize yourcontradictions.
Lisa Ito-Tapang

A lot of the anxiety surrounding the issue of historiography, history, andart history is also related to the more general state of how art historyof the region, of Southeast Asia is told. Whenever we have to discuss
histories of Asian art, it’s challenging to find particular referenceswhere you can get an overview or a sweep of the region, or even specificcountries. A lot of that writing of history is happening as we speak and a
lot of the exhibitions that we see are reflections of this ongoing processof how this history of individual countries and particular regions isbeing negotiated on a large scale. So it’s all in flux and that’s where theproblems and anxieties arise of who gets to be represented. Perhaps inthe case of Western art history where the narrative is more consolidated,historical responses go towards the critiquing or deconstruction of
narratives. Here we have a different situation. It’s an interesting process
to be looking at and to be part of.
Che Kyongfa

How to wrap up? There’s no way to wrap up. My curiosity is, Why are wetalking about history so rigorously now—maybe because there is a revisionist
power all over the world? We’re sometimes using the same tactics but trying
to do something else or to do the opposite.

Session 2: History

090

Session 3

Education

Session 3

Education
─Horiuchi Naoko

At the third session of “Imagining New Ecologies,” which dealt
with the theme of education, four presenters from Japan,
Indonesia, and Vietnam spoke about aspects of education fromthe respective standpoints of an art museum, a privately fundedpublic art space, and artists’ collectives. As artistic expression
expands and curatorial approaches diversify, creating a place forlearning that caters to a wide range of audiences and participants
is indispensable today, whether for reflecting on an exhibition
and the social and political contexts that surround it, or finding
alternative ways of learning and sharing knowledge.
What kinds of dialogues and critiques can artistic andcuratorial expressions and practices take on, and what kind of
discussions can they produce through “educational” programmingor formats? What kind of knowledge can we obtain from artistic
and curatorial expressions and practices? The presenters spoke
about these questions based on their individual contexts of region,
history, and community.
Mori Art Museum, where Shiraki Eise works as an associatelearning curator, changed the name of its Public Programs division
to Learning in 2017 as part of a major gear change in its efforts
in education, which saw it take initiatives beyond the walls of themuseum located on the 53rd floor of a skyscraper and out into the
local area and schools. Accordingly, its programs have incorporated
the ideas of artists that go beyond the space of an exhibition andits duration to create two-way learning that takes into account thediversifying Tokyo community and the increasing segmentationof viewers that accompanies this. Partnering with organizations,groups, and individuals outside the museum serves to integrate
multifaceted perspectives and provide a more comprehensive viewof an exhibition.
Speaking from a rather different community context, Bill
Nguyen, a curatorial assistant at The Factory Contemporary Arts
Centre, founded in 2016 in Vietnam, explained that negotiation
is key to how many of its programs are able to evade government
censorship. With the criticism of society and politics that
contemporary art frequently employs, one of the roles of the center
is to “translate” and convey its value to the authorities. A neverending process of negotiation, with government censors, artists,
and audiences is part of developing multi-layered learning thatencourages participation in a place for debate without chippingaway at the critical nature of the artworks exhibited. This is anambitious activity that transforms ideas and perspectives on art at
a grassroots, yet assured, level.
Leonhard Bartolomeus, a curator who has been running
Indonesian collective ruangrupa’s educational programs,093

explained their evolving efforts to create educational programs
and platforms, developing different models along the way, andpartnering with different collectives to pool knowledge andresources of people, funding, and information, to be “hacked” byothers. These endeavors recognize that art is constantly in flux andknowledge fluid, along with constantly finding new directions forruangrupa’s own activities. Currently, they form part of Gudskul,
an ecosystem for art learning within the framework of collectivity
and collaboration.
Curator and researcher Syafiatudina of KUNCI Cultural Studies
Center in Indonesia spoke about the center’s School of Improper
Education, which focuses on collective study, on learning together
through failure and uncertainty, testing different models of
education. For example, in trying out the Turba methodology ofIndonesian 60s art collective Lekra, the students chose to spend
a certain period of time as farmers, taxi-drivers, and temporary
schoolteachers, observing and experiencing the dilemmas andconflicts in the lives of a range of different people. This prompted
participants to realize that “knowledge” is, in the first place,not something that we receive passively from above, but rather
something deeply rooted in the lifestyle around us, not least ourshared difficulties.
Looking back over past movements in the history of art, it is clearthat numerous artists have urged societal and lifestyle reform,
and one expression that has emerged from this has been thedevelopment of the field of experimental education. Today’s artists
and curators, like those who have preceded them, advocate thekinds of alternative learning outlined above in order to transcend
the frameworks of systems, markets, and conventional art
education, and to explore questions of how people can live more
freely and flexibly. In the future, we should continue to observe
the ways in which the various insights produced by these kindsof practices will continue to change, give us fresh perspectives onrichly nuanced conceptions of the “public” and interpretationsof history, and lead to the further expansion of curation and theutility of art.
(Translated by William Andrews)

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094

Can the Contemporary Art Museum
be a New Place for Learning?
─Shiraki Eise

From the perspective of someone working at a contemporary art
museum, what should I share with my fellow curators in Asia vis-à-vis thethree themes presented by The Japan Foundation of public, history, andeducation? In particular, in regard to the final day’s theme of education,
what should the role be for the educational activities conducted byart museums, and are there possibilities for partnering with externalorganizations like nonprofits developing alternative activities outside
the art museum? On the premise of these questions, I shared knowledge
I have gained from on-site experience through introducing case studies oflearning programs implemented at Mori Art Museum. My presentation
dealt with a question that has long been a compelling one for us: Can
the contemporary art museum be a new place for learning—a third placethat is neither school nor family?
Forming part of the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo, whose wide
range of facilities include commercial spaces, residences, restaurants,
a television and radio broadcaster, movie theater, and school, Mori
Art Museum set its mission as “Art + Life” right from its opening in2003 and has since conducted activities with the aim of forming a new
cultural hub in Tokyo. In 2017, the museum changed the name of its
outreach department from Public Programs to Learning. This name wasdetermined after a two-year process of consultation with staff from eachdepartment in the museum. It was not simply a departmental namechange, but also incorporated the sense of expressing the attitude of
the museum toward its activities. In the wake of the renaming of thedepartment, we have placed a stronger emphasis on creating programs
that facilitate the sharing of the results of research by the curators thatplan exhibitions and of the knowledge that is naturally shared during theexhibition creation process with a wider age range of viewers. In termsof the goals of our learning programs, we also aim to create situations
in which audiences can encounter contemporary art, can learn throughcontemporary art, and can enrich their lives with contemporary art.
Mori Art Museum’s Learning division works with the exhibition
curators to organize events related to exhibitions, including symposia,

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Shiraki Eise │ Can the Contemporary Art Museum be a New Place for Learning?

panel discussions, performances, artist talks, workshops, and curator
talks. It also has programs that are planned and run by the department’s
team, such as school programs, access programs for visitors from various
backgrounds, and the Community and Art Museum Program, run withother Mori Building departments, that cultivates cooperation withlocals. It implements over 100 learning programs annually, attracting
a total of more than 5,000 participants. The division’s programs are
divided into the following three categories: Exhibition-Related Programs,
Audience Development Programs, which are aimed at new visitors, andAcademic Programs, which are aimed at visitors with interests in art.
In my presentation, I introduced the Audience Development Programs,
which have been growing from strength to strength. This category
actually comprises two subdivisions: Creative Learning Programs andCommunity Engagement Programs.
The Creative Learning Programs mainly comprise exhibitionviewing events for students (from preschools and kindergartens up
to elementary, junior high, and high schools, vocational colleges, anduniversities), to help them maximize their learning from the exhibition
on view. Programs are designed not only to relate to art or drawing andcrafts in school but also to complement and go beyond standard school
curricula for subjects like Japanese and social studies. The Schools and
Art Museums Programs, which feature discussions about exhibitions
with participants from the teaching profession, function also as aplatform for information exchange between colleagues and peers.
Meanwhile, the Community Engagement Programs are aimed
at participants of different ages from various communities, creating
environments based on easily accessible themes. We often provide
programs targeted to specific age groups at first, following up laterwith a second round of events whereby those different groups, whonormally have no contact with one another, can meet and interact. The
participants interact inside the art museum, which functions as neithera school nor a home, but as a third place for learning. And each time,
there are also artworks and artists in the space with them.
In my presentation, I introduced a few concrete examples of the
programs.
Kids’ Workshop: FutureThis was a workshop for elementary school students from the local
Roppongi Hills area, led by the artist N. S. Harsha, who is based in thecity of Mysore in south India. Harsha collaborated with us to engage
local school children during one of his visits to Tokyo in preparation
for his 2017 solo exhibition at the Museum, “N. S. Harsha: Charming
Journey.” We went to a nearby public elementary school and discussedwith teachers what we wanted to do, upon which it was agreed to carryout this workshop. Over 100 elementary school children participated.
Harsha asked each of the children to portray what they wanted to bewhen they grew up on an adult-sized white shirt. After the children

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096

depicted their ideal future on the shirts, they gathered in Roppongi Hills,
wearing their shirts, for a parade around the complex, where thousandsof people work in their offices wearing the same kind of shirts. Shouting“mirai,” meaning “future,” the children’s cheerful voices transformed
the expressions on the faces of the gloomy-looking businessmen thatwere heading to work that Monday morning. This is a very good example
showing our collaboration with schools, or so-called “formal education.”
We succeeded in making a new kind of program—working with schools
and artists—where children can learn and have a new kind of experience,not constrained by a specific curriculum.
Meet the Artist Together with People of Various Generations
This was an event program that was not targeted at one specificage group but rather aimed at bringing together participants fromvarious different generations. We held a workshop with the Thai artist
Dusadee Huntrakul, who was one of the exhibitors at “SUNSHOWER:
Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now” (organized by the
National Art Center, Tokyo, Mori Art Museum, and the Japan Foundation
Asia Center in 2017). On the first day of the workshop, groups fromdifferent generations—children, teenagers, and seniors—gathered andviewed the exhibition together with the artist, followed by a discussion
directly with Huntrakul about such topics as how he makes his work,
what are the concepts behind his work, how he spent his childhood andstudent years, and why he became an artist. On the second day, the teensserved as the guides on a gallery tour for seniors, sharing their respective
impressions of the artworks in their own words. The younger children
listened to Huntrakul explain his work and then took part in a handson workshop to make things. On the final day, all the groups came back
together and joined in cooking and eating pad thai, which for the artist
is a dish with special memories of family. The workshop program thenconcluded with another look at Huntrakul’s work in the exhibition
venue. One of the participants from the group of teens said that it was
the first time he had interacted with seniors in this way. “I discovered
new things and it was fun,” he said. For him, seniors were schoolteachersand he had had no prior chance to interact with them in a more familiar
setting. Participants learning about and respecting the opinions ofothers through encounters with artists and works of art: this is what canoccur in an art museum functioning as a third place for learning that isneither a school nor a home. The program was an example of one resultof audience engagement and our mission to promote “Art + Life.”
Designing a Country without Sight
This program hypothesized, “What if our daily lives were spent in aworld without sight?” In this way, it aimed to encourage participants torethink the things they took for granted that would not be the same in aworld that had no visual sense, from the way we communicate to traffic

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Shiraki Eise │ Can the Contemporary Art Museum be a New Place for Learning?

rules, laws, and art. Specialists from a range of fields including an artist,a furniture designer, a TV video producer, an architect, and a chef wereinvited to take part as advisors, and over three days the blind and thesighted joined together to think about “a country without sight.” Startingwith a walk around the Roppongi Hills area and talking about the worldin its present form, the program enabled all the participants to reassess
how they perceive society through dialogue with the visually impaired
facilitators. After the event was over, the participants shared a range ofcomments. “It felt like I used a way of thinking I don’t normally use,” onesaid. “The experience in an art museum is almost entirely constructedby sight, so I was intrigued by the program’s theme of designing a nation
without sight inside an art museum. I could learn of a world I did notknow about,” remarked another. “The process of thinking with othersfrom scratch was fun.” “Given that our senses, including sight andhearing, all deteriorate with age, this is a topic that I want to continue
thinking about carefully.” In this program, the art museum became aplatform whereby participants from various backgrounds could think
together with artists, architects, and other creative people. It enabled
participants to consider the others who are around us.
Neighborhood Seen through Art Version 1: The FurnitureThis project looks at Nishi-Shinbashi, a district near to Roppongi thatMori Building is planning to redevelop. Based on a preliminary survey byarchitecture researchers, it worked with artists to bring out the historyof the area, its various cultural elements, and its local characteristics.
Nishi-Shinbashi was once renowned for furniture manufacturing andwas actually the area that produced the most furniture in Japan in termsof volume from the 1910s to the 1980s. Many furniture artisans lived
here and communities formed according to the industry’s divisions oflabor. The project comprised imagining the state of the neighborhood at
the time as well as re-examining the way the community is now divided
up. We interviewed the head of the neighborhood association, a former
furniture craftsman in his eighties, and also young businessmen who
work in the district today. Based on the various themes that came tolight in the course of these conversations and drawing on the results ofworkshops and talks held with local residents, artists created works andput them on display in vacant buildings. This was a project held over thecourse of a year, starting from the initial research stages in 2018 and set
to continue until February 2019. It is an example of a learning programthat introduces art within the community at a different pace and rhythm
to the format of an exhibition.
Mori Art Museum considers it vital to develop activities that go beyond
the walls of the art museum and to venture out into the city and society.
This is because we are members of the Roppongi Hills community andof society at large. We run programs aimed at different communities,
including the people visiting Roppongi Hills for sightseeing, those

Session 3: Education098

coming here to work, and local residents, and organize learning
programs beyond the museum walls for future visitors who may have yet
to visit an art museum. Learning programs help to form bridges between
audiences and artists and between different audiences; they allow us tobecome aware of our neighbors, enhance our understanding, and enrichourselves. These are examples of the learning practiced in our programs
based on the Mori Art Museum mission of “Art + Life.”(Translated by William Andrews)

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Shiraki Eise │ Can the Contemporary Art Museum be a New Place for Learning?

Ways of Negotiation
─Bill Nguyen

In Vietnam, we possess an independent and different artistic landscape,with the majority of contemporary art activity occurring outside theofficially sanctioned state-sponsored cultural institutions. Art education(specifically for art practitioners) and education through art (for thegeneral public) have thus taken the shape of grassroots, bottoms-up
initiatives, occurring privately and internally amongst the art community,or semi-publicly with a moderately sized dedicated audience.
As Vietnam’s first purpose-built public space for contemporary art,on the one hand, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre faces challenges
in maintaining our creative and critical work in a climate where criticality
is not favored by the authority, especially when it is executed publicly
and with the involvement of the public. On the other hand, the role of art
is often misunderstood by various parties, resulting in a lack of public
appreciation, intellectual investment, and dialogue. I wish here first tointerrogate some of the historical contexts and current events which led
to such a situation. Secondly, I would like to discuss the different “waysof negotiation” and strategies which The Factory adopts to deal with suchdifficulties and challenges.
I
At The Factory, we are in constant negotiation with three types of“public”: the authority, the artists, and the audience, which we consider
as interchangeable and as important as one another. We treat them as“horizontally” as possible, where a balanced amount of care is given
towards all three. But how did we get here?
Skepticism and hostility from the authority, for fear of demand for
freedom of expression, leading to a heavy and unclear structure ofcensorship
The view of the authority towards contemporary arts in Vietnam is oneof skepticism, fear, and hostility. An earlier development shaping thisSession 3: Education100attitude was the Nhan Van-Giai Pham (“Humanity-Works of Beauty”)
movement in the late 1950s in North Vietnam. Initiated by intellectuals(including writers, poets, musicians, artists, and so on), this was one of
the first artistic-cultural-political movements that publicly demanded
political reforms and greater intellectual freedom for the arts. Although
it failed, and its participants had to suffer the consequences of theiractions, the government realized how the power of arts and criticalthinking could alter the course of the official narrative and ignite change.
Today, the strict, but also very ambiguous, system of censorship in place
is a clear manifestation of this skepticism, fear, and hostility.
In recent years, the government has shown its hostility in its
systematic crackdown on intellectuals, citizen-journalists, and activists［01］who write and produce online blogs, who are punished and jailed for“conducting propaganda against the State of the Socialist Republic ofVietnam,” “activities aiming to overthrow the people’s administration,”and “abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to infringe upon
the interests of the state, the rights, and interests of individuals.”［02］Additionally, the government’s recent introduction of the Cybersecurity
Law (which will take effect as early as January 2019) shows theirdetermination to “flatten” our only public forum for critical thinking andsharing.

01
Press freedom campaign group
Reporters Without Borders ranks
Vietnam 175 out of 180 in their 2018
World Press Freedom Index, naming
the country among the “world’s worst
enemies of the freedom to inform.”“Well-known Vietnamese journalist
hounded, facing imminent arrest,”
Reporters Without Borders, February
27, 2018, https://rsf.org/en/news/
well-known-vietnamese-journalisthounded-facing-imminent-arrest.
02
According to articles 88, 79 and 258
of Vietnam’s penal code. “Vietnam:
Reform Criminal Law to Respect
Rights,” Human Rights Watch, October
17, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/
news/2016/10/17/vietnam-reformcriminal-law-respect-rights.
03
In 1984, the art historian, critic, andpainter, Nguyen Quan was appointed
editor-in-chief of Tap chi My thuat. He
was dismissed in 1989, largely due tohis advocating of international ideas ofart-for-art’s sake.

Lack of interest from the public and media, contributing to a growing
neglect of art, deeming it not useful and uneconomical in a society driven
by capitalism
The landscape of art criticism and writing, and its reception by the
public, in Vietnam, is grim.
Two official art publications are run by governmental bodies—Tap
chi My Thuat (Fine Arts Magazine), published by the Fine Arts Association
since 1977, and Tap chi My thuat & Nhiep Anh (Fine Arts and Photography
Magazine), published by the Department of Fine Arts, Photography andExhibition, under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism since 2012.
Having rarely been best-sellers in terms of public consumption, thesepublications have gone through interesting transformations over theyears—sometimes incorporating design and fashion elements into theircontent to stay relevant, other times promoting critical and experimental
ideas that were finally deemed too foreign for the Vietnamese public.［03］The online art journal SOI (http://soi.com.vn), launched in 2010,
focuses on reviewing local art practice and exhibitions, translating
select foreign materials, and providing an interactive platform for public
participation where people can freely offer opinions via the “comment”
function on the website. 2010 also saw the suspension of the influential
online forum Talawas (http://www.talawas.org), mainly due to politicalreasons. Launched in 2001, Talawas offered important articles anddiscussions on the literature, culture, and politics of Vietnam, including
contributions by well-known Vietnamese and foreign authors, writers,
researchers, and scholars from inside and outside the country.

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04
Hue College of Fine Arts is the only
art school in the country that offers acourse in multimedia art, which began
in 2013.
05
In 2018, we see a Vietnamese presence
across various international art
exhibitions and biennales: Tran Luongand Richard Streitmatter-Tran at the
1st Thailand Biennale; UuDam Tran
Nguyen at the 12th Shanghai Biennale;
Art Labor at Carnegie International
57th edition; Nguyen Trinh Thi and
Ly Hoang Ly at the 9th Asia-Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art. In
2019, Phan Thao Nguyen and Tuan
Andrew Nguyen will be exhibiting at
Sharjah Biennial 14.

Even though there have been individual efforts from both insideand outside state-run art and cultural institutions, today there exist
almost no adequate publications on arts and very few regionally/
internationally-involved art writers. Mainstream media offers little
coverage on art exhibitions, which are not considered “marketableproducts.” Online platforms tend to become spaces for biased debates,with no comparative and constructive arguments, or appreciation for (art)historical and theoretical contexts.
Outdated curriculum leading to a neglect of self-directedness, criticalthinking, and interdisciplinary research methodology in art education;
and an erosion of intergenerational exchange
During an interview with Minh Hoang, a recent graduate of the Ho Chi
Minh City Fine Arts University, he shared with me two interesting facts.
Number one: only 10 students—including him—graduated from thepainting department in 2018. And number two: a friend of his once
brought in the Taschen compilation 100 Contemporary Artists, to whicha teacher responded, “Unnecessary materials!” In another interview, with
Phan Le Chung, a professor at the Hue College of Fine Arts,［04］I learned
that in 2015, the number of students enrolling to study painting was
so low that if this persisted for three continuous years, the department
would be suspended; and for five continuous years, closed for good.
While Vietnamese art is gaining international exposure andrecognition elsewhere,［05］internally, we are facing a crisis whereart as a discipline, together with its preservation, development,
mediation, education, and workers, are often deemed unnecessary, evendisregarded, with undesirable consequences for how art is perceived
by the public, written about in the media, or taught in public schools.
Students are skeptical about applying for Fine Arts; even if they do,upon graduation they redirect their interest into money-making fields
such as advertising. This makes it almost impossible for us—organizers,
curators, spaces—to identify and gather the next generation of artists towork with and support. But, how are the students to be blamed when thelocal official textbook on world art history stops at Pop Art, when they
are told by their teachers to dismiss contemporary and experimental art
because they are “impure”? Being thus disengaged, students also lackawareness of the real-life ecology and system of art, outside the outdated
parameters of the university. How can we blame them for getting
lost—not having a system of peer-colleague-finance-knowledge support,
not fully understanding the historical contexts in which they work, notknowing how to learn from the past in order to move forward into the
future?
II
While the first part of this text introduces the context that shapes
our work at The Factory, this second part will delve more into theSession 3: Education102

practicalities of the different “ways of negotiation” and strategies weutilize. Although not new or revolutionary, they are reflective of the times
and contexts in which we live and work.
Choosing “Language”
At The Factory, we take care in our choice of “language.” This entails
deciding, within different styles of writing and modes of communication,
what content is announced (or erased), in what most fitting forms, when,
and to whom. In short, we choose carefully which “voice” to use when
speaking to whom.
We take a “multiple voices” approach to writing—breaking down the“verticality,” or hierarchy, of different forms of writings (with academic
texts at the top and everyday speech at the bottom), utilizing this strategy
repeatedly in every exhibition and public program. It requires us to adopt
the multiple viewpoints of our multiple publics: the authority, the artists,
and the different groups of audiences.
Negotiating Authority
Running an art space as public as ours means that we have to seek
permission for all of our exhibitions and public programs, andinformation has to be screened months in advance by the Ministry of
Culture, Sports and Tourism via a process of license submission. Thus,
a significant amount of time, attention, and care has to be given, first,
to the kind of “language” we choose to negotiate with the authority, andsecondly, to the maintenance of our “friendship.”“Friendship” here means social time spent with members of theauthority out of office hours—drinking, talking about art, informing
them of the latest trends and developments taking place regionallyand internationally. In other words, we adopt a fluid, soft, human, andrelationship-based approach to dealing with them.
In choosing a “language” when addressing the authority, it’s about
walking between the lines—acquiring their permission while staying(more or less) true (we all have to compromise!) to the integrity of theartists and their works.
Example:Tuan Mami’s project In One’s Breath—Nothing Stands Still looked at
the degradation of landscape and the destruction of human lives dueto heavy pollution and over-exploitation of natural resources in his
hometown Ha Nam. To avoid complications, we decided to reworkthe description of the project and approach it more poetically when
applying for the license. We stated that it was an investigation into how
landscape—as an artistic theme and medium—is practiced today: acontemplation on the aesthetic qualities found in ruined landscapesand a questioning of the spiritual relationship between man, Mother
Earth, and the universe.

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Negotiating Artists
As part of our ethos, we look for and support artists who are responsive
to, and also critical of, their surrounding contexts (it cultural, social, or
political), and who understand and utilize their art making as a way tobuild and share knowledge. Naturally, works by such artists are often
considered “sensitive.” In order to exhibit them in an art space as public
as ours, there must be a conversation with the artists about compromise
and about the need to come up with, and carefully orchestrate,
alternative ways of presenting, writing, and talking about works that are
deemed “sensitive.”
Example:In the previous example of Tuan Mami’s project, we explored how else
we can talk about an art project that deals with environmental issues—a
topic which would definitely raise red flags. Man’s exploitation of natureis also the subject of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film My Ailing Beliefs Can
Cure Your Wretched Desires, which was shown in his solo exhibition“Empty Forest.” In this case, we had to negotiate the display of thework itself. Discussing the extinction of certain animals and species inrelation to humans’ greed and spiritual belief in the power of their bodyparts to heal and cure diseases, the work was integral to the exhibition.
Even though the work was part of the exhibition, it was housed in ahidden room separated from the main exhibition space by a curtain andwas only available for private viewing to the art community, the artist’sfriends, and our contacts.
Excluding the film from the eyes of both the authority and the public
was necessary for the safety of those involved in the project, becauseof the “sensitive” nature of its content and imagery. Our solution was
to carefully select other works and design the main exhibition space sothat even without the central video work, the general public could still
experience and get a sense of what the artist was trying to discuss.
This “compromise” approach to solutions is reflective of our context
responsiveness. In this case, it was the social/political circumstancesand conditions in which we practice as creative workers that dictated theoutcome, and we can only embrace them if we want to move forward.
Compromising is not ideal, especially for the integrity of the artwork;
it is not easy either when there is no sense in the system of censorship.
This was a compromise Tuan Andrew had to make.
I am sure not all artists would be willing to take similar risks
with their work, which is completely understandable and respectable.
However, if artists care about the longevity and intellectual
infrastructures of their local art scene, they would be willing to trade,sacrifice, compromise. Because sometimes, saying the unspeakable anddoing the unthinkable—even if it is only semi-publicly and amongst asmall community of peers, colleagues, and supporters—is enough to
ignite changes elsewhere.

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Negotiating Audience
The audience—from the dedicated art community to the generalpublic—plays an important part in the development and sustainingof our exhibitions and public programs. In attempting to understandand serve their different backgrounds, needs, modes of reception, andexpectations, we have come up with a strategy of providing a range ofentry points to our space and what we do.
Example:In terms of formats, we provide a variety of activities, each targeting
particular groups of audience:—	discursive talks (with artists, scholars, and researchers) and creative
talks (with workers from other fields such as music, fashion, design,
and architecture)—	workshops—some skill-based (such as for silk painting or
photography) for the general public, and others more in-depth or
specifically oriented towards art students and young artists (forexample, on “how to write your artist statement,” “how to value yourwork,” “what an art ecology looks like”)— art walks and tours with curators and artists— live arts, including music performances, and so on.
In terms of content making, language, and writing, we take into carefulconsideration the reading habits of our public nowadays. Inspiredby Facebook and Instagram “swiping” culture, we provide different“contents”: “short read” for our newsletter and social media channels(written in a more light-hearted and general tone); “long read” forour press release and exhibition introductory text (more in-depth,
informative, and expansive); and finally, “critical read” for our essays andcatalogues (historically and theoretically weighty, always arguing fromdifferent points of view).
All of these efforts are to ensure that we treat different groups ofaudiences as “horizontally” and “diagonally” as possible. On the one
hand, we try to provide them equal access (by designing programs andwriting that cater to their interests) to “enter” not only the physicalexhibitions at The Factory, but also the spaces of artistic experience,emotional contemplation, and critical thinking that these exhibitions
create. On the other, we aspire to not “flatten,” underestimate, presume,or categorize audiences into established groups (with particular
capacities and interests), ensuring that these points of access (thedifferent types of programs and writings) are not forced upon them, butrather presented as open and equal options.

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Collective as School─Leonhard Bartolomeus

Since it was first established, ruangrupa has distributed informationand knowledge about contemporary art as part of its artistic working
process. However, to arrive at the point when the practice of education
became the main motor in ruangrupa’s artistic work, we could trace along line back through their practice, and even through the journey ofIndonesian contemporary art.
In the mid-1990s, the art scene in Indonesia was getting pretty hot
for various reasons. The political situation was tense, following several
issues related to corruption and the financial crisis. Nevertheless, theart market had just experienced a big bang. Some paintings were being
sold at crazy prices. Meanwhile, alternative art movements—preferring
to avoid the label of “contemporary art” —also emerged, especially inthe art centers of Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Jakarta. These took a very
specific form: artist collectives.
Cemeti Art House was one pioneer driving the emergence ofindependent art groups in Yogyakarta. Their artistic practice also
had another mission: To disseminate knowledge and information
regarding various kinds of social-cultural-political issues directly
into the community as much as possible. Commercial galleries wereconsidered as no longer able to accommodate the need for art to be atool of expression and communication. This alternative character grewstronger when art groups began crossing paths with academic activist
groups to reject the authoritarian New Order regime—becoming part ofa movement which would later become known as “Reformasi.”
In Jakarta, which became the center of all the political chaos,the art community also experienced this tendency. Students from
Jakarta Institute of Arts (Institut Kesenian Jakarta) joined hands withthe movement, alongside students from various disciplines, and thenjoined forces with others to create a larger group. After the regime wasoverthrown, the enthusiasm for resisting establishment, finding new
forms, and creating opportunities independently continued to be one of
the main characteristics of the art movement in Indonesia.
In the tension and spirit of this era, ruangrupa was founded by six

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young artists in Jakarta. The goal was simple: opening a space that could
support the work of young Jakarta artists.
Since then, ruangrupa have focused on encouraging art’s progressin the broader scope of urban culture. This intention is manifested
through a variety of programs, exhibitions, festivals, art laboratories,
workshops and research projects, and publishing books, magazines, andonline journals.
When moving to a new place in 2008, ruangrupa made several
changes in their “organization” workflow. One was forming a special unit
for Support and Promotion. This division aimed specifically to prepareand develop programs carried out by ruangrupa in order to support
the development of cultural agents in Jakarta. Several programs werecarried out to fulfil the plan; the thinking then was not just about being“alternative” but also to support different elements in the art ecosystem,
especially in Jakarta.
Art schools in Indonesia produce many artists, but rarely consideror present other supporting roles such as curators, critics, or art
researchers. Meanwhile, the global art world at that time was busy
talking about cross-disciplinary work. For this reason, then, ruangrupa
designed curatorial workshops and critical writing workshops on art andvisual culture. The project took the form of a two-week lecture coursethat was led by professionals from the contemporary arts and culture
scene in Indonesia. This program tried to fill a role in our arts ecosystemthat had not been taken up by art schools.
The lecture course, which later became a long-term collaboration
project with the Jakarta Arts Council, became an example for us
in ruangrupa to see collectivism as a way to create a learning site/
educational platform. This concept then led us to create anotherdivision to focus on educational programs in 2015, the so-called Institut
ruangrupa, or Ir. (as a pun on an early bachelor degree title in Indonesia).
Ir. was meant to take over all the educational programs and set them in a
specific curriculum.
One of the highest goals we set at that moment was to explore howor find ways to transfer the knowledge we have in our collective, whether
as individuals or the collective. How do we extract this tacit knowledge
about object research or, say, making an affordable music festival,
without losing its meaning of collectivism or causing confusion?
Despite the fact that Ir. never actually developed into a division forvarious reasons, ruangrupa wanted to keep the idea alive. So, insteadof forcing it into a rigid program, we tried to inject it into some art
projects we did abroad, traveling through several continents whilestill maintaining a core concept, to examine “collectivity” in different
contexts around the world.
One of the best examples is RURU GAKKO at Aichi Triennale 2016.
For this particular event, Ir. implemented methods and practices thathave been used by ruangrupa before. In the project, Ir. functioned asa shelter of knowledge and the process of “human manufacturing,”building a special context with young Japanese artists and local residents

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in Chojamachi. In Japanese culture, we proposed Ir. as a style of dojo, aplace to be specifically trained in or learn something. In corresponding
with the Triennale theme “Rainbow Caravan,” Ir. presented a model ofruangrupa’s way of thinking as a collective space. The project started
with eight participants who joined the school and developed their own
projects over three months. After the Triennale ended, the school as asite vanished, but some of the participants are still running their own
projects.
At the end of 2016, we moved to a monstrous 6,000 square meter
warehouse as our new base alongside several other collectives: Forum
Lenteng, Grafis Huru Hara, and Serrum. Here, we challenged ourselves
to work as one entity while still maintaining our own individual
programs and characteristics. We were beginning to transmutate
ourselves into something else but we were not sure yet what this mightbe. But one thing we were certain of was that we shared the same passion
for creating an educational platform that could be accessible for the
public. Even though it was a challenge to maintain consistent schedules,
we tried to create several different education programs.
From that experience, we developed another model that could besuitable for our artistic practice. We called it Ekosistem, to point to therichness of resources that we had and also the variety of knowledge
and functions that existed within our space. We were still far away fromannouncing this as our ideal model, but it could be adjusted in ways that
could be beneficial for everyone living in the environment.
However, in 2018, there was yet another move to a new place: an exfutsal field. This time, we acquired the land together and by doing so
opened the possibility of creating a sustainable program. Learning fromthis working experience, we outlined a knowledge-sharing platform foreveryone interested in the practice of similar approaches. We decided
to create an educational platform using a new alias, Gudskul—a shortname that we borrowed from Serrum’s program while we were still at thewarehouse. The name itself has no special meanings, even though said
aloud it sounds like “good school.”
Taking a different form as a “school” opens the possibility for us toallow others to hack into our resources—something that we have been
thinking about for a long time. Gudskul Ekosistem operates by using
any resources available from the collectives within it: people, programs,
hardware, time, and money.
Under its new official name, Gudskul: Studi Kolektif dan Ekosistem
Seni Rupa Kontemporari (Contemporary Art Collective Studies andEcosystem), we have published a regular, one-year long program
which is conceived as a space for participants to work collaboratively
as a collective on experimentations and simulations. To achieve this,Gudskul employs a series of experiential learning processes using faceto-face meetings, studio work, field trips, internships, and residencies as
our methods.
Participants are selected through an open application process,sending their portfolios and filling out a form that includes several

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questions to give us a picture of their interest in collective practice.
After that, we interview them, either in person or online. From the
30 applicants that registered for the first session, we selected 15
participants from different cities across Indonesia, including Jakarta,
Majalengka, Bandung, Bogor, Bekasi, Medan, Pontianak, Surabaya, andMakassar.
Since we develop via a non-profit working model, there is the needto think about different methods of support to keep this program
running smoothly. We have initiated a financial plan which is inspiredby a lumbung (rice barn) economy model where resources are stored,
to then be distributed proportionally to each collective based on theirdifferent needs. Resources from each collective are gathered in a variety
of forms—funds, programs, equipment, even books—and redistributed
to each collective in the Ekosistem.
The platform itself does not only act as a program but serves a bigger
role as a collective framework. It still carries the idea of the ecosystem.
The vitality of its networks as resources in our collective practice isattained through artistic exchanges, residencies, symposia, and thedevelopment of sustainable collective economic models. Also, comingfrom different collectives, there are a lot of educational programs—wetry to be efficient by merging some of these under Gudskul programs.
Gudskul might also be a good response to the question of“membership” of our collective/s, which is often raised by other people,
and which we can never answer because we have no such thing as“membership.” We dedicate our time and space to hanging out—or
what we famously call “nongkrong” —with people who can and want towork together with us. By involving the participants in our programs at
the Ekosistem, we can simulate the time and value of nongkrong, while
becoming closer to being part of a bigger ecosystem.
While reflecting through these phases of change gives us aperspective on how ruangrupa is trying to find a new role, function,
character, and also a strategy for sustainability, we are reminded thatthe spirit of learning and sharing is always present in collective practice.
Instead of following the concept of the modern “school” where weare taught to always compete with each other, using the collective asa basis of learning practice can help us to understand the concepts oftogetherness and collaboration.

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School of Improper Education:
Education of the Heart, the Mind, andEverything in Between［01］─Syafiatudina

01
This text is an edited transcript of thepresentation by Syafiatudina given at
the forum “Imagining New Ecologies.”

Hello, my name is Dina, full name Syafiatudina. I am practicing as awriter and curator in Yogyakarta Indonesia. I’ve belonged to a collective
called KUNCI Cultural Studies Center since 2009. It was my first job andI’m still there. Here I am going to talk about our current work called
School of Improper Education (or Sekolah Salah Didik in Indonesian).
There are two points I want to underline in this presentation. Firstis the move or shift between education and study, and second is theimportance of uselessness in this process. Uselessness as a way to resist
the imposed values of education by neoliberalist logic. That is why
the title of this presentation is “Education of the Heart, the Mind, andEverything in Between.”
I also need to remind you that in the School of Improper Education,
art exists in a very loose way. Most of our members are not artists,
maybe only two of them are artists. The other 18 of them are students,
unemployed; we have cleaners, we have different people with different
types of jobs.
First I would like to share with you the aim of School of Improper
Education, which is about study. And what we study is studying. So it
is a school to learn how to study. Everyone can come to the school with
their own plan of study, but we study it in the same way. That is how
the school operates. And whatever we study and however we study, theimportant thing in School of Improper Education is that we study it
together. And by studying it together, we study what we can do together.
That is the idea.
People say our school is popular because of the very catchy name,but actually the name comes from two main references—one is analbum by Lauryn Hill called The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (a very good
album), and the second is a novel by Indonesian writer, Abdul Muiz,
called Salah Asuhan—“wrongly nurtured,” or “wrongly educated.” Thestory moralizes about an Indonesian man who gets too Westernized andthis is also the context of how education is seen as something liberating,but if you get it from the wrong source it will damage you. However,since our school name is School of Improper Education, we believe that

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education is not about getting it right, it is about getting it together.
Along the way, there may be many failures or confusion, but as long as
we do it together, that is what matters.
I would like to share with you the overall structure of our school. For
the first two years we plan to experiment with four learning methods,
and we hope by the end of these two years we are going to find a schoolmodel that we want to continue. If not, then we will continue looking
for or duplicating the existing school models. We practice each method
for six months, and then after six months we reflect on it and move toanother method. And we see that moving from one learning method toanother is a form of rehearsal on studying. A very important point in ourstudy is the process of repeating, of continuing, of rehearsing.
The school has been running for one year now, and in the first year,
we have been experimenting with two methods of school. For the firstyear, the school focused on studying outside the dominant model ofschool. So, in the first six months, we tried a school with the structureof no teacher and student. We took this method from Ranciere’s book,
The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and learned using the experience of Jacotot.
The second model we tested last year was learning based on the sharedstruggle of the people, using a method called Turba by an artists’association in Indonesia in the 1950s called Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan
Rakyat / People’s Cultural Association). At the end of this month we aregoing to start the second year of our school and the focus will be on
embodied knowledge—or knowledge that is not based on words, but
based on materials, and for this year we are going to focus on collective
publishing with methods that we took from the Nyantrik learning modeland the Javanese educational movement Taman Siswa.
I will focus here on our experience experimenting with the model of
Turba or “learning from below.” As a model conducted by Lekra in the
1950s, it is actually a method of artistic research, because what this artist
group aimed for through Turba was to understand the life of common
people in Indonesia as a way to create revolutionary artworks. In theiridea, revolutionary artwork comes from the material basis of everyday
people’s realities. In School of Improper Education, every member chose
a topic or community they wanted to research on or “go below” to learn
about. Some chose to go to a village and live as a farmer, or went to work
as online taxi drivers. Others decided to go and live in a school, a real
school not like our “fake” school, for a week to understand the life of
temporary, part-time teachers in that school. Everyone had their own
topic or focus but the requirement was that they had to practice theprinciples of Turba. There are a lot of principles, some of them quite
funny, but one principle is “Three alike”: “eat alike, sleep alike, and work
alike.” So during their Turba period, the school members had to go andlive in these people’s houses, work the same way, and also eat the same
food. At the end of their stay, they came to the school and reported to theassembly what they learned.
And throughout the six months of the school, we learned, or weheard stories from, the struggles of farmers, of online taxi drivers, of111

Syafiatudina│ School of Improper Education: Education of the Heart, the Mind, and Everything in Between

teachers, of mothers who live in the riverbanks of Yogyakarta city, of avillage of painters in West Java. So we heard how the stories of different
people connect with each other. Oftentimes they are represented
as different from each other but through the school, we found theirconnection and the connection is, how despite different professions,
everyone experiences the same uncertain life. The future is unknown
for all of us—for the farmers, for the freelancers, for the designers, forthe artists, the curators. There is no healthcare provided for us—being
privatized, we have to pay for it. We cannot afford to live in the city
because the property rent is getting higher and higher; and so living ishard. But what can we do with this?
In this sense, precariousness and uncertainty becomes the basisof our study together. And through acknowledging our precarious life,
our uncertain life, we try to think about what we can imagine. From thiscomes the question of what we can do, or what we cannot do.
I believe that the process of School of Improper Education is notabout mediating—mediating from the ignorant to the knowledgeable
or from the knowledgeable to the ignorant—because we all possess
knowledge although it has different forms. We resist the idea that one ismore knowledgeable than the others. Education or study is a process of
evoking the empowered subjects in everyone and with everyone.
I am pointing out here education should not be about“disciplinizing” —it is not about giving rules or orders to the mind
and body. The importance is to challenge the existing discipline. And
challenging the discipline of education can be done through the practiceof study because study can exist everywhere, it is something that we dotogether—it is not happening in the classroom or in school; it happensin places like dancehalls, in secret smoking areas, in back alleys, inbars. One of the findings of School of Improper Education is how theprocess of study gives a space for people who are not recognized as partof public—the refugees, the fugitives, the people who try to escape fromeducation.
So that is what I think is the importance of education. And also
I want to emphasize the importance of being together when these days
our society is being more and more separated; we are falling into a
disparity of nations and religions. So I think, in order to imagine analternative world, or a different world, it is important to keep rehearsing
what we can do together. And I think this will be the next project of
School of Improper Education.

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DISCUSSION
October 19, 2018, The Japan Foundation, Tokyo
Moderators: Horiuchi Naoko, Beverly Yong

Horiuchi Naoko

At AIT [Arts Initiative Tokyo] where I work, we’ve been doing art education
programs, mainly focusing on curating and theory, since 2001. We havethis excitement that although education takes time, and doesn’t have an
immediate impact, or a big impact on people, we are slowly changing brains.
After 18 years, we feel like the cultural landscape or art scene has beenchanging a bit after we’ve had approximately 2,000 people participatingin our school. Some of them are working at the museums, studying abroad,starting new collectives. It’s becoming easier to work [in more diverse ways]
or to have more diverse discussions. My question to all of you is: Do you feel
like, through your programs, you are actually making an impact on yourcultural landscape? Or art scene? Or people’s lives, even?
Bill Nguyen

I think collectively, everyone in Vietnam, the art spaces and collectives,
are all trying in one way or another to slowly shift this perception of what
art is and the role of art in our society. It’s going to take a long while tohopefully see some kind of change. We’re actually facing quite a severe
situation right now where we don’t have the next generation of artists
to work with yet. Internally, are we making changes in the thinking ofart practitioners if there are now less and less students going into art
school? So, externally, it’s too soon to even dare to think that what we
do is making changes. I think it’s good to stay skeptical toward our own
work, too, in the context of where we are.
Leonhard Bartolomeus (Barto)

I am not sure whether we have culturally impacted people or not. Jakarta
is much like Tokyo, very dense. And I think not so many people consider
art as part of their priority in their life. But we’re trying to focus on
working together with younger artists. At least, what we know is there isa new generation that always comes up every year—there are art schools,of course, like Jakarta Institute of Arts, and then universities that havegraphic design as their program study, which also turn out artists. When113

DISCUSSION

they graduate, they basically have no point [of reference]: “How can I
work as a contemporary artist?” “How should I deal with galleries,” or, “IfI want to be a curator, how should I start?” This kind of thing began theidea to start the educational program.
We didn’t try to pursue a big target like working with thegovernment. By coincidence, the Jakarta Arts Council came to us andwanted to do the same thing, so we sort of said, Give us your money
and we do the programs. Mutual collaboration. Some of the people that
followed the curatorial or art writing workshops are now working in a
professional way, for example the one sitting there… [indicating Ayos].
We’re trying just to reach small numbers of people, very specific targets,and at the same time, trying to work with more popular mediums. For
example, we always include music, bands, when we do an opening of an
exhibition, so more people come.
Shiraki EiseI could not say yes or no, because our museum is still only just 15 years
old, but [our efforts have created] a result in our museum’s attitude,
because [while] our curators always have very big voices in the museum,
they could [now] hear our—another department’s—voices. We managed
to change the department name, and the meaning of how education isrun.
Syafiatudina (Dina)

For KUNCI and also for the school, something that we are proud of, andsomething that we will keep doing, is making culture as accessible aspossible, making cultural and artistic work a less privileged thing. In my
own words, I would be very happy if less and less people take “artist” astheir profession, and do art in their life. Everyone can do art. Of course,
I am happy for my artist friends, but I also want to see more and more
people creating their own voice through artistic practices. That will be
the aim, and that will also be the process that we will go through.
Beverly Yong

Bill, you were saying, in your context it’s a frightening future because you’re
not sure what you’re trying to aim towards, with the lessening of artists.
Maung, you also work in a pressurized context, different in the sense that in
Myanmar, the commercial art scene has been encouraged: Where do you see
the future of art and education in Myanmar?
Maung Day

Over the past 10 or 20 years, it has always been about artists and their
movements, and the development of art. Like I mentioned on the firstday, we didn’t have curators, especially local curators, and there weren’t
many activities promoting art education. We didn’t have anybody who
studied art history. That’s still kind of the case today. Though now wehave a couple of art historians from the outside who are living in Yangon
and, from time to time, they produce articles and papers, that aspect

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is still pretty much lacking. But people are now starting to realize that
there are gaps that we have to fill up, and so that might be the future.
Bill Nguyen

I actually have a question for Dina. I really appreciate the kind of
philosophical and romantic quality of this idea of being together,or togetherness, in order to learn or to study. You mentioned in the
explanation of the format of the School of Improper Education that usually
you would have six months of trial and error, and then you move on to adifferent form to see whether that form works or not. Who gets to decide
whether this format works or not? How do you reflect on, or measure
the outcome of the six months? How do people get to join the school?
Is there a set of criteria that they have to meet? Finally, the participantsof the school proposing to go into different communities to learn more
about these communities, what do they then do with this information?
I understand that my questions are going totally against this idea ofuselessness, but I think, as the way to move forward and try to measure
the quality of the work we do, there must be a system of measuring.
Syafiatudina (Dina)Thank you, Bill. The question about measurement is important, it issomething that we’re constantly struggling with. For example, in the firstexperiment we tried this model of establishing this class without teacher
and student. It was a failure. We measured it as a failure because a lot of
people left the school, maybe 20 or 30 percent. Some who remained said
that they couldn’t find a reason to learn if there’s no one telling them tolearn something: if there is no teacher, there is no order, there is no rule.
So what makes us learn? That’s one of the group reflections we [explored]at the end of the first experiment. Yet, it’s also one of the characteristics
of our meetings that they always start with a very gloomy situation.
Like, “Oh, I don’t know why we are doing this. This doesn’t make any
sense.” But then, towards the end, we found the meanings behind thisfrustration, like, “Oh, it turns out it’s very difficult to resist the dominantmodels of education, because inside ourselves we have the desire to beordered, to be governed, to be controlled.” So, it was a failure, but [onewhich] turned out a productive reflection.
Answering your question about measurement, there is no single
measurement. The values for measurement are always created throughthe meetings, through the collective reflections, and these are always
documented. We’re going to publish a book with the documents that
we created out of these meetings. We decided that it is importantthat this information about the study process that we go throughcan be accessible for everyone. The key to the mobility of knowledge
is reproduction. We try to make our knowledge as reproducible aspossible and we see that books that include different ways of writing andlanguage are the most feasible way to distribute the knowledge.
How people join is through open call. We distribute posters
saying we are looking for new members, and they can send their115

DISCUSSION

applications through email to KUNCI. For the first class, KUNCI selected
the participants, and for the second year, the first class selected theparticipants together with KUNCI members.
Le Thuan Uyen

I have a question. I guess this is a question directly towards Shirakisan and Bill, but also to all of us here today. With Barto’s and Dina’s
presentations, compared to Shiraki and Bill, you’re geared towards amuch smaller community or smaller public. Bill, The Factory is as close
as it gets to a contemporary museum in Vietnam at the moment, so it
does function like a public institution for art, and my question is: Do
you feel there’s a need or a sense of urgency to make the museum sucha rigorous site for learning? Why is that? Especially at The Factory, where
I know you’re increasingly doing a lot of public programs that allow
for conversations to be exchanged, and also [providing] a platform forknowledge generation and dissemination. Why do we have to have an
education department within our institution?
Bill Nguyen

At The Factory, we see the visual as interchangeable with everything else,
whether it’s dance, workshops, talks, public programs, and this is also
how we view our own ecology. We don’t put artists at the top, we don’t
put the visual arts at the top, we put artists, the public, the authority,and everyone else on the same page, so there’s this understanding ofhorizontal treatment. But we also kind of approach everyone verticallyas well. In the example of the short read, the long read, the critical read,
there’s also the easy view, the time-consuming view, and the critical view.
We try to use these as philosophical anchors, and we try to physically
replicate them with the different publics that we deal with, with different
formats. I think it’s important because, what other fields allow you tojust contemplate, think, and be critical, and not have to have a kind of
an economical outcome? It’s a romantic way to view what we’re doing,but I’d like to believe that there’s still space for us to think like that.
Of course, The Factory is also governed by money. Everything rightnow is coming out of the founder’s pocket, even though we’re trying
to function as a kind of social enterprise, meaning all the profits madefrom the artworks or the restaurants go back into the exhibition-making
and public program-making process. We’re very much aware of andacknowledge fully the fact that we’re still governed by capitalism. But,
it’s about what we do with those limitations, and trying to do the bestthat we can.
Shiraki EiseI think the art museum could become a third place—maybe it’s not yourfamily, it’s not a school, maybe the audience could meet people fromdifferent backgrounds and also different generations. That is a very
important thing for an art museum, so we have to do learning programsin front of the art works in the museum.

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Le Thuan Uyen

In my experience of running public programs in Hanoi, once you call it acourse or something with the term “education” in it, people are actuallyscared. Nobody [wants to] go. People feel, “Oh. I’m going to be judged. I’mgoing to be examined. I’m going to be analyzed. I’m going to be gazedat.” So then you have to find a different way of telling them, “No, no, thisis sharing,” or “This is just conversation.”
Syafiatudina (Dina)

It’s very interesting because it’s different from my observation, at least in
Yogyakarta, because I cannot speak for the whole of Indonesia. KUNCI
and ruangrupa are turning ourselves into schools around the same time,
because when you use the idea of school or education, it attracts a lotof people. Ever since KUNCI opened the School of Improper Education,
our library is not only visited by graduate students, there are now more
people coming to our space. This goes also to the idea of how the school
in Indonesia’s context, or maybe elsewhere, has become the place andspace for organizing, for meeting, for gathering. Maybe that’s why theidea of having a school is very open or humble for many people while,on the other hand, art makes people think, “I don’t really know art, art isvery difficult. I’m not educated, so I don’t really understand what you aretrying to say.” KUNCI also organizes reading groups, and reading groups
are the kind of thing people don’t think they belong to because reading
is a privileged mode of accessing knowledge. Not all people like to read,or think they are entitled to read.
Leonhard Bartolomeus (Barto)

For ruangrupa, of course the question is also within us, of “Why should
we make a school?” It’s kind of against all that we’ve been doing, youknow, those chaotic things. Now we’re trying to make this structurized
thing. The idea actually came from the question, “Okay, now we arethree collectives [merging] into one—what should we do?” If we justbecame a new collective, it wouldn’t make sense. Basically, we would be
reproducing the things we have been doing before. So, [we thought abouthow] we could be more open to people not from our circle, let’s say; howthey could actually use, like hack, our resources, basically copying stuff
or using our networks, working with our friends. And from there we got
thinking that a school could be a good way of trapping people inside.
Then also, continuing from what Dina said, it’s kind of like an opening
for people. It will be an exchange of something. Even though we’re nottrying to be like the kind of schools that we’re actually trying to oppose,
we’re trying to mimic the structure, just to make people believe that weare doing the right stuff.
Syafiatudina (Dina)

I think Furuichi-san mentioned, when she introduced this forum
session, education as a way to communicate, as a way to reach people,
and I’d like to maybe extend the discussion about school or about

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reaching others in relation to the other two topics of the forum, publicand history. Because, on the second day, Sze started talking about how
maybe the exhibition is an outdated form, maybe we should think ofsomething else. Then there are also the questions: Who are the publicthat we are trying to address? Who do we imagine as the public? To
add school into this conversation, maybe curating a school is anothermethod? Or, what do curators do in a school?
Horiuchi Naoko

That also leads me to question those who work at museums. At Mori, forexample, learning programs are becoming bigger in the museum—what’s therelationship between the curatorial team and the public program team?
Could curatorial and education programs be interchangeable along thelines of what Arata and Bill have been talking about, or would they still
be very different in your museum?
Shiraki Eise

Sometimes I ask education or learning curators of other museums, Who
decided the exhibition title? So, that question is very interesting for me,
because [from the answer], I could see the [how] whole thing [works] intheir museum. In most museums, the title is decided by the exhibition
curators, while in some other museums, it is decided with the marketinggroup or education team.
Che Kyongfa

At Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), most of the public
programs are related to the exhibition that curators curate, so it’s verystraightforward, classical—artists’ talks or symposia on art discourse,
public programs for school kids touring the exhibition space. We have a
lot to catch up, or elaborate. But we are closed right now for renovation,
and we are going out to schools with artists. It’s an ad hoc sort ofeducational situation where artists can do whatever they want, imagine
what they can do in such a unique situation in a certain limited amountof time. We choose, or education curators choose, a variety of artists who
work with sound, paintings, and so on. So, these are things that MOT istrying to work on.
I was thinking, Ayos, about your heritage project, discovering
heritage with the people, which resists the idea of heritage as designatedby the authority. It involves this process of learning together, so I thought
you could comment or respond to the conversation we’ve had so far.
Ayos Purwoaji[It’s] interesting to reflect on Dina’s idea of connecting this discussion
about education with notions of what is public and how we perceive
history. As Arata-san said, we need to have critiques about history, whatis written, to continue to ask about the history that we perceive to betrue. I think my curatorial project is based on the idea to think again
about our history, and how we work with people to choose or to write

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their own history. I think it’s part of education itself because a lot of
people in the Surabaya context take heritage as a given concept. Whenthe government says, “This is your history, this is your heritage,” people
just think “Okay”; they don’t ask the question, “Why is this my heritage?”
So, with this program actually, I make people question again: What is
history? What is heritage? It’s based on their reflection, based on theirunderstanding about what is history by themselves. Not by government,
not by us as curators, not by other people, just by themselves.
Che Kyongfa

What’s great about this project is that people who are involved in it havethe potential to articulate, which is pretty difficult for a lot of educational
programs in larger institutions, where people are in the mode of receiving,
and being [taught]. Of course, we do workshops where people can makethings and all that, but it’s slightly different from learning and articulating
their own subjectivities.
Kumakura Haruko

I have a question for Kyongfa-san. [At Mori], I am a curator and Eise is a
Learning curator and we’re trying hard to work together during the process
of exhibition production, but as you know, they are doing a hundredprojects a year, and we’re producing the big shows, and sometimes wereally have a challenging time to discuss enough before the opening day
how to make the public program, physical exhibition, and publication“on the same page,” as Bill said. I know MOT is having the MOT satellite,
so I was just wondering how it works: Who curates the shows, and do thecurators work with educators or do the educators initiate?
Che Kyongfa

We have been closed for almost three years, two-and-a-half years. We got
this funding to do an outreach program outside the museum. The mission
is to engage with the people in the community of Fukagawa or Kiyosumishirakawa area, which is pretty much an old, downtown neighborhoodwith newly built tower blocks and mansions; so, a mixture of residents,
and a long history. Our question was how to engage without having ourown “house.” We started with going around the neighborhood, and trying
to find spaces; literally, I was walking around the neighborhood, andif I found this empty house, I knocked on the door, then the next door.
The curators did that. It’s a bit different from education per se, more acontinuation of engagement; and also using this as an opportunity toinvite a wider range of people back in the museum when we reopen. As
part of it, I did this exhibition at Tokyo University of the Arts. We don’t[usually] have opportunities to work directly or workshop with students,
so it was an interesting experience for me, but it’s not as radical as what
ruangrupa is doing.
Leonhard Bartolomeus (Barto)

I’m trying to think what’s the difference between what the museums do

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and what we as artist collectives are trying do. Continuing from what
Dina has said about creating a site, to make a hub, I’ve found it’s thisthat keeps the younger generation going through art school. They don’t
actually learn much from the school except technical stuff. I don’t knowwhether it’s the same with other schools, but based on my experience,
they actually want to go to art school just because they could meetfriends that have the same ideas, same visions, those kinds of things.
It might be an interesting perspective also to see learning sites,
study, education platforms, as a hub, just to put the people there.
In terms of Indonesian culture, like Dina said, reading things is notworking for us. If you say, “Okay, we are going to do some reading fromthese books of philosophy,” nobody will show up. But if you say, “Okay,
we set up a thing and then do some talks, make things, draw stuff,”then a lot of people will show up. That’s actually the real exchange ofknowledge happening. Trying to find different methods of distributing
knowledge is also interesting. Not only in the physical form, though
documentation is always important —what we’ve talked about today, if
it has been documented, it will be there for the archive and historical
record. But in the current situation, the real exchange is happening
when we are talking directly, or doing stuff together.
Lisa Ito-Tapang

Just to express some discomfort with regard to how we regard art
schools. Not because I work in an art school. And of course, recognizing
the limitations of what can be taught within the structure of an art
school. The notion of school appeals to many, even in very informal
contexts, because being in school means that you are being committed
to work, and to be together with a certain group of people for a certain
amount of time. An extended amount of time; sometimes too long.
Within that time, we start to see some substance or transformation
going on; whether that is for better or for worse really depends on our
respective experiences. Perhaps it is that promise of transformation
which makes the idea of a school, not literal schools, but the concept ofa school, appealing, or repelling as well.
I was also thinking, what are the possibilities for suchtransformative strategies of reaching publics within schools as well?
Like in art school, one of the things we were always talking about was
how important giving students a sense of history was in relation toart production. Otherwise it just becomes solely about technique,ways of making without sense of, or grounding in, the larger historicalor theoretical context. It really just becomes an exercise in skillbuilding, which is needed, but which will not complete that sense oftransformation. There is that kind of problem ongoing in schools.
Although we all have our respective contexts and situations that we face,
I think one common factor that I sensed in a lot of the discussion was
how many of us are feeling the effects of neoliberalism across the school
systems, especially the public school systems, where a lot of the anxiety
and pressure measurement comes in, a lot of trying to quantify, and to

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deliver the numbers while the more substantial aspects of education sortof fall by the wayside.
Syafiatudina (Dina)

I want to respond to what Lisa said first, about how to build thistransformative process of reaching the public within school. Last month
I was in Mexico City for a conference. It was a conference in a school.
The conference was almost canceled because the students were on
strike, and one of the demands of the students was the opportunity
for them to organize with neighbors of the university. They wanted toorganize with their neighbors to discuss the impact of the university
development—gentrification, the rise of property values. I think this is
the important moment where the separation between the institution
and the public disappears. Perhaps it is also useful to use the notionof commons, that education is a form of resource, and something
we manage together. Therefore, the positions of the actors and therecipients are interchangeable. And this is something that Bill also said,
publics, internal or external, and institutions are interchangeable. I’mpart of the organization, but I am also a part of the public. Maybe thisalso goes into what Eise said about the importance of going out of themuseum as a way to think about being part of the public, but also tothink of different ways of publicness.
The other response is to what Ayos said about curating with people.
I think curating with people and doing or studying with others are
powerful ways to open the means of production. And I don’t mean only
production in the Marxist sense, of factory or tools, but productionof knowledge, and the means of knowledge production. I think theimportance of education is to open the means of production as much as
possible, including artistic production. What are these tools of artistic
production? Abstract thinking, freedom, emancipation, or it can be also
the paintbrush, or silkscreen. I think it connects to what Lisa said, thisanxiety about how industrialization and neoliberalization of education
are going into the way we think about education, that it has to be useful,that it has to create more workforce. Maybe this also goes into history,[helps us] to think of a different history. Yes, it is a response to the lackor the gap of formal history, but also when the tools to write history arebeing shared, like what Kyongfa shared about Ayos’ project, then wecan also find other forms of history that are excluded. So, that’s public,
history, education. Okay, I’m finished.
Hasegawa Arata

Can I share my example to you guys? “Chronicle, Chronicle!,” as you
know, includes a lot of events. “Chronicle, Chronicle!” regards installingitself as one of the events. So, one of the events is installing the lighting
equipment in the exhibition. It’s very important, okay? So, audiences
can see professional lighting staff installing lighting equipment on eachsculpture or mannequin or the drawings. So people notice there is a
big difference between kinds of lighting. And professional lighting staff

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talked to the audiences about these differences, how to install, what
equipment is the cheapest, or the very best. Actually, to my surprise,some public curators also came to our exhibition. One of the curators
who came to “Chronicle, Chronicle!” adopted the lighting equipment
lecture in Aichi Triennale, and then one of the professors in Tokyo Zokei
University also adopted it in their class. So, people can understandlighting in the public museum is not the only way of lighting. Of course,
we curators, conservators, must protect art pieces from strong light or
ultraviolet light, but some sculptures, like iron sculptures or replicas,
can be lighted up with various kinds of light, even in colored light.
We can see lots of variations of seeing art pieces. What I want to sayhere is, we can share the production of knowledge and the curiosity inindependent curator projects, but also in the public museum and art
university.

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DISCUSSION: Closing Thoughts
October 19, 2018, The Japan Foundation, Tokyo
Moderators: Che Kyongfa, Horiuchi Naoko, and Beverly YongBill Nguyen

Throughout the three sessions, and also outside of this symposium
when we we’ve been hanging out together, we’ve been talking quite
a lot about the pros and cons of things, of different formats thatare used to tackle public, history, education. I’m just thinking, are
we being too harsh on ourselves? Because, I’m sitting here andthinking about the pros and cons of what Dina’s doing, and the pros
and the cons of Mori Art Museum, the pros and cons of what you
are doing with Gudskul. Why can’t we be a little bit kinder, and justbe okay with the formats we have? They cannot satisfy everything
and everyone. What may work for this particular audience or public
may not work for another. Maybe it’s okay to be a little bit kinder tothe limitations we’re working with, okay with the fact that maybe a
symposium like this cannot be documented, or maybe it should be
documented, and maybe we should be okay with this kind of seating
arrangement, even though it obviously doesn’t work for some people.
Maybe by doing that we’ll be able to lift off a little bit of this pressure
from industrialization or neoliberalism.
Che Kyongfa

Bill, at the same time you shared this discomfort with the show you
saw at Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, no? I mean this institutional
representation of history, or historiography of a representation ofSoutheast Asia, which Japan is not part of. Of course we can be kind tolimitations, but there are limitations that are not forgiven, even amongus. So, this place and time is really to understand each other, whatever
the intentions we have. It’s also time to share knowledge. I’ve been
thinking, what comes out at this kind of forum? I’m interested in what
your response is to being part of this kind of gathering. We have curatorsfrom huge institutions and non-institutional, independent curators inSoutheast Asia and Japan. Why are we here?
Bill Nguyen

I actually have never done a symposium like this before, and thishas been really useful for me, to be physically dislocated from mycontext, to reflect my position in my work—where am I going togo next? I cannot speak for everyone, this is just my very personal
experience. As a newcomer, it’s been eye-opening.
Le Thuan Uyen

Following from what you said, Kyongfa, I just have this question.

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How do you know when something is unforgiven? Yesterday, when wetalked about history, or even today, we have to be aware of what we aresaying. [The fact that we are discussing certain issues may] put us in
positions of power [to play a role, for example, in the shaping of codesof conduct in curatorial practice]. On another note, one of the bestthings is what Ayos and Dina and others have been talking about—learning together. It could just be being [made] aware of what you
have been doing, because sometimes when you are grounded in yourown work, in your own context, and you’re at hundreds or thousandsof administrative tasks that even an independent curator has to do,
you forget to think critically. Also taking inspiration and examples tocontinue our work in this crazy, messy, problematic world.
Vipash Purichanont

What I have been feeling is that this is kind of a privileged place tobe—a place to stop and perhaps talk about the stuff that we don’t
have time to talk about. It has been a force to get me to talk about
what I have been thinking but never explained to anyone. I hope thiskind of thing can continue. It’s been a space for reflection, to think
about something collectively. It’s been a great experience. Thank you.
Le Thuan Uyen

All the issues we’ve touched on have been discussed in various
contexts and settings and there are no answers. So, are we hoping
for suggestions of possible solutions or, what are we doing? I thinksometimes it’s okay to be confused, and it’s okay to accept that we justhave to keep trying to find them. Perhaps this motivates us to keep
working. When it’s all set in stone, then what is there to talk about?
Selene Yap

The Substation used to run conferences from the 1990s to the 2000s,
and these conferences were titled really bold things, like “Art vs. Art”
or “Space vs. Space,” and were transcribed and bound into volumes. I
detect that kind of existential crisis on their end, at that point of time
when they were sharing. It was a panel like this; they had no answers
to what they were confronting at that time. But it acts as a markerof time, with me, a younger generation cultural producer looking
back on their conversations and how it adds value to what we aredoing now, in this era and period of time, grappling with the sameproblems or not. Maybe, just simply, we are that marker of time forthe next generation as well.
Hasegawa Arata

The title is very good, isn’t it? Not creating new ecologies, justimagining new ecologies. A good title.
Beverly Yong

That’s a nice note to end on, thank you very much.

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Afterword

Five years have now passed since the Asia Center was launched and we have
now reached the fifth volume of the Art Studies series. The aim of the series has
been to look back over the art exchange that has taken place in Asia, including
Japan, over the past 30 years from the 1990s until the present, and to offer anoutlook on future art environments and infrastructures in the region.
Against a backdrop of increasing numbers of biennales, triennales, andother art projects around Asia including large-scale regional exhibitions, arush of new art museums, cultural policies promoted at the national level,
the booming art market, and the emerging virtual environments unique tothe information age, we who live here in the present must respond speedily tothese currents in the changing environment. However, as we follow the flowof these currents, we are often gripped by uncertainty. Is this the way things
should be? What will be left behind? Should we not stop for a moment, lookat things in the long term, review them objectively, and give them carefulconsideration?
The art environments in which we find ourselves did not appear out
of nowhere, but are the results of the various relationships and activities ofour predecessors. As such, fresh perspectives regarding how we can reform,
develop, and pass on what has been inherited are vital to meet contemporary
conditions.
The curators who participated in “Curators’ Forum 2018: Imagining New
Ecologies” may be, like those who took part in the “Condition Report” project,prominent actors of the art scenes in Japan and Southeast Asia. Following
on from those who developed the artistic activities from the past 30 years
documented and discussed in the first three volumes, it is their ideas andpractices that will shape the next art environments in the region. Art exchange
between Southeast Asia and Japan requires more effective cultural policy thatcan respond to changes in conditions as a new generation takes over. We sense
the necessity of reconsidering our next steps in anticipation of the future.
Recognizing these issues, the “Imagining New Ecologies” forum wasorganized as an event that should look toward practices for the 2020s, framing
its discussions around the three themes of Public, History, and Education.
These intricately interrelated and inseparable topics are important elementsthat people involved in art, and perhaps curators in particular, must always
remain conscious of in their respective practices. The dilemmas we face today
have to be addressed on a daily basis through our work and activities. I believethat it is from this process that visions of new ecologies can emerge and start
to be created.
Once again, I would like to express my gratitude to the participants fortaking time out of their busy schedules to write their contributions for thisreport. These curators are pursuing remarkable activities at the very forefrontof the field in ways unimaginable five years ago. As with the previous volume,
this publication benefited from assured editing by Beverly Yong and the
support of Horiuchi Naoko right until the final stages of its preparation.
I am greatly indebted to them both. I also look forward very much to hearing
candid opinions and feedback from readers. This is because it is everyone’s
interest and support that will become the driving force for building our art
scene in Asia.

Furuichi Yasuko
Art Coordinator, The Japan Foundation Asia Center