Week 2:   Burung, Naga, Makara
Channel: Simon Soon 孫先勇 சைமன் சூன் سايمون سون ไซม่อน ซุน
Date: 2021-03-15

Across the austronesian world, communities are often divided by the official religion one formally professes. However, there remains certain shared ways of seeing the world or understanding the world that art history can help us uncover. This requires us to pay attention to formal affinities across a long span of time, and then to do the interpretive work so that we might discover what is this way of seeing the world that is different from that which informs European visuality that sometimes we take for granted. Exploring the relationship amongst the makara, the burung and the naga, we might consider them as speaking collectively of a playful attitude to plastic expression, arriving not at essences, fixing things according to a schema or an order, but recognising existence itself as a journey, made up of movements that bring about change and transformation - like the boat that conveys us from one place to another, from one world to the next - like the bird that takes flight.