Images that quiver : the in/visible geographies of 'Southeast Asian' contemporary art

Abstract

Despite what mainstream knowledge of Southeast Asian contemporary art of the 1990s might suggest, Southeast Asian artists have not been exclusively interested in matters of cultural biography in their art practice. In this thesis, I engage with the art of several established artists from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore to take issue with the dominant interpretative frames of cultural origin which have informed representations of Southeast Asian contemporary art in art history, criticism and exhibition since the 1990s. From the time of its international emergence in the 1990s, Southeast Asian avant-garde art has been viewed mostly through ethnographic models of representation that have encouraged a spectacularisation of cultural difference. In the history of international art exhibitions, spectacles of 'the Other' have been previously premised on constructs of 'race' and 'nation'. In recent decades, however, the paradigmatic lens of 'culture' has also served a similar function in framing art as an artefact of essentialised social difference, especially national and regional difference. In short, culture has often taken the place of other thematic issues in the representation of Southeast Asian art, and the cultural identity of the artist has been accorded greater importance than the content of their work. This thesis not only challenges the art historically defined geographies of art making and social identification which are based on simplified nationalist and regionalist cultural frameworks, but also, questions the primacy of cultural biography, especially over art form, in the interpretation and representation of art by Southeast Asian artists. Against a history of essentialist culturalist inscriptions, I explore alternate issues of investigation in Southeast Asian contemporary art since the 1990s. I point to the disjuncture between on the one hand, mainstream curatorial cartographies used to map Southeast Asian art, and on the other, the alternative cartographic imaginations of Southeast Asia that are inspired by the actual art practice of several Southeast Asian artists. I argue that existing definitions of Southeast Asian art offered in mainstream exhibitions and art writing are critically expanded by drawing on alternative theoretical approaches for art interpretation and by focusing on the actual thematic and formalistic content of art. Specifically, I examine the multi-spatial movements and mobile expressions of contemporary art and life within globalising contexts (Chapter 5), the metaphoric spaces and material containers of memory (Chapter 6), and the fluid and complex geographies of bodies (Chapter 7) that have been offered as other significant themes in instances of Southeast Asian art production. These principal themes, I argue, have generally been neglected for a privileging of cultural difference that is, furthermore, often regarded in isolation from such concerns. In calling attention to these other issues (of mobility, memory, and the body), Southeast Asia is reinvented to replace traditional spatial frameworks, refusing the hegemony of culturalist readings and allowing new ways for mapping Southeast Asian difference, as well as Southeast Asian art. Moreover, a renewed attention to the formal and material concerns related to artistic practice provides a critical sway in this thesis, from the hegemonic position of socially-inscribed discourses of Southeast Asian contemporary art; to this end, I adopt a relational critical framework that recognises both the visual and cultural contexts that inform Southeast Asian art.In this way, I suggest a necessary and interconnected relationship between art's formal properties and its socio-cultural dimensions. In summary, I propose that contemporary visual expressions by Southeast Asian artists offer alternatives to traditional art-historical definitions of 'Southeast Asian' space, place and belonging, forcing us to 'look' beyond the significance of 'nation' or 'culture' and even 'race', as the primary markers of and means for experiencing Southeast Asian art.