The Emergence of Critical Exhibitions in Southeast Asia, 1970S–1990S

A History of Art Exhibitions: The Emergence of Critical Exhibitions in Southeast Asia, 1970s–1990s

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Seng Yu Jin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9418-2738

Asia Institute, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne 2019

Parts of this thesis have been presented at the 2015 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society Conference in Surabaya, the 2016 Cultural Typhoon: Can You (still) Feel It? in Tokyo, the 2017 International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS 10) in Chiang Mai, the 2017 Archival Turn: East Asian Contemporary Art and Taiwan (1960-1989) conference in Taipei, the 2018 Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference in Sydney, and From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition-Making — Second Assembly: Exhibition-Making Practices in China and Southeast Asia in the 1990s in Shanghai, 2018. The publisher of the paper comprising part of Chapters 2, 3, 4 share the copyright for that content, and access to the material should be sought from the respective journals and publishers. A selected part of Chapter 2 has already been published in: ‘Cultural Wars in Southeast Asia: The Birth of the Critical Exhibition in the 1970s’ in Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia, Low Sze Wee & Patrick Flores, eds. (Singapore: The National Gallery Singapore, 2017), pp. 214-230. Selected parts of Chapter 3 have already been published in: “Competing Notions of the ‘Avant-garde’ through Exhibitionary Discourses in Post-War Southeast Asia from the 1950s to 1970s” in Art Studies 01: International Seminar 2014 "Cultural Rebellion in Asia 1960–1989" Report, Furuichi Yasuko; Sano Meiko, eds. (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 2015), pp. 48-52. ‘Framing Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia through Exhibitionary Discourses’ in Southeast Asia: Spaces of the Curatorial, Ute Meta Bauer & Brigitte Oetker, eds. (Berlin: Steinberg Press, 2016), pp. 58-68. Selected parts of Chapter 4 have already published in the journals: ‘Descent to the Everyday: The Emergence of Critical Exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1970s’ in The Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, No. 34, 2017.11, pp. 39-64. ‘Art Manifestos in Southeast Asia: The Discursive Struggle between the ‘New’, the ‘Real’ and the ‘Concrete’ in the 1970s in Art History Forum No. 46, 2018.06, Center for Art Studies, Korea, pp. 207-227.

The author of this thesis is the sole author of the publication.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vi

Declaration vii

Abstract ix

List of Figures xi

Abbreviations xxi

Introduction Exhibition Histories as Method in Southeast Asia ...... 1 Exhibition Histories as Method: Exhibitionary Amnesia and Criticality ...... 9 Rethinking the Value and Tasks of Exhibition Histories ...... 16 Towards a History of Exhibitions in Southeast Asia: The Critical Exhibition ...... 21 Research Questions and Objectives ...... 23 Research Methodology ...... 28 Scope of Research and Limitations ...... 35 Conclusion ...... 40 Chapter 1 Intersecting Terrains Between Art and Exhibition Histories in Southeast Asia ...... 42 Locating Southeast Asia and its Historiography ...... 45 Reconnecting Art History and Southeast Asian Studies ...... 47 Intersections Between Exhibition and Art Histories of Southeast Asia ...... 51 Art in the Service of Diplomacy: Exhibition Histories on Southeast Asia from the 1950s to the 1980s ...... 54 Contesting Regionalisms: The Fukuoka Art Museum’s Asian Art Show (1979–1980s) ...... 61 The New, the Beyond, the Traditional and the Conceptual: Curatorial Turns Through Thematic Exhibitions (1990s to Early 2000s) ...... 64 A Pivotal Year: 1996 ...... 68 The Beyond ...... 69 The Conceptual Turn: Back to the Artist as the Progenitor of Ideas ...... 73 New Directions Connecting Exhibitionary Discourses for an Expanded Field (Mid-2000s to Mid- 2010s) ...... 76 Conclusion ...... 79 Chapter 2 Changing Exhibitionary Forms in Southeast Asia, 1945–1970s: From the Salon to the Critical Exhibition ...... 84 The Rise of the National and the Regional in Salon Art Exhibitions ...... 85 Regionalist Exhibitions ...... 92 Internationalist Exhibitions ...... 93

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Student Movements and the Emergence of the Critical Exhibition in Southeast Asia ...... 94 The Black December Incident in Indonesia, 1974 ...... 96 The United Artists’ Front of Thailand ...... 99 The Rise of the Left in the Philippines...... 103 Conclusion ...... 106 Chapter 3 Descent to the Everyday: A Collective, Contextual and Concrete Turn ...... 109 Introduction ...... 109 Unpacking the Everyday ...... 112 The Concrete: Articulating the Politics of Aesthetics in the Everyday ...... 115 The Contextual: Re-Materialisation of the Everyday ...... 121 Descending to Vernacular Images ...... 124 The Performative: Contesting the Everyday ...... 126 Conclusion ...... 128 Chapter 4 The Age of Manifestos: Contesting Exhibitionary Discourses Between the ‘New’, ‘Real’ and ‘Concrete’ ...... 135 Exhibition Histories as Method: Exhibitionary Discourse ...... 135 The ‘New’ and ‘Real’ as Floating Signifiers ...... 138 The Search for the New: Claims for the ‘Modern’ and the ‘Avant-Garde’ by Internationalist Exhibitions ...... 140 The Real Challenge: The National, the Social and the Political ...... 152 The Concrete: Where the New Meets the Real ...... 159 Conclusion ...... 163 Chapter 5 Disrupting the White Cube Gallery Space: The Outside World Must Come In ...... 165 The Exhibition as Assemblage ...... 168 The Curatorial and the Critical Exhibition ...... 171 The Exhibition Model as Methodology ...... 172 The White Cube Gallery as a Frame: The Fragility of the Edge ...... 175 Disrupting the White Cube Gallery Space ...... 178 Towards a Mystical Reality: Subverting the White Cube with the Real ...... 179 Towards a Mystical Space ...... 181 From Viewer to Participant in a Zen Garden ...... 183 Exceeding the Frames of Reality: Po Po’s Untitled 1987 Exhibition and GSRB ...... 188 Expanding Art into Public and Social Spaces...... 192 Conclusion ...... 197 Chapter 6 Exhibitionary Time: Towards Heterochrony, Synchrony and Anachrony ...... 226 Heterochronic Notions of Time ...... 227

The Heterochronic Event: Breaking the Timelessness of the White Cube ...... 230 The Ephemeral and Elusive Exhibitionary Time ...... 233 Collectivity: The Promise of Synchrony...... 236 Anachrony: Mystical and Mental Exhibitionary Time ...... 238 Anachrony: Between the Mystical and the Meditative ...... 240 Anachrony: The Durational ...... 242 Anachrony: The Coevality of Contested Times ...... 245 Conclusion: A New Time Consciousness ...... 248 Chapter 7 Restaging Critical Exhibitions: The Will to Archive, Memorialise and Subjectivise ...... 269 Introduction ...... 269 The Restaged Critical Exhibition as Site of Memory ...... 270 The Production of Exhibitionary Significance Through Criticality ...... 275 Presenting Dissensus: The Critical Exhibition and the Everyday ...... 280 The Desire for Restaging Critical Exhibitions and Its Discontents...... 282 Modes of Restaging Critical Exhibitions: The Will to Archive/Subjectivise/Memorialise ...... 287 The Will to Memorialise: Restaging The United Artists’ Front of Thailand as a Case Study ...... 291 Conclusion ...... 299 Conclusion ...... 317 A Critical Turn: Intersections between Art and Exhibitions in Southeast Asia ...... 317 Criticality as Legacy: Discourse/Space/Time/Restaging ...... 318 Critical Exhibitions and Their Legacies ...... 323

Bibliography 329

Appendices 343

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the generous support and help of so many people who share an interest in the art histories of Southeast Asia.

Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisors, Edwin Jurriëns and Muhammad Kamal from the Asia Institute at the Faculty of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Their expertise on contemporary art in Indonesia, and philosophy broadened my thinking about the history of art exhibitions. I am extremely grateful for their guidance, patience and critical readings of my writings. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to Edwin Jurriëns, my principal supervisor who gave me incisive ideas on structuring my thesis and making connections with broader cultural practices. In Singapore, T.K. Sabapathy and Patrick D. Flores have been constant beacons that guide and encourage me in my study of the history of art and exhibitions in Southeast Asia. Their discussions and suggestions have helped me to sharpen and refine my arguments. My experience of writing this thesis has shown me that it would be impossible without the collegiality of those who research, curate and write on art in Southeast Asia, particularly the generosity of artists who are ever so ready to share their precious time and archival materials. I would like to acknowledge the academic, financial and administrative support from the University of Melbourne and its staff. The Graduate Research Scholarship and the PhD Fieldwork Grant Scheme provided critical financial support necessary for the completion of this thesis. I am also thankful for the Graduate Research in Arts Travel Scheme (GRATS) that allowed me to present a chapter of my thesis as a paper at the 2016 Cultural Typhoon: Can You (still) Feel It? conference in Tokyo. The National Gallery Singapore and my colleagues’ support of my thesis in both research and time to complete my writing has been indispensable. I am truly grateful for all their help and understanding. During my fieldwork, I was aided generously by artists like F.X. Harsono, Siti Adiyati, Uthit Atimana, Koh Nguang How, Po Po, Navin Rawanchaikul, Kitti Maleephan, Kosit Juntaratip, Tawatchai Puntusawasdi, Vasan Sitthiket, Renato Habulan, and all of whom I was able to interview and learn from their knowledge on art and exhibitions. I benefited greatly

vi by having access to important and rare documents from art archives such as the Indonesian Visual Art Archives (IVAA), the Asia Art Archives (AAA), the Asia Culture Center (ACC) Archive & Research, the Resource Centre at The National Gallery Singapore, and the Singapore Art Archive Project. Their professionalism and passion towards their archival work enable scholarship on art to be advanced. I benefited immensely from the conferences where I had the opportunity to present my working chapters, allowing me to receive critical comments to sharpen my thesis. My gratitude also extends to those who peer reviewed my papers published in journals and other publications. Your insightful comments have been very helpful in reworking my chapters and tightening my arguments. My thanks extend to many individuals who have assisted me in different ways. I enjoyed the generosity of the community of scholars who shared their ideas and materials working across Southeast Asia. There are too many to list everyone, but I would like to especially thank John Clark, Ajarn Somporn Rodboon, Simon Soon, Ken Setiawan, Biljana Ciric, Charmaine Toh, Lu Peiyi, Jeffrey Say, Wulan Dirgantoro, David Teh, Ken Setiawan, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Chiang Poshin, Lu Pei-yi, Francis Maravillas, Michelle Antoinette, Amanda Katherine Rath, Stephen Pigney, Michelle Wong, Joleen Loh, Grace Samboh, and Yvonne Low. There are many others not named here, and my thanks go out to all of you. My thesis cannot be completed without the support of friends and family. Friends like Selina Ho, Roger Edward Nelson, Lisa Horikawa, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, and Russell Storer who have always stood by me with your sound advice. Most importantly, I would like to express my deepest thanks to my family and loved ones: Seng Wee Sua, Lim Seng Ai, Seng Pei Sze, and my wife, Charis Chua who has always been there encouraging and supporting me. This thesis is dedicated to all of them.

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Declaration

I hereby declare that this thesis is comprised of original work, which has been submitted towards the completion of a Doctor of Philosophy. Where required, due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other materials used. Furthermore, this thesis is fewer than the maximum word limit in length, exclusive of tables, figures, appendices, and bibliographies.

Signature:

Date: 27 Feburary 2019

viii Abstract

This thesis is the first comparative study of exhibition histories in Southeast Asia from the 1970s to 1990s. It aims to inaugurate new ways of studying exhibitions by identifying, validating and constructing typologies of exhibitions. It brings to the fore a new exhibition type: ‘critical exhibitions’, which marked watershed moments in the history of exhibitions in the Southeast Asian region. The critical exhibitions examined include Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa (Malaysia, 1974), the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement, Indonesia, 1975), the Bill-Board Cut-Out exhibition (Thailand, 1975), the Notes on Hayuma exhibition (Philippines, 1977), Po Po’s Untitled exhibition (Myanmar, 1987), the Time Show (Singapore, 1989–1990), and the Art Festival: Temples and Cemeteries (Thailand, 1992–1993). Within an exploration of the historical reasons behind the emergence of the critical exhibition, this research asks how the exhibition as a critical form intersected with new ways of thinking about art, art-making, and the public display of art. Employing a range of methodologies from disciplines such as curatorial studies, art history, discourse analysis and history, it studies discourse, space and time as constituents and material of critical exhibitions by constructing accurate models of these exhibitions. Using physical exhibition models and archival materials as methodological tools, it analyses how the curation of multiple artworks in an exhibition produce meanings in dialogue with each other, and how audiences actually experience an exhibition. Do exhibition histories produce their own material and methodologies? This thesis advances exhibition histories as an emerging discipline by proposing methods and approaches to study exhibitions. It highlights the importance of studying exhibitions not merely as a container of art, but also as a critical form that repositions the exhibition, art, artists and spectators towards more participatory directions. Furthermore, this research demonstrates how critical exhibitions marked an exhibitionary turn towards artistic and exhibitionary practices that were socially-engaged, conceptual, and participatory. They produced art manifestos that radically questioned the social role of art, its institutions and, most importantly, how it is displayed in exhibitions. A shared attention to criticality as a method of thinking about, displaying and making art resonates across these critical

ix exhibitions. It was precisely this manifestation of a critical turn in Southeast Asian exhibitions that produced methodologies for reimagining the study of exhibitions through exhibitionary discourse, space, time, and subsequently their restagings and multiple afterlives.

List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Map of 10 ASEAN countries. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/asean- countries.html Accessed on 28 May 2019

Figure 1.2 Installation view of the SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now exhibition 5July 5–23 October 2017 exhibition at the National Art Center, Tokyo and the Mori Art Museum. 14 works shown by Htien Lin in this exhibition were created when he was imprisoned as a political prisoner in 1998. Image from: https://jfac.jp/en/culture/features/f-ah-sunshower-htein- lin/. Accessed on 25/02/2018.

Figure 2.1 FX Harsono: The Life and the Chaos of Objects, Images and Words organised by the Erasmus Huis, Dutch Cultural Centre, Jakarta in 2015 featuring a timeline starting with the Malari Incident in 1974. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 3.1 Siti Adiyati, Eceng Gondok, Plastic, water hyacinth, 1979, Collection of Artist, Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 3.2 Catalogue of Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences and various installation views of the exhibition. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 3.3 Jim Supangkat, Ken Dedes, 1975, remade 1996, Plastic, wood, marker pen and paint, 125.5 x 41.5 x 26 cm 61 x 43.5 x 27 cm, Collection of National Gallery Singapore, Image courtesy of The National Gallery Singapore.

Figure 3.4 The United Artists’ Front of Thailand Billboard Cut-out exhibition of paintings, posters, murals and banners at the Rajadamnern Avenue, Bangkok. Image courtesy of The United Artists Front of Thailand

Figure 3.5 A poster by Kaisahan. Image taken when interviewing artists from the Kaisahan taken with permission from artist, Renato Habulan.

Figure 3.6 Renato Habulan, a leading artist of Kaisahan showing a poster by Kaisahan in Manila on 21 January 2017. Image taken with permission from Renato Habulan.

Figure 3.7 Sinsawat Yodbangtoey from the The United Artists’ Front of Thailand explaining this re-made bill board cut out on 14 March 2017 at the 14 October Memorial in Bangkok. Image taken with permission from Ajarn Sinsawat.

Figure 3.8 Photographic image of a Thai soldier that was widely circulated in Thai newspapers. Image from Charnvit Kasetsiri, From Oct 1973 to Oct 6, 1976: Bangkok and Tongpan’s Isan (Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Science and Humanities, 2008), p. 81.

Figure 3.9 The Golden Bowl supporting 1932 Siamese Constitution on the Victory Monument symbolising the importance of the Constitution as the supreme law in Thailand’s democracy.

Figure 5.1 Kurt Seligmann’s Ultra Furniture shown in the 1938 International Surrealists Exhibition. Image from: Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of the Eros, 1938–1968, 3rd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

Figure 5.2 Street of mannequins lined up along street signs in the 1938 International Surrealists Exhibition. Image from: Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of the Eros, 1938–1968, 3rd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

Figure 5.3 Participant using a torchlight in the darkened exhibition space of the 1938 International Surrealists Exhibition. Image from: Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of the Eros, 1938–1968, 3rd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

Figure 5.4 Empty Canvas on which so Many Shadows Have Already Fallen (discarded after the exhibition) Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 5.5 Installation view of TMR showing the found objects on white pedestals. Image from: Image courtesy of Simon Soon.

Figure 5.6 TMR exhibition model constructed by Seng Yu Jin and Denise Ho from NUS Department of Architecture School of Design and Environment with asssiatnce from Simon Soon. Scale 1:20, 2016. Image by of Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.7 View of the Writer’s Corner space of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in the 1990s before restoration (Image courtesy of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka). View of the Writer’s Corner space of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in the 2017 after restoration was completed in 2017. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.8 Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka c.1960. Image courtesy of Don Punea.

Figure 5.9 Detail of TMR exhibition model. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.10 Rock Zen garden of Ryōanji, Kyoto, Japan. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Accessed on 04/05/2018.

Figure 5.11 Installation view of TMR. Image courtesy of Simon Soon.

Figure 5.12 Close-up of the TMR exhibition model showing the potted plant on a low pedestal on the left highlighted in red. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.13 Randomly collected sample of human hair collected from a barber shop in Petaling Jaya. Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

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Figure 5.14 Well Worn Shoes Belonging to Different Persons. Image courtesy of Simon Soon.

Figure 5.15 Empty chair on which many persons have sat on. Image courtesy of Simon Soon.

Figure 5.16 Empty bird cage after release of bird at 2.46 pm on Monday 10th June 1974. Image from: Raja’ah – Art, Idea and Creativity of Sulaiman Esa 1950s – 2011 (Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery, 2011).

Figure 5.17 TMR exhibition model: The empty chair, canvas and birdcage forming a triangular line of sight in dialogue with one another.

Figure 5.18 Po Po, Apo, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

Figure 5.19 Po Po, Pathavi, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

Figure 5.20 Po Po, Tejo, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

Figure 5.21 Po Po, Vayo, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

Figure 5.22 Installation view showing Apo, Pathavi, Tejo and Vayo as a group displayed on the same wall. Image courtesy of Po Po.

Figure 5.23 Exhibition model of Untitled, constructed by Seng Yu Jin and Denise Ho, Scale 1:20, 2016. Image by Seng Yu Jin. Exhibition map of Untitled. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.24 Po Po, Four part paintings in space, oil on canvas, 1986, 75 x 137,2 cm. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

Figure 5.25 Po Po, Space in Four Parts Painting, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1986. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

Figure 5.26 Exhibition model of Untitled showing the arrangement of Four part paintings in space and Space in Four Parts Painting in a straight line visually. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.27 Exhibition model of Untitled showing an elevated perspective of the exhibition’s entrance. Image by Seng Yu Jin. Installation view of Untitled from a similar perspective to the exhibition model above. Image courtesy of Po Po.

Figure 5.28 Installation view of Untitled with the pink intertwining pillows visible. Image courtesy of Po Po.

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Figure 5.29 Po Po, red cube, 1986, oil and paper collage on canvas, 75 x 150 cm. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

Figure 5.30 Two perspectives of the Untitled exhibition model from an elevated perspective. Images by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.31 GSRB exhibition model as part of her exhibition titled, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back — Us and Institution, Us as Institution, June 29–August 11, 2013 at the Times Museum Guang Zhou curated by Biljana Ciric. Model of New Art Movement exhibition produced in collaboration with FX Harsono for exhibition. Images courtesy of Biljana Ciric.

Figure 5.32 Pandu Sadewo’s untitled, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Image from: Menafsir Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (Yogyakarta: ISI Yogyakarta, 2016).

Figure 5.33 FX Harsono, Pistol Plastik, Kembang Plastik dalam Kantong Plastik, 1975, Transparent plastic, plastic toy gun. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 5.34 FX Harsono, Paling Top ‘75, 1975 Plastic gun, textile, wooden crate, wire mesh. 50 x 100 x 157 cm. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 5.35 Bonyong Munni Ardhi, The Flag of Red and White, Oil on canvas, plastic doll. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 5.36 Installation view of GSRB 1975 exhibition. Image courtesy of Hyphen.

Figure 5.37 Jim Supangkat, Bunga Tembaga Dalam Pagar, 1975 Copper, stones, iron fence. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 5.38 Layout of artworks in the CMSI brochure. Image courtesy of Uthit Atimana and Gridthiya Gaweewong.

Figure 5.39 Montien Boonma’s installation work, Body Temple, 1992. Image courtesy of Uthit Atimana and Gridthiya Gaweewong.

Figure 5.40 TUAFT Bill-Board Cut-out exhibition at the Rajadamnern Avenue, Bangkok in 1975. Image from: Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, 1974–1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con- tempus, 1994).

Figure 5.41 Exhibition model of TAFT’s Billboard Cut-out exhibition in 1975, Bangkok Constructed by Seng Yu Jin and Denise Ho Scale 1:25, 2018. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.42 The lampposts in the middle of Rajadamnern Avenue still stands today. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 5.43 Exhibition model of TUAFT showing how the Rajadamnern Avenue leads to the Thammasat University and then to the Grand Palace. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.44 TUAFT billboard Cut-out, untitled, 1975, dimensions unknown. Image from: Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, 1974–1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con-tempus, 1994).

Figure 6.1 Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, “Mystical Reality” (1974). View of the TMR exhibition held at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kuala Lumpur. Image from: Vision and Idea: Relooking Modern Malaysian Art (Kuala Lumpur National Art Gallery, 1994).

Figure 6.2 Exhibition model of TMR showing the descriptive artwork labels accompanying the objects. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 6.3 The Time Show programme that has been edited with Koh Nguang How to reflect the on-site changes on that day to the programme itself. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.4 Map of The Time Show on the layout of The Artists Village at 61-b Lorong Gambas Ulu Sembawang in consultation with Koh Nguang How, TAV artist and archivist. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.5 2am, Poetry Reading by Jailani Kuning, performance 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.6 12 Midnight, New Year Prayer, various participants, performance, 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.7 8am, There is a Hole in the Sky by Koh Nguang How, installation, 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.8 12.30am, “This Time 12 O’clock Comes Later Than Scheduled” by Khairul & The Latecomers, performance, 1990, 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.9 Burnt-out mosquito coils used to keep away mosquitoes on the night of 25th March 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 6.10 Two half-drunk Coca-Cola bottles, 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 6.11 Randomly collected sample of human hair collected from a barber shop in Petaling Jaya, 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 6.12 Empty bird-cage after release of Bird at 2.46PM on Monday 10th June 1974, 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 6.13 Detail of TMR exhibition model. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 6.14 Cheong Soo Pieng, Tropical Life, 1959, Chinese ink and gouache on Chinese rice paper, 43.6 x 92cm. Image from: Pameran Retrospektif Pelukis-Pelukis Nanyang, eds. T.K. Sabapathy and Redza Piyadasa (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara, 1979).

Figure 6.15 TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-out exhibition in 1975 showing the procession performed by its participants before installing the billboards between the lampposts along Rajadamnern Ave. Image from: Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists Front of Thailand, 1974–1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con-tempus, 1994).

Figure 6.16 Exhibition model of TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-out exhibition, Constructed by Seng Yu Jin and Denise Ho, Scale 1:25, 2018. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 6.17 TUAFT Billboard cut-out with loud speakers playing Luk Thung (Thai country music). Image from: Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, 1974–1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con-tempus, 1994).

Figure 6.18 Exhibition model of TUAFT showing the billboard cut-outs displayed in a row along Rajadamnern Avenue from the perspective of the Democracy Monument. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 6.19 FX Harsono, The Relaxed Chain, 1975/1995, Steel chain and mattress, 51.2 x 97.4 x 67.5 cm, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 6.20 Exhibition Model of Po Po’s 1987 Untitled. Apo (water), Parvathi (earth), Tejo (fire) and Vayo (air) are shown on the wall at the end. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 6.21 Empty canvas on which many shadows have already fallen, 1974, 36’ X 36’, canvas, Collection of National Visual Art Gallery. Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 6.22 Po Po, Tejo, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

Figure 6.23 6.30am, Sunrise at Vegetable Farm by Tang Da Wu, performance, 1990, 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.24 Po Po, 6.00pm, oil on canvas, 1987, dimensions unknown. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

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Figure 6.25 Exhibition model of Untitled showing the entire row of works on the wall according to different timings. Image by Seng Yu Jin. Installation view that shows the other side of the wall. Image courtesy of Po Po.

Figure 6.26 Discarded silk-screen which was used to produce many beautiful prints, 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 6.27 Jim Supangkat, Ken Dedes, 1975/1996, Plaster, wood, marker pen and paint; 186.5 x 85 x 27 cm, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

Figure 6.28 Untitled, Bill board cut-out, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, remade. Image courtesy of TUAFT.

Figure 6.29 Photographic image of a Thai soldier that was widely circulated in Thai newspapers. Image from Charnvit Kasetsiri, From Oct 1973 to Oct 6 1976: Bangkok and Tongpan’s Isan (Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Science and Humanities, 2008.

Figure 6.30 Rama IV and the 1932 constitution the golden bowl. Image from: Revolvy, https://www.revolvy.com/page/Constitution-of-Thailand. Accessed on 21/06/2018.

Figure 6.31 The Golden “Bowl” on top of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok. Image from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_Bowl_holding_1932_Siamese_Co nstitution.jpg. Accessed on 22/06/2018.

Figure 7.1 Installation view of Fantasy World Supermarket - Approaches, Practice and Thinking Since the Indonesia New Art curated by Grace Samboh and Kumakura Haruko Movement in 1970s, 26 Mar - 10 Jul 2016 at the Mori Art Museum. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.2 Installation view of Canton Express: Art of the Pearl River Delta at M+, 23 June to 10 September 2017, Hong Kong. Image from M+ Pavilion website at https://www.westkowloon.hk/en/cantonexpress. Accessed on 25/05/2018.

Figure 7.3 Installation view of Live in Our Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969). Image from: Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) https://www.macba.cat/uploads/20091118/lecture5_when_attitudes_eng.pdf. Accessed on 25/06/2018.

Figure 7.4 Installation view of When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes (2012) at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary arts curated by Jenns Hoffman. Image from: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art. http://archive.wattis.org/exhibitions/when-attitudes-became-form-become- attitudes. Accessed on 15/06/2018.

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Figure 7.5 Installation view of TMR in the Raja’ah: Art, Idea and Creativity of Sulaiman Esa from 1950s – 2011 exhibition. Image from: Raja’ah: Art, Idea and Creativity of Sulaiman Esa from 1950s – 2011 (Kuala Lumpur: National Visual Art Gallery, 2011).

Figure 7.6 Installation view of Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs exhibition presented by Para Site, Hong Kong, co•produced with KADIST (Paris/San Francisco) featuring a restaging of the Towards a Mystical Reality exhibition. Image from: Image Art Studio, Eddie Lam, Courtesy Para Site, Hong Kong.

Figure 7.7 Installation View of Towards a Mystical Reality exhibition restaged at Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila. Image from: MCAD 6 September to 4 December 2016. http://www.mcadmanila.org.ph/soil-and-stones-souls-and-songs/. Accessed on 25/07/2018.

Figure 7.8 Installation view of the Chiang Mai Social Installation at the SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now exhibition, Mori Art Museum, 5 July-23 October 2017. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.9 Installation view of The Life and The Chaos: Objects, Images and Words, 1-30 October 2015 at the Erasmus Huis, Dutch Cultural Center in 2015. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 7.10 Close up view of Koh Nguang How’s archival presentation of The Artists Village SUNSHOWER exhibition, Mori Art Museum. Image curtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 7.11 Installation view of Situation: Collaborations, collectives and artist networks from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney curated by Russell Storer in 2005. Image from: https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/361-situation-collaborations- collectives-artist-networks-from-sydney-singapore-berlin/. Accessed on 10/05/2018.

Figure 7.12 Installation view of the Library Park at the Asia Cultural Center in Gwangju displaying archives in the Chiang Mai Social Installation and The Artists Village. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.13 Installation View of Menafsir Seni Rupa Baru: Membaca Ulang Perjalanan Sejarah Seni Rupa Baru 1975-1987, 1-15 December 2016 at the Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.14 14 October 1973 protests near the Democracy Monument, Bangkok. Image from: Siamese Visons, http://siamesevisions.blogspot.com/2011/05/student- protests-14-october-1973.html. Accessed on 12/06/2018.

Figure 7.15 14 October Memorial 1973 in Bangkok. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.16 Installation view of the Billboard Cut-out exhibition at the 14 October Memorial 1973 in Bangkok. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 7.17 Exhibition model of the Billboard Cut-out exhibition with the triangle in red showing how the three political and symbolic sites are connected together in their distance in relation to each other. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.18 Exhibition model showing how the 14 October Memorial (indicated by the blue circle) at Ratchadamnoen Klang Road is near the Democracy Monument and connected to the Thammarsat University and the Grand Palace. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.19 Installation view of the Billboard Cut-out exhibition at the 14 October Memorial 1973 in Bangkok. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.20 Installation view of the Billboard Cut-out exhibition at the 14 October Memorial 1973 in Bangkok. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.21 Installation view of archival posters and photos of the 14 Oct 1974 massacre at the Memorial. Image courtesy of TUAFT.

Figure 7.22 Archival image of the 14 Oct 1973 demonstrations on display at the Memorial. Image courtesy of TUAFT. Archival photograph of the dead body of a protestor killed by the military hauled up the Democracy Monument.

Figure 7.23 Archival image of student protestors in a face-off with the military. Image courtesy of TUAFT.

Figure 7.24 Exhibition on the Gwangju Uprising at the 14 Oct Memorial in Bangkok. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.25 Gwangju uprising in the City Square in 1980. Image from: Asia Society, https://asiasociety.org/korea/gwangju-uprising-divided-country-within-divided- peninsular. Accessed on 20/07/2018.

Figure 7.26 The Memorial Cultural Hall of the 5.18 Memorial Park in Gwangju. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 8.1 Redza Piyadasa, Entry Points, 1978, original framed oil painting and acrylic on wood, 100 × 78 cm. Collection of the National Visual Arts Gallery of Malaysia. Courtesy of the National Visual Arts Gallery of Malaysia.

Figure 8.2 Siti Adiyati, not titled, 1975, Oil on canvas, board & mirror Variable dimension. Image from: List of artworks from Pameran Seni Rupa Baru 1975 (Indonesia New Art Exhibition 1975). Generated by Hyphen from a variety of media clippings, thesis and interview sessions.

Figure 8.3 Siti Adiyati, not titled, 1975, Oil on canvas, board & mirror Variable dimension. Image from: List of artworks from PAMERAN SENI RUPA BARU INDONESIA 1975 (Indonesia New Art Exhibition 1975). Generated by Hyphen from a variety of mediaclippings, thesis and interview sessions.

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Abbreviations

AA Anak Alam (Children of Nature)

ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations

ASRI (Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia) Indonesian Fine Arts Academy

CMSI Chiang Mai Social Installation

DBP Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka

GSRB (Gerakan Senu Rupa Baru) New Art Movement

ISI (Institut Seni Indonesia) Indonesian Fine Arts Institute

LEKRA (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat) Institute of People’s Culture

PDF Pasaraya Dunia Fantasi (Supermarket Fantasy World exhibition)

PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia) Indonesian Communist Party

TAV The Artists Village

TIM Taman Ismail Mazuki

TMR Towards a Mystical Reality

TUAFT The United Artists’ Front of Thailand

Introduction Exhibition Histories as Method in Southeast Asia

When we study exhibitions, what exactly do we analyse, and how do we do it? I posed this question to the panel and elicited tentative remarks, which was interesting to me because two of the members were trained historians of art and the other a practising historian of exhibitions. It seems that there has not been a thorough reflection on methodology. I asked this because I wondered if there is a difference between art history and exhibition history or if there is a shift from one to the other in light of the contemporary and the curatorial. Cannot exhibitions and their histories be studied within art history? And can art historians still enlist the methods of art history in studying exhibitions as material that contains material? Or does exhibition history posit a distinct way of investigating its material altogether? And if so, from which episteme [emphasis added] will it read the exhibition?1

In October 2013, the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong convened a seminal symposium on exhibition histories in Asia. Titled Sites of Construction: Exhibitions and the Making of Recent Art History in Asia, it posed the following questions: Are there differences between art history and exhibition histories in terms of methodology, aims, subject matter, materials, sources and approaches? Do exhibition histories produce methodologies of their own, including and beyond those of art history, by drawing from other epistemes as intimated by Flores?2 These questions, which are fundamental and germane to exhibition histories as an emerging discipline, are addressed in this thesis by studying exhibitions in Southeast Asia from the 1970s to the 1990s, and by focusing on critical exhibitions as a valid, fertile and new category of exhibition. This thesis seeks to present historical, theoretical and methodological trajectories that indicate ways in which exhibitions and their histories can be studied and historicised.

1 Patrick Flores, ‘The Exhibition as Historical Proposition’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 13.2 (March/April 2014), p. 104. 2 For an understanding of Michel Foucault’s use of the term ‘episteme’ as unspoken assumptions that determine what is right in different historical periods, see Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970). This book was first published in 1966 in French and translated into English in 1970.

This is partially in response to the weakness of art history as an institutionalised discipline in universities across Asia. But exhibitions do more than generate art historical discourse, since they are also sites of exchange between artists and artworks. Curator Hammad Nasar posited exhibitions as ‘primary sites of art historical construction’ in Asia, because it is through the exhibition that many writings of modern and contemporary art are generated and constructed.3 Exhibitions mediate art reception, they display strategies, and they reflect ideologies. They also sustain relations within the art world, and between art and the outside world. In other words, the exhibition as a (historical) event embodies a network of artistic, institutional, economic, political, and cultural relations that are constantly shifting and changing. Exhibitions exist not in singular and fixed temporalities, but in multiple past and present temporalities and in different contexts and social conditions that incite constant reinterpretations of their histories. The study of exhibitions as a distinct subject of inquiry is a new form of scholarship. This thesis is the first comparative study of the histories of exhibitions in Southeast Asia from the 1970s to the early 1990s. It identifies, validates and constructs typologies of exhibitions. It focuses on the emergence of a new type of exhibition – the critical exhibition – which shaped the history of art in the region from the 1970s to the 1990s. The emergence of the critical exhibition began in the context of the second wave of student protests in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, with the First Quarter Storm in the Philippines (1970), the series of popular uprisings in Thailand (1973–76) and the Malari Incident (1974) in Indonesia.4 These artist-students came to form the heartbeat of a new exhibitionary mode – the critical exhibition – that was socially engaged, conceptual, and shifting towards public spaces for the display of art. This mode propelled artists to the intellectual forefront of intersecting imaginations of the national, the regional and the global. It critically engaged with social injustices, democracy, decolonisation and nation-building. This thesis will argue that the artists from the region, many of whom were radicalised by the student activist movements, produced the critical exhibition from below, through their own agency, without preconceived notions of constructing a regional art or exhibitionary movement.

3 Hammad Nasar, ‘Introduction’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 13.2 (March/April 2014), p. 8. 4 In the 1970s, the First Quarter Storm in Manila, the University of Thammasat massacre, and the Malari Incident in Jakarta were a series of student-led popular uprisings against social injustices, economic inequalities and the authoritarian regimes of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Thanom Kittikachorn in Thailand and Suharto in Indonesia.

A shared attention to criticality as a method of thinking about, displaying and making art resonates across these critical exhibitions. It is precisely this critical turn in exhibition histories as it is manifest in the critical exhibition in Southeast Asia that inspires a methodology along the fronts of exhibitionary discourse, space and time. Exhibition histories cuts across what Flores suggests are different epistemes or sets of knowledge shaped by conventions that determine which discourses are taken seriously and understood in a society. Exhibition histories as method in this thesis proposes a contingent approach that adapts different fields of knowledge, including art history (i.e., iconography), curatorial studies (i.e. physical exhibition models for curatorial analysis), discourse analysis (i.e. discourses of art manifestos), Southeast Asian studies (i.e., exhibitionary significance) and anthropology (i.e., multiple temporalities). It offers the methodological basis for rigorously studying the complexity and density of the exhibition and its constituents. Exhibitionary discourse builds on Foucault’s notion of discourse as intertwined knowledge and social practices that govern how we think, understand and produce meaning.5 In this research, exhibition histories as method foregrounds the art manifesto as a form of exhibitionary discourse produced by critical exhibitions. In the art manifesto, floating signifiers destabilise previously fixed meanings of art and open up possibilities for alternative discursive spaces and meanings. The section on exhibitionary space in this thesis adopts the physical exhibition model as a way of spatially reconstructing exhibitions, particularly critical exhibitions that subverted the white cube space and produced subjective imaginations of mental spaces. As argued below, the exhibitionary time of critical exhibitions broke singular and homogeneous notions of Eurocentric time, replacing them with multiple temporalities for inhabiting exhibitions. The exhibitions as method approach also addresses the restaging of critical exhibitions, a relatively recent phenomenon in the curatorial world. It examines why critical exhibitions in particular have culminated in multiple restagings and reinterpretations in different social and historical contexts. Operating along the fronts of exhibitionary discourse, space, time and restagings, the exhibitions as method approach can be mapped in relation to (1) exhibitions as such, (2) artists, artworks and artistic practices, (3) art histories, (4) art worlds, and (5) constructions of the national, regional and global. Mapping critical exhibitions within this constellation of

5 For how discourses produce regimes of truth leading to power, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language (New York: Random House, 1982), first published in 1969.

3 their constituencies establishes the critical exhibition as a valid, credible and fertile category of exhibition in the world of art. This research traces the critical turn as an art historical shift that occurred in the 1970s in exhibitions across Southeast Asia. It examines the exhibition history of the region by focusing on how critical exhibitions disrupted previously prevalent exhibitionary typologies, such as the salon, regional, ethnic- and medium-based exhibitions, and internationalist exhibitions (see Appendix A). Each of these art exhibitions has its own exhibitionary models and display formats. The salon and ethnic-based exhibitionary modes that existed before 1945 continued in post-war Southeast Asia, while medium-based, regional, and internationalist exhibitions were invented and proliferated after 1945, both in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the world. Tracking the exhibition as a pervasive form and format to understand its impact and role on modern art developments in Southeast Asia requires the analysis of ruptures and continuities within the changing art worlds of which exhibitions are an indispensable part. It also requires analysis of the wider social and political contexts that shape the art worlds themselves. Critical exhibitions as a new exhibitionary mode rose to prominence in the 1970s by advancing new ways of thinking about and making art, as well as by questioning dominant artistic conventions and social structures of power. Collectivism, manifested through art societies and groups in Southeast Asia, was an important vehicle that drove the emergence and proliferation of critical exhibitions in the region. Both collectivism and critical exhibitions grew in tandem with institutions that emerged in Southeast Asia during those years, including art academies, artist collectives (e.g. sanggar and art societies), exhibition venues (for displaying art), art competitions, and other prevailing kinds of exhibition. This thesis specifically focuses on critical exhibitions from Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. In chronological order, they are the following:

(i) Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa’s Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences (TMR) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1974 (ii) The Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement, GSRB) exhibition in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1975 (iii) The United Artists’ Front of Thailand’s (also referred as The Artists’ Front of Thailand in other sources) (TUAFT) Billboard Cut-Out exhibition in Bangkok, Thailand in 1975

(iv) The Kaisahan Notes on Hayuma exhibition in Manila, the Philippines in 19776 (v) Po Po’s Untitled exhibition in Yangon, Myanmar in 1987 (vi) The Artists Village’s (TAV) exhibition The Time Show in Singapore from 1989 to 1990 (vii) The Art Festival: Temples and Cemeteries now more commonly referred to as Chiang Mai Social Installation (henceforth referred to as CMSI in this thesis) festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand from 1992 to 1993

Several observations can be made about these seven exhibitions. Four of them were held in the 1970s, one in the 1980s, and the remaining two in the early 1990s. Why did most of them occur in the 1970s? Chapter 2 addresses the reasons for the concentration of such expositions in the 1970s by contextualising their emergence within the changing social, political, artistic, and cultural conditions of the time. Critical exhibitions were artist-initiated. Modern and contemporary art institutions such as art museums and curatorship – a profession developed in the West – were still in their infancy in the region.7 For this reason this thesis distinguishes between ‘curating’ as a profession with its own body of knowledge, ethics and practices, and ‘exhibition-making’, which is not necessarily bound by institutional affiliation or professional practices and codes of ethics. The latter, broader notion encompasses activities involved in realising exhibitions, including conceptualisation, organisation, fundraising, research, writing, and display. Although it was not a new development for artists to make exhibitions, the fact that all the critical exhibitions were artist-initiated foregrounds the importance of the connection between independence and criticality for the artists. They wanted to make exhibitions on their own terms in response to their local art worlds and socio-political contexts. While Piyadasa and Esa studied abroad, the vast majority of the artists directly involved in producing critical exhibitions did not. Free from the burden of having to live up to exogenous standards and models of curating in the West, artist-exhibition-makers were able to innovate and invent a new type of exhibition that directly addressed issues and concerns specific to their national and/or regional contexts.

6 Hayuma is a Tagalog term that refers to fishermen mending nets. 7 For a history of the ‘artist-curator’ in Southeast Asia, see Patrick Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008).

Five of the seven critical exhibitions were organised by artist collectives; only Po Po’s Untitled exhibition and Piyadasa and Esa’s TMR were the exceptions.8 The latter two exhibitions were not the initiatives of collectives but had a collaborative character. Piyadasa and Esa collaboratively produced all the artworks in TMR in order to undermine the hegemony of the artist as a single author. Untitled was a solo exhibition, but Po Po played traditional Myanmar music with a local musician for the duration of the exhibition, which was meant as a collaborative gesture, an experiential intervention in his own works, and a dialogue between local tradition and Buddhist philosophies. Artist collectives such as GSRB and TAV were fluid in their membership, as they brought artists together for the purpose of exhibition-making. Other collectives, like the Kaisahan and TUAFT, had more formalised structures and membership. The different forms and concepts of collectivism and collaboration removed the artist’s individual hand. The artists did not sign their artworks, or they used everyday materials that bore no trace of their physical work. These different modes of making and thinking about art in critical exhibitions will be expanded upon in Chapter 3. The rationale of selecting these critical exhibitions for this research is based on these six shared characteristics. The first characteristic is the production of art manifestos, a form of exhibitionary discourses that represented the position of the artists on art in relation to society or aesthetics. The social and political changes in the 1970s resulted, on the one hand, in authoritarian regimes that depoliticised art, and, on the other hand, agitation for art manifestos to repoliticise art through social engagement and rhetorical statements that countered hegemonic discourses on art. The art manifestos of critical exhibitions were produced in the context of decolonisation and resistance to the depoliticisation of art; hence, they emerged from different contexts than those in which Euro-American avant- garde movements, such as surrealism and Dadaism, had responded to the two world wars and their aftermath.9 The ideas advanced by the art manifestos of critical exhibitions included the multi-authorship of artworks, engagement with Asian philosophies, and the expansion of the notion of art beyond aesthetic conventions circumscribed by ‘fine art’,

8 It should be noted that TMR (1974) was not the first exhibition on which Piyadasa and Esa had collaborated. They had previously collaborated on the exhibition, Dokumentasi 72 in 1972. 9 For the historical context of surrealism in the middle decades of the twentieth century, see Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of the Eros 1938–1968 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005).

6 particularly painting. Art manifestos were a manifestation of criticality in the realm of ideas and art discourse that directly shaped both the critical exhibitions and the artworks. Criticality as a defining feature of both the exhibitions and the artworks will be further discussed in the section on research methodology in this chapter. Second, the critical exhibitions were not only produced by artist collectives but were also based on collectivism as a way of thinking about and making art that undermined the singular author. The production of art manifestos as a collective or collaborative discursive act sought to generate radical lines of questioning that challenged the single artist as author. It also recalibrated the passive viewer into a more active participant in making the artwork, constructing meaning, and facilitating changes to artistic and, at times, social conventions (see Chapter 4). Third, critical exhibitions were socially engaged and participatory, and they consciously pursued a politics of aesthetics in their aims to transform people’s perception of things, produce new meanings and experiences of art. They undermined the dominant modernist aesthetic regime based on formalist interest in the visual properties of art and medium specificity, and they infused an expanded notion of art with new possibilities. Fourth, the critical exhibitions expressed their social engagement by focusing on process-based work rather than on finished art objects. Their strong social engagement distinguished them from conceptual, Western approaches that focused on the dematerialisation and questioning of the art object as such. A socially engaged form of conceptualism that made participants aware of their social environment was an important characteristic of critical exhibitions sparked by the left intellectual movement and postcolonial discourse in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. TUAFT and Kaisahan are two examples of artist collectives that produced critical exhibitions propelled by concurrent student activist movements against authoritarian regimes, the neo-imperialism of America, and the Vietnam War. Fifth, the critical exhibitions challenged the hegemony of the modernist white cube gallery by bringing art into public spaces or consciously seeking to provoke viewers to rethink their assumptions about space and time (see Chapters 5 and 6). Sixth, the artworks represented in critical exhibitions made visible the structures of ideological and institutional power. They embodied a desire to close the gap between the artwork and the viewer, and to change the relationship from one of Kantian aesthetic distance and dis-interestedness to

7 one of active spectator participation and public discursive, temporal and spatial action. Intersections between the criticality of the artworks and the exhibitions is proposed as one of the primary reasons behind their later restagings (see Chapter 7) through the restaged exhibition and archive. While the critical exhibitions and the critical art works sought to question and even to ‘subvert’ prevailing systems of power, it is important also to acknowledge that their capacity to change political and social situations was not self-evident. Critical exhibitions propelled by artists were at the forefront of movements of resistance, they produced powerful imageries, and they developed strategies for supporting and rallying these movements. But these claims and intentions of critical exhibitions and the artists who produced and presented art works in social and public domains did not guarantee politically effective social change. How do we appraise the impact of such critical exhibitions and evaluate their effectiveness? Jacques Rancière argues that critical art has the potential to change existing aesthetic regimes by disrupting prevailing sensibilities that govern our perceptions:

Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema is very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of ‘strangeness’; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness; and third, a mobilisation of individuals as a result of that awareness.10

Rancière’s processes of critical art extend to critical exhibitions in their production of ‘strangeness’ by playfully changing exhibitionary experiences and the reception of discourse, space and time. By provoking questions, they transformed the viewer into a participant who partook more directly in the meaning-making of the artworks and of the exhibition as a whole. The key was the mobilising potential of critical exhibitions to disrupt grand narratives circumscribed by modernism. These disruptions were effected by locating the politics of aesthetics in art forms that were not overtly or literal in their political critiques. The efficacy of critical exhibitions can be detected in the bewildered reactions that they provoked, the co-production of meaning in both artworks and the exhibition, and their

10 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 142.

8 ability to mobilise dissensus that was the crux of an exhibition’s critical potential and source of agency. Lastly, some of the critical exhibitions produced by collectives such as GSRB and CMSI continued over several exhibitions. The GSRB, for example, organised the exhibitions Seni Rupa Baru (New Art) in 1975, Concept in 1976, Pameran Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Exhibition) in 1977, Pameran Seni Rupa Baru in 1979, and Pasaraya Dunia Fantasi (Supermarket Fantasy World) in 1987. This thesis focuses on the first GSRB exhibition in 1975, which produced the movement’s art manifesto Five Lines of Attack. Some of the other exhibitions, such as Pasaraya Dunia Fantasi, have recognisably kindred objectives and characteristics of critical exhibitions, but they can be included in future research on interrelated exhibitions that span more than a single event. This selection of critical exhibitions is not exhaustive, and future research should also include similar exhibitions from other places. Other previously colonised regions, such as Latin America, include many sites with potential resonances and connections with critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia.11 This thesis is intended as a foundation for further, expanded mappings of critical exhibitions globally, particularly from areas with shared histories of colonialism, nationalism, authoritarian regimes, student radicalisation and other postcolonial realities.

Exhibition Histories as Method: Exhibitionary Amnesia and Criticality

There is a missing exhibition literature. It has a lot to do with the fact that exhibitions are not collected and that’s why they fall deeper into amnesia.12 (Hans-Ulrich Obrist, curator)

The foundations of histories of art are expanding beyond the primacy of ‘art’. The difficulties of squaring art history with the requirements for studying exhibitions raised earlier by Flores has resulted in the marginalisation of the history of exhibitions. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, an influential curator who has conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with artists and other creative practitioners, has addressed the anxiety of forgetting that undermines

11 For further reading on ‘connections’ and ‘resonances’ as art historical methods, see Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 12 See Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 41. This includes Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s interview art for life with Paul O’Neill, originally recorded on 26 January 2004 and edited with the interviewee between 2005 and 2006.

9 curatorial knowledge and knowledge about the history of exhibitions. Exhibitions are unlike artworks that are collected and enter museums or private collections with possibilities for further study. Part of Obrist’s remedy is to conduct interviews with the exhibition-makers themselves. He observes that the amnesia of exhibition literature is connected to art institutions, such as museums, or private collectors limiting their collections to artworks only. This triggers questions such as how exhibitions can even be collectible, what they comprise, and what their impact on the history of art is. Altshuler describes the group exhibition as a site of exchange where ‘artists, critics, dealers, collectors, and the general public met and responded in their various ways to what artists had done’.13 The modernist avant-garde gave primacy to exhibitions, which were enmeshed in a network of economic and personal relations. Their attempts to gain public acceptance of their work through mutual support propelled the histories of the modernist avant-garde.14 At the same time, the possibility of collecting an exhibition raises the question of what makes an exhibition. An exhibition comprises an assemblage including exhibition-makers, artists, sponsors, artworks, artefacts, catalogues and display strategies. Mary Anne Staniszewski persuasively argues that exhibition design and curating have created innovative exhibition forms.15 The exhibition is a microcosm of the art world that makes visible the exchanges in the political economy of art, where meaning and signification are constructed, circulated, and even deconstructed.16 This thesis conceives the exhibition as discursive medium that produces orders of knowledge that intersect with exhibitionary discourse, spatiality, and temporality. The exhibition responds to a real and pressing need that emerges from its quotidian, social, economic and political conditions.17 These forms of Foucauldian order have been adapted and conceptualised as ‘the exhibitionary complex’ by Tony Bennett. He has proposed that museums could use particular kinds of exhibitions, technology and an ensemble of

13 Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 8. 14 Ibid. 15 Mary Anne Staniszewski Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 16 See Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, ‘Introduction’, in Thinking about Exhibitions (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1-3. 17 See Zdenka Badovinac, ‘Interrupted Histories’, in After the Event: New Perspectives on Art History, ed. Charles Merewether and John Potts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 80–89.

10 disciplines to reorder objects for public display and to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the public.18 In this thesis, the ‘exhibitionary’ refers to the public display of sites of exchanges across a network of ideas, people, discourses, time and spaces. Critical exhibitions generate their own, specific exhibitionary discourses, spatialities and temporalities that intersect with each other (Appendix C). Exhibitions can exist as singular events or as multiple occurrences. They coalesce into historical events, as they emerge from multiple contexts and are produced from different spatial forms.19 Exhibitions should not be understood as static and temporally, spatially or discursively fixed, but as fluid sites of exchange in between the immediate needs of the local and the universalising impulse of globalisation. Exhibitions can be conceived as agencies of communication that deploy a range of strategies, including texts, bodies, spaces and images. They publicly represent the ideology, objectives, and identity of the exhibition maker and aim to persuade and convert audiences to the exhibitionary values and ideas. Exhibitions are discursive mediums that order knowledge by framing and connecting objects, ideas, peoples, markets, discourses, and institutional networks to critically engaged with their publics. What is the cure for the amnesia of exhibition histories? Obrist proposed the collecting and archiving of exhibitions by museums as a way to render their art historical significance. But is a history of exhibitions necessarily linked with the history of art? There are certainly aspects that are specific to exhibition histories. For instance, Staniszewski argues that exhibition design and spatiality are indispensable for the construction of curatorial narratives. The innovative ways of presenting art remind us of the need to attend to space as a site of producing meaning and significance. The history of exhibitions provides an alternative perspective on art history by acknowledging the exhibitionary site and context-specificity. Hammad Nasar, the former Head of Research and Programmes at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, has expanded the significance of exhibitions from merely being containers that display objects to discursive sites that construct art history:

Exhibitions are where artworks meet their publics. In the context of Asia, however, and in the absence of systematic public collections and substantial academic art history departments dedicated to twentieth- and

18 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–10. 19 Merewether and Potts, ‘Introduction’, in After the Event, pp. 3–6.

twenty-first-century art from the region, exhibitions are more than just sites of display and interactions. Exhibitions – and by extension the curatorial strategies, institutional demands driving them, and art writing accompanying them – have become the primary sites of art historical construction.20

Exhibitions as ‘primary sites of art historical construction’ are multifaceted intersections of the histories of artworks, artists, the reception of artworks, and modes of display. In the absence of art history, exhibitions become alternative sites for the construction of art histories. Exhibition history as a discipline therefore requires methodologies and approaches that extend beyond art history. What types of interaction are generated by past and prevailing practices in exhibitions, and what types of art history are constructed by them? While exhibition history needs to be distinguished from art history, it is also important to observe their possible connections and overlaps. As a site of networked interactions and exchanges, the exhibition also requires an interdisciplinary approach. Collecting exhibitions forces us to rethink what constitutes an exhibition, its impact on the history of art, its enmeshed networks of relations, and the circulation, collection and reception of art, archival material and oral histories. It is difficult to collect and analyse exhibitions comprehensively, as they are temporary sites of exchange that are constantly open to processes of interpretation and reinterpretation. The exhibition is also a site that produces culture and shared collective memories through a process of selecting, constructing and historicising narratives. It is also severely underrepresented and repressed as a cultural space, as the ways in which artworks are experienced spatially in an exhibition are often left undocumented and unremarked on by art historians who focus only on analysing artworks. Meanings produced from such spatial experiences of artworks in dialogue with each other in an exhibition are lost as the historicisation of art is privileged over the historicisation of space. This thesis (especially Chapter 7) proposes the restaging of exhibitions as an alternative to Obrist’s proposal of collecting exhibitions. The process of re- enacting extends beyond memorialising and remembering to critically appraising, reinterpreting and producing new meanings in new contexts that link past and current exhibitionary practices. The act of restaging aligns with the open nature of exhibitions as

20 Nasar, ‘Introduction’, p. 8.

12 sites of exchange that are not temporally fixed but, instead, are constantly reified and productive of new cultural meanings and narratives. This brings us to the tasks of critique and how it is relevant to art and exhibitions. Foucault was adamant that the task of critique is not to pass judgement on its objects, be they knowledge, discourse, power, institutions or social conditions. Instead, the task of critique is to question the frames of evaluation that foreclose other possibilities and alternatives for ordering our worlds:

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept ... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as we believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practising criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.21

This thesis locates the practice of criticism at the heart of critical exhibitions. The history of critical exhibitions makes visible the power of critique to raise a new awareness and open up the exhibitionary form and its art and participants as spaces of difference, criticality and provocation. Critical exhibitions are historically significant for making critique their primary strategy for reframing and rupturing the common experience of the sensible, and for demonstrating that art or an exhibition can be conceived and organised differently. A critical attitude is, therefore, what activates and drives the critical exhibition. It is tied to both Kant’s and Foucault’s notions of critique as something that challenges the established order and proposes alternatives to the consensual view of things, and to Rancière’s politics of aesthetics that stimulates disruptions against the governing authority. Exhibition histories in Southeast Asia from the 1970s to the 1990s constitute a history of how criticality as an attitude manifested in the emergence of critical exhibitions. They mark a critical turn resulting in the region’s art history being driven by exhibitions that possessed elements of the critical in relation to discourse, space and time. Michel Foucault’s 1978 lecture ‘What is Critique?’ offers an entry point to the importance of a continuous critical attitude that questions widely accepted doxa,

21 Michel Foucault, ‘Practicing Criticism’, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977– 1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 154–55.

13 conventions, ways of thinking and forms of practice. Criticism is, therefore, an ongoing practice: it is a constant search for alternative ways of doing things. Foucault drew from Kant’s Aufklarung (Enlightenment) as a period of modernity marked by the emergence of a critical attitude that empowered people to use reason to question dominant forms of authority and governance. In Weedon’s summary of Foucault:

Discourse has to take account of its own present-ness, in order to find its own place, to pronounce its meaning, and to specify the mode of action which it is capable of exercising within this present. What is my present? What is the meaning of this present? Such is, it seems to me, the substance of this new interrogation on modernity.22

Chris Weedon’s interpretation of Foucault’s discourse as ‘ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them’ brings to the fore Foucault’s attention to the histories of knowledge, and how the epistemic discourse of Enlightenment critiqued its own contemporary discourses. Enlightenment as a critical attitude based on the primacy of reason established the formation of state systems, capitalism, and modern science that has resulted in self-reflexiveness towards the discourses of the present and in a critique of the instruments of society that regulate, police and govern individuals. Rancière builds on Foucault’s analysis of the critical attitude of the Enlightenment for challenging more contemporary forms of governing. He assigns regimes of aesthetics to instrumental forms of government that condition how we experience the shared sensible world. Rancière refers to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by proposing aesthetics as ‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience’. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière positions aesthetics at the heart of any political act that disrupts the distribution of the sensible. He defines the distribution of the sensible as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’. In other words, the politics of aesthetics is the act of reimagining the common experience of a community. For Rancière, ‘Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak,

22 Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Post-Structuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 108.

14 around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time’.23 Hence, the redistribution of the sensible is the potential of a new aesthetics of politics that ruptures the common experience of the sensible. Like Kant’s belief in the self-consciousness of people to marshal reason to reconfigure sensory experience by critique, Rancière’s politics of aesthetics expands on art’s ability to rethink the political and offer a form of dissensus to overturn dominant forms of governance. Criticality in exhibition histories becomes a methodology intertwined with the emergence of the critical form of the exhibition in the region. The realm of the exhibitionary can generate new contexts and meanings by repositioning the participant’s perspectives in three ways. First, the critical exhibition has the ability to represent and transform the sensory experience and meaning of things. Its potential to expose social absences is a way to recover and reclaim a politics of aesthetics for the marginalised. Second, critical exhibitions reframe the exhibitionary form and challenge conventions of when, where and how art is presented to the public; hence, they re-signify art. Third, criticality as provocation is an important way for critical exhibitions to radically question structures of power. Such provocation may not directly change society, but it functions as a productive and even playful proposition that shifts the participants’ understanding of existing realities and disrupts the dominant aesthetic regime. Critical exhibitions both playfully and ambiguously redistribute the sensible by presenting artworks in an exhibition as strangely familiar, yet simultaneously unfamiliar too. This awakens the participants and potentially mobilises them to question the purpose and critical viability of art, art institutions, and art exhibitions. Criticality energises the critical exhibition as a viable form that is ambiguous, fluid and even strange. ‘Exhibition histories as method’ proposes that the criticality embedded in critical exhibitions is analogous to exhibition histories as a continuous form of critique. Similar to critical exhibitions, exhibition histories may use critique as a method to explore, question and reclaim exhibitionary models and to reconnect art to publics.

23 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 13.

Rethinking the Value and Tasks of Exhibition Histories

The lack of exhibitionary knowledge raised by Obrist and Staniszewski in the early 2000s has been met in some degree by publications, conferences and archival efforts that pivot towards exhibitions and their histories.24 Art historian T.J. Clark outlined the task of art history in ‘connecting links between artistic form, the available systems of visual representation, the current theories of art, other ideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures and processes’.25 Exhibitions can reveal and illuminate these links, as they emerge from particular moments, contexts and historical conditions. Julian Myers has attributed the value of exhibition history along similar lines, by stating that ‘the crucial task of a history of exhibitions, then, would be to attend to this particular constellation – a desired autonomy, the social situation of the artist, institutions, the market, and the public – as they assumed new relationships over time, in and through practice’.26 For Myers, the history of exhibitions makes visible the changing relations between art-making, the social, political and economic conditions of the art world, and the public. As sites that display art, exhibitions produce exhibitionary discourses, interactions between art, artists and the public, and economic exchanges. Art historian Martha Ward describes the history of exhibitions as a field that ‘track[s] the pervasive form of the exhibition and its impact across the modern period’ by focusing on practices related to the display of objects.27 Early exhibitionary histories focused on universal expositions such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park in London, the Exposition Universelle at the turn of the twentieth century, and world fairs that were part of the colonial enterprise to showcase the industrial might of the colonisers. Ian Dunlop’s The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art, published in 1972, provided one of the earliest scholarly histories of exhibitions and their impact on modern art. Although Dunlop was fully aware of his limited selection of exhibitions, which were confined to Western art, and did not claim to be universal in his book, his narrow focus has set the direction of the history of exhibitions as a field since.

24 O’Neill, Culture of Curating, p. 40. 25 T.J. Clark, ‘On the Social History of Art’, in Twentieth Century Theories of Art, ed. James M. Thompson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1990), p. 268. 26 Julian Myers, ‘On the Value of a History of Exhibitions’, The Exhibitionist, 4 (2011), p. 27. 27 Martha Ward, ‘What’s Important about the History of Modern Art Exhibitions’, in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Psychology Press, 1996), p. 452.

Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory and Politics (1995) put forward the ‘exhibitionary complex’ as a theory of exhibitions. It drew from Foucault’s theories on institutional articulations of power and discipline. Bennett defined the exhibitionary complex as ‘a set of cultural technologies concerned to organise a voluntary self-regulating citizenry’ and a ‘context for the permanent display of power/knowledge’.28 According to Bennett, the order in the exhibitionary complex was meant to ‘win the hearts and minds, as well as the discipline and training of bodies’. Another groundbreaking publication, Thinking About Exhibitions (1996),29 presented exhibitionary histories, including their structures and socio-political implications, as noteworthy topics of analysis and theorising.30 Recent scholarship on exhibitionary histories has focused largely on contemporary art exhibitions with a global impulse, and has aimed to contribute to constructing a world history of exhibitions. This could be due to the lack of sources on earlier, modern art exhibitions. The ongoing Exhibition Histories series published by Afterall Books is ‘dedicated to shows of contemporary art that have shaped the way art is experienced, made and discussed’.31 Other book-length publications focusing on contemporary curating and art include A Brief History of Curating (2008) by Lucy Lippard and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (2012) by Paul O’Neill, and Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012) by Terry Smith. Showtime: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014) by Jens Hoffman followed up on Bruce Altshuler’s monumental collation of archival materials in two volumes, Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions that Made History 1863–1959 and Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions that Made History 1962–2002, published in 2008 and 2013 respectively. These authors have canonised exhibitions and stamped their authority and tastes on what makes an exhibition art historically significant. Altshuler’s compendium of two books is an important resource on seminal exhibitions that shaped both modern and contemporary art history and artistic practices. Its analysis of archival photographs and exhibition text excerpts and discourses provides insight into how these exhibitions were critically received and debated. However, both books

28 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, p. 63 (emphasis is in the original text). 29 Ibid., p. 84. 30 See Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne (eds), Thinking about Exhibitions. 31 Making Art Global (Part 1) The Third Havana Biennial 1989, The Exhibition Histories series (London: Afterall Books, 2011), p. 3.

17 traced the history of exhibitions largely from Euro-America, with the exception of only one exhibition, China/Avant-Garde in Beijing in 1989. Altshuler’s inclusion of China/Avant-Garde is merely a tokenistic recognition of the meteoric international rise of Chinese contemporary art. The Euro-American focus of exhibitionary histories continued in Jens Hoffman’s Showtime. Most of Hoffman’s selected exhibitions took place ‘in Europe and North America, several were in South America, Africa and Asia, and the Middle East, and almost all were international in scope’. This would demonstrate ‘the truly global nature of the art world that has developed since 1989’.32 The limited attention to exhibitions outside Euro-America diminishes the importance of locality in exhibitions, and ignores that exhibitions emerge not out of nowhere, but under particular historical conditions. This thesis is not meant to canonise exhibitions in Southeast Asia although many of these exhibitons under discussion have been undergoing canonisation through their restagings and art historicisation. The problem of canonising exhibitions extends beyond the issue of the inclusion or exclusion of events. It leads to the canonisation of curators or exhibition-makers, and towards a slippery slope of hagiography. Even more perturbing is how a history of exhibitions may lead to what Myers describes as a phobia of the study of artworks due to the fear of promoting the fetishisation of objects.33 Instead, this thesis considers exhibitions in relation to artworks and artists. Critical exhibitions by art collectives like TUAFT have been marginalised in the art history of Thailand because of their association with communism and because of a broader suppression of the left intellectual movement in the region. The experimental and radical ideas proposed by these critical exhibitions could be conceived as being part of a history of ideas and concepts through exhibition-making that counters the project of canonising exhibitions. For instance, largely forgotten critical exhibitions such as TAV’s Time Show (1990) rather than the better-known The Space exhibition at the Hong Bee warehouse in 1992 recuperate the art historical significance of radical concepts in time-based performance art.34 The criteria for selecting these critical exhibitions go beyond ideas of the new or the

32 Jens Hoffman, Showtime: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), p. 16. 33 Myers, ‘On the Value of a History of Exhibitions’, p. 24. 34 The Space was a large exhibition located at the Hong Bee Warehouse, 60 Robertson Quay, from 31 May to 21 June 1992. It was a historically significant exhibition as it included works by around 30 artists, including foreign artists from Japan and the Philippines who made site-specific installations that intentionally responded to the space. This exhibition included performances with the audience as active participants in meaning-

18 controversial that align with the modernist narratives of linear and evolutionary progress. Instead, the selected exhibitions shifted towards concepts that stemmed from the social and political realities of everyday life. The artists involved produced art manifestos that propelled the exhibition as a vehicle of social change, and they created new ways of thinking about exhibitions, art and exhibition-making in terms of time and space. They sought to activate and change the mindset of their audiences by involving them in the exhibitions as active participants. Art historical scholarship on exhibitions outside Euro-America has emerged only in the last five years. Wee Wan-Ling’s ‘“We Asians”? Modernity, Visual Art Exhibitions, and East Asia’ (2010) examines East Asian exhibitions, focusing on contemporary Asian art exhibitions ‘conceived primarily for viewers in Asia’ rather than for international and largely Euro-American audiences.35 Wee defines the ‘exhibitionary imaginary’ as ‘an articulation of a modern culture that represents the contemporary moment of East Asia … predicated upon a desire to have a comparative understanding of the regional creation of modern artistic culture’.36 For Wee, the display and curatorial model of the Asian Art Shows in 1979 and 1980, organised by the Fukuoka Art Museum, continued to be circumscribed by the nation state. Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art, co-organised by the Japan Foundation and the Tokyo City Opera Art gallery in 2002, broke new ground by adopting postmodernist strategies of the ‘de-centered, the multiple, and the heterogeneous’ in the region.37 Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art, edited by Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, provides a global survey of biennialisation since the 1950s. It examines typologies of biennale formats within the larger context of the artistic, political and economic dimensions of globalisation. It devotes a chapter to the rise of biennales across Asia, thus acknowledging the impact and significance of curatorial experimentation in this region.38 Curatorial experimentation in Southeast Asia

making. It could be studied as a continuation of The Time Show, or as an ongoing investigation into time and space in an increasingly urbanised Singapore. The Hong Bee Warehouse was itself eventually demolished for redevelopment despite the best efforts of the artists to propose it as a space for contemporary art. 35 C.J. W.-L. Wee, ‘“We Asians”? Modernity, Visual Art Exhibitions, and East Asia’, boundary 2, 37.1 (2010), p. 94. 36 Ibid., p. 93. 37 Ibid., p. 126. 38 Anthony Gardner and Charles Green (eds), Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), pp. 111–44.

19 beyond biennales is extended to curatorial practices, exhibition-making and discourses on exhibitions in SouthEastAsia: Spaces of the Curatorial, a volume of essays edited by Ute Meta Bauer and Brigitte Oetker.39 Both this publication and that edited by Gardner and Green assert the creative and innovative practices of exhibition-making across diverse exhibition formats in Asia and lay the groundwork for a history of exhibitions in the region. Patrick Flores’s Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia, published in 2008, surveys the complex role of the curator in the Southeast Asian region.40 Local curators often function as provocateurs who take on multiple roles, including that of artist-curator. Examples range from institutional curators such as Raymundo Albano, who was the Director of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines, and Redza Piyadasa, who pushed the boundaries of his own artistic practices. Piyadasa was deeply involved in the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (National Art Gallery) since 1972, serving as a member of its board of advisors and curating a range of exhibitions.41 The exhibition Towards a Mystical Reality, co-organised by Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, proposed Daoist and Buddhist philosophies as alternative theoretical underpinnings to conceptualism. Flores’s focus was on curation and curatorial strategies employed by these influential Southeast Asian artist-curators rather than on exhibitions as sites of exchange, or on the structures and socio-political implications of the exhibitions themselves. Michelle Antoinette’s Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990 is another important contribution to the history of exhibitions. It has an entire chapter on ‘exhibiting Southeast Asian difference’, which examines the circulation of Southeast Asian art across international exhibitions such as Under Construction (2002, Tokyo), Cities on the Move (1999, Bangkok), and 36 Ideas (2002, Singapore). As Antoinette rightly notes, these exhibitions are not free from essentialist notions of national, regional and other types of identity.42 Southeast Asia as a regional construction and conceptual device in this thesis provides a framework of comparison for the history of exhibitions. Despite the diversity that

39 See Ute Meta Bauer and Brigitte Oetker (eds), SouthEastAsia: Spaces of the Curatorial (Berlin: Steinberg Press, 2016). 40 Flores, Past Peripheral, pp. 34–69. 41 Redza Piyadasa was a lecturer at the School of Art and Design in the MARA Institute. Later, he became a lecturer in sculpture and three-dimensional studies at the University Sains Malaysia. Both institutions are national bodies. 42 Michelle Antoinette, Reworlding Art History: Encounters with Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990 (Amsterdam: Brill, 2014).

20 characterises this region, the concept of ‘Southeast Asia’ has gained traction in academia, state discourse and the minds of the peoples who live there. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s concept of nation states as ‘imagined communities’, Amitav Archarya uses the idea of ‘imagining the region’ to conceptualise Southeast Asia as an ‘imagined and socially constructed community’.43 Archarya identifies territorial proximities, geographical and economic interconnections, and ideologies as the main drivers of a desire for region-ness and regionalism. This sustained desire and search for regionalism is based on ideas and myths of shared past histories. Leaders of independence movements after the Second World War have played decisive and significant roles in shaping these histories, even if the concept of nationalism was initially a foreign idea from Europe. Various ideas of region-ness have manifested themselves in oral histories, myths, poems, literature, illustrations, institutions, artworks, material culture, and, as argued in this thesis, also exhibitions. Art exhibitions in the region have functioned as vehicles of resistance against colonialism, have generated and disseminated shared ideas of postcolonial reality, and have empowered communities by creating new subjectivities for a postcolonial future in Southeast Asia.

Towards a History of Exhibitions in Southeast Asia: The Critical Exhibition

This thesis is the first scholarly work on the history of exhibitions in the region and proposes analytical tools and methodologies for the study of exhibitions.44 It focuses on a particular type of exhibition: the critical exhibition that emerged across the region from the 1970s. The brief of Comparative Contemporaries states that ‘what has not kept pace with the exhibition of contemporary art from Southeast Asia is the art criticism about it … this body of writing remains largely un-collated, insufficiently analysed, and poorly distributed’.45 This brings

43 Amitav Archarya, ‘The Making of Southeast Asia: Re-Imagining a Region’, in Singapore Biennale 2013: If the World Changed (Singapore: SAM, 2013), pp. 15–21. 44 The scope of the current scholarship on the history of exhibitions focuses on Europe and America, with publications such as Harald Szeeman, With by through because towards despite: Catalogue of All Exhibitions 1957–2005 (2007); Altshuler, Salon to Biennial; and Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lionel Bovier, A Brief History of Curating (2008); Paula Marincola, What Makes a Great Exhibition? (London: Reacktion Books, 2007). 45 Comparative Contemporaries: A Web Anthology Project was a project initiated by art critic Lee Weng Choy. It began with a one-day symposium and two days of workshops, titled Comparative Contemporaries and organised by The Substation in 2012. The web anthology on Southeast Asian art commenced in late 2012. See the website http://comparative.aaa.org.hk/ for more details.

21 two issues related to exhibition histories to the fore. The first is the extent to which writings on art are spurred by exhibitions. Exhibitions have emerged as a significant medium through which art is displayed, accessed, and interpreted. They have led to the production of exhibitionary practices and discourses, which constitute specific knowledge about modern and contemporary art. The second issue is how prevailing writings may be interpreted for developing histories of exhibitions, including critical exhibitions. This involves tracing the social, political and economic contexts that are bound by institutional, curatorial, scholarly, state and supranational interests. Flores’s Past Peripheral is a key scholarly publication on the history of curation in the region, but it focuses on the history of curators as ‘artist- curators’ rather than on the history of exhibitions as such. Regional survey exhibitions such as Telah Terbit (Out Now): Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices During the 1970s, curated by Ahmad Mashadi at the Singapore Art Museum (2006), have also looked at the history of artist collectives and movements as exhibition makers that popularised conceptualism in the region through their art-making and exhibitions. This thesis pays attention to the exhibitions organised by Mashadi and frames them historically as a different type of exhibition: the critical exhibition. Critical exhibitions shaped not just exhibition-making, exhibitionary knowledge, and innovation in the display of art. They also provoked the questioning of social injustices, inequalities and dominant institutional structures of power aimed at maintaining the status quo. By researching the different typologies of exhibitions that have emerged and changed over the years, this thesis will provide a history of exhibitions that reveals both continuities and ruptures between past and present art exhibitionary formats. It aims to give a better understanding of how contemporary modes of exhibitions, such as the biennales that proliferate in Asian and Southeast Asian art today, share resonances with past modes of exhibitions like the critical exhibition. While the study of exhibition typology is useful to understand the characteristics of exhibitions and, therefore, better appraise their impact on the history of art, it should not result in a fixed and unchanging view of exhibitions. This thesis acknowledges differences between exhibitions, even those within the same exhibitionary mode. This is most evident in the adoption of varied exhibitionary strategies towards space, as some critical exhibitions were located in public spaces like streets, while others inhabited, and thus subverted, conventional white cube gallery spaces. With the intention of broadening awareness about

Southeast Asian art and the role of exhibitions in shaping alternative art histories, this thesis will analyse art trajectories located in multiple contexts and social conditions that are different from those in Europe and America.46

Research Questions and Objectives

Changing social and political conditions in post-war Southeast Asia – with states undergoing their own nationalist struggles against colonialism, periods of nation-building and industrialisation, and the urgent need to construct national cultural identities – demanded new forms of art and exhibitions. New typologies of exhibitions emerged from the context of novel, more conceptual ways of thinking about and making art (see Chapter 2). Three main, overlapping sets of questions related to these developments are addressed in this thesis. First, why and how did the critical exhibition as a new exhibitionary mode emerge, proliferate and persist in the context of new, more conceptual ways of thinking about and making art? How did it manifest itself as an active agent in the changing social, political and cultural contexts of Southeast Asia’s art worlds? How did it emerge from the conditions and contexts created by decolonisation, the Cold War, nationalism and multiple modernisms within and outside the region? Historicising the emergence of critical exhibitions requires identifying the characteristics that define a critical exhibition. It also requires locating the overlapping and interconnected histories that generate resonances between these critical exhibitions across the region. Second, what was the impact of critical exhibitions on modern and contemporary artistic practices? What were the contested concepts and ideas that emerged in Southeast Asian art manifestos? Appraising the impact of critical exhibitions on the trajectories of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia involves a comparative examination of the critical exhibition as a site of exchange between different social, political and cultural discourses in various spatial and temporal contexts. As a discursive site, the critical exhibition produced local art terms as a form of calibration.47 Exhibitionary space and time

46 See John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 47 Marian Pastor-Roces, ‘Words’, Eyeline, 22/23 (Summer 1993), p. 45. Available at http://comparative.aaa.org.hk/node/96?page=0,0/.

23 offered multiple rather than singular notions of time and space as a way of decentring Western-centric conceptions (see Chapters 5 and 6). To establish the study of exhibitions as an academic field of inquiry requires expanding methodologies beyond art history to include other disciplines, such as Southeast Asian studies, anthropology, cultural studies, history, and curatorial studies. Third, how did critical exhibitions change the notion of what art is and how it is displayed? How did the critical exhibition become transformed into a vehicle of dissent and resistance against socio-political and economic injustices? What exhibitionary strategies were adopted to advance new ways of conceiving time, space, and discourse through art that responded to changing social and political contexts? One of the objectives of this thesis is to examine shared exhibitionary strategies that expanded the scope of what art could do. These strategies demonstrated connections between art and exhibitions as vehicles of dissent and resistance against socio-political and economic injustices, or as challenges to the dominance of Western ways of thinking about art and its related institutional structures of power and authority. The radical nature of the critical exhibition necessitates constant interpretation and reinterpretation of art and exhibition histories. This is most clearly demonstrated by the recent, multiple restagings of critical art exhibitions, which provide temporal links between the past and the present. Through restagings, critical exhibitions organised by ‘men of prowess’ like F.X. Harsono and Jim Supangkat in GSRB, and Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa in TMR, present themselves as ‘open exhibitions’ that create and interrupt their own histories. I answer the three main questions of this thesis by comparatively analysing and contextualising the seven critical exhibitions mentioned above. Locating them in the context of changing regional and local social, political and cultural conditions is the focus of Chapter 2. This chapter analyses the emergence of the critical exhibition within the intersecting spheres of student radicalisation, the left intellectual movement, nationalism, and resistance to imperialism in a world gripped by the Cold War. Chapter 3 demonstrates how critical exhibitions constantly threatened to collapse art into the everyday, but yet maintained an aesthetic distance from life. This aesthetic distance refers to the gap between a person’s awareness of reality and a fictional reality constructed by a work of art. Chapter 4 focuses on the exhibitionary discourse produced by critical exhibitions in the form of art manifestos that drew on diverse cultural sources. Chapter 5 describes how critical

24 exhibitions deconstructed the universalist ideology of the white cube gallery space by engaging with the realities of the everyday. Chapter 6 analyses the multiple temporalities of critical exhibitions, which exploded the notion of a single homogeneous time. Chapter 7 discusses how and why critical exhibitions are being restaged in the present to offer constant reinterpretations of and new links between the past and the present. Art theory, exhibitionary discourse, concepts of space and time, and the restaging of exhibitions are proposed as entry points for a comparative examination of how critical exhibitions responded to specific sets of problems and contingencies circumscribed by artistic, economic, political and social contexts. These entry points provide different perspectives on how an exhibition can be analysed and contribute to a methodology for the history of exhibitions. Lastly, these entry points shed light on the distinct characteristics of the critical exhibition and how they differ from those of other exhibitionary modes. In Chapter 1, Obrist’s observation about the relative absence of curatorial knowledge and an amnesia surrounding exhibition histories is addressed by bringing together literature across the disciplines of cultural studies, art history, Southeast Asian studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology and curatorial studies to construct and analyse exhibition histories. The main focus of this chapter is to coalesce a body of writings on and produced by exhibitions on Southeast Asian art. There is an urgent need for local art history to go beyond national boundaries and to break with the tendency to be a part of the national narrative or to forge a national culture as demanded by the nation state. Exhibition history is not meant to function as a handmaiden to art history either, but to deliver a discourse comprising comparative and interdisciplinary knowledge that addresses the display, reception and dissemination of art through the medium of the exhibition as a critical form. Chapter 2 historicises the changing exhibition typologies, focusing on the birth of the critical exhibition within the broader contexts of student radicalisation, New Left intellectual movements, and a conceptual expansion and problematisation of the idea of ‘art for life’ as a rhetorical device in art manifestos. This chapter presents a typology of exhibitions in Southeast Asia from the pre- to post-Second World War periods that provides the historical context for the emergence of the critical exhibition in the 1970s. It approaches these exhibitions as products of the institutional structures and social and political contexts of the art world. Salon, group, ethnic, medium-based and regional exhibitionary modes served the needs of artists who wanted to display their work to the public, and these modes projected

25 early aspirations towards a region and region-ness. Another mode, the internationalist exhibition, emerged from processes of nation-building and forms of nationalism that looked outwards to the international by engaging with developmentalism and industrialisation. Artists and forms of collectivism that sought to connect with international avant-garde movements such as abstraction produced the internationalist exhibition as a new type of exhibition. Concurrent with the internationalist exhibition was the emergence of the critical exhibition as a new exhibitionary mode in the 1970s. Chapter 3 discusses the turn to the everyday as a repoliticisation of art driven by criticality as its methodology. The turn to the everyday expanded the notion of art, from the restricted Western modernist confines of ‘fine art’, mainly painting and sculpture, taught by art academies across the region in the 1970s, to art-making and critical exhibitions attuned to the concrete realities of life. The depoliticisation of art was a direct consequence of the Cold War, as authoritarian regimes cast the left intellectual movement as communists, thereby disrupting critical leftist thought and suppressing student radicalism and other forms of political and activist movements. Chapter 3 reveals how critical exhibitions and the artworks displayed in this new exhibitionary mode worked against the suppression of the left intellectual and cultural movement in the region. They countered the fears, constructed by Cold War propaganda, that communism would destroy freedom and democracy. Critical exhibitions opened up a space for rethinking art as something that is inseparable from everyday life and politics, and as capable of changing society through its core exhibitionary strategy of a critical attitude. A convergence between the conceptual and socially engaged artistic practices in the critical exhibition repoliticised art, expanded its sources to include non-artistic everyday materials and popular culture, and reclaimed public spaces, such as streets, as a strategy for artistic display. Art was no longer seen as something to be created by the individual genius-artist, but rather as something to be produced collaboratively and collectively. The critical exhibition turned into a vehicle for generating artistic self-reflexivity, and for empowering people through art. Chapter 4 focuses on the production of exhibitionary discourses by critical exhibitions. These discourses intersected various fields of cultural production, such as literature and popular culture. The discussion focuses on a specific type of exhibitionary discourse produced by critical exhibitions, namely art manifestos. Art manifestos as a symptom of criticality produced by critical exhibitions across Southeast Asia since the 1970s

26 were informed by Marxism, anti-colonialism, and other ideologies of alterity. This chapter examines how critical exhibitions engaged in a discursive struggle over competing notions of the ‘real’, ‘new’, and ‘concrete’. This manifestation of productive discursive dissensus intersected with the social and political contexts of the region and the broader geopolitics of the Cold War. Chapter 5 examines how changing social and political conditions produced new spaces for the representation of art. It demonstrates how the critical exhibition adopted a critical attitude that challenged the white cube as a modernist form of exhibitionary space that espoused universalism. It also analyses how critical exhibitions reclaimed public spaces, such as the street, which were previously under the control of the state or owned by capitalist forces. Critical exhibitions provided alternative imaginations of exhibitionary spaces, including physical and mental spaces for ‘the people’ (rakyat in Malay and Indonesian), beyond capitalist and rational motivations. This chapter presents the critical exhibition as a viable critical form for producing different subjectivities and social imaginaries. Chapter 6 addresses exhibitionary time, another element of the critical in critical exhibitions and one which was integral to dilating time and freeing it from singularity. Critical exhibitions produced heterogenous time rather than adhering to the modernist conception of time as singular, universal and homogeneous. A heterogenous notion of fractured temporalities broke free from a linear concept of time, which privileged the origin – usually the West – and set the Other in a perpetual state of belatedness. Alternative forms of temporalities, located in the synchronic and anarchic produced by critical exhibitions, attenuated Western-centric notions of time and produced multiple temporalities out of various social, political and cultural contexts. In Chapter 7, the thesis returns to the question of the impact of critical exhibitions by examining why this new typology of exhibition is being restaged in the present. Sites of memories, such as the archive, the memorial and various impulses of subjectivity contest, resist and challenge the threat of forgetting the place of the critical exhibition in the history of art and exhibitions. Memory-making as a form of critique propelled by critical exhibitions reveals the capacity for reinterpreting histories and creating new ways of representing art to the public. The linkages between the present and the past in the restaged critical exhibitions are a reminder that the critical exhibition does not reach a conclusion, but rather that it is

27 constantly open to reinterpretation. Powered by its exhibitionary openness to provoke, contest and radically question the role and purpose of art, it constantly enters cycles of interpretation and reinterpretation. The restaging of critical exhibitions underlines the need to constantly question the viability of criticality manifested in this new exhibitionary mode.

Research Methodology

In the symposium Sites of Construction, the study of exhibitions is specifically significant in the context of Southeast Asia, considering the relative absence of art history programmes in universities in the region. The lack of art history programmes and departments for the study of modern and contemporary art has resulted in an increased expectation for exhibitions to construct art history in terms of display and discourse. This is markedly different to Euro- America, where art histories are constructed by both universities and museums, albeit with significant divergences. The conference and subsequent publication, The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (1999), teased out the tensions between museum and academic professionals, with the former being more object-centred and focused on the aesthetics of artefacts, whereas the latter are overly reliant on theory and art’s role in society.48 In the context of Southeast Asia, exhibition makers bear the burden of constructing the ‘grand narrative’ of national and regional art histories, while simultaneously trying to be innovative and critically question the very same ‘grand narrative’. Equally challenging is that the writing of Southeast Asian modern art history began only after the Second World War, whereas modern Western art history has developed since the nineteenth century. This raises the pressing issue of developing a methodology that can be extended to exhibitions, which have played such a pivotal role in the construction of art histories in Southeast Asia. In the Sites of Construction symposium, Flores emphasised the need for methodologies:

And can art historians enlist the methods of art history in studying exhibitions as material that contains material? Or does exhibition history posit a distinct way of investigating its material altogether? [emphasis added] And if so, from which episteme will it read the exhibition? From

48 Charles W. Haxthausen (ed.), The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2002).

visual culture, aesthetic anthropology, phenomenology? I am interested in the responses because it may well be that the ‘curatorial’ offers a critical speculation and a procedure, that it ex-cites and infuses frisson. I suspect that it is the curatorial that will break the impasse between the art historical and the exhibitionary [emphasis added] and hold out a third moment that may finally elaborate on the contemporary.49

Flores’s call for a methodology to study exhibitions extends beyond methodologies enlisted from art history to serve other, adjacent fields such as the study of visual culture. A survey of the symposium’s panellists and contributors shows a mix of academics who have been trained primarily as historians and do not curate exhibitions, such as Kevin Chua, Pamela N. Corey, Iftikhar Dadi, Sophie Ernst, Lucy Steeds and Joan Kee, and art historians who are also curators, including Patrick Flores, Simon Soon, John Clark, Irit Rogoff and Gao Shiming. Perhaps having in mind his own background as an academic trained in art history but also as someone active in the world of curating, Flores proposes the ‘curatorial’ as ‘an aspect of the exhibition’s fracture and its aesthetic and discursive articulation of the historical’ that is open to the risk of critique and reframing.50 I argue that criticality inhabits the curatorial because it creates fractures in narratives and unconsciously accepted conventions, and it destabilises meaning in art. The curatorial as a productive field generating its own methodologies and approaches that can be used to forge connections between art histories and exhibition histories will be unpacked in Chapter 5. This thesis also adopts the construction of models of critical exhibitions as an analytical tool in the study of exhibitions. The use of physical exhibition models opens new pathways for studying exhibitions not only as texts or discourses, but also as experiences – visitors experience an exhibition using their visual, mental and sensory faculties. This method of studying exhibitions by recreating how exhibitions are phenomenally experienced breaks the dominant methodology of reading exhibitions as texts, whether by focusing primarily on the exhibition texts themselves or by reading the artworks as if they are texts. Comparing one or two artworks without taking into account how they actually engage in a dialogue with each other disregards the phenomenological experience facilitated by the exhibition space. Adopting physical exhibition models enables the role of

49 Flores, ‘The Exhibition as Historical’, p. 104. 50 Ibid., p. 103

29 the exhibition in resisting the hegemony of the white cube gallery space to be unpacked, and it allows for new ways of thinking about art and its relation to space to be forged. Chapter 5 addresses these matters in more detail. The art historical study of exhibitions has veered towards the analysis of the textual discourse produced in exhibition collaterals, such as catalogues, reviews, invitations curator’s notes and letters, and correspondence related to the exhibition. Most exhibition studies by art historians produce critical readings of such writings, and they marshal various forms of oral, written and photographic documentation, if it is available. Besides discourse analysis used to comparatively study the terminologies used in art manifestos, scholars of exhibition histories adopt iconography to analyse each artwork singularly, or sometimes in comparison with another artwork in the exhibition. They rarely situate and relate the artworks in an exhibition spatially, in an active dialogue, or even in tension with each other. This is tied to a lack of reflexivity on the problematics of not physically being there at the time of the exhibition to experience it firsthand. The exhibitionary discourse analysed in this thesis refers to the specific forms of discourses, including art manifestos, produced by the exhibitions themselves (see Chapter 4). Questions pertaining to the curatorial in the exhibitionary space include the spatial experience and flow of the exhibition, the typography of the exhibition texts, lighting, display strategies, and other sensory elements like sound. These aspects are usually overlooked in favour of analyses of curatorial texts and the intentions of artists. Even the reception of the exhibition is usually restricted to appraising published exhibition reviews over oral accounts of audiences who experienced the exhibition. This is due to a bias of written sources over oral ones.51 Acknowledging exhibitionary space as active rather than static and homogeneous shifts the way we think about exhibitions. Reimagining the exhibitionary space as a constellation of elements enables an understanding of the interrelations of the exhibition components (e.g., the artworks, lighting, modes of display, and wall texts), which are not discrete but contingent elements. Besides space, exhibitionary time is part of this constellation of elements and one that is constantly changing (see Chapter 6). Exhibitionary time is distinguished from more

51 For instance, although Tang Da Wu does not want to be interviewed on The Artists Village as his time with the artist collective was to him, in the past, other artists like Koh Nguang How and Low Eng Teong were interviewed to give more balanced accounts of The Time Show.

30 general notions of time, because exhibitions generate not single but multiple experiences of time. An exhibition can be experienced by visitors discretely when they visit the exhibition at a specific time and day. Exhibitions also exist over a duration of time, from its first opening to the public to when it closes. The afterlife of the exhibition continues in yet another time. Exhibition histories that tend to focus on the exhibition as a single historical moment in time tend to overlook the longer-term reception of exhibitions and their impact on art and exhibition-making. The existence of multiple rather than singular moments of time, and a pluralistic concept of exhibitionary time, need to be considered. Exhibitionary time consists of multiple trajectories of time that are not homogeneous and static. The reception of exhibitions is another area that requires new methodologies besides the discourse analysis of published exhibition reviews. It needs to account for the multiplicity of exhibitionary experiences, without over-privileging the perspectives of the art critic, historian and curator. This thesis will not focus on reception as such, but it seeks to promote dynamic, relational ways of studying exhibitions as an alternative to more fixed and stable approaches. In a catalogue accompanying the official opening of the Singapore Art Museum in 1996, art historian T.K. Sabapathy wrote:

Those from other regions are busily embarked upon the task of mapping Southeast Asian art history especially those from Japan, Australia and the United States. Drawing attention to such occurrences is not to fuel xenophobic fever or to induce withdrawal into defensive positions – on the contrary. It is undoubtedly important to know how others [from the other regions] see us [in our region]. Even so, it is equally important to know how we see or regard ourselves in our region and as belonging in a region.52

This thesis employs a regional scope and methodology within its history of exhibitions. It offers a perspective that accounts for local and regional artistic developments as active agents in the shaping of these histories. Relating these developments to global contexts gives a layered and textured understanding of the region. An ethnographic approach to Southeast Asian art was proposed by Nora Taylor as a way to excavate the memories of artists. This method to construct art historical narratives

52 T.K. Sabapathy, Singapore Art Museum: A Perspective (Roseville, NSW: Fine Arts Pty., 1996), unpaginated.

31 was meant to compensate for the lack of written art histories in the region. Laurie Sears’s study provided a new perspective on colonialism in the region by focusing on ‘the ways in which new knowledges were brought into being as a result of the interaction between coloniser and the colonised, and the ways in which these knowledges were continually transformed’.53 Sears’s call for the production of new knowledge by studying cultural interactions without privileging the coloniser sits well with John Clark’s recommendation of the study of cultural transfers, signalling a shift from the privileging of Western origins and issues of authenticity and derivation.54 Concepts from Southeast Asian studies, such as O.W. Wolters’s ‘man of prowess’, offer possibilities for rethinking how the organisers of critical exhibitions produced their own forms of prowess, eventually even steering the restagings of earlier exhibitions.55 Sabapathy has identified how ‘generalized accounts of modern art practices in Southeast Asia’, as well as the histories of art in the region, are largely circumscribed by national boundaries, thereby impeding the development of regionalist perspectives.56 Country-based approaches tend to construct hagiographies or coalesce into national narratives that privilege the formation of the nation state over other narratives and events that may move in different directions. More importantly, a comparative approach makes it possible to track the strategies of critical exhibitions. Attention will be paid to continuities and ruptures in the histories of critical exhibitions, which were produced under local social, political and cultural conditions that both resonated with and differed between countries in the region. As dynamic networks of constantly interacting constituents, these art worlds were also shaped by the larger regional and international social and political contexts in which

53 Laurie J. Sears, ‘The Contingency of Autonomous History’, in Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths: Essays in Honour of John R.W. Smail, ed. Laurie J Sears (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), pp. 1–46. 54 Clark, Modern Asian Art. 55 O.W. Wolters, History, Culture and Religion in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Ithaca, NY and Singapore: Cornell South East Asia Program and ISEAS, 1999), pp. 5–7. The gendered use of the term ‘man of prowess’ reflects the male-dominated field of Southeast Asian studies, notwithstanding a few important female exceptions. There has been recent scholarship addressing this gender imbalance by examining female leadership. See Sher Banu A.L. Khan, ‘Men of Prowess and Women of Piety: A Case Study of Aceh Dar al-Salam in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 44.2 (2013), pp. 204–25. See also O.W. Wolters, Early Southeast Asia: Selected Essays (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and SEAP Publications, 2008) for the concept of ‘man of prowess’. 56 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Premises for Critical Studies of Modern Art in Southeast Asia’, paper presented at the 2nd ASEAN Symposium on Art and Photography, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1982.

32 they were embedded. Each art world was geographically defined by its country-specific context; hence, collectively they shared both similarities and differences in their institutional structures. Similarities included the establishment of art academies modelled after European art academies, particularly the École des Beaux-Arts, and the concentrated focus on organising exhibitions by artists as the primary way of displaying and disseminating art.57 In this way, the proliferating production of critical exhibitions across the region’s art worlds from the 1970s to the 1990s could be understood as stemming from prevailing focus points within those worlds. There were also nuanced differences between the art worlds of each country in Southeast Asia. The framework of art worlds thereby offers a network of interactions across local, regional and international space and time that is flexible, interdisciplinary and facilitating of comparisons across countries in the region. This thesis will examine critical exhibitions as critical sites that produced exhibitionary discourses not only in terms of texts, but also in terms of how the works were displayed, received and disseminated. It will demonstrate that this type of exhibition constructed ‘the modern’ both textually (through the written word, such as in newspapers) and visually through exhibition-making strategies. It will explore new ways of analysing primary sources by approaching exhibition catalogues not only as texts but also as discursive spaces in which fonts, design and layout extended exhibitionary strategies and ideological positions. The exhibition catalogue became the afterlife of the exhibition as it opened up discursive spaces for critical discussion and the dissemination of the critical exhibition’s ideas and manifestos. This thesis refers to catalogues, when viewed as a distinct body of writing produced for the purpose of exhibitions, as ‘exhibitionary discourse’. Exhibitionary discourse includes the curatorial text that frames the exhibition as well as other writings related to the curatorial objectives of the exhibition, and it aims at altering and changing how its intended publics understand, interpret and receive new forms of art. Critical exhibitions presented art in non-art spaces, including civic, commercial and transitory spaces. In doing so, they created encounters of strangeness that made the familiarity of everyday objects and experiences unfamiliar in either appearance or function. This thesis adopts the curatorial tool of physical exhibition models to reconstruct how these

57 The École des Beaux-Arts and its art curriculum were transferred to Vietnam and Cambodia under the French colonial administration. Art academies like the Xiamen Academy of Art in China transferred its curriculum to Singapore through the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. See Clark, Modern Asian Art, pp. 175–90.

33 critical exhibitions would have displayed artworks, how visitors would have navigated the exhibition, and, most importantly, how visitors would have encountered the artworks in dialogue with each other.58 The accuracy of the models of critical exhibitions has been achieved by combining the study of archival photographic documentation with semi- structured interviews with the exhibition organisers. Other existing frameworks for studying exhibitions have been circumscribed by forms of art history and art criticism that privilege the singular art object as an autonomous experience without considering the dialogue between artworks in an exhibitionary space. As such, they fail to locate the production of exhibitions and their changing modes within the context of new socio-political realities. The interdisciplinary methodology in this thesis draws on Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory to frame exhibitions as discursive sites.59 Mouffe’s concept of ‘floating signifiers’ as privileged elements in the web of discourse allows the identification of the ‘new’ and the ‘real’ as floating signifiers in the exhibitionary discourse of critical exhibitions. Adopting Mouffe’s discourse theory translates into a methodology for examining the struggles between the ‘new’, the ‘real’, and the ‘concrete’ within the domain of exhibitionary discourses and other discursive domains (e.g. poetry and literature). This allows an understanding of how the structure of exhibitions is constituted and changed by competition within and between orders of discourse (Appendix D). This research does not use the exhibition catalogue merely as an historical document; rather, it treats it as an experimental space that intersects with exhibition- making, the art manifesto, artworks, the reproduction of artwork images, graphic texts, critical reflection, and ideologies of the critical exhibition. Oral history (See Appendix E for the list of oral interviews conducted) is another important part of the methodology, especially because of the paucity of primary sources. Many of the artists in, and makers of, the critical exhibitions are still available for interviews. They possess archival materials on exhibitions and have continued their artistic practices up to the present, thus providing an important data source for this research.

58 Computer programs such as Sketchup are alternative ways of reconstructing past exhibitions. 59 See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 1–6. See also Laclau and Mouffe, ‘Post-Marxism without Apologies’, in Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 79–100.

Scope of Research and Limitations

This study focuses only on a selection of critical exhibitions in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, countries that are generally regarded as being part of Southeast Asia.60 My current research has not produced indications of critical exhibitions in other countries in the region, like Vietnam, Laos, Brunei and Cambodia, during the period studied in this thesis. Critical exhibitions could have emerged in these countries in the late 1990s. For instance, Nha San Studio, established in Hanoi in 1998, has functioned as a site for international exchanges, exhibitions, lectures and workshops on performance, installation and video art. The absence of critical exhibitions in some Southeast Asian countries suggests that certain social and political conditions are needed for the exhibitionary mode to emerge, such as student radicalisation movements, independent artist collectivism, and spaces for artistic experimentation in the public sphere. More research is required to examine the relationship between experimental practices and exhibitions or spaces. An aim of this research is to demonstrate that the emergence of the critical exhibition was not an isolated phenomenon limited to a single country but rather that it resonated across countries from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The comparative focus of this approach has resulted in the exclusion of several exhibitions that could have been appraised according to the six characteristics of critical exhibitions outlined earlier in this chapter. For instance, exhibitions in Malaysia in the 1970s, such as the Manifestasi Dua Seni exhibition organised in 1970 and 1971, brought poets and artists together to collaborate and explore how they could respond creatively to each other, thus blurring the conceptual boundaries between literature and visual art.61 Manifestasi Dua Seni is an example of an exhibition that bore some characteristics of critical exhibitions, but it was ultimately excluded on the grounds that criticality was not its primary driver.

60 The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional grouping that promotes economic and cultural cooperation, while maintaining the principle of sovereignty of each member state. It includes Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. 61 Simon Soon, ‘The March of Semar and his Cavalcade: A Rearview Mirror on the Art Exhibitions in 1970s Malaysia’, lecture presented at the symposium ‘History of Exhibitions’ convened by Very May and Biljana Ciric at the ST PAUL Street Gallery, Auckland, 7–9 August 2013.

Another instance is Anak Alam (Children of Nature), a loosely organised interdisciplinary collective of painters, theatre practitioners and other artists, which was established on 1 May 1974.62 ‘Anak Alam is process, therefore it is full of possibility’ was Ismail Abdullah’s assessment of the artists’ collective.63 Anak Alam occupied a mansion named Taman Budaya in Kuala Lumpur. Its focus on interdisciplinary practices and process was evident in its first exhibition in 1974 on ‘Nature Day’, an event over two days and two nights with ‘spontaneous and creative activities by and for the whole family; events day and night, including enviro-sculpture, drama, pantomime, playreading, and mini-kata; poetry readings, bamboo gamelan, and much more’.64 Anak Alam became a place for artists such as Latiff Mohidin, Yusof Osman, Zulkifli Dahalan, Mustpha Ibrahim, Siti Zainon Ismail, Tajuddin Ismail, Ali Rahamad and others to exchange ideas, exhibit, and make art across disciplines. Street and experimental theatre led by Omar Abdullah, Muhammad Abdullah, Khalid Salleh and others became an important part of Anak Alam; such theatre was also adopted by the student activist movement, spearheaded by University of Malaya’s Experimental Theatre and other campuses protesting against American imperialism and government corruption.65 Teater Kecil (Small Theatre) was the brainchild of Omar and Muhammad, who produced impromptu theatre in street spaces, bringing plays from the stage directly to the public in the street, much akin to the activities of the broader left intellectual movement in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia.66 One of Yusof Osman’s performances at the Taman Budaya studio in 1974 combined silat with t’ai chi. The combination of two philosophically different martial art forms was a performative metaphor for the modern artist attempting to break out from the canvas frame into three-dimensional space. Osman’s performance was referred to as ‘sketsa drama spontanita’, or ‘spontaneous dramatic sketch’, and it exemplified Anak Alam’s cross- disciplinary experimentations. Despite the collective’s desire to shun the state bureaucracy, they were supported by influential cultural figures and patrons, such as Usman Awang, a

62 Nur Hanum Khairuddin, ‘Anak Alam: Behind the Scenes’, in Reactions: New Critical Strategies (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2013), p. 25. 63 Ismail Abdullah, ‘Pameran Catan dan Arca Anak Alam’, Dewan Budaya, Feburary 1980, p. 45. 64 Latiff Mohidin, Catatan Latiff Mohidin (Kuala Lumpur: Maya Press, 2010). 65 ‘Legacy: Theatre on the Move has Ceased to Exist yet it is Part of the Glorious History of Arts in the Country – Experimentation the Anak Alam Way’, New Straits Times, available at http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/experimentation-the-anak-alam-way-1.379212#ixzz31n3oGvtr. (accessed January 2015). 66 Ibid.

36 poet who also worked as the Senior Research Fellow at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature), and Ismail Zain, who served as the Director of the National Art Gallery, Malaysia, and as the Director-General of Culture at the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports.67 Like critical exhibitions produced by artist collectives in the 1970s, Anak Alam was firmly rooted in the student movement that was locked in a struggle to produce socially engaged art for the common people, address the issue of corruption, and resist the forces of imperialism. The group also deployed a manifesto as a potent vehicle for action and change.68 Their desire for art to be racially blind and constrained only by an artist’s ability to imagine was a response to the 1969 race riots and the 1971 First National Cultural Congress on the construction of a national culture and identity. However, it remains for further research to shed light on a specific exhibition produced by Anak Alam that could be clearly identified as being a critical exhibition. . Another example is Rupa dan Jiwa (Form and Soul), an exhibition curated by artist- turned-art historian Syed Ahmad Jamal at the University of Malaya. In this exhibition, an ambitious selection of Malay visual culture and cultural artefacts was assembled to construct taxonomies and create meanings. Another relevant example was an exhibition with an interrelated series of lectures, Seni dan Imajan (Art and Imagery), curated by Ismail Zain at the National Art Gallery in 1980. This initiative expanded the notion of ‘art’ by bringing traditional craft into dialogue with modern art, and by shifting art and its operative logic away from the conceptual foundations of the West. A range of traditional arts, including wayang kulit, keris, kites, mosque architecture, textiles and contemporary paintings, was marshalled to explore conceptual and symbolic intersections and alternative reference points of cultural knowledge that undermined Western notions of art as a dominant reference point. The timelines of the exhibitions and art institutions in Southeast Asia discussed in this thesis provide an overview of the art historically significant exhibitions that shaped the modern in the region. Appendix B provides individual timelines for each Southeast Asian country. The construction of timelines allows a comparative examination of exhibition

67 Nur Hanum Khairuddin, ‘Anak Alam’, p. 29. 68 Anak Alam, ‘Manifesto Generation Anak Alam’, trans. Wong Hoy Cheong, Reactions, p. 23. This manifesto was first published in the Dewan Sastra, June 1974.

37 histories across the region in relation to their social, political and art world contexts. For instance, the salon exhibition emerged from art societies run by artists who were educated in Paris or had graduated from art academies modelled after the École des Beaux-Arts. Comparison across the timelines reveals that the emergence of the critical exhibition in the 1970s was not an accident, but a product of its time. The timelines provide entry points into understanding the emergence of the critical exhibition as a new type of exhibition that was responding to the social and political conditions surrounding it. Student protest movements proliferated across Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and Singapore in the 1970s. The first wave was a leftist one from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, in which students fought for a more egalitarian society and against pro-US policies, which were seen as neo-imperialist and pro-capitalist. Democracy, human rights, gay rights, and freedom of speech were on the agenda of the leftist movements in the Philippines and Thailand. The ideas of Mao Zedong were influential in the New Left in the Philippines and Thailand, especially Zedong’s 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, which called for the arts to serve the people.69 The second wave, which began in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s, saw student protesters who, although initially sympathetic to the developmentalist goals of their governments, turned against them because of their perceived authoritarianism and corruption. The students sought to reform these regimes and to restore the meaning and relevance of art to people’s lives through institutional critique and counter-hegemonic discourse in the form of manifestos and social engagement. Their aim of ‘returning to the people’ was most evident in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Students in this period of social and political upheaval invested in themselves a privileged elite status as the intellectual vanguard of their country. They embodied a moral force for social justice and a bastion against corruption by keeping their distance from the political system and personal gain. Unlike the professional academics and lecturers whose roles were defined more exclusively in terms of their contributions to nation-building and economic development, the students occupied a distinct, in-between status that slipped

69 Alice G. Guillermo, Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines 1970–1990 (Quezon: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), p. 25.

38 between elitism and marginalisation.70 Student activism provides an important context for understanding the emergence of critical exhibitions in the early 1970s, because many of the students were also artists studying at art academies such as the Indonesian Arts Academy (ASRI) in Yogyakarta and the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts at Silpakorn University. This thesis reveals how the critical exhibition exerted its own agency in challenging dominant forms of colonial thought, knowledge and convention, while also making space for more open ways of rethinking the function, purpose and practice of art. The range of primary sources used in this research include exhibition catalogues, periodicals, journals, newspaper articles that capture cultural debates on art, and archival photographs of exhibition installations that show how artworks were displayed. Not all the critical exhibitions had installation views, so I conducted oral interviews with artists and other witnesses who saw the exhibitions in order to find out how the artworks were actually positioned and displayed in the exhibition space. The absence of photographic installation views of some critical exhibitions severely limited the construction of physical exhibition models and the analysis of the spatial positioning of the works within exhibitions. Questions related to spatial analysis include how the artworks produced meaning when in dialogue with each other, and how circulation within the exhibition space affects the participants’ experience. the circulation of visitors within the exhibition space. This project used exhibition texts, exhibition models and archival material to examine the display strategies of the exhibition-makers and to answer these questions. The time frame from the early 1970s to the early 1990s provided enough historical distance, while still being recent enough to enable the collection of research materials. Libraries and national archives were important sources for newspapers and photographs. Many of the primary materials were available in archives, such as the Indonesian Visual Art Archive, the Bangkok Art Archive, the University of Thammasat Archives, the Singapore Art Archives, the Resource Centre of the National Gallery Singapore, and the Hong Kong Asian Art Archives. The digitisation, cataloguing and captioning of these fragile archival materials remain urgent tasks for archival institutions. Many of the artists involved in the exhibitions from this period are still alive and could be interviewed and approached for their materials.

70 Meredith L. Weiss and Edward Aspinal (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Student Activism in Asia: Between Protest and Powerlessness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 5.

Much of the material relating to exhibitions remains with artists and their families, and access was gained through personal connections and trust built over time. The diversity of languages and the geographical size of Southeast Asia posed practical challenges to this research. The translation of materials written in the different national languages was done by professional translators with experience in translating art writings. Certain terms that were difficult to translate highlighted the challenge of maintaining accuracy in the English translations. The translation approach was one of directional equivalence, which allowed the translator to choose between different translational strategies that were not entirely determined by the source text.71 This approach reproduced in English the function and meaning of the words in their original contexts. Although the physical challenge of conducting fieldwork in six countries in the region was daunting, it was made possible by my networks of artists, curators, collectors, scholars and archivists from my work as a curator in Southeast Asia.72 Lastly, exhibition history is still developing as an academic field with its own set of methodologies, approaches and theories. This limitation was transformed into a strength as it enabled new ways and methodologies of thinking about exhibitions as historical events to be proposed. This thesis presents exhibition history as a method with a criticality that is flashed out through the patterns and characteristics of critical exhibitions. It draws from an array of disciplines and analytical tools, such as the construction of physical exhibition models to aid the study of the exhibition as an event operating in multiple and overlapping temporalities, spaces and discursive fields.

Conclusion

Is Obrist’s fear of an absence of writing on exhibitions, a condition of amnesia regarding previous forms of innovative exhibition, a reality that cannot be reclaimed? There is certainly a discursive and methodological gap in exhibition histories that hinders it from being considered as an academic discipline. Paul O’Neill warns that, ‘despite numerous

71 Anthony Pym, Exploring Translation Theories (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 7–23. 72 Information gained by access to artists, curators, scholars and other informants has been shaped by the author’s work as a curator working in an institutional framework. Those interviewed would have given information based on their familiarity with the author as a curator in Southeast Asia attached to a leading art institution, which may have shaped their responses in interviews.

40 claims to the contrary, from Hoffman to Obrist, prioritization of the contemporary and the curatorial gesture has created a particular model of discourse that remains self-referential, curator-centred, and curator-led, with unstable historical foundations’.73 This thesis proposes an interdisciplinary approach to close this discursive gap in knowledge. It seeks to break the cycle of self-referentiality in curatorial discourse by acknowledging the need to compare, historicise, and develop methodologies for studying the complexity of the exhibition as an event.

73 O’Neill, Culture of Curating, p. 42.

Chapter 1 Intersecting Terrains Between Art and Exhibition Histories in Southeast Asia

It is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the twentieth century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions.74

Is it true that exhibitions have gained primacy over artists and artworks in art history, and should the histories of art, artists and exhibitions be conceived as discrete rather than intersecting categories? Art historian and curator Florence Derieux’s polemic claim of an exhibitionary turn in art history appears to be supported by an unprecedented range of literature on exhibition histories since the 1990s, including anthologies, readers, exhibition catalogues, journal articles, archives, academic publications and conferences.75 Although there is a growing discourse on exhibition histories, the absence of methodologies for the study of exhibitions, raised by Patrick Flores in the ‘Introduction’, needs to be urgently addressed. Furthermore, not everyone agrees with Derieux’s claim of an exhibitionary turn in art history. For instance, art historian John Myers has cautioned against the fetishisation of exhibitions and a phobia of artworks. More importantly, Myers’s argument that ‘the history of art is unintelligible without such a consideration of the artwork’s public life, a hereafter mediated by the dreams and practicalities of exhibition making’ reveals how the histories of art, artworks and exhibitions are inseparably intertwined.76 The histories of exhibitions and artworks and their afterlives are interconnected and need to be unpacked in relation to each other. This chapter brings together a body of literature on the exhibition history of Southeast Asia, not as an isolated field of inquiry but as one that shares affinities with disciplines such as art history, curating and museums. Interest in exhibition history is not a

74 Florence Derieux, Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2007), p. 8. 75 For a critique of the exhibition canon formation and its complexities, see Linda Boersma and Patrick van Rossem, ‘Rewriting or Reaffirming the Canon? Critical Readings of Exhibition History: Editorial’, Stedelijk Studies (special issue), 2 (2015). 76 Julian Myers, ‘On the Value of a History of Exhibitions’, The Exhibitionist, 4 (2011), pp. 24-27.

Western phenomenon, and I will demonstrate how the research and writing of exhibition histories in Southeast Asia has also been expanding over the last decade. By locating Southeast Asia and its art historically, this chapter will survey, construct and critique an expanding discourse on the history of exhibitions in the region, and it will explore how Southeast Asian art and exhibition histories converge and critically engage with each other. It is not my intention to produce a comprehensive survey of a history of exhibitions in Southeast Asia, the scope of which is too wide ranging and broad for this thesis. Instead, I will focus on constructing and critiquing a discourse on exhibition histories in Southeast Asia produced both within and outside the region in four different periods. The term ‘exhibitionary discourse’ is used specifically for texts produced by exhibitions either directly, including curatorial statements in catalogues and other exhibition collaterals, or indirectly, such as exhibition reviews. It is distinguished from the term ‘discourse on exhibition’, which more broadly encompasses all writings on exhibitions across various times and contexts. Exhibitions on Southeast Asian art from four periods have been selected for (1) presenting art within the construct of Southeast Asia or larger constructs such as Asia or Asia-Pacific, (2) providing exhibitionary approaches and frameworks to represent these types of art, and (3) generating responses to specific social, artistic, economic and political contingencies and problems in regional or broader, global contexts. This chapter provides a historical survey of intersecting discourses of exhibitions, curation and art history through an analysis of the exhibitions’ discursive and curatorial frameworks. Most of the exhibitions were organised by regional institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and art museums, as expositions of Southeast Asian art are of a scale and complexity that require substantial resources, whether financial, intellectual or administrative. The first period of exhibition histories starts with the First Southeast Asian Art Conference and Competition in 1957, and subsequently focuses on the ASEAN-sponsored exhibitions in the 1970s. The latter constructed a notion of regionalism based on a felt urgency to construct national cultural identities through art within the context of national independence movements across Southeast Asia. The second period of exhibitions were produced from outside the region by the Fukuoka Art Museum’s Asian Art Show series in Japan from 1979 and throughout the 1980s, which imposed an Asian civilisational perspective to interpret the region through the cultural lenses of Japan, India and China as fountainhead civilisations. This section draws on

Michelle Antoinette’s study of how international exhibitions essentialise Southeast Asian art by reducing them to ‘national tropes – “Indonesian art”, “Malaysian art”, “Philippine art”, “Singapore art” – at the same time as they perform a more generalised task of “Asianess”.’77 The 1990s marked a crucial third period of unprecedented expansion of exhibition histories due to art museums, such as the Queensland Art Gallery and the Singapore Art Museum, and cultural institutions, such as the Japan Foundation, producing exhibitions that either included or focused on Southeast Asian art. This section will examine how exhibitions represented Southeast Asian art through exhibitions like New Art from Southeast Asia (1992), the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT, 1993 and 1999), Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions (CAATT, 1996), Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art (1996) and 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art (2002-2003). These exhibitions used the ‘new’, ‘traditions’, the ‘beyond’ and ‘ideas’ as curatorial frameworks for mapping Southeast Asian art and problematising conceptual devices such as the nation, regionalism, ethnicity, identity, and modern and contemporary art. The fourth period from the mid-2000s onwards shifted towards pluralistic exhibitions that intersected curating, ethnography, history and anthropology. Cubism in Asia: Unbounded Dialogues (2005), Telah Terbit (Out Now!) (2006), Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art (2012), and Riverscapes IN FLUX: Ecological and Cultural Change of Major River Landscapes in Southeast Asia (2013) will be surveyed as turns towards more pluralistic curatorial representations that drew connections between conceptual art, figuration, politics, history and socio-geographical imaginations of the region. Together, these four periods of exhibition history marked gradual shifts from prevailing nationalist and biographical presentations of artworks and artists in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, to thematic exhibitions focusing on art historical, artistic and social issues from the 1990s. This chapter offers a counterweight to artist and artwork- centred art histories by bringing together an exhibition history of Southeast Asia that slips between the national and the regional. It does not embrace a phobia of artworks or a fetishisation of exhibitions, as Myers cautioned, but seeks to bring exhibition histories into

77 Michelle Antoinette, Reworlding Art History, p. 164.

44 contact with other discourses by using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the history of art exhibitions in Southeast Asia.

Locating Southeast Asia and its Historiography

As a region with distinct attributes and identities, Southeast Asia has been diversely imagined, constructed, mapped and interrogated since the turn of the twentieth century. The colonial partitioning of this region goes back to Ptolemy’s designation of the lands beyond the Ganges as ‘Further India’ and ‘East Indies’, from which scholars like George Coedès advanced their idea of India as the source or fountainhead civilisation that transmitted ‘Indianized’ concepts of kingship and cultures to receptive civilisations in Southeast Asia.78 Coedès’s ‘Indianized States’ of Southeast Asia was rejected convincingly by later scholars, one the most significant of whom was J.C. van Leur. Van Leur criticised imaginations of Southeast Asia from outside the region itself, such as the ‘Far East’, ‘Oriental’, the Golden Khersonese, Suvarnadvipa, Nanyang (Chinese) and Tonan Ajia (Japanese) and the ‘East Indies’, as ‘a thin, easily flaking glaze on the massive body of indigenized civilisation’.79 These revisionist scholars identified indigenous social and cultural bases in Southeast Asia, to which aspects of Indian, Chinese, Japanese and later, European civilisations were merely added. The term ‘Southeast Asia’ gained currency during the Second World War, which led to the formation of the South East Asian Command. Ironically, it was located in Ceylon rather than Southeast Asia, as the Japanese had occupied almost the entire region. Southeast Asia has come to designate eleven countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Timor Leste. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO, 1955–77) and the ASEAN (established in 1967) comprise these eleven countries and seek to forge economic, political and cultural cooperation while maintaining the sacred sovereignty of each country. ASEAN has not supplanted earlier designations, nor has it exhausted other projections of this terrain as a region. Southeast Asia as a nomenclature, provenance,

78 See George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1968). 79 See J.C. van Leur, Indonesia Trade and Society: Essays in Asian and Social and Economic History (Amsterdam: W. Van Hoeve Publishers, 1967).

45 location, world or regional institution has co-existed with Southeast Asia as an idea since the Second World War. This thesis draws on historian Heather Sutherland’s concept of Southeast Asia as a ‘contingent device’. In Sutherland’s view, an abstract notion of the region that is still deeply historical is always contingent, and its efficacy as ‘a concept may be useful in one specific context, and invalid in another’.80 This does not mean that the concept of Southeast Asia is meaningless. Rather, the study of Southeast Asia recognises the region not as a fixed geographical concept, but as a fluid one that changes in accordance with shifting worldviews and notions of space and time. There is not one but many Southeast Asias, in the same way as there is not one art world but many art worlds in the region. As Southeast Asia scholar Ruth McVey has argued, ‘what now seems important is not organisations but networks, not boundaries but processes’.81 This thesis looks beyond the nation state as a ‘closed box’, instead approaching Southeast Asia as a region of international transit and of zones of cultural and social interactions and transformation, which can contribute to our understanding of the process of globalisation. Trade networks, fluid premodern state boundaries, migration, and the exchange of ideas have made this region what it is today. The adoption of the conceptual framework of art worlds in Southeast Asia as the context from which critical exhibitions emerged focuses on networks that form linkages with other elements in the art world. A study of exhibition histories makes visible networks forged by artists and other cultural producers across different art forms, including visual art, music, and literature. The artists have collaborated and made exhibitions as forms of collective action. It should come as no surprise that, before the 1990s, most exhibitions were organised by artists as individuals or through collectives run by artists rather than institutions like art museums and independent spaces. In these circumstances, Southeast Asia continues to frustrate anyone who seeks to define it in a fixed way. The term ‘Southeast Asia’ as a collective noun needs, therefore, to be used with caution – just as other such collective nouns, such as ‘the United States’, ‘Europe’, ‘Asia’ or ‘Singapore’, do – as it lends itself to easy generalisations.

80 Heather Sutherland, ‘Contingent Devices’, in Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, ed. Paul H. Kratoska, Henk Schulte Nordholt and Remco Raben (Singapore: NUS Press, 2005), p. 21. 81 Ruth McVey, ‘In Praise of the Coelacanth’s Cousin’, in Locating Southeast Asia, p. 313.

Reconnecting Art History and Southeast Asian Studies

The field of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art history began with studies by art historians. Stanley O’Connor, one of the first professors of Southeast Asian art history in the United States, was also the first to advocate the study of Southeast Asian art as ‘experience’.82

Scholars associated with Cornell University contributed significantly to the nascent field of art history in Southeast Asia by adopting methodologies from art history and anthropology. Stanley O’Connor, who studied under Oliver Wolters, was a pioneer in making connections between the fields of art history, Southeast Asian studies and anthropology. He was among a group of scholars from Cornell University who published some of the most seminal academic writings on Southeast Asian art. The studies were rooted in art historical methods but also remained open to ethnographic and anthropological approaches, particularly in conducting artists’ interviews.83 Claire Holt, author of Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (1967), was another Cornell University scholar who employed contemporary accounts of artists through their own writings in her masterful construction of ‘The Great Debate’ in Indonesia. Astri Wright and Nora Taylor also completed their doctorates at Cornell University. Both Wright’s Soul, Spirit and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters and Taylor’s Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art drew on ethnographic methods by visiting artists’ studios and using observations of and holding conversations with the artists in order to understand their own experiences and concepts of art that might exist in a world of lived experiences different from the world of the art historian.84 O’Connor captured this anxiety when he posed the question:

Is it possible that those who inhabit a world shaped by industrial technology, a literate, largely secular, world, reasoned about in very rigorous forms of logic, can come to the immediacies of experience demanded by art works in the same way as those whose lives have such an utterly different shape?85

82 Nora Taylor, ‘The Southeast Asian Art Historian as Ethnographer?’, Third Text, 25.4 (2011), pp. 477–88. 83 See Pamela N. Corey, ‘Of Poems in a Recalcitrant Landscape: An Interview with Stanley J. O’Connor’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 1.1 (2017), pp. 161–83. 84 Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit and Mountain, Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Nora Taylor, Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004). 85 Stanley O’Connor, ‘Art Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A Study in Cross-Cultural Art Theory’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 14.2 (1983), p. 400.

Kenneth George, a scholar on visual and material culture, also contextualised art- making in Southeast Asia as a lived experience. In Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld (2010), George employed an anthropological focus on the artist’s experiences and links to the art world as entry points for an examination of how Islamic faith has shaped the practices of A.D. Pirous. In so far as there is a disconnect in research on Southeast Asian art between, on the one hand, art historians and, on the other, anthropologists and other disciplines within Southeast Asian studies, one could surmise that this can be bridged by a true embracement of interdisciplinary approaches. Sabapathy observed that ‘a symptom of the desultory state of writing on art in Singapore is the ignorance and the somewhat wilful neglect demonstrated by writers towards its own history… It appears that each and every review, notice or catalogue is a new beginning, having no precedence’. However, this situation appears to be changing with initiatives to compile anthologies of existing and new writings on Southeast Asian art.86 This includes Lee Weng Choy’s ongoing collation of writings on the Comparative Contemporaries: A Web Anthology Project website.87 Adopting a broader range of theories from disciplines other than art history offers the possibility of extending beyond monographs on individual countries, such as Apinan Poshyananda’s Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1992), Kwok Kian Chow’s Channels and Confluences: A History of Singapore Art (1996), Andrew Ranard’s Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History (2009), T.K. Sabapathy and Redza Piyadasa’s Modern Artists of Malaysia (1983), and Jim Supangkat’s Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond (1997).88 The once frozen dialogue and critical engagement between art history and the adjoining fields of Southeast Asian studies and anthropology seems to be thawing, with recent anthologies on Southeast Asian art bringing together perspectives, approaches and methods across disciplines. Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, edited by Nora Taylor and Boreth Ly, was published in 2011. It expanded the scope and

86 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Foreword’, in Marco Hsu, A Brief History of Malayan Art, trans. Lai Chee Kien (Singapore: Millennium Books1999), p. vi. 87 Available at http://comparative.aaa.org.hk 88 Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kwok Kian Chow, Channels and Confluences: A History of Singapore Art (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1996); Andrew Ranard, Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History (Chiangmai: Silkworm, 2009); T.K. Sabapathy and Redza Piyadasa, Modern Artists of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1983); Jim Supangkat, Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond (Jakarta: Indonesian Fine Art Foundation, 1997).

48 depth of modern and contemporary art studies by using both country-based and comparative, cross-regional approaches.89 A special Third Text issue on ‘Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast Asia’, edited by Patrick Flores and Joan Kee and also published in 2011, covered a broad range of issues, from the art market and local artist collectives to the teaching of Southeast Asian art.90 The essays by Patrick Flores and Nora Taylor provided specific insight into writings on Southeast Asian art. Flores identified three trajectories and research interests in writings on Southeast Asian art: situating art history within an interdisciplinary frame; locating transfers of ideas and techniques across cultures; and theories of art that explore alternative aesthetics and art from a Southeast Asian perspective.91 Taylor’s essay on ‘The Southeast Asian Art Historian as Ethnographer’ argues forcefully for a marriage of methods and approaches from ethnography and art history as a way of contextualising Southeast Asian art practices and experiences. The exhibition provides another site of art encounters and experiences in the region. Exhibitions lend themselves to interdisciplinary approaches that move beyond texts, images, artists and artworks to include audience reception and alternative notions of space and time in which exhibitions are located. This includes the performative spaces and ‘mystical’ time proposed by the Towards a Mystical Reality exhibition of Redza Piyasada and Sulaiman Esa. While academic scholarship on Southeast Asian modern art has only recently gained traction through anthologies, one must not forget the broad surveys of the arts of Southeast Asia for a general readership in the 1960s. One of the first books on Southeast Asian art, Philip Rawson’s The Art of Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Java, Bali, was a broad and widely available survey textbook published in 1967 within a larger series on the ‘World of Art’. Rawson’s book covered the grand art and craft traditions of the region in an attempt to show how the ‘countries of Southeast Asia have created a unique melange of indigenous art and the art of neighbouring India and China’.92 Following Coedès’s notion of the region as ‘Indianised’, Rawson’s account excluded the Philippines, Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia, as these countries fell outside the influence of India.

89 Nora Taylor and Ly Boreth (eds), Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012). 90 See Third Text, 25.4 (2011), special issue on ‘Contemporaneity in Southeast Asian Art’, edited by Joan Kee and Patrick D. Flores. 91 Patrick Flores, ‘Field Notes from Artworlds: Interest and Impasse’, Third Text, 25.4 (2011), pp. 387–94. 92 Philip Rawson, The Art of Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Java, Bali (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967).

Modern art in Southeast Asia was represented by a single artist from Indonesia – Affandi – and illustrated by a single painting by the artist without any discussion of the history of modern art in the region. It was as if the entire region’s modern art was embodied in ‘the only artist of Southeast Asia to attain a personal world-wide recognition’. Affandi’s Self- portrait is the final illustration in the book, silent and denied a voice. Modern art in Southeast Asia is represented as ahistorical, as if it emerged out of nowhere. Art historian and musicologist Jan Mrázek has focused on other misrepresentations of Southeast Asian art:

There is another genre of art books that (mis)represent Southeast Asian art in a strikingly different way. Books with titles such as Southeast Asian Art Today and Southeast Asian Art: A New Spirit, focus exclusively on contemporary, Western-inspired ‘modern art.’ Rather like in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, they tell an entirely different version of the truth from the books discussed earlier, but their vision is no less limited, excluding again – to use the same examples – wayang, textiles, and anything that does not fit the category of modern art, even though the different traditional arts are in many cases forcefully and consciously part of Southeast Asia’s (post)modernity.93

Mrázek objects to surveys of ‘Southeast Asian art’, such as Southeast Asian Art: A New Spirit, that claim to encompass the cultural production of the entire region while adopting fixed art historical categories of the ‘traditional’, ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’. Exceptions are Claire Holt’s seminal Art in Indonesia and Fiona Kerlogue’s Arts of Southeast Asia, which represent the region’s traditional and modern artistic practices as fluid and changing over time rather than fixed and timeless.94 Mrázek takes Kerlogue to task for excluding the performing arts, an integral part of this region’s culture, suggesting that this reveals a privileging of material culture and objects over performative cultures.95 The performative is an important aspect of exhibitions that has been overlooked. In this thesis, exhibitions are conceived as performative spaces where ideologies, rhetoric, and gestures are enacted as exhibitionary

93 Jan Mrázek, ‘Ways of Experiencing Art: Art History, Television and Javanese Wayang’, in What’s the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context, ed. Jan Mrázek and Morgan Pitelka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), p. 292. 94 Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Changes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967); Fiona Kerlogue, Arts of Southeast Asia (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). 95 Mrázek, ‘Ways of Experiencing Art’, p. 292.

50 strategies. These strategies mark continuities and connections between the performing arts and exhibition-making in Southeast Asia. While writings in the 1960s on Southeast Asian art were largely broad surveys of the grand traditions of their subject, academic writings in the form of monographs on individual country to construct art historical national narratives began in the late 1980s and gained momentum in the 1990s. The scarcity of writings on Southeast Asian art was partly caused by the lack of academic platforms. Programmes offering Southeast Asian studies, such as that at Chulalongkorn University, rarely focused on art history. Similarly, art history received little attention in academic journals on Southeast Asia, such as the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asian Studies launched in 1965 by the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, and the Journal of Southeast Asian History, launched by the University of Singapore in 1960.96 Other journals, such as Philippine Studies (Ateneo de Manila University) and the Thai Khadi Journal (Thammasat University), focused on the study of particular countries. Sabapathy summarised the production and circulation of discourse on Southeast Asian art from academia, before the new millennium, as desultory.97 The question remains: Are art histories of Southeast Asia limited to books and journal articles? Taylor’s observation that ‘Southeast Asian artists, rather than art historians, have been undertaking the task of writing and re-writing art history’ opens possibilities for looking not only at academic journals and books, but also at exhibition catalogues and writings disseminated by artists and art institutions through the medium of the exhibition. The analysis of these art writings sheds light on how artists and exhibition-makers have intervened in the construction of histories of art.98

Intersections Between Exhibition and Art Histories of Southeast Asia

In prevailing writings on art in Southeast Asia, exhibition reviews have ignored display strategies and reception, a point raised by Sabapathy:

96 The Journal of Southeast Asian History was renamed the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies in the 1970s. 97 Since the 2000s, some of the journals on Southeast Asian art that have appeared include Sinlapkorn (Fine Arts from the Ministry of Arts, Thailand), SentAp! (Malaysia) and C-arts (Indonesia). 98 Nora A. Taylor, ‘Writing Contemporary Southeast Asian Art History’, in Southeast Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives, ed. Anthony Reid (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University and UCLA Asia Institute, 2003), p. 180.

It springs, in part, from an abiding disposition in appraising expositions, wherein reviewers train attention chiefly on the intricate network binding curatorial, scholarly, scientific (this is hardly looked into), institutional (including state/national) operations and imperatives that integrally constitute exhibitions; and which claim for them significance. These are embedded in catalogue publications whose textual and authorial stature is upheld as defining expositions. By developing their critical exegeses predominantly, if not exclusively, on these textual grounds, reviewers ignore exhibitions as displays and, as such, leave them unremarked.99

Overlooking the agency of exhibitions as displays and sites of communication that are visual and experiential rather than textual has left gaps in scholarship. O’Connor’s call for ‘lived experience’ in the understanding of Southeast Asian art can be applied to the study of exhibitions. In the context of exhibitions, it refers to aesthetics, space, dialogues between artworks in the exhibition space, and phenomenological and interpretative perspectives on the production of meaning by viewers.100 Exhibition history as a field is open to interdisciplinary thought and writing. It can draw on art history’s analysis of artworks; curatorial studies’ display strategies; the textual analysis of exhibitionary texts; sociological enquiries into the systems of which exhibitions are part; and reception theory. Changing modes of exhibitions, which include the critical exhibition, are products of new social and political realities. They provide insights into competing ideologies; the shaping of artistic practices by exhibitions; and the otherwise invisible institutional structures of power. These are strong reasons why exhibitionary histories are indispensable for our understanding of modern and contemporary art. In Southeast Asia, like elsewhere in the world, exhibitions constitute a critical form through which most art is displayed, received, disseminated and discoursed. Numerous exhibitions have been organised by artists, artist collectives and institutions in post-war Southeast Asia, but there has been a lack of research on the history of those exhibitions. The root of the problem stems from what Sabapathy has surmised as ‘a road to nowhere’, whereby art history has never coalesced as an academic discipline in universities in

99 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Regarding Exhibitions’, in The Artists Village: 20 Years On, ed. Kwok Kian Woon (Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, 2008), p. 7. 100 O’Connor, ‘Art Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors’, p. 400.

Singapore and elsewhere in the region.101 Where art history exists as a programme, it is parked under a college of fine arts, in which the main institutional focus is the making of artists, designers and art educators. Examples are the art history programme at the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines, Diliman; the Asian Art Histories programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, the Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiangmai University, Thailand; and, most recently, the School of Art, Design and Media at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In 2016, a collaboration between the National University of Singapore’s Department of History and the National Gallery Singapore resulted in a Minor in Art History at the undergraduate level, including modules on Southeast Asian art. This marks a departure from existing art history programmes in the region that are usually limited to introductions to Western and Asian art, which serve the development of the artistic practices of fine arts students. These shifts in universities are useful in generating art histories of Southeast Asia that intersect with exhibition histories. The new approach is grounded in fieldwork, empirical research and conceptual frameworks and methodologies pertinent to the region. Surveying the state of writing on Southeast Asian art through exhibitions is useful for building a discourse on exhibition histories that teases out curatorial frameworks and concepts. It helps to problematise the critical exhibitionary discourses of the ‘new’, the ‘traditional’, the ‘conceptual’ and the ‘beyond’. Writings on art have emerged in exhibition catalogues published by galleries, art museums and independent art spaces rather than in academic publications. The reliance on writings in exhibition catalogues, many of which have been commissioned by galleries for their exhibitions, raises the issue of how these writings can be critical and the extent to which these writings relate meaningfully to scholarly work. Another problem is that writings on art have become fragmentary, and hence are without a concerted focus on methods, concepts and grounding in empirical research, thus casting a shadow on the quality and rigour of scholarship produced by galleries for exhibitions. National art museums and institutions produce exhibition catalogues and publications with writings focused on the modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia by respected academics and curators. However, many of these writings are

101 See T.K. Sabapathy, Road to Nowhere: The Quick Rise and The Long Fall of Art History in Singapore (Singapore: National Institute of Education, 2010).

53 aligned with the exhibition programming and agenda of these institutions, which may not necessarily be closing critical gaps in scholarship on Southeast Asian art.102 Not surprisingly, Southeast Asian art and Southeast Asia studies share historiographical anxieties over what constitutes the region. Much of the knowledge about the region was accumulated from the ‘framework of colonial geography’, and was circumscribed by the nation state, the diversity of languages, and the diminishing of area studies in universities. It is therefore pertinent that the field of Southeast Asian art draws from fragmented writings, ranging from academic writings to ‘catalogue writing’ located in exhibition catalogues and art magazines. If writings on Southeast Asian art in exhibition catalogues over four periods from the 1950s to the present form a body of literature that cannot be overlooked, it is one of the tasks of exhibition histories to trace, survey and critique their discourses.

Art in the Service of Diplomacy: Exhibition Histories on Southeast Asia from the 1950s to the 1980s

In 1957, the First Southeast Asian Art Conference and Competition (FSEACC) was organised by the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP), a private institution that mounted this regional competition in the form of an exhibition followed by a conference in Manila. This seminal exhibition, a first on art in Southeast Asia, had been overlooked until curator Kathleen Ditzig discussed it in an article published in the journal Southeast of Now.103 This confirms Sabapathy’s point that exhibition history continues to be overlooked:

[E]xhibitions as materials (to paraphrase Patrick Flores) are ignored. It has remained unknown in part because makers of exhibitions rarely turn to histories of exhibitions as resources for materially shaping the tone and tenor for developing particular shows. The tendency is to assume that each and every exposition is a new beginning.104

102 The Singapore Art Museum website is available at http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/museum/index.html. 103 Kathleen Ditzig, ‘An Exceptional Inclusion: On MoMA's Exhibition Recent American Prints in Color and the First Exhibition of Southeast Asian Art’, Southeast of Now, 1.1. 104 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Exhibitions of Southeast Asian Modern/Contemporary Art: Recollections, and Thoughts on Some Matters’, unpublished paper presented at Second Singapore Art Museum Board Retreat, 13 September 2017, p. 13.

Sabapathy reminds us of the amnesia masking exhibitions and their histories. Art historians focus on writing artist biographies and histories of artworks, while exhibition-makers themselves refrain from referencing previous exhibitions as resources in their exhibitionary discourse. The FSEACC marked the earliest type of exhibition based on inter-regionalism, which also included artworks from Australia, China and India. The inclusion of China and India was based on cultural links with Southeast Asia, while Australia bore diplomatic significance due to the country’s geographical proximity to the region. While the FSEACC projected regional ambitions, it returned to the national at the same time. Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, the founder of the AAP, stated that ‘two important ideas emerged from the competition. The first was that all men are brothers and art transcends all barriers because it is universal. The second – and this may not be as diametrically opposite as it may seem – was a belief in national identity.’105 The idea that art is transcendental and universal went beyond merely seeking acknowledgement of the international world, as it also brought the international within the grasp of individual cultures and countries. The belief in national identity was ideological, and it translated into the way the exhibition employed art to construct national identities. The field of culture was an urgent concern in the region in the 1950s, when nationalist movements had either achieved independence for their countries or were in the process of doing so. The FSEACC was not alone in desiring nationalism. In 1959, the First Southeast Asian Salon of Photography declared that:

In Southeast Asia, you see a resurgence of nationalism. One nation after the other is throwing away the yoke of colonialism. We in Singapore are on the eve of attaining self-government and we in the Singapore Art Society are especially happy that this salon should be held at this opportune juncture. Through art, the people of a country records the moods of history, and what is more befitting than that we should, at this critical moment in our country’s history, hold a salon.106

Regionalism and nationalism fed off each other rather than being diametrically opposed. They could be seen as ‘currencies of exchange’ that framed the exhibitionary discourse on art from Southeast Asia. This discourse, circumscribed by state-dominated narratives and

105 Purita Kalaw-Ledesma and Amadis Maria Guerrero, The Struggle for Philippine Art (Manila: Purita Kalaw- Ledesma, 1974), pp. 67–68. 106 Ho Kok Hoe, ‘Foreword’, in First Southeast Asia of Salon Photography, exhibition catalogue (Singapore: Singapore Art Society, 1957), p. 7.

55 the imperatives of cultural diplomacy, was nowhere more visible than in the ASEAN exhibitions.107 In art historical terms, the birth of ASEAN heralded a new era of cultural cooperation among its members.108 As Sabapathy noted, ‘art exhibitions are one of several cultural initiatives which are deemed as useful in displaying regional consciousness and diversity’.109 The first exhibition to mark the establishment of ASEAN was held in Jakarta in 1968. In 1972, the ASEAN Art Exhibition was held to mark the fifth ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Singapore. The five founding members, consisting of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, held an exhibition of paintings and photography. The concept of a mobile exhibition that would travel to the capitals of the participating countries was mooted, and it was actualised in the 1974 ASEAN Mobile Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur. The ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information (COCI),110 which was set up in 1978, inherited the objectives of ASEAN as an institutional endeavour to promote a ‘sense of regional identity and contribute to the enrichment of the culture of ASEAN’.111 The Bali Summit in 1976 laid the groundwork for the establishment of the COCI. Its framework included the support of ‘ASEAN scholars, writers, artists and mass media representatives to enable them to play an active role in fostering a sense of regional identity and fellowship’.112 ASEAN cooperation in cultural activities, including the visual arts, was deemed useful in forging a regional identity. The ASEAN exhibitions thus exemplified how art and its exhibitionary discourses can be pressed into the service of diplomacy, in line with the intentions of the COCI:

107 The ASEAN Exhibitions were not the first exhibitions to map Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asia Cultural Festival, organised by Singapore from 8 to 15 August 1963, celebrated multiculturalism and the cultural diversity of the region. See Jennifer Lindsay, ‘Festival Politics: Singapore’s 1963 South-East Asia Cultural Festival’, in Cultures at War: The Cold War and the Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, ed. Tony Day and Maya Ht Liem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010), pp. 227–46. The First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition was held at the Philippine Women’s University from 27 April to 12 May 1957, but it was the ASEAN exhibitions that provided a sustained focus on the region’s art and art history since its inception in 1967. For ‘currencies of exchange’ as important in contemporary Thai art, see David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 108 It should be noted that not all exhibitions and their catalogues correlate in their content. Some exhibition catalogues are books consisting of a collection of essays whose authors may or may not have partaken in the actual organisation of exhibitions, and the curators’ contributions to these catalogues may be modest. 109 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art’, in 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2002), unpaginated. 110 For more information about the COCI, see its webpage at http://www.pia.gov.ph/asean- infoculture/default.asp?fi=about&i=myriad (accessed 15 April 2015). 111 Message by Salvador H. Laurel in the Anugerah Senilukis Kumpulan Syaikat Philip Morris Group of Companies Art Awards (Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara, 1998), unpaginated. 112 ASEAN Plan of Action on Culture and Information (Jakarta: ASEAN Secretariat, 1993), p. 43.

The significance of Culture and Information was deemed of vital importance to ASEAN especially during its early years when some member countries were wary of each other’s intentions. It was ASEAN’s programs on culture and information which served as the spade-work that generated the spirit of regionalism during ASEAN’s infant years.113

Even so, could the ASEAN exhibitions that were organised with the intention of constructing a regional identity as imagined by the governing political elites of each member country produce critical exhibitions that challenged Western aesthetic conventions? Or could they produce socially engaged art that diverged from the demands of the nation state? In the catalogue of the 1981 ASEAN Exhibition: Painting, Graphic Arts and Photography in Bangkok, the organising committee declared the three objectives of the exhibition: 1. To promote regional consciousness and cooperation amongst artists and the public through art. 2. To provide a basis for the comparative study of current trends and developments in painting, the graphic arts and photography in the five ASEAN Member Countries. 3. To provide a glimpse of the culture of each Member Country through the media of painting, the graphic arts and photography.114

Points one and three have been repeatedly articulated throughout the ASEAN exhibitions. Point two, however, arouses our interest as it calls for a comparative study of artistic developments in the various member countries of ASEAN.115 Such an outright call for comparative studies raises the question: Have previous ASEAN exhibitions failed or fallen short of mapping out comparisons between the various art developments in the ASEAN member countries? In the art symposium that accompanied the 1982 ASEAN Exhibition of Paintings and Photographs in Kuala Lumpur, Sabapathy gave an accurate overview of the previous ASEAN exhibitions: ‘In the past, mobile exhibitions have offered desultory histories of art in capsule form, based on a selective, condensed schemas of chronology… Invariably, the packaging

113 Ibid., p. 41. 114 ‘Foreword’, in the ASEAN Exhibition: Painting, Graphic Arts and Photography (Bangkok: National Gallery, 1981), unpaginated. 115 Ibid.

57 unrolls as a parade of the top ten.’116 In short, the ASEAN exhibitions have mapped art in Southeast Asia using the trope of the artist as hero, reflected in the focus on the biographical histories of artists in relation to their respective artistic practices. Sabapathy unravelled the essentialist assumptions based on the metonyms of nation and ethnicity that have impeded the development of regionalist perspectives, while recognising the function of such endeavours in providing ‘generalized accounts of modern art practices in Southeast Asia’ largely circumscribed by national boundaries.117 In other words, the ASEAN exhibitions of the 1970s provided particular histories of modern art in the member countries, but they lacked new curatorial strategies for adopting comparative approaches and regionalist perspectives. This has resulted in a deficient understanding of Southeast Asian art. Despite the explicitly stated objective to introduce new curatorial approaches and comparative studies that transcend national boundaries, the glaring absence of discursive activities that provoke, test, articulate and clarify have contributed to what Sabapathy describes as desultory histories of art or a sterile understanding of art in the Southeast Asian region. The questions are: Why have comparative studies not developed, and who or what is imposing the limits on the criticality of these ASEAN exhibitions? The fundamental principles endorsed by ASEAN during the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, signed at the First ASEAN Summit on 24 February 1976, shed light on how Southeast Asian art is mapped by the Association. The principles are: 1. Mutual respect for the independence, sovereignty, equality, territorial integrity, and national identity of all nations; 2. The right of every State to lead its national existence free from external interference, subversion or coercion; 3. Non-interference in the internal affairs of one another; 4. Settlement of differences or disputes by peaceful manner; 5. Renunciation of the threat or use of force; and 6. Effective cooperation among themselves.118

The emphasis on independence, sovereignty, equality, territoriality and national identity of all ASEAN members mirror the maps of Southeast Asia as bounded territories. Any cross- boundary transgressions that might impinge on ‘the right of every state to lead its national

116 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Premises for Critical Studies on Modern Art in Southeast Asia’, a paper presented at the ASEAN Exhibition and Art Symposium, Kuala Lumpur, 13–18 December 1982, p. 2. 117 Ibid., p. 3. 118 See ASEAN website at http://www.aseansec.org/64.htm (accessed 20 June 2015).

58 existence free from external interference’ appeared to run contrary to the objective laid out during the 1981 ASEAN exhibition, which encouraged comparative studies of current trends in the visual arts.119 Poking one’s nose into the art history of another ASEAN member could have unintentionally disturbed a hornet’s nest, and this probably explains why no significant attempt was made to carry out comparative studies under the auspices of ASEAN. ASEAN’s mission to promote regional solidarity while respecting the national sovereignty and integrity of its members was captured in a map of Southeast Asia published in a 1980 ASEAN exhibition catalogue, in which the various nation states were mapped onto ASEAN’s aspirations for region-ness, symbolised by its logo in the faint background. Curators’ possibilities to draw alternative maps were also constrained by the sponsors funding the ASEAN exhibitions (Figure 1.1). The ASEAN Cultural Fund, which was set up in 1978 with contributions from third countries and international organisations, funded the ASEAN exhibitions, with Japan making a significant contribution of five billion yen by 1979.120 The exhibitions depended almost entirely on the Cultural Fund, which in turn was firmly controlled by the COCI’s methodology and means of implementation of projects, including exhibitions.121 The COCI’s stated objective ‘to promote effective cooperation in the fields of culture and information for the purpose of enhancing mutual understanding and solidarity among the peoples of ASEAN as well as in furthering regional development’ provides insight into the reasons behind the tired, perpetual and uncritical use of maps based on ethnicity, the nation state and Southeast Asia. The cartographical constructions of Southeast Asian art were based on the mutual understanding and equality of the respective, sovereign nation states, which also included a sense of cultural equality. This meant avoiding mapping art in a critical way, as well as avoiding controversy or the political uneasiness of any of the ASEAN members. The adherence to ‘safe’ ways of mapping art in Southeast Asia in the spirit of cultural diplomacy was also noted by Sabapathy: ‘ASEAN expositions within the region are carefully managed, diplomatic fares in which discretion and decorum reign supreme.’122It should be noted that it is possible for the curators and artists involved in

119 Ibid. 120 ASEAN Plan of Action, p. 44. 121 Ibid., pp. 46–47. 122. See Sabapathy, ‘Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art’, n.p.

59 these ASEAN exhibitions to personally question the feasibility of region-ness, and that its constituent members may not be equally motivated by a sense of region. Within the organisational structure of ASEAN, the COCI is directly answerable to the ASEAN standing committee and is thus tightly bound by ASEAN’s principles and objectives, as well as its inherent tensions, contradictions and limitations. ASEAN’s desire for a regional identity and culture from above, effected through the machinery of nation states and controlled by political elites, has provided important platforms for exchanges between artists, scholars and curators from the region. These exchanges usually constitute overviews or surveys of the art histories of each ASEAN country by their respective representatives. The ASEAN art exhibitions have neither provided the catalyst to generate exhibitionary collaborations by artists and researchers nor produced discourses extending beyond the national narratives of art history. Exhibition as a critical form has not been viable within the COCI’s framework of cultural diplomacy. With the failure of the early ASEAN exhibitions to engender critical discourses for provoking and stimulating new ways of thinking about and making art, it was not surprising that critical exhibitions did not emerge from the events organised and sponsored by the COCI. The ASEAN exhibitions and their exhibitionary discourses formed a useful foil for the critical exhibition to question systems of institutional and governmental power. It was up to the artists themselves, who adopted the roles of both artist and curator, or ‘artist-curator’, to produce the critical exhibition as a new exhibitionary mode in the 1970s.123 Unlike the ASEAN art exhibitions that imagined a regional cultural identity from above, artists from the region produced the critical exhibition from below within national frameworks and contexts, through their own agency, and without preconceived notions of constructing a regional art form. The critical exhibitions that mushroomed across the region shared common ideas for advancing different ways and practices of making art.

123 It should be noted that some artist-curators like Redza Piyadasa, who co-organised TMR, was also involved in the ASEAN exhibitions, and that artists shown in critical exhibitions were also at times featured in the ASEAN shows, revealing how the circulation of art and exhibition-makers can slip between criticality and institutional acknowledgement.

Contesting Regionalisms: The Fukuoka Art Museum’s Asian Art Show (1979–1980s)

In a catalogue accompanying the official opening of the Singapore Art Museum in 1996, Sabapathy wrote:

Those from other regions are busily embarked upon the task of mapping Southeast Asian art history especially those from Japan, Australia and the United States. Drawing attention to such occurrences is not to fuel xenophobic fever or to induce withdrawal into defensive positions – on the contrary. It is undoubtedly important to know how others (from the other regions) see us (in our region). Even so, it is equally important to know how we see or regard ourselves in our region and as belonging in a region.124

The task of mapping art of the region was certainly not left to the ASEAN exhibitions alone in the 1980s. As Sabapathy rightly noted, alternative mappings of Southeast Asian art by curators, art historians and critics can serve to illuminate the history of art in Southeast Asia. The Asian Artists Exhibition/Modern Asian Art, which later led to the Asian Art Show organised by the Fukuoka Art Museum (Japan), was held in 1979 with a focus on three countries: India, China and Japan. The stated objective of the 1979 exhibition was to trace the modernisation of Asian art in these three nations by clarifying how traditional and modern art had interacted and how these nations had been able to maintain and develop their own national characteristics while undergoing modernisation and a transfiguration of their art.125 Clearly, the exhibitionary discourses employed by the Fukuoka Art Museum resembled the ASEAN exhibitions in their emphasis on national boundaries, essentialising assumptions about ‘unique’ national characteristics and the role of art as a modernising project. In conjunction with the 1979 Asian Artists Exhibition/Modern Asian Art was the 1980 Contemporary Asian Art Show Part II. In this exhibition, the scope was broadened from China, Japan and India to include contemporary art from Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Korea, Singapore and the Philippines. The decision made by the Fukuoka Art Museum to distinguish China, Japan and India from the other Asian countries that were showcased in the second part of the exhibition exemplified a cultural

124 T.K. Sabapathy, Singapore Art Museum: A Perspective (Roseville, NSW: Fine Arts Pty, 1996), unpaginated. 125 Toshihiro Kennoki, Asian Artists Exhibition (Fukuoka City: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1979–80), ‘acknowledgment’, p. 3.

61 hierarchy that privileged China, Japan and India as culturally superior nation states and the other Asian countries as culturally ‘influenced’ by these ‘great civilizations’.126 Such a curatorial approach, with its emphasis on underlying cultural hierarchies, did not square up with the stated objectives of the Contemporary Asian Art Show Part II to ‘respect and try to understand each country’s cultural identity through the positive promotion of art exchange [in accordance with] the resolution which the IAA (International Association of Art) made in 1973 at their General Assembly meeting in Bulgaria’.127 The Fukuoka Art Museum intended that the 1980 Asian Artists Exhibition would ‘look away from the West and turn our eyes to Asia’ in order to ‘rediscover and reabsorb the spiritually strong Asian tradition and culture’ that has been tainted by the ‘poisonous’ West.128 This promised a potential breakaway from the tendency to rely on Western paradigms to understand Asian art. Possibilities for ‘misinterpretations’ due to a dependence on Western codes was clearly shown by Supangkat’s alternative reading to John Clark’s excessively political interpretation of Hedi Haryanto’s Backed into a Corner.129 Supangkat’s more nuanced reading, rooted in what Sabapathy described as ‘socio-political circumstances prevailing in Indonesia’,130 included a questioning of ‘traditional culture’, tradition’s relation to national identities, and the place for traditional products in contemporary art.131 However, the emphasis on a shared ‘consciousness as Asians’132 and ‘spiritual’ Asian traditions as alternative paradigms to decode contemporary Asian art could easily fall into the trap of an essentialist Asian identity or ‘Asian-ness’ and a form of self- orientalism in the spirit of regionalism.133 Besides, claims of rediscovering a ‘spiritually

126 The issue of ‘influence’ is related to power. As Harold Bloom argues, ‘influence’ requires the tracking of origins, and privileges the ‘original’ over those that have borrowed from it. Such a method is poor and reductive. Instead, Bloom seeks an understanding of how ideas are transmitted within a discursive field where ‘an ephebe’s best misinterpretations may well be of poems that he had never read’. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 70. 127 Festival: Contemporary Asian Art Show, 1980 (Fukuoka City: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1979-80), unpaginated. 128 Ibid. 129 Jim Supangkat, ‘Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Indonesia: An Overview’ in Art and the Asia Pacific, 1.3 (1995). 130 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Introduction to the Themes of the Exhibition’, in Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries: Unity in Diversity in International Art (Jakarta: Balai Pustaka: Project for Development of Cultural Media, Directorate General for Culture, Dept. of Education and Culture, 1997/1998), pp. 36–37. 131 Jim Supangkat, ’Introduction 2: Contemporary Art of the South’ in Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries: Unity in Diversity in International Art, pp. 23–24. 132 Festival: Contemporary Asian Art Show, 1980, unpaginated. 133 Supporting such ideas of an ‘Asian-ness’ would include the Asian values debate, based on neo-Confucianism espoused by Minister Mentor Lee Kwan Yew and Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir. Professor Tommy

62 strong Asian tradition and culture’134 that centred on the cultures of Japan, China and India sought to replace the Western paradigms with paradigms based on only three Asian countries. In this respect, the ASEAN exhibitions differed from the Asian Art Show organised by the Fukuoka Art Museum, due to the founding principles of equality, including cultural equality, among the various ASEAN member countries. However, the ASEAN exhibitions also shared similarities with the Asian Art Show in the construction of cartographies that centred on the nation, race and ethnicity. The third Asian Art Show was held in 1989 and marked a departure from the previous two editions of the exhibition in two ways.135 First, unlike the previous two shows, the third Asian Art Show was based on a central theme, ‘Symbolic Visions in Contemporary Asian Life’, which held the entire exhibition together with increased focus and clarity. Second, the method of selection changed from the previous exhibitions. Previously, the various participating countries were assigned the task of selecting the artists that were to be represented at the Asian Art Show. The third Asian Art Show, however, gave selection powers to the Fukuoka Art Museum rather than to the curators nominated from the participating countries. Not surprisingly, the decision to change the method of selection was unpopular among the participating countries. The Fukuoka Art Museum justified its changes by stating that ‘such a new method would contribute to clarifying the characteristics and identity of contemporary Asian art’.136 In addition, the curatorial committee explained that the use of a theme would ‘give the maturing contemporary Asian art an opportunity to make explicit its identity and open up its way toward internationalization’.137 Once again, the issue of an ‘Asian identity’ or ‘Asian-ness’ was evoked, returning to the previously used maps that were based on region, race and ethnicity, and echoing similar calls by the ASEAN exhibitions for a ‘Southeast Asian-ness’. The objective to make explicit the identity of contemporary Asian art was anchored on the assumption that ‘Asian artists are attempting to create art indigenous

Koh interprets the debate over Asian values as a manifestation of an intellectual and psychological liberation from Western dominance in the last 200 years. 134 Festival: Contemporary Asian Art Show, 1980, unpaginated. 135 In between the 1989 Asian Art Show and the 1979–80 Asian Artists Exhibition/Contemporary Asian Art Show, the second Asian Art Show was held in 1985. 136 Keiichi Kuwahara, 3rd Asian Art Show, Fukuoka (Fukuoka City: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1989), p. 5. Emphasis added. 137 Ibid. Emphasis added.

63 to the Orient and different from the West, which will formalize and vivify a certain cultural identity’.138 There were other similarities between the ASEAN exhibitions and the Asian Art Show. As Sabapathy noted, the organisers realised that the previous two Asian Art Shows, with their focus on ‘tradition and the present age [had] in them a near exclusive obsession with formalism, whose models could be traced to the main-streams of modern art originating in 19th century Europe’.139 Therefore, both the ASEAN exhibitions and the previous two editions of the Asian Art Show were committed to the project of being ‘modern’ or modernist. There were, however, distinct differences between how the ASEAN exhibitions and the Asian Art Show were organised and structured. The ASEAN mobile exhibition mooted in 1974 was a travelling exhibition that was hosted by each of the participating country’s capitals in turn, thus signifying the equality and status of each ASEAN member as art centres in Southeast Asia. The Asian Art Show, on the other hand, was centred in Fukuoka, which ‘has gradually been able to attain its firm position as an art center in Asia’.140 Such competing claims for status as the premier art centre reproduced an alternative centre- periphery model, one with Japan as the centre of Asia and according to which a larger map of the Asian region was laid out on the smaller map of Southeast Asia.

The New, the Beyond, the Traditional and the Conceptual: Curatorial Turns Through Thematic Exhibitions (1990s to Early 2000s)

The expansion of academic discourse, which began with art historians in the 1990s, did not occur in isolation from exhibitionary discourses. Both bodies of writing added discursive density to Southeast Asian art at the pivotal moment that the Euro-American art world began to look outside its borders towards other regions and places. It is therefore critical to cast our eyes at exhibitionary discourses and curatorial mappings of Southeast Asian art in the 1990s and early 2000s, which reappraised art and art history from this region in ways markedly different from earlier types of regional or country-based exhibitions. These

138 Ibid. 139 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Significant Content and Symbolic Value: 7 Singapore Artists for Fukuoka’, 3rd Asian art show, Fukuoka (Fukuoka City: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1989), p. 254. 140 Kuwahara, 3rd Asian art show, Fukuoka, p. 5.

64 thematic exhibitions introduced curatorial concepts of the new, the beyond, the traditional and the conceptual for framing modern and contemporary exhibitionary discourses in Southeast Asia. Emphatic proclamations of the ‘new’ marked the inauguration of exhibitions with specific interests in appraising contemporaneity in Southeast Asian art. The New Art from Southeast Asia exhibition, organised by the Japan Foundation (ASEAN Cultural Centre), the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Tokyo Metropolitan Culture Foundation in 1992, was a landmark exposition in this light. It travelled to the Fukuoka Art Museum, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and the Kirin Plaza Osaka in Japan. Such interests in the region were concomitant with the founding of the ASEAN Cultural Centre under the auspices of the Japan Foundation in 1990. It registered a significant manifestation of Japan’s interest in the region with a mission to introduce its contemporary art to Japan.141 Precedents for displaying works from Southeast Asia have been traced to the three editions of the Asian Art Show organised by the Fukuoka Art Museum. These shows sparked public interest in and initiated research on Southeast Asian contemporary art.142 The New Art from Southeast Asia exhibition was a large project and marked the first conscious attempt to survey and appraise contemporary art from Southeast Asia as a region. Nakamura Hideki, an art historian, Masahiro Ushiroshoji, formerly the chief curator from the Fukuoka Art Museum and now professor of art studies at the Kyushu University, and co- curator Tani Arata, an art critic and commissioner for the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and 1984, each contributed an essay to the accompanying publication. New Art from Southeast Asia influenced the Japanese imagination of Southeast Asia. It signalled a shift in interest from the West towards Asia in Japan. The 1990s witnessed increasing Japanese cultural exports to markets in East and Southeast Asia, most notably from its music industry whose exports trebled in volume and value, from 5.5 billion yen in 1988 to 14.6 billion yen in 2002.143 Increased economic trade and cultural exchanges,

141 The ASEAN Cultural Centre was expanded into the Asia Cultural Centre in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. 142 The fourth and final Asian Art Show took place in 1994 before it was replaced by the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial in 1999, marking the opening of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. It was no coincidence that the mayor of Fukuoka City helmed all three shows organised by the Fukuoka Art Museum from 1979 to 1989. The shows provided platforms and a ‘gateway to Asia’ for the building of political and economic ties through art, at a time when Japan’s trade with Asia was becoming increasingly significant. 143 Nissim Otmazgin, ‘Japanese Government Support for Cultural Export’, Kyoto Review, 3 (October 2003).

65 coupled with shifts in Japanese government policies and public attitudes towards Asia, formed the geopolitical and economic backdrops for mounting the New Art from Southeast Asia exhibition. The choice of the designation ‘new’ art rather than contemporary or postmodern art, which were more common in the 1990s, was significant. Nakamura Hideki’s essay on ‘The Self-Awareness of Human Beings in Flux’ set the tone for the exhibition:

In the final decade of the twentieth century, the world is experiencing major changes, as events that upset established notions occur in every region of the globe. The trends in East and Southeast Asia, including dynamic economic growth, represent one of the most noteworthy changes. In the face of new realities, we cannot expect to continue forever to measure Asia in terms of outworn standards.144

The standards that Hideki alluded to were Euro-American criteria and frameworks transcended by ‘new art’. Masahiro Ushiroshoji echoed Nakamura’s claims when he remarked that

the changes in the art scene in Southeast Asia, namely, the appearance of a new subject (i.e. changing society), new forms of art (i.e. installation and performance), and the materials (i.e. familiar ones from daily life), come from the desire of artists to engage with societies in which they live and the real world surrounding them.145

‘New art’ was synonymous with how artists in this region were dealing with contemporaneity, while engaging with conditions of change in societies and artistic practices. History was evoked in explaining new art in Southeast Asia. Hideki historicised Southeast Asian art neatly:

To put it simply, a generation that adhered to folk traditions was succeeded by one receptive to Western Modernism. Now that the depths of folk culture and the legacy of Western Modernism are taken for granted as a spiritual foundation, a third generation that is trying to forge its own identity is rapidly coming to the fore.146

144 Nakamura Hideki, ‘The Self-Awareness of Human Beings in Flux’, in New Art from Southeast Asia 1992 (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 1992), p. 13. 145 Masahiro Ushiroshoji, ‘The Labyrinthine Search for Self-Identity: The Art of Southeast Asia from the 1980s to 1990s’, in New Art from Southeast Asia 1992, p. 21 146 Ibid.

According to Hideki, the second generation of modernist Southeast Asian artists had hybridised folk culture and ‘Western modernism’ or internationalism. This issue was observed and discussed by various writers in the three earlier Asian Art Shows. The ‘third generation’, on the other hand, shifted its preoccupations towards the self and the exploration of its own cultural identities. It was, therefore, the historical continuities with tradition and folk culture that defined the interests of artists in Southeast Asia making ‘new art’. This was reaffirmed by Ushiroshoji, who declared that ‘when Southeast Asian artists took up that difficult challenge, they tried to anchor themselves firmly within the unique and fertile traditions of Southeast Asia’.147 While history explained the exhibitionary discursive impulses of ‘new art’ in the region, it was the ethnographic, evoked through the folk culture and traditions of this region, that shored up the story of the 1992 exhibition. Tani Arata’s ‘Toward an Asian School of Contemporary Art’ challenged the linear conception of time, replacing it with a conception of time in Southeast Asia that was primeval, cyclical, and even mythical:

In spite of having been stimulated by ‘linear time’ and the modern West and metaphors of progress and development,’ the motifs are not limited to them, but also deal with primeval time that continues to exist. Such motifs include the god of fertility Buroru, who emerges from the squashed belly of a naked inverted figure in Agnes Arellano’s work. This is a metaphor for the will of the people, who occupy ‘living’ time that exists in myth and experience. It may also express resistance to linear time.148

His observation of how ‘the Postmodern movement began scarcely without any time-lag behind Europe, the United States and Japan’ was also a condition that shaped the art history of Southeast Asia. This challenged the linear concept of time and replaced it with ‘primeval time’ that existed in the mystical.149 These proclamations of the primeval, the mystical and the mythical marked an ethnographic turn, a return to ethnic traditions as wellsprings from which the art from this region distinguished itself as new art. This challenged the earlier exhibitionary discourses of the Asian Art Show, which constructed a linear art history of the region and adopted the centre-periphery model by replacing the privileging of Euro- American origins with the fountainhead civilisations of India, China and Japan. Southeast

147 Ibid. 148 Tani Arata, ‘Toward an Asian School of Contemporary Art’, in New Art from Southeast Asia 1992, p. 104. 149 Ibid.

Asian art was beginning to be reclaimed on its own terms, rather than as part of other geographical entities like the ‘Far East’, ‘further India’ or ‘Greater Asia’. Exhibitionary discourses that emanated from Southeast Asia itself began to emerge from thematic exhibitions produced by institutions located in the region that looked to the ‘beyond’ and the ‘future’.

A Pivotal Year: 1996

Three exhibitions of extensive scale and curatorial ambition marked out 1996 as a historically significant year for contemporary Asian and Southeast Asian art. These exhibitions were Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions (CAATT), Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art, and the APT. The APTs from the inaugural exhibition in 1993 to the third exhibition in 1999 will be examined as a series of triennials with overlapping curatorial concerns. The late John D. Rockefeller founded the Asia Society, New York in 1956 as ‘the premier educational institution in the United States devoted to fostering understanding and close ties between Asians and Americans’.150 Prior to the CAATT, exhibitions organised by the Asia Society ignored contemporary art in Asia, preferring to hold exhibitions on ‘traditional’ Asian treasures151 in which ‘Classical and premodern traditions from Asia are spectacles that visitors and friends of the Asia Society expect to revere’.152 The CAATT represented a radical shift from the ‘classical’ Asian art of previous exhibitions to contemporary Asian art. In addition, Thomas McEvilley cites three ‘ground-breaking’ achievements of the CAATT in terms of the employment of largely Asian writers and curators,153 the scale of the exhibition,154 and the approach to the artworks from the five nations ‘without prejudices about some purported purity of tradition’.155 The third point on

150 Nicholas Platt, Treasures of Asian Art: Selections from the Mr and Mrs John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1993), p. 11. 151 See Sherman E. Lee, Asian Art: Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Part I and II (New York: Asia Society, 1975). 152 Apinan Poshyananda, ‘Preface’, in Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions, Tensions, ed. Apinan Poshyananda (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1996), p. 15. 153 All the writers and curators were Asians with the exception of Thomas McEvilley. 154 The selected five Asian nations – India, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and South Korea – were not necessarily linked regionally or by overlapping traditions, unlike in previous exhibitions that tended to select countries that were geographically linked, such as in Southeast Asia. 155 Thomas McEvilley, ‘Exhibition Strategies in the Postcolonial Era’, in Contemporary Art in Asia, pp. 57–58.

68 the ‘purity of tradition’ is of particular interest as it breaks down false dichotomies between tradition and contemporaneity, while also exposing ‘the realities of dissolving boundaries and increasing hybridity… as a situation to be acknowledged and dealt with’.156 Art historian Geeta Kapur, in one of the essays published in CAATT’s catalogue, questioned the efficacy of notions of hybridity and eclecticism in reimagining continuities between tradition and the modern:

A continued insistence on eclecticism and its conversion to various ideologies of hybridity within the postmodern can serve to elide the diachronic edge of cultural phenomena and thus ease the tensions of historical choice. It can lead not only to nostalgia but also a kind of temporal recoil. This recourse to eclecticism could lead to conservatism and complacency since every choice and combination is ratified by the participatory spirit of postcolonialism/postmodernism.157

Kapur cited the artist Tyed Mehta as an example in which ‘figural ensembles simultaneously invoke the Arcadia of classical modernism (Matisse and Leger), mythical devouring (of the goddess Kali), and contemporary tragedies (such as the marginalization of his own Muslim community within what is designated as national space)’. His work defies conventional conceptions of eclecticism and hybridity that mask real complexities. The crux of the problem lies in the stability of identities that are deemed hybrid or eclectic, thus prompting Kapur to pose the challenge whereby ‘we must not look for hybrid solutions but for dialectical synthesis’.158 For Kapur, coming to terms with one’s identity is not enough, as space for contradictions beyond the stable national, ethnic and perhaps even regional paradigms have to be available. Similar calls for a fluid and liminal state of identity in place of static and essentialist conceptions were mooted by Hideki Nakamura, who argued that an increasing self-awareness in Southeast Asia was well underway by the 1990s.159

The Beyond

It was also in 1996 that the Singapore Art Museum officially opened with its inaugural exhibition Modernity and Beyond. Besides the ‘modest yet significant mark [that] has been

156 Ibid. 157 Geeta Kapur, ‘Dismantling the Norm’, in Contemporary Art in Asia, p. 63. 158 Ibid. 159 Nakamura, ‘The Self-Awareness of Human Beings in Flux, pp. 13–16.

69 registered’160 by this exhibition in transcending national boundaries, the choice of ‘beyond’ in the exhibition title warrants closer scrutiny. The focus on ‘beyond’ in postcolonial art discourse in the 1990s was also reflected in the theme ‘Beyond the Future’ of the third APT in Brisbane in 1999. Homi Bhabha described the attempt to locate grounds and space that are stable enough for the establishment of a new cultural identity as ‘the beyond’. In this effort, the once stable paradigms of morality and tradition are negotiated and renegotiated incessantly.161 But what exactly is this new space termed as ‘the beyond’? Was it a mere coincidence that both the third APT and Modernity and Beyond employed the term ‘beyond’ in the conceptualisations of their respective exhibitions? The word ‘beyond’ thus alludes to how artists – now much more secure with their own identities162 that have been shaped by a complex multitude of factors – ‘approach the future not with a determination to recohere around a long-lost identity, but with a feeling that that identity (along with the identity of the colonizer) is a thing of the past, and that the future holds new, more interesting

160 T.K. Sabapathy, Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art, ed. T.K. Sabapathy (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 1996), pp. 7–9. 161 Homi Bhabha, ‘Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation – Figurations for an Alternative Consciousness’, in Cultural Diversity in the Arts: Art, Art Politics, and the Face Lift of Europe, ed. R. Lavrijsen (Amsterdam: K.I.T. Publications, 1993), p. 32. 162 This compares with the first decades after the Second World War in which many of the newly independent countries began to move into McEvilley’s third phase of identity. The issue of identity as a historical process postulated by Thomas McEvilley can be employed profitably in relation to Southeast Asian historical realities. McEvilley divides the history of identity as a historical process into four phases. In the first phase, cultural identity in the pre-modern period was “simply a given, unquestioned and unrelativised by the insistent intervention of other cultural realities”. Art historically speaking, this was the precolonial period when “traditional” art developed. The second phase was the “colonial or modernist period, [in which] the idea of cultural identity became a weapon or strategy used by the colonizers both to buttress their own power and to undermine the will and confidence of the colonized”. This phase marked the denigration of the artistic conventions of non-Western cultures, which were dismissed as decadent, static, derivative and inferior to Western art forms. The second phase of identity sparked two responses in resistance to the third phase. The first response was an initially deliberate imitation of Western standards, tastes and art forms couched in terms of an attempt to challenge the Western identity, which was supposedly regarded as a universal identity. The second response (this is usually a more delayed reaction) was an attempt to turn the tables on the Western notions of cultural superiority that has informed their identity by negating the identity of the colonizers and recovering their precolonial identity. The pan-Asian and pan-African theories purported by Okakura Tenshin and Cheik Anta Diop respectively that seek to reverse the colonial relationship by asserting the cultural superiority of Asians and Africans over the West were clear instances of attempts to reassert their own identities. Such Asian-centricism and Afrocentricism mirrored attempts by non-Western artists to return to their so-called “inherited traditions” of the precolonial era. The fourth phase is the postcolonial phase in which non-Western artists are secure in their sense of identity. Cultural hybridity has been accepted as a common element that all cultures share to varying degrees, and there is a desire to move beyond issues concerning identity and colonialism in order to focus on the future, thus burying anxieties stemming from colonialism. In the realm of art, artists in the fourth phase “self-consciously accept hybridization and make their work reflect the various forces that have formed them as individuals”.

70 identities for all’.163 This echoes Bhabha’s interest in the new space that he called ‘the beyond’ wherein a new cultural identity can take root. The emphasis on the future also signalled a desire to come to terms with colonialism and go beyond essentialist notions of a ‘pure’, homogeneous and unchanging national identity. The third APT theme of ‘Beyond the Future’ sought to break out of the linear, chronological unfolding of time, and to examine time as a fluid concept, which slipped between the past and the future, while forging continuities and ruptures. Like the ‘new’, the ‘beyond’ was a flexible and contingent curatorial term that was part of the exhibitionary discourse devised to break out of Euro-American concepts of the modern and the contemporary in art, and to examine relationships between craft, contemporary art, modern art and tradition. The third APT focused on works that challenged the autonomy of the single author by inviting audience interaction and collaboration in meaning-making across cultures and art forms. The concept of the ‘beyond’ provoked a rethinking of the practice of art that related back to the inaugural 1993 APT, which was a watershed in the art history of Asia and the Pacific in its search for new, expanded curatorial frameworks and terminologies to understand art. In the conference that accompanied the 1993 APT, there was a sense of urgency in developing ‘new curatorial paradigms that have the potential to remap the terrain not only of art from the Asia-Pacific region but that of global art in general’.164 ‘The difficulty of finding a new vocabulary and new discourse from which to approach new definitions of identity’,165 as pointed out by APT project director Caroline Turner, was similar to the issue raised by Marian Pastor Roces (cited by Sabapathy):

The challenge is in fact to create new intellectual tools that can perhaps go beyond the terms ‘syncretic’, or even perhaps ‘hybrid’, and certainly beyond that sad word ‘influence’… A calibrated terminology, therefore, that can also register the total extinctions of culture caused by the modern machine, and therefore, allows us the ability to mourn.166

163 Thomas McEvilley, Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale (New York: Prestal Pub, 1993), p. 11. 164 Charles Green, ‘Beyond the Future: The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial’, available at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_4_58/ai_59552691, 6/11/2004. 165 Caroline Turner, ‘Internationalism and Regionalism: Paradoxes of Identity’, in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1993), p. xvi. 166 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Developing Regionalist Perspectives in South-East Asian Art Historiography’, in The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1996), p. 13.

Such calls for new approaches did not occur only in the 1990s. One would only need to recall the numerous times in which Sabapathy had bemoaned the general failure of the ASEAN exhibitions in the 1980s to facilitate comparative studies and new curatorial perspectives and methods. However, the impassioned and sustained calls from art historians, critics and curators from Asia and the Pacific to ‘resist paradigms from the West as being sovereign’167 were unprecedented and historically significant. The efforts to remap contemporary art in Asia and the Pacific and reflect the changing global socio-economic and political realignments are significant. Caroline Turner’s call for ‘collaboration based on genuine partnerships and mutual respect’ as a critical factor to ensure the success of the APT sought to erase cultural hierarchies. Such a shift towards cultural equality was significant as cultural hierarchies were implied in the 1979 Asian Art Show through its pre-mediated curatorial structure of exhibiting art from Japan, China and India first, before holding an exhibition on other Asian countries the following year. The First APT, on the other hand, had a broad representation of Asia-Pacific countries that included India, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Japan, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Korea, Tibet, and Australia. This expanded to some 77 artists from twenty countries in the third APT in 1999,168 without curatorial structures to deliberately express cultural hierarchy. Turner advocated the need to ‘provide ways of looking at art without a “center”, as well as an approach to cultural interchanges open to the future in which we can recognize what we have in common yet respect what is different’.169 Such a remapping of contemporary art in Asia recognised the diasporic nature of the contemporary art world while transcending circumscribed national and ethnic boundaries. It was meant to accentuate and come to terms with evolving complex identities that are hybrid and transcultural. It reflected a sense of coming to terms with one’s own selfhood that paralleled McEvilley’s fourth phase of identity in which Asian artists accept hybridisation and the various eclectic forces that have shaped them as individuals.170 Turner’s effort to

167 Ibid., p. 17. 168 Green, ‘Beyond the Future’, n.p. 169 Caroline Turner, ‘The Asia-Pacific Triennial’, available at http://iias.leidenuniv.nl/iiasn8/ascul/triennia.html, 6 November 2004. 170 Thomas McEvilley, Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale (New York: Museum for African Art, 1993), pp. 12–13.

72 call for ‘art without a center’ is laudable. At the same time, both the APT and the Asian Art Show can be conceived as attempts by, respectively, Australia and Japan to establish multiple centres representing Asian art. The organisers provided space for Asian artists to exhibit artworks that could not be displayed in their own countries due to strict state censorship. In this sense, the events harked back to distinctions between First and Third World countries based on their level of democracy or protection of human rights, but with notions of ‘freedom of expression’ construed in Western terms. Japan’s and Australia’s representation of art from developing or newly developed countries in Asia may easily fall into a different form of the centre-periphery model, with Japan and Australia as the new centres with their own peripheries.

The Conceptual Turn: Back to the Artist as the Progenitor of Ideas

Conceived as a travelling exhibition in 2002-2003 under the auspices of ASEAN, 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-East Asian Art sought to present contemporary Southeast Asian art to audiences in Europe. Sabapathy explains in the ‘Curatorial Introduction’ that the exposition was underlined by a conscious curatorial effort to remap Southeast Asia artistically ‘as a region to be undertaken along perspectives proposed by individual artists’. Such a call signalled an alternative approach to previous exhibitions that framed interpretations of art and artists within specific thematic discourses. Instead, this exhibition proposed employing individual artists as active agents who engaged with, and were acted upon by, an increasingly globalised world. The title referred to the number of artists featured in the exhibition, while ‘ideas’ called ‘attention to the conceptual aspects in the work’.171 The concept of this exhibition was developed in late 1999, when Southeast Asia was perceived as ‘in the throes of political, economic and social crisis’.172 Kwok Kian Chow, then Director of the Singapore Art Museum,173 explained 36 Ideas by making references to a popular song titled ‘DiobokObok’, which, in the Javanese vernacular, ‘alluded to stirred waters and agitated conditions in a tank, causing the fish within to be unsettled and

171 Sabapathy, ‘Thoughts on an International Exhibition on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art’, n.p. 172 Kwok Kian Chow, ‘Message’, 36 Ideas from Asia, p. 10. 173 The Singapore Art Museum, together with the National Heritage Board, was tasked with both the project management and art direction of the exhibition. See 36 Ideas from Asia, p. 124.

73 disoriented’. As the working title for 36 Ideas, ‘DiobokObok’ was intended to capture local contexts and ‘poignantly a sense of the tumultuous times and the dramatic events [that is, the Asian financial crisis] in Southeast Asia in the last years of the latter millennium’.174 The need to map the realities of Southeast Asia was also articulated by Choo Whatt Bin, the chairman of ASEAN’s COCI:

Southeast Asia has witnessed dramatic events in recent years. The regional crisis [that is, the 1997 Asian economic crisis] was also a catalyst that stirred up dormant sentiments of political, social and cultural tensions, occasioning dramatic turns of event on political and civil fronts in its wake. The histories and current realities of the countries in the region are reflected in the art histories and the contemporary practices of Southeast Asian artists. The ASEAN COCI proposes to register the varying nature of contemporary art in the region and to surface the concerns of contemporary artists in the region to an international audience.175

Previous ASEAN exhibitions sponsored by the COCI had constructed peaceful, beautiful, and untroubled narratives of art in Southeast Asia, framed by nation-state boundaries. 36 Ideas marked a departure by charting new maps that sought to trace the contours of topical issues, tensions, differences, discontinuities and heterogeneity from regional rather than national perspectives. The underlying premise for this occasion and the exhibitionary discourse may be cast in the following terms: artists and artworks are progenitors of ideas for contemporaneity in Southeast Asian art, or artists and artworks are progenitors of ideas for apprehending contemporaneity in the region’s art. Nevertheless, as observed by Sabapathy, the ensuing exhibitionary discourses continued to be wrapped in the polite formalities of cultural diplomacy.176 Niranjan Rajah and Patrick Flores also contributed essays to the exhibitionary discourse that deserve close attention. Flores’s ‘Homespun Worldwide: Colonialism as Critical Inheritance’, a survey of the terrains of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, revealed the continuing threads of coloniality that collided and combined in a contingent present. For instance, perspective, a principal aesthetic mode of organising spatiality that was institutionalised in Southeast Asia by art academies modelled after the École des Beaux-

174 Ibid., p. 10. 175 Choo Whatt Bin, ‘Message’, 36 Ideas from Asia, p. 8. 176 Sabapathy, ‘Curatorial Introduction’, n.p.

Arts, was resisted by Soe Naing in his painting Village People. The surface of the painting was flattened in a ‘primitive’ manner, shaped by tendencies in folk art. Closer scrutiny of the artworks reveals how aesthetic properties, such as space, form and colour, were not simply derived from Euro-American ideals. The return to conceptual aspects in artworks in 36 Ideas privileged local worldviews and philosophies that particularised contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Artists such as Soeung Vannara and Phy Chan Than conceptualised culture as nature by tapping into spiritual worlds in which nature, rituals, spirits and culture were integrated and entwined. Rajah’s essay historicised modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia by tracing the impulses of modernisms in the various nation states. In each instance, the impulses were shaped by communism, nationalism, social reform and ethnicity, and directed towards forging regional, global and transnational perspectives in art. He located these conceptual devices in the works by artists in the exhibition. These devices were also historically contingent and formed a history of ideas that framed contemporary art-making in Southeast Asia. Rajah emphasised ‘transnational arenas’ that go beyond national narratives.177 He called for Southeast Asian art to engage with the ‘cultural challenges posed by globalization and the new suzerainty’, entailing the development of new approaches.178 Departing from earlier notions and claims of Southeast Asian art as a fixed category, 36 Ideas marked a real attempt to advance new approaches and methods for curating and thinking about the region’s art and artists. For Rajah, the conceptual in the exhibitionary discourse was employed as a device for historicising the contemporary in Southeast Asian art. It enabled him to locate art’s sources in the region’s spiritual and natural worlds. The conceptual was the entry point for deep engagements with the contemporary, going beyond superficial understandings of the artworks.

177 Niranjan Rajah, ‘Towards a Southeast Asian Paradigm: From Distinct National Modernisms to an Integrated Regional Arena for Art’, in 36 ideas from Asia, p. 32. 178 Ibid., p. 35.

New Directions Connecting Exhibitionary Discourses for an Expanded Field (Mid- 2000s to Mid-2010s)

‘The ethnographic’, ‘the beyond’ and ‘the conceptual’ had manifested in curatorial exhibitions by art museums both within and outside the region since the 1990s. The exhibitionary discourses of these exhibitions were driven by the postcolonial conditions of Southeast Asia. In ‘Critical Curation/Curatorial Critique’, Flores argued that ‘critical writing and curating are moments of critique, and that both could interrogate each other in specific ventures like producing exhibitions and putting together catalogues’.179 One of his case studies was Cubism in Asia: Unbounded Dialogues, an exhibition organised by the Japan Foundation at the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Singapore Art Museum and the National Museum of Modern Art, Korea, from 2005 to 2006, before travelling to Paris in 2007. Cubism in Asia was a ‘moment of critique’ in exhibition histories, whereby exhibitionary discourses engaged and reconnected with the academic scholarship mediated through the international symposium that was held at the Japan Foundation in Tokyo in 2005. More importantly, Cubism in Asia marked an exhibitionary turn towards reinterpretations of history, theory and art historiography. Cubism in Asia broke down previous exhibitionary mappings of Asia as well as Southeast Asian art histories that were linear and privileged the Euro-American origins of cubism. It looked at cubism not as a style but as an artistic strategy used by artists in Asia to signal that they had become modern. Anxieties of belatedness transformed into adaptations of cubism through the process of cultural transfer, including productive mistranslations. It was these productive mistranslations that resisted the notion of cultural transfer as a simplistic and untroubled transfer of style and meaning. They involved creative acts emerging from multiple modernities rather than a passive reinterpretation of Cubism. The idea of ‘multiple modernities’ referred to modernism as plural and contingent, or a confluence of multiple sources.180 It was shaped by the various local, regional and global forces that shaped the social, cultural and political conditions driving artistic production in

179 Patrick Flores, ‘Critical Curation/Curatorial Critique’, in Critical Evaluation Reloaded (Paris: AICA Press, 2006), p. 1 180 See Dilip Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); and Jim Supangkat, ‘Multiculturalism/Multimodernism’, in Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions, ed. Apinan Poshyananda (New York: Asia Society, 1996), pp. 63–85.

76 the region. Cubism in Asia became the exhibitionary moment whereby the discourse on multiple modernities entered the exhibitionary discourse. The academic discourse made visible the active and experimental interventions of Asian artists, which turned cubism into polyvalent cubistic forms, with new meanings produced from local contexts and conditions. It included the ‘transparent cubism’ of Vincente Manansala, which combined overlapping elements of cubism with folk culture treated in a translucent manner. This called for shifts in art historical methods, away from stylistic and iconographical analysis that connected one style to the next. New focal points were the study of the process of cultural transfer, and the productive mistranslations and active artistic experimentations with a plurality of styles and ideas by postcolonial artists. Scholars and curators recognised the need to conduct field research by focusing on artists and their artworks and ideas. 36 Ideas demonstrated how artists interpreted and adopted theories into their art-making, how they developed their own techniques, iconography and concepts, and how they used their materials, particularly local materials that embodied specific cultural and historical meanings. Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art, curated by Sabapathy in 2012, continued the engagement with intersections between history and exhibitionary discourses, including artists’ manifestos, actions, and artworks. The contemporary was historicised through ‘the premises surfacing from discussions of thoughts, aspirations and actions publicised by Cheo Chai-Hiang, and the artists- provocateurs-activists of Towards A Mystical Reality, the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru and the Kaisahan Group… scrutinised with interests in the contemporary after the 1970s and until today’.181 The 1970s was identified as a decade of contemporary turns centred on Flores’s ‘moments of critique’. These moments embodied the ‘critical exhibitions’ in this thesis, which produced manifestos, actions and artworks in the context of a changing art world. Telah Terbit (Out Now) Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Practices during the 1960s to 1980s, curated by Ahmad Mashadi at the Singapore Art Museum in 2006, scrutinised the practices of artists in the 1970s from which we are able to locate a ‘shift from formal conventions and taste, regard to context, reflexivity to historical contingencies – the dual bind of language and content’. Artistic practices in the 1970s registered a move away from modernist preoccupations with formal properties and pictorial conventions embodied in

181 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Intersecting Histories: Thoughts on the Contemporary and History in Southeast Asian Art’, in Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art (Singapore: ADM Gallery, 2012), p. 53.

77 paintings, to new forms of art-making beyond painting, which were socially and politically inflected, contextually driven, and historically aware. Although both Telah Terbit and Intersecting Histories focused on the artistic practices, texts and actions that constituted the contemporary, the specific role of critical exhibitions as exhibitionary forms providing the discursive space for these practices to be displayed, discoursed, received and disseminated has not been given sufficient attention. Riverscapes IN FLUX: Ecological and Cultural Change of Major River Landscapes in Southeast Asia, organised by the Goethe Institute in Hanoi in 2013, involved six curators and seventeen artists from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar and Indonesia. According to Tran Luong, an artist-curator and one of the exhibition’s six curators:

For thousands of years now, rivers have been integral to mankind’s development. The heart-melting beauty of riverscapes has nurtured mankind’s feelings and souls. Riverscapes In FLUX is a complex arts project, a marriage between an academic arts project and social development.182

The exhibition reimagined Southeast Asia not according to nation-state boundaries, but according to natural geographies like the Mekong River that runs through China’s Yunnan province down to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ was also built around this river, which has shaped the culture and soul of the peoples that depend on it for their livelihood.183 River IN FLUX married anthropological methods of field research with artistic responses to transnational issues of environmental pollution and erasures of cultures and ways of life in the name of economic development. The exhibitionary framing of the artists as activists in raising environmental issues was combined with concepts and approaches from Southeast Asian studies. The curator and the art historian as ‘ethnographer’ have bridged the gap between exhibitionary discourses and the field of Southeast Asian studies. They have dislodged modernist categories and replaced them with terms and concepts that emerged from and are embedded in the region itself. At the same time, as Flores rightly points out, the

182 See the River IN FLUX website: http://blog.goethe.de/riverscapes/archives/71-Riverscapes-IN-FLUX- Ecological-and-Cultural-Change-of-Major-River-Landscapes-in-Southeast-Asia.html. 183 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 5–7.

78 ethnographic is also lodged in modernism and colonialism in Southeast Asia, which ‘testif[ies] to the antimonies of modernity, the source of the aporia, the transcendence of which constitutes a modernist failure but with a postcolonial future’.184 Flores identifies the ‘anxiety of context’ whereby ‘without such a context, the specimen is stripped of its artistic rondure as if context invests it with agency, the wherewithal to stand alone as art, to validate its life before it is admitted into the artworld, a contemporary artworld that is so taken by the living’.185 The impulse of exhibitionary discourses on exhibitionary histories has been driven by the anxiety of context. Context infuses exhibition-making and artistic practices with the agency to create moments of dissensus and to question dominant ways of thinking. The challenge is to loosen the burden of location locked by the nation state, and to start looking at networks of shared ideas, issues and contexts across the region. Critical exhibitions that emerged from the art world contexts in postcolonial Southeast Asia demonstrated the complexity of art and were cast in the occasionally contradictory or even conflicting categories of the modern, the contemporary, the new, and the traditional.

Conclusion

SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, which opened on 5 July 2017, was billed as ‘one of the largest Southeast Asian contemporary art exhibitions in history’. It was co-organised by the Japan Foundation Asia Center (launched in 2014), the Mori Art Museum and the National Art Center, Tokyo in ‘the year of the 50th anniversary of the founding of ASEAN’.186 The three organisations assembled a fourteen-member curatorial team, including curators from Southeast Asia. The exhibition involved two-and-a-half years of research and showcased close to 180 artworks across nine themes by 86 artists from ten ASEAN member countries. The inauguration of the Asia Center was announced at the ASEAN-Japan Commemorative Summit Meeting in 2013 to initiate ‘a new cultural exchange policy for Asia centered on ASEAN’.187 The exhibition took as its starting point the series of exhibitions, including Southeast Asian art initiated in Japan, many of which were had been

184 Patrick Flores, ‘Field Notes from Artworlds: Interest and Impasse’, Third Text, 25.4 (2011), p. 386. 185 Ibid., p. 387. 186 SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now exhibition press release. The nine themes were: Fluid World; Diverse Identities; Passion and Revolution; Day by Day; Archiving; Growth and Loss; Medium as Mediation; What is Art? Why Do It?; and Dialogue with History. 187 Ibid.

79 either supported or organised by the Japan Foundation since the 1980s. Sabapathy, in his keynote speech at the exhibition’s opening, observed that

SUNSHOWER is a beneficiary of the research and knowledge generated in earlier exhibitions; it marks a kind of summation of what is cumulatively known and experienced of Southeast Asian art in Japan – modern and the contemporary – since the 1980s and potentially in the field. This is underlined.188

Mami Kataoka, who played the leading curatorial role in SUNSHOWER, places this exhibition ‘at a slight distance from all other Southeast Asian exhibitions mentioned’.189 This critical distance provides both entry points and counterpoints to earlier constructions of exhibitionary discourses produced within and outside Southeast Asia. SUNSHOWER was deployed as a comparison to expose exhibitionary problematics and blindspots, which persistently maintained currency in how art from the region was represented and discoursed. The spectre of cultural diplomacy cast a shadow over SUNSHOWER, which was under the auspices of ASEAN and the Asia Center, and was organised in the context of ASEAN’s fiftieth anniversary. It entailed the risk of representational framings that would gloss over cracks and fissures in order to present coherent and homogeneous national cultures and identities and to confirm regional stability. The ghosts of censorship lurked when Tiffany Chung, who was based in Vietnam and America, had to modify her work in the exhibition due to objections from the Vietnamese government. At the same time, the exhibition also included themes such as ‘Passion and Revolution’. It showed politicised works by artists engaging with the socio-political historical contexts of the region. In his series of 00235 (Figure 1.2), Htein Lin painted and drew on cotton uniforms at the Myaungmya Prison, where he had been imprisoned for four-and-a-half years for alleged involvement in the 1998 student protests against the Myanmar military regime. SUNSHOWER’s exhibitionary discourse explicitly sought to operate between different scales as a pluralistic gesture to return to the artworks and artists as starting points

188 T.K. Sabapathy, ‘Thinking on the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art, Historically’, unpublished keynote address for the symposium on SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, The National Art Center, Tokyo, 8 July 2017, p. 8. 189 Mami Kataoka, ‘Sunshowers in Southeast Asia: A Premise for the Exhibition’, in SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum and The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2017), p. 3.

80 and to eschew chronological order in its thematic sections. The idea of different scales expressed in spatial (i.e., city, country and region) and temporal (i.e., linear, generational and cyclical) terms by Kataoka provided entry points to the notions of the new, the beyond, the traditional and the conceptual, thereby destabilising notions of the modern and the contemporary. The term ‘new art’ in the exhibitionary discourse of the New Art from Southeast Asia exhibition as an alternative to ‘contemporary art’ used in SUNSHOWER opened up the possibilities of situating a different set of artistic practices, produced in different cultural and political contexts, away from the contemporary art that continued to be traced to Euro-American art history. Although the ‘new’ did not address its opposite, the ‘old’, as a rupture, the foundational idea of heterogeneous scales of a continuing present in SUNSHOWER offered multiple ways of interpreting and experiencing the artworks. The theme sprung not from an imposed curatorial framework but from the artworks and artists. The desire to ‘transcend political, racial, religious, or cultural borders and resonate with each other, or overcome generational boundaries’ in SUNSHOWER resonated with the exhibitionary discourse of the ‘beyond’ that gained currency as a curatorial discourse in the 1990s. To transcend the limits of racial, religious and even national borders is to look to what is beyond, to break away from the present, and to shape the future in all its possibilities and potential as a form of empowerment. The beyond offered an empowering exhibitionary discourse for establishing affinities, resonances and connections regionally and between regions on a global scale, while maintaining a continuing present shaped by the specific temporalities, contexts and changing traditions from which art in Southeast Asia emerged. The question of when contemporary art developed in Southeast Asia has drawn a multitude of propositions in exhibitionary discourse on art in Southeast Asia. Telah Terbit looked at the 1960s, Intersecting Histories proposed the 1970s, SUNSHOWER the 1980s and Negotiating Home, History and Nation the 1990s. The different decades as possible wellsprings from which contemporary art emerged reveals how the histories of modern and contemporary art are themselves intertwined. Claire Holt’s Art in Indonesia was an influential text on writings on art in Southeast Asia.190 Her narrative of modern art as contested, manifold and pluralistic could be similarly relevant to explaining the multiple

190 Sabapathy, Thinking on the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art, p. 2.

81 possible starting points of contemporary art. Like Holt’s approach to ‘tradition’ and the ‘modern’ as intertwined categories, ‘tradition’, ‘modernity’ and ‘contemporaneity’ could be conceived as conceptual devices that manifest both connections and fractures. The critical exhibition examined in this thesis bears traces of practices and ideas within specific cultural, political and historical contexts, some of which are located in the modern and others in the contemporary. ‘Clean breaks’ that delineate the contemporary from the modern remain elusive, as art histories intersect at multiple points. The emphasis on artistic ideas assuages the anxieties of art being modern, contemporary or traditional, and eschews the quandary of nation-centric frameworks. These ideas carry critical potential that transcends ethnicity and pollinates across national borders. Returning to ideas seeded by artists is to empower artists and art. Unlike SUNSHOWER’s exhibitionary format of employing themes constructed by curators to order knowledge, 36 Ideas produced a disorder of knowledge, not based on themes that curatorially frame the exhibition’s narrative, but on subjective ideas from 36 artists that randomly resonated, connected or collided with each other. This chapter has demonstrated the possibilities of how exhibition histories, art history, and other disciplines such as ethnography and anthropology, as well as area studies like Southeast Asian studies can reach points of convergence through exhibitionary discourses hinged on the ‘new’, ‘tradition’, the ‘beyond’ and the ‘conceptual’ from the 1950s to the present. The national frame, both in scholarship and exhibitions on Southeast Asian art, is a ghost that refuses to disappear, but exhibitionary discourses imbued with a motivation to transcend it have proposed alternatives. The thematic and comparative approaches of these alternative curatorial interventions, as well as the subjectivity of artists’ ideas, frame exhibitionary discourses imbued with the potential to shape exhibition histories. The next chapter traces the birth of the critical exhibition across Southeast Asia as a different exhibitionary format in the 1970s embodying practices and ideas that had affinities with modern and contemporary art. This type of exhibition was situated in local social, political and cultural contexts, yet it also shared broader regional and global contexts that intersected with local conditions, such as the Cold War, student activism and resistance to authoritarian regimes.

Figure 1.1

Map of 10 ASEAN countries. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/asean-countries.html Accessed on 28 May 2019

Figure 1.2

Installation view of the SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now exhibition 5July 5–23 October 2017 exhibition at the National Art Center, Tokyo and the Mori Art Museum. 14 works shown by Htien Lin in this exhibition were created when he was imprisoned as a political prisoner in 1998. Image from: https://jfac.jp/en/culture/features/f-ah-sunshower-htein-lin/. Accessed on 25/02/2018.

Chapter 2 Changing Exhibitionary Forms in Southeast Asia, 1945– 1970s: From the Salon to the Critical Exhibition

To understand the impact and role of the art exhibition in Southeast Asia requires attention to its ruptures and continuities within changing art worlds, and, in turn, to the wider social and political contexts that shape the art worlds. Not all art exhibitions are alike in their structure and format. This chapter traces the history of art exhibitions by focusing on the structures of different exhibitionary forms. Some exhibition types, such as salon exhibitions, represent continuities in exhibitionary forms that existed before 1945, while new exhibition structures, such as national, regional and internationalist exhibitions, were invented and proliferated across the region after 1945. The emergence of the critical exhibition in the 1970s came amid these competing exhibitionary forms, driven by a constellation of connecting forces of student and left intellectual movements and resistance to dominant systems and structures of power, including political and aesthetic regimes. Art exhibitions are time-specific events that bring together an ensemble of disciplines, practices and technologies. The art worlds in Southeast Asia operate with their own institutional structures and discourses that engage with social, political and cultural conditions that can be local, regional or global. This history of exhibitions in the region serves to study the patterns of the changing exhibitionary modes and their shifting inclinations, affinities and sympathies to new realities. The art exhibition as a site for exchanges allows for an interdisciplinary approach. It brings together disciplines with close affinities to one another. At the same time, it is confronted by the boundaries between disciplines such as art history, art criticism, curation, postcolonial and Southeast Asian studies, technologies of display, and discourse analysis. As a site of construction, the art exhibition also generates and deconstructs knowledge by mapping and making visible its own orders, categories and structures. This chapter focuses on the first two phases in the dynamic development of art exhibitions in Southeast Asia. The first phase from the middle of the twentieth century to

84 approximately 1973 saw the emergence of different exhibitionary formats, including the salon, national, medium-based and internationalist exhibitions. The second phase began in 1974, an art historically significant year in the history of art exhibitions in Southeast Asia. It saw the emergence of a new exhibitionary form, the critical exhibition, which produced manifestos, challenged dominant categories of art, envisioned a new role for art in society, and proposed new ways of thinking about and making art. As will be examined in further detail in Chapter 3, the artists involved expressed their ideas in exhibitionary discourses of the ‘new’, the ‘real’, ‘regionality’, and the ‘contextual’.

The Rise of the National and the Regional in Salon Art Exhibitions

Early modes of exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1950s were dominated by salon exhibitions modelled after the French Salon de Paris. The Salon de Paris was initially organised by an art academy, the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1725–1880), and later by a fine art society, the Société des Artistes Français (from 1881). The salon exhibitions were held annually or biennially and achieved the status of gatekeepers of artistic taste and quality with the introduction of a jury for awarding prizes to artists in 1748. John Clark’s Modern Asian Art identifies art societies that founded art schools and organised exhibitions. For instance, the Indian Society of Oriental Art (founded in 1907) started an art school and organised exhibitions to promote the ‘Bengal School’, thus revealing an incipient network of art academies, societies and exhibitions.191 The salon exhibitions as a type of exhibition initially organised by fine art societies, some of which subsequently became institutionalised as national art salons, ‘have the important function of defining what is national art, categorising works and certifying artists by giving awards and stimulating a national art market to create a standard for adjudicating price’.192 In Singapore, regionalism was pressed into the service of national and anti-colonial movements. Ho Kok Hoe, the then President of the Singapore Art Society, articulated the role of art and photography in recording the zeitgeist of pro-independence sentiments in the ‘Foreword’ to the 1959 First South-East Asia Salon Photography organised by the Singapore Art Society Photographic Group in Singapore:

191 John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), pp. 175–79. 192 Ibid., p. 181.

In Southeast Asia, we see a resurgence of nationalism. One nation after another is throwing away the yoke of Colonialism. We in Singapore are on the eve of attaining self-government, and we in the Singapore Art Society are especially happy that this Salon should be held at this most opportune juncture. Through art, the people of a country records the moods of history, and what is more befitting than that we should, at the crucial moment of in the history of our country, hold a Salon.193

The salon exhibition as an exhibitionary form was imagined as a form of survey exhibition that embodied the zeitgeist of decolonisation leading towards the forming of national cultural identities across Southeast Asia. The convergence of nationalisms and regionalisms in salon exhibitions reveals how the survey exhibition was co-opted for state nation-building purposes. Clark’s study of salon exhibitions in Calcutta and Tokyo forms the basis of comparative studies of networked art worlds. This model analyses the art market, exhibitions and discourse for determining how art was received, legitimised and understood in Southeast Asia. Some salon exhibitions were national art competitions, which shaped the careers of artists in the public domain, and also constructed a pecking order or hierarchy of artists. Boitran Huynh-Beattie regards the 1959–1964 annual Spring Painting Awards organised by the Department of Culture as heralding a ‘Golden Age’ for artists from the Society of Young Saigonese Artists, including Nuguyen Trung and Dinh Cuong, who won awards and gained national fame.194 The annual Spring Painting Awards, fashioned after the Salon d’Automne exhibitions that coincided with the changing seasons, were consolidated and institutionalised as permanent fixtures of the art world in Vietnam. The salon exhibition stamped its influence on the art worlds in the region not only by becoming important staple fixtures for artists to exhibit and be recognised nationally, but also as gatekeepers and arbiters of artistic quality that shaped tastes and determined the status of artists. This was achieved partly with the formation of the Société des Artistes Chinois (sic) or the Salon Art Society, subsequently renamed the Society of Chinese Artists (Huaren Meishu Yanjiuhui, SCA), which was registered on 20 January 1936 and quickly established itself as the most

193 Ho Kok Hoe, ‘Foreword’, First South-East Asia Salon of Photography (Singapore: Singapore Art Society, 1959), p. 7. 194 Boitran Huynh-Beattie, ‘Saigonese Art During the War: Modernity Versus Ideology’, in Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, ed. Tony Day and Maya H. T. Liem (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010), p. 95.

86 prestigious and exclusive art society in Singapore (so much so that it was exempted from registration by the British administration).195 Exclusiveness or exclusivity was a strategy used to project the SCA as an elite art society. Restricting membership to graduates of only three Chinese art academies – the Shanghai Academy of Arts, Shanghai University of Art and Xin Hua Academy – was consistent with the SCA’s objective of raising artistic standards.196 The founders of the SCA initially envisaged the Society as a bastion for maintaining and raising what they themselves defined as ‘high artistic standards’. Restricting membership exclusively to graduates from three prestigious Chinese academies guaranteed cultural capital, thus granting these artists the power of consecrating and legitimising what was to be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art. The small group of artists who graduated from the three Chinese art academies ensured a near monopolisation of cultural capital by an elite and privileged group in the SCA. The decision to open the membership to artists who were not graduates from the three academies was a pragmatic one, as the growth of an art society depends partly on its strength in numbers. But membership was still restricted to the selected few deemed to have met the ‘rigorous’ artistic and moral standards of the SCA. According to Tan Tee Chie’s account of his membership of the SCA, those seeking to join first had to be recommended by a member who would give testimony about the prospective member’s character and integrity, and they would also have to produce certificates as evidence of having graduated from an art academy, submit five artworks, and pass an interview.197 SCA members recommending prospective members had to sign against their testimonies in the application form, reflecting the seriousness of the whole enterprise. Members of the SCA were expected to be of exemplary moral character, as the prestige of the Society would suffer should any of its members be found to be dissolute. Artworks submitted by prospective members were assessed for artistic standards by prominent

195 According to the Straits Settlements Gazette, the SCA was still registered as the Société des Artistes Chinois in 1936, although See Hiang Tuo, who compiled the Society’s history, recorded a change of name to the Singapore Society of Chinese Artists on 17 November 1935. See the Straits Settlement Government Gazette, 22 May 1936, p. 1335. 196 See Seng Yu Jin, ‘The Primacy of Painting: The Institutional Structures of the Singapore Art World from 1935 to 1972’, unpublished MA thesis, The National University of Singapore, 2007, available at http://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/23223. 197 Tan Tee Chie recalled being interviewed by Liu Kang at Minri Huashi, Liu Kang’s own gallery. See Tan Tee Chie, ‘Pleasure on Discovering Our Society’s Early Exhibition Catalogue’, in The Society of Chinese Artists 70th Anniversary: New Era, New Direction (Singapore: PCL Printers, 2005), p. 44.

87 members like Liu Kang. The rigorous and disciplined manner in which the SCA conducted itself was reflected in rules to which all its members had to adhere. They were not allowed to miss more than three consecutive monthly Society meetings, and all members were required to produce artworks for the SCA’s Annual Exhibition. Failing to meet these requirements meant expulsion from the Society.198 Cultural capital was also accumulated through the periodical Yishu (Art), a supplement of the Sin Chew Jit Poh employed by the SCA to promote art through discussions on aesthetics and the use of art in China’s war efforts against Japan.199 Yishu targeted artists and students of Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), and some of its articles on artistic standards influenced its readers. Five Annual Art exhibitions were successfully organised by the SCA from its founding until 1941. They have continued up to the present, only to be disrupted during the war years.200 Restricting the Annual Art exhibition to members was a means of ensuring the ‘high standard’ of artworks displayed, which was guaranteed by the Society’s stringent and rigorous selection procedures, and thus the exhibition projected an image of being the artistic platform par excellence in Singapore. The inclusion of Xu Beihong by special invitation in the 1939 and 1942 SCA Annual Art exhibitions further cemented its status as the most prestigious salon exhibition in the Singapore art world. From 1938 until 1940, oil paintings formed almost half the artworks displayed in the Annual Art exhibitions, with watercolour and Chinese ink paintings coming second and third respectively.201 The dominance of Western oil and watercolour paintings, which emphasised perspective, technical drawing and three-dimensional geometric projection, reflected the absorption and transmission of Western painting. In tandem with the importation of Western technologies for the purpose of modernisation, Western realist oil painting techniques were received as vehicles of modernisation and ‘progress’, which naturally made it the most ‘progressive’ art society promoting modern art. Stringent entry requirements into the SCA created a perceived exclusivity, further amplified by some of its members. For instance, Tchang Ju Chi,

198 Zhong Yu, Malaiya Huaren Meishulishi, p. 29. 199 Yishu first appeared in 1940, and it ran for nineteen issues. 200 According to Yeo Mang Thong, the sixth Annual Art exhibition scheduled in December 1941 did not materialise due to the encroaching Japanese army. See Yeo Mang Thong, ‘The Society of Chinese Artists (1935–1941): The First Organizationally Complete Chinese Art Society in Singapore”, in Yeo Mang Thong, Essays on the History of Pre-War Chinese Painting in Singapore (Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies, 1992), p. 41. 201 Yeo, Essays, pp. 47–48.

Dai Yinlang, Chen Puzhi, Chen Chong Swee and Liu Kang were recognised not only as prominent artists, but also as intellectuals with qualifications from prestigious academies in China. Gaining acceptance into the SCA was immediately recognised as an achievement of a certain artistic standard. The SCA’s penchant for inviting renowned artists like Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu to exhibit, give talks and raise funds for the Sino-Japanese War raised the Society’s profile and status.202 By these means, the SCA accumulated symbolic capital and secured a leading position as the most prominent art society and as organising the most prestigious salon exhibition in the 1930s. Artists who held teaching positions at NAFA, founded in Singapore in 1938, were highly esteemed by their students, because only artists who had qualifications from recognised art academies and had already achieved recognition for their artistic practices were employed as teachers. Since many of the teaching staff at NAFA were also members of the SCA, induction into the Society quickly became the barometer of success and the benchmark of artistic standard for the fresh graduates from the art academy. Tan Tee Chie, who graduated from NAFA in 1951, recalls his application to become an SCA member in 1953:

The Society of Chinese Artists and the Singapore Art Society (established in 1949) are two of Singapore’s biggest art societies although the Society of Chinese Artists was formed fourteen years earlier. However, the difference between the two art societies being the former’s (the SCA) members having attained a certain artistic standard while the latter (the Singapore Art Society) has members who are not artistically inclined.203

It is clear from Tan Tee Chee’s account that the SCA was an art society whose ‘members needed firm artistic foundation’ and where artistic standards were never compromised.204 Huang Baofang, both a NAFA teacher and member of the SCA, describes the direct influence of the SCA on NAFA students: ‘As the Society of Chinese Artists was situated on the second floor of NAFA, members and students often interacted, encouraged and learned from one another, established good relationships, and contributed to a conducive atmosphere for

202 Xu Beihong gave talks on the two occasions he came to Singapore by invitation of the SCA in 1939 and 1941. Liu Haisu gave a talk in 1941 when he came to raise funds for the war in China. 203 Tan, ‘Pleasure on Discovering Our Society’s Early Exhibition Catalogue’, p. 44. 204 Ibid.

89 students to study art.’205 Although the SCA had taken significant steps in accumulating symbolic and cultural capital through its art activities, the close relationship between the SCA and NAFA also accumulated symbolic capital for both institutions and cemented the reputation of the annual salon exhibitions organised by the SCA as the most high profiled exhibition to be seen by the public. Salon exhibitions primarily organised by art societies gradually institutionalised and gained a measure of stability after the Second World War, when countries in Southeast Asia, fuelled by independence movements against colonialism, entered the period of decolonisation. The salon as an exhibitionary mode either featured members of an art society like the SCA, or was open to all artists in a country, as in the annual Spring Painting Awards in Vietnam. The concept of a national art exhibition differentiated itself from the salon-type exhibition in its manifest search for the national. This was often tied to one’s belonging to a particular country as a citizen, and an either unspoken or overt claim towards constructing a national cultural identity through art. The premise of national art exhibitions as an exhibitionary mode was based on how art and artists could be marshalled as a unifying cultural force to serve the country’s drive for nationalism and independence. Art was thought to somehow exhibit and manifest the nation and identity, and national art exhibitions served as a vehicle to show art with ‘national characteristics’. Apinan Poshyananda, in Modern Art in Thailand, examined the National Exhibition of Art, which was organised primarily for art students from Silpakorn University and Pochang to showcase their talents. When ‘placed under the rubric “national exhibition”, it affirmed for the viewers an acceptance of modern Thai art being practised by local artists’. Apinan captured a rare moment of how the second National Exhibition of Art in 1950 was received by M.R. Kukrit, a politician and intellectual who published his exhibition review in a newspaper. According to Kukrit, the works shown were ‘too advanced for the spirit of the present age’, revealing tensions with the conservatives who were anxious to preserve Thai traditions. Silpa Bhirasri, who was instrumental in the founding of Silpakorn University (founded on 12 October 1943) and became a lecturer in the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts, represented a prominent voice championing the need for Thai artists to

205 Huang Baofang, ‘Some Recollections of NAFA and Lim Hak Tai’, in Nanyangmeishu zhifu linxueda (The Father of Nanyang Art, Lim Hak Tai) (Kuala Lumpur: Malaixiya xueyuan yishuyanjiuzhongxin, 1991), unpaginated.

90 be free in their creative practice. This was in tandem with how ‘contemporary art all over the world has freed itself from traditional styles which relied on academism in order to express artistic personality from feeling and technique’.206 Silpakorn University under Bhirasri was tasked with the organisation of the first to the fourteenth National Exhibitions of Art. This bestowed on Silpakorn University and on Bhirasri significant power to shape the direction of the exhibitions in line with the university curriculum. The numerous categories of art, such as painting, applied arts, children’s art, decorative arts, advertising, graphic arts, drawing, painting and sculpture, coincided with the university’s art subjects.207 In his largely biographical A Brief History of Malayan Art, Marco Hsu locates salon- type national art exhibitions, such as the National Art Exhibition held at Kuala Lumpur for artists from the Federated States in 1959, and the 1961 second art exhibition of the Festival of Arts organised by the Ministry of Culture in Singapore, as signs of a maturing art community. Although Boitran, Apinan and Hsu do not consider the national art exhibition as a mode of exhibition that defined, categorised, legitimised and influenced the reception, dissemination and conception of art in the broader art world, their narratives nevertheless register the local importance of this type of exhibition. The shift from salon exhibitions to internationalist exhibitions that promoted specific styles, mediums and ideologies sourced from elsewhere in the world happened across Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. In this regard, scholarship on Indonesian art tends to overlook the importance of exhibitions in the 1950s and 1960s. Although Claire Holt captured the ‘Great Debate’ over what was Indonesian art and its future directions with much detail and clarity, she focused on the discourses produced by individual artists and intellectuals such S. Sudjojono and Takdhir Alisjahbana rather than on exhibitionary discourses.208 A biographical account of artists framed her narrative, centred on the cities of Jakarta, Yogyakarta and Bandung, without an analysis of exhibitionary interactions and networks between these cities. In a similar way, Agus Dermawan overlooked the history of exhibitions by focusing solely on art academies and sanggar (artist collective workshops),

206 The 1st to 13th National Exhibition of Art Catalogue, 1949–1962 (Bangkok: Silpakorn University, 2002), p. 8. 207 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 208 For a discussion on the ‘Great Debate’, see Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 221–54.

91 like the Sanggar Bambu in the 1950s and 1960s.209 Nevertheless, his narrative shifted towards exhibitions and exhibitionary discourses in his account of contemporary art in Indonesia in the 1970s, an approach shared by other scholars like Jim Supangkat in Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond.210

Regionalist Exhibitions

As explained in Chapter 1, in 1957 a new exhibitionary mode emerged, the regional exhibition, with a scope and scale much larger than the salons and national art exhibitions. Although the First Southeast Asia Art Exhibition: A Southeast Asian Competition and Exhibition organised by the Art Association of the Philippines is an exhibition widely known to scholars, it has remained largely unstudied. This regional art competition was a precursor to later regional art competitions like the Philip Morris ASEAN Arts Awards in 1994. Patrick Ng Kah Onn’s batik painting titled Batek Malaya won the first prize, a signal that batik painting as a genre embodied region-ness in its hybridisation of batik as a textile craft tradition. It was reinvented into an easel format infused with pictorial idioms of the region. This explains why Seah Kim Joo’s batik painting was accepted by the Modern Art Society (MAS) as the bastion of avant-garde artistic practices fifteen years later in the 1972 MAS exhibition. The same exhibition rejected Cheo Chai-Hiang’s conceptual 5’ x 5’ (Singapore River). The South-East Asia Cultural Festival, organised by the Ministry of Culture in Singapore in 1963, marked continuities with the regional exhibitionary mode in which ‘national, regional and global factors intersect in cultural display’.211 The state used strategic systems of representation in the exhibition to project Singapore as ‘a nation of gathered races performing to and each other, a vision extended to Southeast Asia as a whole’. Such state-sponsored and choreographed exhibitionary display constituted a site where the networks of the art world and ‘cultural networks cut across political and ideological ones’. Lindsay’s focus on the cultural politics of constructing national and regional cultural

209 Agus Dermawan T., ‘Contemporary Indonesian Painting 1950–1990’, in Streams of Indonesian Art: From Pre-Historic to Contemporary, ed. Supono Hadisudjatmo, Djoko Sujono, and Arwah Setiawan (Jakarta: Panitia Pameran KIAS, 1990-1991), pp. 103–52. 210 See Jim Supangkat, Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond (Jakarta: Indonesia Fine Arts Foundation, 1997). 211 Cited in Jennifer Lindsay, ‘Festival Politics: Singapore’s 1963 Southeast Asia Cultural Festival’, in Cultures at War, p. 228.

92 identities within the context of the Cold War provides another way of studying modes of exhibition as strategic representations of intersecting national, regional and global forces.

Internationalist Exhibitions

Hsu devoted an entire chapter to ‘Vibrant Young Artists (B)’ in A Brief History of Malayan Art. It included the 1956 exhibition organised by the Singapore Chinese High Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Association (SCHSGAA) and the exhibitions by the Equator Art Society. He traced the exhibitionary discourses by highlighting specific artworks and essays in the exhibition catalogues. He quoted texts such as ‘Art belongs to society – it is public, and should serve the public’ to mark these exhibitions as ideologically driven, while describing them stylistically as ‘mainly realist in nature’.212 Solo exhibitions that propelled ‘avant-garde’ styles like cubism and abstraction were mounted by individual artists such as Ta Ty, who was described by Boitran as committed to ‘Cubism for a brief period of time before venturing into abstract art’.213 Ranard recounts Paw Oo Thet’s solo exhibition as groundbreaking for adopting cubist and semi-abstract styles ‘as the spark which ignited the “modern art movement”’ in Burma in 1963.214 This show was held at the Myanmar American Institute, a cultural centre sponsored by the United States Information Service, opened on the same day as the assassination of American president John F. Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963. It was a great success for Paw Oo Thet, as most of his works were sold. His paintings drew from cubist visual language and represented a break from ‘traditional’ paintings dominated by realism.215 In the Philippines, the First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala in 1953 featured non-representational works that included cubist, semi-abstract and symbolist paintings. It marked the emergence of exhibitions based on propagating styles conceived as ‘non-objective’, which went against the tide of the dominant Amorsolo School that featured realist and idealised landscape and figure-types for imagining the Philippines.216

212 Marco Hsu, A Brief History of Malayan Art, trans. Lai Chee Kien (Singapore: Millennium Books, 1999), p. 81. 213 Boitran, ‘Saigonese Art during the War: Modernity versus Ideology’, in Cultures at War, p. 93. 214 Ranard, Burmese Painting (Chiangmai: Silkworm, 2009), p. 160. 215 Ma Thanegi, Paw Oo Thett: His Life and His Creativity (Yangon: Daw Moe Kay Khaing, 2004), pp. 8–9. 216 Magtanggul Asa, First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala (Manila: House of Asa, 1954), p. iii.

The study of exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s reveals how exhibitions can be analysed not only in terms of solo or group exhibitions, as in the majority of academic literature, but also in terms of the exhibitionary modes displayed. The approaches employed by scholars like John Clark, who analysed the salon national art exhibition as a mode of exhibition, and Apinan Poshyananda, who examined the reception of regional-type exhibitions, offer different and useful ways for appraising exhibitions held before the 1970s. However, a new type of exhibition – the critical exhibition – that emerged in the 1970s across the region has yet to be conceptualised and historicised. The rest of this chapter will focus on the social, political and cultural conditions that provided the context for the birth of the critical exhibition in the 1970s. Subsequent chapters will expand our understanding of critical exhibitions and how they shaped the way art was conceptualised, practised and received in the region.

Student Movements and the Emergence of the Critical Exhibition in Southeast Asia

The period from the late 1950s to the late 1970s was critical for the history of exhibitions in Southeast Asia. These tumultuous decades coincided with radical student activism, a push for economic development by governments across the region that resulted in an unprecedented expansion in higher learning, the spread of authoritarian and military regimes taking control in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, and the looming spectre of the Cold War, manifested in the intensification of the Vietnam War (1955–1975) in the early 1970s. This was a period when ideas and ideologies mattered, as marked by a resurgent youth movement of students from higher education institutions, including fine art academies that were either part of universities or existed as autonomous institutions of higher learning. These student movements were one of the key drivers of critical exhibitions across the region. They were part of the left intellectual movement against forms of American neo-imperialism as manifested in the Vietnam War and supported by the authoritarian regimes of Thailand and the Philippines. These radical student movements formed the heartbeat and engine of social and political change in the region. Artists, many of whom were either students or lecturers themselves in the 1970s, formed artist collectives or conducted collaborative action closely intertwined with these movements.

The first phase of student movements in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and Singapore spanned the late 1950s to the early 1970s. It was intertwined with the left intellectual movement in which students fought for a more egalitarian society and against pro-US policies, which they viewed as neo-imperialist and pro-capitalist. The New Left in the Philippines and Thailand, which departed from the Marxist focus on the labour movement and class struggle, as well as from communism’s tendency towards authoritarianism, aimed at a broad range of reforms, including the promotion of democracy, human rights, gay rights, and freedom of speech. Maoism was influential in the New Left in both countries, particularly Mao’s 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, which called for the arts to serve the people. The second phase from the late 1960s to the late 1970s was characterised by student protesters who were initially sympathetic to the developmentalist goals of their governments. However, they turned against the very same regimes when they perceived them as becoming authoritarian and corrupt. The students sought political reform by critiquing institutions and the systems, structures and aesthetic conventions that they embodied by producing counter-hegemonic exhibitionary discourses in the form of manifestos and socially aware art practices aimed at restoring the meaning and relevance of art to people’s lives. Their aim, to redirect the governments to their ideological origins of ‘returning to the people’, was most evident in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. The emergence of the critical exhibition began in the context of the second phase of the student movement, although some of its roots could be traced further back to the first phase in Southeast Asia. Students in this period of social and political upheaval used their privileged status to present themselves as the intellectual vanguard of their country. The academics teaching at these tertiary institutions shared similar positions, but to a lesser extent. Unlike the academic professionals, students occupied a status in between privilege and marginalisation. They embodied a moral force for social justice and were a bastion against corruption due to their distance from the political system and personal gain.217 Many of the students involved in artist collectives or collaborative art movements studied at art academies such as the Indonesian Arts Academy, Yogyakarta (ASRI), the

217 Meredith L. Weiss and Edward Aspinal (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Student Activism in Asia: Between Protest and Powerlessness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 5.

Faculty of Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts at Silpakorn University, and the Poh Chang Academy of the Arts, Bangkok. For example, some of the leading proponents of the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB), such as F.X. Harsono, Siti Adiyati and Hardi studied at, and were subsequently suspended from, ASRI. The United Artists’ Front of Thailand (TUAFT) comprised Kamol Tassananchalee, a graduate of Poh Chang who had just returned to Thailand from his studies in America, Boonsong Wattakeehuttakum from Thammasat University, who designed posters and billboard cut-outs, Sinsawat Yodbangteuy, a fine art student from Poh Chang, and Takol Priyakanitpong, a professor at Silpakorn University who was involved in organising the 1975 Billboard Cut-Out exhibition. These artist-students came to form the heartbeat of a new critical exhibitionary form – the critical exhibition – which was a site for propelling artists to the intellectual forefront of broader movements concerned about democracy, the social and economic conditions of the people, forms of authoritarianism, institutional structures, and the construction of national cultural identities.

The Black December Incident in Indonesia, 1974

Suharto’s New Order was established in the wake of an abortive coup on 1 October 1965, which resulted in the death of some of Indonesia’s highest-ranking generals. The PKI (the Communist Party of Indonesia), blamed for the killings, was banned in 1966. Mass killings in Indonesia followed in the period 1965–66. Hundreds-of-thousands of communists and alleged communists were killed or imprisoned. The military led by Suharto pursued a developmental regime focusing on economic growth and denying the working class, farmers and the economically disenfranchised the ability to represent themselves politically. The Malari Incident of 15 January 1974 was a student-led demonstration triggered by the Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka’s state visit to Indonesia. The students sought to reform the New Order regime, which was seen as corrupt and incapable of addressing increasing commodity prices. They protested against senior military officers colluding with foreign investors, including Japanese businesses, to the detriment of local businesses. They

96 criticised the government for promoting a developmental strategy that appeared to benefit foreign investors and selected elites from the New Order excessively.218 Connections between the student movement and artist-students in Indonesia were clearly made in F.X. Harsono’s solo exhibition, titled FX Harsono: The Life and the Chaos of Objects, Images and Words, organised by the Erasmus Huis Dutch Cultural Centre in Jakarta in 2015 (Figure 1). This solo exhibition followed Harsono receiving the Prince Claus Award of the Netherlands (2014) and the Joseph Balestier Award for the Freedom of Art in Singapore (2015). Both awards recognised his role as a socially engaged artist whose works addressed the issue of democracy, provided counter-hegemonic national histories to oppose state- controlled histories, and gave a voice to the marginalised and disenfranchised. The exhibition featured a timeline that started with the Malari Incident as the catalyst and context for Harsono’s artistic practice. It connected the student movement both with the Black December Incident in December 1974 and with the emergence of the GSRB. Harsono was one of the leading proponents of the Black December Incident, which has been cited by art historians as a precursor to the emergence of the GSRB, a critical exhibition in 1975.219 Prior to the Black December Incident, groups of young art students in Yogyakarta and Bandung had begun to experiment with new art forms that challenged the aesthetic and theoretical conventions of modern art as taught at their art academies. The art students criticised their curriculum for being too conservative and restricted to fine art defined as painting, sculpture, printmaking and graphic arts only. They experimented with found objects and organic materials, as they believed the rakyat (ordinary people) could easily relate to these everyday non-art media. One of these groups, Kelompok 5 (Group of Five), was based in Yogyakarta and comprised Hardi, Harsono, B. Munny Ardhi, Nanik Mirna and Siti Adiyati, who were all students at ASRI. In exhibitions organised in cities like Surabaya and Solo, The Group of Five questioned the institutional structures of ASRI and succeeded in drawing considerable attention from the mass media. In 1974, members of the Group of Five were involved in a dispute with the ASRI administration, culminating in what is now known as the Black December Incident. Their

218 Edward Aspinall, ‘Moral Force Politics and the Struggle Against Authoritarianism’, in Student Activism in Asia, p. 160. 219 Sumartono, ‘The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art’, in Outlet: Yogyakartan within the Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene (Yogjakarta: Cemeti Art Foundation, 2001), pp. 21–22.

Black December Manifesto was issued in reaction to the jury’s decision at the 1974 Grand Exhibition of Indonesian Painting. The Manifesto proclaimed the following:

1. Diversity is undeniable in Indonesian art, even if diversity does not by itself signify a desirable development.

2. For the sake of a development that ensures the sustainability of our culture, it is the artist’s calling to offer a spiritual direction based on humanitarian values and oriented towards social, cultural and economic realities.

3. Artists should pursue various creative ways in which to arrive at new perspectives in Indonesian painting.

4. Thereby, Indonesian art may achieve a positive identity.

5. Obstacles in the development of Indonesian art come from outdated concepts retained by the Establishment by art business agents as well as established artists. To save our art, it is now time for us to pay tribute to the established by giving them the title of ‘cultural veterans’.220

Fourteen artists, including Harsono, signed the document, which was issued as a response to the perceived favouritism and conservatism of the judges of the 1974 Grand Exhibition of Indonesian Painting, who favoured decorative works by established artists and awarded the five prizes to Widayat, Irsam, Aming Prayitno, Abad Alibasyah and A.D. Pirous. The protesting artists sent a wreath on the day of the announcement of the five winners. The wreath read: ‘Our condolences upon the death of the art of painting’. The protest by the fourteen art students can be seen within the context of the broader student movement in 1974 that peaked with the Malari Incident. It manifested the discontent of students with government institutions, including art academies, that appeared to exhibit corruption in the form of favouritism and conservatism. Like the larger student movement, the fourteen artists who issued the Black December Manifesto were seeking to reform ASRI and its perceived conservatism. The Manifesto was welcomed by artists and art students in Jakarta and Bandung, but it was rejected by ASRI, which suspended the signatories. Just eight months after the Black December Incident, the Group of Five and other artists from Bandung, together with noted art critic and lecturer Sanento Yuliman, established the GSRB and organised an exhibition in August 1975 at Ismail Marzuki Art

220 Sumartono, ‘The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art’, pp. 23–24.

Centre (TIM) in Jakarta. Works presented in this exhibition covered injustices beyond the field of art, including socio-economic and political issues that intersected with concerns over the corruption of the military regime that sparked the Malari Incident. However, the GSRB and the Black December Manifesto sought to reform not only the politics of the state but also the politics of aesthetics, specifically the Indonesian art world that privileged painting, and more precisely certain established painters and sculptors, many of whom were art teachers at ASRI or ITB. GSRB aligned with the Black December Manifesto in its call for artists to develop socially engaged artistic practices. Works shown by the GSRB artists encompassed a wide range of art forms, from performance to installation art, which questioned the definition of art circumscribed by the aesthetic conventions and practices of painting. The use of everyday materials to make artworks expanded beyond conventional art materials such as oil and watercolour paints, to include found objects that embodied local symbolic cultural and political meanings (see Chapter 3).

The United Artists’ Front of Thailand

TUAFT was also formed in 1974, one year after the toppling of the Thanom Kittikachorn, Praphat Charu-satien and Narong Kittikach military dictatorship in October 1973. TUAFT opposed art that was produced for the capitalist interests of those in power and big businesses, and it called for art to be relevant to the Thai worker and farmer. In short, it attempted to bring modern art to the ordinary Thai.221 Like the artist-students who initiated the Black December Incident that led to the formation of GSRB, TUAFT grew out of the larger student movement that successfully demonstrated against and brought about a change in the Thai government. Thammasat University, a product of the 1932 revolution led by the People’s Party, had adopted an open admission policy at its foundation. It opened up the opportunity for a university education to all Thais, regardless of their economic background, unlike Chulalongkorn University that catered largely for the elite.222 Post-war Thammasat University became a hotbed for student activism, with students from different economic classes, including the working class, spearheading anti-imperialist protests against Japan. The protests were led by Pridi Banomyong from the Free Thai Movement. Unlike

221 Manifesto of The Artists’ Front of Thailand, unpaginated. 222 Prajak Kongkirati, ‘The Cultural Politics of Student Resistance’, in Student Activism in Asia, p. 231.

99 other universities in Thailand that shifted emphasis to hard sciences as dictated by the military regime, Thammasat University focused on expanding its humanities and social sciences programmes, from which many of the student protesters originated.223 Students in Thailand and Indonesia shared a belief in their privileged status as a moral force above the corruption of their governments. They sailed on the powerful potential of youth, shaped by ideas perpetuated by the New Left. They sought to transform society by challenging the institutions of the authoritarian capitalist and developmental regimes. TUAFT was not alone in resisting the Thai military regime. The Dharma Group, founded by Pratuang Emjaroen in 1971, organised its third exhibition in 1976, just after the violent suppression that resulted in a student massacre. After the failed democratic transition under the Interim Prime Minister Sanya Thammasak, a civilian dictatorship led by Thanin Kraivichien was installed. The Dharma Group’s third exhibition catalogue was titled Sinlapa khong prachachon (Art for the People), which aligned with Pratuang’s own beliefs that ‘true art must be ‘for life’s sake’ and not ‘for art’s sake’ as it was formerly believed’.224 Dissenting artists who were horrified by the violent clashes between student demonstrators and civilians on one side, and the military and police on the other, gathered around Pratuang and joined the Dharma Group. Pratuang’s massive oil on canvas painting that stretched to almost six metres was titled The Days of Disaster. It was a painting that drew from the symbolic potency of ‘Thai-ness’ steeped in Buddhism. Buddhist iconography was reinvented by Pratuang, who included a bullet-hole-ridden flag, dismembered limbs with blood pouring out, and the face of Buddha, filled with bullet holes and melting under the intense streaks of penetrating light. The painting employed powerful symbols to make a political statement on the bloodshed that followed the 14 October 1973 protests in which half a million people were involved. In October 1975, on the second anniversary of the October 1973 student protests, TUAFT organised a large display of paintings on Rajadamnern Avenue. It consisted of more than a thousand paintings and posters to commemorate the victory of the students over the military regime. This critical exhibition challenged the exhibition format in gallery spaces by expanding the display of artworks into public spaces, and involving artists and the public, especially students, as a form of social engagement. It was innovative in presenting art as a

223 Ibid., p. 237. 224 Pratuang Emjaroen: His Life and Artistic Works (Bangkok: Saha International Printing, 1990), p. 26.

100 form of performative action, or a gesture of anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian protest against the military regime’s support of American military intervention in the Vietnam War. They used national symbols and popular images painted onto large billboards. Works by artists and students were shown in this outdoor exhibition, which demonstrated the close relationship between TUAFT and student activists.225 TUAFT’s connection to the broader student activism was further evident from the strong support that it drew from students in vocational institutes and the Po Chang School of Arts and Crafts.226 Kamchorn Soonpongsri was the chairman of TUAFT, and his thinking on art was shaped by earlier Thai socialist discourse, which was recycled and became popular with TUAFT artists and student activists. The most influential writing was Chit Phumisak’s Art for Life and Art for the People, first published in 1957 and widely circulated through the cheap printing technology of ‘one baht books’.227 TUAFT formed solidarities with other nationalis-cultural movements agitating against American military bases undertaking air strikes in Vietnam and producing symbolic gestures for democracy and national sovereignty in Thailand.228 These new solidarities from below formed part of larger ground-up cultural initiatives calling for ‘art for the people’, ‘art for life’, ‘songs for the people’ (replacing foreign language songs with Thai lyrics), and ‘theatre for the people’.229 Other forms of cultural resistance to the military regime by student activists ‘responded with conceptualism, surrealism, and other forms of experimentation – including the transformation of traditional forms that were rejuvenated as well’.230 Art Historian Clare Veal describes art groups like TUAFT and the Coalition of Thai Artists as ‘modernists’, as they had

definite memberships; worked under the auspices of manifestoes; and stylistically their works were within the parameters of Surrealist and Expressionist discourses, already largely accepted by the establishment art system. This meant that, despite their political radicalism, members of

225 Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand, p. 165. 226 Ibid., p. 164. 227 Ibid. 228 Giles Ji Ungpakorn, ‘The Impact of the Thai ‘Sixties’ on the Peoples Movement Today, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7.4 (2006), p. 574. 229 George N. Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Volume 2: People Power in the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, 1947–2009 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), p. 305. 230 Ibid.

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these artists’ groups were easily reabsorbed into official arts systems in the 1980s.231

While some of the leading artists from TUAFT and the Dharma Group (for example, Pratuang Emjaroen from the Dharma Group) later became established and recognised artists in the Thai art world, the moment of artistic resistance against the military regime in the 1970s deployed the critical exhibition as a new exhibitionary form. It abandoned the white cube gallery for public spaces and used a range of artistic strategies that included conceptual and social engagement. Veal identifies the manifesto as a product of modern art within the Western context, propounded by artist groups such as the Futurists and the surrealists. The art manifesto in Southeast Asia emerged from a different, postcolonial context, and artists deployed manifestos in the 1970s as a counter-hegemonic discourse, a form of cultural resistance to imperialism in the Cold War context, particularly America’s military intervention in the Vietnam War. The critical exhibition became the stage on which the art manifesto corralled its ideological force as social and political critique. Flores has focused on art manifestos as an important characteristic of the critical exhibition in the 1970s by tracing the proliferation of these manifestos across the region as a ‘proxy for the work of art itself’, a ‘document of alterity’ and a ‘dissemination of text as collective undertaking and the polemical fire it sparks’. Flores defines the manifestos as ‘a vehicle of agency’, driven by the ‘desire to rethink the world’ in its rebellion against forms of authoritarianism.232 Flores is not alone in identifying manifestos as potent instruments wielded by artists in the 1970s. In his Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art, Sabapathy locates ‘contemporary turns’ in Southeast Asian art within the ambit of exhibitions and the manifestos produced from these exhibitions. Both Flores and Sabapathy cite manifestos, some of which were directly produced for exhibitions such as Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa (1974) and the New Art Movement (GSRB) (1975). Others were created by artist collectives such as the Kaisahan, TUAFT, and Cheo Chai-Hiang in the Philippines,

231 Clare Veal, ‘Visual Ruptures: Visually Documenting the Precarious Nature of Thai Politics After 2010’, Modern Art Asia, 12 (November 2012), p. 6. 232 Patrick Flores, ‘First Person Plural: Manifestos of the 1970s in Southeast Asia’ in Hans Belting, Jacob Birken, Peter Weibel, Andrea Buddensieg, ed., Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), p. 264.

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Thailand and Singapore respectively. Both Flores and Sabapathy signal the primacy of exhibitions as sites hospitable for exhibitionary discourses.

The Rise of the Left in the Philippines

In the Philippines, 1974 was a turning point with the decentralisation of the Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artists at Arkitekto (NPAA) and other mass organisations from the urban areas to the countryside, where the peasants who formed the main lifeblood as new recruits for the New People’s Army resided. In 1971, the NPAA was formed as a collective of artists and a cultural organisation that produced revolutionary propaganda in the form of portable murals, banners, illustrations, posters, comics, photographs and paintings. They sought to produce anti-bourgeois art that depicted the social conditions of the proletariat. It became part of a global struggle against American imperialism in tandem with student movements in France, the US and Japan. In the Philippines, activists came from education institutions such as the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas and St. Mary’s College.233 The dislocation of the NPAA artists from the city to the countryside created a vacuum for another artist collective, the Kaisahan group, to establish itself in 1976 in metropolitan Manila and produce artworks on political and social themes. The Kaisahan members came from different socio-economic classes and comprised artists like Renato Habulan, Edgar Fernandez, Al Manrique, Jose Tence Ruiz and Pablo Baen Santos. Besides exhibitions, they organised workshops, lectures and exhibitions on socio-political issues in the Philippines.234 Like TUAFT, the Kaisahan produced a manifesto about the purpose of art as people- oriented, and the importance of art in shaping a national identity. It differed from TUAFT in its desire to open up the aesthetics of political art and to allow more room for creativity. In this respect, the Kaisahan was similar to GSRB in its desire to expand the thinking and making of art by being socially engaged without necessarily reducing art to mere propaganda. Mao Tse-tung’s 1942 Yenan Forum was an influential text for both the Kaisahan and TUAFT to deploy art for the masses rather than for a small urban elite that

233 Alice G. Guillermo, Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines 1970–1990 (Manila: University of the Philippines, 2001), p. 51. 234 Ibid., p. 62.

103 tended to be co-opted into the ruling regime. They provided a powerful postcolonial attack on imperialism and authoritarian regimes in Thailand and the Philippines. The Notes on the Hayuma exhibition in 1977 was a critical exhibition that brought together paintings from the Kaisahan artists and poetry from the Galian sa Arte at Tula poets. Its critique of existing ways of thinking about art through interdisciplinary art collaborations distinguished Notes on the Hayuma as a critical exhibition from previous types of exhibition. This interdisciplinary collaboration was meant to display art that was ‘relevant to the people and their lives’.235 The 1977 critical exhibition by the Kaisahan provided an alternative to the art academies and salon exhibitions. It challenged the notion of singular authorship in art- making by presenting collective and collaborative ways of producing art. Like TUAFT, it intimated an expanded notion of art beyond the gallery space to public spaces, such as schools, streets and plazas.236 The GSRB, TUAFT and the Kaisahan shared a similar emphasis on the ‘concrete and the everywhere’, an aesthetics based on the real conditions of the urban poor and the struggles and aspirations of the common people. Their shared aspirations towards the concrete and the real were drawn from a confluence of ideas around socialism by way of Mao Tse-tung’s Yenan Forum, local socialist intellectuals, the energy of student movements, anti-imperialism focused on the Vietnam War, and the struggle against the corruption and authoritarianism of developmental regimes. Malaysia in the early 1970s experienced a mixture of three waves: nationalism, the rise of the left, and religion. Meredith Weiss, a Southeast Asian politics scholar, examined post-war Malayan nationalism as manifested in the formation of the University of Malaya (UM) on 8 October 1949 in Singapore. UM was eventually split into two autonomous campuses, the University of Singapore and the University of Malaya in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, respectively.237 UM proved to be an important institution for fostering a Malayan national consciousness. It produced left-leaning journals like Fajar, published by the University Socialist Club. The leftish wave in the early 1970s was led by student activists propelled by international concerns generated by the Vietnam War and conflicts in the

235 Ibid., p. 65. 236 ‘Notes on the “Hayuma” Painting-and-Poetry Exhibit of the Kaisahan and the Galian sa Arte at Tula Poets’, in Guillermo, Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines, p. 244. 237 The University of Singapore based in Singapore was established on 1 January 1962 as a separate division from the University of Malaya based in Kuala Lumpur and recognised as a national university by the Federation of Malaya, the government then.

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Middle East, such as the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The student movement centred in universities was joined by other forces with similar interests, such as trade unions.238 The Malay Muslim Student’s Society and the UM Student Union were actively organising protests for social justice and pro-poor policies – which the government tried to reign in but with little effect – by passing the Schools Societies Regulations of 1960. Sectarian violence between Chinese and Malays in what became known as the 13 May 1969 Incident led to the 1971 New Economic Policy to reduce poverty, break down the tendency of certain occupations being dominated by specific races, and improve Malay access to higher education through quotas. The religious wave, or Dakwah activism, first began in 1965 under the leadership of the Pertubuhan Al Rahmaniah at UM. Dakwah activism provided an Islamic perspective on social issues such as corruption and poverty. By the 1970s, Dakwah activism quickly turned towards a broader spectrum of Islamisation, from religious study groups to moderately violent protests against perceived decadent Western cultural influences like pop culture. Towards a Mystical Reality (TMR) was organised by Sulaiman Esa and Redza Piyadasa, who both taught fine art at the Mara Institute of Technology (MIT, now known as Universiti Teknologi Mara) in Kuala Lumpur. TMR shared the anti-imperialist tenor of the other critical exhibitions organised by artist collectives in Southeast Asia by producing a manifesto calling for Asian artists to ‘emphasise the “spiritual essence” rather than the outward form’ as an alternative way to think about and make art.239 It was based on a different concept of reality, which was not scientific, but meditative and experiential. It was meant to break away from the hegemony of Western art and art history.240 Although both Piyadasa and Esa were lecturers rather than students at MIT, they were nonetheless part of the broader intellectual movement centred on a critical attitude against dominant aesthetic conventions circumscribed by Euro-American notions of art.

238 Meredith L. Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror Slideshow (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), p. 176. 239 The original text is in upper case as a deliberate form of emphasis by the artists as an art manifesto. 240 Sulaiman Esa and Redza Piyadasa, Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Suleiman Esa (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1974).

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Conclusion

This chapter has traced the emergence of the critical exhibition within the changing and overlapping contexts of student movements, the rise of the New Left, decolonisation, emergent nationalisms, anti-imperialism, and cultural resistance to authoritarian and developmental regimes from the 1950s to the 1970s in Southeast Asia. The historical development of different, earlier exhibitionary types, such as the salon and national, regional and internationalist exhibitions, gave way to the critical exhibition as a new exhibitionary mode. The critical exhibition emerged in the early 1970s as an art historically significant turning point in the confluence of the social, cultural and political contexts, including student movements. In particular, the emergence of the internationalist exhibitionary form in the 1950s and 1960s was an important precursor to the emergence of the critical exhibition. The internationalist exhibition-makers imagined themselves as part of broader art movements such as social realism and abstraction, which encouraged a deepening of knowledge about art theory and art history even though these types of knowledge were Western-centric. Continuities between the internationalist and critical exhibitions could be seen in the production of art manifestos. The difference between these two modes of exhibition was in how critical exhibitions deployed art manifestos not as a way to connect with broader art movements in the West, but to engage with existing social, cultural and political contexts. Student movements across the region that were protesting against forms of imperialism, as manifested in the Vietnam War and as supported by most of the developmental regimes, were a powerful force embodied in critical exhibitions. Exhibitions such as TMR, which was not student-led but nonetheless part of the larger intellectual movement located in universities and art academies, repudiated the slavish deference to Western ways of thinking about and making art, and explored different ways and approaches to experience art as a ‘mystical reality’. The influence of socialism and the New Left on student movements appeared to be a viable alternative to the Western model of capitalism and to those who sought economic development for its own sake without addressing the issue of poverty. Under this influence, critical exhibitions were political in their questioning of dominant power structures, and they were willing to rethink exhibitions not only as a way of displaying art, but also as a

106 viable, exhibitionary form of resistance and change. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was reconfigured as ‘art for life’ or ‘art for the people’. Previous exhibition formats, like the salon and national and internationalist exhibitions, which displayed art in gallery spaces were challenged by critical exhibitions, which showed art in public spaces and engaged in interdisciplinary practices, including street theatre and poetry recitals. Chapter 3 will examine a turn to the everyday in critical exhibitions. This turn marks the primacy of critique in uniting art and exhibition-making, and in transforming passive spectators into active participants. This is followed up by subsequent chapters that demonstrate the capacity of critical exhibitions to question social and aesthetic systems through their production of exhibitionary discourses, spatialities and temporalities that differ from previous exhibitionary forms.

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Figure 2.1

FX Harsono: The Life and the Chaos of Objects, Images and Words organised by the Erasmus Huis, Dutch Cultural Centre, Jakarta in 2015 featuring a timeline starting with the Malari Incident in 1974. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Chapter 3 Descent to the Everyday: A Collective, Contextual and Concrete Turn

Introduction

Decolonisation as a historical process and project intensified in the 1970s in Southeast Asia. Processes of decolonisation in the region occurred as countries gradually became independent after the end of the Second World War in 1945.241 Southeast Asian postcolonial nationalism included a period of left nationalism driven by a combination of a left intellectual movement and various communist organisations across the region from 1948 until the late 1970s.242 Historians Geoff Wade and Karl Hack have recently argued that the ‘Southeast Asian Cold War’ was driven mainly by local forces drawing on outside actors for their own ideological and political purposes.243 The process of decolonisation in the region intersected with international, regional and domestic fronts of the Cold War. From the international perspective, the western bloc comprising the US and west European countries such as France and West Germany represented a world order based on capitalism, democracy and freedom, while the eastern bloc led by the USSR and China were based on communism and an economy centrally controlled by the state. The Cold War was not merely a clash of ideologies, but also encompassed a broader struggle for a balance of power between the two superpower blocs, fuelled by economic demands and the need for political stability.244 This binary framework of the Cold War has been challenged by recent historians. Heonik Kwon has argued against a simplistic and universalising understanding of

241 The Philippines became independent in 1898 and, after recolonisation, in 1946, Indonesia in 1945, Vietnam in 1945, Myanmar in 1948, Cambodia in 1953, Laos in 1954, Malaya in 1957, Malaysia in 1963, Singapore in 1965, Brunei in 1984, and East Timor in 2002. Thailand was never formally colonised. 242 Tony Day and Maya H. T. Liem (eds), ‘Introduction’ in Cultures at War, p. 2. 243 See Karl Hack and Geoff Wade, ‘The origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40.3 (2009), pp. 441–48. 244 For a cultural perspective on Southeast Asian postcolonial nationalisms in the context of the Cold War, see Day and Liem (eds), Cultures at War. For the cultural dimensions of processes of decolonisation in Southeast Asia, see Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann (eds), Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945-1962 (Palo Alto, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Stanford University Press, 2009). For information about the Malayan Emergency and its cultural impact on the Singapore art scene, see Seng Yu Jin, From Words to Pictures: Art During the Emergency (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2007).

109 the Cold War as a period of uneasy peace between two superpower blocs.245 The Cold war was hardly ‘cold’ in other centres in Southeast Asia for instance with millions of civilians and soldiers killed in conflicts of the Cold war such as the Vietnam War. The Cold War needs to be understood not as a monolithic and universalising global event with centres in America and Europe. It needs to be decentered to other regions of conflict, authoritarian regimes, and student movements like those in Southeast Asia. A changing understanding of the Cold War and its cultural histories needs to take into account the varied and different local social conditions and cultural contexts across distinct locales and countries.246 Curator Ahmad Mashadi argued that these ‘contexts of social and political transformation in the region within which developments in prevailing artistic practices and conventions took place’ framed the changing Southeast Asian art practices in the 1970s:

The tenor or intensity of such [Cold War] conditions varied across locations, yet they broadly informed the emergence of artistic discourses marked by newer attitudes towards the role of artists and art, as well as the constitution, the materiality of art, and the considered references made to society and notions of publicness.247

The enmeshment of social and political transformations, both within and outside Southeast Asia, with ways of thinking about, making and discoursing on art is an important premise on which Mashadi’s reframing of the region is based. It is also the central premise of this thesis that the ideological struggle of the Cold War, as manifested in a variety of discourses, shaped the cultures of the newly independent countries in Southeast Asia. It influenced thoughts about national cultural identities, the autonomy or social purpose of art, and the role of artists. Chapter 2 mapped the historical, social and political contexts of the emergence of the critical exhibition as a new exhibitionary mode in Southeast Asia. It traced the changing types of exhibitions in concomitantly changing art worlds and socio-political environments, by adopting a synchronic approach that identified significant moments in time, such as the year 1974. At that time, artists and artist collectives engaged in student activist movements, challenged aesthetic conventions promulgated by art academies, resisted authoritarian

245 See Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Colombia University Press, 2010). 246 John J. Curley, Global Art and the Cold War (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2018), pp. 7-16. 247 Ahmad Mashadi, ‘Framing the 1970s’, Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, 25.4 (2011), p. 409.

110 regimes, and participated in ideological struggles over the role of artists and art in the context of cultural nationalism.248 In this chapter, I propose a perspectival shift from artistic practices to exhibitions as another way of reframing the 1970s. All exhibitions, including art exhibitions, share a desire to connect and engage with publics and hence serve as a conduit for society. The exhibition histories of Southeast Asia in the 1970s reveal the historical reasons behind the proliferation of exhibition-making by artist collectives such as the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB) in Indonesia, the Kaisahan group in the Philippines, The United Artists’ Front of Thailand (TUAFT) in Thailand, and The Artists Village in Singapore. As well as artist collaborations such as Towards a Mystical Reality (TMR) by Sulaiman Esa and Redza Piyadasa in Malaysia and the Chiang Mai Social Installation, these collectives produced critical exhibitions as a new type of exhibition. Only one of the critical exhibitions – Po Po’s Untitled exhibition in Myanmar – was a solo exhibition that was not part of the turn towards collectivism. This chapter traces the turn towards the concept of ‘the everyday’. It identifies collectivity and the contextual as the gears that propelled the conceptual shift to the everyday in critical exhibitions. The everyday represented an ‘aesthetics of decolonisation’ that was articulated in various ways. Examples include the discourse of manifestos that proclaims ‘art for life’ and ‘art for the people’; artistic research on the poetics of everyday life; the use of the materiality of everyday non-art objects; the fracturing of the white cube gallery space into public spaces for the people; the rethinking of time as heterogeneous rather than universal; and the performative as a way to make social practices visible. A close examination of the artworks displayed in critical exhibitions seeks to demonstrate how a turn to the everyday provided a conceptual bridge that challenged the simplistic binary between, on the one hand, realism focused on the representation of reality, and, on the other, conceptual practices and internationalism dominated by abstraction.249 Instead, internationalism was combined with the strategies of social activism, protest, intervention in public spaces, the use of everyday materials, collectivism, and a return to making art in local contexts.

248 Ibid. 249 For an introduction to the intersections between artistic practices, different forms of nationalism and ethnicity, ideas such as multiculturalism, and the rapid social and economic transformations across the region, see Ahmad Mashadi, ‘Framing the 1970s’.

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This chapter foregrounds the critical exhibition’s turn to the everyday as an ideational and critical shift that impinged on the production of collectivism, aesthetics, manifestos and the representation of art that made the familiar unfamiliar, presented social practices for transforming daily life, reclaimed public spaces for social change, and sought alternative ideas and models outside Euro-American systems of thought. The critical exhibition attended to the everyday as a moment of critique in the process of decolonisation that intensified in the 1970s. This chapter also provides a foundation for subsequent chapters of this thesis that examine how intersections between the everyday and discourse, space, time and performativity have been reimagined and produced by critical exhibitions.

Unpacking the Everyday

The descent to the everyday is the final annulment of the boundary between art and non-art. Art can be any kind of thing and anything can constitute art. But even as this decisively intermixes art and nonart, it also nonetheless sharpens the divide between art and nonart. This is because even if art can be anything and anything , art cannot be everything and everything cannot become art... Anti-Art is not Non-Art. If we take it that there are no longer any criteria sufficient to make art art, then such a proposition is not a regression to the futile enquiry, ‘what is art?’, but an impossible question which asks how an art that doesn’t exist can exist.250

Art critic Miyakawa Atsushi has argued that the art world in 1960s Japan was witnessing a conceptual shift from kindai bijutsu (modern art) to gendei bijutsu (contemporary art) based on a descent of ‘Modern Art’ from its detached and exalted realm to the level of everyday realities. This radical proposition suggested not just a conceptual turn, but, more specifically, a conceptual turn towards the everyday that marked a break with the modern. Modern Art (with a capital ‘A’) was subverted by contemporary ‘Anti-Art’. The latter uses everyday objects as materials of art-making to collapse the elevated and esoteric realm of modern art and descend to the level of everyday life. For Miyakawa, anything can be art but not everything is art. This distinction is important in asserting how anything in terms of

250 Miyakawa Atsushi, ‘Anti-Art: Descent to the Everyday’, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945– 1989, ed. Doryun Chong et al. (New York: MOMA, 2012), p. 132.

112 materials or modes of display can be art. At the same time, it avoids saying that everything is art, for otherwise art would become impossible and no longer exist as a distinct form of cultural production. The distinction between art and non-art still exists, but, in the exchange between the two, the veil of sacredness of Modern Art is removed.251 Non-Art can never fully nullify Art because both are constantly in a state of exchange whereby art integrates with life without completely merging with it. Critical exhibitions differed from previous types of exhibitions such as the salon, and national, regional and internationalist exhibitions, as the earlier forms of exhibition primarily focused on displaying art as autonomous artworks detached from the realities of the outside world. The title of this chapter, ‘The Descent to the Everyday’, refers to Miyakawa’s influential text, ‘Anti-art: Descent to the Everyday’ (1964), which provoked the shift towards rupturing the barriers between art and everyday life. This shift occurred in the 1960s when artists in Japan began to use junk and other non-art materials in their works. For Miyakawa, ‘the descent to the everyday is nothing other than the annihilation of the border between art and non-art’.252 Anti-art was not non-art as it only sought to ‘recover a fundamental structure of the “actual” world through everyday objects, signs and vulgar images’.253 Anti- art marked a contemporary turn for it consistently sought to abandon the detached realm of the modern artwork by descending to the level of everyday life. At the same time, as Miyakawa concludes, art’s longing for the everyday as a way of connecting with society and daily life has arguably remained an elusive goal.254 The cultural debates and shifts in artistic practices towards a rethinking of art and art-making that destabailises distinctions between art and life or the everyday also resonated in Southeast Asia, forming intersections with Miyakawa’s ideas. ‘Suddenly turning visible’ was an expression used in 1981 by Raymundo Albano, the Filipino artist and curator of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines (CCP), as he initiated thoughts about the role ‘art’ could play in the developmental process of Third World nations.255 It is an expression that is

251 For how the ‘sacredness’ of art is collapsed by the everyday, see Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), and Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987). 252 Miyakawa, ‘Anti-Art: Descent to the Everyday’, p. 129. 253 Ibid. 254 For an anthology of writings on how the ‘reinvention of the everyday’ continues to resonate in artistic practices, see Stephen Johnstone (ed.), The Everyday (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2008). 255 Raymundo R. Albano, ‘Developmental Art of the Philippines’, Philippine Art Supplement, 2.4 (1981), p. 15.

113 connected to another curatorial concept Albano developed during the period, that of ‘strangeness’, and his stance that it was in the mandate of the CCP to expose audiences to non-common materials and experimental art strategies by the leading artists of the time, even if they did not meet the public’s preconceived notion of the essence or meaning of art.256 In effect, the aim was to rethink the very categories of painting and sculpture. The turn to the everyday was a form of socio-political awareness that was manifest in the critical exhibitions of the 1970s. Critical exhibitions and critical art shared a desire to attend to the realities of daily life and to generate new representational forms that made visible and countered the dominant social, cultural and political structures of the changing ‘real’ world. The critical exhibitions shaped an ‘aesthetics of decolonisation’ that used the material of everyday life to foreground the complexity of the world. They signalled an urgent need to register contemporaneity as a radical experience located at the level of everydayness. They tried to present strangeness, visualise social practices, transform daily life, reclaim public spaces for social change, and urge participants to seek alternative ideas and models outside Euro-American systems of thought. They deconstructed modernity as a series of repetitive routine experiences of everyday day life in a bureaucratic and capitalistic society. The critical exhibition that embraced the everyday by making strange what otherwise went unnoticed was transformed into a site of resistance. It intersected with new modes of representation in exhibition discourses, materials, public spaces, images, and actions. These modes of representation were found in A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Suleiman Esa (Malaysia, 1974), the GSRB exhibition (Indonesia, 1975), The Artists Village’s Time Show (Singapore, 1989), the Billboard Cut-Out exhibition by TUAFT (Thailand, 1976) and the Chiang Mai Social Installation (Thailand, 1992– 3), among others. The turn to the everyday encompassed the materiality of everyday non-art objects, the fracturing of the white cube gallery space into public spaces, the rethinking of time as a heterogeneous rather than universal concept, and the performative as a form of social practice. In Southeast Asia, the return to the ‘everyday’ was a form of critique challenging existing political systems, aesthetics and economic power. Critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia, in active engagement with the international art world, introduced shared strategies of

256 Ibid.

114 activism, protest, intervention in public spaces, the use of everyday materials, collectivism, and a return to making art in local contexts. These strategies, which will be discussed in the remainder of this chapter, shattered the mutually excluding binary of the conceptual and forms of socially engaged practices.

The Concrete: Articulating the Politics of Aesthetics in the Everyday

Ahmad Mashadi brings our attention to two broad trajectories of art-making in Southeast Asia in the 1970s:

If these works are to provide a cursory snapshot of contemporary practices in Southeast Asia during the 1970s, then such practices on the one hand characterised two broad approaches; conceptualism and statement– making, and realism and forms of activism. However on the other, these need not to be seen as mutually exclusive to one another, but rather trajectories with common contextual historical, social and political groundings.257

The modern in Southeast Asia was propelled by forms of abstraction and realism that engaged with broader international trends in the world. While abstraction embodied the desire for ‘progress’ to replace conservatism, realism appealed to social change by presenting the realities and conditions of the present. Abstraction and realism formed part of the larger international confluence of cultural debates shaped by the binary ideologies of the Cold War. This was captured in the ‘Great Cultural Debate’ between the Bandung School, which was labelled the ‘Laboratory of the West’ by Trisno Sumarjo, and the realists from Yogyakarta, who were led by artists like S. Sudjojono and believed that art was the expression of jiwa ketok, or the visible soul of the artist who inevitably expressed his or her national culture and emotions in art.258 The same debate raged in Singapore between the artists from the Modern Art Society (MAS) and the realists from the Equator Art Society. The MAS famously declared that:

257 Mashadi, Telah Terbit. 258 Holt, Art in Indonesia, pp. 191–254.

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predecessors… We do not mean to belittle the achievements of traditional art, but we certainly do not agree with those who stick to the old course.259

The MAS had, in a single breath, proclaimed the end of successive styles of painting — realism, impressionism, Fauvism and cubism — in the history of art, while legitimising their claim of being the pre-eminent avant-garde art society by declaring abstraction as the ‘new’ style of painting propagated by the Society. At the same time, the MAS, in its art manifesto, effectively set up ‘traditional art’ and ‘modern art’ as binary opposites. Modern art was exalted as the ‘new’ form of art produced from Singapore and Malaysia’s own social conditions:

Every age has its own typical productions of art and literature conditioned by its special social background. Let us have a look at our era. In the field of contemporary fine arts, there are a variety of schools breeding artists of different styles. This is the natural course of human culture. As long as our minds keep operating, the field of creative art shall be improved and enriched.260

Modern art was conceived by the MAS not as a singular art form, but as a field of cultural production that included literature and other creative practices, thus creating a plurality of styles. Modern art was rethought beyond ‘styles’, as a movement with its own ideas and practices that were relevant, engaging and produced from their own social and cultural contexts. However, the MAS also veered towards an internationalist-type exhibition, which exalted form as transcendental and universal. In the ‘Foreword’ to its 1969 exhibition catalogue, it proclaimed that ‘the main concerns of modern artists are the beauty of form, harmony of rhythm and creativity’.261 This was proposed by the Modern Art exhibition in its own exhibitionary discourse (narrowly defined here as texts produced by exhibitions), including exhibition catalogues and exhibition reviews. The exhibitionary discourse produced around the Modern Art exhibition was substantial, especially reviews in Chinese newspapers such as Wan Bao, Nanyang Shang Pao, Xin Sheng Ri Bao, Kwang Hwa Ri Bao, and Nanyang Wan Bao, art magazines such as

259 Ho Ho Ying, ‘Preface’ to Modern Art, art catalogue of the inaugural 1963 Modern Art Society exhibition, unpaginated. 260 ‘Foreword’ to Modern Art (Singapore: Modern Art Society, 1963), unpaginated. 261 ‘Foreword’ to Modern Art, art catalogue of the 1969 Modern Art Society exhibition, unpaginated.

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Zhan Wang, and literary supplements such as Nanyang Shang Bao Xinqi Kan and Xin Zhou Ri Bao Xinqi Tian Kan.262 The Straits Times was one of the English-language newspapers that included an exhibition report. The Chinese newspapers went beyond merely reporting the exhibition, by giving reviews of outstanding paintings and providing commentaries on the notion of modern art itself. These Chinese newspapers were widely circulated to a broad audience and would have garnered an extensive readership and fuelled interest in the exhibition. They also produced a discourse on modern art as a practice and an idea. The relationship between the ‘new’ and youth was apparent in how many of the newspaper articles stressed the energy of the seven young artists who participated in the Modern Art exhibition. Wu Han Ming, in ‘The Proponents of the Modern Art Movement’, attributed the experimental nature and boldness of the artists to their youth: ‘Young people are passionate, open, and dare to dream, and even more so to create.’263 The dynamic energies of the youth would feed Malaysia’s appetite and desire for the ‘new’. The intersections between the youthful energies of the artists and the collective optimism about a newly independent Malaysia freed from colonial rule opened up the field of cultural production. It was believed that freedom, imagination and the possibility of a plurality of art forms and ideologies could forge new cultural identities for the country. Although similar cultural debates occurred across the region in the 1960s, the institutionalisation of abstraction and realism began with art societies organised by artists propagating abstraction as universal, such as the MAS and the Alpha Gallery in Singapore, Sang Tao (Creation Group) in Vietnam, and the Gelanggang Group in Indonesia. Their opponents who gravitated towards realism included the Equator Art Society in Singapore and Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (Institute of People’s Culture, LEKRA) in Indonesia and Kaisahan (Solidarity) in the Philippines. The public art institutions, such as the CCP, the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok, and the Taman Ismail Marzuki in Jakarta, were built as sites where the pulse of creative internationalism could manifest itself in combination with forms of nationalism. These institutions provided spaces for experimental

262 The publication titles with their English translations are Wan Bao (Evening Newspaper), Nanyang Shang Pao (Nanyang Business News), Xin Zhou Ri Bao (Xinzhou Daily Newspaper), Kwang Hwa Ri Bao (Greater Chinese Daily Newspaper), Nanyang Wan Bao (Nanyang Evening Newspaper), Zhan Wang (Prospect), Nanyang Shang Bao (Nanyang Business News), Xinqi Kan (Daily Literary Supplement) and Xin Zhou Ri Bao Xinqi Tian Kan (Xinzhou Daily Literary Supplement). 263 Wu Han Ming, ‘The Proponents of the Modern Art Movement’, Nanyang Shang Pao Fukan, 9 October 1963.

117 interdisciplinary practices, including modes of abstraction. They reflected international art movements regarded as ‘progressive’ and therefore coherent with the authoritarian regimes that promoted developmentalism to generate economic prosperity, such as Suharto’s New Order in Indonesia, Thanom Kittikachorn’s military rule in Thailand, and Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law in the Philippines.264 Progressive art was conceived and supported by these authoritarian regimes to construct and project a democratic, liberal and open international face to the global community of nations in general, and to the West in particular. Positioning abstraction against realism in a period of intensifying internationalism runs the risk of constructing a simplistic binary opposition that reproduces the binary logic of the Cold War. Abstraction was not necessarily conceived as ‘art for art’s sake’ and a celebration of the unfettered autonomy of art, nor as art detached from reality. Art critic and artist Rodolfo Paras-Perez argued that ‘the one constant factor in this stylistically protean scene lies in the concerted move from illusionistic realism towards actual reality – a stress… on pigments and gestures in painting rather than the subject or theme’.265 Painting the modern in the Philippines remained grounded in reality while negating the illusionistic impulses of realism. The notion of reality itself was claimed both by realism and by paintings in the style of Art Informel and gestural abstraction.266 The ‘real’ became a contested terrain that could not be separated from the notion of everyday life, regardless of the ideological or artistic inclinations of the artists. At stake was the critique of representation: whether abstraction, plasticity, illusionistic or ‘concrete’ forms of the real was most suited to depicting the actual realities of the everyday, going beyond the appearance of things and

264 On authoritarianism in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, see, respectively, ‘Remembering/Silencing the Traumatic Past: The Ambivalent Memories of the October 1976 Massacre in Bangkok’, in Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos, ed. Charles F. Keyes and Shigeharu Tanabe (London and New York: Routledge/Curzon, 2002), pp. 243–83; A.B. Brillantes, Dictatorship and Martial Law: Philippine Authoritarianism in 1972 (Quezon City: Great Books Publications, 1987); and the ‘References’ in Soeharto's New Order and Its Legacy: Essays in Honour of Harold Crouch, ed. Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy (ANU Press, 2010), pp. 209–24, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hc65.20. 265 Rodolfo P. Perez, ‘International Cross Currents’, The Chronicle Magazine, 5 October 1963, pp. 12–15, reprinted in Philippine Modern Art and Its Critics. 266 Art Informel is a form of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s that focuses on highly gestural techniques and improvisatory methodology. Gestural abstraction emphasises the process of painting rather than the final work or the type of paint. Painting as a process that is intuitive, physical and spontaneous is a hallmark of gestural abstraction. Both Art Informel and gestural abstraction provide alternative ways for painting to relate to reality not as verisimilitude but as processual, intuitive, physical, directly emotional, and hence more earnest. See Harold Rosenberg, Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on gestural abstraction.

118 producing an aesthetics of politics. The ‘real’ is therefore differentiated from realism as a style to make visible underlying institutional structures of power. This approach was meant to prioritise the role of participants in meaning-making, change people’s comprehension of existing realities, and disrupt dominant aesthetic regimes. Realism as representing actual social and political conditions was advocated by the Kaisahan as a way to depict the everyday life of the people of the Philippines. Kaisahan also sought to change the lives of ordinary people by uplifting them through art, as clearly articulated in the collective’s art manifesto:

But we wish to gradually transform our art that has a form understandable to the masses and a content that is relevant to their life… We shall therefore develop an art that not only depicts the life of the Filipino people but also seeks to uplift their condition. We shall develop an art that enables them to see the essence, the patterns behind the scattered phenomena and experience of our times. We shall develop an art that shows the unity of their interests and thus leads them to unite.267

The Kaisahan sought to make visible the otherwise invisible patterns of everyday life through realism as form of critique that could awaken the consciousness of the ‘masses’ and unite them. They tried to trigger action by bringing art directly to public spaces through their posters and mural paintings. They were not alone. TUAFT produced an art manifesto along similar lines, declaring that:

The Artist Front of Thailand’s promotion of important culture and art could help the ‘little people’ develop their ethnicity (value of living and social, intellectual, and moral thoughts) to fight the injustice in society. All in all, to develop the whole Nation and society, the basics of life, i.e., politics, economics, education, and culture must be correctly and equally promoted.268

TUAFT’s call for the ‘basics of life’ was a return to the everyday and an exploration of how it was structured by society, politics, the economy, education and art. It was the structures and conditions of the everyday that had to be changed from the ‘bottom-up’, and art was seen to play an empowering role for social change.

267 The Kaisahan’s ‘Declaration of Principles’; see Alice G. Guillermo, Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines 1970–1990 (Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), Appendix A, pp. 243–44. 268 ‘The Artists’ Front of Thailand ‘Manifesto’ in Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists Front of Thailand, 1974–1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con-tempus, 1994).

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The contestation over the ‘real’ in the everyday and how it was to be represented took a different articulation in Indonesia in debates over maya (the illusory world) and the concrete. Art critic Sanento Yuliman explained this in relation to his defence of the artists and artworks of the GSRB critical exhibition:

Jim Supangkat went further by not producing anything at all. He simply asked someone else. In the New Art Movement 1975 exhibition, forms and qualities conventionally attributed to a work of art, in whole or in parts, were not produced by the artists themselves, but rather assigned to carpenters, puppet makers or plastic and aluminium manufacturers. … In response to the notion of ‘real’ and the ‘maya’ (illusory world), these artists proposed the use of concrete objects [ready mades]. … Can we say from this exhibition that we are being introduced to an aesthetic experience that is new where the ‘sense of concreteness’ becomes the basis to that same experience, hence transforming the experience qualitatively into one that is ‘conventional’, as though to shock us with the materiality [emphasis added] of the banal? Earlier generations of artists were satisfied with works that were bound by the imaginative experience and reflections into an inner realm. Artists participating in this exhibition step out of these constraints, aggressively moving into the ‘outside realm’ [emphasis added], the concrete world, as if aiming that art can provide an experience which is full and total.269 The representation of the ‘concrete world’ using ‘concrete objects’ found in everyday life was proposed as a ‘new aesthetic experience’, a ‘sense of concreteness’ to shock the viewer through the use of banal everyday materials, and it was opposed to the illusory world drawn from the artist’s inner realm. The concrete world is, therefore, a critically effective dimension of aesthetic experience. It steps outside the constraints of realism as imaginations of an inner realm that is illusory to a notion of the concrete environment that is directly engaged with the social and political conditions of the real world. The capacity of the concrete lies, therefore, in its political interpretation of aesthetic experiences. In critical exhibitions and critical art that reconfigure our sensory experiences, the concrete expands beyond the formal (i.e., abstract) and the representational (i.e., realism). Supangkat elaborated on his notion of concreteness as being more than an abstract idea. Instead, it

269 Sanento Yuliman, quoted in Telah Terbit (Out Now): Contemporary Southeast Asian Artistic Practices During the 1960s to 1980s (Singapore: SAM, 2006), p. 63.

120 referred to a genuine desire to communicate not only with elite intellectuals, but also with ordinary Indonesians. Participants were to be transformed from ‘observers’ into participants, whose consciousness was meant to be awakened and attuned to new aesthetic values and ways of interpreting aesthetic experiences politically:

Concepts of creation in this exhibition were also influenced by these concepts. For example: ‘Concreteness’ as a concept speaks about the involvement of the observer physically, in this sense, if the consciousness of the observer could not be provoked, then the physical would be changed. And here the distance between the world of the actual observer and the world of the imagination of a work vanishes through the concrete.270

The artists felt the need to use everyday materials and objects to transform passive spectators into active participants. Concreteness was marked as a shift from the interior imaginations of the artist to the exterior, concrete materiality of the banal. Crates and cushions that people were familiar with in everyday life were transformed into artworks. The aggressive shifting of these concrete artworks into the ‘outside realm’, the world of the everyday, was to be made manifest in the materiality of art.

The Contextual: Re-Materialisation of the Everyday

The use of non-art materials expanded the making of artworks from conventional art materials, such as oil and watercolour paints, to everyday objects that embodied local symbolic, cultural and political meanings. F.X. Harsono, one of the leading artists of the GSRB, proposed the term Seni Kontekstual (contextual art) as a conceptualist strategy that draws on local materials imbued with culturally specific meanings. Moelyono developed the concept of Seni Penyadaran (Consciensation Art), a term used by Siti Adiyati271 to describe his artistic practice that focused on raising the criticality of audiences by making visible and subverting dominant ideologies, and breaking the cycle of socialisation that entrenched oppressive regimes.272 Amanda K. Rath defines ‘contextual art’ as an artistic practice that:

270 Jim Supangkat, ‘Keinginan Berkomunikasi’, Kompas Daily, 9 September 1975. 271 Siti Adiyati, Kompas, 4 September 1988. 272 Edwin Jurriens, Visual Media in Indonesia: Video Vanguard (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 19.

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should be able to bring awareness about the plight of society and their suffering through aesthetic means. As such, artistic production is a sociological process, and demands the artist possessing knowledge of both the local social and political problems, and the visual symbols and materials of that area as well.273

This way of making art objects is markedly different from conceptualism in Euro-America. The notion of contextual art resonated with a literary movement – contextual literature (Sastra Kontekstual in Bahasa Indonesia) – that sought to foster a socially engaged literary discourse to challenge the formal structuralist and universal-humanist literary discourses that were manifestations of depoliticised literary production in Indonesia.274 The literary contextualists aimed to question the institutional structures that perpetuated social injustices, and they actively deployed literature to effect social change and address injustices. American art critic Lucy Lippard introduced the term ‘dematerialisation’ in 1967 to refer to a reduction of material in art-making that was meant to reduce art to its purest form, that is, to its existence as an ethereal concept only.275 The dematerialisation of art was a rejection of the dominant conceptualist movement from 1966 to 1972 in Euro-America, in which the material construction of art served the conceptual production and dissemination of ideas. The dematerialisation of art was less prominent in conceptual artistic practices in Indonesia.276 Instead, Indonesian artists tended to re-materialise everyday objects by making them strange and defamiliarising them from their usual contexts and functions, and by reassembling new meanings and understandings. Eceng Gondok Berbunga Emas (Water Hyacinth with Golden Flowers) (Figure 3.1) by Siti Adiyati was shown in the 1979 GSRB exhibition. It was the only work that used a living organism, eceng gondok (Figure 3.2), a type of water hyacinth. The hyacinth is an invasive species, originally from the Amazon basin, which was brought to Southeast Asia and naturalised in the region. Amid the water hyacinth were plastic golden roses that contrasted

273 Amanda K. Rath, ‘The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Effectiveness: The Ethical Universal in the Works of FX Harsono’, in FX Harsono Titik Nyeri/Point of Pain (Jakarta: Langgeng Icon Gallery, 2007), p. 82. 274 For an understanding of how Sastra Kontekstual was developed by important intellectuals like Arief Budiman, see Ariel Heryanto, Perdebatan Sastra Kontekstual (Jakarta: Rajawali, 1985). 275 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967). 276 Some aspects of dematerialisation might have occurred in literature and drama, such as Rendra’s ‘mini-kita’ theatre that used minimal or even no words, due to the muting of words by the New Order’s oppression.

122 life and artifice, and which prompted audiences to think about the delicate balance in the relationship between humans and nature. Bringing a living organism into the GSRB exhibition also bridged the gap between art and non-art and presented the water hyacinth as both a floating aquatic plant and a weed. Its high reproduction rate caused by agricultural waste from polluting rivers and lakes can destroy aquatic life. Adiyati combined the water hyacinth as a potentially environmentally harmful weed with the plastic golden roses in the art gallery to reveal that Suharto’s New Order developmentalism was:

just an illusion symbolised by the golden rose in the sea of absolute poverty that the eceng gondok represents. This is why the eceng gondok is included in the art movement (GSRB). That is my point to understand everyday life.277

Adiyati approached real problems and issues of everyday life through the water hyacinth, which also symbolised the capacity and resilience of the Indonesian rakyat. The weed that embodied the developmentalism of the New Order can be read as having the potential to be transformed into useful organic fertiliser and animal feed. Like Adiyati’s Eceng Gondok, TMR (1974) also transformed the appearance of ordinary natural and man-made objects, including human hair, a live potted plant, a chair ‘shown as it was’, and two Coca-Cola bottles that were ‘half consumed’ (Figure 3.3). Placing these everyday objects on white pedestals in a white cube gallery space prompted the viewer to appreciate them as sculptural artworks sharing a reality with the viewer. When reconstructed elsewhere, viewers would create experiences that were altogether different. In Piyadasa’s words:

My works exist within the same reality as the viewers’. The time and space are the same. My works are always existing in the present. In a sense, my works cannot be sold. This is because the experience that I am forcing upon the viewer is a real experience. My works may be reconstructed elsewhere in which case they will constitute an altogether new experience.278

This art practice drew on the Daoist philosophy of experiencing the world as events. Krishen Jit explains that these ‘live situations’ in art focus on the viewer as an active participant

277 Email from Siti Adiyati on 1 January 2017. 278 Redza Piyadasa, Dokumentasi 72 exhibition catalogue, unpaginated.

123 rather than on static and physical material objects.279 The handwritten label for Randomly collected sample of human hair collected from a barber shop in Petaling Jaya pasted on the pedestal itself prompted the viewer to look beyond the apparent valuelessness and ephemerality of discarded human hair. It encouraged the viewer to enter a mental rather than a rational space, and to shift away from relying on sight, the retina, and scientific observation as the main framework to appraise the found object. Instead, the viewer was situated as a participant who entered a ‘live situation’ using daily objects as an event- centred entry point to think about whose hair it was, whether the person lived in Petaling Jaya, and what the hair could tell us about the person to whom it had once belonged. The value of the found object was not based on material value, but on experiential ones. It referred to lived everyday experiences as a specific form of reality. The TMR’s manifesto stated that ‘there are alternate ways of approaching reality and the Western empirical and humanistic viewpoints are not the only valid ones there are’.280

Descending to Vernacular Images

Miyakawa’s idea of anti-art also embodied a return to ‘vernacular images’ to recover the fundamental structures of the everyday world. One example in the Indonesian context was the work Ken Dedes (Figure 3.4), which incited controversy when it was first shown at the New Art Movement exhibition in 1975 because it presented a vulgar cartoon-graffiti rendition of the body of Ken Dedes.281 The figure was clad in a pair of unzipped jeans revealing her pubic hair to the spectator. Her head was based on the iconography of the revered Queen Ken Dedes, wife of Ken Arok who ruled the Singhasari empire in Java. It was

279 Kristen Jit, ‘An Introduction’, in Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, exhibition catalogue, 1974, pp. 2–3. Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa explained how Daoism and Zen understand life directly. When translated to art, this called for a similarly direct connection with life and the everyday, instead of a relation in abstract or representational terms: ibid., pp. 17–19. 280 Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, ‘Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa’, republished in Reactions: New Critical Strategies, Narratives in Malaysian Art ed. Nur Hanim Khairudin, Beverly Yong and T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: Rouge Art, 2013), p. 46. 281 See Yvonne Low, ‘Making Space in Art History: 4 Objects of Art’, in Intersecting Histories: Contemporary Turns in Southeast Asian Art (Singapore: ADM, 2012), pp. 98–100.

124 believed that whoever married Ken Dedes would be destined for kingship.282 Ken Dedes’ sacred powers, defined by her pure beauty and sexuality, were given a vulgar reinterpretation by Jim Supangkat. The cartoon-graffiti part of Ken Dedes adopted a system of depiction from cartoons that was juxtaposed with the sculptural head that employed a system of representation derived from Hindu-Buddhist iconography. The combination of two different and incongruent systems of representation in a single artwork produced a new mode of representation that provoked the viewer to think critically about the different ways in which the vernacular manifesting the real was represented across time and cultural contexts. The adoption of incongruent systems of representation was a strategy also adopted by the TUAFT, which was formed in 1974, in the aftermath of the toppling of the military dictatorship of Thanom Kittikachorn, Praphat Charu-satien and Narong Kittikach in October 1973. TUAFT opposed art that was produced for those in power and big businesses, calling for art to be relevant to the common Thai worker and farmer, and for culture to be brought to every Thai. In October 1975, TUAFT organised a large display of paintings on Rajadamnern Avenue (Figure 3.5) with posters to commemorate the victory of the students, who played a significant role in causing the collapse of the military regime. The collaboration between artists, students and the Thai people in making these billboard cut- outs transformed the everyday public space of Rajadamnern Avenue using capitalistic system of visual representation in the form of advertising to undermine it with national symbols. Along this avenue is the Democracy Monument, which has symbolic value as a site of student protest. TUAFT was similar to Kaisahan in producing posters and murals against an authoritarian regime (Figures 3.6 and 3.7). Whereas Ken Dedes employed vernacular images from cartoons and popular culture, TUAFT’s Untitled (Figure 3.8), a billboard cut-out from its 1975 critical exhibition, deployed widely circulated and socially charged popular images from the media to make people aware of the brutality and violence of the military regime. In Untitled, the popular newspaper and television image of a Thai soldier in the midst of throwing a grenade was used. This image (Figure 3.9) alluded to the Thai military’s violence against its own people

282 For how Ken Dedes and Ken Arok, as folklore, have been reinterpreted within the changing contexts of Indonesia’s political and cultural discourse, see Novita Dewi, “Surviving Legend, Surviving ‘Unity in Diversity’: A Reading of Ken Arok and Ken Dedes Narratives”, Antropologi Indonesia, 72 (July 2014), pp. 131–41.

125 and its participation in the Vietnam War, in which almost 40,000 Thai military volunteers fought against the Viet Cong. This image captured the growing resistance to the Thai military’s support of America’s war effort in Vietnam.283 As a popular image of the war, it embodied a sense of contemporaneity with the resistance to American imperialism. Imperialism was in action, like the grenade that was suspended momentarily in time, just about to be lobbed over the barbed wire towards the Thai national flag, the symbol of Thailand’s independence and freedom. The flag was depicted as wrapped around an object that looked like a coffin. The Thai national flag, as the symbol of Thailand’s unity and freedom, was presented as a symbol of a universal time that would exist as long as Thailand stood as a nation. The directness of naked violence represented by the soldier momentarily clashed with the sacredness of the Thai national flag, but also with the golden ‘bowl’, which was repainted in black by the artist. The golden bowl is a sacred object used in Thai Buddhist and royal ceremonies to hold offerings for Buddhist relics. It holds the 1932 Thai constitution forged from the coup of the same year (Figure 3.10). The vernacular and the everyday were represented by the mass media image of the soldier, while the violence of the military was matched by the double sacredness of the Thai people and the Thai constitution. The artwork made visible the complexities of the political and social everyday as experienced by the Thai people under military rule in the 1970s.

The Performative: Contesting the Everyday

The public interest in the Modern Art exhibition in Singapore in 1963 extended beyond the exhibitionary discourse. It was estimated that almost 5,000 people had visited the exhibition three days before it ended.284 The media’s hype around it was fuelled by important personalities like Han Suyin, a well-known writer and physician who was the guest of honour at the exhibition, Frank Sullivan, who was the first administrator of the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, and Tunku Abdul Rahman, the former press secretary to the prime minister of Malaysia. While the vast majority of the newspaper reviews were supportive and positive on the Modern Art exhibition, newspaper articles about an incident regarding the

283 Richard A. Ruth, Buddhism In Buddha’s Company: Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010). 284 ‘The Last Three Days of the Modern Art Exhibition’, in Nayang Shang Bao, 25 October 1963.

126 intentional damage inflicted on one of the paintings in the exhibition also revealed contestations over what constituted art and its role in society. Just a week into the Modern Art exhibition, one of the paintings was intentionally damaged by an exhibition visitor. The culprit was never caught or identified, but at least three newspapers, including the Xin Sheng Ri Bao, reported the incident.285 The artists who participated in the exhibition were invited onto Television Singapore, which had started broadcasting on 15 February 1963.286 The artists called for anyone who disagreed or had issues with the paintings on display to pose their questions to the artists or to air their views in the press.287 The newspaper articles did not reveal that the artist whose painting was damaged was Tay Chee Toh. His painting was allegedly damaged by another artist, whose artistic practices were rejected by the MAS as outmoded.288 The act of defacing Tay’s painting was a gesture that signalled the rejection of what the MAS stood for, and also constituted a public challenge. Tay’s painting was defaced while exhibited in a public space, a library, where vandalism (whether of books or of artworks) was not tolerated. The defacement of Tay’s painting was indicative of tensions surrounding the dominant mode of artistic practice, painting, within and outside the Singapore art world. The act of vandalism represented a moment of contestation between modern art and other ideological expressions and practices. The contestation of aesthetic ideologies can be traced to realism as modern art’s apparent ideological opposite. The Singapore Chinese Middle Schools’ Graduates of the 1953 Arts Association (Yiyanhui) organised an art exhibition that propagated realism. One of the essays by Lee Tian Meng compiled in Yiyanhui’s exhibition catalogue, titled ‘Three Reasons against the Ideas of Pablo Picasso’, attacked cubism, Picasso and other styles, artists and ideological expressions that were deemed ‘anti-realist’. Lee claimed:

The so-called Cubist art is actually a type, which denies the heritage of tradition, discards humanity and truth in art, and emphasises hypocrisy and anti-realism. Reason, progress, love for mankind, peace and harmony

285 ‘Modern Art Exhibition has One More Week’, Xin Sheng Ri Bao, 21 October 1963. 286 The invitation to the artists to appear on television was reported in Nanyang Shang Bao, 21 October 1963. 287 ‘Modern Art Exhibition Audience: An Artwork that was Damaged by Someone and Hope for Criticisms to be Made in the Press’, Nanyang Shang Bao, 21 October 1963. 288 Interview with Tay Chee Toh, 20 February 2006. See Ho Ho Ying, ‘Modern Art Society’, in Thang Kiang How et al., New Directions 1980–1987: Modern Paintings in Singapore (Singapore: Horizon Pub., 1987). According to Ho, one of the reasons why the inaugural exhibition was a success was the defacement of Tay’s painting, since this act of vandalism elicited public sympathy.

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are forsaken and replaced by a decadent art which tries to propagandise bestiality, violence and anti-humanist ideas… As Malayan art workers, we should not only possess a keen eye for painting, but should at the same time have a sharp discretion for politics. Our criticisms should be unprecedented and closely committed to realism.289

Lee presented the message of his exhibitionary discourse in both stylistic and political terms. Cubism was cast as anti-humanistic, false and violent, in contrast to the harmony and truth of realism, the paragon of what art should be. Artistic styles were proposed as indices of worldviews, and cubism was accordingly denounced as an exemplification of the ‘decadent culture’ of the West that threatened the social and political fabric of Malaya.290 Realism was held to be the only ‘true’ art, whereas cubism was demonised. Lee’s exhibitionary discourse was not only rhetorical in tone, but it also privileged one aesthetic ideal (realism) over another (cubism). Art (or, in this case, realism) was declared to be political. The Yiyanhui was dissolved after its art exhibition of 14 August 1956. Its dissolution can be linked to the increasing pressure exerted by the British colonial government on organisations regarded as a threat to their authority.291 Some of its members subsequently formed a new art society in September 1956, the Equator Art Society, which continued the propagation of realism.292

Conclusion

Resonating with Miyakawa’s notion of anti-art and its descent to the everyday, the ambassador and art critic Armando Manalo described the 1970s in the Philippines as a

289 Lee Tian Meng, ‘Three Reasons against the Ideas of Pablo Picasso’, quoted in Marco Hsu, A Brief History of Malayan Art, “Vibrant Artists C”, translated by Lai Chee Kien (Singapore: Millennium Books, 1999), p. 101. 290 Lee’s art manifesto should also be located within the anti-yellow movement that was a confluence of anti- colonial and anti-pornographic sentiments. 291 The Singapore Chinese Middle Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Association seemed to be connected with the Singapore Chinese Middle Schools’ Student Union (SCMSSU), which was formed in 1954. The SCMSSU was forced to dissolve in 1956 by the British colonial government, the same year the Singapore Chinese Middle Schools’ Graduates of 1953 Arts Association ceased to function. 292 The Equator Art Society officially registered on 22 June 1956. Art-related activities organised by the Equator Art Society included art classes that were divided into three levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced), exhibitions for its members, art-theoretical research, and study seminars. It may have had over 800 members at its peak. Besides the fine-arts wing of the art society, the literature, music and theatre wings were also active. However, the Equator Art Society deregistered on 11 January 1974, after six exhibitions at various locations, such as the Victoria Memorial Hall, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and its premises at 56 Geylang Lorong 32, Singapore.

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‘period of metaphysical unrest’. He saw the curatorial programmes at the CCP from 1971 until 1975 as the ‘exposure phase’ of ‘advanced art’ that was ‘experimental in nature’:

The use of sand, junk iron, non-art materials such as raw lumber, rocks etc. were common materials for the artists’ developmental strategies. People were shocked, scared, delighted, pleased and satisfied even if their preconceived notions of art did not agree with what they encountered.293

The CCP under Raymundo Albano sought to provoke audiences by making strange the familiarity of the everyday, which ‘made one relatively aware of an environment suddenly turning visible’. The turn to the everyday was made visible, propelled by critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. Making visible the real as a contested terrain required new modes of representation in critical exhibitions that politicised the real by making it concrete, defamiliarised, strange and provocatively vernacular. The turn to the everyday produced new modes of representation, which discursively stemmed from notions of ‘art and life’ and the concrete, and were materially realised in the use of non-art and ‘readymade objects’. It incorporated ‘vulgar’ and popular images that destabilised the boundaries between the sacred and the profane. The possibility of politicising everyday life by reclaiming the street from authorities was demonstrated by the billboard cut-out critical exhibition by TUAFT. The collaboration between artists, students and the public in making and installing the billboard cut-outs democratised both the street as a public space and art-making itself as a collective gesture. The impulsion of critical exhibitions lay in its politicisation of the everyday, and, in this politicisation, the exhibitions provoked and generated alternative aesthetic regimes that were located in reality, materiality and the reinterpretation of popular images to subvert dominant ideologies and power relations. The repoliticisation of art was the hinge that turned critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia towards the everyday. It also produced and was represented in a new form of exhibitionary discourse, foregrounded by the proliferation of art manifestos, which will be addressed in the next chapter.

293 Albano, ‘Developmental Art of the Philippines’, p. 15.

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Figure 3.1

Siti Adiyati, Eceng Gondok Berbunga Emas (Water Hyacinth with Golden Flowers), Plastic, water hyacinth, 1979, Collection of Artist, Image by Seng Yu Jin

Figure 3.2

(Detail) Siti Adiyati, Eceng Gondok Berbunga Emas (Water Hyacinth with Golden Flowers), Plastic, water hyacinth, 1979, Collection of Artist, Image by Seng Yu Jin

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Figure 3.3

Catalogue of Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences and various installation views of the exhibition. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 3.4

Jim Supangkat, Ken Dedes, 1975, remade 1996, Plastic, wood, marker pen and paint 125.5 x 41.5 x 26 cm 61 x 43.5 x 27 cm, Collection of National Gallery Singapore, Image courtesy of The National Gallery Singapore.

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Figure 3.5

The United Artists’ Front of Thailand Billboard Cut-out exhibition of paintings, posters, murals and banners at the Rajadamnern Avenue, Bangkok. Image courtesy of The United Artists’ Front of Thailand

Figure 3.6

A poster by Kaisahan. Image taken when interviewing artists from the Kaisahan taken with permission from artist, Renato Habulan.

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Figure 3.7

Renato Habulan, a leading artist of Kaisahan showing a poster by Kaisahan in Manila on 21 January 2017. Image taken with permission from Renato Habulan.

Figure 3.8

Sinsawat Yodbangtoey from the The United Artists’ Front of Thailand explaining this remade bill board cut out on 14 March 2017 at the 14 October Memorial in Bangkok. Image taken with permission from Ajarn Sinsawat.

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Figure 3.9

Photographic image of a Thai soldier that was widely circulated in Thai newspapers. Image from Charnvit Kasetsiri, From Oct 1973 to Oct 6 1976: Bangkok and Tongpan’s Isan (Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Science and Humanities, 2008.

Figure 3.10

The Golden Bowl supporting 1932 Siamese Constitution on the Victory Monument symbolising the importance of the Constitution as the supreme law in Thailand’s democracy.

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Chapter 4 The Age of Manifestos: Contesting Exhibitionary Discourses Between the ‘New’, ‘Real’ and ‘Concrete’

Exhibition Histories as Method: Exhibitionary Discourse

Chantal Mouffe’s discourse analysis is based on the premise that discourses are ways in which we talk about and understand the social world.294 Reality is accessible to us through knowledge categories, which are in turn a product of discourse. All discourse and knowledge are historically and culturally specific, and discursively contingent. Discourses are conceived as fixations of meaning that determine a particular way of representing the world. For Mouffe, the discursive struggle arises from competing discourses that aim to achieve hegemony and define and fix the meaning of language. This discursive struggle for hegemony is never permanently settled, because discourses are constantly transformed when challenged by other discourses. Although Mouffe does not extend her discourse analysis to discourses produced by exhibitions, discourse analysis can be applied as a methodology to study exhibitions. Exhibition histories can be conceived as discursive sites where discourses compete for hegemony to lock the meaning and representation of art in a specific way. The weakness of Mouffe’s discourse analysis is that it does not differentiate between discourses that have been excluded from a particular ‘field of discursivity’ (such as the discourse of football that has no connection with the exhibitionary discourse), and related discourses that inhabit and struggle in the same field of discursivity (like the discourse of literature in relation to exhibitionary discourse). Building on Mouffe’s discourse analysis and adopting Norman Fairclough’s concept of the ‘order of discourse’ enables a separation between different

294 See E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

135 discourses and different fields of discursivity.295 The exhibitionary discourse can therefore be conceptualised as a particular type or order of discourse. The discursive struggle for hegemony in the exhibitionary in post-war Southeast Asia was driven by the art manifesto as a specific mode of exhibitionary discourse. In other words, the manifestos that were produced by internationalist and critical exhibitions made visible the structures that circumscribed the art worlds in Southeast Asia. The Modern Art Society Annual Exhibitions (Singapore), Sang Tao (Creation Group) exhibitions (Vietnam), and the First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in the Philippines (Philippines) were internationalist exhibitions from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Critical exhibitions examined in this chapter include Towards a Mystical Reality (Malaysia), the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru exhibitions (Indonesia), and the 1974 Billboard Cut-Out exhibition by The United Artists’ Front of Thailand (TUAFT). The two exhibitionary forms, the internationalist and the critical, provide entry points into the competing exhibitionary discourses that sought to gain discursive hegemony on the role and function of art in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. What are the characteristics of an art manifesto? The art manifesto is a rhetorical device, issued by an art group, individual or collective of artists, usually associated with the avant-garde and presenting themselves as militants, to a potentially wide audience, with the intention to shock, propagandise, revolutionise and thus subvert the status quo of ideas, aesthetics, and systems.296 As a specific type of exhibitionary discourse, art manifestos have been perennial in the history of Western modernism. Futurists, Dadaists, surrealists, Situationists and Fluxus issued manifestos as public declarations of their artistic ideas and intentions. As a literary genre, art manifestos employ text to present ideas on art within a social context. The relationship between the art manifesto and society can be traced back to the art manifesto’s historical relationship with the political manifesto. Political manifestos are ideological documents issued by collectives or individuals with the intention of changing society. Art manifestos also function as rhetorical devices for carrying political statements and allying with political, social and cultural groups.297 More importantly, the art manifesto

295 Norman Fairclough, ‘Text and Context: Linguistic and Intertextual Analysis within Discourse Analysis’, Discourse and Society, 3.2 (1992), pp. 193–217. According to Fairclough, the order of discourse is a network of social practices articulated as a language comprising discourses, styles and genres. 296 The art manifesto does not necessarily occur in a textual form. An argument can be made that art manifestos exist in other sites of discourse, such as artworks. See Mary Anne Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001) for an anthology of artists and cultural manifestos. 297 For instance, Marinetti, one of the leading Futurists joined the Fascists and published political manifestos.

136 is the heartbeat of the critical exhibition, which consists of curatorial and artistic practices that partake in a constantly discursive struggle for hegemony over the meaning of specific elements of an exhibition. This chapter traces and examines the discursive struggle between the ‘new’ and the ‘real’ as floating signifiers – privileged elements – in art manifestos. In exhibitionary discourse, the meanings of these elements are constantly negotiated and contested. Discourse is conceived as the fixing of the meaning of elements in an order of discourse – the exhibitionary discourse. A discursive moment is understood as the moment when hegemony is established over the meaning of an element. In the exhibitionary discourse in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, the floating signifiers of the ‘new’ and the ‘real’ interacted with and framed other free-floating elements, such as the ‘avant-garde’, ‘national’, ‘modern’, ‘social’, ‘political’, ‘concrete’ and ‘conceptual’. Another concept examined in this chapter, the ‘concrete’, stood out among the floating signifiers in the 1970s exhibitions. The ‘concrete’ departed from concrete art conceived by Theo van Doesburg, a Dutch artist who formed the Art Concret group in Paris. In the 1930s, this group sought to completely expunge abstract motifs and figuration, using only geometric planes to represent an autonomous reality. It also had resonances with the short-lived Latin American neo-concretism (1959–61), led by critic and poet Ferreira Gullar. Neo-concretism itself was influenced by philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, according to which viewers engaged with artworks with all their senses, to the point of even physically re-shaping them and thus bridging the gap between art and life.298 The concrete, as it is unpacked in Chapters 4 and 5, is a prime candidate for being designated ‘calibrated terminology’,299 as it emerged from the discursive wellsprings of Southeast Asia. It had resonances with discourses in other regions with shared colonial histories, including Latin America, while it departed from the concrete art movement located within Euro-American art historical contexts. The concrete in the region was significant for marking a conceptual shift towards thinking about art as being critical of its social and political

298 In 1959, the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar wrote the Neo-Concrete Manifesto that marked the start of the movement. Artists associated with this movement include Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica. For a comparison between neo-concretism in Brazil and anti-art in Japan, see Pedro R. Erber, Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014). 299 Marian Pastor Roces, ‘Words’, Eyeline, 22/23 (Summer, 1993), pp. 45–48.

137 environment, transforming passive viewers into active participants, and bridging the gap between thought and action. The analysis of exhibitionary discourse produced by critical exhibitions demonstrates that exhibition history is viable as a method to understand how lexicons on art can be constructed and disseminated through the exhibition as a critical form.

The ‘New’ and ‘Real’ as Floating Signifiers

Strictly speaking, Realism has passed its golden age; Impressionism has done its duty; Fauvism and Cubism are declining. Something new [emphasis added] must turn up to succeed the unfinished task left by our predecessors… We do not mean to belittle the achievements of traditional art, but we certainly do not agree with those who stick to the old course.300

We recognise that national identity, if it is to be more than lip service or an excuse for personal status seeking, should be firmly based on the present social realities and on a critical assessment [emphasis added] of our historical past so that we may trace the roots of these realities [emphasis added] [...] We shall therefore develop an art that reflects the true conditions in our society.301

The Modern Art Society (MAS) in Singapore had, in a single breath, proclaimed the end of successive styles of painting — realism, impressionism, Fauvism and cubism — in the history of art by declaring abstraction as the ‘new’ style of painting. At the same time, the MAS art manifesto set up a binary opposition between the traditional and the modern. The search for the ‘new’, envisaged as the next stylistic breakthrough, or the subversion of existing aesthetic conventions in the art world by means of heroic avant-garde artists working in the modernist vein, has featured prominently throughout the history of modern art in the West. From the perspective of the MAS, the genealogy of stylistic shifts ran from realism and cubism in the West to the ‘new’ in Southeast Asia. In other words, the MAS saw itself as the

300 Ho Ho Ying, ‘Preface’ to Modern Art, art catalogue of the inaugural 1963 Modern Art Society exhibition, unpaginated. 301 Manifesto of Kaisahan, issued in 1976. For a discussion of the manifestos of The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, the Kaisahan and TMR, see Patrick D. Flores, ‘First Person Plural: The Manifestos of the 1970s in Southeast Asia’, in Hans Belting et al. (eds), Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012), pp. 224–71.

138 successor of the avant-garde movements that had powered the narrative of modern art in the West. The exhibitionary discourse of the MAS provides entry points for understanding how media and art movements (i.e., painting and conceptualism) engaged in a discursive struggle to fix the meaning of the ‘new’ as a floating signifier. In the preface to the 1963 MAS exhibition catalogue, the ‘new’ was conceived as a linear stylistic shift from realism, cubism and abstraction in painting. Cheo’s conceptualist discourse was first published in a Chinese newspaper before being republished in the foreword to the 1974 MAS Annual Exhibition catalogue.302 This foreword introduced the conceptualist discourse of how

Contemporary art has in fact reached a point when artists are prepared to adopt anything as a medium to work with. What is important is not the execution of an art work but the idea behind it… Similarly, the ‘non-art’ attitude in art itself has become a new notion, a new concept of contemporary art.303

The eventual exclusion of 5’ x 5’ (Singapore River), despite Cheo’s sustained engagement with the MAS and its discourse, showed the process of how one discourse (i.e., abstraction and painting) succeeded in fixing its meaning over another discourse (i.e. conceptualism). The Kaisahan is an artist collective that emerged within the context of the radicalised left-wing student movements in the Philippines, such as the Nagkakaisang Progresibong Artista formed in 1971 at Arkitekto (United Progressive Artists and Architects, NPAA). The Kabataang Makabay (Nationalist Youth) recruited young artists from these student movements, including the Kaisahan, for the armed struggle for a proletarian revolution led by the Communist Party of the Philippines.304 The Kaisahan manifesto differed from the MAS manifesto in its conception of art history. It did not see art as grounded in the history of modern art driven by the Western avant-garde movement and unfolding in a series of stylistic changes. Instead, it saw art history as embedded in the social realities of the Philippines. More specifically, it believed that socially and politically critical art emerged from the conditions of ‘the real’. The ‘real’ as a floating signifier was based on the actual

302 Cheo Chai Hiang, ‘Foreword’, Modern Art Society 1974 exhibition catalogue, unpaginated. It is important to note that Cheo did not employ the term ‘conceptualist’ in the 1970s. Nevertheless, what he put forward can be framed within conceptualism. 303 Ibid. 304 Patrick Flores, ‘Social Realism: The Turns of a Term in the Philippines’, Afterall, 34 (Autumn/Winter 2013), pp. 64-65.

139 social realities and conditions experienced by the people of the Philippines. The Kaisahan ideal was ‘an art that reflects the true conditions in our society’.305 A comparison between the ‘new’ and ‘real’ advanced by the MAS and the Kaisahan, respectively, reveal how both terms or floating signifiers were embedded in the art manifesto as a mode of exhibitionary discourse produced by critical exhibitions. The discursive struggle between the ‘new’ and the ‘real’ in art manifestos in turn intervened in and changed other elements of the exhibition discourse, such as the ‘avant-garde’, ‘nation’, ‘tradition’, ‘history’, and ‘conceptualism’. Such interdiscursivity, or interactions between exhibitionary discourse and other orders of discourse from the domains of popular culture (e.g., popular songs), literature and philosophy (e.g., Marxism) and culturally specific worldviews, requires methodological analysis in the field of exhibition history. Interdiscursivity in Southeast Asia intervened in, changed and pushed the boundaries of exhibition discourse by introducing new linguistic terms and concepts drawn from indigenous sources. It contributed to an active decolonisation of exhibitionary discourse by providing multiple frames of reference, including local and regional discourses.

The Search for the New: Claims for the ‘Modern’ and the ‘Avant-Garde’ by Internationalist Exhibitions

The MAS burst onto the Singapore art world, anointing itself as the harbinger of the ‘new’. But which aesthetic ideal was the MAS championing as the ‘new’? The foreword to the 1969 MAS exhibition explained that ‘the main concerns of modern artists are the beauty of form, harmony of rhythm and creativity’.306 Form was defined as ‘living lines, breathing strokes, unique structures, or moving colours’. ‘Beauty’ could be attained by the arrangement and composition of the elements of form (space, rhythm, harmony, line and colours).307 A bold statement hoisted form as the pre-eminent criteria for art: ‘We [the MAS] appreciate them [artworks] as long as they are composed and arranged artistically.’308 Form was also proposed as a universal language of art, as its elements (colour, shape, and line) did not need to carry culturally specific meanings, relying instead on ‘instinctive impulses’ and

305 Ibid., p. 64. 306 ‘Foreword’ to Modern Art, art catalogue of the 1969 Modern Art Society exhibition, unpaginated. 307 ‘Foreword’ to Modern Art, art catalogue of the 1971 Modern Art Society exhibition, unpaginated. 308 Ibid.

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‘subjective feeling’ that were transcendent and subjective.309 With its proclaimed universality, ‘Modern art is therefore an effective and essential means to promote better understanding amongst the various countries of the world’.310 The MAS’s exhibitions broke away from the salon exhibitions organised by art societies and art academies by introducing the exhibitionary strategy of the manifesto. They propagated ‘new’ modern styles – abstraction and abstract expressionism – that connected with the avant-garde modern art movement worldwide. They also propelled the internationalist exhibition that promoted specific styles and ideas rather than a particular medium. The MAS was not alone in its vision of an international avant-garde modernist movement. Ta Ty’s 1951 solo exhibition in Hanoi, Exposition of Modern Paintings, presented an avant-garde vision similar to the MAS internationalist exhibition. Ta Ty presented twenty paintings that were cubist in style. The paintings broke away from the academic realist style taught, exhibited and promoted at the L’École des Beaux-Arts L’Indochine (EBAI) in Hanoi, from which Ta Ty graduated. ‘In the Avant-garde Movement’ was printed brazenly in brackets below his name on the cover of the exhibition catalogue.311 Ta Ty was conscripted by the Bao Dai government and sent to South Vietnam in 1953. He continued to experiment in the avant-gardist modern art movement by making abstract paintings in the late 1950s, which culminated in another solo exhibition in Saigon in 1961.312 Ta Ty consistently employed the internationalist exhibition form to introduce new ideas about art, which were grounded in the international avant-garde modern art movement and centred on styles like cubism and abstraction. The Hoi Hoa Si Tre Saigon (Society of Saigonese Young Artists, SSYA), formed in the 1960s, was described by art historian Boi-Tran as consisting of artists who ‘ventured into styles more Symbolist and Expressionist than narrative. One distinctive trait they all shared was a commitment to being apolitical, which meant that typical Cold War politics, pitting the North against South, or Russia against the United States were excluded from their

309 Ibid. 310 ‘Foreword’ to Modern Art, art catalogue of the 1965 Modern Art Society exhibition, unpaginated. 311 Ta Ty, Exposition of Modern Paintings, exhibition catalogue (Hanoi: The Information Service of North Viet- Nam, 1951), cover. 312 Boitran Huynh-Beattie, ‘Vietnamese Modern Art: An Unfinished Journey’, in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology, ed. Nora Taylor and Ly Boreth (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012), p. 44.

141 art’.313 Their manifesto declared their position as modern artists who ‘Follow modern art movements closest to the tendencies that reside in the hearts of our Vietnamese audience… [and] Bring a positive atmosphere to criticism, and exclude hypocritical diplomacy’.314 In their manifesto, they aligned themselves with modern art, while their works explored styles associated with the avant-garde movements in Europe and America. The SSYA was regarded as a protégé of the Sang Tao (Creation Group), which had been established in the 1950s. Sang Tao published an eponymous magazine to disseminate modern avant-garde ideas:

Cross out the old academic style, catch new tendencies in world art, do not stop at the decorative or objectively record matters, but mix up all the orders, forms, and colors residing in nature to create new forms of objects and life and so spear a new avant-garde movement [emphasis added], a new language for Vietnamese art; to raise our young visual arts to the level of a Grand Art utilizing painting as an artistic means to express the inner world and life – all in record time [emphasis as in the original].315

Like the MAS, Sang Tao conceived of the ‘new’ as a break with academic styles promoted by the art academies, as well as a desire to connect, in an unprecedented ‘record time’, with international avant-garde modern art movements based on formalism. The tempo of the ‘new’ sought to convey a sense of urgency to catch up with the rest of the world. America was seen as the new hegemonic centre. It fixed the notion of the ‘avant-garde’ in the subjectivism of the artist’s ‘inner world’. This aligned Sang Tao with other internationalist exhibitionary discourses proliferating across Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Philippines, the call of the avant-garde came in a statement in the 1953 First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala (FENOAT): ‘To the avant-garde artists of this country who have endured untold sacrifices and cruel criticisms that Art in Tagala might move forward to greater horizons.’ These words were printed in the exhibition’s booklet, which was published in 1954.316 It included an essay by Aurelio Alvero (he wrote by the pen name Magtanggul Asa) about the idea of the ‘non-objective’. Alvero saw this art as the

313 Boitran Huynh-Beattie, ‘Saigonese Art during the War: Modernity versus Ideology’, in Cultures at War, p. 95. 314 Manifesto of the Society of Young Saigonese Artists, 10 November 1973. 315 Sang Tao, September 1960, p. 21. 316 Magtanggul Asa, First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala (Manila: House of Asa, 1954), p. iii. This exhibition featured 28 paintings by the following artists: Fernando Zobel, Hernando R. Ocampo, Nena Saguil, L. Locsin, Fidel de Castro, Jose Joya, Conrado V. Pedroche, Lee Aguinaldo, Carl Steele, Vic Otzeya, and Manuel Rodriguez.

142 culmination of the leftist trend in Tagalan art, which he connected to the history the European modernist avant-garde:

impressionism painted what existed in the eye. Expressionism, however, painted what was in the mind’s eye. This painting of things that existed in the mind’s eye, irrespective of the actual physical, or visual nature of the objects, was to reach its culmination in non-objectivism.317

Expanding on the notion of non-objective art advanced by this exhibition, Alvero noted that, instead of focusing on the ‘faithfulness of the object being reproduced’, the exhibition dealt with the non-objective or the subjective, ‘more popularly known as modern art’.318 He elaborated: ‘In this new trend, the artist moved away from the external object, and into the direction of the internal, which was considered more valuable. The artist fragmentised his/her subject and finally reassembled the fragments into a composition [that] eliminated recognisable representation.’319 FENOAT became one of the first internationalist exhibitions in the Philippines to propagate ‘the new’. It renounced verisimilitude and mimicry of nature by shifting towards the subjective individualism of the artist, which was to be freed from the chains of realism and to pursue ‘art for art’s sake’. Internationalist exhibitions articulated an exhibitionary discourse that sought to determine the meaning of the ‘new’ by constructing an imagined connection to the international avant-garde movement centred in Euro-America. The Philippine internationalist avant-garde movement remained on the periphery, and it was mostly absent in the discourse on avant-garde movements such as Western abstract expressionism. This imagined avant-garde promoted modern art as a progressive, linear succession of styles culminating in abstraction. In its exhibitionary discourse, the ‘avant-garde’ and the ‘modern’ were delineated by the Western historical experience of avant-gardism as a global, internationalist and universal movement. The Philippine movement, on the other hand, promoted avant-garde styles based on formalism and non-objective, depoliticised art. This exhibitionary discourse of the ‘new’, which deployed the ‘avant-garde’ and the ‘modern’, and placed America at the centre of the international avant-garde, was a ‘weapon of the Cold War’. Eva Cockcroft used this phrase to describe how abstract expressionism was used

317 Ibid., p. 5. 318 Ibid., p. 2. 319 Ibid., p. 5.

143 by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an ideological counterweight to the communist bloc at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s.320 Abstract expressionist artists from America, with Jackson Pollock as the art movement’s hero, were supported by museums like the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York that organised travelling international exhibitions of abstract expressionists overseas, funded by Rockefeller’s millions. They championed the taste-making Cold War cultural warriors such as Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg, who condemned socialist realism as propaganda that exemplified totalitarianism. The CIA employed abstract expressionism as the ‘new’ to create an image of America as an individualistic, depoliticised and ‘free’ society. It was epitomised as ‘art for art’s sake’ in contrast to socialist realism, which was portrayed as regimented, uncreative, ideologically determined, and intended to reduce art to mere propaganda.321 The success of the discourse of the ‘new’ created by the American intervention in the order of discourse enabled abstract expressionist artists in America to break free from the modernist yoke of Paris.322 More importantly, it gained success in influencing intellectuals and artists internationally to articulate the same discourse, thereby fixing the meaning of the new, the avant-garde and the modern on their own terms. Even artists behind the Iron Curtain were absorbed into this discourse. After Stalin’s death in 1953, there was a limited form of cultural liberalism in Poland under Gomulka’s leadership (1956– 1970). Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor and a group of fourteen Polish artists moved away from socialist realism to start a non-objective art movement and were subsequently given a group show at MOMA in 1961. The FENOAT exhibition in the Philippines that promoted non- objective art in its exhibitionary discourse was similarly framed within the international discourse of abstract expressionism as the ‘new’, the ‘avant-garde’ and the ‘modern’. The internationalist exhibition was not alone in articulating an exhibitionary discourse that aimed at determining the meaning of the ‘new’ in the context of the Cold War’s binary framework that opposed East to West. Other competing exhibitionary discourses of the ‘new’ were articulated to contest the exhibitionary discourse of the internationalist exhibitions. Like the internationalist exhibition, critical exhibitions

320 Eva Cockcroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2nd edn, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 147. 321 Ibid., pp. 150–53. 322 Serge Guilbaut, ‘New Adventures of the Avant-garde in America’, in Pollock and After, p. 204.

144 appropriated the art manifesto as a vehicle for propagating their exhibitionary discourse, but they differed in adopting a critical attitude to the ‘new’ as a floating signifier. The critical exhibition attempted to modify the meanings of the modern and the avant-garde by widening the scope of what art could be and by including alternative ways of thinking and making art that departed from the exhibitionary discourse of abstraction. Western abstractionism had created a hegemonic discourse that circumscribed exhibitionary practices seen in the adoption of the ‘white cube’ as a decontextualised space to display art and create a distanced and disinterested aesthetic experience disconnected from social and political realities. This disconnect from the actual conditions of society was also present in the decontextualisation of artistic practices through the privileging of abstraction as being ‘universal’, and seemingly free from all social and historical constraints, while promoting ‘universal’ freedom, individualism, and subjectivity.323 By employing alternative discourses that contested the ‘new’, critical exhibitions decolonised the international discourse of abstraction that had America as its hegemonic centre. Two exhibitions that adopted this critical approach in Southeast Asia come to the fore: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa (TMR) and the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (The New Art Movement, GSRB). Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa’s manifesto published in the TMR exhibition catalogue claimed the status of the modern, in block letters no less; and a similar claim and exhibitionary strategy had been deployed by the MAS exhibition catalogues from 1964 and 1965. For both artist collectives, using capital letters as part of the graphic design of the catalogue was meant to lend weight and importance to their words. In their TMR manifesto, Piyadasa and Esa were critical of the ‘Western-centric influence’ of the avant- garde on modern art and artists in Malaysia and Asia:

It seems necessary from the inset to state that we are MODERN artists and as such, we are not involved in traditional Asian art forms. We are however borrowing from Asian philosophies in order to come up with an attitude which we hope will help enrich the international modern art movement which needs to be considered in global terms… WE ARE HOWEVER ATTEMPTING TO WORK OUTSIDE THE WESTERN-CENTRIC ATTITUDE TOWARDS FORM. WE ARE TRYING TO SOW THE SEEDS FOR A THINKING PROCESS WHICH MIGHT SOMEDAY LIBERATE MALAYSIAN

323 The adoption of the white cube space as a form of discourse will be expanded on in Chapter 6 of this thesis.

145

ARTISTS FROM, THEIR DEPENDENCE OF WESTERN INFLUENCES [emphasis as in the original].324

The two artists attempted to adopt the artistic strategy of multiplying frames of references and including ‘Asian philosophies in order to come up with an attitude which we hope will help enrich the international modern art movement which needs to be considered in global terms’.325 Marking a shift in attitude – a postcolonial attitude – infused by a critical and self- reflexive approach was the primary aim of TMR. It decentred the hegemony of internationalist exhibitionary discourses that had achieved a hegemonic moment of fixing the meaning of the ‘new’ in the 1950s and 1960s. Although TMR proclaimed its distance from ‘traditional Asian art forms’, it drew from Asian philosophies such as Daoism and Zen that formed the philosophical basis of traditional Asian art. However, it did not adapt the traditional techniques that avant-garde Vietnamese artists like Nguen Gia Tri or Malaysian artists such as Chuah Thean Teng used in pioneering lacquer and batik paintings, respectively. The latter two artists combined the traditional techniques of lacquer wares and batik textiles with the conventions of easel painting.326 The inclusion of Seah Kim Joo’s semi-abstract batik painting Twilight in the 1972 MAS exhibition showed an acceptance of traditional art forms and techniques, on condition that they were reconstituted formally into the format of a painting. The difference between the TMR and MAS exhibitions on the issue of ‘tradition’ was what was being adapted from tradition. For internationalist avant-garde exhibitions, techniques, materials and even subject matter from traditional art forms could be adapted if reconceived formally as an easel painting, whereas exhibitions that took a critical approach, as TMR did, emphasised conceptual and philosophical ideas of traditional art forms that could be adapted in the reconstruction of ‘the new’ and ‘the modern’. In a remarkably similar way to the 1963 MAS preface that announced the passing of realism, Fauvism and cubism, the TMR rejected styles considered outdated:

324 Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, ‘Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa’, republished in Reactions: New Critical Strategies, Narratives in Malaysian Art, ed. Nur Hanim Khairudin, Beverly Yong and T.K. Sabapathy (Kuala Lumpur: Rouge Art, 2013), p. 32. 325 Ibid. 326 Ibid., p. 32.

146

THE ANSWER CERTAINLY DOES NOT LIE IN EMULATING OF EXPRESSIONIST INFLUENCES OR EVEN, CONSTRUCTIVISM. THE ARTISTS IN THIS EXHIBITION ARE THEREFORE REJECTING ALL THE DEVELOPMENTS WHICH HAVE TAKEN PLACE IN MALAYSIAN ART SO FAR, ESPECIALLY THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST INVOLVEMENT OF THE 1960S AND THE CONSTRUCTIVIST ‘NEW SCENE’ INVOLVEMENT OF THE 60s AND EARLY 70s… THE COMMITMENT, IN-RETROSPECT, HAD TENDED TO BE MOTIVATED BY STYLISTIC RATHER THAN INTELLECTUAL CONSIDERATIONS AND NO WONDER THEN THAT THE ARTISTS OF THESE TWO MOVEMENTS HAVE EASILY CEASED TO PRODUCE WORKS [emphasis as in the original].327

The TMR rejected the ‘avant-garde’ abstract painters in internationalist exhibitions who were motivated by new styles rather than new ways of thinking about art. TMR thrust forward the idea of conceptual considerations as the basis from which ‘the new’ could be prospected: ‘THAT ART IS BECOMING VERY DIALECTICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ACTIVITY TODAY IS INDICATIVE OF A NEW STATE OF AFFAIRS WHICH SUPPOSEDLY “MODERN” ASIAN ARTISTS ARE YET TO BECOME AWARE OF!’.328 The conceptual rather than form was the wellspring from which ‘the new’ and ‘the modern’ emerged: ‘WHEREAS THE WESTERN ARTIST APPROACHES ART IN TERMS OF “SPATIO-TEMPORAL/SENSORIAL” CONSIDERATIONS, WE ARE APPROACHING ART FROM A “MENTAL/MEDITATIVE/MYSTICAL” STANDPOINT.’329 The exhibitionary discourse of the TMR appropriated discourses from the domains of Asian philosophy to intervene and contest the hegemonic international exhibitionary discourse of the ‘new’. It used the language of Zen Buddhism and Daoism, which was rooted in the ‘mystical’, ‘mental’, and ‘meditative’, rather than a scientific understanding of the world that negated a spiritual and equally legitimate way of accessing reality. TMR effectively rejected this form of scientific perceptualism – based on the human senses and transmuted formally in abstracted forms in the avant-garde MAS, FENOAT, and SSYA exhibitions – as a Western obsession that was antithetical to Asian sensibilities. Instead, TMR called for a new attitude that required a new exhibitionary discourse with exhibitionary and artistic practices that took Asia as its reference. The GSRB in Indonesia came into being as a result of the Black December Incident. On 31 December 1974, a group of art students protested against the Major Indonesian

327 Ibid., p. 35 328 Ibid., p. 39. Emphasis as in the original. 329 Ibid., p. 50. Emphasis as in the original.

147

Painting Exhibition awarding prizes to ‘decorative and consumerist’ paintings and excluding experimental works. The young rebels of the Black December movement included F.X. Harsono, Ris Purnawa Hardi, and B. Munni Ardhi. They delivered floral wreaths to the judges, which included the following statement on a ribbon:

Ikut berduka cita atas kermatian seni lukis kita

(Condolences on the death of Indonesian painting)330

As a result of meetings between artists from Bandung, Yogyakarta and Jakarta to further the ideas of the Black December movement, the GSRB was born in the 1975 GSRB exhibition. In their manifesto, they declared the Lima Jurus Gebrakan Gebrakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia (The Five Lines of Attack): 1. Elimination of sharp distinctions between painting, graphics and sculpture such that artists can develop new forms. 2. Abandoning the concept of ‘fine art’, which limits the definition of art to mean only the art of the elite, and expanding the definition of art based on diverse aesthetic values such as traditional and ethnic art forms. 3. Liberating art from elitist attitudes. Art as an expression of an individual’s feelings is rejected and regarded as a manifestation of elitist attitudes. The problems of society are more important than individual feelings. Concepts and ideas are also privileged over technique. 4. Art students should not be restricted by the limits imposed by their teachers. 5. Research into Indonesian art history should be carried out by Indonesian art historians and critics. Universality of art was rejected, implying that Indonesian art cannot be studied from imported foreign books.331

The GSRB’s attack on ‘elitist attitudes’ targeted the prevailing narrow conception of art as ‘fine art’, which excluded other definitions of art and aesthetic values and philosophies embedded in traditional art forms. Like TMR with its use of sources located in Daoist and Zen philosophies, the GSRB turned towards alternative contexts to expand the scope of art

330 Brita L. Miklouho-Mikai, Exposing the Society’s Wounds: Some Aspects of Indonesian Contemporary Art Since 1966 (Adelaide: Discipline of Asian Studies, 1991), p. 23. 331 Ibid., pp. 25–26.

148 beyond the narrow confines of art academies, such as Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia in Yogyakarta, which were based on Western modernist categories of painting and sculpture.332 GSRB also rejected the decontextualisation and depoliticisation of art under Suharto’s New Order regime. Both TMR and GSRB privileged concept over technique by elevating and closing the gap between intellectual engagement and social action, as well as by privileging critical attitudes and approaches to art-making and art exhibitions. It was not coincidental that the terms ‘new’ and ‘reality’ were included in collectives with the names ‘New Art Movement’ and ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’ respectively. Contesting the ‘new’ in the cultural discourse countered the dominant state discourse of the ‘New Order’. While the GSRB claimed the new for the experimental, including the political, the New Order’s cultural policies depoliticised art and fixed its meaning along formalist lines.333 The internationalist exhibitions’ fixing of the meaning of the ‘avant-garde’ and the ‘modern’, and their framing of them by formalism, faced challenges from the articulation of the conceptual as the ‘new modern’ and the ‘new avant-garde’, which expanded the scope of art beyond a linear progression of styles originating from the avant-garde movement in the West. The critical exhibitions advanced an exhibitionary discourse of the new that ‘provincialised the West’ by multiplying its frames of references from other discourses.334 For the foreword to the 1974 MAS exhibition catalogue, an essay by Cheo Chai-Hiang was extracted from a Chinese newspaper.335 According to Cheo:

The expansion of art into the field of art concepts rather than technique proposed by Cheo marked an openness of the MAS as an internationalist art society to a discourse – the

332 Edwin Jurriens, ‘Social Participation in Indonesian Media and Art: Echoes from the Past, Visions for the Future’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 169 (2013), p. 15. 333 Patrick Flores, ‘Communicating the Concrete: The Criticism of Art in the Contemporary’, forthcoming essay in an anthology of writings on the GSRB. 334 Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 335 Cheo Chai Hiang, ‘Foreword’ to Modern Art Society 1974 exhibition catalogue, unpaginated. 336 Ibid.

149 conceptual – that momentarily threatened MAS’s own discursive hegemony. Ho Ho Ying, then president of and intellectual force behind the MAS, wrote a letter to Cheo stating the reasons why he considered Cheo’s 5’ x 5’ (Singapore River) as ‘empty’, ‘hollow’ and ‘monotonous’. These reasons were based on formalist aesthetic criteria that made visible the hegemonic discourse of formalism. In 1972, Cheo issued an art manifesto underlining his own artistic practices, which was published in the Singapore Monthly Magazine:337 1. Total rejection of formalism. 2. Strong emphasis on the personal and emotive. 3. Incorporation of objects not previously considered as art in the process of making. 4. Precedence of artistic process over finished work. 5. Use of simple materials and ordinary objects. 6. Emphasis on mutual interaction between materials and process. 7. Avoidance of reliance on visual experience as point of departure. 8. Audience participation in the process of artistic activities (besides artists).338

Cheo’s ‘total rejection of formalism’, his turn towards the ‘emotive and personal’ rather than the objective, his use of ‘non-art’ objects with an emphasis on artistic processes as opposed to the finished work, his emphasis on the experiential and the conceptual rather than the perceptual, and his interest in involving the spectator in the process of meaning- making – all of these contested the hegemonic discourse of abstraction and painting. Cheo made these discursive interventions in the hegemonic exhibitionary discourse from a literally distanced position, as he was in England at the time. This space afforded him the distance to take radical positions on art in a guerrilla-like yet witty fashion. By destabilising the meaning of the ‘new’ as a floating signifier, his interventions simultaneously destabilised the meaning of the ‘modern’. The conceptual became a new way of making and thinking about art within the MAS between 1972 and 1974. This was a brief and temporary intervention, largely sustained by the critical engagement of Cheo and Ho, which ended

337 During the Iconoclast Symposium held on 31 August 2013 at the Sculpture Square, Cheo objected to the casting of his statements as an art manifesto. He perceived them instead as a way of sharing his ideas on art. The symposium was moderated by T.K. Sabapathy with panellists Susie Lingham, Adele Tan and Seng Yu Jin. 338 Cheo, ‘New Art, New Concepts’, in Cheo Chai-Hiang Thoughts and Processes, Rethinking the Singapore River (Singapore: Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and the Singapore Art Museum, 2000), p. 115.

150 when Cheo ceased his exhibitions and other activities with the MAS after 1974. MAS’s engagement with the conceptual as the new momentarily offered the possibilities of freeing the new from its ideological yoke to formalism and of opening and widening the scope and practice of art. This was a short-lived conceptual moment, as 5’ x 5’ (Singapore River) was ultimately not shown in the 1972 MAS Annual Exhibition, and the conceptual only re- emerged in the late 1980s. One such proponent was The Artists Village, a loose artist collective established in 1988 that propagated performative, conceptual and installative practices in Singapore.339 Cheo’s intervention in the hegemonic discourse of the MAS’s annual internationalist exhibitions marked an art historically significant critical moment of a discursive struggle, which ended with the re-fixing of the ‘new’ in terms of abstraction, painting, and formalism. However, critical exhibitions advancing the conceptual as ‘the new’ did not start or end in Singapore, as flares of the conceptual occurred throughout Southeast Asia in the 1970s. The notion of the ‘new’ was contested in exhibitionary discourses in Southeast Asia. Rather than adhering to a unified notion of the ‘new’ based on the Western avant-garde movement, artists developed alternative ideas of the ‘avant-garde’ and the ‘modern’ that contested the new. They expanded how to think about and make art that went beyond formalism and into the direction of the conceptual. The challenge spearheaded by art collectives like TMR and GSRB, as well as individual artists like Cheo, widened the scope of art by offering exhibitionary sites of resistance to the Western-centric internationalist exhibitions that propagated a shared global and universal avant-garde. Alternative ideas based on Asian philosophies, aesthetic values and traditional art forms multiplied frames of reference through which the ‘new’ in Southeast Asia could emerge. Patrick Flores credits the ‘new’ for breaking the dichotomy between the structures of modernity and tradition.340 I argue that the ‘new’ offered an alternative passage by opening up the discursive space for experimental artistic practices freed from the yoke of binary structures. But assertions of the ‘new’ were not sufficient. The new had to draw from realities anchored in the notion of

339 It is worth noting that The Artists Village was not alone in the propagation of conceptual practices in the late 1980s. In 1988 alone, the Trimuthi exhibition by S. Chandrasekaran, Salleh Japar and Goh Ee Choo, the Yin Yang Festival organised by the Art Commandoes led by Vincent Leow and Gilles Massot, and the More than Four exhibition comprising of Lim Poh Teck, Tang Mun Kit, Chng Ching Kang, and Baet Yoke Kuan showed ‘readymades’ and performances associated with the conceptual. See Yvonne Low, ‘Positioning Singapore’s Contemporary Art’ in the Journal of Maritime Geopolitics and Culture, 2 (1&2), 2011, pp. 115–37. 340 On how the ‘new’ modified the procedures of ‘fine art’, see Flores, ‘Communicating the Concrete’.

151 the concrete, as advanced by the critical exhibition. Hence, it is the ‘real’ that offered an even more compelling challenge to the internationalist exhibitions inspired by the Western avant-garde.

The Real Challenge: The National, the Social and the Political

Living in this politically, economically and socially repressive and heavily regimented space and time, one often is stagnant. Splashing colours and creating free flowing, spontaneous and unrestrained lines releases me from feelings of oppression. I hope that the viewer is able to enjoy the free, spirited feeling in my painting.341

In the same letter that he wrote to Cheo explaining his criticism of 5’ x 5’ (Singapore River), Ho revealed his anxiety about his practice as an artist under repressive and regimented social, political and economic conditions. For Ho, art was a way of freeing himself from such ‘feelings of oppression’.342 Even an avant-garde artist like Ho, the exemplary abstract expressionist and the intellectual force behind the internationalist MAS, struggled with his artistic practice under the real social, political and economic conditions of everyday life, complicating the narrative of abstract art as being absolutely depoliticised. While avant-garde artists like Ho, whose artistic practices were circumscribed by Western discourses of the new, the avant-garde and the modern, tried to free themselves from the oppressive realities of the world, ‘the real’ quickly became the battle cry of another group of artists who organised a different mode of exhibition: the critical exhibition. The exhibitionary discourses produced by the critical exhibition deployed ‘the real’ as a conceptual weapon to engage in social, institutional and political critiques. They sought to realise art’s capacity to transform the appearance of things and reposition the participant’s perspectives. It was from the feelings of discontent about the social, political and economic injustices suffered by the common people, the working class and the disenfranchised that critical exhibitions by TUAFT, Kaisahan, and GSRB emerged. These artist collectives adopted

341 Ho Ho Ying, ‘Besides Being New, Art Should Possess Intrinsic Qualities in Order to Strike a Sympathetic Chord in the Viewers’ Hearts’, in Ho Ho Ying, Collection of Writings on Art (Singapore: the Singapore Art Museum, 1999), p. 83. 342 Ibid.

152 a critical approach to expose ‘the real’ conditions in their countries and effect social and political change. TUAFT was formed in 1974 and published an art manifesto in 1975 outlining their opposition to art produced for capitalist and imperialist consumption. They adopted a critical discourse against the institutional structures of the state:

As long as all the misleading structures of the government in politics, economics, education, and culture art continue taking great part in Thailand and/or Thai society, the real democracy of the Nation and its assets, i.e., independence, freedom, equality, and justice in society would be impossible to establish. The so-called democracy used in the country these days is what we may call ‘a democracy of the “big people”’

We, who are not satisfied with what the ‘big people’ have done and we, who are conscious of the priceless Thai culture art’s conservation, innovation, and development for the ‘little people’, then organize ourselves into The United Artist Front of Thailand. Our mission is to conserve, innovate, and develop Thai culture art and make it serve all Thai people in the correct ways it should.343

TUAFT’s first critical exhibition took place in October 1974. It adopted the new exhibitionary practice of breaking out of the white cube gallery spaces usually inhabited by internationalist exhibitions. Instead, TUAFT’s exhibitions were organised in public spaces on the Rajadamnern Avenue to commemorate the anniversary of the Thai military’s fall from government in October 1973.344 In 1976, TUAFT organised an exhibition of over a thousand paintings to protest against the American military bases in Thailand during the Vietnam War. This eventually resulted in a military crackdown and the arrest and killing of protesters.345 The anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist aims of TUAFT, which engaged directly with the public through internationalist exhibitions in public spaces, redefined the role of the artist as an activist who had to produce art for the people and to incite social change. TUAFT’s reclaiming of public spaces created a dialogue that cohered with its interdiscursive

343 Manifesto of The Artists’ Front of Thailand (Bangkok, 1975), unpaginated. 344 Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand, p. 164. 345 Ibid., p. 165. Caravan played the song, ‘America Antarai’ (Dangerous America) around the soldier’s monument, helping to gather protestors to march onwards with small Thai flags towards the American embassy in Bangkok. The close collaboration between Caravan and the TUAFT was an example of how different cultural groups were working together to resist American neo-imperialism in Thailand.

153 appropriation of other orders of discourse in the public domain, such as literature, poetry, and popular culture. TUAFT’s interdiscursive 1975 art manifesto drew on metaphors from popular culture for its exhibitionary discourse, thereby destabilising seemingly fixed meanings of the ‘national’, ‘social’ and ‘political’:

At the same time, policies of education and culture are given by the government, have failed in developing ‘little people’s’ ethnicity (value of living including social, intellectual, and moral thoughts) as they should primarily do. In fact, the policies were promoted for the ‘rich’ individuals’ sake, not for the priceless value of education and culture for the public. These kinds of empowering policies have been used as a tool to mislead the ‘big groups of little people’, to give up on their own beliefs and stop developing/fighting for their own right and society. The misleading policies have led the ‘little people’ to believe and follow the western imperialism as the ‘big people’ do.346

The linguistic aspects of the manifesto, including its metaphors, imageries, grammatical structure, vocabulary, and use of pronouns, as well as the graphic design of the text and its accompanying images prompt interdiscursive analysis. Imageries of ‘big people’ and ‘little people’ denoted class inequalities and were articulated together with a different order of discourse from a Marxist literary document by Anud Aaphaaphirom. His book, The Big Shot as Toad (1970), used the phuujaj-phuunauauj (literally ‘big man–little man’) as a metaphor to denote unequal social relationships.347 Anud’s deployment of the toad (phuujaj) and the ‘big man’ to denote the powerful Thai officials and capitalists was meant to stimulate the imagination of Thais. In Thai culture, the toad is normally seen as noxious (contact with a toad’s skin can cause skin infection), ugly (toads inflate their heads as ‘big people’ do), and useless (toads, unlike frogs, cannot be eaten). The ‘big people’ as an imaginary was articulated by both the exhibitionary discourse of TUAFT and the different-order discourse of Marxist literature. Bringing imaginaries together from different orders of discourse creatively challenged the hegemonic boundaries of superordination and subordination in Thai social life. The exhibitionary discourse of TUAFT was further politicised by the cultural

346 Manifesto of The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, unpaginated. 347 Anud Aaphaaphirom, ‘The Big Shot as Toad’, Chaturat, 1.1 (August 1970), translated in Modern Thai Literature: With an Ethnographic Interpretation, ed. Herbert P. Philips (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp. 310–11.

154 symbolic power of the toad, which challenged the ‘big people’ in power. It extended TUAFT’s idea that art had the potential to incite social and political change and to serve the ‘little people’. Discourse from popular culture provided another site for interdiscursivity. ‘Man and Buffalo’ was a popular Thai song based on a poem by Chitr Phoumisak and musically arranged by Suratchai Chanthimat. It was sung by the Caravan, one of the most popular groups who were part of the phleeng phyra chiiwid (songs for life) movement that emerged in the 1970s in Thailand.348 The lyrics of this popular song appropriated discourse from Marxist philosophy by identifying the bourgeois class as oppressors:

These are the lyrics and music of death For having had our manhood broken By the bourgeois who, elevating themselves into a superior class, Devoured the excess value of our labour Contemptuous of the peasant class Reviling us as savages. Truly and surely the oppressors will die.349

The interdiscursivity derived from appropriating the Marxist discourse of class struggle, anchored in the use of the concept of the bourgeoisie as an exploitative class and an enemy of the working class (the peasant class), tied in with the concept of the ‘big man–little man’ in its accentuation of a class struggle between the haves and the have-nots that called for social action, and even for revolution. The appropriation of Marxist discourse in the exhibitionary discourse of TUAFT, and its intersection with the discourse of the popular ‘songs for life’, challenged the hegemonic discourse of formalism that depoliticised artistic and exhibitionary practices. The ethical and political dimensions of exhibitionary discourses and exhibitions as discursive sites that evoked a will to social action will be addressed in the remaining chapters of this thesis. Like TUAFT, the Kaisahan sought to manifest the realities of the Philippine condition as a statement against the capitalist and colonial West. For the Kaisahan, ‘This means, first of all, that we must break away from the Western-oriented culture that tends to maintain

348 See Herbert Philips, ‘Scum of the Earth’ and ‘Man and Buffalo’ in Modern Thai Literature, p. 329. 349 Ibid., p. 333.

155 the Filipino people’s dependence on foreign goods, foreign tastes and foreign ways that are incompatible with their genuine national interests’. The insistence on departing from a Western orientation and a slavish imitation of the West was similar to TUAFT’s aims to preserve Thai culture and TMR’s rejection of Western perceptualism. TMR clearly insisted that ‘WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO SUGGEST QUITE SIMPLY IS THAT THE SCIENTIFIC AND EMPIRICAL VIEWPOINT OF REALITY IS NOT THE ONLY VALID ONE THERE IS. THE MYSTIC’S VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE IS ALSO VALID FOR THE MANY PARALLELISMS THAT ARE BECOMING APPARENT TODAY’.350 The real for the TMR was one of multiple mental realities departing from the hegemonic rational and empirical view that prioritised the human senses and intellect and served as the basis of perceptualism. The GSRB’s manifesto, in which ‘Universality of art was rejected, implying that Indonesian art cannot be studied from imported foreign books’, effectively undermined knowledge dominated by the West and encouraged local understanding and interpretations to emerge as the dominant form of knowledge. Intersections between the exhibitionary discourse of the GSRB and literary discourse occurred with the adoption of the term Kontekstual (Contextual) in Bahasa Indonesia in the early 1980s. The pre-1965 Sukarno era literary discourse, which was dominated by the hegemony of social realism through left-wing cultural organisations like Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (Institute for the People’s Culture, LEKRA), was abruptly and violently replaced by a new hegemonic literary discourse under Suharto’s New Order.351 Under Suharto, the new anti-realist writers ‘dominated government-sponsored arts bodies, publishing media, literary competitions and international representation in Indonesian arts’.352 Traces of social engagement in literary works were expunged and replaced by formal experimentation with language. Literary production in Indonesia was effectively depoliticised in the 1970s and 1980s. Those writers, such as Mochtar Lubis and Yudhistira Massardi, who persevered in contesting the hegemonic discourse of literary formalism were

350 Piyadasa and Esa, ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’, p. 46. Emphasis in capitals is as it is in the original. 351 Established in 1950, LEKRA was the cultural arm of the Indonesian Communist party that advocated for socialist realism to be adopted in all forms of cultural production. LEKRA called for art to serve the people. 352 Keith Fouchler, ‘Sastra Kontekstual: Recent Developments in Indonesian Literary Politics’, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 2 (1986), p. 7.

156 marginalised as ‘entertainment’ literature, as opposed to those who created ‘serious’ literature that engaged in formalist experimentations.353 A group of anti-establishment intellectuals, writers and cultural activists who styled themselves as ‘contextualists’ engaged in a discursive struggle with the hegemonic formalistic literary discourse based on the premise of universal values and worldviews. Contextual literature (Sastra Kontekstual) sought to foster a socially engaged literary discourse in order to challenge the formal structuralist and universal-humanist literary discourses that were regarded as manifestations of depoliticised literary production in Indonesia. The literary contextualists aimed to question the institutional structures that perpetuated social injustices by actively deploying literature as a tool to address these injustices and to effect social change. Contextual literature was distinct from the earlier leftist literature because of the contextualists’ critical approach to all forms of political structure and ideology. Leading proponents of the GSRB, such as F.X. Harsono, were producing new artistic practices that had interdiscursive links with the literary contextualists in the 1980s. Contextual art, on the other hand, embodied criticality in its efforts to create social awareness:

[Contextual art] should be able to bring awareness about the plight of society and their suffering through aesthetic means. As such, artistic production is a sociological process, and demands the artist possessing knowledge of both the local social and political problems, and the visual symbols and materials of that area as well.354

The interdiscursivity between contextual literature and contextual art brought to the fore similar concepts of producing socially engaged practices critical of hegemonic discourses. The ‘contextual’ became a new floating signifier from the domain of literary discourse, and one that was meant to destabilise the hegemonic exhibitionary discourse of formalism and the depoliticisation of art by art academies like the Bandung Institute of Technology (Institut Teknologi Bandung), which were bounded by Western categories and knowledge of art. The creation of a ‘national’ art form was a burden shared by many artists in Southeast Asia. Even the avant-garde artists were anxious to create a national identity

353 Ibid., p. 8. 354 Ibid.

157 through art for the newly independent nations. The internationalist exhibitions were instrumental in forging the ideas for a national art form. The MAS abandoned its usual focus on expounding universal formalist aesthetics in its 1970 exhibition catalogue, which called for a rejection of all existing traditions, including Western modernist styles. It tried to create a tabula rasa from which an entirely new Singaporean art could emerge:

WE CANNOT AFFORD THE FAILURES OF OUR FOREGOERS. THE TRADITION OF CHINESE ART IS NOT OURS. NEITHER THAT OF INDIAN NOR OF THE WESTERN. WE CANNOT COMPEL OTHERS TO RECOGNISE IT AS SINGAPORE ART BY PAINTING SINGAPORE SCENERIES WITH CHINESE INK AND BRUSH OR BY PAINTING SINGAPORE PEOPLE WITH WESTERN REALIST TECHNIQUE; AND WE MUST BE ASHAMED OF BEING A COPYCAT OF WESTERN MODERNIST STYLES. WE HAVE NOTHING. OURS IS A NEWLY INDEPENDENT IN WHICH MUCH HAS TO BE DONE. WE ARE HERE ON THE VIRGIN EARTH TO EXPLORE, TO EXPERIMENT, TO CREATE SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT IS EXISITNG IN THE WORLD [emphasis as in the original].355

The inability of the MAS to concretely articulate what this new Singapore art might be, other than to reject copying ‘Western modernist styles’, revealed the same underlying uncertainty that beset previous internationalist exhibitions that had veered towards Western avant- garde movements. Critical exhibitions that adopted social and political engagements with ‘the real’ were on firmer ground in articulating their vision of the ‘national’. They expanded their frames of reference to the marginalised working classes and the traditional cultural forms rooted in the actual social and cultural experiences of the peoples who lived in the region. The Kaisahan firmly entrenched their aims to commit themselves to ‘the search for a national identity in Philippine Art’.356 Like the Kaisahan, TUAFT clearly stated that art was to serve the common people and that any national art form had to emerge from traditional Thai cultural forms. Both the Kaisahan and TUAFT shared a common ideological connection with Mao Tse-tung’s 1942 Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, which had stated that art had to serve the people and the revolutionary cause and would thereby lead towards a ‘national’ identity. Both groups required art to incite social and political revolutionary

355 ‘Foreword’ to the 1970 Modern Art Society exhibition catalogue, unpaginated. 356 Flores, ‘Social Realism’, p. 65.

158 change. The desire to politicise these internationalist exhibitions as an act of resistance and engagement differed from the aims of avant-garde exhibitions that propagated formalism. The GSRB rebelled against the idea that art had to serve one ideology and contribute to the search for a national identity.357 The GSRB artists were seeking to expand the field and scope of art, and they wanted to free artistic practices from the conservertive national fine art institutions. This set GSRB artists apart from earlier nationalistic artists and institutions like S. Sudjojono and LEKRA, a left-wing cultural organisation circumscribed by communist ideologies in the 1950s. Under the spectre of the New Order’s suppression of communism in Indonesia, the GSRB desired art as a form of communication not only to the elite but to the common person through their artistic strategy of making ‘art for the people’. These nuanced and complex differences in how experimental artistic practices and exhibition-making emerged in the 1970s across the region reveal a pressing need to understand specific local contexts to build global art histories, that is as art historian Reiko Tomii describes, from ‘bottom up’.358

The Concrete: Where the New Meets the Real

The observer forgets his concrete [emphasis added] environment, focuses his attention to the imaginary world offered by the square area that hangs a few steps in front of him or a sculpture in a corner: keenly contemplating each line, each mark, every inch of the painting or surface of the sculpture, following its movements, its rhythms, their relations to one another, how these elements are bound by a main element and come to be unified as a whole. An adventure in a rich experiencing of forms, exciting and sublime. As if to emphasize the imaginary presence that is different to the real world that surrounds, a painting is limited by a frame. A sculpture isolates itself not only with its solid and closed form, but also with its rules and regulations, with its base, in order to underline the ‘unreal space’ in which it lives.359

357 Jim Supangkat, Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond (Jakarta: Indonesia Fine Arts Foundation, 1997), p. 69. 358 Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness, pp. 11-44. 359 Sanento Yuliman, ‘Perspektif Baru’, in Pengantar dalam Katalog Pameran Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia 1975 (Taman Ismail Marzuki: Jakarta, 1975), reprinted in Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia, ed. Jim Supangkat (Gramedia: Jakarta, 1979), pp. 96–98.

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Art critic Sanento Yuliman’s essay for the 1975 GSRB critical exhibition held the concrete environment in tension with the imaginary world, or, in Marxist terms, with a false consciousness. The imaginary was manifest in what S. Sudjojono derogatorily termed as the Mooi Indië (Beautiful Indies), a romantic orientalising representation of Indonesia in which ‘Mountains, coconut trees and rice fields becomes a Scared Trinity for the painters. Mountains, coconut trees and rice fields become the centre of attraction, as if they are unable to free themselves from this dogma and are always drawn towards those subjects’.360 For Sudjojono, the jiwa ketok, or visible soul, was absent in Mooi Indië paintings destined not for Indonesians but for tourists and the Dutch colonialists. But did the visible soul expressed in paintings that depicted the realities of Indonesian social and political life meet the new criteria of Yuliman’s notion of the concrete environment? The answer is clearly no. Social-realist paintings continued to be trapped by a verisimilitude that formed an unbridgeable aestheticised gap between the illusory and the concrete environment.361 The hegemony and limitations of painting in representing reality through the two- dimensional flat canvas were made visible by the floating signifier of the concrete, which claimed a new perspective on the real. The concrete showed that paintings were limited by the picture frame, just as sculptures were differentiated from the real world by their bases. Jim Supangkat, artist, provocateur and ideologist of the GSRB, claimed the 1975 GSRB critical exhibition as a break with previous forms of representation in art. Supangkat observed:

Most of the works displayed are not in the form of sculptures, paintings or others, they are more suitable to be called as works, expressions. Even if you want to stretch it, this ‘new’ can only mean something new, such as moving from an old, crowded house to another house which gives the feeling of ‘new’.362

The ‘new’ as a sensibility and attitude offered a way out of the entrenched structures of modernity and tradition beholden to the West. Deploying the ‘new’ was a strategy to engender an epistemological shift, to break out of the trap of binary frameworks between the modern and tradition, and to short-circuit the tyranny of teleology with the West as its

360 S. Sudjojono, ‘Kesenian Meloekis di Indonesia, Sekarang dan jang Akan Datang’, Keboedajaan dan Masjarakat, 1/6 (October 1939), p. 145. 361 Flores, ‘Communicating the Concrete’, unpaginated. 362 Jim Supangkat, ‘Keinginan Berkomunikasi’, Kompas Daily, 9 September 1975.

160 origins. Intersections between the new, which expanded art as an open discourse, and the real produced the ‘concrete’. The concrete was a concretisation of both the real and the new, unbounded by illusions of reality, and grounded in actual social and political contexts. The concrete as a calibrated terminology was transformed into a floating signifier that embodied both the new and the real. By freeing itself from illusion, the concrete was the new. It was driven by a desire to communicate actively rather than passively with viewers; the latter were meant to become participants in the artworks. Reality was no longer mediated by the artist’s hand using a medium like oil paints or plaster, or a frame or pedestal. It also no longer needed rarefied ideas of aesthetics, since art was meant to descend to the everyday and make direct experiential and contextual resonances with the public. Reality was manifested in the concrete through the direct use of ordinary objects, quotidian detritus of everyday materials, popular graphics, and the participation of the viewer. The concrete collapsed representation in art as verisimilitude and illusion, circumscribed by the picture frame. It exploded these strictures by giving reality form, not only aesthetically but also in its materiality. Bonyong Munni Ardhi’s Pintu dalam dimensi ruang ’75 (Door in Spatial Dimension ’75), shown at the 1975 GSRB critical exhibition, was an artwork that revealed how the ‘real’ and the ‘new’ coalesced into points of criticality that exposed the limitations of painting, locked in the aesthetic convention of a flat canvas surface, in representing reality. Although documentation images of the work itself are lost, there is a useful interview between Bambang Bujono and Bonyong describing this work and its concept: Bonyong: There was two... There is a door. I had a door. I wanted to use it as my studio door. It was still in a good condition. I thought I would use it as my art first. I made the door stand with two iron stakes and used two doormats in both sides. So when the door opens like this, I feel like I am in a two different space/dimension. I wanted to talk about space. Space before the door and after the door. Yeah, it was about space (and dimension). It was three dimensional (by form). No canvas, no nothing. It was a real door and some windows that I stuck into a canvas surrounding it. Yeah, I was playing with the idea of (two or three) dimensional and its existing spaces... Bambang Bujono: But if it’s a door, it means that people can really go around it? Bonyong: Yeah, not just around it, people can also enter/walk through the door

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Bambang Bujono: Hm... What were your thoughts on the two spaces? The inside and the outside? Bonyong: Back then, we thought that the canvas is the space. The space (for us to work on) is limited within that canvas. What are we are supposed to be working in is something that will be inside. There, that is the space. But now I am making a real space [emphasis added], not just three dimensional, but real...363

Bonyong’s idea of an artwork creating its own space shared affinities with art historian Keith Moxey’s notion of ‘visual time’, which refers to artworks producing their own concept of time.364 The artist’s imagination of differences between two-dimensional and three- dimensional experiences of space by using a real door extended beyond the notion of a ‘found object’. The door itself was augmented by windows and canvases secured onto the door. Bonyong challenged the efficacy of painting to represent reality, since painting was limited by its two-dimensionality and could only represent an illusion of three-dimensional space. His critique of the flat painting did not end there, as he also questioned the constraints of three-dimensional representations of reality, including sculpture. He claimed that his own, different work was making ‘real space’. His concept of the door as a portal between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ spaces embodied the concrete. It proposed new ways of thinking about art by investing agency in the artist to go beyond representing reality through verisimilitude. Instead, it concretised reality by making the experience of different spaces ‘real’ to participants. The ‘real space’ made by Bonyong was meant to transform the passive spectator or viewer into a participant whose meaning-making was unbounded by two- dimensional forms of representing reality. Bonyong was able to make visible art’s capacity to transform the appearance and experience of space itself. It politicised the aesthetics of his work by reframing the participants’ perspective of space and how it was represented. Structural affinities resonate between, on the one hand, critical exhibitions seeking to redefine reality in experiential and cognitive terms by departing from painting, and, on the other, forms of representational art that depended on the illusory. Critical exhibitions, such as GSRB’s 1975 exhibition and TMR, produced exhibitionary discourses that subverted Western orders of representing reality in terms of verisimilitude or rational, scientific

363 Interview between Bonyong Munni Ardhi and Bambang Bujono in ‘Pameran Senirupa Baru Indonesia 1975’, Kompas Daily, 16 August 1975. 364 See Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in Art History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 3. See also Chapter 6 below.

162 observations. Other forms of structural affinity were seen in efforts to transform the passive act of viewing an artwork into a process that involved viewers as active participants in both meaning-making and the physical reclamation of spaces. TUAFT’s exhibitionary discourse, which reclaimed the Rajadamnern Avenue as a symbol of democracy, nationalism and freedom for the Thai people, resonated with the Kaisahan art manifesto’s message that art should reflect the true conditions of society. The ‘real’ was concretised in the exhibitionary discourse of critical exhibitions as a new way of conceptualising and making art, which included the active participation of both artists and the public.

Conclusion

This chapter has unravelled the discursive struggles that centred on the ‘new’ and the ‘real’ in exhibitionary discourses. Whereas the internationalist exhibitions imagined themselves as part of the avant-garde movement in the West, the critical exhibition forged a new path by multiplying frames of reference. The concrete acted as a floating signifier to destabilise the hegemonic discourse of representation in art dominated by painting and sculpture, which limited the real to the flat canvas, sculpture base and the illusory. The critical exhibition drew on Asian philosophies, including Daoism and Zen Buddhism, and encouraged social engagement and self-reflexivity as part of a creative and political struggle towards decolonisation in the region. Collectively, this new exhibitionary mode achieved what political theorist Chantal Mouffe describes as a ‘critical dimension’. This critical dimension played a role ‘in making visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate, in giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of existing hegemony’.365 Critical exhibitions organised by TUAFT, GSRB, the Kaisahan, and TMR expanded the scope of what art could be. The Euro-American notion became just one of the multiple frames of reference that artists in Southeast Asia could draw on. The interdiscursivity of critical exhibitions made visible the significance of local contexts and cultures in determining the role of art and artists as critical agents for dissent. Critical exhibitions were socially oriented and produced exhibitionary discourses of the ‘new’, ‘real’, and ‘concrete’. They

365 Chantal Mouffe, Agnostics: Thinking the World Politically (New York: Verso, 2013), p. 91.

163 were symptomatic of a process of decolonisation, not only from the West but also internally, from within nation states in the region. The exhibitionary discourse aimed at rediscovering diverse forms of modernity by including alternative forms of knowledge- production located in real and concrete local practices and experiences. As demonstrated by Bonyong’s exhibitionary discourse of making ‘real space’ unbounded by existing aesthetic conventions, space and the experience of space became the battlegrounds for debating the question of reality.

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Chapter 5 Disrupting the White Cube Gallery Space: The Outside World Must Come In

A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take on its own life.’ The discreet desk may be the only piece of furniture. In this context a standing ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, just as the firehouse in a modern museum looks not like a firehouse but an aesthetic conundrum. Modernism’s transposition of perception from life to formal values is complete. This, of course, is one of modernism’s fatal diseases.366

The white cube gallery space is the dominant exhibitionary mode for the presentation of modern art. According to Brian O’Doherty, it embodies the ideology of universalism through hermetically sealed gallery spaces of white walls, flushed with fluorescent lighting. The false consciousness of neutrality and transcendence is constructed by the white cube, which transforms art into a sacred object for view from a distance by disinterested participants. Exhibitions that make visible the otherwise invisible power of the white cube gallery as a form of Euro-American modern spatial ideology are the focus of this chapter. This chapter reveals how critical exhibitions across Southeast Asia breached the frame of the white cube space by spilling out into symbolically charged public and mental spaces. By encouraging audience participation, critical exhibitions challenged conventional ways of comprehending art and presenting it to the public. Critical exhibitions reimagined the exhibition space as a mental and symbolically charged space beyond the confines of white gallery walls. The critical exhibitions examined in this chapter include Towards a Mystical Reality (TMR, 1974), the Billboard Cut-Out exhibition by The Artists’ Front of Thailand (TUAFT, 1975), Po Po’s Untitled solo exhibition (1987), and the Chiang Mai Social Installation Festival (CMSI, 1992–

366 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 15.

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3). Two critical exhibitions, the TMR and the Billboard Cut-Out anchor this chapter, as they manifest and exemplify most clearly the two main trajectories of critical exhibitions. TMR was at the forefront of expanding into mental spaces and making audiences aware of the ideology of the white cube space, while TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-Out exhibition was most successful in breaking the walls between the gallery and public space, and thus creating space for social and political change. A symposium entitled Sites of Construction: Exhibitions and the Making of Recent Art History in Asia, convened by the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, marked an important focus on how ‘Exhibitions – and by extension the curatorial strategies shaping them, institutional demands driving them, and art writing accompanying them – have become the primary sites of art historical construction’.367 The histories of exhibition were significant, in light of the relative absence of research and teaching on modern and contemporary histories of art in universities in Southeast Asia. This absence has resulted in an increased burden on exhibitions to construct art history in terms of both display and discourse. This is markedly different from Euro-America where art histories are constructed by the university and the museum, albeit with significant divergences between the two institutions. The conference and subsequent publication, The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, teased out the tensions between professionals from the worlds of the museum and academia, with the former focusing more on objects and the aesthetics of artefacts, and the latter having a stronger interest in theory and art’s role in society.368 In the context of Southeast Asia, exhibitions are made to bear the contradictory burden of constructing the ‘grand narrative’ of national and regional art histories, while simultaneously critiquing this ‘grand narrative’ via curatorial intention. This brings us to the pressing issue of developing a methodology for the study of exhibitions, which can also be extended to exhibition histories in Southeast Asia. Flores underlined the need for methodology in ‘The Exhibition as Historical Proposition’ panel of the Sites of Construction symposium:

When we study exhibitions, what exactly do we analyse, and how do we do it? I posed this question to the panel and elicited tentative remarks,

367 Hammad Nasar, ‘Introduction’, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 13.2 (March/April 2014), p. 8. 368 See Charles W. Haxthausen (ed.), The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in association with Yale University Press, 2002).

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which was interesting to me because two of the members were trained historians of art and the other a practising historian of exhibitions. It seems that there is not been a thorough reflection on methodology. I asked this because I wondered if there is a difference between art history and exhibition history or if there is a shift from one to the other in light of the contemporary and the curatorial. Cannot exhibitions and their histories be studies within art history? And can art historians enlist the methods of art history in studying exhibitions as material that contains material? Or does exhibition history posit a distinct way of investigating its material altogether? [emphasis added] And if so, from which episteme will it read the exhibition? From visual culture, aesthetic anthropology, phenomenology? I am interested in the responses because it may well be that the “curatorial” offers a critical speculation and a procedure, that it ex-cites and infuses frisson. I suspect that it is the curatorial that will break the impasse between the art historical and the exhibitionary [emphasis added] and hold out a third moment that may finally elaborate on the contemporary.369

In his call for a methodology to study exhibitions, Flores proposed the exhibition itself as a subject of research. He also suggested that exhibition material demanded its own methodology, beyond the methodologies of art history that have been employed in other, adjacent fields, such as visual culture. A survey of the panellists and contributors to the symposium reveals a mix of academics who were trained primarily as historians and did not curate exhibitions, such as Kevin Chua, Pamela N. Corey, Iftikhar Dadi, Sophie Ernst, Lucy Steeds and Joan Kee; and art historians who were also curators, including Patrick Flores, Simon Soon, John Clark, Irit Rogoff and Gao Shiming. It is perhaps because of his own background as an art historian and curator that Flores proposed the ‘curatorial’ as a productive field that could generate its own methodologies and approaches and be used to forge connections between art and exhibition histories. Flores defined the curatorial ‘as an aspect of the exhibition’s fracture and its aesthetics and discursive articulation of the historical’.370 Building on Flores’s definition, I propose the ‘curatorial’ within exhibition histories as a methodology to analyse the elements of discourse, space and time in critical exhibitions and their restagings.371

369 Patrick Flores, ‘The Exhibition as Historical Proposition’, in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 13.2 (March/April 2014), p. 104. 370 Ibid. 371 Ibid.

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The Exhibition as Assemblage

The 1938 International Surrealists Exhibition (Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme) employed a radical approach to exhibition-making by transforming the exhibition space from a gallery into a surrealist world. The surrealists used an assemblage of objects, signs and artworks to evoke the eros of the everyday. The space was filled with mannequins who had flattened pubic mounds or whose dismembered limbs had become alluring parts of furniture. Kurt Seligmann’s Ultra Furniture (Figure 5.1) embodied sexual fetishes, sexlessness, and the fear of castration simultaneously. The mannequins lined up along street signs that subverted the street as a site for commerce and social order (Figure 5.2). The surrealists created an exhibition space that transformed the white walls of the gallery into a space that emphasised the experiential, interactive and tactile. They liberated the participant from the masculine social spaces of the city that were based on rationality. They enacted feminine qualities, by spatially exposing the viewers to intuition, subjectivity, and emotion. The viewers had a participatory role as they could activate a torchlight in the darkened exhibition space. They could experience and engage directly with the artworks (Figure 5.3).372 The surrealist exhibition of 1938 turned towards the phenomenological. This type of exhibition, which was meant to be experienced rather than only seen or read, demands a specific type of research methodology. In its study of exhibitions, art history has veered towards the analysis of textual discourse produced in exhibition collaterals, including catalogues, reviews, invitations, curator’s notes, and correspondence related to the exhibition. Most studies of exhibitions by art historians provide critical readings of the exhibition writings and marshal various forms of documentation, primarily oral and written sources and, if available, photos. Besides discourse analysis, scholars of exhibition histories adopt art historical methods that focus on iconography to analyse each artwork in its singularity, or sometimes in comparison with other artworks in the exhibition. However, they rarely situate artworks in an exhibition spatially and in active dialogue or tension with each other. Questions pertaining to the curatorial, including the spatial experience and flow of the exhibition, the typography of the exhibition texts, the use of lighting, the display strategies and other sensory elements like

372 Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of the Eros, 1938–1968, 3rd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), pp. 23–65.

168 sound, are usually overlooked in favour of the analysis of the curatorial text, exhibition intention and specific works. Even the reception of the exhibition is usually restricted to appraising published exhibition reviews over oral accounts by audiences who experienced the exhibition. Acknowledging exhibitionary space as active rather than static shifts the way we think about exhibitions. Reimagining the exhibition space as a constellation enables us to understand the relations between its components (for example, the artworks, lighting, ways of display and wall texts), and to treat these components not as discrete but as interconnecting elements. Besides space, exhibitionary time is part of this constantly changing constellation of elements. Exhibitionary time distinguishes itself from more general notions of time by involving not singular but multiple experiences of time. An exhibition can be experienced discretely when we make a visit to the exhibition on a specific day at a specific time. Exhibitions also exist over a duration of time, from its opening to the public to its closing. The afterlife of the exhibition continues in another time, the Braudelian longue durée (long term). This concept is derived from the French Annales school of history, which focuses on long-term historical structures rather than on single events.373 Exhibition histories that attend to the exhibition as a single historical moment in time often overlook the longer- term reception and impact of exhibitions on art and exhibition-making. The existence of multiple notions of time needs to be considered. This requires a pluralistic, dynamic and non-homogeneous concept that acknowledges multiple trajectories of exhibitionary time. The reception of exhibitions is another area that requires new methodologies besides the discourse analysis of published exhibition reviews. It needs to account for the multiplicity of exhibitionary experiences without over-privileging the perspectives of the art critic, historian and curator. Gilles Deleuze’s theory of assemblage is useful for studying exhibitions in terms of interior and exterior elements.374 It helps us to conceptualise the exhibition as an assemblage of heterogeneous interior elements that include artworks, exhibition texts, typographies, exhibition design, lighting, sound, programmes and exhibition collaterals such

373 For an understanding of the Annales school, see André Burguière, The Annales School: An Intellectual History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 374 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 63.

169 as the catalogue, invitation card, and brochure. Exterior elements are happenings that are unplanned and contingent, unlike the curatorially intentional interior elements. Exterior interventions, such as unplanned performances, censorship by the state and even violence arising from opposition to an exhibition, can change the relations between the heterogeneous elements of an exhibition. It is therefore important to study both the exterior and the interior elements of the exhibition, including the interconnected, unstable and fluid relations of exteriority. Simon Soon intimates the notion of the exhibition as an assemblage by drawing on the concept of ‘converging extremes’. He refers to What About Converging Extremes, an exhibition in Malaysia curated by the artist Wong Hoy Cheong in 1993. For Soon, this exhibition deconstructed the notion of the exhibition as containment: ‘As a platform that refused to delegate these narratives to the critics or historians, the exhibition instead played out that struggle within an artistic domain, through the logic of assembly, so that the parts strained against the whole.’375 Exhibitions undergo a Deleuzian form of reterritorialisation, when new elements or parts enter and forge new assemblages of articulations and relations in the exhibitions. New assemblages are formed by interventions, such as a performance or an event, including the removal of artworks due to state censorship. More frequently, new assemblages are formed by the exhibition catalogue, which is a trace of the afterlife of the exhibition. The catalogue stretches exhibitionary time beyond the duration and space of the original exhibition event. The new assemblage manifests itself in the exhibition catalogue as a non-physical and discursive site of intersections between artworks, the curatorial, art history, and exhibitionary discourse. The exhibition catalogue becomes part of the afterlife of an exhibition, and exists as a discursive site in multiple temporalities. Catalogues are circulated and reinterpreted both during and after the exhibition is over. It is a prime example of a new assemblage that can augment or even provide alternative and oppositional meanings to those produced by artworks shown in the exhibition. Thinking about exhibitions as assemblages is a methodology of exhibition histories. Using the physical exhibition model opens up new pathways for studying exhibitions not only as texts or discourses, but also as experiences. This exhibition experience goes beyond seeing, and also engages our mental and sensory faculties. This experiential mode of

375 Simon Soon, ‘Converging Extremes: Exhibitions and Historical Sightlines in 1990s Malaysia’, in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 13.2 (March/April 2014), p. 87.

170 studying exhibitions breaks the dominant methodology of reading exhibitions as texts. The conventional method focuses primarily on the exhibition texts, reading the artworks like texts, or comparing a few artworks. This method does not consider how artworks engage in a dialogue with each other in terms of ideas, aesthetics, form, and histories, or how the exhibition space itself provides a phenomenological experience. Adopting a different methodology enables us to unpack the role of the critical exhibition in resisting the hegemony of the white cube gallery space, and to forge new ways of thinking about art and its relation to space.

The Curatorial and the Critical Exhibition

The critical exhibition as assemblage cannot happen without an important element: the curatorial agent. For Flores, ‘Curatorial agents emerge within intersecting contexts of social unrest arising from tension between citizens and authoritarian regimes, largely turning away from institutional habits and a moving toward a conception of an alternative creative sphere at the fringes of law and freedom’.376 The radicalism of curatorial agents who operate in specific social contexts proposed by Flores needs to be guarded against tendencies towards romanticising and heroising them. An example of one such curatorial agent is Jim Supangkat, who played the multiple roles of ideologue, artist and art critic in the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB) art movement. He was influential in shifting cultural debates through his curatorial interventions. His intervention in the What Is an Identity exhibition in 1977, for instance, shifted the exhibition focus from national identity to cultural identity.377 The curatorial and its main interlocutor and provocateur, the curatorial agent, activated and breathed agency into the critical exhibition, both conceptually and ideologically. The exhibitionary provides an expanded notion of the curatorial that is useful for clarifying the critical exhibition. The critical exhibitions in the 1970s caused what Flores terms frisson in the curatorial, as they constantly sought to test and push the boundaries of social, political, artistic and curatorial conventions by injecting new ideas into exhibition- making. The curatorial agents of the critical exhibitions may have considered themselves exhibition-makers rather than curators. They were not necessarily restricted to museums

376 Patrick D. Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2008), p. 180. 377 Ibid., p. 42.

171 and other institutions of the art world, but they sought to use the critical exhibition as a means to many ends. The curatorial agents of critical exhibitions tended to defy the category of ‘curator’ as they were, in Flores’s view, the ‘ones most strongly placed to radically reshape art discourse by virtue of their multiple engagements as critics, professors, government agents, and exhibition makers’.378 In their roles as artists and students from art academies and universities, they kept ‘their locality’s knowledge, received knowledge from outside, mediated the foreign, and remade the local’.379 The curatorial is a powerful conceptual device to frame the critical exhibition, but it does not offer a suitable research methodology. The exhibitionary, which draws methods from both curation and art history, provides a different, expanded approach to studying exhibitions.

The Exhibition Model as Methodology

Chantal Mouffe conceptualises the political as something that upsets and disturbs power relations through dissent.380 Maria Lind demonstrates how artworks in an exhibition can be in tension with each other, and even with the exhibition itself.381 This dissensual mode calls for a methodology that does not frame exhibitions as mere containers of internally coherent and stable narratives and meanings generated by the artworks individually, in relation to each other, or as a whole. The dissensual mode of reading an exhibition allows us to go beyond Lind’s linking together of the multiple components of an exhibition. It calls for sensitivity to the internal tensions within exhibitions and the lack of consensus between the exhibition-maker(s), artists, and artworks. The dissensual approach views the exhibition as dynamic, constantly changing, and always with tensions. Lind’s approach to the curatorial lends itself well to the texts produced by exhibitions in the form of wall texts and curatorial writings. However, a different methodology is required to account for the plurality and open-ended character of the exhibition in containing and framing its own material. The artworks in an exhibitionary space and time produce meanings and processes that call for a

378 Flores, Past Peripheral, p. 195. 379 Ibid. 380 See Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces’, in Art and Research: Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, 1.2 (2007). 381 Maria Lind ‘Active Cultures: Maria Lind on the Curatorial’ in Artforum International, 42.2 (2009), p. 103.

172 dissensual mode of reading, one that unpacks and makes visible otherwise invisible power relations. The physical exhibition model as a reconstruction of the exhibition and artworks to scale provides a form of documentation that allows scholars to be certain of basic information about the exhibition. It is for the purpose of studying exhibitions and developing a methodology that I constructed models that are to scale of critical exhibitions.382 The Artists Village’s (TAV)The Time Show and CMSI were instances whereby maps rather than physical exhibition models were used because these exhibitions and festivals comprised performance art that was ephemeral and not object-based. This made marking out where these performances occurred more relevant. It is also for this reason that physical exhibition models were made for more object-based critical exhibitions, where artworks needed to be considered in relation to each other in the exhibitionary space. Factual information about the location of the artworks within the space, the titles, dimensions, and mediums of the artworks, the exhibition flow of visitors, which artworks were placed more prominently than others – all these have to be accurately considered in an exhibition model. There is also a need to account for changes in the exhibition over time, caused by interventions that alter the exhibition, such as spontaneous performances or censorship that resulted in the removal of artworks. Traces of these changes are spatially marked in the exhibition model. The exhibition model serves as an archive to record not just events, but also information about the exhibition that would otherwise be obscured. For instance, the listing of artworks documented in the exhibition catalogue may not necessarily cohere with the artworks actually shown in the exhibition, due to space limitations, artworks not arriving on time for display, and other contingencies that tend to disrupt exhibitions regardless of their level of planning. The exhibition model is a reconstructed documentation of the exhibition, and it serves to alert us to the possibility of discrepancies and accidents in exhibitions. In the process of ascertaining the facts concerning an exhibition, one is compelled to interrogate and cross-reference other exhibition-related sources, such as exhibition catalogues and oral accounts of the exhibition. This is not to say that the exhibition model is able to exclude errors, but it does serve as a documentary tool that pieces together the various elements of

382 These to-scale exhibition models were constructed with the assistance of model-makers.

173 an exhibition in conversation with other sources of documentation, such as oral histories, the exhibition catalogue, and photographs of the exhibition. The making of exhibition models is proposed in this thesis as a methodology to break the impasse between art history and the way exhibitions are actually experienced by the audience. Art history often examines individual artworks located within an exhibitionary space without looking at how the various artworks, images and texts act in tension with each other spatially and relationally. The methodology of art history does not pay sufficient attention to the dialogues between artworks in an exhibitionary space, dialogues that may be dissensual, contradictory or even in opposition to each other. When viewed individually or as a whole, the artworks in an exhibition may also run counter to the narrative and intention of the exhibition-makers. Time is not static either. Exhibitions change while they are happening, and exhibition histories need to provide a methodology to properly account for these changes. The physical exhibition model that reconstructs the exhibition spatially and to scale draws from the curatorial as a tool for scholars to study and examine the artworks not in isolation, but in active dialogue with each other. While the exhibition model may seem static, it is amenable to change in response to different restagings of the original critical exhibition. Art historical research is no longer limited only to archival photographic documentation of exhibitions. Archival material normally consists of two basic categories of ‘exhibition shots’: the exhibition installation shot, which aims to capture the exhibition display from different perspectives, and the exhibition opening shot. The exhibition shot, especially of exhibitions before the popularisation of digital cameras, is often taken not for the purpose of documenting the exhibition display, but to capture the exhibition opening as an event. The exhibition installation view usually focuses not on the artworks and how they were displayed, but on the people who came to the opening. Although such photographs of exhibition openings offer useful insights into who came to the exhibition and possibly help identify historically significant artists or personalities who graced the occasion – which is particularly useful for studying the reception and patronage of these shows – the artworks often remain out of focus and are obscured by the crowd. The final point to be made about the exhibition model is the distinction between reconstructing and restaging or remaking an exhibition. Harald Szemann’s exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form (1969), has gained sustained interest from scholars because of

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Szemann’s reinvention of the curator. He positioned the curator as independent exhibition- maker and creative partner of the artist, championed process-based art over art that was made as object-commodities for wealthy elites, and advanced the idea of the exhibition as a workshop and site for the generation of ideas. While art historical discourse on this seminal exhibition has consecrated its legacy in academic writings and publications, the actual physical experience of encountering the works cannot be replicated discursively. This has resulted in a number of exhibition restagings of When Attitudes Become Form, such as How Latitudes Become Forms (2004) organised by the Walker Art Center, When Lives Become Form (2008) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and, most recently, When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes (2012), curated by Jens Hoffman at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary arts.383 The restaging of seminal exhibitions, including critical exhibitions, provides reinterpretations of these exhibitions through the lenses of the different social, political and cultural contexts of the present, and it re-examines the significance and legacies of these exhibitions for the history of exhibitions and curating. The exhibition model does not restage an exhibition, as it does not involve the display of the actual artworks in an exhibition space, but it functions as a documentation of the exhibition by archiving the wide-ranging forms of information surrounding and shaping it. Its limitations rest in not showing the actual works of an exhibition. This is done in restaged exhibitions, but not necessarily in the original exhibitionary sites. The exhibition model provides other forms of documentation, such as exhibition photographs and oral interviews with members of the public who had first-hand experience of the exhibition and artworks.

The White Cube Gallery as a Frame: The Fragility of the Edge

The exhibition space as a frame for the display of artworks shapes and guides the audience’s experience and interpretation of the artworks. One particular construction of the exhibition space – the white cube – has codified a decontextualised, seemingly neutral and depoliticised spatial experience that takes the participant into a world that is separate and disconnected from the realities of the world outside. The white cube did not spring from a

383 Rebecca Coates, ‘Curating Histories and the Restaged Exhibition’, paper presented at the AAANZ Inter- Discipline conference, December 2014.

175 vacuum but was related to an earlier form of exhibition space – the salon. In the salon, paintings and other artworks were hung and displayed side by side, almost from floor to ceiling, in an outward demonstration of comparison and, more precisely, competition, as each picture jostled for the viewer’s attention. The white cube with its pristine and clinical whiteness codified the gallery space as a seemingly open space, full of possibilities. Brian O’Doherty describes the white cube as an ideological space and a triumph of modernism.384 The white cube assumes a placeless-ness and universalism that codifies a way of seeing and interpreting art without locating the displayed artworks within historical contexts. Ideologically, the white cube serves and confirms the tastes and viewing habits of the upper middle class as it turns away from the mass public. It is a hermetic space that enshrines art and, as the philosopher Arthur Danto proposes, transfigures the commonplace into art.385 As life is barred from seeping into the white cube exhibition space, the right conditions are created for the celebration of formal values. The white cube has become an exclusive, expensive and self-referential space, which rarefies the objects shown as ‘fine art’, emptied of functionality and utility. In isolation and with their senses heightened, the viewers are encouraged to observe and judge every detail or object. ‘Art for art’s sake’ appears to be the main obsession of the white cube exhibition space. The role of the white cube space in framing exhibitions is related to the role of the picture frame in delineating paintings. Painting in successive styles, such as romanticism and realism in the nineteenth century, focused on the subject and not on its edges. The picture frame was a powerful technological device that kept the meaning and images well contained.386 Even in the genre of landscape painting, which made the viewer aware of the space outside the picture, the edge of the frame retained its gatekeeping role of determining what was in or out. Photography in the early twentieth century played a significant role in eroding the picture frame. O’Doherty argues that in photography ‘the location of the edge is a primary decision, since it composes – or decomposes – what it surrounds. Eventually framing, editing, cropping – establishing limits – become major acts of composition.’387 The frame for

384 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, p. 20. 385 Arthur C. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 386 Ibid. 387 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, p. 19.

176 photography is like the exhibition that frames the artworks. By making the frames or the edges of a photograph visible in the twentieth century, ‘the edge as a firm convention locking in the subject had become fragile’, thereby undermining the power of the picture frame in locking in the picture’s subject. This breaching of the frame extended to the art world and affected the status of the white cube exhibition space as a neutral container that decontextualised the artworks within. By revealing the edge as a socio-ideological device that was constructed by the picture frame, the subject of the artwork slipped through the frame, permeated the white cube, and threatened to break out of the gallery space. The ideology of the white cube exhibition space was transferred and replicated in various forms around the world, including Southeast Asia, after the Second World War. Exhibition spaces replicating white cubes to display art, especially paintings, sprung up with the proliferation of museums, art galleries and other cultural institutions across the region. The possibility of the artwork breaking out of the white cube exhibition space was described in detail by Sabapathy in his appraisal of the works shown in the TMR exhibition in 1974:

Situations as presented in the exposition push the limits of creative practice to the edge, beyond which there abide silence and emptiness. Having reached the edge, decisions have to be made, and these can be staked along the following two paths, namely: (a) maintain silence and perpetual emptiness, (b) withdraw from the edge in order to reconsider objectives and recast strategies.388

Empty Canvas on which so Many Shadows Have Already Fallen (discarded after the exhibition; Figure 5.4) shown in the TMR exhibition was one of the many works that pushed the subject of emptiness and shadows out of the edge of the picture frame and into the white cube exhibition space. The artwork promoted an active role in meaning-making for the participant. Depending on who or what cast a shadow on the canvas, multiple meanings and subjectivities were produced. Like the empty canvas that could not contain the multiple subjectivities produced by the shadows, the white cube exhibition space could no longer function as a fixed frame that determined habits of seeing and interpreting artworks.

388 T.K. Sabapathy, Piyadasa: An Overview 1962–2000 (Kuala Lumpur: Balai Seni Lukis Negara, 2001), p. 53.

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Disrupting the White Cube Gallery Space

In some ways, these works played out the now familiar idea of institutional critique by deconstructing the ideological underpinning of the exhibition space itself. The early decades of Post-War art and the rise of abstract expressionism were synonymous with the emergence of the gallery with white walls, conceived as a non-interfering neutral space in which the work is isolated from everything that distracts us from evaluating it on its own grounds.389

Soon’s observation of how TMR deconstructed the neutrality of the white cube exhibition space as a frame that sanctified ordinary daily objects as art alerts us to ideological and institutional power structures. This section will examine critical exhibitions as vehicles of change that disrupted, resisted and destabilised the institutional and ideological dominance of the white cube gallery space in two ways: 1. By employing the ideologies and display conventions of the white cube gallery space and subverting them. This made visible the institutional structures that had been codified spatially and also proposed alternative ways of imagining space. 2. By abandoning the white cube gallery space totally and prospecting alternative and marginalised spaces that demanded new publics and different ways of engaging with art. Soon attributes the works shown in TMR to the rubric of institutional critique, which questioned the power and conventions of art institutions, such as the museum, the art market and even art history as a discipline itself, in determining how art was produced, received, canonised and circulated. Artists like Duchamp with his urinal signed R. Mutt, the Dadaists with their anti-art gestures, and Hans Haacke also made visible the otherwise invisible power relations in museums and galleries and their effect on artists and art- making. Art historians have come to categorise these art practices as institutional critique. Was institutional critique the primary aim of critical exhibitions? There are some similarities in how the ideological underpinnings of the white cube gallery space were subverted in a critical exhibition like TMR, but there was also more to this type of exhibition. Critical exhibitions expanded beyond art as institutional critique in the Euro-American

389 Simon Soon, ‘An Empty Canvas on which Many Shadows Have Already Fallen’, Reactions: New Critical Strategies Narratives in Malaysian Art, Vol. 2 (Kuala Lumpur: RougeArt, 2013), p. 63.

178 context, which was largely restricted to the hegemony of the art museum and the art market. It also involved a critique of and resistance to the cultural hegemony of Euro- American discourses that had come to determine what art was. Critical exhibitions were, therefore, counter-hegemonic vehicles of change as they resisted the white cube gallery space and its ideologies by forging new ways of thinking about and making art.

Towards a Mystical Space: Subverting the White Cube with the Real

The TMR catalogue listed the short, descriptive titles of the various works consisting of found objects in the exhibition: 1. Empty bird cage after release of bird at 2.46 pm on Monday 10th June 1974. 2. Potted plant watered and looked after by the two artists over a period of seven months. 3. Empty chair on which many persons have sat on. 4. Two half-drank Coca-Cola bottles. 5. An outlined area occupied by the shadow of the poet Usman Awang made at 4.05 pm on Saturday 8th December 1973. 36”X36”. 6. Empty canvas on which many shadows have already fallen. 1974. 36” X 36”. 7. Discarded silk-screen which was used to make many beautiful prints. 8. Burnt-out mosquito coils used to keep away mosquitoes on the night of 25th March 1974. 9. Discarded raincoat found at a Klang rubbish dump at 4.23 pm on Sunday 13th January 1974 that must have belonged to someone. 10. Randomly collected sample of human hair collected from a barber shop in Petaling Jaya. The found objects in TMR included organic material such as human hair, a potted plant, a chair shown as it was and two Coca-Cola bottles that were half consumed. Placing these everyday objects on white pedestals in a white cube gallery space immediately prompted the viewer to appreciate these objects formally as sculptural artworks (Figure 5.5). The ideology of the white cube with its own internal logic determined by the art world signalled

179 to the viewer that these objects were to be appraised as artworks.390 Philosopher Arthur Danto’s institutional theory of art is useful in illuminating that the ideology of the white cube cannot be separated from the art world.391 For Danto, the question of what is art is determined by art theories and the art world. Danto conceives ‘the Art World as the historically ordered world of artworks, enfranchised by the theories which themselves are historically ordered’; it is ‘the discourse of reasons’ or theories existing in the art world that makes an object art. Piyadasa and Esa permeated TMR with philosophies from Zen and Daoism as alternative ways of thinking about art that were not Eurocentric. George Dickie, one of the chief architects of the institutional theory of art, differs from Danto in his conceptualisation of the art world as a hierarchical structure of roles.392 For Dickie, the artist and public occupy the central roles, while the producers, curators, museum directors, critics and art dealers provide supplementary or supporting roles. Sociologist Howard Becker points out that Danto and Dickie’s concepts of the ‘art world’ neglect to explain how the institutional structure of the art world functions.393 In his sociological analysis of the art world system and its operations that are governed by its own conventions and rules, Becker emphasises ‘the “gate-keeping” functions of institutions, persons and practices in the art world’. Based on empirical studies, Becker describes the organisational framework of the art world as a network of people ‘whose cooperative activity, organised via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of artworks that the art world is noted for’. This leaves open the possibility of different art worlds with no particular or fixed ways of operating, instead depending on and being shaped by local conditions. Danto and Dickie rightly refer to the invisible institutional structures of the art world embodied in the white cube gallery space. Nevertheless, as will be explained in relation to TMR, an overly deterministic structuralist approach needs to be avoided and mediated by the possibility of the institutional structures being subject to change through interventions

390 Sarena Abdullah and Chung Ah Kow, ‘Re-Examining the Objects of Mystical Reality’, Jati, 19 (December 2014), pp. 203–17. 391 Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, The Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964), pp. 571–84, and Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace. For a more complete collection and critique of Danto’s writings, see Danto, The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste, ed. Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (Netherlands: Gordon & Breach Arts International, 1998). 392 George Dickie, The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (New York: Haven Publications, 1984). 393 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), p. 150.

180 of the artist as an active agent. In this respect, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the art world as a field provides space for the agency of individuals (such as artists) within that world.394 The structure of the art world is in a state of persistent ‘revolution’. A change in the position of an artist as one of the art world’s agents (for example, an artist who creates a new position in the art world by ‘inventing’ a new style of painting) might lead to a corresponding change to the art world’s structure. For instance, it can change the notion of the white cube gallery space as being neutral, capitalistic and hermetically closed to the outside world. Dickie’s and Danto’s understandings of the art world are useful for unpacking how the white cube gallery space and its ideologies are shaped by the art world.395 The found objects on display in TMR conformed to a particular way of showing art with its own logic of display. The exhibition was held at the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature, DBP), it was attended by fellow cultural practitioners, and it was officially inaugurated by Ismail Zain, then Director of Culture in the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports. Piyadasa and Esa were of considerable standing, both as artists and art educators. The exhibition conferred the status of art to found objects that made strange the familiar detritus of the everyday. The objects were displayed according to the conventions of a white cube gallery and the common expectations of what was art and what was non-art. By creating new contexts that encouraged participants to shift their own perspectives, TMR transformed the appearance of familiar non-art objects by proposing that these objects were art. This transformation revealed the capacity of art in critical exhibitions to create a politics of aesthetics based on a different distribution of the sensible. It proposed new aesthetic experiences requiring different understandings of art by encouraging participants to create mystical spaces in their minds.

Towards a Mystical Space

There is something very religious about my obsession with actual space. It is almost metaphysical. The emptiness and the detachment are

394 For an understanding of how art is located within the social conditions of its production, consumption and dissemination, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1994). 395 Mark Rollins (ed.), Danto and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 75.

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reminiscent of the spirit of Zen. The Zen garden, sand arranged in furrows and a few rocks, is the image of stillness. The more still our position and the less disturbed the immediate environment, the greater the possibility of the deepest penetration of reality. This is exactly what meditation is really about.396

Piyadasa’s approach to space and reality from a metaphysical rather than scientific and rational standpoint began before TMR in his 1972 exhibition dokumentasi 72. Scholars like Sabapathy have highlighted Piyadasa and Esa’s Asian philosophical leanings towards Zen and Daoism, particularly the former, which achieved cult status in America and Europe due to the popular writings of D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts. Nevertheless, the substance of how the artists adopted Zen philosophies on space and time for their Zen garden and notions of ‘Asian’ thought needs further scrutiny. Piyadasa’s description of space in the ‘spirit of Zen’ probably referred to the Muromachi Zen gardens, in which ishitate-so or ‘monks who arrange rocks’ further simplified the earlier Heian-period Zen gardens by using only rocks and sand with minimal plants to reveal the true substance of nature.397 The ponds and carefully selected deciduous plants of earlier Zen gardens that signified Buddhist teachings on the transcendence of life were replaced by rocks and carefully raked sand that alluded to the streams of water, and stripped nature to its bare essence. One could read the rocks and the wavy raked sand as representing mountains and water streams, respectively. Ascribing meaning and value to these material objects formed part of a process that was meant to lead to an obsession with objects that were in reality empty of value. This corresponded with the Zen school’s central thought of opening one’s mind to all possibilities, without being overly attached to material things, in order to find one’s ‘original nature’. Piyadasa’s obsession with ‘actual space’ in terms of Zen metaphysical teachings like emptiness, stillness, and meditation provides insights into how TMR was conceived and displayed according to the principles of a Zen garden. Using a physical exhibition model of TMR and documentary photographs of the exhibition’s installation allows an examination of the specific characteristics of the exhibition (Figure 5.6). At first glance, it seemed to adopt the display conventions of a white cube exhibition space with found objects placed on white

396 Redza Piyadasa, ‘Statements by Redza Piyadasa about his work’, in Dokumentasi 72: Recent works by Sulaiman Esa and Redza Piyadasa (Kuala Lumpur: Samat Art Gallery, 1972), unpaginated. 397 See Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, reissued edn (New York: Grove Press, 1991), p. 7.

182 pedestals like sculptures. However, this was subverted by the counter-hegemonic strategies of the artists drawing from the ideas of Zen and Daoism as alternative ways of approaching reality. By bringing inside everyday objects from the outside world, and displaying them as artworks, the artists destabilised and disrupted the white cube gallery space.

From Viewer to Participant in a Zen Garden

TMR was held at DBP’s Writer’s Corner space in 1974. The DBP was first established as the government agency Balai Pustaka in Johor Bahru on 22 June 1956 (Figure 5.7). It moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1957 and was given its own building in 1962 at Jalan Lapangan Terbang Lama (Figure 5.8). DBP’s mission is to publish works in the Malay language. The institution plays an important role in the development and support of writers, particularly novelists, as well as the regulation of the Malay language. The staging of TMR in the DBP reveals the interdisciplinary character of both Piyadasa and Esa across the creative fields of literature, visual art and theatre. This was echoed by the audience of the exhibition opening, which included theatre director Krishen Jit, poet Salleh ben Joned and actress Faridah Merican, all of whom were significant practitioners in their respective fields. Krishen Jit remarked in the foreword to the TMR catalogue that the ‘live situations’ activated the otherwise neutral and decontextualised white cube space by bringing the real and concrete to confront people’s everyday realities. This demonstrates TMR’s openness to different fields of cultural production as a way of opening up the mind of the viewer, akin to the intended effect of a Zen garden.398 TMR’s stated aim in its manifesto to ‘SOW THE SEEDS FOR A THINKING PROCESS WHICH MIGHT SOMEDAY LIBERATE MALAYSIAN ARTISTS FROM THEIR DEPENDENCE ON WESTERN INFLUENCE’ was an attempt to open the minds of the viewer to alternative perceptions of reality.399 The physical exhibition model provides insights into how the viewer would have visually experienced the TMR space (Figure 5.9). The varying heights of the white pedestals mirroring the rocks in a Zen garden would have immediately captured the attention of the viewer (Figure 5.10). The TMR exhibition model shows how the two

398 Krishen Jit, ‘Towards a Mystical Reality: Introduction’, in Krishen Jit, An Uncommon Position (Singapore: Contemporary Asian Art Centre, 2003), pp. 216–17. First published in Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa (Kuala Lumpur, 1974). 399 Towards a Mystical Reality, pp. 4–5.

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Coca-Cola bottles perched on one of the highest pedestals in the exhibition would have particularly drawn the attention of the viewer as they formed a visual connection with the hanging birdcage, the burnt-out mosquito coils, the randomly collected hair, and the shoes on pedestals of varying heights. These everyday objects, either hanging or on pedestals, resembled how the rocks in a Zen garden are normally placed. Just as the raked gravel forms currents of water that flow around the Zen garden, so the artworks on pedestals merged like rocks into one. Phenomenologically, these elements brought the participants into a flow around the entire exhibitionary space. Looking at the TMR exhibition model allows us to understand how the varying heights of the birdcage and the pedestals cohesively transformed the critical exhibition into an exhibitionary space where participants could enter a meditative state and interpret the artworks within the frame of a ‘mystical reality’. The viewer might initially have attempted to interpret these objects within the hegemonic framework of the white cube gallery space: as found objects occupying a physical space. All the found objects seemed to be suspended in time, motionless and quiet (Figure 5.11). The ambiguity of the chair as an artwork or object loomed in its close proximity to the potted plant, perhaps prompting the viewer to wonder if, unlike the potted plant on a low pedestal that signalled its status as an artwork, the chair was merely a chair placed for a functional rather than artistic reason (Figure 5.12). Studying the TMR exhibition model allows us to understand how the found objects on pedestals gravitated around the chair, which was facing the empty canvas. The ambiguity of the chair as an artwork or functional object acted as the anchor, positioned in the centre of the exhibition space. It was a constant playful reminder to the participants of tensions between art and non-art. Should the chair be sat on and touched, and if so, should physical interaction between the participant and these found objects be allowed, even encouraged? These anxieties must have been experienced by visitors entering TMR. It is precisely the strangeness of encountering familiar objects in unfamiliar ways in an exhibitionary space that excited frisson as moments of critical speculation. These moments made visible the curatorial as imagined by Flores. It is only upon closer inspection of the pedestals that the viewer would have noticed and read the artwork label, a curatorial convention used to provide information about the artwork, such as the identity of the artist, the year of production and the medium. It is here that the artists deployed their strategy of subverting the conventions of the white cube

184 gallery space. They used the artwork label to provoke the viewer to shift from formalist and aesthetic ways of appraising the found objects to a conceptual attitude. This drew from the Daoist philosophy of experiencing the works as events, or as Krishen Jit articulated, ‘live situations’, rather than static and physical material objects. The handwritten label for Randomly collected sample of human hair collected from a barber shop in Petaling Jaya (Figure 5.13) pasted on the pedestal prompted the viewer to look beyond the human hair as an ephemeral, organic and valueless found object. It stimulated the viewer to enter a mental rather than a rational space. The viewer was encouraged to shift from relying on the retina, sight and scientific observation as the framework for appraising the found object to becoming a participant in a ‘live situation’. The found object functioned as an event-centred entry point for thinking about where the hair came from, whether it belonged to a person in Petaling Jaya, and what other information it could provide. The value of the found object was transformed from one that had a material basis to one that was experiential and based on lived experiences. In a similar way, the rocks and sand in a Zen garden are to be valued just for what they are in nature, without their meanings being manipulated and assigned to create false value. The viewer who previously relied on seeing to appraise the found objects was encouraged to become an active participant, thus undergoing a transformation within the white cube gallery space itself. The distinction between viewer and participant was crucial to TMR and, more generally, to how critical exhibitions operated to activate the audience. The viewer, as Danto has proposed, relies on seeing to determine what is art or non-art.400 Seeing is also mediated by people’s knowledge of art theories and what the art world accepts as art. The viewer is required in the white cube gallery space to primarily rely on seeing for their interpretive framework, without questioning underlying ideological practices, such as the commodification of artworks driven by a capitalist mode of production. The TMR exhibition, on the other hand, was meant to make the participant mentally aware of the white cube’s hegemony over how art was to be conceived and displayed. The participant was encouraged to become an active viewer who no longer relied on the retina or seeing as the only possible way of appraising art. Using other sensory and mental faculties, including the metaphysical and the conceptual, became equally valid ways to make, receive and experience art.

400 See Danto, ‘The Artworld’.

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The strategy of subverting the white cube convention of using artwork labels as a way of providing factual information to the viewer was repeated by other found objects, such as three pairs of worn shoes bearing the handwritten text Well Worn Shoes Belonging to Different Persons (Figure 5.14). These three pairs of worn out shoes as found objects were not included in the TMR catalogue artwork list even though they were shown in the exhibition itself, demonstrating the importance of referring to photographic installation views of the exhibition when constructing exhibition models. This is another important way in which exhibition models serve as an archive of the exhibition to countercheck the documentation that art historians tend to rely on as their primary source, such as the exhibition catalogue. Instead of factual information, the label title introduced a different mental space that moved away from the representational mode of thinking to a direct experience. This aligned with how ‘Taoist thinking concerns itself with the understanding of life and reality directly instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking’.401 The chair was one of the few found objects that was displayed without a pedestal. It exuded an ‘anxiety of function’, as it could transform the viewer into a participant. The text label for the chair read: Empty chair on which many persons have sat on (Figure 5.15), suddenly conferring the status of art to the chair. The notion of emptiness was repeatedly conveyed by the empty birdcage and the empty canvas hung on the wall. All three works – the chair, the birdcage, and the canvas – drew the participant in the gallery space to engage with the philosophy of emptiness, also central to the Zen garden, that sought to reveal the emptiness of material meaning and the obsessions with the tangible. The intangible was reflected in the imagined people who have sat on the chair, the shadows in the Empty canvas on which many shadows have already fallen, and the Empty bird cage after release of bird at 2.46 pm on Monday 10th June 1974 (Figure 5.16). These three objects were visually connected in a triangular manner, increasing the prominence of these objects to the participants (Figure 5.17). Shadows and emptiness formed the core concepts for producing new subjectivities for the participants, who were encouraged to use their own life experiences to interpret the artworks. The artists became the mediators who had used the found objects to initiate ‘live situations’ or events that mattered to the participants. They

401 Towards a Mystical Reality, p 18.

186 seemed to act as ishitate-so, or meditating monks, do when they rake the sand to create swirl patterns. The qualities of stillness and quietness transformed the entire white cube gallery space into a meditative Zen garden. It helped to open the minds of the participants to what the artists perceived as differences between Euro-American and Asian perspectives: ‘The western artist’s attempt to create works which “exist within the viewers’ own space” then must be quite redundant to the oriental artist.’402 The mental space of the participant became the focus of TMR as it proposed deeper engagements with Asian philosophies, rejected Euro-American ways of thinking about art, and encouraged new ways of experiencing art using mental and mystical entry points, quite ironically through everyday objects in a gallery space. The white cube gallery space kept the outside world out and constructed a space that was neutral. It encouraged the viewer to admire the formal qualities of the artwork in a singular physical space. At the same time, TMR also brought the philosophies of an outdoor Zen garden into the gallery space. In this way, TMR reversed the inside-outside relationship, produced multiple events and mental spaces based on the subjectivities of the participants, and reconceived the real through the mental spaces and lived realities of the participants. The subversion of the white cube gallery space was complete, to the point of triggering the participants themselves to question the exhibition’s effectiveness at manifesting reality. The most radical subversion was Salleh ben Joned’s gesture of unzipping his pants to pee in a corner of the exhibition space. In his reply to Piyadasa, who was furious at this gesture, Salleh said:

Think about the arch of my urine fountain – which celebrates the integration of reality: the fine and the rough, the spiritual and the vulgar, the mystical and the concrete; a fact that even your most hailed Zen would agree. So, Piya (and Ms Siti), when I dropped my pants at your historical exhibition, I wasn’t ‘prostituting dignity’, actually, I was exposing reality.403

For Salleh, this performative intervention made visible the empowerment of the participant. He produced an alternative perception of reality based on the performative body rather

402 Ibid, p 20. 403 Salleh Ben Joned, ‘Urination and Art’, Dewan Sastera, July 1975.

187 than on a mental state. The rejoinder to this infamous gesture will be further examined in Chapter 6 on exhibitionary time.

Exceeding the Frames of Reality: Po Po’s Untitled 1987 Exhibition and GSRB

Contestations over what reality is and how art can awaken people to alternative ways of perceiving it were reflected in Po Po’s works, which used the lens of religion. Po Po’s first solo exhibition, Untitled (1987), was held at a gallery space at the Bogyoke Aung San market. The space still occasionally hosts exhibitions today, but it has not succeeded in replicating the same levels of excitement and perplexity. The 1980s was a period of strict censorship under Ne Win’s ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’ programme, which instituted censorship through the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division of the Ministry of Information. This Division screened all media content for approval, including art and culture. Artists have recounted how representatives from the various government ministries arrived on the day of the exhibition opening and removed works deemed unacceptable.404 Untitled displayed 36 works, comprising 30 paintings and six sculptures. Ma Thanegi recalled that ‘Till today it is an exhibition remembered and discussed by the intelligentsia of Yangon’.405 It displayed geometric abstract paintings with lines, colours and forms previously unfamiliar to local artists due to decades of censorship and international isolation. The paintings seemed to refer to Euro-American artists, particularly the cube-like sculpture Homage to Piet Mondrian, which clearly referred to Mondrian’s non-representational, neoplastic grid-like forms. Both Untitled and TMR drew from Asian philosophies. Po Po, a devout Buddhist, drew primarily from Buddhism. Compared to TMR, Untitled adopted a less confrontational position when proposing new ways of thinking about art. It engaged with international discourse and art theories within the strict environment of censorship in Myanmar, and it adopted various strategies to subvert the white cube gallery space and its ideologies. According to art historian Isabel Ching, Untitled, like TMR, ‘breach(ed) the frame of painting’.406 The breaching of the frame intersected with the fragility of the white cube

404 Interview with San Minn, 20 March 2016, Yangon, Myanmar. 405 Ma Thanegi, ‘After the Exile: Art in Myanmar’, in Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015), p. 14, originally published in The Arts Magazine, Jan/Feb 1998, Singapore. 406 Isabel Ching, ‘Escaping the Frame: Pavathi, Vayo, Tejo and Apo’, in Po Po Out of Myth, p. 26.

188 gallery’s spatial edge that had also been destabilised in TMR. For TMR, the found objects expanded beyond the edges of the gallery space, and the physical notion of space, into a mental meditative space. Like TMR, meditation was an important aspect of the works in Untitled. Apo (water; Figure 5.18), Pathavi (Earth; Figure 5.19), Tejo (fire; Figure 5.20) and Vayo (air; Figure 5.21), which manifested in visual forms in Po Po’s paintings, were meant as meditation tools for participants. Ching posits that representing these four elements ‘exceed our usual conceptual frames of reality, and is cultivated from heightened states of mind-body awareness through one’s access to insight/intuition sparked by individual effort’.407 The photograph of the installation view of Untitled (Figure 5.22) shows all four paintings lined up on the right wall of the gallery, giving a commanding presence over the entire gallery space, and showing the artist’s intellectual and religious understanding of these four primary elements. The energy emitted from these four elements would have seeped into the white cube gallery space, destabilising it as an exhibitionary space for aesthetic contemplation. This energy might have activated the viewers into participants with a capacity to connect with and share Po Po’s knowledge of Buddhism. The physical exhibition model and map of Untitled (Figure 5.23) shows how Four Parts Painting in Space (Figure 5.24) and Space in Four Parts Painting (Figure 5.25) were displayed symmetrically on adjacent walls. Participants in the critical exhibition would have been able to look at how each work employed the rectangular form differently in relation to space (Figure 5.26), thus prompting them to observe the spaces in between the paintings as part of the work in addition to the paintings themselves. Four Parts Painting in Space, in particular, transformed the brick wall on which the four paintings hung into an inseparable, site-specific element of the work. Po Po’s conceptual rigour was evident in both works as he explored the different ways in which exhibitionary space could potentially transform into mental spaces. The physical exhibition model of Untitled and the photographic installation view (Figure 5.27) show how the participants in the exhibitionary space would have been perplexed by encountering sculptures that resembled everyday objects. The arrangement of the sculptures in an almost straight line can be clearly seen in the exhibition model. The soft sculpture of intertwining pillows (Figure 5.28) was placed opposite Red Cube (Figure 5.29), which comprised a painting and rocks laid on the floor. The

407 Ibid., p. 28.

189 textures of the solid and weather-beaten rocks came into tension with the softness of the pillows. Pillows and rocks as everyday objects were transformed to reveal their material properties. The intertwined pillows were also in tension with the Red Cube diagonal painting, which appeared to be precariously balanced on the point of a rock. Playing with appearances such as the sculpture of a birdcage with a swing pendulum created a moment of suspension, signalling to participants that the exhibitionary space existed in a different temporality. In Red Cube, the painting and pieces of granite rock on the gallery floor symbolised the weight of the burden that people had to bear to reach enlightenment.408 The exhibition model (Figure 5.30) enables us to visualise the entire exhibitionary space. It reveals how the participants were completely surrounded by the works on the walls. The spatial arrangement encouraged visitors to create highly personal metaphysical experiences in response to the works. This metaphysical approach bore similarities with the way in which TMR provoked participants to construct mental spaces that broke out of the confines and edges of the white cube gallery space. Both TMR and Untitled proposed alternative approaches and frameworks to resist and counter the hegemony of the white cube gallery space. The mental space became a powerful artistic strategy that drew from Buddhism, Zen and Daoism to slip out of the shadow of Western-centric notions of art. As critical exhibitions, they advanced ways of thinking about and making art by freeing the mind of the participant. Both critical exhibitions offered multiple ways of conceiving space beyond the rational, observable, and physical. More importantly, both exhibitions utilised the entire exhibition space as an artwork in itself – in TMR as a Zen garden, and in Untitled as the embodiment of the mind of the artist. By intending to activate the production of new subjectivities by and for the participants, both these highly conceptual exhibitions subverted the notion of the white cube gallery space as objective and decontextualised. The GSRB also critiqued the notion of the ‘real’. According to art historian Wulan Dirgantoro, the GSRB ‘challenged the orthodoxy of art education in art academies; it explored new visual languages in Indonesian art and presented new approach in art-making,

408 Nathalie Johnston, Po Po Out of Myth, p. 3.

190 perhaps also unwittingly; and brought back socio-political content in works of art’.409 And curator Rifky Effendy has commented: ‘It is undeniable that GSRB became a canon in the practice and strategy of realism in the subsequent development of art.’410 Effendy’s focus on ‘realism’ could be traced to writings on art by Sudjojono, who brought nationalism and social commitment to the fore of Indonesian art. Art historian Paul Khoo highlighted the schism and differences within the movement. Supangkat focused on the avant-gardist trajectory in search of new aesthetics, while Harsono and Hardi wanted to explore socio- political issues and content in their works. The movement eventually broke up after the 1987 exhibition Proyek 1: Pasar raya Dunia Fantasi (Project 1: Fantasy Super market).411 Although there existed differing views in GSRB,412 all the artists shared a critique of realism and rethought the meaning of representing reality and the concrete. The exhibitionary space of the 1975 GSRB exhibition at Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) is shown as a physical exhibition model (Figure 5.31) that was displayed in the exhibition One Step Forward, Two Steps Back — Us and Institution (2013), curated by Biljana Ciric. From the exhibition model, we can see how the artworks were displayed around the garden at the centre of the exhibition space. The exhibition model provides a better understanding of how the exhibition would have been experienced by the spectator, who was faced with myriad symbols and everyday objects that in different ways questioned both reality and art’s engagement with society and politics. The wall showing Pandu Sadewo’s untitled painting of a pistol is an image that resonates with other artworks in the exhibitionary space, including Harsono’s Pistol Plastik, consisting of toy pistols and flowers suspended within three plastic bags (Figure 5.33), and Paling Top ’75 (Figure 5.34), which consisted of a toy M-16, embedded in a wooden casing and covered by a wire fence. It alluded to the fencing used by the military, and it made real the oppression by the New Order. As seen in the exhibition model, the open, wall-less exhibitionary space would have enabled spectators entering the space to almost immediately make a visual connection with

409 Wulan Dirgantoro, Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia: Defining Experiences (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), pp. 59–65. 410 Rifky Effendy, ‘Realisme Sudjojono dan Praktek Seni Rupa Kontempororer Indonesia’, in Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2008), pp. 58–62. 411 Dirgantoro, Feminisms and Contemporary Art, pp. 59–65. 412 For a critical discussion of the contesting narratives of the GSRB, see Paul Khoo, ‘The Trials of Indonesian Conceptualism’, unpublished Master’s thesis, Asian Art Histories Programme, LASALLE College of the Arts (2011).

191 the pistols as symbols of the military and violence. Another artwork depicting the New Order as a military regime was Bonyong Munni Ardhi’s The Flag of Red and White (Figure 5.35), alluding to the colours of Indonesia’s national flag. By also including decapitated dolls, the work suggested that the country’s leadership, who largely came from or were affiliated with the military, was violent and had ‘lost its head’ in irrationality, while it also referred to those killed under the New Order’s nationalist agenda. Playing with national symbols to reveal the reality of socio-political conditions was another way of making the ‘real’. According to the physical exhibition model, the GSRB exhibitionary space was also exposed to natural light due to the existing architecture of TIM, which ruptured the white cube space as a closed space. The installation view of the GSRB exhibition (Figure 5.36) shows how the natural sunlight entered the garden at the centre of the exhibitionary space. This garden resembled a Zen garden with pebbles covering its surface, resonating with TMR’s exhibitionary space that also alluded to a Zen garden. Supangkat’s Bunga Tembaga Dalam Pagar (Figure 5.37), consisting of a bronze flower enclosed by a fence in the Zen-like garden, was perhaps the only work in the GSRB exhibition that critically engaged with the site itself. The flower that drew nourishment from the sun in the garden was paradoxically enclosed by a fence, which also bore connections with the fence of Paling Top ’75. The fence, the pistol and the gun were symbols and objects of the military. The GSRB criticised the military by placing these objects in a crate (in Paling Top ’75) or in plastic bags (in Pistol Plastik). The participant was made conscious of the exhibition as a critical form through a new approach to art-making that deconstructed and played with symbols and objects associated with the military regime. The new politics of aesthetics used national and military symbols, and everyday objects and materials. It collapsed boundaries between art and non-art materials, and between popular culture and fine art. By making the familiar strange, it altered the way participants understood their existing realities.

Expanding Art into Public and Social Spaces

Propositions of plural notions of reality coalesced in the mental in TMR, the religious in Po Po’s Untitled exhibition, and the performative in Salleh ben Joned’s intervention in the TMR. These events and actions sought to subvert the false universality of the white cube gallery

192 space by bringing in the realities of everyday life and transforming passive spectators into active participants. The shift towards closing the gap between art and life escalated in the Art Festival: Temples and Cemeteries of CMSI, which rejected the modernist white cube space in favour of public spaces. Some of the site-specific events engaged with contextual realities and involved the public as active participants. CMSI began in 1992 with a group of students and artists who were based in Chiang Mai, most of whom were from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Chiang Mai University. Two artists in particular, Mit Jai Inn and Uthit Atimana, played an important role in determining what ‘social installation’ – the concept behind CMSI – was. There was no singular ‘curator’ or selection of artworks, as all artworks were accepted and the event operated organically with logistical and organisational support from fine arts students at Chiang Mai University, such as Navin Rawanchaikul, Kost Junataratip and Adul Boonsham. For Uthit, the word ‘social’ encompassed an ethos of including everyone, not just artists, to discuss social issues, while ‘installation’ referred to a way of making art either site-specifically or confined to a gallery.413. Mit had just returned from Vienna where he had been based from 1986 until 1992. During his time abroad, he attended the Academia of Angewandte Kunst and was an apprentice of Franz West. Before returning to Chiang Mai, he saw Documenta 9 in 1992. Both Mit and Uthit were instrumental in organising workshop sessions in which artists debated and shared ideas about what the first CMSI was to be. Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture was a reference point for the artists, who believed in the potential of art as a vehicle of change in society. By extension, the CMSI was conceived as an exhibition that could be deployed as a vehicle to change not just how art was being conceived, made and practised, but also the very function of art itself in shaping society. The ‘curatorial’ for CMSI was an open platform not only for artists, but also for other people, such as monks, yoga instructors, prostitutes, tuk tuk drivers, staff at non- governmental organisations, and university professors.414 CMSI was a critical exhibition as it pushed the boundaries of the art world to build an inclusive festival. It sought to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, artists and non-artists, and, most importantly for the

413 ‘Oral histories of Chiang Mai Social Installation’, in Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98, ed. David Teh (London: Afterall, 2018), p. 59. 414 CMSI did not have a single curator or group of curators conceptualising it. Instead, it worked and thought organically through a process of cooperation from artist to artist.

193 purposes of this chapter, art exhibition spaces and public spaces. Its exhibition title included ‘temples and cemeteries’, because ‘Thai people are more familiar with temples than art galleries, as it’s purely a part of Western culture to view art in galleries… so we are bring art to places that people are familiar with’. The aim of CMSI was to communicate with and engage Thai publics. Temples and cemeteries also ‘have unique characteristics which encourage people to contemplate life. Unlike ordinary galleries, these places have their own spirit’.415 Unlike TMR and Untitled, both of which subverted the white cube gallery space by making visible its ideological frame and by proposing alternatives, CMSI abandoned the white cube completely and moved the critical exhibition directly to public spaces. The temples, cemeteries, public squares and markets were imbued with the history, traditions and spirituality that were familiar to Thai people. Participants produced an aesthetics of politics by sometimes experiencing and interpreting the art displayed in dissensual tension with religious sites. Whereas both TMR and Untitled constructed mental or metaphysical spaces from Daoist, Buddhist and Zen philosophies, CMSI returned to social engagement with local contexts and cultural conditions as its starting point, eschewing the trend of international biennales and festivals to imagine the global:

At the end of the first year, we wanted it to be local and accessible to rural people… We just didn’t want to display art in a white cube, or mix it with other projects. We just wanted a small and temporary exhibition… For a social context, we made use of local traditions which saw people gathering in one place. You could call it a public sphere… back then, we just wanted to do something that wouldn’t pile up in a conventional box, that didn’t follow social norms or formalities.416

The exhibition map of the CMSI (Figure 5.38) shows the distribution of the works over different public sites in Chiang Mai, including cemeteries, temples, Tar Pae Gate (public square), canals, bridges, museums, markets, streets and other public areas. CMSI included many ‘non-art’ participants and a diversity of public sites, thereby both challenging the conventional display of art in galleries that constrained the critical potential of art and engaging with a diverse range of publics across different classes. The main public sites were temples and cemeteries, because the temple is a cultural, social and religious site for Thais,

415 Chanyaporn Chanjaroen, ‘Art is a Temple’, The Nation, 19 January 1993. 416 Mit Jai Inn, ‘Oral histories of Chiang Mai Social Installation,’ in Artist-to-Artist, p. 58.

194 and normally the first place in which they encounter art in the form of temple murals and statues. The cemetery is a marginalised site, but it also represents the end of life. It forms a cycle with the temple as a religious site with merit for one’s afterlife. Montien Boonma’s installation work Body Temple (Figure 5.39) was located at Wat Chet Yod (Chet Yod Temple), which housed the relics of Mangrai, the king who founded Chiang Mai 700 years ago. Navin’s site-specific installation comprised a canoe-like container with objects and photographs of Buddhist inflection.417 Participants who entered the installation were immersed in a meditative space where their different senses were activated by the smell of spices and herbs. Siting these installations on religious grounds required an intensive process of negotiations with the monks, who were generally supportive of the artists as they considered these projects to be another way of spreading the teachings of Buddhism. Works like Montien’s Body Temple adopted the strategy of abandoning the white cube public space, engaging directly with the public, and maintaining a dialogue with the site itself. Such works were site-specific, as the meaning and history of the site added layers of meaning to the work. The site-specificity of Body Temple was made visible when the work was destroyed, allegedly at the orders of a senior monk in Bangkok who thought the work was disrespectful to Wat Ched Yod.418 However, not all the works in CMSI could be considered site-specific, even if they were shown in public spaces. Some creators, especially non-artists or art students, did not conceptualise their works as engagements with public space, due to their relative inexperience and unfamiliarity with the notion of site-specific ways of making art.419 Like TMR, CMSI was concerned with how art could penetrate reality, challenge social norms, and suggest new ideas about the public display of art and the promotion of social engagement with art. Uthit’s comment on CMSI is particularly illuminating:

All artists are treated equally – Thai, non-Thai, famous, not famous, student, non-student, inspired, not inspired. All artists are assisted in the realisation of their works – often idealised versions of reality, and art is a

417 Interview with Navin Rawanchaikul, 2016, Singapore. 418 ‘Oral histories of Chiang Mai Social Installation’, in Artist-to-Artist, p. 58. 419 The art students and general public who participated in CMSI may have had their own specific thoughts on presenting art in public. This would be worthwhile to examine, as the main curatorial proposition of CMSI was to blur boundaries between art and everyday life.

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process of discovering reality, and art projects invite people to develop their ideas.420

Compared to TMR, CMSI expanded its range of collaborations with the public, which included the collective participation of people from all walks of life. In its desire to expand the notion of art to include the participation of non-artists, CMSI subverted the elitism of the white cube gallery space more effectively than TMR and Untitled had done. By not making the sale of the artworks a priority or not putting the works up for sale at all, TMR, CMSI and Untitled resisted the white cube gallery space as a site for capital transactions. These anti-capitalist underpinnings were a thread that wove through most of the critical exhibitions that challenged the dominance of the art market in the artworld. Rejecting the white cube as the dominant exhibition space by bringing art into public spaces was charged with national, symbolic, cultural and political meaning. It was a strategy also deployed by TUAFTTUAFT, which had been formed in 1974, one year after the toppling of the Thanom Kittikachorn, Praphat Charu-satien and Narong Kittikach military dictatorship in October 1973. TUAFT opposed art that was produced for capitalist purposes and controlled by big business and those in power. It called for art and culture to be relevant to the common Thai worker and farmer. Exactly one year later, in October 1975, TUAFT organised a large display of paintings at Rajadamnern Avenue (Figure 5.40). It claimed to comprise more than one thousand paintings and posters to commemorate the students’ victory that had led to the collapse of the military regime. Its physical exhibition model shows the visual and experiential impact of an entire row of billboard cut-out paintings installed between the lamp posts in the middle of Rajadamnern Avenue (Figure 5.41). The lamp posts on Rajadamnern Avenue still stand there today (Figure 5.42), and the symbolic significance of this road can be seen in the exhibition model. The avenue connects Thammasat University, where many of the student demonstrations had started, with the Grand Palace, where the monarchy resides (Figure 5.43). This critical exhibition challenged the exhibition format in gallery spaces by expanding the display of artworks into public spaces, and by involving artists and the public, especially students. The participants in this critical exhibition were engaged in a ritualistic

420 Thasnai Sethaseree, ‘Overlapping Tactics and Practices at the Interstices of Thai Art’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Chiang Mai University (2011), p. 192.

196 march, holding the billboards in a single file before carrying them for installation at the lamp posts.421 The ritual was significant for manifesting a sense of collectivism and solidarity, to state their political and social positions against American neo-imperialism, to display nationalism, and to defend Thai sovereignty and democracy in public. They were placing themselves at risk as most of the billboards were eventually destroyed by their opponents.422 It contributed to rethinking art as a form of social engagement and performative action. It constituted a gesture of anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian protest against the military regime’s support of American military intervention in the Vietnam War (Figure 5.44). Just as CMSI had used symbolically important landmarks like Tha Phae Gate and the nearby public square, TUAFT sited the billboards in a public space, the politically charged Rajadamnern Avenue. The avenue leads from the symbolic Democracy Monument, a magnet for protesters, all the way to the Palace where the royalty, and more importantly, the much-revered Thai king, reside. The siting of the billboards subverted the white cube space in a similar fashion to CMSI, by rejecting the white cube space in favour of direct engagement with the public. TUAFT tried to create a new public that would collaborate with the artists to make the billboards. The billboards occupied different spaces, such as the main avenue and even the tops of buildings. TUAFT reclaimed public spaces from authorities and activated these spaces in new ways to propel their aims of resisting what they perceived as the neo-imperial power of America.

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated how using the physical exhibition model as a curatorial tool can be useful for understanding the multi-layered relationship and dialogue between artworks and the exhibition space. In addition, it has shown how critical exhibitions adopted the strategies of either subverting the white cube gallery space or transcending it by making participatory spaces for the public. The critical exhibition was a vehicle for resistance against the white cube and its ideologies that framed exhibition spaces as neutral, decontextualised, capitalistic and separated from the outside world. Blurring the edges of the white cube gallery space activated the exhibition space, participants and artworks. It

421 Interview with Sinsawat Yodbangtoey, 14 March 2017, Bangkok, Thailand. 422 Ibid.

197 shifted from the primacy of seeing to alternative ways of thinking about and making art that was connected to everyday social practices. The critical exhibition expanded into mental spaces and triggered the production of new subjectivities by participants. It also engaged with society by transforming public spaces and artistic practices into more participatory ones. This chapter has shown how critical exhibitions played a significant role in critiquing ideologies and aesthetic conventions of the white cube and Western-centric ideologies of universalism by recontextualising and repositioning the participants’ view of art in mental, religious and symbolic exhibitionary spaces. The critical exhibitions demonstrated art’s criticality and its capacity to disrupt social and aesthetic norms.

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Figure 5.1

Kurt Seligmann’s Ultra Furniture shown in the 1938 International Surrealists Exhibition. Image from: Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of the Eros, 1938–1968, 3rd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

Figure 5.2

Street of mannequins lined up along street signs in the 1938 International Surrealists Exhibition. Image from: Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of the Eros, 1938–1968, 3rd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

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Figure 5.3

Participant using a torchlight in the darkened exhibition space of the 1938 International Surrealists Exhibition. Image from: Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of the Eros, 1938– 1968, 3rd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).

Figure 5.4

Empty Canvas on which so Many Shadows Have Already Fallen (discarded after the exhibition) Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

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Figure 5.5

Installation view of TMR showing the found objects on white pedestals. Image courtesy of Simon Soon.

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Figure 5.6

TMR exhibition model constructed by Seng Yu Jin and Denise Ho from NUS Department of Architecture School of Design and Environment with assistance from Simon Soon. Scale 1:20, 2016. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 5.7

View of the Writer’s Corner space of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in the 1990s before restoration. Image courtesy of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

View of the Writer’s Corner space of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in the 2017 after restoration was completed in 2017. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 5.8

Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka c.1960. Image courtesy of Don Punea.

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Figure 5.9

Detail of TMR exhibition model. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 5.10

Rock Zen garden of Ryōanji, Kyoto, Japan. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Figure 5.11

Installation view of TMR. Image courtesy of Simon Soon.

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Fig. 5.12

Close-up of the TMR exhibition model showing the potted plant on a low pedestal on the left highlighted in red. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 5.13

Randomly collected sample of human hair collected from a barber shop in Petaling Jaya. Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

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Figure 5.14

Well Worn Shoes Belonging to Different Persons. Image courtesy of Simon Soon

Figure 5.15

Empty chair on which many persons have sat on. Image courtesy of Simon Soon

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Figure 5.16

Empty bird cage after release of bird at 2.46 pm on Monday 10th June 1974. Image from: Raja’ah – Art, Idea and Creativity of Sulaiman Esa 1950s – 2011 (Kuala Lumpur: National Art Gallery, 2011)

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Figure 5.17

TMR exhibition model: The empty chair, canvas and birdcage forming a triangular line of sight in dialogue with one another Figure 5.18

Po Po, Apo, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015)

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Figure 5.19

Po Po, Pathavi, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015)

Figure 5.20

Po Po, Tejo, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015)

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Figure 5.21

Po Po, Vayo, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015)

Figure 5.22

Installation view showing Apo, Pathavi, Tejo and Vayo as a group displayed on the same wall. Image courtesy of Po Po

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Figure 5.23

Exhibition model of Untitled, constructed by Seng Yu Jin and Denise Ho, Scale 1:20, 2016. Image by Seng Yu Jin

Exhibition map of Untitled. Image by Seng Yu Jin

Figure 5.24

Po Po, Four part paintings in space, oil on canvas, 1986, 75 x 137,2 cm. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015)

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Figure 5.25

Po Po, Space in Four Parts Painting, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1986. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015)

Figure 5.26

Exhibition model of Untitled showing the arrangement of Four part paintings in space and Space in Four Parts Painting in a straight line visually. Image by Seng Yu Jin

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Figure 5.27

Exhibition model of Untitled showing an elevated perspective of the exhibition’s entrance. Image by Seng Yu Jin

Installation view of Untitled from a similar perspective to the exhibition model above. Image courtesy of Po Po

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Figure 5.28

Installation view of Untitled with the pink intertwining pillows visible. Image courtesy of Po Po. Figure 5.29

Po Po, red cube, 1986, oil and paper collage on canvas, 75 x 150 cm. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015)

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Figure 5.30

Two perspectives of the Untitled exhibition model from an elevated perspective. Images copyright of Seng Yu Jin

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Figure 5.31

GSRB exhibition model as part of her exhibition titled, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back — Us and Institution, Us as Institution, June 29–August 11, 2013 at the Times Museum Guang Zhou curated by Biljana Ciric. Model of New Art Movement exhibition produced in collaboration with FX Harsono for exhibition. Images provided by Biljana Ciric Figure 5.32

Pandu Sadewo’s untitled, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Image from: Menafsir Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (Yogyakarta: ISI Yogyakarta, 2016)

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Figure 5.33

FX Harsono, Pistol Plastik, Kembang Plastik dalam Kantong Plastik, 1975, Transparent plastic, plastic toy gun. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 5.34

FX Harsono, Paling Top ‘75, 1975 Plastic gun, textile, wooden crate, wire mesh. 50 x 100 x 157 cm. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

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Figure 5.35

Bonyong Munni Ardhi, The Flag of Red and White, Oil on canvas, plastic doll. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 5.36

Installation view of GSRB 1975 exhibition. Image courtesy of Hyphen

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Figure 5.37

Jim Supangkat, Bunga Tembaga Dalam Pagar, 1975 Copper, stones, iron fence. Image courtesy of FX Harsono

Figure 5.38

Layout of artworks in the CMSI brochure. Image courtesy of Uthit Atimana and Gridthiya Gaweewong

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Figure 5.39

Montien Boonma’s installation work, Body Temple, 1992. Image courtesy of Uthit Atimana and Gridthiya Gaweewong

Figure 5.40

TUAFT Bill-Board Cut-out exhibition at the Rajadamnern Avenue, Bangkok in 1975. Image from: Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, 1974– 1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con-tempus, 1994).

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Figure 5.41

Exhibition model of TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-out exhibition in 1975, Bangkok Constructed by Seng Yu Jin and Denise Ho Scale 1:25, 2018. Image by Seng Yu Jin

Fig. 5.42

The lampposts in the middle of Rajadamnern Avenue still stands today. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Fig. 5.43

Exhibition model of TUAFT showing how the Rajadamnern Avenue leads to the Thammasat University and then to the Grand Palace. Image by Seng Yu Jin

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Figure 5.44

TUAFT billboard Cut-out, untitled, 1975, dimensions unknown. Image from: Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, 1974–1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con-tempus, 1994)

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Chapter 6 Exhibitionary Time: Towards Heterochrony, Synchrony and Anachrony

Can the critical exhibition create its own time? Or can participants who undergo the phenomenological experience of viewing art in a critical exhibition create new notions of time? If critical exhibitions possess the agency to make exhibitionary time, which method do we use to study this experience in exhibition histories? I argue that exhibition history as a discipline needs to study the idea of time in exhibitions, and to examine how certain exhibitions, such as critical exhibitions, produce not singular but multiple timescales. This chapter is about the roles and ideas of time in critical exhibitions. It questions the assumption that the experience of time in exhibitions is universal and fixed. The language that we use to talk about time reveals how we understand time in our own historical and cultural context. Time is elusive and difficult to grasp, as evidenced by the deficiency of words like the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ to capture the wide and diverse spans of alternative temporalities, which range from evolutionary time and geological time to the time of the cosmos. The list of possible timescales is endless. The historicity of time itself is designated by the very terms we use to track time. They reveal how ‘our conceptions of time, and our enactments of it, are rooted in specific social contexts and grow from historical transformations, some of which are finished, and some are not’.423 Towards a Mystical Realty (TMR, 1974) anchors this chapter and acts as a comparative intersection with other critical exhibitions, including The Artists Village’s Time Show (1990), Po Po’s Untitled (1987), and the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB, 1975) exhibition, each of which in its own way contested and disrupted the ‘homogeneous and empty’ time of Western modernity. The previous chapter showed how critical exhibitions breached the modernist ideological confines of the white cube space that decontextualised art as universal, singular and timeless. The exhibitionary space of the critical exhibition flowed out into the everyday

423 Joel Burges and Amy Elias (eds), Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2016), p. 2.

226 of the streets, temples and cemeteries. This chapter unpacks the notion of exhibitionary time by freeing it from the tight embrace of a singular temporality. It proposes heterochronic temporalities that rethink our understanding of exhibitions not within a singular temporality, but in terms of synchrony and anachrony.

Heterochronic Notions of Time

Our conception of time as being socially, historically and culturally constructed expands time studies as a field of enquiry into exhibition histories in three ways. The first is the possibility of exhibitionary time as a timescale specific to the exhibition. It departs from art history as a discipline that has ‘overwhelmingly dedicated its resources to understanding the work in the moment in which it was created’, as well as one that has ‘been tempted to treat the image as something dead and inert’.424 Second, the study of exhibitions by art historians has tended to understand the exhibition in a single moment in time, usually when an exhibition first opens to the public. This static approach to the study of artworks in art history is replicated in exhibition histories that examine exhibitions at a singular moment, limited by the texts and the reproduction of artworks in the exhibition. The catalogue as a representation and documentation of the artworks in the exhibitionary space is often assumed to be accurate for the duration of the exhibition. The fluidity and unstable nature of exhibitionary time is excised in favour of stability and inertness, which literally freeze the exhibition in time. Third, framing exhibitionary time as a concept that is dynamic rather than static enables scholars to study exhibitions throughout their entire duration, from their opening to their multiple afterlives. This requires scholars to be attuned to an exhibition’s ontological presence. It calls for an exhibition to be encountered and experienced rather than to be ‘read’ like a text. The exhibition itself has an agency and power to produce its own time: exhibitionary time. This calls for more intimate ways of understanding exhibitions, reducing the historical distance produced by historicist methods, and using methodologies that are sensitive to the vicissitudes of how artworks exist in exhibitionary time and space.425

424 Keith Moxey, Visual Time: Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 3. 425 Keith Moxey believes the artwork has the power and agency to break time by creating an immediate experience for the viewer. This implies the possibility of an aesthetic response across different points in time,

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The goals of this chapter are twofold. First, it aims to demonstrate how critical exhibitions produced alternative forms of exhibitionary time that ruptured the homogeneous timelessness of the modernist white cube. White cube spaces not only decontextualise artworks, but they also create a false consciousness of time as transcendent and universal, as if exhibitionary time did not have a variety of rhythms and tempos. Secondly, it seeks to locate and compare the contextual resonances of the strategies adopted by critical exhibitions and the artworks shown in these exhibitions via exhibition models and maps. These resonances also challenged the uniformity of a Western-centric notion of time. The contextual contemporaneity of critical exhibitions manifested a shared desire to rethink the concept of time, and to make exhibitionary time a form of time that critiqued the ‘homogeneous, empty’ time of Western modernity. ‘Heterochronic’ is a term deployed by Keith Moxey to underline the multiplicity of temporalities that may not be in step with Western modernity.426 The heterochrony of exhibitionary time is an antidote to ‘the denial of coevality’ as described by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other. Fabian uses this concept to refer to the condition whereby people outside Western modernism are condemned to be forever out of step with Europe and America.427 The idea of exhibitionary time allows for the Eurocentric notion of modernist time to explode into multiple, heterogeneous and non-linear time paths. These time paths are conceived as moments of disruptive collisions in the otherwise linear time of art history. Such moments of disruption might arise when an artwork is removed or damaged due to censorship or other reasons, or when a performative intervention punctures the otherwise homogeneous, modernist time. Walter Benjamin famously declared that the invention of the clock that measured time in hours, minutes and seconds gave rise to ‘homogeneous, empty time’. This notion of time was further universalised with the introduction of Greenwich Mean Time in 1898 as a global chronometric system.428 As part of his notion of the ‘altermodern’, David James called for the formulation of alternatives to challenge the institutional and discursive structures

including the past, the present and the future. This thesis proposes that exhibitions can also trigger aesthetic responses over time, especially when they are restaged or reconstructed. See Keith Moxey, Visual Time, p. 31. 426 Ibid., p. 3. 427 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 428 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), p. 395.

228 that privilege linear, Euro-American patterns of history. According to James: ‘This is why it becomes crucial to formulate other models of time for registering the patterns of artistic activities that can reflexively acknowledge the conceptual and institutional values we attribute to those patterns when tracing significant cultural change or unprecedented aesthetic emergence.’429 While exhibitionary time as a heterochronic concept is one way to rupture the ‘Eurochronology’, it is equally important, as Dilip Gaonkar has argued, to decentre and provincialise Europe by challenging the universal currency of Eurocentric modernism. This involves considering multiple and alternative forms of modernisms arising from different cultural, historical and economic contexts.430 Another way to challenge Eurochronology is a rethinking of synchrony and anachrony. To synchronise is to align something and to make it function in the same way as something else at an identical time, rate or pace. Synchronisation to clock time has been an effective machine for modernity, with the clock time dominating the geological, biological and cultural forms of time. The effect of synchronising to clock time is seen in the emergence of the capitalist form of time produced by the industrial revolution, whereby synchronisation effectively produced simultaneity. Elizabeth Freeman describes this as ‘the spectacle of mass simultaneity’ that, in its most extreme form, produced ‘aestheticized spectacles of people moving in concert that were so popular in the Weimar and Nazi eras, as symptomatic triumph of commodity capitalism’.431 The social effect of the synchrony of time is the homogenisation and flattening of diverse forms of time and, by extension, the temporalities of individuals. A large timescale, such as that of clock time in late modernism, has turned time itself into a capitalist mode of consumption. The notion of the contemporary in its etymological sense of ‘con-temporary’ suggests ‘joined times’, a sense of multiple temporalities happening simultaneously or in a single instant. Simultaneity as a product of synchronising all time serves capitalism in its endless search for new markets and diversification. But synchronising time to produce simultaneity also opens up possibilities for collective action. Calendars, the newspapers and social media platforms like Facebook synchronise time to produce the social, but they also have the potential to create

429 David James, ‘Modern/Altermodern’, in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, p. 77. 430 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 1-23. 431 Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Synchronic/Anachronic’, in Time: A Visual Vocabulary of the Present, p. 132.

229 simultaneity in action through collectivism. With this potential for collectivism through multiple temporalities, critical exhibitions could challenge Eurochronology. Linked to synchrony is anachrony, which seeks to evade the hegemony of Eurochronology by opening the potentials of a heterogeneous coevality based on diverse notions of time. Anachrony challenges the rational Eurochronological time by offering alternative notions of time, including the mental and meditative times that constitute exhibitionary time. The periodisation that privileges the Eurocentric linearity or the notion of time loops must be surpassed by alternative notions of time, such as exhibitionary time and its proposition that time is textured, stretched and inherently heterochronic. Exhibitionary time encompasses both synchronic and anachronic notions of time, so it produces simultaneities that intersect with multiplicity. It also evades chronometer-based capitalism and Eurochronology, and, by doing so, it fills the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ with a notion of time as a type of culture filled with creative impulses and rhythms. Exhibitionary time is set in the condition of contemporaneity, because the concept of time in exhibitions is understood differently in different social and cultural contexts.

The Heterochronic Event: Breaking the Timelessness of the White Cube

Exhibitionary time produced by critical exhibitions is a phenomenological turn towards the participants who view, experience, and critically engage with these exhibitions, including the artworks. The participants contribute to the creation of the exhibition as a heterochronic event of multiple temporalities. The white cube gallery space produces not only a homogeneous and decontextualised space, but also exhibitionary time that is unchangingly ‘timeless’. The white walls suspend the heterochrony of multiple temporalities for a singular and uniform sense of time. In a white cube space, time is frozen and static, as the viewer is put in a state of Kantian, distanced disinterestedness.432 The timelessness of the white cube is the embodiment of a Eurocentric modernist form of time. Claims for the ‘international’ as a universal idiom are embodied in the walls of the white cube. Local contexts are erased when artworks are displayed on uniform white walls. The white cube space is devoid of references to the outside world and separates the experience of art from the everyday

432 For Kant’s discussion on the notion of distanced disinterestedness, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

230 social, political and cultural conditions. The white cube space shapes how visitors interact with artworks in silence and distance, thereby influencing the way in which artworks and the exhibition are represented, aesthetically experienced, encountered and understood. Critical exhibitions consider the ‘homogeneous, empty’ timelessness of the white cube space as neither natural nor universal. Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa’s joint manifesto in their Towards a Mystical Reality exhibition in 1974 proposed a different notion of time that destabilised the timelessness of the white cube:

The realization that the ‘object’ is really an event draws the participant’s attention to the fact that it exists within a continuum just as he does. The realization that he and the ‘object’ are both processes existing in time results in a breaking down of the essential differences between the ‘thing’ and ‘the person’. In a sense, both are essentially energies in an infinite situation.433

The exhibition was sited in what is essentially a white cube space at the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in Kuala Lumpur, although the building itself consists of wooden, brown walls with tiled flooring (Figure 6.1). The fact that the artists titled the exhibition a Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences implied two things in relation to exhibitionary time. First, the exhibition was conceived as a documentation of experiences, which implied a notion of time that did not focus on the direct and immediate experience of encountering artworks in a gallery. Instead, it was a documentation of an event that had already happened before. The conflation of the past and the present, which alluded to an uncertain future, heightened and disoriented the viewer’s sense of time. The exhibition’s title also referred to the notion of multiple events. Exhibitionary time was not conceived in linear terms, as the everyday objects such as Coca-Cola bottles or tufts of hair were proposed as individual time capsules. The objects and their descriptive labels encouraged participants to use their imagination to construct different contexts and meanings. As illustrated by the exhibition model of TMR (Figure 6.2), participants experiencing this exhibition could have been encouraged to wander around the exhibitionary space as if it was a Zen garden. TMR’s intention to crack the homogeneous and empty timelessness of the white cube by conflating the participants, the initiators

433 Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, Towards a Mystical Reality (1974), p. 22.

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(Piyadasa and Esa) and the objects in a bounded continuum of time, which was subject to individual experiences and interpretations. TMR is an example of how critical exhibitions presented not a singular temporality, but multiple temporalities within an exhibition space that itself was analogous to a white cube. Thus, it ruptured the rigid timeframe of the white cube from within. Like other critical exhibitions, TMR evaporated the boundaries between the participant and the object that co-existed in a specific time. It produced a form of exhibitionary time that exploded into the multiple sites of object-participant ‘micro-time’ events. It was a heterochronic event, which produced multiple forms of exhibitionary time. The Time Show organised by The Artists Village (TAV) was a 24-hour multidisciplinary event that took place from 31 December 1989, 9 a.m. to 1 January 1990, 9 a.m. The programme of The Time Show at The Artists Village (hereafter abbreviated as The Time Show) declared optimistically that ‘Time-based work and installations are most suitable at this precious moment. The programme will include Performance Art, Dance, Music, Poetry, Installation, Talks and other Time-based work’ (Figure 6.3).434 The schedule of some of the events changed throughout the programme, which demonstrates the methodological need for oral interviews to ascertain the accuracy of written documents. For instance, Jailani (Zai) Kuning’s work at 2 a.m. was replaced by Lee Wen’s poetry performance.435 Closer scrutiny of The Time Show’s programme reveals different modes of heterochronic events. The events included a ‘Talk about “The Drawing Show” at The Artists Village’ by Tang Da Wu, impromptu events, performance art like Red Cat by Wong Shih Yaw, ‘Songs and Poetry’ by Jailani Kuning, and collaborative dancing in Concrete Dancing led by Tang Da Wu. An exhibition map of The Time Show (Figure 6.4) reveals how most of the performances were concentrated in two outdoor sites, one of which was near Block C (an open courtyard area), and the other next to Block A (the ruins of a neighbour’s house). These two sites were chosen, as they were open, flat areas suitable for larger-scale collaborative performances. However, there were also site-specific performances, such as Tang Da Wu’s Dancing by the Ponds (highlighted in blue on the exhibition map), which was the first performance to open The Time Show at 9 a.m. Tang performed with fishes in the fish ponds located at the outskirts of the farm.

434 The Artists Village, The Time Show at The Artists Village programme, 1989. 435 Interview with Koh Nguang How, 13 March 2018 (Singapore).

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Compared to TMR, the events at The Time Show were not based on the temporal relationship between the object and the participant. Instead, the events at The Time Show produced a heterochronic exhibitionary form by enabling participants to experience the different timescales of events. Tang’s Dancing by the Ponds was immersed in the natural environment of the fish ponds and surrounded by vegetation at the fringes of the farm. It made the participants aware of nature’s time as an alternative notion of temporality. Other temporalities ranged from a short song and poetry by Jailani Kuning (Figure 6.5) at 2 a.m. and a collective ritual like ‘A Midnight Prayer’ (Figure 6.6) at midnight, to Koh Nguang How’s There is a Hole in the Sky (Figure 6.7), which was installed at 8 a.m. as an ongoing, site- specific installation. These events were scheduled in a chronometric manner bound to the clock time, but they challenged the universal form of modernist time and its flow of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years in two ways. First, The Time Show was a 24-hour event that straddled two years, 1989 and 1990, breaking the time boundary of exhibitions and events that tend to be organised according to calendar year. The Chiang Mai Social Installation (CMSI) was similar, as it was conceived as a festival straddling 1992 and 1993. While The Time Show scheduled its events largely according to the hour, This Time 12 o’clock Comes Later than Scheduled by Khairul and the latecomers (Figure 6.8) deliberately stretched the notion of midnight as something that arrived later. It expanded the rigid, rational and calculated chronometric time and produced a heterochronic exhibitionary time instead. Second, ‘time-based’ was used as a term by TAV to describe the events happening in The Time Show. It suggested the potentiality of each event to produce its own temporality in a way similar to TMR. Alternative notions of time in relation to language (e.g., poetry), action (e.g., performance art), rituals (e.g., prayers) and even time itself (e.g., the geological time of There is a Hole in the Sky) dismantled the homogeneous and universal chronometric time.

The Ephemeral and Elusive Exhibitionary Time

Simon Soon recognised how ‘these works [in TMR] played out the now familiar idea of institutional critique by deconstructing the ideological underpinning of the exhibition space

233 itself’.436 As a way of institutionally critiquing the art museum, everyday objects such as mosquito coils, cans of paint, and furniture were brought into the white cube space. They blurred the boundaries between art and the everyday by provoking the participants to form contextual and temporal connections with these objects. In the exhibition space, they were not objects of utility, as they were originally intended to function in their usual context; rather, they were tools for reflexive meditation on the temporal relation between the participant and the object. The artworks in TMR produced multiple temporal entry points as time capsules that could be accessed by the participant, depending on his or her subjective imagination in relation to the object. Burnt-out mosquito coils used to keep away mosquitoes on the night of 25th March 1974 (Figure 6.9) is a case in point. The lengthy title included information about the time the mosquito coils were actually used, ‘on the night of 25th March 1974’. The objects documented an event that had passed. This was one temporal entry point into this work. There were, however, other temporal entry points that enabled participants to produce multiple, subjective narratives, such as narratives around the questions of what could have happened on that night when the mosquito coils were used, who was using them, and where. The list of temporal entry points was endless. The present in which the participant was engaging with the burnt-out mosquito coils was suggestive of their past value, like a time machine that prompted participants to ask what possible actions could have taken place with these objects. It was not surprising that the burnt-out mosquito coils were placed in close proximity to Two half-drank Coca-Cola bottles (Figure 6.10) and Randomly collected sample of human hair collected from a barber shop in Petaling Jaya (Figure 6.11) to form a triptych of everyday objects (Figure 6.12). Their ambiguous temporalities slipped between a documentation of the past and their potentialities for the future, thus provoking participants to be aware of multiple temporalities. Empty bird cage after release of Bird at 2.46PM on Monday 10th June 1974 (Fig. 6.13) presented the most challenging heterochronic work with a specific time and date – 2.46 p.m. on 10 June 1974 – stated in its caption. The temporal entry points of the empty birdcage filled the homogeneous and empty time of the white cube. Its temporal references to art history included the birdcage as a dominant motif in the paintings of the Nanyang

436 Simon Soon, ‘An Empty Canvas on which Many Shadows have Already Fallen’ in Narratives in Malaysian Art Vol. 2 (Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt, 2013), p. 63.

234 artists. For instance, Cheong Soo Pieng’s Tropical Life (Figure 6.14) was a symbol of nature trapped by a rapidly urbanising environment. Other temporal entry points included the specific time, which begged the question of who recorded the event so precisely, what happened to the bird, what was going to happen to the empty birdcage, and what other birds might inhabit this cage in the future. These endless temporal entry points produced an ambiguous heterochrony of exhibitionary time. The potential subjective narratives from participants that slipped between the future, the present and the past were numerous. These slippages of temporality extended to the utility of these objects. Some of these objects, like the empty chair or the potted plant, could potentially be reused. However, there were also other objects, like the human hair and burned mosquito coils, which suggested the impossibility of returning to their original functions. Playing with these ambiguities of time and utility opened different ways of critically thinking about temporalities and the utility of objects. The ephemeral and the elusive as symptoms of heterochronic exhibitionary time produced by critical exhibitions and their artworks took a different turn in the critical exhibitions of The United Artists’ Front of Thailand (TUAFT) and the Kaisahan. TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-Out exhibition of 1975 and the Kaisahan posters and mural projects broke out of the white cube space into public spaces (Figure 6.15). The TUAFT billboards that occupied the centre of the Rajadamnern Avenue were ephemeral in the sense that they were exposed to the environmentin a public street, and therefore never meant to be permananetly displayed. None of the billboards have survived, as they were attacked and destroyed by politically opposing forces. The intervention of these billboards at Rajadamnern Avenue temporally altered a street that was symbolically connected to democracy and freedom due to its proximity to the Democracy Monument, as seen in the exhibition model of the Billboard Cut-Out exhibition (Figure 6.16). The Democracy Monument symbolised Thailand’s commitment to democracy and freedom and continues to be an important rallying point for demonstrations and protests. The intervention created a form of heterochronic exhibitionary time that transformed the street space from one in which time moved quickly as a conduit for vehicular transport, to one in which time was forcibly slowed down to enable people to engage with the messages conveyed by the billboard cut-outs. In the same way, the posters produced by the Kaisahan and plastered onto walls in public spaces demanded a shift in temporality whereby walls were no longer

235 just barriers, but rather served as momentary exhibitionary sites that produced their own exhibitionary time. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey, one of the key TUAFT artists who participated in the 1975 Billboard Cut-Out exhibition, recalled how using the visual language of capitalism that was manifest on large billboards all over Thailand was appropriated by the artists to critique the very structures of capitalism.437 The fast-paced temporality of capitalism seen in the quick-changing images of commercial advertisements on television as a form of ‘commercial time’ shares affinities with the ephemerality of the billboard cut-outs that were never meant to last. The artists called for the participants to act and attempt to change the social, economic and political conditions of the present in an increasingly fast paced society driven by capitalism. They produced powerful images that represented democracy and freedom from martial law as part of the larger student movement that started with the First Quarter Storm of 1970. Heterochronic exhibitionary times that ruptured the homogeneous and empty time of the white cube challenged the modernist notion of time as static and universal. Critical exhibitions made their own forms of exhibitionary time that critiqued and expanded the very notion of time through their sensitivity to the existence of various temporalities that were out of step with Western notions of modernity.

Collectivity: The Promise of Synchrony

The synchronisation of time into a universal and homogeneous form of modernist time results in the spectacle of mass simultaneity, which in turn feeds commodity capitalism. Social media is an example of synchronisation that leads to a simultaneity of action by a networked community. Synchronisation may produce uniformity, but it can also lead to the mobilisation of a community. For example, people may react simultaneously to the news of the sudden death of a celebrated opposition politician, and then be galvanised through social media and other platforms to protest in the streets due to rumours of a possible assassination.438 The synchronisation of time brought about by technology such as social media has closed distances of time and space. It can increase the simultaneity of action via a

437 Video Interview with Sinsawat Yodbangtoey conducted by Gridthiya Gaweewong commissioned by the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea. 438 Fake news on social media or Internet platforms spreads in the same way.

236 heightened sense of collectivity that could potentially serve commodity capitalism as much as it could undermine it. I will argue that critical exhibitions harnessed collective action that produced synchronic time as a mode of resistance against the dominance of a homogeneous capitalisation of time. The potential for collectivity through synchronisation and simultaneity was important for critical exhibitions. Artist collectives were instrumental in the making of critical exhibitions. It was precisely the potential of synchronic time that enabled artist collectives to bring together students, communities and people from different fields of cultural production. These different groups collaborated in making critical exhibitions that synchronised time for simultaneous action. The CMSI brought together a strong variety of participants, many of whom were not artists. Although CMSI was led by artists like Mit Jai Inn and Uthit Atimana, it involved monks, students, academics, yoga teachers and almost anyone who wanted to participate. CMSI’s propensity for synchrony could be seen in how the organisers worked with monks to obtain permission to install artworks at religious sites such as temples and cemeteries. At the same time, they collaborated with communities at other sites, including commercial ones. For instance, they worked with vendors and displayed their works at markets. The social as the unifying concept of CMSI synchronised time for the duration of the exhibition and galvanised the city to be simultaneously involved in various types of creative production in public spaces. TUAFT was equally successful in harnessing synchronic time. The collective brought together fine art students for painting the billboards in the 1975 Billboard Cut-Out exhibition. The socio-political motivation was that of anti-American Imperialism. The Vietnam War and the military dictatorship in Thailand, which had received substantial military assistance in the form of financial grants from America since 1965, fuelled anti- American sentiments.439 These sentiments provided the backdrop for the TUAFT Billboard Cut-Out exhibition. The working classes contributed in their own ways by helping to install loudspeakers for the billboard cut-outs (Figure 6.17). The loudspeakers served as a tool to convey TUAFT’s message of making art for the people as well as for playing Luk Thung, a form of Thai country music with lyrics about country rural life sung in a distinctive rural

439 See Arne Kislenko, ‘A Not So Silent Partner: Thailand's Role in Covert Operations, Counter-Insurgency, and the Wars in Indochina’, The Journal of Conflict Studies, 24.1 (2004).

237 accent. Also including Western instruments like the electric guitar and brass instruments, Luk Thung was popularised in the northeastern region of Thailand, far from the political- economic centre of Bangkok. The exhibition model shows how playing Luk Thung and positioning the many billboard cut-outs in a straight line right in the political heart of Bangkok would have disrupted the space and sound of urbanised Bangkok (Figure 6.18). The playing of country music in the middle of Rajdamnern Avenue also caused temporal-spatial disruption by bringing the rural with its slower tempo of life into the urbanised city. GSRB’s first exhibition in 1975 was a mixture of resistance to both the military authoritarianism and the conservatism of the art academy in Indonesia. Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia narrowly defined art along the lines of painting, sculpture and printmaking, while favouring depoliticised forms of art such as abstraction. Unlike TUAFT and the Kaisahan, GSRB was driven only by artists. They produced works with significantly less involvement from other communities in society. Harsono’s Rantai Yang Santai (The Relaxed Chain, 1975) (Figure 6.19) used everyday objects like cushions and chains to convey the notion that Indonesian citizens had become comfortable with the erosion of their civil liberties by the New Order. The desire to communicate artistic and socio-political ideas to the broader Indonesian public was seen in GSRB’s decision to organise one of its group exhibitions at the Taman Ismail Marzuki, then the country’s most prominent space for cultural activities.

Anachrony: Mystical and Mental Exhibitionary Time

Towards a Mystical Reality unpacked the seeming neutrality of the exhibition space. By bringing daily objects into a sanctified space that framed them as art, the exhibition of these objects provoked the viewer to consider our way of looking at reality not through scientific reasoning but through an understanding of time as a passage transacting from one moment (the past) to the next (the present), colluding in what is termed a ‘mystical’ apprehension.440

The exhibition space of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, described by Soon as a ‘sanctified space’, was in essence a white cube space. TMR unpacked the white cube space’s timelessness and homogeneous universality and proposed an alternative way of experiencing and conceptualising time. TMR effectively harnessed the spatio-temporal

440 Soon, ‘An Empty Canvas’, p. 63.

238 potentialities of the white cube by freeing it from its chronometric cage and expanding it into mystical and mental timeframes. Modernist chronometric time as measured and calculated by clocks presented an antithesis to the ‘mystical apprehension’ of TMR, which deliberately sought to dismantle the hegemony of chronometric time. The Western-centric notion of time denied the coevality of art and art history outside Euro-America. The artists aimed at advancing the alternative concept of an anachronic exhibitionary time, which challenged the Western-centric constructions of time. This was declared in their manifesto in bold terms:

IT SEEMS NECESSARY AT THIS POINT TO STATE THAT ALL OUR WORKS, WHILST REMAINING STATIC ARE NEVERTHELESS ‘KINETIC’ FOR THEY ENCOMPASS TIME/SPACE CONSIDERATIONS. THE TIME FACTOR IN OUR WORKS IS VERY MUCH A ‘MENTAL’ TIME, THE EXPERIENCE OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION EXISTS IN THE MIND OF THE PARTICIPANT. THE FORMS TRANSCEND THEIR ‘OBJECT-NESS’ AND EXIST PRIMARILY AS DOCUMENTATIONS OF ‘EVENTS’. WE ARE AS SUCH NOT INTERESTED IN THE FORMAL AND AESTHETIC CONSIDERATIONS. WE ARE INTERESTED IN THE PROCESSES THAT THEY ARE. WHEREAS THE WESTERN ARTIST APPROACHES ART IN TERMS OF ‘SPATIO-TEMPORAL/SENSORIAL’ CONSIDERATIONS, WE ARE APPROACHING ART FROM A ‘MENTAL/MEDITATIVE/MYSTICAL’ STANDPOINT.441

The notion of time as ‘MENTAL/MEDITATIVE/MYSTICAL’ requires further unpacking. The use of the term ‘mystical’ can be construed as a strategy or tactic by the artists to counter the hegemony of the ‘scientific’ basis of modernist chronometric time. The TMR manifesto expanded on the idea of the mystical by revealing its sources from Daoism and Zen Buddhism, especially D.T. Suzuki’s metaphysical concept of an object ‘as an event and not as a thing or substance’. This was based on Kegon philosophy, which, according to Suzuki, was the climax of Buddhist thought.442 Objects like the half-drunk Coca-Cola bottles in TMR were like time capsules, which produced their own exhibitionary time that could neither be measured scientifically nor applied universally:

The western artist’s attempt to create works which exist ‘within the viewers own space’ then must be quite redundant to the oriental artist. Similarly, the commonly held notion amongst so many ‘Kinetic’ artists that

441 Simon Soon, ‘An Empty Canvas’, p. 63 442 D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series (New York: Grove Press, 1927), p. 59.

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their works are only active when ‘switched on’ would seem very naïve to the Taoist. Whereas the western artist has tended to envisage time through ‘physical’ action, the oriental artist feels it mentally. It is essentially a very metaphysical concept of time that the oriental artist deals with!443

Here, Piyadasa and Esa marked out the stark differences between physical and metaphysical concepts of time. Eurocentric methods of measuring time are teleological, linear and can manifest themselves in physical forms. In kinetic art, for example, time is made visible in the movement of kinetic sculptures, which can be controlled by switching them on or off.444 For TMR, time could not manifest itself physically or scientifically. Instead, the artists focused on ‘“mental time” that cannot be measured for all measurements, can only remain relative!’445 This relativity is part of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, which views all objects as existing within an interrelated time continuum. At the same time, TMR’s anti-Western discourse could be seen as a form of reverse orientalism, or a process of self-orientalisation that feeds on essentialism. Although this criticism of TMR should be taken seriously, it remains the case that the artists took a rhetorical, binary position to subvert the dominance of Western notions of time and art-making. For TMR, ‘mystical time’, as a form of exhibitionary time in the realm of the mind, was the antithesis to the rationalism of the West. It was a form of mental time that was anachronic and open to the possibility of heterogeneous coevality. It escaped the rationalisation of time by modernity and exploded the homogeneous timelessness of the white cube into multiple temporalities.

Anachrony: Between the Mystical and the Meditative

TMR advanced metaphysical time as an anachronic form of exhibitionary time, which was offered as an alternative to the singularity of synchronic time and its rationalisation by the logic of commodity capitalism. Another form of anachronic exhibitionary time grounded in the meditative Buddhist system of thought was proposed by Po Po’s 1987 Untitled exhibition in Yangon. A comparison between the artworks shown in the two critical

443 Piyadasa and Esa, ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’, p. 20. 444 Abdullah and Chung, ‘Re-Examining the Objects of Mystical Reality’, pp. 203–17. 445 Piyadasa and Esa, ‘Towards a Mystical Reality’, p. 19.

240 exhibitions will reveal the potential of plural forms of exhibitionary time to undermine the modernist time of the white cube. Although Po Po’s Untitled exhibition did not produce a manifesto as like TMR had done, it succeeded in shaking up the Yangon art world. Ma Thanegi recalled Po Po’s artworks and how ‘the sincerity of their existence and the simplicity of their creation awed the viewers, and silenced the older generation of critics who were usually highly voluble about the “craziness” of “maw-dun” (modern) art.’446 Instead of deploying the strategy of provocation and polemics through the art manifesto, Po Po used a quiet and meditative approach to art-making. Nevertheless, his aims to advance an alternative approach to time were as ambitious as the goals of TMR’s project. Po Po showed a series of four paintings, Apo (water), Parvathi (earth), Tejo (fire) and Vayo (air), which appeared to adopt the visual language of geometric abstract painting at the level of formalism. In fact, Po Po sought to transcend the abstract with the metaphysical. These four paintings were shown together on the same wall in the exhibition space (Figure 6.20), demonstrating the artist’s intent to let the participants encounter all four works together as a group. The paintings represented the four fundamental elements of rupa, from which our bodies are formed. These elements are based on Buddha’s teachings encoded in the Abhidhamma, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism. The rupa, or matter, comprises the kamma (past thoughts), citta (present thoughts), utu (climate), and ahara (nutrients that one consumes). Both kamma and citta are mental states, while utu and ahara relate to our physical bodies. This underlines the importance of our mental state: although the body deteriorates over time, the mind is free from the physical body at the point of death, and ready then to be reborn. Here lie the ontological similarities between TMR and Po Po’s Untitled exhibitions, since both critical exhibitions sought to produce forms of exhibitionary time that were metaphysical. For Po Po, the four paintings were metaphysical mindscapes allowing the participant to enter a meditative state that transcended synchronic time and chronometricity. Seen together, these paintings, which appeared to emanate light like geometric abstract paintings, were predicated on Buddhist systems of thought, thus bearing connections with TMR’s turn to Daoism and Zen Buddhism.

446 Ma Thanegi, ‘After the Exile: Art in Myanmar’, p. 14.

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Both TMR and Untitled produced multiple forms of metaphysical and anachronic exhibitionary time. Their turn to anachronic rather than synchronic time installed time as non-linear and heterogeneous. In TMR, Empty canvas on which many shadows have already fallen. 1974. 36’ X 36’ (Figure 6.21) amplified the critical exhibition’s focus on heterogeneous time by foregrounding the impossibility of keeping track of the number of times that shadows had fallen on the canvas. The shadows that could have been cast on the empty canvas alluded to a time continuum that defied measurement. The geometric triangular shapes of Tejo (Figure 6.22) resonated with fire, the elemental form that embodies a kinetic, upward-surging energy. The sensorial rejected by TMR was not entirely abandoned by Po Po. In Tejo, Po Po sought to achieve the higher aim of developing and controlling the mind over the body, and purging one’s mind of akusala cetasika, or unwholesome thoughts that ultimately lead to malicious actions. A comparison of TMR and Untitled provides insights into how critical exhibitions produced anachronic and heterogeneous concepts of exhibitionary time, based on metaphysical time and opposed to the rational and homogeneous timelessness of the white cube. The artworks shown in these critical exhibitions also amplified the potentialities of anachrony as a productive way of challenging synchronic time, a form of Eurochronology in its privileging of the scientific rationalisation of time. Both critical exhibitions chose to inhabit white cube spaces precisely to subvert its ‘universality’. The exhibitions proposed alternative ways for the participant to engage with art and the exhibitionary through metaphysical, mental and meditative states of mind. The turn to the subjective and the individual gave agency to the artwork, the participant and the critical exhibition as viable critical forms, capable of generating multiple temporalities and hence realities that were not constrained by the singular time event. Instead, they were heterochronic events that occurred and existed within the viewer’s own mental time space.

Anachrony: The Durational

Dear Mr Piya,

When I open my mouth, people say I spout profanities.

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When I drop my pants (sorry, Siti, ‘trousers’) people say I ‘prostitute dignity’.447

These are the opening sentences of Salleh ben Joned’s open letter to Redza Piyadasa that was published in the journal Dewan Sastra. It was one in a series of published letters between Siti Zainon and Piyadasa expressing their views on TMR. In Siti’s review of TMR, she recounted Salleh’s performative intervention during TMR’s opening when he went into a corner of the exhibition, unzipped his trousers and urinated on a catalogue of TMR, which contained Piyadasa and Esa’s manifesto.448 Siti described Salleh’s gesture as a form of prostituting his dignity. Piyadasa was furious at what he perceived as a slight on a serious endeavour, and he dismissed Salleh’s gesture as irrelevant. Salleh published a rejoindering response to the letters between Piyadasa and Siti to explain in his letter how his very gesture ‘saved’ the exhibition:

The purpose of your exhibition, Piya (let’s just say that the goal can be achieved according to your concepts and plans), can only be saved by a particular gesture such as the one I had made. A gesture in an ironic- humorous tone and based on something really concrete. Actually, you should thank me for my ‘impudence’!449

Salleh explained how his gesture was imbued with the Zen philosophy of humour and irony, and that it ultimately produced a moment of reality based on a concrete action. He went on to question TMR’s confusion about reality and art, as he believed the two could not possibly be the same:

Piya, you want art, but you’re confused about art; you want reality but you are confused about reality. Reality? Remember the stream of my piss – the one that celebrated the culmination of reality; between refinement and the coarse, the spiritual and the vulgar, the mystical and the concrete; it is the consequence of the Zen which you so look highly to. So Piya (and Ms Siti), when I took off my pants in that historical exhibition of yours, I wasn’t prostituting my dignity. In fact, I was revealing reality.450

447 Salleh Ben Joned, ‘Urination and Art’, Dewan Sastera, July 1975. 448 There have been conflicting accounts of the exact location where Salleh ben Joned urinated, but most accounts indicate that it was somewhere in the exhibition itself. 449 Salleh Ben Joned, ‘Urination and Art’. 450 Ibid.

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Salleh’s gesture opened another form of exhibitionary time, as the arc of his piss touched the TMR catalogue, and thus connected the durational aspect of the catalogue to biological time. The very act of urination as part of the ‘biological clock’ that determines normal body functions introduced an anachronic mode of time, the biological, to the already heterogeneous temporalities that existed in TMR. The durational extending to the time scales of nature was another example of how anachrony could generate alternative, ephemeral forms of exhibitionary time. This includes Salleh’s provocative action that has now become canonised in Malaysia’s art history. The durational aspect of natural time or temporalities of nature also emerged in The Time Show organised by TAV. Tang Da Wu’s Sunrise at Vegetable Farm (Figure 6.23), performed on 1 January 1990 at 6.30 a.m., harnessed the resources of nature to make a performance. It used the light from the sunrise to cast a shadow on the screen. Working with nature to make collaborative art was a mode of artistic practice already found in Tang’s earlier works, such as Product of the Rain and Me and Product of the Sun and Me. Tang’s Sunrise at Vegetable Farm was a truly time-based work that had to be performed in the morning when the sun was rising. The sunrise at 6.30 a.m. itself challenged the chronometric measurement of clock time, as the sunrise was closely tied to traditional notions of duration. The day starts with a period for the sun to rise above the horizon, which also regulates the biological clocks of plants and animals alike. Tang’s ‘collaboration’ with the sunrise returned viewers to their biological clocks that were attuned to nature rather than to capitalist time. His time-based performance intervened and created a temporal rupture within The Time Show, similar to Salleh’s gesture in TMR. These moments of action contested the hegemony of chronometric time by employing the cyclical biological duration from sunrise to sunset as another form of exhibitionary time. Cyclical time as a form of durational time is resonant of Po Po’s Untitled critical exhibition that produced works similar to TMR and The Time Show, describing time in a seemingly chronometric way as seen in the exhibition’s artwork titles. For example, 6.00 a.m. (Figure 6.24) was part of a series of time paintings, each titled after an even-hour time sequence of two hours (i.e., 12 a.m., 2 a.m., 4 a.m., 6 a.m., and so on). As clearly discerned in the exhibition model (Figure 6.25), these time-based works were displayed as a group, indicating their conceptual connections as a coherent body of work. 6.00 a.m. stood out, as it consisted of pieces of wood attached to the painting surface, which threatened to fall out

244 of the flat painting into the exhibitionary space. The entire series of ‘time works’, like Tang’s Sunrise at Vegetable Farm, proposed a durational mode of cyclical time that aligned with nature’s rhythmic pulses of day and night. Nature and its own cyclical rhythm that follows the impulses of day and night, or the biological clock that skips to the beat of people’s bodily tempo and temporality, offer heterogeneous forms of exhibitionary time. They multiply the possibilities of temporalities, going beyond the homogeneity, universality and timelessness of the white cube. Critical exhibitions invest agency in the artworks, participants and the exhibitions themselves, and they produce forms of exhibitionary time that play on anachronic concepts of time. The propensity for both synchronic and anachronic time to produce a constellation of heterochronic time marks the art historical significance of critical exhibitions in their attempts to decentre Eurochronology and offer experiences of different timescales.

Anachrony: The Coevality of Contested Times

The generation of anachronic time through the mystical, meditational and durational modes of exhibitionary time has undermined the dominance of the timelessness of the white cube. As Freeman has observed: ‘Anachrony figures the possibility of time escaping the rationalisation and calculability of rational thought that modernity has imposed on it. It opens up the possibility of coevality.’451 Coevality rejects the notion that art produced outside Euro-America is derivative of modernity; instead, it looks for a shared contemporaneity. This section locates coevalities of multiple temporalities in a diversity of cultures in Southeast Asia through analysis of the critical exhibition. Anachrony is, in a way, aligned with ‘wrong’ time. This wrong time is an anti- modernist time that does not accede to linear, scientific, rational and universal time. The timelessness of the white cube is the result of the constructed universality and the cultural and historical decontextualisation of time. Anachronisms in coevality, as manifested in the contestations between different times in the artworks of critical exhibitions, produce entry points that enable a shared contemporaneity to be imagined. They do not demand homogeneity; rather, they promote heterogeneous concepts of the temporal.

451 Freeman, ‘Synchrony/Anachrony’, p. 79.

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Discarded silk-screen which was used to make many beautiful prints (Figure 6.26) in TMR proposed the possibility of anachronic time or multiple temporalities. The past in the form of a discarded silk-screen that had produced many ‘beautiful prints’ carried potentialities for both the present and the future. The silk-screen could be reused to make new prints as a form of creative potentiality. Subsequently, the prints could be recuperated into art objects themselves within the TMR exhibition. The latent creative energy of the silk- screen was an event itself, one that embodied a continuum of potentialities to make art across multiple temporalities. The agency of the individual to activate the discarded silk- screen by reusing it to make prints in the present and the future suggested the possibilities for multiple temporalities. Alternatively, the past agency of the silk-screen that had made many ‘beautiful prints’ was in tension with its status as a discarded object that could fail to fulfil its potential to continue making prints in the present or the future. This tension between contesting temporalities and latent potentialities pointed towards a heterochronic concept of time. Jim Supangkat’s Ken Dedes (Figure 6.27), which was shown in the 1975 GSRB critical exhibition, can shine comparative light on Discarded silk-screen which was used to make many beautiful prints in TMR. Ken Dedes provided contesting temporalities with the historical and mythical Queen Ken Dedes, who was the consort of King Ken Arok and the mythical ‘origin’ of all subsequent Javanese Kings of the Rajasa dynasty. She became the embodiment of perfect feminine beauty, and it was foretold that any man who married her would be king. The paragon of beauty in Ken Dedes was seen in the top sculptural bust, while the bottom was flat and graphical, with the figure’s breasts almost pornographically exposed and her pubic hair erotically revealed through an unzipped pair of modern jeans. The sacredness of ‘Ken Dedes’ as the perfect beauty was brought into stark and uncompromising contrast with the profanity of the modern, including the crass pursuit of eroticism. The contesting temporalities in Discarded silk-screen which was used to make many beautiful prints revealed how anachrony could generate a heterogeneity of temporalities that harboured the potentialities of art-making. Ken Dedes deployed the traditional and mythological in tension with the perceived Western cultural decadence in products such as

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Hollywood movies, which were part of everyday reality in Indonesia in the 1970s.452 It is this contestation of temporalities that defined anachrony, as the linearity of time itself was forcefully interrupted and ruptured to insert the possibilities of heterochronic time. Whereas Ken Dedes employed tensions between the sacred and profane to create ‘time-frictions’ or temporal ruptures, TUAFT’s Untitled (Figure 6.28), a billboard cut-out from its 1975 critical exhibition, used the different strategy of deploying politically charged images from the media to create temporal ruptures. In Untitled, the image of an American soldier in the midst of throwing a grenade manifested a powerful image of violence in war. This particular image of the American soldier (Figure 6.29) who was about to throw his grenade was taken from the context of the Vietnam War. It popularly circulated in Thailand amid growing resistance to the political intervention by the US, which was seeking Thailand’s support for the war effort in Vietnam. It embodied a sense of contemporaneity in the opposition to perceived American imperialism. This was reflected in the image of the soldier in the act of throwing a grenade at the Thai national flag, the symbol of Thailand’s independence, unity and freedom. The flag was wrapped around what looked like a coffin. The Thai national flag was a symbol of a universal time that would not cease as long as Thailand as a nation existed. The temporality of a violent act in the historical context of the Vietnam War clashed with the temporality of the universal symbol of the golden bowl, a sacred object used in Thai Buddhist and royal ceremonies to hold Buddhist relics. The golden bowl was used to hold the first constitution signed by Rama VII in 1932, which declared Thailand a constitutional monarchy (Figure 6.30). The golden bowl as a symbol of democracy also sits on top of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok (Figure 6.31). In Untitled, the ‘death’ of the Thai nation was symbolised not only by the Thai national flag wrapped around a coffin, but also by presenting a black bowl instead of a golden one on top of it. By using popular, profane images of contemporaneity in tension with the sacredness of the Thai national flag and the golden bowl, Untitled employed strategies similar to those of Ken Dedes. The universal time of the sacred is contested by the contemporaneity of popular images constructed by the media. Like Discarded silk-screen which was used to make many

452 The opening up to Hollywood movies, which contributed to the demise of local film-making in Indonesia during Suharto’s New Order, is analysed in Krishna Sen’s Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order (London: Zed Books, 1994).

247 beautiful prints, it also used competing temporalities to create temporal frictions that challenged the dominance of a singular concept of time. The politics of anachrony were apparent in these and other artworks in critical exhibitions across Southeast Asia. They demonstrated time-frictions between the contemporaneous, the historical, and the mythical; between the sacred and the profane; and between the past, the present and the future. These time-frictions, far from generating chaos, produced multiple entry points for breaking the dominance of the homogeneous and empty time exemplified by the timelessness of the white cube. These heterogeneous concepts of exhibitionary time in critical exhibitions, including metaphysical, natural forms of time, exploded the homogeneity and universality of modernist time. Such challenges to Eurocentric notions of time were postcolonial strategies adopted by critical exhibitions within the broader context of decolonisation in the Southeast Asian region.

Conclusion: A New Time Consciousness

The critical exhibition as a vehicle for changing subjectivity opened up singular and universal time to heterochronic notions of time. New subjectivities manifested themselves synchronically in collectivism and anachronically as the results of fractured time. The desire to pursue alternative timeframes and timescales through concepts and practices of art- making merged with the ways in which art was exhibited. The very idea of time in making and exhibiting art was reconsidered, in order to demonstrate that the timeless and transcendental character of modernist time was a form of false consciousness. Piyadasa’s Entrypoints, which bore the text ‘ARTWORKS DO NOT EXIST IN TIME, THEY HAVE MULTIPLE “ENTRY POINTS”’ could also be read as ‘art exhibitions do not exist in time, they have multiple entry points’.453 Critical exhibitions never existed in a singular time; rather, they continuously sought multiple entry points into a variety of socio-cultural contexts, systems of thought and temporalities.

453 This is a paraphrase of Piyadasa’s reading of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).

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Figure 6.1

Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, “Mystical Reality” (1974). View of the TMR exhibition held at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kuala Lumpur. Image from: Vision and Idea: Relooking Modern Malaysian Art (Kuala Lumpur National Art Gallery, 1994)

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Figure 6.2

Exhibition model of TMR showing the descriptive artwork labels accompanying the objects. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 6.3

The Time Show programme has been edited after cross checking with Koh Nguang How and Low Eng Teong who were both participants and artists in this critical exhibition. This cross checking is necessary to reflect the spontaneous on-site changes on that day to the programme itself, and to minimise the possibility of bias. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

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Figure 6.4

Map of The Time Show on the layout of The Artists Village at 61-b Lorong Gambas Ulu Sembawang in consultation with Koh Nguang How, TAV artist and archivist. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.5

2am, Poetry Reading by Jailani Kuning, performance 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

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Figure 6.6

12 Midnight, New Year Prayer, various participants, performance, 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.7

8am, There is a Hole in the Sky by Koh Nguang How, installation, 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

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Figure 6.8

12.30am, “This Time 12 O’clock Comes Later Than Scheduled” by Khairul & The Latecomers, performance, 1990, 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.9

Burnt-out mosquito coils used to keep away mosquitoes on the night of 25th March 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

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Figure 6.10

Two half-drunk Coca-Cola bottles, 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 6.11

Randomly collected sample of human hair collected from a barber shop in Petaling Jaya, 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

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Figure 6.12

Empty bird-cage after release of Bird at 2.46PM on Monday 10th June 1974, 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue

Figure 6.13

Detail of TMR exhibition model. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 6.14

Cheong Soo Pieng, Tropical Life, 1959, Chinese ink and gouache on Chinese rice paper, 43.6 x 92cm. Image from: Pameran Retrospektif Pelukis-Pelukis Nanyang, eds. T.K. Sabapathy and Redza Piyadasa (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara, 1979)

Figure 6.15

TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-out exhibition in 1975 showing the procession performed by its participants before installing the billboards between the lampposts along Rajadamnern Ave. Image from: Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, 1974–1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con-tempus, 1994).

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Figure 6.16

Exhibition model of TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-out exhibition, Constructed by Seng Yu Jin and Denise Ho, Scale 1:25, 2018. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 6.17

TUAFT Billboard cut-out with loud speakers playing Luk Thung (Thai country music). Image from: Building and Weaving the 20 Year Art Legacy: The United Artists’ Front of Thailand, 1974–1994, ed. Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (Bangkok: Con-tempus, 1994).

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Figure 6.18

Exhibition model of TUAFT showing the billboard cut-outs displayed in a row along Rajadamnern Avenue from the perspective of the Democracy Monument. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 6.19

FX Harsono, The Relaxed Chain, 1975/1995, Steel chain and mattress, 51.2 x 97.4 x 67.5 cm, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

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Figure 6.20

Exhibition Model of Po Po’s 1987 Untitled. Apo (water), Parvathi (earth), Tejo (fire) and Vayo (air) are shown on the wall at the end. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 6.21

Empty canvas on which many shadows have already fallen, 1974, 36’ X 36’, canvas, Collection of National Visual Art Gallery. Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

Figure 6.22

Po Po, Tejo, oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm, 1987. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

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Figure 6.23

6.30am, Sunrise at Vegetable Farm by Tang Da Wu, performance, 1990, 1990, The Time Show, 61-B Ulu Sembawang, Singapore. Image courtesy of Koh Nguang How.

Figure 6.24

Po Po, 6.00pm, oil on canvas, 1987, dimensions unknown. Image from: Po Po Out of Myth, Onto_Logical (Singapore: Yavuz Gallery, 2015).

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Figure 6.25

Exhibition model of Untitled showing the entire row of works on the wall according to different timings. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Installation view that shows the other side of the wall. Image courtesy of Po Po.

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Figure 6.26

Discarded silk-screen which was used to produce many beautiful prints, 1974, Image from: Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences catalogue.

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Figure 6.27

Jim Supangkat, Ken Dedes, 1975/1996, Plaster, wood, marker pen and paint; 186.5 x 85 x 27 cm, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Gallery Singapore.

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Figure 6.28

Untitled, Bill board cut-out, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, remade. Image courtesy of TUAFT.

Figure 6.29

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Figure 6.30

Rama IV and the 1932 constitution the golden bowl. Image from: Revolvy, https://www.revolvy.com/page/Constitution-of-Thailand. Accessed on 21/06/2018.

Figure 6.31

The Golden “Bowl” on top of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok. Image from: Wikepedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_Bowl_holding_1932_Siamese_Constitution.jpg. Accessed on 22/06/2018.

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Chapter 7 Restaging Critical Exhibitions: The Will to Archive, Memorialise and Subjectivise

Introduction

Why and how do we remember exhibitions, who remembers these exhibitions, what are the motivations behind them, and what makes them so charismatic and even desirable for restaging? This chapter examines the recent curatorial phenomenon of restaging critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia as part of a broader interest in exhibition histories. The selection of these critical exhibitions by curators and art institutions is not a matter of coincidence, but the result of a gradual emergence of an exhibitionary turn in the study of the history of art in the region, in both exhibition histories and curatorial studies. Critical exhibitions that have been restaged since the early 2000s include Towards a Mystical Reality (TMR; Malaysia, 1974), the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB; New Art Movement; Indonesia, 1975) exhibition, The Time Show by The Artists Village (Singapore, 1989–1990), The Chiang Mai Social Installation (CMSI; Thailand, 1992), and the Billboard Cut-Out exhibition by The United Artists’ Front of Thailand (TUAFT; Thailand, 1975). Out of these critical exhibitions, TMR holds the record of being restaged the most – three times prior to 2018 – across different sites and locations, including Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and, most recently, Bangkok.454 The restaging of critical exhibitions is a relatively new exhibition genre, one that presents exhibitions as episodic and existing in fixed moments in time, but also as a constellation of events that intersect, interconnect and resonate with each other over time, space and contexts. Examining the different restagings of the same critical exhibitions will be useful for future scholars to think about these exhibitions as connected, cumulative and reflexive events. The act of restaging exhibitions using different approaches

454 Restagings of Towards a Mystical Reality by Simon Soon in Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs took place at MCAD, Manila (6 September – 4 December 2016), Para Site in Hong Kong (18 March – 11 June 2017) and the Jim Thompson House, Bangkok (15 July – 31 October 2017). A small restaging of Towards a Mystical Reality was also presented as part of Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century, a show that marked the opening of The National Gallery Singapore’s Southeast Asia Long-Term Gallery, curated by the Gallery’s curators with Lisa Horikawa as the lead curator.

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(memorialising, archiving and subjectivising) historicises these critical exhibitions, and reveals a fascination with memory that forges slippages and interconnections between the past and present, and between the modern and the contemporary. This chapter takes the restaged exhibition as an entry point to re-examine the arguments of my previous chapters from the perspective of the present. The main ideas of the critical exhibition as a turn to everyday life (Chapter 3), a discursive event (manifestos; Chapter 4), a subversion of the white cube (Chapter 5), and a manifestation of heterogeneous time (Chapter 6) intersect and are reinterpreted in the restaged critical exhibitions analysed in this chapter. Restaged exhibitions can be conceived as afterlives of critical exhibitions that offer the potential to veer away from established canons of art histories and towards exhibition histories as a critique of art history and its methods, while bearing the possibility of constructing its own canons.

The Restaged Critical Exhibition as Site of Memory

What is a restaged critical exhibition? Is it different from other ways of restaging, remembering, remaking and reconstructing exhibitions that have been proposed by scholars and curators writing on this subject? Reesa Greenberg’s concept of ‘remembering exhibitions’ is useful for understanding what restaged critical exhibitions are. For Greenberg, ‘remembering exhibitions’ is a new genre of ‘exhibitions that remember past exhibitions’.455 Remembering exhibitions can be categorised broadly into the ‘replica’ that seeks to reassemble as much as possible of the historical exhibition; the ‘riff’ that plays on aspects of the historical exhibition such as its title or exhibition concept; and the ‘reprise’, whereby the historical exhibition is remembered through platforms such as publications, documentation and the web. Building on Greenberg’s concept of ‘remembering exhibitions’, I will focus on how restaged critical exhibitions form a critical reflection on the various formats of historical critical exhibitions. Restaged critical exhibitions refer to the emergence of the critical exhibition as a new type of exhibition that proliferated across Southeast Asia in the 1970s. The historical critical exhibition was conceptual, entered public spaces, blurred the boundaries between

455 Reesa Greenberg, ‘Remembering Exhibitions: From Point to Line to Web’, Tate Papers, 12 (2009), pp. 2–4, available at https://www.scribd.com/document/194834910/Reesa-Greenberg (accessed 20 March 2018).

270 art and life, and produced manifestos and artworks that sought to decolonise the mind. The restaged critical exhibition is a type of exhibition that has the capacity to constantly remake and reinterpret the historical texts and contexts of critical exhibitions in the present. Restaging critical exhibitions also help to historicise contemporary art and position these exhibitions as art-historical turning points. Which exhibitions are likely to be remembered? This thesis proposes that one exhibitionary mode in particular – the critical exhibition – is remembered due to its embodiment of exhibitionary criticality. Criticality is understood as the use of critique in its myriad forms as an analytical apparatus to question the dominant conventions, logics and operations that sustain and perpetuate institutional structures of power. In the field of culture, criticality is imbued with an agency to question and change the social and political conditions underlying various forms and structures of knowledge. Critical exhibitions accumulate and concretise criticality by adopting strategies of withdrawal from and intervention in the problematics of representation. The increasing restagings of critical exhibitions such as TMR, TUAFT, CMSI and GSRB attests to the growing curatorial and public interest in exhibition histories in Southeast Asia. This development intersects with a growing community of curators based in the region who are advancing new curatorial practices. Greenberg posits that ‘The emergence of the “remembering exhibition” is a manifestation of Western culture’s current fascination with memory as a modality for constructing individual or collective identities’.456 The contestation of memory is equally, if not more, urgent in Southeast Asia, due to the long histories of suppression by authoritarian regimes, dictatorships and military governments in the region. The massacre of communists or alleged communists in Indonesia during the mid- 1960s, the killings of student activists in Thailand from 1973 until 1976, and the killing fields in Cambodia under Pol Pot are some of the most traumatic and violent events that have remained largely unresolved and suppressed in both personal and collective social memories. Recent publications in regional memory studies also excavate forgotten and

456 Ibid., p. 1.

271 repressed social memories and seek to construct alternative historical narratives to challenge the officially sanctioned ones.457 Discursive sources such as exhibition reviews and oral histories are useful, but they may not adequately recreate the experience of encountering the exhibition in person. Constructing exhibition models and restaging exhibitions are methods for reliving the phenomenological experience of critical exhibitions, as discussed in previous chapters. This chapter will analyse the restaging of the critical exhibition as a ‘site of memory’ amassed with exhibitionary significance, and one that goes beyond fragmented and suppressed individual and collective memories. How do we remember critical exhibitions? Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire is a multi- volume project that seeks to understand French culture from a non-linear and site-specific perspective.458 Expanding the study of ‘sites of memory’ beyond museums and monuments to include novels, streets and cities, Nora’s study provides a framework to imagine exhibitions as another site of memory. This approach helps to explain the afterlives of critical exhibitions as manifested in their restagings. The restagings are entry points into multiple and changing historical contexts, and they function to construct a shared collective memory in the present. If restaging critical exhibitions is one of the ways of remembering exhibitions, why has it only occurred in the last ten years in Southeast Asia? Why are critical exhibitions invested in the will to remember, and why are they restaged more than other exhibitionary modes? And, more importantly, how do we remember exhibitions through restagings? Nora defined sites of memory as sites where ‘memory crystallizes and secretes itself’, manifesting itself in material, symbolical and functional artefacts.459 For Nora, ‘Lieux de mémoire are created by a play of memory and history, an interaction of two factors that results in their reciprocal overdetermination’. This suggests that memory itself has a history

457 See Kwok Kian Woon and Roxana Waterson (ed.), Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012). See also Loh Kah Seng, Thum Ping Thing, and Tjin Meng-Tat Chia (eds), Living with Myths in Singapore (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2017). 458 Lieux de mémoire has been translated into English as either ‘places’ or ‘sites’ of memory. This thesis adopts ‘sites of memory’, as the concept of ‘site’ as spatial location is closer to my aim of spatially comparing exhibitions. ‘Place’, on the other hand, emphasises the notion of a particular position. 459 Pierre Nora, ‘Entre Mémoire et Histoire’, in Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, 2nd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), I, p. 7.

272 and can be historicised.460 Nora goes on to unpack the oppositional relationship between memory and history:

With the appearance of the trace, of mediation, of distance, we are not in the realm of true memory but of history. … Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. … History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it … History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism.461

Memory that is spontaneous, lived and knotted to the present is critiqued by the proponents of a certain type of officially acknowledged history. This type of history, which is in the service of dominant institutional structures of power, seeks to reconstruct and authenticate memory to legitimise the past for the present and the future. For Nora, memory has been relegated to the private domain, whereas official history writing has transformed itself into a social science that serves the nation state. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that history can also resist the very same hegemonic forces by producing counter and alternative histories. According to Nora, ‘lieux de mémoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, and endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications.’462 Here lies an important characteristic of sites of memory: they are resilient and amenable to being constantly remodeled, revisited and reinterpreted over time and as a result of societal change. Restaged critical exhibitions as sites of memory share this characteristic. They exist in their various afterlives, due to their capacity for metamorphosis in multiple restagings, which take place in different contexts of time, space and discourse. Nora developed his concept of ‘site of memory’ in relation to the French context and a specific historical period, and questions over the applicability of his concept to other contexts and period have received considerable scholarly attention and should be discussed

460 Ibid., p. 19. 461 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 462 Ibid., p. 19.

273 in relation to critical exhibitions. The term ‘Les Lieux’ is epistemologically connected to a site-related idea, but it does not have an equivalence in English. The eventual use of ‘site of memory’ was adopted to capture the historiographical potential of this concept. The socio- political and intellectual context inhabited by ‘site of memory’ was a product of the social and political conditions in France in the 1970s, such as the economic crisis, the rise of Gaullism, and the end of student radicalism. Although ‘site of memory’ was clearly a concept stemming from the French historical experience, and one that was inseparable from the idea of France as a nation, I argue that it is possible to transcend that specific context and extend the concept to other cultures and histories. Southeast Asia in the 1970s shared historical resonances with the situation in France at the time. The student protest movements and national movements in the Southeast Asian region had been equally traumatic, and hence they were hospitable to the production of sites of memories. One of the main obstacles to understanding the restaged critical exhibition as a site of memory is Nora’s insistence that historical distance is necessary for a site of memory to be produced. A site of memory is to endure beyond the generation in which it was created. Only then can forms of national memory crystallise across historical periods. For Nora, a site of memory must have a historical relationship with the past, with links to other national memory sites across different time periods. As such, a site of memory cannot focus only on the present. However, this thesis adapts an expanded concept of ‘site of memory’, one that acknowledges the importance of the history of the present in relation to the history of memory. The restaged critical exhibition as a site of memory stresses the historical and curatorial process in which an exhibition is remembered and constantly reinterpreted that is different from the historical sites of memory that seek to commemorate an event or persons over time. Understanding restaged critical exhibitions is important, as these exhibitions will become future sites of memory for individuals and communities. The multiple restagings of critical exhibitions make visible how memory is still being shaped, reconstructed and reinterpreted as histories relevant to the present. We are reminded of how the anxiety of forgetting is as powerful a motivation for the consecration of a site of memory as the impulse for remembering. The anxiety of forgetting motivates the will to remember and reinterpret histories that had almost been lost through historical amnesia. The remainder of this chapter shows how restaged critical exhibitions function as sites of

274 both memory and amnesia in their efforts to excavate and crystallise forgotten, transient, and traumatic events. It is important to recognise that not all sites of memory are equal. Dominant sites of memory are often patronised and legitimised by the state; examples are war memories and the state-sanctioned status of historical figures. These dominant sites of memory have the capacity to summon people to them, as national monuments do during commemorative events. Similarly, the sites inhabited by a restaged critical exhibition produces different interpretive frames that shapes how history is remembered. The restaging of TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-out critical exhibition in the 14 October Memorial in Bangkok- which remembers the deaths of many students who fought for democracy in Thailand - is a vehicle of resistance that generates counter-narratives to the hegemonic discourse. The restaging makes visible and give a voice to suppressed memories of controversial pasts. Other rcritical exhibitions like TMR have been restaged at national art museums. Sulaiman Esa’s solo exhibition titled, Raja’ah: Art, Idea and Creativity of Sulaiman Esa from 1950s–2011 at the Balai Seni Lukis Negara offers a different interpretive framing that reinforces the legacy of the artist. These different interpretive framings reveal the complex relations between the restaged critical exhibitions and their exhibitionary site. The restaged critical exhibition, as a site of memory that critiques the processes of remembering and forgetting, embodies the capacity for metamorphosis and change. It seeks not only to remember, but also to reinterpret the past, as well as to shape the present and the future. But how does criticality as an exhibitionary form drive the restagings of critical exhibitions? And how do the multiple restagings of some of the critical exhibitions assert a will to remember?

The Production of Exhibitionary Significance Through Criticality

The multiple restagings of critical exhibitions demand a rethinking of critical exhibitions as manifesting exhibitionary significance. Exhibition-making in the region from the 1970s to the 1990s was dominated by male artists who have been canonised in art history for their pivotal role in organising exhibitions and writing much of Southeast Asia’s art history.463 In

463 See Dirgantoro Wulan, Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia, pp. 59–65, for an account of art writings on GSRB being male dominated.

275 many ways, the critical exhibitions from the region examined in this thesis propagate such a gendered exhibition history. For instance, F.X. Harsono, Jim Supangkat and Hardi are exhibition-makers who were also artist-organisers of critical exhibitions. These male artists have constructed almost the entire narrative of the GSRB. The perspective of female artists like Siti Adiyati was cast into relief only in the Fantasy World Supermarket: Approaches, Practice and Thinking Since the Indonesia New Art Movement in 1970s show curated by Grace Samboh and Kumakura at the Mori Art Museum (Figure 7.1). In this exhibition, a video interview with Adiyati revealed a different perspective on the GSRB. Adiyati emphasised the primacy of concept as the driving force behind this art movement, while Supangkat and Harsono respectively summoned cultural rebellion and resistance to authority as their primary motivations. By giving prominence to Adiyati’s ideas and works, this thesis marks a small but significant step towards a more plural and diverse view of the GSRB. Although Esa and Piyadasa were the exhibition-makers of TMR, the critical voice of Siti Zainon, a female art critic and artist, also provides a more nuanced perspective on the exhibition. In the same way, the discourse around The Artists Village centres on male artists like Tang Da Wu, while the female perspectives represented by Amanda Heng are often overlooked. Excavating and highlighting marginalised voices in exhibition histories is urgently needed. One approach is to interview women artists who have been overshadowed by their male counterparts. This will require a concerted effort by scholars and curators who have been advancing exhibition histories as a discipline. While exhibitions have a gendered history, it is important to understand why certain male artists like Supangkat, Harsono (GSRB), Piyadasa (TMR), Renato Habulan (Kaisahan), Tang (TAV), Uthit Atimana (CMSI) and Santi Isrowuthakul (TUAFT) produced exhibitionary significance through their active engagement in cultural discourse, art-making, and leadership. The charismatic prowess of artists, most of whom were vital figures in propelling critical exhibitions, can be understood via O.W. Wolters’s concept of the ‘man of prowess’ and charisma. Wolters argues that historical ‘men of prowess’ in Southeast Asia were endowed with an ‘abnormal amount of personal and innate soul stuff which distinguished their leadership from that of their kinsmen and other contemporaries’.464 Academics have critiqued Wolters’s male-dominated perspective of ‘men of prowess’ and charisma. Critics

464 Wolters, History, Culture and Religion in Southeast Asian Perspectives, pp. 5–7.

276 have also argued that casting charisma mystically as ‘innate soul stuff’ bears traces of orientalism and machismo, a critique that should extend to the domination of exhibition- making by male artists, including critical exhibitions.465 Their organisational abilities enabled them to produce critical exhibitions in collaboration with other like-minded artists who believed that art served social and political causes. David Teh’s Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary proposes a calculated ethics of withdrawal manifested in baramee, a Thai word that can be translated as ‘charisma’ and also implies renown.466 It is derived from the Hindu-Buddhist concept of kingship that justifies power and promises righteous and just rule based on an accumulation of merit from past lives by a king. Teh argues that the charismatic artist Montien Boonma accrued the ‘currency of withdrawal’ by relocating away from the metropolitan centre of Bangkok to Chiang Mai. From Chiang Mai, he undertook his spiritual journey to the temples in northern Thailand.467 Montien’s rejection of consumerism and institutions of power in favour of spiritual cultivation in the temples was a form of self-isolation. It did not, however, reduce his visibility nationally and globally. He continued to be widely circulated in global survey exhibitions in the 1990s, particularly biennales in Australia (Eighth Sydney Biennale, 1990; and the Asia-Pacific Triennial, 1993), Cuba (Fifth Havana Biennale, 1994), and Turkey (Fourth Istanbul Biennale, 1995). As the power to persuade and influence, charisma, when combined with ‘prowess’, activates people’s capacity to challenge and change existing social norms and aesthetic conventions. The male artists discussed earlier, who were also exhibition-makers and members of the student protest movements of the 1970s, had accumulated charisma and were publicly acknowledged as ‘men of prowess’ through their intellectual, organisational and, at times, moral leadership. Some of the critical exhibitions were directly engaged in resistance to social and political injustices produced by prevailing regimes and power structures. While charisma and prowess are useful concepts to understand how the artist- exhibition-makers were able to galvanise resources and influence, it is also necessary to study the significance of the forms and events of critical exhibitions themselves.

465 For scholarship that provides a more balanced notion of female leadership in Southeast Asian societies, particularly in villages and in the economy, see Anthony Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, 22.3 (1988), pp. 641–42. 466 David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary, pp. 123–32. 467 Ibid., p. 134.

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Exhibitionary significance is accumulated through a conscious strategy by the organisers to withdraw from institutional centres tainted by corruption, capitalism, urbanism and authoritarian power. CMSI and TAV’s Time Show were located in, respectively, the art world peripheries of Chiang Mai as an alternative or even competing centre in relation to Bangkok, and a farm in then-rural Sembawang in Singapore. TAV’s address, ‘Lorong Gambas Ulu Sembawang’, included the Malay term ‘Ulu’, which means remote, clearly referencing a psycho-geographical notion of somewhere distant. For CMSI, Bangkok had maintained its dominant position in the art world, where art institutions such as Silpakorn University – the elite place for a fine art education – and most of the country’s art galleries and museums were situated. It was only in 1999 that the Chiang Mai University Arts and Cultural Centre opened. The MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, a private museum for the programming and display of contemporary art, was established only in 2016. Other critical exhibitions, like TMR, the Billboard Cut-Out exhibition by TUAFT, GSRB, Po Po’s Untitled exhibition and the Kaisahan deployed an opposite strategy of intervention. These critical exhibitions were located in the capital cities. They were meant to directly resist regimes of authority that produced social injustices, to reclaim spaces that had been consumed by capitalism, and to advance alternative ways of thinking about and displaying art. Both the strategy of withdrawal and that of intervention allowed critical exhibitions to amass more exhibitionary significance than other exhibition formats could garner. The capital city as the metropolitan centre of economic and political power was the common stage to deploy interventionist strategies and amass exhibitionary significance most effectively in terms of speed and quantity. This form of accumulated exhibitionary significance has to be distinguished as ‘speech’ rather than ‘noise’. As argued by Rancière, in strategies of intervention speech has to compete with the cacophony of competing voices, bodies and capacities that converge in the capital city.468 The critical exhibition functions not as a container for displaying art, but as a provocative vehicle of dissension that activates the viewer mentally. It raises awareness of social and political issues through its prompting of alternative lines of questioning and inquiry by destabilising the distribution of dominant ideologies and power structures.

468 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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While the strategies of withdrawal and intervention fuel the exhibitionary significance of critical exhibitions, we also need to understand the affective power of critical exhibitions in relation to their effect on participants. Rancière argues that ‘Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting: when we understand (that) the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing, themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.’469 Criticality as the driving force of exhibitionary significance in critical exhibitions bridges both viewing and acting by activating the viewer out of his or her passivity. It provokes questions that recover art’s political potential and translate this political potential into action. This exhibitionary significance exercised by the critical exhibition seeks to actively transform the passive spectator into an active and emancipated one. Exhibitionary significance accumulated through withdrawal, intervention, or possibly even both, manifests the aura of the critical exhibition. It also has the power to persuade and influence, and it seeks political emancipation by trying to make visible what cannot be seen and said. The political agency of the exhibitionary does not embrace consensus as a preconceived outcome or objective. Instead, it embraces the capacity of the dissensual to create contestation and alter and question what can be said and seen. Creating dissensus enables the exhibitionary to accumulate exhibitionary significance, which in turn advances the emancipation of the spectator. It is meant to turn the spectator into an active participant, one who rejects the singularity of meaning and instead looks for multiple interpretations and perspectives. The restaging of critical exhibitions amplifies their exhibitionary significance through continuous processes of reinterpretation and recontextualisation. These processes legitimise the historical importance of the exhibitions and makes them relevant to the present. This is not to say that exhibitionary significance is the privilege of critical exhibitions alone, as other exhibition formats can accumulate and manifest the exhibitionary as well. What distinguishes critical exhibitions from other types of exhibition are the deep affinities between exhibitionary significance and criticality. Critical exhibitions, unlike other forms of exhibition, make the amassing of exhibitionary significance their focus. Recent curatorial interests in restaging critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia both by national art museums, such as the National Gallery Singapore, and by independent, privately funded art spaces,

469 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2008), p. 13.

279 such as Para Site in Hong Kong, testify to the exhibitionary significance exuded by critical exhibitions. The cumulative exhibitionary significance of critical exhibitions such as TMR helps to explain its multiple restagings across cities, including Hong Kong, Manila, and, most recently, Bangkok. The power of discernment is one of the most compelling reasons why critical exhibitions are desired by curators. It explains their many afterlives. The next section will demonstrate how the restagings of critical exhibitions mark a shift from representing to presenting propositions that reframe artworks and the exhibition as a format itself.

Presenting Dissensus: The Critical Exhibition and the Everyday

Rancière’s proposition of a shift from the representational regime to the aesthetic regime is useful in understanding why critical exhibitions are restaged.470 Restaging critical exhibitions reveals the problematics of representation in exhibitions. Critical exhibitions challenge the assumption of the representational regime that separates art from everyday life. The white cube format adopted the representational regime in displaying art as being separated from life. It deprived exhibitionary modes, such as salon or internationalist exhibitions, of the possibility to engage with a politics of aesthetics for transforming the everyday into art. The representational regime in Rancièrian terms corresponds to the beaux-arts and their disciplined aesthetic conventions based on French classicism in the seventeenth century.471 The idea that art is separate from life was central to the aesthetic understanding of this period. Art could only represent life, and it could remain only a form of representation. The aesthetic regime from the nineteenth century onwards began to question what makes art, with a series of movements like the Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris. Morris’s movement broke down established artistic hierarchies between ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’, and ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’. We should cautiously note that the sequence of regimes – from the ethical that determines art as imitation in the philosophy of Plato, to the representational regime that is freed from the morality of the ethical regime, and eventually the aesthetic regime – does not unfold in a linear fashion, as these different regimes may occur concurrently. Old hierarchies of genres, such as that

470 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 142. 471 Rancière, Dissensus, pp. 145–48.

280 which regarded history painting as the epitome of artistic achievement and the still life as ranking at the bottom of the hierarchy, have been blurred. Rancière uses the idea of ‘the distribution of the sensible’ to refer to the implicit conventions and rules that determine the distribution of responsibilities, functions and roles in a shared social world, such as an art world.472 The institutional structure of the art world – a structure that determines the modalities of roles and functions – is shaped by our modes of perception (how our senses apprehend our environment). In short, the distribution of the sensible regulates what can be thought, seen, heard, articulated and acted upon. The politics of aesthetics in the aesthetic regime is dissent towards the dominant order established by the representative regime, and a struggle for the excluded to have their voices heard and to be visible on their own terms. The aesthetics of artworks create alternative ways of thinking that are both inseparable from life and, simultaneously, different from it. A perpetual tension and contestation between art and everyday practices maintains art’s heterogeneity and promises to reconfigure our senses and perception through the dissensual. Exhibitions harbour the political potential of aesthetics as well as the potential to redistribute the sensible. The exhibitionary significance of critical exhibitions lies in troubling our senses and the conventional patterns, categories and discourses that assign meaning to art and life. Critical exhibitions break out of the confines of the white cube, the embodiment of the representative regime. The white cube seeks to represent art in a decontextualised discursive and sensorial frame, thereby limiting its political potential to engage with the everyday. The separation of the outside world from the pristine, self-purifying and homogeneous universality of the white cube parallels the separation of the representative regime from everyday life. The critical exhibition therefore plays an important role in the aesthetic regime as a vehicle of the dissensual, which breaks down the separation of art from the everyday through its exhibitionary discourses. It conceptualises the centrality of life and politics in art; and it also conceptualises heterogeneous exhibitionary time, and exhibitionary space that implodes the white cube gallery space by reclaiming alternative spaces and intruding public and mental spaces. It is the critical exhibition’s accumulation

472 Ibid., pp. 12–14.

281 and concretisation of exhibitionary significance that fuels its revoking of the idea of art as representation, while nevertheless keeping art significantly different from the everyday. Other exhibitionary modes tend to reduce the exhibition to a passive container with the sole function of displaying objects. Maria Lind argues that the curatorial ‘involves not just representing but presenting [emphasis added]and testing; it performs something here and now instead of merely mapping something from there and then’.473 In this view, critical exhibitions promise more than the representation of art as objects in exhibitions. Critical exhibitions and their exhibitionary significance present art, by provoking counter-histories and narratives, and by inciting situations that ignite and offer alternative ways of thinking about art. The exhibitionary significance of critical exhibitions precipitates their restagings as they redefine and reframe the assumptions of art that operate in the representational regime. The restaging of critical exhibitions stems from the rejection of the idea that art has a single, definitive meaning. The politics of the dissensual demands multiple restagings, so critical exhibitions can continue to make visible what otherwise cannot be heard or seen in different social contexts and even time periods. The multiple restagings of critical exhibitions reveal how this exhibitionary mode does not exist in a singular time, context or space. Instead, every restaging of a critical exhibition allows for heterogeneous entry points, situations and instances to be produced and redistributed in line with the Rancièrian articulation of the ‘distribution of the senses’. This thesis proposes that the multiple afterlives of the critical exhibition in its restagings are linked to its exhibitionary significance, which transforms these restaged critical exhibitions into sites of memory. But what are the impulses to restage critical exhibitions?

The Desire for Restaging Critical Exhibitions and Its Discontents

Recent trends in the contemporary art world have thrust Southeast Asian and other Asian art to the forefront.474 In 2017 alone, two major contemporary exhibitions of art from Southeast Asia were organised outside the region: SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from

473 Maria Lind, ‘Active Cultures’, Artforum, October 2009, p. 103. 474 Japan has been staging exhibitions on Asian and Southeast Asian art since the 1980s. For an account of this history of exhibitions, see Mami Kataoka, ‘Sunshowers in Southeast Asia: A Premise for an Exhibition’, in SUNSHOWER, pp. 272–77.

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Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, at the Mori Art Museum and the National Art Center, Tokyo, which was billed as the largest-ever exhibition of Southeast Asian contemporary art held in Japan, with over 89 artists at two art spaces; and After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History at the Asia Society in New York. The burgeoning Asian art market has also played a part in fuelling interest. In 2011, China and Hong Kong accounted for 41 per cent of the world auction market, and, between 2005 and 2007, the volume and value of the Asian art market exploded. Sales of Chinese art captured 30 per cent of the world’s art market by 2011.475 The global acknowledgement of art from the region in the form of exhibitions has been reinforced by academic initiatives. Afterall’s call for papers for a conference in 2018 on ‘Asia through Exhibition Histories’ outlined the need to focus on exhibition history and its methods in the context of exhibitions in Asia:

While regional showcase exhibitions – presented both in Asia and elsewhere across the globe – are an obvious topic for appraisal in this context, we also welcome papers considering initiatives that have not explicitly taken on that role but have instead emerged over time as regionally influential. To take two examples from the 1990s, ‘Cities on the Move’ would be one obvious case-study, while ‘Chiang Mai Social Installation’ might be significant in a different manner…. In this session, we seek to question the stationary perspective and centre/periphery binary implied by ‘looking out’, encouraging debate of past art exhibitions as a way to think about more mobile and contingent histories that also prompt us to look both inwards and sideways. In other words, we call for discussion of exhibition histories that encourage looking in multiple directions. 476

The recent interest in art and exhibition histories from Asia, including Southeast Asia, have been fuelled by an effort to approach art history contingently and from multiple directions. In 2017, the Spring Foundation and Lu Peiyi from the Critical Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art, National Taipei University of Education, organised a series of talks at the

475 ‘The International Art Market in 2011’, in Observation of the Art Trade Over 25 Years (Maastricht: TEFAF, 2012). 476 Call for papers for the ‘Asia through Exhibition Histories’ conference, available at https://www.afterall.org/events/call-for-papers-asia-through-exhibition- histories?utm_campaign=19+October+2017&utm_medium=email&utm_source= (accessed 25 October 2017). This conference was organised in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive, the Tate Research Centre: Asia, and the Paul Mellon Centre at the 2018 annual conference of the Association for Art History in the UK. Hosted by the Courtauld Institute of Art and King’s College London, this event ran from 5 to 7 April 2018.

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MOCA in Taipei on ‘Curating History/Histories of Curating’, which focused on methodologies based on exhibitions in Asia.477 The Canton Express (2017; Figure 7.2), a seminal exhibition curated by Hou Hanru at the 50th Venice Biennale’s ‘Zone of Urgency’ section in 2003, was recently restaged at the M+ pavilion in Hong Kong. The restaging was made possible by a generous donation of works from the 2003 exhibition to M+ by the Chinese collector Guan Yi. It brought to public attention artists from the Pearl River Delta region, whose experimental works using everyday objects, videos and installations engaged with the rapid urbanisation, industrialisation and societal changes after the economic reforms of the 1980s. The restaging involved the remaking of works that were lost. A floor plan was installed at M+ to identically match the original in 2003, which itself was designed to resemble a commercial street in Guangzhou in the 1990s. Art historically significant exhibitions like Harold Szemann’s Live in Our Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969; Figure 7.3) have received sustained interest by scholars, because of Szemann’s reinvention of the curator as an independent exhibition-maker and creative partner to the artist. He championed process-based art over artworks that were made as object-commodities for the wealthy elites, and he also advanced the idea of the exhibition as a workshop and site for generating ideas. While art historical discourse on this seminal exhibition has consecrated its legacy in academic writings and publications, the actual physical experience of encountering the works cannot be replicated discursively. This has resulted in a number of exhibition restagings of When Attitudes Become Form discussed earlier in Chapter 5 (Figure 7.4). Restaging seminal exhibitions suggests a renewed experience and critical reinterpretation of the original exhibition through the lens of the different social, political and cultural contexts of the present. It results in a networked constellation of exhibitions that can shape the histories of exhibitions and curating.478 Jens Hoffman’s Show Time: 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014) was a survey of seminal exhibitions that were curatorially innovative and art

477 The speakers for ‘Curating History/Histories of Curating’ at the MOCA Taipei and funded by the Spring Foundation were Seng Yu Jin, Cosmin Costinas, Liu Ding and Lucy Steeds. 478 The effectiveness of the restaged critical exhibitions falls outside the scope of this thesis as this requires more historical distance due to the relatively recent phenomenon of restaged critical exhibitions since 2010. This will require a separate study on the audience reception of the restaged exhibitions. Instead, this chapter seeks to demonstrate how the repeated restagings of critical exhibitions in different exhibitionary forms offer the possibility of different interpretations that reinforce their exhibitionary significance.

284 historically significant. It went beyond the existing canon of exhibitions to also include exhibitions outside Euro-America. However, out of the 50 exhibitions, not one originated from Asia. The exhibitions were selected according to Hoffman’s criteria of being the ‘most groundbreaking or the most characteristic of a certain type of practice’. This brings up the question: are there no curatorially innovative, experimental and radical practices that emerged from Asia? If the history of exhibitions and curating is being constructed and canonised in Euro-America, how should exhibition histories in Asia be constructed? Apart from the restaging of Canton Express as a possibly seminal exhibition in Asia, and the multiple restagings of When Attitudes Become Form, restagings of TMR deserve to be highlighted because of their repeat occurrences, and more importantly, the exhibitionary significance of this critical exhibition in relation to the art histories of conceptualism in Southeast Asia. This exhibition was restaged first at the National Art Gallery, Malaysia, as part of Esa’s retrospective exhibition in 2011, Raja’ah: Art, Idea and Creativity of Sulaiman Esa from 1950s–2011 (Figure 7.5). The National Gallery Singapore’s inaugural exhibition Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century (2015) also featured documentation of TMR, including works that were remade by Esa in relation to the original 1974 exhibition. It was a form of restaging through the archive, as will be further explained in this chapter. TMR was also restaged as part of the Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs exhibition at Para Site, Hong Kong (Figure 7.6). This restaging travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila in 2016 (Figure 7.7) and to the Jim Thompson House in Bangkok in 2017. The multiple restagings of TMR that travelled across the region validate this critical exhibition as the anchor of this chapter. It provides the foundation for a method for exhibition histories. It presents three forms of the exhibitionary – discourse, space and time – as a framework to unpack the interconnecting, heterochronic, and experiential nature of exhibitions. An interdisciplinary approach to the study of exhibitions that incorporates the ways in which we encounter exhibitions could answer Flores’s call for a ‘third moment’ to break the impasse between the art historical and the exhibitionary. Struggles over the erasure of memories and contestation over the construction of socio-political histories generate an impulse for restaging critical exhibitions. This includes unresolved histories from the 1960s to the 1990s, such as the ‘communist’ purge resulting in mass killings across Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 by the military and civilian groups. Long

285 periods of authoritarianism in Southeast Asia under martial law and military regimes in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines have created disconnections between the memories of the victims who lived through these regimes and the construction of national histories. The SUNSHOWER exhibition stressed the importance of forging intergenerational connections as a productive way of thinking about the art history of the region. It highlighted how restaging critical exhibitions forms a reflexive bridge between the past and the present across generations that have very different experiences and memories of traumatic historical events. Critical exhibitions were born from these tumultuous overlapping socio-political contexts of the Cold War. Critical exhibitions that directly involved student protest movements across the region included those by the GSRB in the context of the Malari Incident (1974) in Indonesia, by TUAFT in the context of the massacres of student-led protests in Thailand (1973–76), and by the Kaisahan in the context of the civic unrest of First Quarter Storm at the University of the Philippines in Manila. They shared a common resistance to the authoritarian regimes of the 1970s. The fragile democracies in the region that have arisen out of the collapse of these authoritarian regimes have been threatened in recent years. The rise of Muslim hardliners in Indonesia – as seen in the prosecution and subsequent jailing for blasphemy of former governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (‘Ahok’) – the return to military control in Thailand, and the rise of President Duterte in the Philippines – who has waged an extrajudicial war against drugs that has resulted in people being killed in the streets – are impulses for the restaging of critical exhibitions. Art-historical impulses also explain the restaging of critical exhibitions. Characteristics of critical exhibitions that include their shift towards socially-engaged artistic practices, conceptualism, breaking down categories of art, presenting art in public spaces, being collaborative and producing art manifestoes coalesce into the exhibition as a site from which broader art-historical turns such as conceptualism and even contemporary art can be located. Critical exhibitions emerging from the context of the 1970s now provide entry points to discursively renegotiate the present with the historical past. The restaged critical exhibitions act as bridges to the current generations, which have been fed on official histories that overlook the traumatic histories of the 1970s. The continuous reinterpretation of history, resistance to the forgetting of traumatic events, and a reflexive renegotiation between the past and the present are powerful impulses for restaging critical exhibitions as

286 sites of memory. Critical exhibitions that were themselves conceptual and socially and politically engaged are used as an entry point to critique the complex interplay of history and memory along three pathways: the memorial, the archive, and the making of new subjectivities.

Modes of Restaging Critical Exhibitions: The Will to Archive/Subjectivise/Memorialise

What is the purpose of the archive? Is the archive a mere repository of records or a form of memory produced by modern societies, which seeks to preserve itself for the future within the framework of the national imaginary? The relationship between history and the archive used to be based on solid ground, with the archive as the site of authority built on the ‘authenticity’ of its holdings. This seemingly unshakable relationship has been destabilised by postcolonial studies that question the very nature of the archive itself as a product of the colonial frame of mind. Systems of classification that determine what goes into the archive have been stripped of their veneer of objectivity and revealed to be cultural and political constructs. Postcolonial studies have reimagined the archive as being a place for study, and a subject of study. Questions about the archive as a cultural and political construct, and about the archive’s purpose, formation, and sponsoring institutions, have opened up our understanding of the archive as an area of study. Restaged critical exhibitions propagate their own memories and construction of histories. Due to its exhibitionary significance, the critical exhibition has in recent years generated archives of itself, demonstrating a will to archive, a phenomenon that sets it apart from other exhibitionary formats. The archive becomes a different way in which the critical exhibition is restaged within survey exhibitions, artist-archival projects, and constellations of archives. The archival format frequently emerges in restaged critical exhibitions with a regional focus. The reasons for the propensity for restaging critical exhibitions as archive could be attributed to the impracticality and considerable logistical challenges of restaging the original exhibition. Another reason is that many critical exhibitions were originally sited in public spaces at particular socio-political moments. The recent SUNSHOWER exhibition

287 had a section on ‘Archiving’, which included the various iterations of CMSI.479 The restaging of CMSI as an archive (Figure 7.8) was assembled by Uthit Atimana, one of the initiators of CMSI, and Gridthiya Gaweewong, an independent curator for the archival presentation in SUNSHOWER. The CMSI archive as a site of memory included various documents, ranging from photographs of the exhibition, brochures, and articles from magazines and newspapers, to a video interview with Uthit narrating a history of the CMSI. What is vital about the CMSI as an archive is how records that embody the memories of the exhibition have been actively transformed into a subjective narrative through the screened video interview with Uthit. Uthit actively constructs his subjective versions of CMSI’s history. His narrative of the history of CMSI provides an important perspective, given his crucial involvement in the conceptualisation of the critical exhibition. At the same time, it is clear that he is asserting his subjective position and drawing authority from his interpretation of the archival materials that he and Gaweewong have gathered. This will to archive is propelled by the exhibitionary significance of critical exhibitions. A regional and thematic survey exhibition like SUNSHOWER lends even more exhibitionary significance to the restaged critical exhibition as an archive, as it affords a regional view of different critical exhibitions across Southeast Asia. Intersections between the will to archive and the desire to produce subjective positions exemplify the relentless renegotiation between individual and collective memory, and the construction of history. The assertion of individual subjectivity is most apparent when the critical exhibition is sited in the retrospective solo exhibition of an artist. Harsono’s solo exhibition The Life and the Chaos: Objects, Images and Words took place at the Erasmus Huis, the Dutch Cultural Center in Jakarta, in 2015 (Figure 7.9). This exhibition displayed artworks, studies of objects like large needles used in Harsono’s installations, an historical timeline of his artistic practice, and an archive. The critical exhibition GSRB looms large in this exhibition as an archive seen in the display showcase of exhibition catalogues

479 The curatorial team of Sunshower comprised: The National Art Center, Tokyo: Yoneda Naoki (Curator) / Kida Sayuri (Associate Curator) / Mukasa Yuiko (Assistant Curator) / Minami Yusuke (Director, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art / Former Deputy Director, The National Art Center, Tokyo) Mori Art Museum: Kataoka Mami (Chief Curator) / Tokuyama Hirokazu (Associate Curator) / Kumakura Haruko (Assistant Curator) / Araki Natsumi (Curator) / Kondo Kenichi (Curator) / Tsubaki Reiko (Curator) Independent Curators from Southeast Asia: Merv Espina (Artist / Curator, The Philippines) / Vera Mey (Curator, Singapore) / Ong Jo-Lene (Curator, Malaysia) / Grace Samboh (Curator, Indonesia).

288 produced by the GSRB. Restaging the GSRB as an archive in his own solo exhibition appropriates the exhibitionary significance of this critical exhibition into his own artistic practice and legacy. The lineage of Harsono’s socially engaged art practices is closely connected to student activism, particularly the university student demonstrations across Indonesia in 1974 (known as the Malari Incident), and it connects the history of the GSRB with these broader historical events. The Life and the Chaos brought objects, images and words together in an exhibition that could be conceived as a subjective archive based on Harsono’s memories, historical records, objects and artworks. Harsono’s archive offers another site of memory in which the GSRB generates new meanings and contexts rooted in student activism in Indonesia in the 1970s. In SUNSHOWER, artist-archivist Koh Nguang How was invited to present an archive of TAV in collaboration with Lim Shengen (Figure 7.10), which included not only The Time Show but other exhibitions organised by the collective. TAV as an archive was previously presented in other exhibitions, the earliest of which was the Situation: Collaborations, collectives and artist networks from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin exhibition, curated by Russell Storer at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 2005 (Figure 7.11). It included TAV artists Jeremy Hiah, Koh Nguang How, Kai Lam Hoi Lit, Tang Da Wu, Lee Wen, Juliana Yasin, and Agnes Yit, as well as artists from Berlin and Sydney. Koh has been actively involved in the restaging of The Time Show and the history of TAV as an archive. Presenting the archive as an artwork centred on Koh’s personal mode of archiving. He claimed his subjective position by combining his memories and records to construct multiple histories of TAV and its exhibitions, which also presents the question of the representational politics of the history of TAV as a collective being framed by an almost singular voice. His anecdotal interactions with the users of his archive brought together a personal art-historical framing of TAV predicated on Koh’s subjectivity and mediation as both an artist-archivist and the collective’s member. Restaging the critical exhibition as an archive was also realised at the Asia Cultural Center in Gwangju (established in 2015; Figure 7.12). Housed in this large cultural complex is a library park that presents archival projects, which included an archive of CMSI by Gridthiya Gaweewong and an archive on TAV by Koh Nguang How. Here, exhibitions that this thesis has framed as critical exhibitions were restaged as archives, and they were presented and connected with other archives of exhibitions across Asia in 2016. Comparisons could be

289 made, for instance, with how TAV artists like Tang Da Wu and Amanda Heng participated in the third CMSI, while resonances in conceptualist practices could also be detected. The constellation of archives created the possibility of multiple pasts being constructed from the historical records and the memories induced from the photographic images, films and video interviews. Restaged as archives, these critical exhibitions function as sites of memories. They fulfil an insatiable desire to produce multiple afterlives of critical exhibitions through archives that move across locations, contexts and histories. Driven by exhibitionary significance, the exhibitions generate a will to archive, and demand constant reinterpretations of their histories in relation to the past, the present and the future. Critical exhibitions restaged as archives employ documentation records such as oral interviews, photographs, and exhibition collaterals, and also generate new documentation in the process. They produce memory structures that employ both the regime of the image through documentary photographs, and the regime of verbal discourse through the display of text. The authoritative regimes of image and text that come together in the archival restaging of critical exhibitions are a manifestation of criticality as a way of constructing meaning. Hinged on the subjective, the meaning produced by archives tends to be constructed by the artists of critical exhibitions themselves, with their own biases and perspectives that should be examined and, if necessary, critiqued. At the same time, they also generate the possibilities of new subjectivities that push the boundaries of historical understanding. Harsono, who actively restaged both the GSRB as an archive (as part of his The Life and the Chaos exhibition) and the GSRB exhibition Menafsir Seni Rupa Baru: Membaca Ulang Perjalanan Sejarah Seni Rupa Baru 1975–1987 at the Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, Yogyakarta (2016; Figure 7.13), is a case in point. Restaging GSRB as an archive and as an exhibition makes visible Harsono’s subjectivity in reconstructing the history of this art movement, while also opening up other perspectives and narratives. At the same time, the desire to restage the GSRB as an archive and exhibition produces a contested site of memory. The restaging of GSRB transforms into memorial struggle, as it constantly seeks to locate its own art historical position in the modern and contemporary art histories of Indonesia. The will to archive is manifested in the persistent restaging of critical exhibitions as archives. The archive as a form of memorial not only constructs the memory of these critical exhibitions, but it simultaneously opens up the possibility of multiple constructions of their

290 histories. Critical exhibitions like the GSRB, CMSI, TAV and TMR, which have been restaged as archives, demand to be remembered.

The Will to Memorialise: Restaging The United Artists’ Front of Thailand as a Case Study

TUAFT was formed in 1974 as a direct response to the 14 October 1973 violent crackdown by the military and police forces of a student-led pro-democracy demonstration against the authoritarian government of Thanom Kittikajorn, Praphas Charusathien and Narong Kittikachorn (who became known as ‘The Three Tyrants’). What began with the arrest of eleven and later thirteen political activists without bail for suspicions of plotting to overthrow the government and congregating in a group of more than five people, quickly escalated into rallies centred on Thammasat University in Bangkok. The mass of protesters numbered 50,000 students and civilians by 11 October.480 The numbers swelled to almost 400,000 by 13 October, with the crowd moving to the Democracy Monument site, and it only began to disperse when Thirayuth Boonmee, one of the thirteen arrestees, managed to get word to Seksan Prasertkul that the demonstrators who had been arrested had been released and granted an audience with the late King Bhumibol (Rama X), with the promise of a new constitution by October 1974. The students and public participating in the demonstration began to disperse with their demands met, but almost half the crowd continued to stay on, concerned about the lack of concrete assurance that the government promises would be kept. In the late morning of 14 October 1973, the Thanon government brutally attacked the protesters with tear gas, batons and bullets, causing the deaths of over 70 people, and injuring hundreds more. Explosions near the Grand Palace added to the confusion, and many buildings around the Rajadamnern Avenue were set ablaze. The demonstrators retaliated and the crowd rallying in support grew to almost 500,000 (Figure 7.14). Violence only ceased in the evening, when the police withdrew and the king announced in public the resignation of Thanon’s military government. Subsequently, Thanom and Praphas escaped out of Thailand into self-imposed exile, and Sanya

480 The thirteen arrestees were: Prapansak Kamolpetch, Visa Kanthap, Thanya Chunkathatharn, Thawee Muenthikorn, Boonsong Chalethorn, Thirayuth Boonmee, Bandhit Hengnilrat, Montri Juengsirinarak, Nopporn Suwanpanich, Preedi Boonsue, Chaiwat Suravichai, Kongkiat Kongka and Khaisaeng Suksai.

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Thammasak, the chancellor at Thammasat University, was appointed prime minister and instructed to draft a new constitution and organise a national election. The 14 October 1973 popular uprising emerged from a left intellectual movement influenced by the writings of Jit Phoomisak. Phoomisak’s new way of thinking about socially and politically engaged art in his widely read book Art for Life (Silapa Peur Chivit) was used to welcome freshmen Silpakorn students in the 1950s. Jit was not alone in thinking about the relationship between art and society, as other intellectuals such as Sayteekosett and Phraya Anuman Rajadhon echoed the idea that the role of art is to serve society. Political science journals were also influential in shaping the public’s desire for social justice. Scholarly groups that discussed the root causes of social and political problems in Thailand were largely formed within student bodies such as the Kloom Sapa Na Dome at Thammasat University, Kloom Lunchatut at Chiangmai University, Kloom Fern Fooh SOTUS Mai at Chulalongkorn University, Kloom Kitjakum at Ramkumhaeng University, and Kloom Sapa Kafe at Kasetsart University. The intersections between academic and student-led organisations led to an intellectual climate of public discussion in the early 1970s. The first wave of the left intellectual movement ceased when Jit and other leading leftist intellectuals and pro-democracy activists were arrested under Field Marshal General Sarit Thanarat’s regime, which was established after a coup d’état in 1958. In the early 1970s, the left intellectual movement caught a second wind when artists like Chang Sae Tang, who was self-taught, and Kamol Tutsanachalee, who had previously studied in America, began to introduce new ways of thinking about art. Their promotion of socially engaged art and the need for experimentation captured the imagination of the students from Poh Chang. Chang Sae Tang’s house at Taksin road and Prateung Emjaroen’s house at Koh Samet road were transformed into gathering places for Poh Chang students. The student groups shared progressive ideas about the need for democratic institutional structures in Thailand, and about the role of art and artists in bringing about societal changes. Concomitant with the intellectual shift to the left embodied in Jit Phoomisak’s Art for Life, the proliferation of left-leaning organisations spearheaded by student unions such as the National Student Center of Thailand (NSCT), an inter-university student National Council of Labour, became one of the main driving forces for the Naew Ruam Tor Tarn Padetkarn Haeng Chart (National Front for Opposing Dictatorship). When Thirayuth Boonmee became

292 the secretary general, he raised awareness of a new form of neo-imperialism represented by American and Japanese political and economic interventions in Thailand. He initiated the slogan ‘Gnod Chai Sinkah Yipoon Hunn Klup Ma Chai Sinkah Palid Nai Prathet Thai’ (‘Stop using Japanese products, return to using products made in Thailand’) to politicise these forms of economic imperialism and to organise resistance by advocating the use of locally produced untreated raw cotton. This translated into a trend in the arts community to use this material instead of textiles from Japan. The twin trajectories of a resurgent left intellectualism and organisations that propagated the ideals of ‘art for life, art for the people’ emerged within the context of a form of Thai nationalism that resisted what was perceived as the neo-imperialism exerted by America and its allies. The 14 October 1973 violence against the student-led protests also gave birth to TUAFT as a cultural organisation. The inseparability of TUAFT’s formation from the 14 October 1973 massacre can be seen from the background of the more than 40 participating artists. They called for a meeting to form a national organisation for all forms of cultural production one year after the traumatic event. Many of the artists who came to this meeting, like Chang Sae Tang, Prateung Emjaroen, Lawan Oopa-in (Daorai), Sompot Oopa- in, Chumleong Wichiakhet, Seht Thetsatham, Kumjorn Soonpongsri, Phanom Suwannanark, Thakon Priyakanitpong, Saetee Juntimatorn, Tawee Meurnnikorn, Pithak Piyapong, Sataporn Chaiseht, Chartchawun Patumvit, Nivat Kongpia, Luan Khetjasart, Trakul Preepun, Chookiat Jareonsook, Manut Kiasingha, and Chokchai Tukpo, were actively involved in the 14 October 1973 protest movement.481 The meeting concluded by naming this cultural organisation the Naew Ruam Silapin Haeng Prathet Thai (The United Artists’ Front of Thailand) and electing Phanom Suwannanark as its first president. TUAFT immediately began working closely with the NSCT to reproduce posters by Chachawun Pratumvit, while students from Poh Chang were active in promoting democracy in rural areas. The clearest instance of the close relationship between TUAFT and student groups came in the exhibition titled Silapa Wattanatham Thart (‘Slave Art and Culture’) at the Main Hall of Thammasat University. This exhibition was a collaboration between TUAFT, the Association of the Literary Society, and

481 Wongsmai Muang Larn-Na, ‘The Stream of Art History: The Artists’ Front of Thailand’, in Building and Weaving the 20-Year Art Legacy: The Artists’ Front of Thailand 1974–1994 (Bangkok: The Artists’ Front of Thailand, 1994), pp. 8–107.

293 the Student Union with its culture division at Thammasat University. The aims of this exhibition included:

1. Analysing the art and culture (locally) and internationally, whether it benefits the society or not. 2. Linking the important relationship of art and society together. 3. Research and propose values of culture towards humanity.482 This exhibition was important in charting the ideological, research and artistic directions of TUAFT in its attempt to make visible the oppressive regime of the Thai military government. Introducing the art of the working class, by making posters and illustrations for circulation, was seen as a way of empowering the people. TUAFT artists like Rawee Phawilai and Seksan Prasertku participated in the various art workshops, painting competitions and seminars. The spectre of history weighs in heavily, as the realities of the past are relentlessly modified and even erased, thus shaping how historical events are remembered. The 14 October Memorial was built to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the event, using largely private donations from those who were affected by the event, as well as from the Lottery Bureau, the University Affairs Bureau and the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration. The memory and historical construction of this event as a popular pro-democracy uprising against the autocratic military regime continues to be resisted by powerful political forces. Thailand’s most recent coup d’état was staged by the Royal Thai Armed Forces under the leadership of General Prayut Chan-o-cha, the current prime minister, who has also suppressed dissent, agitations for democracy, and criticisms of his government by using the lèse majesté law. This law criminalises any defamation, insult, or threat to the monarchy under Section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, which has been in effect since 1908. Coups in the past have often cited the lèse majesté law to overthrow elected governments. The 14 October Memorial as a site of memory is a beacon of light that remembers the sacrifices of those who died, particularly the students and civilians in a series of demonstrations for democracy from 1973 to 1976. It is, therefore, a site of memory born out of a trauma of a relatively recent past, and one that continues to have a currency in the present as part of Thailand’s struggle for democracy starting from 1932 when absolute monarchy was abolished.Since then, Thailand has experienced nineteen coups d'états of which twelve were successful, with the last coup by the military on 22 May 2014.

482 Ibid.

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The remembering of the Billboard Cut-Out exhibition by TUAFT that is exhibited within the 14 October Memorial (henceforth referred to as the Memorial) in Bangkok itself sparks questions of why a restaged critical exhibition is sited and remembered within a politically and historically charged memorial (Figure 7.15). If the Memorial is a site of memory, how does the Billboard Cut-Out exhibition function as ‘a site of memory within a site of memory’? Lastly, does the trauma of the 14 October 1973 massacre overshadow the Rancièrian idea of the politics of aesthetics, and does it alter our understanding of Nora’s insistence on the binary between history and memory that embodies a site of memory? Intersections between the Memorial and TUAFT’s activities are evident from how the latter emerged out of the left intellectual movement that shaped the thinking about art and its role in society, in direct response to the 14 October 1973 violence and its aftermath. The location of the Memorial at Rafadamnern Klang Road near the Democracy Monument (Figure 7.16) is symbolically significant, since many of the student protests that started at Thammasat University had the Democracy Monument as one of the important landmarks on their route. Examining the exhibition model of TUAFT reveals how Thammasat University, the Democracy Monument, and the Grand Palace form a triangular relationship linking these three sites of memory together (Figure 7.17). It is not surprising that many of the student-led protest marches have taken their route along these three symbolic touchstones connected by the Rajadamnern Avenue (Figure 7.18). The avenue itself is intended as a ceremonial boulevard and site of memory, where many acts of military and police brutality against the protesters occurred. On 13 October 1973, the leader of the protesters, Seksan Prasertkul, marched the crowd towards the Jitlada (the Grand Palace) front gardens, opposite Dusit Zoo, hoping to draw protection from the king’s baramee. This effort failed when the explosions near the Grand Palace went off and the violence started. Locating the Memorial in close proximity to the Democracy Monument produces a symbolic gesture, with the former representing the many people who paid the ultimate sacrifice to realise the aspirations and vision of the latter. The two sites of memory enforce their will to remember in support of each other. The construction of a site of memory that commemorates a recent event, which is the case for both the Democracy Monument and the Memorial, challenges Nora’s more restricted idea of the need for historical distance for a site of memory. Understanding a site of memory as a process enables us to think about how the relationship between memory

295 and history may not be framed as the binary opposites that Nora proposes. The Democracy Monument as a site of memory began as a commission by Field Marshall Pibul Songram to mark the 1932 coup d’état, otherwise referred to as the 1932 Revolution against King Prajadhipok (Rama VII), who went into exile and abdicated. It was effectively a monument to legitimise the military dictatorship under Prime Minister Pibul rather than to celebrate democracy in Thailand. It was only as a result of new memories being inscribed into the Democracy Monument by the democracy activists from 1973 to1976 that the monument truly transformed into a site of memory for democracy, albeit one that also embodies the failures of that aspiration. The Democracy Monument shows how a site of memory and its creation of symbolic meaning is a process that can be destabilised and changed with new meanings, memories and ultimately histories. It shifted from an embodiment of military dictatorship that contradicted its name and intention as a symbol for democracy, to one that remembers what Thailand should strive for in order to realise democracy and the empowerment of its people. The Memorial as the ‘younger sister’ site of memory to the Democracy Monument remembers the trauma of the string of massacres of students in the protest movements from 1973 until 1976. The Democracy Monument bears witness to the courage and sacrifice of those who died for democracy and resistance against military regimes. The Memorial acts as a monument for the traumatic memories and contested histories. It exemplifies a struggle against the state’s construction of a national narrative of ‘progress’ towards democracy, which in fact tends to return to military rule, at the expense of democracy, with its chequered history of coup d’états against elected civilian governments. Sites of memories built around the traumatic histories of national catastrophe and grief can neutralise other memories, especially those of collective action that are imbued with hope, empowerment and agency to effect changes. The Memorial encompasses a permanent restaged exhibition of the 1975 Billboard Cut-Out that was organised by TUAFT to commemorate the second anniversary of the 14 October 1973 massacre. It comprises remakes of the already destroyed billboard cut-out paintings. The restaged critical exhibition is a site of memory that activates and recovers individual and collective memories (Figure 7.19). The restaged critical exhibition in the Memorial comprises remade billboard cut-out paintings on canvases instead of plywood, and they are reduced to almost a quarter of their actual size. Most of them were painted by

296 the original artists. The restaged exhibition itself confronts the trauma of the student massacres by presenting the remade billboard cut-outs with photographic documentation of the military’s violence and the bravery of the student protesters who stood up for their beliefs, along with posters produced by TUAFT, and books about this tumultuous period in Thailand’s history (Figure 7.20). The Memorial as a site of memory is activated by the density of these visual and textual materials that manifests a will to remember the 1973– 1976 protest movements as a period of student activism, left intellectualism, and collectivism between cultural organisations across disciplines. The exhibitionary significance of TUAFT’s restaged critical exhibition as a site of memory is amassed through the strategy of intervention. Remembering TUAFT’s collective action educators from Naew Ruam Prachachon Haeng Prathet Thai (Allies of Thailand) helped to bring together the billboards, the posters with political slogans displayed on both sides of the Rajadamnern Avenue by TUAFT artists like Likit Gnarnsen, Virasuk Kunkaew and Pichai Funyeung, and the plywood, paint and other tools donated by the public or purchased with funds from the NSCT. The atmosphere of collective action and empowerment bestowed by the remade billboard cut-outs manifest a lived collective memory that refuses to be eclipsed and forgotten by official histories. This interplay between memory that refuses to yield to a history that is constructed by the dominant state generates a counternarrative to Nora’s vision of a site of memory as a largely linear progression from memory to history. The Billboard Cut-Out critical exhibition as a site of memory transforms into a vehicle of resistance that constantly contests the dominant historical narratives constructed by the military government. The will to memorialise meets the will to archive in the restaged exhibition of the 1975 Billboard Cut-Out. The restaged critical exhibition encompasses an archive of documentation images of the 14 October 1973 events (Figure 7.21), which either captures the huge mass of human bodies that breathed life into the demonstration (Figure 7.22) or presents violent images of soldiers attacking the protesters (Figure 7.23). The former presents a narrative of freedom through democratic processes and peaceful collective action, while the latter frames the violence inflicted as inhumane and unjust. Both narratives are central to the collective national memory that has been actively constructed as history by the Memorial. They provide the traumatic socio-political context to the activities of TUAFT, which culminated in the Billboard Cut-Out exhibitions in 1975 and 1976.

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Despite the persistence of the narratives that inhabit the Memorial and the history of TUAFT, the lingering unresolved history concerns the role of King Bhumibol. The king had initially supported the students in the 14 October 1973 uprising that led to the resignation of the Thanom regime, but he later withdrew his support for the students, thus exposing them to violent action from the military and police on 6 October 1976. On 5 October 1976, just one day before the massacre, TUAFT was involved in producing posters that mocked the powers behind the plans to bring Field Marshal Thanom back to Thailand under the pretext of his ailing father and himself being ordained as a monk. A group of students, including Lawan Oppa-in, a key member of TUAFT, were accused of lèse majesté or defamation of the royal family for staging a theatre performance in which a person, whose image was manipulated to look like the Crown Prince, was hung. The performance was covered in the Dao Siam and the Bangkok Post newspapers, known for opposing the student unions. This shifted public opinion against the students, who were blamed for defaming the revered Thai royalty. The next day, the massacre of 6 October occurred, which marked the Thai monarchy’s shift in support from the student protesters to the military. Until today, questions remain about the Thai monarchy’s role and responsibilities in this massacre. It remains a traumatic memory that can neither be forgotten nor find closure. These unresolved histories continue to haunt the Memorial and, by extension, the history of TUAFT. TUAFT ended in 1976 due to the arrest of most of its members; thus, it shared the same fate as the student protest movements of the 1970s. TUAFT’s critical exhibition as a site of memory within the Memorial constructs a complex and eventful history of democracy in Thailand. However, the Memorial has created a history of trauma, while the restaged critical exhibition has generated a history of collective mobilisation as a form of empowerment. Both sites of memories embody a will to remember that attempts to erase the memory of this moment of Thailand’s contested history. Siting the restaging of TUAFT in the Memorial produces resonances and connections between the two sites of memory. The Memorial and TUAFT’s critical exhibition reinforce the need to remember their shared trauma and struggles. This foregrounds the importance of not studying them in isolation. In 2017, the Memorial staged an exhibition (Figure 7.24) on the Gwangju people’s uprising in May 1980 in downtown Geumnamno in South Korea as a site of memory against the Chun Doo-hwan government, which brought an end to martial law, but in which over 600

298 protesters were killed (Figure 7.25). Both mass democratic movements involving artists (in the case of South Korea, the artist movement is known as Minjung Art) are now memorialised: the Gwangju Uprising in the 5.18 Memorial Park, Gwangju (Figure 7.26), and the student-led protests from 1973–76 in Bangkok in the 14 October Memorial, Bangkok. The links between both memorials as sites of memories call for more comparative examination of these sites to reveal art’s critical capacity in facing governing authorities.

Conclusion

We return to the question posed at the start of this chapter: Why have critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia been restaged in recent years? A surge of scholarly and curatorial interest in exhibition histories, which is gradually expanding from a Western phenomenon to a global one, mirrors the trend in art history to adopt a global perspective to frame art movements like conceptualism, feminism, pop art and surrealism.483 Most of these exhibitions of global ambitions have been organised by art institutions in Euro-America, with the recent exhibition Minimalism: Space. Light. Object, curated by the National Gallery Singapore in 2018, a rare exception. While art movements are ‘canonised’ and gain currency by being global, the same can be said of exhibition histories that canonise seminal exhibitions that are innovative, experimental and historically significant. In the same way, most restaged seminal exhibitions after the 2000s were exhibitions from Euro-America. Afterall’s Exhibition Histories, a series of publications on contemporary art shows that have provoked debates and shaped artistic practices, has only recently focused on an exhibition from Southeast Asia with their publication on the CMSI, titled Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992-98 (2018). The selection of CMSI suggests the critical viability of this exhibitionary form. Restaging seminal exhibitions is an effective way of canonising exhibitions. Can we therefore attribute the will to restage critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia to an assertion of the experimentations and historical significance of exhibitions from this region on a possibly global and inter-regional scale?

483 Recent exhibitions that claim a global perspective include: Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s- 1980s (1999), Global Feminisms (2007), The World Goes Pop (2017). Global Surrealism (2020) is to be organised by the Art Institute of Chicago and Tate Modern.

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I propose that recent restaging of critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia is connected to anxieties of the legacy of this critical exhibitionary form. The impact of critical exhibitions on artistic practice can be regarded as the turn to the everyday (Chapter 3), which brought social practices of the everyday into art-making. A ‘descent to the everyday’ functioned to question what art is. Art manifestos as a form of exhibitionary discourse produced by critical exhibitions shaped artistic practices most directly through the force of ideas that critiqued dominant aesthetic conventions. Critical exhibitions resulted in a shift towards more participatory practices, in both the making and the interpreting of art, by transforming the passive spectator into an active participant (Chapter 5). The exhibitionary turn towards multiplicities of space (Chapter 5), and the reclaiming of public spaces through festivals (in CMSI) or as politicised rituals (in TUAFT’s Billboard Cut-Out exhibition) continue in today’s performative and installation art. Heterochronic notions of temporalities (Chapter 6) in critical exhibitions critiqued how time was conceived, and they started to include the meditative, anachronic, and natural. These multiplicities of time have had a direct impact on subsequent artistic practices that are durational, participatory and metaphysical. This chapter has shown how critical exhibitions manifest exhibitionary significance in their propensity for being restaged. They build bridges to enable the constant renegotiation between the past and the present. The attention of critical exhibitions to discourse, most notably in the production of art manifestos, has been a vital and empowering force, to the extent that the conceptual and political strength of these art manifestos have attracted the restagings of critical exhibitions. These restagings make visible once again the exhibitionary significance and political potential of critical exhibitions in provoking and changing the perspective of participants. The historical significance of critical exhibitions lies in their restaging. Their criticality in contesting, reinterpreting and mediating the past continues to shape present and future exhibitionary and artistic practices. Critical exhibitions constitute a gesture of resistance to forgetting. In this way, restaged exhibitions reveal how critical exhibitions were invested with agency in the making of history itself, whether it was in the intellectual struggles of Marxism and the left, anti-colonialism or assertions of nationalism; or in offering alternative ways of thinking about and making art. They addressed questions such as: ‘What is art?’ and ‘Why are we artists?’. Critical exhibitions were products of socio-political and cultural contexts that persistently spoke to the present. They have been entry points for creating

300 situations, which destabilise and produce narratives and counter-narratives that are open- ended, contested and plural. The restaging of critical exhibitions does not represent the past in a fixed and authoritative manner; rather, it presents, tests and creates friction and alternative ways of reframing the past in relation to the present. It is also for these reasons that critical exhibitions are historically significant and vital to our understanding of how aesthetics are political in creating dissensus, and in making visible, contesting, and altering what can be seen, heard and said.

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Figure 7.1

Installation view of Fantasy World Supermarket - Approaches, Practice and Thinking Since the Indonesia New Art Movement in 1970s curated by Grace Samboh and Kumakura Haruko Movement in 1970s at the Mori Art Museum. Image by Seng Yu Jin

Figure 7.2

Installation view of Canton Express: Art of the Pearl River Delta at M+ (2017), Hong Kong. Image from M+ Pavilion website at https://www.westkowloon.hk/en/cantonexpress. Accessed on 25/05/2018.

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Figure 7.3

Installation view of Live in Our Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969). Image from: Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) https://www.macba.cat/uploads/20091118/lecture5_when_attitudes_eng.pdf. Accessed on 25/06/2018. Figure 7.4

Installation view of When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes (2012) at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary arts curated by Jenns Hoffman. Image from: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art. http://archive.wattis.org/exhibitions/when-attitudes-became-form-become- attitudes. Accessed on 15/06/2018.

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Figure 7.5

Installation view of TMR in the Raja’ah: Art, Idea and Creativity of Sulaiman Esa from 1950s – 2011 exhibition. Image from: Raja’ah: Art, Idea and Creativity of Sulaiman Esa from 1950s – 2011 (Kuala Lumpur: National Visual Art Gallery, 2011).

Figure 7.6

Installation view of Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs exhibition presented by Para Site, Hong Kong, co•produced with KADIST (Paris/San Francisco) featuring a restaging of the Towards a Mystical Reality exhibition. Image from: Image Art Studio, Eddie Lam, Courtesy Para Site, Hong Kong.

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Figure 7.7

Towards a Mystical Reality exhibition restaged at Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila. Image from: MCAD 6 September to 4 December 2016. http://www.mcadmanila.org.ph/soil-and- stones-souls-and-songs/. Accessed on 25/07/2018.

Figure 7.8

Installation view of the Chiang Mai Social Installation at the SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now exhibition, Mori Art Museum, 5 July-23 October 2017. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 7.9

Installation view of The Life and The Chaos: Objects, Images and Words, 1-30 October 2015 at the Erasmus Huis, Dutch Cultural Center in 2015. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.

Figure 7.10

Close up view of Koh Nguang How’s archival presentation of The Artists Village SUNSHOWER exhibition, Mori Art Museum. Image curtesy of Koh Nguang How.

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Figure 7.11

Installation view of Situation: Collaborations, collectives and artist networks from Sydney, Singapore and Berlin exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney curated by Russell Storer in 2005. Image from: https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/361-situation-collaborations- collectives-artist-networks-from-sydney-singapore-berlin/. Accessed on 10/05/2018.

Figure 7.12

Installation view of the Library Park at the Asia Cultural Center in Gwangju displaying archives in the Chiang Mai Social Installation and The Artists Village. Image by Seng Yu Jin

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Figure 7.13

Installation View of Menafsir Seni Rupa Baru: Membaca Ulang Perjalanan Sejarah Seni Rupa Baru 1975-1987, 1-15 December 2016 at the Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.14

14 October 1973 protests near the Democracy Monument, Bangkok. Image from: Siamese Visons, http://siamesevisions.blogspot.com/2011/05/student-protests-14-october-1973.html. Accessed on 12/06/2018.

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Figure 7.15

14 October Memorial 1973 in Bangkok. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 7.16

Installation view of the Billboard Cut-out exhibition at the 14 October Memorial 1973 in Bangkok. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.17

Exhibition model of the Billboard Cut-out exhibition with the triangle in red showing how the three political and symbolic sites are connected together in their distance in relation to each other. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 7.18

Exhibition model showing how the 14 October Memorial (indicated by the blue circle) at Ratchadamnoen Klang Road is near the Democracy Monument and connected to the Thammarsat University and the Grand Palace. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 7.19

Installation view of the Billboard Cut-out exhibition at the 14 October Memorial 1973 in Bangkok. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

Figure 7.20

Installation view of the Billboard Cut-out exhibition at the 14 October Memorial 1973 in Bangkok. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 7.21

Installation view of archival posters and photos of the 14 Oct 1974 massacre at the Memorial. Image courtesy of TUAFT.

Figure 7.22

Archival image of the 14 Oct 1973 demonstrations on display at the Memorial. Image courtesy of TUAFT.

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Archival photograph of the dead body of a protestor killed by the military hauled up the Democracy Monument. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 7.23

Archival image of student protestors in a face-off with the military. Image courtesy of TUAFT.

Figure 7.24

Exhibition on the Gwangju Uprising at the 14 Oct Memorial in Bangkok. Image by the Seng Yu Jin.

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Figure 7.25

Gwangju uprising in the City Square in 1980. Image from: Asia Society, https://asiasociety.org/korea/gwangju-uprising-divided-country-within-divided-peninsular. Accessed on 20/07/2018.

Figure 7.26

The Memorial Cultural Hall of the 5.18 Memorial Park in Gwangju. Image by Seng Yu Jin.

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Conclusion

A Critical Turn: Intersections between Art and Exhibitions in Southeast Asia

Why is the exhibition history of critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia important, and what are the legacies of these exhibitions for contemporary exhibition-making, artistic practices, the position of the spectator, and the capacity of the exhibition as a critical form? This thesis has foregrounded how a turn towards criticality in Southeast Asia manifested in the emergence of a new exhibitionary mode – the critical exhibition – that advanced conceptual, participatory, and socially engaged ways of both exhibition- and art-making. Moments of criticality consolidated in critical exhibitions as sites of resistance and action in the intersecting social and political contexts of a region awakened by rising nationalisms. Student and anti-colonial movements demanded independence from colonial and authoritarian forms of rule, as seen in artist collectives like The United Artists’ Front of Thailand (TUAFT) and the Kaisahan. Other movements propelled by artist collective action, such as the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB), The Artists Village (TAV) and the Chiang Mai Social Installation (CMSI), critiqued established institutions and their aesthetic conventions, and expanded the notion of art with a shift towards the everyday. Criticality remained the cornerstone of critical exhibitions as important art historical forms of resistance. In Southeast Asia, they produced sites of resistance against the universalising exhibitionary and artistic conventions of the white cube, the Western monolithic notion of temporality, and the depoliticisation of cultural discourse, and they made (and still make) visible the inadequacies of art historical methodologies that privilege the study of artists and artworks. And yet, there is still at times prominence and agency of artists and artworks through critical exhibitions and exhibition histories, especially via restagings and archival presentations. The need to understand exhibitions and their histories becomes apparent when critical exhibitions as vehicles of social and cultural change are invested with art historical agency and significance. It is therefore imperative that the histories that gave rise to critical exhibitions in this region are systematically examined. This makes possible comparative studies on other critical exhibitions and the development of exhibition histories as a discipline. The global mapping of critical exhibitions

317 produces multiple pathways of criticality as an art historical turn and method, which focuses not only on artworks and the ideas of artists, but also from the perspectives of participants who receive and actively engage with art in exhibitions. The methodology proposed in this thesis can be further expanded upon through interviews with those who were involved in the making of these exhibitions or actually experienced them. Using the physical or even virtual reconstruction of exhibtions will be useful in these participant interviews to jog their memories and relive their experiences more realistically. This thesis proposes exhibition history as a method through the entry points of exhibitionary discourse, space, time, and restagings. It brings into relief the dispersal of critical capacities by exhibitions united in a desire to transform passive spectators into active participants.

Criticality as Legacy: Discourse/Space/Time/Restaging

The participation of artists in critical activity has been examined in this thesis within the ambit of exhibition-making. Criticality is understood as the use of critique to question dominant conventions and the logics and operations that sustain and perpetuate them. In the field of culture, criticality emphasises present social and political conditions. It is imbued with an agency to change these conditions by questioning hitherto hidden underlying assumptions of structured knowledge. This thesis has demonstrated how exhibition histories intersected with criticality in Southeast Asia with the emergence of critical exhibitions as a new exhibitionary mode. The demand for criticality in exhibitions, artists, artworks and audiences gained currency within shared social, political and cultural contexts in Southeast Asia, which were connected by global events such as the Vietnam War. Anxieties over the perceived threat from communism in the 1970s led to the suppression of political freedom by authoritarian regimes pursuing developmentalism. Critical exhibitions in the region in this period eschewed the binary ideological framework of the Cold War by empowering participants with the agency to question dominant power structures and produce new subjectivities. Critical exhibitions had the underlying strategy of constantly searching for alternatives to conventional exhibitionary forms. The study of critical exhibitions in other regions and places is an area for future researchers on exhibition histories to explore. A comparison between critical exhibitions from different regions may yield a different understanding of art and art exhibitions. This

318 thesis has started a process of ‘differencing’ art history by turning to exhibition history as a method to reimagine alternative ways to think about art, how it is brought to the public, and how the public can become active participants in it. This methodology of exhibition history analyses not only singular artworks, but artworks in dialogue with each other. It analyses the spatial, temporal, and discursive elements of exhibitions, as well as the restagings of exhibitions. It shifts our understanding of art history by examining how artworks are received and contested collectively as an exhibition in the public realm. The use of the exhibition model as an analytical tool is productive in enabling the study of the dynamic relationships between artworks and critically engaged participants. It produces a more comprehensive exhibitionary experience, one closer to that of someone who had physically been at the exhibition. Exhibition history as method therefore narrows the disconnect between the actual experience of the exhibition and its exhibition history. It constructs models of exhibitions and their contemporary restagings. It also uses conceptual devices related to time, space and discourse to examine the multiple interpretations of exhibitions. Criticality as a way of thinking, making art and taking action to destabilise hegemonic structures of power dominated by authoritarian institutions and state actors is manifested in the advent of critical exhibitions. Critical thinking can be directed either by or to the self, or by and to the collective. Critical exhibitions provided the sites of connection for re- examining and propositioning new ways of presenting, thinking about, critiquing, receiving and negotiating art in terms of its historical context and explicability. Regional exhibitions, art, participants and artists from the 1970s gave weight and attention to the agency of critical activity to change mental frames and transform society. Critical exhibitions were sites for considering and acting upon new subjectivities and possibilities. Some explication is required of the relationship between critical exhibitions and art that is critical. This thesis has shown that critical exhibitions tend to present art that demands criticality from its audience as participants. They amplify critique as a way of questioning dominant structures of power. Art that is critical often shares social, artistic and exhibitionary purposes from which spring forth new afterlives in the form of multiple restagings. The restaging of critical exhibitions demonstrates the demand for continuous reinterpretation and forwards the potential of this typology of exhibitions as ‘open exhibitions’. Restaging enables different readings across art-historical contexts, which are

319 relevant to the currencies of contemporary art. Art and exhibitions meet in a confluence of criticality and openness to new artistic and exhibitionary strategies. Redza Piyadasa, one of the artists and exhibition-makers of the critical exhibition Towards a Mystical Reality (TMR; 1974), allows us to revisit his role as a provocateur. He proposed new ways of thinking about artworks and art history, regarding them not as being fixed in time, but as constantly changing their meaning in different historical contexts. Entry Points (1978), a work he made after TMR, bore the stenciled text ‘ARTWORKS DO NOT EXIST IN TIME, THEY HAVE MULTIPLE “ENTRY POINTS”’ (Figure 8.1). This could easily be read as ‘EXHIBITIONS [emphasis added] DO NOT EXIST IN TIME, THEY HAVE MULTIPLE ENTRY POINTS’. Exhibitions never exist in a singular time, space and discourse; rather, they continuously slip and slide between spatiality, temporalities and discourses. Criticality as proposed by this thesis aligns with Piyadasa’s critique of how the meaning of an artwork tends to be fixed in a singular timeframe. It prompts us to reconsider how we actually encounter exhibitions in terms of constantly changing discourses, spaces and times. Drawing on Piyadasa’s concept of artworks having multiple entry points, criticality in relation to exhibitions refers to a particular type of exhibition that generates multiple contexts and perspectives. Critical exhibitions, in particular, have generated multiple restagings, and hence they demand constant reappraisal in different art historical contexts. The multiple entry points of critical exhibitions include specific notions of time, space, discourse, and even the entirety of the exhibition itself, which can be restaged and recontextualised as art historical material for other exhibitions. The multiplicity of entry points in critical exhibitions open and undermine monolithic, static and universal understandings of exhibitions and artworks. It is through criticality allied with critical exhibitions that it becomes possible to ‘difference’, reinterpret and destabilise dominant interpretations of exhibitions and their histories. To ‘difference’, as art historian Griselda Pollock proposed, is a potent strategy, and it is one that has been adopted in this thesis to look elsewhere beyond the centres of Euro- America for a history of exhibitionary activism. For instance, TMR’s appeal to mental spaces as an alternative, metaphysical form of reality challenged a rational, visual-centric way of experiencing exhibitions and artworks. TAV’s Time Show ‘differenced’ the idea that exhibitions are unchangeable and fixed by the time of their opening. It opened up the possibility of an exhibition’s timescale over 24 hours as being constantly changing with both

320 planned and spontaneous events. These moments of differencing in the histories of critical exhibitions produce different modes of thinking about exhibition-making and artistic practices. Criticality in exhibitionary discourse propels the art manifesto as a discursive weapon employed by artists, either as an artist collective or through collaborative exhibitions, to interrogate hegemonic aesthetic and ideological conventions. Besides the art manifesto, there are other orders of discourse in the discursive struggle of exhibitions, such as the ‘new’, the ‘real’ and the ‘concrete’ (Chapter 4). The exhibitions destabilise the dominant meanings of these floating signifiers and open them up to different interpretations. This expanded notion of exhibitionary discourse forms an important method in exhibition history. Art manifestos by the Kaisahan and TUAFT critiqued the cultural power in the hands of the political elite, and argued for a shift towards the ‘people’ who had been culturally, politically and economically disenfranchised. TMR’s art manifesto, on the other hand, had its sights on art theory and history by decentring narrow, Western-centric cultural discourses that alienated Asian philosophical thought about reality and representation in art. GSRB’s art manifesto slipped in between both art historical and socio-political approaches towards Indonesian art history. Most of all, GSRB’s art manifesto and critical exhibition called for art to descend from its elitist pedestals, to communicate socially and politically relevant issues, and to awaken the rakyat, or ‘people’. While the art manifesto was a potent discursive weapon that many critical exhibitions deployed, its efficacy was heightened by a concomitant shift towards conceptual ways of rethinking the role and definition of art. This included the metaphysical in the case of TMR and Po Po’s Untitled critical exhibitions, which expanded conceptualism beyond the rationality of thought to spirituality and the mystical. The shift towards the conceptual in critical exhibitions cannot be separated from demands for criticality in the interrelated activities of exhibition-making and art-making. One of the principal contributions of exhibition history as method is precisely the need to understand the connections between exhibitions and artworks. Rather than considering the exhibition as a mere container of artworks, it examines the agency of exhibitions and its exhibition makers in engaging in a creative dialogue with the artworks, artists and spectator-participants. Critical exhibitions transformed spectators into participants in two ways. First, new subjectivities were produced through the metaphysical. TMR used everyday objects and

321 statements on labels to provoke participants to produce their own meanings drawn from their own lived experiences. Second, passive spectators were transformed into participants through collective and collaborative action. This was seen in the Billboard Cut-Out exhibition, in which artists, students, workers and practically anyone who wanted to join participated in the art-making and ritualistic procession of installing the billboards between two lamp posts along Rajadamnern Avenue. The conceptual was an exhibitionary entry point to foster a thought-provoking way of making and presenting art. It required art that was sympathetic to criticality, and it also demanded critical engagement on the part of the audience-participant. Both the art manifesto and the conceptual were discursive forms undermining Western-centric hegemonic discourses that commodified art and circumscribed how art was to be thought of, practised, discoursed and produced. They opened alternative ways to conceptualise art more expansively as propositions to be negotiated. The relationship between exhibitionary space and criticality can be seen in the critique of the limitations of the white cube exhibition as an exhibitionary form to present art. The critical exhibition as a site of multiple spatial possibilities foregrounded the capacity of art and the exhibition to change the participants’ perspectives. These possibilities ranged from public spaces like streets charged with symbolic and political meaning in the Billboard Cut-Out critical exhibition to mental spaces that extended beyond the rational mind in TMR and Po Po’s Untitled. The critique of space as being physical and perceived rationally through scientific observation was destabilised by a constellation of other ways of spatial thinking, derived from religious, spiritual, metaphysical and phenomenological understandings of people’s immediate environment. One-dimensional understandings of space based on rationality were questioned by Siti Adiyati who consistently used the mirror to produce multiple entry points into realities. Her early GSRB works, such as the untitled piece painted directly onto mirrors (Figure 8.2), and a piece, also untitled, with a mirror collaged into the painting (Figure 8.3), were described by art critic Sudarmadji as bringing the audience into the work itself as active participants, and as proposing the possibility of producing new subjectivities. In his Door in 75 Spatial Dimension, Bonyong Munni Ardhi described the door as a way of making ‘real space’. The door as a medium was a challenge to the limitations of paintings on canvas that

322 could only represent rather than make reality.484 The repeated use of everyday objects like mirrors and doors pushed the boundaries of existing conventions and dogmas of how reality and space were perceived and represented in artworks. The possibility of making reality rather than just representing it in critical exhibitions shattered the illusion of a singular and universal reality. The new-found critical mindset unravelled assumptions and proposed multiple ways of not just thinking about, but also producing, concrete realities, both spatially and experientially. The notion of time as monolithic, universal, and static has also been critiqued and rejected by critical exhibitions and critical artworks. Multiple temporalities were proposed by The Time Show. It embraced biological and natural notions of time that are attuned to the rhythms of day and night. Other forms of time were revealed in CMSI’s return to cyclical time as shaped by Buddhist ideas on the ephemerality of nature and the transience of all things. CMSI situated artworks in cemeteries and temples as sacred sites where the notion of a linear and teleological time is not imposed. ‘EXHIBITIONS DO NOT EXIST IN TIME, THEY HAVE MULTIPLE “ENTRY POINTS”’, my modification of Piyadasa’s statement, opens both critical exhibitions and artworks to the possibility of infinite reinterpretations and meanings in different historical contexts. Exhibition-makers in the present have been attracted to restaging critical exhibitions and, by extension, critical artworks, in the form of exhibitions, memorials and archives, precisely because of the availability of multiple entry points. The tendency for critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia to be restaged in recent years gives credence to their distinctiveness as a new type of exhibition. Thriving on criticality, they are constantly reappraised and reinterpreted.

Critical Exhibitions and Their Legacies

Critical exhibitions as sites of critical potential have the capacity to critique and propose new ideas on art and its presentation in different exhibitionary spaces, temporalities and discourses. The legacy of critical exhibitions therefore resides in its criticality as a method to interrupt existing aesthetic regimes determined by the white cube, Western-centric art discourses and universalising notions of time. In other words, critical exhibitions enable us to

484 ‘Interview with Bonyong, Des 2015, Pameran Senirupa Baru Indonesia 1975’, Kompas Daily, 16 August 1975.

323 think about exhibition history as a method based on criticality, and to consider how the constituents of exhibitions – discourse, space and time – can be rethought and critiqued. They make us understand how exhibitions shape artistic practices in the ways they present art, as well as how they transform the spectator into an active participant. Critical exhibitions have the capacity to transform passive spectators into active participants by engaging them in the making of artworks, either physically through collaborative action, or conceptually by constructing meaning through metaphysical or subjective interactions with the artworks in the context of their exhibitionary space, time and discourse. Critical exhibitions like CMSI have influenced the ‘relational aesthetics’ of later work. ‘Relational aesthetics’ is a term proposed by art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to refer to art that uses ‘the whole of human relations and their social context as its material and subject, rather than an independent and private space’.485 Relational works that are participatory in contemporary art have affinities with critical exhibitions that prioritised participants, and that involved participants even further in making meaning out of artworks and exhibitions. The political that is embedded with critique in critical exhibitions is of vital significance. The politics of aesthetics that changes the participant’s understanding and perception of existing realities by disrupting dominant aesthetic regimes is common to all the critical exhibitions. Concept Context Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia, curated by Iola Lenzi, Agung Hujatnikajennong and Vipash Purichanont in 2014, frames the strategies of the ‘conceptual’ for engaging with everyday life as the wellsprings of contemporary art.486 In response to the exhibition, Flores raised the question: ‘why privilege the conceptual to define the contemporary when there is already a recognition of the back- and-forth movement between the modern and the contemporary?’ Rather than a conceptual turn, which is too narrow in its definition of specific forms of non-object-based ‘conceptual art’ that privilege ideas and processes over finished works, it is a critical turn towards socially engaged forms of artistic practices, including the conceptual, that empowered art with the capacity to challenge prevailing aesthetic and exhibitionary conventions. The critique of restrictive aesthetic conventions by art academies in the case of

485 Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presse Du Réel, 1998), p. 113. 486 Jim Supangkat, ‘Seni Rupa Baru’, in Gerakan Seni Rypa Baru Indonesia (Jakarta: Penerbit PT Gramedia, 1975), pp. 99–104.

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GSRB, and the critique of authoritarian regimes in the cases of TUAFT and the Kaisahan, brought the potential of the political into the exhibitionary. Exhibitions here served as vehicles for challenging state institutions and their regimes of aesthetics. Supangkat clearly identified the desire to rebel in the GSRB: ‘Now, if there was a rebellion, there was a confronting arrogance in this New Art Movement of 75 [GSRB], it was based on a number of its own anxiousness, its own inertias, a break from the dogmas it had embraced and gave birth to its own conclusion’. GSRB rebelled against established institutions of power and demanded a critical questioning of dogmas about the essence, role or meaning of art and exhibitions. The critique of the separation of art from life in CMSI and The Time Show, and Western-centric notions of art in favour of ‘mystical’ ones in TMR and Po Po’s Untitled exhibition, are forms of political aesthetics that challenged expectations of how art and exhibitions should be interpreted and experienced. Metaphysical ways of experiencing art cognitively and spiritually, attuned to nature’s rhythms and temporalities, are examples of how critical exhibitions produced alternative aesthetic values that resonate with contemporary art as an expanded field. The agency of the GSRB and other critical exhibitions in questioning dominant aesthetic values relates back to the emancipatory power of criticality in forging new definitions and understandings of art and exhibition- making. Critical exhibitions have left a legacy of far-reaching significance in the history of exhibitions by focusing on the exhibition as a viable critical form in constant need of questioning. Critical exhibitions demonstrate how exhibitions are not mere containers for the display of art. Instead, critical exhibitions show how exhibitions can advance and challenge conventions of aesthetics and the exhibitionary. They constantly challenge the notion of art and the possibilities of the exhibition as a model for connecting art to the public in more participatory ways. The restaging of critical exhibitions in recent years is an indication of the historical significance of these exhibitions and their relevance to our understanding not only of the history of exhibitions in Southeast Asia, but also of art history more broadly. Experiments in exhibition-making are present in critical exhibitions. TMR’s use of the entire exhibition as a mental space goes beyond the physical limitations of an exhibition, while TUAFT’s collaborative approach to art-making, and CMSI’s use of cultural spaces like temples and cemeteries to engage with art, continue to resonate with and remain pertinent to contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, whose histories can be

325 traced back to these critical exhibitions. Critical exhibitions as historical precedents of subsequent artistic and exhibitionary practices have been highlighted by Simon Soon, who locates the ‘activation of public space as a site for artistic practice’ in TUAFT’s Billboard Cut- Out exhibition as a historical precedent of CMSI.487 Time had come full circle between two critical exhibitions in Thailand that continued to question the critical viability of public spaces to engage with their publics. The critical exhibitions that I have examined in this thesis show the turn to criticality in the history of exhibitions in Southeast Asia. They allow us to understand art historical shifts in the region in the 1970s not as another ‘ism’ chained to a successive, linear progression of art movements that struggle to be free from being ‘belated’, ‘derivative’ or even ‘creatively adapted’ in comparison to the West. Radical and experimental ideas in critical exhibitions in this region drew from a constellation of cultural sources and coalesced in the currency of criticality to question the role of art and its institutions. In a world now permeated by ‘fake news’, the continued need for criticality has become more urgent than ever before. Most importantly, critical exhibitions show us the capacity of exhibitions and art to question the structures of art in society.

487 Simon Soon, ‘Images Without Bodies: Chiang Mai Social Installation and the Art History of Cooperative Suffering’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 42 (Autumn/Winter 2016), pp. 36–47.

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Figure 8.1

Redza Piyadasa, Entry Points, 1978, original framed oil painting and acrylic on wood, 100 × 78 cm. Collection of the National Visual Arts Gallery of Malaysia. Image courtesy of the National Visual Arts Gallery of Malaysia.

Figure 8.2

Siti Adiyati, not titled, 1975, oil on canvas, board & mirror Variable dimension. Image from: List of artworks from Pameran Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia 1975 (Indonesia New Art Exhibition 1975). Generated by Hyphen from a variety of media clippings, thesis and interview sessions.

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Figure 8.3

Siti Adiyati, not titled, 1975, Oil on canvas, board & mirror Variable dimension. Image from: List of artworks from Pameran Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia 1975 (Indonesia New Art Exhibition 1975). Generated by Hyphen from a variety of media clippings, thesis and interview sessions.

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Appendices

Appendix A

Timeline of different types of exhibition in Southeast Asia from the 1940s to the 1990s.

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Appendix B (Please use your zoom function to read the text) published in Institution for the Future edited by Sally Lai & Biljana Ciric (Manchester: Chinese Arts Centre, 2012).

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Appendix C

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Appendix D

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Appendix E Interviews conducted by the author Interview with Uthit Atimana (Chiang Mai Social Installation), 27 December 2015, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Interview with Po Po (Po Po’s Untitled exhibition), 22 March 2016, Yangon, Myanmar. Interview with San Minn, 20 March 2016, Yangon, Myanmar. Interview with FX Harsono (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru), 10 December 2016, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Interview with Kitti Maleephan (Chiang Mai Social Installation), 25 December 2017, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Interview with Kosit Juntaratip (Chiang Mai Social Installation), 25 December 2017, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Interview with Tawatchai Puntusawasdi (Chiang Mai Social Installation), 25 December 2017, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Interview with Somporn Rodboon (Chiang Mai Social Installation and The United Artists’ Front of Thailand), 25 December, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Interview with Navin Rawanchaikul (Chiang Mai Social Installation), 6 May 2016, Singapore. Email interview with Siti Adiyati (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru) on 1 January 2017. Interview with Renato Habulan, Pablo Baens Santos, and Edgar Talusan Fernandez (Kaisahan), 31 January 2017, Manila, The Philippines. Interview with Jose Tence Ruiz (The Artists Village), 1 February 2017, Manila, The Philippines. Interview with Vasan Sitthiket (The United Artists’ Front of Thailand), 1 February 2017, Bangkok, Thailand. Interview with Sinsawat Yodbangtoey (The United Artists’ Front of Thailand), 14 March 2017, Bangkok, Thailand. Interview with Low Eng Teong (The Artists Village), 19 September 2017, Singapore. Interview with Koh Nguang How (The Artists Village), 13 March 2018, Singapore.

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Seng, Yu Jin

Title: A history of art exhibitions: the emergence of critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia, 1970s–1990s

Date: 2019

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/225000

File Description: A history of art exhibitions: the emergence of critical exhibitions in Southeast Asia, 1970s–1990s

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