Kevin Chua Exhibiting Modern Asian Art in Southeast Asia

n the spate of innovative exhibitions of modern and contemporary art that have taken place around the world since the 1980s, it is safe Ito say that exhibitions of modern Asian art have lagged behind. If modern art was once at the forefront of exhibition production—think only of Duchamp’s First Papers of Surrealism installation of 1942, or even the Impressionist exhibitions of the 1870s and 80s—it appears, of late, to have been eclipsed by exhibitions of contemporary art. The upsurge of biennials around the world since the 1990s has, especially, foregrounded new and inventive modes in the display of contemporary art—enough to put modern art, I would argue, in shadow. I’d like to examine this problem of the lag of modernism1 within contemporary exhibition making by looking at two recent exhibitions of modern art in Southeast Asia: Realism in Asian Art, a joint exhibition between the National Art Gallery, Singapore, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, in 2010 (hereafter referred to as Realism),2 and Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art, staged by the National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum, Singapore, in 2008 (hereafter referred to as Strategies). Because modernism has been so intrinsically tied to “nation,” I will ask how “Southeast Asia” and “Asia” were defined and positioned via these exhibitions of Asian modernism, using Maria Lind’s deployment of “the curatorial” to probe the historicity of modernism in Southeast Asia.

By “the curatorial,” Lind refers to a “mode of curating [that operates] like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions.” Drawing from Chantal Mouffe’s use of the term “the political,” which itself refers to the ineradicable antagonism that is fundamental to politics, for Lind, the curatorial is “a viral presence that strives to create friction and push new ideas, whether from curators or artists, educators or editors.”3 By that I take her to mean that the curatorial is a kind of ineradicable and contagious energy that courses through an exhibition and keeps it dynamic, on permanent edge. Exhibitions that embody the curatorial produce “not a survey but a situation.”4 They refrain from having the exhibition space be a mere container for objects; the exhibition would generate narratives that would be plural and open-ended. As a mode of production, curating in the traditional sense—authorized by and the product of a curator—would give way to the “labour of a network of agents.”5 Finally—and this is especially important for my purposes—the curatorial “involves not just representing but presenting and testing; it performs something here and now instead of merely mapping something from there and then.”6

Vol. 13 No. 2 105 As an attempt to capture much of what has been innovative and critical about exhibition practice, I find Lind’s concept useful. For her, the concept owes much to site-specific and context-sensitive art practices and the various lineages of institutional critique that emerged in the 1960s (one thinks of exhibition experiments by Marcel Broodthaers or Michael Asher).7 Closer to Lind’s own moment, she cites the São Paolo Biennial of 2008 as emblematic of the curatorial; but one could also point to the Havana Biennial of 1984,8 the Shanghai Biennale of 2000, or, most famously, documenta 11, of 2001.9 While one could track the lineaments of “the curatorial” through performance theory10 or the Peircean index,11 for me, the curatorial’s key distinction between “representing” and “presenting” is traceable back to Wittgenstein, specifically his distinction between “saying” and “showing.”12 Looking at exhibitions from this angle will allow me to ask what is specifically modern about the curatorial, which also is to ask of the particular historicity of modernism.13 Recovering this will go some way toward helping us answer why current exhibitions of modern art in Asia seem to pale against those of contemporary art.

Curated by Joyce Fan and Kim Inhiye,14 Realism displayed works by artists from ten countries: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. At the Singapore venue, seventy-nine paintings were arranged into five themes spread across several rooms: “Realism as Form of Representation,” “The Rural as an Attitude and Metaphor,” “Hail the Worker!," “The Impact of War,” and “Social Commentary and Criticism.” Twenty-six works were added at the Korean venue. The works shown dated from the nineteenth century—with paintings by Juan Senson (Philippines), Raden Saleh (Indonesia), and Takahashi Juichi (Japan)—to the 1980s.15

As modernism is often thought of as both beginning in, and belonging to, the West, this exhibition explicitly sought to locate what was distinctive about modernism in Asia. Thus, one often found in the paintings European techniques and methods being applied to Asian content or subject matter, and the exhibition sought to privilege this local uptake. Because the advent of realism in Asia coincided variously with colonialism, war, and occupation, the exhibition sought to open these paintings up to the social history in and of these countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The art became a way to reflect on what was “real” about this long history of war and occupation; maybe, at its best, the exhibition revealed what this painting, in its historical moment, was able to do—shake viewers from their certainties and have them attend to what is most urgent and valuable about the world. The thematic organization of the show, as well as juxtapositions of works from different countries within each room, attempted to remove any potential concern that the exhibition might be narrowly about national stylistic identity, or cling to some anodyne progress narrative—say, if the exhibition went from early to late realism, or from country to country, as one went from room to room.16 At the very least, the exhibition offered a rare occasion to view paintings from Asia and Southeast Asia, many not well known and infrequently exhibited, and to think about an important artistic movement in the light of social history.

106 Vol. 13 No. 2 Some curatorial decisions and moves were, however, puzzling. For instance, the exhibition cleaved form from content: “Although the starting point in the enquiry has a firm footing on a Western art historical concept, the powerful imagery of the exhibited paintings attests to the region’s own Asian realism,” the curators write.17 As an attempt at definition, the sentence verges on tautology. Presumably the curators meant that while the idea of realism came from the West, realist art took shape in relation to contexts and environments particular to Asia, and it is this differential uptake that matters. Yet similarities of subject matter or content across Asia and the West—such as socialism—mean that form wasn’t just an empty vehicle for content. Nor am I convinced that the idea of realism began in the West.18 The exhibition downplayed form and conceptual origin in favour of content and reception. But a better word for “downplayed” might be “repressed”: the exhibition addressed the problem of the derivativeness of non-Western modernism only by wishing Western modernism away. In other words, that old saw—the tired notion that modernism began in the West and was later “exported” to various countries around the world—kept coming back, ringing in one’s ear.

While the curators added focus to the exhibition by concerning themselves not with what they call the “mimetic theory of art” but rather with realism as “a stylistic attitude,” this distinction quickly descended into confusion: “The so-called ‘truth’—the notion that perception could be unadulterated by place and time remained an ideal or a realist myth. Instead, as the selected paintings demonstrate, we are confronted by the emotive potential of imagery and its representation, and more often than not, artists going beyond simple documentation and using art to convey their perceived truth, whatever their position or opinion may be.”19 The authors collapse social realism back onto optical realism, then dismiss optical realism as inadequate to a true understanding of reality. Why, moreover, are false oppositions set up between “mere appearance” and emotion, and between documentation and “perceived” truth? Art historians have, in fact, shown how, in the West since at least the fifteenth century, a pictorial practice that was a kind of literal recording or documentation never existed. Truth coexisted with emotion, objective reality with subjective being. The more one zooms in on perspectival realism, the stranger it appears.20

The exhibition relied on a cliché of the West to get itself going: “While in the West the past is abandoned in Asia however the constant and consistent reconciliation Asian artists faced towards new ideas and technology from the West with their own cultures, traditions, and philosophy, in fact gave rise to a new strain of modernism.”21 Here the West is caricatured as a culture and geographical region hurtling forward toward the new, without looking back to the past, whereas in Asia there is a constant and greater attention to tradition. To so sharply mark “tradition” off from “modernity” for one artist or artwork might be written off as a simplification; but to transpose this to characterize an entire culture is, to put it mildly, egregious.

So even as the exhibition tried not to be linear and fall into traps of teleology and progress, it fell into another one—that of a barely disguised

Vol. 13 No. 2 107 essentialism. Is it possible to ask what is distinctively “Asian” about realism in this part of the world without falling into the trap of identity? Perhaps it would have been better to ask not what, but when, is Asia—when did certain cultural configurations and formations come into being, in relation to other cultural forces and necessities, such that identity came to seem fixed? The assumption that realism as a mode of representation is bound up with a correspondence theory of reality seemed to predetermine what the exhibition was looking for: the “Asianness” of realism. While the thematic approach tried to move toward an open form for the exhibition’s structure, I would argue that the latter, for the most part, remained closed.

Instead of avoiding the problem of the derivativeness of non-Western modernism, the exhibition could have found ways of erasing it altogether. There are ways to decentre Western modernism such that our histories no longer (need to) refer back to this originating core: for example, work by Dipesh Chakrabarthy, Partha Mitter, or Susan Buck-Morss.22 Instead of avoiding European realism, how much more challenging would it have been to consider realism’s emergence as an aggressively peripheral, even provincial, art form.23 Gustave Courbet’s painting, for one, drew insight from the economic depredations of the city on the countryside, felt dramatically in places like his hometown of Ornans. The paintings he showed at the Paris Salon of 1850–51 were terse missives to an uncomprehending bourgeoisie.24 How radical if we better understood how realism turned the master’s language against his own ends—look at how Courbet inverted the language of idealistic history painting, to make it speak the popular. How do we understand the gap or distance in realism—between artifice and truthfulness, calculation and contingency—as it occurred in Asia?

We could say that this exhibition spent too much time on the epistemology of realism (that is, what the paintings looked like), when a more interesting approach might have been to ponder its ontology—in other words, how realism instates, or puts us in, a “world.”25 Why does realism so powerfully, so effortlessly, privilege orientation in the world? Insofar as Kwok Kian Chow, one of the catalogue authors, casually cites, but doesn’t address, David Summers’ Real Spaces, it seems appropriate to point out that Summers’ argument centrally revolves around place and orientation.26 Though Realism was at pains to stress intra-Asian relationality, what if we found out that realism in Asia was primarily oriented towards the West? Our answer would have to take some measure of the historical persistence of the relationship between colonizer and colonized.27 Once we start paying attention to the various temporalities in and of realism, we will get closer to what lies beyond what Walter Benjamin called “homogenous, empty time”28: that realm of heterogenous time and space that Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel call the “anachronic” and that Terry Smith calls “contemporaneity.”29

European modernism arrived in Asia at different speeds—via books, magazines, newspapers, exhibitions, word of mouth, etc. Did S. Sudjojono, for example (who I will later address), have some understanding of Courbet when creating his seminal paintings of the late 1930s and early

108 Vol. 13 No. 2 40s? How do we reconstruct the multiple mediations that lead to a work of art? In privileging production instead of reception here, there is a way that the curatorial, with its emphasis on showing rather than saying, treats artworks in a productivist30 or constructivist manner. It asks about the productive “work” done by the work of art. The curatorial avoids thinking of production and reception as at two ends of a straight line; the work of art instead pulsates on a dynamic continuum. Instead of a container of objects, think of a rhizomatic lattice or mesh; instead of looking at works of art, attend to the nervous and neural networks in and around us, of which the artwork is a merely an enabling component. If the curatorial tries to break down the distinction between the viewer “over here” and the art object “over there,” it fits into a growing tendency in advanced quarters of art history to rethink the enabling conditions of a work of art.31

Chua Mia Tee, Epic Poem of Malaya, 1959, oil on canvas, 112 x 153 cm. Collection of National Heritage Board, Singapore.

Some of the paintings in Realism might speak to the problem of how not to linearize the rupture in and of modernism: for example, on the left shoulder of the boy sitting in the foreground of Chua Mia Tee’s Epic Poem of Malaya (1959) is a single fruit fly. Small yet conspicuous to a viewer standing in front of the painting, it must have been fully intentional on the part of the artist. Yet what does it mean? The fly was likely painted to signal the painting’s illusionism; it is a nifty trick that artists from the Renaissance onwards used to show off their painterly prowess. Yet the fly, which appears on margins of medieval manuscript illuminations, was also understood as a religious symbol connoting sin, corruption, and mortality. It was linked to Satan, and there was something demonic about it.32 The fly in Chua Mia Tee’s painting helps convey to the viewer the absorption of the boy who is actively listening to this rather animated poetry reading, and thus serves as a metaphor of our absorption into the painting. But in the broader religious sense, the fly might also connote the baseness or abjectness of the children receiving this education; it might explain the strand of regressive infantilism that troubles so many of Chua’s paintings of the late 1950s. What is most “real” about his painting during this crucial period, then, is the tension between its idealistic politics and a kind of psychological blockage, anxiety, or, indeed, trauma;33 putting a fly on a young boy’s shoulder paradoxically allowed not flight nor errancy, but this painting’s peculiar achievement of immanence.

Vol. 13 No. 2 109 In the end, the exhibition structure Koeh Sia Yong, Here They Come! , 1965, oil on canvas, of Realism seemed to function as 85 x 100 cm. Collection of the National Heritage Board, a bland container for the works Singapore. of art. Where this matters most, I think, is in the way that political art was subsumed and tamed when put into such a framework (and there might be something intrinsic about realism that provokes such de-politicization—think of Courbet).34 So artworks like Chua Mia Tee’s Epic Poem of Malaya or Koeh Sia Yong’s Here They Come! (1965) seemed drained of their politics in this exhibition. This work by Koeh, however, though perhaps a little satirical, is certainly politically evasive—it suggests an approaching person, group, or event, but refrains from naming it. The apparent ambiguity of the painting hides from real engagement; but perhaps its tone of paranoia and retreat is understandable given the failure of socialism in Singapore by 1965. How perfect it would have been—given the National Art Gallery’s strong ties to the Singapore state—if the exhibition’s containment of the art expressed the state’s containment of this form of representational politics. But I don’t think the exhibition was cognizant of this.

If Realism achieved its ambition of defining the identity of Asian realism, it would have (brilliantly) inverted the hierarchy between Asia and Southeast Asia, positioning Southeast Asia over Asia. In and through the exhibition, it would have positioned the National Art Gallery, and thus Singapore and Southeast Asia, as being at the centre, rather than at the periphery, of Asia. Perhaps this goal might have been possible if the exhibition asserted itself into this position via a coherent, integrated, and sophisticated artistic- intellectual vision—which, by and large, it did not have.

Strategies brought together a selection of twenty-five modern and contemporary works of art from Indonesia. S. Sudjojono, the famed “father” of Indonesian modernism, was used as a jumping off point for artistic reflections by contemporary artists, from Agus Suwage to Sigit Santoso.35 Realism was a focus of the exhibition, in that the exhibition chose to treat the “real” in a very broad sense that exceeded social realism. The exhibition foregrounded artists’ “engagements” with the real—implying variable, practical results and consequences over epistemological certainty. Objects were arrayed in the main room and hallway of the NUS Museum space in modern and contemporary conjunctions, which encouraged a plurality of perspectives. Wall texts—often quotes—jarred productively with visual objects and imagery, and one “heard” these voices as one looked at the art. “[The] exhibition space,” curator Wang Zineng writes, “is envisioned as one where multiple perspectives may surface—a space where different voices can be heard, sometimes smooth and sonorous, sometimes crass and jarring, at times in harmonious agreement, at other times marked by discord. . . . [T] he exhibition is distinguished by a condition of polyvocality, where multiple voices articulate actualities through differing and subjective contexts. Instead of one story, many personal narratives are put forth, each with equal validity.

110 Vol. 13 No. 2 Entrance to Strategies Towards An ahistorical and non-linear approach is sought. Instead of hierarchies, we the Real, 2008. Courtesy of 36 NUS Museum, Singapore. find layers of meaning in democratic contestation.”

Instead of an exhibition space that served as a container for objects, one had the sense that Strategies was structured like a loose network of object-idea constellations, and that each constellation was structured by a non-linear sense of time. Polyvocality captures what was fundamental about time in this exhibition: multiple temporalities, each moving at different rates or speeds, arrested in a single moment. Instead of representing or saying, Strategies presented and showed.37

S. Sudjojono, Maka Lahirlah Compared to Realism, Strategies Angkatan ’66 (So Was Born the ’66 Generation), 1966, performed the curatorial. Its oil on canvas, 98.5 x 84 cm. Collection of Museum Seni modern-contemporary structure Rupa dan Keramik, Jakarta. made it refreshingly open-ended; instead of privileging either modern or contemporary art, viewers were put in an active space between the two. It also gave the sense that, as their consistent engagements have shown, contemporary Indonesian artists do not consider modernism to be “over.” So the exhibition’s time structure was different: if Realism ended up being linear, despite not intending to be, Strategies had us moving back and forth between past and present. We find many non-unidirectional juxtapositions: for example, although putting Agus Suwage’s Maka Lahirlah Angkatan ’90-an (So Was Born the ‘90s Generation) (2001) next to Sudjojono’s Maka Lahirlah Angkatan ’66 (So Was Born the ’66 Generation) (1966) seemed to bring the earlier painting into the present, it also sent us back to the 1960s. Although the man with paintbrush and can recurs in both paintings—the student demonstrations of the 1960s and late 90s in Indonesia surely occasioned

Vol. 13 No. 2 111 this—one notes how Suwage’s painting, with its screen of dots and voided background, seems almost emptied of meaning. The picture was done just at, or slightly after, the moment when the artist became disillusioned with politics, after witnessing the Reformasi movement, including riots in Jakarta, that culminated in 1998 with the fall of Suharto. It seems to usher in the cynical and worldly style of art that would become so favoured by the art market, which began in Indonesia after 1998. And yet, the more we move back and forth between both paintings, the more the story deepens: what if Sudjojono’s student demonstrator was part of the broader pro-Communist, PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia)-led push to carry out Sukarno’s revolution—which for some groups was its own form of totalitarianism?38 To what degree was S. Sudjojono cognizant of the contradictions of this PKI period, which only seemed to end up reinstalling certain forms of power, hierarchy, and corruption?

One way to deepen the exhibition Strategies Towards the Real 2008, installation view with is if viewers attend to the “before” Agus Suwage, Maka Lahirlah Angkatan ’90-an (So Was Born of Sudjojono, as much as we were the ‘90s Generation), 2001, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, presented with the “after” (the 150 x 200 cm. Collection of Indra Leonardi. Courtesy of contemporary works presented in NUS Museum, Singapore. response to him).39 If Strategies Left: Marc Chagall, The Fiddler, 1912, oil on linen tablecloth, focused on the reception end 188 x 158 cm. Collection of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. of modernism, what about the production end? What were Sudjojono’s sources, choices, and influences, and how did he arrive at

112 Vol. 13 No. 2 S. Sudjojono, The Optimist, 1982, oil on canvas, 89 x 69 cm. Collection of Sudjojono Center, Ciputat-Tangerang, Indonesia.

his peculiar art?40 One example: we know that Marc Chagall’s The Fiddler (1912) (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) was one source for Sudjojono’s The Optimist (1982).41 Sudjojono had seen Chagall’s painting in the 1930s, when the work was exhibited in one of the Regnault exhibitions in Batavia. But what did he see in the Chagall? How did the 1912 painting help resolve a problem the artist faced in 1982? S. Sudjojono was sixty-nine when he painted The Optimist, and the bright colours and energetic tone seem to belie what must have been anxieties about old age and a need to take care of his family (represented in the five brownish circles around him in the painting). Chagall’s fiddler was useful for Sudjojono as a familiar icon of Jewish cultural survival. More specifically, that Chagall belonged to a strain of Hasidic Judaism, which differed from the more rational Orthodox Judaism then in Vitebsk, explains the way the figure floats over the city—it is a simple yet eloquent emblem of freedom. The way Sudjojono floats in his own painting captures the way he was “thrown” into history; historicity is surrendering to the utter contingency—the unlikeliness—of his paintings ever occurring.

What, then, is the historicity of Strategies as an exhibition? 2008 was an early moment when contemporary Indonesian art was trying to break out of its domestic market, a market that had been robust and healthy for about a decade.42 Shifting and diversifying the collecting base, however, presented opportunities but also risks; one suspects that the exhibition was part of a push to give contemporary Indonesian art greater world-historical visibility and significance. Perhaps the goal was for Indonesia to rival China

Vol. 13 No. 2 113 and its art market—surely Indonesia had the right kind of contemporary art, with its adroit blend of history and irony. But I don’t think this shift to a broader collecting base necessitated the retrieval of modernism as a way to reflect on the politics and economics of their own contemporary art. Modernism continues to be retrieved by (at least) the immediate post-1998 generation of contemporary Indonesian artists, which might serve as a cautionary check as contemporary Indonesian art is increasingly absorbed into the global art market.

That Realism ended up being rather static, while Strategies came across as more dynamic, might be explained by the character of their respective organizing institutions: the National Art Gallery was and is a large and powerful institution in Singapore, with vast resources. It continues to have the largest collection of Southeast Asian art in the region. The National Art Gallery had not yet split off from the Singapore Art Museum at the time of Realism; when the National Art Gallery opens in its new building in 2015, it will more fully devote itself to the exhibition, collection, and maintenance of modern Asian and Southeast Asian art. The NUS Museum, by contrast, was and is a smaller institution with a collection of works from Asia and Southeast Asia spanning the ancient to the contemporary. Its association with the National University of Singapore has also given the museum a more scholarly bent. But its relatively small size, I would argue, has afforded it a certain degree of flexibility and relative lack of hierarchy perhaps necessary to put up innovative exhibitions.43 It is the same flexibility that Carlos Basualdo saw in certain biennials, what he called “the unstable institution.”44

Modernism’s ongoing recession into the art-historical past is commensurate with the decline of a certain kind of nation-state politics (based on democratic party politics and voting) in the face of the increasing neoliberalization of the global economy, which subordinates the state to its own ends. The extension of the biopoliticized security state into more and more avenues of everyday life in many Southeast Asian countries has tended to erode, rather than strengthen, such nation-state politics. As the intransigent politics of modernism fades into the past, a distant glimmer of what it once was, modern paintings have become prized as fetish objects on the art market, with art historians often simply called upon to prop up the regime of market legitimacy. If “the curatorial” has any relevance, perhaps it can provide us with greater insight and self-reflexivity into our own exhibition practices. Modernism was once the centre of gravity of an entire art world; it would be a shame if our exhibitions of modern art became elaborate exercises in forgetting.

Notes 1 I use “modernism” and “modern art” interchangeably in this essay. 2 The Singapore version of the show was organized by the National Art Gallery, but was exhibited on the premises of the Singapore Art Museum. 3 Maria Lind, “Active Cultures,” Artforum, October 2009, 103; for the full essay, see Lind, “The Curatorial,” in Selected Maria Lind Writing, ed. Brian Kuan Wood (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 57–66. While Patrick Flores used the phrase “the curatorial” in his Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2008), published a year before Lind’s essay, I use “the curatorial” in Lind’s more specific sense here. Nonetheless, many of Flores’s analyses do seem to anticipate Lind’s.

114 Vol. 13 No. 2 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 For one version of this global history, see Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012). 8 Rafal Niemojewski, “Venice or Havana: A Polemic on the Genesis of the Contemporary Biennial,” in The Biennial Reader, eds. Carlos Basualdo, Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Ovstebo (Berlin and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 88–103. 9 While I am not trying to bring “the curatorial” back to the non-West, there is a way in which the exhibitionary developments that informed Lind’s term were happening around the world (e.g., her example of the São Paolo Biennial). It may be that, as an impulse, the curatorial emerged out of conditions of global sociopolitics, stirring in the 1960s and peaking in the 1990s and 2000s. Patrick Flores, building on work by John Clark, recovers some of the Asian contributions to global exhibition- making since the 1960s in Past Peripheral, op. cit., 62–65. 10 Hence the anthology edited by Maria Lind, Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). 11 For an introduction to the semiotic term “index” as theorized by Charles Sanders Peirce, see Michael Leja, “Peirce’s Visuality and the Semiotics of Art,” in A Companion to Art Theory, eds. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 303–16. 12 “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and R. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1961), 7. Moving away from logical atomism—for my purposes, a form of epistemological realism—in his later years, Wittgenstein turned his attention to the informal language of everyday life whose multiple communicative functions could not be accounted for by strict, logical rules. 13 As will I hope become clear in the course of this essay, there is already something of the curatorial in realism, specifically its rejection of idealism and transcendence in favor of immanence and finitude. 14 Fan was then Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore; Kim was Curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. Additionally, Kwok Kian Chow (then Director of the National Art Gallery, Singapore) and Choi Eunju (Senior Curator, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea) were also involved in the conception of the exhibition. 15 The curators state, quite rightly, that the opening up of countries like Vietnam and China to capitalism in the 1980s led to a very different kind of art. Joyce Fan and Kim Inhiye, “‘Engaging’ Realism in Asian Art,” in Realism in Asian Art (Gwacheon-si, Korea, and Singapore: The National Museum of Contemporary Art and The National Art Gallery, 2010), 11. 16 Curator Joyce Fan pointed out that the exhibition sought not to be “linear.” E-mail communication with the author, July 7, 2013. I understand “linear” here to mean that the exhibition would embody the move of realism “from” Europe “to” Asia. 17 Fan and Kim, "'Engaging' Realism in Asian art," 11. 18 For example, artistic developments in Egypt were formative for Greek art of the fifth-century B.C.; Al-hazen’s innovations in optics were crucial for Brunelleschi’s “invention” of perspective in fifteenth-century Italy. See David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon Press, 2003). The subsuming of Western modernism (including realism) into a much longer span of world art is one of the major themes of Summers’s book. 19 Fan and Kim, "'Engaging' Realism in Asian art," 12. For me, this is equivalent to the distinction between what I call “optical realism” (i.e., depicting figures and objects with mimetic accuracy) and “social realism” (i.e., a mode of engagement with the world, e.g., in mid-nineteenth-century France). 20 Hubert Damisch has argued that there was Lacanian misrecognition at the heart of the Brunelleschian perspectival experiment, see The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995). Whitney Davis has argued that perspective was originally “queer”; see “Virtually Straight,” Art History 19, no. 2 (1996), 434–42. 21 Fan and Kim, "'Engaging' Realism in Asian art," 12. 22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin, 90, no. 4 (December 2008), 531–48; Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000), 821–65. 23 That is, concerning a region that is outside the city but also seemingly backward. 24 For this argument, see T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 25 For example, while Kwok writes of three philosophical considerations in relation to realism—1) perceived world, 2) materiality, and 3) social aspirations (Kwok Kian Chow, “Looks Real, For Real, As Real,” in Realism in Asia: Volume One, ed. Yeo Wei Wei [Singapore: The National Art Gallery, 2010], 11)—in many ways 3) is folded into 1) and 2). Our ways of social behaving are contained or embedded in our perceptual being-in-the-world. Although we tend to think of them as separate entities and as having separate claims, there is a way in which ontology is prior to epistemology or visual knowledge. Courbet’s social aspirations were of a piece with the ontology of his painting, and that ontology was prior to what his paintings looked like. 26 Summers, Real Spaces; for the citation, see Kwok, "Looks Real, For Real, As Real," 11. 27 One question is whether the fact that Realism showed a variety of works from Southeast Asian and Asian countries made it transnational, and therefore qualified it as performing the curatorial. I would say that while the “transnational” is often used as a convenient means of invoking cultural pluralism and exchange, it all too often misses, or fails to capture, politics—specifically, the irreducible antagonism that is constitutive of politics (note Lind’s adaptation of Mouffe again). More productive would be to think how the friction, resistance, and heterogeneity (of individuals and objects) that we find transnational encounters might be embodied in exhibitionary form.

Vol. 13 No. 2 115 28 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 395. 29 Nineteenth-century realism was in fact the first moment of contemporaneity—and thus the curatorial. For example: “That increasing numbers of French Realist painters and sculptors during the 1850s and 1860s rejected imaginary, timeless, and historical themes in favor of depictions of contemporary life has long been regarded as foundational to the creation of a truly modern art.” Terry Smith, “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” Art Bulletin XCII, no. 4 (December 2010), 371. Against older approaches to modernism as derivative, my essay attempts to recover, via the curatorial, contemporaneity for realism in Asia. 30 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 768–82. 31 “According to the post-formalist alternative I am offering,” Summers writes, “we do not radically imagine our world, nor does ‘art’ show us all the ways in which we have done that. Instead . . . we human beings have always found ourselves already in the world under certain conditions that in important respects, and to varying degrees, have been determined by those who went before us. This world, and these conditions, among which are the terms of our embodiment and community, are never encountered in themselves but rather in one or another cultural historical form.” David Summers, “World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, or, Goodbye to the Visual Arts,” in Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art, ed. John Onians (Williamstown, Massachusetts: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, distributed by Yale University Press, 2006), 221. 32 Steven Connor, “Flysight,” Cabinet 25 (Spring 2007), 78–84. 33 For Chua Mia Tee’s National Language Class (1959), see my “Painting the Nanyang’s Public: Notes toward a Reassessment,” in Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience, and Practice of Modern Asian Art, ed. John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi, and T. K. Sabapathy (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, distributed by University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), 72–93. 34 For the assimilation and taming of Courbet by the French state, see Linda Nochlin, “The De-Politicization of Gustave Courbet: Transformation and Rehabilitation under the Third Republic,” October 22 (Autumn 1982), 64–78. 35 Most of contemporary works had been done prior to the show; a few were done specifically for the show or were realized in and through the show. 36 Wang Zineng, Strategies Towards the Real, exhibition brochure (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2008), n. pag. 37 Note how in Realism, while the introductory wall texts at the beginning of each room left viewers to look at the paintings in a more or less formalist way, there wasn’t the same productive jarring of word and image. Word and image were kept separate in Realism, which also had consequences for how the viewer was encouraged to think about form and content, artwork and context. 38 Leading artists like Sudjojono, Hendra Gunawan, and Affandi, along with writers like Pramoedya, were part of the Institute of People’s Culture, which sought to use culture to advance the revolution. See Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 157–58. 39 At the Asia Art Archive conference, Simon Soon rightly brought up that this would also involve examining the artists who worked alongside Sudjojono—against the tendency to think of artist- geniuses working in isolation. 40 Amir Sidharta’s insightful catalogue essay goes some way towards answering this. Sidharta, “S. Sudjojono: The Artist, Realiteit and Truth,” in Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art (Singapore: NUS Museum, National University of Singapore, 2008), 47–53. 41 On the Nyoman Masriadi pendant to this painting, The Man from Bantul—The Boxer (2000), see the discussion in T. K. Sabapathy, Nyoman Masriadi: Reconfiguring the Body (Singapore: Gajah Gallery, 2010), 66–81. 42 This is supported by the fact that during the installation of the exhibition, the collector of the Masriadi painting that was to be exhibited requested an increase in the insurance premium for his painting— which spurred his friends, who also had paintings in the show, to also negotiate increased insurance premiums. Masriadi was just beginning to become popular on the market at this time; the market for Indonesian contemporary art took off around 2005. Conversation between the author and Wang Zineng, August 5, 2013. 43 Crucial to Strategies, as Wang readily admits, was the curatorial stewardship of Ahmad Mashadi, director of the NUS Museum, who supervised and gave advice at every critical juncture of the planning and execution of the exhibition. 44 See Carlos Basualdo, “The Unstable Institution,” in Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O’Neill, (London: Open Editions/Occasional Table, 2007), 39–52.

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