SEPTEMBER/OCTO B E R 2 0 1 2 V O LUME 11, NUMBER 5

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Special Issue: Institution for the Future

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VOLUME 11, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2012

CONTENTS  Editor’s Note 25  Contributors

6 Artists and Institutions: Institution for the Future Biljana Ciric

25 Curatorial Circulations in Southeast Asia Patrick D. Flores

33 Calling for a Process of De-alternativeness: 33 On Artist Initiatives in China Nikita Yingqian Cai

43 What's Next? A Conversation between Biljana Ciric and Carol Yinghua Lu

50 Future Intuitions Richard Streitmatter-Tran

61 Institutions of the Future: Singapore Eugene Tan

61 71 Rumah YKP: Art in the Margins of Society Nur Hanim Khairuddin

81 A Cartography of the “Other”: Social History and the Production of Spaces of the “Other” in Modern and Contemporary Art in Thailand Narawan Pathomvat

93 The Self-Invested Nation Sanjay Ghosh

71 108 Chinese Name Index

Cover: He An, Wind Light as a Thief, 2011, installation view. 81 Photo: Wang Wei. Courtesy of Arrow Factory, Beijing.

We thank JNBY Art Projects, Canadian Foundation of Asian Art, Mr. and Mrs. Eric Li, and Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu.

Vol. 11 No. 5 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art  Katy Hsiu-chih Chien   Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C.C. Liu Yishu 52, guest-edited by Shanghai-based   Ken Lum curator Biljana Ciric, builds upon issues raised -- Keith Wallace in the exhibition Institution for the Future, which   Zheng Shengtian   Julie Grundvig she organized for the Chinese Arts Centre Kate Steinmann in Manchester, UK, during the Asia Triennial   Chunyee Li   Larisa Broyde Manchester 2011. This exhibition explored new   Michelle Hsieh ways artists in Asia are contributing to the    Chunyee Li development of an art infrastructure within their   respective communities. Judy Andrews, Ohio State University Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum John Clark, University of Sydney The texts inYishu 52 examine artist-initiated Lynne Cooke, Museo Reina Sofia Okwui Enwezor, Critic & Curator spaces, projects, and collectives in China, Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Singapore, and India. Through these examples Fei Dawei, Independent Critic & Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh we learn about different histories, cultural Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute contexts, existing art infrastructures, and how Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster artists are creating innovative institutional models Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive within them. While we were unable to include Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator every country within this region of Asia, the ones Lu Jie, Independent Curator we selected have, for the most part, lesser-known Charles Merewether, Director, ICA Singapore Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University histories within the broader international realm, Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand and it is our aim that these texts will contribute to Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator an increased understanding of the past, present, Wu Hung, University of Chicago and future of artist initiatives within Asia and to Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar provide a forum for these various nations to see  Art & Collection Group Ltd. themselves in relationship to each other. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 Together, these texts look at opportunities Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 that exist for artists within their particular art E-mail: [email protected] infrastructures where museums, galleries, foundations, as well as collectors, curators,    Jenny Liu Alex Kao critics, and audiences play a fundamental role. In   Joyce Lin most of Asia, these systems tend to be different   Perry Hsu Betty Hsieh from those in the West; their recent art histories have frequently been altered by destabilizing  Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. social, economic, or political interventions.   http://yishu-online.com Institution for the Future proposes that in many   Design Format  1683 - 3082 ways artistic practice has been taken out of the hands of artists, who, in order to become Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, successful, too often are compelled to adhere March, May, July, September, and November. All subscription, to the protocols and rules of what has evolved advertising, and submission inquiries may be sent to: into a huge, largely market-driven or politicized Yishu Editorial Office art industry, and presents the ways some are 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada strategizing to regain control of their destinies. V6Z 2P3 Phone: 1.604.649.8187 Fax: 1.604.591.6392 We thank Biljana Ciric for proposing this idea to E-mail: offi[email protected] Yishu and also to all the contributors who have brought valuable insights into artist initiatives   1 year (6 issues): $84 USD (includes airmail postage) within these regions of Asia. 2 years (12 issues): $158 USD (includes airmail postage) 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD (http://yishu-online.com)

   Leap Creative Group Keith Wallace   Raymond Mah   Gavin Chow  Philip Wong

No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written Erratum: The caption on page 12 of Yishu 51 should read permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are March Meeting speaker Dr. Youssef Aidabi, not March not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. Meeting speaker Salah Hassan. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 200251

2 4 (Larisa Broyde) 6 Biljana Ciric (Chunyee Li)

25 (Philip Tinari) (Judy Andrews) Patrick D. Flores (Britta Erickson) 33 (Melissa Chiu) (Sebastian Lopez) (Claire Hsu) (John Clark) 43 (Pauline J. Yao) (Martina Köppel-Yang) 50 Richard Streitmatter-Tran Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill 61 Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 71 81 “ 856 : (886) 2.2560.2220 (886) 2.2542.0631 [email protected]

Yishu Office 93 200-1311 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada Sanjay Ghosh : (1) 604.649.8187 (1) 604.591.6392 : offi[email protected] 108

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http://yishu-online.com Design Format

Contributors

Nikita Yingqian Cai currently lives in Shanghai Contemporary Culture (2009). Her Guangzhou and is Curator at the Guangdong recent projects include Contemporaneity: Times Museum. She has curated and edited Contemporary Art of Indonesia, presented publications for A Museum That is Not at Shanghai MoCA (2010), and Body as a (2011) and Jiang Zhi: If This is a Man (2012, Museum, at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm co-curated with Bao Dong) and organized (2010). In 2011, Ciric initiated a year-long No Ground Underneath: Curating on the exhibition titled Taking the Stage Over, Nexus of Changes (2012, co-curated with which investigates the performative aspects Carol Yinghua Lu). She was one of the of art, presenting works by artists such as founders of Ping Pong Space (2008–10), in Bestue Vives, Tino Sehgal, and Antti Laitinen. Guangzhou, which functioned as a platform She is also the co-curator of Asia Triennial of activities and artistic production for Manchester 2011. She is a regular contributor local artists. She is also a critic and writes to several Chinese and international art frequently for various catalogues and publications, including Broadsheet, Yishu, publications. Her major focuses are context- Flash Art, and Independent Critic. responsive curating, educational curating, exhibition studies, and institutional critique. Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies She graduated from the Journalism School at the University of the Philippines and of Fudan University and was a participant Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. of the de Appel Curatorial Programme, He is Adjunct Curator at the National Amsterdam, 2009–10. Art Gallery, Singapore. He was one of the curators of the Gwangju Biennale (Position Biljana Ciric has an M.A. from East China Papers) in 2008. He was a visiting fellow at Normal University, Shanghai. She was the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Director of the Shanghai Duolun Museum of D.C., in 1999. Among his publications are Modern Art Curatorial Department and Net- Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Working Curator (China) for the Singapore Colonial Art (1999) and Past Peripheral: Biennale 2006. Her ongoing Migration Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was Addicts project was presented at the Venice a member of the Advisory Board of the Biennale 2007 Collateral Events and the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Art Worlds After 1989 (2011) and of the Urbanism and Architecture. Ciric was the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council curator of the public art project intrude 366 (2011). He co-edited with Joan Kee the (2008) and History in the Making: Shanghai special issue Contemporaneity and Art in 1979–2009, 30 Years Retrospective of Southeast Asia, for Third Text (2011).

4 Vol. 11 No. 5 Sanjay Ghosh is a communication Bangkok. She is a lecturer at the Department consultant with a research interest in of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology, contemporary Indian art and early Silpakorn University. Pathomvat is also an twentieth-century religious prints. He holds independent curator, writer, and translator. a B.F.A. from the College of Art, Delhi (1993–97), and an M.A. from the School Eugene Tan is a Singapore-based critic and of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru curator. His previous appointments include University (2010–12). Beyond critical Director of Exhibitions, Osage Gallery writing, he divides his time between graphic (Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai), novels and painting. Programme Director for Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art (Singapore), and Nur Hanim Khairuddin is an artist, curator, Director of the Institute of Contemporary and writer on arts and culture. She obtained Arts Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. in Art her B.F.A in Art and Design in 1994 from History from the University of Manchester. the Institut Teknologi MARA (now UiTM), He has curated several exhibitions, including in Malaysia. Formerly Curator at Perak Arts the inaugural Singapore Biennale, in Foundation, she is the owner of Teratak 2006, and the Singapore Pavilion at the Nuromar, an independent publisher of the 2005 Venice Biennale. He has also written visual art magazine sentAp!, of which she for several exhibition catalogues and is editor-in-chief. She is also one of the key publications, including art journals such members of the experimental band Space as Art Asia Pacific, Art Review, Broadsheet, Gambus Experiment. In 2007 she received a C-Arts, Contemporary, Flash Art, Metropolis grant from the American Center Foundation M, and Modern Painters. He is currently to conduct research on diasporic artists in a Programme Director of the Singapore Copenhagen. Economic Development Board.

Carol Yinghua Lu is an art critic and curator Richard Streitmatter-Tran is an artist, based in Beijing and a contributing editor at Director of Dia/Projects, and Senior Frieze. She is co-curator of Roundtable: The Lecturer at RMIT University Vietnam. 2012 Gwangju Biennale, opening September Working with Le Tuong Vi under the 6, 2012. moniker VILE/RATS, he explores the intersections at the folds and fractures of art, Narawan Pathomvat is the founder and science, and philosophy. director of a contemporary art library/ non-profit platform, The Reading Room,

Vol. 11 No. 5 5 Biljana Ciric Artists and Institutions: Institution for the Future

Introduction Recent global changes in cultural funding policies have prompted us to reconsider where these changes will lead us and how we may need to redefine our work and activities. We see more and more institutions adopting corporate models while other institutions that function differently, providing space for reflection and acting as laboratories, are disappearing. This makes me wonder: What kinds of institutions do we need, or do we hope to foster for the future?

The above-mentioned changes were prompted by economic crises in the Western hemisphere and seem to have permanently embedded themselves into discussions and negotiations within the region of Asia. Moreover, because of a lack of institutional infrastructure for contemporary art, it is a challenge for artists and cultural workers to continue our work. These conditions not only affect local discourses, which in many cases remain weak, but also their presence within the global context.

Of the young nation states that came into being in the mid-twentieth century, most of them had a long colonial history and went through many different stages in the process of developing their national identity. Here, the development of institutional structures at various levels also included those that pertain to culture. Malaysia became independent from Britain in 1957, and North and South Vietnam were re-united in 1976, while China proclaimed itself a Republic in 1949, just to name few. Although these countries have taken very different paths toward development over the past three decades, the field of contemporary art practice continues to be marginalized in most of them.

In a recent discussion I had with scholar Dorothea Von Hantelmann about the issue of institutions, she stated that a new type of institution could inevitably create a new kind of ritual, which she calls the “exhibition ritual.” Although the idea that new types of institutions can create new types of rituals might be true in the Western context, I would say that the situation is much more complex in places where we hardly have any institutional structure to begin with and where new institutional models don’t focus solely on exhibition making.

Artists who are themselves acting as institutions within parts of Southeast Asia, by their proposals to construct new institutional models, also manage to circulate their work within international systems (like the networks of the biennial, triennial, and other institutional/museum exhibitions). This fact

6 Vol. 11 No. 5 reveals itself as a common thread for many of the artists who will be discussed here. Again, the complex issue of the roles of these artists both globally and locally re-emerges and proposes a possible way to understand their strong involvement and ability to build local institutional infrastructures.

This text will not discuss the market forces in the region that have increased the international exposure for a number of contemporary artists but failed to introduce a more constructive dialogue between the local and global contexts; instead, it will investigate local initiatives and platforms for the production of greater discourse within the region. I see these types of activities as being crucial in establishing a local knowledge that will in turn also contribute to global knowledge. The discussion will take the exhibition Institution for the Future, which I curated and which was presented at the Chinese Arts Centre as part of the 2011 Asia Triennial Manchester 2011, as its point of departure, providing an in-depth introduction to the conditions of contemporary art in the region in order to better understand the cultural and social context for production.

In recent years, because of the lack of any institutional involvement, artists and curators working in their respective, specific localities have taken charge of the construction and definition of the narratives attached to their practice. Their actions involve strategies of self-historicization, the development of discourse, the establishment of platforms for knowledge production and exchange, and self-education about independent publishing. It is common that individual artists, artist collectives, or groups of curators are the organizers of projects, and, in doing so, they have created small-scale institutions beyond and outside of the institutional system of the state. These spaces provide important access to information and have strong peer-to-peer relationships as well as developing a public space for discussion.

Some of these practices could be discussed in terms of modes of institutional critique that have developed over time into new institutional models. It is important to note that institutional critique requires engagement with an institutional structure and its position of power, a structure that didn’t exist in many places in Asia during the development of their local avant-garde movements, and today in many respects this is still the case. On the other hand, in some of these countries the existing state systems were institutional in nature, including the cultural sector, and this contributed to artists to establishing their own spaces and nurturing their own small groups of followers and audiences. This process of institutional critique is geared towards larger ideological systems and values, often times without any direct confrontation towards the government on the part of the artists.

Institutional critique in most of the countries in South and Southeast Asia cannot be considered or defined according to conceptions of institutional critique in the West—Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke in the 1960s and 70s, Renée Green and Andrea Fraser in the 1980s and 90s, and, more recently, with writers such as Stefan Nowotny and Simon Sheikh. Institutional critique in Asia is more of a reaction to existing institutional frameworks or existing conditions such as with the National Art Gallery of Kuala Lumpur Young Contemporary Artist Award, Vietnam’s significant lack of

Vol. 11 No. 5 7 institutional infrastructure, Singapore’s state-funded system, and China’s disconnect between institutional structures and the working artists they are supposedly intended to serve. Many of these institutions not only fail to exhibit contemporary artists’ works, but, most importantly, they fail to provide any sort of discourse or access to history, whether through books, exhibition-making, or other kinds of reference material.

Within this environment, many artists, out of frustration, have been driven to establish a new type of system that would exist parallel to the state’s cultural apparatus, with the recent possibility of collaboration between artists and state. These new positions that are taken up by artists can be understood as a form of institutional critique that does not necessarily have an academic presence as it is rarely discussed in academic circles because of a lack of any theoretical grounding around these issues.

This text will not attempt to map out this region according to individual contributions, but, instead, will present certain activities that operate on a similar level as institutional frameworks and will discuss three more or less distinctive modes of working within the region: artists’ collectives as institutions; artist-funded institutions; and curatorial initiatives that have proposed new ways of thinking about the organization of knowledge and resources.

Institutional Critique and Its Different Manifestations Through Artistic Practice I will begin with the case of Malaysia and its contemporary art scene. Malaysia developed an early presence with the involvement of the National Visual Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, which in the early 1970s established the annual Young Contemporary Artist Award. The Gallery also hosted different artists and engaged with commercial galleries, and collectors organized exhibitions, all of which contributed to the construction of a narrative around contemporary art in Malaysia. The Young Contemporary Artist Award was first presented in 1974 and still exists today with a format in which artists submit their project proposals to the museum to be juried. If accepted, the work is then presented in an exhibition at the National Visual Art Gallery. After 2000, the award morphed into a biennial event and still serves as an important exhibition opportunity for young artists coming out of art schools. While the Young Contemporary Artist Award was an early platform for the support of young artists in Malaysia, the institution, at the same time, imposed rigid rules for artist participation, such that eventually many artists opposed and reacted to the institutional failure to produce more constructive ways of involving artists in establishing a local art scene. One of the more notorious critiques of this rigid institutional framework was in the work of Roslisham Ismail (aka Ise), who, in a work titled 3 x 3 x 3=27m3 (2004) directly opposed the museum’s rule that works presented to the gallery should be no more than 3 x 3 x 3 metres in size. The artist met the required dimensions proposed by the gallery with boxes filled with newspaper and invited friends to come and destroy the boxes right before the opening of the exhibition. The destruction of the sculpture that was 3 x 3 x 3=27m3 was documented and in turn shown at the opening as a video installation with two screen projections.

8 Vol. 11 No. 5 Roslisham Ismail (aka Ise), 3m x 3m x 3m = 27m3, 2004, 2-channel video, 10 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Yap Sau Bin, Youthful Contention Not ( ) to Detach from Parental Eclipse, 2000, installation, 3 x 3 x 3 metres.

Yap Sau Bin, Youthful Aspects of institutional critique are also Contention Not ( ) to Detach from Parental Eclipse (interior present in the work of Yap Sau Bin, who view), 2000, installation, 3 x 3 x 3 metres. joined the Rumah Airpanas artist collective in 2003. Sau Bin’s work for the 2000 Young Contemporary Art Award, which was titled Youthful Contention Not ( ) to Detach from Parental Eclipse (2000), took the museum size rule outside, where he constructed a room without a roof exactly 3 x 3 x 3 metres in size and perfectly white inside. The room was constructed out of wood and very quickly was damaged by rainy weather, so it was removed, leaving only the trace of the floor 3 x 3 x 3 metres. Yap Sau Bin’s works are generally responsive to their sites, and this way of working not only confronts the larger art institutions, but also the galleries, exhibitions, and other entities that evoke further institutional aspects that inform the system within which the artist exists. Among other younger artists working within this vein of institutional critique is Chi Too, who confronts not only art institutions but also other institutions that structure society and social behaviour.

Vol. 11 No. 5 9 Ise’s work from the early 2000s, which openly confronted the museum’s sentAp! magazines on display at Chinese Arts Centre, rules, found little support from the local art scene, and many were critical Manchester, 2011. Courtesy of Chinese Arts Centre, of his actions. But this turned out to be an important point of departure for Manchester. the artist as he then began to change his working strategies by presenting himself as a quasi-institution through various project initiatives that he continues with today. sentAp! magazine, a quarterly English-Bahasa publication on contemporary art started by Ise and curator and artist Nur Hanim Khairuddin, was established in 2005 and acted as an illegal publication without a proper ISBN number until they were invited to participate in documenta in 2007. sentAp! is still today the only bilingual publication with a focus on the Southeast Asian region, and Ise stated in a 2012 interview in Shanghai about sentAp!’s future and role in society: “We are actually in the early stages. In twenty years, this magazine will be very important as an archive, but now people don’t look at it as important.” Similar initiatives in independent publishing in Southeast Asia are Karbon Journal, by ruangrupa in Indonesia, and a recent online artist journal titled PDF started by Shanghai-based Hu Yun, Li Mu, and Lu Pingyuan.

Another of Ise’s initiatives, the Parking Project, arose from the lack of interest in Malaysian art by practitioners and curators doing regional research. Parking Projects is more loosely defined than those organizations that receive regular funding or have formal programming, and is open to residency opportunities for artists and curators visiting and doing research on the Malaysian art scene. The Parking Project has no funding, so it assumes the role of a host providing accommodation to artists and curators who are planning to visit Kuala Lumpur as well as offering an introduction to the local art scene.

Very similar in its role and ways of operating is the artist collective Rumah Air Panas (RAP), also in Kuala Lumpur. This collective was established in 1997 by Liew Kung Yu and Puah Chin Kok, and from 2000 to 2003 the directorship was held by Chuah Chong Yong. But the actual artist collective known today as Rumah Air Panas was formed in 2003. RAP’s mission

10 Vol. 11 No. 5 statement explains how the collective “aims to explore and coalesce the visual arts and other cultural practices through collaboration in exhibitions and projects, and documentation and exchange of ideas in discussion. The members of RAP support an independent, aware, and concerted artistic practice in engaging the artistic community and the art public.” In 2006, an important transition took place in RAP’s working methodology as, on the one hand, they gained legal status as a registered artist collective, while on the other, they lost their venue which consisted of a bungalow, outdoor workshop area, artist studios, and living quarters, as it was earmarked for acquisition by the government for a highway construction project.

Kok Siew Wai, Face(s), 2002, video installation, 7 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Vincent Leong, Run, Malaysia, Run!, 2007, video, 4 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

Since then, the shift that occurred after the loss of their own space pushed RAP towards a new way of working, and the collective has been experimenting with a parasitic strategy of organizing events, talks, workshops, and projects in which they collaborate with other institutions, and through such collaborations actually try to change the institutional framework from within. An example would be a recent talk of mine that took place in Kuala Lumpur that was organized by Rumah Air Panas but hosted by the National Visual Art Gallery. These kinds of collaborations open up very important possibilities for redefining institutional frameworks. One of RAP’s members, Yap Sau Bin, described it “as a soft target in Malaysian contemporary art system.”1 RAP doesn’t receive funding

Vol. 11 No. 5 11 for its projects, nor is there any fixed annual plan of activities: instead, it utilizes a format open to all sorts of possibilities and chances that come their way through their professional network.

Open institutional critique in A wreath offered as a statement of condolence Indonesia effectively began in to the death of Indonesian painting by December Hitam December of 1974, also known as artists,1974. Courtesy of FX Black December, when members Harsono. of the younger generation that belonged to the Group of Five— Hardi, FX Harsono, B. Munni Ardhi, Nanik Mirna, and Siti Adiyati—became dissatisfied with the jurying process and conservative attitude demonstrated in the exhibition titled Grand Exhibition on Indonesian Painting, which took place at the Jakarta Art Council at Taman Ismail Marzuki. On the final night of the exhibition, during its closing ceremony, the artists sent a wreath of condolences to the Jakarta Art Council and distributed a petition. The artists wrote: “Our Condolences for the Death of Indonesian Painting.” This move has come to symbolize the beginning of a resistance movement that continued throughout the 1970s in Indonesia through the organized activities of the New Art Movement (which included some members of the Group of Five) and the Pipa collective.

The notion of institutional critique Xiamen Dada burning works in front of Xiamen Cultural through artists’ actions in China is Palace, November 23, 1986. Courtesy of Huang Yongping. an issue that has been explored by Xiamen Dada, an artists’ collective formed in the mid-1980s. One of the collective’s key figures is the artist Huang Yongping. On November 23, 1986, members of Xiamen Dada gathered in front of Xiamen Cultural Palace and burned all the artworks that they had exhibited in that very museum just a month prior. After this event, Huang Yongping stated: “Artworks for artists are like opium for people. If you don’t destroy them, you will never live in peace.”2 In December of 1986, Xiamen Dada organized an exhibition at the Fujian Art Museum, but they didn’t show the works that they had planned; instead, they moved in construction materials they found around the museum building and exhibited this detritus. After the exhibition Xiamen Dada stated: “This is a delimited, aggressive, and continuous event. . . . The fact that these objects are flooding the [Fujian] art museum clearly

12 Vol. 11 No. 5 Exhibition view at Fujian Art shows that it’s an action of attack. Museum, December 1986. Courtesy of Huang Yongping. And what is being attacked here is not the audience, but their opinions on ‘art.’ Likewise, it is not the art museum itself that is under attack, but the art museum as an example of the art system. . . .”3 Then, in

Last Supper, 1988, 1989, for the China Avant-Garde performance at Shanghai Art Museum. exhibition in Beijing, Xiamen Dada proposed to move the museum from its original location using pedicabs. This exploration of institutional critique was interrupted after the 1989 Tian’anmen incident but remains present in Huang Yongping’s practice today. Early encounters between state institutions and the avant-garde movement in China, such as the Last Supper Performance at the Shanghai Art Museum in 1988, and China Avant-Garde, in Beijing, in 1989, created interruptions but slowly were reinstituted beginning in the mid-1990s (although the presence of institutional critique was somewhat absent). A certain notion of critique would remain present in individual artist’s works but was focused more on the exhibition as ritual than institutional critique.

Huang Yongping, proposal for the China Avant/Garde exhibition, 1989. Courtesy of Huang Yongping.

With regard to curatorial practice, in 2000 an exhibition was held titled Fuck Off (the Chinese title more closely translates as Uncooperative Attitude, but Fuck Off had more effect, especially for an English speaking audience), curated by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi, the premise of which was an open call for artists who did not wish to collaborate with the institutional system (the exhibition was a satellite show of the Shanghai Biennial in 2000).

More recently, an exhibition curated by Nikita Cai in 2011 at the Guangdong Times Museum titled Museum That Is Not, further pushed the limits of curating as institutional critique and attempted to explore and initiate discussion around institutional critique today (which to this day doesn’t really exist in China). One work in this exhibition, Museum

Vol. 11 No. 5 13 and Me, by Liu Ding, explored Liu Ding, Museum and Me, 2011, 2-channel video different relationships within the installation, 85 mins. Courtesy of the artist and Guangdong art system—from the relationship Times Museum. between artist and museum through individual relationships determined by the field of art. A recent work by Li Ran titled Beyond Geography,

presented in the 2012 Shenzhen Li Ran, Beyond Geography, 2012, HD video Installation, Sculpture Biennale as a kind of 23 mins., 9 secs. Courtesy of Discovery Channel mockumentary, the artist. Opposite top: Hu Yun, is witty but ultimately Another Hundred Years, 2012, installation, neon, eighty straightforward in its criticism of 35mm slides, slide projector, 30 x 570 cm. Courtesy of the our art historical narrative and artist. reliance on Western reference Opposite bottom: Hu Xiangqian, Xiangqian material. The artist Hu Yun, with his Focus on Talent (2012) project hosted Museum, 2011, performance at Chinese Arts Centre. Courtesy by the Today Art Museum, criticizes the consumption of so-called young of the artist and Chinese Arts artists with a huge neon light installation titled Another Hundred Years Centre, Manchester. (2012), which was placed at the gallery entrance. The neon spells out: “7 hours of young Chinese contemporary art,” referring to the gallery hours of the museum. Then there is the Hu Xiangqian Art Museum (2010–ongoing), that consists of public performances in which the artist utilizes his body as a museum and shares his collection by describing the works that are stored in his mind. Although Hu Xiangqian’s point of departure for the development of this body of work grew from a very simple idea involving language and the desire to describe works of art through the use of didactics, I propose an interpretation of the ongoing project as institutional critique of the museum and market system in China.

In 1988, the artist Tang Dawu established an artist village in Singapore, which for many years was the only place that showed performance and installation art. The National Art Council blocked funding for what became known as The Artists Village after Josef Ng’s 1994 public performance, in which, with his back to the audience, he pulled at his pubic hair, and an image of his naked back was then distributed by the media that resulted in a huge controversy. In reaction to the government’s decision, in 1995 Tang Dawu dressed in a black jacket with yellow words written on the back, stating “Don’t give money to the art” and handed a message to then President Ong Teng Cheong, who was visiting an exhibition titled Singapore Art, declaring: “Dear Mr. President, I am an artist and I am important.” Ho Tzu Nyen, in his most radical gesture, Episode 3, explored this important event by providing a more complex assessment of Tang Dawu’s performance that took place in front of the ultimate symbol of state authority by questioning why authorities actually allowed this piece to take place in front of them.

From Institutional Critique Toward Self-Organization Early forms of institutional critique in many countries, such as Vietnam, were soon replaced with more constructive examples of artists organizing themselves in ways that reflected institutional structures and that would come to replace existing state institutional systems. But today state funded museums remain isolated from the contemporary art context and in

14 Vol. 11 No. 5 Vol. 11 No. 5 15 many localities usually serve as venues that galleries rent for the artists’ so-called museum exhibitions. This is not only the case in China, but also in Indonesia, Malaysia, and other countries.

Entrance of Salon Natasha, mid-1990s. Courtesy of Natasha Kraevskaia and Vu Dan Tan.

Left: Salon Natasha, detail from the exhibition Lithography featuring Vu Dan Tan, 2010. Courtesy of Natasha Kraevskaia and Vu Dan Tan. Right: Thinh Le, light performance during the opening of the exhibition Lightplay, 2002. Courtesy of Natasha Kraevskaia and Vu Dan Tan.

An example of this is Salon Natasha, Nhasan Space, Hanoi, 2008. Photo: Biljana Ciric. established in 1990 by Natasha Kraevskaia and artist Vu Dan Tan, which was the only independent art space in Vietnam during the 1990s that showed contemporary art. During that time the space was established in their home, which was also used as Vu Dan Tan’s studio. As part of their directive, Salon Natasha created a space for the exhibition and exchange of ideas between like-minded artists. Another more loosely organized group in Vietnam that still exists today in Hanoi is Nhasan Studio, which was founded in 1998 by Tran Luong and antique restorer Nguyen Manh Duc. Nhasan Studio, after Salon Natasha, was the most important gathering place for local artists and for many years the only venue where they could exhibit their work. Today the Nhasan Studio program is run by representatives of the younger generation of artists, Nguyen Manh Hung and Nguyen Phuong Linh, but as a result of financial trouble and tight policing by the local government, the program has been inconsistent in recent years. Contemporary Art Center, established in Hanoi in 1997 with support of the Ford Foundation, under the artistic directorship of Tran Luong and administrated by the Vietnam Arts Association, was an attempted collaboration between artists and the state apparatus. This collaboration lasted until 2003, when Tran Luong resigned from his position because of government restraints.

16 Vol. 11 No. 5 In the 1980s, artists in mainland China were very active in organizing exhibitions, but this was interrupted by incidents in 1989, thus providing a brief encounter between contemporary artists and state institutions. In the 1990s, artists continued to reorganize their work through more temporally minded forms of exhibition making rather than within organized spaces. The tradition of artists organizing exhibitions, particularly in Shanghai, could be read as a certain strain of institutional critique that existed actively until around the mid-2000s. Artist-initiated spaces began to appear in 1993 with the Borghes Libreria Institute for Contemporary Art, which first functioned as a bookstore and then in 2003 became an art space in Guangzhou. Also, in 1998 the BizArt Center in Shanghai opened, with other spaces to follow, such as DDM Warehouse, which was established in 2000. These are just a few examples. Of these early spaces, the only one still active is the Libreria Borges Institute, while the others have either closed or transformed into some other institutional venture.

Tisna Sanjaya, Football Print, 2010, football, paint, paper. Installation view at the Ruangrupa exhibition Decompression, 2010, National Gallery, Jakarta, curated by Agung Hujatnikajenong, Farah Wardani, and Reza Afisina.

Stable Institutional Models Initiated by Artists After 2000 After 2000, and in specific countries such Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and Malaysia after 2005, more stable institutional structures began to appear on the art scene. By stable institutional structures I am talking about those that have planned programming, institutional funding sources, publishing branches, educational platforms, and physical spaces for their own programming and mounting of exhibitions. In most cases, these institutions were established by artists in the region, such as ruangrupa, founded in 2000 in Jakarta; San Art in Ho Chi Minh City, founded in 2007 by artist Dinh Q Lei; 12 Art Space in Kuala Lumpur, founded in 2007 by artist Shooshie Sulaiman; Sa Sa Bassac, founded in 2009 in Phnom Penh; Arrow Factory, established in 2008 in Beijing; the Observation Society, established in 2009 in Guangzhou; and the very recent initiative Video Bureau in Beijing, founded in 2012 by artists Fang Lu, Zhu Jia, and the director of Libreria Borges Institute in Guangzhou, Chen Tong.

All of the above-mentioned institutions provide a more or less stable institutional framework in these different locales. Depending upon the different contexts, these institutions adopt very different roles within the local art scene, from an educational role of assisting young artists, such as the case with San Art, or the role and commitment adopted by Zoe Butt, who joined the institution as co-director and curator. San Art established

Vol. 11 No. 5 17 Libreria Borges, Guangzhou.

18 Vol. 11 No. 5 Installation view of San Art, May 2011. Photo: Phunam. Courtesy of San Art, Ho Chi Minh City.

Malcolm Smith, ex-director of Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, and currently working as artist, arts manager, and curator in Yogyakarta, Indonesia conducting the workshop Almost Everything About Grants, Residencies, and Funding for Art, April 2012. Courtesy of ZeroStation, Ho Chi Minh City.

the San Art Laboratory residency for local artists, for which the artists get to stay in Ho Chi Minh City working on their independent projects, sharing ideas with their paired talking partner who could be an artist of any genre or a professional from a different field. Their reading room is an important part of San Art’s commitment to the public, and San Art is working with local artists in order to provide basic professional experience for recent graduates through exhibitions of their work and by gaining professional

Vol. 11 No. 5 19 experience on very practical levels as well. A recently opened space in Ho Chi Minh City is Zero Station, created by curator Huy Nguyen Nhu which provides a platform for artists to experiment, and, as Huy said himself, is very much process-oriented.

DIA/Projects in Ho Chi Minh City, established by Richard Streitmatter-Tran in 2010, operates on a slightly different premise, with a focus on building a professional library with around two thousand publications. DIA/Projects serves as the artist’s studio and, at the same time, as a public space, and it seems more comfortable defining itself as a para-institution rather than an institution proper, particularly with the aim of remaining modest in scale and and its activities being flexible.

What many of these spaces have in common, in one way or another, is their involvement in the archiving aspects of the local art scene, which could be seen as one of the first attempts towards constructing a self-history. However, at the onset, very few mentioned anything about acting as a platform for collecting and archiving primary material with the specific intent of making such materials available for future research. San Art, as Zoe Butt stated, is “an archive just by its very existence and history.”4 San Art, in collaboration with the Asia Art Archive, initiated a project on archiving alternative art spaces and their activities in Vietnam, including Blue Art Space, from Ho Chi Minh City, and Salon Natasha, from Hanoi. 12 Art Space in Kuala Lumpur is in the process of creating an archive of individual artists working in Malaysia and has devoted a series of exhibition projects related to their practice. And Video Bureau is producing an archive on video art in China, examining specific artists as case studies.

Video Bureau, Beijing, 2012.

This shift toward an interest in archives in South and Southeast Asia can also be found earlier in Indonesia, back in 1995, when the Cemeti Art Foundation established the Indonesian Visual Art Archive, officially changing its name to IVAA in 2007. These initiatives or archival institutions, although rare in the region, have today been incorporated into artist-initiated spaces as part of their mission and contribution to the re-definition of the local context through archiving and research.

These individual institutional research initiatives still lack any support on the local level from state institutions, and, at the same time, are practices

20 Vol. 11 No. 5 that for many practitioners in the local art scene seem rather new and perhaps less important at this point. But their fragmented efforts provide the basic foundation for understanding art practices that have been evolving over the last few decades and, perhaps more importantly, will undoubtedly do so for generations to come. One of the more specific institutional formats devoted to archiving and research in China will be the new OCT Terminal Space that will open in Beijing with a mission of collecting such primary material.

A slightly different and earlier encounter with more stable institutional structures occurred in Indonesia around 2000, after the fall of the Suharto regime. Ruangrupa, an artists’ collective, was established in 2000 around an institutional structure that consists of an artist’s residency program, workshops, publishing activities, and a small gallery space for young artists to exhibit. Kun Ci Cultural Studies Center, established in 1999, focuses on critical cultural studies and public education, to name just a few of their activities. These institutions, although already in existence for over a decade, rarely have the opportunity to disseminate their work outside of Southeast Asia, with the exception of ruangrupa, which has been more successful at this as a result of exhibiting as a collective in international exhibitions.

State Funding of Infrastructure and Independent Initiatives More stable funding infrastructures and state funding policies in some locales create very different conditions for artists who wish to maintain their independence. One example of this can be seen in Singapore, where the current state of contemporary art practice is an interesting case study. Rem Koolhaas noted about Singapore: “It is pure intention: if there is chaos, it is authored chaos; if it is ugly, it is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity. Singapore represents a unique ecology of the contemporary.”5 The government in Singapore is attempting to position the city as the artistic center of Southeast Asia. The Singapore Art Museum is the only professional institution supporting and systematically collecting contemporary art from the region. The National Art Gallery, due to open in 2015, will also have a focus on Singapore and Southeast Asia. The Singapore Biennial and Art Stage Singapore art fair are part of the main targeted activities in Singapore, while an upcoming project at Gillman Barracks will bring some twenty international galleries to Singapore, with another new art center planned for the same area.

Open Studio at Grey Projects On the other hand, most of the Annex on Niven Road, Singapore. artist-run spaces in Singapore have ceased being active or have highly irregular programming. Although artists have funding opportunities and the National Art Council is very generous in supporting its artists, there haven’t been any new artist- driven initiatives, which tells us a great deal about the local artistic ecology. Jason Wee, founder of Grey Projects and an artist based in Singapore, when pressed on this issue, stated:

Vol. 11 No. 5 21 The national art agencies are consolidating program and funding protocols, which also means that they are centralizing control of art spaces. It does not only affect artist-run spaces, but museums as well. Unfortunately, Grey Projects is the only artist-run project left with its own space. There are others but they are for most purposes defunct or closed. Post-Museum is now a roving occasional program with no space, and Your Mother Gallery is only rarely programming. A new outfit SCYA is focused on providing commercial art opportunities to its pool of young artists, and has no space. It is a problem, the state’s quiet and insidious control.6

Currently, Grey Projects and Studio Bibliotheque seem to be the only artist initiatives doing projects on a more regular basis.

In Taipei, the Taipei Contemporary Art Centre (TCAC), initiated by artist Jun Yang in 2008 as a research proposal for the Taipei Biennale and also shown in the exhibition Institution for the Future, started as an initiative to build an art centre independent from government funding. In March 2012, TCAC concluded its first phase. It received its space for free from a local real estate company with a two-year contract that has now expired, and TCAC is facing a major transition. Meiya Cheng, an independent curator, stated that TCAC will apply for a new space from the Taipei City government and fund-raise for programs in order to maintain their independent status, thus proposing a new way for all of them to work.

Curatorial Involvements in the Self-Historicization Process Rogue Art, an art consultancy agency initiated by Beverly Young, Adeline Ooi, and Rachel Ng in Kuala Lumpur, proposes a new way of working that exists between the role of the independent curator and institution. Rogue Art provides services to galleries and collectors while proceeding with academic research-based projects and their own exhibition curating. Narratives in Malaysian Art is their publishing initiative in four volumes, in English and Bahasa, that looks at the early 1940s, or pre-Merdeka period, all the way through to today. This publishing initiative grew out of the lack of discourse in contemporary Malaysian art as well as the lack of publications relating to it. Rogue art, as initiator of the project, has secured funding for the project through fund-raising drives targeting local collectors as well as institutional support, and there are a number of local writers, curators, and researchers working on it. Narratives in Malaysian Art is a long-term project and will provide insight into the critical discourse of the local art scene, representing a new way of working together.

A similar approach can be found in the Shanghai Archival Project, an archival initiative I started after curating the exhibition History in the Making: Shanghai 1979–2009, which had already involved the archiving of the history of exhibitions in Shanghai from 1979. Related research that I am conducting over the next year will further expand the initial regional research on the history of exhibitions and entails working with professionals from different locales, thereby creating points of contact across the region, opening up

22 Vol. 11 No. 5 History in the Making: Shanghai, 1979–2009. Exhibition view with Ni Weihua and Chen Yanyin. Courtesy of Biljana Ciric.

Cover of Patrick D. Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia, (Singapore:NUS Museum, 2008).

existing narratives of different histories, and developing the foundation for future comparative research on the history of exhibitions.

One of the important reference books focused on curatorial practices in the region is Past Peripheral: Curation in South East Asia, a book authored in 2008 by Patrick Flores. In a recent talk, scholar and curator Reiko Tomii suggested that the more global we want to be, the more local we must go. This is an important point of departure in the process of making many histories visible and available.

Many of the institutions and individuals mentioned in this text have contributed their own texts for this special issue of Yishu, all working towards creating a greater understanding of the global context through

Vol. 11 No. 5 23 their local involvement and hoping to find point of connection among professionals in the region.

Their slow visibility within global scene, for better or worse, actually allows for independence, whether in work or in the consideration of ideas that are not going to be merely consumed by an overly produced and producing art world. Instead, hopefully, they contribute to the production of local knowledge and help to open up existing narratives that will surely reveal that we are facing many histories and many futures as well.

Institution for the Future hopes to continue discussions about individuals as institutions that could lead to creating new habits and rituals in our societies that in turn will open up possibilities for creating new models of working and new practices.

I would like to thank Keith Wallace and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art for their support over the years, as well as to all the other writers and colleagues contributing to this issue. Special thanks to Yap Sau Bin, Parking Projects, Zoe Butt, Tran Luong, and Richard Streitmatter-Tran for their time spent sharing information and ideas with me.

This article shares the title of the exhibition Institution for The Future, presented as part of the Asia Triennial in Manchester in 2011 and curated by Biljana Ciric in collaboration with the Chinese Arts Center. Artists in the exhibition include: Hu Xiangqian, Roslisham Ismail (aka Ise), Yang Jun, Michael Lee, Vandy Rattana, Ruang Rupa, and Richard Streitmatter-Tran. Institution for the Future showcased artists’ collectives and small, independent, para-institutions from various Asian countries that are actively engaged in their local arts scenes and that attempt to contribute to the development of an arts infrastructure in their regions. This publication attempts to continue the discussion by expanding it to the global level.

Notes 1 Yap Sau Bin in conversation with the author, May 8, 2012. 2 Huang Yongping, House of Oracles: A Huang Yongping Retrospective (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), 13–14. 3 Ibid. 4 Zoe Butt in e-mail conversation with the author, May 26, 2012. 5 Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL (New York: Random House, 1997). 6 Jason Wee in e-mail conversation with the author, May 21, 2012.

24 Vol. 11 No. 5 Patrick D. Flores Curatorial Circulations in Southeast Asia

n Bangkok during the nineteenth century, the Thai king of the Chakri dynasty, Chulalongkorn, reserved a place in the royal palace for a museum he called phrabas phiphitaphan, or “a tour of various I 1 materials.” In the early part of the twentieth century, the American anthropologist, census-taker, and museum maker Dean Worcester went around the islands of the Philippines to document ethnicity. These forays share something with the toils of British explorer Sir Stamford Raffles, who, as recounted by an attentive observer, hoarded his people and things: “He kept four persons on wages, each in his peculiar department; one to go to the forests in search of various kinds of flowers, fungi, pulp, and such like products. Another he sent to collect all kinds of flies, grasshoppers, centipedes, bees, scorpions.”2

The intersection between the amassing of objects and people through the devices of the wunderkammer (a collection of objects without defined categories) and anthropometry (the study of human physical measurement in anthropology), well known in the discourse of reconnaissance, leads us to ponder the scale of the colonial in relation to the scale of the modern, the monument of empire and the miniature of periphery. Over time, this act of rendering the world picturesque and therefore collectible may be coincidental with the act of representation of both the self and the state, as can be gleaned in the efforts of the Thai king, the American social scientist, and the British discoverer. The colonized subject who is spoken for in the fullness of time internalizes this longing to not only be represented but also to be part of the representation of the modern beyond the auspices of the colony or the kingdom. The portrait of the nineteenth-century Indonesian painter Raden Saleh, the first Asian to have his work exhibited in a European salon, at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, attests to this aspiration in which the ethnographic and the exotic, inscribed in the image of a Javanese partaking of Europe self-consciously, craft the conditions of appearance and possession: to be enchanted, to transfigure, and finally to be had. The Filipino National Hero Jose Rizal would later call this kind of bedeviling or bewitching, el demonio de las comparaciones, the “spell of recollection” or “phantasm of affinities,” or, in the translation of historian Benedict Anderson, the “specter of comparisons.”3

The postwar republics of Southeast Asia, after consolidating their nation-states in the wake of postcolonial revolutions against European powers and in the shadow of the Cold War, invested in nation-building initiatives, alongside industrialization and modernization, in which the production of official culture was central. Exemplary of these exercises

Vol. 11 No. 5 25 Model of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Courtesy of Arkitektura Filipino Online.

were the programs of Suharto, in Imelda Marcos in front of the Cultural Center of the Indonesia, and Ferdinand Marcos, Philippines, circa 1960s. in the Philippines. The so-called strongman rule in these countries created a coordinated system of cultural infrastructure revolving around nationalism and a national civilization. In Indonesia, the anti-Dutch hero Sukarno began this agenda with commemorative statuary in Jakarta that was continued by his successor Suharto. In Manila, Imelda Marcos undertook Lobby view of the Cultural an extensive public-works project, Center of the Philippines. reclaiming a large part of Manila Bay, and built a complex of edifices for culture and world-class events like the Miss Universe pageant, in 1974, and the International Monetary Fund-World Bank meetings, in 1976. The iconic monument of this vision is the Cultural Center of the Philippines, which advanced the cultural policy of the government to foster an at once internationalist and nativist aesthetic form. In this elaborate measure, Suharto and Marcos envisioned the multitude of islands and ethnicities as a unity under the paternalist aegis of development. To condense such vastness into an impossible singularity, they built, among other endeavours in the realm of language and culture, miniature archipelagoes in veritable theme parks called Nayong Pilipino (Philippine Village) and Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (Beautiful Indonesia Miniature Park).4

26 Vol. 11 No. 5 Jim Supangkat, Indonesian This totalizing impulse was resisted, curator. together with the orthodoxy of the art academy—a resistance that is referenced in the manifestos of such artist coteries as the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia, or Indonesian New Art Movement, and the Kaisahan, or Solidarity, in 1975 and 1976, respectively. The nucleus of the formation of such resistance had deep Jim Supangkat, Ken Dedes, roots in the early part of the twentieth 1975, mixed media, 180 x 40 x 30 cm. century. The sanggar or workshop in Indonesia was a critical community in which artists met and discussed art. The Persagi or Union of Painters led by Sinduotomo Sudjojono in 1938 advocated a nationalist style “for the people” as a critique of what was perceived as the idealization of the locale or what was dismissed as Mooi Indië, or the beautiful but corrupted, Indies. This mode of gathering proved to be so potent a force that it would be drawn to ideological allegiance, as in the case of Lekra (Organization of People’s Culture), another incarnation of the workshop that was known to have had sympathies with socialism, having been conceived at the behest of the Communist Party in the fifties, during Sukarno’s time. This political lineage was to be stigmatized by the Suharto regime, leading to what the art historian Jim Supangkat has called the “depoliticization” of art in the seventies; its “repoliticization”5 through the Gerakan may have effected a break between the modern and the contemporary and sought, as the manifesto contended, “to ensure the sustainability of culture” in which “it is the artist’s calling to offer a spiritual direction based on humanitarian values and oriented toward social, cultural, political and economic realities.”6 An emblematic work from this period is Supangkat’s 1975 sculpture of Ken Dedes, revered queen of the royal lineage during the Rajasa dynasty, who ruled Java from the Singhasari to the Majapahit era, roughly from the early thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Cast in chalky plaster, the face of Ken Dedes, who is chronicled to have exuded such stunning beauty and wisdom that men killed for it, is delineated cosmetically, primed with fiery red lipstick. The torso is painted on a pedestal that serves as the surface on which her lower body appears, with uncovered breasts and dressed in tight denim pants, unzipped so that wisps of pubic hair are revealed. The work is fragmented, consisting of a bust that alludes to the stone statuary of a Southeast Asian empire to which the Suharto government pretended for pedigree and a minimal plinth that contains the rest of the stripped corpus, including blue jeans and unshod feet, which may imply urban and contemporary mores. This work sparked outrage in the world’s densest Islamic nation.

In the Philippines, the social realist movement had links to the ideology of the armed revolution, which had appropriated a Maoist pedagogy

Vol. 11 No. 5 27 in its strategy and tactics. In the field of art, it looked to Mao Zedong’s doctrine on culture, specifically his description of the people’s new culture as national, scientific, and mass, in a 1940 article titled “The Culture of New Democracy.” The New People’s Army, the armed organization of the socialist movement, soldiers on to this day, making it one of the few remaining actual revolutions in the world. Perhaps it is in this context that the contingency of the national allegory becomes salient. The manifesto of the Filipino artists leaning toward its ideology declared in the seventies: “We believe that national identity is not to be found in a nostalgic love of the past or an idealized view of our traditions and history. It cannot be achieved by using the common symbols of our national experience without understanding the reality that lies within them.”7 An early 1971 work by the United Progressive Artists and Architects consisted of a reinterpretation of Juan Luna’s nineteenth-century painting Spoliarium, which was conferred a gold prize at the Madrid Exposition in 1884, depicting a spoliarium, the cellar of the Roman coliseum where gladiators were despoiled and burned in the furnace. The Filipino revolutionaries at that time read into it an allegory of the colonial condition under Spain, an interpretation pursued by the latter-day social realists to portray the trifecta of inequity: American imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism, and feudalism.

These aforementioned instances carve the political in sharp relief, animating the production of art and its complicity with the people and social transformation. Surely, such an engagement with the political would render art prone to the instrumentalization of ideology, something that a cognitive mapping of a totality of radical change requires in tension with the equally radical particularities of the subjective and the aesthetic.

The idea of a coherent tradition and its vitiation by singular power and sometimes coextensively with the “West” was a notion at play in this political struggle. Collectives like the Dharma Group, in 1971, and The Artists Front of Thailand, in 1974, came to the fore in the context of the bloody struggle between civil society and the military government of the period in Thailand. Pratuang Emjaroen’s Dharma and Adharma (1973–74) distills the ferment of the time by intuiting the 1973 turbulence (reprised in 1976 and 1992) in Bangkok by way of Buddhism: dharma (truth, righteousness, justice) and adharma (evil, wrong, injustice, immorality). As the artist himself stated: “I wanted to capture the feeling of confusion, shock, and horror . . . The face of Buddha is symbolic of Thai people who have been hurt; his eyes are closed, 8 tears are streaming, bullet holes are shot across his face.”

It is important to note that this surrealistic inclination was part of the more fulsome syntax of the neo-traditional aesthetic of Thai mural painting, as social transformation may have also meant a return to traditional values of Thai folk culture and Buddhism, supposedly untainted by the perversion of the modern or the metropolitan. The neo-traditional in Thailand dwelled on the notion of Thainess in a political register; this identity as an essence or life-force was decisively politicized because it dared to interrogate the basis of and longing for art itself. The fine arts school Silpakorn, founded by the Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci, set up the Department of Thai Art in 1977, in the midst of the internecine upheavals.

28 Vol. 11 No. 5 Installation view of Towards a Mystic Reality, 1974, Dewan Bahasa dan Pusaka, Kuala Lumpur, curated by Rezda Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa.

Poster for Towards a Mystic Still, in the same season, in 1974, Redza Reality, 1974, Dewan Bahasa dan Pusaka, Kuala Lumpur, Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, styling themselves curated by Rezda Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa. as “mystical conceptualists,” curated an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur of “jointly initiated experiences” they called Towards a Mystical Reality, with a manifesto that elaborated on a different mode of perceiving reality beyond the pale of the West. According to them: “It is our contention that there are alternate ways of approaching reality and the Western empirical and humanistic viewpoints are not the only valid ones there are.”9 Piyadasa was likewise staunchly opposed to the reduction of Malaysian subjectivity to a pan-Islamic ecumene, actively engaged in the critique of the conflation of ethnicity with faith. One of his works titled May 13, 1969 (1970) comments on the ethnic riots between the Malays and the Chinese in 1969, and other works reconceptualize art through pieces bearing texts like: “Why did the Chinese artist refuse to halt reality in a single instance of time?” and “Artworks do not exist in time, they have entry points.”

The episode of modernity in Southeast Asia is, therefore, rooted in such a sequence of incidents. The promise of postcolonial critique within a broader dialectic of liberation was conceived in democratic movements, activism, and community. This collective ethic may be key in our understanding of the interdisciplinary, collaborative, and cooperative social engagement in contemporary art in Southeast Asia that challenges the authority of collections in the form of the history of art and the history of nation. This “collectivity” and inevitably the impulse for a “collection” may have condensed in the curator. My broad survey of the history and the current situation of curators in Southeast Asia reveals the following types of curators. It is with caution, however, that I use the word curator, with keen attention to the nuanced declensions of the term in an art ecology that is in many ways improvised, confounded by the social movements surrounding it, importuned by the need to be specialized in keeping with international standards, and idiosyncratic in its tessellation of tactics.

Vol. 11 No. 5 29 First is the artist-curator, who in Southeast Asia in the seventies and eighties was seen as an “avant-garde” figure seeking to question the idea and material condition of art by proposing a different form of practice. There is in this modality a kind of institutional critique on the part of the artist who later engages in curatorial practice because of the competence to critically reflect on what it is that is happening, to gather a coterie of likeminded artists to sustain it, to historicize it and represent it beyond national boundaries through discourse and theory. Here, the artist-curator is a provocateur, a ludic figure, a public intellectual, an innovator, and a crisis maker within modernity.

Second is the art historian, trained in the discipline and working within the institution of the museum. The practice of the art historian who becomes a curator creates a body of initiations that builds up an art historical discourse that reconsiders the ramifications of modernity in Southeast Asia and its relationship with contemporary art. The art historian-curator, who is engaged to the museum institution with a markedly fraught colonial history, abides by the efficacy of art history as a method or procedure in figuring the extent of a modernist premise. All this is situated within the latitude of the contemporary and converses with Eurocentric art history through a critical narrative and an equivalent modernity that is reflexively normative.

Third is the peer, more often than not belonging to the same generation of artists, who eventually takes on the tasks of a curator, organizing peers in exhibitions, thus defining a peer-to-peer relationship within the curatorial scheme. Along this grid, the curator gains social capital from contemporaries and explores access to them almost as a matter of course. This curatorial personality is rather interesting because while it is very prone to market co-optation because of its proximity to the production of art, it is also similarly closest to artist-run spaces and the other improvised scenarios of contemporary art. This gives rise to an embedded curator, a conspirator in the adventure, and in the experimental, tactical time of contemporary artists.

Fourth is the networker-curator, who attempts to develop practice outside institutions but nevertheless generates an alternative structure, one that is more rhizomic, emerging from multiple circuits of various interests. The high level of relationality in this arrangement enables this type of curator to venture into intersecting terrains of practice, forms, and areas not necessarily national, as well as into such processes as workshops, dialogues, residencies, events like performance art and film festivals, and gatherings of community in general. It is this curator, a strategist in many ways, who is most predisposed to collaborate with international non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations and assimilate their advocacies, together with their funding streams, under such broad rubrics as the “creative industry” (including heritage) and “culture and development,” into contemporary art. It could also be that this curator is not from the locality and may be seen as an expatriate whose tenure in regional practice is variable.

Fifth is the professional independent curator, raised in a curatorial program overseas within what usually is a practice-led institution. This curator is relatively relieved of the burden of art history and its dialectical critique and more liberal in citing conceptual assumptions from varied traditions

30 Vol. 11 No. 5 of inquiry. The curatorial knowledge deployed here is decisively oriented toward the contemporary as well as the infrastructure of the contemporary to which the professional independent curator is drawn. The layers of this system—from teachers to peers to curators to gallerists to critics to editors and commentators—surround the practice and guarantee entry- level position in the worldwide curatorium. It is this sort of curator who is keen on the biennial paradigm and its mutations and is astute in seeking resources across the milieu. A class analysis may also be considered in probing the practice of this curator, who studies and lives abroad and imbibes the customs of a confident, well-connected curatorial and artistic sector and promotes certain tastes and standards in the locality upon return.

Finally there is the gallery personnel, who assume the role of curator through the art-market network laid out across the region by galleries that have set up different collaborations beyond their original site of operation. It is through this art-market agent who gathers symbolic capital through training and travel that contemporary art is parlayed into the market with both financial and curatorial value. This curator is an entrepreneur who coordinates interlocking markets through relationships with nation-state instrumentalities like government, the local elite, museums, galleries, collectors, and auction houses, and takes all this to a transnational level.

The other prospect of this essay is to offer possible ways of explaining the consequences of these modalities of curatorial practice in Southeast Asia.

First is the shift from institutional critique to some kind of parallel institutionality. Whether this institutionality is to be regarded as critical is arguable. But what is apparent is that power accrues to this institutionality through curatorial work. And what is also clear is that this institutionality is a modified one that redistributes power formerly concentrated in, let us say, the state or the market, without necessarily negating the sources of such power, which may actually turn out to be the state or the market.

Second is the movement beyond national representation, with curatorial practice making certain that the contemporary art of a locality achieves a transnational circulation and reception, with the curator acting as agent of the mobility, facilitating that art as a level of locality that survives the translation of the global (that it is comparable) or enhancing this locality so that it survives the globality of translation (that it is comparative). This transnational movement may explain how forms coming out of fragile modernities could leapfrog into the public sphere of contemporary art.

Third is the possibility of the reconfiguration of curatorial power from a vertical one that was largely conceptualized within institutions to a horizontal platform in which more lateral, reciprocal, interactive relationships could take place and prosper among the various agents of contemporary art.

Fourth is the insertion of local curators into the global curatorium through the rites of passage secured in foreign educational systems, internships, residencies, and so on. This development effectively eludes the national institutions of validation for curators and introduces a somewhat highly

Vol. 11 No. 5 31 specialized neoliberal approach to contemporary culture that is no longer beholden to the particularity of discipline and the universality of the humanistic perspective.

Last is the ascendancy of the primary and secondary markets, the boundaries of which in Southeast Asia are blurred, which has transmitted contemporary art more quickly and with more versatility partly through the quick-change personas of the curator, whose ties with the market are deep and lasting and whose aspirations to the capital of a critical contemporary art are equally unwavering.

All told, the curator, in his or her circulation in these channels in Southeast Asia and beyond, is informed by a history of a turbulent political life in the seventies, the economic developments and their decline in the nineties, the surge in the art market in the last decade, and the integration of commodity systems of art in the current time in which the biennial and the art fair are the platforms par excellence. Along with the verticality of the integration of the art system is the lateral consolidation of strategies through artist- led or self-organized projects, the effort to constitute a region of art called “Asia-Pacific” with its own processes of making and intuiting art, and the formation of a discursive community that rethinks the circumstances of contemporaneity in this part of the world. The curator is an agency in this assemblage, one among many whose name is legion.

This paper is partly derived from two presentations: “Collection/Collective: Tracing the Southeast Asian Contemporary,” for the Annual CIMAM Conference held in Shanghai, China, in 2010, and “Curatorial Circulations in Southeast Asia,” for the symposium Curating in Asia, organized by the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2011, as part of exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989.

Notes 1 Cary Caverlee, “In the image of the king: Two photographs from nineteenth-century Siam,” Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, ed. Nora A.Taylor (New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2000), 132. 2 Gretchen Liu, One Hundred Years of the National Museum (Singapore: National Museum, 1987), 15. 3 Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere, trans. Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin (Manila: Bookmark, 1996), 67. 4 Abidin Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture and Political Culture in Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2003) and Gerard Lico, Edifice Complex: Power, Myth and Marcos State Architecture (Manila: Ateneo de Manila Press, 2000). 5 Jim Supangkat, Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond (Jakarta: Indonesian Fine Arts Foundation, 1997). 6 Sumartono, “The Role of Power in Contemporary Yogyakartan Art,” Outlet: Yogyakarta Within the Contemporary Indonesian Art Scene (Jogjakarta: Cemeti Art Foundation, 2001), 23. 7 Alice Guillermo, Protest/Revolutionary Art in the Philippines 1970–1990 (Manila: University of the Philippines, 2001), 243. 8 See Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 162. See also John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998). 9 Redza Piyadasa, Towards a Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences by Redza Piyadasa and Suleiman Esa (Kuala Lumpur: Muzium Seni Negara, 1974), 21.

32 Vol. 11 No. 5 Nikita Yingqian Cai Calling for a Process of De-alternativeness: On Artist Initiatives in China

n the first International Artist Initiatives Istanbul Meeting in October 2009, the topic “Alternative to What?” was brought up in the following Iquestions: What is an “artist initiative”? Is there only one definition of it? Most of the artist initiatives claim to be “alternative.” What are they alternative to? What is their role in society and in the art world?1

The first question seems to be far too easy to answer since one can quickly locate a satisfactory definition on Wikipedia, which reads as follows: “An artist-run initiative is any project run by visual artists to present theirs' and others’ projects. They might approximate a traditional art gallery space in appearance or function, or they may take a markedly different approach, limited only by the artist’s understanding of the term.”2 As Wikipedia is an open source Web site, this non-canonical public-contributed definition might be dismissed by much of the art world, but it does point out the fundamental characteristics of artist initiatives, which can be summarized as run by artists for themselves or others, with or without a physical space, and consisting of diverse practices. The last phrase in the Wikipedia definition above, “limited only by the artist’s understanding of the term,” might appear to be vague and uncommunicative and the question posed in the above quote, “is there only one definition of it?,” is perhaps a better way of approaching it. I would agree that in general this definition from Wikipedia could also be applied to the situation in China, where answers to “alternative to what” and “what are the roles of artist initiatives in society and the art world at large” might remain obscure.

The designation “alternative space” or “alternative practice” is commonly used when one talks about artist initiatives or self-organizational practices in China. It conveys at least three layers of meaning. First, the sustainability of initiatives and practices as such is usually in question because of the unavailability of public funding and their supposedly non-profit model. Second, these alternative, small, quasi-institutions are usually located in peripheral areas, either far away from a cultural centre like Beijing or not situated directly within art-clustered or populated areas such as Beijing’s 798 Art District. Staying away from the centre is the most accepted symbol that represents “alternative” status, which leads us to the third layer of meaning—that alternative gestures are thus interpreted as acts of

Vol. 11 No. 5 33 self-alienation or realistic compromise due to the unavailability of capital and resources rather than being independent or micro-political constructions. For most artists or art practitioners in the art system of China, artist initiatives are posited in an illegitimate situation—none of them can be registered as non-profit organizations—and they don’t receive enough visibility either physically or discursively, in the minds of many peers they are merely interesting but not influential or indispensible.

The reality is that artist initiatives in China are alternative to everyone: to their direct public, who might be the local residents of the neighboirhood and who are generally not familiar with self-organized visual culture projects, or the fame-fetching, market oriented art world, which centers around the symbolic values of the cultural capitals. This creates a conundrum for most artist initiatives—either stop being disconnected from the public and win them over by abandoning legitimation from within the art world, or aim to receive recognition from the art community and ignore communication with the local community. This battle puts the very last question raised at the Istanbul meeting—what is their role in society and in the art world?—in a state of suspension.

The problem with the term “alternative” is that it reaffirms the dichotomy between “the centre” and “the periphery,” a situation that prioritizes artwork that can be visually displayed, represented, and consumed by museums and institutions. Artistic and cultural practices that are not object-based and involve more micro-political participation from their direct audiences—local neighbours and communities for example—are essentially unrepresentable and uncommodifiable, nurturing a sense of dissidence and self-critique within the art ecology and society itself. These kind of practices within China should be understood as an immunity born from within the system and not as an antidote injected from the outside or as exotic ornaments. The question “Alternative to what?” should always be kept in mind as a reminder of resistance and autonomy, but not taken as a restriction on how one should look at, project imaginations about, and construct artistic practices. Instead, substantial issues such as the politics of collectivity, survival strategies, and sustainability, need to be discussed.

How About Sustainability? To talk about the sustainability of artist initiatives in China, one needs to talk in a realistic manner and even in legal terms. It might be unknown to most that the majority of private art museums in China are registered as “cultural communication companies” in the Bureau of Commerce and Industry. In legal terms, they are companies that are entitled to make profit. There are a few museums and art centres registered as“private non-enterprise entities,” but there are no regulations for art foundations within mainland China. An institution or initiative can register as a non-profit organization, but there is no legal way for it to gain financial support if it does not make any profit itself. Collecting donations privately is illegal, although there are grey zones, as with almost everything else. If the situation with private museums and

34 Vol. 11 No. 5 mid-scale institutions is already contradictory and difficult, how do artist initiatives, without being able to register legally and having access to public funding get the money to run their spaces or their projects?

Most artist initiatives in China, either space-based or project-based, meet their budget through their founders’ own profit-making activities such as teaching, selling thier own artwork, writing, or running a more profitable company, in addition to small personal donations or funding from local patrons or foreign foundations. This might not be much different from some of the artist run spaces outside of China, but there is doubt among the general public and even within the art world in China about the very model and principles of “non-profit.” It appears to be difficult for Chinese to think of art as something “non-profit,” especially when the auction price of a single oil painting can soar into the millions of dollars and artists appear all the time on the red carpet and attending luxurious parties. Besides, does non-profit make any sense in a society of “kleptocracy.”3 But one should never forget that capitalist society is exactly where the concept of “non- profit” was created—it’s a byproduct of modern civic society. The anguish and confrontation between the people and the government in China that is represented in the Western media mocks the fact that most Chinese expect the government to play a decisive role in their public life and public welfare, and they just don’t think it is doing well enough! What is alienating for them is not artist initiatives themselves, but idea of self-organization and a sense of belonging to a smaller unit within society, namely a self-defined community. If art in general is just another aspect of wealthy lifestyles appreciated by the rich and privileged, it is the last thing that the public would like to contribute to.

The sustainability I am talking about here is actually about building up and strengthening a belief in contributing, for free, to others and society, and the urge to diversify practices of cultural production. That is why claiming to be “alternative” might not be that appealing to most; instead, how about replacing “alternative” with “being together” and telling the truth about survival?

The Politics of Collectivity To put my proposition under the generic slogan of being together might not be productive or inspirational. When one witnesses the widely dispersed interest groups of the apolitical movements in the West and their varied appeals, as well as the parties, gatherings, and free speeches happening on the streets and in the museums worldwide, one cannot stop thinking that “being together” spatially might not create common goals, and we do need some common goals in order to continue being together. Maria Lind summarized some of the related issues for further examination in her essay about collaborative and collective activities: “. . . how people work on a short-term basis, as well as on a long-term basis; how they spread their attention across various subjects, methods, lifestyles, political orientations; how they hope for some kind of emancipation; which obstacles they come across and last but not least, what sort of satisfaction results from working in a group.”4

Vol. 11 No. 5 35 In the project Little Movements: Self-Practice in Contemporary Art, Museum of Unknown, Encounter, 2011, installation curated by Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Su Wei, artist initiatives such view in the exhibition A Museum That is Not. Courtesy as HomeShop in Beijing, and Little Production, run by young artists in of Guangdong Times Museum. Shanghai and Hangzhou, have been introduced under the term “self- practice,” which was defined by the curatorial narrative of Little Movements as the “individual,” the modernist unit of autonomy and resistance. From the perspective of these initiatives, to be together is either a voluntary choice or a strategic decision; the politics of collectivity is their everyday reality. Curiously, when speaking with these artists, most of them insist on the temporality of collaboration and emphasized they still work on their own projects most of the time and they highly respect each one’s personal choice. Artist initiatives are collaborative and collective activities by nature, so if artists choose to work together and not alone, and if they choose to situate their projects in the public sphere and not in their own studios, what happens, exactly? Compared with the variety of symposia, conferences, exhibitions, and publications in the last decade that have been produced outside of China, the politics of collectivity remain untouched and even are a taboo in the area of contemporary art in China.

In recent years, collectivity has returned as a discourse together with a fanaticism for Eastern European conceptualism globally. Collectivism used to be an omnipresent word for common life in most former-communist countries, but it also signified a strong suppression of the individual—once the ideological disguise of collectivism gets destroyed, the withdrawal back to the complete and absolute individual became unprecedented. In my personal experience working in self-initiated projects and with artist initiatives, what is at stake in collectivity is a goal of efficiency. The non-hierarchical structure of negotiation within a collective endeavour takes on a lot more than one’s

36 Vol. 11 No. 5 Participants relax in the individual ambition, the unceasing process of self-inquiry, and self-reflection, courtyard before stretching their vocal chords with and struggle between the particularities and the common ground is bound experimental improvisationists Phil Minton and Audrey Chen to happen, thus a platform can be built for the others and one artist can act for HomeWorkShop No. 13, 2012. Courtesy of HomeShop, as agency for other artists. I collaborated with the artist initiative Museum Beijing. of Unknown in an exhibition I curated last year titled A Museum That is Not, and the members of the collective individually worked under the same title of Encounter, which was a new commission for the exhibition, while real negotiation happened mostly in the actual display of the objects. To me, as the curator and as an observer of the project, the collective moments of negotiation within the group remained obscure. What process of decision- making actually happened, and what can one learn from it?

Survival Strategies Survival is usually understood as the struggle between life and death, but it can also be taken as a positive approach in a precarious context. The survival strategies of artist initiatives in China can be categorized as proactive intervention, progressive localization, and self-institutionalization. I will provide a few examples to further illustrate my categorization.

Since June 2010, to protest against the Overseas Chinese Town Holding Company’s filling of the East Lake in order to build a real estate project, artists and architects from Wuhan initiated two rounds of projects involving a variety of groups and individuals. The organization took the form of a series of proactive and discrete interventions under the umbrella of Project of Donghu and responded to the local situation with flexibility. Their strategy of interventions could be viewed as a form of civic mobilization, and the slogan “Everyone’s East Lake” surely appealed to the nostalgia of retaining natural landscapes for urban dwellers. Resonance with global

Vol. 11 No. 5 37 Top: Janin Walter + Melanie Humann, Zhong Jialing, That Obscure Theatre, 2011. Courtesy of Observation Society, Guangzhou. Left: He An, Wind Light as a Thief, 2011, installation view. Photo: Wang Wei. Courtesy of Arrow Factory, Beijing.

38 Vol. 11 No. 5 movements that seem apolitical can be found in Project of Donghu’s aesthetic and poetic, rather than overtly political, gestures. Regardless of their social aspirations, discussion brought about by these ephemeral interventions and performances, and their eventual impact, remain mostly within the art world.

HomeShop and Arrow Factory in Beijing, and Observation Society in Guangzhou, are among the a few artist initiatives in China that take an approach acknowledging the spatial and everyday circumstances of where they are located. Each have set themselves up in ordinary neighbourhoods where most of the residents have nothing to do with art and might never walk into a museum. Compared with the relational projects of Arrow Factory and the young artist solo exhibition model of Observation Society, HomeShop seems to be the only one that has progressively localized their practice through, for example, their self-printed community newspaper, organic farming, or free weather forecasts—activities that deviate greatly from accepted canonical museum exhibitions. As a result of a relatively conventional exhibition model, Observation Society has gained more visibility and recognition from within the art world than that of HomeShop.

Artists in Shanghai have a prolific history of presenting self-organized exhibitions, and that is why after TOP Building in the Outstanding Park of Shanghai initiated a year-long project, Future Festival, the urgency of self- institutionalization was clearly manifested:

The topic of Future Festival was inspired by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who said that ‘the role of the artist is to prepare for future projects’. This quotation alludes to a certain reversion in contemporary art action, suggesting that participating artists turned from the act of criticizing and making experiences to a new attitude of bidding, gathering, and mingling. During this period, discussions between local artists and a philosophy professor (Lu Xinghua), as well as interviews in artists’ studio and exhibitions, will be held. This continuous symposium is more than a simple combination between philosophy and art, the organizers insist on the fact that: it is neither a talk, nor an exhibition, neither an art project, nor one of those academic topics we were used to, an inertia processing in an experienced thinking. It responds to art introspection, surprises, conflicts of opinions, differences, and the unknown. Everyday becomes a festival. It is actually more a final festival, a kind of decisive conviction.5

This might be the strongest manifesto I’ve ever read from an artist initiative in China, but the anonymous and strong-minded organizers remain mysterious; the only person whose name appeared in the whole paragraph took on the role of spokesperson and mentor. The world has been separated into that of

Vol. 11 No. 5 39 Installation view of Poster Exhibition, 2011. Courtesy of TOP, Shanghai.

40 Vol. 11 No. 5 Vol. 11 No. 5 41 the “artists” and that of the “others,” and it calls for a festival consisting only of the former. Most of the organizers of the TOP Building belong to the generation born in the 1970s in China, while an even younger generation of artists might approach the same issue of autonomy through comparatively more moderate propositions. Since the spring of 2012, Hu Yun, Li Mu, and Lu Pingyuan, from Shanghai, have designed and published three issues of PDF, an artist journal circulated mainly by e-mail with essays written by the artists themselves and other contributors who pose critical questions to the art institutions and inject new ideas into the art world.

As an institutional practitioner, specifically, a museum curator in China, I think that I can learn a lot from the diverse and vigorous practices of artist initiatives. By collaborating with each other, artists can make different forms of imagination, visibility, and participation possible. Last, but not least, we should perhaps reject the word “alternative” and take each other as equal partners and interlocutors. Artist initiatives should be taken as a necessity within, and even outside of, the art system, and the questions and issues brought up by their practices are far from “alternative”—they are ubiquitous.

Notes 1 http://www.artistinitiatives.org/. 2 Wikipedia, “Artist-run initiative,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist-run_initiative. 3 Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptocracy. Kleptocracy is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service. 4 Maria Lind, “The Collaborative Turn,” in Taking The Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, eds. Johanna Billing, Maria Lind, and Lars Nilsson (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 17. 5 “Future Fesival,” http://www.m50top.com/details.aspx?id=249&key=creative.

42 Vol. 11 No. 5 What's Next? A Conversation between Biljana Ciric and Carol Yinghua Lu

Biljana Ciric: We are experiencing an important transitional period at the moment in China on many different levels. This became very obvious during the end of EXPO in late 2010 and then in early 2011 when Ai Weiwei was jailed. This, together with the economic crisis, conservative government streams in the cultural field and the pressure that is felt by people working in this field are becoming very present. This pressure is not physical, but a bubble around us that forces upon us self-restriction and self-censorship. We all begin to question ourselves about whether we are doing anything wrong even before we start doing anything.

Thus, it is an important time for self-reflection. We all realized that still, today, China doesn’t have an art infrastructure, and we are in many ways where we were a decade ago, but we are involved in a much more complex game, one that is ruled by the market.

Contemporary cultural practice is no longer an underground activity, it has been in a void for a decade, and, finally, we are witnessing the moves of bureaucratic bodies to institutionalize living artists, their lives, their work, and even public opinion through the government’s establishment of the Contemporary Research Art Institute which was instituted in 2009. It is first state platform for researching contemporary art, and the artists who are honourary members or experts include Fang Lijun, Feng Mengbo, Wang Jianwei, Yue Mingjun, Wang Guangyi, Liu Xiaodong, Zhang Xiaogang, Xu Bing, Wei Ershen, Xu Jiang, Luo Zhongli, Zhan Wang, Wang Gongxin, Song Dong, Lin Tianmiao, Sui Jianguo, Ye Yongqing, Qiu Zhijie, Zhou Chunya, and Zeng Fanzhi.

The institutional boom that followed the market economy boom started in the early 2000s and introduced a very different foundation to the institutional system. In China, before 2000, it was very difficult to discuss instititutional infrastructure, but after 2000 contemporary art was first recognized by the government through the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and since then it has been officially accepted. At around the same time, private capital started becoming involved with contemporary art, especially real estate companies through the construction of the museums all over China. Although seen as a marketing tool for real estate developers, this did give a boost to contemporary art. However, because of a lack of more structured strategic plans, and decisions that were usually made by the CEO of the

Vol. 11 No. 5 43 company, as well as unstable budgets that were dependent upon real estate market fluctuations, these museums failed to propose a solid institutional framework of conducting systematic research, building collections, or producing knowledge. This still continues as more and more museums are being built. In China, the museum system is based on the market and economic growth, and not for reasons of democracy and serving the public as found in most Western countries.

Speaking of formats of presentation, exhibitions have a power to affect individuals that is very different from that of the theatre which produces a collective experience. Within an exhibition, there is the potential to create temporal space and allow time for reflection, although many displays are simply mounted to satisfy consumer desire. Only very private and small- scale initiatives have managed to establish a so-called temporal democracy through exhibition making and public discussion, while most institutions in China continue to present exhibitions as a market economy product. This is one of the reasons many artists lost their intellectual responsibility towards society and began turning exhibitions into financial and speculative deals with the museums. You mentioned this in one of your texts, Carol, where you referred to a seminar that included a public roundtable discussion with artists whose work was shown in the exhibition Breaking Forecast—8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation of Artists at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). One artist, Chen Shaoxiong, who was not in the exhibition, tried to open up a discussion about the problematics of an exhibition like this, but one of the artists responded that this was not important and that for him the exhibition was a good opportunity.

In the last few years not-for-profit spaces—at least the few of them that existed—failed to adjust to their new role within an art system that has an increase in exhibition spaces, but a decrease in experimentation, and closed their doors or have delayed opening them. In early 2011, UCCA founder, Guy Ullens, announced that he would pull out his funding from that institution, and the Himalayas Art Museum in Shanghai, which was scheduled to open in 2011, has postponed its opening indefintiely.

This situation has provided few options for emerging artists within the gallery or museum system, or for them to totally re-invent a new model of taking action or not within the art system. The meaning and significance of non-action is certainly more complex than producing or not producing work, but perhaps action can take on a role that is different altogether— maybe that of an active observer within the system that we are all a part of. A choice of resistance to the rituals of contemporary art seems to be the only possible way of truly contributing to the art system today, producing a space to reflect and to provide filters through which we can better understand the system.

Because of the above-mentioned conditions, contemporary Chinese art is in a state of highly monotonous production and suffers from a lack of

44 Vol. 11 No. 5 discourse, partly because artists and curators are not acknowledging that there are different ways of producing and presenting contemporary art besides the traditional format of an exhibition.

Discursive practices have been what are lacking in China, as well as self- reflection upon the artistic environment. These discursive practices became initiated through individuals and smaller groups who gave new possibilities to developing an art system with a different future, but, again, many of these initiatives seem to have had very short lives.

Carol Yinghua Lu: What you have articulated above describes the very setting under which Liu Ding and I have developed the project Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art (referred to below as “Little Movements”). This ongoing research, discussion, publishing, and exhibition project, which has been supported by OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT) in Shenzhen, was born out of a desire to understand where we are in this moment and where we are heading in the near future by looking at Chinese and international models of practice, both past and present, whose autonomy and strength stem from internal motivations and the spirit of independence from, and dissatisfaction with, given conditions and boundaries.

One of the issues that many of us working in the Chinese context have faced is the general understanding of contemporary Chinese art, which places all of us in oversimplified categories with assumptions and speculations that often neglect the significance of individual practices, thinking, and contributions. Through Little Movements we have proposed a way of looking at the art system not as a hierarchy of power, but, instead, as a flat surface consisting of modes of creativity, experimentation, and radical thoughts originating from individual and collective, independent and institutional forces that exist simultaneously. Every sector of, and role within, the art industry has the potential to become a creative subject, and in this sense everyone is equal and every individual can be equal to institutional powers, whether they be art museums or art history discourses. By contributing to a deeper understanding of the boundaries within the art system and the new visions shaping the art system, each individual can be as influential and exert as much power as the institutions. At the same time, institutional powers, be they art centres, curatorial practice, publishing, or art discourse, should also strive to be as self-reflexive, innovative, and experimental as an artist or an author. In a way, everyone has the potential for authorship in determining how art history is taking shape and where the art industry should be heading.

This way of thinking places much weight on the responsibility of individual practitioners in their respective roles and can help us identify those practitioners who are generating more fundamental and embedded changes to the system rather than responding to immediate situations and

Vol. 11 No. 5 45 generating immediate but perhaps short-term visibility. We also believe that critical engagement within the system is crucial to the well-being of the system in the long run, and rather than endless expansion of the art system and of the scope of each practice, there is a need to internalize our thinking and go deeper vertically rather than horizontally. It’s important to understand and follow each individual practice in the art system rather than look at it as part of a faceless mass. Art is a highly personalized matter, although what you have described is a current situation in which art production, discourse, museum practices, and art education have been highly standardized, industrialized, and over-stretched for public perusal resulting in quick consumption of art. As a result, the rigour, complexity, and professionalism of artistic practice has been compromised.

Within this reflection there is a new form of institutional critique arriving on the scene. What I refer to as an institution not only concerns museums and art centres as the usual embodiment of power and authoritarian order, but it concerns individuals as well. This kind of critique of the institutional is not generated externally and issued by less privileged roles within the art system, but, rather, internally from the institutions and individuals themselves. It’s an attempt to re-establish the boundaries of professional roles and internal practices, and to recognize the boundaries between professionals and the public rather than use the generally uneducated public as an excuse for a mediocre performance.

In the spirit of Little Movements, we want to reiterate the importance of taking individual responsibility rather than blaming the larger context for pains and losses. We encourage efforts that examine the most basic conditions of art making and the aspiration to search and establish new methodologies, challenging and stretching conventional understanding, definition, and the very order of the dominant art histories and value systems on every level.

Biljana Ciric: Your mention of re-establishing the boundaries of roles makes me think of my own situation. After I left Shanghai’s Duolun MoMA, in 2007, after working there for three years, I developed a way of working independently that I usually describe as a museum in itself; I don’t have a space of my own, so my programming happens in different venues. The parallel between the individual as institution reminds me again of a beautiful piece by the young Beijing-based artist Hu Xiangqian, who made series of performances called Hu Xiangqian’s Museum. The artist considers his own body to be a museum and describes his collection—which exists only in his mind—to the audience by giving a public presentation. This is in a way a very utopian approach of the artist or curator as an institution and seems to be something that we all see as a very important element today in the environment in which we are working. Cultural workers discuss so-called new models of the institution that could work in the social and political context, as many things discussed in recent decades have related

46 Vol. 11 No. 5 to China and the development of its art institutions with so-called Chinese characteristics. So this could be seen as a possible model that is proposed by individual efforts. It opens the possibility of redefining ideas of what it means to be an individual today. It is a task that again requires awareness of the individual as citizen. This statement probably sounds like a basic thing in different social contexts, but I think it is very important in the context of where we work. So, citizen first, then artist and curator or cultural worker.

An exhibition that I worked on in 2011 for the Chinese Art Centre in Manchester, titled Institution for the Future, actually looked at individual artists and collectives in the Southeast Asian region and their role in building infrastructure within their local context by producing discourse and facilitating dialogue. Again, these individuals, collectives, or para- institutions are small, independent, and sustainable. At the same time, their practices go beyond ideology and geography, so their work is important not only locally, but contributes directly, through their practice, to a global dialogue about what an institution is today and what it could be.

One of the works in exhibition, by Austria-based Yang Jun, posed the following question, with its blanks to be filled in, to the art centre:

Is ______, Should ______, Could ______, Would ______?

But at the same time we can ask the same question of curators and artists. What we are/could/would/should do?

The issue is, how can we actually produce temporal reality that has relevance to society, and how should we act to create and shape social relevance through existing formats? It is not a case of producing critical relevance to something but of constructing a new model. The role of cultural producers has changed everywhere in last few decades. We now are working in times in which contemporary art never had more presence within public realm. I think it is a time with a lot of potential for change.

On the other hand, there is a thin line about how and in which context one can work, and what the limitations are that arise from the existing environment. Two decades ago, contemporary Chinese art was, in many different respects, a product of its time and highly influenced by the West. Today it is very different. Today, a discussion of the role of artists brings up once again the question of who the audience is for their work and how they build an audience for the future. There is also a very important educational aspect to curatorial work, and it brings the issue of public awareness to light, which is very different from what it was two decades ago. In general, the older generation of artists started gaining recognition in the West first,

Vol. 11 No. 5 47 so they rarely had any encounter with a local audience, and many today are still unknown locally. For the younger generation that started working within the last five years, for example, it is different. There is little influence or acknowledgement of the West in their practice.

The lack of curatorial and discursive practice in the existing system has generated very little discussion about education through curatorial work, something I consider crucial at this moment.

Carol Yinghua Lu: The very system in China that you have described brings not only little discussion or discourse, critical or not, about art, but also little satisfaction to almost everyone involved. In this system that lacks any kind of credibility or professionalism, one receives little recognition and enjoys little sense of achievement. It’s not at all encouraging. That’s also why for a very long time, Liu Ding and I have tried our utmost to maintain a level of independence and believe in the possibility of being an individual institution. Rather than joining any institution or becoming part of any “groups” or “associations” where professional performance is often misplaced, misjudged, and mixed up with feelings, affiliations, and so on, it’s very important to establish models of individual practices that can happen without necessarily complying with any structured conditions or policies. Liu Ding has experimented with the possibility of initiating and continuing to develop a discourse about value in art through Liu Ding’s Store, which is a conceptual project and a platform for discussion in-between private and public domains, whereas I have seen my writing as a self-sufficient and independent realm of performing my role, participating, and creating.

In a panel discussion at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Irit Rogoff responded to a discussion by Ann Demeester about her methodology for shaping the De Appel Curatorial Course and how curatorial practice is affected by structural changes by saying,

Don’t you think that comes about through a kind of endless attempt to adjust yourself as a subject in relation to a whole set of existing structures? I have been working with Florian Schneider over the past three years with a whole network of activists across Europe. One of the things I understood through this experience is that there is an inclination to move away from defining one’s self in relation to these structures, towards what self-organization means. I know, it’s a slogan, but in actual fact—and what I understood and saw unfolding is precisely that—a self-definition moving away from defying institutions, hierarchies, and authorities and all that juvenilia, and emphasizing instead a possibility of starting from elsewhere. It is a mode of thinking tending much more towards a centrifugal rather than a centripetal structure. That gives the work a kind of impetus which can create minor devolutions from within institutions

48 Vol. 11 No. 5 and can begin to function as self-organized entities: small initiatives that can be instigated both from within and from outside institutions that break the bonds between subjects and institutions towards a production of knowledge that moves up against the hegemonic structures. In a way, the necessity of contemporary pedagogy is to re-examine totally the relations between subjects and institutions—as in the interpellative model of Althusser—so as to make clear to people, early in their formation process, that there is a lot more to be interpellated by than an institution.1

These thoughts speak to the core value of Little Movements, one that looks at small initiatives within and from outside of institutions and proposes production of knowledge. We pursue intensity and quality of thinking and creativity as a way to transcend power structures. Autonomy within the art system can be achieved through both individual subjects and institutional organs, from collectives to museums. Any form of practice ultimately is not a production of power, but one of knowledge and intellectual and artistic content. In many discussions in China, the descriptions, ambitions, and horizons of institutional and individual practice are often defined by technical details only in terms of scale, the capacity to market performance. This kind of description reduces art to a technical and practical existence, which is both uninspiring and unproductive.

Advocating modes of knowledge production and creativity among individuals and institutions as means of independence also helps practitioners in the field to be less burdened and affected by existing power structures and limited value judgments and, instead, to internalize their energy into their own practice and thinking.

Notes 1 Rotterdam Dialogues: The Critics, The Curators, The Artists (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2010), 124–25.

Vol. 11 No. 5 49 Richard Streitmatter-Tran Future Intuitions

New Interests, New Institutions Over recent decades arts institutions, particularly museums in Europe and North America, have undergone a remarkable shift from being the authoritative purveyors and canon-bearers of taste to being primary sites of production and investigation. Responding then to critique and resistance from emerging interest groups exterior to, and often excluded from the institution, museums were compelled to reconsider their practices in terms of social equity and inclusiveness. Progressively, a cohesive and sustained institutional criticism would mature from embryonic identity politics embedded in the feminist, civil rights, and third-world advocacy movements as they challenged institutions for increased representation. By the late sixties, these movements had penetrated the consciousness of the mainstream public and attained important visibility in the media. The rise of institutional critique went hand-in-hand with the evolving social and political sensibilities of the time. Political grassroots organizational and resistance tactics provided examples for new artist-run spaces and artistic forms of creative expression that regarded direct action, community engagement, and performance as strategic cornerstones in the construction of a new art ecology that could exist outside, and often in spite of, the institution.

This belief in “alternatives” to the institution would require museums to take a deep introspective assessment of their operations and basic assumptions about how, what, and where art should be. The 2003 symposium, Museums for Tomorrow, identified five areas that future museums would have to carefully consider: The Corporate Museum, The Politics of Collecting, Museums and Their Audience, The Museum as Gatekeeper, and Museum Education and Pedagogy.1 Concern for alternative modes of production and display had once manifested itself in the late 1990s as a short-lived curatorial framework known as new institutionalism, in which institutional curators attempted to use the institution as a laboratory, inviting artists and audiences to collaboratively produce art with the institution—challenging the perception of the inert white cube space through its activation.2 Inheriting the late-twentieth-century history of a resistant and responsive institution, a question we now confront is: What ideas will underpin the institution of the future? In at least one aspect, the future institution may be defined less by one physical location than by its engagement within a sophisticated, increasingly complex and global ecology of symbiotic and competing interests.

50 Vol. 11 No. 5 In 2012, the Guggenheim Museum announced the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Arts Initiative with Singapore-based June Yap as the curator of the first phase and exhibition, in 2013, of this program. The five- year initiative intends to identify artists and curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, The Middle East, and North Africa, areas that have not traditionally been associated with the Guggenheim.3 While traditional practices such as museum acquisitions will be a part of the program, the initiative has looked to comprehensively integrate other areas of engagement through outreach, education, and residency programs. Apparently, the initiative falls in line with the Guggenheim’s long trajectory of expansion, critically now considering engagement through collaboration as opposed to the physical construction of new museums as a viable strategy for growth. Considering art production, particularly the relationship between the largest and long-standing Western institutions and budding regional institutional infrastructures, we might begin to see what a future institutional ecology looks like.

This ecology appears to be an ever-shifting pie chart—a finite area with slices taking more or less real estate. The slices themselves are diverse organized interests including artists, dealers, collectors, curators, museums, and publishers, among others. In this ecology, one increases their lot by consuming or integrating competing interests as their own—for example, curators working for institutions that publish their own material, or corporate sponsorship of museum programming. Multi-tasking, as opposed to specialization, has been a dominant contemporary mode of operation for several organizations from large institutions to small artist run collectives that must compete for funding and audiences, mirroring the consumer culture, technologies, and economies that strive for efficiency and market share. The multi-faceted organization’s ability to meet the demand for higher standards of efficiency always depends upon the specific base (economy) from which it operates within. As we look outside of the West and its contemporary familiar landscape of established institutions, increased privatization of public interests, and massive production capabilities, we find another model directed at production in small batches: regional and specific, and certainly with its own set of problems.

Local Knowledge and Institutions In Local Knowledge/New Internationalism, Tom Hill posits that the institutional demise of modernism’s utopic claim to universality went hand in hand with the rise of the local. Local knowledge looked toward the regional and organic, to those marginalized groups that had before leveled the first institutional critiques from the outside. A New Internationalism that sought revision to a redistributed global cultural economy would usurp the modernist dream of an International Style.4

A focus on local knowledge has been noticeably present theme in art for some time, notably as expressed in curator and critic Olu Oguibe’s book The Culture Game, where he systematically deconstructs the institution’s ability to appropriate the local.5 On the surface, local knowledge seems

Vol. 11 No. 5 51 to satisfy all of the criteria (and former critique) that concern modern institutional correctness: the inclusion and validation of certain knowledge in what some might consider a pure form—unfiltered through translation and external/foreign interference. And herein lies a contradiction: How does one include within a certain institutional framework a particular knowledge intrinsically posited as anti-institutional? Can the institution lay claim to areas of knowledge production and distribution outside its normal territory of expertise without reverting back decades to the very same critiques concerning hegemonic control over canons and colonialist affections. What really does inclusion signify? Does intent justify the ends in this case?

In a world with a rate of unprecedented human population growth and information production (inversely, and in one of rapid extinction of language and species), the race to document and record the emerging and disappearing has become increasingly urgent. This violence of speed allows certain knowledge infrastructures to rapidly outpace others thus creating chasms that define and sort relevant modern worlds separated from the irrelevant ones. The contemporary condition more than ever is information itself.

The twentieth century saw the arts pass from objects to ideas in natural response to information, technologies, and discourses that enabled its production and distribution. We might say that the twenty-first century is defined by our struggle in dealing with so much information. The problem, beyond the contradictions described in the previous paragraph, is that the institutional focus on local knowledge leaves regional knowledge production at a disadvantage in comparison to the speed of institutional distribution or dissemination. The two infrastructures are often incompatible. The ideal solution is to establish conditions for improvement both in terms of the speed and scope of local production and distribution. But then what would be the need for the larger institution if the regional infrastructure met or exceeded those capabilities? The institution would be relegated to simply consuming the information—almost a complete inversion of the earlier institutional model. As unlikely as this suicidal scenario is, we are now witness to local infrastructures throughout the world, such as in China, developing and going head to head with Western institutions. A more credible scenario that will emerge is that a certain type of autonomous institution will be able to produce local knowledge while providing its own channels for small-scale distribution, often in later partnership with larger institutional interests. I think we are at the right time in art history and practice for this to occur. The technologies are in place to allow smaller entities to conduct research, produce and distribute work that can compete with and complement larger institutions, but without the bureaucracy or need for large financial investment. Importantly, by being independently directed, they also provide a space for alternately allowing for institutional critique and collaboration depending on the context or situation. The small entities also inherit a history and exist precisely as a consequence of the hard fought battles of their ancestors in artist-run organizations. Within this ecology, a symbiotic relationship has opened the possibility of the local/untranslatable connecting to the

52 Vol. 11 No. 5 institution via what might called, local para-institutions for the arts. In the next section, I will describe what I feel are some defining aspects of these para-institutions and what they care about.

What will Institutions for the Future Care About? Over the past two years, since the establishment of Dia/Projects in Ho Chi Minh City, I and a number of collaborators have spent a great deal of time developing a discursive space that welcomes anthropologists, academics, historians, scientists, and economists to enter into dialogue with local artists, designers, architects, and emerging curators. Our focus at Dia/ Projects tends to align with the emerging field of artistic research, “a new practice in the arts which artists themselves act as researchers and present their findings in the form of artwork.”6

Entrance to Dia/Projects, Ho Chi Minh City. Courtesy of Richard Streitmatter-Tran.

Artistic research in this respect has been our primary activity as it engages areas of local knowledge production and production of artworks. As a producer, Dia/Projects is ideally set up as a studio, currently in two locations—one interior space with a library, archives, wireless internet, coffee and all of the other accouterments of research spaces worldwide; the other location, called Dia/Studio, is an open-air production studio located in a warehouse compound and suited for large-scale work in installation and sculpture. Like artistic research, one practice envelopes two concerns (and in this case, two locations). With research and production being our main priorities, we have not been as concerned with some of the domains that artist run spaces have traditionally claimed or been preoccupied with— namely community engagement and outreach, regular exhibition schedules and programming, and growth.

Even though these important domains fall outside of our scope, they are quite deftly handled by other local spaces and I would like here to introduce a selection of spaces to provide a context for the cultural infrastructure in Ho Chi Minh City (and more broadly in Southeast Asia) before moving on to specific Dia/Projects operations.

Vol. 11 No. 5 53 In contrast to Singapore, Vietnam does not currently enjoy an advanced Interior space of Dia/Projects, Ho Chi Minh City. Courtesy of national arts infrastructure with policies committed to the serious Richard Streitmatter-Tran. development of contemporary art practice with targeted initiatives in education, international promotion, or financial support for extant art spaces. When minimal financial and promotional support is offered to arts organizations, the state maintains significant control over the organization’s creative content. The law requires that all public exhibitions and gatherings require specific permits in advance that authorize the scope of what can and cannot be shared with the public. This applies from art exhibitions to commercial music concerts and performances. Applying for the necessary documentation can be seen not only as logistically burdensome, but potentially risky given that you inevitably draw attention and scrutiny to the work and personalities from an audience that is unlikely to be your biggest fan.

The obvious decision that some art spaces have taken is simply not to ask for support and thereby operate as independently as possible. The degree to which one is able to go under the radar is largely based on ambition and scale. If you require local promotion in the media or large audiences, it is not easy to ignore the permission protocols. Unless you have internally developed an effective communications network to attract audiences (for example, through social media), you have few other options. Once you require official permits, very often a dedicated staff will be required to liaise with various government ministries to ensure proper paperwork is in place. Depending on interpretations of the work submitted for permission, exhausting negotiations might entail with various government organs thus expanding your financial requirements and further entrenching the organization’s resources in a vicious cycle of dependency.

Certain initiatives have found a way to avoid the “stigma” of art exhibitions by rebranding them as commercial events—seeking corporate sponsorship

54 Vol. 11 No. 5 that blends commerce and art. Largely, these events do not require permission from the ministries dealing with culture and fall within the territory of business. Yet corporate sponsors and artists are likely to have very different expectations. Several years ago I attended an exhibition at the Ho Chi Minh City Photography Association (a state-endorsed guild of commercial and non-commercial photographers). I noticed that the photographs were compromised by gaudy Fujifilm stickers placed upon the frames of exhibited works and the exhibition gallery was filled with advertising banners competing for visual attention. In these cases, art can become a casualty when contextualized within entertainment or play supporting roles to marketing.

For many years, independent initiatives for contemporary culture (including artist-run spaces, collectives, festivals, dance companies, theatre, and music) have partnered with foreign cultural organizations such as the Goethe Institut and the Alliance Français to co-promote events. In Vietnam, this practice has become an alternative to corporate sponsorship, while maintaining more control over artistic integrity. While many of these events will require the normal permits, it is often the foreign organizations that will be applying for them rather than the independent organization and they are usually (though not always) approved. The additional benefits are mutual: the event is seen as being simultaneously international and local; and with an all-important buffer zone of protection from cultural authorities less zealous to crash an event hosted by an organization that is itself an extension of its foreign embassy. It's not surprising that one drawback in this scheme is the utilitarian focus of many of these pairings: populist proposals that appeal to the sensibilities of the most people usually are the ones that prevail. In nearly all cases, these collaborations are community-focused, politically safe, and family friendly.

There are several commercial art spaces in Ho Chi Minh City, though few of them would be considered contemporary. Full-time spaces such as Galerie Quynh, a contemporary art gallery in Ho Chi Minh City in 2000, rely on sales to sustain their activities and programming. The gallery’s ability to program experimental work that does not generate income must be supported by those programs that do. Maintaining that balance while keeping financially afloat becomes particularly difficult where there has yet to emerge a concrete local collector base and where costly participation at top art fairs can stop cold experimental expenditures. Recently some collections, such as the Post-Vidai collection, have begun to organize their own events, exhibitions, and activities independently from the galleries from which they acquire work. Interestingly enough, exhibition of works in collections often does not require exhibition permits as they are considered private events and not public exhibitions.

The truth is that nearly all contemporary art practices and programs that occur in Ho Chi Minh City rely on ever-changing combinations of commercial, foreign and domestic, private and self-funded support in concert with the cultural policies set forth by the government. As in the examples

Vol. 11 No. 5 55 above, the same work viewed in one context may require certain permits, but when viewed in another context it might not. Sometimes it can simply be a matter of the commercial or non-commercial nature of the organizer(s). Businesses tend to have more freedom than non-commercial endeavors.

Two non-commercial organizations that I would like to mention specifically are San Art and Zero Station. The former was founded in 2007 by four returning overseas Vietnamese artists (Dinh Q. Le, Andrew Tuan Nguyen, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, and Tiffany Chung) and is currently directed by former Queensland Art Gallery and Long March Space curator Zoe Butt. San Art is funded by a number of sources including a foundation specifically developed for funding San Art and it’s activities. San Art has been extremely active since its establishment and gaining international attention through its programming and rising stature of its artists.

Curator and critic Nguyen Nhu Huy established Zero Station more recently in 2010. While both San Art and Zero Station share a mission focused on local community outreach, San Art tends to be more international in scope by attracting established curators and critics to its space, and young artists have certainly benefitted from San Art’s extensive top-tier network. Zero Station receives significant patronage from the local art and design schools, and, thematically, has focused on the development of creative youth through street art and small public projects, often in partnership with organizations such as the Goethe Institut and the Japan Foundation. Recently, Nhu Huy has developed and delivered a course in contemporary art theory for a local arts school. While it would be incorrect to say that San Art is international while Zero Station is locally focused, they may be perceived as such.

Nearly all of Saigon’s contemporary arts spaces and galleries that I have mentioned up to this point emerged after the 2006 collapse and failure of Saigon Open City (SOC), the city’s first attempt at a large, international, biennial-style exhibition. Another fact worth noting is that many personalities affiliated with these spaces emerging in SOC’s wake had some relationship with SOC, including me. Ultimately, as a result of inexperienced arts management and government intervention, the three-phase exhibition was terminated before phase one was completed. The initial disappointment was transformed later into the realization that smaller, more agile and flexible projects were tactically more sound in an environment that was still young, bureaucracy laden, and extremely controlled. It is no surprise then that there has not been any push for anything grandiose since then, and all of the newer spaces remain focused on their own independent initiatives, and in the last few years there have been no serious motions toward the establishment of institutional sized projects/spaces.

Dia/Projects and Dia/Studio As I wrote earlier, Dia/Projects is an arts initiative established in 2010 focused on artistic research. Since its inception we’ve collaborated with spaces such as San Art and Galerie Quynh, as well as a number of international organizations and spaces, the conditions for our existence set us apart in many ways from the spaces in the city.

56 Vol. 11 No. 5 Dia/Projects is largely a one-person operation that I run near the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University Vietnam, where I teach. Unlike many spaces, Dia/Projects does not have programming nor does it receive any external funding. The space and its activities are financed directly by my university teaching salary. Not relying on external funding and the obligations that go with it, I’ve been able to be selective, even capricious, about the directions of the space. In fact, over the past two years I realized that the space needed to be more subjectively aligned with my own interests and schedule.

Intuition, rather than institution, become the guiding rule for the space, and as fickle as that may sound, it has introduced areas for investigation that we certainly would not have considered if we had a more institutional, or even constitutional, framework.

Royal Melbourne Institute The original intent was to create an entity that was part studio and of Technology International University Vietnam students part project planning space. Dia/Projects would serve as an umbrella working on projects at Dia/ Projects. Courtesy of Richard for collaborative projects in art, design, architecture, and urban design. Streitmatter-Tran. Importantly, it would remain distinct from my individual arts practice. This structure would also allow us to submit proposals that might not be accessible to individual artists. I’ve often joked that dia/projects is the alter- ego of an arts match-making service, as much of the work we do emerges from introducing people to networks and opportunities, and in many instances our involvement stops after such introductions. Examples of organization-to-organization projects that we’ve completed include several design projects with partners such as the International Centre for Art and New Technologies (CIANT), in Prague; the University of Applied Science in Munich, Germany; The Japan Society; and the Japan Foundation. Through

Vol. 11 No. 5 57 these partnerships, we’ve been able to send young artists and architects abroad, for some being their first time traveling overseas.

A part of maintaining an active discussion is bringing in new ideas, and we have had three researchers-in-residence over two years: Thai art historian Vipash Purichanont, then a M.A. candidate at the School of the Art Institute Chicago researching contemporary art production in the Mekong subregion; Manila-based Mervin Espina from Green Papaya arts space researching micro-cinema and video art in Vietnam; and New York- based Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, after the completion of her residency at the Whitney Independent Study Program, researching traditional rituals as she prepared new work. Researchers are offered use of the space, archives, media, and library during their residency. We have collaborated with local and international spaces such as the Asia Art Archive, in Hong Kong, and Art Sonje/SAMUSO, in Seoul, on research-related projects.

In December 2011, we helped to organize the Small Spaces in the Mekong Region panel discussion that took place at Art Sonje in Seoul that included the New Zero Art Space, from Yangon; Sa Sa Bassac, from Phnom Penh; and Dia/Projects, looking closely at the unique conditions under which each of our mainland Southeast Asian spaces operate. The New Zero Art Space and Sa Sa Bassac have largely a community development oriented focus, while The Reading Room (a Bangkok-based art space invited but unable to attend to the panel discussion) and Dia/Projects tend to be more research directed. The curator of the Institutions for the Future exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre as part of the Asia Triennial Manchester 2011, Biljana Ciric, further details alternative spaces in the Mekong in an essay published in Apexart’s Playing by the Rules: Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces.7

Over time the distinction between those projects that belonged to Dia/ Projects and those attributed to my solo practice has become less defined. I suppose that it’s because I am becoming more selective in the projects we engage in—seriously considering only projects that align with my own interests as an artist as opposed to a community enabler. I am prone to now using my name and Dia/Projects somewhat interchangeably and creating new entities where needed.

In late 2010, I formed an artistic collaboration with Le Tuong Vi, working together under the moniker of VILE/RATS under the Dia/Projects umbrella. Each of the projects through this collaboration have emerged from extended discussions at the space and included the co-development of text and installations for the Moved, Mutated and Disturbed Identities symposium at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai (2010); the Institutions for the Future exhibition (2011); with artist Michael Lee and his one-man operation, Studio Biblioteque (2011); and the No Ground Underneath: Curating on the Nexus of Changes symposium at the Guangdong Times Museum (2012).

Investigations that we’re particularly interested to include philosophy and the history of science, technology, economics, and geology. We are less

58 Vol. 11 No. 5 interested in positioning ourselves in terms of being Vietnamese, or defining essentialist arguments about identity. We are very interested in publishing as one output, usually in addition to producing object based work for exhibitions. Our choice of exhibition venues tend to be institutions and institutionally organized exhibitions as opposed to galleries and art fairs.

The research often occurs through conversations and collaborations that happen online, and we maintain an archive of Google documents that are accessed and edited by collaborators in their own time, thereby eliminating time zone and scheduling conflicts. Because of our research orientation, Dia/Projects maintains a strong connection to education and we have spoken to art schools in Asia and the United States as well as advised and lectured at various curatorial initiatives, including the Sotheby’s Institute for Art, in Singapore, and the Parasite Curatorial Training Program, in Hong Kong. Student and professional interaction has been an early cornerstone of Dia/Projects, and many of the students from the university where I lecture have participated in nearly all the events hosted at Dia/Projects. By expanding their networks early in their careers, we have been able to recommend students and recent graduates to Hong Kong, Prague, Norway, Singapore, and China, for various projects.

In April 2012, I decided to open a second location in Ho Chi Minh City called Dia/Studio, an open-air production space for large-scale projects in a warehouse compound near the center of the city. With the opening of the new location, Dia/Projects continues to be a research and planning space, while the new Dia/Studio will be the primary production site where artwork can be fabricated and stored. Perhaps we’ll begin to ape Michael Lee’s Studio Bibliothèque in Singapore (I’m a big fan of his ability to be seamlessly be artist, curator, research, and publisher) and look into publishing and commissioning works from artists while trying to extend our network outside of the art sphere. We’re intrigued by Urbanomic, led by Robin Mackay in the United Kingdom, and their texts on Speculative Realism, a loosely defined movement in contemporary continental philosophy that interests us because of its ability to reconcile the latest observations in scientific discovery within the framework of philosophy and critical theory. Urbanomic also engages with institutions such as the “Tate Britain with contemporary sound, video and sculptural work, and other interventions exploring the emerging philosophical paradigm of Speculative Realism and its impact on contemporary art practice.”8

Left: Dia/Studio production space, Ho Chi Minh City. Courtesy of Richard Streitmatter-Tran. Right: Screening films at Dia/Projects, Ho Chi Minh City. Courtesy of Richard Streitmatter-Tran.

Vol. 11 No. 5 59 Intuitively Small In some respects, we might see the smaller para-institutions as fractal subsets of the larger institutions by mirroring areas of inquiry and production, even accessing the same libraries and resources, though often with a higher metabolism and speed. Organisms within organisms, bound by co-dependency, the para-institutions act not unlike bacteria and predigestion, releasing nutrients that in turn can be absorbed by the larger institutions. At times, large institutions, as in the case of the Guggenheim USB Map Global Art Initiative mentioned earlier, provide a supporting (even if temporary) framework to which smaller para-institutions can contribute. We even see the grandiose emulating the strategies of the small with documenta 13 publishing, 100 Notes—100 Thoughts, a series of pamphlets featuring essays and projects from artists, scientists, filmmakers, philosophers, curators, and critics. Ironically, the pamphlet as a form always had an anti-institutional bent.

Throughout the world there is increased viability of smallness as a preferred mode of operation. According to the authors of the 2011 book Circular Facts, smallness refers to a way of working as opposed to scale and is defined by operating “within a framework of mutual support, resourcefulness, and responsiveness in order to realize diverse projects that require very different methodologies, skills, and knowledge”9 from those of museums or artist- run spaces. Smallness, in this sense, may become the defining quality for the “institutions for the future.”

Inevitably, one of the first considerations encountered by any arts institution concerns funding. Organizations have evolved apparatuses specifically designed to connect to funding infrastructures—whether through public or private patronage, or in-house sales—that ensure their survival. You might imagine an ecology with a food chain of lesser and larger institutions, each with a host and a parasite, each being supporter and supported. Keeping afloat and sustaining regular income in an increasingly unreliable economic climate requires a tremendous amount of effort. The struggle to maintain artistic and creative autonomy in parallel with the interests of supporters can lead to schizophrenic planning and self-doubt.

Notes 1 See the symposium table of contents in: Maurice Berger, ed., "Museums of Tomorrow: A Virtual Discussion," Issues in Cultural Theory 8 (Baltimore: University of Maryland, 2004). 2 Alex Farquharson, “Bureaux de Change,” Frieze 101 (September 2006). 3 Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/ upcoming/guggenheim-ubs-map-global-art-initiative. 4 Tom Hill, “Local Knowledge/New Internationalism," Naming a Practice: Curatorial Strategies for the Future, ed. Peter White (Banff: Banff Centre Press. 1996), 29. 5 Olu Oguibe, “In the Heart of Darkness” and “Double Dutch and the Culture Game,” The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 3–10. 6 Corina Carduff, Fiona Siegenthaler, and Tan Walchi (eds)., Art and Artistic Research (Zurich: Verlag Schedigger and Spiess, 2010), 1–29. 7 Biljana Ciric, “Searching for Tomorrow’s Alternative China, Vietnam and Cambodia,” Steven Rand and Heather Kouris, eds., Playing by the Rules: Alternative Thinking/Alternative Spaces (New York: apexart, 2010), 47–59. 8 Urbanomic, The Real Thing, http://www.urbanomic.com/event-uf12-details.php. 9 Mai Abu El Dahab, Binna Choi, and Emily Pethick, “Smallness,” Circular Facts (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 87–88.

60 Vol. 11 No. 5 Eugene Tan Institutions of the Future: Singapore

ingapore has long held a position as an important hub in Southeast Asia, primarily as a business and financial centre, but also, in recent Syears, as an artistic one. Singapore enjoys a growing position within Asia; it is no longer perceived merely as a hub for the immediate proximity of Southeast Asia, but also an important economic centre for the wider Asian region. And while in neoliberal capitalism an underlying premise is continued economic progress, the notion of economic progress is even more significant for Asia, whose identities have long been determined by its economic realities, the consequence being that the development of art and economic modernization in Asia are intimately linked. Current understandings of Asia have largely been derived from the region’s growth as an economic power led by Japan in the postwar period, followed by the rapid growth of the so-called “Tiger” economies—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan—the currency crisis faced by Southeast Asian economies at the end of the 1990s, and, more recently, the economic resurgence of China, India, and Southeast Asia through the potential their fast-growing consumer markets are seen to have. The economic potential of Asia has been further highlighted in recent years given the contrasting economic woes in Europe and America. And within Asia, with Hong Kong now a part of China and becoming increasingly dominated both culturally and economically by it, Singapore has emerged as a more neutral and strategic centre from which to reach out to the rest of the markets in Asia, thereby strengthening its strategic position within the region.

The strong correlation between economic development and modernity in Asia, as in many parts of the world, has also resulted in the increasing dominance in the region of a market for art. A strong link now exists between the economic power a country wields and interest in the art that it produces. This is evident in the focus on contemporary art from China and India during the past decade, which was fuelled in no small way by growing economic interest in each of those countries, where their large, relatively untapped, and increasingly affluent populations are seen by multinational corporations as potential markets. In recent years, nowhere has the importance of the market for the development of art been more evident than in Asia, where, among others things, contemporary Chinese and Indian art have financially appreciated to record levels and at an unprecedented pace. This rapid rise in the value of art in Asia can be seen through, among other indicators, the growth of art auctions in China, which is emerging as one of the most important markets globally for art. In addition, some of the biggest and most important galleries in Europe and

Vol. 11 No. 5 61 America have set up bases in Hong Kong with the hope of cashing in on the Top: Ho Tzu Nyen, The Cloud of Unknowing, 2011, single- escalating interest in contemporary art. In the past two years, galleries such channel HD projection, multi- channel audio, lighting, smoke as Gagosian, White Cube, Emmanuel Perrotin, and Simon Lee have opened machines. Installation view at 54th Venice Biennale. Courtesy gallery spaces in that city. of the artist and the National Arts Council, Singapore. Left: Liu Jianhua, Dream, This growing interest in art in Asia 2005–06, porcelain, video. Installation view at the 2006 has also had profound effects on other Singapore Biennale. Courtesy of the artist. parts of Southeast Asia. With art now becoming more widely accepted as an alternative form of investment and achieving the status of an international asset class, speculation has been widespread, further fuelling the market. Governments in the region of Southeast Asia have also begun to recognize the benefits that art can bring, both in terms of direct economic benefits as well as in terms of branding a city and a country, which are in turn seen to benefit the wider economy. Singapore is one country that has embraced this branding in a significant way. The Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore, published in 2000, sought to develop the Singapore art scene through an ambitious internationalization program. It began with Singapore’s participation at the Venice Biennale, in 2001, with its first pavilion, followed by the Singapore Biennale, in 2006, as well as the subsequent announcement of the establishment of a new national art institution, the National Art Gallery, which is due to open in 2015.

62 Vol. 11 No. 5 Artist impression of the National Art Gallery, Singapore. Courtesy of the National Art Gallery, Singapore.

Artist impression of the National Art Gallery, Singapore. Courtesy of the National Art Gallery, Singapore.

The National Art Gallery in Singapore is the currently the most significant art institution being created in Southeast Asia. It will be housed in the former Supreme Court and City Hall, two of the country’s most imposing and prominent colonial buildings, indicating the importance of the project on a national and international level. As the government announced:

Vol. 11 No. 5 63 “[The] National Art Gallery is inspired by our vision to transform Singapore into a global city for the arts, and a vibrant place to live, work, and play. The Gallery will showcase the best of visual arts from Singapore and Southeast Asia to the world.”1 The National Art Gallery will occupy some 60,000 square metres, which will rival in size museums such as the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and Tate Modern, London. At the time of writing, the National Art Gallery is finalizing its international search for a director, after its previous director, Kwok Kian Chow, stepped aside to assume the role of Senior Advisor to the Gallery. The National Art Gallery’s collection will be based on the comprehensive collection of Asian and Southeast Asian currently housed at the Singapore Art Museum, whose fate remains uncertain after the National Art Gallery opens, with some speculating that it will transition into a contemporary art museum. The National Art Gallery has also announced its plans to become the main authority for Southeast Asian art through its collection and exhibition program.

It is with the National Art Gallery as well as other developments and Façade of the Singapore Art Museum. Courtesy of the institutions in Singapore that we can see the potential effect and Singapore Art Museum. relationship that Singapore can have within Asia. The current domination of the market in art, which is perhaps more pronounced in Asia due to a less developed cultural ecosystem in relation to Europe and America with its in-built system of established checks and balances, is, in effect, a conflation of economic globalization and cultural globalization. The importance of the market has resulted in the disproportionate level of power that collectors now hold within the complex and intricate power relationships that exist between them and gallerists, curators, and art critics who determine the workings of the art world. This has resulted in a situation where art’s commodity status, in effect, dominates its other social, art historical, and aesthetic values. While Hong Kong has emerged as the main art centre for the art market in Asia, with the presence of international auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, as well as aforementioned top-tiered international galleries, Singapore has emerged with the potential for it to effect a different role in the region—a place for symbolic or cultural validation of art through institutions such as the National Art Gallery, as well as other projects and developments in the country. Given the lack of credible public museums and non-profit structures throughout Southeast Asia, institutions in Singapore such as the Singapore Art Museum, with

64 Vol. 11 No. 5 its impressive collection of Asian and Southeast Asian art as well as its international program of contemporary art exhibitions, have emerged as key factors for the validation of art in the region. This is further enhanced by its role as organizer of the Singapore Biennale, which has emerged as an important platform for the production of new work by regional artists. The next edition will be held in 2013, and initial reports suggest that this Biennale will be even more focused on art from Southeast Asia than previous ones. These plans will be complemented by ones to collaborate with regional collectors, to harness the benefits that their collections and patronage will bring to the institution, thus recognizing the important role that collectors play in the new landscape of art in Asia. The efforts of these state institutions are complemented by other non-profit independent institutions in Singapore, such as the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore, currently headed by Charles Merewether, as well as the National University of Singapore Museum and The Substation, Singapore’s original artist-run space.

Installation view of Ian Woo: A Review, 1995–2011, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, September 2012. Photo: Pix Asia. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.

Façade of The Substation. Courtesy of The Substation, Singapore. Next page: Installation view of Chinese Bible: Yang Zhichao, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, April 2012. Photo: Yang Zhichao. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.

Vol. 11 No. 5 65 66 Vol. 11 No. 5 Vol. 11 No. 5 67 Overview of Art Stage Singapore. Courtesy of Art Stage Singapore. Opposite, top: Site for the Centre of Contemporary Art Singapore at Gillman Barracks, Block 9. Photo: Samantha Quek. Courtesy of the Singapore Economic Development Board. Opposite, middle: Artist’s impression of Gillman Barracks. Courtesy of the Singapore Economic Development Board. Opposite, bottom: Artist’s impression of Gillman Barracks. Courtesy of the Singapore Economic Development Board.

The development of these structures of symbolic and cultural validation in Singapore comes at a time when there is acknowledgement in Asia that the nurturing of the art scene requires a more robust structure of validation that will counter the instability that the market and its accompanying speculative effects can bring. Complementing the museum and non- profit situation in Singapore is the growth of commercial structures for art. Led by a government economic agency, the Economic Development Board, a few projects have been initiated including Art Stage Singapore, a new international art fair started in 2011 that has Lorenzo Rudolf, the former director of Art Basel, at the helm. With a strong focus on Asia, Art Stage Singapore is also a platform for galleries from the region looking to internationalize. A significant section of the fair is devoted to showcasing emerging galleries from Southeast Asia, recognizing that galleries from the region require further promotion in order to compete and operate within the international art market. Therefore, in addition to being a marketplace, Art Stage Singapore is also serving as a platform to expand the profiles of galleries from the region. In this instance, Singapore is playing a role as an internationalization platform, not unlike the National Art Gallery, but in this case for commercial galleries to gain a stronger position within the commercial ecosystem.

In addition to Art Stage Singapore, a new gallery district is also under development in the city. Gillman Barracks, a former British military camp as its name suggests, is in the process of being converted into a new arts district. Envisioned to be a site for the production, discussion, and exhibition of art, it will consist of more than fifteen galleries, mostly international, and include a new arts centre that will house a residency program, a research centre, as well as providing an exhibition program. Galleries such as ShanghART and Pearl Lam Galleries from Shanghai, Tomio Koyama, Mizuma, Ota Fine Arts, and Kaikai Kiki Gallery from Tokyo, and Southeast Asian galleries such as The Drawing Room and Silverlens from the Philippines, will set up outposts at Gillman Barracks, while additional galleries from Europe and India are also planned to be part of the eventual mix. The addition of these primary

68 Vol. 11 No. 5 Vol. 11 No. 5 69 galleries into the cultural ecosystem in Singapore will inject a new dimension into the arts landscape of the region. With Art Stage Singapore establishing itself as a platform for Southeast Asian art, Gillman Barracks with its galleries and new art institution, will further establish Singapore as a centre of art production in the region.

The growing importance of Singapore in Asia, the rise of interest in Asian art, and Singapore’s internationalization of its art scene have resulted in Singapore now playing a significant role in the vibrant and flourishing art scene in the region. This recognition of the need for more credible validating structures within Asia from the marketplace and the conflation of symbolic and economic validating structures for art in Singapore sets it up for the possibility of becoming an important international art centre. By not merely finding the appropriate translation for the context governing the situation the art scene in Asia finds itself in, but rather problematizing the translation process and making space for its contradictions and limitations, institutions in Singapore are able to mediate the dominant power of the art market in Asia, which is itself recognizing the need for a system of checks and balances. Institutions in Singapore are creating possibilities for a new understanding within Asia, one that is not merely premised upon economic progress but instead one based on cultural exchange and diversity, which is one of Singapore’s strengths. As a culturally diverse country, not dominated by any one culture, it is well positioned to create a new paradigm for the development of art in Asia, one that is no longer based on a centre- periphery relationship, but, instead, on cultural exchange and on creating a dialectical relationship between established practices from the West and new practices that are emerging in Asia.

Notes 1 Lui Tuck Yew, "Foreword" in Bulletin 1: Building the National Art Gallery, unpag. Lui Tuck Yew was the then Senior Minister of State for Information, Communication and the Arts, and Chairman of the National Art Gallery Steering Committee.

70 Vol. 11 No. 5 Nur Hanim Khairuddin Rumah YKP: Art in the Margins of Society

I. The Yayasan Kesenian Perak (YKP), or Perak Arts Foundation, was an institution that was funded by and worked closely with the government of Perak, a state about 200 kilometers to the north of Kuala Lumpur. Established in 1996, YKP was instrumental in providing the local people with opportunities to encounter and experience different kinds of art and culture, especially in consideration of the general lack of art-cultural infrastructure in the state. Its primary aim was to bring an awareness of art and culture to the public through its diverse projects and activities. The highlight of its activities was the annual Pekan Seni Ipoh, or Ipoh Arts Festival, which involved participants from inside as well as outside of the country. Held for five consecutive years until 2000, the weeklong festival included art-cultural-literary forums, poetry readings, concerts, theatrical performances, and art exhibitions, in addition to traditional cultural shows, a handicraft bazaar, and demonstrations. Sociocultural exchange programs were also arranged whereby invited participants were brought to places of interest around Perak to meet and interact with people, especially those in rural areas outside Ipoh, the state’s capital.

Registered as a non-profit making organization, YKP had substantial autonomous power over its administration and activities. However, it still served as an agency that was required to abide by the Perak public service’s rules and regulations and operate within its institutional parameters. Therefore, the presentation of art and culture was essentially informed and at the same time constrained by the state government’s policies and strategies. Owing to its affiliation with the state government, YKP’s programs always received extensive assistance from a diversity of state and federal agencies, including national institutions like the Institute of Language and Literature and the National Art Gallery. Indeed, the annual Ipoh Arts Festival was considered a state program with a huge budget allocated to it, and, as such, was included in the state’s tourism calendar.

Unfortunately, support and patronage from the state terminated in 2001 due to some political interventions that were rooted in the dismissal from the cabinet of the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, a close friend of YKP’s founder-director. After this incident, YKP had to rent its own office premises and source its own funds to sustain activities and programs. YKP moved its office to a single-story bungalow located in the middle of a residential area. As its curator, I was given the task to restrategize and reassess the direction YKP was to take. Thus began my search for a mode of operation

Vol. 11 No. 5 71 and an organizational template that would suit YKP’s vision and objectives and fit its lack of funding and institutional support (at least at the state level).

During that period, I knew quite a few renowned artist-run organizations within the Southeast Asian region: Cemeti, ruangrupa, and Taring Padi in Indonesia, Plastic Kinetic Worms in Singapore, Project 304 in Thailand, and Big Sky Mind in the Philippines, to name a few. In Malaysia itself, Rumah Air Panas and UBU were two of several spaces run by people I knew or had links with YKP. Some collectives and initiatives formed by local artists, from Anak Alam in the 1970s, to LabDNA, Spacekraft, and Matahati in the 1990s, also caught my attention. Additionally, my study of local youth culture led me to be aware of how thriving and dynamic the underground music scene in Malaysia was, despite its lo-fi, indie, and self-supporting structure. What fascinated me with these artist-initiated spaces and underground collectives were their independent spirit, social engagement, knowledge sharing, interdisciplinarity, collectivism, and, most distinctly, their astute maneuverability and small yet loyal networks of supporters, sponsors, and friends. These are some elements an alternative space should have in order to succeed without the backing of any state machinery or institutions.

In 2002, the name of YKP was changed, unofficially, to Rumah YKP to indicate its shift from being a governmental agency to serving as an independent art space. Throughout its almost eight years in existence, Rumah YKP held various art, cultural, and social activities that ranged from traditional cultural performances, contemporary art shows, music gigs, performance art, and artists’ presentations to activities such as a blood donation clinic, fundraising events, and educational projects, all serving to bring art and the public in a closer, informal, and relaxed environment. Its main focus was to provide a space for youth and the art-loving community around Ipoh, allowing them to appreciate art and culture without the need to travel to Kuala Lumpur, thus enabling them to participate in the art and cultural movement in Malaysia.

In addition to the annual Genta Talk by Gerhard Haupt and Pat Binder of Universes in Merdeka, a multidisciplinary Universe, at Rumah YKP, Perak, Malaysia, 2007. Photo: event arranged at Rumah YKP’s Nur Hanim Khairuddin. premises to celebrate Malaysia’s independence day, Rumah YKP also hosted Gebang Seni, a monthly art talk involving prominent local figures in the fields of visual art, animation, film, music, and literature. It also arranged numerous series of dialogues, discussions, and workshops on art and culture with locals and visitors, including representatives from Malaysia’s art spaces such as Parking Project, Matahati, and underground collectives, as well as cultural organizations from overseas like Universes in Universe and Indonesia’s alternative spaces like ruangrupa, Common Room, and Taring Padi. Rumah YKP also built a small resource centre that catered to those interested in knowing more about art and culture and published Suara Seni, an art-cultural-literary journal.

72 Vol. 11 No. 5 Poetry reading by Danish poet Ole Lillelund at Rumah YKP, Perak, Malaysia. Photo: Nur Hanim Khairuddin.

Printmaking workshop conducted by Rumah YKP for NGO organization EMPOWER in support of a tsunami aid program, Pahang, Malaysia.

Sculpture by Tengku Sabri during Contemporary Art in School. Courtesy of Rumah Air Panas, Kuala Lumpur.

Vol. 11 No. 5 73 Operating in a city situated distant from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital and its political and economic centre as well as its (only) art and cultural hub, Rumah YKP encountered a set of concerns and problems probably not experienced by alternative spaces inhabiting and serving communities in Kuala Lumpur. (The majority, if not all, of the spaces, collectives and initiatives mentioned in the following were/are based in Kuala Lumpur or its vicinity.) First of all, Ipoh does not have enough art-cultural infrastructure or funding to support and sponsor Rumah YKP’s programs. Secondly, in Ipoh, the size of the art audience is smaller and its level of sophistication lower than in Kuala Lumpur. These were some of the key factors that impeded Rumah YKP’s sustainability and development, even though until its closure the local public and art-cultural communities did show remarkable support and enthusiasm towards its activities.

II. In the development of modern art in Malaysia, the emergence of artists’ groups, clubs, and organizations since the 1920s was mainly prompted by artists’ need to pursue their creative endeavours in a collective environment. The spaces where members of these groups met served as places for them to learn and practice their skills and to share their knowledge and experience in art, normally under the tutelage of well-known artists who in many cases acted as the groups’ founders and leaders. These spaces functioned as studios for artists to produce artworks that would then be shown in their own spaces or private and public exhibition spaces. Current groups, like Studio Sebiji Padi, Di Kala Jingga and Studio Rajawali, also adopt the same approach. Even Matahati, Malaysia’s longest-running artists’ collective, was moving in a similar direction during its formative period in the 1990s.

Formed in 1974, Anak Alam (Children of Nature) can be considered the earliest artists’ collective in Malaysia. It involved a variety of artistic disciplines, from painters and printmakers to dramatists, performers, writers, and poets, both educated and self-taught. Housed in an old government bungalow where some of its members lived, worked, and exhibited their works, it was the first to instigate a pluralistic, interdisciplinary creative movement. Concrete poetry, experimental theater, happenings, and multimedia shows organized by them seemed radical for the Malaysian art audience at that time. Despite being a self-sustaining entity, it also received moral and financial support from the government by way of its close connection with certain prominent figures in the Institute of Language and Literature and the Ministry of Culture. Members of Anak Alam too were active contributors to Malaysia’s first art-cultural journal, Dewan Sastera, which became a vehicle for them to present their works and express their ideals regarding art, culture, and literature. The collective was finally disbanded around the mid 1980s, when the government reclaimed the mansion the artists were occupying, thus ending their communal living and collaborative practice.

The advent in the 1980s of theatre-oriented groups, notably Five Arts Centre and Centrestage Performing Arts, seemed to push the roles of

74 Vol. 11 No. 5 independent art-cultural spaces to another level of sophistication and significance with their interdisciplinary, intercultural, critical, and contextual approaches. Since its formation in 1984, Five Arts Centre has been injecting contemporary social, cultural, and political issues into the contexts of exhibitions, projects, performances, and workshops that they held in diverse places, including theatres, galleries, schools, and on the streets. Centrestage Performing Arts was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At Centrestage, artists coming from various disciplines had the chance to not only meet and collaborate with one another, but also to experiment with diverse modes of expression that included theatre, music, film, and video.

In the wake of new and challenging sociocultural realities and imperatives in the 1990s, a number of artists began assuming a more critical stance toward institutions, for aesthetic, sociological, political, economic, and strategic reasons. The national interests of public institutions and the consumerist concerns of private galleries were largely at odds with the positions taken by this new generation of artists, impelling them to redefine, if not to rebuff, the intrusive power of institutions in the dissemination, interpretation, and mediation of images, texts, and discourses. This transgressive stance towards institutions regarding art and cultural production, distribution and consumption, manifested itself in a big way, and with impact, within the underground music scene. Thus, if the escalation of alternative spaces is to be associated with the spirit of independence among art practitioners, the role played by a collective of underground musicians in the late 1980s and into the 90s could be taken as an important indirect influence, although the link between these musicians and artists cannot be easily established as they appeared to exist and practice largely in isolation to each other (only a very small number had probably crossed paths with one another in music gigs and art shows). Moreover, one cannot ignore the fact that the mushrooming of alternative spaces in Malaysia since the late 1990s happened in parallel with the emergence of artist-run spaces around the region.

In view of their self-empowering mentality inspired by DIY ethics of punk culture and their creation of inter-supportive networks, this group of underground musicians living in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, influenced the rise of myriad underground bands, indie labels, jamming studios, gig organizers, merchandise producers, and zine editors. Their house, dubbed 121C after its mailing address, served as a communal meeting point for youth having a similar interest in music genres related to punk rock and extreme metal. Gradually it turned into a place to trade zines and cassettes, to discuss gig arrangements, make demo tapes, exchange news, ideas, and resources. Another seminal group was Republic of Brickfields, founded around 1996 by a few members of the 121C collective and based in a house nearby. The DIY approach of underground musicians to music making and distribution, their strategies in evading formal structures of control, anti- capitalist and anti-corporate stance, and joyous celebration of life through their art (i.e., music), provided a proven template for the formation of autonomous collectives and communities.

Vol. 11 No. 5 75 Another form of self-directed spaces and collectives leaned more toward the sociopolitical sphere. A small number of them, notably APA (Artis Pro Active) and UBU (Universiti Bangsar Utama), arose out of sociopolitical upheaval in 1998. (The two groups were invited to participate in the Gwangju Biennale in 2002.) APA was started by several visual artists and theatre exponents and did not have any specific physical space as a base of operation, whereas UBU, which occupied a house in an old commercial building in Bangsar, was initiated in 2000 by a group of political and student activists who acted as key organizers for street demonstrations and protest rallies during the early stage of Malaysia’s own Reformasi, a mass political movement spurred by the 1998 sacking of the then Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. While APA presented its critiques in a rather cerebral and dialogical way, UBU’s approach and actions were more direct, confrontational, and situationist, employing agitprop, guerilla theatre, graffiti, performance art, protest music, and interventionist strategies. Besides giving free tuition to poor students and providing a space for Food Not Bombs, UBU also held art-cultural events and parties and organized classes, workshops, and dialogues to instigate sociopolitical awareness among urban youth and university students. These politically inclined spaces and collectives brought a new dimension to the function of art and culture, introducing them as tools for social transformation, civil rights reformation, and the betterment of public governance.

Since the 2000s, alternative art spaces, collectives, and initiatives have Rei Shibata in the performance event Stopover, at UBU become increasingly active and varied, playing pivotal roles in the next (Universiti Bangsar Utama), May 30, 2005. Photo: Juliana phase of the development of contemporary art and the social functions Yasin. of art in Malaysia. Through collaborations between visual artists, graphic designers, writers, musicians, DJs, architects, filmmakers, and even non- artist collaborators, they promote new artistic forms and cultural media, such as performance, experimental sound, and digital photography. In their attempts to engage with a wider audience and to reach out to the

76 Vol. 11 No. 5 Bebek, I Hate Boundaries, 2005, performance at Lost Generation Space, Notthatbalai Art Festival, Kuala Lumpur. Courtesy of Lost Generation Space.

Lost Generation Space, Kuala Lumpur.

nyba-kan, 2005, performance larger segment of the society, Rumah Air at Lost Generation Space, Notthatbalai Art Festival, Kuala Panas, Lost Generation Space, SicKL, Urban Lumpur. Courtesy of Lost Generation Space. Village, and Findars, to name a few, do not only organize cross-disciplinary events and art dialogues within their own premises, but they also present community-based and site- specific projects in public spaces. Although several artist-run spaces, for instance, HOM, are primarily set up to provide spaces for young artists to exhibit and sell their artwork, many, like Parking Project and Buka Kolektif, now give emphasis to non-object-based, non-commercial art and public and interdisciplinary-engaged art practices.

Vol. 11 No. 5 77 78 Vol. 11 No. 5 Opposite, top left: Performance Several underground music collectives/studios in recent years have started to event at Findars. Courtesy of Findars, Kuala Lumpur. incorporate other art forms in their showcases. Rumah Api, a space run by a Opposite, top right: Opening punk community, for example, holds art exhibitions, film screenings, video reception at HOM. Courtesy of HOM, Kuala Lumpur. projections, and zine festivals in addition to their usual music gigs. On the Opposite, middle: Talk at Findars. Courtesy of Findars, other hand, many alternative spaces initiated by artists, including those owned Kuala Lumpur. by established institutions, have begun to feature elements usually associated Opposite, bottom: A music gig at HOM. Photo: Nur Hanim with subculture, counterculture, and youth culture, such as music, graffiti, Khairuddin. Courtesy of HOM, Kuala Lumpur. comic, and other youth-generated media. Interdisciplinary collaborations and interactions between recent artists are probably more inclusive, hybrid, and fluid than those previously attempted by Anak Alam and Centrestage. Events such as Notthatbalai, Rantai, Maskara, Projek Rabak, and Pekan Frinjan arouse more interest because of the intersection of varied art-cultural forms, from music and film to installation and literature.

Urban Village, Rantai art event, 2012. Photo: Nur Hanim Khairuddin.

III. By and large, the operational modes and curatorial strategies adopted by most alternative spaces in Malaysia do not necessarily entail a practice of reaction and resistance against art-cultural-economic institutional politics and policies. It is true that a few of them do aspire to review the functions of private and public institutions in their bureaucratization of cultural policies, commodification of cultural life, and propagation of certain historical and ideological agendas, as well as to re-examine the ownership of the means of production, presentation, and distribution of art, and hegemonic controls imposed over style, form, and content of art-cultural products. However, they do so in order to strategically free themselves from institutional trappings and commercial constraints for the sole purpose of enjoying their artistic and creative freedom to the fullest.

Working outside the mainstream circuit of art institutions and commercial galleries undoubtedly has helped them erase the boundaries separating

Vol. 11 No. 5 79 high and low cultures and art and non-art communities, thus reducing the contested territorial forces existing in the realms of art, culture, and public. Although some independent spaces realize social and political engagement in the real sense, expressing their critical positions on certain national sociopolitical issues, some, on the other hand, are purely driven by political impetus directed at attaining more individual freedom in the pursuit of happiness and entertainment. I would argue that the majority of these spaces do not essentially reject institutional structures and the art market. Their intent, on the contrary, is to provide an alternative, some sort of an extension rather than a serious counterpoint to the systems in place to control and monitor. In brief, they attempt to operate in parallel to existing systems and structures of art-cultural management and not merely assert the kind of aesthetics and the politics of art in opposition to those institutions.

Art, cultural, economic, technological, social, and political contexts have changed drastically over the years. Thus, the same old actions and tactics may no longer hold the same significance and impact that they previously did. If alternative art spaces are to keep on developing and having long-term sustainability, they must strive for greater heights of complexity and activism and higher levels of integrity and wisdom. They must be able to engage in new technologies, new discourses, and new audiences. Given that they exist at the margins of society and in an environment largely not supportive towards their endeavors, at least in the Malaysian context, they should widen their interests and concerns beyond the narrow confines of art and culture. They should learn how to maneouver within institutional parameters.

In recent times we have witnessed a corresponding shift in the social function of art. Art and artists are now playing greater roles in promoting public action and facilitating social change. Alternative art spaces, collectives, and initiatives, along with other new forms of self-directed institutions created by artists, must have a clear vision and conception of what values they desire. The values they hold dear and strive to achieve usually require some personal sacrifice, not only in terms of time, money, and energy, but also in terms of having to delicately balance these desired values with their own interests, aims and emotions, the situational politics, the surrounding sociocultural milieu, the aesthetic tendencies of the public, and the shift in the demographics of audiences and consumers of art and culture. To be able to make waves and generate ideological movement, in spite of the shortage of funding and institutional backing, they must be ready to discard the shallow, selfish, and impotent mindset that has been the demise of many before them.

80 Vol. 11 No. 5 Narawan Pathomvat A Cartography of the “Other”: Social History and the Production of Spaces of the “Other” in Modern and Contemporary Art in Thailand

I. Introduction: Othering and Cultural Hegemony Thailand is a country deeply divided, as has been illustrated by recent political turmoil. There is a long history of the “Other” that is created by the ruling class in order to maintain power. The dialectic of the “Other” is still widely utilized today in order to defame, demoralize, and ostracize the opposition, not only those from outside but also those within the country. Modern art in Thailand was initiated during the second half of the nineteenth century and became institutionalized around the middle of the twentieth century; not surprisingly, the emergence of “Other” art spaces can be traced back to the same period. As articulated by Antonio Gramsci, a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class through manipulation of societal culture and norms to create an ideology that supports the status quo; a culturally hybrid country such as Thailand falls comfortably into this cultural hegemony.1 From birth to death, every Thai has been inculcated into just such an ideology—devotion to the triad of Nation, Religion (Buddhism), and Monarchy (the King)—which manifests itself at every level of society, and the spectacle of which has been propelled by the deft and subtle exploitation of art. Therefore, in a profoundly homogenized and hierarchized sociocultural environment, the “Other” has no choice but to carve out its own space.

II. Modernization: The Quest to Be Civilized In the mid nineteenth century, during the height of Western colonization in Southeast Asia, Thailand (or Siam, as it was called at that time) escaped colonialism, yet it had to adapt quickly to the concept of modernity brought about by the West. The Kings and the elite were eager to acquire and appropriate concepts and things they considered “civilized,” yet they strove “to attain and confirm the relative superiority of Siam as the traditional imperial power in the region,”2 especially during the fourth and fifth reigns (1851–1910).

Art was to become a very important tool in this grand project. Western artists and architects were imported to Thailand to construct and decorate many royal and state buildings, to paint and sculpt the royal portraits, and to instruct Siamese artists. Between 1890 and 1930, exhibitions and museums were part of Siamese projects that represented modernity and civilization. The king and the elite started collecting “Other” art and artifacts both from outside (the West), and from within the country (multi-ethnic villagers and indigenous people in the forest).3 The myth and

Vol. 11 No. 5 81 delusion of Thailand’s self-aggrandizement, the derogatory view towards the lower class, and the spatial hierarchization and discrimination are still at work today—the view of the “Other” has been handed down from the elite to the bourgeois.

III. Democratization: The Coup d’Etat of 1932 King Bhumibol and Princess Srinagarindra, the King's From Court Spectacle to State Spectacle, Elite Nationalism to mother, with Silpa Bhirasri at the National Exhibition of Art, Mass Nationalism mid-1950s. During the 1920s and 1930s, a new generation of Siamese intelligentsia emerged, expedited by the return of a group of students from Europe and driven by the deep dissatisfaction with the absolute monarchy within the atmosphere of a domestic and global financial crisis; this led to the Coup d’Etat of 1932 that shifted the country from absolutism to democracy. The function of art had accordingly shifted from offering service to the court to being employed by the state, and while its goal remained the same—to promote nationalism—its forms were radically different and reflected opposing nationalistic ideologies and narratives. It suggested the transformation from elite nationalism to mass nationalism.4 Prime Minister Phibunsongkhram, Director-General of Department of Fine Art, Luang Wichitwatakan, and the director of School of Fine Art—an Italian, Corrado Feroci—were all fascinated by Mussolini’s use of art as propaganda and thus created a version of bureaucratic, institutionalized art that promoted mass national consciousness, not unlike that of Italy in the 1930s.5 Art became increasingly institutionalized after the establishment of the annual National Exhibition of Art by the Department of Fine Arts (as suggested by Corrado Feroci) in 1949, as the nation’s official competitive exhibition. The National Exhibition of Art and its prize grew more and more prestigious and exclusive, not unlike the Salon of the eighteenth century French academy, which exercised a virtual monopoly on public taste through academic art and official commissions.

82 Vol. 11 No. 5 Early Attempts at “Other” Spaces Since the mid 1940s, small groups of artists started to gather and produce their own spaces in reaction against the rigidity of the Department of Fine Arts and its patronage of civil servant artists as well as the rapidly growing commercialization of art. The first attempt of this kind was the League of Artists formed in 1944 by a group of independent artists, writers, and journalists who aimed to foster discussion and sponsor art exhibitions. However, the League lasted only two years and was dissolved in 1946. Another early group was the Society of Painters and Sculptors (1950–55), founded with objectives similar to those of the League before them. The Society was situated in an art shop, which offered valuable space as neutral ground for artists from two opposing art schools (Silpakorn University and the Arts and Crafts School). An annual art exhibition also was organized.

Exhibition opening at the Bangkok Art Center, early 1960s. Photo: Peera Pattanapeeradech. Courtesy of Sittitham Rohitasuk.

The first so-called alternative art spaces also emerged around this period, a time of social and political restriction, as Thailand had been governed by a military government since the late 1950s. The rise of the military brought about a return to traditional values that included arts and culture; thus, the art that was being promoted and approved depicted rural scenes, the historical past, or traditional motifs as opposed to the neoclassical and futuristic characteristics supported by the previous Fascist sympathetic government. The Bangkok Art Center, founded in 1961, was a nonprofit art gallery and an alternative space for artists and viewers. It provided an alternative space for works that were rejected by the National Exhibition of Art as well as works by younger, emerging artists. In 1966, Patumwan Gallery opened and tried to revive the spirit of the Bangkok Art Center that had by this time closed, but the Gallery survived only one year and had to close in 1967. Similar to the artist collectives before them, these independent art spaces enjoyed only brief lifespans, yet they reflected the deep dissatisfaction artists had with the authorities and illustrated artists’ strong will to produce their own independent spaces.

Vol. 11 No. 5 83 Chokchai Thakpho, member of Artists' Front of Thailand, political billboard on Ratchadamneon Road, October 1975.

IV. Student Protests of the 1970s: Art and Political Change By the late 1960s, Thailand was torn between the polemics of military dictatorship and the students’ uprising. Student demonstrations had started in 1968 and grew in size and number in the early 1970s. The protests focused on the government’s increasing incapability of dealing with the country’s internal problems as well as its relationship with the United States during the Vietnam conflict and the Cold War. This was the moment at which the desire for social change led artists to align themselves for the first time with wider social movements. The democratic revolution of 1932 was carried out by a group of educated civilians and soldiers (many Western educated), while the middle class (many were ethnic Chinese) played little part in either politics or art; however, the political upheavals in 1973 and 1976, especially the mass demonstrations, the student uprisings, and student massacres, were major factors in arousing the political sentiments of local artists.6

Marxist and Communist writings encouraged political consciousness among middle class, students, and artists. The government was quick to revive the “Other” dialectic, bringing out accusations that the student movement was part of the Communist scheme, that they were not Thai

84 Vol. 11 No. 5 (i.e., if they were Chinese or Vietnamese), and that they deserved to be eradicated. The authority’s fear of Communism could be traced back to the revolution of 1932,7 but it had never been employed to defame opposition on as mass a scale (with endorsement from the King and religious leaders) as in the 1970s.8

The most important group of artists during this time was the Artists’ Front of Thailand, founded in 1974 with the aim of “opposing capitalist and imperialist art and creating art for the people and new cultural values for the masses.”9 It fought alongside the student movement—producing propaganda art and organizing many exhibitions displaying paintings and posters by artists and students from all over the country. But after the military crackdown in 1976, the Artists’ Front ended as some of its leading members were killed and some had to flee the city and hide in the hills, while others gave up making political art altogether.

Performance of Song for V. The Rise of Nonprofit Institutions and Alternative Art Spaces: Artistic The Dead Art Exhibition by Kamol Phaosavasdi at Melting Pot Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art, 1985. Courtesy of Kamol One of the most significant art spaces in modern and contemporary Thai Phaosavasdi. art was the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art, opened in 1974. The Institute played an important role in promoting modern Thai art, organizing exhibitions from abroad and facilitating the exchange of ideas among artists. The Institute was considered a “neutral” venue that allowed different groups and camps to express their views and exchange ideas freely, and it was one of a few venues to exhibit works with social and political content. There was a series of events called “Wethi-Samai” (or Modern Stage), designed to be an artistic melting pot that offered Thai artists an

Vol. 11 No. 5 85 alternative workspace, especially for experimental theatre, poetry, music, and workshops.

The decisive shift came during the mid 1980s, when a group of artists came back from their studies in Europe and the US and introduced elements of Western contemporary art to Thailand, namely conceptual, pop, and happenings through the use of found objects, mixed-media installations, and performance. Their work reflected a generational gap between those from the 1970s who were part of the political movement and who still worked within the vein of sociopolitical representation and the new generation freshly coming back home with its postmodern ideology. Although these artists produced works that are characteristically postmodern in a society in which modernity had only recently been granted equally among the masses, their influence among young artists caught on quickly and would remain at the forefront for years. The melting pot within the Bhirasri Institute had fractured, and shortly afterward, it went into decline, closing after its patron and principal donor passed away, in 1988.

Utopia Station After the 1992 military crackdown ended with the King’s intervention, Thailand headed back to peace with a heightened sense of neo-nationalism and neo-royalism. As the economic crisis consumed the country during the late 1990s, a new spectre was born: capitalism. However, post-1997 Thailand did not look toward a socialist socioeconomic solution; instead the capitalist ghost was to be condemned by the state, chased after, and exorcised by way of a Buddhist path of conductand implemented with the King’s teaching of “Self- Sufficiency, which commended “taking the middle path in life and the optimal route for conduct at all levels such as individuals, families and communities”10

Similarly for art, with the economic boom in the 1980s and throughout the early 1990s, the art business was on the rise, as exemplified by the countless corporate patronages and art contests that were almost all monopolized by teachers and students from a leading art university, Silpakorn, in Bangkok. When the economy came crashing down toward the end of the decade, so did the art market, and artists struggled against the ghost of capitalism by producing their own “Other” spaces situated outside of commodification— both as protected sanctuaries in the heart of the city and as pilgrimage sites of nostalgia and self-sufficiency in the countryside. In short, they were creating their form of own utopias, or, to be exact, these spaces were heterotopias of time, ritual, and sometimes deviation.11

One of the most innovative utopias/ Key Hold Shape, 1995, lightbox installation at Pra Singha heterotopias did not take place in Temple, part of Chiang Mai Social Installation, 1995. Bangkok, but in the northern city Courtesy of Uthit Atimana. of Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai Social Installation (1992–98) was a public art intervention project initiated by a group of young artists that incorporated art installations,

86 Vol. 11 No. 5 performances, talks, and participatory events held in public places throughout the city. Chiang Mai Social Installation was a very progressive art festival, particularly in its use of various kinds of venues; the first installment took place at seven temples around the city, while the later editions incorporated various spaces in the city of Chiang Mai, including private and public buildings, roads, bridges, markets, canals, and abandoned sites. The artists organizing the festival were quoted saying, “the event is based on the concept that art is a quest of Dhamma [moral truth],” and “art should function as a bridge that draws people together.”12 However, this utopian ideal proved to be only partially fulfilled; indeed, the artists were successful in creating community, but as one participating journalist wrote, it was a community that was an “exclusive members’ group of art practitioners,” not the target audience of Chiang Mai residents, and the festival was “an organizer’s attempt to extend the boundary of art in the way they preferred into a public [sphere].”13

The Land Foundation, The idea and practice of an art space as utopia reached its peak with the Chiang Mai. Photo: Narawan Pathomvat. inception of the Land Foundation, near Chiang Mai. Initiated in 1998 by artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert, at the height of the Relational Aesthetics movement, the Land, located some forty minutes drive from the city of Chiang Mai, could be seen as an actualization of the ideal of socially engaged art. It combines two diverse approaches—the collaborative architectural and community project of Tiravanija and the spiritual and self-sufficient agricultural project of Lertchaipraset—to form an ostensibly idyllic and idealistic living entity that was achieved with varying degrees

Vol. 11 No. 5 87 of success. Since the Land’s original residency program (which focuses on self-sustainable living, meditation, art and media study) has been in hiatus for quite some time and most of the buildings have gradually become non- functioning or fallen into decay, its original goal of sharing and offering “an experience in a self-privileged learning environment, [with] criticality and exchange of practice”14 seems lost. Utopia has slowly turned to entropy. In a leaflet accompanying an exhibition about the Land Foundation at Palais de Tokyo, the author stated that “The Land has been likened to an environment where people go to try and realize a life previously lived only in dreams and the imagination, a place where people can live together communally and peacefully (examples of this are ashrams, spiritual resorts, and new age healing centres).”15 The Land has become a rather spiritual art pilgrimage site not unlike Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,16 where art enthusiasts locally and internationally trek in search of the romanticized “Other”—which conjures up the notion of the space of indigenous villagers in the nineteenth century as “Other” space that, once being “domesticated spatially and temporally” can be “appropriated, romanticized, or even (re-) invented, for example, as a leisure space . . . or as a historical utopia.”17

Installation view of Neo Romantic, by Kornkrit Jianpinidnan, at About Studio, 1998. Courtesy of Kornkrit Jianpinidnan.

During this period of economic decline, Bangkok also witnessed numerous locations of utopia of its own, with the rise of the so-called alternative spaces during the decade of the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s. As before, the majority of small, independent spaces had very brief lifespans. The ones that withstood time and challenging obstacles were About Studio/About Café (1997–2004), and Project 304 (1997–2003). These two dynamic spaces were one of the factors in exposing Thai artists and audiences to experimental and interdisciplinary art and also to giving contemporary Thai art and artists their own place within the international art world.

About Studio/About Café initially functioned, as its eponymous name suggested, as a photo studio and a café, but it complemented the space with an initiative called “About Art Related Activities” (AARA). It organized numerous exhibitions, events, and programs that were conceptual, participatory, and multidisciplinary in nature. The About

88 Vol. 11 No. 5 Studio also collaborated with many international curators, collectives, and institutions and brought international art projects to Bangkok. It was also one of the first institutions to incorporate an archive and a program of documentation—a reading room, an art space listing, and Thai artist database—in its program. Project 304, however, functioned more as a straightforward gallery space; it was an experimental art space initiated and run by artists and curators showcasing exhibitions and events, particularly media and time-based works. Project 304 also published a now defunct newspaper, Bang, and organized the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (BEFF) that is still active today.

While the significance of the two spaces cannot be overemphasized, they need to be examined from several perspectives. First, there were numerous contemporary art spaces during the 1990s–2000s decade that have not been mentioned in texts and other media simply because of their lack of longevity and also because those involved may no longer be working in the art-related environment, while many of the artists and art professionals who were related to About and Project 304 are still working and thriving in the art community locally and internationally. Thus, whether intentionally or not, selective memory and distorted cartography have conspired to give these two spaces a prominent place in history. Second, it is widely written and publicized that these two spaces fostered community and public participation in their programs; for example, an excerpt on About Studio described it as an “initiative to nurture a vibrant and responsive public and its participation in art” that was “seriously concerned about the place of art in the community and its relationship with the local people who deserve to experience art.”18 In fact, these two spaces certainly created “community” but not “local people” or “the public” in the inclusive sense; if anything, the community they produced was the close-knit “gated community,” which suggested “a continuation of a series of protected environments . . . a ‘city within a city,’ a complex that is relatively independent of its location and immediate surroundings.” It is a utopian-nostalgic conception whose principal effect “is that a collective form of subjectivity evolves in these places.”19 Moreover, in creating a gated community of the “Other,” (themselves) these gated communities conversely pushed the “Other” dialectic back to those outside the gates of their realms. Consequently, they did not intend to escape the autonomy of art; they were in fact fighting for it.

VI. Present/Future: Sociocultural Hybridity When the decade of 2000s came to an end, Thailand had endured political turmoil—a series of coups, changes in government, and mass protests. Clashes began with the 2006 military coup that removed the then-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, resulting in Thailand’s rural underclass rallying to his defense. In 2010, the military crackdown on antigovernment Redshirt protesters killed eighty-eight people and injured more than eighteen hundred. The art community’s response to the political unrest was slow; many artists aligned themselves with the government and its criticism of the Redshirts as the “Other.” Conversely, art had been employed

Vol. 11 No. 5 89 prolifically and creatively by social activists to express their opinions and sentiments, ranging from drawing and painting to site-specific happenings and performances, notably by Red Sunday group, who organized regular events and rallies to drum up support for the protest movement.

Talk at The Reading Room by R&sie(n), French architecture collective, April 2011. Photo: Withit Korprasertsri. Courtesy of Narawan Pathomvat.

View of WTF Gallery & Bar. Courtesy of Somrak Sila.

Since the beginning of the protests up to the present, the government has imposed strict censorship on opposing television and radio stations, films, and on thousands of websites; with the threat of severe punishment a number of spaces—physical and virtual—have turned to self-censorship. Recently, a number of artists and art professionals have started to question the restrictive conditions that they live in. Within these past few years, sociopolitical works and events have blossomed, and new models of art spaces have emerged: spaces of sociocultural hybridity. The new alternative model does not seem to answer the present situation since the aim is for artists to have a space of freedom for themselves, but to do so in a society in which freedom and equality is not widely granted would be oxymoronic. Art spaces now aim to incorporate the sociopolitical as much as art and cultural context and to provide much-needed space for freedom of expression. For example, there is the Reading Room, a contemporary art library, activity space, and collaborative platform, and WTF Gallery and Café, a café/bar with a dynamic gallery/activity space. These spaces take a step toward becoming a “lived social space”—as Edward Soja has suggested, a space that shares similar purpose in rebalancing the spatial, historical, and social through the projection of “Otherness” into the right place in

90 Vol. 11 No. 5 order to disrupt the flow of hegemonic power via individual and public education, networking within the art community and with other groups of sociocultural producers, and working closer to the general public and existing sociopolitical conditions.

While the official and established artists are still obsessed with a projection of Thainess in their art to present to the world and the mid-career and the up-and-coming generation of artists are trying to catch up with the contemporary art world and its politics, there is an emergence of a new and urgent attempt to once again relate art to society and community. The idea of a Temporary Autonomous Zone has been explored; it is “a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location in space,” like a vacant, unused plot of land in the suburbs or an abandoned industrial site; these sites provide space for collective activities and shelter for society’s marginal groups.20 Social intervention in public space is of course not new, as seen in many projects such as Chiang Mai Social Installation, and the Huey Kwang Mega City Project (an urban wasteland-cum-art festival, in 1997), but the temporary autonomous area filled with sociopolitical messages that the public can relate to is.

Geerati Gusawadee, Be Good, Recent art projects focusing on performance, MADifesto 2011, Chiang Mai. Courtesy contemporary sociopolitical issues were of MADifesto and Atikom Mukdaprakarn. organized in Chiang Mai, taking a cue both from Chiang Mai Social Installation in form and from Midnight University in content (a Web site founded in 1997 Opening night of exhibition publishing both original and translated One Speaking Out, MADifesto 2011, Chiang Mai. Courtesy academic texts, articles, and lectures, of MADifesto and Atikom Mukdaprakarn. from social to political sciences, and from arts and culture to science and technology; it published one of the first translated postmodernism and leftist

Sutthirat Supaparinya, public texts). MADifesto (2011), a media arts and art intervention, Unseen Thailand exhibition, 2012. cultural festival organized by graduate Courtesy: Nitimon Collective. students in the media arts and design department at Chiang Mai University, was held at various private and public sites around the city, with many politically oriented projects, and Unseen Thailand (2012), an art exhibition/intervention focusing on the issue of political prisoners and 112 article (the lèse majesté law that states whoever defames, insults, or threatens the the monarchy can be imprisoned from three to fifteen years)21, also held at unconventional public spaces around the city of Chiang Mai. The challenge for projects like these is to figure out the way to transfer and translate them to a bigger stage like Bangkok where they could potentially gain more visibility and make more impact.

VII. Conclusion: Not Just “Other,” But “Other Than” For centuries, the production of “Others” in Thai society by the authorities has been reproduced and fabricated throughout history, and, in the process,

Vol. 11 No. 5 91 has divided the country into unbridgeable halves. The roots of many myths about “Others” might lie in the reverence toward the ideology of Nation, Religion, and King that prevails over the country now more than ever. Henri Lefebvre stated that social space is religio-political space, in a country where the three main institutions are still felt strongly at every level of society and for which art spaces also serve. These three values are embodied in the figure of the King, who is the father of the nation and the patron of Buddhism. Lefebvre elaborated that the “unconscious” space,”22 which suggests repressed life by a father figure who has gotten to be rid of in order for a new space to be produced is very similar to Deleuze’s concept of the desire for equality that needs to be liberated from the “repressed” Oedipal condition created by authority.23 So in a society in which great numbers of people do not realize that they are in the repressed state, when self-censorship is so automatic and subliminal the self does not even register, what contemporary space can offer is an orphaned space freed from attached symbolic values that not only exists to record crossroads of space and time, but also invites and welcomes all, creating peril as well as possibilities. As Soja said, “They are not just 'other spaces' to be added on to the geographical imagination, they are also 'other than' the established ways of thinking spatially.”24 Art spaces for the “Others” need to go beyond the label and restriction and realize their full potential to always try to become the “other than.”

Notes 1 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 2 Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam,” The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 3 (August 2000), 529. 3 Thongchai Wanichkul, “The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects, 1885–1910,” Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Thai States (London: Curzon Press, 2000), 50–52. 4 Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1992), 36. 5 Ibid., 49. 6 Ibid., 28. 7 Somsak Jeamteerasakul, Prawatsart ti pueng sarng (Recently Constructed History) (Bangkok: October Remembrance, 2001), 12–20. 8 Benedict Anderson, “Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6 Coup,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 9 (1977),13–30. 9 Apinan Poshyananda, Modern Art in Thailand: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 164–65. 10 Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board, Sufficiency Economy Implications and Applications (Bangkok: Sufficiency Economy Movement Sub-committee, Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board, 2007), 5. 11 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces, ” Diacritics, 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1986). 12 John Clark, Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai art Compared, 1980 to 1999 (Sydney: University of Sydney, 2010), 301–02. 13 Ibid. 14 Jennie Guy, The Land: The V Precepts (Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2006), pamphlet. 15 Ibid. 16 Roche, Jennifer. “Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents: An Interview with Claire Bishop,” Community Arts Network, http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_ eng age.php. 17 Thongchai Wanichkul, “The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects, 1885–1910,” Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Thai States (London: Curzon Press, 2000), 54. 18 Patrick D. Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia, (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2008), 138. 19 Marc Schuilenburg, “The Right to ‘Terroir’: Place and Identity in Times of Immigration and Globalizaton,” Open, no. 21, 24–25. 20 Bey Hakim Bey, “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone,” Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 109. 21 Lèse majesté in Thailand, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lèse_majesté_in_Thailand. 22 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 35–36. 23 Chairat Charoensinolarn, Lecture on Deleuze, Chiang Mai: Chiang Mai University, February 2011. 24 Edward Soja, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 163. Emphasis mine.

92 Vol. 11 No. 5 Sanjay Ghosh The Self-Invested Nation

Seminar hosted by the Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator Biennale Society, New Delhi, 2007. Left to right: Manray made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should change to European Hsu, Arshiya Lokhandwala, Gulammohammad Sheikh, costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his demonstration all over again, Fumio Nanjo, Won-li Rhee. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, dressed with impressive style and elegance. And this time everybody accepted Hong Kong. his report.1 —Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

ecently, the two most respected barons of India’s IT industry (the nation’s largest export), Azim Premji (Wipro) and Narayana RMurthy (Infosys), warned the Indian government that continued inaction with respect to its economic policy decisions would force the nation into a desperate situation. Having enjoyed two decades of spectacular economic growth rivaled only by China, India is faced with a return to what some people disparagingly call the “Hindu growth rate,” a phrase used to describe the chronically tepid growth rate it endured from the 1950s to the 1980s. Surprisingly, during the dizzying heights of the general prosperity experienced in the mid-2000s, the media in India was pointing out how the returns on investment in art had outstripped returns on real estate, a marked shift in the ways art was usually reported on. Almost every week a new auction record was being set for “masterpieces” of

Vol. 11 No. 5 93 Indian art, some of them barely a few years out of the artists’ studio. There was an air of optimism—gala openings (bordering on orgy), art funds (to compete with mutual funds), ridiculously expensive monographs, and a seminar organized in March 2008 to establish a Delhi Biennale. Then, later in 2008, came the Lehman bankruptcy, and global markets crashed. The private galleries that had popped up on every street corner in Indian cities started to fold, and a large number of artists returned to looking for a steady day job. It wouldn’t be too far fetched to inquire into this coincidental development between economics and culture, where two decades of artistic innovation had been matched by generous inflow of foreign funds into specific pockets of artistic practice in India, ones that Western investors were most comfortable with.

However, during the last two decades contemporary art has been sheltered largely by art fairs, biennials, and residencies. Many of the most well known names that have survived at the top were able to milk the international art circuit to their advantage. It seems that the postmodern framework for inclusivity within the political and cultural sphere increasingly has been set aside in favour of an exclusive corporate branding logic that has the top brand followed by its nearest rival as the relevant players. The same set of twenty or so artists in India seem to be representing the country at every international forum. While numerous government-run art colleges in India produce conventional painters, relatively few of them are able to break into the art market. In a country where social security is still a distant dream, the majority of artists are self-invested—without any serious institutional support, out of the spotlight, and struggling to keep themselves alive. Now, with the Greek crisis looming, worldwide economic confidence is very low. Western philanthropic funds such as the Ford Foundation, Getty Foundation, and Hubert Bals Fund, supported much cutting-edge art in India for more than a decade, but are now less accessible. In spite of this new economic ecology, the established players have long realized that in order to survive, artists eventually would have to group together, especially along an interdisciplinary axis, with a generous dose of public participation at the margins.

The historian Dipesh Chakravarty has argued that the framework of democracy in India is basically imported. He says that “the phenomenon of ‘political modernity’—namely, the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise—is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe.”2 Invariably, art patronage operates through a sense of nostalgia that conforms to the idea of high culture. One wonders if the contemporary art operating in much of Asia isn’t borrowed from a European avant-garde practice from the 1970s. The untold story of the art scene in India is that of a tussle between old-school, conventional artists, and cutting-edge art produced in an environment mediated by Euro- American collaboration. While theoretically a broader range of practice is sought after and brought under the umbrella of art, in practice totalitarian market clichés have belied that promise.

94 Vol. 11 No. 5 National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Photo: Keith Wallace.

Although the existence of art colleges dates back to the colonial period, a government body supporting modern art emerged only after independence in the form of the Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA). In fact, LKA and the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) provided the biggest institutional support for much of the post-independence period. Even two decades ago, young artists coming out of art colleges had to depend on the state-funded LKA for exhibition space, and it was usually a day job as a teacher, illustrator, draftsman, or clerk that financially sustained them through the lean years. In 1976, LKA established the Garhi artists’ studios, in Delhi, to facilitate the practices of artists migrating to the city. However, all along there were also parallel efforts in supporting artists by private gallery owners, notably Keko Ghandy and Kali Pundole, in Mumbai, and Ebrahim Alkazi and Virendra Kumar, in Delhi, who at times provided artists with stipends until their careers became financially viable. These were small efforts that in themselves were a relief from bureaucracy-ridden government institutions. Indian society, with its entrenched nepotism and caste discrimination, has always had problems in creating transparent institutions. To say that a dalit, once referred to as “untouchable,” artist like Krishnaji Howlaji Ara attained a voice among the Progressive Artists Group in the early 1950s is to overlook the genre-bound nature of his work in that it didn’t make reference to dalit oppression in India. The economic changes that started in the late 1980s resulted in a rise in the number of private galleries. However, the majority of these galleries were upgraded boutiques or run by furniture sellers who were poorly educated in contemporary art; now, gallery owners like Mortimer Chatterjee (from Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda art district) are writing scholarly monographs.3

Nomadic Suspension in a New Media Solution One might wonder what really changed from the old guard to the emergence of contemporary practice. A new attitude toward materiality is certainly one element. Two decades ago installation art was a novelty on the Indian scene, while today canvases are abandoned after the foundation year at school. In fact, the search for new exhibition spaces have led

Vol. 11 No. 5 95 some artists to seek shelter in Top: Installation view of Cynical Love: Life in the cyberspace. Another element is Everyday, curated by Gayatri Sinha, Kiran Nadar Museum of that young artists are caught up Art, New Delhi, 2012. Courtesy of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, in the negotiations between being New Delhi. accepted by the “system” while Left: Ground Rules, A Live Art workshop conducted by Sonia simultaneously finding ways to Khurana, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2011. Courtesy of Kiran speak against it. Some might Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. call it hypocrisy. A decade ago Ebrahim Alkazi wanted to distinguish himself from the new galleries by highlighting his documentation efforts through publishing monographs and archiving press notices and reviews of exhibitions. Since then, many private galleries and museums such as the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), a novel offshoot of the commercial Vadhera art gallery, and the Kiran Nadar Museum, which houses a private collection, have started focusing on research and thus absorbing into their organizations many budding curators and critics. FICA’s emerging artist award has had a similar effect as the Sotheby’s Prize, which was inaugurated in India in 1995 (but was discontinued after three years) and provided exposure for promising young talent in the visual arts. According to the contemporary critic Ranjit Hoskote, “The exhibition representing the artists short-listed for the Third Sotheby’s Prize, which was mounted nineteen years after Place for People (a 1981 exhibition that was conceived and organized collectively and introduced a dramatic change in the Indian art scene through some highly intellectually and politically charged art), embodied a set of art practices that were radically different (from the previous generation of artists) in stylistic emphasis and assumed context. The artists included here were Nataraj Sharma, Baiju Parthan, Anju Dodiya, Jitish Kallat and Sudarshan Shetty.”4 FICA’s synergy with Khoj International Artists’ Association, the most recognized organization in contemporary Indian art because of its visibility, international connections,

96 Vol. 11 No. 5 Left: Artists presentations from the Khoj Peers Residency at the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art reading room, June 10, 2011. Courtesy of Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi. Right: Audience for the presentation by three young curators during the Khoj Curatorship Program, 2011. Courtesy of Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi. and longevity, makes for an energetic sharing of resources—in 2011 Khōj staged presentations from its Peers Residency at the FICA reading room, for example—even in these lean times. Overall, gallery owners in India are far better informed now compared to the late 1980s and 1990s, with many of them attending curatorial courses.

Apeejay Media Centre, However, there are a large number of artists stepping out of colleges who installation view of the exhibition Private Mythologies, end up self-exhibiting in rentable spaces such as the galleries of the Habitat 2002, curated by Pooja Sood, which included artists such Center, in Delhi. The Press Club in Delhi, until it was demolished by the as Subodh Gupta, Subba Ghosh, Ranbir Kaleka, Sonia expanding Metro network, provided a similar alternative exhibition space. Khurana, Kiran Subbaiah, Vivan Sundaram, B. V. Suresh, But it is one thing to have an exhibition space and another to make a Umesh Maddanahali, and Natraj Sharma. living from one’s art—one needs a gallery that can sell the work. While the cutting-edge artists graduate to the international circuit, the leftover talent is usually absorbed by the plethora of private galleries that were established when the economy was good, and these galleries absorbed the sudden flowering of creativity in those peak years when the art market was healthy. Jeebesh Bagchi of the Raqs collective often questions the endless stories of struggle peddled by conventional artists, yet these days the established stars of the new media firmament, of which Raqs is at the forefront, also have only tales of struggle; how, when they started, there was no support for innovative work and very little infrastructure supporting the display of multimedia artwork. Indeed, the Apeejay multimedia gallery, established in 2000 in Delhi, was one of the earliest to showcase new media artworks (it is currently in a semi-permanent state of renovation). Its curator, Pooja Sood, doubled as one of the initiators of Khōj (along with Subodh Gupta, Anita

Vol. 11 No. 5 97 Façade of Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi, 2006. Opposite, top: Preparations for the First International Residency at Periferry, (barge M. V. Chandardinga), in Guwahati, hosted by desire machine collective, 2008. Courtesy of desire machine collective. Opposite, middle: Unspeakably More, seminar cum symposium on curatorship at Periferry, (barge M. V. Chandardinga), in Guwahati, organized by desire machine collective & n.e.w.s., 2009. Courtesy of desire machine collective. Opposite, bottom: Belgian artist Bartaku's food spiral from residency program Slow Flow, in August, 2010 at Periferry, (barge M. V. Chandardinga), hosted by desire machine collective, August 10, Guwahati. Courtesy of desire machine collective. Dube, and Manish Parekh), which was started in the late 1990s to support multi-disciplinary art. On the surface, Khōj has been considered an artist- run initiative, but for most its lifetime it has been generously funded by, among other sources, a Ford Foundation endowment. Today, no survey of contemporary Indian art can be complete without a generous mention of the activities undertaken by Khōj over the past fifteen years. Indeed, without its residencies, workshops, and exhibitions, contemporary art practice in India would have been missing a crucial platform. However, as India’s most respected art critic, Geeta Kapur, points out, “Mileage can be earned on the ground of discourse through such interventionist relays where many players are honed to the task of empowering the practice of art—not least critics, alert to the lapses inherent in an ‘institution’ such as Khōj where curricular attractions can easily overtake criticality.”5

If an artist is lucky enough to be based in the capital of Delhi or in the financial capital of Mumbai, things are much easier. The centre/periphery debate has raged for years, and the establishment of Periferry in 2007, a riverboat art residency on the Brahmaputra River, in the outskirts of Guwahati, Assam, went some way toward addressing this debate. The desire machine (Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya) collective at the heart of this initiative has been able to highlight problems peculiar to its specific location, especially in its difficult relationship with the often tense political situation in the north east. Periferry unfortunately emerged when funding was drying up for its mother ship, Khōj, in Delhi. As an outpost, Periferry has the potential to bring the cultural focus of the Northeast out of its traditional paradigms, where work is dominated by folksy, apolitical content, while engaging international attention. Referring again to Khōj, Kapur asks, “Does Khōj offer a time and place for new praxiological possibilities? There is no declared politics to Khōj, it is an experimental setup where politics in terms of gender or class is on occasion discussed and presented.”6 Somehow a platform like Periferry belies this judgment; they are reasonably upfront with their politics. Similarly, 1 Shanti Road is a home (of professor Suresh Jayaram) converted into an artists’ residency that is

98 Vol. 11 No. 5 Vol. 11 No. 5 99 Preparations in progress for ART + PUBLIC, a public art program at Periferry, (barge M. V. Chandardinga), in Guwahati, organized by desire machine collective and Lalit Kala Academi, New Delhi, March 2010. Courtesy of desire machine collective.

intended to bridge the gap between India Art Fair 2012. Courtesy of India Art Fair, New Delhi. a conservative market and restless young innovators. At the opposite end is India Art Fair, initiated in 2009, an unapologetic commercial enterprise whose director, Neha Kripal, declares, “We have to create a product which is global.”7 India Art Fair annually rents out space expo-style to galleries for a two-week extravaganza. Its critics call it a dumping ground for leftovers, as very few artworks are commissioned specifically for the fair.

With the market in the red, many private galleries are now relegated to laldora (demarcated urban villages in Delhi), areas such as Lado Sarai, where commercial taxes are suspended. In Delhi, only a few galleries operate outside these special zones, notably Nature Morte, run by Peter Nagy, and Espace, run by Renu Modi. Espace has particularly expanded the use of its exhibition space through its Video Wednesday program, which took place in 2008–09 and showcased video art curated by the outspoken art critic

100 Vol. 11 No. 5 Johny ML. However, with most big-ticket contemporary artists leading nomadic lives in international residencies, the dearth of such exhibition spaces is a local phenomenon because on the back of its economic upturn, contemporary Indian art has been doing the rounds in the international circuit with exhibitions and biennials. John Clark similarly speculates, “It may well be the economic importance in transnational relationships of Japan in the 1980s, of China in the 1990s and 2000s, to be followed probably by India in the 2000s and 2010s which have been the motor for the wider entry of Asian artists into international circuits. Or, if we sensibly bracket the reductivity implicit in economic arguments, such relationships have at the very least produced the economic context that has allowed this movement in art its own degrees of autonomy.”8 In fact, the more successful artists are so busy that they have to employ “ghost” painters to keep up with market demand, and the poor painter of yesterday has successfully turned into a CEO within today’s art industry.

Opening reception at Latitude 28 gallery in Lado Sarai gallery district. Courtesy of Latitude 28, New Delhi.

The nomadic residency-hopping has rendered the contemporary artist somewhat akin to journalists embedded in the army. In the name of public participation, of attempting to be one with the masses through short term “assignments,” these artists simply tolerate a “picnic” in the outback, like a reality TV survival adventure. They don’t compare to artists like Sudhir Patwardhan, who led a double life as a radiologist in Thane, a satellite town near Mumbai. His lifetime of everyday interactions with the marginalized brings to his work a depth woefully missing in that of most contemporary practitioners. Even when he felt unjustified in representing a voice for the underprivileged by giving space in his paintings to the genuine concerns of poorer people who visited his suburban clinic, his dignified distance hasn’t been able to disguise his empathy.

Traditionally, art collectives have established themselves based on proximity, mostly of the ideological kind. The fallout from the Indian economical miracle is a wholesale suspension of socialist ideology. In 1949, when six Mumbai (then Bombay) artists got together to form the Progressive Artists Group, fashioned on the leftist Progressive writers group founded in Lucknow in 1934, their ideological impetus was radical. However, within

Vol. 11 No. 5 101 three years the group split up, and a number of them migrated to the West. Left: Nalini Malani and Bhupen Khakar at Kasauli Art Lurking in those black-and-white photographs of the group are some of Workshops, 1980. Courtesy of Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundaram, their “supporters”—American and European embassy personnel. Kapur New Delhi, and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. would like to trace the genealogy of the Khōj collective initiative to the Right: Geeta Kapur and Vivan Kasauli summer art workshops with artists such at Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Sundaram at Kasauli Art Workshops, 1980. Courtesy of Malani, Jogen Chowdhury, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, and Bhupen Geeta Kapur, Vivan Sundaram, New Delhi, and Asia Art Khakar, who became famous for their participation in the aforementioned Archive, Hong Kong. landmark exhibition Place for People. Johny ML goes even further back to cite the creation of the school at Shantiniketan founded in the early part of the century by Rabindranath Tagore as the original Indian residency. It however cannot be denied that the collective spirit of yesterday has now turned into pragmatic glue. As funding is decreasing, artists find it practical to collectively group together when pitching corporate friendly projects— three for the price of one—a far cry from K.P. Krishnakumar’s short-lived Kerala Radical Group, which lasted from 1987 to 1989 and was a bare bones, confrontational outfit.

This year, documenta showcased the work of the Mumbai-based collective CAMP comprising Asok Sukumaran, Shaina Anand, and Sanjay Bhangar, who are known for their archival initiative Pad.ma. One of the marked features of contemporary art practices has been its inter-disciplinary nature. Contemporary art has attracted people from various disciplines (Sukumaran is an architect by training), such as the trio of the Raqs collective, who were originally filmmakers. The WALA collective of Akanksha Rastogi, Paribartana Mohanty, and Sujit Mallick has taken Delhi’s Metro as their hunting ground—the Metro is bringing an inclusive common ground to the splintered dwellers of this class-aware city. While new media has been a difficult sell for the players within the market, at the

102 Vol. 11 No. 5 extreme end of such un-marketability are graffiti artists, who are basically Banksy clones without much political impact. We wait for them to release their own version of Banksy’s film Exit through the Gift Shop (2010) and cash in.

WALA, Narcissist in the The Discursive Space Mirror Shop, A Walk from the National Museum to the Two things are critical to the infrastructure in art in India—the means National Gallery of Modern Art via India Gate, 2012, for practice and for a discursive space. If artists are a small struggling performance. Courtesy of WALA, New Delhi. group, the critical fraternity here is minuscule. However, a few art departments in India’s universities have kept abreast with the developments in contemporary art. For example, along with the art market there has been a parallel rise in the importance of the faculty of fine arts at the MS University, in Baroda. In fact, a measure of its importance is that when a particular crisis hit the department,9 it was seen as an assault on Indian art historiography. A product of the deliberations at Baroda is the book Towards a New Art History,10 which remains a landmark in Indian art history. Along with Shantiniketan’s Kala Bhavan, Baroda has been the catalyst for innovation at various other art schools in India. The School of Arts and Aesthetics at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University has become a notable new discursive space, especially because of its inter-disciplinary synergy. Bengaluru’s Shrishti School of Art, Design, and Technology is an important private initiative, but with the art market crashing, one doubts if such an enterprise will be able to survive.

Vol. 11 No. 5 103 The trend toward a multidisciplinary approach has brought a wider perspective to art practices. The Gati residency program, in Delhi, is an emerging outlet in that direction. It’s a platform for innovative research in dance. The collaboration between Khōj and Gati for the Yellow Line project, a biannual collaboration between a dancer or choreographer and artists from other disciplines, initiated by Lizz Aggiss and Sonia Khurana, is another example of inter-disciplinary synergy between different agencies. In Bengaluru, the India Foundation for the Arts (different from FICA) has supported a wide array of creative projects. At the height of the art market frenzy, a number of art journals also started; none, however, could compete with The Journal of Arts and Ideas (1982–99), started by Geeta Kapur, in terms of intellectual engagement. While the past decade has produced innumerable sponsored monographs, critical writing has been negligible. Kapur and her husband, artist Vivan Sundaram, tried to cobble together support for a Delhi Biennale, but the lack of government support sunk the project. Now it seems even more unlikely because revenue is shrinking with the economy slowing down.

Among other important private Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 23–24 (1993). Courtesy initiatives has been the establishment of Digital South Asia Library, University of Chicago. of Devi Art Foundation, a private museum for contemporary art in Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi. Young Anupam Poddar had been a pioneering collector of contemporary art, and his collection is one of the few that is representative of the wide array of “uncollectable” artworks produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lately he has shifted his focus away from contemporary Indian art toward art from Iran and Uzbekistan, and so much the worse for contemporary Indian artists. Yet in 2011 he mounted a fantastic exhibition at the Foundation, Elephant in the Room, of contemporary Iranian art that could have been an eye-opener for Indian practitioners—for those who chose to go and see it. Unpampered by a buoyant market, Iranian artists are producing a far more sophisticated discourse, one that evolves from sincere social engagement.

One the most notable contemporary Indian artworks of the last decade that bucks the general trend of avoiding social engagement is Subodh Gupta’s Very Hungry God (2006), which Kapur dismisses as a “post-orientalist allegory on global consumption.” Leaving aside the enormous price tag, this installation needs to be seen from a vernacular point of view, with its evocation of the shopping frenzy at the Dhantheras, the festival of wealth held each autumn. Add to it the festival’s mythological reference to the god of death (Yama) and pitch it in the context of a country where about 77% of the population subsists on a daily expenditure of INR 20 or less (approximately 30 cents US).11 Here, for once, the scale of the artwork

104 Vol. 11 No. 5 is justified in terms of content, which isn’t always the case with this artist’s other works. Prone to scaling up, this tendency that is rampant in contemporary art practice belies Bourriaud’s contention that there is an absence of utopia in relational art. Not discounting the effect on the price tag, scale is the life beyond. The heroic modernist artist was abandoned only in theory, not in practice.

Building that houses the Devi The Raqs collective (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Monica Art Foundation, Gurgaon. Photo: Keith Wallace. Narula) are the grand old folks of contemporary Indian art. They tread an interesting ground between theory and practice, in the midst of inter- disciplinary practices and a peculiar interface with the wider society, particularly in their espousal of the illegal society of squatters that exists on the city margins. At the height of their expansive presence at Sarai (a collaboration with the Center for Study of Developing Societies), they were able to engage such a wide cross-section of society as to bring out some fantastic possibilities through research grants. While the Cyber-mohalla project—five media labs set up for young people in underprivileged neighbourhoods to creatively voice local concerns—has become a benchmark of sorts, it is important to remember the trail of diverse initiatives that were supported by them. Among them were the debut graphic novel of the prolific Sarnath Banerjee and the nascent Islamic poster collection of Yousuf Sayeed, which would evolve into the Tasveer Ghar project. However, a small, motley assortment of critics question the efficacy of Raqs’ leftist posturing in-as-much as it poses no threat to the powers that be. Well, neither does the rest of contemporary Indian art.

The economic “reforms” that started in the late 1980s bore fruit within a decade. Capital inflow into business was followed by philanthropic

Vol. 11 No. 5 105 initiatives within social sectors, and, finally, endowments for the arts such as Subodh Gupta, Very Hungry God, 2006, stainless steel the Ford and Getty Foundations. The voice of the establishment wants to see utensils, installation view outside François Pinault’s this period of change as positive by denying that the state has been waging Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Photo: Keith Wallace. a war on its tribal population to satiate industry’s ravenous appetite for raw minerals. The hybrid aesthetics of contemporary art practice is often lauded for its vernacular bent. However, the notion of vernacular is a political one inasmuch as it confronts linguistic hegemony. Most Indian artists take this vernacular reference as an embellishment and place it in a white cube gallery setting, where it becomes a meaningless gesture, at best a joke. This became very clear with two recent presentations12 that were part of the public art project titled 48 Degree, curated by Khōj’s Pooja Sood. While the organizers were confronted with the realities of state power, the artworks themselves moved no one, not even an enlightened audience of European university teachers. Some lip service to environmental concerns to replace the erstwhile resistance to Hindutva, a right-wing religious movement that envisages cultural nationalism to be imposed on religious minorities, has become the token content of much of contemporary Indian art.

One aspect of the fallout of the market crash has been the exit of the well- heeled operators from the art scene. When Charles Saatchi was complaining about the fall in quality of British art as being related to the withdrawal of government support to art colleges, he had in mind those paid students who were mostly well-connected rich Asian kids. The navigation lines of the international art circuit seem to have a special side gate to the Goldsmith’s old boys club. It has become clear now (with Paul Krugman getting the Nobel prize) that the economic optimism in the first decade of the

Vol. 11 No. 5 106 millennium was a product of imaginative accounting. Did this misplaced optimism inadvertently change the course of contemporary Asian art practice for the worse? The poor public response in India to modern art (and not just contemporary) can be gauged from exhibition attendance on weekdays. Take away the alcohol from the openings and the whole fig leaf of public participation just falls. Even art students decide their visiting priorities based on beverages—the wine in Lado Sarai better than the beer at Khōj.

Notes 1 Antoine Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, trans. Katherine Woods (DuBois, PA: Mammoth Books, 1991), 15. 2 Dipesh Chakravarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. 3 Mortimer Chatterjee and Lal Tara, The TIFR Art Collection (Mumbai: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 2010). 4 Ranjit Hoskote, “Indian Art: Influences and Impulses in the 1980s and 1990s,” in Indian Art: An Overview, ed. Gayatri Sinha (New Delhi: Rupa, 2003), 205. 5 Geeta Kapur, “A Phenomenology of Encounters at Khöj,” in THE KHOJBOOK (1997–2007), ed. Pooja Sood (New Delhi: Harper Collins: 2010), 67. 6 Ibid., 63. 7 ShailajaTripathi, “All’s Fare: Interview with Neha Kripal,” The Hindu, January 5, 2012. 8 John Clark, “Biennales as Structure and Operations of International Art System,” in Asian Art History in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Vishakha Desai, ed. VishakhaDesai (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2006). 9 In 2007, the graduating students’ exhibition was vandalized by right-wing mobs, leading to the arrest of student Srilamantula Chandramohan. There were nation-wide protests by artists, yet the dean, Shivaji Panikkar, who had stood by the side of students, was eventually removed. 10 Towards a New Art History, eds. Shivaji Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji, Deeptha Achar (New Delhi: D. K. Printworld). 11 Arjun Sengupta, Report of the Commission on Unorganised Labour, Government of India, 2007. 12 In the conference organized by Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute, "Between Global Aspirations and Local Realities," at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nenhru University, in March 2012, Arunav Dasgupta from the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, and Christiane Brosius from Heidelberg University spoke on the same public art event.

107 Vol. 11 No. 5 Chinese Name Index

Too Chi

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FAFLDN+FM12 Yishu.indd 1 11/06/2012 12:10 Vol. 11 No. 5 111 W ANG G U ANG YI (b. 1957) is a central figure of Yishu the Political Pop movement and recognized as a leader of the New Art Movement in China established in the 1980s. He is most recognized for Edition the socio-political paintings and prints from his Great Criticism series begun in 1998. Through his use of No. 5 the Chinese political icons and symbols of Western commercialism, his images respond to the deeply engrained legacy of propaganda experienced in To purchase a Yishu edition China during the Cultural Revolution. Originally print please send your request painted in 2005, in this work the artist uses his own to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), name as a substitute for luxury brand names common or contact Zhang Chaoxuan to his Great Criticism series. By calling attention to 134.6655.9126 (China). the consumer legacy of his own commercial success, Wang provides cheeky commentary on the experience Each edition is commissioned of China’s changing society. by and produced exclusively for Yishu; and is measured the same A RTWORK DESCRIPTION size as the Journal. ARTIST ------Wang Guangyi TITLE ------Great Criticism — Wang Guangyi (2009) MEDIA ------Serigraph DIMENSION ------210 x 295 mm EDITION SIZE ------200 PRICE ------US $400 plus shipping

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