Chang Tan What Asia? Whose Art? A Reflection on Two Exhibitions at the Art Museum

hat is “Asian art”? Wasn’t this a concept conjured up by the first generation of modern connoisseurs and collectors who were Winvariably Orientalists looking for an antithesis to the West?1 Why, then, do we cling to such a troubled discourse and keep on renewing it? In each display of “Asian Art,” who is chosen, and who is left behind? Aren’t these selections always based more on sociopolitical rather than aesthetic criteria? To what extent, then, should curators lay bare their criteria and agenda—or must they remain hidden and unspoken? Finally, what kind of “Asia” is being presented, when a museum—and the state apparatus behind it—is committed to collect, display, and interpret “Asian art”?

The above questions haunted me during my visits to the two exhibitions at the (SAM)—Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991–2011 (March 12–June 26, 2011) and Panorama: Recent Art from Contemporary Asia (April 20, 2012–April 14, 2013), the latter presented in two segments, and installed, respectively, in the main building of SAM and at its 8Q branch across the street. Both exhibitions were excellent, yet the art they choose to display leads to radically different impressions that, in combination, may help us understand the agenda and vision of the museum, the first institution of modern art in Singapore and, in its own words, “the first international standard art museum in Southeast Asia.”2 The earlier exhibition, which featured fifty-four artists from Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, is scrupulously scoped to achieve a dynamic balance between diversity and coherence. As “the first such large-scale Asian-made institutional presentation of contemporary Southeast Asian art,”3 it also firmly places Singapore at the centre of modern Southeastern Asian art, despite its own limited representation in the show.4 What matters, the exhibition seems to argue, is the museum’s capacity to rescue those artworks from politically tumultuous societies, to display them in a state-of-the-art facility, and to interpret them in a vocabulary that stays at the frontline of the global art world today. Beneath it all—or, perhaps, above it all—is the new initiative of the Singaporean government, which has decided that its manicured city-state will harbour creative industries and become the cultural hub of Southeast Asia—or even entire Asia—in the twenty-first century.5

The curatorial conceit behind Negotiating Home, History and Nation is well articulated, if not unproblematic. The six nations, the guest curator Iola Lenzi explains (Lenzi worked with two co-curators, Tan Boon Hui

Vol. 12 No. 2 35 and Khairuddin Hori), share a regional network of maritime migration Sutee Kunavichayanont, History Class, 2001, mixed and trade, a dynamic “syncretism” of religions and spirituality, and a media. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. more recent history of colonization, independence, and nation building.6 Individual nations within this ensemble, of course, had different historical trajectories, demographics, and societal structures, but such details get lost to those unfamiliar with the historical and geographic diversities of the region, since the exhibition galleries provide little context for each work. Even the works that aim to investigate specific historical facts can be read as abstract and “contentless.” Sutee Kunavichayanont’s History Class (2000), for example, features fourteen school desks with texts and images carved on each desktop in low relief. As the title suggests, these carved images outline the history of Thailand from 1884 to 1992 through quotes from a range of documents as well as photos of historical figures and illustrations of events. Pencils, crayons, and paper were provided so that the visitors could make their own rubbings of the desktop renderings. The narrative of History Class is one of bitter irony and somber reflection: The country fought to turn absolute monarchy into constitutional monarchy and democracy but acquired a “modern” government of military dictators in the process. The texts, however, were written in Thai, and no translation was provided in the exhibition venue.7 Such a lack of explanation posed few problems when the work was first installed in 2000—in the open air, at the foot of Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, again with pencils and papers provided. Since much of the carving is too shallow to be directly legible, the lack of explanatory texts compels viewers to replicate and “make seen” the artist’s compositions, therefore creating a much stronger sense of involvement. But in its current setting, the vast majority of visitors, the present author included, understood next to nothing when sitting down at the desks to dutifully duplicate the artist’s vision. The “class,” in other words, can no longer be taught due to transcultural illiteracy. The work evolved into a clever yet inconsequential specimen of relational art.

On the other hand, a powerful yet carefully mediated sense of communal trauma—and, to a degree, communal resilience and revival—pervades much of the work in this exhibition. One of the most eye-catching works, encountered immediately upon entry, is the Filipino artists Alfredo and

36 Vol. 12 No. 2 Alfredo and Isobel Aquilizan, Isabel Aquilizan’s Wings (2009), Wings, 2009, used rubber thongs, fibreglass armature a large installation consisting of with metal internal structure, metal plate base and tubing, four thousand pairs of rubber stainless steel bolts. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. flip-flops assembled into three pairs of gigantic, angelic wings. The shoes are semi-transparent in varying shades of ivory and yellow, and when lit properly—as they were in the SAM gallery—they glow and sparkle beautifully. This Bayu Utomo Radjikin, Lang congregation of the mundane Kacang, 1991, metal and cement, 141 x 104 x 120 cm. acquires an aura of the ethereal, but Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. when one learns that all the shoes are collected from a “correctional facility” in Singapore—as I found out during the curatorial tour I took of the exhibition—the piece becomes at once ironic and moving: for those who cannot even walk freely, the fantasy of flying with slippers must have brought a sense of bitterness as well as comfort. Ascending to the third floor, the visitor was greeted by Bayu Utomo Radjikin’s Lang Kacang (1991), a human-sized sculpture of an armless warrior, squatting, head thrown back, howling into the void. Rustic scrap metal constitutes his armour— underneath which no body exists—and the elaborate headgear and the jeweled breastplates hint at his Javanese origin. While only 1.41 metres in height, the statue nevertheless appears monumental: desperate yet ferocious, defeated yet proud, the warrior is the epitome of tragic heroism. Many other pieces, such as Vasan Sitthiket’s Committing Suicide Culture: The Only Way Thai Farmers Escape Debt (1995), F. X. Harsono’s Burned Victims (1998), Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Horror in Pink (2001), and Din Q Lê’s The Farmers & The Helicopters (2006) also point at traumatic events in recent history, with varying degree of explicitness. As the curator points out, social problems that ravaged Southeast Asia in the past decades—“ inequality, corruption, environmental rape, authoritarianism”—are common themes for the artists of this generation,8 yet the very fact that they can now address those problems freely speaks to optimism and hope.

Left: Vasan Sitthiket, Committing Suicide Culture: The Only Way Thai Farmers Escape Debt, 1995, mixed media, 250 x 400 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. Right: F. X. Harsono, Burned Victims, 1998, installation and performance video. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Vol. 12 No. 2 37 Din Q Le, The Farmers and The Helicopters, 2006, 3-channel video installation, 15 mins. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Again, while the audience can become mesmerized by the visually captivating presentations, one continues to desire historical specificities that may throw more light on and contexualize these conceptually intriguing pieces. The viewer would have had a broader understanding, for example, of the pink-suited man who pushes a shopping cart through the black- and-white scenes of torture in the photographic series Horror in Pink by Manit Sriwanichpoom, if she knew that the work was provoked by the artist’s shock at hearing that Samak Sundaravej, who publicly urged the use of brutal force on Thai democratic protesters in 1976, won more than a million votes in his campaign for mayor of Bangkok in 2000. The economic boom and the pleasure of consumerism, the artist concludes, erases memory of injustice and trauma among the Thai populace, and the “pink man” stands for present day Thailand—“a soulless man without a conscience to trouble him.”9 The de-contextualized images of violence, suffering, and resistance, on the other hand, convey a larger sense of an inexplicable yet inescapable victimhood that reminds one of what Paul Kagawa described twenty years ago—all “Third World Artists” (T.W.A.) are, “by our (e.g. American) definition, a voice of the oppressed.”10

Many works also feature troubled representations of individual as well as national identities—another theme that is routinely associated with “T.W.A.” The Singaporean artist ’s Strange Fruit (2004), in which he douses himself in bright yellow paint and walks through the streets of London with his upper half covered in a balloon of red lantern, is a blatant and confrontational appropriation of racial stereotypes. Thailand’s Navin Rawanchaikul, in Where’s Navin? (2007), on the other hand, is at once more light-spirited and

38 Vol. 12 No. 2 Manit Sriwanichpoom, Horror high-strung: a human-sized statue in Pink, 2001, colour print, 120 x 165 cm. Courtesy of the of the artist holds up a plaque with Singapore Art Museum. “Navin” printed on it, and a plethora of plaques are scattered around his feet, each with his name printed in a different Asian language. As an ethnic Hindu-Punjabi-Thai artist with permanent resident status in Japan, Rawanchaikul’s anxiety as well as playfulness with his “Asian” identity is well justified, yet the work’s power comes primarily from its materiality: The painted fiberglass simulates the tone and texture of human skin to perfection; one can see every pore, every crease, and every droplet of sweat on his face. The work is also placed strategically—at a corner next to the stairs—so that it appears abruptly to the visitor, and from a few steps away the hyperrealism of the work, therefore, is doubly striking. Before grasping the ideas about the fluidity of identity and its confused expressions that underlie this work, the viewer immediately feels the emotional stress and comical awkwardness of “Navin.” The uncanny realism also induces the visitor to suspect, no matter how briefly, that a real human being is performing on the spot, thus making its title doubly ironic: where, indeed, is the real “Navin”? For an artist immersed in the ethnic and linguistic jungle of “Asia,” does any name, label, or even visual representation, do him justice?

Is it wrong to create an exhibition with themes that are routinely associated with “third world artists?” As both the curator and the critics have convincingly argued, those two themes—“the challenge to national power structures and their offshoots . . . as well as investigation of cultural identities”11—indeed have been central to Southeast Asian art during the past two decades. However, the majority of the works in Negotiating Home, History and Nation had little to do with either political trauma or cultural identity. In fact, many are impossible to classify within any of the themes the curators propose—national memories, religion and spirituality, or women serving as “victor” of storytelling.12

Vol. 12 No. 2 39 Left: Lee Wen, Strange Fruit, 2003, C–prints, 42 x 59.4 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. Right: Navin Rawanchaikul, Where’s Navin?, 2007, painted fibreglass, cloth, and wood, 176 x 67 x 45 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Pinaree Sanpitak, Noon Nom, 2001–02, silk, cotton stuffing, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Most works from Singaporean Jose Legaspi, Untitled 4, 2009, pastel on paper, 100 x 70 cm. artists, for instance, seem to deal Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. with a set of issues that are different from the main themes—such as censorship (), commercialism (Vincent Leow) and emotionally estranged yet physically close relations across generations ()—issues that are more relevant in that particular city state than in the other Southeast Asian countries represented. Filipino artist Jose Legaspi’s clinically accurate yet eerily nightmarish portrayal of violence, perversion, and mental anguish in his series of Untitled (2009), is frankly private and confessional, yet this work also creatively engages with both psychological and pictorial realism, mixing familiar visual icons of Philippine folklore with those of horror films and the more graphic depiction of pain and sacrifice in Catholicism.13 The Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak’s Noon Nom (2010–11), which consists of sixty large pieces of vaguely breast-shaped cloth balls (filled with synthetic fiber, with organza covers) among which the

40 Vol. 12 No. 2 visitor could sit or lie down, has feminist implications, yet it is primarily a piece of relational art—inviting, playful, and deliberately inconsequential. While those individualist works are no less “Asian” than those bearing more familiar themes, they appear marginalized and out of place within the overall installation of the exhibition.

The liberal inclusiveness within Negotiating Home, History and Nation, however, is not without exceptions. Despite all its political critique, the exhibition sidesteps any portrayal or reflection on the conflicts among the various countries represented. Ethnic tensions, both within and across national borders, also seem absent despite their persistent prominence in the region: nothing is present to remind the viewer of uneasy relations Singapore has with its neighbours, nor can anyone tell, from the rich display of religions and ethnicities in the exhibition, that the Chinese, the Muslims, and the Buddhists clashed, often violently, in Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. The tension between the “indigenous” Asians and various stages of Western colonialism, on the other hand, receives considerable attention. The exhibition leaves the impression that, while individual nations might have experienced repression and devastation, the bond between them, facilitated by the networks of artists and curators, remains strong and untroubled. While such a perception, especially regarding the close ties among art communities, might be accurate to a degree, one must be wary of turning art into a kind of “visual massage”—a vehicle through which the ethnic, political, and economic tensions between the Association of Southeast Asian (ASEAN) nations is smoothed over to create a sense of brotherhood and harmony, a regional “imagined community” that is even more false and misleading than the nation.14

National and ethnic conflicts are not the only theme that was excluded (albeit subtly) from Negotiating Home, History and Nation; the curators also make clear that they selected only “contemporary art”—that is to say, artworks that consciously respond to the visual lexicons that have prevailed in the “global art world” during the past century, including modernism and its later, postmodern ramifications.15 The curators tread water carefully: They declare that they do not attempt to define “the contemporary in Southeast Asia” in any conclusive way, yet they also argue that new critical approaches and formal styles emerged in Southeast Asia only in the past two decades—the timeframe chosen for this exhibition— and that the “contemporary turn” was preceded by the encounter between “socio-political art practices and postmodern theory.”16 What they did end up selecting, as a result, would not be out of place in a “world class museum,” international biennial, or art fair anywhere on the globe. In other words, “contemporaneity,” though constantly in flux and hotly contested, is a prerequisite for practically every living artist who wants to be taken seriously. Other types of art are created in abundance, yet they invariably end up in either the low-end commercial market or historical- anthropological oriented museums. Nowadays, “non-contemporary” yet living art may encompass anything from academic realism to “traditional” ink-wash paintings, from totemic statues made for worship to the

Vol. 12 No. 2 41 decorative abstracts hanging in the corporate offices. While one may debate whether the properly “contemporary” sensibilities should dominate the field of fine art, there is little chance that the vast numbers that represent “the other” will ever attract much attention of critics and curators.

If we cannot step out of the “contemporary,” Top: ZERO, CMYK Soft Sculptures, 2010, cotton we might as well acknowledge it and embrace cushion cover and printed iron-on, 150 x 100 x 120 cm it fully. The next major exhibition at SAM, each, (5 sculptures in total). Courtesy of the Singapore Art Panorama: Recent Art from Contemporary Museum. Asia, displayed a range of artworks that are as Left: Justin Lee, Eat Fast Food Fast, 2011, video, 4 mins. diverse as the title suggests. Walking into the Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. first gallery, one encountered the works of two Singaporean artists: Justin Lee’s Eat Fast Food Fast (2011), in which he mixes a McDonald’s value meal—hamburger, fries, Coke, etc.—together in a blender and gulps down the brown slush, and Zero’s installation of two paintings and four cushion- style soft dolls, Agent Provocateur, Monogram, and CMYK Soft Sculptures, all of which feature his design of brightly coloured, graffiti-inspired humanoids. I have sat through many grueling pieces of performance and video art, but I found Lee’s work hard to endure—one cannot help imagining how the mixture of those familiar ingredients must have tasted as he raises the jar to his lips. Yet I wouldn’t say that the work is powerful. The concept seems at once familiar and redundant; after all, to blend any foods of different textures and flavours would produce equally unappetizing results. Also, I found myself asking “why McDonald’s?” It is, of course, a universally recognized symbol, but in a multicultural, densely populated Asian city with numerous choices of small, family-owned “fast food” vendors at every street corner, Lee could have made a stronger, more complex statement. Zero’s dolls, on the other hand, seem merely coy at the first glance. A close look reveals, as the artist points out in an interview conducted by the museum, that the faces of the humanoids are “morbid” and “sad:”17 the eyes are pupil-less, heavily creased, and drooping, the nose literally “thumbed”

42 Vol. 12 No. 2 by an intrusive finger. The short, tapered limbs also add to the sense of helplessness. Yet, like Lee’s work, the installation speaks little of its locality: to imply a sense of morbidity and perversion through seemingly harmless images of pop culture was a trademark of Tokyo Pop, if not the earlier generation of Pop Artists in the US.

Agnes Arellano, Haliya Bathing, 1983, cold cast marble sculpture (polymer resin with marble dust as filler), and crushed marble stones, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Wong Hoy Cheong, Reading To start an important exhibition (After Henri Fantin-Latour’s La Lecture, 1877), from Days of with these two pieces—Panorama is Our Lives, 2009, digital print on archival coated canvas, the museum’s first installment of its 112 x 83 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum. permanent collection—is to make a statement, although I cannot determine whether it is a bold or a reconciliatory one. It is radically irreverent, yet it is also consistent with the museum’s proclivity to entertain—a characteristic shared by many cultural institutions in Singapore. But above all, I am struck by how “non-Asian” the two works appear: Asia happens to be the land where the two artists were born and raised, but no more. This impression persists throughout the exhibition. Not that the artists are avoiding the iconography, themes, or issues of their origins; on the contrary, many appropriate or confront “indigenous” objects, legends, and controversies—the disappearance of bajaj as a mode of transportation in Indonesia in Bajaj Gold, Silver and Bronze (2009–10) by Naisun; the Philippine myth of the Goddess Haliya giving birth in water in Haliya Bathing (1983) by Agnes Arellano; and the awkward condition of Malaysian Muslim women today in Days of Our Lives Series (2009), by Wong Hoy Cheong. What is absent here is a sense of shared identity, a subtle implication that there is something fundamentally “Asian” behind all the works. While I find the curious “locus-less-ness” of some works puzzling, this absence of “Asianness” also feels refreshing and liberating.

The works in Panorama remain primarily from Southeast Asia, with Singapore playing a more prominent role than in Negotiating Home.18

Vol. 12 No. 2 43 But the exhibition also includes two artists from China, one from India, and one from —to justify the “Asia” in the title, of course, but also in keeping with the museum’s acquisition policy, which “devotes 80% of its funds to Southeast Asian art and the remaining 20% to the wider Asian region.”19 The curators wisely refrained from putting such diverse regional experiences and sensibilities under one (or several) thematic umbrella; instead, they choose to structure the exhibition around the all-encompassing idea of “contemporary art.” Remarkably, they have also managed to turn this notoriously slippery and diverse entity into eight “key points,” illustrated by ten of the exhibited works but “can be applied to viewing all kinds of contemporary art.” 20 The two works by Justin Lee and Zero, for example, demonstrate the “irreverent and humorous” aspects of contemporary art, as well as its tendency to mix “high and low culture.” Other important characteristics of contemporary practices, such as the emphasis on the art-making process, site-specificity, and the appropriation of existing pictorial paradigms, are also well exemplified by selected works. Some points seem generic, however, such as contemporary artists “are often influenced by their context or background.”21 Also, one could conceivably criticize the entire undertaking as reductive or superficial—contemporary art, after all, can hardly be summarized in a bulletin list.

But one may also argue that, instead of navigating a labyrinth of theories and concepts, the curators are dealing with the biggest challenge contemporary artists in Asia face: how to make themselves accessible to the majority of its population. The recent market boom does not necessarily translate into popularity among the general public, and although artists have—at least in principle—struggled to bring art out of its institutional confines during the past decades, most of their works remain incomprehensible and irrelevant to all but a small group of urban sophisticates. The accessibility of Panorama, on the other hand, is immediately apparent. Unlike Negotiating Home, History and Nation, all the works are accompanied by large, subtly illuminated, easy-to- read plaques that provide background information as well as clues for interpretation. Visitors can also download The Director’s Guide, which contains the aforementioned eight “key points” and detailed explanations of selected works, and The Educator’s Guide, which includes multiple “activity sheets” from the museum’s Web site.22 In addition, one may also visit “The Learning Gallery,” a separate exhibition hall that has been an integral part of the museum since its founding, but has never before been used so effectively: Here, diverse, thought-provoking works of contemporary Asian art are selected, each supplied with lengthy yet engaging explanations of its sociopolitical and art historical context as well as questions for further contemplation, and available at the door of the gallery. Again, such guidance may appear redundant or even restrictive for more seasoned viewers, yet for an audience with little prior exposure to modern or contemporary art, it provides helpful opportunities. I wish more museums in China—or even in the US—could develop such a practical and thoughtful educational program about contemporary art.

44 Vol. 12 No. 2 Phunk, Electricity (Neon), 2010, carbon ink transfer on wood panels, animated projection, 300 x 830 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Sherman Ong, Hanoi Haiku, 2005, print on archival semi- gloss paper, 75 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

Ang Song Ming, Be True to The desire to reach across and beyond Your School, 2010, 5-channel video. Courtesy of the Asia may well qualify as the strongest Singapore Art Museum. rationale of Panorama. The aesthetic contemporaneity of these works also represents the face of the “new Asia” they come from, where identities are being crafted anew and articulated in a more or less “universal” language. In other words, the strategy of identity politics that since the 1980s has marked artists who live in the “periphery” is now being resolutely rejected; thus the absence of a fixation on ethnicity- based identity has become a sign of avant-garde pride. The Singaporean artists seem to lead the way in this triumphant cosmopolitanism: With the sole exception of the art and design collective Phunk, whose glittering Neon (2010) mirrors the over-electrified city of Singapore (although, as the curator points out, such “neonized” landscapes are far from unique in Asian metropolises), all the works in Panorama by Singaporean artists appear curiously rootless. Sherman Ong’s Hanoi Haiku (2005) series, made during his residency in Vietnam under the Goethe Institut Art ConneXions project, is perhaps the best example: featuring the street scenes of Hanoi, the beautifully assembled triptychs are inspired by the aesthetics of haiku—poetry created through the juxtaposition of seemingly banal imagery. To push the rejection of fixed identities even further, Ong admits that he learned about the idea of “visual haikus” from Sculpting in Time, a book by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, the English translation of which was published in 1987.23 Ang Song-Ming’s video Be True to Your School (2010) records scenes of high school reunions he observed during his years of residency in Japan, and six of the Singaporean artists in the exhibition work with abstraction, in both two-dimensional and three-

Vol. 12 No. 2 45 dimensional forms. The only work with clear local relevance is Tang Mun Kit’s White Elephant Expostulation (2007), which makes reference to public outrage in Singapore regarding a redundant subway station in 2005, yet the explanatory plaque still stresses the arte povera influence in its aesthetics. In other words, the works of these Singaporean artists are mostly either “pan- Asian” or not “Asian” at all.

Tang Mun Kit, The Hidden White Elephant Expostulation, 2006–07, canvas, stitching, acrylic sheets, cotton netting, wooden found objects, wood dye, preservatives, acrylic paint, LED strips, red bulbs, sockets/wiring, 366 x 396 x 28 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore Art Museum.

One might attribute such a lack of local Zhou Xiaohu, Crowd of Bystanders, 2003-2005, clay content to censorship or self-censorship in statues, video animation, 800 x 800 cm. Courtesy of the Singapore, which raised much controversy Singapore Art Museum. in the 1990s and still exerts its influence today;24 works from other countries refer to their respective origins more liberally,

yet they are also anything but provincial. Wiyoga Muhardanto, Conversation Pieces, 2010, The Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu’s Crowd installation. Courtesy of the of Bystanders (2003–05), for example, Singapore Art Museum. clearly draws from the century-old intellectual critique of the “bystanders’ mentality” (pangguanzhe xintai) within the Chinese population—the morbid Nalini Milani, Hamletmachine, curiosity and prevailing indifference 2000, 4-channel video installation. Courtesy of the observable in crowds faced with spectacles Singapore Art Museum. of injustice, suffering, or violence. The ten groups of “bystanders” in his installation, however, feature several scenarios from the global theatre: The 9/11 terrorist attack and the trial of Saddam Hussein, as well as more generic references to idol worship in a temple or the electrocution of a criminal. Each scene is staged as both a group sculpture of clay figures and a black-and-white animated narrative played on a monitor placed next to the sculptures, and the crude, homogeneous appearance of these clay figures further enhances their lack of ethnic specificity. The exhibition hall of Indonesian art, located at the 8Q branch of SAM, features two heavily conceptual works that poke fun at institution of art: Wiyoga Muhardanto’s Conversation Piece (2010) and Syagini Ratna Wulan’s Biblio Tea (2011). The former is an installation of several

46 Vol. 12 No. 2 Syagini Ratna Wulan, Biblio pairs of hyper-real and fashionably dressed legs that are visible beneath lifted Tea, 2011, installation. Courtesy of the Singapore Art curtains, which, according to the placard on the wall, depict typical members Museum. of the “art circle” in Indonesia today—rich wives, professional dealers, and hip artists who form an exclusive society “behind the curtains.” The latter features a “teashop” that parodies a museum shop or an art collective, with titles of works listed as menus, boards covered with slogans or photographs of artists, and books that bear titles such as Blood and Beauty and World’s Greatest Conceptual Impostors yet carry nothing but blank pages inside. Both works are delightful, and their irony, although originating within an Indonesian context, can easily apply to art communities everywhere in the world. The Indian artist Nalini Malani’s Hamletmachine (2000), an ambitious work that takes up an entire room with a triptych of gigantic video projections on the wall, one projection on a bed of salt on the floor, and surrounding sound effects, is supposed to address a distinctly local and personal issue: the Hindu-Muslim conflicts in India, which resulted in Partition in 1947 and rendered the Karachi-born Nalini and her family refugees. Yet the artist chose to make explicit references to Hamlet, the prototype of human fickleness and the inability to act, and to the German playwright Heiner Müller’s 1977 work Hamletmachine, which depicts the violent split of a nation and the consequent trauma. It also employs a Japanese Butoh dancer, on whose body a montage of images is projected—the scenes of riots in India and Pakistan are interspersed with abstract patterns as well as an array of faces and objects. The audience has to rely on the artist’s monologue, which is cryptic and often indecipherable among the accompanying drumbeats, in order to penetrate the layered intertextuality and comprehend how this work is relevant to the ethnic conflicts in India; all the same, the sophisticated, multicultural intentions of the artist come across with conviction.

What does all this imply for the Singapore Art Museum and for the idea of “Asian art”? First of all, in this age of globalization and migration, one’s identity, as Homi Bhabha has famously argued, has become an issue of itinerary instead of fixated, essentialist topography.25 All the artists presented have “traveled” across and beyond Asia—physically,

Vol. 12 No. 2 47 intellectually and emotionally—and their works are shaped more by such experiences than the locality of their birth. But as important, while such dislocation used to be a source of nostalgia, anxiety, alienation, or deliberate awkwardness for the “T.W.A.” artists, Asian artists today seem to be increasingly comfortable with hybridity. One may speculate that the rising prominence of Asia, enhanced by its relative immunity to the recent global recession, is manifesting itself in the sphere of culture. Only those who are secure about their own identity can accommodate the “other” with ease, and Panorama seems to suggest that Asia is in the process of acquiring such confidence. The exhibition Outside In: Chinese X American X Contemporary Art (March 5–June 7, 2009, Princeton University Art Museum), which displayed works created by Chinese-American as well as ethnically non-Chinese artists, may count as an example of such expansiveness;26 maybe it is time to forgo “Asian” as an adjective when contemporary art is the subject.

However, such exuberance cannot stand up to close scrutiny. The cosmopolitanism of some artworks seems contrived—the multicultural references in Hamletmachine, for example, are rich to the point of obscurity and pedantry. More importantly, the erasure as well as expansion of what can be perceived to be “art of Asia” continues to be selective within Asia, and the standard of selection—the elusive yet authoritative “contemporaneity”—in fact becomes more elitist than ever, especially if one considers that the vast majority of people in the parts of Asia represented in Panorama still have little or no access to the advantages offered by cosmopolitanism. To travel, to acquire the taste for other cultures, to become familiar with an artistic lexicon that is current, and to engage with “international” institutions and agents is a privilege that only a handful can enjoy—with the apparent exception of Singapore, a city-state with a relatively small population and land mass, where cosmopolitanism, at least at a mundane and materialist level, is more easily available. In a manner that is subtle yet persuasive, the Singapore Art Museum extols the exceptionalism of its city-state. This ease of switching among cultures, together with a business-friendly environment and an English-speaking population, is precisely what Singapore uses to compete against its neighbouring giants in the race to become the “art centre of Asia.”27

Whether one chooses to retain a uniquely Asian identity or to reject it, the political agenda behind such choices should not be overlooked. In other words, the concept of Asian art remains ideologically fraught. When we encounter a display of Asian art, we are obliged to ask, “whose Asia? What art?” The answers can be illuminating. Negotiating Home and Panorama offer seemingly paradoxical answers to those questions: The Asia they represent is both a tight-knit community and a “global village” without borders, and the art on display is at once bound up with the history, religion, and culture of its origin and accessible to all, bespeaking visual sensibilities and conceptual sophistication that are decisively “contemporary.” In combination, the two exhibitions showcase how art can articulate the status and ambitions of a culture—within Southeast Asia, in Asia at large, and in a world of shifting paradigms.

48 Vol. 12 No. 2 Notes 1 The most obvious examples would be Ernest Fenollosa, Okakura Teshin, and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the “three luminaries of Asian art” in the early twentieth century. Their perceptions of “Oriental art” were also perpetuated by many institutions, collectors, and artists at the time, in Europe, America, and Asia. 2 Singapore Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum: A Perspective (Roseville, N.S.: Fine Arts Pty. Ltd., 1996), 3. 3 "Exhibition Synopsis," Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Educator’s Guide, Singapore Art Museum, available at http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/downloads/nhhn_educator_guide.pdf. 4 Seven Singaporean artists were selected in the exhibition, already an outsized representation. All but Malaysia, however, had more artists represented. 5 Eugene Tan’s “Institution of the Future: Singapore,” published in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 11, no. 5 (September–October 2012), is a resounding statement of the Singapore government’s intentions on this front. 6 Iola Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991–2011 (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011), 9–10. 7 There was no translation available in the gallery, and the texts were not explained during the curatorial tour offered on May 24, 2011, which was admittedly constrained by time (one hour). One has to look to the end of the exhibition catalogue for translation; see Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation, 241–2. 8 Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation, 20. 9 See the artist’s statements at Rama IX Art Museum, the Web site of Thai Modern and Contemporary Art (http://www.rama9art.org/manit_s/). The Pink Man series started 1997 as a parody of the rampant consumerism the artist observed in Bangkok. 10 Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessing: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 15. 11 Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, “Southeast Asia Artists Look to the Present,” New York Times, April 27, 2011. 12 Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation, 20–7. 13 For more detailed commentary on Lepaspi’s handling of the imagery of horror, see an introduction of the artist from the exhibition Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia, August 13–November 6, 2011). Available at http://www.portrait.gov.au/ site/exhibition_subsite_beyondtheself_artist.php?artistID=10&languageID=1 - start/. 14 Apinan Poshyananda, “The Future: Post–Cold War, Postmodernism, Postmarginalia (Playing with Slippery Lubricants),” in Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993). 15 There is no consensus on what constitutes “contemporary art,” yet it is evident that “contemporary art practice is saturated with deep, detailed—but not always (or even often) systematic—knowledge of art history.” See Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 244. 16 See Lenzi, ed., Negotiating Home, History and Nation, 10–11, 85. 17 The interview is available on YouTube and accessible through the official site of the exhibition. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEv54Ed3Qw&feature=plcp/. 18 Thirteen of the forty-one artists are Singaporean; two of them are originally from Yugoslavia (Milenko Privacki) and Korea (Om Mee Ai). 19 See the “Collection” section on the SAM Web site, at http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/the_ collection/. 20 Tan Boon Hui, Panorama, Director’s Guide (2012), downloadable at http://www.singaporeartmuseum. sg/exhibitions/details.php?id=112. 21 Ibid. 22 Educator’s Guide, together with “Primary Activity Worksheet” and “Secondary Activity Worksheet,” is downloadable at the same Web site. 23 The interview is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEv54Ed3Qw&feature=plcp/. 24 Notable examples include Josef Ng, who was banned from performing in public after his provocative performance in 1994, and Simon Fujiwara, whose work was “altered” without the artist’s permission at the 2011 . But more often, the state’s control of the arts is achieved through the granting as well as withdrawal of funds, and its power has grown as the funding increased in recent years. 25 For Homi Bhabha’s theories on hybridity and dislocated identity, see his monograph The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) and article “Cultures in Between,” in David Bennett, ed., Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 29–36. Bhabha also brings up this argument in the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council Symposium, Part 3, “Exhibiting Asian Art—Alternative Models and Non-Western Paradigms,” published in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, no. 5 (September/October 2008), 67–98. 26 As Sohl Lee points out, the exhibition sits “awkwardly” between Chinese and American art as well as contemporary and “traditional” art, and challenges the very construction of both polarity. See Lee, “Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 4 (July/August 2009), 88–97. 27 In Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, “Singapore Nurtures Art with Bureaucratic Touch,” New York Times, November 12, 2012), various gallery owners discuss the advantages of opening galleries in Singapore, as compared with other Asian countries—and with China in particular. Interestingly, the article carries a more sensational title in the Times’ Chinese version: “ ”[Singapore surpasses China in becoming the center of art in Asia].

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