INTERLACED JOURNEYS INTERLACED INTERLACED JOURNEYS Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art Edited by Patrick D. Flores & Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art INTERLACED JOURNEYS| Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art brings together the work of some of the most engaging art historians and curators from Southeast Asia and beyond that explores the notion of diaspora in contemporary visual culture. Regional attention on this particular condition of movement and resettlement has oen been conned to sociological studies, while the place of diaspora in Southeast Asian contemporary art remains mostly unexplored. is is the rst anthology to examine the subject from the complex perspective of artistic and curatorial practice as it attempts to propose multiple narratives of diaspora in relation to a range of articulations in the contemporary context. INTERLACED JOURNEYS Diaspora and the Contemporary in Southeast Asian Art Edited by Patrick D. Flores & Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Editing Patrick D. Flores Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani Copyediting Thelma Arambulo Carlos Quijon, Jr. First and foremost, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to the writers whose insightful Design chapters, developed for this publication, have helped to advance the discourse on migration and Belle Leung for Osage Design diaspora, Southeast Asia, and contemporary Southeast Asian art. We hope this publication to be but the initial step towards a larger research and exploration on the topic of migration and border crossing Publication Coordination in the region. Carlos Quijon, Jr. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to the artists included in this book whose invaluable art practices and Publication Support viewpoints have inspired the writers and editors. We are also deeply grateful for their kind permission SAM Fund for Arts and Ecology, Indonesia to reproduce images of their works throughout the volume. We extend our utmost gratitude to artist Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong Dinh Q. Lê, whose artwork appears on the cover of this book. Publishing We greatly appreciate the research undertaken by each writer and are thankful for the support of Osage Publications their host institutions worldwide. We are also indebted to all who have helped and facilitated the research process of this book. Our deep appreciation goes to Professor Ashley Thompson, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London; Professor Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne; and Professor Patrick D. Flores (co-editor of the volume), University 4/F, 20 Hing Yip Street, Kwun Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong of the Philippines, for their sustained encouragement received at all stages of this endeavor, and www.oaf.cc | www.hkact.hk (852) 2389 8332 whose vision and support in pursuing the completion of the manuscript, and insightful feedback [email protected] osagehk osagehongkong throughout, have been of utmost importance. Our utmost gratitude goes to Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong, under the leadership of Agnes Lin, ISBN 978-988-77281-4-6 for its unstinting guidance towards editorial support and the publishing of this book. We are proud to First Edition, 500 copies be part of the Foundation’s vision of fostering greater understanding of and knowledge on Southeast March 2020 Asian art and culture. We are also tremendously grateful to SAM Fund for Arts and Ecology, Indonesia, for its generosity in supporting our efforts and in making this project possible. ©2020 The authors and Osage Art Foundation Ltd. Last but not least, we acknowledge and recognize every migrant of Southeast Asia, those who have crossed the borders of their own countries under difficult circumstances and have experienced lives as All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by outsiders and have lived elsewhere. We dedicate this book to them. any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. The publisher does not warrant or assume any legal responsibilities for the publication‘s contents. all opionions expressed in the [Editors’ Note: Southeast Asian names are presented in the manner of their country of origin, unless book are of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Osage Publications or Osage Art Foundation Ltd. otherwise specified] Cover image : Dinh Q LE, Persistence of Memory #10, 2000-2001.C-print and linen tape. CONTENTS 7 95 Foreword Ways of Unbelonging: Myanmar and “There, hapless state…”: The Geopoetic of Diaspora Co-Suffering Zasha Colah Patrick D. Flores Transpatial Bodies: The Artist in the 17 Diaspora Introduction Mobility and Curating the Contemporary 113 Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani Anybody: Diasporic Subjectivities and the Figure of the ‘Historical’ Buddha Ashley Thompson Locality and Movement: Redefining the ‘Diasporic’ in Southeast 129 Asian Art Practices The Koboi Project: diasporic Artist… diasporic Art 29 Niranjan Rajah Distinguishing Artistic Mobility from Diaspora through Philippine Art History 151 Eva Bentcheva Dwelling in Travel as an Aesthetic Practice Brigitta Isabella 47 Planning Home: Disaporic Curatorial Practice 167 against Policy from Homeland Postscript Vipash Purichanont The Global, the South, the Cosmos Nikos Papastergiadis 65 Where is the Dragon Boat Going? New 177 Institutional Geographies of Our Time Authors Nikita Yingqian Cai Art, Politics, and Diaspora 79 Recollecting Collateral Damage: Diasporic Artists and the American War in Viet Nam Cathy J. Schlund-Vials FOREWORD 7 “There, hapless state…”: The Geopoetic of Co-Suffering1 Patrick D. Flores In 2017, I was asked to do a keynote address at the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens. The symposium titled “On Homelands and the Stateless as the World Tilts Right” was co-organized by the Fast Forward Festival and Creative Time. The conference brief framed its urgency thus: “Athens today is witness to two of the world’s most urgent, and lived, issues. The destruction wrought by the Syrian war has caused thousands to flee to Greece’s shores. At the same time, a strict austerity regime and the resurgence of neoliberalism have caused a multifaceted social crisis. Globally, these events have found terrifying handmaidens in the rise of xenophobia, reactive populism, and waning support for internationalism. At this critical conjuncture, the symposium will address the challenges facing progressive artists and activist communities under prevailing economic and political conditions.”2 I began my presentation with a sense of location. After all, the terms that animated the gathering— homelands and statelessness—gestured towards both a ground on which to prevail and the condition of losing this ground brought about by an exceptional turn, or a tilt, towards that which refuses and resists the moral world of location. In reflecting on this intersection that is the moral world of location, I am drawn to the term “local moral world” crafted by the medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman who regards the “local world” as “the ethnographer’s village, neighborhood, networks, family, and other institutions”.3 Kleinman continues that “even in a vast sea of globalization, in which we are more acutely aware that local worlds have permeable boundaries, undergo frequent change, and that their members may belong to several different networks at the same time… the local [endures] as the grounds of social life”.4 Kleinman recognizes this local ground of social life in a global world and further rescales it through “local biologies with particular moral-bodily connections”.5 I think we should all begin in this enduring local ecology when we speak of homelands and statelessness, tropes that may translate into a range of formations, subjectivities, and interventions of what Geeta Kapur calls the citizen artist and the political artist.6 And since they are tropes, they are meant to always turn and incline, to always 1 Parts of this text are lifted from the keynote of the same title delivered at Creative Time Symposium in Athens. The Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece, 13–14 May 2017. 2 “On Homelands and the Stateless as the World Tilts Right,” Onassis, 13 May 2017, https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast- forward-festival-4/fff4-international-symposium-homelands-and-stateless-world-tilts-right. 3 Arthur Kleinman, “Experience and Its Moral Modes: Culture, Human Conditions, and Disorder,” accessed 15 July 2019, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/k/Kleinman99.pdf. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 See Geeta Kapur, “Secular Artist, Citizen Artist,” in Art and Social Change, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Tate Publishing and Afterall, 2007), 422–39. 8 9 tilt in a particular direction, to be always rendered vulnerable to the excitations and expositions of any violated the borders and destroyed states from Afghanistan to Libya. The people from those countries form of creative practice or sensible life. were forced to flee our bombs and the violence of our terrorist proxy armies. When we destroyed their states, we reduced them to nothing.”12 And in light of this nothingness, the pavilion proposes a political My location is art history. And I went to this conference with some thoughts on how this discipline, response: “For the state in time, taking an ethical stance means opening a political perspective. We need which is of nineteenth century vintage and well within the scopic regime of the museum