Invocation of Montien Boonma (1953–2000) almost always arrives in the form of an elegy. Best known for meditative sculptural installations that incorporate herbal medicines and earthy fragrances, he was a rising star of the international biennial circuit before an untimely death from cancer at the age of forty-seven. For many curators and critics who came to prominence in the 1990s, Montien’s work carried the promise of profundity for “contemporary Asian art,” back when the field still had to prove its capacity for aesthetic and philosophical complexity in comparison to so-called traditional art.¹ His contemplative brand of Buddhism—unbeholden to national essentialisms but also ostensibly undiluted by “sloppy New Age enthusiasms”—exemplified a particularly credible cross-cultural currency.² In his native Thailand, Montien was likewise heralded as a pathfinder who pioneered an approach to local materials and religious subject matter without nostalgia.³ His legacy has been consolidated in fetes of hagiographic commemoration otherwise reserved for modernist masters of an older generation.⁴ Death has, in short, made a heroic figure out of Montien.

If these narratives deserve revisiting, it is not only for the sobriety of historical distance, but also in light of the rich archive that Montien left behind. Located in his old studio space in Bangkok, Montien Atelier houses a collection of drawings, letters, faxes, and emails that chart the artist’s trajectory across Chiang Mai, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Brisbane, and other nodes of an emergent contemporary art world. More than an index of geographic mobility, the selection of documents catalogued thus far reveals his expansive intellectual appetite, ranging from an engagement with European philosophy (notes on Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean-Paul Sartre abound) to an interest in the vibrant world of religious commerce during the boom years of the Thai economy (think magical amulets and spirit shrines).⁵ A less dreamy picture of an artist emerges here, one perhaps as doubting and skeptical as he is faithful, and certainly without the mystique of ascetic withdrawal. The archive offers the possibility of refiguring Montien’s relationship to the sign of Buddhism that hangs over his oeuvre.

Consider House of Hope (1996–97), a work that marks a departure from his usual reference to Buddhist iconography for the generic shape of a gabled house. An installation shot taken at Deitch Projects in New York presents the work as a dramatic stage set against an otherworldly backdrop (fig. 2). We can imagine wandering up the red steps into the porous but forebodingly dense forest of medicinal prayer beads. There is an urge to enter and be absorbed into this shadow architecture, the hanging weight of which centers the gravity of the room. Painted directly onto the walls with aromatic herbal pigments, a band of smoky clouds wafts in an atmosphere that intimates ethereal ascent. “House of Hope is abstract,” Montien noted in 1997. “It concerns the existence of something large, but which we cannot grasp. Like how we think God exists, but we have never truly known. He has never shown himself. It has been a story of hope all along.”⁶ All too aware of being pigeonholed as a “Buddhist artist,” Montien gestures here toward a more expansive thematization of faith.

Critic Holland Cotter would later call House of Hope “the most moving New York gallery installation I had seen in years.”⁷ Others praised it for offering an emotional experience that transcended specific religious reference, reaching a “doctrine-free spiritualization of art.”⁸ However, with no other work of his did Montien express such profound skepticism. In various published and unpublished conversations, he revealed his unhappiness with its first iteration in Japan, ambivalence about the New York version, and uncertainty if it would restage well in Athens.⁹ Production and staging issues abounded in what was his grandest project to date, especially if measured by its unprecedented scale of production (over 300,000 beads and 440 stools). Yet Montien’s frustration, I think, concerned more than the challenge of achieving largeness or immersion. His choice of a culturally unspecific shape, staged within the archetypal space of the white cube, was an ambitious experiment with the neutral. In an art world that was quick to collapse aesthetic experience into essentialisms (Thai, Buddhist) and universalisms (spiritual, transcendent), what did it mean to chart a middle path?

But first, a detour through the question of shape. After all, Montien’s oeuvre sees the preponderance of immediately recognizable silhouettes, whether the Buddha’s head and torso, the round vessel of the monk’s alms bowl, or the conical towerlike construction of the stupa (Buddhist reliquary). Exemplary of his earliest work, Paintings and Candles (1990) de-monumentalizes the form of a stupa into a precarious pyramid of wax panels leaning against the wall (fig. 3). Coated with a thick layer of candle wax, the surface is then charred to produce a smoky triangular shadow across the panels. The fleshy skin is molten and gouged with wounding incisions that turn the architectural reference into a carnal one or, according to Montien, “give it a real physical presence in the room at the same level as the viewer.”¹⁰ Where critics were quick to take any reference to the stupa as evidence of his Buddhist faith, they missed altogether the unorthodoxy of his gesture. Paintings and Candles carries a sensuous organicity in a manner that recalls, almost contemporaneously, Janine Antoni’s lard cubes and Wolfgang Laib’s beeswax panels.¹¹ As much as Montien may have been interested in evoking the stupa’s historical ritual and symbolic associations, he rooted the encounter firmly in the present tense of a corporeal encounter. Shape became the basis for a psychosomatic relationship between geometric figure and lived body.¹²

No mere formalist concern, shape cut to the heart of identity politics in the 1990s, when the evocation of objects native to an artist’s background routinely served as a cipher for cultural difference, and often exoticism. Shape, however, also afforded escape from the tyranny of origins. A contemporaneous comparison for House of Hope might be found in Do Ho Suh’s geometrized life-size replicas of his childhood home, whose ethereal apparition in silk gauze suggests the fluid physical mobility of the itinerant artist.¹³ For both Suh and Montien, architecture need not be durable or monumental—or preoccupied with cultural memory—to have staying power. But where Suh insisted in the haunting domestic detail of his house’s specific furnishings and finishings, Montien reached for a house in a more elemental sense with his earthy materials and woody scents. Seemingly rootless form, if rendered through evocative materiality, can hold a phantasmatic quality. By playing on this tension between architectural abstraction and an appeal to the deeply visceral, House of Hope holds out a promise of remapping the terms of the specificity and malleability of cultural associations.

Montien’s approach in the work might then be described as less tethered to symbolic meaning and more concerned about the dynamics that intertwine building and body, shape and subjectivity. The house that from afar looks durable and even solid, when up close becomes diffuse, no longer a discrete geometric form that we confront, but rather a blurred field. Its earthy, fragrant materiality conditions the entire interior weather of a space, playing off the currents of swirling clouds that evoke the gentle heat of incense. Montien was known to invite viewers to lay down on the red wooden platform, to be showered in what he called a “torrent of black rain.”¹⁴ The cool touch of the clay beads cuts against the temperature of the vermilion sky. Minimalism gives way to meteorology, as we oscillate between seeming tactility to synesthetic immateriality and back.¹⁵ His analogy to religious space provides insight: “When you enter a temple, it makes you warm. I use the word ‘warm’ because there’s the feeling that we will be given help—like having a father and mother to protect us. These shrines used to be centers of healing and faith, where people would go and propitiate the gods and at the same time do chants and take medicine, so it was also a kind of psychotherapy.”¹⁶ Architecture as constructed form or iconographic order may provide an entry point, but it is the way that space inscribes social relations and shared mood that is of interest. In other words, if shape was Montien’s compositional tool, his true medium was atmospheric. At turns warming and cooling, House of Hope changes the weather in the white cube to one that is less aridly didactic or cerebral, priming mind and body for more supple states of becoming.

If, so far, we have meandered—between shape and subjectivity, structure and environment, directed attention and diffuse affect—it is for reasons that relate back to the question of Buddhism that hangs over this discussion. Most accounts cite Montien’s debt to both the forest monk Ajarn Chah (1918–1992) and the reformist monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (1906–1993), for whom meditation was a central practice. These references provided a dependable source of Montien’s moral and intellectual legitimacy, especially for a Euro-American audience—or even an upper-middle class Thai audience—that favored a soteriology of withdrawn ascetism. And yet, his investment in practices of oscillation points to a structure of experience that barely accords with the focused concentration that is essential to meditation. Even as his works may offer opportunities for detached repose, they also invite interaction and even touch, driving bodily performances that go beyond the purely meditative. The minimalism of Montien’s shapes is a red herring that misleads us down a genealogy of quiet contemplative Buddhism, when his works may in fact have more to do with crowded and colorful everyday scenes of ritual propitiation that appeal directly to the senses.

After all, Montien was more attuned to the consumerist trappings of religion than most. Following his wife’s cancer diagnosis in 1994, he went in search of hope and healing from the many cults that sprung up in the bubble years of the Thai economy. In a 1995 interview, he recalls: “I went and made propitiations at shrines everywhere. I would chant continuously the Jinapanjara (an ancient mantra, popularised by the late Buddhist saint, Somdej Toh of Wat Rakhang) and whatever I found in Lok Thip magazine (literally ‘Heavenly World,’ a journal focused on the Buddhist supernatural). I took an oath to Mother Kuan Im (Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion) to stop eating beef. I went to pray to the Buddha relics of Doi Suthep and Khruba Sriwichai.”¹⁷ Instead of casting Montien as a pensive thinker, it might then be more accurate to also picture him, at times, as a restless pilgrim in search of talismanic promises. The grammar of his Buddhism entailed breathing meditation, but also propitiation rituals, esoteric prayers, and offerings to charismatic images of Hindu, Chinese, and animist bent.¹⁸ In these scenarios, atmosphere again matters. “If you go look in Khmer temples [prasat khom], you will see black marks on the walls, traces of incense and candle smoke. It is a reminder of prayer, stained with memories of begging.”¹⁹ For all that religion may offer by way of doctrines and promises of ultimate truth, Montien turned to the primal importance of acknowledging what we do not know. The house of hope is a place of not knowing.

It is under this sign of ambivalence and openness that a less idealistic account of House of Hope’s realizationcomes into view. For the initial idea of the work lacked any of the immersive atmospheric play that we now see as its defining quality. The sketch for House of Hope—originally submitted as a conceptual proposal to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) in 1996—shows with schematic clarity the house in its totality, as well as its constituent units (fig. 5).²⁰ The structure’s porosity is overshadowed by an impression of impenetrability, as the shape emerges as a dense overlay of precisely drawn lines. This laborious graphic presentation calls attention to the sheer number of beads and stools required to achieve density, perhaps in implicit justification of a financial advance to cover production and shipping costs. The inclusion of a human figure to provide scale is expected, but here, the surrounding elements also function to highlight the installation’s obduracy. A ghostly human silhouette is juxtaposed against, on one side, the house’s solid curtain wall and, on the other side, medicinal beads drawn to real size to solicit the viewer’s literal grasp.²¹

This schematic clarity, intended to make the work believable for the commissioner, belies the fact that its construction remained untested. For the work’s first staging at MOT in April 1997, Montien relied on the museum’s production team to devise a suspended metal frame from which the beads would hang.²² It was only upon arriving in Tokyo that Montien realized that the fabricated frame, overly chunky and in a distractingly bright white, undercut the levitative quality he wanted; worse yet, the work was assigned to a large gallery, leaving plenty of empty space, which negated the intimacy he sought.²³ As he later recalled, “In Japan, the scent emanates from the work. But for New York, it is as if we have entered a sauna. The work gives an impression of warmth. As soon as you enter the room, herbal aromas surround you. I like the work in New York better. The Japanese version felt too sparse. Ineffective.”²⁴ Despite Montien’s criticism, the Japanese crew could hardly be blamed. After all, the drawing he had submitted prioritized a sense of physical integrity. The team accordingly ensured that the structure, which had to hold the weight of 1,648 strands of hanging beads, was also sturdy enough to be safely entered by visitors, though at the cost of its outsized ponderability.

In the same way that no concept of religion can be relayed without material translation, House of Hope’s making points to the way that there is no such thing as a predetermined shape of experience that can be transported frictionlessly. The invitation to present the work again at Deitch Projects later in 1997 offered Montien the opportunity to propose the wraparound mural, whose spatial illusionism was a deviation from his usual painterly style. In this manner, the freestanding sculptural object dwarfed by the room gave way to a transformation of the room into an immersive enclosure. While this version was successful by comparison to Tokyo, Montien nonetheless equivocated, “I did not let the beads touch the ground in New York. I did not feel good about the cement floor at Deitch Projects.”²⁵ The coldness of the floor mitigated the warmth that he wished to conjure, a testament to the emphasis Montien placed on calibrating the right interior weather. Indeed, temperature was a recurrent challenge with which the artist contended in his travels; Apisit recalls a project in Scandinavia where Montien asked for his work to be stored in the HVAC room for the heat and humidity to activate the organic pigment—to return the suppleness and chromatic saturation it had in the tropics.²⁶ The seeming interchangeability of white cubes belies differentiation across cultural and climatic zones.

This transnational story of House of Hope’s realization is, in many respects, one of an artist at the height of his powers and peak of circulation. Here was Montien ascendant, producing a project of unprecedented scale that fully leveraged the infrastructure of transnational financing, distributed fabrication, and multilingual mediation that constituted the art world. But he was also made keenly aware of the limits of this infrastructure. In an interview given in the fall of 1997—as the Asian financial crisis was in full swing—Montien criticized the installation shots from Deitch Projects with uncharacteristic harshness: “I don’t like them at all. They’re too perspectival. Because the gallery is so small, they had to take the frontal photo from the entryway. It’s a difficult work to photograph.”²⁷ With the crash of the Thai baht, and with the desertion of the hotels and skyscrapers that once housed Bangkok’s commercial galleries, photographic mediation was the only means that remained for the work’s movement. For all the lubricants and cultural currencies of the art world, the prospects of its showing in Thailand became impossible in the face of real economic illiquidity. Ostensibly a mobile architecture of faith, House of Hope could not travel to where its solace may have been most needed.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the narrative rehearsed here, it concerns the insufficiency of branding Montien’s art as “Buddhist.” The term has been mobilized for interpretations with relish for authenticity and Orientalist stereotype, a far cry from the complex relationship to faith evinced in his approach. This is not simply a retrospective observation, for the postmodern critique was already immanent, with Montien himself a passionate student of continental philosophy. Given his time at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1986 to 1988, it was the legacy of Jean-François Lyotard’s mega-exhibition Les immateriaux (1985) at the Centre Pompidou that plausibly loomed large over his intellectual formation. The show was significant in thematizing global postmodernity as a question concerning communicative technologies that shape a mediated imagination of distant and fragmented cultural “spaces” or “zones.”²⁸ That Montien had metabolized such semiotic lessons is made clear on a page of undated handwritten notes titled “Postmodern.” He wrote: “Meaning is not communication (information) or signification (symbolism) BUT it is the house where experience lives [sing mi yu asai khong prasopkan], which holds the constant play of difference. The incommensurability of the message is one pathway towards emptiness.”²⁹

To revisit Montien’s legacy with the question of how discursive structures enable—or stifle—play allows us to see that the biennials, exhibitions, and even the discourse of “contemporary Asian art” in which he figured so prominently were frameworks for the management of cultural difference that made room for the religious but also often accelerated its reification. But these spaces, ungoverned by the norms of orthodox religious architecture, were also critical opportunities for articulating a malleability of faith that need not be beholden to traditional markers of identity. With its resolution for the most nondescript of shapes, House of Hope may be—to take on Montien’s phrasing—a house where difference lives.

House of Hope is currently on view in Gallery 211 at MoMA.

With gratitude for Wong Binghao and Roger Nelson, thoughtful interlocutors; Jumpong Bank Boonma, Apisit Nongbua, and Apinan Poshyananda, generous keepers of memory; Petch Osathanugrah and Poolsri Praepipatmongkol, in memoriam.

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There is always more at stake in a market than prices. So goes a fundamental lesson of anthropology. Beliefs, norms, obligations, and other non-utilitarian valuations are in play, together providing the scaffolding that gives meaning to material acts of exchange. In the Marketplace suggests something of the difficult task of picturing embeddedness. A hand clutching a bundle of cash is at the painting’s center, yet the significance of monetary transaction is subsumed into the fray. A raucous din suffuses the crowded composition, as figures jostle one another, pushing up against the tightly cropped frame. With their mouths open and limbs wildly gesticulating, the women appear to be engaging in a choreography that construes communication as commotion. Extended hands and pointed digits take on expressive lives of their own—the marketplace here being defined less by sovereign agents than by disjointed gestures of uncertain intentionality. A young girl to the left proffers an offering to an unseen divinity above. Another girl in the distant background has her eyes closed, as if this were all a numinous dream. God, or gods, inhabit the scene.

In the Marketplace was painted in 1955 by Anita Magsaysay-Ho (1914–2012), first cousin of then-president of the Philippines, Raymond Magsaysay, and in the words of a contemporary critic, “the most popular painter in the country.”¹ The work’s subjects, native women with awkward, angular features, had been a “Magsaysay trademark” since her student days at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1947.² But this small egg tempera painting represents a particularly ambitious compositional attempt, featuring the largest group of figures the artist would ever assemble. Magsaysay-Ho must have anticipated In the Marketplace not only as a magnum opus of sorts, but also as a hot commodity. “The mere mention of a new Ho painting is as good as sold,” critic Emmanuel Torres marveled in 1957.³ Indeed, the work would later go on to shatter the auction record for a Filipino artist, selling for nearly four hundred thousand US dollars in 1999.⁴ No wonder that Magsaysay-Ho’s detractors, both then and now, have interpreted her fascination with native women as symptomatic of an elite gaze trained upon an idealized world of the folk.⁵ Put in the most critical terms, the marketplace of her painting could be said to present a primitivist imagination of an economy unalienated from the spiritual.

Yet the strangeness of In the Marketplace—its refusal of the saccharine—belies plain nostalgic longing. Embedded as Magsaysay-Ho was in the booming art market, what would it mean to take her seriously, not only as a painter, but also as an observer of the economy? Could In the Marketplace be said to respond to its own condition as an exemplary artwork-commodity? The first step in answering these questions may be to revisit the idea of “moral economy,” toward which the painting gestures. The term broadly refers to the nexus of beliefs, obligations, practices, and emotions that underpin market exchange, and is often applied to describe subaltern resistance to the encroachment of modern price-making markets.⁶ But the rich have moral economies too, even if such economies encode unjust patterns of accumulation. Magsaysay-Ho had a front-row seat to new flows of transnational capital that, commandeered largely by Catholic, mestizo elites, fed the rapid development of postwar Manila.⁷ With this view toward its embeddedness in channels of elite desire, In the Marketplace is perhaps a response more to the world of its maker than that of its subjects.

The painting’s only male figure peers directly out, cutting through the commotion of the marketplace to meet the gaze of the viewer. Though located furthest back, he arguably feels the most psychologically present, if not connected to the physical world that we occupy. If this figure offers a measure of open communication between two parties, Magsaysay-Ho seems also to imply that such efficiency of means short-circuits the intrigue of the artwork. Moving forward from the man and to the right, gestures that invite conjecture and imagination play out. Two hands lightly brush in awkward tenderness, their disjoint scale denying the intimacy of a firm clasp. Talking at the same time, two women in the foreground vocalize with a vigor that makes palpable the airy interval that separates them. The broken sociality of these communicative acts suggests something of the difficulty of convening a world conjointly. But they also intimate, by touch and breath, the possibility of intersubjectivity. Discrete individuality and the directness of the gaze give way to forms of non-sovereign relationality. Next to the man, a woman has her eyes closed, in a withdrawal that reaches for another idealized mode of communication—that of otherworldly communion.

In the Marketplace may well serve as a meta-reflection on the communicative norms of the world that Magsaysay-Ho inhabited. Alongside booming real estate development in Manila, one of Asia’s most vibrant art scenes emerged, the consolidation of which legitimized the previously marginal profession of art criticism. As Marian Pastor Roces argues, prominent male critics of the decade habitually reached for a “language of mysticism,” straining for the “lost comforts” of religious authority.⁸ Disgust, bafflement, attraction, surrender, marvel, enrichment, and release—these were the libidinal tropes that framed aesthetic judgment and the evaluative operations of the art market as heroic activity.⁹ But such fierce individualism was also diagnosed as (male) longing, rather than reality. “The situation,” Emmanuel Torres wrote in 1963, “calls for a gallery proprietor who has savoir faire, showmanship, a shrewd business sense, and money. But such a proprietor, we fear, is as mythical as the unicorn. This absence is lamented as much as the lack of a single qualified art critic who can actively cover the art exhibitions in the metropolitan papers to stir up awareness, pass critical judgment, inform, and help set up an art market.”¹⁰ Against the backdrop of this desire for communicative bravado and sovereignty, Magsaysay-Ho’s intersubjective ploy gained an edge.

At stake was the figuration of the postwar economic actor—or actress. Elite, highly educated women such as Purita Kalaw-Ledesma (1914–2005) and Lyd Arguilla (1914–1969) took on executive roles at the helms of galleries and cultural organizations, becoming instrumental in imagining a yet-to-be-determined social order of the art world. “A gallery is both encourager and mentor,” explained Arguilla, founder and manager of the Philippine Art Gallery (PAG; est. 1951). “It teaches by visual demonstration, by elimination, by choice. When a gallery has set a standard for itself, it becomes a critic of art in the gentlest and most persuasive sense.”¹¹ Arguilla’s personification of the gallery as exemplary subject—business proprietor and discerning critic rolled into one—suggests something of the edifying thrust behind the activities of the PAG, the postcolony’s first “Modern” art gallery. But as importantly, and perhaps indicative of operative patriarchal norms, Arguilla’s conflation of corporate entity, economic actor, and art critic also served to mask her voice, dissipating her agency into more abstract forms. Indeed, Arguilla and Kalaw-Ledesma, who founded the Art Association of the Philippines, would insist on framing their activities in terms of collective moral uplift, a far cry from Torres’s showman-proprietor.¹²

If Magsaysay-Ho animated In the Marketplace in an operatic register, the result is less a celebration of heroinic individualism than a claim to immanence. The marketplace as a site of pictorial representation offers a testing ground for the figuration of economic agents whose sense of communality takes precedence. The drama of group form harks back to the works of Hungarian-born American artist Zoltan Sepeshy (1898–1974), Magsaysay-Ho’s teacher at Cranbrook.¹³ Deeply affected by the mandate of civic unity promoted by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (1935–43), Sepeshy’s paintings center on scenes of synchronized action among figures at work, often touched by the providential hand of God. Magsaysay-Ho’s women carry distorted echoes of Sepeshy’s fishermen, rail operators, and framers—her teacher’s ideal of bodies unified through collective labor now reformulated as a concerted drama of gesticulations and calls in the marketplace. The importance of the individual recedes within a compositional order that finds value in the interrelation of its subjects. What spirituality could be read in her work suffuses the scene as the force that holds the possibility of a shared world together.

If the assertion of artistic integrity often implies a critique of market principles, Magsaysay-Ho championed precisely the opposite of distance. Her sense of integrity had everything to do with embracing the fray of the marketplace as a site of potentially transformative relationships. Such a belief animated the careers of many artists of Magsaysay-Ho’s generation. Even if In the Marketplace is exceptional, the connections that the work raises between artistic production, transnational economics, and faith should not be regarded as incidental to histories of Philippine modernism. An emphasis on art’s moral economy may reveal something of the deep-rooted beliefs and desires that animate the promises of collectivity, cutting across political divisions of right and left classically construed. How such morality becomes a smokescreen for other forms of exploitation is a story for another time.

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