2010s

Au Sow Yee’s three-part video series The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea: In 3 Acts (2019–22) begins with a karaoke session. An introductory xylophone sequence announces the unfamiliar Song of Departure: a mash-up of lyrics and melodies from a Taiwanese conscription tune and cinematic theme songs. In conventional karaoke fashion, synchronized textual cues (in Japanese, Chinese, and English) accompany a montage of images, and from the song’s main refrain, we learn of its premise as well as its protagonist: ぼくらのハリマオ | 我們的 Harimau—in English, “our Tiger.”

Since the 1990s, the Hindi film industry has undergone several transformations in response to socioeconomic and political changes in India. This is particularly a result of how the Indian nation-state and its film industries have entered into the global market. Though popular Hindi cinema has always circulated internationally through informal, ad hoc networks, during most…

A tapestry of interplays between mythology and technology is on display in Ming Wong’s Windows on the World (Part 2), a 24-channel soundtracked video installation from 2014 composed of flat-screen monitors arranged on three levels of long tabletops stacked like freestanding shelves. This work’s corpus of moving images and accompanying on-screen notes are gleaned from the sprawling archives of Cantonese opera film, East Asian science fiction, and TV news about the role of the People’s Republic of China in what has become of the Space Race.

Originally a concept that signifies manuscripts in which new layers of writing have been added atop of an effaced original writing, of which traces remain, the palimpsest has evolved into a methodology through which one critically examines a historical phenomenon as embedded in the cycle of inscription, erasure, and re-inscription. I employ the palimpsest as a methodology to reassess the material ethos of Vietnamese lacquer and its place in prominent canons in Vietnam’s art history, thus opening opportunities for its rewriting.

A work of openness and inscrutability, Salah Elmur’s Missing and Lost People’s Day (2021) commemorates a terrible moment in Sudan’s recent history: the massacre on June 3, 2019, when security forces opened fire on a peaceful protest in Khartoum. Hundreds were killed, injured, or arrested. In this painting, which Elmur made during a residency in…

This essay by art historian Gabriela Germana Roquez delves into the significance of landscape in the art of the Sarhua community in the Peruvian Andes and the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Amazon. Through her analysis, Germana Roquez illuminates how these artworks depict, embody, and summon the landscape, emphasizing the active role of the natural world…

“Seyni Awa Camara doesn’t belong to any artistic school,” wrote art critic Massamba Mbaye in 2016. She resists any classification and has always considered herself a singular artist, whether in the context of her own country or in that of the international art…

On Conspiratorial Materialisms Firearms, Molotov cocktails, flags, and banners are some of the objects in an arsenal of protests and revolts. Alongside clenched fists and enraged bodies, these objects form an imaginary of human gestures associated with the uprising. Art historian and curator Georges Didi-Huberman dedicated the exhibition Uprisings (2016–17) to this theme, assembling artworks…

These presentations and panel discussion at MoMA brought together four filmmakers and artists who work in expanded documentary modes, using existing footage, archival research, interviews, and scripted narratives to produce imaginative accounts of transnational struggles, solidarities, and interventions. Using moving images, some of these practitioners interrogate the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the mid-late 20th…

Magdalene A. N. Odundo is a ceramic artist born in Kenya in 1950 but residing in Britain since 1971. Much has been made of her biography and the complexities of her education, training, and rigorous practice of creating beautiful vessels that speak to multiple associations and inspirations across the history of art and their resonances…

Articulations of the relational have been shifting in parallel with the recent turn in global contemporary art toward validating ecological and indigenous practices. This shift invites a consideration of what exactly constitutes the relational among artistic and curatorial efforts within the global contemporary. And among Southeast Asian exemplars, the multimedia practice of artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook…

Kavita Singh was a distinguished and beloved art historian, curator, and pedagogue. She passed away in New Delhi on July 30, 2023, following a brave battle with cancer. In this 5 Questions interview, conducted when she visited The Museum of Modern Art as a C-MAP Asia speaker in 2016, Singh shared her critical insights into questions of canonicity, location, representation, and translation in the era of globalization.