Ashamallah was born in 1948, the year of the Nakba or “catastrophe,” a paradigmatic rupture that would change the course of history and redefine the trajectory of Egyptian nation-building.² Her life thereafter has been decidedly marked by events that punctuate the making of modern Egypt. Like many Egyptians, her sense of time is structured by presidential eras (Nasser, Mubarak), wars (the Six-Day War, Al Naksa, the War of Attrition), and agreements (Camp David, Oslo). These sweeping, large-scale, political shifts have reverberated in Ashamallah’s private life. Indeed, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization policies impoverished her formerly middle-class family, and her brother’s martyrdom in the 1967 War of Attrition is a tragedy that has deeply afflicted her. 

Ashamallah grew up in Desouk, a provincial town in the Egyptian Nile River Delta region of Kafr-el-Sheikh, amid rural traditions that continue to influence her painting and drawing today. Though her Christian family was not originally from this region, they lived in Desouk because her father was assigned there to oversee life insurance policies. At home, her father’s library was rich with literature, which she pored over. Outside, she climbed sycamore trees, befriended the local livestock, and sang folk songs with the neighboring children. She planted rice and other seeds on her aunt’s land, fascinated by watching how plants grow and yield fruits for picking. Today, her imagination is still populated by the creatures, real and invented, that inhabited her early childhood. 

Against Canonization 

When prodded about the imaginative tropes in her work, Ashamallah sings a song that the village women would sing in a processional held at night during the lunar eclipse. Her artwork, which contains elements from Egyptian folklore and Pharaonic motifs—often hybridized alongside figments of her own imagination—offers novel interpretations of traditional forms. Ashamallah’s apartment is filled with paintings, and one that stands out is Hathour and Her Egg (1995), a large, prominent portrayal in her living room of the Pharaonic goddess Hathour (fig. 1). Ashamallah has been consistently preoccupied with the female figure and feminine prowess, as is evident in her depiction of Hathour, mother of all the Pharaohs and a goddess who represents the sky, motherhood, fertility, beauty, music, and joy. When asked what inspires these figures, she recounted a pivotal discovery: that the female mantis eats her partner by decapitating it after they have mated. Though Ashamallah did not elaborate further, it makes sense that the violence and beauty inherent to the natural process of mantis-mating could have inspired her to depict insect-like creatures as well as women with plants or other creatures inside their bellies. For Ashamallah, the female body is the touchstone of creation, the alpha and omega.³
 

It is challenging to attach Ashamallah to a particular school or “ism”—Expressionism, Primitivism, Surrealism. Instead, she weaves in and out of these styles at whim, eluding categorization by reworking forms that present her unique worldview. Though she received highly formal Beaux Arts–style training, she often surrenders her traditional education to follow the lead of her imagination. Her compositions present the world as she remembers it: full of trials and tribulations and marked by the simultaneity of euphoria and desolation. As an artist, her confidence in her own vision has always been steadfast. She recounts being on a field trip in middle school and visiting the Fine Arts Library. When her friend asked her, “Have you seen Picasso?” she responded, “Who is Picasso? I am Evelyn Ashamallah.” 

Her politics are seldom explicitly manifest in her artwork, though on certain occasions, she has illustrated specific political events, such as the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre or the ongoing genocide in Gaza (fig. 2). Nevertheless, most of her paintings and drawings are not didactic. When looking back on her body of work, it is difficult not to read certain pieces as parallels to the large-scale political transformations taking place in the background at the time they were made. Compositions featuring peasants tilling their land or astronauts (fig. 3), aliens, and UFOs evoke societal changes such as the 1952 Land Reform Law, which redistributed Egypt’s arable land, or the establishment of a national space program in 1960. 

As a young artist, Ashamallah found herself caught in the 20th-century gestation of a new republic. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1973 and then moved to Cairo. There, not yet fully embracing her painting practice, she worked as a journalist for Rūz al-Yūsuf, a weekly political magazine that had just begun distribution in the Gulf countries. Her first piece, published in August 1973, was on the bride economy between the Gulf and Egypt. As an investigative journalist, she shed light on cases of newly wealthy Arabs from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates who would come to various rural places across Egypt and purchase young girls to bring home as wives. After this fearless debut, she earned a living by writing similar political, investigative editorial pieces until a disagreement with her editor led her to find work elsewhere. In 1977, the Egyptian government issued a warrant for Ashamallah’s arrest for her alleged involvement in leftist political activity. Forced to leave the country until they were no longer targets of the Egyptian state, she and her husband, journalist Mahmoud Yousri, moved to Algeria, where they lived in exile for six years. While she would not return to journalism, she was always involved in her husband’s editorial work and has remained an avid writer. Later in her practice, she began incorporating her writings into her artwork.

During one of our interviews, I asked Ashamallah about her relationship to politics after the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square, in which she played a prominent role as a leading dissident and organizer. She discussed how, in retrospect, almost fifteen years later, she sees “how naive and blind we were, how we didn’t understand anything.”⁴ Now, after a lifetime of involvement in different political groups—ranging from leftist to Marxist to Socialist to Communist throughout regime changes and political fluctuations—Ashamallah wants her artwork to be free of political determinations and social burdens. As she explained to me, “They’re free to politicize whatever they want. For me, what do I do? What is good for me to do? I paint. Let me paint.”⁵
 

Exile and Early Drawings

In our discussions, Ashamallah referenced multiple times how the farmers’ fields inspired her developing visual language as a young girl.⁶ Despite this, she did not demonstrate interest in landscape painting while a student in Alexandria. Instead, she preferred riding the tram all day long and watching—and drawing—the hustle-bustle. It was not until she arrived in Tiaret, Algeria, in 1977 and encountered the topography of the agricultural province that she began drawing landscapes. Before traveling to Algeria, she had never seen such majestic hillsides. Given the flat, agricultural lands of her childhood, she was captivated by the different elevations in her first landscapes, which are often rendered in flat compositions with multiple planes stacked on top of each other. This compositional structure has remained present throughout her work, as she still typically divides the surface—whether cardboard, canvas, or paper—into sections that she then populates with original forms.

Landscape in Algeria (1980) is made of quasi-organic, geometric shapes that are common in her other illustrations from this time (fig. 4). Inspired by local crafts within the Amazigh tradition, Ashamallah borrowed certain forms that suited her desire to blend human figures with bushes, and trees with architecture. This hybridization is a constant throughout her artistic practice, whereby people are depicted with plantlike traits, and animal-creatures float in boundless spaces, undisturbed by the laws of perspective or gravity. 

In Algeria, Ashamallah’s husband only found sporadic work as a schoolteacher, and so they struggled to make ends meet. Though she never stopped drawing (“not even for one day”), it was a rare joy for her to receive colors, and when she did, she gravitated toward the saturated tones that she would later use in her acrylic works. 

When they moved from Tiaret to the capital of Algiers, Ashamallah developed a tight-knit community of friends from the political, intellectual, and artistic milieus across the Arab region—Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and, of course, Algeria. She was influenced by many of the conversations that took place at this time. The Algerian modernist artist Mohammed Khadda states in his essay “Elements for a New Art,” which he wrote fresh out of the Algerian War (1954–62) in 1964, “Our country is taking the socialist path, and the artist—like the worker and the peasant, has a duty to participate in the edification of this new world, in which man will no longer exploit man.”⁷ Though Ashamallah never directly references Khadda—except for in a side conversation in which she notes his calligraphic forms with admiration—it is clear that Ashamallah shares some of the concerns he waged in the formation of the new independent Algeria. She was inspired by the goings-on around her and has spoken extensively about the importance of her time in Algeria in her personal life and artistic trajectory.

In 1984, Ashamallah returned to an Egypt that was fundamentally different from the country she had left: one that was rife with economic disparity, increasingly common sectarian clashes, and a new age of political repression under the leadership of President Hosni Mubarak. Nevertheless, determined to support her children and continue making art, Ashamallah engaged with formal cultural apparatuses, staging exhibitions in state-run venues such as the Cairo Atelier (1986), among others. In the 1990s, she served as director of the Mohamed Nagy Museum in Giza before becoming director of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo. In 2011, she left this post, emphatically exposed the corruption within the Ministry of Culture, and took to Tahrir Square. 

The Rural Trace

Now, as Ashamallah has lived longer in the dense urbanity of Cairo than in its rural environs, she continues to derive inspiration from the landscape that defined her youth. It is there that she identifies the “Egyptian spirit” in its truth and essence. This portrayal of the rural as the “essence” of the nation, and the peasant as the “true Egyptian,” defined art historical, literary, and political debates in Egyptian modernism throughout the 20th century. In 1911, the newly established Egyptian Faculty of Fine Arts opened with a European curriculum and the following aim: “After having taught the students the conventional rules of each art, the professors shall endeavour to develop in them a taste for a national art, that which should become the expression of the modern civilized Egyptian. This will be thanks to what is available to them through the remarkable examples they see of Egyptian monuments and relics and of the Golden Age of Arab art.”⁸

Egyptian modernists responded to this prompt by representing the rural Egyptian, a figure that could potentially unite a heterogeneous population seeking a national identity.⁹ As did the artists Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964), Seif Wanly (1906–1979) and his brother Adham Wanly (1908–1959), Ragheb Ayad (1892–1982), Mahmoud Naghi (1888–1956), Hamed Owais (1919–2011), and Injy Aflatoun (1924–1989) before her, Ashamallah identified the rural condition as the ultimate, defining feature of Egyptian society. Like them, she occupied an insider-outsider position, portraying the peasant from close proximity though never fully occupying the role herself. 

In the scramble to locate a static Egyptian national identity, images of peasants and the agricultural landscape they tilled—an unchanging constant across dynasties, kingdoms, and empires of rule—became a fixture in Egyptian artistic representation of the 20th century.¹⁰ From Mahmoud Said’s 1938 portrait Fille à l’imprimé (Girl in a Printed Dress) to Mahmoud Mokhtar’s 1930 sculpture Au Bord du Nil (On the Banks of the Nile) or Injy Aflatoun’s 1963 L’Or Blanc (White Gold), the Egyptian modernists were obsessed with portraying the “ordinary Egyptian” in a rural setting. There is no doubt that this practice was highly influential in Evelyn Ashamallah’s work, with some of her early works portraying women as abstract, organic figures that resemble Mokhtarian sculptures. 

In 1986, Ashamallah borrowed from the tropes of peasant representation (for example, the jagged portraiture of Hamed Oweais and the rural stereotypes of Ragheb Ayad) in Portrait or Analysis of the features of the Egyptian peasant, a profile sketch with a pseudo-Pharaonic phrenology (fig. 5). While this portrait borrows from Ashamallah’s antecedents, it also demonstrates the germination of some of her signature features: the almond-shaped hollow eyes and large skull. Over time, she further developed her own typologies of representation, departing from the rural depictions typical in the work of earlier Egyptian modernists.

In her 1990 drawing The Peasants’ Hope, Ashamallah employs the signature stacked composition she used in her early Algerian landscapes to completely recast a tired and pernicious rural trope (fig. 6). In the left of the composition, a woman with curly hair and an earring in the form of a striped bird diving downward is rendered in closeup profile above an underworld inhabited by part-sea part-human creatures, who swim toward a twirling structure at the surface. Above it, a central figure is positioned in the typical Pharaonic stance, wherein the feet point in one direction, and the body and head face the viewer. This figure also wears bird-like jewelry as well as a snake on its head. On the right, the artist stacks three figures on top of each other to make one hybrid creature: a crouching man, a bird-woman, and a flower-child. Each figure in this totemic trio relates to a figment from Ashamallah’s memory. Free from the stereotypical tropes that were common in the work of her predecessors, Ashamallah portrays what she knows about Egyptian peasants. Perhaps her renderings are acts of subversion, but it is more likely that they are forms of fantastical futurity, pointing to a time when humans, animals, land, sea, and sky will have all collapsed into an incongruent harmony.  

Throughout the 1990s into the early 2000s, Ashamallah dove further into the interspecies realms that had long populated her imagination. In the work from this period, we can begin to identify recurring motifs, including femininity, motherhood, and birth, which are conveyed by pregnant creatures or by characters contained in eggs, and womanhood in the form of reptilian beings with full breasts. These works almost always contain an unbridled articulation of humor and whimsy. As time progressed, Ashamallah depicted her figures with more limbs, tails, and fins, and she portrayed their encounters with even more levity. In her droll renderings, she would imagine conversations between different species that, as she has stated, “are not so easy to understand.” In her painting Balance (1993), we see her signature saturated colors deployed in the portrayal of four figures spilling over four quadrants of a composition (fig. 7). A turnip-headed red boy lies on his stomach and swings his feet next to a blue star creature with red lips, who smiles directly at the viewer. On the bottom of the composition, another red boy balances a reptilian figure in his mouth and an upside-down pyramid on his foot. As in Ashamallah’s other works, the composition is split and stacked, with each section containing a creature floating in its own respective world, yet brought into conversation with the other creatures in their whimsical portrayal.

In the fall of 2024, Ashamallah’s largest retrospective opened at Azad Art Gallery in Cairo’s Zamalek neighborhood. Titled The Harvest of a Lifetime, this exhibition was organized by decade, demonstrating Ashamallah’s evolution as an artist and offering unfettered access to her phantasmagorical world.¹¹ In some ways, Ashamallah’s ongoing legacy fits squarely into an art historical evolution of Egyptian modernism that draws key articulations from the rural. However, her representations offer something much more alluring than those of her predecessors. In reading her paintings and drawings alongside her writings, her exile, her political engagement, and then her disengagement, it becomes clear that her imagination is her antidote to the injustices that she has borne witness to throughout her life. She knows that this world-building is not entirely her own creation, as it follows the folktales and customs that surrounded her as a child. Now, looking back on a life laden with the contradictions, affiliations, and disaffiliations not uncommon to those navigating the rubble of the 20th century, Ashamallah consciously returns to the land, still, still invigorated by the potential of its promise (fig 8). 

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Carlos Quijon, Jr.: A typical entry point to the political in art is representation. I am interested in how you conceptualize the political and ideas of representation in relation to your practice, particularly in terms of your chosen materials and modalities. For one, this question relates to how you are also very embedded in activism, and most of your works use the forms and materialities of activist paraphernalia—banners, placards, etc. These are forms that are not necessarily made to last. Usually they are made from whatever materials are available and intended to be site-specific and very agile. For the other, there is the notion of address. We can think about the place of Port Dickson in Malaysia in your work, which is, in a sense, a hyperlocal site. What do you think about that in relation to, for example, the legibility of the political in your work? This question of address further opens up to the category of contemporary art. How do you reconcile your practice’s specificity of address with the wider circulation and citations of global contemporary art? Is this something that you also try to speak to in your work?

Sharon Chin: One of the features of doing activism here [in Port Dickson]—extremely local political action—is that so much depends on being around. The more I participate in the art world, the more I’m in a state of hypermobility that puts me at odds with staying local, or as I prefer to say it, being around. I’m away for a time, and I’ll miss things—that’s normal. But if it keeps happening, then the relationships that have built up from me being around start to adjust to the reality of my intermittent presence. And it’s not just neighbors and townspeople, it’s the land. The animals and plants, the mangrove trees, the rocks on the beaches . . . they forget my name, they lose my number. 

This sounds like a one-way ticket to burnout at both ends. But spending time on the land has helped me understand that endurance can look less like individual struggle and more like collective ongoingness. When I saw the first green shoots in a mangrove forest devastated by an oil spill, I knew that crabs and snails had probably come back under the mud and were doing their thing. At some point, if we’re lucky, the feedback loops of mutually engaged agents in an ecosystem reach a stage where they take on a life of their own. I try to remember that and focus my activism on multiplying relations between neighbors, surrounding neighborhoods, local authorities, and refinery executives. Broadcasting online is not central at all to the strategy, but it is an important tool to have. The goal is to create social connections that are dense enough to produce emergent outcomes—and to reduce reliance on any single agent.  

What I call “going on the land” is just spending time in the landscape that I call home. Being with the land, hiking, whatever. I’ll admit, in the beginning (a few years ago), I would go with a proposal or grant deadline chasing my heels, and look to the land to provide—I don’t know—content or insight or something I could use. But in recent years, I’m not searching for anything when I’m out on the land. It’s more like a leisurely day with a favorite person—brunch, a second coffee, evening drinks. That kind of pleasurable intimacy and companionship, always finding something new in their dear, familiar face. A relationship defined by long and stimulating ongoingness.  

Then there’s the oil refinery next door. That’s an ongoing relationship too. It was established by Shell in the 1960s and taken over by a Chinese multinational in 2018. The first few years of the new management were not bad—they engaged residents in good faith and actively tried to mitigate the pollution from the refinery. But that changed when the C-suite turned over, and the last three years have been like living next to Mordor. I need to be around all the time, otherwise we lose momentum in the neighborhood organizing—a fact that’s at odds with the mobility and visibility requirements of participating in the art world.

A similar ongoingness has been playing out in my practice since 2018, when Creatures of Near Kingdoms came out. It’s a book of short stories about fantastic animals and plants, set in Southeast Asia. My partner Zedeck Siew wrote the stories, and I made a series of linocuts and repeating patterns to illustrate each one (fig. 1). I’ve iterated some of the animal forms in the book into a number of projects over the years: enlarging them into placards for a climate protest in Kuala Lumpur (2019; figs. 2–5) and photographing them as shadow puppets lit by the refinery flare for Creatures on the Move (2022–24; figs. 6–8). An upcoming show in 2026 will bring me closer to realizing my vision of a shadow-puppet play, but it will also be about animals disappearing from the scene, leaving humans alone on the stage we created and in the spotlight we’re so unwilling to share. Where have they gone? I want to find out—I will follow them.    

To your point about how these conditions have shaped the formal aspects of my work, I’d say I’m conscious of playing with a certain lack of polish in presentation. I am familiar with the grammar of the gallery or museum space. I’m not sure these are necessarily political choices given the context, but they are certainly aesthetic ones. For example, wheat-pasting poster images directly to the gallery walls for Creatures on the Move, as opposed to using light boxes or getting wall stickers professionally installed (figs. 9, 10). The technique is messy and laborious and finicky enough that I have to be on-site to do it myself (with assistants). But the glitches and wrinkles left behind exude the warmth of humans working in space and time, which I believe can be perceived by the person looking. How much of this is just compensating for my lack of technical ability or resources to create high-definition finishes? It doesn’t matter. I’m an artist as well as an activist, and how good or bad my politics are is not a stand-in for the formal choices I make in a gallery space. It’s probably more important to remember that the reverse is also true.   

CQJr: My next question is a bit more self-reflexive. I am wondering if there’s some anxiety about these forms being cannibalized by the art world. In relation to, for example, more performative, ephemeral, temporary forms and how these kinds of materials and forms have been co-opted by the contemporary art world into mere spectacle or contemporary currency. I was wondering if you have this anxiety? 

These kinds of forms can easily be co-opted by contemporary art into abstract values of specificity or timeliness. Or if there’s no anxiety, I am wondering if you’ve been thinking about ways to prevent this co-optation. I think, off the top of my head, that your idea of “anti-polish” is something like that. Do you have these kinds of strategies for how to participate in the contemporary art world without having the political edge of such forms blunted by it?

SC: In contemporary art spaces, staging—what is allowed to be visible—is everything. I am constantly aware of that. In many ways people can only perceive what is put in front of them. In terms of the reality of living next to an oil refinery, I’m not interested in representing my activism work in a gallery space because 1) I have yet to be moved by seeing a spreadsheet in a museum, and 2) it doesn’t help the activism. 

Although I have been tempted sometimes to do that because there’s a legitimacy to all that documentation, I’m averse to most archive-based artworks in a gallery setting, where there are vitrines, diagrams, files of documents to dig through, books on a shelf, etc. And I understand it’s a whole museological thing. What’s interesting is that evidence-gathering has been crucial in our neighborhood’s struggle against refinery pollution. There’s so much data collection and building paper trails for every stage of engagement. Then the material has to be translated, i.e., made legible, to various agents. In fact, CCTV footage of the refinery’s flare stack has done the most so far to convince both the public and the authorities of the harm that’s being done to us by industrial emissions (figs. 11–12, 19–23). 

But when it comes to an exhibition, I’m not thinking about that kind of legibility at all. I’m concerned about how these empirical data are translated into questions of form, of space. I’m concerned with what’s going to seduce the person who’s looking, because that’s why I look at art: to be entranced and transported into the heart of something. 

The anxiety about being co-opted, I feel . . . no, I don’t. Maybe I used to, but these days, there’s a confidence in being able to step into different spaces and contexts. It’s funny—I used to have more anxiety about it when I made art about national politics, like Weeds/Rumpai  (2013–15), a series of weeds painted on political party flags collected during election time (figs. 13–14), or Mandi Bunga/Flower Bath (2013), a performance inspired by the Bersih movement for clean and fair elections, in which I had a hundred people take a flower bath with me in public (figs. 15–18).

I think doing activism at the local level has made me more confident about stepping into and addressing the particularities of any given space. So if we’re in the contemporary art space, I’m in control of what goes in, what is staged, and importantly, what is refused. Sometimes it helps to think about being like a river (although I find it vaguely obnoxious or cringeworthy—who do I think I am, Bruce Lee?), because that means there’s no place I won’t go, but also, I’m just passing through; I won’t be trapped, and there’s nothing to fear. 

Whatever the work or project is, it’s made to be carried into different contexts. There is a lightness and contingency built into the form that helps it catch whatever current is available. All this stuff needs to find its way back, too, to the place that gave it meaning—that’s its momentum. That circulation is very important, because it’s how you don’t get trapped by prestige or authority or the need to impress. The gallery or institution is not where things end. It shouldn’t end there. It’s just another stop.

CQJr: I think this also speaks to how you foreground ideas of distribution and circulation and their relationship to the political. I feel like the one thing about forms, particularly “activist forms,” like the effigy, the agitprop, the zines, is that all of them that are easy to produce and distribute, easy to let go of, easy to shed off, easy to keep. So, I think that’s also something interesting about your practice, how that formal genealogy also informs or is thought through your works. There is a keen attentiveness to this across what you do.

My last question is in relation to the categories. I feel like the categories always matter because with the categories comes currency and visibility. What do you think about art and activism? How do you see, in your practice in particular, the relationship between art and activism? And I want to dovetail this question to what you mentioned before as the seduction of form.  

I feel like that was something interesting when we were doing the project with Ilham Gallery in Malaysia. Of course your work there was about Port Dickson and the effects of the refinery on the community, but you created wayang puppets of animals found in and around Port Dickson. This was the translation that you mentioned earlier, and it was so evident in that project. You don’t lose sight of the politics of the refinery, but it’s not like your activist persona will be the same as your artist figure. I am wondering if you can talk more about the relationship between art and activism—and how the forms are the ones in a way mediating the relationship for you. 

SC: I think this can be clarified with that river metaphor. Lately I have started to ask myself, “Can the neighborhood speak to the national or international, and what does it have to say?” But then there’s the other question: Can the national or international artist speak to the neighborhood? 

When I lived in Kuala Lumpur, the capital, I felt comfortable about speaking on what I perceived to be national issues, translated through an intensely personal and subjective lens. My works were addressed to an imaginary national audience. But the thing about moving to Port Dickson and becoming a local is that the address turns around, and I am confronted with the question of how to speak to the people here. Now the river metaphor turns into a challenge to live up to: Can you go everywhere, in all directions? Back and forth from the neighborhood to the national and from the national to the neighborhood. So we’re just circulating things constantly: forms, ideas; translating, carrying something from there to here.

I think what artists and activists share is a spirit or a will to intervene in reality. You’re awake to the world and all its forms of address to you. You’re picking up those calls, baby. Otherwise, where will the art come from—or the frankly stupid conviction required to make things better for life on earth?

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Paul Galloway: An aspect of your work that intrigues me is that it is steeped in the visual culture of India—and Mumbai, in particular. Can you give us a bit of information on your upbringing, and how the rapid changes you witnessed growing up in the 1980s–90s impacted your development as artists?

Sameer Kulavoor: We grew up in the northern suburbs of Bombay, a small world in the 1980s–90s. But things changed very fast after 1990. That’s when the government introduced economic liberalization that created major changes that meant, suddenly, there were brands we had never seen in India—like McDonald’s or Levi’s or MTV. A lot of younger people also started getting more interested in what was happening outside the country. So, I think [that] that period of the ’90s was very critical to a lot of these cities around India, not just Bombay. The farmlands gave way to more housing apartments and infrastructure. The road that used to be kind of like the grazing patch for donkeys became a major thoroughfare, and today there is a metro line passing [through] there. And our family was unique because we come from a Hindu-Muslim interfaith marriage.

Zeenat Kulavoor: Our personal background also shaped our perspective. We come from an interfaith family—a Muslim from South India and a Hindu, a Gujarati from Bombay—and there was a class difference between our parents as well. Growing up in that environment taught us acceptance at many levels. Even language played a role: My maternal side used the Gujarati language and script, while my father’s side spoke Beary Bashe—a dialect that is a mix of Malayalam, Kannada, and Tulu, but it has no written script. At home, we spoke English, mixed with Gujarati and Beary Bashe, while outside, we used Hindi in daily life. Later, at art school, we picked up Marathi, which we now use regularly to maneuver the city. And after I married my partner, whose Mangalorean family speaks Tulu and uses Kannada, the linguistic mix expanded even further. This multicultural and multilingual context is inseparable from who we are and inevitably influences how we see and create.

PG: Can you give me a sense of your professional lives before you started Bombay Duck Designs? Sameer, you worked in advertising, right?

SK: Before I got into art school, I used to do a lot of cartoons and illustrations for my college magazine. Between 1998 and 2000, during the dot-com boom, I joined a design team on a website. I ended up learning a lot of software, and I started to understand animation using Flash. At that point I continued freelancing with advertising agencies working for brands. Simultaneously, I was also involved with the indie music scene in Bombay. That led to me designing album covers during that decade for friends and the circle. I continued freelancing until 2008, when I formalized Bombay Duck Designs. 

ZK: Pre art school, I was drawn to scripts and languages through my family and loved collecting everyday objects and visual ephemera—labels, wrappers, tickets—elements that later informed the Everyday India project. At art school, I majored in typography, which brought these interests together, and focused extensively on Urdu—a natural choice given my background and fascination with scripts carrying layered histories. After graduating, I worked on Urdu-related projects with various agencies before freelancing with Sameer. We began with an album cover and soon moved on to larger projects, including one of the early large-scale independent music festivals of India, where we designed everything from the identity to the stages and environments.

PG: I think the name “Bombay Duck” (a commonly eaten fish native to the waters in and around Bombay) perfectly encapsulates your design ethos, which is rooted in the everyday culture of India. This ethos comes across in your amazing zines, and I wonder . . . what drew you to that format? 

SK: I think it came from a general frustration with how design projects work. Many times, I felt that a certain thing I had created for a commercial project wasn’t doing the idea justice. That drew me to the medium of zines, where I could talk about something that means a lot to me without compromising on how I’d like to express it. In a sense, self-publishing laid the foundation for my own art practice.

ZK: The first one we made was Zeroxwallah zine, which talks about Bombay photocopy shops. I remember [that] when we started making this book, it was simply because the subject, the format, and the effort excited us. We decided to make about 50 copies, show them to people, and see how it went.

SK: Our college was very close to Fort (a neighborhood in the city), which has a high concentration of photocopy shops. And we found it fascinating because all of these shops have the same branding and color scheme. Every one [of them] sticks to yellow and black; every one [of them] has a similar way of using bold type. So, the idea of creating a photocopied zine that talks about photocopy shops felt very meta and interesting. 

PG: What did the people working in these shops think when they were printing this book about themselves?

ZK: While photocopying the first few pages, they didn’t understand what we were doing. Eventually, when we were binding the book together, they asked, “Why are you doing this? Who’s going to buy this?”

SK: We took pictures of the exteriors of certain shops from that area, and the workers spotted rival shops. “These guys are our competitors . . . why have you featured them?” And then there is this very interesting phenomenon where people in India use the [company name] “Xerox” as a verb or a noun “Can you xerox this?” or “Please give me a xerox of this sheet.” The Xerox company objected to the use of their name on shops, and so shop sign makers simply repainted the X with a Z.

PG: A theme that comes across in much of your work is a focus on taxonomies of visual culture of India—an indexing of commerce and architecture and social life. What is it about this everyday visual experience that fascinates you both?

SK: When you look at any city, you’re trying to decode [its] layers. So, the first thing that you see is shop or road signage. And then there are walls covered with graphics, posters, or public art; building facades and surfaces that may be of a certain material—brick, concrete, tiles and so on—or construction sites covered by metal sheets, debris protection fabric, or blue tarpaulin sheets. There are several layers depending on your vantage point. While it may seem like absolute chaos to someone who is not familiar with it, for us it became a way to understand the logic and chronology of how things form. When your senses are overloaded, you want to break it down into understandable parts. 

ZK: We’re simply trying to make sense of the country and the city in our own way, and that comes out in the form of zines, artworks, and murals. Take the blue tarpaulin sheet, or tadpatri as we call it locally, for example.

SK: The blue tarpaulin sheet is omnipresent when you’re going through the daily rigor of life in Bombay. But no one has the time or the mental bandwidth to dwell on these things. 

ZK: Yet, you can look at this piece of blue plastic and see that it’s significant. It reflects socioeconomic conditions, ways of living, and the resourcefulness of people who adapt and creatively use this material.

PG: Your practices make me think of others who have tried to tackle the complexities of urbanism. In his research for the font Gotham, typographer Tobias Frere-Jones photographed thousands of building addresses and signs across Manhattan, documenting the diversity of letterforms in the wild in order to distill vernacular typography into one typeface that would represent the ethos of New York City. You two take an alternative approach and embrace the diversity and wide range of not only typefaces and languages but also visual cultures that you find. I think that, in a way, that’s an embrace of chaos. 

SK: We never consciously set out with the idea to embrace chaos, it just happened. The other aspect to this is that there is currently a politically rooted attempt to homogenize culture in India—like imposing Hindi in the South Indian states, for example. Such impositions or blanket rules, we feel, are dangerous. It becomes a responsibility to show people the richness of this so-called chaos. There is a lot of work to be done to make Bombay and India more livable in certain parts, but this aspect of plurality or multiplicity is part of our DNA.  

PG: In the dramatic structures of your Metromorphosis project here, we see the churn of history, architecture, and community that happens in all urban environments sped up, with chaotic accretions and evidence of past lives. What do you think we risk losing when we pursue order and homogeneity to its furthest extent?

SK: Architect and academic Rahul Mehrotra in his text about Metromorphosis notes a kind of emulation that is commonly occurring: “The presence of the ‘edifice complex’ in Manhattan, New York, that grew naturally out of the accumulation of capital then circulated around the globe. Singapore wanted to be the Manhattan of Asia and then Shanghai wanted to be the Singapore of China. Politicians and Capitalists in India want to make Mumbai Shanghai and then, for example Nasik aspires to be Mumbai and the small towns near Nasik then aspire to be Nasik and so on.”¹ Homogenization can consume culture and texture—and not just within India. This loss of identity in design is a complicated issue and needs a nuanced understanding and more conversations. We talk about this in our work, trying to show people that the richness of what India is is at risk in this flattening of everything from architecture to graphic design. 

PG: I think your interest in the visual taxonomy of India functions similarly to the many efforts across the world to preserve endangered languages. Particularly with [the exhibition] Everyday India, it’s like you’re documenting a visual dialect. Is this something that you see as a mission for yourselves?

SK: Recognizing multiplicity and plurality is a recurring factor in our work—while also not getting nostalgic or sentimental about the past. And I think we want to keep that factor alive in our work, especially in this atmosphere, where there is a real risk of things being wiped out. We are excited about the future and how it can be shaped.

ZK: We feel that deeply these days, which is why Everyday India felt so important. It gave us a chance to do something we might not have done otherwise—to make people notice the multiplicity around them. We’re always photographing things, posters, architecture, fragments of design that catch our eye. It’s part of our daily rhythm, something we both do in our own ways. The show allowed us to share that, spark conversations, and see how everyone else was feeling. 

PG: I think a strength of your practice is this idea of looking at the world from the ground up rather than from an aerial view. Because, as you say, when viewed from above, everything becomes flattened, whereas from the ground, everything is rich and full of texture and variety. 

SK: Having such a vantage point becomes important in these kinds of scenarios. We walk a lot. We’re on the ground level a lot. We don’t live in a 40-floor high-rise; we like to be grounded and keep our eyes and ears open to what’s happening at the street level. It’s very easy to find ways to cut off the chaos and have a very comfortable life. A lot of decisions we make in our day-to-day life, like where do you want your studio to be or where do you want to go for a trip—those kinds of very personal decisions are shaped by the logic of not wanting to be cut off from the ground level. It percolates into our daily lives. It’s a habit that you want to live a certain kind of life, to be able to do a certain kind of work. As we grow older, I think, for us, it becomes important to hold on to that.

This conversation stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024-2026 Bombay/Mumbai program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

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The concept of establishing a museum in a remote region of India—one that is not only geographically isolated but also prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes and cyclones—presents a complex set of challenges. Yet, it also offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply with the traditional knowledge systems of local communities. Located in Ajrakhpur, just outside the city of Bhuj in Kutch, Gujarat, in western India, the Living and Learning Design Centre (LLDC), founded in 2016, exemplifies this duality (fig. 1). Conceived as a multipurpose cultural institution, LLDC is dedicated to the preservation, revival, and continuity of the diverse craft traditions of Kutch.¹ Situated on a nine-acre campus, it houses three galleries as well as craft studios and educational spaces that collectively serve as a platform for cultural transmission and innovation.

Tracing the development of LLDC, this essay focuses on how indigenous systems of knowledge informed its planning, construction, collections, infrastructure, and modes of audience engagement. Using LLDC as a case study, it explores how the model of a global museum can be thoughtfully translated to a local context—one that is shaped by environmental precarity, cultural richness, and community resilience.

Building Trust: The Elders as Gatekeepers of Knowledge

The seed of the Living and Learning Design Centre was planted more than five decades ago in a chance encounter between the late Chanda Shroff (1933–2016) and women from the Ahir and Meghwaad Gurjar communities.² In 1969, Shroff traveled overland from Bombay (present-day Mumbai) to Dhaneti in Kutch to assist with famine-relief efforts.³ For the fifth consecutive year, Kutch—the second largest district in India—was experiencing severe drought that had resulted in an acute need for humanitarian assistance as many residents faced starvation. Despite these hardships, women arriving to collect food aid remained impeccably dressed and were hesitant to accept charity. They had nothing to exchange for the food parcels they received as they had sold most of their belongings—including valuable embroidered heirlooms passed down through generations—just to survive. 

Their pride and skills caught the attention of Shroff. Recognizing the need for a long-term solution, she asked if they would create embroidered designs on plain saris that she would then sell in Bombay, returning the proceeds of any sales directly to them. The women agreed to participate under the condition that the patterns and motifs would be outlined by Parmaben Balasara, an aarekhni artist and their designated designer.⁴ This was Shroff’s initiation into how traditional crafts, such as embroideries, were not just borne from women who sat in their homes and created them, but rather from a regulated system that relied on the wisdom and knowledge of elders from their community. Without the support of Parmaben, Shroff could not have engaged these communities (fig. 2), and it was through her steadfast support that the initial seeds were planted for LLDC, building trust with the communities through their first organization, Shrujan.⁵

Engaging Communities: The Need for a Mobile Museum

In the late 1990s, Chanda Shroff launched a precursor to the Living and Learning Design Centre through an innovative mobile museum housed in a repurposed bus, initially named the Design Center On Wheels. This initiative was instrumental in introducing the concept of a museum to the rural craft communities of Kutch, many of whom had limited exposure to formal cultural institutions. Rather than imposing an external model, the mobile museum served as a dialogic platform—demonstrating how a museum could emerge from within the community’s own knowledge systems.

The Design Center On Wheels featured a rotating display of specially commissioned panels and garments, showcasing traditional patterns and techniques in contemporary formats, all painstakingly hand-stitched by women from the various communities of Kutch (figs. 3–6) 

Encouraging the use of traditional stitches in a modern color palette and moving beyond clothing and textiles were crucial steps in teaching the women how, through the eye of a needle, to reinvigorate and expand their cultural histories using their own knowledge and experience. Between 1997 – 2003 they created over 1000 embroidered panels and over 600 garments, in a range of designs and colorways, establishing a rich visual archive of stitches and motifs. From 2003 to 2012 the Design Center On Wheels travelled across Kutch, exhibiting a rotating selection of these panels. This mobile museum not only documented craft heritage, but it also inspired renewed interest among younger generations, who began to see their cultural practices as valuable and evolving (figs. 5, 6). 

By visiting more than 100 villages and engaging more than 20,000 community members, the mobile museum played a critical role in the instruction, retention, and revitalization of an intangible cultural heritage. It laid the groundwork for LLDC’s later development by fostering a sense of ownership and participation among artisans and by demonstrating that museums could be truly inclusive and rooted in lived experience.

In 2006, Chanda Shroff was honored with the international Rolex Award for Enterprise for preserving, protecting, and safeguarding the unique embroidery heritage of Kutch and for empowering rural craftswomen. Her pioneering efforts were recognized as “one of the most successful models of social entrepreneurship in her country.”⁶

Building the Living and Learning Design Centre

With the support of the prestigious Rolex award, Chanda Shroff advanced her vision by establishing the Living and Learning Design Centre in Ajrakhpur—a village founded by the Khatri community after the devastating 2001 earthquake in Kutch. The Khatris, renowned for their intricate ajrakh block printing, had previously lived in the village of Dhamadka.⁷ However, the earthquake altered that village’s natural water sources, changing their mineral composition, which negatively affected the quality of the dyes produced there. Seeking better conditions, many Khatris relocated to Ajrakhpur, a site near Bhuj with a more suitable water supply for their craft.

Recognizing the potential of this new site, the Khatris encouraged Shroff to consider acquiring land in the same area, which subsequently led to the procurement of the plot. The location was selected not only for its proximity to the artisans but also for its potential to host a multifunctional campus. Through a process of community dialogue and environmental assessment, the land was eventually prepared for construction. Importantly, the acquisition of this property involved ongoing community collaboration and consultation, outlining the vision and plans for the site, ensuring that the initiative was embraced as a collective effort rather than an external imposition.

The acquisition of the land marked a pivotal transition for LLDC—from mobile outreach to a permanent institutional presence. It signaled a long-term commitment to the region and laid the foundation for a built environment that reflects the values of resilience, inclusivity, and cultural continuity. By embedding the institution within the living context of one of Kutch’s most iconic craft traditions—ajrakh—LLDC reinforced its mission to support and sustain artisan life through meaningful, place-based cultural infrastructure.

The architectural design of LLDC had to emphasize structural resilience, incorporating earthquake-resistant technologies alongside vernacular building practices. In doing so, it addressed environmental risks while maintaining the region’s architectural heritage. The design team, working with local engineers and artisans, aimed to ensure the building could withstand future seismic activity.

Locally sourced materials were combined with reinforced structural systems to create a hybrid approach that enhanced durability while preserving cultural continuity. The campus layout—including galleries, studios, and open courtyards—was designed to support rainwater harvesting and to optimize natural ventilation and lighting, thus reducing reliance on mechanical systems and promoting environmental sustainability. For thermal stability, the design team used bricks made from lime and fly ash. Lime mortar was prepared on-site by grinding lime with sand and cement, and this gauged mortar was used for the masonry work. Natural lime plaster, applied using traditional methods, was used in the interiors of two galleries.⁸

Although Kutch experiences a predominantly hot and arid climate, winter nights can be very cold. To regulate temperature extremes, the building plan incorporates passive cooling strategies. Fenestrations of varying sizes on the west and south sides allow winter sunlight while minimizing summer heat and enhancing ventilation. Shaded passageways offer cooler zones, and rainwater harvesting tanks collect approximately 500,000 liters annually, supplemented by onsite wastewater management.

By embedding resilience into its architecture, LLDC exemplifies how cultural institutions can be both context-sensitive and future-ready. The building itself serves as a pedagogical tool, demonstrating how indigenous knowledge and modern engineering can converge to create spaces that are safe, sustainable, and symbolically rich.

Documenting the Collections 

Alongside the building of the Living and Learning Design Centre, work was begun on documenting the collections in readiness for the gallery displays. Of particular importance were the specially commissioned embroidered panels initiated through the Design Center On Wheels. Each piece was systematically photographed and catalogued, including details such as the maker’s name, community affiliation, and pattern type, preserving the unique identities and cultural significance of each motif, such as the scorpion at the midway point on either side of the central medallion in figure 5. Oral interviews were conducted in Kutchi—a dialect that has no written script—and were later translated into Gujarati and then English. These interview transcripts were also digitized to ensure comprehensive recordkeeping. This time-consuming process could only be overseen through locally recruited teams composed of members of the communities themselves. In doing so, LLDC has been able to capture and contextualize some of the region’s most intricate embroidery as markers of its ecosystems and holistic way of living, heralding a break from previous museological practices. Importantly, many of the team at LLDC are multilingual and have the advantage of being able to speak Kutchi. By sitting with the community members, sharing food, and listening to intergenerational stories of how their crafts have changed over time, they have slowly collected facts, piecing them together over days, months, and years. To date, the communities that are being documented (an ongoing process with varying degrees of completion) are the Ahir (within which are the subgroups of Pranthadiya, Machhoya, Boricha), Meghwaad Gurjar, Sodha and Jadeja, Rabaari (including the subgroups Debariya, Kaachhi, Vagadiya, and Bhopa), Meghwaad Maaru, Jat (Garasiya, Danetah, Fakirani, and Haajani), Rau Node, Mutwa, and Halepotra. 

By actively recruiting staff from within these communities, LLDC has been able to ensure and conserve a granular level of knowledge that has been authentically verified at each stage. This practice remains ongoing, safeguarding cultural heritage through grassroots representation and local expertise. Additionally, the collection continues to expand through the acquisition and donations of personal traditional garments and artifacts from the communities as well as those made for commercial sale and the repatriation of antique garments and crafts from Kutch, previously held in Western public and private collections.

Storing the Collections

The collections at the Living and Learning Design Centre are housed in purpose-built, specialized facilities, with the natural materials of the building and construction serving as active agents, conducive to regulating the temperature and light levels. To ensure the collections are protected from pest infestations, natural preventive methods that use local indigenous insect-repelling herbs are employed. Since traditional Western materials like Melinex are unsuitable for the climate, finely woven unbleached cotton and herb-filled pouches are placed within the storage units, and to minimize contamination, visitors and staff must enter barefoot: No outside footwear is allowed inside the archive.⁹

Programming at the Living and Learning Design Centre

The Craft Studio and Hands-On gallery at LLDC serve as dynamic spaces for the transmission, experimentation, and celebration of Kutch’s rich craft traditions. Designed not merely as a production unit but also as pedagogical and collaborative environments, these spaces facilitate a range of activities bridging traditional knowledge and contemporary practice.

Workshops are regularly conducted in the Hands-On gallery, bringing together master artisans, apprentices, students, and visiting designers. These sessions focus on skills transmission, enabling younger generations to learn intricate techniques such as ajrakh block printing, embroidery, felting, spinning, weaving, and dyeing. The studio also functions as a site for experimentation, as a place in which artisans are encouraged to innovate with materials, motifs, and forms while remaining rooted in traditional aesthetics.

Community engagement is central to the Craft Studio’s ethos. Local residents and artisans are invited to observe and participate in open-studio days, fostering a sense of shared ownership and cultural pride. Collaborative projects with design institutions and nongovernmental organizations create opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue and economic empowerment. Through its multifaceted programming, the Craft Studio and Hands-On gallery exemplify LLDC’s mission to sustain living traditions by embedding them in spaces of learning, creativity, and community interaction.

Currently, there are approximately 30 active crafts in Kutch, encompassing textiles, vegetal materials, metals, and pottery. Each craft is maintained and utilized, with traditional techniques adapted to suit the available natural resources. LLDC includes these practices as a central aspect of its programming.

Throughout the year, various programs take place, featuring live and performing arts such as dance, drama, music, and film screenings as well as academic conferences and award ceremonies that recognize the work of local artisans. The Winter Festival is an annual major event bringing together traditional craft communities from across India.

Sustaining the Longevity of Craft: Community and Cultural Resilience

The Living and Learning Design Centre offers a compelling model for rethinking museum practice in rural and environmentally sensitive contexts. The pioneering work of the late Chanda Shroff continues under the leadership of her daughter, Ami Shroff. By integrating indigenous knowledge systems into its architectural design, curatorial strategies, and community engagement, LLDC challenges conventional museological frameworks that often prioritize static preservation over dynamic cultural continuity. Its establishment reflects a deliberate effort to create a space that is not only resilient to seismic and climatic disruptions but also responsive to the sociocultural fabric of the region.

The Centre’s infrastructure—characterized by its use of local materials, vernacular construction techniques, and participatory planning—demonstrates a contextually grounded approach to sustainability and resilience. Furthermore, LLDC’s hybrid functionality as a museum, educational hub, and craft studio positions it as a site of both cultural preservation and economic empowerment. It facilitates intergenerational knowledge transfer and supports the livelihoods of artisans engaged in traditional crafts such as embroidery, weaving, and block printing (to name but a few), each one a complex and historically rich practice unique to the region.

In translating a global institutional model into a locally embedded framework, LLDC contributes to a broader discourse on culturally responsive heritage infrastructure. It underscores the importance of ecological sensitivity, community participation, and cultural specificity in the development of museums that serve not only as repositories of history but also as living systems of learning and innovation. As such, LLDC offers valuable insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to design inclusive and resilient cultural institutions in the Global South.

This essay stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024-2026 Bombay/Mumbai program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

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Romuald Hazoumè (born 1962, Porto-Novo, Benin) began his artistic training unintentionally. Between the ages of 10 and 12, he made masks as part of a Kaléta group.² Kaléta is a tradition mainly carried out by children that was imported to the Republic of Benin in the mid-19th century by former Afro-Brazilian slaves who returned to Africa and settled in Benin. Group members perform during popular celebrations such as Christmas and New Year’s. Kaléta places a strong emphasis on playfulness and scenic art, typically comprising singers, musicians, dancers, and mask-makers. Unlike most traditional Beninese masks, which are made from wood, Kaléta masks are made from discarded everyday objects or materials, such as plastic jerrycans or cardboard, making them more varied in shape and color and often more visually flamboyant. When I interviewed Hazoumè in the spring of 2025, he reminisced about making Kaléta masks as a youth, unaware that this process would lead him to become a renowned artist.³

Hazoumè’s special connection to masks comes not only from his engagement with the Kaléta tradition as a child but also from his Yoruba heritage, specifically as it relates to being a descendant of Lali Alomavo, who was a Babalawo (Voodoo high priest) and advisor to King Dê-Sodji (r. 1848–64) of Hogbonou (now Porto-Novo). Yorubas use masks in various rituals and cults, for example, the Gélédé, a ceremony that pays tribute to Iyà Nlà, the Great Mother, and to the role of women in Yoruba society. On this occasion, the men don masks, dance, and sing, sometimes playing satirical or parodic games, to entertain and honor the women.

Heir to these legacies, Hazoumè posits his artworks, whether created individually or collaboratively, as celebratory and commemorative objects through which he can address a range of topics. The artist prefers to use plastic for their fabrication, rather than the wood favored by the Yoruba, as it is more malleable and lends itself readily to various formal and conceptual experimentations.⁴ Since the 1980s, he has collected plastic gasoline jerrycans used by smugglers along the border separating Benin and Nigeria, which he recycles and transforms into mask sculptures, thus creating works that evoke both contemporary geopolitical and economic issues and local tradition. These containers, the same ones that he has used since childhood, remain his go-to material. For him, the geometric forms of traditional African masks are visible in the shapes of gasoline cans and other everyday objects, which he cuts and remakes into what he calls “masque-bidons” or “mask-cans.” In this way, tradition is never too far removed and can be illustrated using nontraditional materials. Hazoumè’s masks are, in effect, “traditional” ready-mades.

In Yoruba culture, each mask has a cultural, social, and spiritual personality. Hazoumè builds on this concept to craft sculptures that serve as documentary portraits. For example, he created a notable piece titled Bororo du Niger in 1992 after meeting a Bororo/Wodaabe man (fig. 1). This artwork features a face of a Wodaabe male adorned in the makeup and jewelry associated with the annual Gerewol festival, a beauty contest in which young men decorate themselves and perform the Yaake, a ritual dance to seduce young women eligible for marriage. Another example of Hazoumè’s documentary masks is Aloda from 1996 (fig. 2). During the period he created this piece, Hazoumè was researching Yoruba women’s matrimonial hairstyles, a coded language that functions as a kind of social identity card. In the precolonial era, a woman’s hairstyle commonly indicated whether she was single, of marriageable age, married, unfaithful, or experiencing issues in her household. The Aloda hairstyle represented in this portrait, with its cornrows covering the entire skull, leaving the top of the forehead clear, suggests that the married woman is at peace in her home. While some artworks dwell on ancestral forms and ritual, others—like Petite from 1999 (fig. 3)—take their cue from modern life and the artist’s personal encounters. Indeed, he conceived of Petite, which he composed using a typewriter and a cleaning brush, as a tribute to a secretary he had met in Cuba. He was struck by her low wage of just $6 a day, especially considering he had just spent $110 in a single day.⁵

By using discarded everyday objects, especially those made of plastic, Hazoumè critiques the trivialization of the African mask form since the frenzy that emerged in the West in the early 20th century when Westerners first saw the traditional African sculptures and masks brought back from the African colonies by soldiers, missionaries, scientists, and merchants.⁶ Their presence in the West, and particularly their display in museums, has given them new ethnological and artistic value, distancing them in some ways from their original ritual and cultural significance in Africa. These newly discovered forms captivated Westerners, particularly artists and collectors, and led to their increasing popularity. This growing interest also led to a rise in the trade of counterfeit objects, which persists to this day. As descendants of the Beninese mask tradition, Hazoumè’s works reflect on this frenzy for and ensuing trivialization of the African mask shape through a sarcastic touch that dilutes tradition by using humble materials from consumerist society.

Classical African arts, particularly masks and statues, have been a significant topic of discussion in the relationship between the West and Africa since the 20th century. Does displaying traditional African pieces in Western museums compromise their original nature? Should these works even be housed in Western collections?⁷ Sub-Saharan African visual artists of the 1960s were not concerned with addressing this subject directly, as they were primarily focused on pursuing modernity through new forms. This pursuit was often achieved through a distancing from traditional African sculpture, as seen in the work of Aina Onabolu (born Nigeria, 1882–1963) or Iba Ndiaye (French, born Senegal, 1928–2008). Alternatively, some artists, like Christian Lattier (born Ivory Coast, 1925–1978), and art movements such as the Zaria Art Society (1958–1962) or the Dakar School (1960s–1970s), have sought to integrate or reinvent traditional African art forms. However, this work seldom directly criticizes the Western world’s relationship with classical African art.

Romuald Hazoumè was one of the first contemporary artists on the African continent to work on the appropriation and reinterpretation of masks.⁸ Deeply rooted in his Yoruba culture, Hazoumè considers himself to be a present-day aré. In the days of the Yoruba kingdoms, the arés were itinerant artists appointed to create art for the royal court who spread their knowledge and culture from kingdom to kingdom. Hazoumè claims to uphold this tradition by spreading his artistic vision across localities where his assembled masks initiate larger debates.

The assemblage of mask-cans is the artist’s favorite technique for installations, allowing him to layer his work with meaning. Displayed together, the mask-cans unite their voices and personalities to convey multiple threads. His mask-cans converge, for example, different temporalities and symbolize the irreducible link between individuals and their history. Indeed, the plastic gasoline containers recovered and transformed into masks by Romuald Hazoumè bear traces of the memories of the individuals who owned them, featured in the touches of blue, red, yellow, white, or green paint on their surface. In Benin, transporters and sellers of smuggled gasoline use distinctive marks not only to identify themselves among each other while trading with Nigeria but also to protect themselves, since the transport of gasoline is a dangerous business. According to the artist, the color refers to the consciousness or unconsciousness of the Beninese individual, which is attached to the Voodoo religion. Indeed, as he explains: “During their childhood at home, the fuel transporters experienced Voodoo ceremonies in their backyards before converting to Christianity or Islam. Growing up in that environment, they learned that, for example, red could be a protective color. Each person thus adopts the cult color that is personal to them at home.”⁹ Red refers to the Voodoo cult of Shango, the god of justice, lightning, and thunder; blue to the cult of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea; yellow to the cult of Elegba, the god of encounters and an intermediary between other Voodoos; white to the cult of Damballah, the god of fecundity; or green to the cult of Oduduwa, the creator god. Thus, these mask-cans, through color, represent, for the artist, the faces of the individuals who once carried them. Their assemblage in installations enables the artist to tackle a variety of societal discourses.

For example, in 1997, Hazoumè created his first well-known large-scale installation, La Bouche du roi (fig. 4).¹⁰ Held by the British Museum, this multimedia work is a tribute to the memory of slavery and the transatlantic trade that took place from the 17th to the 19th century between Dahomey, the Americas, and Europe.¹¹ The mask-cans attached to the conscious or unconscious mind of their previous owners illustrate here the difficulty of obscuring the memory of slavery, as it is a deep-rooted history shared by African, European, and American people alike. Hazoumè’s artwork is a life-size representation of a slave ship containing 304 African slaves—each represented by a mask-can—who are crammed together in the ship’s hold. The artist based his reconstruction on the 1789 plans of the Brookes, a renowned British slave ship.¹² At the front of the ship, two masks are arranged, set apart from the rest of the group by a rifle, emphasizing the violence associated with the trade. They represent the characters of Chacha de Souza (in yellow) and the king of the Kingdom of Dahomey, Adandozan (1797–1818), and/or his brother Ghézo (1818–1858; in black), upon whom he depended. Francisco Félix de Souza (1754–1849) was a major slave trader and the chacha, chief under the authority of the Dahomean king of the town of Ouidah, the hub of the Dahomean slave trade. Together, the king and the chacha were responsible for the slave trade: the king captured the slaves, while the chacha sold them to the Europeans. Both were responsible for transporting slaves to the Americas, and as a result, held the captain’s position at the bow of the ship La Bouche du roi. Through his installation, Hazoumè confronts this chapter in Beninese history. According to the artist, taking responsibility in the present for the future means understanding both culture and the past, however hard it may be.

Even if it tackles a historical subject, La Bouche du roi bears contemporary resonances as it evokes the smuggling of raw materials and goods as well as modern-day forms of forced labor. Looking at his work in the present time, Hazoumè connects it to the current treatment of sub-Saharan migrants in Libya or that of South Asian workers in the Gulf countries, even though he had not yet considered those issues in 1997.¹³

In later works, such as Rat Singer, Second Only to God! (2013), the artist chose to address poor governance in modern nation-states. Rat Singer, Second Only to God! (fig. 5) depicts a pirogue sinking into a sea of mask-cans. On the boat’s deck, a white rat symbolizes the figure of the immoral ruler. The rat wears blinding dark glasses and is seemingly unaware of the disaster unfolding below. The work is a sarcastic political critique of the inaction of certain heads of state, especially dictators, regarding the issues that affect their citizens’ lives.

A more recent work, ASÈ (2024), created as part of Everything Precious Is Fragile, the first Republic of Benin pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, encapsulates the multiple threads in Hazoumè’s practice.¹⁴ This work is built with 540 plastic gasoline jerrycans to form a more than 13-foot-high hut with two opposing entrances (fig. 6). Smoothed on the outside using a process of plastic melting, the structure appears to have been built from raw earth, reminiscent of traditional architecture in Benin. Inside, the hundreds of colored mask-cans encircle and immerse the visitor in a meditative penumbra, barely illuminated by only a few beams of light (fig. 7). ASÈ was conceived as a sacred temple, reflecting the strong imprint of Voodoo religion on Beninese culture. During colonization, Voodoo was fought by Christian missionaries, and then it was banned by the Marxist regime of President Mathieu Kérékou in the 1970s.¹⁵ Despite these attempts throughout time and history, Voodoo has remained a part of Beninese culture. The artist thought of ASÈ as a space in which, upon entering, visitors could meditate, make a vow, and say “ASÈ,” which in Yoruba means “amen” and “so be it” but also “power.” The mask-cans functioned here as signifiers of the psychological connection between individuals and the Voodoo religion.

According to Hazoumè, there is power in returning to one’s history and culture, and ASÈ is his first installation entirely dedicated to traditional Beninese culture and speaks for it, fully embracing heritage as “a contemporary solution.” As the artist noted in 2024: “Today, our biggest problem as Africans is that we look at Europe, and we want to do what Europe does. But we can embrace our culture and be ourselves. When you talk about your own culture, you have a place in the world, which is not the case when you talk about someone else’s culture. Today we have to look at home.”¹⁶

A looping recorded recitation of a panegyric praising Tassin Hangbé, the warrior queen who ruled the Kingdom of Dahomey, now the Republic of Benin, from 1708 to 1711, highlights the significance of women’s role and power in Beninese society. Tassin Hangbé is recognized for having created the Amazons, also known as the Agodjé, an all-female military regiment that remained active until the end of the 19th century, when Dahomey was colonized. Through the Queen’s tale, the artwork presents an ode to women, echoing the Yoruba idiom “Iya Alachê” or “Iya ASÈ,” that is, “The woman has power.”

Romuald Hazoumè is an heir to the Beninese and Yoruba mask traditions, embracing both continuity and transformation. His work, which illustrates and critiques various historical and contemporary themes, is often also infused with a sense of humor or parody, drawing from the legacy of the Kaléta or Gélédé. In Hazoumè’s art, tradition and memory are not only preserved but also reimagined through everyday objects. By doing so, the Beninese artist positions himself as a guardian of memory and an actor in the formation of a new consciousness.

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Born on November 6, 1911, in Fukuoka, Tani Yutaka moved with his family to Terengganu, Malaysia, where he settled and learned to speak fluent Malay (supposedly, to the detriment of his handle on Japanese). During a brief return to Japan in 1931–32, Chinese rioters razed Tani’s family’s barbershop, killing his youngest sister, Shizue, in the wake of the Mukden Incident of 1931. This tragic turn in Tani’s biography set forth the quasi-historical Tiger of Malaya: the vengeful Muslim-Japanese intelligence agent who returned to Malaya, stole from the British and ethnic Chinese to distribute their wealth to rural Malays, and assisted the Fujiwara Agency in covert operations.

Like many heroic narratives, there are contestations to his identity that threaten to refute his claim to the title. Notably, even though he is among Malaysia’s heroes, Tani Yutaka remains relatively obscure. It may be due to the tragicomic nature of his death—one theory is that he succumbed to malaria—but it is more likely that he evades easy political and national identification because of his biography. Instead, the story of Tani Yutaka thrives in Japan as a simplified narrative of the country’s imperial successes in the South Seas through his enticing model of the noble hero traversing the treacherous jungles of Southeast Asia—a performance that oriented Japan to the south and against Western and ethnic Chinese powers in magazines, cartoons, television and cinema.¹ Tani’s enduring legacy in contemporary Japan can be attested to by perhaps the most bizarre of these examples: when, posing as an adorable mascot of Japan’s imperial history in Malaya, he was reimagined as a villager in the popular video game Animal Crossing.²

Today, as Taiwan enacts its own southward gaze with the New Southbound Policy, Au’s locus of production has become laden with these legacies of the Cold War.³ The expression of its latencies emerges in her practice as strongly in her obsession with ambivalent biographies as in her investigations of the filmic traditions and industries that bolster or obscure their dislocation. This obsession, in part a reflection of the artist’s own diasporic condition as a Malaysian Chinese resident of Taiwan, imbues her works with a charged sensitivity toward figures who can be neither fully claimed nor entirely dismissed.⁴ More specifically, it is a critical approach to the evolution of image technologies that has characterized Au’s practice from the start, a perspective that recognizes the pivotal role that cinema played during the mid- to late twentieth century as a platform for ideological warfare, postwar nation-building, and remembrance.⁵

In her 2017 work Castle, Valley, Anonymous Island and Their Return to the Moon (fig. 2), Au reanimates the story of Jim Thompson (1906–1967), the Thai silk tycoon whose mysterious disappearance in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands in 1967 has been speculatively traced to his associations with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In The Kris Project (2016), she imagines an alternative scenario in which the founder of the Cathay-Keris film empire, Loke Wan Tho (1915–1964), survives the plane crash that led to his death upon departing Taiwan in 1964. In these works, Au recovers and collages footage from disparate archives to disorient between fact and fiction. These examples reveal another crucial aspect of Au’s practice: that it is not simply a matter of retelling but rather of mapping a Cold War network and the fluid geopolitical identities and alliances that are held in tension within the biographies of these mysterious historical figures.

The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea orchestrates this hallucinogenic transition between different times, geographies, and chimeras as we journey with Tani Yutaka across the sea and through the jungle, space, and a tiger cave, lured by the promise of adventure. When displayed in Au’s solo exhibition Planet Traveler and Its Broken Song at Project Fulfill Art Space in Taipei in 2022, the videos in the three-part series were distributed within the space in varying screen sizes and heights (figs. 3, 4). The experience was one of disorientating encounters, of rounding corners in dimly lit rooms and of sneaking past an animation of a sleeping tiger, who occasionally wakes up to trigger a version of Tani in his various chronotopes. The viewer’s own journey comes to mirror Tani’s in that one experiences the aesthetics of a transmutable and groundless modern life, a space-in-flux within which we are all bound. And Au declares its artificiality by concluding each video with flashes of its instruments of seeing and imaging. At the end of Electric, Cosmos and the Seance (2022), the drunken revelry of a party between Tani and his companions is rudely interrupted by a confessionary panning shot of a studio, where we see a green screen, a costume of a tiger, and then a diorama of a jungle that later forms the backdrop of her third film To Harimau: See You on the Other Side (2022). To enter too deeply into the hero’s journey, Au implies, is to forgo a necessary distance from its technologies of mediation.

我們的 Harimau, 我們的 Harimau, 我們的 Harimau . . . The song’s repetitive drone is not so much a musical choice as it is a manifestation. Far more than an expression of interest in symbolic interpretations, Au’s practice attunes us to the production of the “our” in “our tiger,” the hero who inhabits entangled times and worlds. By following The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, this essay identifies in Au Sow Yee’s films a process of defining the perwira as an aesthetic phenomenon: a product of a Cold War imagination—and one that persists as a distracted, filmic formula representing our ongoing search for identity in a post-heroic age.

The Heroic Journey

Prior to proposing a post-heroic aesthetic turn, it is useful to return to existing formulations of the figure of the perwira to understand what exactly Au is confronting. Her first act in The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea is to reclaim Tani Yutaka a hero of as much interest to Malaya as he is to Japan, responding to the overwhelming control of Japanese media over representations of Tani imbued with the language of imperial power. In the title of the series, Tani is a perwira—a Malayan “warrior” and national hero who resurges in various guises across history to represent the changing ideals of postcolonial Malaysia’s elusive cultural self. Embedded within the etymology of heroism in Malaysia is this feudal past: the hero as rebel and resister to colonial forces, resurrected in the postcolonial world as an agent who sets forth a new national order.

In conferring this title upon Tani, Au engages with a dynamic tradition of reconstructing the Malayan perwira, such as Hang Tuah: the 15-century Malay warrior whose loyalty to the Malaccan sultanate became emblematic of Malaysia’s anti-colonial national identity. Indeed, a disproportionate section of Malaysian academic and popular discourse has been dedicated to this potent symbol through a tedious cycle of representations, discoveries, and refutations of Hang Tuah’s lineage, a cycle that in turn mirrors the changing ethnonationalist sentiments of the multiethnic state and its fluctuating ideals.⁶ In 1956, the mythic figure served as a nostalgic anchor in the titular film directed by Phani Majumdar (1911–1994)—Malayan cinema’s first film to be fully shot in Eastman color. Hang Tuah’s unwavering allegiance to the sultan and the kingdom served as an allegory for the role of heroism in safeguarding sovereignty during an uncertain political moment, a reflection of Malaysia’s nascent independence from British colonial rule.⁷

In a rapidly transforming Malaysia of the late 1980s, Hang Tuah embodied the anxieties of a modern nation that could no longer rely on simplistic heroic narratives to define its postcolonial identity. Anwardi Jamil’s 1988 film Tuah took a distinctly introspective approach to the legendary figure, marking a departure from earlier celebratory and heroic portrayals. In this version, Hang Tuah is no longer presented solely as an unflinching symbol of loyalty and righteousness but rather as a character caught between conflicting duties and personal struggles. The film explores the psychological toll of his fierce loyalty to the sultan, most palpable in the film’s reimagining of the infamous episode in which Hang Tuah is ordered to kill his closest friend, Hang Jebat, who has rebelled against the sultan. In this version, Tuah’s actions are depicted not as heroic but instead tragic, framing him as a figure trapped by the rigid codes of feudalism—and raising questions about the nature of power and loyalty. Today, his multimedia representation wields just as much agency in meaning-making within hegemonic state narratives because it offers artists, activists, and cybercitizens the terrain upon which to make alternative histories.⁸

To declare Tani as a perwira, Au draws him into this rich, vernacular cinematic tradition steeped in myth and metaphor. The artist’s symbols and physical lexicon are just as alluring—the appearance of the phallic keris (dagger) speaking to an “authentic Malay masculinity” or the physicality of Tani, who resembles the boyish, mustached perwira of Malayan folklorewhose triumph over a larger opponent embodies a reversal of power through wit and strategy, not violence.⁹ But one senses Au’s awareness of these idioms as having been no more than illusions, exploding clumsily across the screen as dated, tokusatsu special effects characteristic of Japanese action films or, at times, as only a translucent mirage.¹⁰ The cursory glance above at formulations of the perwira reveals how Au’s reframing of Tani within Malaysian cinematic tradition was to situate him in his related context, where she can play out his contingent relationship to a Malaysian postwar heroic imagination. His return, as evoked in a text sequence from Au’s prelude, bears the baggage of “the sadness of a million years, as if possessed by an evil curse.” It is a return that unsettles, reframing the hero as a site of ongoing negotiation and flux.

A Post-Heroic Malaysian Cinema

What was the curse that befell Tani Yutaka? As the same sequence explains, it is an ever-transforming body that marks the cursed hero. It was in reckoning with Yutaka’s glitchy identity that a more transnational lens on the heroic figure, one beyond the perwira, began to appear necessary in my viewings and re-viewings of Au’s films. There are significant affinities between what Au is here addressing with the perwira’s global cinematic equivalents—from Hollywood to independent cinema—and these inflections on Malayan cinema merit renewed attention. For one, there is the concern within the burgeoning, transnational study of heroic tropes, with the hero’s transformation to self-actualization; when describing the psychology of the mythical hero’s journey, founder of heroism science Joseph Campbell pathologizes the hero as necessarily incomplete or unrealized.¹¹ Elsewhere, the scholar Scott T. Allison emphasizes the hero’s transformation as an essential biographical turn resonating across multiple examples: “Without a change in setting, the hero cannot change herself, and without a change in herself, the hero cannot change the world.”¹² In such archetypical heroic narratives, the hero’s transformation is the motive that drives their journey through unfamiliar settings, providing the necessary psychological resolution that elevates them to heroic status.

In The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, Au denies Yutaka such resolution. Appropriating cinematic tricks including dioramas, theme songs, and green screens, Au dismantles the very grandeur these artifices once sought to evoke, using them not to progress but rather to diminish. Here, they appear awkward, almost absurd, as if they are uncomfortably aware of their own artificiality. In doing so, she aligns with those auteurs who are less beholden to the hero’s political wielding, gesturing toward the perwira’s disintegrating teleological idiom and its aesthetic innovation. These are the traits of the “post-heroic cinema” that film historian Thomas Elsaesser proposed in 2012 as an “imaginative test-bed” for European cinema to address Europe’s loss of a heroic narrative, and the realization that much of the “progressive social projects” that defined it “was also based on imperialism, slavery, and colonialism, on exploitation and exclusion.”¹³ To Elsaesser, in order for a post-heroic European cinema to liberate itself from these tautologies, “it would also have to rethink itself in cinematic terms and no longer assume the screen to be functioning as either ‘window’ or ‘mirror’: the two abiding epistemologies of classical popular cinema.”¹⁴ The post-heroic traits that Elsaesser identifies in his selected films are the flawed heroes whose victories are not material or decisive, but instead philosophical, psychological, or deeply personal.

In the case of Tani Yutaka, the weakness of his archive is the potential of his cinematic transformation. Its state: a memorial gravestone in Singapore’s Japanese Cemetery Park and several shifting, fictionalized portrayals on Japanese media, among them, the television series Bandit Harimao (1960–61) and the movie Marai no Tora (Tiger of Malaya, 1943), both of which Au references. By taking up Tani Yutaka—a figure haunted by his own impossibilities for national recuperation—Au transforms Elsaesser’s post-heroic aesthetic from a response to narrative exhaustion and the collapse of grand civilizations into a productive framework for examining unresolved historical tensions. Unlike European cinema’s disillusionment with heroic narratives after their historical fulfillment, Malaysian cinema never fully consolidated its heroic mode to begin with; its heroes remain caught between a network of Cold War spectralities, feudal loyalties, and competing ideals. In Au’s hands, however, the perwira’s inability to fully realize his heroic mode might itself be generative. The “post” in post-heroic cinema might function differently in postcolonial contexts, not marking the end of heroic narratives but rather their perpetual deferral.

Toward this, Au participates in the canon of Tani’s mythologization by inventing a new chimeric form for the present: an anthropomorphic drummer with a tiger’s head in an astronaut suit with an “ambiguous sexual identity.” This textured figure inhabits the longest and most lively work within the series, Electric, Cosmos and the Seance, which begins in the jungle and on the shores of the South China Sea—two environments ripe with the specters of Malaysia’s Cold War history (fig. 5). In this work, we see Au’s most cogent development and articulation of a post-heroic aesthetics for Malaysian cinema. A fight scene is stripped of violent special effects, with comic, homemade props for weapons used in their place. In the first half of the video, we likewise find the flailing potency of the heroic telos enacted through sound and its chaotic rapture. Non-diegetic sonance of satellite communication and distant drumming introduce the video, immediately defamiliarizing the natural order. These scenes jump to reveal the chimeric Tani as the source of the drumming, cutting between medium and close-up shots to match the increasing veracity of his performance. The syncopated rhythmicality of this sequence functions to dislocate Tani from the jungle as the background morphs into outer space; the jungle can no longer sustain the uninhibited, queer identity of the chimeric Tani.

In its lack of linearity and sense of social purpose, The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea forgoes one of the most important features of the heroic formula: the figure who operates as a self-sustaining and independent agent of will. Instead, Tani’s catapulting across times and worlds with no apparent resolution relates the disruption caused by an accelerated, nonlinear heroic journey that parallels developments in our spectatorial experiences. In Tiger Cave (2020), Au confronts the unstable surfaces of digital aesthetics in the disintegration of her animated tiger, whose CGI rendering melts into skin before disappearing gradually into a flat red screen. This striking sequence recalls Elsaesser’s formulation of a post-heroic European cinema as not only shedding its formulation of nationhood and community, but also necessarily reforming itself in cinematic terms. He writes: “It would deploy the screen as a surface that is neither transparent nor reflecting back, but whose elements are in constant movement and flux, distinct and singular, yet capable of forming new ensembles, configurations, and attributes-in-common.”¹⁵

Aesthetically, we may reasonably ask what Elsaesser is proposing: If there is no community to ground us, is the image of the post-hero as obsolete as its predecessors? Contemporary Malaysian cinema has certainly not spared its impulse for the heroic. In June 2022, Mat Kilau: Kebangkitan Pahlawan (Mat Kilau: The Rise of the Warrior) broke records to become the highest-grossing film in the history of Malaysian cinema, telling the story of the national hero and defender against the British colonists in the Pahang uprising between 1891 and 1895.¹⁶ The painful predictability of its controversies around the film’s representation of non-Malay characters, again, testifies to the specter of postcolonial division and its familiar anxieties and insecurities about the representation of non-Malay identities and cultures that persist in the country today.¹⁷ Reconciling this with the post-heroic aesthetics of Au’s The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, I argue, requires understanding contemporary art’s retelling of heroic narratives as sparks of aesthetically complex engagements with our nostalgia for mythologies within our ongoing struggle with their cooption by those who wish to reduce them to singulars. If Au’s perwira navigates tangled terrains of postwar myths and cinematic artifice, it is because these terrains are not his alone to traverse—they belong to a broader, shared condition of diasporic dislocation and the fractured inheritances of the Cold War. Au’s post-heroic aesthetic emerges not from the exhaustion of narrative possibility—as in Elsaesser’s European context—but from the recognition that Malaysian cinema’s heroes have always inhabited spaces of productive tensions, moving between competing systems of meaning, vernacular memory and imperial technique.

Ultimately, the sticky and unshakeable power of Au’s perwira is why we should recalibrate our thinking about heroic aesthetics. This does not require us to turn our backs on their cinematic legacies and conventions, a proposition that Au supports by her frequent return to the cinematic archive and which drives the powerful aesthetic effects of The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea. We cannot deny that the hero remains a useful symbol for the will to demand an equal and just society; nor should we be embarrassed by the justifiable reasons for our sentimental attachment to the perwira and heroes in their most simplified and epic forms. These beliefs can coexist in recognition of the urgency to understand how these ideological shape-shifters are mediated by instruments of seeing and power today and in the future.

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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 of the twentieth century what was then known as Bombay cinema catered mostly to local audiences in India where it was central to producing a national identity. However, changes to production, financing, exhibition practices, and aesthetics from the 1990s onwards turned Bombay cinema into a globalized cultural industry in a process that film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha refers to as “Bollywoodization.”¹ To emphasize this transformation, today’s Hindi film industry is often referred to as “Bollywood” or, for films produced in the 2010s and later, “New Bollywood.” For many, New Bollywood likely conjures up images of song, dance, and melodramatic excess, but as a global cultural industry, New Bollywood addresses audiences across multiple different media and discourses that circulate on a variety of global, digital platforms, and in everyday, local visual culture. In this way, New Bollywood continues to play a crucial part in producing a commodified, national, cultural identity that can be easily consumed both nationally and globally. 

A notable aspect of New Bollywood cinema is that it has created a space for gender and sexual identities that have traditionally been absent from mainstream Bombay cinema. In Indian society, nonnormative sexual and gendered subjects have a long history of stigmatization, marginalization, and criminalization because they were framed as “morally degenerate” – a view that was in large part shaped by the colonial era origins of many laws in India’s penal code that are still in use today. Concurrently with the changes in the film industry, the Indian state’s entrance into the global market has led to a de-territorialization of the nation-state. As a result, geographical location is no longer sufficient to produce a coherent national cultural identity for the state’s subjects. For this reason, as feminist scholar Rupal Oza has argued, cultural expressions of gender and sexuality have become subject to increased surveillance in recent years because they serve as crucial sites for demarcating and policing normative, national values at a time of intensified global cultural flows.² In this context, New Bollywood’s foregrounding of nonnormative gender and sexual identities seems to be in direct contrast to culture’s role in policing gender and sexuality, yet attending to New Bollywood’s diverse local and global entanglements will illustrate how this global cultural industry sutures together heterogenous narratives of social inclusion, consumer citizenship, and national development.

In this essay, I examine the processes that allow New Bollywood to integrate seemingly subversive subjects and topics within a modern Indian cultural identity. For my analysis, I draw on examples from actor Ayushmann Khurrana’s filmography, his global brand as a star, and his participation in advertisements. Khurrana’s career largely overlaps with the rise of global, digital streaming platforms on which New Bollywood cinema can now be watched worldwide. Moreover, Khurrana’s filmography singularly highlights how New Bollywood has positioned itself as a nexus for grappling with anxieties about shifting gender and sexual identities in globalized India through social-message films. In an industry frequently critiqued for its nepotism, Ayushmann Khurrana is also notable for entering cinema as an outsider. In fact, much like the characters he plays, he hails from an ordinary middle-class family. As a result, Khurrana has developed an image, nationally and internationally, as a socially progressive man who at the same time is representative of an aspirational modern, middle-class subjectivity. 

By using Khurrana and his filmography as a case study, I map New Bollywood’s wider entanglements with commodity culture and argue that New Bollywood plays a key role in developing a globally and locally meaningful image of the modern, Indian nation-state as technologically, economically, and socially advanced. My analysis further illustrates that this is made possible by framing the citizen as a socially responsible individual who takes charge of their own and the state’s development through consumption, a category that can encompass historically marginalized sexual and gendered subjects provided they have the financial means to do so.

New Bollywood and the Social-Message Film

From the last decade (2010s) onward, New Bollywood has demonstrated a rising commitment to telling stories centering subjects and experiences that have previously been absent from mainstream cinema. No filmography demonstrates this more completely than Ayushmann Khurrana’s. Since his screen debut in 2012, Khurrana has become known for playing male characters who find themselves in unorthodox situations or who behave in nonnormative ways. His comedies highlight anxieties about shifting gender and sexual roles in India through themes such as sperm donation, infertility, erectile dysfunction, the performativity and fluidity of gender, geriatric pregnancy, premature balding, colorism, same-sex desire, and female health care. In Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017), a young man discovers that he has erectile dysfunction when he tries to have sex with his fiancée (fig. 1), whereas in Dream Girl (2019), Khurrana’s character vocally cross-dresses as a woman to work in a call center where his clients are mostly lonely men (fig. 2). Stories like these dramatize a meeting between imaginary, ordinary Indian subjects and new subjectivities and expressions of desire, gender, and sexuality. Narratively, the films negotiate these encounters within familiar vocabularies such as the family melodrama familiar from earlier Bombay cinema. In this way, New Bollywood allows audiences to understand historically marginalized subject-positions in relatable, humanizing terms, and it offers these subjects access to the imaginary of modern India through a shared cultural identity. 

Though topics pertaining to sexuality, gender, and desire are openly discussed in New Bollywood cinema, the social message in such conversations is framed as a challenge to conservative norms and normative gender identities that exist in ordinary, middle-class Indian families while offering a model for reconciliating these seemingly opposing values. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020) addresses a gay couple’s struggle to be accepted by their families. The narrative frames LGBTQ+ experiences and desires as unfamiliar to most ordinary Indians. In a scene that is also featured at the start of the trailer, the explicit reference to male, gay sexuality is paired with the incomprehension of a family member whose conception of same-sex desire is so diffuse that he has no words for it (he consistently refers to it as “yeh” or “this”). In this scene, the Anglophone term “gay” as a label for same-sex desire is introduced to both characters and audiences in a comedic way that counters the medicalized language of queer desire and the prohibition against public discussions of sex and sexuality (figs. 3–5). The story of Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan addresses anxieties about how queer subjects might pose a challenge to the institution of the heterosexual family and to normative male identities. The male patriarch no longer has the same authority as the younger, gay male subjects who wear earrings and flaunt their sexuality through public kissing and rainbow flags (fig. 6). But despite the novelty and the potential controversy of the topic, the narrative serves to illustrate how LGBTQ+ subjects can be integrated into the social world of the film. In fact, the plot treats “homophobia” as the “disease” that threatens modern Indian society (fig. 6). 

Generally, New Bollywood cinema has demonstrated a concern with social-justice issues. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan is significant for being one of the first mainstream Hindi pictures with an explicit LGBTQ+ plot, and it was the first to be both produced and released after the decriminalization of homosexuality in India in 2018—a historical event that garnered extensive coverage in international newspapers and by global LGBTQ+ movements. This judgment is also cited directly, and repeatedly, in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan’s promotional material and in its dialogue. In the last few decades, a country’s ability to guarantee its LGBTQ+ subjects equal citizen rights has become an important way to build a positive image as evidenced by the discourse around pinkwashing by nation-states and during mass-mediatized, global cultural events like the Olympics and Eurovision. Both the landmark ruling and its invocation in a globalized screen text serve to publicize modern India’s progressive sexual politics.

Globally, perceptions of national development are often connected with a state’s ability to guarantee vaguely defined “liberal values” and “human rights.” India’s claim to be a modern, well-developed state hinges on its ability to address the stigmatization attached to these taboos and desires while integrating historically marginalized subjects into the modern nation-state. In this context, New Bollywood’s capacity to fold diverse subjects and topics into its vision of modern India through publicity, narrative, and aesthetics plays a crucial part in shoring up India’s global image—even more so as New Bollywood cinema, now frequently financed by multinational companies, often becomes accessible to a broadly conceived liberal, cosmopolitan audience on digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ after playing in multiplexes in malls in India.

The global significance of New Bollywood and its orientation toward social-justice narratives is further illustrated by considering the labor of its stars who are mobilized to perform cultural diplomacy at events in India and abroad. In 2023, Ayushmann Khurrana was recognized in the American news magazine TIME’s list of “100 Most Influential People” for the second time in less than five years. TIME’s rationale for including Khurrana stresses the actor’s history of playing characters that run counter to gendered stereotypes and his commitment to stories that push middle-class social mores by explicitly addressing societal taboos. Furthermore, the magazine highlights how Khurrana’s filmography is complemented by his off-screen social-justice work, such as his appointment by UNICEF India as a national ambassador to support children’s rights.³ Extending the brand of the star to the nation, Khurrana’s global persona thus underwrites the image of a socially progressive India.

New Bollywood and Commodity Culture

The emphasis on progressive social values, both the actor’s and as expressed within the films, discursively vanish New Bollywood’s entanglements in a commodity culture that nevertheless permeates both screen texts and wider visual culture. The setting of New Bollywood cinema is often deeply localized, with stories taking place in named suburbs of metropoles or bigger cities in northern India: Chandigarh, Haridwar, Bareilly, Allahabad, etc. The diverse geographical locations are supplemented by scenes in call centers, marketing offices, and glossy malls housing national and international brands that produce a cultural imaginary of a nation fully integrated into global financial and technological systems. The stories also illustrate the entanglement between local spaces and the global economy through snappy, intertextual dialogue that invokes imaginaries of a global India that is technologically, socially, and economically advanced. To take three examples from Khurrana’s filmography: in his debut film, Vicky Donor (2012), Khurrana’s character’s usefulness as a sperm donor is contextualized through his enjoyment of shopping, and on two separate occasions, he is stalked at a mall; in Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), Khurrana’s character encourages audiences to look up the rating of his gym on the search engine Just Dial; and in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, the main characters work in a mall, where they promote toothpaste. Service-oriented jobs and real, recognizable brands embedded in the storylines reconfigure commodity culture as a realist aesthetic that undergirds the social worlds of the characters in the film. 

The Bollywoodization of Bombay cinema into a global cultural industry in which identity is commodifiable has enabled an aesthetic shorthand for representing these new subjects in a way that risks flattening the radical political possibilities of New Bollywood’s new representational practices. Specifically, by attending to the emphasis on commodity culture in the films, we recognize a flattening effect as historically marginalized subjects and family patriarchs are addressed equally as middle-class subjects, united by their capacity to participate in commodity culture. Queer subjects move through spaces just as frictionlessly as non-queer subjects because access to malls, cafes, and white-collar jobs are all conditioned on the ability to buy access. The commodified approach to identity representation means that difference is simply something that is “named” rather than an occasion for coalitional, intersectional politics as feminist scholar activists like Sharmila Rege have called for.⁴ Taking Khurrana’s social-message filmography as an example highlights how New Bollywood’s additive approach to diversity is often only skin-deep.

Moreover, the emphasis on commodity and consumption in the cultural imaginary of New Bollywood extends from the cinematic screen into a broader, everyday visual culture in which New Bollywood’s brightest stars advertise consumer goods and—sometimes—developmental government campaigns. For instance, if you had visited India in the latter half of the 2010s, you might have been greeted in the airport by signs and billboards of actor Akshay Kumar advertising tiles by Kajaria. Notably, Kajaria’s tagline promises that tiles made from the soil of the land will build the country (“desh ki mitti se bani tiles se, desh ko banate hai”).⁵ Similarly, train stations and urban roadsides were covered with advertisements featuring then-newlywed actress Anushka Sharma and cricketer Virat Kohli promoting bridal wear and steel for building a “home.” Pictures of yet another acting couple, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, promised domestic bliss through choosing the right washing machine. Likewise, Khurrana is among these stars. Indeed, you might see his face plastered along the length of buses as he endorses the right shaving cream (fig. 7) or on buildings (along with actress Bhumi Pednekar) selling affordable fashion to the young and hip (fig. 8), and his ads for the smartphone brand realme (fig. 9) might be screened in the multiplex before the start of the film and during the intermission—a place only accessible by passing through a security check that bars those less likely to have money from entering. 

The cultural imaginary of New Bollywood cinema and its stars participates in a larger political project of modern India in which the middle-class subject is mobilized to perform citizenship through consumption. Whereas the cinema activates consumption in conjunction with social messages as a way to promise citizenship and a stake in the cultural imaginary for all who can afford it, in the ads, commodity culture equates individuated social and economic development with the prosperity of the nation. By thinking of New Bollywood as a global cultural industry that operates across screen texts and diverse local and global star-driven discourses that circulate in everyday spaces, we can understand how diverse vectors come together to produce a cultural imaginary in which new gender and sexual identities are integrated into the vision of the modern nation-state through a vocabulary of middle-class commodity culture. But so long as belonging is conditioned on flattening lived experience into a commodifiable identity, this acceptance is not only superficial but also risks foreclosing more radical political possibilities. 

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A tapestry of such and similar 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.

The collection partially explores the turbulent history of Chinese and East Asian narratives and characters with science-fictional elements, whether found in annals, reports, films, or literature from the late nineteenth century onward. As David Wang has argued, “By the act of imagining and writing out the incredible and the impractical, late Qing writers set forth the terms of China’s modernization project, both as a new political agenda and as a new national myth.”¹ The staunch realism of the May Fourth literati, however, meant an aversion to such works of fiction and led to their relatively belated canonization.

Of course, the genre’s position vis-à-vis the Western canon has not been much less ambivalent. In 1941, Wilson “Bob” Tucker coined the term “space opera” to define the popular subgenre that had helped to establish science fiction as a literary staple in the previous two decades. He meant it pejoratively, calling it the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn, or world-saving for that matter,” which follows similar designations like “horse opera,” as in a cheap Western, and “soap opera,” as in the radio tearjerkers once sponsored by soap manufacturers.²

Wong, however, takes the label at face value, treating it with irreverence. Instead of rejecting “hacky” and “outworn” clichés, the Berlin-based Singaporean artist uses them as cultural vehicles with high mobility. Divesting from essentialist truth claims, he pursues unprecedented affinities and adjacencies across space and time, reclaiming the hollowness of types, tropes, and clichés as a shape-shifting mold for recasting the history of an unrecognized presence. He turns “opera” into an opportunity to bring together science fiction and Chinese mythology in an arguably queer outer space, working toward the emergence of further hybrid constructs and media offshoots—particularly a Cantonese space opera film.

Wong’s personal history also weaves into his multiyear quest for an exquisite amalgamation of film, media, and performance. He is related to acclaimed opera singer Joanna Wong Quee Heng, who first encountered Cantonese opera in Penang, her birthplace, and later pursued it academically and professionally in Singapore. Wong also wrote an award-winning play as a student in the early 1990s, which led to a theatrical production with elements from Indonesian Wayang and Cantonese opera.

His research into the “opera film” as a transnational genre traces the history of complex and multilayered interactions between Hollywood films, dialect or non-Mandarin Sinophone films, and Cantonese opera performances. The international appeal of talkies in the 1930s transformed performing arts in China, leading to stage versions of popular movies, both foreign and domestic, as well as film adaptations of Cantonese operas.³ By the mid-twentieth century, this hybridity had been further facilitated through connections developed by opera troupes that sailed from Hong Kong to perform for the Southern Chinese immigrant communities on the North American West Coast. Considering how hybridization both compounds and confronts the differences and divisions from which hybridity emerges in the first place, Wong studies the form of Cantonese opera film not only as a response to the invasive hegemony of Hollywood but also as it was shaped by diasporic and nomadic conditions.

Like a media archaeologist, Wong explores how old narratives of the heavens are retold by new means, and he gathers videographic visions of the world’s expanding future into outer space as imagined and reimagined at different points in the past and from multiple standpoints in and around China. Nonetheless, thematic through lines form the armature that supports the work’s treatment of different media—as much juxtapositional as it is anachronistic. Wong’s approach to locality follows the forms and narratives of dislocation, considering historical discontinuities of a place alongside incredible overlaps between what is no longer there and what is not yet there. The work’s own curated database, much like an index, can serve as a research dossier or study station for identifying various associations between the fictions and realities of future imaginaries, between the unrealized and exhausted narratives of modernization.

In light of the political agendas and national myths that were set in motion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wong collects visual testaments to situated experiments in alternate modernities, whether Chinese, socialist, or both. In this sense, his methodology is tantamount to what could be called “comparative futurism,” charting the conflicts and commonalities between different kinds of “the incredible and the impractical” envisaged through artistic, discursive, and political practices of posterity in different geographical and historical contexts.⁴ Comparatism in this sense is fundamentally archaeological; every comparative futurist is required to always historicize the future in its multiple guises. This entails studying how the different progress- and return-oriented approaches to futurity have grown closer and/or more distant from each other over time, or how the technologies of imagination developed by one approach are appropriated and repurposed by the other. The archaeological model of sedimentation reveals to the comparatist that even a newly minted future-oriented thought often carries forward traces of hopes, fears, and ideologies that render it comparable to the accumulated strata of past imaginings.

Given its ethnic, racial, national, and linguistic baseline, Windows on the World (Part 2) particularly situates its comparative lens in relation to what has been referred to under the rubric of Sinofuturism since the 1990s. It is an ambiguous moniker that often stands for a heterogenous constellation of competing ideas. However, by drawing on science-fictional correlations between myth and statecraft, Wong suggests that the presence of Sinofuturist orientations predates the emergence of the terminology and its most emblematic associations today, namely with artificial intelligence or smart cities. For some, Sinofuturism is a techno-orientalist imaginary in which fears and fascinations of a rapidly changing world are projected onto all things Chinese as reductive metonyms for East Asia at large. Its counterpart is another tyrannical sense of the term: a technocratic ideology that drives state policies envisioning China’s future as an ethnonationalist and neocolonial force with a monolithic grip on global capital. Yet for others, Sinofuturism may represent a set of tactics for reappropriating techno-orientalism into an ever-emergent vision with transregional affiliations, navigating a path of futurity between and beyond hegemonic tendencies.⁵

Either way, the Sinofuturist bottom line is that if the future is not so radically new as to erase old constructs of otherness, and if inherited identities remain fictions—because they have never been anything but—then why not fabulate further? Windows on the World (Part 2) frames the future as a dialectic of progress and return, while positing futurisms as the tactics of making do with and without history. It wonders how speculative fabulation might go beyond cashing in on the past or compensating for it, even if history is rife with such maneuvers.

The socialist futurisms in the mix range from Maoist propaganda posters featuring “space babies” to Zheng Wenguang’s pioneering short story “From Earth to Mars” (1954), the first of its kind to gain the Communist Party’s official endorsement. Also included are scenes from Kurt Maetzig’s The Silent Star (1960), a screen production of The Astronauts (1951) by Stanisław Lem, who later distanced himself from his popular novel’s “simplistic moral universe,” seeing it as a result of the period’s constraints.⁶ The first of several Eastern Bloc sci-fi films, The Silent Star is distinct in its techno-positive pacifism and interplanetary color blindness by way of a multicultural community of crew—perhaps an unsung precursor to Star Trek.⁷ This history also revisits the brief years between bans on the genre, when archaeologist Tong Enzheng’s short story “Death Ray on Coral Island” (1978) was adapted by actress and director Hongmei Zhang into the PRC’s first sci-fi film (1980). Finally, Wong’s assortment circles back to the present, marked by the genre’s growing popularity in China since the 1990s and the international rise of Chinese science fiction, particularly those stories set in an extraterrestrial context, since the 2000s.

A key reference among the more recent productions excerpted in Windows on the World (Part 2) is Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004), which is part of a lineage of Hong Kong films emerging in the 1980s and flourishing through the 2000s that are often considered an alternative within rather than to the Hollywood mainstream.⁸ The title alludes to the final year of the fifty-year interregnum during which China and its former British colony are to be governed as “one country, two systems” (although this period feels prematurely cut short following the 2020 national security law). The year 2046 is in the future but also represents a place trapped within the memory walls of unfulfilled desires and unmet promises.

Considering this filmic citation, Wong’s space patchwork seems immersed in a mood of anticipatory nostalgia fused with cognitive latency: in the age of planned obsolescence, extraterrestrial imageries might still momentarily tingle with futuristic flair before turning sourly dated. This is what Ackbar Abbas terms “déjà disparu,” or “the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been.”⁹ Media archaeology can address this cultural politics of disappearance not only by studying the past but also through a historiography of the vanishing present. Media archaeology remediates the experience of becoming aware of something only when it begins to disappear—or of realizing, retrospectively, that it may as well have never existed. Confronted with such prophecies of disappearance, a media archaeologist of the future may be poised to both invoke and intervene in the conditions under which clichés, or memories of what has never been, become self-fulfilling precedents.

Technically an inexhaustible cliché, the lunar soil has long served as fertile ground for stories of colonization, exile, alienation, and physical or psychological transformation, among others. Windows on the World (Part 2) sifts through a large corpus of East Asian cultural productions that reference mythopoetic and technoscientific engagements with the Moon. Among them is Battle in Outer Space (1959) by the kaijū auteur Ishirō Honda, an early non-Western apocalyptic scenario wherein major cities, including those in the West, come under attack by Moon-occupying, mind-controlling aliens. Another is a 2003 recording of the renowned Bai dancer and choreographer Yang Liping’s solo dance Moonlight, in which she fluidly shifts her full-length silhouette between human, animal, and vegetal forms against the backdrop of a large gleaming circle.

Another example of shape-shifting as a motif is Satoshi Kon’s cult anime Millennium Actress (2001), a fictional account of a documentary being made about a reclusive former movie star, which implodes into a dizzying metanarrative conflating biographical facts with her on-screen roles. This fourth-wall-free tour de force follows the actress’s memories of embodying characters in a wild array of films, from period dramas to sci-fi thrillers. In Wong’s selected excerpt, she appears in a spacesuit, boarding a rocket on an ominous solo mission into the unknown—a scene that resonates with other images of predominantly female taikonauts. Among them are Major Liu Yang, the first Chinese woman to leave Earth in 2012—who is shown in a postmission TV interview—and Captain Wang Yaping, the second to do so in 2013—who is shown gracefully practicing Tai Chi and teaching physics via a live video broadcast while defying gravity aboard the Tiangong space station.¹⁰

Such thematic focal points—including matters of alienation and longing, adaptation and reinvention, and female or femme representation in historical and mythological narratives as well as in aerospace and entertainment industries—reveal the queer tendencies woven into Wong’s practice. Since the mid-2000s, his oeuvre has involved reenacting iconic scenes from the Golden Age and New Wave canons of film history, with the artist often casting himself in every role. While offering a nod to the long history of female (and male) impersonation in Chinese opera, this approach also suggests a queering of the mutual reinforcement of diversity and uniformity, of segregation and integration, as two sides of the same coin in late liberal globalization.

The artist not only asserts roles that he, as a queer Asian in the diaspora, has been historically excluded from but also challenges assumptions about the historicity and locality of what renders him identifiable. The aim here is to gesture toward global lineages of movement across the assumed borders of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and language. In his own words, Wong is an “unwilling performer,” challenging “mainstream” expectations for explaining oneself or performing one’s own authentic self: “Double-drags and triple agents; what you see is not always what you get.”¹¹

Via a clip from the video component of his multimedia installation Windows on the World (Part 1) (2014), the artist inserts himself into the grid of (Part 2), where he is walking through a foil-covered, tube-shaped corridor, its oval windows casting an eerie glow. He is wearing a metallic spacesuit with orange details, a high bun with short bangs peeking from beneath a round, oversize helmet, and a stoic expression—somewhat evoking French-Japanese vedette Yoko Tani’s look in The Silent Star. The mise-en-scène echoes that of the Soviet sci-fi classic Solaris (1972), adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky from a 1961 novel by Lem.

Wong soundtracked both (Part 1) and (Part 2) by mixing Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score for Solaris, which was based on a Bach composition, with a 1950s recording of a sorrowful aria from the opera Zhaojun Crosses the Border performed by legendary actress and Cantonese opera virtuoso Hung Sin-nui. This opera narrates the story of Princess Wang Zhaojun’s marriage, arranged as a form of foreign peace treaty during the Han dynasty, and her symbolic role as a “mediator in ethnic and gender conflicts.”¹² When placed within Wong’s repertoire, her journey of no return reflects how national bodies, always already gendered, remain haunted by a longing born of “estranged futures,” which can offer “passports into queer worlds” through reimagining their aborted beginnings in the past.¹³

Wong’s recombinant approach to customs of crossing or tales of transgression, on the one hand, and futures repeatedly exhumed and exhausted or imagined and abandoned in the past, on the other, is aimed at queering the present—that is, the present as the locus of historical reorientations where our ways of relating to both the past and the future can be reshaped. “Old futures,” according to Alexis Lothian, “are the traces that remain to show that the official narrative is never the whole story.”¹⁴ In this sense, Wong’s ambivalence toward the mainstream brings together a twofold set of vestigial fragments: some represent one of the many narratives of the same story or one of the many renditions of the same narrative, while others suggest shapes of an implied future that never came but still might in one configuration or another.

The grid of identical flat screens—complete with the typewriter effect that animates the artist’s explanatory briefs—evokes not only a control room but also TV sets in a store window, as well as the associated history of forming public spaces in the broadcast image of space travel, among other news. Here, the familiar view of 24-hour news cycle playing in sync across multiple screens has been replaced with an archival display. Deep into the postnetwork era, the contemporary public that Wong calls on too is familiar with the reformatting of diverse source images, daily doomscrolling through so much of it. His audience also knows that while data footprints might be hard to rub off, the digital age has its own culture of disappearance formed around not only encoding losses but also the human inability to retain attention amid mounting information overloads.

For Abbas, writing at the turn of the millennium, disappearance in this sense entails “a radical desynchronization: the generation of more and more images to the point of visual saturation going together with a general regression of viewing.”¹⁵ The present vanishes into images generated at speeds and volumes beyond perception. Every image becomes a record of an instant relic and then a distant memory of what may never have existed. The past thickens, weighing down on the present, pressing it thin. In other words, globalization has accelerated history to the point that it blurs in places.

A little over a decade into the new century, Wong’s ensemble relocates the matter of ubiquitous disappearance within the increasingly globalizing conditions of the screen age. What characterizes the screen age today is not only the desynchronization of sequential images but also the simultaneity of parallel streams of viewing. More channels, more gaps or divisions—where the specter of disappearance hovers.

What remains in the drift of disappearance is perhaps the impulse to connect—to form longer, layered trails of association across space and time. Simultaneous yet out of sync, a kind of disjointed affinity. This is queer persistence in media mode, seeping from one screen or format into another. The queerness of wayward associations is embedded into Windows on the World (Part 2), which the artist has called an attempt “to open windows into the metaphysical contradictions and cultural clashes of [his] own lived, queer existence.”¹⁶ Whether on a screen or in a spaceship, these are also windows through which to navigate the history of the future, its repetitions and discontinuities, in today’s split, multichannel media culture. “Splits function as porous contact zones rather than inviolable borders,” David Joselit writes about early experiments with video, adding that “The split is a navigable space of interchange rather than a void or vacuum into which dialogue disappears.”¹⁷ With this archival installation, the artist plants another seed of queer porosity within the split narratives of the past and future. Amplifying the resonance between situated facts and fictions, Wong traces the splintered backstory of a hybrid, imaginative tradition yet to come.

The post A Queer Media Archaeology of the Future: Ming Wong’s Quest for a Cantonese Space Opera Film appeared first on post.

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. Lacquer refers to the resin extracted from the sơn tree.² It is a transparent liquid that alchemically turns varying shades of dark brown and black upon contact with heat and metal. While traditionally applied as a crude varnish to preserve daily objects, in the early 20th century, the first batches of Vietnamese artists trained at L’École des beaux-arts de l’Indochine subsequently transformed it into medium for painting, whereupon coat upon coat of lacquer paint and other materials (vermilion paint, black lacquer, silver and gold leaf, and even eggshell) are applied on top of one another to a wooden base. 

After an extensive amount of time—as lacquer needs humidity to dry and patience to settle—the artist applies a final layer of lacquer paint over the composite block, before sanding away its surface to reveal the materials hidden underneath, a process that balances skillful composition, astute memorization, and pure chance. The act of sanding the surface, akin to the chemical interference that causes textual traces on the palimpsest to reemerge, likewise facilitates a reappearance of previously hidden fragments, thus creating an illusion of depth, which Vietnamese lacquer painter Nguyễn Gia Trí (1908–1993) aptly described “can be felt more accurately with our hands and not our eyes.”³ 

As I compare lacquer with palimpsest, I begin noticing similarities between these two tropes: (1) The creation processes of lacquer and palimpsests mirror one another in that both involve inscription/layering, erasure/sanding, and reinscription/reapplying; (2) While giving an illusion of depth, both objects in fact function at an “utterly flat” surface level.⁴ As palimpsest scholar Sarah Dillon has eloquently expressed, the surface structure of the palimpsest can be described as “involuted.” “Involute” is 19th-century literary critic Thomas De Quincey’s term for the way in which “our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects . . . in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled.”⁵ The palimpsest and lacquer diverge in their surface: while palimpsests present an involuted sense of incongruity—perceived through a spontaneous layering of texts, lacquer orients its surface toward a subtle harmony, as the mutually complementary materials—interspersed between paint laminae and selectively revealed through sanding—assemble into a painterly composition. 

This essay is not purely concerned with the history of lacquer painting, or at least with the dominant, normative, and nationalistic version that lauds it as a form of untouchable national art, where any debate or aesthetic or philosophical reexamination of which is deemed uninvited, or treasonous. Instead, I want to experiment with a form of art writing that is palimpsestuous in that it does not adhere to a chronological development of lacquer as surmised in the previous paragraph but rather hinges upon different modes of artists’ in-depth engagement with the aesthetics and process of lacquer as well as the moments in which these modes inform, inter-refer, and inspire one another. Alternating three distinct voices—those of late, renowned lacquer pioneer Nguyễn Gia Trí (through a collection of his transcribed and translated utterances), contemporary artist Trương Công Tùng (born 1986; through his moving-image works), and my own—I aim to position lacquer’s history at the interstices of layers of surface in both text and screen. Trí’s words, Tùng’s video, and my own analysis are then viewed as conceptual inlays that add a performative operation of lacquer, one functioning as an elucidating yet eroding kaleidoscope through which one might view the ever-shifting structures of the two works. In turn, these operations call out ontological challenges that will further consolidate the paradigm of a lacquer metaphor. This constitutes a lacqueresque method.

Lacquer painting requires one to explore its rhythm. Each material has its own unique life. The flow of lacquer is slow, so we can observe its life with ease.⁶ 

Nguyễn Gia Trí has long been hailed as a pioneer in Vietnamese modern art history, credited with liberating lacquer from its decorative function and elevating it to a medium capable of conveying emotions and abstract thought. His experimentation with abstract composition and unconventional materials, such as eggshell, revolutionized lacquer painting. This shift was comparable to 15th-century Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck’s groundbreaking innovations in underpainting and drying oil medium in oil painting, according to researcher Quang Việt.⁷ For Trí, in contrast with oil painting, which finishes at the topmost layer, lacquer painting ends at the bottommost layer, an inward journey that searches for sublime truth in the dark depths of enmeshed material vestiges. As Trí notes, “To begin with lacquer painting is to engage with the abstract, as lacquer does not merely reflect reality. A lacquer painter looks into the essence of things, not their outer appearance.”⁸

Trương Công Tùng (TCT): Lacquer is both tangible and elusive; it can be felt and expressed through other mediums such as video or sculptural installation. . . . My practice has always centered on erasing preconceived notions of time and space, which are embedded in presumably concrete materials. . . . Lacquer’s emergence through corrosion allows me not only to dissolve these notions, but also to remain at the contingent point between visible and indivisible, between near and far.⁹

Letting go, of the things we see not.¹⁰

Not much has been known about Trí’s textual ponderance on lacquer, even though art historian Phoebe Scott has remarked that he was connected to Hanoi’s literary intelligentsia through his illustrations and satirical cartoons for modernizing periodicals such as Phong Hoá (Mores) or Ngày Nay (Nowadays).¹¹ It was not until 2018, however, that Nguyễn Xuân Việt, one of Trí’s students, published a collection of his teacher’s aphorisms titled Nguyễn Gia Trí – Sáng tạo (Nguyễn Gia Trí – Creativity), in which he encoded Trí’s musings on art, life, and lacquer. 

Spanning a variety of topics on lacquer (materials, technique, process, aesthetics, creative philosophy), the book’s structure is arguably lacqueresque, with Trí’s sayings layered atop one another and subtly referencing one another in their shared textual materiality. Throughout the text, we encounter Trí’s interspersed descriptions of lacquer’s flatness (“Lacquer’s flat surface is in fact kinetic.”¹²), its foliated materials (“The vermilion paint inundated the cracks between eggshell pieces, akin to water flooding into canals, everywhere is the same.”¹³), and his technical reflections (“A scratch on the surface / will disappear if you view the painting from different angles. The more you try to polish, the clearer the scratch will show.”¹⁴). These descriptions perform a chaotic dance with more philosophical ruminations like “The artist must exist inside and outside of the painting, in between each egg shell’s crack”¹⁵ or personal confessions such as “I have been making lacquer painting since its inception, so I am as old as lacquer; my existence is intertwined with it, such as a fish to water, / so I am no longer aware of my existence.”¹⁶

Trí’s lacquer utterances thus figure lacquer as a composite object composed of abstract and interlayered texts. In addition, lacquer’s ontological operation can be observed through the intertextual relationship between Trí’s lacquer utterances and Việt’s transcriptions of them. Two layers seem to function in parallel here, colliding and colluding with one another, as Viet’s transcription partially concretizes Trí’s lacquer philosophy into a historiography based on the latter’s stream of thoughts. This approach facilitates an intertextual emergence whereby the student’s text-based recording manifests one of many potentials through which his teacher’s words can be accessed and reinterpreted. 

This gesture of textually engaging with lacquer and Việt’s intertextual engagement with Trí’s words conjures a personal interception in the national historicization of lacquer in Vietnamese art history—not to interrogate lacquer’s position, but rather to unveil another layer, albeit one overlaid with a more opaque and poetic veneer that suggests a different way of interpreting the history of lacquer. 

Out of opacity is born translucence.¹⁷

TCT: My lacquer practice is a way for me to recognize that I exist, in between the temporal flows of past and future. My body becomes a transitional point, through which images of different time lines pass through and emerge transformed. So, lacquer to me, is a path.¹⁸

A lacquer painting’s ending is in the final blink of an eye.¹⁹

Trương Công Tùng’s works desist from transparent finality. His body of mixed-media works cultivates nonlinearity across different sites. This forms a synergic ecosystem that can be activated against the monotonous view of history as he contemplates the atmosphere enshrouding a speck of soil or peers into the interstices of pixels. His aesthetic is one of lacqueresque superimposition and dissolution hinged upon the metaphorical tendon that links fragmented layers of memories of a landscape, a person, an object. 

Trained in lacquer painting at the University of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City, Tùng shared that he was instinctively drawn to lacquer, particularly its simultaneous process of layering and sanding that allowed him to fluctuate between memories of a figure or landscape, between serendipitous revelation and sublime concealment, and to experiment with deconstructing and reconfiguring materials that he foraged from his homeland in Central Highlands and other physical and virtual realms.²⁰

Ultimately, the quantum generated from Tùng’s subtle traverse of layers of his subjects, of lucidity and nebulousness, creates moments of time-space rupture within his works, particularly within his moving images. After foraging visual scraps and recording sound bites from both the natural realm and the Internet’s virtual sphere, Tùng superimposes these images, creating an illusion of depth that comes from visual layering akin to the surface-level effect achieved in lacquer painting. The images appear to commingle and yet obstruct one another: As viewers try to concentrate on a single object, its shadow clandestinely faints, its space corrosively usurped and its time disrupted by another phantom. Tùng’s lacqueresque process of layering and sanding disrupts the spatiotemporal sense surrounding the objects and people within his moving images. 

In lacquer, unlike with other mediums, one can find the maximum in the minimum, and vice versa.²¹

Manifest across four channels, the homeland in Across the Forest (2014 – present) foils reification. Elements that constitute its body blur, sway, and disintegrate; gloved hands pull plastic threads from the soil, fragments of corrugated iron flutter like flags in the wind, a forlorn cocoon is suspended in midair, the silhouette of a figure wears a shirt donned with fairy lights. These vestiges further recede into the depth of the screen as they are superimposed with layers of scenes featuring a cavorting swarm of winged insects under a hazy light. Not only do these illusory layers render the video’s surface more visually abstruse by creating a false impression of depth, they also eradicate any sense of temporal or spatial markings of the landscape, collapsing the demarcations between realms. This effect delineates a lacqueresque intervention into the landscape of the Central Highlands that resists conventionalization and exotification and is, instead, vested in private dreams and personal memories. 

TCT: Landscape in Across the Forest exists as layers . . . one layer of day and the other of night . . . the time and space within day and night are also superimposed, so that they simultaneously appear . . . one exists because the other exists . . . sometimes the brightness of day inundates a scene, others are dimmed by the dark of night . . . still, they remain independent . . . a mutual symbiosis.²²

An instance of spatial illusion occurs in a scene shot inside Tùng’s family home in the Central Highlands, where his father and nephew are watching an advertisement on an obscured TV screen. Through the open door behind them, we can see yet another screen-layer showing the same advertisement, which Tùng has inlaid to create a visual loop that exponentially extends the space within his house. These seemingly detached layers of screen-within-screen coexist on the surface of the video work, alluding to Tùng’s lacqueresque process of handling space.

TCT: What fascinates me about lacquer . . . is its ability to scrub away the boundaries between spaces, or concepts of space . . . between objects and materials as well . . . to render something not just as it is but beyond . . . each layer of paint is a different space with specifically tailored images . . . yet, when you sand the surface, it erases the distance between these spatial layers, collapsing them.²³

There exists no sense of territory within lacquer. A lacquer artist’s job is to dissolve boundaries and borders.²⁴

A propensity for eradication, which stems from Tùng’s muscle memory of sanding the surface of lacquer painting, unfurls in another scene of the artist’s family house. The silhouettes of the house and the trees surrounding it emerge from the video’s opaque background, overlaid with the filament of insect wings. White bands flash across the screen, temporarily wiping out parts of the landscape, like the static and noise that corrode images on an old television screen. As soon as they appear, the ghostly bands dissipate, leaving only faint illusions behind our eyelids. The white bands can be seen as ghostly traces of Tùng’s sanding, disrupting the work’s temporal flow by inserting blank slates into its configurations. Time becomes oblique due to this lacqueresque intervention; an entity that symbolizes inevitable erosion is now subject to abrasion. 

TCT: The moment your hand touches the surface, in preparation for sanding, it already signifies a shift . . . each touch will change time . . . without your physical interference, the past and present time remain intact . . . yet, the moment you begin to sand away, they began colluding with one another, coexisting, which brings about a change in future time as well . . . you remember the layer that you sand, yet you also forget it . . . you have to consider both sides of your hand, what it is capable of.²⁵

An ant, crawling on the ground, understands space differently than a mosquito flying in the air.²⁶

TCT: I operate at that point of tugging friction, which I always try to pinpoint while making work, a mnemonic anchor that helps me remember or forget . . . to orient myself toward something new altogether . . . in order to dissolve the lens’s power, I have to incorporate many layers, so as to question the role of my eyes . . . you have to reflect on your way of seeing . . . so each layer in my video is both ancillary to and obstructive toward each other layer, to create moments of tension for self-reflection.²⁷

As time and space distort, the memories and histories of people and communities in Tùng’s videos blur and morph, shifting from one murmuring sound to another dissipating figure. This lacqueresque effect of visual layering and dissolution, coupled with an almost trance-like audioscape, subtly gestures toward an oneiric reconstruction of Tùng’s homeland—allowing not only its residents but also onlookers to participate in its reimagination. The land’s history is thus renegotiated, albeit temporarily, within the scope of the moving image. In the end, lacquer binds Trí’s text and Tùng’s video not only through its fragmentary aesthetic and layered process, but also through the desire for a change in perspective—exemplified in Trí’s caution to stop drawing with your eyes and Tùng’s wish to create moments of tension for self-reflection. Lacquer’s power to disrupt an object or landscape, excoriate its characteristics, and diffract its history harbors immense transformative power to reinvent our perspective, allowing us to see it differently and write about its history differently. By attempting a lacqueresque approach, in which different voices, texts, and ideas are layered, I hope to deliver a performative lacquer-text, in which cohesive thoughts and fragmentary musings construct and construe one another, colliding and colluding as they trace and retrace one another’s step.

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Missing and Lost People’s Day also points toward the complex and empathetic politics of an artist who has reflected on his homeland for four decades. The painting shows seven protestors—three men, three women, and a child—each dressed in monochrome Sudanese attire. They appear emblematic, though Elmur’s subjects always look half realistic and half like characters in a story. Six of them hold white pieces of paper, each of which contains the image of a missing person. Several cover their own faces with the depicted face, as if it were their own. The effect is evidentiary and stirring, as if each protestor were two people at once—the living and the dead.

It is also a remarkably self-reflexive painting, because photography is at the very heart of Elmur’s practice and, specifically, the inspiration for the works he has been making since his mid-30s, of which Missing and Lost People’s Day is exemplary. Its profound political commitment also reflects the inextricability of art and politics, for better and for worse, in the Sudanese context. Sudan’s modern art history typically begins with the Khartoum School¹, which in the postcolonial excitement of the 1960s sought to find and represent a specifically Sudanese identity. When Elmur, who was born in 1966, studied at the College of Fine Art and Applied Art in Khartoum, the lead tutor was Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, cofounder of the Crystalist movement that challenged the foundations of the Khartoum School.(Elmur, under pressure from his family to earn a living, studied graphic design, but he painted in his free time and sought advice from Ishaq and other lecturers.) The Crystalists aimed to break free from art’s ties to nationalism and class and move toward Conceptualist underpinnings, particularly as elaborated through a study of the intrinsic properties of materials. However, as the country’s political situation worsened in the 1980s, many artists fled to Europe or neighboring countries. When Omar al-Bashir seized power in 1989, his repressive regime began instrumentalizing art, pushing artists to produce pastiches of Islamic designs or Sudanese identity. Elmur was targeted by the conservative government. Soon after the coup, the authorities deemed one of his cartoons inflammatory—an image he had drawn for the newspaper and magazine where he worked after university—and he was fired from his job and then arrested. Afterward, he fled to Nairobi, where many Sudanese artists were already living.

When he returned to Khartoum, he painted furiously, developing the style that he is now best known for, with photography at its center. As he often tells the story, after Sudan achieved independence in 1956, the state mandated that each citizen carry an identity card.² Suddenly, all of Sudan needed to have their picture taken, and so Elmur’s enterprising father opened a photography studio—the Studio Kamal, which was adjacent to his own father’s barbershop—to meet this demand. As a child, Elmur was fascinated by the rejected photos that were kept in a tin box: double exposures or photographs in which a subject turned a head or arm, leaving a scar of a blur across the picture. These images, as well as others from his archival collection, became the basis for his new paintings. The technological misfires account for some of the glimpses of oddness in his portraiture: the wonky cheeks of one subject’s face, or the second chin that unexpectedly protrudes from another’s. Sometimes the double exposures are easier to spot because a subject appears to have two or three faces, with the extras hiding behind the original like discarded personalities—or, as in Missing and Lost People’s Day, take the form of an image of a face that is held in front of an actual face. These glitches are commensurate with the overall strangeness of Elmur’s work. His figures’ blocklike bodies seem at once too bulbous in their shape and too linear. Subjects are often shown in head-on formality—like they are posing for a studio photographer—or holding animals or plants as if to record their own role as caretakers, occupying the frame with impenetrable or perhaps simply worried facial expressions.

Elmur’s decision to put photography at the core of his work is a loaded one. The photograph played an important role in colonialism, where it reinforced the racist views of the European administrators. Popular images of the time showed “newly discovered” people in tribal dress, submitting them to the taxonomies and hierarchies laid out by colonial authorities. Others showed crowds arrayed as passive subjects around a central European administrator, clearly visible by his white skin and, more often than not, his obstinately white linen attire. (Elmur has also collected examples of these colonial images.) This legacy persists in Elmur’s work, though he also brings out other, less theoretical and arguably more powerful uses of photography: its dual role as a mechanism of state and economic state control (as, for example, in ID cards) and, on the flip side, as a means of accountability or way to contest state control by evidentiary testimony.

His Innocent Prisoners series (2019) refers to those who were disappeared under Omar al-Bashir’s regime. His subjects mostly appear in white, each holding or identified by a number, recalling another genre of photography: the mug shot, examples of which also appear in Elmur’s collection. He has acquired numerous archival photographs of apparent criminals from the United States, with their name, age, alleged crime, and other particulars handwritten underneath profile and frontal views. He also collects mug shots from 19th-century Egypt as well as Egyptian and Sudanese identity cards—much like those produced by the Studio Kamal.³ Other elements of his collection are less typical, such as water and electricity invoices and notices informing recipients that their service will be cut off after 24 hours if the bill is not paid immediately. These latter administrative papers were the inspiration for the Central Electricity and Water Administration series (2022), which shows the artist’s trademark characters standing next to water tanks and towers whose contents they have been denied. Water supply in Sudan is a serious issue, with most in the arid country hugging the contours of the three major rivers. For Elmur, who was raised on the banks of the Blue Nile, the idea of legislating access to water through extortive corporations is no mere infraction but a major example of the injustices of Sudanese corruption.

These notices, much like the images held by the figures in Missing and Lost People’s Day, point to the outsized importance of paperwork (passports, contracts, leases, birth certificates, images) among the migratory and dispossessed. If a house or a life is destroyed, these documents can be key to establishing lines of credit, gaining permission to travel or remain, or securing government benefits, new legal standing, and other fundamental rights. (Or to alerting you that you will have no water or that you must leave the country.) Elmur’s artwork not only acknowledges the power of these papers—the proof of life that the relatives of the June 3 massacre brandish in front of them—but also recognizes the absurdity of this power, couching this proof within a world of surreal and made-up figuration. These documents are both more and less than mere pieces of paper, depending on the authority behind them. But such testimony is sometimes all that people have: fragile leaves of paper that Elmur elevates on his stretched and confrontational canvases.

All personal accounts from Salah Elmur, unless indicated otherwise, were gathered by the author during discussions with the artist in the spring and summer of 2024.

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