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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Bombay cinema looms large over media and cinema studies in India even though the history of the Bombay film industry is more recent than the history of film culture in the Subcontinent. The Bombay film industry as we know it today consolidated during the 1950s in the wake of the massive political and economic restructuring that followed the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Much before erstwhile Bombay became the prime filmmaking hub of independent India, film marketing, spectatorship, and criticism were already thriving practices in late colonial India (Fig. 1).

The rich history of pre-Independence film culture in India, however, remains understudied, and this has a lot to do with the difficulties of tracing non-textual and ephemeral popular-cultural forms through predominantly textual institutional archives. Recent film-history studies have drawn attention to the limitations of relying on sparse and badly preserved film archives, and scholars have instead begun to draw on a patchwork of sources, leaning particularly into the vast “parallel archives of paper” across vernacular languages to write deeper and more connected histories of print and cinema publics in India.¹ Adding to this web of scholarship, I examine three early twentieth-century Urdu film magazines published during the 1930s—The Film Review, Film Star, and Filmistan—as gateways into early film culture in India.² It was during the 1930s that film culture took off in earnest in the Subcontinent as the decade heralded the rise of the “talkies,” which introduced sound and, therefore, spoken language to Indian cinema (see Fig. 1). The decade thus marks a crucial moment of transition not only in film history but also in the trajectory of Urdu in twentieth-century India, which had by then become the subject of a reactionary language politics led by literary elites that was shrinking the boundaries of the Urdu public. Circulating in this sociopolitical context, film magazines bring into focus how Urdu was instrumental in cohering regionally diffused early film production into a shared and mutually legible film culture, and cinema, in turn, widened conceptions of the twentieth-century Urdu public by animating modes of viewing, listening, and speaking that blurred binaries of “high” and “low” culture in different ways.

Film Culture and the Urdu Public

The cover pages often offer the first clues about the audiences Urdu film magazines were addressing. The Film Review, established in 1930 in Calcutta, defined itself as the film magazine of mashriqi (eastern) India (Fig. 2), but this strong regional claim did not restrict the cinema public it was addressing. Publicity material across the magazines shows that the pre-Independence film-production business during the 1930s was scattered across a range of locations: Calcutta, Lahore, Bombay, and to some extent Delhi were the cities where noteworthy production companies were based (Fig. 3).

There is no indication of regional insularity in the way that the films were presented in Urdu magazines since, regardless of origin or language, they were framed as part of a wider market of “Hindustani” cinema—a collective imagination that overlapped with Urdu’s transregional spread as a lingua franca. Both the pseudonymous stylings of Filmistan’s editor as “Hindi” and the title dedication of the magazine evoke this transregional “Hindustani” imagination that is woven together by Urdu (Fig. 4).       

Moreover, the magazines themselves originated from regions just as disparate as the film industries they marketed—ranging from Calcutta (The Film Review and Film Star) to Lahore (Filmistan)—drawing attention to the expansive regional spread of the Urdu-speaking cinema-viewing publics being addressed. For instance, an advertisement in The Film Review alerting readers to the publication’s vast circulation network lists not only the Indian and foreign agencies but also the railway book stalls selling the magazine. These extended from Dhaka (Dacca) in the east which comprises present-day Bangladesh all the way up to Peshawar on the northwestern reaches of what is now Pakistan (Fig. 5).

The frequent and generous use of English across Urdu film magazines—with advertisements, film publicity material, and even cover pages of Urdu film magazines often appearing entirely in English—suggests a substantial transnational and multilingual audience. The tagline at the bottom of the page shown in Fig. 5 urging buyers to pick up a copy for their journey indicates that the magazines were largely ephemeral objects meant to be consumed as quick, on-the-go, pulpy pleasure reads. Finally, the ad’s emphasis on railway stalls as primary nodes of distribution and the explicit framing of consumers as travelers pointedly evokes an Urdu cinema public that was just as mobile and regionally porous as it was multilingual.

Advertisements targeting emerging middle-class interests were certainly not features unique to film-oriented magazines, as Urdu literary publications carried eclectic and visually evocative advertisements for new commodities and technologies that were visually keyed into the cosmopolitan character and consumerist impulses of Urdu periodical culture (Fig. 6).

Participating in the same consumer-aware print culture, Urdu film magazines displayed a much more direct and transparent understanding of their audience as consumers, and at the same time, films tended to be presented explicitly as commodities. This can, for example, be seen in a recurring ad template for Calcutta’s Krishna Film Company in The Film Review that extols the good quality of its film products to potential exhibitors, while also playfully evoking the mazah (pleasure) of a crowd mobbing the theater’s ticket window (Fig. 7). By evoking filmgoers as unruly masses, the ad also encapsulates thematic tensions in film-culture discourse, examined in the following section, which show that even as film magazines leaned into cinema as a trade and business, the way they imagined cinema-viewing publics was laden with both excitement and anxiety about public cultures derived from the bazaar, street, and quotidian life.

Gender, Urdu, and the Film Bazaar

In Filmistan’s 1932 afsana (story) issue, a regular opinion column by an anonymous critic vehemently derides filmmakers for including unnecessary bazaari (commercial songs) to ensure their films’ success.³ The column exemplifies how textual discourses on twentieth-century Urdu film magazines played into and perpetuated respectability politics by deriding the corrupting influences of the bazaar. Their visual culture, however, simultaneously undercuts this moralizing by magnifying the bazaar-associated sensibilities that had been absorbed into films. Relying heavily on cinema’s visuality, film magazines made generous use of glossy film stills, which is most evident in the great emphasis the publications put on being ba-tasveer (illustrated), that is, on including image supplements that usually carried half-tone photo blocks. The Film Review’s aforementioned full-page advertisement for its distribution agencies leads with the availability of half-tone photographic stills, establishing the inclusion of pictures as a key attraction and selling point for the magazine itself (see Fig. 5).

The most notable element of Urdu film magazines’ visual culture are the subjects of these images: female performers (dancers, singers, actresses, etc.) who are featured variously, in staged studio photographs, film stills, and illustrations (Figs. 8–10).

The illustrated cover of a 1931 issue of Filmistan’s special afsana issue (Fig. 8) depicts a provocatively dressed and sensuously postured woman as the literal conduit between literature and cinema. This imagery captures the sharply classed and gendered anxieties that films triggered by steadily blurring the boundaries between literary/“high” and popular/“low” cultures. The image underlines the contradictory impulses of Urdu print culture through the 1930s, when ideas of competitive nationalisms and social reformism awkwardly jostled for space with depictions of vanity, indulgence, leisure, and consumerism.

The ubiquity of feminine imagery attests that films made women, who in general had thus far been reduced to passive subjects of reformist and nationalist agendas, increasingly and dramatically more visible in the public sphere. Since the actresses of early Hindustani films usually came from courtesan lineages, they were socially marginalized, but cinema enabled them to craft something akin to professional identities.

O one from this humble earth, where is your destination?

Do you come from within four walls (home) or the market?

If you are honorable, then you are a beacon of beauty without question;

and if not, then get off the stage, for you are simply without shame.⁴

Apart from invoking the gendered private-versus-public divide that is typical of nineteenth century nationalist-reformist discourse, the poem specifically shows that the bazaar emerged as the lynchpin for anxieties about cinema in general and performing women in particular.

Conversely, conservative attitudes were also satirized in Urdu film magazines that gave voice to a range of opinions and commentary, including expressions of the new indulgences and pleasures that films afforded. A frequent satirical column titled “Gulabi Urdu” (Garbled Urdu) in The Film Review in 1931, penned anonymously under the moniker “Mulla Rumuzi,” plays with notions of adab (refinement) and sharafat (respectability) and mocks elite perceptions of cinema as the bawdy circus for the gawars (uncultured masses).⁵

Another article by an anonymous author in Filmistan expresses the exciting new modes of sociality that films were shaping through the trope of tafrih (enjoyment).⁶ Adopting the perspective of a young male flaneur enjoying the big city, the article describes the distinct pleasure of watching thrilling adventures in a cinema as part of a crowd. Cinema here is characterized as a form of tafrih for a rangeen pasand tabqa, or a colorful (leisure-loving) social group, a mildly derisive descriptor identifying the typical cinemagoer as a city slicker with money to burn. In addition to being a specifically urbane pastime, cinema-going is also cast by the article as a gendered activity that imagines the cinema theater as a space occupied exclusively by men.  

At the same time, the vision of film viewing as an avenue for male homosociality conjures tropes of early modern literary traditions like rekhti poetry, particularly the shahr ashob genre, which describes a young urbane dandy exploring the city and romancing young male paramours. Immersed in sensuality, rekhti poems express all manner of bodily and sensory pleasure with witty abandon, and they explicitly evoke homosexual desire.⁷ Such transgressive themes were derided by male literary elites whose views channeled Victorian ideals on gender and sexuality and sealed off Urdu literary genres into separate silos of “masculine” and “feminine.”⁸ Despite the mapping of these notions and attitudes onto early Hindustani cinema, cinema and film culture went a long way in allowing Urdu to transgress and transcend text-centered discourses in the twentieth century.

These examples show that Urdu film magazines, in both form and content, offer considerable insights that deepen the history of both film and Urdu in late colonial India and also highlight how they intersect and influence each other. The tensions in textual-visual discourses in Urdu film magazines reveal that cinema’s embrace of the bazaar in particular—as a space of social, cultural, linguistic, and gendered mixing and as a site of tafrih—animated uses, arenas, and publics for Urdu beyond the literary at a time when dominant discourses advocated for excluding entire vocabularies, registers, and indeed non-elite social worlds from the Urdu public. Early Urdu film magazines and other remnants of popular-culture ephemera therefore deserve to be analyzed more closely. Rather than simply folding its postcolonial history into totalizing narratives of national language politics and institutional erasures, Urdu film magazines have the potential to throw open discussions on the alternate lives of Urdu in twentieth-century India.

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In 1907, Oskar Kokoschka (1886­–1980) was commissioned to create an illustrated fairy tale for the children of Fritz Waerndorfer, founding member and financial supporter of the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s premier design workshop. In Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1917), Kokoschka produced a haunting narrative poem about the awakening of adolescent sexuality, set on distant islands, far removed from modern city life and bourgeois society. His meticulously crafted text draws on familiar tropes from classical and contemporary literature, including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Viennese writer Peter Altenberg. While nostalgia is an essential trope of the Romantic period, Kokoschka’s work subverts this emerging canon. His work transforms what should have been a Romantic-style evocation of nostalgia and passes traditional wisdom through myth into a critical dismantling of such a gesture. The designs in the artist’s lithographs exemplify the prevalent decorative style of fin de siècle Vienna, showcasing his adept integration of various “primitivist” trends in European art. This is evident in Die träumenden Knaben’s cloisonné-like outlines, unconventional perspectives, and flat color planes.

Aside from the aspiration to awaken emotions across a vast geography, Romanticism was hardly a united cultural movement. Poets and writers such as Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Lord Byron in Britain were immersed in rethinking histories of imperial conquests and state-building. The emerging heroism of national liberation movements after the collapse of Napoleonic imperialism in Greece, for example, served as the utmost inspiration for Romantic literary mythmaking. Creating poetry out of the heavily imagined past while weaving new mythologies through it as a powerful embodiment of the Romantic style. Goethe asserted that “the highest lyric is decidedly historical,” alluding to the power of synergy between fact and fiction in shaping the ideological foreground of discourse through literature.¹ In the age of economic rationalization, Romanticism stood as a mystic guard of the unyielding power of subjective imagination. Applied to actual historical narratives, it became a powerful tool in constructing political imaginaries.

In 1818, Lord Byron published Mazeppa, a narrative poem introducing Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709), a political leader of borderland Ukraine who, a century before, had stood at the fateful historical intersection between the warring Swedish and Russian Empires. Undoubtedly, Hetman Mazepa played a crucial role in the war as custodian of a borderland; however, the exact details of his actions are disputed, leaving an empty vehicle for Romanticist imagination. Mazepa is known for changing allegiances, but the precise circumstances of his shifts are apocryphal. He initially supported Russian emperor Peter I (r. 1682/1721–25) but later defected to the side of Swedish king Charles XII (r. 1697–1718). As little is known about Mazepa from historical sources, Byron had the freedom to experiment with sentimental inventions. In Mazeppa (1819), he portrays the hetman (commander) as a youthful hero, a romantic soldier of fortune famous for his aesthetic tastes, and a supporter of arts and culture. Ten years later, Russian Golden Age poet Alexander Pushkin published, like a delayed “rhapsodic battle” with Byron, his own interpretation of Mazepa’s story in Poltava (1828–29). In Pushkin’s poem, the hetman is portrayed as an ailing traitor of the Russian Empire, a ridiculous and horrible old man.

Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi (b. 1985) has revived the Romantic-age rivalry with a transhistorical twist, revealing how a core stylistic element of Romanticism lingers in contemporary times, namely in the form of an uncompromising agonism. In his video work The Battle Over Mazepa (2023), commissioned jointly by Pushkin House in London and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, Ridnyi cast spoken-word artists from around Europe to stage an actual rhapsodic narrative battle of rendering and creating subjective takes of Byron’s and Pushkin’s stories. Referred to by the artist as a “rap battle,” the medium is more akin to the practice of the ancient Greek aoidoi (Attic bards or storytellers) who performed poems as narrative stories. While Ridnyi bridges the ancient and contemporary forms of weaving the narrative, Byron’s and Pushkin’s respective storytelling can be considered “a narrative digression,” or parékbasis in Attic, the important bardic strategy in which the narrator intentionally alters details of the story to deliver a moral, ethical, or political “lesson” to the audience while retaining recognizable fundamentals.

Ridnyi’s video reveals the transhistorical nature of political agonism by layering ancient tradition, Romantic source material, and contemporary style. The concept of agonism is rooted in the works of Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, who insisted that binary conflict is a natural state of the political animal—and that winning by any means is the only way to ensure survival.² More recently, political theorist Chantal Mouffe has developed agonism into a more general paradigm of looking at conflict as a healthy state of affairs and mitigating it as a fundamental task of the political system. Mouffe has criticized the possibility of post-conflictual mediation societies, which she thinks only serves to bury the conflict temporarily and, in effect, to create a ticking time bomb. The essential point here is that while agonism is discussed as natural, assigning roles in a friend-enemy distinction is highly volatile depending on the evolution of the context.³

In casting spoken-word artists as contemporary bards, none of whom were previously familiar with Byron’s Mazeppa or Pushkin’s Poltava, Ridnyi focused on the diversifying representation of those who contemporaneously weave the historical narratives anew, indicating the enduring relevance of re-rendering stories in modern political and culture wars. Before filming, the bards participated in a workshop led by Susanne Strätling, professor of Eastern European studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Mediated by Ridnyi and Strätling, the artists read Mazeppa and Poltava, and each formed a subjective interpretation of Mazepa’s character based on the literary portrayals—choosing their side (for or against the hetman) in the process. Mazepa served as source material in the agonistic setup for the artists in the video—reminiscent of contemporary tendencies of turning cultural memory into a site of an emotive battle of subjective truisms.

The 20-minute-long film, shot in 4K in a Berlin warehouse on a hot summer day, showcases rhapsodic battles against a pitch-black background. This staging recalls Kokoschka’s illustrations in which the baroque complexity of the Romantic backdrop is nullified by the flat, color-saturated figures set against a black background, highlighting their presence and accentuating the agonistic tension between them. In the film, the camera moves between pairs of poets performing the twisted verses inspired by Byron’s and Pushkin’s texts. The action is framed by chanting extras, who evoke an ancient theater choir. These singers carry meme-like banners and flags akin to the frequently posted short opinion statements on social media.

In their respective epochs, Kokoschka and Ridnyi each subverted the aesthetics of Romantic storytelling: They stripped the beautifying surroundings and focus on the essence of the brutal agonistic argument in place. They effectively challenged not only Romanticism as a literary and artistic movement but the act of romanticization of anything—and this leads to a fundamental questioning of the attitudes of the material and immaterial cultural heritage in the past, present, and future. The transtemporal relevance of this comparison stands by the essential question that pierces through the epochs: Are we continuing to romanticize Romanticism itself?

For the exhibition curated by Elena Sudakova at Pushkin House, Ridnyi developed a newspaper-like leaflet that presents a Wikipedia-style introduction of Mazepa’s character, somewhat mocking the possibility of arriving at truth through describing him. It is framed similarly to Kokoschka’s illustrations. Both artists emphasize temporality rather than constancy, the relativism in the narrative construction. Visitors to the exhibition could take home a copy of the one-page agitprop publication. Ridnyi’s video enlivens the message with new media energy and breathes dynamism into a rhetorical battle.

While Kokoschka challenged the use of folklore in reaffirming traditional values, Ridnyi has refused to take a side, to choose one or the other portrayal of Mazepa as more probable and outrightly highlighted the subjective nature of any possible reading and interpretation of the character. Both artists’ works boldly subvert the romanticization of generic conventions, “bastardizing” their elevation to the level of sanctity. They did not need to invent the methodology from scratch; rather, they employed ancient techniques of narrative speculation from rhapsodists of the deep past. With equally vivid energy, both challenged the norms of accepted discourse that preclude conformism to authorial position or its binary, agonistic opposition. Kokoschka dove into the psyche of his adolescent readers, offering them introspective agency in the face of the demanding regulations of the world around them. At the same time, Ridnyi emphasizes the artificiality of the restriction in the political stances on Hetman Mazepa offered to the passive spectator as if from a menu of acceptable positions. The works differ in style, but they are comparable in their seeming attempts to subvert the essence of the respective narrative in affirmation of the sociopolitical order and naturalness of agonism.

The creative impulse is comparable to how the ancient Greek rhapsodists, for example, wildly rendered folk stories and their characters. We have so many versions of Heracles, Dionysus, and other mythological characters, sometimes radically different depending on the author narrating them. Paradoxically, the creation of a myth was a demystifying gesture. The multiplicity of possible versions and the constant introduction of new portrayals of characters and new readings of storylines prevented them from fossilization and invited the dynamic approach to the social identity–affirming lore. The eternal and static become impossible, while dynamism and change characterize the necessary reaction to essential change with the constant transformation of the community. Unlike the Romantic search for fundamental, unchangeable wisdom and permanent cultural codes embedded at the beginning of time, the rhapsodic attitude to rendering the story invites the propositions of reformation, vital critique, and opposition. In this spirit, Pushkin and Byron can be seen as creators of entirely different characters in parallel literary realities. This assumption counters the historizing attitude of Romanticism and redefines the scheme of approaching storytelling at large as narrative speculation or a field of essential, dynamic digressions.

Shaping collective political memory is essential to legitimize contemporary forms of universal imperialism and its primary adversary—a particular nationalism. While the weaponization of cultural heritage in the political struggle is ubiquitous, Ridnyi’s film epitomizes the critical function of narrative digression, namely subversion. “Subversion,” rooted in the Latin verb subvertere (to overthrow), refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system are contradicted or reversed to sabotage the established social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. Kokoschka and Ridnyi have approached subversion from opposite ends, but they both aimed to achieve the same effect of critical confusion in their respective audiences. Kokoschka challenged his client’s expectations by subverting the fairy-tale genre as a vessel in which to preserve bourgeois norms and values and instead focusing on the realness of the experience of growing up. This strategy sparked effective intergenerational agonism instead of creating repulsion for the abnormal and a reverence for conservative ideals—as was desired by the party that commissioned the work—thereby introducing a speculative artistic agency. Ridnyi has thrown off presumed determinacies of the correct or incorrect political position by subverting agonism itself, equalizing the perceived real and the possible speculative. While the approaches to the subject differ, both artists have focused on subverting the status quo by addressing the normalized in a way “that is just human nature” agonism. They transform the gesture into effective and potent criticism by making the sociopolitical construction and conditions of agony visible, registrable, and estranged.

Ridnyi’s video challenges the audience to step back from choosing sides—and to focus on dangerous oversimplifications as a fundamental source of naturalizing fiction. The Battle Over Mazepa, the first video in a planned trilogy, restages Romantic agonism and demonstrates its actuality in the present—against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It also reveals the tendency of contemporary art to reaffirm the subjective, oversimplified battlefronts through aestheticization—as in the case of Romantic legacies. Like the meme-banner holders in the video, the artist with a political agenda draws the frontiers to the agonistic battle lines, reaffirming the distinction between friend and enemy.

As David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky argue, Romanticism sanctified the nation-state as the church waned.⁴ It legitimized the state as an absolute arbiter of ethical and moral judgement. As such, it materialized a political imaginary. While French philosopher Auguste Comte insisted on the “rationalization” of society through the nation-state, Romanticism in fact remythologized society anew.

The work of Kokoschka critically addresses the emerging bourgeois conservatism, which aimed to rearrange society’s new boundaries of restrictions as the power of the church vanished—and in that, to tighten the screws on the imagination of possible alternatives from the early childhood period. In challenging his commissioner’s intention so radically, Kokoschka revealed the intention behind the supposedly apolitical gesture of producing a piece of “edutainment” (educating entertainment) for children. Ridnyi, in his interrogation of our permacrisis-branded contemporaneity, spearheads our time’s burning ontological cleavage—normalization of the subjectivity of political agonism, in which the temporary arrangements and interpretations are communicated by power and perceived by the public through the lenses of multiple media channels as natural, eternal, and unchanging. This is among the feeders of the resurgence of new fascisms and other forms supposedly abandoned by the “never again” humanism’s progress, abominations as the solution offered is “final” and “simple.” The Wikipedia-style leaflet in the exhibition at Pushkin House and the one-line-slogan carriers in the video embody the rising number of these agents of further naturalization of agonistic battle.

The problems Kokoschka’s and Ridnyi’s works address intend to reaffirm the stance of historical truism beyond critique, nullifying or conveniently ignoring the context in which it emerged and removing it from the contested speculation space. Such conservative discourse contributes to the problem of “romanticizing Romanticism”—not actively challenging its positionality within “the greatest of eras” and as the source of nostalgic pride—which continues to emphasize the ethereal materiality of ghosts from the past. At the same time, it naturalizes and fixates as permanent the dynamic boundaries of agonistic struggles, presenting figures and ideas about the good and the bad as ontological categories, though they are, in fact, products of the sociopolitical context of their time and their power relations. The subversion and “bastardization” of Romantic tradition through critical speculation, as seen in Kokoschka’s drawings and Ridnyi’s video, show us a potent example of shaking up normality at a moment when reality starts to appear everlasting, futureless, and disjointed from its surroundings. Both works, though separated by age, demonstrate a successful multimedia address of the transhistorical challenge. Amplifying the messages conveyed in these works and further igniting the spread of their approaches is relevant in any time—but specifically in the present.

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Read the first part of the series here.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed that a systematic understanding of other cultures was important for a peaceful postwar world order. He also believed that the museum, particularly The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was the ideal institution to undertake this work. In MoMA’s press release for the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation (1943), Bateson notes that “there is one common ground between the scientific world of the anthropologist and the world of art: the idea that in some sense the artist expresses himself. The exhibition is based on that idea which, in time of war, may become as grim as a mathematical equation in ballistics.”¹

Bali, Background for War captured the social science and art networks that were brought together during World War II by the war effort and an institution of modern art. In turn, the exhibition became an important constellation of global history. At MoMA, Bateson’s notion of the museum as a common ground for science, art, and social engineering dovetailed with Bauhaus thought on the shaping of visual culture and perception, leading to a historical confluence of proto-cybernetics, regional thinking, and the New Bauhaus within the modern art museum in the service of military goals and postwar rebuilding. The influence of Bali, Background for War resounded in the postwar years, possibly contributing to the formation and intellectual history of Southeast Asian modern art networks in terms of how the exhibition foreshadows but is also informative in reading the postwar rehabilitation of the US cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.

During World War II, the Museum executed 38 contracts for various government agencies. Among these contracts and programs, Bateson found work in the Film Library developing cultural intelligence studies of Axis countries through film.² While Bateson was not a film specialist per se, it was his work in Bali and his use of still and motion photography in analyzing cultures that attracted the attention of Iris Barry, first curator of MoMA’s Film Library (now the Department of Film), and led to his employment.³ Prior to joining the Museum, Bateson believed that MoMA had a specific and important role in the war effort, particularly in producing wartime subjectivities through exhibitions. This resonates with how scholar Fred Turner has described the exhibition-form’s compilation of material and the vistas from which viewers could freely discern cultural patterns and navigate the exhibition as a “democratic surround.”⁴ This experience of moving from image to text, of observation, inference, and deduction, could lead the audience to become more psychologically flexible and democratic in nature.⁵ In this regard, Bali, Background for War was an occasion for viewers “to exercise democratic choice.”⁶ This was an exhibitionary logic that provided a counterpoint to Nazi Germany’s instrumentalized modes of communication and power associated with fascist propaganda. Turner notes that Mead and other members of the Committee for National Morale, of which Bateson was secretary (while still at MoMA), envisioned the museum as the proper setting for a new kind of propaganda that could nurture both the individual democratic personality and a collective sense of national purpose.⁷

As an institution, MoMA was committed to these same ideas. In addition, some of the emigrant Bauhaus artists who had made their way to the United States after the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 were committed to ideas of producing psychological agency through vision. Bauhaus artist Alexander Schawinsky was invited by the Museum (as opposed to Bateson personally) to design Bali, Background for War. Turner has noted that the museum was an important wartime node, one that mobilized Bauhaus methods. Victor D’Amico (founding director of MoMA’s Department of Education), for example, mobilized László Moholy-Nagy’s ideas for treating and resocializing veterans through the Museum’s War Veterans’ Art Center, which opened in 1944.⁸ MoMA likewise employed Bauhaus artist and designer Herbert Bayer’s techniques for extending field of vision by hanging photographs below and above eye level to give viewers of wartime exhibitions a field of visual choices.⁹ Bayer designed MoMA exhibitions Road to Victory, which was curated by photographer Edward Steichen in 1942, and Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geography for the Future, which was planned and directed by Monroe Wheeler in 1943.¹⁰

Schawinsky attended the Bauhaus and studied with Moholy-Nagy, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Schlemmer. At the invitation of Josef Albers, he taught from 1936 to 1938 at Black Mountain College, where he developed the “Spectodrama,” a multimedia stage design. In response to MoMA’s interest in Bauhaus ideas of how vision might inform subjectivity, on October 28, 1943, Monroe Wheeler, then director of Exhibitions at MoMA as well as the Museum’s first director of Publications, wrote to Schawinsky to solicit a proposal for an exhibition based on the artist’s notion of “perspective,” which Schawinsky explained in terms of the “changes in visual conceptions with the climax of today’s formation of new visual experience in the making.”¹¹

Bateson’s correspondence with Schawinsky in May 1943 indicates a highly collaborative exhibition-making process, wherein Bateson sent detailed notes, expanded the list of artwork to be included, and solicited feedback.¹² However, in July 1943, Bateson wrote to Wheeler and James Thrall Soby, then director of the Museum’s Armed Services Program, to request that Schawinsky be removed from the project. Bateson complained that Schawinsky lacked “respect for the material” and that he was “trimming . . . photographs to fit in with his scheme of rectangles regardless of the internal composition of the pictures.”¹³ Ultimately, Schawinsky was kept on, and in the press release for the exhibition, he is credited as designing the exhibition.¹⁴ Despite their differences, Schawinsky’s Bauhaus training was evident in the exhibition. His design employed Bayer’s extended field of vision techniques—with images placed at different proximities to eye level—and performatively staged modern Balinese art against linear fields in a way that recalled the Spectodrama.¹⁵

These affinities between Schawinsky’s Bauhaus ideas and Bateson’s interest in social engineering subjectivities through vision and aesthetic experience would take on an expanded and international vision through Bali, Background for War and Bateson’s work at MoMA. As part of his job at the Museum, Bateson attended a conference that, held in Chicago in March 1943 by the army’s Military Government Division, brought together faculty from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and universities in Wisconsin and Michigan to develop training for the Army Specialized Training Program. Upon returning to New York, he and MoMA Film Library founding director, John Abbott, drafted a proposal to set up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA that would be responsible for circulating artworks, cultural objects, graphic materials, photographs, and films to college campuses hosting the army program and eventually to nongovernmental agencies involved in postwar reconstruction. Bali, Background for War was an exhibition that attempted to put these ideas into operation. In his letter to Mortimer Graves, then executive director of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, Bateson identifies the exhibition as a basis for setting up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA.

Bateson’s papers include notes regarding who would be part of the unit and how it would be constituted through MoMA’s infrastructure. Bateson focused on the diversity of artistic and cultural material at the Museum, including graphic design and film, as well as on its public programs.¹⁶ He considered the Museum an ideal institution to host the unit because it dealt “both with the Arts and with the Sciences.”¹⁷ The notes draw defined lines from Abbot, founding director of the Film Library, to Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum, and Elodie Courter, who would organize circulating exhibitions, which were seen as fundamental to this unit. The unit was imagined to mobilize the different departments of the Museum, with dotted lines drawing different divisions across the institution into the unit. The inclusion of Barr in Bateson’s notes and Bateson’s supposed attempt at writing a Balinese modern art history point in turn to the transmutation of the currency of modern art history to military value. Bateson’s exhibition expanded the visions of modern art history that Barr had mapped out in his diagrams on the development of abstract art.¹⁸ The anthropologist’s vision for MoMA was that the Museum would be an apparatus that produced intelligence derived from exhibitionary experience and the visual analysis of art. This intelligence during the war represented a convergence of the anthropological and the art historical as these were mobilized toward militaristic ends. Ultimately, however, Bateson’s proposal to develop a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA was not realized.¹⁹

At first glance, Bali, Background for War was not a particularly successful venture. Yet, it can still be considered an important exhibition of its time and one that is significant in a Southeast Asian modern art history. At the close of the exhibition in 1943, Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an American wartime intelligence agency. This was an unusual achievement given Bateson was a British national. Created in 1942, the OSS was the first centralized intelligence agency in the United States. It was the institutional predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).²⁰ David Price, an American anthropologist who has spent his career studying the historical and contemporary military uses of anthropology, has noted in his archival research on Bateson’s wartime work that the OSS was interested in the techniques of visual anthropology.²¹

An OSS memo Bateson authored in November 1944 suggests strategies for maintaining the long-term interests of the United States in South Asia.²² Bateson’s position paper envisions the postwar period as an extension of the prewar colonial system. His memo posits a moderation of the dynamic of “exhibitionism” and “spectatorship” to manage possible rebellion from independence movements—concepts that Bateson had first deployed in explaining child-rearing norms in different cultures. In the memo, Bateson elaborates:

The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man. . . . If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.²³

Bateson suggests that if Indigenous peoples are encouraged to exhibit and celebrate their culture, as opposed to being encouraged to model themselves on Western culture, then “nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.”²⁴ Taken at face value, Bateson’s comments read as patronizing prescriptions for how to manage the postwar decolonizing process. Yet at the same time, an inverse relationship of cultural relations of “occupation” was being brought to the fore. In Bali, Background for War, Bali defined the region that the American soldier was to reoccupy. In this framework, the exhibition established an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic in which American soldiers were the spectators celebrating the culture of a region that they were liberating. In theory, American soldiers were placed in an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic that prepared them for the more benign reoccupation and postwar worldbuilding that they would have to enact in the Pacific.

Price detailed that when he declassified Bateson’s documents under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1990s, Bateson’s memo from November 1944 was found in the CIA archive and not the OSS archive. This suggests that Bateson’s advice for intelligence gathering was influential beyond World War II and perhaps formative to the CIA. Indeed, in 1951, only four short years after its founding, the CIA outlined a policy on Cold War weapons. The classified report considers culture a “Cold War Front” and advocates for private foundations to patronize and issue commissions to artists “who could create works of art symbolical of the struggle against tyranny in their native lands.”²⁵ The CIA would also infamously fund cultural organizations around the world, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Asia Foundation.²⁶ Both organizations contributed to the advancement of modern art internationally in the postwar years. From 1951, the CIA put into effect a program code-named DTPillar to influence the development of nationbuilding in Asia as a means to limit the growth of communism. Stirred by a public exposé in Ramparts magazine (in circulation from 1962 to 1975), the CIA ceased funding of cultural organizations in 1967.²⁷

Bateson was also strategic in targeting individuals who should see Bali, Background for War. He wrote personal invitations to the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and to individuals at the OSS.²⁸ Particularly telling is a loose list that includes Cora Du Bois (OSS, 1942–45). Du Bois was chief of research and analysis for the Southeast Asia Command by 1944 and, after World War II, influenced the framing of Southeast Asia through her positions as chief of the Southeast Asia Branch of the US State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research (from 1945 to 1949) and as an academic at Harvard University. The list also includes Charles Fahs (OSS, 1941–45), who became chief of the Research and Analysis Division (Far East) of the OSS in 1942 and director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950, where he was directly involved in allocating Rockefeller grants and providing critical support to individual artists and intellectuals as well as to museums and art spaces in Southeast Asia.²⁹ In 1947, as if telegraphing Bateson’s comment about regions as a sane orchestration of the world, Du Bois, having returned from her service in the OSS and been asked to speak about cultural anthropology and Southeast Asia, stated at Smith College: “Regions and areas, like fields of academic learning, are artificial boundaries which we erect around our curiosity. They do not represent limits of integrated reality, but defenses built to encompass the frailties of human comprehension.”³⁰ This correlation and the constellated network of Bali, Background for War raises complex questions about US postwar and postimperial worldbuilding and intelligence, as well as about Southeast Asian modern art.

After the war, Bateson would advance his ideas on visual anthropology in other fields. In 1947, he addressed the United Nations, giving a speech titled “Atoms, Nations and Cultures” to argue for the urgency of social engineering based on the cultural analysis derived from visual anthropology.³¹

Twenty-four years after Bali, Background for War opened, in 1967, Bateson published the essay “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.”³² In this text, he performs an analysis of Balinese art as information coded in style, material, composition, and skill. He emphasizes the profundity of art in terms of its relational quality. Thus, he argues, Balinese paintings, under the influence of traditional and Western art forms, encapsulate the communication process between these societies. Furthermore, the text resonates with Bateson’s interest in addressing differences in international relations, which could also be read as laying out the framework for data to remake the world.³³ In this sense, Bali, Background for War in many ways foreshadowed Bateson’s work on cybernetics in the 1960s and throughout the Cold War.³⁴

The cross-cultural relations based on aesthetic experiences with modern art that defined Bali, Background for War were echoed in MoMA’s contributions to the postwar construction of modern art in Bali. In 1953, the foundation Puri Lukisan was set up to establish a museum of modern Balinese art in Ubud. Tjokorda Gee Agung was its founding chairman while Rudolf Bonnet was its curator. The museum sought support from patrons of Balinese art in Holland, the United States, and England. Monroe Wheeler answered the call. Beyond sending a book on the care of artworks, he supported the development of the museum by soliciting donations from American foundations. The first organization he approached was the Asia Foundation, which would contribute to the building in 1956 of Museum Puri Lukisan, the oldest museum in Bali. Wheeler might not have known at the time that the Asia Foundation received funds from the CIA. Nevertheless, the networked triangulation of capital flows from the CIA as well as the belief in aesthetic experience being able to mold subjectivities is important in the intelligence-making project of modern art in the Cold War.³⁵ In his letter to the Asia Foundation, dated July 10, 1955, Wheeler notes that a financial contribution to the Indonesian government to complete the building of the museum would be an admirable “token of American concern with the fine arts, which is too little understood in Asia,” extending MoMA’s wartime concern for Balinese modern art and Southeast Asia into the postwar period.³⁶

Bali, Background for War, when read against its possible influences on the cultural Cold War in the region and Bateson’s postwar accomplishments, anticipates exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern art as forms of intelligence-making, marrying the regional as a method in structuring the world with “modern art” and as a product of international exchange. Thus, Bali, Background for War offers a vista onto early cybernetic entanglements between Southeast Asia and modern art. It is important to keep in mind that MoMA did not set out to make a regional art exhibition with Bali, Background for War. Neither did the Museum set out to influence the policies of the cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia that Southeast Asian modern artists (like the Balinese modernists) would later navigate in seeking support for their own development through the Asia Foundation and other CIA-funded organizations. As an exhibition that predates Southeast Asia as a field of area studies, Bali, Background for War is an exhibitionary method: it is at once a field of relations, a feedback loop, and an open-ended imaginary produced from comparatively looking at modern art. Bali, Background for War foreshadowed future articulations of the relations that have come to define cybernetics as a field. As this essay argues, the exhibition also expands our understanding of MoMA’s influence as a museum and center for a global history of modern art, a critical part of the construction of a postwar world order.

*This essay has been adapted from and expands on an unpublished chapter from the author’s dissertation titled “Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s),” Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2023.

**With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

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Articulations of the relational have been shifting in parallel with the recent turn in global contemporary art toward validating ecological and indigenous practices. This shift invites a consideration of what exactly constitutes the relational among artistic and curatorial efforts within the global contemporary. And among Southeast Asian exemplars, the multimedia practice of artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (born 1957, Thailand) comes to mind as a rich prompt via which to think about the nuances, complications, or possibilities in the relational.

Hinting at such nuances, Roger Nelson and Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol’s essay accompanying a recent translation of Araya’s writing proposes the neologism “transunitary” to characterize Araya’s practice: “It is between and across and beyond its many parts and modes. . . . It is a singular practice whose polysemy and sometimes almost dissociative polyvocality circles around ethical, existential concerns.”¹It is striking to note that the thematically diverse range of critical and curatorial discourses on Araya’s practice converge around each of two poles. The first implies that her artistic evocation of the relational hinges on a certain similarity in existential conditions. This does not imply shared suffering through common experiences or circumstances, but rather affective solidarity through proximate conditions of existential marginality—for instance, the similarities between female subjects in patriarchal gender regimes, or those between the lives of powerless, marginalized humans and the lives of animals dependent on human care or vulnerable to human violence. ² Meanwhile, the second discursive tendency dwells on the radical independence, singularity, and intransigence of Araya’s practice, thereby associating the relational with the potential in dissociation, that is, with the artist’s agency in terms of establishing distance from or separating from her immediate artistic and social contexts.³

Here, I would like to think about the question of the relational in contemporary artistic practice from another angle, one more explicitly attentive to encounters or entanglements with difference.⁴ I detour to the artist’s usage of the cinematic tableau as a method of framing, displaying, and addressing difference. In the context of contemporary moving image practices, the tableau has a broader, less traditional meaning than that of restaging an artwork. The cinematic tableau can instead be understood as a compositional form that draws attention to the displaying and viewing of images.

Araya explores the relational potential of the tableau most fully in two video installation series: The Two Planets (2008) and Village and Elsewhere (2011), both of which are composed of short audiovisual vignettes that are usually exhibited as multichannel video and photographic installations. The individual works in each series are almost identical in terms of visual composition. Araya re-situates one or two large-scale, ostentatiously gold-framed reproductions of famous western paintings in outdoor or neighborhood spaces in the rural outskirts of the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. The video camera frames these reproductions and their visually associative physical surroundings in a straight-on shot. On-screen, the framed reproductions are frontally displayed in the background. In the foreground, small groups of people are visible from the back, and their murmurings, chatter, gossip, speculations, and digressions as they look at the reproductions audible. A reproduction of the work by Vincent van Gogh of a man and woman asleep by a haystack is placed in a lush green field of banana trees and other crops in Van Gogh’s The Midday Sleep and the Thai Villagers (2008; fig. 1); a reproduction of a painting by Edouard Manet of picnickers hangs in a bamboo wood in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai Villagers (2008); and a reproduction of a painting of peasant women by Jean-François Millet is beautifully positioned at the edge of a lake, seemingly suspended above the calm surface of the water in Millet’s The Gleaners and the Thai Farmers (2008). Inside the prayer hall of a neighborhood Buddhist temple, its wooden panels painted burgundy, two enormous and provocative reproductions are placed side by side at one end of the hall; behind them on the wall are brightly colored murals displaying scenes from Theravada tales (Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers, 2011).

In each of these audiovisual vignettes, the duration of the scene displayed approximates the duration of spectatorship by a figural group whose faces we do not see. The visualization of the group signifies “Thai Villagers,” or “Thai Farmers,” transfiguring people who, in everyday life, live in the same suburb as the artist. In each tableau, the group is sitting on the ground, their backs to us, facing the framed reproduction. The shortest of these videos are nearly ten minutes, and the longer ones about twenty-five. Someone comments on a detail that strikes them about the picture in the frame. Another person observes something about this face or that body, this plant, that tool, this hat, or that dish. The group amuses itself, speculating wildly on the backstory in the displayed scene. Sometimes they prod one another to dart up to the framed picture and point out a small detail—or to caress the image of a face, the skin, a body part. With the van Gogh reproduction, the group contemplates the placement of the sickle, the number of wheels on the wooden cart, the total number of oxen legs visible, and the casting of the sunlight on the haystack, all in order to decipher winning lottery numbers. Their conversation flows easily, often straying from the framed reproduction to random neighborhood gossip. Each video is unscripted and staged as a one-take piece using a static shot. The editing is minimal, involving discreet jump cuts to crop out of parts of the conversation without changing the visual composition, giving the impression that the vignettes are displaying spectatorial experiences in real time.

Film theoretical scholarship on the tableau tends to imply a continuation of modernist cinema and museum spectatorship.⁵ This modernist genealogy continues to exert an influence over present-day thinking about contemporary art cinema and the moving image. Here, contemplation remains a persistent marker of the value of spectatorial experience, along with the conception of the apparatus of display that situates the spectator as the solitary beholder of the artwork. Agnes Petho, for instance, observes that the contemporary “tableau-film” ⁶, is, in effect, a continuation of the modernist apparatus for the display of artwork. That is, the artwork is presented for the eyes of the spectator, for contemplation by its beholder. In order for the spectator “to comprehend the picture as a whole,” the work is “displayed in a manner that visibly separates it from the surrounding space,” implying the spectatorial experience is one of intimate, solitary beholding.⁷

Petho differentiates this mode of spectatorship from the more familiar model in which the filmic tableau represents an occasional, exhibitionistic moment of suspension of narrative flow. Her proposition concerning the spectatorial mode of the contemporary tableau-film helps us to grasp the precision with which Araya’s series decenters that model. Rather than reproducing the ideology of the cinematic tableau that is indebted to the genealogy of western modernist art history, the form of display of The Two Planets and Village and Elsewhere instead constellates two incommensurable spectatorial models. The apparatus of contemplative beholding is figured, frontally displayed, and simultaneously entwined with another genealogy of displaying, spectating, and experiencing images, one anchored in improvisatory, social, and participatory interactions.

Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers (fig. 3) is an especially suggestive example in this regard. The framed scene takes place inside rather than outside, in the public space of the prayer hall of a Buddhist temple. In the background of the tableau shot, we see an enormous gold-framed reproduction of an untitled painting by Jeff Koons that is displayed frontally on the left side of the screen. Beside it, toward the right side of the screen, there is a reproduction of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which is encased in a matching gold frame equal in size to the one framing Koons’s work. In the foreground, there are several rows of lively spectator-figures, children and neatly dressed older women—including Araya herself—all of whom are sitting with their backs to the camera on a fandango pink carpet facing the two reproductions. Unlike in most of the other works in the series, a figure stands next to the framed reproductions and faces the camera. He is a Buddhist monk who, for the duration of the video, delivers a humorous, didactic sermon on the third Buddhist precept, the prohibition of sexual misconduct, using the images as visual aids. The response of his audience of unruly children and aunties veers between raucous opining and gleefully digressive and associative interpretations of details in the images to chanting enthusiastic replies by rote. The last group of visible figures in this work are sāmaṇeras, or novice monks, and dogs of different sizes, whose errant wandering off- and on-screen during the unusual sermon disarrays the loose geometric lines of the tableau.

This improvisatory and participatory spectatorship recalls another genealogy of moving-image exhibition: the live narration of films. As with a number of other global majority cinematic cultures throughout the twentieth century, such practices have been the predominant mode of film exhibition and spectatorship in Thailand. Film “versioning” artists toured the country and strayed into borderlands, performing live or as-live vocal improvisations accompanying film projection.⁸ They served as human mediators of film projection performances whose agency in making films come to life, and whose translation of highly mobile, reproducible images into utterances addressed to specific audience congregations, constituted another ground from which to re-pose questions concerning cinema’s ontology and its historical or possible modes of spectatorship. In Araya’s staged tableau, the monk-narrator seems to channel the ancestral figure of the film “versionist.” His improvisatory montaging of a story sequence from Koons to Gentileschi resources his fabulation of a morality tale concerning the spectacular punishment of an adulterous man. The duration of display of this tableau makes perceptible how the monk’s sermon thrives on the sociality and unpredictability of spectatorial energy. To spectate here is to participate in the liveness of improvisation, asserting, exchanging, interjecting, and derailing meaning. Presenting the monk’s versioning and installing traveling, reproducible images inside the temple compound should not be understood in blunt terms as gestures of artistic disruption to the institutional and affective functioning of this place of worship. It is worth recalling that the Buddhist temple ground in Thailand and elsewhere has historically played host to, and certainly continues to host, wide-ranging forms of public celebrations and festivities including itinerant film projection.

In one of her many pieces of writing connecting her visual and textual practice, Araya tells a story of how she came upon the idea to make Village and Elsewhere and The Two Planets:

            เป็นในเช้าตรู่วันหนี่ง ฉันนั่งอยู่ในห้องอาหารกว้างของโรงแรมในเมืองหลวงหนึ่งของยุโรป มีกาแฟร้อนบนโต๊ขณะมองดูหิมะตกขาวบนถนนในเมืองและลานกว้าง ฉันนั่งดูเมืองสลับไปกับอ่านบทความที่อ่านค้างอยู่ว่าด้วยศิลปะอาเซียน ท่อนหนึ่งของบทความพูดถึงการพัฒนาศิลปะของเอเชียจะเป็นไปได้จำต้องได้รับการวิจารณ์ที่แหลมคมจาภายนอก หมายถึงยุโรปและที่อื่นๆ

            ด้วยเหตุที่ชีวิตฉันแวดล้อมไปด้วยสองสิ่งอย่างซึ่งต่างกันคือ ศิลปะซึ่งถูกดูแลดีราวกับจะไม่มีวันตาย กับ อีกอย่างคือเมื่อฉันย้ายออกจากเมืองมาอยู่ในชนบท, ภาพธรรมชาติ การเกิดและตายง่ายๆ ของคนในหมู่บ้าน

                        ฉันวางสองอย่างไว้คู่กัน ศิลปะชิ้นเอกของโลกกับ ชาวนา ชาวสวน สวนทางกับประโยคเคยอ่านข้างต้น

Early one morning, I was seated in a large restaurant inside a hotel, somewhere in a European capital city, with hot coffee on the table. The streets and square outside were covered in pristine white snow. I alternated between watching the world go by and reading an article I had started on ASEAN art. At one point, the author asserts that Asian art can only develop if artists are stimulated by sharp external criticism, meaning from Europe or elsewhere.

I exist in two different environments. One is the world in which artworks are so well looked after they seem immortal. When I moved out of the city, I encountered the other world, a world of nature and of birth and death without fanfare of people in the village.

I placed these two beings together—the world’s renowned artwork, and the farmers—reversing the logic prescribed in the sentence I had read.⁹

Art historian Sayan Daengklom cautions against the reductiveness of reading Araya’s tableaux as a reversing of the Eurocentric mentality expressed in the article she had come across: the provision of an opportunity for the native to talk back and to criticize famous western artworks.¹⁰ Another parallel logic, that of inclusion, likewise meets a dead end when used merely to endorse the socially and symbolically privileged artist for making artworks that apparently endow voice and visibility to the underrepresented. Equally reductive would be to conclude that Araya made these tableaux by manipulating specific groups of people with her symbolic privileges: Araya the artist-academic luring unsuspecting villagers and farmers into her frame in order to expose their ignorance about western modernist art and its spectatorial and museological conventions.

How then to think differently about the relational form of Araya’s tableaux—their constellating, staging, and superimposing of incommensurable modes of display and spectatorship? The logic of display and address in Araya’s series might be thought of as a twist on Jacques Rancière’s proposition concerning the potentiality of art in the aesthetic regime.¹¹ In his argument, the potential efficacy of this regime is premised on dissociating the artwork’s form from its presumed effect. It also implies a conception of community structured in separation and asynchrony. Aesthetic community in this definition concerns the common capacity of every person to experience art in dissimilar and unpredictable ways, and it implies community in absentia, as the speculative future. While differentiating his proposition from western modernist ideas regarding the autonomy of artwork and aesthetic experience, Rancière’s characterization of the potentiality of the aesthetic break still rests on an assumption of the necessary solitude of aesthetic experience. His proposition tends to imply that, at best, artistic works are efforts that, in their very form, explore “the very tension between the apart and the together . . . either by questioning the ways in which the community is tentatively produced or by exploring the potential of community entailed in separation itself.”¹² What if the potentiality of the aesthetic regime—its unpredictability—is less a matter of the separation/solitude of the beholder in their aesthetic experiencing than of the sensorial and perceptual encountering of difference? Here, Édouard Glissant’s proposition regarding the necessity of the poetics of relations in what he calls the “chaos-world” provides a compelling counterpoint. “Chaos-world” is Glissant’s name for the totality of the contemporary world, in which inhabitants live within multiple temporalities and do so within a drastically accelerated time of intercultural contacts and connections. The chaos-world is “the shock, the intertwining, the repulsions, attractions, complicities, oppositions and conflicts between the cultures of peoples.”¹³ Unpredictability is likewise a foundational value in Glissant’s conception of the potential of the aesthetic or the poetic. Yet, unlike Ranciere’s definition of the aesthetic regime, Glissant posits the relational as a situated imagining, opening out from one’s locality and experiencing the extensiveness, immeasurability, openness, and unpredictability of connecting and colliding with others near and far in the totality of the chaos-world. Here, the relational becomes the sensation and the potential of entangling in radically different or incommensurable forms, modes, and beings. With this in mind, I would like to end by drawing attention to how Araya’s tableaux stage encounters with the foreign, and entangle us, the off-screen spectators, in the time-space of the mise en abyme.

The tableau display of the gold-framed reproductions references and aggrandizes museum conventions of hanging and presenting artworks on walls, an exhibition apparatus that lays claim to addressing everyone. Yet the spectators in The Two Planets and Village and Elsewhere exceed the boundary of that universalizing assertion with their actualization of what, following Elaine Castillo, we might call the spectatorship of the unintended.¹⁴ At the same time, their encounters with the reproductions take place in spaces that do not cohere with the museological value of suspending the time and space of daily life. The “Thai Villagers” and “Thai Farmers” in Araya’s tableaux are shown engaging with framed reproductions of art in neighborhood spaces—the local field, temple, and bamboo forest. The spectatorship of the unintended that they enact is a kind of unruly hosting, an extending of hospitality to the foreign, an unpredictable engagement with mobile artifacts from distant lands, cultures, and times.

An iteration of Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers at 100 Tonson Gallery (Bangkok, 13 October 2011 – 31 January 2012) reproduces and re-situates the audiovisual vignette in the format of a single-channel projection of a video within a video. In this example, the projected display shows the sermon video playing on a television screen inside what appears to be a Japanese Buddhist temple and being watched by a small group of monks seated to one side of the television screen. Here, Araya quite explicitly draws attention to the mise-en-abyme structure of the work, highlighting its function as a method of spectatorial entanglement.¹⁵ Each of us, as off-screen spectators, becomes ensnared as the additional figure in the group, the incidental commencer of another space of viewing-participation, situated beyond and “behind” the arrayed bodies of the aunties, children, and dogs on the TV screen, and the monks in Japan whose profiles fill the foreground. In this way, Araya’s installation undoes the separation between the work as an object of viewing, and the spectator as a subject of vision. The mise-en-abyme structure of this and other works in her tableaux creates a preposterous effect of vacillation between the vision of the spectating subject and the spectator as object.

My usage of the notion of the preposterous is inspired by Mieke Bal’s method of theoretic fiction. Bal analyzes the relationship between the work of Caravaggio and that of the contemporary artists who “quote” him, doing so in such a way as to conceptualize the method of “preposterous history” and its accompanying contemporary baroque epistemology.¹⁶ This historiographic method runs counter to art history’s traditional historiographic method, in which the relationship between historical and contemporary works of art is one of the former’s influence over the latter. Bal proposes instead that contemporary artistic works constitute the starting point with which to engage with, understand, or reenvision historical works, and in so doing, to grasp precisely the historical characteristics of those works from the concerns and vantage points of the present. This is the “preposterousness” in question, a dynamic of inquiry constituting a kind of baroque vision characterized by a “vacillation between the subject and object of that vision and which changes the status of both.”¹⁷ Embracing the necessity of reestablishing the terms of relations between entities, acknowledging their singularity while asserting their contemporaneous status, this baroque sense of preposterousness is highly applicable to Araya’s practice. Focusing on Araya’s use of the tableau enables us to better grasp the way the artist makes relational forms. Insofar as her work entangles beings, species, roles, and worlds—the living and the dead, women and dogs, the artworld and the village, the spectator, the participant, and the artist—it might be described, to riff on Nelson and Chanon Kenji’s neologism, as a kind of trans-relational method performing the duration and movement of associating radically different beings and incommensurable worlds. What is so significant about Araya’s practice lies here, in the performing and framing of relations of radically different beings, and of incommensurable and yet contemporaneous entities, in ways that are preposterous, wildly disorientating, and fully lived.

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I spent my childhood in the hills or in the sea. I liked to listen to the fog. I ran cross-country, I ran through the woods, the grass, and the meadows; I ran all the time, so much I wore out my knees and now my knees ache at random. When my friends and I got our licenses, we often went to the Marin Headlands. By the time we got to it, the Headlands was a national park; it still is. First though, it was Coast Miwok lands. All of California is unceded. Later, the area was home to Portuguese and Spanish dairy farmers, and marked by all the violence of their arrival. Since the 1900s, it has been a federal military base, which swelled into a monster of an outpost in the 1940s to protect Americans from the perceived threat from the other side of the Pacific. Nobody came. Nevertheless, it was deemed appropriate to intern our own citizens and residents.¹ I remember mulling over this violence when I was still young: Why did that happen like that? It is funny to remember that sense of confusion, despite not knowing or having any of the knowledge then that I do now about the trinity of imperialism, racism, and colonization. Though it was nameless then, I still felt the ambient, unflinching whine of the accumulation of capital, among its cacophonous cohort of atrocities.

There are two ways to get to the Headlands. The way the tourists go, which involves traffic on the weekends and an incredible drop straight to the ocean. Or the way you go when you’ve seen the Golden Gate Bridge before: through a five-minute-long one-way tunnel that spits you out into a valley surrounded by gentle hills, rambling to the sea. Winding through and around and then down a little (if you drive fast, you can make your stomach flip), the beach unveils itself, a lagoon, a parking lot, the cliffs, dark sand; there’s a particular vibrancy and depth to the blue of the Headlands; everything is shrouded with it, the dark swirling, freezing ocean. The sand is so fine and on some days nearly black. The surf in its verticality is so strong, there is kind of a steepness imprinted in the sand, not quite an embankment, a steep slip to the ocean. Meters-high rocks, scale, scale, scale, wind, brush, sage, rumors of a helicopter landing for unknown reasons, and then back in the hills, which were filled with bunkers, deep, crazy caverns, cracking and dripping. I’ve never seen anything darker, filled with people, at least we wagered, kids from other high schools had tall tales buoyed by the traces; lots of jokes are based in fear, writing our names timidly near the entrances, never going much deeper. Rin was here.

Years later, on the street in the rain, Mad told me I was reserved, not quiet. I realized later walking home how I emulated the landscape of my childhood. I think of the darkness of the bunkers and the fog meandering across that big expanse of whatever you call gray when it’s blue, the city across the way and then the bowing horizon, and always a ship going out to the Pacific. Sometimes, I notice things really quickly, and other times, I’m so busy living inside of one thing, I don’t realize the illusion of the other. Like how those ships are so large, the city seemed closer than it was. What was in those containers? It did not matter then, we found the boat a kind of metronome. We’d be sure to see it, smoking somebody’s brother’s California medical marijuana out of an apple on that federal territory before going back to our cars to giggle, or if I was with a lover,² to touch each other until the sun was long gone and the great white lights of the federal police told us from their loud speakers to go home.

In a cafe, as a lark, I suggest to X—a curator who has invited me to do an exhibition in Shanghai—that I would like to cross the Pacific Ocean. I base this lark on the fact that yes, I will always be tied to the Atlantic for the accident of birth.³ However, in practicality, I feel far more tied to the Pacific, having grown up in it, around it, having visited family who had transplanted themselves to Hawai’i, and always, always swimming in it, even now, by chance, marrying a woman from the other side of it. That to cross the Pacific on the various highways of winds that flow across might provide an interesting exercise, one that might not be possible in the future. There were also things that made this act of crossing an American one, more specifically a colonial one. Obvious question: How much has my country irrevocably changed the nations of the Pacific? Besides that there was something about the fact that it matters how you get somewhere, and more in there too that I wasn’t quite sure about all of it; what is the point of this?⁴ It was something, though. In short, I talk myself into a knot and then look up at X. They smile, they think that’s the best idea I’ve presented and that I should indeed cross the Pacific. The Pacific grows in their mind too; it zigzags or maybe bogs up beside us both. So, I will cross. My next preoccupation: how?

Likely the last time I sailed was at age 13 off the coast of Pimu (Catalina Island). In the water I was focused, sharklike. I won my races; I got the gold star in sailing. The only phrase that has really stuck with me after these 20 years is “tacking into the wind,” that to go forward you’d have to do a dance in triangles to arrive at your destination, never being pushed backward, but never straight forward exactly either. This is around the time I think if I had been born a bit later, I would have come out as trans; I didn’t know what to call it then, even with trans adults floating near me in San Francisco. I was too afraid of them. On the water and in it, the changing of my form and its congruous incongruencies with myself were held at a remove. The sheltered bays of Pimu are not the open waters of the Pacific.

I settle on some sort of 40- to 50-foot boat, which I will rent or buy. I learn I’ll need to leave between January and April, and if I don’t stop, it will take me around 30 to 40 days, depending on how things go with the weather. I won’t go alone. I’ll need some companions. I search for them. Likely, we will go in a regatta, with some others who are crossing. This is safest. I begin to compile the tools I’ll need to properly sail. I spend hours on the internet, researching alone and chatting excessively with ChatGPT. I learn that, in addition to my boat and the various rations, I will need the following in both analog and digital forms:

1. A compass
2. GPS
3. Charts and maps
4. SSB radio and VHF radio
5. Weather-forecasting tools
6. GPS-enabled sextant
7. A logbook
8. Automatic identification system (AIS).

Each tool is familiar to me except for the Automatic Identification System (AIS). AIS is used for automatic tracking of large ships and passenger boats. It allows the operator of the vessel to receive and transmit information, such as the ship’s name, position, course, and speed, to other AIS-equipped vessels and shoreside traffic-control centers. Essentially, it transmits who you are to everybody and transmits who everybody says they are to you too. On the water, they say, see and be seen.⁵ Or that’s how it’s meant to be.

I increase my watching of sailing videos on YouTube, I focus on crossing. I watch other people cross in 15-20-30-60-minute bursts, families, solos, couples. I watch their tensions, boredom, the horizons, the fish they catch, their bodies writhing in pain, flipping, the humans grinning holding that transparent line, the flat eye of the fish narrowing in exhaustion,⁶ intermingled as if imbibed with hot sauce into the human, exhausted in the late hours, the sudden squalls, the choppy waves. I watch them stare at their digital charts, their compasses, and their AIS.

Every group I watch eventually struggles with readings on their devices and often on their AIS. Either there are ships that are spoofing—pretending to be larger or smaller than they actually are—or there are ships that have turned off their AIS altogether.

On their voyage to Uruguay, sailing couple Kate and Curtis of the YouTube channel Sailing Sweet Ruca, chronicle their run-in with an illegal fishing vessel.⁷ The episode begins, as most sailing vlogs do, with a teaser of the big event and then jumps right into their day-to-day. They explain how their dog, Roxy, uses the restroom on board the sailboat,⁸ breakfast is made, routes are planned, a day passes, things are fixed, wind is scarce until it isn’t. On the third night of their voyage, during heavy winds—and all the efforts it takes to move through those—the radar alarm⁹ goes off and they discover that there is something very close to them. Kate identifies it as a fishing boat, and it is less than a mile away. The drama of this moment is narrated and explained more than felt in a traditional dramatic sense. Visually, to a non-sailor; the moment feels somehow confusingly mellow. The fishing boat looks far away, just a white light splitting the darkness into horizon and sky. The stress level in Kate’s voice drives home a truism of sailing: distance on the water is very different from distance on land.

“Curtis has been battling him for at least the last half hour,” Kate explains. “He keeps changing direction every time we change direction, making a collision course with us, so finally we had to turn on the motor . . . and just try to get by him.” They try to radio the fishing boat, but there is no response. Kate turns the camera to reveal their view, the main sail, the ropes flexing, sailing in the dark, into nothingness, tool-dependent, tipped to the right, the wind is fast at 20 knots, there is spray coming over the bow, it’s wet.¹⁰ “What the **** is this guy,” Curtis says in calm frustration. He’s spotted another boat on the AIS and asks Kate to go down and take a closer look. It is a 91-foot fishing vessel going 3.5 knots. The boat’s AIS popped on and then off again, suddenly. While it is common enough for boats not to always leave their AIS on, in this circumstance, it is odd; in this weather, at night, usually you’d be in communication via radio with the other vessel, doing what you can to avoid one another. So now there are two boats. One directly behind the other. And suddenly, they’re closer. Still no response on the radio, the spray continues. Frustrated, Kate says, “We all have to respect each other, but I don’t know what this is, it’s just carelessness.” At this point, Kate and Curtis are going upwind using their motor and doing everything they can to avoid this second boat, which reads a mile away from them. It continues, their radar isn’t picking up the second boat’s location, and now Kate and Curtis must depend on their vision alone to figure out how to avoid them. They can see their lights and that’s it; they can’t tell which side of the boat they’re seeing, what direction the boat might be taking. These confusions have forced Kate and Curtis to continue to keep their motor on, going straight into waves that are beating their boat down.

Unbelievably, Curtis spots another vessel. Kate takes a look, “It’s almost like it’s two different AISs for the same vessel.” Curtis agrees, “He’s got a fake-out AIS. These guys are probably all illegal.” Kate gives us a further description: One AIS went off, another went on, they’re in the same position according to the charts. They’re spoofing. “God, it shows him pointing directly at us too, like he wants to hit us.” Kate and Curtis have all their lights on, they want to be visible, they are not trying to hide, they’re just trying to get through. Kate predicts that this will be a sleepless night for her and Curtis; the wind picks up. A week later, Curtis and Kate will find out that the Uruguayan navy caught a Chinese fishing vessel in the same location they had been sailing in.¹¹ Kate notes in her final narration that she and Curtis cannot say for sure if these boats were illegally fishing or not, but given their behavior, it seems quite possible.

The Uruguayan navy put footage of the capture of the fishing vessel on YouTube. The whining of a helicopter provides a heavy soundtrack as the large blue-hulled fishing vessel bobs in the water alongside the navy ship.¹² In another shot, two dinghies surround the fishing vessel. This dance from my view, the computer, seems static, like a painting; the charge is the matter.

Likely, when a boat does not come up on an AIS, that boat’s main job is to transship. I am trans, we must be related. (I’ve told this joke before.)

“Transshipment” is a term used to describe the transferring of cargo from one mode of transportation to another during its transit from point of origin to final destination. For example, this could mean transferring cargo from a ship to a train, or from one ship to another ship. In the Pacific Ocean, transshipment has a long history that isn’t worth relaying here. We can speculate that transshipment likely hit some sort of uptick with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.¹³ And that uptick at the Panama Canal then grew exponentially with the growth of the globalizing economy in the 1990s.¹⁴ In its innocent form, transshipment is used to optimize logistics and save on transportation costs. However, as obvious as this is to state, transshipment can also be used to bypass bottlenecks or trade barriers. 

Illegal transshipment can take many forms: smuggling, tax evasion, fraud. Transshipment is resorted to in order to avoid tariffs and quotas. To further avoid inspection, goods are mislabeled, paperwork is falsified, and certain circuitous shipping routes are taken. Transshipment can be used to smuggle goods like drugs and weapons, or live beings like rare wildlife and nolonger-living beings like fish and other dead sea creatures. These activities all live under the title of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU). IUU fishing vessels will engage in transshipment at sea, where the fish is caught by one vessel and then transferred to another (and sometimes even another) to then be brought to market.

To accomplish the first part of this IUU fishing, a ship will turn off their AIS to conceal their identity and location, or at the very least, confusing or, for lack of a better word, troubling it. This process of concealment is known as “dark shipping,” and it is this practice that Kate and Curtis found themselves caught in the middle of.

In Hakai Magazine’s article “Catch Me If You Can: The Global Pursuit of a Fugitive Ship,” writer Sarah Toy details the complex and intense process of catching the IUU fishing vessel STS-50 in 2018. The capture involved multiple governments and agencies all working together in tandem, often the effort coming down to one email or phone call. Before the vessel was caught, it operated for eight years under different names, with crew members coming and going, some knowing the legality of the ship’s activities, and others just passing through. STS-50, like many other IUU ships, sold its catch to many different middlemen.

As investigators began to close in on STS-50, Toy narrates:

“STS-50 tried to evade tracking by periodically switching off its AIS and using a generic Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number, a nine-digit code that is supposed to be unique to each vessel. With the generic identification number, the STS-50 was able to hide under other ships’ transmission signals, says Bergh, “a bit like everybody trying to talk on the same frequency on a radio.” Specialists at Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT), a Norwegian nonprofit that provides vessel tracking analysis to FISH-i Africa, were able to decipher the STS-50’s intermittent satellite signals and detect where the vessel really was. It was like playing a game of cat and mouse in an area larger than the Australian continent.”

STS-50 fled toward Indonesia, a nation whose task force to combat illegal fishing had blown up more than 400 illegal fishing boats since 2014. Since STS-50 only occasionally turned on its AIS, trackers found themselves predicting the ship’s location between each ping, assuming its course. Eventually it pinged in, likely to let the owner of the ship know its location, and the Indonesian navy was able to intercept it. The captain was fined and put in prison, but the owners cannot be prosecuted. “On the high seas, the bad guys have almost always gotten away—a frustrating reality of the seemingly Sisyphean task of policing lawbreakers in such a vast arena.”¹⁵

A vast arena, liquid and thus confusing, it can hold me yet—shipping, illegal fishing—whole ecosystems and beings we’ve never met and probably never will. Paradoxically, once something is nameable, it can be contained. Maybe it’s better to play the homophone and hear that it’s a parallax. The incongruities of trying to make an image when the lens is actually lower than where your eye composes the picture. Transshipment—in its evasion of being known by continuing to go across—sounds familiar. In the case of the shipment, an exploited group of beings taken and going from one state to the next.

What is a definition but an act mired in its traces? We know that transshipment is happening because we see the boats, the boats are caught, the fish are gone, but are we literally seeing the fish brought up onto the decks? Not often. Fragmentation by way of commodification. Confusingly, we have a lot in common—that is me, the act of transshipping, and the very things that are being transshipped. We are reliant on others to exist on multiple levels. We are full of legal and illegal missions and substrates. In IUU transshipment, there is the plundering of the oceans, and in transness, there is a liberation for the person bearing the label.

The self is a troubling political object. Its maintenance is a pawn to be trifled with, exchanged for a different person’s will, whether that is being in the world or what one ingests in order to live. Containment means not just the possibility to be incorporated into capital accumulation but the possibility to be obliterated because of lack of access to things that are basic to one’s survival. My lines of logic have me running toward myself as a commodity. Is that what I share with the shipment? Commodities are to be traded. I won’t be going to Tennessee or Kentucky any time soon. What does the marine life say? Let’s all trade places in this merry-go-round of exploitation.

Vexing statement: Trans is whatever the group needs it to be. In certain instances, nobody needs it to be much of anything; in others, it is the very structure upon which the entire artifice of social interaction is built; and still in others, it is the perfect scapegoat for the uncomfortable god-level truth, change. Trans is the demon, the liberator, the cocoon, the bear, the cave, the ship, the fisherman, the sailor, and me.

There is a phenomenon called “group random dance.” What happens is groups of people get together and play clips of K-pop songs, and if you know the dance, you go to the center and do it. These groups are large, young, queer, trans. Their vibe is good, diverse; there is an air of excitement, encouragement. They are showing off together. These random dances happen all over the world and are very popular. My five-year-old daughter and I watch these random dances while we draw in my studio. In one random dance in Frankfurt, we stop drawing for a long time to witness this group energy. As is custom, each clip is followed by a computerized voice counting down to the next clip, 5, 4, 3, 2 . . . There’s a collective pause as each song comes on; usually there’s a few squeals, a shout, a scream, and then always a mad dash for the center. Places! Then my daughter and I wait for the moment when they all, together, really do perfectly sync up. A lift of a leg, a hip pop, a head shake, a raised hand in a circular motion.

We also watch for a phenomenon we haven’t fully named yet, something like the confusion of the mirror. What happens is that some of the people dancing know the dance from one perspective, and others know the dance from another. So that means they’re doing the same moves, but one is going right while the other goes left. Elbows knock and concentrations are broken.¹⁶ Implied in these public random dances is that they all kind of know what’s going on, not enough to be the “real” thing, but they’ll try all together, kind of knowing the dance is enough; the point is to be dancing, to be giving it a go, to all be trying. Or at least that’s the point I’m seeing from it (we can only read so much of another person’s reasoning through the filter of our own logic). Trying is worth it at least.

Night in our corner of Berlin is quiet, mostly just footsteps and the occasional shout, and still I am unable to sleep. I give in, walk myself to my computer, I begin looking for 40-foot sailboats; there’s one in Providence that could be promising. My ears burn when I am afraid but I kind of like the feeling. I imagine myself reading charts at the shining table on this particular vessel. Poring over the lines, the weather. I bid on the boat; it will be my most expensive artistic endeavor. Anything to cross over. I walk to the window to hear the morning birds. I wait.

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There is a chasm between classical and contemporary Southeast Asian art—as there is between specialists in the former and the latter. On the one side is the devotional object, iconographic signification, politico-religious context, and material means—largely bound together today as in the past century by a scholarly investment in the empirical reliant especially on archaeological investigation and connoisseurial skill. On the other is theoretical exploration, where artistic and art historical practices meet to sound objectivity as a means not of abandoning the pursuit of truth but of reinforcing it, to query codification, and to push boundaries of interpretive foreclosure. Attempts to bridge the chasm are engineered, usually from the contemporary critical edge, through constructs of continuity and change, indigeneity, alternative modernities, and decoloniality—all frequently underpinned by deference, sincere or feigned, to classical knowledge—and harnessing the subaltern to the past through anthropological research. I have tumbled into its depths more than once. Here, rather than hoisting myself up to peer obliquely over the edge of the past, as I am wont to do, I am trying to eke out an existence within, probing where meaning might take root underground—between the two.

Taking “tradition” as a starting point strikes me as an increasingly anachronistic gesture, be it on the part of the artist or the art historian. The gesture is premised on the image of a static-dynamic tandem in which contemporary art is a site of research into fixed things. The premise effectively denies the multiple contemporaneities of historical objects even as it seeks to reactivate them. From the subterranean vantage point I am attempting to sustain, where roots take hold but also grow and branch, historical conditioning proceeds from the work of art as much as precedes it. The materials I am considering here are as historical as they are contemporary, and as contemporary as they are timeless insofar as they all comprise dynamic sites of practice-led research. I see that they theorize in themselves. And their work is never done. If the artworks embody theorization-in-the-making, they do not—indeed cannot—reify history or theory.

This means taking underground culture literally: seeking at once the point of view of the ancestors, buried as they are and yet made to regulate social order by virtue of their very assimilation with the enduring earth, and that of the disruptors of normativity, those who, shunted beneath the surface, are made to bolster the foundations of normativity itself. Still, mingling to make a scene that can be seen now and again, these perspectives all hold the promise of a breakthrough. At stake in exploring this common ground are, from my point of view, important dimensions of the practice of art history today as it might probe the imbrication of the normative and its challenge at the heart of the work of art, old and new.

Two artworks will ground me. At first glance, the one is on the order of a prototype: an iconography-cum-narrative reproduced in sculpture, painting, and performance with scant variation over time; the other, a film, is by contrast an original work that explores inheritance of and in art. Appealing to Hubert Damisch, we might call the iconography a “theoretical object.”¹ The iconography has, in Damisch’s terms, “emblematic value”: it is a staid model that exceeds history not only in historical terms as it endures through repetition over time but also in theoretical terms as a site of ever-unsettled and unsettling exploration of its essential referent—in this case, the gendered aesthetics of figure and ground. The more apparently original work teases out the like emblematic value of its subjects.

Artworks

My first theoretical object is the Māravijaya scene as it typically appears in Cambodian art from the eleventh century to the present (fig. 1). I have worked extensively on this and related iconographies elsewhere, and will only summarize below the narrative and interpretive points most pertinent to discussions here.² The Māravijaya, or “Victory over Evil,” is an episode in the life of the Buddha. The young Siddhartha has rejected the domestic world of the palace, the harem, the parents, the wife and child, to seek he does not know what—something more or less than the mundane. After a long period of searching for the right path, he finds himself meditating in a final approach to Awakening. A demon named Māra, the embodiment of Evil, comes to challenge Siddhartha to the throne on which he sits. Remaining nearly impassive, the Buddha-to-be reaches his right hand down to call the Earth to witness. This moment in the story is denoted by the bhūmisparśa mudrā, the hand gesture of “touching the Earth.” The Earth bears witness to the future Buddha’s accomplishments over past lives. This proves that the future Buddha’s wealth of merit exceeds that of Māra, and in such, confirms the former’s right to the throne. In the process, the Earth is shown to bear—to conserve and to reveal on demand—ancestral history in a Buddhist sense in which one is one’s own ancestor via the cycle of rebirths known as the saṃsāra. The means by which the Earth bears witness varies across time and space. In textual accounts, the Earth quakes at the future Buddha’s touch, and sometimes takes the form of a woman. The latter is the case in much Southeast Asian visual representation, and nearly systematically in Cambodian art. More specifically, a voluptuous woman with long wet hair appears out of the Buddha’s pedestal; she is standing or dancing, and wrings out her hair, making it into a weapon with which she drowns Evil.

On the one hand, the normative binary constructions could not be clearer: the prince rejects the mundane to achieve transcendence, with women—wife or Earth—as his foil, which is to say, as the pedestal on which he appears a transcendent figure, the Buddha. On the other hand, the iconographic ensemble works to deconstruct the very normative structures it nonetheless promotes. The phallic attributes of the Earth figured in the pedestal are oddly matched by the Buddha figure’s embodiment of ambiguous gender. He has shed manhood to become a “Great Man” (Mahāpurus) sublimating (hetero)sexuality in ways that align them with the non-binary if not also the female sex. In formal terms, the Earth Goddess sometimes becomes a figure in her own right, outgrowing the Buddha’s pedestal as it were to stand atop her own. The iconography is bound up in Southeast Asian “cadastral religion” as analyzed by Paul Mus:³ the iconography establishing the Buddha’s sovereignty over the Great Earth, who is shown to attest to his superiority, functions also as a macrocosmic affirmation of mundane practices of territorial organization.

The second artwork, which I will argue also calls the Earth to witness in probing analogous theoretical objects, is Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s 2015 essay film Letters from Panduranga (fig. 3).⁴ The thirty-five-minute single-channel video is a measured contemplation of the Cham people and heritage of south-central Vietnam. The work grew from an activist response to Vietnamese government plans to build nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuận province, Cham ancestral lands once known as Panduranga. The Vietnamese government installation would have caused yet another displacement of a people subjected to multiple colonialisms over the course of the second millennium. The Cham were once synonymous with Champa, a loose confederation of principalities located in what is now central and southern Vietnam from the fourth to the seventeenth century. The gradual expansion south of Vietnamese governance in the second millennium ultimately effaced Champa and displaced the Cham people. The shift in the ethno-political organization of the region was concomitant with a complex religious shift that saw some Cham communities embrace Islam on the back of centuries of Hindu-Buddhist practice embedded in a matrilineal kinship system. The ancient Cham material culture linked Cham peoples to their ancestral lands even as monuments fell into ruin and people moved on—or perhaps because of such transformations. From the nineteenth century, French colonial authorities worked to restore Cham temples and statues not to any contemporary owner deemed rightful, but rather as testimony to the universal value of the art produced by an ancient civilization discovered and recovered by modern colonial power. This is the landscape in which and about which Nguyễn Trinh Thi made Letters from Panduranga. As a Vietnamese citizen-artist, she seeks with her film to restitute some degree of dignity to the Cham people and places she meets.

In formal terms, the film develops through an intimate narrative exchange—a feminine voice and a masculine voice exchanging orally what seem to be the “letters” of the film’s title. The feminine voice begs seamless elision with the filmmaker, while the masculine voice conveys a sort of alter ego, in which a similar elision is nonetheless tempered with différance. The velvety texture of the two voices accompanying the camera in slow-paced trial-and-error shots of people, landscapes, and things envelops viewers in the collaborative contemplation of field encounters and techniques for engendering and adequately recording them. With notable exceptions, the filmed subjects look back at or beyond the camera but say little.⁵

Letters from Panduranga, Take 1

In an analysis of what she will finally call “an aesthetics of matriarchal potentiality”⁶ in Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s essay films, May Adadol Ingawanij alerts viewers to a fine line between repressive and progressive impulses in the assimilation of women with land: “The association of women with background and silence may superficially resemble a colonial trope of visualizing the landscape of conquest.” But Nguyễn, she argues, “complicates the commonly problematized binary, of female/background/non-speech and male/foreground/speech” by evoking a competing association, this time of artists with women, both “silenced by censorship and relegated to the background in modern Vietnam.”⁷ I want to supplement this historical commentary with further consideration of ways in which the complication of the binary engenders Letters from Panduranga’s visual and vocal fields. As the female/background/non-speech is made to emerge into the foreground of the work of art, the subject positions of artist and filmed subject are subtly exchanged. It is nonetheless the background that is foregrounded, the female who is figured, non-speech that is made to be heard. That is, the exchange does not operate a simple inversion of the binary, in which the ground becomes wholly figure and the figure wholly ground. Nor does the film arrive at a resolution fixing subject positions in their proper place. The exchange is ongoing: subject positions vacillate. Though to my knowledge we never actually see them, in the voice, the artist themself is alternately foregrounded and backgrounded, as is the woman/land/silence filmed. They are shown to be resilient and made to be so in the showing. The artwork draws from an underground power, which at the same time, it creates. The power that it makes seen is one characterized by its capacity to relinquish its own hold. The fine line between the progressive and the regressive separates the two contrary motions while also binding them. And it is this relation at work between the normative and its challenge that I see the artwork to probe as it effectively calls the Earth to witness.

There are many stand-ins for the silenced, buried woman in Letters—notably men: old Cham men whose emasculation by the consecutive colonization of Vietnamese, French, and World Heritage regimes shows on their dignified, weathered faces; Vietnamese deminers whose emasculation is hidden in plain sight by the blatant cover-up of regressive labor exploitation in futuristic garb that, along with their undeniable bravery, makes them tragic superheroes; a shirtless, beer-guzzling Cham intellectual whose emasculation finds casual, noble expression in a learned citation of Nietzsche on the joke that is life perfectly void of irony; and the Vietnamese artist’s own male counter-ego whose gentle and wise narrative voice matches her own. Still, if the women in Letters are made to show potentiality in resilience, the men are made to show resignation.

This is to say that in the hands of the artist, the binary holds the seed of its own deconstruction. The Cham/women/land are called to witness, and they do, but they do not speak back to take back; nor does the artist speak for them. Yet, in the call-and-response the artist plays out, she is more than one person, one sex, one ethnicity. The unrelenting acknowledgment of the unbridgeable gap between the artist and their subjects holds the promise of exchange and in such, uncannily and fleetingly unites them. The “matriarchal potentiality” lies then in the background as it is given form.

Letters from Panduranga, Take 2 (Clip 1)

The female narrator-filmmaker’s “favorite place to be” in the Ninh Thuận region of Vietnam is “the cemetery of the Cham Bani, who mix Islam and Brahmanism with local traditions.”⁸ A wide-angle shot of a full, tall tree against a gray sky introduces these words. The nearly two-and-a-half-minute passage that follows takes place in the cemetery in the middle of Letters from Panduranga. The camera pans from the treetop down. Birds sing. A mountain range comes vaguely into view in the distance. Reaching the ground, the camera pulls in to pan the foreground of boulders on a sandy surface before cutting to a woman standing on the sand among neat rows of rounded stones (see fig. 2). The background is now a low building and distant water. The woman is a bit rounded too, hair tied back, oval face, dark eyes, a long scarf draped over her shoulders with the lengths pinned down under either arm, hands clasped under her belly, a taut top, a long full skirt billowing in the wind. The camera lingers on her among the stones. Holding still for the full-frontal portrait, she seems to teeter. She averts her eyes briefly. The narrative voice continues, “Sometimes I lie down among all these stones.”

A colleague’s query brought into focus my obscure sense of the uncanny interplay between voice and image here. He asked, “Was the woman standing in the cemetery the filmmaker?” In contrast to the enunciation of the “I” elsewhere in the film where the narrator explicitly reflects on her difference from the Cham, this phrase, “Sometimes I lie down among all these stones,” suggests an identification between the narrating subject and the subject filmed. Pictured lying in the landscape, the narrator collapses the distance elsewhere made so apparent between herself and her subjects. Yet, the narrated image jars: the woman is actually pictured, that is to say filmed, standing. The resolution of this enigma follows but is no less jarring. The film cuts to a close-up of a pair of stones. The narrative voice continues, “The Cham Bani have the tradition of burying the dead on the chest of their deceased mother.” This is the first of fifteen cuts to different pairs of stones. “At each spot under a pair of stones, there might be a dozen skeletons lying on each other’s chests,” the narrative voice continues.

When she lies down among the stones, and when she pictures herself doing so in words, the narrator, it turns out, is identifying with the dead. It is a striking gesture of agency—lying down with the dead, where agency is defined as the ultimate form of passivity. In herself making like the dead, the narrator imbues a like passive agency to the stones lying on the sand as to the living woman standing among them. Any line between living and dead, as between the filmmaker and the filmed, is blurred. The camera cuts and lingers on each pair of stones just as it had on the woman. The stones also hold still under the gaze—which is to say they are made capable of movement. Do they flinch? Or do we? Once we are made to look, each pair appears different, in size, color, and positioning. They have character.

The burial image is odd: How are the dead made to lie on the chest of their deceased mother? Does the whole body not lie atop the whole body? The chest functions metonymically, that is, the pairs of stones evoke the ancestral mother’s breasts as a stand-in for the whole abstract body—ancestor and land, time and space as one.⁹ Silence ensues. The camera opens up, from one pair to show the following sequence of pairs; and out, to show many rows of pairs stretching to the horizon. The stones have taken the place of the standing woman. Was the woman standing in the cemetery a ghost?

Letters from Panduranga, Take 3 (Clip 2)

Otherwise uncanny is the incorporation of Hanoi’s Statue of Liberty into a Buddha statue in the wake of World War II and the filmic account of this historical event (fig. 3).¹⁰ This is another take on the return of the repressed, where Nguyễn makes us see a palimpsest of narratives embedded in a single image. On one register is the “perfect study of the ‘destiny’ for the ‘colonial remnants’” as the artist-narrator’s alter ego tells it in this passage. The Hanoi Statue of Liberty, a small-scale version of the French gift to America, would become the city’s own beacon of freedom. Locally named bà đầm xoè, the “Open-Dressed Dame,” in an insider’s tongue-in-cheek critique of Western expressions of freedom, the Statue of Liberty had once stood atop Turtle Tower in Hanoi’s Hoàn Kiếm lake. She was taken down and melted down after the war as the Vietnamese gathered strength against the French seeking to reestablish colonial authority in “‘Indochina.” In literally recasting this quintessential embodiment of Western power as a Buddha statue—that is, as a quintessential embodiment of Eastern power—the repressed emerged victorious.

On another register is the filmic excavation of this story and its standing woman. The images accompanying the narration invite analysis on the model of that undertaken by the film itself, zooming in and out to discern detail, assess context, and performatively consider development of method. The passage is framed by a study of stone specimens. Someone—presumably the male speaker—holds an earthy rock up to the camera. A glass jar, with what looks like a plant rooting in water, is out of focus in the background. The hand holding the rock mirrors the camera, both unsteady, as the rock is brought in and out of focus. A small light beam abruptly illuminates its surface, which is reddish, rough, grainy. This is one of a series of specimens presented in the same manner: the presenter puts the first rock down and puts another to the same test, before then presenting a sequence of black-and-white colonial postcards also made to come in and out of focus. The particular “study of the ‘destiny’ for ‘colonial remnants”’ comes into focus as the camera homes in on the fuzzy details of one postcard featuring an engraving—Vietnamese people going about their lives on the ground. The camera moves up the card surface to reveal a tiny statue atop a building set at the far side of a lake; the narrator points her out—Hanoi’s Open-Dressed Dame—as he tells the story. The camera pulls out to show the bigger picture: a larger statue in the foreground rises above the people first shown close up. They are all set in a park. Seen from behind, the larger statue mirrors the tiny one across the lake. The man and the woman are both standing on high pedestals. They appear to face each other, communicating in the common language of their bodies standing straight and tall extending skyward—for Liberty with her hallmark right arm raised to hold a torch aloft; for her counterpart, a flagpole held to his left. The flag envelops the figure from behind to effectively expand his body in a dramatic manner: the pole appears as an extraordinary extension of his left arm. A screenshot of another postcard view of the Open-Dressed Dame rising above Turtle Tower islet across the lake, but this one, a sepia-colored photograph, is placed on top of the first, covering part of it. The camera flits between the two, highlighting different details. When the camera zooms out, we can read the postcard legend: “AUTOUR DE LA STATUE DE PAUL BERT A HA-NOI” (Around the statue of Paul Bert in Hanoi). Paul Bert was the resident-general of Tonkin and Annam for a short few months in 1886. The 2.85-meter replica of the Statue of Liberty was erected in a park at the symbolic heart of colonial administration in Hanoi in 1887. It was displaced in 1890 to make room there for the new statue of the deceased resident-general. Press reports at the time record local anger at the erection of the Open-Dressed Dame atop Turtle Tower, a monument commemorating the fifteenth-century legendary defeat of Ming Chinese colonizers and the foundation of a new dynasty to lead the independent Vietnamese state.

The humiliation can also be imagined through contemplation of the statue that took its place. Viewed frontally, the sculpture depicts Paul Bert with his right palm pressing down above the head of a Vietnamese man appearing to cower at the Frenchman’s feet.¹¹ This “statue of Paul Bert” is actually a sculptural ensemble. The grand figure of the resident-general is made to stand out by the smaller figure at his feet, a figure that is, then, effectively part of the resident-general’s pedestal. Here, we see an earlier iteration of how “the colonized nations were called upon to testify to the superiority of the colonizers” in the public exhibition of “art,”’ to quote Thomas McEvilley on the symbolic work in the famous 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at The Museum of Modern Art.¹²

It is as if the colonial sculptural ensemble is a warped reiteration of the Māravijaya—or vice versa: unperturbed in their sovereignty, the men call to witness those who have gone to ground. The point is not to reduce the one artwork to the other in the name of the universal, to diminish colonial violence in eliding it with Buddhist order, or to equate two historico-culturally distinct expressions of Enlightenment leading to Liberation. Rather, it is to highlight the complex engendering of figure and ground at work at this nexus of historical settings. As history has it, many statues were incorporated like relics into the victorious postwar Buddha. But it is the French statue of Liberty that Nguyễn Trinh Thi calls to witness here to attest to the victory of the Vietnamese and in the process, now, to attest also to her own history. The filmmaker makes her reemerge from within the Buddha before our eyes, standing, right arm aloft. Like the woman in the cemetery of the Cham Bani—the filmmaker-narrator?—she too teeters in the faintly shaky hand of the presenter and the camera(wo)man. We know she has been melted down and yet she reappears, barely, like a ghost. The passage ends with the natural specimens brought back into focus.

The story is loosely reconstituted by the narrator’s alter ego as an exemplar of the truth beating fiction at its own game. Fiction, he reflects, can bring on a closer approach to the real in introducing a distance from it. The fiction the artist conjures is effectively surreal, a true story that appears so outrageous as to appear unreal. Like the shirtless Cham intellectual in Ninh Thuận province citing Nietzsche on the joke that is life.

Deep thanks to Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Nguyễn Hoàng Hương Duyên, Wong Binghao, Panggah Ardiyansyah, Pamela N. Corey, May Adadol Ingawanij, Vandy Rattana and the members of the Harvard University Collective on Gender, Religion and the Arts of Asia, for their interest and support in the development of this essay.

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