While Tibet has ceased to exist as an independent nation, Tibetan material heritage continues to be extensively circulated, collected, displayed, and interpreted in museums, the art market, and academia (fig. 1). Exhibitions of “Tibetan art” remain a regular occurrence in the exhibition circuit. Moreover, Tibetan objects are omnipresent in auctions of Asian art every season at all the major international auction houses and continue to fetch record prices in the global art market. This hypervisibility of Tibetan objects in museums and the market raises a fundamental question: Why is so much of Tibet’s material heritage circulating outside Tibet, displaced from its original place of worship and practice, and so far removed from Tibetans? This phenomenon is succinctly captured by Clare Harris, who notes, “The bulk of Tibet’s portable cultural heritage has been retained everywhere other than Tibet, and is now most readily at the disposal of everyone other than Tibetans.”⁵ Hence, further attention to the provenance of Tibetan collections dispersed across the world in public and private collections is warranted, particularly to assess the colonial entanglement of sacred Tibetan objects. 

The complex colonial entanglement of museum collections in the Global North has led to a growing body of scholarship suggesting that museums must engage with the communities to which these objects originally belonged as a form of symbolic reparation and restorative justice.⁶ This practice has been gaining recognition and momentum, with various attempts to “transform” the museum or, at the very least, alter the relationship between the museum and “communities of origin,” a move that has been deemed “one of the most important developments in the history of museums.”⁷ However, to this day, there is an acute absence of Tibetans in museums, whether as curators, interpreters, collaborators, or other agents in the construction of knowledge and representation or as members of the audience for museum displays.

“Doubly colonial” Tibet: An Inheritance of Loss

In her seminal text The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet (2012), Harris highlights that the hypervisibility of Tibetan objects is due to the extensive scale of displacement of Tibetan heritage from the Tibetan landscape and people through repeated waves of extraction of objects in a “doubly colonial” context, that of both British and Chinese looting in the twentieth century.⁸ She articulates that Tibet is a possibly unique example of being “doubly colonial” as before the People’s Republic of China assimilated Tibet, it witnessed a British colonialist intervention in the form of the Younghusband “Expedition” of 1903–4. These repeated waves of pillaging have physically deprived Tibet of significant quantities of its material heritage, which is now found primarily in Western or Chinese museums and private collections worldwide, not in Tibet itself.

The Younghusband Mission was a British military campaign sanctioned by Lord Curzon (1859–1952), who served as viceroy of India (1898–1905), due to rising anxieties over perceived Russian influence in Tibet. There was no intention to annex Tibet into the British Empire, but the aim was to force the Tibetans to end their suspected dealings with Russia and to establish a dominant British influence in Tibet, an agenda some have deemed “almost entirely bogus.”⁹ Strikingly, the Younghusband Mission was primarily a military campaign, deploying the latest technology available to the British at the time: four field guns firing shrapnel shells and two Maxim machine guns capable of firing 760 rounds per minute. To illustrate the scale of senseless violence and plunder that took place during this invasion, let’s revisit the infamous “Battle of Guru,” known among Tibetans as the “Massacre of Chumik Shenko” (fig. 2).

On March 31, 1904, the incursion of British forces was halted by Tibetan forces in the valley of Guru in southern Tibet. According to Tibetan sources, the British proposed that as a precondition for negotiations, all Tibetan soldiers must unload their weapons and extinguish the fuses of their muskets.¹⁰ While preparations for negotiations were taking place, British forces strategically positioned their machine guns on nearby hills and surrounded the Tibetan army from three directions. According to Tibetan government records, when the British opened fire, 523 Tibetans were killed and 300 more were wounded.¹¹ While there is debate about what started the skirmish, it is apparent that the British army used a strategic maneuver to outflank and “box in” the Tibetan army, attacking them from three sides and firing over 15,000 rounds of ammunition on retreating Tibetans.¹² British forces pursued Tibetans for 12 miles and continued to kill and maim them.¹³ After this massacre, many battle trophies were collected from the bodies of the dead or from surrendered Tibetan soldiers, including earrings, gau (box amulets), bandolier belts, weapons, and clothing.

After seizing key strategic positions in Tibet, such as the monastery-city of Gyantse, British officers committed what Patrick French has termed “casual robbery” in deserted monasteries or houses.¹⁴ What began as collecting battle trophies at Guru became frenzied looting among the ranks at every available opportunity, but the expedition later followed a formalized protocol to sift through the material, which would, in appearance, be “a more reputable form of collecting for intellectual pursuits.”¹⁵ According to Harris, the Younghusband Mission is significant because it created a desire and appetite for Tibetan objects in the market.¹⁶ Even before Younghusband’s military campaign reached its conclusion in Lhasa, a steady stream of looted Tibetan objects had been trickling into Great Britain, some of which fetched high prices at Christie’s auction house in London.¹⁷

The state-led destruction of Tibetan cultural heritage peaked later, during the Cultural Revolution (1967–77), when according to Tibetan sources, more than 6,000 Tibetan temples and monasteries were ransacked and partially or fully destroyed mainly by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).¹⁸ During this purge of Tibetan culture, sacred Buddhist sites such as the Jokhang temple in Lhasa were desecrated (fig. 3). This systematic desecration was through the destruction of venerated sacred images of Buddha, Bodhisattvas and protective spirits; the burning of precious manuscripts, manuscript printing blocks and thangka paintings as cooking fuel; and the turning of the area into a pig slaughterhouse and toilet by the PLA Garrison Command.¹⁹ Sam van Schaik notes this destruction was a “carefully planned operation” as each site was first inventoried, with “all precious stones and metal objects carefully labelled and prepared for transportation to Beijing.”²⁰ The desecration and destruction of the Jokhang temple are illustrative of what happened to many sacred temples and monasteries all over Tibet. 

In an overview of different case studies on plundered cultural properties for the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) publication Countering Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods: The Global Challenge of Protecting the World’s Heritage (2015), Sam Hardy argues that the loss and destruction of Tibetan heritage under the Chinese state was “incalculable both in terms of culture and in terms of sheer quantity.”²¹ For instance, in the 1990s, monasteries in Tibet were targeted by Chinese gangs who “killed monks in their violent attempts to remove statues from monasteries” so that they could profit from the appetite for Tibetan material heritage in the global art market.²²  In 2008, the Chinese police confiscated cultural assets from Tibetan communities as a punishment for the Tibetan uprising, and this was evidenced by a marked flow of Tibetan cultural material onto the antiquities market.²³

The destruction and dispossession of Tibetan material heritage has been acutely experienced by Tibetan refugees, who were forced to sell their material heirlooms to survive and sustain themselves. The exodus of refugees from Tibet in 1959 has only added further symbolic capital to Tibetan material culture.²⁴ Despite the mainstreaming of debates around decolonizing museums and restitution of looted heritage, the case of Tibet in museums has remained conspicuously absent from both postcolonial and decolonial discourse.²⁵ Tibetans remain completely marginalized within such museum agendas and discussions, giving rise to a paradox that while objects from Tibet are much desired and welcomed in museums, Tibetan people are not.²⁶ Thus, the fractures in the geopolitical and cultural identity of the Tibetan people are further amplified as they endure the loss not only of their land but also of their material heritage. 

Uncovering the “Debt of Truth” in Tibetan Collections

Among the vast Tibetan collections dispersed across museums and private collections in the United Kingdom lie the muted and suppressed histories of violence and plunder that took place during the Younghusband invasion of Tibet, often embedded in the object’s very materiality. This was particularly evidenced by a gau pierced by a bullet and now held in the Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery in Gloucestershire, which Harris argues was collected as a battle trophy by the British army.²⁷ Another gau riddled with a bullet hole (fig. 4) was discovered in the collection of the National Museums Scotland.²⁸ The late historian of Tibetan art John Clarke highlights that for a gau to be effective, it must be in contact with the body.²⁹ For this reason, although we do not have Tibetan bodies to examine to uncover the violence that took place during Younghusband’s military campaign in Tibet, the gau becomes a proxy for Tibetan bodies and lives in material form. During my collections research at various museums in the United Kingdom, I have encountered a vast number of gau and even if only a minority of them were removed from the bodies of dead Tibetans, this still potentially represents hundreds of lost Tibetan lives (fig. 5).

This loss of life can be even more “explicitly” evidenced through Tibetan objects I encountered during my doctoral fieldwork that have spots of what could be blood. I observed such spots on two objects, both with a direct Younghusband provenance—a gau in the World Cultures collection of the National Museums Liverpool and a wicker shield from the British Museum.³⁰ The gau (fig. 6) houses a tsa-tsa (clay tablet) of Mahakala and a folded kha-btags (white silk scarf). The handwritten label reads, “Charm against bullet—taken from the body of a dead Tibetan at Dongste monastery by Major.”³¹ The label refers to a Geluk monastery at Drongtse (‘brong-rtse), near Gyantse, that was founded in 1442. On examining this gau, I observed a sizeable, red spot on the object’s textile amulet (srung-nga) component. I thought this stain was possibly blood due to the acquisition circumstances (it was taken from a dead Tibetan’s body) and the knowledge of how the amulet is traditionally worn across the body. I immediately requested testing, and the in-house investigation was conducted by senior organics conservator Tracey Seddon. Due to the museum’s hesitance to authorize destructive sampling, we discussed and explored alternative, nondestructive analytical procedures. However, such methods were inconclusive.³² Joanne Dyer and Diego Tamburini from the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum also conducted noninvasive testing on the shield, with FORS (Fiber Optic Reflectance spectroscopy) as the only available in-house option (fig. 7). Preliminary tests on both objects were unable to conclusively scientifically verify the presence of blood, and multiple experts, including the team at the British Museum, concluded that the only viable route would be to conduct proteomics analysis (a cellular examination of proteins), which would require destructive sampling.³³

Even with the small sample size of the collections review during my doctoral research, I uncovered two objects of potential significance at the British Museum whose origins were inscribed on them—a kapala (fig. 8) and a helmet (fig. 9).³⁴  Both had been “collected” by Major H. A. Iggulden, a member of the Younghusband Mission. Upon examination, I observed that “Palkhor Chode” had been inscribed on the base of the kapala. This refers to Pelkhor Chode, an important monastic complex in Gyantse (located in the historical Tsang province of Tibet), which was attacked and occupied by the British in 1904.³⁵ I argue that this kapala was inscribed by the field “collector” to mark the origins of this battle trophy collected from Gyantse. The helmet revealed a Tibetan inscription rgyal-tse (Gyantse), which is accompanied by what appears to be the Tibetan numeral seven (༧). I believe that these objects were removed and taken from the Pelkhor Chode monastery (or Gyantse dzong) by Major Iggulden, but were transcribed by two different types of agents: Indigenous (Tibetan) and colonial (British). However, it is noteworthy that the museum recorded neither of these easily legible inscriptions, particularly considering they reveal direct provenance. These gaps in the museum database are not highlighted to criticize the specific institutions, as this is symptomatic of the broader sector, but rather to show how such gaps could become focal points for museums to coproduce knowledge with living members of the Tibetan community, rather than re-amplifying what was said or done by British officers. 

Considering the limitations in archival information (notably on early Tibetan collections), and more importantly, due to suppressed and silenced histories in the colonial archive, new modes of scientific inquiry on Tibetan objects could be deployed to uncover “truths” in the collection. Such inquiries can make the hidden violence of Tibetan objects explicit, which historian Achille Mbembe calls a “debt of truth” that museums should address.³⁶ This case study also highlights the inherent conflict between institutional guidelines that seek to preserve the physical integrity of objects and the necessity of conducting tests that generally require destructive sampling.³⁷ Reflecting on the histories of the museumification of Tibet’s material heritage, venerated Tibetan sacred images and objects (such as gau) have been emptied of their sacral contents (gzungs-gzhug) in the name of scientific inquiry and thangka paintings have been radically altered with their textile borders (gong-gsham) removed to elevate them as “fine art.”³⁸ Considering sacred Tibetan objects have been subjected to such forms of museal violence across different institutions, museums must reconsider and prioritize such modes of inquiry that would uncover the colonial violence that caused the object to be in the museum’s collection in the first place. 

Reanimating Tibet in the Museum

While Tibetans have had limited agency in how much of Tibet’s portable heritage was deposited in museums across the world through “doubly colonial” extractive regimes, it can be argued that the objects have only survived significant periods of destruction due to their “museumization.” However, as is apparent, there are substantial gaps in the knowledge and provenance around/of Tibetan collections across institutions. To address these gaps and offer an antidote to the dislocation and destruction of Tibetan cultural heritage, museums must engage with Tibetans and reconnect these objects to the community (fig. 10).³⁹ To begin addressing the colonial entanglement, these Tibetan collections could serve as focal points for long-term and sustainable engagement between museums and Tibetans. Besides tackling issues surrounding the lack of Tibetan agency and the acute absence of Tibetan voice(s) in museums, this could give rise to innovative approaches to creating new knowledge and working with Tibetan collections. However, Tibet’s complex and contested nature raises a foundational question: Who can represent Tibetan interests in museums and in the related “authorized heritage discourse”?⁴⁰

While working with communities has become increasingly mainstream across the museum and heritage sector in the United Kingdom (and beyond), prevailing practices and discourse primarily focus on the outputs of community engagement or collaboration. As noted by some scholars, there is a need to move beyond the prevalent “black box” approach to community engagement and pivot the focus from the products of consultation or collaboration to its underlying process and methodologies.⁴¹As museums become increasingly social spaces and undertake more extensive consultation and collaboration initiatives, divergent actors and groups will inevitably emerge to compete for the role of representing a “community of origin.” Hence, the museum will have to mediate between these competing groups and subsets of communities. Considering the cultural and geopolitical implications and shifting goalposts in ethics, community-oriented museum practices must be grounded in sustained research, methodology, and ethical and critical precision, particularly when the ownership of material heritage is contested and its provenance is complex. My work remains grounded in a simple idea—let’s not propose or conceive of solutions to problems we don’t fully understand, especially if the decisions are irreversible and permanent, such as restitution. Museums (and academics) could instead try to create conditions or spaces that allow communities to undertake “slow agentive decision-making” in choices concerning the future of their heritage accessioned in Western museums, which will have long-lasting impact and significance.⁴² In such slow, agentive processes, it can become more apparent how sub-state actors such as Indigenous/historically marginalized communities could assert agency in authorized heritage discourse currently dominated by (direct and indirect) state actors. It’s evident that the complex and contested case of Tibet in museums requires a nuanced research-led approach. Perhaps this is a true litmus test for the decolonial agendas of the museum and heritage sector?

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Carlos Quijon, Jr.: I am interested in how we can think about conceptualism in Southeast Asia, and I want to consider this question in a more exploratory tenor: What is different, if there is a difference, in the development of conceptualism in Southeast Asia? How is its development different from that of Western conceptualism? Do we even need to differentiate the two, or is it more productive to consider conceptualism as an encompassing global narrative—like how it was approached by the seminal exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Queens Museum, 1999)?

David Teh describes your practice and your artistic ethos as follows: “[Phinthong is] a conceptual alchemist, specializing in the conversion of disparate values across apparently unrelated economies.”¹ Teh uses this distinction as a foil or counterpoint in his discussion of how your idea of dematerialization, a concept crucial in Western conceptualism, is very different from our usual take on dematerialization. 

So maybe we can start with that. If you can speak on this idea of conceptual alchemy—what do you think about it? Does it resonate with how you conceptualize your practice?

Pratchaya Phinthong: I am not sure if I have an issue with or am concerned so much about conceptualism or a conceptual approach. I mean, definitely what I have been doing somehow falls into these categories, and I have nothing against that. However, I have not been actively trying to resist these categories. From my point of view, I am interested in understanding other stuff. I am reading around. By reading, I understand the terms of the conversations and, of course, this somehow frames every production of art or the way that I practice it. 

When it comes to the works I make—somehow I do not produce them, somehow I let things produce, somehow I am more interested in trying to question my approaches to thinking than in whether I am being a conceptualist or not. In my practice, I would have people participate in my kind of ideas and thinking. Of course people think, and that does not mean that people have to be born into this kind of conceptual logic. 

CQJr: I also feel like there’s a need to keep this tension; of course people will, if they see your work and if they read about your work, categorize. Especially for art historians, there would be an almost automatic categorization. “Oh, this guy works with labor and materials and language; therefore, he is a conceptualist.” 

Most of the artists from Southeast Asia who are doing a lot of things, not just painting, not just the academic traditions of art-making, but also a lot of other things—they don’t really categorize their work as anything actually. That’s one part of the equation, and then the other part is the work’s legibility or how people react to and read and categorize your practice: “If you’re looking for an artist in Southeast Asia with a conceptualist practice, check the works of Pratchaya.”

If we don’t go with or if we somehow suspend the idea of conceptualism or a conceptualist practice, how do you describe your interests in your work? I know that you work a lot with artisans, laborers, and specialists, and I know that your artistic methods are mostly guided by things or materials that you find. How do you characterize what you do in terms of your interests? What are the usual things that you think about before diving into a work? 

PP: I am interested in the definition of things generally and for art. Why do we need art? Why should it be here for a long time? And then why should I have been born for this, and then why continue doing it? When is it going to end? If it’s not my life, then when will my art life end, and will I be going to other fields, doing other things?

I think if I came from outer space, I would choose to be an artist because artists aren’t responsible for things. We don’t have so much responsibility. We are not nurses, and we are not doctors; we are not architects. They will not come after me when the building collapses. 

So what is really being an artist about? That’s what I am so interested in. A part of what defines what I would call an artist is the work that they do, the production of an artwork. What it means, what the value of it is, how it exists, why it is exchanged—why its value increases or decreases, and if there are ways around this.

It’s a thin membrane that you can really slip in and out of without people understanding it. This really gets you a little numb, and maybe the next time you slip in and out, you will get used to it. People will not be affected because you didn’t respond to something—unless you are in the front lines of art and activism or you really hurt somebody or rip somebody off and you call that part of your practice, or something like that.

So I wonder why I am here. Life is really short, and if I leave for a long time tomorrow, no one is going to care about this, and then next week, I can just come back and be an artist again. No one would really care about this. I mean performing being an artist is also for one’s own sake.

When I started to call myself an artist, you had to have long hair, and you had to act kind of cool, and then you had to have all sorts of things. After all the years of studying, I tried to trash these ideas. When I was in Germany, the classes were really nice. Professors were trying to trash me and force me to forget about what I have. So I started up a new thing. Something that I was not really good at, and then I was trying to be good at things so many times that at some point, I felt that this is the burden of the artist, that this is something that one has to carry on. This is how you get your name as an artist, right? So, I think the problem for me is creating something that I am interested in. It is not just that I want to be good at things.

CQJr: I am interested in what you said about the idea that you can easily slip in and out of the art world—and your art practice, too, in a sense. I am thinking about this in relation to more traditional mediums, for example, painting or sculpture, and how these are very anchored in tradition. These are anchored in producing as many things as you can so that you can become an expert in them. I am wondering if this idea of slipping in and out of your practice plays a part in why you have created the things that you’ve created, the kinds of forms that you work with, or the kinds of concerns that you have—found objects, collaborative processes, invisible histories?

PP: I would describe this as trying to change the approach to the same thing—in different moments and at different times—to understand the different dimensions of it and the meaning that will come out of each approach.

For example, we all shower in the morning—maybe I just did, right? But we do not recognize how we do it. So when you go back to thinking about that . . . you did it without a plan, right? You don’t realize how you started, with touching what, and then trying to do what, and then that you’ve done this thing so many times that it has become a structure—it can be solved and quite automatic. It depends. But once you become aware of that, it changes. So it has become a little bit unnatural. So if you think, “I am realizing right now that I reach for the soap,”—I mean, for example, you have normal soap and you have liquid soap—so you shower differently. I think that’s beautiful.

CQJr: I mean, that’s so interesting—also, because if you remember, we opened our conversation with how David Teh discusses your work in relation to value and in relation to converting value from different types of economies and also the idea of dematerialization. Hearing you talk about your practice—and while you were talking, actually, I had a breakthrough, that maybe what describes your practice best is not really dematerialization but rather an act of denaturalization. We have these kinds of naturalized ideas about what art should be—your example about showering, using bar soap or liquid soap—and that kind of experience. I feel like it is a different way of processing what art-making is. We know these things; we are used to them. 

I want to ground these kinds of realizations in your actual works. If you think about your practice in relation to conventional ideas of conceptualism—or even the tradition of conceptualism and how your practice might move away from this kind of tradition—maybe we can discuss Spoon [disk] (2024) (fig. 2), an amorphous, flattened blob or puddle of solidified metal crafted from unexploded ordnances, unexploded mines that people in the northern part of Laos harvest from their fields and out of which they create trinkets that they sell to tourists.

I wonder how you approached the development of this work. From the outside, for example, for me, looking at this work, there are gestures that you can read as conceptual: There is an object that exists, and you create something out of it; and there is material labor as much as there is conceptual labor involved. But how do you describe the work? How did you start thinking about what it is, and what was your process in relation to creating the work?

And this is more of a personal interest: What came first? Did you know that they were producing stuff from unexploded bombs? Did you know that before, or did you see the object first and then talk to them about what they were doing?

PP: I didn’t know that at first. My artist friends, who are a couple, went to shoot their work in northern Laos, in Napia village. They were passing through the mountains somewhere in Laos, where they went to a noodle place where they served pho. I think it was a Lao-Vietnamese version, and the spoon was really light. That is how they recognized that the material for the spoons was different. It was not common, and then they told me about it. I visited the village with them, and we found out that there are at least 17 houses in the village doing the same thing: They had shophouses where they melted the ordnances and then cast them (fig. 3). This happened under their houses, and they used the same heat to warm their homes. 

This is how I start my work. I mean many stories come from another story. At that time, I was also trying to respond to the idea of soft power for an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).² I was trying to see how I can respond to this, and for me, the best way was to throw myself into the situation. And so I went back to Napia, and I chose one house owned by this really young couple who had just had a baby. I think that now he is already grown up. So I just asked them if they were interested in doing something with me. They said yes, and then I asked them if they could cast the metal in molds and then just make a hundred of them.

The next day, we came back, and they had one finished. We kind of liked it, and it started like that. I did not know what to do with it. I just had some idea to make it like a mirror, to make it into something that can reflect. I brought it back and gave it to my friend, who always made things with me. I challenged him to make a mirror out of it. So he had to find a way to slice it and then sand it. This became a recipe. 

All that I am saying is that my process includes a lot of reaching out to other people, to other people’s places and other people’s ideas, and then trying to see if we can do something together. And then the word that we were talking about earlier, “labor,” is in the word “collaboration”—in the middle of it. So, I mean, without these, you cannot be associated with other people; labor always appears, not just in the workforce but also in other forces. To be able to collaborate, whether through your body or your sweat . . . these are my materials. Convincing is also my material. 

So, basically, I am good at shifting and turning things. And probably that currency that David Teh said about alchemy in my practice is coming from this kind of method. It is sort of an exchanging thing, but also different. I mean, it’s crazier than that because in between the nodes, I try to make a cycle of it.

CQJr: And in our previous conversation, you mentioned that you also wanted to make use of the work’s exhibition as part of its performance and, I guess, to allude to the circulation of the objects made out of the unexploded ordnances. Can you tell us more about that? 

PP: Yeah, I mean you saw Spoon [disk] as part of the SFMOMA collection. I never wanted to exhibit in that space, and so I asked them if I could exhibit in the art shop, in the museum shop. I wanted to sell my work and to give the proceeds back to this village.

So I created this box. Inside the box, you see this metal object really shining like mercury, reflecting like a mirror. In the first run, I sold probably 50 pieces, and it was shown in the museum shop and not in the exhibition space. It included a postcard that I dedicated to the curator of SFMOMA because I had sent her the original card (figs. 4, 5).

The city down the mountain has a shophouse where there is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Mines Advisory Group (MAG). MAG helps with locating and collecting unexploded mines and exploding them as safely as they can. They hire young women and men and train them. It is mostly the women who go into the open field first, and then when the bomb locator goes off, they mark it, and then the men come in to figure out how to dig up the bomb because it is buried. 

Laos was heavily bombed during World War II. For Thai people, Laos was an ideal place for agriculture. They had hectares of green land, but they cannot do agricultural activities because the bombs are still there (fig. 6). Every time they attempt to cross or cultivate the forest, they get hurt. So they have to have some people help, like from this NGO, but there are only a few, and MAG is one of them. They have a shophouse where they display the trinkets I mentioned earlier. They also earn money from photo postcards, which they also sell in the shophouse. The postcards were the work of one photographer. I do not remember the name on the back, but they sell them for one dollar. 

I got the idea immediately after I saw this, and that was when I made a postcard. I just sent the blank postcard with the name of a curator and the address of SFMOMA, and I sent it from Laos. So the museum exhibited it along with the one that you saw.

The photo on the postcard is a picture of an old lady. She just had her land cleared of bombs, and in the photo, she is holding her first cotton harvest. She planted cotton years ago, and this is her first crop. It is in her hand. It is a piece of pure cotton so light that it flies when you release it from your hand. Then you remember that the bomb was something that fell from the sky. I liked the idea of juxtaposing the two in the box (fig. 7). In the box, you will find something really solid, something that you have to get rid of—the bombs—and then another thing that is really light, that will be leaving you immediately. So it is softness and strength. Something that kills and something that looks hopeful.

CQJr: This attentiveness to form and how forms circulate is very important in your practice. I think for the most part, this is how your works become legible as conceptualist and how they compellingly play out conceptualist gestures. How important is this attentiveness to your practice? How does this attentiveness inflect your interest in value and material and symbolic economies?

PP: I mean, it does not matter what form it is—it could be a painting, it could be whatever; but I found these, and then I designed the paper box with some people I know here, and then we created them by hand, like any merchandise.

The disk in SFMOMA is the raw material for other works in this series. Thinking about that raw material and how sanding it eventually creates this mirror—and that takes a lot of months. And my friend found a technique to transpose the materials from one form to another. When I had the exhibition in my gallery gb agency [in Paris], I was already thinking about other forms that these can take on (figs. 8, 9). I tried to see the bigger picture of the project and how it could extend.

I went to a website about phantom limbs. So a lot of people lost their limbs during World War II. What comes along with this is the phantom limb syndrome, when the missing limb still exists in your brain. I discovered this guy who created this thing called “mirror therapies.” His name is Stephen Sumner, and he runs this organization called Me and My Mirror.

I wanted to connect with him, but this was during COVID. So it was complicated to get connected, and I tried to see if he wanted to collaborate somehow. But what I wanted from him is basically nothing. I just admired the way he did things because he lost his leg in a roadside accident, and then he went to this therapy. So he got over phantom limb, and then he wanted to share the way he did it with other people. He flew to conflict areas like Afghanistan or other war-torn places, and then he went to Cambodia and he just bicycled around the country, finding people who are amputees and trying to help them by giving away this kind of a plate, just a kind of mirror that is light and easy to carry.

We cast the unexploded bombs into these plates and made the mirrors. We exhibited them with the goal that when I sold one, I would share the money with him so that he could go to other conflict areas—because on his website he asks for donations because he is doing it by himself.

This is the legacy of war. The village and other villages like it have been behind, starting with previous generations. They just cannot move on economically. In my practice, I think about how questions of economy can go through this kind of transformation.

This transformation is part of the work—from the raw materials to the objects in the box—and then it becomes an installation nicely representing phantom limbs. All the ideas are brought back as resources for the person who is going to solve the problem on the spot, who wants to stop the pain of people. So when you see this kind of man going like the dot that I have been trying to connect to other dots. Then I think, “This is the reason that I’m here, to connect this dot to others and make things possible.” It is not even about what you call me; you can call me another NGO. I am an artist doing such things. You can call me an activist or whatever you want. In the end, I just do what I am doing, and I think that this is the bigger picture. All of this is somehow giving me back some energy, so I think that this is why I am still coping and doing this. 

Typically thinking about the bigger picture looks like wanting to have bigger frames or using lots of colors or using a bigger canvas. For me, I have these bombs that I can have whenever I want because there are a lot of them to clear out in Laos. How are we going to get rid of these so that people can cultivate their lands? That is how material has been somehow found.

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Artistic photobooks in Japan had originated some years earlier, when photographers and architecture students who had studied at the Bauhaus returned home with modernist ideas. Publications like Sensation of Flight (詩画集 飛行官能 / Hiko Kanno) (1934) and New Compositions of Beauty of Human Anatomy (人体美の新構成 /Jintaibi no Shin Kōsei ) (1932) were part of this avant-garde movement influenced by European photography.³ The Japanese military, recognizing photography’s potential early on, had been using photo publications for propaganda since the late 19th century.

After World War II, the photobook became a key outlet for expression outside the official or institutional art world, especially given the lack of a gallery infrastructure and the overall economic instability. Photobooks were often printed in relatively affordable editions, combining documentary content with a graphic-design sensibility. Notable examples include Hiroshi Hamaya’s Japan’s Back Coast (裏日本 / Ura Nihon) (1957) and Ken Domon’s (ヒロシマ / Hiroshima) (1958), both of which highlight social issues and underrepresented communities.⁴

In this earlier period, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the foundation was laid for the golden age of Japanese photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, when the photobook became an artistic object in itself—the definitive expression of photography. Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (地図 / Chizu) (1965) epitomizes this shift. During this era, photographers challenged modern photography and documentary traditions, using abstraction and experimental visual language as forms of political and social critique. This trend culminated in the radical break marked by Provoke (1968–1970), a magazine that reshaped the trajectory of Japanese photography.

Despite photography’s growing role in postwar Japan, female photographers remained largely overlooked by art historians and critics. The 1950s saw significant changes in Japanese society, with women entering a wider range of occupations, including photography. However, their role in the context of photography was often limited to that of a studio assistant who primarily handled retouching for a male photographer. Moreover, it was a profession that many women abandoned upon marriage. While Japan’s first photographic school for women had opened in 1902,⁵ it did so 40 years later than its male counterpart, reflecting the broader gender disparities in artistic and professional recognition. Within this male-dominated industry, women struggled to gain legitimacy as independent photographers.

Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019) was born in Yokohama and grew up during the devastating years of war and occupation. She developed an early interest in photography, inspired by her elder brother who was also a photographer. After finishing high school, she studied home economics in Tokyo but defied family expectations to marry, choosing instead to pursue a career in photography. She joined the Shirayuri Camera Club (白百合カメラクラブ/ Shirayuri Kamera Kurabu), a social club that evolved into a learning hub where women practitioners honed their skills under the guidance of established male photographers. Tokiwa was interested in capturing the lives of working women, particularly those whose work involved their bodies. Through this focus, she critiqued the gendered division within postwar photography culture and asserted the subjectivity and agency of women photographers.⁶

Her series Working Women (働く女性 / Hataraku Josei) was published in the June 1957 issue of Women’s Review magazine (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron). Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick note that her work’s placement in women’s magazines rather than in photography publications shows that she was disregarded by photography historians of her time.⁷ Working Women was exhibited in Tokyo in 1956 at the Konishiroku Photo Gallery in the district of Ginza. Critics at the time agreed that only a woman could have taken these photographs because a man would not have been able to access the spaces they document. Tokiwa, however, disliked the implication that a woman could only produce exhibition-worthy work when she photographed such subjects.⁸ Shortly thereafter, when she was approached by publisher Mikasa Shobo to produce a photobook titled Dangerous Poisonous Flowers (危険な毒花 / Kikenna Adabana) (1957) based on the Working Women series, she became the first female photographer to publish a photobook in Japan.

While many male photographers of the time focused on postwar devastation, urbanization, and political protests, Tokiwa centered women’s everyday lives and labor. As one of few professional female photographers and someone working with explicitly gendered subject matter, she created a photobook that was not only formally democratic in its accessible format but also socially transgressive. In offering a female-centered narrative within a photographic documentary landscape overwhelmingly shaped by male perspectives, it challenged dominant visual and social hierarchies.

Tokiwa’s photographs align with social realism and emerging subjectivity movements of her time, yet they embody a radical form of empathy as a distinct way of seeing. In her work, empathy becomes a critical factor, and the photobook the platform upon which this vision unfolds most powerfully. Tokiwa’s portraits of sex workers and other working women resist voyeurism and instead foreground relational intimacy. Her lens does not objectify her subjects but rather invites the viewer into their world to bear witness. The sequential format and the physical intimacy between the viewer and the photographs—elements inherent in the photobook form—invite personal engagement, offering a more egalitarian viewing experience than is possible in an austere traditional gallery setting. In this way, Tokiwa subverted the visual conventions shaped by the “male gaze,” a concept introduced by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she argues that dominant visual culture tends to position women as passive objects of heterosexual male desire.⁹ This present essay argues that Tokiwa’s photographic disposition fleshed out, for the first time in the history of Japanese photography, a “female gaze,” one that centers empathy, subjectivity, and emotional resonance, and established a new approach to social documentary, one that I theorize as the “empathetic gaze.” The concept of the female gaze emerged as a counterpoint to Laura Mulvey’s framework. As filmmaker Jill Soloway describes it, the female gaze is a sociopolitical, justice-demanding way of art-making. It is a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool. It changes the way the world feels about women when they move their bodies through the world, fully feeling themselves as the subject.¹⁰

Tokiwa’s Dangerous Poisonous Flowers deepens our understanding of the empathetic approach and exemplifies how the photobook served as its platform while also being a more democratic form of photographic expression. Unlike exhibitions, which are confined to specific spaces and audiences, the photobook allowed for broader circulation and accessibility, reaching viewers from diverse backgrounds. Publisher Mikasa Shobo was not primarily known for art or photography publications; indeed, after the war, the majority of its titles focused on popular literature and translations of works by English-language novelists, such as Ernest Hemingway, and catered to a general readership interested in fiction and Western ideas.¹¹ We can assume that Tokiwa’s photobook reached a wide audience based on its publication history. While exact sales numbers are not available, the book was reprinted multiple times in 1957, the year it was published, suggesting significant circulation and sustained demand.¹² The photobook reached at least its eleventh printing that same year, indicating its widespread popularity and impact.

The title “Dangerous Poisonous Flowers” is a traditional euphemism for sex workers.¹³ The cover of the book features a self-portrait of Tokiwa behind the lens, foregrounding her photographic labor and positioning her as another working woman (fig. 1). This image emphasizes her unique perspective, highlighting her identity as a female photographer. The close-up shot makes the image more relatable for women readers, who recognize themselves in the figure pictured. Inside Tokiwa’s lens, a photomontage shows a man and woman holding each other. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the man is forcing the woman to accompany him, dragging her in a way that suggests violence. Although Tokiwa disliked the image because it was staged (as she reveals in her interview with Kelly Midori McCormick¹⁴), this image reinforces the theme of the book, addressing the struggles of being a working woman in a male-dominated world.

The book was printed using photogravure, a printing process that enriches the black tones and was often used at the time for magazines like Women’s Review (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron) (1916–present) and Ladies’ Club (婦人倶楽部 / Fujin Kurabu) (1920–1988). This printing method, along with the arrangement of the images and choice of paper, mimics those publications in material and composition, perhaps catering to a female readership familiar with such formats. The predominantly dark photos heighten the atmospheric quality of the hidden world revealed in the images. The 248-page photobook unfolds like a memoir, with its extensive first-person narrative evoking the personal nature of a diary. This sense of intimacy is reinforced by its compact size (approximately 7 ½ × 5 ¼ inches), which invites physical closeness with the object, while the absence of borders around the photographs draws the reader into their world. Tokiwa’s autobiographical notes throughout the book enhance its journal-like quality, offering personal reflections on her early years, the process of photographing her subjects, and her evolving thoughts on photography and gender. This combination of text and image, a common style in photo publications at the time, creates a narrative experience that blends visual and written storytelling. The structure of the book—interweaving expansive text chapters with photographic sequences, each marking distinct phases in Tokiwa’s journey—further enhances the book’s diaristic character. The use of first-person narration and the short anecdotal captions accompanying some of the images make it feel as though Tokiwa has directly inscribed the pages, deepening the connection between her and the reader.

A substantial number of photographs in the book are focused on sex workers in the red-light district of Yokohama (fig. 2). The photobook also extends beyond this setting, capturing images of nude models engaged in photo sessions, female wrestlers, divers, and street performers, offering a broader perspective on women who earn a living by using their bodies (fig. 3).

In the accompanying text, Tokiwa reflects on the challenges and dangers she faced while working, particularly within the red-light districts. Armed with her camera and dressed in a skirt and a pair of clogs, she wandered through these shadowy and often dangerous areas. It was precisely her appearance as a young woman that enabled her to move unnoticed and to gain the trust of the women she encountered. They welcomed her into their world and offered her glimpses into their private lives, willingly posing before her lens. “They trusted me because I was wearing a skirt. If I wore trousers, I would have been looked at with alarm,” she explained.¹⁵

As we flip through Tokiwa’s photobook, we witness her evolution from detachment to empathy. Initially, she resents her subjects for what she perceives to be their betrayal of nation and dignity, a feeling evident in her early photographs, most of which were taken from a distance. In figure 4, the prostitutes appear as background figures, seemingly barely noticed by the blurry, shadowy figures in the foreground, perhaps alluding to society’s disregard for their existence. Over time, Tokiwa builds connections with her subjects, capturing them with increasing understanding and compassion. As her work progresses, she moves closer, entering their personal spaces and thereby conveying a more firsthand perspective (fig. 5).

When comparing Tokiwa’s images to those of her contemporary male photographers, such as Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012), a leading figure in postwar social documentary, a noticeable difference emerges. In Tomatsu’s Prostitute, Nagoya (1958), the artist’s famous photograph of a prostitute, his subject appears defensive, her expression suggesting that she is filled with anger at or at least disapproval of the male photographer’s incursion into her private moment. In contrast, Tokiwa captured her subjects in more relaxed, unguarded moments, often during their free time. In her photographs, her subjects meet her gaze, and we sense in this encounter a feeling of approval or trust. In figure 5, Tokiwa has entered the women’s home, where the central figure (on the left), who appears laid-back, is enjoying a drink and a cigarette. She is surrounded by other women, who also seem to be engaging in their usual routines. Tokiwa’s presence feels natural, as if she is part of their world. As McCormick notes, “[Tokiwa] shifts her position from repulsed voyeur to a photographer with a consciousness.”¹⁶ Ultimately, in shedding light on the realities of sex workers’ everyday lives, using photography as a tool for awareness and advocacy, Tokiwa’s work goes beyond documentation. As the photographer comments in her book, “When I first started, I didn’t feel love for them, maybe hatred. However, when I got into their lives, their rooms, and had tea with them, I realized that these dogs were humans after all. . . . I take these pictures to raise awareness of the negative aspects of the prostitution system.”¹⁷

Tokiwa’s ability to gain her subjects’ trust, to position herself as a participant rather than an intruder in their world, enabled her to photograph them in their intimate settings, capturing their true nature and emotions through her lens. This approach constitutes what can be understood as a “female gaze.” Unlike the traditional male perspective, which often imposes power dynamics of control and objectification, Tokiwa’s images center subjectivity and empathy and aim at awareness. Her camera creates space for the women to appear as full, complex individuals rather than symbols of marginalization or desire. This empathetic way of seeing not only challenges the viewer to look at these women differently but also reinforces the role of photography as a tool for sociopolitical change.

Tokiwa experienced the devastation of World War II, including the bombing of her home during the Yokohama Great Air Attack in 1945, which killed her father. After the US military took control of Yokohama’s harbor, she developed a deep resentment toward American soldiers and channeled this anger through photography. As she explains in Dangerous Poison Flowers, “I took my camera and went to the Yokohama port to comfort my feelings of hatred against the American soldiers while pointing my camera at them.”¹⁸.

Tokiwa’s photographs document US soldiers exploiting Japanese sex workers in the red-light districts. This subject matter parallels the work of male photographers like Shomei Tomatsu, Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015), and Daidō Moriyama (born 1938), who likewise captured the impact of the American occupation of Japan. Ross Tunney describes the US military bases in Japan as embodying the “symbolic rape” of Japan, reflecting the fears of “miscegenation” held by many Japanese people.¹⁹ In Tokiwa’s images (figs. 6, 7), this symbolic rape is powerfully evoked, with the Japanese women depicted as both victims and symbols of a coerced and weakened Japan. Tokiwa’s focus, however, is not on the soldiers but rather on the women’s faces and postures. This shift in perspective gives the women agency, transforming them from passive victims into individuals marked by resilience and strength.

In the second photo sequence in the book, we follow Tokiwa as she enters a hospital in which prostitutes are seeking medical treatment. Hiding her camera under a white coat, she pretended to be the doctor’s assistant, which enabled her to capture intimate and disturbing scenes like the moment of injection. As a female photographer, Tokiwa felt a unique connection to these women, seeing and relating to them in a way that male photographers could not. She sought to reveal their lives “under their skin,” to show their vulnerability.²⁰ The women, who in most cases seem unaware of Tokiwa’s presence, appear vulnerable and tired. One image captures a woman who, having just received a penicillin shot, lies on a hospital bed with her face down and a cigarette in hand (fig. 9). Tokiwa has noted on the side of the image, “She looked like she was exhausted from living” and reveals that it was a scene that left a strong impression on her.²¹ Depicting her subjects as patients offers an unconventional portrayal of prostitution while also alluding to the way prostitution is looked upon as a societal illness.

Tokiwa’s ultimate motivation was to shed light on the harsh realities faced by women whose labor involves their bodies. Her goal was to bring attention to their plight and, in doing so, to foster empathy and awareness. At the same time, she aimed to challenge the stigma attached to sex workers, asserting their humanity and dignity in the face of societal judgment. With remarkable honesty, she reflects on their labor and living conditions, weaving together personal anecdotes and the stories of the women she encountered, offering unconventional portraits of women who were typically idealized by male photographers.

Tokiwa’s photobook not only challenged dominant narratives about sex workers and other working women but also made space for marginalized female voices, both those of her subjects and her own as a rare female photographer in a male-dominated field. Dangerous Poisonous Flowers functioned as a feminist manifesto of its time, incorporating powerful language and imagery that not only empowered women but also exposed their gender-based oppression as workers and artists. In these extensive written passages and photo sequences, she reveals the challenges of being a female photographer and the struggles she faced in completing her project.

From the opening sentence of her book, Tokiwa makes a powerful statement about gender biases in photography: “Does being a woman, rather than a man, give you any disadvantage in taking photos?”²² These words not only challenge established stereotypes at the time but also serve as a testament to the sexist discrimination she endured at the beginning of her career. On the contrary, she believed that it was the very nature of women that made them more capable than men in documentary photography. In Dangerous Poisonous Flowers, she declares: “There is a feminine element to photography. Photographers must have a passive stance to get the subject to accept being photographed. . . . Most of my work was made because I am a woman.”²³

Tokiwa’s photographic work evokes that belief, as we see her subjects allowing her to capture them in their most vulnerable and personal circumstances. What makes her approach unique and compelling is her empathetic gaze, which is free of idealization and marked by a sense of belonging. Empathy, in this case, is a transgressive act, as it challenges the dominant documentary tradition characterized by detachment, domination, and objectification. Instead of reinforcing the viewer’s power over the subject, Tokiwa’s gaze fosters proximity and emotional connection. The empathetic gaze is also a female gaze. Both are grounded in care, presence, and a refusal to look from a position of power, allowing the subjects to reveal their own idea of themselves. The term “empathetic gaze” emerges not as a departure from the female gaze, but rather as a way to articulate its specific emotional and political mechanisms, particularly how it invites viewers to feel with, rather than look at, the photographed subjects. In this sense, the “empathetic gaze” is both a way of seeing and engaging with the subject and an artistic practice that challenges dominant representations and redefines the relationship between viewer and subject.

The book concludes with photographs Tokiwa took in a rehabilitation facility in Kanagawa, where young women from the red-light district were sent after the anti-prostitution law was enacted in Japan in 1956. She photographed them during their free time (working at their sewing machines, arranging flowers, eating), believing that these moments reveal their true natures. These images, accompanied by her words, also reveal a deepening compassion for the working women she had followed for several years.

This final sequence, without context, could easily depict a girls’ school. The women are shown during the day, either attending classes or playing sports, with their bright, clear faces exposed to the lens and radiating innocence. They appear relaxed and absorbed in their activities. Tokiwa is no longer hiding from her subjects. She is present in their daily lives, placing them in front of her lens, against the bright sunlight. She has become one of them. In figure 10, the girls are arranging flowers. The flowers take prominence in the foreground, and the girls seem to blend into them, almost appearing as flowers themselves, reinforcing the title of the book. This scene deeply moved Tokiwa, who writes, “The dirt of the past is washed away clean, and the innocent feelings of young girls, placed in a normal environment, are transformed into a flower arrangement. Even withered and lifeless flowers are still flowers.”²⁴

This essay is the outcome of my research trip to Japan in April 2024, which took place in the context of my internship with the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art. I am grateful to curator Yamada Yuri of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, who introduced me to Toyoko Tokiwa’s photobook. I also want to thank Carlos Quijon, Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow at the International Program for his guidance through this process. A copy of this rare publication is available in MoMA’s Library, thanks to the support of the International Program.

The post The Empathetic Gaze: Toyoko Tokiwa’s <em>Dangerous Poisonous Flowers</em> and the Female Photographic Subject in Postwar Japan appeared first on post.

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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Before Nightfall, a 1981–82 triptych by Nilima Sheikh, imagines a scene unfolding at twilight on the campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat (fig. 1).¹ The image conjures an otherworldly landscape, with the local flora and fauna painted as swirling forms and sweeping swaths of color. Nestled on the left is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that served as Sheikh’s home for nearly two decades. The open structure of the house reflects the familial nature of the community in Baroda. Artists frequently dropped by each other’s homes simply to chat, conversations in the studio often continued over the dinner table, and students addressed their teachers as bhai or ben (“brother” or “sister” in the local language, Gujarati). 

Sheikh is one of several Baroda artists whose work has been categorized in art historical scholarship as “narrative-figuration,” a term first associated with the Baroda school in the early 1980s.² This designation refers to a distinct mode of figuration adopted by artists like Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram, who created paintings grounded in sociopolitical critique, images of everyday life, and narratives embedded in local settings (figs. 2, 3). However, this formalist grouping excludes their contemporaries, artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and Jeram Patel, who were working at the same time but in a decisively abstract idiom. It also reflects a tendency in the art historical discipline to classify artists by singular stylistic affinities. Against this, I challenge the idea that a stylistic label can easily be applied to the Baroda artists and argue that writing a narrative of this school demands a closer look at the collaborations, dialogues, and influences across generations of artists who taught, worked, and lived alongside each other.

During my interviews with artists from Baroda, I expected them to describe their classroom pedagogy or to discuss the development of their visual language. Instead, our conversations turned to anecdotes about gatherings in their homes, jokes about cooking or dancing together, and memories of the “homey” atmosphere on campus. Their words, when read alongside candid archival photographs, portraits of them and their friends, and artworks depicting their shared residential spaces, paint an image of the home as an alternative site of artistic and pedagogical practices, one that was as central to their experience as the classroom and studio.³ By examining these visualizations of social spaces and the dialogues taking place within them, I recontextualize their artistic practices through a lens of community and camaraderie. I propose that this framework has implications beyond a study of the Faculty of Fine Arts in that it allows us to understand postcolonial modernity more broadly as having developed through collective efforts and informal networks of exchange rather than through the stylistic innovations of individual artists.

The Faculty of Fine Arts, founded in 1950, was the first art school established in an independent India. Over the years, the Faculty incubated generations of Indian modernists, many of whom first trained as students and later returned to teach in the same departments in which they themselves had studied. Echoing the artists’ descriptions of a “homey” campus, the college began out of a single residential bungalow called Pushpa Baug (fig. 4). This house provided a bright and open space for the art school, with a veranda and balcony on the first floor, rooms that were used for lecture halls and studio spaces, and a guesthouse that was converted into a pottery studio. In the span of a few years, the campus grew around this central space to include half a dozen buildings housing multiple departments, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. 

As a witness to these early years, ceramist Ira Chaudhuri described an extemporaneous development of the institution, when both teachers and the administration were navigating what was, at the time, uncharted territory in the newly independent nation-state. Practicing artists were invited from across the country to set up individual departments within the school. As new positions continued to be filled and young families began moving to Baroda, it became increasingly difficult to find accommodation. It was suggested that apartments in one building be combined, so that new faculty members and their families could live together in a common residence. This ad hoc development of the school resulted in an atmosphere where artists like Ira and her husband, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, became local guardians for many young students arriving in Baroda, and their houses, gathering places for the growing community. Students recall that they could drop by their teachers’ homes and studios anytime, a precedent likely set by the Chaudhuris. Ira ben explained this with nonchalance, “We just never closed the front door [of our house]. It was always open. People came in and out.”⁴ Despite the Chaudhuris’ meager salaries during these early years and their frequent difficulties in making ends meet, they made their home a refuge for any student seeking a meal, a loan, or a place to stay.

The shared space of community that was inevitably created in these artists’ homes can best be described as an adda, a term translated by linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as a “place for careless talk with boon companions.”⁵ Conversations in an adda were often long, meandering, and informal. The same could be said of the conversations taking place in Baroda. Nilima Sheikh describes the gatherings at her friends’ homes as fundamental to her time at the school. Yet, when I inquired whether these discussions included pedagogical discourse or feedback on her work, she was quick to say that her peers never taught her anything in that sense. Instead, these get-togethers included “random discussions. Hanging around the college canteen. Staying late in the studio to chitchat.”⁶ These informal hangouts both within and outside of the institutional spaces allowed for a fluid or unconscious mode of pedagogical instruction and a sharing of ideas beyond the constraints of the classroom or studio. 

The recruiting of teachers from schools around the country resulted in a confluence of diverse pedagogical lineages in Baroda. Sankho Chaudhuri and K. G. Subramanyan, for example, introduced ideas and methods from their alma mater Santiniketan, a colonial-era school founded in 1901 by the writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Santiniketan was modelled after the tapovans, or forest hermitage schools of India, where teachers and students lived together as a community. Tagore’s founding vision emphasized a linking of art and the environment, villages, and folk traditions that surrounded them, and he insisted that artists move out of their studios and into public spaces. Responding directly to the existing models of art education, the Santiniketan faculty integrated community-based practices into their teaching as an ideological and anticolonial tool against the rigid pedagogy of the art schools established by the British government.⁷

In contrast, the Faculty was established in the decades immediately following independence and developed its collective practices as a specifically postcolonial proposition, one fostered by artists seeking like-minded collaborators and, for many, a community different than those they came from. Since its early years, the Faculty had attracted students from both neighboring rural regions in Gujarat and urban metropolises across India. As a result of this heterogeneity, artists moving to Baroda experienced freedoms unlike any in their hometowns. Bhupen Khakhar, for example, noted that he came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for him to stay in Bombay and paint: “My family members would not allow me. . . . At the back of my mind, it also must be my gay attitude.”⁸ Similarly, as a young girl arriving from Delhi, Nilima Sheikh recalls being surprised that she was allowed to stay out and work in the studios until late into the night.⁹ Gulammohammed Sheikh, who had moved from a smaller town in Gujarat, was made to reckon with an unfamiliar kind of cosmopolitanism: “It was a new experience for me altogether. To meet so many people in the liberal environment that the university provided—it was almost like an extended family.”¹⁰ The addas, which enabled artists to retreat into a cosmopolitan bubble on campus in an otherwise provincial town, thereby came to symbolize a mode of sociality that was unique to Baroda’s local context.¹¹ At the same time, as my interviews with the artists revealed, it also led to moments of exclusion, marginality, and difference, despite the close-knit community. I thus argue that this period was entrenched in contradictions and simultaneities—a reflection of the complicated postcolonial climate in which the school emerged.

At the crux of this narrative is also the seemingly anomalous location of Baroda, a small town removed from urban centers such as Bombay or Delhi, which had previously been the primary loci of modernist movements and art schools in India. In many ways, it was this provincial location that encouraged the sense of camaraderie and interdependence among peers. The lack of a commercial gallery system and established collectors or patrons of art eliminated a sense of competition among friends or a desire to cater to the art market. With limited opportunities to exhibit works in Baroda, students would travel together to Bombay—carrying rolled-up canvases on the train, collectively renting out gallery spaces, and installing their works there themselves. Much like the ad hoc trajectory of the institution, the artists’ entry into the art market relied on self-driven labor and collaboration among peers.  

In my conversations with art critic Geeta Kapur, she was particular about using the word “bohemianism” to describe the atmosphere in Baroda from the 1960s onward.¹² Kapur’s presence in Baroda—as one of the first critics to write about its practices—was influential. As the partner of the artist Vivan Sundaram and a close friend of several other Baroda artists, she was uniquely positioned as a witness to both their artistic trajectories and their lived experiences. Reflecting upon her memories from the time, she spoke to me of the kinds of informal and deliberately sparse conditions in which they existed. Over the years, several artists came to inhabit the same residences, often due to the lack of alternative housing, to financial hardship, or through the provision of university accommodations. Artists rarely worked in their home-studios alone and, in fact, would leave their doors open so that friends could come and go as they wished. 

Kapur’s description poetically echoes the title of Sundaram’s 1981 painting People Come and Go, which is set in Paramanand, the bungalow that the artist Bhupen Khakhar built for himself in the middle-class Baroda neighborhood of Chikuwadi (fig. 5). Khakar named the house after his father and the Sanskrit word for “supreme happiness,” foreshadowing the revelry that he hosted there in the years to come. While the house had a separate studio, Khakhar preferred to work in the room pictured above, where he could be surrounded by friends, who dropped in at all hours and engaged him in conversation while he painted. Sundaram hints at Paramanand being a place where the community convened by depicting a welcome mat strategically placed at the bottom of the stairs and showing the door to the house left ajar. Khakhar appears to be in the middle of his painting process, examining a canvas propped up against a wall. British painter Howard Hodgkin, a close friend of the Baroda artists, is shown seated behind him at leisure, with his arms outstretched and his legs casually crossed. The otherwise tranquil setting is interrupted by “glitches” in the composition—a spectral figure of Vallabhai, Khakhar’s lover at the time, floats next to him; Khakhar’s body is painted in translucent hues as if fading into the background; and the picture planes intersect one another, like where a wall panel overlaps Hodgkin’s arm. These idiosyncrasies, combined with the dreamlike pointillist light that floods the room, indicate that Sundaram was not just painting from memory but rather creating a vision of memory—a reminiscence of camaraderie and intimate friendships.

I began my research on Baroda with the awareness that the crux of my argument relied on something intangible—unrecorded conversations, veiled social relations, and ordinary moments of companionship. And although some of this narrative could be gleaned from archival materials and conversations with artists, this research would likely have remained within the realm of the speculative were it not visualized through Jyoti Bhatt’s collection of nearly 1,500 photographs of the campus and the community taken between 1956 and 1999. Much like the formation of the community in Baroda, the development of Bhatt’s photographic practice was by happenstance. Since many students were not able to afford to have their work professionally photographed, Bhatt offered to shoot it for a small sum—in essence, for the price of the necessary film—which allowed him to learn new techniques at little cost. Studying the photographs in his archive chronologically, however, reveals a branching out of his subject matter from documentation of artworks to portraits of friends and contemporaries. Otherwise unassuming photographs of artists in their studios or posing with their work are filled with glimpses of conviviality, playfulness, and collaboration. 

In one photograph from 1970, three students are seated on top of a canvas laid out on the floor, simultaneously drawing different sections of a collaborative artwork (fig. 6). In another, from 1975, more than a dozen students are spread out on a porch, sharing a meal from an array of lunch boxes set between them (fig. 7). In a third, three students sit huddled together, poring over a single book (fig. 8). Lastly, a group shot from 1974 sums up friendships in the studio; amid art supplies, canvases, and frames, we see students holding hands, leaning on one another, and mid-laughter as if caught sharing a joke (fig. 9). 

As a witness to and participant in the formation of this community, Bhatt had untethered access to these candid moments, allowing him to capture the complex undertows of friendship and camaraderie on campus. And yet, despite my place as an outsider to this community, artists spoke to me with the same sense of kinship and familiarity that I describe here. My interviews, which primarily took place in their homes, were replete with nostalgic stories, complicated reflections on the past, and above all, an openness to sharing. Like Jyoti bhai said in response to my request to meet: “ઘર ખુલ્લું છે. ગમે ત્યારેઆવો (The doors of my house are always open. Come anytime you like).”

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The performances conducted by the late Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva (1947–1995) prompted the effects and the facture of ritual. In 1989, a sprawling circular labyrinth constructed out of eight-foot runo reeds occupied the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Metro Manila. Inspired by a pattern found in the Cordilleran rice fields of northern Luzon, the labyrinth orchestrated a walk, or dance, toward the center, where one found a circular pit lined with river stones and presided over by totemic figures like the bulul, a carved wooden sculpture representing a guardian spirit. The center was an area resembling a dap-ay, a place for gatherings and rites, traditionally the foundation of Cordilleran learning. Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth, like many of Villanueva’s works, combined installation, chanting, magical invocations, and other ritualistic tropes drawn from Indigenous sources.¹ Writer Charlson L. Ong, in a 1989 article for the Daily Globe, articulates a popular impression of Villanueva toward the height of the artist’s prolific practice: “[Villanueva is] most everyone’s idea of a mumbaki—a Cordilleran shaman who invokes ancestral and nature spirits.”²

The events that signaled the opening and dismantling of the maze aspired to states of revelry and trance by way of an eclectic ensemble. Musicians wearing their malong, or tubular garments, played Muslim instruments. Cordilleran elders performed a cañao, a sacrificial ritual. Villanueva’s performative agency assembled a social world through degrees of mimicry and guise. Though not of Indigenous origins, Villanueva wore a bahag (loincloth) and applied white circular patterns on his skin, signaling affinities with Indigeneity through a competently invented self. Certain magical effects were attained through crafty, logistical trickery, while others solicited improbable cosmic interventions. At the closing ceremony, Villanueva performed a borrowed ritual to call rain to the site, expressing the artist-shaman’s ambitions to synchronize spirit and atmosphere. A documentary by Egay Navarro and Rica Concepcion condenses Villanueva’s fascinating duality through its title Showman/Shaman, a duplicitous play between guise and embodiment that parallels what he, in his life, had sought to overcome.  

While the trope of the artist-as-shaman is certainly as alluring as it is ethnographically contentious, it must be seen in light of a sensibility that thrived in the Baguio Arts Guild (BAG), of which Villanueva was a founding member. The Cordilleran region is a mountainous territory inhabited by several ethnolinguistic groups. In the nearby city of Baguio, BAG cultivated a subjectivity that not only sought affinities with the Indigenous but also found, within the halo of that affinity, the aesthetic and moral grounds on which to practice their postcolonial agency. This essay looks at the modern as the discursive milieu that grants the figure of the artist-shaman its historical vitality, which I will also call its anomaly.

In 1992, the Indigenous inclination of BAG was inscribed into a narrative of modernism when three of its members—Villanueva, Tommy Hafalla, and Willy Magtibay—received the Thirteen Artists Awards from the CCP. The Thirteen Artists was first conceived as an exhibitionary project in 1970. Then CCP director Roberto Chabet pinned its lineage to the historical group of Filipino modernists who had turned away from Classical values. The loose metric upon which he based the selection of artists—“recentness, a turning-away from past, familiar modes of art-making”³—expressed the modernist urge for forward traction which oriented succeeding iterations of the awards. The attention given to BAG in 1992, however, suggests other institutional desires. In his notes as CCP director for visual arts, Virgilio Aviado praised the awardees’ use of “old, ancient and traditional methods for modern expression.”⁴ Pointing to pursuits such as “the retribalization of the Filipino” and the search for identity through a recuperation of traditions, this sentiment stresses the national as it draws on the otherness of Indigeneity as a modernist cipher of the authentic.⁵

The term “tradition” is in itself duplicitous, one that assumes diverse uses in countries that share colonial histories. Art historians Geeta Kapur and Leonor Veiga, in tracing fragments of tradition within the largely secularized arenas of Indian and Indonesian art, rethink the notion of tradition as an ancestral practice that has survived modernization. Kapur approaches it as “an ambivalent, often culpable sign,” deployed in post-colonial nation-building, at times conceived and re-functioned for nationalist aims.⁶ Veiga cites British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s argument that the invention of tradition, often prompted by the birth of the modern nation-state, attempts to repair the “social voids caused by secularization.”⁷ Whether enacted on the level of the state or at the grassroots, the process of invention can be essentialist in its appropriations, as it lifts an ideal tradition from a ritual milieu and casts it along the quest for nationhood, identity, and origins.

It is from these discursive frames that I draw the term “invention”—but in conceiving it as a guise, I refer to invention as an activity that is intimate in that it arises out of appearance and bodily enactments. Its pronounced exteriority, commanding recognition through all its elaborate adorning, nonetheless strives for a depth of affinity. Shamanism is traditionally practiced within paradigms of the magical and the religious. The shaman is a medium who brings access to the sacred in communal life. Villanueva echoes this function of mediality and retools it into a poetics. In an undated essay titled “Cosmology in Art: An Experiential Process,” he writes that it “is the unique position of the artist as a go-between of the visual and recognizable world and that of the world that is beyond phenomena that strengthens the artist’s role in the society.”⁸ By rendering sensuous form to “unconscious feelings and thoughts of the social environment,”⁹ the artist-medium, much like the shaman, is seen to perform both a psychic duty and a social one. The artist may not necessarily aspire to summon the sacred but at least to access the subliminal through communal experience.

Early on, Villanueva’s poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena materialized in what several writers had contemporaneously tagged as his surrealist paintings. Taking part in a 1975 exhibition that announced the surrealistic as a common ground, Villanueva relished the ways in which this pictorial modality granted him “a freedom of expression” to mine “dreams, desires, and even fears,” a subliminal repertoire from which he found “a greater sense of realism.”¹⁰ Painting butterflies and arid terrains with winged and “evolutionary beasts,”¹¹ the artist signaled the dreamlike before assuming the register of social allegory, like the painting Aqui descansa el rio defunto, Pasig; año 1985, which divines the degradation of the Pasig River.

In these secular visions, the painter, allied to the prophet or seer, foils a faithful inscription of an external reality; he prefers the clairvoyant register to signal a harboring malaise. The subliminal in Archetypes may refer to the visceral qualities of ritual revelry heightened by drumming and dancing as well as to understandings of the primordial—from Indigeneity to the archetype of a labyrinth. Villanueva notes the archetype’s recurrence “in many ancient cultures—from Ancient Egypt to Neolithic Europe, particularly England, to the American Indians, the Chinese, the Australian Aborigines.”¹² Through the motifs and sociality of ritual, artist and viewer are presumably drawn closer to a primordial consciousness rooted in Indigeneity—an affinity that is nonetheless anomalous as it assumes that psychic license can collapse material difference.

Villanueva was raised in Metro Manila, the urban center of modernization in an archipelago defined by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Indigeneity and tradition typically correspond to an imagination of what lies beyond this center, a vision of cultural periphery conceived according to colonial delineations of territory. Ethnolinguistic groups in the Cordilleran highlands, having resisted Spanish colonial efforts, retained significations of otherness during the American occupation as they cast a reverse-image of what was largely seen as a Hispanized and Christianized population in the lowlands. In Philippine modernist painting, this otherness becomes material for an artist’s self-conscious evocations of identity and shared origins, which are at times prone to essentialist portrayals. As Filipino art historian Flaudette May Datuin remarks of modernist Victorio Edades’s depictions of a Cordilleran idyll in Two Igorot Women (1913), “Identity is presented as an eternal and unchanging ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnic’ moment, often associated with the chthonic and submissive female ‘savage.’”¹³

Villanueva’s anomaly rests on a more pronounced representational ambivalence as it is the artist’s body that gestures and personifies, while the otherness of the highlands remains the milieu’s chief source of invention.¹⁴ The fraught territorial divides—wherein periphery and center ideologically align with constructions of tradition and modernity—produce anxieties surrounding the right to represent. Villanueva’s shamanism may thus inspire contrasting attitudes: on the one hand, the celebratory yearning for precolonial identity and then, on the other, the charge of appropriation and self-exoticization. If both these viewpoints spin on tense questions of authenticity, might other readings be possible when we consider what it is about the mediality of the artist-shaman that is fruitfully anomalous?

Villanueva’s biography unwittingly subverts the myth of identity as origin. The anomaly of a body standing in as a medium, proxy, or artifice emphasizes identity’s performativity, one that entails a prolonged process of affinity to stage and to overcome its masquerade. His consciousness of ethnic diversity developed during his childhood visits to Palawan and, eventually, through projects in documentary filmmaking, where he observed and befriended Indigenous groups in several parts of the country. In the late 1970s, dismayed by what anthropologist and BAG member David Baradas has described as a commercialized arts scene that favored homogenizing Western styles, Villanueva moved from Manila to Baguio.¹⁵ This transition brought crushing financial strains; he was then a young father developing an art practice with little commercial or institutional support. What perhaps relieved these precarities was a growing sense of affinity with the thriving cultural and spiritual life he encountered in his visits to the Cordilleras—an affective kinship that differs from systematic ethnography. Scholar Katrin de Guia notes Villanueva’s apprenticeship with an Ifugao mumbaki as well as his visits to healers and mystics in Japan, the United States, and Australia.¹⁶

This affinity with the Indigenous coalesced into a politics of identity through the formation of BAG in 1987. The end of the decade witnessed demands for the state to establish regional autonomy in the Cordilleras. Members of BAG foregrounded cultural identity by inflecting genres of Western origins—film, painting, photography, sculpture, performance—with markers of the local. Materials were sourced from immediate environments and themes carried Indigenous motifs. As an alternative to the secular, commercial, and individualized model of art production in Manila, BAG advanced an ethos of communality: disciplined, spirited organizing—which bred the artist-run international Baguio Art Festival—and a freewheeling camaraderie among travelers, musicians, performers, and artists of all persuasions. The modernist atmosphere of experimentation energized BAG’s postcolonial quest—a quest not just for national origins but also for a real sense of originality, a defining self-consciousness that yielded, for Villanueva, the liberties and the conceit of representation.

In probing the meeting points between tradition and modernity, Geeta Kapur advises us to look “not for hybrid solutions . . . but for a dialectic.”¹⁷ Leonor Veiga then nominates the category of a “third avant-garde” that recognizes the postcolonial agency of artists in using appropriation as a conceptual strategy to capture tradition’s transgressive stance. The “third avant-garde,” in undoing “the taxonomical division between art and ethnography,”¹⁸ fulfills what Kapur has described as a “double-dismantle.”¹⁹ It objects to invented traditions that serve nationalist interests, and it defies the Western monopoly of the avant-garde.²⁰ While much of Veiga’s astute propositions resonate with the conditions of BAG—chiefly, with its ambitions to undo Western aesthetic models and modes of display—Villanueva’s visceral and spiritual performances seem somewhat at odds with the transgressive, radical, and antagonistic edge that defines the vanguardist posture.

The artist-shaman is positioned here as an anomalous figure of postcolonial modernity. What I have been describing as an anomaly is motivated less by the wish to advance than by a long look backward, a nostalgic turning that is naively but also deliberately revivalist in its urges. In working with ritual, however, Villanueva was not only concerned with the symbolic operations that bind it to tradition but also interested in its facture, its design, and its plasticity, recalling the modernist fascination with medium specificity and surface. The artist-shaman thus commits impieties in their revivals, animating the atmosphere of ritual while remaining unfaithful to its ethnographic source.

An anomaly is an instance of irregularity, an improbability, or a moment of anachronism; it derives its effects by virtue of its dislocations. When Villanueva traveled to stage more ritualistic performances in countries like Japan and New York, he seemed more inclined to approach Indigeneity as an activity of invention and guise. It is perhaps the artist-shaman’s more improvised works, like the 1991 project Panhumuko, that reveal another side to his mediality. Largely intuitive, diverging from the elaborate ensembles of Archetypes, Panhumuko foregrounds the shared, symbolic, subliminal space of ritual, which is also a conceptual space to address modernity and its attendant malignancies.

Showman/Shaman documents the performance.²¹ In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in central Luzon displaced several Indigenous Aeta communities, forcing them into evacuation camps. Panhumuko, a Sambal word that translates as “surrender,” was prompted by the intention to make an offering that could appease Apo Namalyari, a deity of the Aetas. Around this time, Villanueva had been preparing to travel to New York to serve as an artist-in-residence upon the invitation of the Filipino cultural group Amauan.²² He was conceiving an engagement that could inform his work at the residency. Villanueva, accompanied by documentarians and a linguist, made the trip to Zambales to find Aetas receptive to holding a ritual offering. The plan did not work with one group, but he was welcomed by another, whose elders (whom he described as “shamans of the community”) reacted with enthusiasm.²³

The central element of this project was the ritual atmosphere approximating a collective trance; the making of the installation-offering appeared like a means to achieve this end. Improvisation, play, and eclecticism marked Panhumuko: Cordilleran dances inspired Villanueva’s actions, the Aetas made percussive sounds with bamboo drums and tin cans, and intuitively, the group assembled the installation by an open well by scattering coals, erecting bamboo stems, hanging vegetables, and arranging candles shaped in human form. A semblance of this resulting material form was then constructed as an indoor installation at Lincoln Square Gallery, New York a month after. Villanueva’s impious, eclectic acts seem like an echo of folk religiosity, a cultural response to the colonial imposition of Christian belief. Writing about the human-shaped candles taken from Quiapo Church in Manila, Villanueva relays his fascination with these ritual objects whose “roots are in the animistic traditions of the past” but are now integrated in Christian practices, an integration he regards as “one of the richest points in Filipino culture.”²⁴

Villanueva’s ritual performances may be read as sites of a similar dialectic. Episodes of calamity most sharply manifest an existential rupture, what Villanueva intuits as “man’s alienation from nature,” which brings about environmental havoc.²⁵ The poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena—fulfilled in Panhumuko as a communal experience of psychic release—signal a postcolonial disavowal of modernization’s rational processes. Villanueva favors installations because their assembly calls for communal acts that “quiet the rattles of intellect and allows intuition to reign.”²⁶ For hours in Zambales, drumming, dancing, and chanting ensue as they build the offering. As a performative gesture, Panhumuko attempts to alleviate a collective unease toward modernity’s malignancies, here construed as calamity, loss of community, and ecological disconnect.²⁷

Villanueva held Indigeneity as a modality of being that may yield a cure for modern problems. The artist then assumed the role of a medium to access an eroded subjectivity or to approximate its guise. What he aspired for, it seems, was an exit from modernity, an exit that was never totally fulfilled when modernity created the conditions for his agency and emergence. The anomaly of ritual proceeds from the artist-shaman’s autonomy and invention. Villanueva’s charismatic performances, while sympathetic to Indigeneity, claim a duplicitous worldliness, an independence that appears to keep him unbeholden to one group or spiritual belief. It is through this anomalous position that he performed his dislocations, ruptured categories, and constituted the self as an improbability.

The artist died of leukemia in 1995. The early onset of illness and exhaustion may have manifested in the pain he expressed during the ritual of Panhumuko, which led the Aeta elders to initiate a curing ritual.²⁸ If an anomaly absorbs the time’s contradictions, the modern played out its paradox fully through his body, through to its demise, as though the shaman also absorbed the very malignancy he sought to cure. This emblematic affliction finally makes palpable the contradictory status assumed by the artist and the shaman in modernity, as these figures dwell at the tense point of magicality and marginalization that comes with embodied, material, and terminal pains. To foreground an anomaly is to anticipate such fetishizations, duplicities, and ambivalences. Villanueva’s shamanism was in some ways a show and a representative conceit. It was also a profound affinity, an invention that was, at the same time, his becoming.

The author is grateful to Agnes Arellano, Billy Bonnevie, Rica Concepcion, and Kawayan de Guia for sharing their archives, documentation, and memories.

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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.

The post Through Resin and Screen: Writing Art History Through Lacquer appeared first on post.

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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