Southeast Asia

In an assiduous reading of Philippine modern artist Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s painting, In the Marketplace, art historian Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol discusses notions of gender, economic value, and spirituality.

Ming Wong wanders between worlds. From Chinese painting and philosophy to theatre, film, Non-Aligned histories, and the radical politics of queerness, Wong’s artistic worldview comprises a prescient pastiche of cultural possibilities.

As art historian Anissa Rahadiningtyas argues, Arahmaiani’s long-term, performative, and community-based work Proyek Bendera (Flag Project) foregrounds a socio-political trinity of feminism, environmentalism, and Islam that cultivates a reparative and egalitarian space of potential.

Therapeutically, and deeply attuned to context, Jaya Jacobo intimates spirits of transfemininity through the temporalities of the Philippines. Without spoon-feeding tangibility or timeline, Jacobo unsensationally invokes perseverance in its purest form.

Treating as insightful case studies the records of miraculous, flower-flurried advents of Mary, Mediatrix of All Grace in the Mindanao Cross, a local newspaper founded by Catholic missionaries in Cotabato City, Mindanao, in 1948, researcher and curator Renan Laru-an initiates the notion of an exhibitionary heritage, articulating this proposition through a self-created grid.

To uncomplicatedly enunciate and hyphenate the manifold concentrations of Daniel Lie’s practice would be to miss the artist’s durational engagement with their complexities. Intimately coiled, these lifelong preoccupations are at the heart of the artist’s experience of the world.

This conversation took place via email from December 2020 to February 2021. Though participants had already been acquainted for a long time before this, they began their exchange with casual personal introductions.

Global South collaborations, site specificity, public engagement, cultural mediation, translation, and the politics of the environment—these are but some of the many facets of curator Đỗ Tường Linh’s research and practice.

Artist and community organizer Tamarra reflects on the personal experiences, emotional complexities, socio-political events, and pilgrimages to non-binary communities across Indonesia that motivated Tamarra’s name change.

Eschewing assumptions about the absence of artistic and political agency under so-called “undemocratic” circumstances, Chaw Ei Thein and Htein Lin’s public performance Mobile Market / Mobile Gallery speaks to the prevalence—and symbiosis—of art and political action in Burma.

Da Hyung Jeong proposes a reading of Soviet-built structures in the region. He attempts to reveal the intentions behind their construction through an analysis of Soviet-era cultural criticism, socioeconomic studies, and encyclopedia entries.

Through analyses of works by David Medalla, Nick Deocampo, and Yason Banal, art historian and curator Carlos Quijon, Jr. looks beyond categorical genres of queerness, proposing instead irreducible, methodological modes that embrace its felicitous potential.