Southeast Asia

The author applies what they call “a Buddhist reading” to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (rucksack installation), 1993, analyzing it alongside recent developments in contemporary Thai art and politics.

This conversation between filmmaker and artist Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and C-MAP Asia Fellow Wong Binghao is accompanied by a two-week screening of Nguyen-Chi’s film Into The Violet Belly (2022), and a collage by designer Ghazaal Vojdani that responds to the conversation.

Collaborating artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho take a speculative approach to Alfonso Ossorio’s sculpture, currently on view in Gallery 415, attempting to locate an insurgent potential bubbling underneath the picture’s baroque aesthetic.

Historian Sumit Mandal initiates a comparison of the architecture, surrounding landscapes, and histories of two keramat, or Muslim gravesite-shrines—Habib Noh in Singapore and Tuan Guru in Cape Town.

The first of its kind on post, this interactive commission sees artists S. Yi Yao Chao and Poklong Anading and curator Chương-Đài Võ responding to three archival collections at Asia Art Archive and, more broadly, approaches to artmaking in Southeast Asia.

Art historian Simon Soon analyzes the texts and images in Syed Sheikh Syed Ahmad al-Hadi’s two-volume novel Hikayat Faridah Hanom (The Story of Faridah Hanom), published in Penang in 1925 and 1926, which notably repurposed photographic images from magazines.

post interviews curators and directors from vital institutions around the world about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their conceptions and practices of programming, civic engagement, and care. In this interview, we speak with Gridthiya Gaweewong, Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Thailand.

In her detailed analysis of Heman Chong’s nearly two-decade-long artistic practice, art historian and curator Kathleen Ditzig contextualizes the ways in which Chong has consistently and intently negotiated with cultural policy and national politics.

This year’s C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations, comprised four panels that took place on Zoom in June 2021. This essay reflects on Looking Sideways, the first panel in the seminar series featuring Sorawit Songsataya, Corina L. Apostol, and Ruth Simbao.

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.