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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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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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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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.

Read the first part of the series here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Bali, Background for War (1943), Part II: A Proposal for Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA; A Proposal for the Cultural Cold War appeared first on post.

The whites of eyes and the glint of teeth, the only discernible features in the otherwise dark shape of the Balinese shadow puppet of the witch Rangda in her supernatural form, were probably the first things visitors encountered when they entered the 1943 exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation. With its fiery head and tendril fingers, the shadow puppet is a totem for a ferocious “other.” Encapsulating the anxieties that contextualized this exhibition, which coincided with World War II, the shadow puppet embodied the sensibility of the exhibition-form—an elusive sensemaking of a culture oceans away.

A wartime exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, Bali, Background for War opened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in late summer 1943 and then traveled to universities and museums across North America.¹ Unlike MoMA’s other wartime exhibitions of the early 1940s, such as Road to Victory (1942) and Airways to Peace (1943), Bali, Background for War did not visually represent the efforts of the Allied Forces. Instead, it presented Balinese sculpture, paintings, puppets, and idols—Balinese modern art—collected by Bateson and Margaret Mead, his wife and collaborator at the time, as well as a selection of photographs from the more than 25,000 images taken during their joint anthropological expedition to Bali in 1936–39.²

Designed by Bauhaus artist and designer Xanti Schawinsky to be portable, the exhibition’s display system relied on wooden structures composed of thin vertical poles on which artworks and cultural objects were hung or otherwise installed in a variety of ways and at different heights. Balinese cultural objects were installed to facilitate distinct sight lines, which Bateson referred to as “vistas,”³ with the individual pieces appearing to float relative to one another. The exhibition presented works and objects on the same ground, alluding to how the artist and their making of the artwork were the material products of a society in which they lived and worked.

Bali, Background for War was an anthropological exhibition of Balinese modern art and culture conceived as a technology for producing a necessary subjectivity in the American infantry and civilian administrators who would oversee the “reoccupation” of Japanese-captured territories, such as Bali. The exhibition sought to cultivate the ability to recognize cultural patterns so as to foster understanding of “those habits of thought and behavior” characteristic of a particular people.⁴ In turn, it represented a weaponization of the then emerging methods of visual anthropology. Bali, Background for War was, in this respect, an exceptional exhibition. Bateson’s only curatorial effort while he was employed at MoMA (from 1942 to 1943), it encapsulated aspects of Bateson and Mead’s most influential work in visual anthropology—at the time, a new subfield of anthropology that would, in part, lead to a break from the racial codification informing exhibitions of Balinese culture in Western museums in the 1930s, wherein biological markers identified race as a defining paradigm of a people’s identity.⁵ Mead and Bateson’s use of film and photography in their fieldwork in Bali has been interpreted by scholars such as Urmila Mohan as a move away from such racialized logic.⁶

After their fieldwork in Bali, Mead and Bateson developed this inquiry into a method that became a “leading social-scientific strategy in World War II” through what Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan has described as “a new alliance of federal and foundation sponsorship with university and industrial partners.”⁷ This included the Committee for National Morale, which the couple joined in 1939, and the Council on Intercultural Relations, which they co-established in 1942 to coordinate research projects among an interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists interested in analyzing contemporary cultures to benefit the war effort.⁸

Mead and Bateson cowrote Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) based on their findings from their fieldwork in Bali. In this book, they lay out their new methodology of visual anthropology.⁹ Photographs capture “behaviors” that are seen as logics or patterns that were registered across a society and found in individual actions or objects. The book explores the social relations that form the basis of larger social patterns. However, this study of Bali by visually surveying the cultural other has been critiqued by scholars such as Geoghegan as indebted to a Dutch colonial policy of turning Bali into a “living museum,” that is, of looking upon it as an idyllic “primitive” society—the assumption being that Balinese culture remained unchanged and thus could be essentialized and understood through visual codes. To be sure, Mead and Bateson’s lack of analysis of the Dutch administration renders their documentation and analysis problematic.¹⁰

Bali, Background for War (1943) was, in essence, the physical manifestation of the method of visual anthropology fleshed out in Balinese Character. Indeed, the exhibition itself became a space in which anthropological methods produced a sense of knowing and relating through the visual encounter with art and cultural artifacts; yet, at the same time, it did not end up being solely an ethnographic representation. In one of Bateson’s many drafts of a press release, he explained that the exhibition would promote “[a] greater realistic understanding of the differences between peoples, of the ways in which each people has developed its own customs and its view of life” and that “if different people are to work together . . . and appreciate each other, some of these special peculiarities must be recognized” and “labelled and pointed out partly so that we may avoid stepping on each other’s toes but also so that each people may have opportunity to make its own special contribution to an organized world.”¹¹ These ideas formed the groundwork for an exhibitionary logic in which the artwork is understood as indexical of a culture and people. Furthermore, it anticipates the belief in postwar art exhibitions as visual arguments for cultural affinities and thus the basis of a shared identity and political consciousness.

Bali, Background for War was the first “regional” exhibition of art from Southeast Asia. In 1943, the imagination of Southeast Asia as a region was a product of World War II. An offshoot of the India Command and formed in response to the Japanese conquest of the region, the South East Asia Command was created by the Allied Forces in August 1943, the same month that Bali, Background for War opened at MoMA.¹² Southeast Asia is referenced in MoMA’s exhibition press release as the “conquered countries” of the Japanese.¹³ The Japanese occupation during World War II had been articulated as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an economic, military, and cultural bloc of occupied countries in East and Southeast Asia that supported the Japanese war effort. In wartime propaganda, the Co-Prosperity Sphere was framed as part of a larger historic aim of resisting Western colonization and manipulation. Seeding a regional identity through a cultural program that included the establishment of “modern” arts education, it championed the revitalization of local, traditional, and Asian aesthetics across the region.¹⁴

As a regional exhibition, Bali, Background for War was less a geographic understanding of the region as a proof of concept of Bateson’s theorization of a world order based on regions of cultures. While he does not explicitly point to it, Bateson’s presentation of modern artworks alongside anthropological materials advanced an aesthetic argument about the role of art in navigating cultural differences. It reflected an understanding of the region that was sensitive to the effects of war, one that offered an alternative visual logic to “Asian” aesthetics advanced by Japanese wartime propaganda.

Bateson’s notes about the exhibition indicate “Southeast Asia” alongside other themes such as “Problems of Overseas Administration,” “Problems of National Character,” “Intercultural Relations and Propaganda,” and “Problems of Visual Presentation.”¹⁵ His conceptualization of the region was a framework for organizing and ordering the world—one based on visual identification of “cultural patterns.” In memos regarding the exhibition, he commented that “in the organization and orchestration of the postwar world [,] many different types of technical insight will be required—political, geographic, economic and cultural.”¹⁶ Furthermore, he highlighted that a key failure of the Treaty of Versailles was the lack of regional knowledge and warned that in the postwar epoch, there was a real risk that the cultural aspects of the various regions would “be ignored or imperfectly understood.”¹⁷ Bateson believed that this would lead to conflict. In a letter to Mortimer Graves of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, sent in April 1943, four months before the opening of Bali, Background for War, Bateson explained that he and Mead were “trying to arrange in the museum an exhibition of Balinese material (native paintings, carvings, observational films, and observational photographs of native behavior) as an example of what a single culture would look like when worked out in this way.”¹⁸ He concluded by claiming the exhibition was part of a larger framework that was “the next logical step towards a sane orchestration of the world’s regional culture.”¹⁹ If regions were a framework for organizing the world and integral to international relations and building a peaceful world, then the ability to read the cultural patterns found in art and its relationship to a society was crucial.

Bali, Background for War sought to represent “the patterns of thought and behavior” of the Balinese people through “works of art and [Bateson’s] photographs of daily life on the island.”²⁰ Developed with MoMA in mind, the exhibition set out a methodology of viewing that made the exhibition-form a generative site for producing “intelligence.” Intelligence in this regard took multiple forms, including the conversion of anthropological information on Balinese culture into “military intelligence,” wherein the viewer learning to read Balinese culture through the exhibition develops a skill necessary for the successful American “reoccupation” of Bali. The exhibition was firstly a collection of material and anthropological information that in the context of World War II had military value. Secondly, it was mobilized to cultivate skills and subjectivities for military application. In turn, the exhibition as a historical object points to an emergent “cultural” military industrial complex centered on modern art and anthropology.

In this context, the “regional” exhibition was a technology that converted anthropological intelligence into military intelligence, both in terms of apprehending a cultural other but also as a way of organizing the world through cultural regions. How was modern art integral to this convergence? How was the production of a modern subjectivity and exhibitionary logic of Southeast Asia entangled with the writing of modern art at MoMA, and how was it distinct from the colonial aesthetics of the census that scholars have pointed out in discussing Balinese Character?²¹

The artworks that Bateson and Mead presented in Bali, Background for War were procured from three main painting centers in Bali: Ubud, where most foreign artists in Bali had settled from the 1920s onward; Sanur, where some foreign artists lived and most vacationed; and Batuan, which tourists rarely visited. Bateson and Mead seemed to have been most interested in Batuan, where most of the paintings in Bali, Background for War were sourced from.²² By the time Mead and Bateson were in Bali, there was a thriving business of Balinese artists making tourist paintings for a Western audience. As products of transnational exchange, these works of art were quintessentially modern.

Hildred Geertz, in her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection of Balinese paintings and, more generally, of Batuan paintings, describes the paintings produced in Batuan as “bicultural” and “bound up in the meaning systems and aesthetic ideas of several cultures at once.”²³ She notes that only a few of the Batuan painters were directly taught by German artist Walter Spies and Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, both of whom lived in Ubud. For the most part, Batuan or Balinese painters at the time encountered Western images in textbooks, in foreign magazines, and in the form of small commercial images distributed within the Dutch colony.

Prior to Bateson and Mead’s arrival in Bali, there were already precedents of exchange and modernism on the island. The year 1928 is marked as the first time Western observers recorded art in Bali as consisting of new forms of representation. These observers went on to cultivate a tourist economy for such images.²⁴ The Pita Maha, an artist society committed to modern art in Bali, was established in 1936 and active until 1940. It became associated with modern art of Bali, with Bonnet, a member of the society, organizing exhibitions of Balinese modernists in Indonesia and in Europe, including exhibitions in 1937 and 1938 in Amsterdam and London²⁵

The modern style that emerged from this period in the 1930s and which defined the artworks that Bateson presented in Bali, Background for War was thus informed by engagement with Western art. As Adrian Vickers has noted, Balinese modern art in the 1930s was seen as exotically primitive and distinctly different from Western modernism. And yet, art dealers such as Dutch gallerist Carel van Lier sold Balinese modern art in Europe alongside European modern art.²⁶

Walter Spies housed Bateson and Mead upon their arrival in Bali in 1936 and provided their first introduction to Balinese paintings, influencing Bateson’s perspective on Balinese modern art.²⁷ For MoMA’s installation of the exhibition, Bateson considered an additional section devoted to Balinese modern art.²⁸ In the anthropologist’s personal papers, there is a memo to Xanti Schawinsky about the wall text alongside instructions regarding which photographs and artworks were to be installed. In addition, Bateson scribbled down several possible configurations for the works. A section called “History of Modern Balinese Art,” for example, was to be arranged in a straight row, suggesting a linear historical narrative. The selection of works would include one or two paintings by Spies and about ten artworks from Bateson and Mead’s collection. The wall text focused on the genealogy of the making of the artwork and described how artists made their works as part of a loose art history of modern Balinese art development, information that was then interspersed with short stories and mythical accounts such as how Spies gave paper and black ink to Balinese artist Sorbet and a whole school was born. The genealogy privileged Spies and his position in Balinese modern art at the expense of other influences, implicitly reflecting Bateson’s own perspective of Balinese art.

Bateson claims in the written guide that accompanied the traveling exhibition that all the artworks were of the artists’ “spontaneous invention,” with the exception of a painting by Ida Bagus Made Togog, who was asked to make pictures of his dreams.²⁹ In this regard, Bateson’s mobilization of artworks might seem to speak to how Balinese artists authentically represented their inner lives and society. This was not necessarily the case, however. In her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection, Geertz found that the two anthropologists deeply influenced the Balinese artists. Throughout their fieldwork, the couple was in contact with Balinese painters who would not only travel to see them but also made art specifically to sell to them.³⁰

While Bateson intended the artworks to be seen as sources of information about the inner lives of the peoples they represented, their makers were aware of the Western anthropological gaze of Bateson and Mead, which informed their process and, in particular, their subject matter. Thus, the Balinese society that Bali, Background for War pictured was one already in dialogue with an international world order and a modern art history.In this sense, Balinese modern art in the exhibition was relational, not just representative of a faraway culture. The photographed Balinese man and more generally the people whose gaze met those visiting the exhibition was thus returning a gaze that was part of a cultural exchange that spanned back to the 1930s and was a critical part of the definition of Balinese modern art. The regional imagination captured in Bali, Background for War was, in turn, an emergent international order framed by an encounter with modern art. This nexus of the anthropological and militaristic sensemaking that took shape as an exhibitionary technology of worldmaking during the Cold War will be unpacked in the second part of this essay.

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

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The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was established in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961, during the peak of the Cold War, drawing inspiration from the principles of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Founded by developing countries opposed to formal alignment with either the United States or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, NAM advocated for national self-determination and resistance against all forms of colonialism and imperialism. Its united front on social and economic policies proved only the beginning, as it also sought to create a united artistic front, an aim resulting in the opening of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito” on September 1, 1984, in Titograd (today Podgorica), Yugoslavia. 

Although Yugoslav artists exhibited works at the Alexandria Biennale (Egypt), São Paulo Biennial (Brazil), and New Delhi Triennale (India), and artists from NAM member countries exhibited at the International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (Yugoslavia), the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito” was the only art institution established under NAM auspices¹, a fact crucial to grasping the significance of its collection². 

The archives of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro³, which was founded through the integration of the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito” and the Republic Cultural Centre after the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1995, reveal a transnational network of cultural diplomacy linking fifty-six non-aligned countries to generate a collection of about eight hundred artworks originating from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Though criticized by Yugoslav art historians for collecting “works from faraway exotic places” and “from authoritarian states that support official art,”⁴ the Gallery challenged what its founders viewed as the imperial model that prevailed in many museums in that it acquired its holdings solely through gifts and donations. This essay discusses the transnational model of assembling an art collection by employing NAM networks, countering the imperial model of doing so through colonial violence, looting, or transactional exchange.

Situated in a nineteenth-century castle built by Nicholas I, the last king of Montenegro, and surrounded by a large park complex, the Gallery began collecting, preserving, and exhibiting the art of non-aligned and developing countries in 1984. This effort made Yugoslavia a cultural center, one that attracted artistic productions from North Korea, India, Egypt, Angola, and Cuba, among many other NAM countries (fig. 1).

A European nation situated between the Eastern and Western blocs and in proximity to the African and Asian Mediterranean shores, Yugoslavia proved to be a perfect site for an art space dedicated to the exhibition of the artistic production of NAM countries. Although the rupture with the Soviet Union in 1948 undeniably served as the primary catalyst for a significant transformation in its foreign policy, the Yugoslav Partisans’ resistance against fascism bore symbolic resonance with anti-colonial struggles in the Global South⁶. Not only did the Partisans unite the diverse nationalities within Yugoslavia against local fascist regimes, they also accomplished a remarkable feat in making it the only occupied European nation to liberate itself from Axis occupation⁷. In so doing, they established Yugoslavia’s distinct position beyond the spheres of influence of the United States and the Soviet Union. Operating in a state of “semiperipherality,” Yugoslavia fostered the emergence of distinct perspectives and, notably, “ambivalence . . . regarding . . . Western modernity”⁸ and hostility toward colonial subjectivity. As sociologist Marina Blagojević contends, “Semiperipherality” is “essentially shaped by the effort to catch up with the core, on [the] one hand, and [on the other] to resist the integration into the core, so as not to lose its cultural characteristics,” an ethos that made Yugoslavia a suitable site for the NAM collection.⁹

The Gallery’s model of collecting and exhibiting artworks helped establish its specific identity as an institution that steered clear of cultural colonialism. In an introduction to an undated Gallery exhibition catalogue, Raif Dizdarević, Yugoslav Federal Secretary of Foreign Affairs, remarks how the institution collected art, “preserving national identity despite colonialism, occupation, foreign domination, despite racism, economic exploitation, removal of cultural treasures,” and all other forms of forced exploitation.¹⁰ In the 1970s, a comparable anti-imperialist model united transnational art projects such as the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Museum of Solidarity) in Santiago, Chile, and the International Art Exhibition for Palestine in Beirut, Lebanon.¹¹ These endeavors fostered transnational solidarity movements and strengthened alliances among countries in the Global South, the same vision NAM pursued through the establishment of the Gallery in Yugoslavia.¹²

The works in the Gallery’s collection, with the exception of objects made by artists in residence in Titograd, were processed and administrated by Yugoslav embassies based in NAM countries before being sent to Yugoslavia and exhibited. Indeed, letters exchanged between non-aligned countries, Yugoslav embassies, and Gallery personnel show that the acquisition process followed a structured pattern: countries would submit lists of artworks they wished to donate, and then the Gallery would systematically incorporate them into the collection. Although the acquisition process varied across the fifty-six countries donating works, it chiefly relied upon art institutions, cultural organizations, and appointed artists acting as liaisons between NAM countries and the Gallery. Notably, no records indicate the rejection of any submitted works, a practice that resulted in not only a heterogeneous collection but also eclectic exhibitions. 

In the absence of presentation directives, Gallery curators chose to display acquired objects alongside each other, highlighting the collaborative and transnational dynamics inherent in NAM networks. This inclusive approach to collecting and exhibiting is also reflected in the Gallery’s array of objects, which encompasses various time periods and mediums. For example, a photograph of a display of works in the permanent collection captures its wide-ranging nature and scope (fig. 2): two antique Cypriot vessels, one from about the 14th century and the other from 725–600 BCE, shown together in a glass cabinet; a sequence of Indian modernist paintings by, left to right, Brahm Prakash, Rameshwar Broota (born 1941), and Gurcharan Singh (born 1949) on the walls; and a white marble sculpture by Indian artist Awtar Singh (1929–2002) on the floor. 

The Gallery’s permanent collection ranges from archaeological objects from as far back as the seventh century BCE to contemporary works from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Although the collection includes works in a range of mediums and from different time periods, modern and contemporary artworks dominate its holdings. Between 1988 and 1990, for example, the Gallery organized more than one hundred exhibitions featuring art from different countries, regions, and eras.¹³ While it primarily sought to collect and present works from non-aligned countries, it also organized permanent exhibitions, special exhibitions in Yugoslavia and abroad, lectures and conferences, on-site artistic interventions, and publications promoting the artistic production of NAM countries. By activating the space through a range of public-facing activities, the Gallery swiftly became the hub of NAM’s artistic networks as it drew people from all over the world to Yugoslavia. 

By examining three types of collecting by the Gallery—works created on-site, works produced in other non-aligned countries, and works made off-site with NAM’s mission in mind—this essay will reveal how the Gallery expanded NAM’s transnational solidarity networks and challenged the imperial model of collecting by assembling a collection solely through gifts and donations.

Many artists from NAM countries participated in Gallery residencies, creating art on-site and giving lectures about the art of their respective nations, activities that fostered opportunities to network internationally. A white marble sculpture by Zimbabwean sculptor Bernard Matemera (1946–2002) is an excellent example of a work created by an artist in residence. Porodica (Family, 1987) remains central to the collection as it has been greeting Gallery visitors since its unveiling in 1987 (fig. 3).¹⁴ By 1987, Zimbabwe (which gained independence in 1980, making it one of the last African countries to do so) sought to assert its cultural identity and promote its national narrative on the international stage.¹⁵ Therefore, the Gallery’s invitation to a Zimbabwean artist to undertake a residency and the inclusion of his work in the permanent collection symbolizes more than Zimbabwe’s integration into the global anti-colonial discourse. To be sure, it also reaffirms the Gallery’s dedication to supporting artists and exhibiting art from nations actively engaged in decolonization and self-determination.

The Gallery’s collection also includes two sculptures Matemera made on-site using locally sourced stone. In his works, Matemera explores African folklore, myths, and legends, a pursuit that has made his sculptures of interest beyond Africa.¹⁶ One monumental piece exhibited on the Gallery’s front lawn embodies themes and styles Matemera examined across his oeuvre as he carved African histories and myths into his works (fig. 4). 

The captivating painting by Egyptian artist and activist Inji Efflatoun (1924–1989) is notable as a piece created in a non-aligned country and later gifted to the Gallery. Seljanka i banane (Peasant Woman and Bananas, 1968) depicts a working-class woman seated in a banana tree plantation, themes Efflatoun explored from the mid-1960s onward (fig. 5).¹⁷ Efflatoun, alongside other Egyptian artists represented in the collection, such as Rabab Nemr (born 1939), Hussein El Gebaly (1934–2014), and Zeinab Abdel Hamid (1919–2002), made works “that expressed the characters of the Egyptian people and recorded the urban and rural landscapes of the country,” a theme explored across the Gallery’s Egyptian holdings.¹⁸ This particular collection of works comprises eighty-two objects, a large number of which were made by women. Due to the lack of records regarding the selection process, one wonders whether these objects were given because works by women were deemed minor or if the Egyptian regime was intentionally aiming to highlight the artistic contributions of women through the Gallery’s transnational solidarity networks.

A founding NAM member state, Egypt donated the most works to the collection of any nation, solidifying its continuous support of the project and showcasing the steadfast leadership of its fourth president, Hosni Mubarak, who advocated for deeper South-South cooperation at the 7th Summit Conference of Heads of State or Government of NAM held in 1983 in New Delhi.¹⁹ In the 7th Summit’s final declaration, under the section “Education and Culture,” it is “recommended that the non-aligned countries should actively collaborate in enriching the content and enlarging the scope of the Gallery of Arts of all non-aligned countries, established by the City Assembly of Titograd, Yugoslavia, and invited the coordinating countries to consider concrete measures in this regard.”²⁰ After receiving an official invitation to collaborate in the formation of the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito,” Egypt donated works reminiscent of Efflatoun’s oeuvre, emphasizing the human subject and everyday life, two themes central to NAM, and the collective struggle for equality and peace amid the Cold War.

A work in the collection made off-site by Cypriot artist Hambis Tsangaris (born 1947), founder of the Hambis School of Printmaking, celebrates International Children’s Day and, at the same time, extends NAM’s philosophy of non-alignment, intercommunal peace, and coexistence. Cyprus, a Mediterranean island country and founding member of NAM, played a critical role as a nation that has historically followed a non-aligned foreign policy. For instance, Greek Cypriot authorities saw NAM as a potential source of further international backing for constitutional reforms aimed at mitigating the inter-communal strife between the principal ethnic groups—Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots—an issue central to Tsangaris’s practice.²¹ In Greek and Turkish, the official languages of the Republic of Cyprus, as well as in English, Tsangaris advocates “PEACE IN THE HOMELAND / PEACE IN THE WORLD,” addressing both the intercommunal conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and the broader geopolitical strains stemming from the Cold War (fig. 6). 

In Prvi jun—Međunardni dan djeteta (June 1—International Children’s Day, 1977), Tsangaris captures the essence of folk culture, myth, and tradition by integrating abstracted representations of nature and figures—such as the sun, sea, human figures, birds, and fish—symbolizing connections that unify the island. Tsangaris’s work not only raises questions about the island’s geopolitical reality of being situated between the east-west axis, it also deepens the complexity of solidarity networks within NAM, which in turn lends further significance to the Gallery as a space capable of collecting “art of the world” through gifts and donations.²²

Many western museums, thanks to acquisition practices now looked upon as unethical, contain highly diverse collections, especially given their colonial legacies. At the same moment the Gallery opened in 1984, many such institutions flaunted their eclecticism, as did MoMA in its 1984–85 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, which brought together objects from many different places and times under the loose heading of “affinity.”²³ While the Gallery also staged collisions between works with distinct histories, it resisted trying to find unity in formal affinities between objects and instead looked to the distinct mode of sociability that was responsible for the objects coming into its hands in the first place: gift-giving—though not by wealthy donors, but rather by national peoples participating in a common project of self-determination. Whatever shortcomings this ideal may possess, it represented a self-conscious counter-practice to that of imperial art institutions. 

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The somewhat offhand archive called Track Changes nests in the permanent, and therefore more premeditated, display of the art collection of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center at the University of the Philippines in Manila. The items in this collection are organized according to a loose art-historical diachrony and within broadly conceived tropes of light, province, unease, and passage. Layered around this nucleus of privileged objects are select contemporary artworks and archival materials. The latter comprise Track Changes, which aims to introduce the public to the archives of the Vargas Museum and the University of the Philippines. The clusters of things are rendered equivalent to and contemporaneous with the encounter of the art through a paracuratorial supplement that exists adjacently to the collection; this arrangement enhances a porous scenography that pursues the interdisciplinarity research inscribed in the word “Filipiniana,” which may mean anything, and so everything, or at the very least, something Philippine. And because Track Changes reminds the public that the museum is the custodian of more than just art as validated by an elite and an expert class, it alerts them to the redistribution of the values of the motley “stuff” of which the museum is steward.

In certain ways, the initiation is an insertion into the stable canon of the collection, thus alluding to a “distraction,” to drag or to pull in different directions in Latin and late Middle English, but not altogether a disruption. It is a practical diversion, so to speak, a delay of expectation consisting of vitrines resting on the spindly legs of wooden tables that may easily be moved or stored. The room housing the collection is surrounded by glass, the panes of which are framed by aluminum, and dappled by various illuminations at different times of the day from the outside. Not a typical white cube, it situates the viewer amid art and nature in a kind of wraparound transparency that instills the feeling of being in a museum and, at the same time, experiencing a kind of continuum with external happenstance, be it rain or a riot. Track Changes is both implicit and complicit, receding and advancing within the institution but not seeking a center; in fact, it is at the sides, flush to the glass wall and so invites oblique reading in the way of an annotation or an aside. While sufficiently present, it is neither ubiquitous nor conspicuous: rather, it is intermingled and intermittent though delicately indented.

The initiation into this endeavor is titled The Native Strain: Guillermo Tolentino and Aurelio Alvero. It focuses on the relationship between Jorge B. Vargas (1890–1980), collector and donor of the collection; artist-professor Guillermo Tolentino (1890–1976); and curator-critic Aurelio Alvero (1913–1958). These three figures are related at certain nodes. Vargas collected the stalwart academic sculptor Tolentino, and Alvero helped Vargas set up his collection. Furthermore, the archives of Tolentino are in the University of the Philippines, which administers the Vargas collection and where Vargas was a student in its first law class and later a regent. Relating Tolentino and Alvero to Vargas is particularly intriguing as it gives us a glimpse into the aesthetic and political implications of making art, making nationalisms, and making museums in the interwar, war, and postwar years in the Philippines.

Jorge Vargas aspired to a postwar national culture through an art collection, as stated in the founding papers of the collection. The latter yield references to cultural heritage being vital for a “young Republic” and the logic of art being a kind of “accumulation” that serves as a gauge of a “level of culture.” According to a 1948 document that conceptually forms the basis of the Vargas collection, the pieces are viewed as “representative of a national art.” The first catalogue, published in 1943, spells out the aims of the collection: “‘encouraging Filipino artists and assisting in the presentation of their works’ . . . helping ‘Filipinos to know and treasure our cultural heritage’. . . and . . . contributing ‘to the proper presentation of Philippine art.’”¹ Vargas commissioned modernist painter Victorio Edades (1895–1985), who studied architecture and mural-making at the University of Washington in Seattle and worked in a salmon cannery in Alaska, to write the first catalogue of his collection; and Alvero completed a catalogue of his own collection titled Art in Tagala (1942/1944).² These efforts may well be the earliest anthologies of art criticism and curatorial writing in the Philippines to the degree that they attempted close readings of works in a collection.

Alvero and Tolentino were nativists who exalted the pre-Hispanic Philippine lifeworld; at the same time, they were decisively (other)worldly, advocates of abstraction and builders of monuments. The term “nativist” is deployed here as a provocation and pertains to the range of articulations that may be considered not-yet or never-to-become colonial (and therefore potentially national or nationalist) or, perhaps, the basis of the exemplary folklore that is the nation, or its afterlife via a new folkloristics in the contemporary. Tolentino was a sculptor of the classical tradition, of the heroic and allegorical kind, and a spiritist who convened séances. He also proffered claims on the Philippine primeval such as its writing system or script, spinning some esoteric codes and wildly transhistorical comparisons.

Jorge Vargas was born into a family that had significant interests in sugar in the central Philippine islands of the Visayas. He was a political figure in the Philippines, its first executive secretary, who served the governments of the United States and Japan from 1935 to 1945. Apart from playing a vital role in American bureaucracy with various portfolios including defense and agriculture, Vargas was invested in the scouting movement, international sports, and the collecting of a gamut of things that, from art to ashtrays, included stamps, coins, photographs, books, and documents, inter alia. He was accused of conniving with the Japanese and later convicted, only to be absolved by the postwar government. He donated his collection to the University of the Philippines, which opened the museum in his name in 1987.

Kept in the vitrines of Track Changes are important texts that tend to inflect the trope of the Philippine bildung. Tolentino’s excursus references a deep past, an ancient ethnic and racial community lying beyond the strictly colonial and imperialist civilization. For instance, in Ang Wika at Baybaying Tagalog (The Language and Script of Tagalog, 1937), he unfolds an almost encyclopedic account of the Philippines through the different systems of knowledge, describing flora, fauna, and people in lofty and idiosyncratic Tagalog, an ethnolinguistic marker of communities around the capital of Manila.³ Tolentino illustrated some of the pages, including the one imagining how the Tower of Babel might have looked from an interplanetary perspective and in the context of the birth of Tagalog as one of the world’s languages.

Alvero, who opened his collection to the public in 1942, was born to intellectuals. His father was the painter and interior decorator Emilio Alvero (1886–1955), and his mother was Rosa Sevilla (1879–1954), founder of the Instituto de Mujeres (1900), the first Filipino-run lay Catholic school for women. He was an accomplished orator and took up law and education simultaneously. He was a poet and taught English, history, and the Tagalog language. He was tried as a Japanese collaborator and imprisoned from 1945 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1952. He cofounded the Young Philippines, a fringe nationalist party of the 1930s advocating that “The Political Salvation of the World Lies in Dictatorship Rather than Democracy.” Alvero founded a “quasi-fascist, blue-shirted” organization that was modeled on groups in Germany, Italy, and Spain.⁴ He went by the name of Magtanggul Asa, which in the local language means “Defending Hope,” and wrote prodigiously on Philippine culture. A case deserving closer study is the monograph titled The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala written in 1954 in Manila, in which he theorizes the rubric of the “non-objective” based on the First Non-Objective Art Exhibition in the Philippines, which opened in 1953 at the modernist nerve center in postwar Manila, the Philippine Art Gallery. Here, he would realign the idiom of western abstraction twice: first through the term “non-objective” and second through “Tagala,” a reference to the dominant ethnic society in the country that is appropriated presumably as an alternative to the colonial appellation of the archipelago, which is the Philippines, the genealogy of Filipiniana. With Alvero and Tolentino looming in the mindset of Vargas, the absolute and the occult alternate with the self-conscious and the internationalist to conjure the fantasy of the modern. 

Alongside documents related to Vargas, Alvero, and Tolentino, the vitrines also contain visual material from the Japanese occupying forces that portray the Americans as murderous, while promising social stability and prosperity through the banking system, health service, and a market economy under their auspices. Curiously, in their illustrations, which are veritable wartime propaganda, the template is American comics and editorial cartoons, thus indicating a persistence of American popular visuality across colonial cultures.

To discuss Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero as an ensemble is to anticipate a theoretical and historiographic framework of the Philippine modern that considers the aesthetic, artifactual, and discursive implications of the archival material inscribed in or ornamenting the collection. What might be offered here concomitantly is a method that contemplates the postcolonial modern through a paracuratorial visibility. In this regard, the modern is not singularly intuited as a mode of progress or criticality; like the vitrines in Track Changes, this modern is, as alluded to earlier, offhand. For the ethos of Vargas insisted on a certain pleasure in appreciating the distracting collectible, perhaps an elaboration of the desire to belong to an abstract collective.

The term “kawilihan” is key. Kawilihan was the name of Vargas’s residential complex and the site of the collection before its transfer to the university. It roughly translates as fascination, distraction, or absorption. It shapes the time and pursuit of leisure, even of reverie. The complex was imagined as Pleasantville and was part of the development of the suburbs of Manila. It had a garden where Vargas raised vegetables, chickens, and pigs, and ample spaces where he hosted costume parties. Besides being a concept-work, kawilihan was also real estate, the land that bought and preserved the art.

The care and thoughtfulness that sustained fascination and the longing for culture would not have found its distinct institutional framework had Vargas not settled on an intellectual scheme that braided culture and nation, not to mention art and garden. It was a scheme seen within the context of fondness for materials in a collection thriving on heterogeneity and later subjected to analysis in a university museum. Across these interactions, the collection would feed into a life of ferment, speculation, and scholarship. These three impulses of fascination, culture, and university animate the collecting instinct of Vargas and the collection. The phrase “university museum” holds two of modernity’s most consummate bureaucracies: the university and the museum, from which stem the prospects of enlightenment and radical epistemology through knowing and sensing. The alternation between homegrown joy and critical institution is instructive.

The joy derives from kawilihan. It is at once residence, collection, museum. Its root “wili” is also attentiveness, interest, penchant, liking, pleasure, enjoyment. In the early lexicon, it straddles between afección (in Juan de Noceda and Pedro San Lucar), a profound, deep-seated affection on the one hand, and afición (in Pedro San Buenaventura), a habit, inclination, talent, or an enthusiasm on the other. These words gravitate toward “love”; in one Filipino translation of “wili,” it is considered “mataos na pagmamahal,” or a lofty devotion to a beloved.⁵ If kawilihan as a structure of feeling hangs over a particular sensitivity to a precious belonging, then it is a cognate of the ethos of care and inevitably of curation in the sense of a possession being under the care or in the custody of, or of curiosity, the inquisitiveness about things. Because the state of kawilihan or the condition of wili is absorption, love becomes a discursive articulation of the word: the collector, or lover, loses the self, which is absorbed in the collection.

In the Pedro Serrano Laktaw dictionary, the absorbed subject is an “aficionado, apegado, encariñado,” that is, generally attached, and a connoisseur. Such cultivated attachment and connoisseurship are mediated by an object of desire. The example of the lexicographer is intriguingly allegorical and potentially moral: “Hindi mawiwili ang aso, / kundi binibigyan nang buto.”⁶ The dog will not be engaged if not given a bone. Wili, therefore, hinges the subject to the object for it to be distracted.

Criticality informs the second aspect, specifically how the conceptualization of culture and the state, or how the state represents the polity through culture, or the ethical necessity of representativeness for a common image of an ethical community that professes the symbolic birthright of a tradition.⁷ To be more concrete in the Philippine historical context, the trope of the American Commonwealth and the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere speaks to a collective and expansionist imaginary rooted in colonial history. And the sui generis Vargas was right at the center of these projects and at the same time the collector of the evolving Filipiniana of the Philippines. No other figure in Philippine history rivals his acumen and dexterity in terms of the country’s political and aesthetic education. The historian Teodoro Agoncillo, who wrote a detailed account of the Vargas collaboration case, opines that the “collaboration question was . . . the brainchild of the Americans who, acting under the pressure of the prevailing war psychosis, dictated to the hapless Filipinos what they should and should not do or think in relation to the incidents and accidents of the war.”⁸

What Track Changes does is to create a relationality between the historiography, which is also the museology, of colonial and modern art and the curatorial supplement that is not programmatic or thematic, but rather contingent and tropic. It insinuates itself from within the institution and beside, or within reach of, the displayed collection to hopefully choreograph, or subtly incite, the frisson of “situated knowledge” across the varia or corpora in the room. In other words, the paracuratorial in this instance coordinates, hints at, a cognitive mapping of things in a tentative totality without lapsing into ideological iconography or art-historical repetition. The “para-” turns out to also be “proto-” in that it reveals symptoms of the museological unconscious of Vargas as well as the apparatus that enabled the collection to cohere and then ramify across temporalities through curatorial activation. The native, the national, and the non-objective suffuse this utterance of the modern—all caught up in contradictions but also pointing to a third moment beyond the dualisms that underlie all stylizations of coloniality and its attendant class-, gender-, race-continuous discriminations. Track Changes proves to be a viable intersectional site that cannot be quickly co-opted by narrow specialization and the positivisms it attracts.

The native, the national, and the non-objective initiate a relay between expressions of the subjectivity that is the Philippine, construed as a figurine and not an identity. The latter dilates across the said three registers in which various imaginaries coalesce to generate particular phases, and plasticities, of modernity: the supposed authenticity of the indigenous (the native), the idealized cultural character of postcolonial autonomy (the national), and the eccentric entitlement to a transcultural and international abstraction (the non-objective) in which all empirical and rational references are banished as if to perform the purity of the native and the melancholic hubris of the national. In a certain way, the Philippine is all of these, condensing in the acquisitive personas of Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero, who communed with the archaic, the multitude, and the dead—all taken by liberal sympathies, cabinets of curiosity of their own. In this sequence of categories, the notion of the modern becomes exceptionally complex, interpellated by the difficult desires of belonging, and not belonging, to the aesthetic polity of the colonial western by sketching out a cognate genealogy of the Kantian sensus communis: the bodies of willful subjects, which include the collector, the collection, and the culture. This can only be the very groundwork of the museum, its curatorial substrate, when it renders the art ambiguously present in its space, “derived from distractive experience” and turned into an “abstraction of bits of the world.”⁹ Modern art critic Richard Shiff brings distraction, abstraction, and the (non)objective together rhythmically: as the art is grasped so does it “draw away” and “draw apart” from how it is sensed as actually existing and how its becoming real is not only poignantly, but also punctually prefigured.¹⁰

To end with another distraction: In 2022, the Philippine government asked the Vargas Museum to temporarily keep and curate the collection of about five hundred pieces from the collection of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1986, at a time when the couple’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had become president. The items in the collection comprise paintings on canvas, glass, and wood. They are crafted from the tradition of lacquer, egg tempera and copper, and the ornament of gold leaf, among other mediums. These objects are paintings from the late Gothic and Rococo periods in Italy, reverse glass paintings from former Yugoslavia of folk-fantastic style and called “naif” in Southeast Europe, and lacquer vanity cases and religious icons from Russia. The Marcos government was hailed as developmentalist and cosmopolitan but was deposed by a popular uprising in the wake of autocracy and allegedly massive thieving.

While not cohabiting with the display of the collection and Track Changes, the Marcos collection finds its place alongside the Vargas Collection guided by a kindred paracuratorial sensibility. The task of a university museum is to invite a mindful and urgent study of these objects as well as the tricky lives of Vargas and Ferdinand Marcos, both of whom were enmeshed in the history of colonialism, the formation of nation-states, the accumulation of wealth, and the status itself of objects in collections. With their contentious imbrication as the ecology, essential questions may be revisited: What is an object? How does it become property or patrimony? Why is it in the world, why are we around it, and what do we as subjects do about it?

When the initiatory and coincidental Track Changes asks these same questions, digressively and not aggressively or even transgressively, it drags and pulls the museum in different directions, paracuratorially. As the title “Track Changes” suggests, it traces the indicia of amendments to the text, the writing itself of difference—or the difference finally of curatorial writing.

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“Seyni Awa Camara doesn’t belong to any artistic school,” wrote art critic Massamba Mbaye in 2016.¹ She resists any classification and has always considered herself a singular artist, whether in the context of her own country or in that of the international art scene (fig. 1). As Mbaye stresses, Seyni Awa Camara (Senegalese, born c. 1945) could easily have been excluded from the history of art built in the aftermath of independence in Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s patronage and with state support, when artists were trained at the Dakar “école des arts,” mostly as painters. Except for Younousse Seye (Senegalese, born 1940), no women participated in the exhibitions organized to promote national Senegalese art. Younousse Seye was the only woman to display in Dakar (solo exhibition, Théâtre Daniel Sorano, 1977), Algiers (Pan-African Festival, 1969), and Paris (Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, 1974). And contrary to most men, she did not benefit from academic training; she learned from her mother who worked as a batik dyer. Camara also inherited her skills from her mother, who was a potter in Casamance (Senegal). Both artists grounded their practices in family knowledge and later developed in more personal directions. Camara certainly gained more attention than Seye over time, especially outside of Senegal. At the turn of the 1990s, her bold statues were displayed in Paris (Magiciens de la terre, 1989), Las Palmas (Africa Hoy, Africa Now, 1992), and Venice (Biennale Arte 2001—Plateau dell’Umanità, 2001). They are now part of important collections such as the National Museum of Art (Oslo), the Theodore Monod Museum in Dakar (see fig. 4), and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), as well as held in many private collections, some of which are in Senegal (Jom in Dakar and the Musée Khelcom in Saly Portudal). If her creations have stood the test of time, they have also crystallized many of the binary opposites that still structure the art world’s expectations, such as art and craft or the collective and the singular, or the caution deemed necessary by the West in validating any artistic process developed in the so-called peripheries. Looking at the history of global contemporary art from the perspective of Camara’s work and career reveals the ways in which globalization operates, especially regarding women artists from Africa.

Seyni Awa Camara’s figures are striking, and yet they are not meant to please or seduce. They stand free, strongly anchored by their feet, and are sometimes double-headed. With their large smiles, their visible teeth, and their bulging eyes, they often look provocatively happy. Their size varies from a few inches to several yards high, but they are always frontal and hieratic; they are sometimes covered with smaller figures, who cling to their torsos and legs (fig. 2).

When Camara started making these sculptures in her village in Bignona (Casamance, Senegal), people were scared; she could not show them publicly. Michèle Odeyé-Finzi recalls that when she met the artist in the early 1980s, Camara was selling utilitarian pots in the local market.² She was keeping her personal sculptures at her home outside the village in a special room that she had dedicated to them. There, statuettes ranging from maternity figures to zoomorphic ones, small frogs juxtaposed with large cats, trucks, or monkeys (fig. 3), covered the floor. They were made of clay of various shades depending on how they were fired, which is less the case today.

Mystery and rumor surrounded her activities and continue to do so: some wonder if she is still alive and if it is she or rather a sibling who is making the sculptures sold today. A triplet, she was about twelve years old when she disappeared into the forest with her two brothers. As the story goes, they stayed hidden for about four months and geniuses protected them and taught them how to model clay. When the three children finally returned to the village, one of them (Allassane) was carrying a sculpture that he said the forest geniuses had taught him to make. Camara told anthropologist Michèle Odeyé-Finzi that all three of them had been initiated into art by mystical forces—a story that perfectly fit the expectations of the West. It only needed to be relayed by the art world to become magical, which happened in Paris in 1989 at the Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the World) exhibition.

A lot has been said and written about Magiciens de la Terre as it betrayed many of the hopes it had raised of being the first truly inclusive and international exhibition. According to the Centre Pompidou, which mounted the show, one hundred artists from all over the world were represented in the French capital: fifty from the West and fifty from “the rest” or “non-Western countries.”³ This Eurocentric division was reinforced by the selection criteria: the works of artists from Asia, South America, and Africa were the result of religious, rural, or mystical practices, while those from Europe and the United States were technological, conceptual, and often self-reflexive in nature. Global modernisms were excluded as curator Jean-Hubert Martin feared they would be considered mere copies of Western styles.⁴ The “Picasso syndrome” theorized by Partha Mitter for Indian artists easily applies to any artist from the Global South, and instead of presenting artists who questioned modernism from different perspectives (such as those affiliated with the Dakar School or Laboratoire Agit’Art in Senegal), Martin and co-curator André Magnin chose artists whose work implicitly reenacts the opposition between the “primitive” and the “modern.” This dual approach revived the primitivistic fashion that took place in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the European avant-gardes drew inspiration from the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, hence contributing to their paradoxical integration into the Western canon.⁵ The “problem” with this exhibition was not the art or the artists, but rather the burden of representativity it imposed on the artists as their art was led to incarnate one part of the world in comparison or contrast with another.

Still unknown within the contemporary art scene, Camara’s statues were exhibited next to those of Louise Bourgeois (American, born France. 1911–2010), one of the few “great women artists” at the time, to quote art historian Linda Nochlin.⁶ Bourgeois served as symbolic validation for Camara, a gesture that was reiterated in 1996 when Bourgeois was invited to write about Camara for a book titled Contemporary Art of Africa: “I recognize her originality and a certain beauty. Now, beauty is a dangerous word because notions of ‘beauty’ are relative. So let me be very clear: the work gives me pleasure to look at. As one artist to the other, I respect, like and enjoy Camara.”⁷ Camara always considered herself an artist even though she lacked academic training (in the 1980s in Senegal, only 30 percent of girls went to school, and 93 percent of those attending art school were men⁸). “She enjoyed or missed the privilege of going to art school (a blessing in disguise),” continued Bourgeois. “But there need be no apologies for naïveté or technical shortcomings. Her genuinely expressive figures have a coherence in style.”⁹

Camara started making sculptures when she was six years old. She learned from her mother and used to hide zoomorphic figurines in the burning oven among the pots and amphoras her mother was making to be sold at the local market. At the age of fifteen, she was forced to marry a much older man and stopped creating. Though she was pregnant four times, she never gave birth; moreover, she fell seriously ill and had to undergo several operations. Like too many women in Senegal and around the world who are forced to marry at too early an age, Camara had to fight. She came back to art when she left her husband and found in sculpture a way to survive and rebuild herself. Her creations are testament to the power of a woman who not only persisted in a practice many considered strange or marginal, but also was able to make sense of it. She fashioned a unique style and, in the process, built herself a home and secured stable sustenance for her family.

Drawing inspiration from her surroundings, Camara has been prolific and consistent, often dedicating her efforts to pregnant figures and expressions of the maternal. In 1989, for instance, she showed a series of feminine statues covered with small smiling figures that seemed to be budding from them. The energy and power of this work results from accumulation, from the repetition of motifs that creates a tension and challenges any easy apprehension of their meaning. Faces suddenly appear on a belly or the knees, radiating like a sun. Camara’s anonymous characters wear jewelry, they have scarifications and elaborate hairstyles. They command our attention with their round eyes, but yet repel us with their silent, empty stares.

Camara believes these figures can heal both herself and others. Indeed, she once cured a couple who could not have children, helping them give birth to twins, as she recalls in Fatou Kandé Senghor’s film Giving Birth.¹⁰Healing takes time, as does the making of sculptures, which in Camara’s case, begins with the fetching of clay from the marigot (swamp) and is followed by the fine grinding of shellfish and the mixing of the two ingredients.

Once the modeling has been completed, the firing stage, which takes place in the open air of the concession yard, begins (fig. 5). As is always the case with ceramics, some pieces break or explode, while others endure the flames and come out just fine. Camara can count on the help of her family and is often shown surrounded by the young men (her second husband’s sons) who work for her, obeying her orders, preparing the pellets she progressively adds to her hollow figures (fig. 8). Though Camara trains those who assist her, she does not intend to pass down her style or her secrets, as she states in Kandé Senghor’s film. Her art is personal, unique; she believes she received a gift from God and that when she dies, her production should stop. 

Camara has been living from her art since the 1990s, but to her great regret, she sells mostly to foreigners. As she recounted in 2006: “People don’t know me in my own country. I survive thanks to foreigners’ orders. They buy my work and then they leave. My own country ignores me. They don’t know who I am.”¹¹ Fortunately, things have changed since then. The Théodore Monod African Art Museum organized a show of her work in 2018 and acquired some of her statues. The Dak’Art biennial included several of her ceramics in the national pavilion the same year, including her in a national survey of art, and her fame continues to grow within the Western art market. 

I wish to thank Francesco Biamonte, Bassam Chaïtou, Michèle Odeyé-Finzi, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and Fatou Kandé Senghor for the information and images they so generously shared with me for this essay. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            เป็นในเช้าตรู่วันหนี่ง ฉันนั่งอยู่ในห้องอาหารกว้างของโรงแรมในเมืองหลวงหนึ่งของยุโรป มีกาแฟร้อนบนโต๊ขณะมองดูหิมะตกขาวบนถนนในเมืองและลานกว้าง ฉันนั่งดูเมืองสลับไปกับอ่านบทความที่อ่านค้างอยู่ว่าด้วยศิลปะอาเซียน ท่อนหนึ่งของบทความพูดถึงการพัฒนาศิลปะของเอเชียจะเป็นไปได้จำต้องได้รับการวิจารณ์ที่แหลมคมจาภายนอก หมายถึงยุโรปและที่อื่นๆ

            ด้วยเหตุที่ชีวิตฉันแวดล้อมไปด้วยสองสิ่งอย่างซึ่งต่างกันคือ ศิลปะซึ่งถูกดูแลดีราวกับจะไม่มีวันตาย กับ อีกอย่างคือเมื่อฉันย้ายออกจากเมืองมาอยู่ในชนบท, ภาพธรรมชาติ การเกิดและตายง่ายๆ ของคนในหมู่บ้าน

                        ฉันวางสองอย่างไว้คู่กัน ศิลปะชิ้นเอกของโลกกับ ชาวนา ชาวสวน สวนทางกับประโยคเคยอ่านข้างต้น

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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