By Bharti Lalwani
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Manit Sriwanichpoom, _The Election of Hatred , 2011, 36 photographs, each: 60 x 90 cm. All photographs courtesy: Jakarin Tewtao
I’m sitting at a table, sipping jasmine tea and chatting with strangers while separating the roots from a sizeable mound of bean sprouts at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). We’ve been invited to join Amanda Heng, one of Singapore’s pioneering performance artists, as part of her work ‘Let’s Chat’ (first performed in 1996).
We are all here for the opening night of ‘Concept, Context, Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia’, an exhibition of contemporary art from Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma and Cambodia. Curated by Singapore-based specialist on Southeast Asian art Iola Lenzi, with co-curators Agung Hujatnikajennong (Indonesia) and Vipash Purichanont (Thailand), the exhibition showcases 60 artworks by nearly 40 Southeast Asian artists of three generations.
‘Concept, Context, Contestation’ is the second significant institutional exhibition in recent years to examine Southeast Asian contemporary art within its own historical context rather than in relation to China, Japan or the rest of the world. The first, also curated chiefly by Lenzi was ‘Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011’ at the Singapore Art Museum in 2011. After ‘Negotiating Home…’, ‘Concept, Context, Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia’ expands on one of the 2011 exhibition’s key currents, conceptualism grown out of local context.
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Amanda Heng (centre-right) with guests performing, Let’s Chat, 1996/2013, performance
‘Concept, Context …’ includes a different set of interactive installations, performance, photography, digital media and paintings by early innovators as well as younger artists from the region. Imelda Cajipe-Endaya (b. 1949, Philippines), FX Harsono (b. 1949, Indonesia), Amanda Heng (b. 1951, Singapore), Vasan Sitthiket (b. 1957, Thailand), Vu Dan Tan (1946-2009, Vietnam) and Lee Wen (b. 1957, Singapore) are some of the region’s pioneering artists featured. Exhibited together for the first time at BACC, their works show the extent to which the region’s art history and conceptual approaches to expression are interconnected. Recurring themes span issues of race, ethnicity, patriarchy, corruption, gender and social inequality and the use of religion as a political tool. Meditations on the same themes are also evident in the work of a younger generation of artists. Together, the connections between locally-rooted conceptual approaches and social ideologies in Southeast Asian art of the last four decades are made apparent.
As is well known, the latter part of the twentieth century was a troubled period in the region’s history, and with protests against Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s government that began just the week before the opening, made CCC a timely show.
With the demonstrations going on in the heart of Bangkok, this exhibition quite astutely leads with works of Thai artists Sutee Kunavichayanont, Manit Sriwanichpoom and Vasan Sitthiket. Appropriately, the show opens with Sriwanichpoom’s The Election of Hatred (2011), a set of 36 large-scale photographs of election posters from all Thai political parties. Ordinary, except that these are photographs of portraits on promotional political banners around the city that have been mutilated by the people. Shinawatra’s mouth for instance has been slashed through, rendering her metaphorically mute and ineffective. Kunavichayanont, for his part, extends an earlier series with History Class II (2013). A set of 23 school desks are etched with salient imagery from Thai political history. The first edition of 14 desks, History Class (Thanon Ratchadamnoen), featured in ‘Negotiating Home…’ and was originally placed outdoors at the foot of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok in 2000. On each occasion of display, the public has been invited to sit and make rubbings on paper from the etched desks and take home an assortment of crucial events in Thai history that have been written out of (or excluded from) school textbooks. “History Class,’ Lenzi explains, ‘embodies Southeast Asian conceptual art in that it perfectly combines real social issues, the forceful involvement of the audience in discovering these histories, and an allusive, codified approach to critique, the desks referencing the state and the education system as nationalist propaganda.”
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Vasan Sitthiket, Blue October (detail), 1996, tempera and gold leaf on canvas, 6 pieces, each 1.5 × 1.5 m
Blue October (1996) by Sitthiket, a set of six paintings, references the 1976 Thammassat University massacres in Thailand. Icy cobalt-blue surrounds monochrome scenes of brutality borrowed from media images of the day. Deliberately uncomfortable in their violent iconography, these stark paintings are also visually seductive. On close examination, small squares of gold leaf appear on the shoulders of the dead, marking them as martyrs. Re-contextualized, grounded in reality, this act of appropriation and reference makes up the conceptual core of the work. Blue October was first displayed for only three days at a small gallery in Chatuchak market in Bangkok in 1996. “These paintings had been forgotten”, said Lenzi, ‘and after their weekend stint at Chatuchak in 1996, were never seen in Thailand again until now. The paintings fit this show perfectly, illustrating how regional artists combine conceptual approaches and powerful images related to local issues to rope audiences in. With their mix of references that all Thais can read, and their print-media appropriated representation of the massacre, they are as scary-stunning today as when first painted nearly twenty years ago.”
Another artwork that attests to social and political instability, this time in Indonesia, is FX Harsono’s Pistal Krupuk Semoga Menjadi Piatal Beneran (What would you do if these crackers were real pistols?). This is the earliest work in the show, originally made in 1977 and specially recommissioned for BACC. Harsono piled pinkish edible gun-shaped rice-crackers on the gallery floor. Next to this cheerfully coloured mound, visitors can record their responses to the piece. Pistal … evolved from the steady clampdown on criticism of President Suharto’s authoritarian regime (1967–98). Harsono’s wafer-guns and Kunavichayanont’s desks operate as catalysts for social change rather than offering a simple reflection of it.
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From the series ‘TOSS’, 2013, Japanese ink, seal ink, rubber soap on Nepalese handmade paper (10 pieces), 79 × 53 cm
Delicately tackling race, the young Singapore artist Tay Wei Leng presented a sound piece in which one hears the recitation of the Singapore Pledge of Allegiance. Recited in schools, on National Day Parade and by those taking up Singaporean citizenship, the Pledge specifically disregards race, language or religion in order “to build a democratic society based on justice and equality”. Tay had 30 foreigners recite the pledge, cryptically alluding to the migrants who have built the island-state. Tay plays on the image of multi-ethnic coherence that Singapore projects on the world stage and questions the veracity of this pledge in a society increasingly stalked by xenophobia.
However, where Tay is subtle, the first generation Singaporean conceptualist Tang Mun Kit is more unequivocal. His ‘TOSS’ series (The Other Singapore Story, 2013) openly critiques the state. In his direct assessment of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy, Tang juxtaposes recognizable symbols and political phrases on paper, levying layers of critical appraisal against the social and cultural policies of the ruling party over the last 50 years. He also poses uneasy questions to the citizen who has been willingly pliant over these decades in return for material affluence. Lee’s tenure from 1959 to 1990 yielded Singapore’s rapid economic growth. However, nation-building policies also eroded budding democratic, social and political constructs. The country’s 1979 ‘Speak Mandarin Not Dialect’ policy informs the social bean-sprout cleaning in Heng’s Lets Chat performance. Meant to unify the Chinese communities of Singapore by strengthening a single national language, this policy robbed independent communities of their cultural identities and also prevented the younger generation from communicating with their elders. A product of the successful campaign, the young Heng was left with no linguistic skill to communicate with her dialect-speaking parents. This experience, shared by many of her generation, left her devising other forms of connection. Through her invitation to audiences to embark on the routine chore of cleaning sprouts, Heng’s work reveals how she expands from the personal to address the communal.
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Imelda Cjipe Endaya, The Wife Is a DH , 1995, installation at BACC, 2013
The work of Philippine artist Imelda Cajipe-Endaya acknowledges the afflictions another community. Seated next to me during Heng’s performance on the opening night, she recounts a poignant incident that sparked the making of her installation, The Wife is a D.H (1995), also featured in the exhibition. As she separated root from sprout-tips, she recollected the case of Filipina helper Flor Contemplacion. Sentenced to death in Singapore in 1995, under allegedly strange circumstances, for the murder of another Filipina maid and her four-year-old ward, Contemplacion’s guilt was never accepted by the Philippine community.
In The Wife is a D.H the distinct shape of a woman steps out of a suitcase equipped with suggestive heels and a feather duster, as well as various symbols of the Catholic faith. Through literal and metaphoric prompts, Cajipe-Endaya articulates the vulnerability of domestic helpers and other economic migrants the world, and beyond this social exclusion, a universal theme. Not just a nod to helpers from the Philippines, the work also iterates the sociological impact of a country whose economy is based on the export of female labour. The case of Contemplacion, instigated the rising voice of a collective in the Philippines against unfair working conditions and widespread exploitation of their nationals outside their country.
As the ongoing protests in Thailand attest, social, political and cultural tensions are far from resolved in Southeast Asia. The Wife is a D.H, among numerous other works in ‘Concept, Context, Contestation …’ captures the ethos of Southeast Asian artists as drivers of social change, addressing issues that concern their fellow citizens. Their ideologies, responses and iconographies are all grounded in local vernacular, history and intellectual discourse, rather than Duchamp. Through socially charged reference and allusion, these artists, as well as the author’s of the essays in the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, offer a necessary perspective on Southeast Asia. In a region, where art histories are currently in the process of being written, exhibitions such as ‘Concept, Context, Contestation’ and ‘Negotiating Home, History and Nation’ offer canon-building discourse.
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‘Concept Context Contestation’ has been extended to March 16. A Southeast Asian contemporary art symposium on themes raised by the exhibition takes place at BACC on 5th and 6th of March 2014.
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