Southeast Asian Art in an Age of Glocalization
by Louis Ho
Louis Ho is an art historian, critic and curator, and co-editor of an upcoming journal of Southeast Asian art
history, Remote. He has contributed articles and reviews to various publications, including books, journals and
magazines, and also teaches art history at a number of local institutions. His recent published writings include
‘The Non-Affirmative: Jason Wee, Photography, Scopophobia’ in Reflect/Refract (2013),‘Hauntings, Histories,
Fragments, Citations’in The End of History (2013), ‘Loo Zihan and the Body Confessional’ in Embodying
Singapore: Critical Perspectives on the Arts, Society and Politics (forthcoming), and ‘Yue Minjun:
Iconographies of Repetition’ in Modern Chinese Language & Culture (forthcoming).
Fast food, unsurprisingly, provides an apt example of the case at hand. The latest offering on
the McDonald’s menu here in Singapore is something dubbed the “kampung burger”: a
confection of crispy chicken, pineapple and salsa, it touts itself as a tribute to “the friendly
roar of the kampung spirit.” Here are two starkly divergent symbols collapsed into one hybrid
treat: all-American fast food, the golden arches being almost synonymous with Uncle Sam’s
cultural heft and economic might, meets the Southeast Asian kampong, that site par
excellence of inimitably local ways of life, of nostalgia for supposedly vanished histories,
identities and values.
Ol’ Ronald’s kampung burger represents the phenomenon of glocalization at its kitschiest, the
global given a local twist – mostly for the purposes of commerce. Despite that market
orientation (or precisely because of?), glocalization provides an apposite frame through which
to view the more compelling strands of Southeast Asian art today. Take, for one, Thai artist
Kamin Lertchaiprasert, featured in the upcoming edition of Art Stage Singapore. His Buddha
statues crafted from shredded baht notes speak powerfully to the twinned poles of religion
and consumerism in Thailand, the region’s second largest economy. For all their seeming
incompatibility, spiritual transcendence and worldly materialism have settled into a rather
blissful marriage in the land of a thousand smiles – as the numerous juxtapositions of goldroofed wats and mega-malls throughout the country bear ample testament to. As a statement
on the insinuation of economic realities into various spheres of life, Lertchaiprasert’s aesthetic
engagement with money is simply one more entry in a lineage that began in earnest in the
twentieth century with Roy Lichtenstein’s drawing of a Ten Dollar Bill in 1956, and crowned
most recently by Hans-Peter Feldmann’s installation involving a hundred thousand dollar bills
at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, on the occasion of his receipt of the Hugo Boss
Prize in 2010. The Thai artist’s work, in other words, exemplifies the paradigm of specifically
local concerns filtered through the visual language of contemporary art.
"Lord Buddha Said "If You See Dhamma You See Me" (2003), Kamin Lertchaiprasert. Shredded Thai currency.
Image courtesy of the National Collection, Singapore.
Closer to home, the work of another Art Stage participant, Singaporean Robert Zhao, whose
photographs of fauna and flora are premised on a slippage between the factual and fictive,
utilizing both the camera’s instrumental neutrality and expressive potential, is likewise
plugged into international circuits of contemporary art while speaking to issues of immediate
interest to his countrymen. He notes: “I am influenced by the works of Mark Dion, which
deals our concepts of nature, and also Walid Raad’s, which addresses the systems by we try to
understand things, and of course Andreas Slominski’s series of trap installations addressing
how art functions as a trap for the audience each time.” One of Zhao’s projects at Art Stage,
in fact, consists of a life-size replica of a wild boar trap: in 2012, largely urban Singapore
suffered a surprising infestation of the creatures, and the authorities decided to begin culling
them after a child was attacked. Numerous holes are drilled into Zhao’s piece (which
resembles a large box), resulting in a sea of lights illuminating its otherwise bedimmed
interior. According to the artist, the ethical issues surrounding the culling of these animals,
and the repercussions for the island’s already fragile eco-system, have not been fully
explored; the holes in his boar trap represent a literal breath of life for them. Like Slominski’s
installations, Zhao’s work hovers between aesthetics and utility, between its status as
sculpture and its role as an implement.
The quieting and the alarming (2013), Robert Zhao. Wood, Rope, Acrylic. Image courtesy of the artist.
It is worth bearing in mind, however, that Southeast Asian artists have been incorporating
Western visual modes in their work for far longer than zippy labels like “glocalization” would
have us believe. The colonial interface produced many talented individuals from the region
adept at the ways of the old masters, with Juan Luna from the Philippines and Indonesian
Raden Saleh being simply the first names to leap to mind. In the mid-twentieth century, a new
generation of painters achieved renown for synthesizing avant-garde techniques and local
subject matter in bold new visions. The artists of the so-called Nanyang School of Singapore
– Cheong Soo Pieng, Georgette Chen, Chen Chong Swee, among others – applied both the
styles of various Modernist ‘-isms’ and traditional Chinese ink painting to their immediate
visual environment, to the colours, customs, and contexts of a region just now beginning to
shake off the yoke of colonialism. Cheong’s portrait of a Malay Woman, for one, rendered in
the fragmented planes of Cubism, or Georgette’s famed still-lifes of tropical fruit, or Chong
Swee’s landscapes of bucolic kampungs and undulating hills depicted in Chinese ink. (No
less significant, though, is the fact that a small number of Filipino artists trained in the U.S.
were painting canvases inspired by Abstract Expressionism around the same period, in the
1950s and ‘60s – a rather different variety of experimentation altogether). Nonetheless, the
marriage of Western forms of representation, and a determinedly Southeast Asian sense of
aesthetic identity, that these artists brought about in their work set the tone for generations of
local artists who came after them.
They certainly beat McDonald’s to the punch, in any case.
Still Life with Tropical Fruits (1967), Georgette Chen. Oil on canvas. Image: Louis Ho.