REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
Arts in Southeast Asia Seminar Series
About the Seminar
Political violence is not uncommon in Southeast Asia. This seminar looks at artistic articulations of political violence in Indonesia and Thailand. Two controversial incidents, namely the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-1966 and the bloodshed on 6 October 1976 in Thailand, were ignited by
anti-communism sentiments and resulted in acts of violence from respective states. The consequences of these two political events are gradually and slowly addressed today but the process of justice and reconciliation is still far from complete.
The seminar will discuss the construction of state narratives and describe how current forms of arts such as documentary films are used to counter the state’s narratives in both countries. These documentaries, directed by foreigners and local film makers, have played significant roles in giving voice to victims and exposing the trivialisation of violence. 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy (2009), The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence (2014), Pulau Buru: Tanah Air Beta (2016), Silence-Memories (2014) and Respectfully Yours (2016) are documentaries revealing the stories and memories of victims and perpetrators from the two incidents.
This seminar will argue that these films have become testimonial artworks in revealing victims maltreatment and exposing how violence and impunity have become the norm. Such artworks are also responsible for paving the way for ‘alternative memories’ for the nation.
About the Speaker
Chontida Auikool is a lecturer from International Studies (ASEAN-China) programme, Thammasat University, Bangkok. She earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Southeast Asian Studies and completed her Master’s Degree in International Relations from Thammasat University. Her research interests include Indonesia, Chinese Indonesian, conflict and violence, and Southeast Asian film. She published articles such as “The Ambivalent of Chinese – Indonesian Position in Medan, Indonesia” in Journal Lakon (Airlangga University), “Ethnic Relations in Transnational Context: The Case Study of Chinese Indonesians-Indonesians in Medan after Suharto” in The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities proceedings, “Breaking Silence of Indonesian Mass Killings between 1965 and 1966” in TU-UGM Research Seminar Making Southeast Asia and Beyond proceedings and a short article “Indomie: Political Food and Hidden Hugger in Indonesia” in Sarakadee Magazine. She is also a member of Film Kawan, an informal group organising Southeast Asian film events in Bangkok. She also published film reviews for the ASEAN film column in a Thai Magazine, Bioscope. She reviewed films such as Yasmine, Cinta Tapi Beda, As You Were, Sayang Disayang, Lilet Never Happened, The Tales of Waria.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email it to <iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg> by 30 March 2017.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
Arts in Southeast Asia Seminar Series
About the Seminar
In the early decades of the 20th century, Paris was a cosmopolitan site of exchange for artists from all over the world. For artists from the territories of Indochina, Paris was also the centre of colonial power. This seminar looks at how these two facets of Paris interacted in the careers of Vietnamese artists who exhibited there in the 1930s and 1940s. The French colonial state actively promoted the export of Indochina artwork for sale in Paris, and exhibitions of Vietnamese art were part of this strategy. Artworks from Vietnam were also shown at the two massive international exhibitions of the 1930s – the Exposition coloniale internationale of 1931, and the Exposition des arts et techniques de la vie moderne of 1937. These exhibitions framed Vietnamese artists firmly within a discourse of colonial propaganda. However, they were also the catalyst for further engagements in Paris, with some artists (such as Le Pho) settling there permanently. By looking at how Vietnamese artists were exhibited and received in the French capital, this seminar investigates their place in the Parisian art world, and the tension between its colonial and cosmopolitan aspects.
This seminar builds on research that grew out of the Reframing Modernism exhibition of the National Gallery Singapore, and is now part of an ongoing research project about Southeast Asian artists in Paris.
About the Speaker
Dr Phoebe Scott has been a curator at the National Gallery Singapore since 2012. She was a co-curator of the inaugural exhibition Between Declarations and Dreams: Art of Southeast Asia since the 19th Century and of the March 2016 exhibition, Reframing Modernism: Painting from Europe, Southeast Asia and Beyond, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou. Prior to joining the National Gallery, Phoebe completed her PhD in art history at the University of Sydney, focusing on modern art in Vietnam from the 1920s to 1950s. She has written and taught on modern and contemporary art from Asia.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg by Tuesday, 22 November 2016.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
Arts in Southeast Asia Seminar Series
About the Seminar
Indonesian reverse painting on glass is seldom studied because it is considered to be one of Java’s ‘minor’ arts. Produced mainly by Javanese painters for urban and rural Javanese, it was also much appreciated by Chinese and Arabs communities. While European or Chinese artists probably introduced reverse glass painting to Java in the late 19th century, its golden age was between the 1930s and the 1960s. An expression of mixed modernity, combining Javanese, European and Islamic features, the themes ranged from so-called ‘traditional’ Javanese wayang figures and mosques to new technologies and modern lifestyle in the Dutch Indies.
In the first part of this talk, I will present the main features of Javanese reverse glass painting such as technical aspects, themes of representation, and production issues. I will then focus on one of the trends from the early 1900s: the representations of the Ottomans (or Turkey). These representations show the emergence of a clear narrative linking the Ottomans with an idea of political and religious modernity at the turn of the 20th century amongst the local population in the Dutch Netherland Indies. This theme will also allow me to demonstrate the swift circulation of iconographic models throughout the Muslim world, from Istanbul to Java, through the Holy Land and Singapore.
About the Speaker
Professor Jérôme Samuel is a sociolinguist and historian specialising on Indonesia. He is the co-director of French National Research Center’s laboratory Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CASE) and lectures in Paris’ INALCO on Malay and Indonesian language and civilisations since 2002. He published widely on politics of linguistic and terminology history and authored a seminal book on teaching Indonesian language for a French public published in 2012 (second volume forthcoming). He has been working on reverse glass painting for 10 years and has published several articles on this subject, in Journal Archipel, and is currently working on a book. He was awarded a PhD from INALCO in 2000 and obtained a full professorship in 2015.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg by Thursday, 3 November 2016.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
Since mid-2015 the dramatic pictures of refugees on their way to Central Europe raised attention and emotions worldwide. Leaving their war-torn countries in the Middle East behind, several hundred thousand people started their arduous journeys to look for a better life for themselves and their families. The global media coverage has focused heavily on the refugees in Europe. However, the current refugee crisis is not only a challenge for Europe. The growing numbers of refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers are a worldwide issue. The arrival of thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshi people on the shores of several Southeast Asian countries in May 2015 and the following human ping-pong between the ASEAN member states made clear that this region will also have to deal with this issue in a larger scale in the near future.
In his presentation Dr Patrick Ziegenhain will explain how the European Union and its member states reacted to the refugee challenge in the last year and why they have been incapable of managing the crisis in a proper and common way. He will also discuss why Germany opened its borders for refugees and what kind of consequences this policy will have on the national and European level. In a next step, he will then focus on current and future migration problems in Southeast Asia and analyze what lessons the ASEAN member states can learn from the current refugee crisis in Europe.
About the Speaker
Dr Patrick Ziegenhain from Germany is since May 2015 Visiting Professor at the Asia-Europe Institute of University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia. Previously, he had been a Visiting Professor at the Department of Business Administration at Atma Jaya University in Jakarta/ Indonesia, an Interim Professor at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt/ Germany (2015), a Visiting Professor at De la Salle University Manila/ Philippines in 2014 and Assistant Professor (Akademischer Rat) at the Department of Political Science, University of Trier/ Germany (2007-2014). Since 2005, Patrick Ziegenhain holds a PhD in Political Science from Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg/ Germany. Beside numerous academic articles, he is the author of the books “Institutional Engineering and Political Accountability in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines” (2015), “The Indonesian Parliament and Democratization” (2008) and co-author of the book “Parliaments and Political Change in Asia” (2005). These three books were all published by ISEAS, Singapore. More information about Dr Patrick Ziegenhain can be found on his website at http://www.patrick-ziegenhain.de.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg by Friday, 4 November 2016.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
ARTS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA SEMINAR SERIES
About the Seminar
Curator Jim Supangkat and other participants in the Southeast Asian art world have argued that writers, particularly Western art theorists and historians, have over-emphasised politics in the analysis of Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art. This paper explores the importance of the political dimension of contemporary Southeast Asian art, and asks whether it is over-stated, or whether the political, broadly defined, should be seen as the basis of what artists do. I will examine this question by exploring the role and historiography of LEKRA, the People’s Art Movement in Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s. I will look at questions of Soviet and European influence on art, and the roles of social realism and socialism in delimiting the content of art. I will also explore the legacy of LEKRA in the depiction of social issues in Indonesian art of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries.
About the Speaker
Professor Adrian Vickers holds a personal chair in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Sydney, where he is director of Asian Studies. His publications include Bali: A Paradise Created (1989, latest edition 2013, previously translated into German, Dutch, Japanese and Indonesia); A History of Modern Indonesia (2004, new edition 2012, translated into Chinese, Indonesian and Turkish); Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawing of Bali (2012), and, with Julia Martìnez, The Pearl Frontier: Labor Mobility across the Australian-Indonesian Maritime Zone (2015). The Pearl Frontier was 2016 winner of the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s History Book Award, winner of the Queensland Literary Awards 2016 USQ History Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2016 Ernest Scott History Prize of the Australian Historical Association. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and the Cambridge University Joint Centre for History and Economics; Senior Visiting Fellow at the Asia Research Centre at the National University of Singapore; and a Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute for Linguistics and Anthropology, Leiden.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to <iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg> by Tuesday, 25 October 2016.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
ARTS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA SEMINAR SERIES
About the Seminar
Throughout the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia from 1940 to 1945, approximately 300 Japanese and local artists were sent to the battlefront. This was part of the Japanese government’s policy of utilising the arts as a tool for the military campaign in the region. The collaboration between the army and these prominent Japanese and local artists gave birth to new art projects. This presentation will explore the role of Japanese artists and art policy in Indonesia and Singapore during the Japanese occupation from 1942-1945. It will examine the journey and works of Japanese artists employed in Indonesia and Singapore, such as Tsuguharu Fujita, Tsuruta Gorō, Saburō Miyamoto, Kenichi Nakamura, Kenichi, Koiso Ryōhei and Takashi Kōno among others. It will also address the decades-long debate over the discontinuities in art history caused by the Japanese occupation. Did occupation radically change the course of Indonesian and Singaporean art history and how much did Japanese artists assist to foster a “national art”?
About the Speaker
Mr Antariksa is an independent researcher and co-founder of KUNCI Cultural Studies Centre, a research collective focusing on critical knowledge production, research-action, and vernacular education. Mr Antariksa is the author of Tuan Tanah Kawin Muda: Hubungan LEKRA-Seni Rupa 1950-1965 [Tuan Tanah Kawin Muda: The relation between art and the Institute of People’s Culture 1950-1965] (CAF/IVAA, 2005). His primary research is on art and mobility of ideas in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia. He is now working on his new book Art collectivism in Japanese-occupied Indonesia (Kyushu University Press, 2017). Mr Antariksa is an Artist-in-Residence in the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore Residencies Programme. He won the Global South fellowship at Le Collège d’études mondiales, Paris, under the supervision of Françoise Vergès and Mélanie Bouteloup, to engage in a research on the Japanese war artists (sensō sakusen kirokuga) in the Parisian art scene, 1914-1939.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg by Tuesday, 27 September 2016.
Call for Papers
Regional Social and Cultural Studies Programme
Workshop on National Imaginations in Southeast Asian Art
The role of art in nation-building is not new. From French history paintings which glorified Napoleon’s reign to Soviet Socialist Realism, art has not only been yoked to the political objectives of the elite but also served as a narrator of nation. In this context, art has been deployed as sophisticated means to express political values and ideals seeking to capture the spirit and mentalities of successive periods.
Southeast Asian nations emerged from a whirlwind of ideologies such as anti-colonialism, communism, and socialism, with the Cold War as backdrop. These postcolonial nations have produced iconic art works and discourses that have captured the aspirations and struggles of the day. Indeed the political transitions and shifting ideologies experienced by many societies in the region progressively changed the way modern art was produced and perceived in terms of styles, subject matter, iconography, idioms and genres.
Many young Southeast Asian nations sought a new artistic identity inspired by western idioms and genres. Suffice to say early concepts of ‘modernisms’ were not unanimously embraced as ‘national’. In Thailand in the late 1950s the second National Exhibition of Art was rejected by local critics for being “imitations of Western art”. Indeed, tension and conflict often accompanied the emergence of modern art. Some Indonesian artists, for example, emerged through the dispute over representations of the “Indonesian identity” between the so-called “pro-West” Bandung School and the “anti-West” Yogyakarta School. Furthermore, the position of the artists and art in the canon is under constant revaluation. So-called “proto-nationalist” or “nationalist” works such as Raden Saleh’s The Capture of Prince Diponegoro (1857) or Juan Luna’s Spoliarium (1884), for instance, may be argued to have been less concerned about creating a sense of local or indigenous identity than the artists’ own desire to create work in colonial idioms.
We seek to critically evaluate the ways in which Southeast Asian nations are imagined by artists and other cultural agents such as art critics, gallerists, collectors, independent curators or museums, and the state. This one-day workshop comes at a time when ‘national art’ is being redefined while more public and private institutions in the region are erected to re-imagine the narratives of nationhood. Whether through modern or contemporary art which interrogates the consequences of global capitalism, scholars are invited to explore how art is deployed either as a coalescing force for the imagination of the nation or a critical expression of its flaws and strains.
The workshop welcomes papers that explore, though not limited to, the following questions:
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How did ‘national art’ take socially shape in Southeast Asia?
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How was art used to build “national consciousness” by political programmes?
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How have iconic works of art captured national aspirations and the interests of the political elite?
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How do national art collections contribute to forge or undermine imaginations of the nation?
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What roles do cultural agents such as artists, art critics, curators, patrons and teachers from the region and beyond play in imagining the nation?
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How have institutions such as art academies, exhibitions and biennials, galleries, museums and the state framed ‘national art’ for the nation? What are the tensions and contradictions?
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How has contemporary art engaged with the consequences of neocapitalism in Southeast Asian societies?
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What is the impact of private collections and museums to the building of ‘national art’?
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How were western idioms and genres used to address ‘national art’, and is there a common Southeast Asian modern and national art specificity?
Submission and Deadlines
Please send your abstract (250 words) and brief biography (150 words) to the following address: helene_njoto@iseas.edu.sg.
Deadline for abstract submission is 31 Oct 2016. If your abstract is selected for the workshop you will have to submit your full-length paper by 9 January 2017.
Convenors: Dr Terence Chong and Dr Helene Njoto
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
My encounter with the poetic works of Teo Kah Leng (1909-2001), a former principal of the primary section of Montfort School in Serangoon, was the unexpected result of a two-year project on Francis P. Ng’s F.M.S.R. (1937), the first notable work of English poetry by a Singaporean writer. Through biographical research, I discovered that Ng, whose real name was ‘Teo Poh Leng’, was the younger brother of Kah Leng, also a poet. While Poh Leng wrote poetry throughout the 1930s until falling victim to Sook Ching, Kah Leng survived the Japanese Occupation and wrote actively in the 1950s-60s as British Malaya moved towards independence.
During the post-war decades, Malayan poetry matured at the University of Malaya. There students such as Wang Gungwu and Edwin Thumboo ‒ later credited as Singapore’s pioneer poets ‒ focused on the creation of a distinctively Malayan poetry inspired by Anglo-American Modernist writers. Meanwhile, outside the University’s poetry community, Teo, influenced by British Romanticists such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, produced an abundance of ballads and sonnets about Malaya’s natural environment, utilising rhymes and regular rhythms.
Through the 1950s-60s, Teo’s poems gained a wide audience via his school’s annual and Young Malayans, a magazine for Malaya’s English-medium school teachers and pupils. The University’s poetry community, however, felt poems of this kind were too conventional and preferred to emphasise free verse. As a result, Teo’s contributions were marginalised.
Through textual and discourse analysis, I will demonstrate that Teo’s poems, although falling into oblivion during Malaya’s era of decolonisation, constituted a significant part of the post-war Malayan poetry.
About the Speaker
ERIKO OGIHARA-SCHUCK is a Lecturer in American Studies at TU Dortmund University, Germany. Dr Ogihara-Schuck is the co-editor of Finding Francis: A Poetic Adventure (Ethos Books, 2015) and the author of Miyazaki’s Animism Abroad: The Reception of Japanese Religious Themes by American and German Audiences (McFarland, USA, 2014). Her current major research interest is cultural relations between Singapore and the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. Aside from being a Visiting Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, she is also a European Postdoc Fellow at the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg by Monday, 1 August 2016.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
The National Gallery’s inaugural exhibition on Singapore art, SIAPA NAMA KAMU?, which opened in November 2015, pushes the beginnings of art in Singapore back to the nineteenth century. This seminar presentation builds on an essay I was invited to contribute to a forthcoming National Gallery publication. In my essay I argued that if the received view is that art in Singapore began with a group of artists who developed what in the National Gallery exhibition is periodised as “The Nanyang Reverie”, then what we have in the National Gallery is a revision of that received view. This seminar will probe further into the underlying assumption of the argument for extending the narrative of art in Singapore back to the nineteenth century. What unifies the rather disparate categories of natural history drawings, landscapes, historic photographs and portraits as nineteenth century art in Singapore? Were they “works of art” when they were produced in nineteenth century Singapore, or were they more commodities? When did they become appropriated as “works of art”?
About the Speaker
Kwa Chong Guan is an Associate Fellow with the Archaeology Unit of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. He is also a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies where he works on a variety of regional security issues, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the History Department of the National University of Singapore. Kwa was a Director of the old National Museum and continues to serve on various advisory committees of the National Heritage Board today. He also serves on various advisory committees of the National Library Board. Among his publications is an edited volume, Early Southeast Asia viewed from India, An anthology of articles from the “Journal of the Greater India Society”, published as part of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Series.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg by Friday, 15 July 2016.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
ABOUT THE SEMINAR
It is commonly thought that meaningful contact between Asia and America did not begin until the 19th century, with the massive arrival of Chinese laborers for gold mining and railroad construction in California. Before that, however, the China trade between New England merchants and Canton merchants had thrived since the 18th century, before and after the American Revolution. But well before that, if we think of “America” hemispherically as “the Americas,” then we must go back to the mid-16th century to locate the beginning of sustained contact between Asia and America, in this case, between Manila on Luzon island in Las Filipinas and Acapulco on the Pacific coast of Mexico, then called New Spain. From 1565 to 1815, for 250 years, one to three galleon ships made the round trip trans-Pacific voyage without fail, carrying American silver (mined in Mexico and Peru) to Manila. There, the largely Hokkien traders and settlers in Manila’s Chinatown, called the Parián, acted as indispensable intermediaries in the trade of American silver for Chinese silk, porcelain, lacquer, ivory carvings, as well as spices and many other precious commodities from the larger Indian Ocean and Nanyang world. Chinese and other Asian goods were also trans-shipped from Mexico across the Atlantic to Spain and Europe. Without the critical role played by the Chinese in Manila, this first truly global trading system could not have happened. Because Spanish Manila was an extension of Mexico in the Americas, should we not consider the Parián in Manila as “America’s First Chinatown?”
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Evelyn Hu-DeHart is Professor of History, American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, USA. During AY 2014-15, she is Visiting Professor in the History Programme of HSS. She received her B.A. from Stanford University and her PhD in Latin American and Caribbean history from the University of Texas at Austin. She has written and edited more than 10 books and over 60 articles, in English, Spanish and Chinese, on three main topics: Indigenous peoples of the US-Mexico borderlands; the Chinese and other Asian diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean; race and ethnicity in the Americas. Her most recent publication is on Latino politics in the U.S., and she has a forthcoming translation of collected works in Chinese from Zhejiang U. Press. While at NTU, she is interested in sharing research interests and scholarship with scholars in Singapore and the rest of Asia; most of all, she hopes to learn about new methods and perspectives, and to delve into new historical archives and materials. At Brown, she is a founder and co-director of the long-term research project on “Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas,” and with her alma mater Stanford University, she is a founder and principal investigator of the Chinese Railroad Workers of North American Project. Both research projects involve international collaborators from Asia and Latin America, and include strong Public Humanities as well as Digital Humanities components. Please check out our websites:
http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/wordpress/ and http://www.brown.edu/conference/asia-pacific/home.
REGISTRATION
For registration, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg by 1 April 2016.