In this webinar, Prof Patrick D. Flores walks us through a series of exhibitions that yields instructive reflections on what it means and what it takes to curate the Southeast Asia region.
In this webinar, Dr Rachel Chan discussed the conditions of the rising popularity of Malaysian-made manga and the potential that they bring for education polices in Malaysia.
In this webinar, Mr Htein Lin spoke about how the subjects and materials of his art reflect contemporary Myanmar history and politics, and capture elements of Myanmar culture which are disappearing as the country modernises.
This webinar by Dr Miguel Escobar Varela is based on conversations with artists who hold a wide range of ideas on what wayang kontemporer should aspire to – both politically and aesthetically. The multifaceted landscape of contemporary wayang practice and discourse offers insight into the complex politics of contemporary artistic practice in Indonesia.
In this seminar, Professor Edwin Wieringa examines examples of manuscripts from the 19th-century Court of Yogyakarta held in the National Library of Singapore and discusses the politics of representation and meaning-making in producing these illuminated manuscripts.
REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAMME
The Politics of Art in Southeast Asia Seminar Series
About the Seminar
The consequence of the 1932 Revolution on the development of Thai modern art was the shift of art patronage from the court to a “commoner” government. In 1933, the management of the Fine Art Department (Krom Silpakorn), the national organisation responsible for the preservation, support, and promotion of arts and culture in Thailand, was transferred from the Royal Institute (Ratchabanditsabha) to the Ministry of Education. At the zenith of the revolutionary regime, the Fine Art Department, founded in 1912 during the reign of King Vajiravudh (King Rama VI, r. 1910-1925), promoted art representing the working class as a subject matter and Western realism as a stylistic preference. This resulted in the creation of a new aesthetic canon: the strong, desirable armoured body, symbol of the revolution’s commoner ready to work and sacrifice for the nation. This seminar will discuss this canon, its promotion of the ideal Thai body, and how it was, in fact, a critique of the upper class. This politics of the body was primarily manifest in the art of sculpture and promoted through Constitutional Fairs between 1937 and 1938. I will elaborate further on how these fairs served as a tool for nation-building and for the eradication of social hierarchy.
About the Speaker
Thanavi Chotpradit is a lecturer in modern and contemporary Thai art history in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology, at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. She is also a member of the editorial collective Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of contemporary and modern art in Southeast Asia. She received her PhD in art history from Birkbeck, University of London, under a Royal Thai Government Scholarship. Dr Chotpradit’s areas of interest include modern and Thai contemporary art in relation to memory studies, war commemoration, and Thai politics.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg by 13 April 2018.
Professor Emmanuelle Sinardet (Paris Nanterre University) presented the first seminar of the year, with a paper titled “Reflections on the Spanish Conquest and its Representation in the Philippines: El Pacto de Sangre (1886, The Blood Compact) by Juan Luna (1857-1899)”.
The Politics of Art in Southeast Asia seminar series was launched in July 2016 and is a platform for scholars and practitioners to present their research on arts in the region. We welcome art historians, cultural critics, curators, artists, sociologists, anthropologists and others who have investigated or developed original research. ‘The politics of art’, in this case, refers to research on the social production process, political and cultural influences, art market, art institutions, art-state relations, and the politics of cultural production.
The aim of the seminar series is to provide opportunities for researchers to present their findings or work-in-progress to an audience from diverse backgrounds. It seeks to serve as a public forum to bridge the gap between art scholars and specialists from other disciplines by addressing issues relating to the complexities of cultural production.
The subject of research should be Southeast Asian and may span modern and contemporary art. The subject matter may include, though not limited to, genres like painting, sculpture, theatre, film, literature, music, dance, and prints.
The seminar series is interested in various themes such as the socio-political role of traditional or ethnic arts; the importance of art in the nation-building project; representations of the ‘nation’ in Southeast Asian art; the biographies of regional artists; contextualising artistic movements or national narratives; the politics of art institutions and their relations with the state and artists.
Coordinators
Terence Chong (terencechong@iseas.edu.sg)
Hélène Njoto (helene_njoto@iseas.edu.sg)
Previous Lectures / Seminars / Workshops / Conferences
2020
November
Ties of History: Reflections on the Politics and Poetics of Curating Southeast Asia by Prof Patrick D. Flores (Tuesday, 3 November 2020 ) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
September
Breaking windows: Malaysian Manga as Dramaturgy of Everyday-Defined Realities by Dr Rachel Chan (Tuesday, 29 September 2020) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
August
Myanmar: Recovering the Past – Politics, Prison, Plastercasts and Patchwork by Mr Htein Lin (Wednesday, 25 August 2020) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
July
Resistance and Reinvention: The Politics of Contemporary Wayang by Dr Miguel Escobar Varela (Monday, 27 July 2020) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
March
The Politics of Javanese Book Art and Illuminated Manuscript Production by Professor Edwin Wieringa (Monday, 23 March 2020) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
2019
September
China’s Opera Diplomacy and the Chinese Diaspora in 1950s-1960s Bangkok and Singapore by Dr Zhang Beiyu (Monday, 30 September 2019) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
August
How to Practise Trance Dance and Survive: The Growth and Place of Jathilan in Yogyakartaby Ms Eva Rapoport (Friday, 30 August 2019) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
2018
December
Raffles and the Ruins of Empire by Dr Sarah Tiffin (Monday, 10 December 2018) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
October
Performance, Affect and Memory in Tan Pin Pin’s Films by Cheng Nien Yuan (Monday, 29 October 2018) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
September
Post-1986 Revisited: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Vietnamese Art by Ms Đỗ Tường Linh (Tuesday, 11 September 2018) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
June
Staging the Colonial-Self: Photographing Industrialised Dutch East Indies at the Turn of the 20th Century by Alexander Supartono (Friday, 29 June 2018) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
April
The Strong Body Canon: The Art of the People’s Party after Thailand’s 1932 Revolution by Thanavi Chotpradit (Monday, 16 April 2018) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
March
Reflections on the Spanish Conquest and its Representation in the Philippines: El Pacto de Sangre (1886, The Blood Compact) by Juan Luna (1857-1899) by Emmanuelle Sinardet (Thursday, 1 March 2018) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
2017
September
The Import of Art: Exhibiting Singapore’s National Development through MoMA’s Visionary Architecture by Kathleen Ditzig (Friday, 29 September 2017) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
Indonesian Art in 1976: A Hundred Years of Indonesian Art by Adrian Vickers (Thursday, 14 September 2017) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
May
Returning to the Roots: Lim Tze Peng’s Visions of the Nanyang Dream by Chinmiao Hsu (Thursday, 4 May 2017) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
April
Visualizing a New Kampuchea: Developing a Post Khmer Rouge National Art Identity by Christine Ege (Wednesday, 12 April 2017) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
March
The Culture of Impunity and Alternative Memories in Films: A Comparative Study of Indonesia and Thailand by Chontida Auikool (Friday, 31 March 2017) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
February
Ironies of Theory and Practice: Singapore New Wave Cinema by Dr Gerald Sim (Thursday, 23 February 2017) – For event announcement, please click here. For event summary, please click here.
January
National Imaginations in Southeast Asian Art Workshop (Friday, 20 January 2017) – For event announcement, please click here; For event summary, please click here.
2016
November
Colonials or Cosmopolitans? Vietnamese Artists in Paris in the 1930s-1940 by Dr Phoebe Scott (Wednesday, 23 November 2016) – For event announcement, please click here; for event summary, please click here.
Representations of the Ottomans in Javanese Reverse Glass Painting by Professor Jérome Samuel (Friday, 4 November 2016) – For event announcement, please click here; for event summary, please click here.
October
Political Art in Southeast Asia : The Role of LEKRA in Indonesia by Professor Adrian Vickers (Wednesday, 26 October 2016) – For event announcement, please click here; for event summary, please click here.
September
Japanese Artists in Indonesia and Singapore During the Occupation (1942-1945) by Mr Antariksa (Wednesday, 28 September 2016) – For event announcement, please click here; for event summary, please click here.
August
After Finding Francis: Teo Kah Leng’s Malayan Poetry in the Era of Decolonization by Dr Eriko Ogihara-Schuck (Tuesday, 2 August 2016) – For event announcement, please click here; for event summary, please click here.
July
On Nineteenth Century Origins of Art in Singapore by Mr Kwa Chong Guan (Monday, 18 July 2016) – For event announcement, please click here; for event summary, please click here.
June
Breaking Manila: Identifying Emerging Modern and Contemporary Art Collecting Behaviours in the Philippines by Ms Kaye Aboitiz (Wednesday, 1 June 2016)