On Representing Art and Southeast Asia

On Representing Art and Southeast Asia Lee Weng-Choy, Liew Kung-Yu and Ray Langenbach published in German, August 2022, in Suedostasien: <https://suedostasien.net/malaysias-vision-2020-ueber-den-traum-und-die-wirklichkeit-teil-i/> <https://suedostasien.net/malaysias-vision-2020-ueber-den-traum-und-die-wirklichkeit-teil-ii/> Lee Weng-Choy: As an art critic I’ve preferred to speak from but not for this corner of the world that I work within. Too often when we speak of Southeast Asia as a region, the nation remains the default discursive and curatorial framework. Artists are identified by nationality more than any other category, and cultural nationalisms frame the way histories are written—rarely about the region as such, but instead as a catalogue of separate nations. The grammar of the nation is containment, exclusion, closure as well as the definition and control of borders and identities. Patrick D Flores, a curator and art historian from the Philippines, has said the notion of a region remains productive, nonetheless, “if only because it persists in being a problem, one that is grasped in geo-poetic terms”.[1] I’m speaking here with Malaysian-based artists Liew Kung-Yu and Ray Langenbach. Ray is Professor of Creative Arts, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Kuala Lumpur, and was Professor of Live Art and Performance Studies, University of the Arts, Helsinki. He creates conceptual performances, convenes gatherings, writes about cultural theory, performance, propaganda, and queer cultures. He has presented work throughout the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the United States, and has curated exhibitions and performance events in Malaysia, Singapore, Palestine, USA, and Germany. His video archive of Southeast Asian performance resides at the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, and various museums. And his work is in this year’s documenta 15: lumbung. Kung Yu is well-known for his witty approach towards uncovering touchy issues, particularly those surrounding nationalism and national identity. He is also involved in the preservation of Malaysian cultural heritage as well as local and regional community projects. His exhibition history includes: the Gwangju Biennale; “1st Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art”, Queensland Art Gallery; “Temu Seni Multi Media Nur Gora Rupa”, Taman Budaya Surakata, Indonesia; “Malaysia Art Now”, National Art Gallery, Malaysia; the travelling exhibition “Cities on the Move”; “Art in Southeast Asia: Glimpses into the Future”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; and “Asiatopia”, Bangkok. Over the years, Ray and Kung Yu have worked together on a number of projects, including co-curating a festival of performance art, Satu Kali (2006). They have an upcoming twoperson show “Appointment & Assignment” (with me as curator). The exhibition conceit refers to the fact that, more than thirty years ago, Ray was once Kung Yu’s mentor. Kung Yu, my first questions are for you. Malaysia has a complicated racial politics: the majority ethnic Malay population was disadvantaged during the colonial era, but since independence, the policy has been to privilege them over the Chinese and Indian minority groups. During Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s first tenure as Prime Minister, there were criticisms of his rule, from suppression of civil liberties to corruption and his exploitation of racial politics, but his legitimacy has derived from delivering on the promise of economic development. One of his campaigns to bolster a sense of national identity was Wawasan 2020, or Vision 2020. Could you share some of your thoughts about this campaign, and why it inspired you to create artworks about it. Liew Kung-Yu: Wawasan 2020 was introduced by Mahathir when he tabled the Sixth Malaysia Plan in 1991. Functionally, it was a national ideal, wherein Dr. M set a lofty goal for Malaysia to become a developed, self-sufficient and industrialised nation by the year 2020. This Vision became a mantra for his administration, and played throughout his reign; it featured everywhere, from the media, to public events and even souvenir collectibles. While the goals of Vision 2020 were arguably admirable, its legacy is as questionable as the regime of any dictator, having been plagued by corruption and controversy, while its critics and detractors were silenced. On the surface, it presented a glorious façade of a developing nation, but one that may ultimately prove to be hollow as the promises of a fallen politician. It consumed an entire generation of Malaysians, and its ramifications irrevocably altered the very identity of what it meant to be “Malaysian”. LWC: Kung Yu, your first work on Wawasan 2020 was done in 1993. In 2020, you made another work, shown at a group exhibition which opened on the last day of the year.[2] There wasn’t much talk about Wawasan throughout 2020, because we were focused on the pandemic. But this exhibition wouldn’t have happened without you prompting the organisers. This dream of Mahathir’s was something you felt important to commemorate— why? LKY: The first work is called Bersatu Menuju Wawasan (1993), and over the years I’ve made several other related works, like Pasti Boleh/Sure Can One (1996) and Cemerlang, Gemilang, Terbilang (2007). Barisan Menuju Wawasan (2020) is notable as it is the finale in this series, created almost 30 years after the first work. In this piece, as with all the ones that came before, I commemorate my observations of the current state of Malaysia and the Rakyat (the people), which has been plunged into economic and social anxiety, wrought by recent political turmoils as well as the COVID pandemic. The piece shows us the Dream and the Reality, juxtaposing the achievements against the failed projects conceived under Vision 2020. All the while, the Rakyat stand in line to go into a pajak gadai (pawn shop). I felt it to be a fitting way to close Vision 2020—to create a memorial of its history and legacy, one which shows us where the dream began and how it ultimately ended. LWC: Kung-Yu, these works are, for me, representative of the way you engage social or political themes. Rather than offering direct or heavy-handed criticisms, you often employ humour and playfulness to get inside the legitimising fantasies of power. Could you tell us more about how you approach sensitive issues? LKY: My strategy is that, even after you slap them on their face, they’ll still invite you to their kenduri (feast) the next day. The reality of life here is that minorities in this country simply won’t stand much of a chance going head-to-head against the powers-that-be. As artists, we need to fully utilise our creative licenses to be respectful when raising the issue, and to present the issue in a way that lets your voice be heard without being blacklisted or censored. For example, after a visit to Galeri Perdana in Langkawi island, I was inspired to create a series of 13 works titled, Wadah Untuk Pemimpin, which were exhibited at the National Art Gallery in 2004. One of the pieces featured a glittering picture of Dr. M gaudily displayed above a spinning spaceship with disco lights and a fountain flowing with smoke. That work was almost taken down before the opening because some persons at the Gallery thought it might be ridiculing the PM, while others interpreted it as glorifying him. In the end, it was allowed to be exhibited, but then the VIPs who opened the show were not led to the area where my installation was. Years later, one of the pieces in the series was exhibited in Galeri Perdana, in an ironic homecoming, back to the place where it had all began. LWC: Ray, you’re an American who has taught and practiced art in Malaysia and Singapore since the late 1980s, and your work has consistently problematised your own identity as a gay white American in Asia. In Vol 4 of the seminal book series, Narratives in Malaysian Art, you addressed the problem of exclusions in the prevailing discourses about modern and contemporary art in Malaysia.[3] Your work, across different modes, often concerns such themes. For our conversation here, could you speak about your artistic practice as a documentarian? Ray Langenbach: Perhaps I naively thought that archiving and historicising events in Southeast Asia and the actions of fellow artists would somehow compensate for the imperialisms of my nation. “Who is this ugly American with a camera?!” I’m aware of how my presence is historically defined by a post-colonial script inflected by orientalist traditions of ethnographic, anthropological, sociological, and military surveillance. Such issues influence the manner in which I surveil the performance of others, and how my documentation is viewed by others in the region. My video archive is now thirty-three years in the making—since 1989. In the year after I arrived in Penang, a documentary filmmaker, Dawn Wiedeman, whom I’d worked with in the past, came to visit and she sold me her Canon Hi-8 camcorder. That began my process of serious recording. After I moved to Singapore in 1993, that camera was replaced by a smaller and more compact Sony Digital Tape cam, which allowed me to always carry a camera with me. And then that was replaced a few years later by an even smaller DV Cam, recording to SD card. As someone who performs, but also regularly documents the performance art of others, I have had to focus on the cultural ramifications of what’s saved, what’s eliminated, and the manner in which the documented performance and the performance of documenting are related, overlap and converge. Every hour I spend shooting and editing, I am forced to think about what it means to be doing that. It’s not just the instrumental questions of what is the best way to document events, but more epistemological ones: What marks the performance of documentation? How is memory “framed” by technology? How is history constructed through technological memory? What sort of “being-ness” is it that we find in the frame, or that constitutes the surplus that cannot be framed? LWC: As you’ve noted elsewhere, libraries and museums are now dedicating a lot of resources to archiving and collecting documents of performance art, in particular from the region. Whereas performance art in Southeast Asia, like its counterparts elsewhere, was once deliberate in its resistance to the mainstream, now, in large part, it seems happy to have arrived, at home in the institution. There’s a lot you have to say about this, but given our limited scope here, could you say more about your process of documenting. RL: When I record a performance festival, decisions of when to turn on the camera are influenced by my aesthetic predisposition and my ‘“read” of the cultural codes in play. Whether or not I, as documenter, understand the spoken language recorded isn’t important. I’m conscious of how there are many codes that may be inaccessible to me, from local conventions, to rituals determining audience response, the selection of site, the organisation of space, and so on. But I don’t try to be consistently egalitarian when it comes to aesthetics. I deploy my aesthetic judgments as a defence against the despotic desire to capture everything for history: the technocratic tendency to produce a perfect representation—a map at 1:1 scale. I want to bring this dialectic between aesthetic nihilism and documentarian priggishness into the open. Aesthetic judgments, cultural presumptions and epistemic hegemonies have always had a profound but largely invisible effect on what we remember of the past. In this case they may determine when I turn the camera on and off. If I consider a performance to be a “stupid piece of crap”, to put it harshly, I may well turn off the camera. After all, it’s one thing to waste time on a bad performance, but to waste video tape and money? But, clearly, how one evaluates any work has a lot to do with culturallydetermined notions of aesthetics. This is a largely unspoken complexity in all forms of cultural documentation. If it is social or daily-life performance that is being documented, these decisions may be even more complex, requiring the sort of “thick description” of anthropology. Speaking of contextualisation, what are the best ways to fill in the gaps? Because there is always missing information in documentation. What was happening outside the frame and off-camera? Theorist Heike Roms developed a very productive technique of interviewing local performance artists in a public setting as part of an oral history project entitled “What’s Welsh for Performance”?[4] As I understand her method, these interviews were recorded with the discussions and even corrections generated by audience members, some of whom had participated in the events recalled. Such a methodology, or the “generational filming” technique of Pekka Kantonen,[5] could also be used to help fill gaps around the camera-memory of events. Notes 1. Patrick D Flores, (2019) quoted in CoBo Perspectives, edited by Selina Ting, et al., Hong Kong: CoBo Social. 2.“Wawasan 2020: Townhall” presented by A+ Works of Art at Tun Perak Co-Op, Kuala Lumpur. See http://www.aplusart.asia/exhibitions/wawasan-2020-townhall (Accessed 8 April 2022). 3. Ray Langenbach, (2019), “Performative Narratives: ReLooking Malaysian Cosmopolitanism”, in Narratives of Malaysia Art: Perspectives, Vol. 4, edited by Nur Hanim Khairuddin, Beverly Yong, Yap Sau Bin and Simon Soon, Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt 4. Heike Roms, (2008) What’s Welsh for Performance?—An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales, Vol. 1, Cardiff: Samizdat Press. 5. Pekka Kantonen, (2017) Generational Filming: A Video Diary As Experimental and Participatory Research, University of the Arts Helsinki. *** Additional Notes: For his works shown at documenta 15, Ray Langenbach provided these contextual notes: RL: Live Art/Performance Art draws extensively on the behaviours of daily life. There is a transposition of particular form, gestures, expressions, ways of talking, ways of acting, ways of interacting which are normally expected in daily life that suddenly re-appear as works in an aesthetic context. My commitment to the creation and documentation of performance art works in different cultures extends to documenting vernacular behaviours that serve as the repository for social semiosis. These include the choreographed and spontaneous mass rituals of elections and demonstrations, which encode gestures and performative speech acts. While certain broad choreographic patterns in mass rituals are universal (how state or corporate agents function, how barricades are formed for assault, control or protection), the micro-performances and interpretations of acts are culturally specific, coded and often encrypted. This requires a different kind of documentation than what is seen in mass media or most social media and is methodologically related to the documentation of performance art works. The video documentation, Black May, 17–20 May, 1992 Bangkok, Thailand (1992), concerns the mass shootings of Thai citizens protesting the extension of the military Junta (National Peacekeeping Council), following their coup d’etat in 1991. When the crowd of demonstrators in front of the Royal Hotel in Bangkok lay together on the street, each person provided shelter from the army’s bullets for those lying immediately behind them. The live fire whizzing inches above our heads produced a profoundly intimate experience of group survival, each of us breathing in the mist of each-others’ emitted fear hormones: adrenaline and cortisol. Mass social events, especially those laced with the extreme states of passion or terror, encode such acts of intimacy and survival rarely available in the arts. The massacre was perpetrated by Suchinda Krapayon, with M16 rifles purchased from the United States. It is estimated that there were between 52 to 100 deaths, 175 persons disappeared and 696 injured.