Negotiating Change in recent Southeast Asian Art

Negotiating Change in recent Southeast Asian Art by John Clark Professor Emeritus, University of Sydney at Asia Society, New York, 20 October 2017 I would like to express my thanks to the Asia Society, New York, for the opportunity on 20 October 2017 to present these views in a symposium for their exhibition After Darkness. For the work on which this paper was based I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for a Professorial Fellowship from 2007-2012. Parts of this material will be found in a two-volume book The Asian Modern to be published by the National Gallery of Singapore in early 2019, to whom I am indebted for permission to present this, as also to their curator Phoebe Scott who researched and co-wrote one chapter in Volume II on the Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm. The text on Dacchi Dang is substantially that of my article in Art Monthly Australia, issue 301, September 2017, 32-35. Southeast Asian regional identity To begin with, the question of what is ‘Asian’ and how it may be approached seems to have preoccupied earlier geo-biologists, See Gordon T. Bowles, The People of Asia, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. At that time Bowles used many kinds of comparative historical data as well as distributive classifications of blood types. and also those seeking to disabuse Europeans of their projection that ‘Asia’ had anything like the cultural and historical integration supposed of Europe itself. See John M. Steadman, The Myth of Asia, London: Macmillan, 1969, with a foreword by the noted British reactionary literary historian A. L. Rowse. The former may now defer to scientific conceptual and technological changes which have allowed genome sequencing to show the interlinkage of population genealogies and the specious validity of the concept of ‘race’. There have been several genome sequencing studies which undermine the notion of singular ‘races’ in any of the SE Asian cultures, since their populations historically speaking have been so inter-mixed. A genome-sequencing study of Thai populations, also published in 2008 is: Patcharee Lertrit, Samerchai Poolsuwan, Rachanie Thosarat, Thitima Sanpachudayan, Hathaichanoke Boonyarit, Chatchai Chinpaisal, and Bhoom Suktitipat. ‘Genetic History of Southeast Asian Populations as Revealed by Ancient and Modern Human Mitochondrial DNA Analysis,’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 137:425–440 (2008). Even in advanced supposedly monolingual states like modern Thailand there is no such thing as a pure language and the resulting modern amalgam is inalienably hybridized. For a discussion in the context of Thai history see Chris Baker & Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 78-80. Genetic studies clearly demonstrate that populations themselves are mixed from very many components such as in peninsular Malaysia: Malay populations shared four major components, e.g., East Asian, South Asian, Austronesian and aboriginal Southeast Asian. East Asians, which contribute 4%–16% of the Malay genomes, had interactions with Malays at very recent time (100–200 years ago, assuming a single generation time of 25 years was applied throughout this study). See Deng, L. et al. ‘Dissecting the genetic structure and admixture of four geographical Malay populations.’ Sci. Rep. 5, 14375; doi: 10.1038/srep14375 (2015). At https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14375 The present, supposed cultural integration of ‘SE Asia’ now appears to be a forlorn parallel of that Eurocentrism in the academy as it existed some ten years before the critiques of Said. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, and London: Peregrine Books, 1985. There are many critiques of Said, mostly ignored by his supporters, including Chapter Nine of Robert Irwin, For lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, London: Allen Lane, 2006. My own critique is ‘On Two Books by Edward W. Said’, Bicitra Seni, Jilid 2, 1996, [from Pusat Seni, Universiti Sains Malaysia,], 20-47; and Chapter Eleven of John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Sydney: Craftsman House & Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1998. A most interesting articulation of Said’s method including analysis of its critiques is Robert C. Young, Postcolonialism: an historical introduction, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001, 385-392. Young refers back to Foucault’s original concepts of discourse where ‘A discursive practice establishes an interactive relation between otherwise heterogenous material elements’, and discourse may be determining without its determinations being fixed. Ibid, 406. But the further notion that Asia is regionally divided into East, Central, South, Southeastern and Western Asia is no less a problematic field of discourse. The reasons for identification of sub-regions may be based on propinquity, population links, and cultural bases such as the diffusion of South Asian and West Asian religious beliefs into Southeast Asia over two millennia. And Southeast Asia cannot be something large and relatively interlinked like the East Asia (that which we all know about) which was drawn together by war, historical flows of cultural goods, religions, and the distribution and adaptation of the characters of the Chinese script system. Southeast Asia contains entities [cultural and state units] which are neither as large nor as interlinked, nor as putatively homogenous. Indeed the notion of Southeast Asia, despite the common spread of Indic and Islamic beliefs from the West and Confucian familistic concepts from the North, is pre-eminently a modern one. Despite later inter-regional trading patterns, Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, Volume One: The Lands below the Winds, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988 & Chiangmai: Silkworm Books. one would have to go back to the eight century kingdom of Srivijaya and its localized sites in what is now Sumatra, isthmus Thailand, littoral Cambodia and Vietnam, to find a previous inter-regional linkage which was comparable in extent. Southeast Asia arises because of Euramerican colonialism, its defeat, Perhaps the core discussion of what constitutes Southeast Asia is ‘Towards defining Southeast Asian History’ in O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, Ithaca: SEAP/Cornell University, 1999, 41-57. The wartime South-East Asia Command was formed in 1943; see D. G. E. Hall A History of Southeast Asia, London: Macmillan, 1955, Fourth Edition 1981, 866. Keith W. Taylor, ‘The Early Kingdoms’ in Nicholas Tarling, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Volume One, from early times to c. 1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 173-176, summarizes what is known about early Srivijaya which might claim to have been the first kingdom of a Southeast Asian scope. Southeast Asian state formation is examined in Tony Day, Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia,, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002, and a general history is Norman G. Owen, ed., The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2005. the rise of nationalism and of new nation states. The fictions of nationalism or the national are opposed and super imposed upon by the fictions of independence, the post-colonial, and the underlying differentiation of the colonial; these notions are now allied with strong and in some respects apparently stable states. At least these states are the units for international relations, for the holding and privileging of languages and beliefs, for organizing economic systems which have been increasingly tied into global movements of goods and capital. If art is now situated at the juncture of internal and external social forces which give it a negotiatory role, to be defined by the interactions shown in endogenous discourses [internally caused], as well as their play into exogenous discourses [externally caused], then the imbrication of the endogenous with the exogenous makes for a very complex set of negotiations across art cultures, and of them with all the other historical forces in play. But much as it may be attractive and even desirable to look for a general principle of means or modes of negotiating change, we must start this examination from particular artists in particular nation state histories. Despite the rootedness of current concepts of ‘negotiation’ in the realities of business deals, where the final intent is to understand the terms for the exchange between artist and the primary dealer or the peripatetic ‘independent’ curator among other mediators, there is too negotiation between exogenous and endogenous positions and processes, between the imposed amnesia of historical events and the costs of forgetting and remembering their truths, between the regional and the global, and so forth. The alternative trajectory of ‘negotiation’ may be more fruitful as meaning a movement towards agreement by discussion and the establishment or acceptance of a shared interpretation of an art work and by the getting around the obstacles to this achievement. The resistant artist as negotiating the national: S.Sudjojono In Indonesia I shall take up the case of F. X. Harsono [b.1949] but his negotiations with local histories are by no means without close and distant precursors. A distant example can be found in the clear nineteenth century cultural negotiations between Raden Saleh (c. 1811-1880) and the Dutch colonial authorities to establish himself as a recognized painter within Dutch discourses but of subjects and with intents which were not Dutch. In the twentieth century to a close precursor is Sudjojono (1913-1986) who bridges both the colonial, post-independence, and post-national state consolidation eras, the so-called Orde Baru [New Order]. Indeed Sudjojono might serve as something of a model for art negotiation having mastered a modernism to the knowledge of which he did not declare his full indebtedness. He instead proposed a notion of Jiwa Ketok [visible soul] which became one solution to the continuation of a non-indigenous art discourse but was now rendered authentic under nationalist conditions. PERSAGI stands for Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia [Association of Indonesian Drawing Specialists]. Agus Djaya, President; Sudjojono, Secretary; L. Setijoso, Treasurer founded in 1938 and exhibiting until 1942. [ill. 1, ill.2] 1 Marc Chacgall, Portret van mevrouw Chacgall 1934-5. Shown in Java from the Regnault Collection in 1938. 2 Sudjojono Di Depan Kelambu Terbuka, [Before the open Mosquito net], 1939, oil on canvas, 86 x 66 cms, Istana Presiden, Bogor, photographed by John Clark.. Sudjojono changes the emotional connotation of a relatively fixed subject matter. He also did this later with his images of the war for independence and the display of a proper concern for the people in his LEKRA era. Sudjojono wrote on December 25 1942 in a letter to H. B. Jassin on the character of the artist: What he requires at the base itself is truth and a character which pushes him to act in conformity with his desire (the love of truth), [these] are indispensable [attributes] in an artist. All works must be born spontaneously and each line (if he is a painter) which he traces on a canvas has to be an honest image which issues directly from his heart without being dulled by any other considerations. [Hadiwardoyo, Sanento Yuliman, Genèse de la Peinture Indonésienne Contemporaine: Le rôle de S. Sudjojono, Doctorat de 3e cycle, Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1981, 153] [ill. 3]. 3 Sudjojono, Seko or Gerilya [The Scouts or Guerillas] (nd :1949) oil on canvas, 95 x 150 cms, Istana Presiden, Yogyakarta. Later he went to an inner landscape full of private dreamings and surrealist, crazy fantasizing of himself as an eccentric wanderer. On the one hand this is a lot he happily accepts, like the cigarette butt collector, on which depiction the poem reads, in Amir Sidharta’s translation: Ah, so beautiful a country Clear skies, blue seas, Collecting cigarette butts while smoking, On top of my bottle people are happy, Who is able to handle this? Only me? No problem in any kind of weather. Amir Sidharta, et al, S. Sudjojono, visible soul, Jakarta: Museum S. Sudjojono & Canna Gallery, 2006, 109. [ill. 4, ill.5] 4 Sudjojono, Menunggu Kapal Berlabuh, 1975, oil on canvas, 132 x 242, Museum Universitas Harappa Pelitan, photographed by John Clark. 5 Sudjojono Safe in all circumstances, 1980, oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cms, Deddy Kusuma Collection. The resistant artist as multiply bifurcated: F. X. Harsono F. X. Harsono was born in 1949, and belongs to almost the first cohort of Indonesian artists for whom direct experience of colonialism was absent or its residues highly attenuated. For F. X. Harsono, the past was an ever-present, real but ghostly companion traduced in the historical present by its denials, particularly of the 1965-66 massacres Harsono himself had seen as an adolescent in 1965, and also those he learned of such as the anti-Chinese massacres his father witnessed in 1947. In his father’s files Harsono discovered the photographs he had taken when the bones of the victims were disinterred and reburied for a memorial in 1949-51. [ill.6] 6 F.X. Harsono, Darkroom, 2009, mixed media installation with C print on paper, acrylic sheet, steel, plywood, and lamp, photographed by John Clark. Harsono would go to the art school Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia in 1969 in Yogyakarta but was suspended in 1975 for signing a radical manifesto, and only continued his studies to graduation at a different art school, Institut Kesenian Jakarta from 1987 to 1991. The antecedent situation in the Indonesian art worlds were of some importance in Harsono’s formation. Perhaps the first bifurcation behind his work was the split between a kind of academic, nationalistically sanctioned romantic realism in Yogyakarta which continued a lyrical identification with Indonesian subjects and pictorial mannerism carried on from the artist’s exhibition group PERSAGI in 1938 [as seen in Sudjojono above]. The other branch of the art movement was largely concentrated in the art departments of the Institut Teknologi Bandung, from where some ‘modernist abstract’ teachers, like Fadjar Sidik, would shift to Yogyakarta after 1965-1966, and where Fadjar would be Harsono’s teacher. [ill.7, ill.8] 7 F.X.Harsono, Spatial Dimension 4, 1972, etching, 20 x 15 cms 8 Fadjar Sidik, Bidang Biru & Jungga [Blue Field & XYZ],1973, oil on canvas, 88 x 98 cms. Collection Budiman A second bifurcation underlying Harsono’s work, as seen in the after darkness catalogue, is between a generalized Indonesian identity and the possibilities within that of a Chinese expression, if only as a particular sensibility with an attributed ethnic background. This bifurcation was also activated and articulated by the targeting of those with ‘Chinese’ background during the Independence War of 1945-49 as traitors in the pay of the Dutch, the ‘anti-Communist’ massacres of 1965-1966 where many Chinese-background Indonesians were claimed to be ‘communist’, and the anti-Chinese outrages after the fall of Suharto in 1998. A third and ideological bifurcation is between the ideological compliance ordained by the state and the search for an individual artistic expression allowing the constitution of an artistic ‘I’. Here I suppose the independence of sanggar [art workshops] found a collocation with academy-based art student opposition to authority, certainly in the 1970s to 1990s. There seem to be many possible parallels between small group formation among university students and the organization of art sanggar as a small group with a core of dedicated members who acknowledge a leader, or several prominent seniors, which possesses a specific technical discourse, and opposes external and usually academic hierarchical control structures. Sanggar ideological positions seem to syncretically depend more on the period and artists’ cohort in which they originated, and on the background and charisma of leaders, [ill.9] rather than closely thought-through ideas or formal expressions. 9 F.X. Harsono with Thy Kingdom Come, at Galeri Cemeti, 1998 Much of the PERSAGI declaration in 1938 or the various statements of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru [New Art Movement] in the 1970s would be unexceptional were it not for the residual colonial or actual hegemonic Indonesian situations in which they were made. How far the sanggar is simply the social site for transfer and dissemination into the visual arts of sensibilities and practices founded elsewhere, such as in the conceptual leaps of some radical poetry, or in the technical devices of some avant-gardist theatrical performance, remains to be investigated. Some details of recent small art groups in Yogyakarta in particular relating to Cemeti are found in Jaarsma, Melia, ‘The search for stable ground in Indonesia’s art scene’, in Iola Lenzi, ed. & cur., Concept, Context, Contestation: Art and the collective in Southeast Asia, Bangkok: Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 2014. Almost certainly had it not been purged after 1965 the Indonesian Communist Party-affiliated art and literature group LEKRA would have moved to further exclude ‘bourgeois individualism’ or ‘reactionary traditionalism’ from the art world with a sort of Soviet or Maoist socialist realism. [ill.10] 10 Harijadi Sumadidjaja, Biografii II di Malioboro, 1954, oil on canvas, 180 x 200 cms. When later in the 1990s Harsono came to make one aim of his practice the re-excavation of the buried pasts rather than just the examination of repressed structures within the present, the New Order exigencies made this ipso facto a political quest. [ill.11] Furthermore, Harsono after the fall of Suharto in 1998, was able in 2009 to refer back to and incorporate in his installations the photographs which his father – the Blitar town photographer - had taken 1949-51 when the dead of the 1947 anti-Chinese massacres were disinterred and reburied. [ill.12] 11 F.X.Harsono, Darkroom, 2009, as shown at Langeng Foundation, 2010, photographed by John Clark. 12 F.X.Harsono, Father's photograph of a disinterrment, 1949-51, as shown at Langeng Foundation, 2010, photographed by John Clark. This fourth bifurcation functions as a temporal split which often anachronistically spaces and replicates buried or tabooed events by the exhibition and installation of photographic or other archived mementoes. [ill.13, ill.14] The deployment of material about one long-suppressed event moves into hints at the structure of historical forgetting about another, even more deadly and firmly repressed set of events. If in 2009 Harsono was able to articulate information about 1947 before his birth, what about the events he had actually experienced as a sixteen-year old in 1965? 13 F.X.Harsono, Chain 1975, as reconstructed for Langeng exhibition, 2010, photographed by John Clark. 14 F.X.Harsono, Chain, 1975, as exhibited in Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru [Movement of New Art], 1979 [from the catalogue]. Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru [GSRB, Movement of New Art] exhibited first in August 1975 after the expulsions of several members including Harsono for signing the Black December manifesto of December the previous year which protested about blatant academicist narrowness and self-seeking by the jury at the Biennale preparatory exhibition. The GSRB included much ‘impolite’ or taboo-breaking works which began to criticize the morality of the elite and was largely lead by Jim Supangkat and Hardi, [ill.15, right] the latter also being one of the artists expelled alongside Harsono in Yogyakarta. The group booklet published in 1979, the last year of its group exhibitions, included a particularly vigorous polemic between the art historian Sudarmadji and the curator Kusnadi, then employed by the Ministry of Culture, who had also been the curator long ago in 1955 of the survey exhibition of Indonesian arts shown during the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Countries. For a summary see Maklai in Hooker, 1993, 73. In reply to established painter Kusnadi’s charge that it was a form of plagiarism to combine the head of an ancient Javanese Queen [in Supangkat’s 1975 work, Ken Dedes] with a cartoon-style body [displaying pubic hair]. Sudarmadji said that it was surely better to borrow the image than to steal the original (which at that time was in a Dutch museum). Thus underlying the point that ancient Javanese culture was, therefore, a valid element to draw on in constructing an image of Indonesian society. This heated exchange between Kusnadi and Sudarmadji continued in the newspapers for some time, showing that there were already several conflicting value systems with which to evaluate Indonesian art. In fact the argument was not so much about whether Indonesian ‘traditional’ art or forms could be re-mobilized, but how they could be re-contextualized inside a new art work which was relatively free of institutional control hierarchies. In the New Order Indonesia ‘modernist’ art came to mean in the eyes of Supangkat and others an art which belonged to or was produced under the aegis of this hegemony and which thereby reinforced its domination in the field of art. This was so much so that the re-contextualized display of physical objects from everyday life, the re-positioning of ‘traditional’ art objects, or even the realization of mimetically visualized fantasies such as in the paintings of Dede Eri Supria, [ill.16] Ivan Sagito, and Lucia Hartini, could all effectively resist the government and its [putative] agents in art academia. 15 Nyoman Nuarta, The Generals, 1976, mixed media, 160 x 40 x40 cms, and Jim Supangkat, Ken Dedes, 1975, about 125 cms high, from Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru catalogue, 1979 16 Dede Eri Supria, Montir-montir [Mechanics], from Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru catalogue, 1979 At his first major turning point, Harsono also left the field of academic art practice in Yogyakarta for about ten years, preferring to work as a commercial graphic designer in Jakarta on the one hand, [ill.17] and on the other to become directly engaged with non-governmental organizations forcing particular agendas such as environmental concerns. It is only at the end of the 1980s that he re-entered academic art at a different institution in Jakarta, and one imagines, because he had much better intellectual collaborators there, like the historian and critic Sanento Yuliman. 17 F.X. Harsono & GugusGrafis, Teater Koma, 1986, poster. 18 F.X.Harsono, The Top Most, 1975, (remade 2006), plastic gun, textile, wooden crate. Wire mesh, LED tube, dimensions variable. The Artist, photographed by John Clark. By 1973 Harsono felt the need for greater social development which might need expression outside the art school, and by the first Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru exhibition in August 1975 he had found it through contextual installation such as in his Paling Top ’75, a ready-made of a cage and a machine-gun toy. [ill.18] In 1977 Harsono wasn’t interested in an art discursive point, but in presenting new forms: At the time it didn’t cross my mind that these were ready-made or found objects. Neither was I thinking of Duchamp, although I knew of him. My focus at the time was how presenting new forms [can] raise social issues using visual elements from day-to-day life, with the idea that: 1. Daily objects (without changing their meaning) would easily be understood by observers, so they would be more communicative: 2. Daily objects are visual elements that cannot be identified as a form of fine art; and 3. Daily objects can represent the spirit of experimenting and playing around. Harsono in Hendro Wiyanto; Amanda Katherine Rath, Seng Yujin; Tan Siuli, Re:petition/Position/FX Harsono, Magelang: Langgeng Art Foundation, 2010, 75. Painting everyday objects as a subversive reality curiously resembles a LEKRA-type of mimetic realism which does down among the people and shows the ‘real’ structure of their lives. Harsono returned to the everyday to alter a discourse or subvert positions already arrived at, rather than via some grand art discursive understanding obtained by reading or conceptually referring to foreign masters. [ill.19] It was this originality and a dislike for group leaders who would take his work away from the very critical originality he had just achieved which caused him to leave GSRB. Clearly this paradoxical identity with the autonomy of art allowed Harsono to preserve both its very criticality and its social relevance through materializing qualities of the objects recontextualized through their visualization. By the early 1980s he extended his conceptual criticality to a kind of direct social concern through his 1982 beach installation at Parangkritis Beach near Yogyakarta, Pagar tripleks dan hutan kita [Plywood fence and our forest]. [ill.20] In this he screenprinted one side of a piece of plywood with statistics of tropical forest destruction min fifty panels over six hundred metres in length. started a group of works with environmental concerns. 19 F.X.Harsono, Voice without Voice Sign, 1993-94, silkscreen on canvas, 9 panels, wood stools, stamps, 143.5 x 95.5 cms each, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. 20 F.X.Harsono Plywood Fence and our Forest, 1982, text screenprint installed at Parang Tritis Beach nearYogyakarta 1982. 120 x 15 cms x 600m. In Voice of the Dam project I 1985 Harsono had realized that objects could function as conduits for personal stories which otherwise would be concealed. At the same time in parallel with his NGO-related engagements he was working in graphic design and this field formed the basis for the collective works in 1987 for Seni rupa baru proyek 1: pasaraya dunia fantasia [New visual arts project no.1: Fantasy world supermarket], where his hand can be traced in the posters, [ill.21] Harsono having worked as a book and graphic designer on and off since December 1975. The exhibition presented a series of pop art re-workings of everyday objects and images, although how far the exhibition actually created the simulacrum of a supermarket, rather than treated consumer relations and aesthetification of consumer goods, is not clear. 21 F.X. Harsono, Pameran Seni Rupa Baru Proyek 1, Pasaraya Dunia Fantasi, catalog cover 1987 22 Semsar Siahaan, Olympia, Identity with Mother and Child, 1987, oil on canvas, 145 x 295 cms, Collection Robert Sumendap [photograph courtesy the artist, 1998]. Harsono’s resistance to the political status quo was part of his participation in art school revolts and in the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru [New Art Movement] Although Harsono was expelled from ITB with Hardi in 1975 there were also memorable works of resistance by the later participant in this group, Semsar Siahaan (1950-2005), who burnt the sculpture of his teacher Sunaryo in 1981 and was expelled from the Institut Teknologi Bandung in 1983. Semsar Siahaan briefly joined Gerakan Senirupa Baru after its inception in 1978. Semsar also painted the memorable critique of the Suharto rule and its corruptions in Olympia, Identity with mother and child,(1987), the same year as Harsono’s consumer critique. [ill.22] The work is well analysed by Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Indonesian Painters, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994, 220, 222. The flood of parodies was a representation of daily goods that had been taboo to those of high artistic tastes, previously considered unfit to be exhibited in an art gallery. Wiyanto et al, 2010, 105. But international exposure through a South Australian residency and then exhibition at ARX III in 1993 and at the first Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, in the same year, may have let him see how the relatively recently accepted form in Indonesia of installation could be linked to representation of the violence of the state, and the situation of little people trapped by its hegemonies. [ill.23] 23 F.X. Harsono, Power and the Oppressed, (original 1992) 2010 replica, installation of branches, textiles, soil, chair, barbed wire. All through his work up to the fall of Suharto in 1998 Harsono is concerned with such violence, both of the state and as a wider social condition and with the silencing of human voices of protest. Killing and violence is still carried out by those with political power and in my society there is a continuing problem with the imbalance of power between those with power and those without. We are all part of a culture of violence. I am not against my culture but against the violence in my culture and the suffering it causes… As artists we research social problems with NGOs and local people before creating our works. This gives them validity and they are created from a base of involvement with villages and communities and the issues important to them. Installations are a good means to communicate about urban culture and the effect of development… Involvement across cultures is also possible through the idea that the world is a theatrical pool in which stories are enacted and told. Installations have become a response to and a concern for the processes of globalization which remain outside the capitalization of art. They are a forum for expressing strong social concerns and yet still allow for some expressions of individuality. Harsono from Inside Indonesia, 1993, as given in Wiyanto, 2010, 114. After the violence against Chinese which accompanied the fall of Suharto in 1998, Harsono turned to a preoccupation with questions of identity and what might lie beyond identity. The anti-Chinese pogrom of 1998 is when Harsono felt he was made to question intensely what it meant to be an Indonesian of Chinese background, one who had very little knowledge of Chinese culture and could not write Chinese language apart from his painfully mastered ability to write his own name. [ill.24] As seen in Memory of a name, Re-writing the erased, 2009, this preoccupation is found in several other works up until 2016 and meant in practice that he was both allowed publicly to acknowledge his Chinese background, and also internally compelled to do so because of the need to remember the other pasts suppressed under Suharto, against which he had hitherto only been able to fight indirectly or through symbolic allegory through his work. 24 F.X. Harsono, Memory of a name, Re-writing the erased, 2009, installation at Langeng Foundation, Yogyakarta, in 2010. 25 F.X. Harsono, Ndudah [Digging ], video documentary about 1948 Blitar massacre, installation at Langeng Foundation, Yogyakarta, in 2010 Harsono had sided against the Chinese in youthful demonstrations in Blitar, had known friends who were forced to execute suspected communists in 1965 when his own father had held him back from such groups and thus spared him the guilt of participation. [ill.25] Harsono must have known all the wide range of anti-Chinese regulations passed by Suharto, not to mention the change of his own name to conceal a Chinese origin which nevertheless appeared on identity documents. Instead of asserting the ‘Chineseness’ which he had never had Harsono went into a more difficult place: his hybridity as produced by the Indonesian context in which he had grown up. [ill.26] 26 F.X.Harsono, Purification, 2013, mixed media installation, image from website of F. X. Harsono. This may have led him away from a notion of cultural authenticity just at that point when many in Indonesia, freed of the hegemony of the New Order, were cleaving after it. In following the full cultural complexity of his hybrid position Harsono was displaying a courage in experiencing himself as an ‘other’ within his society which he had frequently shown in the past, but this was to produce a new social alienation of its own. After the Soeharto regime fell, a culture of violence became even more prevalent in our society. Witnessing the ambivalence towards the fate of the people on the one hand and the narrow-minded priority placed on each group’s own needs sickened me at this time. My pessimism and revulsion pushed me into leaving behind the social themes in my work. I felt disoriented about morals, ethics, and even nationalism. I felt that whenever these were bandied about, they were empty slogans without any meaning whatsoever…. Following this I felt that I no longer had a stance and I felt alienated amongst my own people. These were people I had once considered needed fighting for through art. I also felt alienated from the people who I had previously thought had the same vision for change. Amidst the nakedness and plainness that was revealed through their actions, I suddenly asked myself, who are they really? Harsono, ‘Transisi’, 2003, in Wiyanto, 2010, 156-7. His 2013 work, The Raining Bed, [ill.27, 28] was shown first at the Yogyakarta Biennial in 2010 and then three years later at the 20th Biennale of Sydney, but on this occasion with the Indonesian text of his poem in white letters rained on in the bed, and the English translation in red letters crawling on an eye-level scroller behind the bed. 27 F.X.Harsono The Raining Bed, 2013, Wood,bed, stainless steel pump, water, ceramics, fabric & LED with running text, 200 x 200 x 200 cms. 28 F.X.Harsono The Raining Bed, 2013, Wood,bed, stainless steel pump, water, ceramics, fabric & LED with running text, 200 x 200 x 200 cms, as exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney, 2016, photo courtesy Gina Fairley. For Harsono the bed is a place of rest and contemplation but the ignorance about Chinese contributions to Indonesian development turns the bed into ‘a place that made them anxious, a dark and bitter place..’ From notes provided by the artist with the 2016 Biennale of Sydney installation. The poem reads: In my sleep the past unfolds At the tip of the pen history is invented At the tip of the rifle history is fooled By the end of the falls history is swept away. The mixture of Chinese, local and European elements in the ornaments of the bed mark it as a site of hybrid culture, that of the Peranakan [Straits’ Chinese whose language is a Penang Hokkien/Malay fusion]. But Harsono does not resolve the ebb and flow of different cultural elements; His work, for this viewer, is a melancholic siting for the possibilities of a hybrid culture which are unrecognized or have been lost. Because Harsono so firmly sites himself in Indonesia, and so strongly worries about the ignorance or mis-identification of Chinese contributions to his culture, that he refuses either, say, the Marxist universalism of Toer’s literary realism, In early January 1963 the writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer delivered a 70-page seminar paper at the University of Indonesia, Realisme Sosialis dan Sastra Indonesia-Sebuah tinjauan sosial, [Socialist Realism and Indonesian Literature –a social review] but it is unclear how much impact this literary analysis had on visual arts. See Keith Foulcher, Social Commitment in Literature and the Arts: the Indonesian ‘Institute of People’s Culture’, 1950-1965, Clayton: Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1986, 120. or the surrealist and cosmopolitan imaginary flights of a Heri Dono. See Wouter Wellling, Helena Spanjaard, The Dono Code: installations, sculptures, paintings, Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2009. The situation is unresolved. Harsono is clearly more interested in listening to the echoes of its conflicts or a making cool appraisal of its potential for allowing a new self-consciousness as ‘Indonesian’, than opposing or resisting its constraints on ‘Chineseness’. The exploration of cultural and ‘ethnic’ hybridity implies that the notion of resistance against a regime or a personal situation transforms into a greater awareness of multiple layers of culture and types of expression. Here it cannot be forgotten that Harsono is a practising Roman Catholic so he may have wanted to link up with a universal recognition of humankind, rather than a narrow state or religion-based notion, and possibly for some time. [I haven’t discussed his religious beliefs with him]. Resistant Vietnamese artists: Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm, Dacchi Dang, Dinh Q. Le Where an artist links up with the layers of his or her cultural affiliation or past histories is a particularly acute question for artists who sojourn overseas, or become full emigrants after a period of diasporic identification from which they may temporarily or permanently return ‘home’. Here Vietnamese artists who have left ‘home’ come into comparison and I will look at the work and strategies of Dacchi Dang [Đặng đắc Chí] who as a child was a boat-borne refugee and still lives in Australia, and Ding Q. Lê [Lê Quang Đỉnh] who left Vietnam as a child but returned from the USA to live. Ding Q. Lê’s work is featured in the exhibition and catalogue after darkness. It may be art historically prudent, as with Sudjojono and Harsono, to briefly look for prior examples of what were initially positive artistic negotiations with the rulers of the new Vietnamese state, but which were followed by resistance and difficult attempts to negotiate artistic autonomy during the cultural and political transition in Vietnam. Here the case of Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm briefly springs to mind. Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm is an artist whose work I have seen in Hanoi, but of whom my knowledge and the text here is particularly indebted to research and writing by Phoebe Scott. Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm was born in 1918 and studied at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de L’Indochine, Hanoi from 1941, formally graduating after wartime disruptions in 1950. He was a participant in land reform campaigns and in 1955-56, Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm joined a land reform team for the second time. Nghiêm has said that the organizing committee of the team wanted paintings on the theme of “sharing the fruits of the struggle” (chia quả thực). Thuận Thiên. “Xuân muộn của họa sĩ Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm” (“The Late Spring of Artist Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm”). Lao Đòng 19-20 (1996): 13. Nghiêm developed studies at this time that he would later use in the lacquer painting Con nghé quả thực (The Buffalo Calf: the Gains of Land Reform), now in the Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts and dated to 195. This work shows how an artist could nominally complete a party assignment at the same time as implying ambivalence about it. [ill. 29]. 29 Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm, Con nghé quả thực (The Buffalo Calf: the Gains of Land Reform), dated to 1957, Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts. The work represents a group of villagers gathering to look at a newly-born buffalo calf. It has been interpreted as emotional study of different figures within village life – from young children to village elders. Tô Ngọc Thanh. Người Cùng Thời (People through Time). Hanoi: Fine Arts Publishing House, 2005, 18-19. The work can also be understood as showing the end result of a land reform campaign in a rural village. Along with land, agricultural goods such as buffaloes, feed stores and tools were redistributed during land reform campaigns from ‘landlords’ to peasants. Edwin, Moise, “Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Revolution at the Village Level.” PhD, University of Michigan, 19773-4. Kerry Nguyen-Long suggests an alternative explanation for the distribution of agricultural goods represented in the painting, where villagers would draw lots to determine who was responsible for the care of the new buffalo, while ownership remained with the collective, see Kerry Nguyen-Long “Nguyen Tu Nghiem: One Man’s Journey into Modern Painting”, Arts of Asia, 37:6, 2007, 135. The work represents the complexities of the land reform process, in its positive and negative aspects and was awarded the National Exhibition prize in 1957. At that time, the excesses of land reform had been publicly acknowledged, including in August 1956 by Hồ Chí Minh himself, and a rectification program to unwind the errors of the earlier campaigns had begun. Ninh, Kim Ngoc Bao Ninh. A World Transformed: The Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Vietnam 1945-1965. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 121. It is not clear whether the work’s ambivalence towards land reform, as indicated by the different groups of figures represented, was appreciated at the time or not. Despite the work’s success, Nghiêm has maintained that he personally dislikes it. Quang Việt, “210 phút với Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm” (“210 Minutes with Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm”), Tạp Chí Mý Thuật (Fine Arts Magazine), 64 (1996), 38. In 1960, Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm requested and was granted permission to leave the Communist Party. Interview of Phoebe Scott with Quang Việt, February 2011; Quang Việt, “210 phút”, 41. He was resisting national institutions which privileged him and after 1960, he withdrew almost completely from public life and public activities. While the reasons for this are not completely clear, it has been linked to the strain he suffered as a result of the land reform campaigns. Interview of Phoebe Scott with Quang Việt, February 2011, interview with Phan Cẩm Thượng, February 2011. This view is also expressed in Phan Cẩm Thượng. “Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm,” 93. He maintained his position in the Artist’s Association which paid him a stipend but he rarely exhibited, instead painting at home, developing new directions in his work. Between 1960 and the early 1980s, Nghiêm developed the subjects and stylistic elements that were the fruit of his encounters with folk art and communal house sculpture, principally the motif of the ‘ancient dance’, images of the twelve animals associated with traditional astrology, the mythological hero Saint Gióng, and the characters of a Vietnamese epic poem. The use of geometric abbreviations and multiple spatial perspectives compressed into a single image has often led Nghiêm’s work to be compared with Picasso’s. [ill.30] 30 Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm, Children’s Festival Marionettes, 1967, oil on canvas, Dao Danh Anh collection. For some art historians in Vietnam, the comparison with Picasso is frustrating, because it underplays Nghiêm’s sustained engagement with communal house sculpture and village art. Interview of Phoebe Scott with Phan Cẩm Thượng, February 2011. Nghiêm has commented that he had very little exposure to the work of Picasso: he first knew of Picasso during the Resistance period. “Nguyen Tu Nghiem Speaks of Arts” in Fine Arts Publishing House, Tranh Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm trong Sưu tập Nguyễn Thu Giang (Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm Paintings in the Nguyễn Thu Giang Collection). Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Mỹ thuật, 1994, 19. While Nghiêm was working on forms of folkloric Modernism in relative isolation in the 1960s, the Artist’s Association was also discussing the idea of ‘national character’ (tình dân tộc). This was a new emphasis in the public discourse of visual art, which otherwise emphasised Socialist Realism and specifically images of workers, peasants, soldiers and revolutionary heroes. In 1962, a pamphlet submitted by the Communist Party to the Second Artist’s Association Congress stipulated that Vietnamese art should reflect national character. Taylor, "Framing the National Spirit: Viewing and Reviewing Painting under the Revolution." In The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai, 109-34. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001, 114. According to Nora Taylor, it was only at this time that the first attempt to systematically define ‘national character’ within the visual arts took place. While the overall definition of what constituted national culture remained relatively unclear, Taylor writes that: “the general understanding of national character was that it exemplified the spirit of the Vietnamese culture in their struggle for independence, their daily work, and their ancient historical culture.” Taylor, “Framing the National Spirit”, 114. Implicit in this definition was an idea of emphasizing positive aspects, rejecting violence or sadness. Taylor, “Framing the National Spirit”, 114. Nudes and abstractions were also banned from public display. Taylor, “Framing the National Spirit”, 114 . Despite the sense of ‘national character’ evident in Nghiêm’s work, it is clear that in the 1960s his work diverged significantly from what was generally understood by this term. Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm was also an innovator with ‘national form’ not merely or simply of ‘national subjects’. This was via his development of what had been the craft practice of lacquer painting. This is unusual since the academically trained artist as the restorer of the national generally deployed ‘superior’ technical fields of oil or gouache painting, and Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm was definitely the inheritor of the Vietnamese scholar-bureaucrat tradition, his father having been the last generation to take the Vietnamese imperial civil service examinations. Common aspects of the work of Nguyễn Tư Nghiêm and Sudjojono need to be added to these comparisons: War as a mediating or necessitating experience, and artistic ideology as a field of debate. They regarded art as a private pursuit as against a public representation, they thought art was coded or determined by non-art values, those of the individual artist as the bearer of the spirit of the times which formed their new nation. In a sense these artists and many like them embody an experience of their societies as being beyond the colonial, that there was some expression of a content through art which had existed from before colonialism and had now been given place after its end. It may be, as pointed by Aijaz Ahmad and others, that the notion of ‘postcolonial’ over-emphasizes ‘…the significance of the impact of colonialism on the societies that were colonized’. See Young, Postcolonialism: an historical introduction, 60. The intensity of the experience which, in their cases enabled and probably induced them to criticize narrow views of a formal realism that ‘served the people’ was the experience of violent anti-colonial struggle they had both lived through. They were thus induced to ask that if realism was a domain of practice which suited their national expression then under what terms was it to do so? Dacchi Dang I will now turn to the work of an Australian Vietnamese artist Dacchi Dang in whose life and work at least three circles of events and experience overlap: This section is drawn from my opening remarks for an exhibition by Dacchi Dang at Gallery 4A Sydney on June 28th 2017, and an edited version was published in Art Monthly Australia, issue 301, September 2017, 32-35. My writing on Dacchi Dang is indebted to a conversation with Dacchi Dang, 18 May 2017, and sources cited below in the notes. the War in Vietnam [ill.31abc]; the survival of a child refugee followed by and his move to and acceptance in Australia [ill.32]; and finally the development of a mature discourse to realize Dacchi Dang’s more formal awareness as an artist [ill.33]. 31a 31b 31a West Australian September 1981, photography by David Tanner 31b West Australian September 1981, photograph by David Tanner . 31c Dacchi Dang, The Boat, 2000-2001 32 Dacchi Dang, Phoenix, 2011, three channel video 33 Dacchi Dang Spectacle I, 1994 Dacchi Dang [Đặng đắc Chí] was born in 1966 in Saigon as a Chinese Vietnamese [Viet Ngoc Hua Vietnamese Chinese heritage] and even though the war ended in 1975 when he was nine he did not leave by boat until 1982 when he was sixteen. Thus he passed his childhood and much of his adolescence during the war and its immediate aftermath. Dacchi’s Chapter One in his 2013 PhD thesis at Griffith University details his personal experience as a ‘refugee’, and explains carefully the relation between that experience and his family structure and familial expectations in Australia. See Dacchi Dang, ‘The refugee experience: a personal account’, Chapter One of his PhD thesis, The Artist as Explorer: How Artists from the Vietnamese Diaspora Explore Notions of Home, Brisbane: Griffith University, 2013, at https://www120.secure.griffith.edu.au/rch/items/737babd1-379e-4a9d-1e79-0b106a3e344d/1/ On the relation of Vietnamese artists to War see Nora Taylor, ‘Playing with National Politics: Vietnamese Artists’ Visions of War’, Obieg, no,2, 2016, at http://obieg.u-jazdowski.pl/en/numery/azja/playing-with-national-politics--vietnamese-artists----visions-of-war. This is such a frequent topic in Australian Vietnamese reminiscences or fictional reconstructions about their experience of leaving Vietnam and of their initial reception in and adjustment to Australia, that we may assume it was determinative for their later character formation and life choices. In particular, the role of the father present or absent from the family, and of the mother as the subject of the husband’s affection and sometimes physical abuse also functions as a centre of ‘Vietnamese’ values in both Vietnam and Australia. See Mandy Thomas, Dreams in the Shadows: Vietnamese Australian lives in transition, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999; Nam Le, The Boat, Melbourne: Penguin Books, 2008; Pauline Nguyen, ‘Born in Vietnam, Made in Australia’, from The Griffith REVIEW, Edition 27: ‘Food Chain’, 2010; Ahn Do, The Happiest Refugee: a memoir, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010. On Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees in Australia see also: Jacob Hickey, Sue Clothier & Craig Graham, producers, Once upon a time in Cabramatta, 3-episode documentary, SBS, 2012 [available from SBS on Demand in 2017]; Hoang, Carina, ed., Boat people: personal stories from the Vietnamese Exodus 1975-1992, Cloverdale, W.A.: Carina Hoang, Communications, 2010; Andrew Jakubowicz, ‘Vietnamese in Australia: a quintessential collision,’ May 2004, downloadable from https://andrewjakubowicz.com/publications/vietnamese-in-australia-a-quintessential-collision/ [Jakubowicz also appears in the Hickey et al SBS documentary, 2012]; Pauline Nguyen, Secrets of the Red Lantern: Stories and Recipes from the Heart, Sydney, Miller’s Point: Murdoch Books, 2007; Alice Pung, ed., Growing up Asian in Australia, Collingwood: Black Inc., 2008; Nancy Viviani, The Long Journey: Vietnamese Migration and Settlement in Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1984; Nancy Viviani, The Indochinese in Australia, 1975-1995, from burnt boats to barbecues, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996. Standard histories of Vietnam include Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam, London: Allen Lane, 2016, Penguin, 2017; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: a history, New York: The Viking Press, 1983 & London: Penguin Books, 1997. Two great war novels which treat experience from the Vietnamese side are Duong Thu Hong, Novel without a name, [translated by Phan Huy Dong and Nina McPherson]. London: Picador, 1995, and Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, [English by Frank Palmos after translation by Phan Thanh Hao] Martin Secker and Warburg, 1994 & Vintage Books, 1998. The latter structures the experienced and recollected narratives via reference to a third and distanced narrator level which resonates with other refugee recollections. Both books are banned in Vietnam. Because the war was so traumatic but also because reactions to it were so polarized, and many of the refugee children had fathers who served in, or whose families were closely linked to, South Vietnamese forces, the children’s later cultural and political understanding of the war and its savageries cannot be divorced from their family situation. Nor can it be cut away from the need, as seen by parents, to leave as refugees, bearing all the risks that dangerous illegal exile carried in most cases. Another leitmotif of recollections is the abjectness of the refugee exile, subject to parental as well as external social domination even before they encountered the resistance and often hostility of parts of the reception culture. Senator Pauline Hanson [Pauline Hanson’s One Nation] still sits in Parliament and, as the now somewhat notorious Senator Dastiari [Labor] recently pointed out in the TV talk show Q&A on the Australian ABC, has merely shifted the target of extreme right-wing discourse from indigenous Australians, to Vietnamese, to Asians in general, and now to Muslims. Et in arcadia ego. In many ways these children were not allowed to become persons even in the sometimes restricted manner of a ‘traditional’ Vietnamese family subject as this was to all the upheaval of civil war and murderous, criminally meaningless foreign intervention in which Australia was a willing partner. The goal of an artist is to become a person with autonomous understanding and individually articulated issues and subjects: it seems that many artists had to face this dilemma overseas in a world-wide diaspora. It is a situation found across many artists from South America in Europe who escaped one set of cultural and family constraints, frequently articulated through local corruption and military rule, to reach a Europe which was ignorant of and wilfully indifferent to their need to establish an autonomous artistic identity. See Marius Kociejowski, God’s Zoo: Artists, Exiles, Londoners, Manchester: Carcanet, 2014, particularly the chapter on a diasporic Brazilian artist, ‘Ana Maria Pacheco’s Journey to the Underworld. Or Misfortunes of a Sardine’, 146-176. Those who succeeded like Dacchi and some other Australian Vietnamese may be exceptions. All faced this great hurdle and I can only wonder how many there were unable to found their own personalities through their creative work, be it in art, writing, theatrical comedy, or even cuisine. We are left with double survivors: those who both passed through the hell of the boats and the pain of readjustment, and those who also successfully learned to find a metier, a means to express themselves in a life. Dacchi reminds us that even in Vietnam he felt an outsider because he was of Chinese background which also excluded him from identification as ‘Vietnamese’. Deep beyond his presence for others in Australia as a ‘Vietnamese boat person’ was his distance from being Vietnamese itself because his maternal language was Cantonese and not the Putonghua which catholic Chinese Vietnamese refugees had brought to South Vietnam when he was a child, nor was it Vietnamese itself, articulated between many regional variations and also of minority peoples who had lived as separate linguistic and cultural groups within Vietnam. He began his photographic work by looking for a ‘home’ around 2008. It was a place to which he could securely return to or safely inhabit without the application of external criteria of belonging. Most of photographic work seemed to depict homes of the people whose lands I was exploring, and in particular homes and temporary shelters of the dislocated and disenfranchised. Dang, 2013, 27. [around 2009 in Japan] [ill.32] He early on recognized that Vietnamese present their diasporic experience through unrecorded oral stories because they do not express themselves in writing well, and by implication could be caught in the expression of their emotion through photography. For him the diasporic has two faces, ‘one looking forward and one looking back, Dang, 2013, 28. and as he came to mull acceptance by the culture to which his refugee status had given him access he began to question the of pattern of adjustment which Vietnamese made, using a set of concepts derived for Vietnamese in North America. See Nghia M. Vo, The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992, North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2006, 182-183. These distinguished three patterns: an old linear pattern where values were traced back to a pre-communist, pre-Vietnam War set of traditions; an assimilation pattern where the values of the accepting society were accepted and provided the field of social action; and a bicultural pattern where the Vietnamese lived between two imperfectly coordinated worlds which were discriminated as separate but inter-communicating cultures. What is remarkable about Dang’s own writings about home is his careful identification of different notions of home, chiefly varying between the two poles of home as centre which is outward looking, and home as identity which is inward looking. Refugees detach home from specific spatial locations, and they create a notion of being, for a given culture of reception: The Other can choose to re-present who they are or how they conduct themselves within the wider society. Subject matter can thus be re-framed within culturally specific means, in this way determining new possibilities for interpretation by the viewer. Dang, 2013, 34. Many of these issues of identity and how to express it were worked out by Dang in his early piece The Boat [2000-2001]. [ill.31] Here unlike some other Vietnamese diasporic artists he showed respect for the stories of other Vietnamese which he only re-told with permission. These identifications re-surfaced in works such as Phoenix [2011] a three-channel video, [ill.32] one channel of which shows a white wax re-fabrication of a Dongsong drum melting, but with red wax flowing from inside. Clearly during his postgraduate research of 2009-2013 he began to make pieces which worked directly on a subject matter which was his own, even as it could be positioned by external, other-culturally emplaced viewers. But his growth as an artist and the maturation of his discourse was not a linear progression of stages, but more a series of moments in a complex spiral only partially denoted by time. Clearly the collaged, or more properly speaking overlaid and re-synthesized photographs he did after his first return to Vietnam in 1994 with Spectacle I, [ill.33] were an anticipation of future ability to handle multiple levels and contents of discourse in the same work. I am not quite sure how he transferred this maturation in photomedia to work with video, but video often allows itself to be a series of moving but interlocuted and visually static tableaux, and may have formed the basis for his later work with camera obscura or the pin-hole camera. The use of video to show simultaneous but parallel imagined worlds marked a new and exploratory confidence. This may be seen first in Phoenix [2011], [ill.32] and in Captain Van Dang in the Great South Land [2012]. [ill.34] The latter is a single-channel video animation of a Vietnamese explorer greeting people of different origins arriving on Cronulla Beach. Somewhat humorously –perhaps a gallows humour – he deploys the symbol of the famous 19th century Australian bushranger and folk hero Ned Kelly meeting an Arabian woman. 34a Dacchi Dang, Captain Van Dang in the Great South Land, 2012 34b Single channel 3 mins animation HD 16 9 Pal48Khz stereo sound Dang has been searching for a tool that, allows me to negotiate these spaces and cultures [signifies displacement and the search for belonging and identity by members of the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia…. The pinhole camera produces infinite depth of field on the same projection plane. Pinhole camera images have a soft focus and distort reality in a similar way to how we see things in dreams. Dang, 2013, 140. He believed the pinhole camera satisfied these requirements and used it for the Full Circle series 2009-2010. [ill.35] This was part of a project at an island off the Queensland coast which had once been a leper colony. In Dang’s mind this island was associated with Pulau Bintong in Malaysia where he had been kept for a year before transfer to Australia under conditions of privation he compared with those of the former leper colony inhabitants. 35a Dacchi Dang, from Full Circle Series, 2009-2010 35b Dacchi Dang, Faith from Full Circle series, 2009, black and white silver gelatin print, 11 x 14 inches. Dang had meanwhile acquired a very sophisticated knowledge of art theory. He deploys various thinkers putting his photographic practice into a broader theoretical frame such as De Certeau that in a photograph ‘what can be seen designates what is no longer there’, Dang, 2013 citing Michel de Certeau via Francis Marravillas, 149. and he instances Jill Bennet on memory where ‘the poetics of sense memory involves not so much speaking of but speaking out of a particular memory or experience’ Dang, 2103, citing Jill Bennett, 150. Dacchi is not just interested in singularity of vision and he somewhat paradoxically thinks the pin hole camera can overcome this: The idea of single-point perspective seems to suggest a refraction of a very specific point of view, a point, or instant in space-time, it can also function as a site of enmeshment, or a source of multiplicity Dang, 2013, 151. But elsewhere, and in conclusion, he adumbrates an abjection which is sometimes despairing, sometimes a cool, self-confident knowing. My society does not know how to cope with the layered otherness it has applied to me. Dang, 2013, 174. Dacchi Dang also repeated this view in my interview with him of 18 May 2017. Dinh Q.Le [This section might have to be carried over to Q & A session] Turning now to the work of Ding Q. Lê, Dinh Q. Lê is well-covered by references on the web including a useful biography in Wikipedia to which I have referred. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinh_Q._L%C3%AA. This does not state whether or not he has any Chinese background, unlike Dacchi Dang for whom this was an important source of complexity in his early cultural identification before he fled Vietnam as a boat refugee. we can see that some artists chose to return to Vietnam rather than go on living a diasporic existence overseas. Therefore the hybrid’s analysis of a multi-layered response to an existing reception culture like Dacchi Dang does not apply, and the artist on their return ‘home’ is in contact with a culture they want to regard as their own, and to whose authenticity this desire awards some sovereignty. Dinh Q. Lê was born in 1968 near the Cambodian border and after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 when Lê was ten, his family emigrated to Los Angeles. Thereafter he received both his BFA in 1989 and MFA in 1992 in the USA. He claims Vietnamese woven grass mat folk art as the motivation via his aunt for the woven photographs by which he first became well-known. See Moira Roth, ‘Obdurate history: Dinh Q. Lê, the Vietnam war, photography, and memory’, Art Journal, vol.60, no.2, 2001, 50 for a description of his technique. It was Francesco Bonami who exhibited him at the Italian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 2003, and was the same Biennale which brought the Thai artist Rirkrit Thiravanija to prominence. Bonami had earlier commented on Rirkrit’s first group exhibition in Flash Art for which he was US’ editor. See Flash Art, XXV, no. 170, May-June, 2003, exhibition advertisement, and review by Francesco Bonami. One may see this selection and placement as evidence of a pattern of promoting Asian artists at the international level who had graduated from US’ art schools by critics who were US-based from the early 2000s. Ding Q. Lê problematizes memory and the way this is constructed as well as the way in which major social issues are ignored by state policies. His exhibition at the 5th APT in 2006, which I saw, combined two series of works: Lotus Land which indirectly referred to the congenital deformities caused by Agent Orange though the use of small sculptures the size of children’s toys. Lotus land 1999 in effect memorializes the conjoined twins worshipped in some rural communities Lê visited. See Chanika Svetvilas ‘The Art of War’, Dialogue, Spring-Summer, 1999, 27-28, cited in Roth, 2001, 46. [ill.36] 36 Dinh Q. Lê, Lotusland, 1999, 27 components in fibreglass and wood synthetic polymer paint, purchased QAG 2006, photographed by John Clark. 37a Dinh Q, lê with Tran Quoc Hài et al, The farmers and the helicopters Video as part of linked installation, 2006 37b Tran Quoc Hài, Helicopter, later installed in Brisbane, 2006 He had earlier in 1998 treated the state-suppressed discourse on the genetic effects of Agent Orange by exhibiting for a month in a Vietnamese market a range of clothing and pacifiers made for conjoined twins. Lê had branded these with names of those US corporations that had produced the dioxins scattered over Vietnam. In Brisbane, the toys were shown with an imitation helicopter by the farmer who made it, Tran Quoc Hài, as part of a linked video installation [ill.37a, 37b], and Tran was interviewed in person in Brisbane by Dinh Q. Lê. I remember the combination of small made objects, video and tinplate helicopter as being distinctly uncoordinated and difficult to accept as one piece, but clearly the curators and artist thought the combination would have a cumulative effect. The interest in memory of the part of Dinh Q. Lê is that for him it can never be direct, unlike Dacchi Dang who was sixteen when he left Vietnam as opposed to Lê who had been ten years old. Later on as the APT catalogue cites it was in 2001 that Dinh Q. Lê stated, I am interested in the way nature actively erases both physical evidence as well as our memory of the event. We cannot keep all memories because not all memories are meant for us to keep. The question then is what memories to keep and what to let go of as the way of nature intended. From the essay in the APT V catalogue by the curator José da Silva, ‘Disabled genes and the experience of memory’, in Lynne Sear & Suhanya Raffel, eds., The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery Publishing, 2006, 98, citing Roth, 2001, 44. Of course, Dinh Q. Lê is aware of the role various media play in encoding memories which the subject later thinks to have been his or her own experience. Remembering is via representations and in the late twentieth century these representations were often visual or reinforced by film and TV media, something which diasporic refugees in highly mediated societies like the USA might be supposed to particularly focus on. He quickly remembered…that there had been no helicopters in their region of Vietnam. What Lê remembered from life was, in fact, a scene in the film Apocalypse Now. José da Silva, 2006, citing Karen Irvin, Stages of Memory: the war in Vietnam, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2005. Dinh Q. Lê’s many works include Erasure, 2011, a complex video and photographic installation exhibited at and commissioned by the then Sherman Art Galleries in Sydney, which I saw. [ill.38] 38 Dinh Q. Lê, view of Erasure installation, 2010. This was both an interactive piece involving movement of the audience through the installation and a collection of images which could also be downloaded and printed from a photographic data base in the exhibition, then to be erased one-by-one. They were then to be uploaded to directed web-site. Unfortunately by September 2017 this was only accessible with a hacking warning. [www.erasurearchive.net]. The video work merged with an opera-like soundtrack but without music – the sound of burning timber, crashing waves and a howling gale Pedro De Almeida, ‘Dinh Q. Lê: Erasure’, Art & Australia, vo.49, no.2, Summer 2012, 323. For an overall view of Dinh Q. Lê’s art see also Zoe Butt, ‘Red tape and digital talismans: shaping knowledge beneath surveillance’, in Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King, and Mami Kataoka, Art in the Asia Pacific: Intimate Publics, London: Routledge, 2014, 96-97; C. A. Xuan Mai Ardia, ‘Hollywood, violence and contemporary Vietnam: Dinh Q. Lê – artist profile’, Art Radar, posted 24/07/2015. There is a very insightful conversation between Carolyn Christof-Bakargiev and Dinh Q.Lê in 100 Thoughts no.073, Kassel: documenta und Museum, & Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. The catalogue of Erasure is Dinh Q. Lê Erasure, [including interview by Dinh Q. Lê with Dolla S. Merrilees; Zoe Butt, ‘Archiving fear in the struggle against forgetfulness’], Sydney: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2011. - a very large video image of a burning ‘Western’ sailing ship [actually not real-size but a filmed wooden model blown-up on the screen]. The viewer passed along an intimate walkway through photo memorials of lost souls, hidden because the photographs were turned face down, and seen from a walkway like a yatsuhashi [eight bridges, a wooden plank zig-zag pictured in some Japanese scrolls and seen in some gardens made of stone]. [ill.39a, 39b] 39a Dinh Q. Lê, View of Erasure installation showing wooden walkway, 2010 39b Dinh Q. Lê, View of Erasure video showing burning ship [model], 2010 This would appeal to a wanderer through memories of a history which was not quite the artist’s via the conscious reference to the recent contemporary loss of boat people sunk on their way to Australia. An operatic and therefore melodramatic mise-en-scène, sentimentalizes a drama which was all too tragic for those who underwent it, but might just be a distanciation via the artistic licence required in order to treat it. Certainly the tenor of the artist’s previous work had led the Prince Claus Fund to award the artist a prize a year before the Sherman commission. The Prince Claus Fund website includes the following citation for its award to Dinh Q. Lê in 2010: The Prince Claus Award honours Dinh Q. Lê for his strong creative work exploring different constructions of reality, for providing inspiration and practical opportunities for young artists, and for advancing free thought and contemporary visual expression in a context of indifference and hostility. See http://www.princeclausfund.org/en/library/library/speech-by-dinh-q-le-at-the-inaugural-encounter.html Comparison with prior examples treating this sort of material link it to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) [ill.40] and Turner’s Slave Ship (1840) [ill.41], works whose pictoriality and imagined cries rather than heard operatic sounds also produce a distance from the sheer horror of what is shown and parenthetically experienced. Erasure is a profound and grandiose, but a necessarily provocative work. [not to scale] 40 Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19, oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cms, Louvre, Paris 41 J. M. W.Turner, Slave-ship, 1840, 90.8 x 122.6 cms, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The rhetoric of identification with the displaced and despoiled of the earth appeals to a certain sympathy which privileged audiences can indulge. This reaction may also affect an increased international willingness to accept the art of emigré artists if they can convincingly refer to real historical experiences, preferably ones they have undergone themselves to add authenticity. See, inter alia Caroline Turner and Jen Webb, Art and human rights: contemporary Asian contexts, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. This includes extensive description of a number of artists treating human rights issues including F. X. Harsono and Ding Q. Le examined here. My own research writing was largely completed by 2012. These issues have frequently surfaced in news media, and on ‘refugee’ artists in Australia see Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, ‘Refugee art: a way to face up to ugly truths- and possibly change minds’, The Guardian, 30 July 2016. Khadim Ali mentioned by Sebag-Montefiore, an Afghan refugee artist in Australia, where he has gained a MFA, numerous grants, and became only one of two artist trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is also interviewed by Arjmand Aziz and Ann Proctor, ‘An interview with Khadim Ali’, TAASA Review, vol.26, no.3, September 2017. 18-19. Fictional works direct dealing with Stalinist and the Nazi exterminations are quite well known in Eastern Europe, including Andrej Wajda’s film about the slaughter by the Soviet NKVD of Polish officers and intellectuals, Katyn, 2007. The victims included Wajda’s father. A literary fiction of the Holocaust by a Polish survivor of Auschwitz but deliberately written from the viewpoint of the perpetrators is Zofia Posmysz’s The Passenger from cabin 45, a radio play in 1959, published as a novella, The Passenger in 1962. The opera by Mieczyslaw Weinberg is from 1967-68. Its DVD recording has an introduction by Weinberg’s teacher Shostakovitch, from a Bregenz Festival performance in 2010. As of 2017, I have found no direct English translation apart from the libretto included in this opera box. The tendency to privilege for chiefly North American exhibition or international art curatorial dominated selections the art of those already privileged by overseas art education in USA, Europe or Australia, and who speak English, can sometimes fall into a privileging of the abject: is the art or the artist deprived enough for us the privileged and distanced audience to show sympathy? It is as if the work allows conscience a place to express itself that it might not or would not have had in its home country, rather than now constituting a howling, engulfing audience-memorial to pain which can barely be called art because the horror engulfs any distance from it. Coda As of a kind of coda which hints at other explorations, one can ask if the selected Indonesian and Vietnamese examples treated here handle issues Euramerican curators might for their own ideological reasons want to see taken up, such as gender or class. When they are selected the curatorial inclination may be to treat as a-political what are literary or gender issues or are expressed by artists who for good reasons, including self-preservation, do not directly concern themselves with politics. This may be seen in the work of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook in Thailand, where she makes small ‘p’ political statements about daily living and dying without confronting the political forces she knows would emasculate or destroy her statement. [ill.42] 42 Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, In reinterpreting old landscape we may have to endure repetitions of the same old karma photographic still from a video, 2009 It is also the case with Philippine artist like Roberto Bulatao Feleo, whose work treats colonialism and the heritage of pre-colonial beliefs and ritual customs but avoids explicit left-wing positions even from an ostensibly non-political or mythologising position. [His grandfather was a founder of the Philippines’ Communist Party, and was presumed murdered by the Military Police in 1946. His father was imprisoned by the Marcos regime]. Roberto Bulatao Feleo criticizes local power and stake holders, those of a dis-unified and often morally questionable oligarchy which still rules. In the Philippines there is no unified party of opposition despite centres of cultural and political resistance, so Bulatao’s recourse, short of direct political struggle, is to materialize the suppressed mythological figures of a pre-colonial past, or of a present vibrant with the Rabelaisian discord in the streets. [ill.43a, 43b] 43a Roberto Bulatao Feleo, TauTao 1994, mixed media in chalk and molded sawdust & white glue 240x 150 x 1080 cms. photographed by John Clark. 43b Roberto Bulatao Feleo, Processional “Tao-Taong Aklasang Basi-Ang Hanay ng Ñ”, [Tao-Tao of Basi Revolt -- The Ranks of the Ñ (Ñ having been introduced by the Spanish)] 2015. 47 Negotiating Change in recent Southeast Asian Art © John Clark 2017