/ARTS WEEKLY/SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Globalisation Provokes New Visual Vocabulary

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, May 18 2004 (IPS) - While globalisation keeps transforming the cities of South-east Asia, its influence on the region’s cultural landscape has led to an array of styles that convey how artists from Bangkok to Bandung are grappling with their evolving times.

For one, the innovative visual vocabulary that has taken root in the 10 countries that make up the region has little room for cliches that once passed for art, such as the pastoral scenes with temples, buffaloes and paddy fields.

On the other hand, the artists have found in installations or video art elements that are ideal to convey themes that are to be celebrated or be despondent about, be it on identity, politics or their rapidly dwindling local cultures.

An art exhibition that opened in the Thai capital this month provides a glimpse at the diversity of this trend – and the 60 artists whose works are being showcased are by no means short of humour or a whimsical touch in their endeavours.

Indonesian artist Ade Darmawan’s installation of how materials to make a bomb are so readily available in daily life captures this mood. In a room with mirrors on one end, he had placed five supermarket trolleys containing limes and a mix of easy-to-purchase items essential to assembling an explosive device.

Vietnamese artist Nguyen Dam Thuy’s installation was a commentary on the pressures a developing country feels to give up its cultural moorings in the race towards being ‘developed’ and usher in the icons of globalisation.

In a room that exuded warmth, she had placed five conical hats under which was a canopy made of U.S. dollars and on the walls were oil paintings with broad bands of deep blue and red. The conical hats are commonplace across Vietnam, often worn by farmers in the paddy fields.

Montri Toemsombat’s installation was a celebration of meditation in a world drowned in noise and chaos. This Thai artist had projected on to the walls of a room black-and-white images of a person meditating, accompanied by sounds of deep, relaxed breathing. The floor had alternating squares of sea sand to give it a look of a chessboard.

And Marine Ky, from Cambodia, converted the space in a room to explore a theme central to her identity – an amalgam of many cultures for she grew up a refugee in Paris while her country was at war, and then studied art in Australia.

”Identity is not something that is frozen. It is an accumulation of many experiences,” she explained during an interview. ”My art tries to reflect this rich mixture. But it also deals with the problem I have in Cambodia, not fitting in, being treated like a foreigner.”

Red was the only colour she used in her installation, a deep red. The walls were lined with engravings of abstract patterns encased in a circle and from the roof hung large fishing nets.

Ky sought to evoke many sensations in her work. ”I wanted people to go inside this space and feel claustrophobic,” she said. ”Yet at the same time there is room to move and feel this is a transient space, not permanent.”

For their part, Filipino artists like Alfredo Esquillo are still rooted in the conventional canvas to convey powerful critics of globalisation’s onslaught on the developing world. He achieved that through a painting that depicted four boats, sawn in half, connected by an uneven bridge.

At the heart of this composition in dark, dismal tones was the question of the cultural sacrifices people have to make to belong to the dominant global economic order.

For Jorg Loschmann, curator of the exhibition organised by the Heinrich Boll Foundation of Germany, the Bangkok event is more than a celebration of the artistic diversity spread across South-east Asia. ”What we see here is the new level to which the region’s art has risen. It is comparable with Europe,” said Loschmann.

Most striking to him was the confidence with which the artists are expressing themselves with forms that have their origins in the West. ”This comes out in the aesthetic sense; the works have content, and a good idea and good aesthetic resolution,” he told IPS.

Such was not the case a decade ago, says Thai curator Gridthiya Jaweewong. ”You got the feeling then that the artists were uncertain and shy about forms that went beyond the canvas and the two-dimensional view it offered.”

But with time – and effort – a confident aesthetic language has evolved, she explained. ”The current exhibition shows how bold, daring and determined the artists are to move beyond the canvas to installations, video art and performance art.”

Yet not all artists across this region have stepped into this new terrain. That unevenness, which is also mirrored in the exhibition, tells another story – about the varying pace of globalisation within each South-east Asian nation.

Communist-ruled Laos, for instance, still retains an old-world charm and barely has the trappings of the global culture when compared with its Singapore, which represents the pinnacle of globalisation in the region.

For Loschmann, such differences offers depth to the picture of art that mirrors the region: ”The contradictions come out clearly. You get the feeling of how heterogeneous South-east Asian culture is.”

Consequently, paintings still have an important place, adds Loschmann, referring to works he chose from Burma and Laos for the exhibition. ”One of the most interesting works of art was a painting from the Philippines.”