Intermediality. Inter-Asia, Decoloniality

Intermediality is usually understood as an exchange between different artistic media—in the examples cited above, between painting and architecture—and sometimes even as an effacement of the distinctions between those different media. Gonzaga notes that “intermediality presupposes the dialogue between at least two disparate media modalities” thereby functioning, like intertextuality, to create “a larger network of meaning” (Reference Gonzaga2016: 93). For instance, to study paintings in relation to architecture is to become sensible to a wider world of analysis and appreciation, extending from two into three dimensions, and traversing into several complex discourses.

The concept of intermediality facilitates this elaboration and extension, more than the notion of subject matter. For instance, architecture, when conceived simply as a painting’s subject matter, is subservient or secondary to the painting; by contrast, intermediality recasts this exchange in more generative terms by understanding the painting and the architecture to both be active in a process of dialogue. In this way, intermediality can resist the imagined hierarchy of the arts, central in canonical Western art-historical thought, whereby certain genres of painting are imagined as superior art forms.Footnote ⁴ By sidestepping this Western hierarchy, intermediality may be conducive to other ways of understanding and valuing the arts, thereby decolonizing knowledge. I will return to this idea below.

Because intermediality engenders an enlargement and complication of both meanings and discourses surrounding art, the concept lends itself to revisionist reappraisals of accepted norms of historical narrative, including about art’s histories. Noting this tendency toward heterodox rethinking, Chairat Polmuk and Eric Goh write that they “approach intermediality as both a lens for understanding Southeast Asia’s dynamic cultural landscapes and a critical framework for re-examining the region’s intertwined artistic histories and practices” (Reference Polmuk and Goh2025, 3). In this article, I aim to contribute toward this reassessment, which I understand to be always ongoing and dynamic, not static or final.

Being predicated on the possibility of exchange, intermediality is related to other concepts articulated with the prefix inter-, including the international and the inter-Asia, among others. The scholar and artist Mieke Bal observes that “inter- means between. It denotes a willingness to exchange on an equal basis … [as in] interdiscursive, intermedial, international, and intertemporal perspective” (Reference Bal and Leitch2017: 179). Notably, Bal’s conception of intermediality explicitly resists a hierarchy of importance within the exchange between art forms as she stresses the “equal basis” of the intermedial interplay. Moreover, Bal’s annotation also affirms the interstitial nature of the intermedial. In a similar vein, the art historian and curator Patrick D. Flores observes that the idea of the international “posits an inherent relationality, a certain between-ness” (Reference Flores2014: 175).

Inter-Asia, as a concept describing multidirectional interactions between different agents within global Asias (often, although not necessarily international), is also predicated on exchange. In this article, by focusing on the contributions of artists including Suzuki and Tô Ngọc Vân to Cambodia’s art histories, my inter-Asia perspective decentres the contributions of Western and colonial artists. My work builds on prior studies of inter-Asia contributions to Southeast Asian art, such as Werner Kraus’s (Reference Kraus2005) study of 19^th-century Chinese painter Hou Qua, who worked with the Javanese painter Raden Saleh, among many others. In this way, I follow Flores’s invitation to imagine “a truly worldly Southeast Asia … one that does not entirely arise from the interaction with the West, which is rightly though not reductively cast as extrinsic and extractive” (Reference Flores2025, 50). I argue that an intermedial interplay between artforms, like an inter-Asia exchange between people and places within the region, is part of what makes Southeast Asia “truly worldly.”

Yet unlike my usage of intermediality, the concept of inter-Asia does not necessarily involve equality in exchange. For instance, while both Tô and Suzuki’s presence in Cambodia are examples of inter-Asia interaction, nevertheless there remains a stark power imbalance between them and their Cambodian pupils. Although Tô travelled from a neighbouring colony, within the colonial hierarchy of French Indochina he enjoyed considerably greater authority for both ethnic and class reasons. Even more starkly, Suzuki first visited Cambodia as part of a colonial occupying force. Alongside these differences in political and symbolic power, there are also economic and material disparities within global Asias that condition inter-Asia exchanges. The widely cited scholar of inter-Asia studies Kuan-Hsing Chen has noted “the unequal distribution of wealth between first- and third-world Asian countries” (Reference Chen2010: 213). Moreover, sites like Cambodia may be seen to be always already inter-Asia in their internal divisions and disparities, for example, the incorporation of minoritised groups such as Cham and Indigenous peoples into dominant national narratives. Thus, the “inter” in inter-Asia—unlike in intermedial—does not necessarily imply parity between parties.

While acknowledging that asymmetrical power relations endure in inter-Asia exchanges, my focus on inter-Asia intermediality is decolonial in its aspiration to rethink Southeast Asia’s art histories in ways that loosen their ties to colonial structures of knowledge. These include the separation—and hierarchisation—of different artistic media (which is, after all, an invention of the West), and also the tendency to emphasise the role of Western artists in the development of modern art. Like the historian Faris Joraimi, I contend that for Southeast Asia, “an important step in ‘decolonising our minds’ is decolonising our histories and the frames we use to understand them” (Reference Joraimi, Sa’at, Joraimi and Siew-Min2021: 139). Attending to intermedial and inter-Asia exchanges, in place of medium-specific histories or narratives that centre interactions with the West, may be one modest contribution to this ongoing challenge.

Tô Ngọc Vân, Suzuki Shigenari, Intermedial Reflexivity

Tô Ngọc Vân’s intermedial translations of architecture and sculpture into paint, described above, are sharply at odds with earlier portrayals of Angkor by French colonial artists such as Louis Delaporte (1842–1925), who stressed (and frequently exaggerated) the monumental scale of the temples, making compositions with a distinctly more distanced viewpoint (Figure 3). Delaporte’s illustrations, which often depict Angkorean temples in their entirety, exemplify a colonial conflation of seeing with knowing and possessing. Tô’s paintings, by contrast, offer partial glimpses and fragmented impressions which suggest fleeting encounters rather than lasting control. This difference is unsurprising: Nora A. Taylor (Reference Taylor2004: 47) notes that Tô “is considered by Vietnamese art historians to be the father of revolutionary painting,” and was a renowned anticolonial activist, who died from wounds sustained while fighting the French in the battle of Dien Bien Phu (52).

Figure 3.

Louis Delaporte. Ruines du Bayon, monument aux 42 tours (Ruins of the Bayon, Monument of 42 Towers). 1873. Two tone lithograph on paper, 44 x 67 cm. Gift of John and Pauline Foo. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board, Singapore.

With these political and biographical contexts in mind, the artist’s intermedial depictions of Cambodian temples may be understood as a rejection of prevailing French representations, which were made to satisfy French desires. Chen (Reference Chen2021: 137) argues that through a “project of translation” including Henri Mouhot’s (1826–1861) writings and Delaporte’s work, “France emphasised its role of safeguarding and protecting the temples at Angkor as well as introducing Cambodia’s cultural heritage to the West.”Footnote ⁵ Moreover, Tô’s inter-Asia perspective—as a Hanoian visiting Siem Reap while living in Phnom Penh—meant that he would have had a lifelong familiarity with premodern Hindu-Buddhist architecture in Southeast Asia. Whereas Delaporte’s peers and predecessors (extractive and exoticizing French colonial “explorers” in the 19^th century) claimed to have “discovered splendid ruins” and judged them “nearly perfect” (Belinfante Reference Belinfante1864: 24) by contrast, Tô in the early 20^th century came to Cambodia with the confidence to adopt varying aesthetic approaches to different temples, according to his subjective tastes.

The inter-Asia intermediality initiated by Tô Ngọc Vân’s paintings from the 1930s proved to be a tenacious tendency during the formative decades of modern “Cambodian art.” The “Japanese artist” Suzuki Shigenari (1901–c. 1960s), who trained in Tokyo and Paris before moving to Phnom Penh less than a decade after Tô had left, also made intermedial paintings of modestly scaled religious structures and vernacular housing in Cambodia during the 1940s and 1950s, including depictions of Wat Phnom (Figure 4) and attap-roofed huts on stilts (Figure 5).Footnote ⁶ These paintings not only make architecture their subject matter; they also derive their aesthetic impact from their intermedial citation pointing from one art form to another. Like Tô, Suzuki’s approach to intermediality was tempered by his inter-Asia perspective, which seems to have enabled a quiet curiosity about aspects of Cambodian culture which many French colonial artists had overlooked. Seen together, works by Tô and Suzuki made in Cambodia between the 1930s and the 1950s can be understood to express what Chung (Reference Chung2020: 362) has called a “shared social goal” using an intermedial approach to “the media ecology.” Their works seem to share an impetus to displace or decentre European colonial depictions of Cambodia, while drawing inspiration from diverse forms of art and culture, including architecture.

Figure 4.

Suzuki Shigenari. Wat Phnom. 1953. Watercolour on paper. Private collection. Displayed at SAR, Museum of Modern Art, Siem Reap.

Figure 5.

Suzuki Shigenari. Not Titled (Stilted houses). 1954. Watercolor on paper. Collection of Mary Ann and Jimmy Chua, Singapore.

Works by Tô, Suzuki, and other migrant artists from Southeast and East Asia working in Phnom Penh between the 1930s and the 1950s laid a basis for a later generation of “Cambodian artists” to make artworks which are flamboyantly deliberate in their intermediality. Chung (Reference Chung2020: 337) proposes the term “intermedial reflexivity” to describe an artwork or cultural object which “self-consciously references another medium” and in which that reflexive reference “shapes the composition.” Intermedially reflexive “Cambodian artists” active between the late 1950s and early 1970s include practitioners working in several different media. Painters such as Nhek Dim (1934–78) and Sam Yoeun (1933–c. 1970) often depicted dancers and musicians. Filmmakers such as Ly Bun Yim (1942—) translated mythological literature into cinematic spectacle (Chou Reference Chou2011), while Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) depicted modern architecture and even paintings of Angkor by Nhek Dim within his films (Nelson Reference Nelson, Whiteman, Abdullah, Low and Scott2018: 24–25). Musicians such as Sinn Sisamouth (1933–1976) and Ros Sereysothea (1948–1977), sang about modern painters, and even collaborated with Nhek Dim in the writing of lyrics (Nelson Reference Nelson, Whiteman, Abdullah, Low and Scott2018). More recently, photographers such as Khvay Samnang (1982—) and Kim Hak (1981—) have repeatedly portrayed diverse forms of visual and material culture, including architecture, as well as (in Samnang’s case) the performing arts (Bilbao Reference Bilbao2023: 19–22; Kim Reference Kim2022). These artists are among the most celebrated in modern and contemporary Cambodia; despite their differing media, all demonstrate an assiduous commitment to what Chung (Reference Chung2020: 337) terms “intermedial reflexivity.” Moreover, several of these figures also experienced pivotal inter-Asia encounters, as in Nhek Dim’s sojourn to the Philippines in 1957, or Sinn Sisamouth’s recordings done in Hong Kong during the 1960s, or Khvay Samnang’s residencies in Japan in 2009 and 2011. In these ways, these “Cambodian artists” were following a path first cleared by Tô Ngọc Vân and Suzuki Shigenari during their time in Phnom Penh over the preceding decades.

Tô Ngọc Vân and Suzuki Shigenari are central to the beginnings of modern art in Cambodia. Their intermedial and inter-Asia contributions are documented in archives and artworks, but have been under-examined by scholars whose accounts of the development of modern art in Cambodia—as elsewhere in Southeast Asia—have typically focused on interactions between European colonial and local figures, rather than between artists from different sites across Asia. For example, important prior studies have shown that in Hanoi, French colonial authorities encouraged “Vietnamese artists” to adopt modern, Western techniques and develop novel forms of art (Taylor Reference Taylor2004: 23–41), whereas in Phnom Penh, innovation was mostly forbidden for “Cambodian artists” who were instead required by the French administration to study and replicate “traditional” forms (Muan Reference Muan2001: 72–183). These radically divergent views were instituted at two very different schools: the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (EBAI: School of Fine Arts of Indochina), established in 1920 in Hanoi, and the École des Arts Cambodgiens (School of Cambodian Arts), established in 1918 in Phnom Penh. The histories of these institutions have been well-studied (Abbe Reference Abbe2014) and insightfully compared (Herbelin Reference Herbelin2011). These accounts have demonstrated the fraught negotiations between colonised and coloniser, and their impact on the development of modern art.

My work here builds on and departs from that foundational scholarship, by setting aside interactions between coloniser and colonised, and instead focusing on inter-Asia encounters that decentre European artists, as well as intermedial impulses that embed a decolonial attitude in painterly form. I will show that it was Tô Ngọc Vân and Suzuki Shigenari who first taught modern art techniques in Cambodia, and that they prized the ability of paintings to borrow creative energies from other artistic forms. I will thereby contend that modern “Cambodian art” has intermedial and inter-Asia origins.

Origin Stories of Modern Art in Asia

Origin stories and questions concerning the early development of modern art have become quite unfashionable in Art History. This shift is concurrent with the discipline’s global turn, including its increased attention to modern and contemporary art in Asia. An apparent reluctance to narrate histories of the beginnings of modern art in global Asias may be understood as part of a larger rejection of Art History’s erstwhile devotion to the nation-state. Addressing the rise of global art histories, Parul Dave Mukherji (Reference Mukherji2014: 151) affirms that the “art history that emerged out of European nationalism in the nineteenth century has lost its original job description.” In a related vein, Christopher S. Wood (Reference Wood2016/17: 290–291) has noted that “influence is no longer a favoured concept in the toolbox of the art historian or art critic,” for a variety of reasons, including a turn away from biographical approaches leading to a reluctance to consider artists’ own accounts of their work. It is worth noting that Art History’s turn away from origin and influence sets the discipline apart from adjacent fields such as cinema history, in which the concept of intermediality has been used “to point to the need to historicise… the possibilities of a new medium or audio-visual tool, in their period of emergence” including its interactions with older media (Ingawanij Reference Ingawanij2018: 36).

Along with a turn away from nation-centred and biography-driven narratives, there has also been a shift away from chronological accounts toward a more heterochronic approach to art histories, including those written in, on, and for Asias. Most foundational accounts of national art histories in the region written in the 1990s and 2000s had been centrally concerned with what Apinan Poshyananda (Reference Poshyananda1992: xxii), writing about Thailand, called the “genealogy” of modernism, and the way in which “the word ‘modern’ … began to take on a special connotation” (28–29). By contrast, many scholars in the 2020s are instead more attuned to what Việt Lê (Reference Lê2021: 185), writing about Vietnam and Cambodia, calls “circles of association” that defy “linear time and narrative.” This shift in discourse on Southeast Asia is consistent with the broader appeal, as identified by Georges Didi-Huberman (Reference Didi-Huberman2023: 280), of Walter Benjamin’s “notion of the origin as ‘an eddy in the stream of becoming’—and not as the root of all things—[which] burst apart all prejudices concerning time.”

Thus, the turn toward nonlinear narratives of art is not only a response to the nationalism that until recently had shaped Western art-historical discourse, as noted above, but also to the view (which Benjamin already rejected in the 1920s, but which endured elsewhere) that art’s history had embodied a kind of “progress” which was unidirectional, teleological, exclusionary, and white. The infamous “torpedo” diagrams that visualise these epistemically violent yet canonical ideas—drawn in the 1930s by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. as the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art—have been roundly discredited and rightly discarded, even if scholars have also pointed out that they represent ideas which were always more contradictory and messy than prevailing myths have suggested (Zalman Reference Zalman2022). By contrast, Geeta Kapur’s (Reference Kapur2000: xiii) sense of Asian modernities as having a “contestatory nature” (as distinct from “a respectable lineage” tied to “civilisational values”) has been widely influential on scholars of modern and contemporary art in global Asias. Saloni Mathur (Reference Mathur2019: 116), for example, praises Kapur’s work as “resolutely antichronological and self-consciously antiteleological.” This is a defiant corrective to Barr’s “torpedo,” to be sure; it also elicits a new set of challenges and questions.

Where does the rejection of linear and progressivist narratives leave us when we wish to study the emergence of modern art in Asia? How can we construct a story about modern art’s beginnings which resists teleology, yet remains nevertheless historical? How can transnational contributions to a nation’s art history be accounted for? I propose a focus on intermedial inter-Asia as one option to respond to such challenges.

Accounts of early developments in modern art in Asia often occupy a position somewhere on a spectrum between, at one extreme, an over-investment in the formative role of both the nation and the colonial encounter, and at the other extreme, an excessively general or pluralised sense of multidirectional interactions. The former strategy (epitomised in the work of John Clark, a specialist in Asian art histories) may risk discounting inter-Asia encounters and intermedial cross-pollination between different artforms, because of its focus on “transfer” from the North and West to Asia (Clark Reference Clark1998: 49–69). The latter strategy (epitomised in the work of Christian Kravagna, a proponent of global art histories) may tend to downplay the need for specialist knowledge, including primary research in Asian archives, and may risk disregarding difference and distinctiveness in the pursuit of “inclusion, and plurality” (Kravagna Reference Kravagna2022: 11). Both approaches usually study “fine arts” alone, largely in isolation from other cultural forms; this mindset may limit the imaginative potentials of analysis, and may be rooted in colonial epistemologies and attitudes about different art forms.

John Clark’s theorisation of the origins of modern art in Asia has been crucial to the development of the field, yet has also been limited by its focus on interactions between “Asian artists” with the art of the North and West. Clark (Reference Clark1998: 49) proposes that the origins of modern art in Asia lie in what he calls the “transfer” of “artworks, their styles and techniques, and their artists; their secondary mediators such as critics and art merchants; their elite; and variously broad, mass publics and so on.” This concept has been invaluable for its insistence on the agency of artists in Asia. Clark (Reference Clark1998: 49) insightfully observes that the “art culture that receives [ie, in Asia] does a great deal more than simply accept,” as “reception is above all governed by the receiving art culture’s demand for a specific art style at a given epoch.” This view privileges Asian desires, tastes, and demands over those in the North and West. Yet Clark (Reference Clark1998: 49) also insists that “modernity in all Asian art cultures has developed out of contact with that of Euramerica.” This focus on “transfer” from the North and West to Asia—even while recognizing the primacy of Asia within that encounter—risks downplaying or overlooking other exchanges of artistic techniques and ideas that exceed the nation-state, or exclude the North and the West. Clark’s model of “transfer” may be insufficiently attentive to intermedial shifts between different artistic forms and to inter-Asian exchanges. For instance, this model may be ill-equipped to account for the works made by Tô Ngọc Vân and Suzuki Shigenari in Cambodia.

More recent theories of the development of modern art offer a more pluri-centred view, but come with other limitations. Kravagna (Reference Kravagna2022: 3), for his part, proposes that “encounters between artists, authors, and other stakeholders of various origins and different forms of artistic and intellectual socialisation, taking place all around the world – in the (former) colonies and in the Western metropolitan centres – gave rise to new and alternative forms of modern art.” Calling this “transmodernism,” Kravagna emphasises plural “transcultural relationships” some of which do not involve the North or West at all, as in the case of artistic exchanges between India and Japan. More than Clark, Kravagna (Reference Kravagna2022: 3) stresses the multidirectional nature of these relationships, arguing that “processes of exchange, collaboration, and the forming of alliances resulted in the mutual transformation of artistic concepts and ideas of aesthetics.” While this helpfully expands the range of factors shaping the emergence and development of modern art, it may tend toward being overly broad, perhaps even unspecialised. Kravagna’s approach may therefore risk being insufficiently attentive to the details and specificities of intra-regional interaction, or the poetics of crossings between different artistic media. Discussing intercultural intermediality, another scholar has eloquently described a “churning taking place in the in-between spaces” (Singh Reference Singh and Singh2024: 1).

This interstitial, intermedial and intercultural “churning” may re-energise scholarship on the origins of modern art in Asias, building on but also departing from models such as those developed by Clark and Kravagna.

Tô Ngọc Vân and Suzuki Shigenari: The Beginnings of Modern Art Education in Cambodia

As well as being probably the first “Asian artist” to render Angkor in oil on canvas, as noted above, Tô Ngọc Vân was also the first person to teach modern, Western forms of observational drawing (as professeur de dessin) in Cambodia, at Phnom Penh’s premier school, the Lycée Sisowath, from 1935 to 1938.Footnote ⁷ Although his curriculum has not survived, it is safe to assume that Tô taught some version of representational drawing and/or painting, from life. It is known that he had studied and taught these skills at Hanoi’s École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, where he was the first Vietnamese member of faculty, and later president (Rawanchaikul Reference Rawanchaikul, Ushiroshoji and Rawanchaikul1997: 191). Moreover, he would of course have had no education in Khmer kbach ornamental designs, or any of the other “traditional” forms being taught at the School of Cambodian Arts under the leadership of its founding director, the artist George Groslier (1887–1945).

While the teaching of modern, Western forms of observation drawing was becoming commonplace in other parts of Southeast Asia by the 1930s, in Cambodia, Tô was an outlier, and his work was quite at odds with Groslier’s anti-modernizing agenda.Footnote ⁸ The pioneering historian of modern “Cambodian art,” Ingrid Muan (Reference Muan2001: 15–71) notes that Groslier saw the “Cambodian arts” as in “turmoil” caused by “our [that is, French] appearance on these shores,” and as a result embarked on a paternalistic quest to “rescue” the “traditions” in order that Cambodians might “refind their lost prestige.” This was the impetus for his establishment of the School of Cambodian Arts. There, as Muan (Reference Muan2001: 74) evocatively describes it, Groslier insisted that “only ‘local or traditional tools and materials’ were to be used and ‘only the known rules of the ancestors’ were to be ‘applied’: thus training was to return to the way it was ‘in Cambodia before the arrival of the French.’” Unsurprisingly, as Muan (Reference Muan2001: 72–183) carefully documents, these “rules” intended to “preserve” and “rescue” ancient “traditions” were unevenly applied, especially when the French administration required certain innovations in order to make commodifiable objects more appealing to small but profitable European markets. Nevertheless, the conservative, anti-modernizing agenda—in rhetoric, as well as often in actual curriculum—of the School of Cambodian Arts is markedly at odds with the art school established by the French authorities in Hanoi.

Muan’s (Reference Muan2001: 266–267) foundational and now canonical narrative about the emergence of modern art techniques such as drawing and painting from life—forbidden under Groslier—is that they “arrived” at the School of Cambodian Arts with the “arrival” of Suzuki Shigenari, who began teaching at the School of Cambodian Arts “by the late 1940s.” Suzuki had been in Phnom Penh during the war, and then spent time in Saigon before returning to take up his teaching position.Footnote ⁹ Most of the information Muan recounts regarding Suzuki is drawn from her interviews and conversations with an older generation of artists who had studied under Suzuki. Muan (Reference Muan2001: 267) conducted these interviews and conversations from 1997 to 2001;Footnote ¹⁰ regrettably all have since either fallen ill or passed away, and I have not been able to speak directly with any of Suzuki’s former students. I have, however, located additional information about Suzuki in various archives, some of which Muan also consulted. According to one document, Suzuki’s given name was Shigenari, he was married, and he was paid a salary equivalent to $3265, which was almost double that of the next-highest paid Cambodian instructor, and three times as much as the average wage paid to Cambodian instructors.Footnote ¹¹ This disparity in wages was common during the Protectorate, with French officials and educators paid much more than their Vietnamese counterparts, who were in turn paid more than most of the Cambodians employed in civil service.Footnote ¹² Japanese records show that Suzuki studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts, in March 1928 producing a self-portrait held in that institution’s collection.Footnote ¹³ After completing his studies in Tokyo, Suzuki travelled to Paris. The artist is mentioned in a 1929 edition of Paris Shujo, a weekly newsletter published in Japanese in the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁴ While brief, the article is illuminating. It confirms that Suzuki was a student in Paris in 1929. He therefore must have been aged in his mid-thirties at least when he arrived in Phnom Penh, and probably older. It further suggests that he was probably in France at the time of the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris, an event of unprecedented spectacle as well as controversy, at which parts of Angkor Wat were “reconstituted” in life-size, and at which Vietnamese anti-colonial demonstrators were matched by a Surrealist counter-exposition (Norindr Reference Norindr1996: 24–28; 33–51).

The emergence of modern art can also be reframed not as an “arrival” to be attributed to Suzuki alone, but rather as a cumulative process driven by intermedial and inter-Asia impulses and encounters. We have already seen that Suzuki began teaching modern art techniques in Phnom Penh a decade after Tô Ngọc Vân. Moreover, as Muan notes, one reason why Suzuki was permitted to stay on in Cambodia even after the end of the Japanese occupation during World War II—a relatively unusual situation—was because he was, in the words of King Sihanouk, “Asian like us” (Muan Reference Muan2005: 22). This points to the inter-Asia appeal of Suzuki, perhaps like Tô before him. It is striking that this inter-Asia appeal seems to have outweighed any sense of animosity Cambodians may have felt towards Tô, because he was from Vietnam (a nation with which Cambodia had longstanding tensions), or towards Suzuki, because he had been part of the Japanese occupation. Barker (Reference Barker2017: 202) notes “despite the fact that cultural industries came totally under Japanese control from 1942 to 1945, the period is seen positively by Indonesian nationalists for the impact it had on the subsequent emergence of an Indonesian national cinema after 1950.” Moreover, Barker (Reference Barker2017: 207) traces the biography of a Japanese filmmaker who was able to remain in Indonesia even after the end of the occupation and the declaration of national independence. This suggests that despite the destruction and violence of the wartime period, there were also other, more positive legacies in the development of the arts as enabled by inter-Asia encounters.

Moreover, there is strong evidence that Suzuki’s focus on intermedial depictions of architecture was important to his appeal to his Cambodian students, such as Nhek Dim. One of Suzuki’s paintings depicting Srah Srang (a baray or reservoir from the Angkorean period), done in the 1940s, was copied by Nhek Dim in 1975, over two decades after he graduated from Suzuki’s classes at the School of Cambodian Arts. The two paintings are nearly identical not only in their subject matter—depicting the sculptures of guardian lions, nagas, and garudas that adorn that landing platform on the reservoir’s western side—but also in their composition and vantage point.Footnote ¹⁵ We can safely assume that Nhek Dim’s later painting was made either from memory or from observation of Suzuki’s work, since by 1975 travel from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap was largely impossible, given the escalating civil war. Muan (Reference Muan2001: 268) recorded Suzuki’s work as located in the King’s residence in the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. It is possible that Nhek Dim viewed the work there, or that he had made a copy of it.

Although Nhek Dim did make several other paintings depicting Angkorean temples, it was for his scenes of daily life that he won most acclaim (Nelson Reference Nelson, Whiteman, Abdullah, Low and Scott2018: 28), and these too demonstrate a debt to Suzuki in their intermedial impulses and in aspects of their technique. This is seen, for instance, in Village Scene (1960) (Figure 6), a painting which was exhibited in Phnom Penh in 1961 and subsequently reproduced in a magazine and calendar printed by the United States Information Service.Footnote ¹⁶ The painting centres on a figure holding a distinctive kind of clay vessel, known in Khmer as chhnang. Nhek Dim’s focus on vernacular pottery, rather than royal temples, is another example of intermediality which is consistent with Suzuki’s sustained interest in domestic architecture, as seen in his 1954 watercolour, discussed above (Figure 5). Although housing is not the primary subject matter of Nhek Dim’s work, in Village Scene, he draws attention to the person holding the chhnang pot by positioning the figure in front of a hut, which has a framing effect within the composition. Moreover, the artist’s treatment of the sky—in which the white clouds are equally prominent as the blue sky—resembles Suzuki’s. The latter artist renders the clouds using an opaque white pigment, rather than with the white of the paper, in a manner typical of the gansai or gouache watercolour technique. Nhek Dim’s transposition of this technique to oil on canvas reflects his inter-Asia education under Suzuki’s tutelage, while his emphasis on pottery and vernacular housing exemplifies his intermedial approach, pointing from one artform (painting) to other artforms (including crafts and architecture).

Figure 6.

Nhek Dim. Village Scene. 1960. Oil on canvas, 55 x 75.5cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board, Singapore.

While Tô Ngọc Vân and Suzuki Shigenari were the first to teach modern art techniques in Cambodia, the intermedial citations of both royal and vernacular architecture, which they encouraged, are also found in mural paintings made in the late 1930s, several hundred kilometres from Phnom Penh. Thompson (Reference Thompson2003: 25-30) discusses the depiction of Angkor Wat as well as the Royal Palace in mural paintings done in 1939 at Vat Angkor Reac Borei, a pagoda located near the town of Preah Trapeang (Tra Vinh) in southern Vietnam, an area also known as Kampuchea Krom or “lower Cambodia” because of its historical links to the Khmer empire. It is highly unlikely that the painter of these murals would have had any contact with Tô Ngọc Vân (and they predate Suzuki’s arrival in Cambodia), so their intermediality must be understood as having other origins, or as belonging to another trajectory of modern “Cambodian art.”

Buddhist mural paintings, like other forms of religious art made outside of art schools or other modern institutions, are often set aside from histories of modern “Asian art.” Vera Mey (Reference Mey2023: 73) argues that Buddhist mural paintings are “a dimension to the story of modern art in Cambodia that [have] not been adequately looked at” and that focusing on these materials “produces a challenge to the framing of modern art” including the limitations of usual understandings of both “the modern” and “art.” Scholarship on Buddhist mural paintings is often quite separate from scholarship on “modern art” in Cambodia. Mey (Reference Mey2023: 212) further observes that “scholarship often places a sharp dichotomy between the rural and the urban in modern Cambodia.” While both Tô and Suzuki travelled to rural areas and depicted them in their works, both artists lived and worked in Phnom Penh, and thus the impact of their intermedial inter-Asia approach may have been largely limited to urban settings. Examining parallel trajectories of intermediality in Buddhist mural paintings would be a rewarding area for further study in future.

Intermedial Reflexivity in “Cambodian Art”

If paintings by Tô Ngọc Vân and Suzuki Shigenari initiated inter-Asia intermedial citations in “Cambodian art” during the 1930s and 1940s, it was “Cambodian artists” who would extend the intermedial reflexivity of their works during the 1950s and 1960s. Chung (Reference Chung2020: 337), who developed the concept of intermedial reflexivity in his discussion of postwar Korea, observes “the recurrence of such reflexive relationships across multiple media during this period as they tracked forms of everyday life, organised around and gravitating towards the changing urban streets.” In Cambodia, intermedial reflexivity is also recurrent across multiple media, but rather than focusing on the portrayal of everyday life, many artists chose to make other artists the subject of their works. Their works could be considered “citational paintings” (Nelson Reference Nelson2023). They may even be understood as a contribution to “artistic art histories” (Nelson Reference Nelson2026).

This intermedial reflexivity can be understood in two ways. First, it reflects the always already expansive understanding of “art” in the Cambodian language. The Khmer word silpa, which is Indic in origin, can refer to almost any kind of art, including works made by painters, dancers, musicians, performers, and so on. This capacious quality of vernacular terms for “art” is found in many Southeast Asian languages (Chotpradit et al. Reference Chotpradit2018). A receptiveness to or tendency toward intermediality is one obvious effect of this linguistic phenomenon. Second, the intermedial reflexivity of “Cambodian artists” choosing to portray artists working in other media—particularly during the years following national independence, achieved in 1953—can also be understood as a decolonial reclaiming of the agency of artists in representing their culture and nation. Under French rule, “Cambodian artists” had often been called on to play this role. Dancers and musicians entertained the French public during Colonial Expositions throughout the early 20^th century (Edwards Reference Edwards2007: 39). In the early years of independence, performing artists served as cultural ambassadors within the Global South, such as in the Afro Asia Conference held in Bandung in 1955 (Wilcox Reference Wilcox2017). Visual artists during this period often chose to portray performing artists in works intended for international circulation and display, such as in biennales or other large-scale exhibitions bringing artists together.

Suzuki’s student Sam Yoeun, for instance, repeatedly depicted musicians in his works, and his paintings borrow from the energy and dynamism of the sonic arts while also dramatizing the relationship between performer and audience. This is seen most clearly in La musique populaire (Popular [or Folk] Music) (1959) (Figure 7), a work which was exhibited in the 1959 Biennale de Paris (and listed in the catalogue for that exhibition, and illustrated in its archives), and which is the only known surviving painting by Sam done with oil on canvas. The painting displays striking “intermedial reflexivity” by making musicians the subject of the painting. Near the middle of the image, just to the right of centre, a moustachioed man playing a two-stringed fiddle known as a trou ou looks directly at the painter, confidently meeting the viewer’s gaze. It is as if the musician is insisting on his agency and subjectivity as a performer, even as if he is performing within the space of the painting. His directness and self-assurance is a stark contrast to the subjugated musicians and dancers who had been brought to France for Colonial Expositions in prior decades. To the right of the man, another figure plays the flute or khloy, with both eyes closed in intense concentration. Here, it is as if the immersive quality of musical performance is being transferred to the canvas. Of the eleven musicians depicted in Sam’s painting, eight are looking in different directions, suggesting the polyphony of the ensemble, in which different instruments complement each other. The tight framing of the composition, in which several figures are partially cropped out of view, ensures that almost the entire picture plane is filled with musicians and their instruments. This creates a density in the painting which intermedially echoes the density of most popular music in Cambodia. There are few moments of silence in this music, just as there are few areas of unfilled space on Sam’s canvas. The sense of richly resonating intensity is heightened by the predominance of orange-reds and cerulean blues in the painting: the two hues complement each other harmoniously.

Figure 7.

Sam Yoeun. La musique populaire (Popular [or Folk] Music). 1959. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81cm. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

A comparable chromatic musicality appears in another of Sam Yoeun’s paintings, made the following year. Titled Männer mit Trommeln (Men with Drums) (1960) (Figure 8), the watercolour work depicts three figures holding drums, likely of a kind known as skor daey. Although the exhibition history of this work is unknown, the painting was presented as a gift to the East German artist Lea Grundig (1906–1977), along with several prints, when Grundig invited Sam Yoeun to East Germany to join the Intergrafik exhibition in 1967.Footnote ¹⁷ This suggests that—as with Sam’s painting made for the Biennale de Paris—the artist was drawn to depictions of performers as a suitable subject for both representing and enacting intercultural exchange, including at international exhibitions held during the independence era. The three figures depicted in the painting are dressed in varying shades of clothing, yet they are decisively united by a vibrantly saturated field of sharply contrasting cobalt blue and rose pink, which surrounds them on the page. The colours are rendered in alternating wavy lines, a loaded brush confidently applying a wet-on-wet technique to maximise the chromatic impact. As a result, the pink and blue appear to radiate from the three musicians and to resound with a percussive rhythm. As with La musique populaire, the vibrant colours and crowded composition densely fill the picture plane, leaving very little empty space. This abundant visual density, which implies a musical fullness, underscores the intermedial intensity of the painting.

Figure 8.

Sam Yoeun. Männer mit Trommeln (Men with Drums). 1960. Watercolor on paper, 49.9 x 32.5 cm. Gift of Dr Maria Heiner, Dresden, Germany. Collection of National Gallery Singapore. Image courtesy of National Heritage Board, Singapore.

Noting a similar intermedial alignment between sonic richness and compositional fullness elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Rod Paras-Perez (Reference Paras-Perez1994: 67) observes that “gamelan music is highly textured and insistent on filling up every silence or space—with sound” just as many postwar painters across the region made works with an “insistent filling up of space” (70–71). For Paras-Perez (Reference Paras-Perez1994: 67), this sonic and visual fullness may amount to a distinctly Southeast Asian “sensibility” characterised by “the value attached to the fullness of things.” It is significant that this sensibility is cast in regional rather than national terms—it is inter-Asia—and that it is observable in visual art and music, as well as in village festivals and even vernacular home decorations: it is intermedial. Paras-Perez’s article is also noteworthy for being among the earliest regional discussions of Southeast Asia’s art, following T. K. Sabapathy’s (Reference Sabapathy, Sabapathy and Flores2023[Reference Sabapathy, Sabapathy and Flores1982]: 74) pioneering call for “plausible, generalised accounts of modern art practices in Southeast Asia.” Paras-Perez (Reference Paras-Perez1994: 66) is self-conscious in his critique of artists in the region working “with one eye on mainstream art in New York, Paris or London.” His poetic and speculative attempt to articulate an inter-Asia and intermedial aesthetic attitude in Southeast Asia’s art may be considered—like the writings of his peers such as Sabapathy—to be “decolonial before the word and the outlook it names were given the currency they have today” (Thompson Reference Thompson2022: 395).

Inter-Asia Intermediality and Decolonial Options

While inter-Asia thinking has been closely linked to the decolonial turn (Ching Reference Ching2010), the epistemically decolonizing potentials of intermediality have been less well examined. In this article, I have argued that intermediality is conducive to decoloniality. Moreover, intermediality is especially prevalent (as an artistic phenomenon) and particularly fruitful (as an analytical method) in inter-Asian contexts. Following Ching (Reference Ching2010: 185) I recognise that two central contributions of inter-Asia scholarship are inseparably interlinked: it is both “a much-needed corrective to Eurocentrism” and—in its commitment to “connectivity, relationality, and commensurability”—also “a radical departure from previous efforts in the region.” Building on this irreducibly double-edged quality of inter-Asia thinking, I see intermediality both as an attribute inhering in artworks and other cultural objects, and as a method for studying those artworks and cultural objects. Moreover, intermediality, in both senses of the word, is an essentially interdisciplinary concept: as the scholar and artist Mieke Bal (Reference Bal, Bruhn, Azcárate and de Paiva Vieira2024: 466) observes, “intermedial thinking … stands at the intersection, or meeting point, of the art-historical method of iconography and the literary concept of intertextuality, and, hence, of the two disciplines.” Just as inter-Asia scholarship necessarily addresses both Eurocentrism and the region, so too intermediality is always already interdisciplinary and a characteristic of both art and analysis.

As a result of these qualities, I contend that the concept of intermediality facilitates an ecological approach to knowing, which in turn contributes to decoloniality. Many proponents of epistemic decolonisation have argued that there are ecologies of knowing. Scholars have suggested that it may not be enough only to recognise that Western and colonial ways of knowing are not the only legitimate forms of knowledge, or to recognise that there are multiple ways of knowing and that these have value. Rather, it may be more productive to apprehend that different ways of knowing feed and nourish each other. Discrepant modes of knowing—including decolonial thinking—are interdependent and mutually illuminating. Thus, I argue, epistemic decolonisation brings into view not simply a plurality of knowledges, but rather ecologies of knowing that are not just many but interdependent. This is why intermediality—like inter-Asia thinking—is conducive to decoloniality.

This conduciveness to decoloniality that I have proposed is not meant to be causal or prescriptive, but rather an enabling option. Like many other words formed with the prefix con-, conferring togetherness, this conduciveness relies on a conjoining. That is, the intermedial and the inter-Asia are especially conducive to decoloniality in their connection to each other. While practices that are intermedial, inter-Asia, and decolonial may seem to be synonymous with the contemporary art of the 21^st century, the examples of Tô Ngọc Vân, Suzuki Shigenari, Sam Yoeun, and other “Cambodian artists” active between the 1930s and 1960s makes clear that these impulses were also vital within—even formative of—modern art in the 20^th century.

Just as decoloniality existed before it was named and popularised, so too antecedents of inter-Asia intermediality can be found in vernacular Southeast Asian discourse that predates the anglophone terms. For instance, in 1974 the writer Neak Srei Troeung Ngea (née Laay Hunki) published a Khmer textbook—still in use today—which stresses the interplay between different artforms and the interactions between different Asian cultures. “Art (silpa) has a very broad meaning, and there are many kinds of art,” she proposes (2007[1974]: 71).Footnote ¹⁸ In anglophone scholarship, this emphasis on the “many kinds of art” such as painting, architecture, dance, music, and so on would later be theorised as intermediality. Neak Srei Troeung Ngea (11–13) continues: “No people ever have a civilization that is purely theirs and theirs alone … Contact between one people and another always involves mutual influence between them.” Today, such contact between Cambodia and its neighbours is characterised as inter-Asia exchange. In this article, I have focused on intermedial inter-Asia moments to historicise and theorise the beginnings of modern art in Cambodia. But just as inter-Asia intermediality has a long history, so too it may present many possibilities for the future.