This overdue anthology is an uneven survey of an uneven field, reflecting the disjointed state of visual art production and discourse across an always tenuous geography. In her introduction, Nora Taylor wisely hoses down expectations of any comprehensive regional survey — indeed, the book's wide historical scope (‘modern and contemporary’) is matched by its medley of analytical modes and vocabularies. Essays range from forensic speculations on the techniques of a nineteenth-century Siamese muralist, to a psychoanalytic study of films about Khmer Rouge atrocities and commentaries on the latest ‘relational’ practices in international contemporary art. The breadth testifies not just to a patchy and interdisciplinary field, but also to the region's hitherto underestimated — and now burgeoning — variety of aesthetic modernities. Though an incomplete stock-take of recent scholarship, the anthology's concerns revolve around certain key problems. The incoherence of the region as a site of art practice and study is pivotal, as what Taylor calls the ‘fight against generalizations’ (p. 4) is complicated by the struggle for visibility of a region doubly marginalised — on the one hand by Euro- and US-centric histories of art, on the other by area studies often indifferent to the visual. But while the volume justly claims to be the first on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art not connected to some exhibition or symposium, it nonetheless falls short of gathering disciplinary critical mass.

The art historians here are outnumbered by others, and yet play a crucial role in linking diverse subject matter. John Clark's opening study of ‘transitions to modernity’ emphasises the artist's graduation from craftsman to a super-artisanal status. While empirical accounts of such social elevation remain scant in most places, it behooves scholars to consider carefully what ‘art’ might have meant in this or that place, before considering what modern art has come to mean. Clark's emphasis on professional self-consciousness — as constitutive of an aesthetic modernity mediated by colonial then national institutions and systems of distinction — offers a potentially useful framework for lassoing an unruly field. This would be especially valuable where artists have put old techniques to contemporary purpose, as in the finely wrought rattan sculptures of Sopheap Pich that are so suggestive for co-editor Boreth Ly, or the contemporary Javanese batik examined here by Astri Wright.

Another tension animating the volume is that of distance: all authors are conscious of the parallax that attends looking, and writing, from afar, yet those that shine are the ones who waste the least time worrying about it. It is still the case that the most service to a regional art history is done by researchers operating within national frames. Among them here, Patrick Flores (The Philippines) and Lee Weng Choy (Singapore) — surely the region's two most reliable resident scribes — deserve mention. Without making pronouncements about Southeast Asia, their research furnishes regional scholarship with models for thinking through common shapes and problems, offering cogent critiques of national consciousness and policy, without losing sight of regional and global economic histories. Kenneth George's study of Islamic aesthetics in Malaysian modern art, meanwhile, is leavened by fruitful comparison with Indonesia. With his arm's-length iconography, George is the antithesis of that trending scholarly archetype, the participant observer, remaining conscious of, yet unselfconscious about, his analytical distance. And Ashley Thompson's thoughtful engagement with the films of Rithy Panh, though addressing histories quite peculiar to Cambodia, complicates certain universalist assumptions (e.g., those of human rights discourse) in ways richly suggestive for much of mainland Southeast Asia.

Indeed, wariness of liberal presumptions smuggled into regional art histories is what cuts the most telling axis through this anthology, highlighting both its great promise to the field, but also its failure to cohere as a volume. Taylor herself notes a tendency to cast ‘artists as spokespersons for democracy and progress in Asia’ (p. 9), but not all contributors are sufficiently circumspect about projections of these articles of teleological faith. Sandra Cate's generous reading of Thai artist Sutee Kunavichayanont's public interactive works, for instance, raises more questions than it answers: Cate has the artist engendering in his accidental urban viewers a political agency they manifestly lack in all other aspects of their social intercourse, but alas, this miracle goes unexplained.

Will we ever get beyond nationalistic art history if art is reduced to ends that can only be thought in national terms, or realised by national means? The matter is especially fraught when viewed from Singapore, a state that in its rush to institutionalise visual culture — largely through acquiring art from the region — has naturalised the progressive democratic narrative, despite not sharing any of its ambitions. This liberal narrative still underpins regional canonising, as in Iola Lenzi's recent survey for the Singapore Art Museum (‘Negotiating Home, History and Nation’, 2011), but it sheds little light on emerging generations of artists less preoccupied by national-political struggles. The speculative art market Singapore is so eager to host will hardly illuminate things better. (Can that emancipatory spirit still be embodied by, say, a contemporary Indonesian painting, when the viewer that matters is no longer a Dutch curator but a Chinese billionaire?)

While veteran researcher Astri Wright may bemoan the rarity of reflexivity (p. 136), the present volume suggests no shortage of it. Several contributors address the parallel receptions and meanings artworks accrue ‘at home’ and elsewhere. Exemplary are Vietnam's diasporic returnee (or việt kiều) artists, and Việt Lê's chapter on them promises much-needed scrutiny of their special purchase on local and international circuits. Unfortunately, though, Lê's reflexivity sidetracks him, the focus lost between artist profiling and more personal, theoretical musings. Art history gains little from those trundling down interdisciplinary paths toward a hazy, ‘transnational’ horizon. Boreth Ly bridles fellow Khmer, Sopheap Pich, with a weary brand of diasporic trauma studies, projecting postcolonial pretensions onto the artist's ambivalent rattan grids. Such exercises suggest that the academic vogue for the transcultural will do little to explain contemporary practices still enmeshed in national political realities and symbolism. Though many artists may have transcended nation as a frame of production, as an interpretative device it is far from obsolete.