A fortuitous pairing of edited volumes reflecting on the development of cultural production in the visual arts and independent cinema draw attention to both the ambivalence and salience of the terms “independent” cinema and “modern” and “contemporary” art in Southeast Asia. As both of these artistic fields have relatively short histories in Southeast Asia, these concepts remain under debate. Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art and Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia are the first of their kind to compile critical texts by a plurality of voices—from scholars to producers, including art historians, anthropologists, curators, critics, film scholars, and filmmakers—on their respective topics. Both volumes aim to give the reader a general yet critical understanding of the creative terrains of the visual arts and independent cinema and how they might constitute regional phenomena particular to Southeast Asia. In order to accomplish this task, both volumes contain numerous essays that draw on such frameworks as the local/transnational interface; the role of the paternalistic state; historicized notions of the avant-garde; shifts in artistic patronage during sociopolitical change; and the expansion of geographic and social networks resulting in alternative modes of exhibition, display, and discourse. The underlying current that runs through most of the essays concerns how these acts of production, from the visual arts to filmmaking, engage in the global phenomena of modernity, independence, and contemporaneity.
The anthology edited by Nora Taylor and Boreth Ly emerges at a time when Southeast Asian contemporary art is gaining increasing visibility on the global art stage and is beginning to be the focal point of various critical and discursive texts (although these remain few and far between). The late 1980s and early 1990s is considered the time period during which contemporary art movements began to take shape across Asia. Beginning in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, Southeast Asian contemporary artists began to draw attention to the region through their participation in global exhibition circuits. Therefore, some twenty years later, this volume serves as a reflective and critical body of essays that illuminates ways in which these developments may be questioned and understood.
Taylor's introduction to Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art begins by foregrounding the contested nature of the modern as a concept still under debate. In relation to this, she revisits the question of how one should approach the notion of a Southeast Asian art, thus bringing into relief the debatable nature of a regional art history, given the persistence of doubt as to the geographical and cultural coherence of the region known as Southeast Asia.Footnote 8 Taylor frankly asserts that “geography, therefore, may not be the most useful lens through which to view Southeast Asian art” (p. 2).
If not geography, then how to argue for a concentration of essays that together constitute a focused study of Southeast Asian artistic modernity? The marginalization of Southeast Asian art history across academic disciplines plays into Taylor's response. In addition, the variation of methodological approaches used in studying artistic production in the region—from anthropologists, historians, art historians, curators, and art critics—while enlivening the discourse, perhaps has also served to destabilize the notion of a regional art history. In other words, the practices under scrutiny are seemingly so diverse as to be up for grabs from almost any discipline. Has this served to the detriment of the field? To reflect upon this issue, Taylor and Ly's volume utilizes a diverse selection of voices to articulate various social, cultural, and historical patterns, which, when compared as a whole, begin to lend shape to what otherwise is an amorphous body of artistic practices grouped together by geographic affiliation. At the same time, in stating that “the authors situate Southeast Asian art beyond the nation” (p. 4), the concerns of the essays are not particularly unique to Southeast Asia, but draw on issues that are now part of global discourses surrounding modern and contemporary art.
In similar fashion to Glimpses of Freedom, the essays are organized in order to converse with each other methodologically and thematically. The essays by John Clark, Boitran Huynh-Beattie, and Kenneth George interrogate the cultural politics of artistic engagement in the project of modernity against the shadow of the postcolonial nation-state. Sandra Cate, Viet Le, Boreth Ly, and Astri Wright also engage the dimension of the nation as it is implicated in their studies of specific artists and artistic practices, both local and transnational, in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Grant Kester's interview with Chu Yuan and Jay Koh and Lee Weng Choy's essay on Singapore question and critique both state and global apparatuses that have come to enable and complicate the mechanisms of the contemporary art world as it permeates the region. Flaudette Datuin, Viet Le, and Patrick Flores interrogate the role and self-positioning of the curator who interprets works by artists in Southeast Asia for the rest of the world, revealing the cultural politics of curatorship.
In Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia, the word “independent” has the same kind of insistence and compelling nature as “modern” and “contemporary” have for the visual arts in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art. As such, it is the first term to be explicated in the introduction by May Adadol Ingawanij. What is emphasized throughout the essays is that in the context of Southeast Asia, due to the degrees in which independent cinema relies on alternative sources outside of the state (and at times partially by the state) or large production studios, and varies in terms of filmic aesthetic, narrative subject matter, and artistic or intellectual aims, the concept of independent cinema—and its other nomenclatures such as “oppositional,” “underground,” or “artisanal”—remains somewhat ambiguous and complex as a regional phenomenon. However, what is demonstrated throughout the volume is that certain social, political, and cultural frameworks distinguish the development of Southeast Asian independent cinema as having various commonalities.
Independent filmmaking in Southeast Asia has often emerged with an impulse towards activism or social change, at times a priority over articulating an alternative intellectual and aesthetic trajectory. This social impulse is clearly understood against the backdrop of what appears to be in most Southeast Asian nations a state that continues to exercise control over cultural expression to varying degrees. Therefore, according to Ingawanij, the involvement of the state in popular cultural production retains salience as an analytical frame: “As many of the chapters indicate, state economic aspirations and censorship do play a decisive role in shaping the independent cinematic terrains in question” (p. 3). In almost all of the countries in Southeast Asia, censorship is implemented outright or through ambiguous rating systems.
The role of foreign capital is also a recurring theme throughout many of the essays, including the way it creates transnational networks of artistic and financial collaboration. Mariam Lam discusses how Vietnamese independent cinema is a fraught concept due to the extent to which “it is much more intricately tied up with foreign and diasporic capital, and with global cultural activism than our traditional notions of ‘alternative’ media would generally accommodate” (p. 88). In addition, one finds in numerous Southeast Asian countries a pattern in which NGOs have played a hand in developing alternative artistic venues or projects, or funding independent filmmaking endeavors or film festivals. In line with the emergence of some independent filmmaking initiatives in tandem with social activism, Ingawanij describes this “will to activism” as something that, for example, organizers of the Thai Independent Film Festival implement as part of a larger project to “lay down the roots of an unalienated and democratic culture of cinema in Siam” (p. 169).
In addition, several of the authors tackle the notion that digital media and piracy as mass media interventions have appeared to enable a form of modernity in the public sphere, in granting access to banned films or artistic cinema that have no outlets otherwise. As Ingawanij points out, pirate culture has been a “crucial condition for independent filmmaking and other accompanying activities of dissemination” (p. 3). Media piracy as an enabling condition of modernity has been theorized by Ravi Sundaram, in the case of Delhi, as an alternative form of urban modern life, an illicit form of urban globalization, which has strong echoes in the essays of John Torres and Tilman Baumgartel in their discussions of the Philippines.Footnote 9 Digital media, in turn, has been at the core of DIY (do-it-yourself) filmmaking throughout the region, thus circumventing issues of funding, production, and distribution, and, as Hassan Abd Muthalib describes in the case of Malaysia, has served in large part to help democratize filmmaking.
Both Glimpses of Freedom and Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art draw on a plurality of perspectives and hence styles of writing and analysis in order to create what feels like a dialogue between the various authors, the former perhaps more successfully than the latter. This is due to the clear-cut organization of the volume (with essays grouped into three thematic sections: “Action,” “Reflection,” and “Advocacy”), which is eloquently laid out in Ingawanij's introduction. Some of the authors' frank explanations regarding their implications in their topics of study, such as Torres's personal reasons for researching piracy or Hassan Abd Muthalib's background as a filmmaker, therefore lend their essays the intimate perspective of primary witnesses. In addition, the relatively short length of the essays, resonating with the title of the volume, give the reader provocative glimpses of independent Southeast Asian filmmaking. While the essays at times serve as personal reflections, biographical accounts, or theoretical cinematic analyses utilizing reception theory, Marxist frameworks, or psychoanalytical approaches, the reader will likely find them fairly quick yet productively challenging to digest.
From either volume, one gains an understanding of the way artistic producers have fashioned regional modernities and alternative geographies of exchange and representation in Southeast Asia, an incredible phenomenon given its numerous scales of diversity and difference. As such, this is a critical time for reflection, and the texts are of immense value in attempting to give these terrains of visual culture due attention.
