Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Kenneth M. George, University of Oregon
Discussant: Fred R. Myers, New York University
The traffic in art is not without its confusions, contradictions, and coercions. This panel explores some of the dilemmas that attach to the appropriation of "emblematic" works of Southeast Asian art—works that have become exemplary signs of national or regional identities. Many of these problems spring from persistent discourses about modernity, taste, authenticity, artistic genius, historicity, and cultural heritage, discourses that have comingled in a thoroughly commodified and globalized art market and that have fed the desire to possess or look upon such emblematic works of art.
Our papers draw from ethnographic and art historical research in Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the United States. Although the four papers speak to each other in their concerns, special emphasis has been placed on comparative conversations. A story about forgeries sold as paintings by the late Vietnamese artist, Bui Xuan Phai, and one about Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous turning over artworks to government patrons and representatives throw light on the fetishizing practices of those who long to possess emblems of modernity, class, and national identity. Conference rhetoric on regional Indonesian textiles and MOMA’s controversial exhibit of photographs from Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng detention center show how globalization, shifting economies of value, and competing constituencies of connoisseurs, designers, curators, and preservationists have disrupted the moral meanings of objects considered emblematic of specific national or local identities. So juxtaposed, these papers call attention to the unsettled social life of works that are incessantly subject to appropriation and reappropriation.
Nora Taylor, National University of Singapore
When the Hanoi painter Bui Xuan Phai died in 1988 he left behind over ten thousand paintings, none of which he was able to sell for more than food and shelter from his friends. By 1994, a Bui Xuan Phai painting sold for U.S. $10,000, and there were suddenly more of his paintings on the market than either his wife or his friends could account for. Every gallery and art shop in Hanoi was selling Phai street paintings, nicknamed "Pho Phai," most of which had not been painted by him. Based on fieldwork notes and interviews with artists in Hanoi, this paper will attempt to shed light on the Phai phenomenon by questioning the reason for Phai’s posthumous success and his sudden rise in popularity. Why have his paintings in particular become the object of forgery and why is there such a great market for his work? An examination of the situation reveals that, to painters in Hanoi, Bui Xuan Phai has become a national icon of the quintessentially Vietnamese artist who fought his way through poverty and war and re-emerged as a "Master of Modern Painting" in the last year of his life. To foreigners, the primary collectors of his works, his paintings represent an idyllic image of a bygone era in Vietnamese history. The motivation behind faking Phai’s street paintings may be simply a desire to gain access to the burgeoning art market in Vietnam, but their saleability indicates how immediately recognizable a "Pho Phai" or a "Phai Street" has become regardless of its authenticity.
Kenneth M. George, University of Oregon
Given the authoritarianism of Suharto’s New Order and its preoccupation with development, it should come as no surprise that the Indonesian government has established itself as the country’s foremost promoter and patron of the arts. Indeed, it effectively dominates the institutional contexts for legitimating and recognizing the work of artists. On one hand, this support reflects a pride in the nation’s artistic production, as well as an interest in asserting the nation’s modernity. On the other, the government’s institutional support, and the threat of its withdrawal, can place tremendous constraints and demands on Indonesian artists. In these circumstances, what can happen when influential government figures become connoisseurs and private collectors? What can happen when the state bureaucracy itself becomes a collector? This paper comments on the dilemmas faced by Muslim painter A. D. Pirous during the early months of 1994, when the Minister of Religion and bureaucrats from the Department of Education and Culture independently sought paintings from the artist’s private collection. More than a story about offers that can’t be refused, Pirous’s response to these figures has something to say about the appropriation of artworks that are at once emblems of a nation and its art world, and signature creations intensely bound up with a painterly subjectivity and personal history.
Lorraine Aragon, East Carolina University
Regionally distinctive and locally meaningful elements of material culture such as houses, sculpture, and textiles readily have been abstracted as matching ethnic emblems in a developing Indonesian nation increasingly concerned about the balanced "unity and diversity" of its people. At the same time, however, Indonesian regional textile industries are being influenced by government-led policies to escalate production and export of these textiles beyond their original centers of manufacture and use. This geographical movement produces a variety of little-examined consequences with respect to the significance of these textiles, and their related ethnic associations, from both producers’ and consumers’ perspectives. This paper will look beyond the well-known appropriation of Indonesian textiles by foreign tourists seeking the aura of exotic tropical islands to a range of cases such as that of Javanese business leaders who are reconstructing a South Sumatran batik industry to rid it of the "poor quality" local workers and the regionally distinctive colors and materials that might hinder the fabric’s potential marketing in national and international arenas. Contemporary Indonesian fashions’ ancestry in regional textiles is simultaneously invoked and erased for consumers through modular shifts of materials, patterns, and colors. These trends, while creating manufacturing jobs for some, offend and disenfranchise others. Conflicting pronouncements of various specialists on Indonesian textiles delineate how developers’ rhetoric concerning "markets" and "high quality manufacture" dislodge and redefine Indonesian textiles’ local roles as status-laden vehicles of aesthetic and moral meaning.
Lindsay French, Rhode Island School of Design
What is the purpose of exhibiting photographs of soon-to-be-killed Cambodians—documentation from the Khmer Rouge’s infamous Tuol Sleng detention and torture center—in the world’s most prestigious modern art museum? How is such an exhibition meant to be understood? How is it understood?
The photographs—prison records, never intended as art—document with excruciating intimacy victims of one of the most brutal experiments in 20th century radicalism. In this setting, however, the intimate and particular take on more general significance with regard to their subject matter. The photographs have caused a minor sensation in New York, where patrons of the Museum of Modern Art grapple with their meaning in a small gallery of the photography department. This paper looks at how images of "others" communicate—and miscommunicate—impressions of the people they portray in part by becoming iconic, emblematic of situations and histories too complex to "explain" in the space of a small exhibition hall. The show raises questions about appropriation, representation, audience, the effect of context on the meaning of an exhibition, the curator’s responsibility to the people whose tragedy is displayed, and the possibilities of photography as a carrier of meaning irrespective of context. For those of us who work with Cambodians, it causes us to think again about our relationships with the people we study, and how we should represent what we know of them to people who know a great deal less than we.