For the last two decades Southeast Asian contemporary art has travelled the world generating universal excitement. Though diverse in its forms and in the cultural and political environments that have spawned it, Southeast Asian art of today is testament to Southeast Asia’s shared regional history and 21st century solidarity. In a spirit of unity, and anticipating ASEAN integration commencing in 2015, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre is proudly presenting a new and specially BACC-commissioned exhibition of regional contemporary visual art, the biggest ever Southeast Asian contemporary art show produced in Thailand Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia.
Curated in close collaboration with BACC by three respected Southeast Asia specialists and curators from Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia, will be visually stimulating for the public at large, while also offering art historical insights into our own regional visual culture of today. Through the works of artists from Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma and Cambodia, the show will chart one of regional contemporary art’s most important threads, locally-rooted conceptual thinking used to engage in ideas about and for the collective. It will investigate the close connection between conceptual approaches and social ideologies in Southeast Asian contemporary art of the last four decades.
With nearly 50 artworks by over 40 celebrated and internationally-known Southeast Asian artists of three generations, the exhibition will defend the idea that conceptual approaches used in contemporary art of Southeast Asia are not necessarily imported but rather can find their source in home culture.
Numerous internationally-celebrated artists are featured in: seminal Singaporean practitioners, well-known for their sharp social commentary, include Amanda Heng and Lee Wen; from Philippines canon-shaping practitioners include Imelda Cajipe Endaya and Alwin Reamillo; Indonesian heavyweights with potent political voices are FX Harsono, Eko Nugroho and Daging Tumbuh and Popok Tri Wahyudi, among others. The large Thai section will not only present Thai pioneers of the contemporary such as Sutee Kunavichayanont, Vasan Sitthiket, and Manit Sriwanichpoom but also emerging talents of the second generation of contemporaries still keen to engage audiences in issues of the collective.
Works of all media, all countries, and three generations will be displayed in dynamic visual dialogue, so showing how forms and approaches may evolve over time, and differ over geography, but how layered thinking and metaphoric tactics remain constants -and are in fact hallmarks- of the contemporary in Southeast Asian visual art.
The show will present media of all types - interactive installation, text-based works, painting, performance, photography, sound art etc...- and will include several works that are in game form, or are durational pieces designed to be used and experienced by the public over the course of days and weeks. Thus repeated visits can yield a different experience each time, so fully illustrating the way in which Southeast Asian contemporary art and life mesh.
The exhibition will be documented by a fully-illustrated ten-essay research catalogue by the curators and other specialists, available after the opening. In addition, BACC will be hosting a weekend of free public educational talks and panel discussions by experts in the field. Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia will reveal the connection between conceptual approaches in art, and an active art of social change, the two components’ linkage a key characteristic of Southeast Asian contemporary practice.
*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and BACC
