Many countries in South and Southeast Asia have at one time or another been colonised or influenced by European powers. It is inevitable, then, that when we talk of these countries, we often do so in the context of European powers and, particularly after the Second World War, the United States. Not only cultural influences but also the borders between the countries are products of a series of negotiations between European powers and the natives. These conflicts, from the formation of nation states to the Vietnam War and the current turmoil in Pakistan, and so on, are legacies of colonialism.
You might think that in a country like Thailand, where postcolonial discourse is not a priority, being the only country in Southeast Asia to escape colonialism from a European power, we have little awareness of its dénouement. Over the last few years, with the problems in southernmost Thailand and the daily acts of violence in the predominantly Muslim community, accused of the acts of separatists who want their own Muslim state, or the recent dispute between Thailand and Cambodia over the rights to the Hindu temple of Preah Vihear, the question of postcolonialism has come to the fore in the most concrete forms imaginable.
The long conflict between the two countries was sparked off again in 1962, when the World Court ruled that the temple belonged to Cambodia, using the French map as a reference and leaving the issue of surrounding areas unresolved, with a recent claim by Cambodia to the World Heritage Committee (UNESCO) for sole ownership of the Preah Vihear temple. The two sides are still arguing over whether to use the French or American map to determine the boundaries between the two countries. Neither side has been directly involved in producing these maps. In the early 20th century, due to their lack of map-making knowledge, they were merely observers in the process of mapping their territories. It is ironic that the issue over borders, having once been settled and mapped out by the colonial power, has resurfaced at a time when the call is for ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’. Recent conflicts over the settlement of borders between China and Russia, and disputes over territories in many parts of the world, only serve to confirm that the reconsideration of history is needed. These are instances reminiscent of or left over from a colonial period that defines what we are as a nation and as individuals today. The lost world that we thought had been minutely rediscovered by the technology of mapping, has re-disappeared, so that we need to re-map the territory in every way, physically, culturally and mentally.
This proves that colonialism will never go out of fashion. In other places, or for other people, ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’ has become an official ending to the heavy baggage that tied them to the discourse. It is more or less the same question of arriving at modernity, at enlightenment: there are many paths, many routes, and different times at which one understands or chooses to understand postcolonialism. I found this rather ambiguous statement of ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’ quite problematic for Asia because of its diverse backgrounds, beliefs, cultures and intricate relationships with colonial powers. How do we begin to make sense of talking about postcolonialism in the midst of such diversity and varying relationships to the discourse? This is a question that we must also return to through the visual engagement in the last section, where I hope to sketch out some of the specificities.
Cold war and globalisation have changed the face of postcolonial discourse many times over through discourse on identity, hybridity, diaspora, multiculturalism, although we seem to look at the world through what is left over from the old world. It seems the colonised and coloniser only change their outward forms, as the gun turns into capital. In today’s situation it is rather naïve to confront the world with the colonial viewpoint, when the basic notions of nation and identity and its related issues are no longer the same. These are also two issues I would like to draw attention to. How could one discuss ‘identity’ beyond the framework of the socio-political and amidst rapidly changing borders? It has become a fluctuating entity that always escapes the authority/state’s desire to manage and control, when diversity and difference are no longer such challenging ideas to put across.
I would like to refer to one of the symposiums for the triennial, ‘Restarting from Asia’, as a starting point to look through and from the specific viewpoints of Asia, particularly South and Southeast Asia, to reflect on what is taking place in a global context around the issue of postcolonialism. The two regions have for decades been overshadowed by the continuing rise of East Asia, except for acts of violence reported across the global media, such as in East Timor, until its success in becoming a new state in 2002, or in the southernmost part of Thailand, or in Pakistan. The phrase ‘Restarting from Asia’ in many people’s minds undeniably means ‘ Restarting from China, Japan, Korea or Singapore’. Their economic and cultural domination, as in art domains where they have their own art biennales, have produced a double mission, not to say mission impossible, for many countries in Asia to begin to understand postcolonial discourse fully. The influence of China particularly, with its long history of domination in the regions, and that of Japan, which has been significant over the last century, has been indispensable to the regions’ development. Although without a proper deconstruction of the Western powers and their ways of thinking, it is already a common desire among some of the South and Southeast Asian countries to reinvent and reconstruct themselves in relation to Asian superpowers.
In Southeast Asia in particular, not only its boundaries but the various terminologies of the region itself have already acquired a postcolonial overtone.
[i] Early names such as British India and French Indochina have suggested the political influence of European powers, while others have their origins in the cultural differences between the two biggest forces in Asia, India and China, which have long struggled for power over many areas. However, it also needs to be said that it is rather unfair to say that region has been totally culturally dominated by Europe, India or China, as most of the countries’ traditions are strongly rooted in their own cultures, as seen in their unique architecture and visual arts.
What is pertinent in today’s situation is to examine the complicated and delicate issues of postcolonialism through the particular contexts of South and Southeast Asia, and how the visual can help to expand and question our understanding of some of the inexplicable situations taking place nowadays; just as the visual standing of the Preah Vihear Temple reminds us today of the intricate relationship between colonised and coloniser, between God and people, between nationalism and capitalism, and so on.
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Prior to the arrival of the colonising powers, mainland Southeast Asia had never had official national borders. Until then, boundaries had been signified by symbols instead of concrete border signs. The separation between kingdoms could be seen by natural symbols such as mountains, watersheds and forests, and sacred sites or temples built for spiritual gatherings.
[ii] As many mountains are believed to house sacred spirits offering protection of the land and its people, the Preah Vihear Temple was built as a sanctuary on the Dong Rek range that used to separate Thailand and Cambodia. Its existence symbolized the attempt to blend old beliefs of people of different races who settled in adjacent areas; therefore the true meaning and significance of the temple is universal.
[iii]It was only just over a hundred years ago or so that the colonizing powers demarcated the borders, leading to the abolition of the old kingdoms. The nation and state were born without regard to history or cultural heritage. Different disciplines were established, and the two areas of archaeology and history of the arts were used to build the new nations. Southeast Asia as a whole was trapped into constructing their nation and identity through the colonial microscope.
This demarcation of borders then became an infernal machine waiting to explode. Borders taking no account of people or cultural differences have become an excuse for violence in the name of security and nationalism. Border wars seem unavoidable, as suggested by Donnan and Wilson: they have been ‘a long-standing if not necessary component to the processes of nation- and state-building in the post imperial age’.
[iv] As they further suggest, the borders have become ‘sites and symbols of power’.
[v] These symbols of power go far back to the colonial powers.
Intending to conquer, colonising powers began their search in every corner of the world, where every nook and cranny was marked into their maps. Map-making knowledge was limited to those superpowers, and it has continued to be so as the United Nations Security Council is still composed of five permanent superpowers – China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States – who stand to protect their interests in the former colonies and elsewhere. New superpowers such as China, Singapore and Japan are part of the committee managing heritage sites, waiting to get their hands on the temple for their own economic and cultural interests in the regions. The Preah Vihear Temple questions us again and again about that disappearing old world, as Cambodia recently lodged a complaint with the National Security Council against Thailand. Yet again, the new series of renegotiations will result in borders having to be redrawn.
Over time, the dynamic meanings of the Preah Vihear Temple have changed from those of sacred site to a symbol of nationalism and capitalism, where tourism has devalued what once was. As a result of the conflicts, the Preah Vihear Temple is no longer a Vihear or house of God. The God has disappeared, as has the site of Preah Vihear, becoming a void space into which no one is allowed while both sides continue to claim ownership. The solid space of Preah Vihear has evaporated into thin air, until it is once again rediscovered through a remapping of the territory.
It is this constant oscillation between discovering and recovering, between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s deterritorialization and reterritorialization, between arriving and bidding farewell, that has opened up the moments of both crisis and possibility in the history of the regions. It is in these moments of crisis and possibility, of something in-between, that one needs to look closely, taking care not to walk into the minefield or time bomb of nationalism or racism waiting to explode. It is in these time warps or gaps of the in-between that, as in the arts, we produce something very interesting, where something fresh can result from the destructive moments. We need to see with clear head and mind that this is no longer an excuse for violence.
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Yet, how then could we bid farewell to that which has always been part of us? The departing moment itself is already an act of violence. This territorial mapping, as I have suggested, is not only physical but also psychological, as people re-identify themselves through the process. How do we know who we are when our knowledge of history and nation is unsettled and renegotiated? Julia Kristeva’s (1982) understanding of ‘abject’ may provide an extreme understanding of the tension between borders. In a personal sense, it marks the departing moment when we begin to recognise a boundary between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’, me and (m)other, self and other. The subject wants to repel the other but is powerless to do so. This otherness is ‘radically excluded’ but always a presence. It produces a moment of rupture into being, into making meaning. These attempts to separate the two, what is ‘self’ and ‘other’, or expel the abject, as suggested by David Sibly, creates a feeling of anxiety because such separations can never be finally achieved.
6 The attitude towards the other is then often related to the abject, the unwanted but necessary part of who we are, which to a certain extent causes ‘ambivalent sensations of desire and disgust’,
[vi] key to our understanding of the social practice of inclusion and exclusion, whether for the nation or the self.
The colonial ramification, in a way, has stood as a rupture of the coherent identity and dominant order, in the same way as capitalism has left and still creates a mark that produces sporadic moments of rupture in society. How could we then renegotiate with the other to produce a new territory of physical and psychological terrain? While borders are theoretically unsettled through the movements of people, capital and technology, it is doubtful that we could escape a world situation filled with hatred. We may have a better awareness through much writing in past decades as to how to deal with xenophobia, and at least recognise that otherness is part of the self, but without an understanding of the roots and specificity of that generalised other, this would just remain in the pages of books. Sibly (1995) urges us to engage with people, to listen to them. In a similar manner, Sarat Maharaj encourages us to engage with ‘difference and the unknown’ in both ‘artistic’ and ‘social political’ terms.
[vii] Without direct dialogue, the otherness would still remain the ‘unwanted’ that is always a threat to the construction of the self, or as Kristeva puts it, as ‘the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death’.
[viii]It is only fifty years ago or so that ‘nationalism’ brought us the unity of freedom within the region, without foreign domination further dividing our common values in an already diverse region of different religions and cultures, through borders decided by the outsider. It is a conflict deeply embedded in our history, and as seen in the Preah Vihear Temple case, one finds similarities in the current situation. It is this initial quest of attempting to understand what ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism’ means in South and Southeast Asia that I find in the spirit of the works by artists from the regions, hoping to offer alternative views of the situation and further expand the views on ‘identity’ and ‘nation’, ‘self’ and ‘us’, and perhaps unpack our complex context and new situation under the economic influence of China, Singapore, Japan and the new superpowers in the current world order. Fifty years on, many countries in South and Southeast Asia are still dreaming of the reconstruction of their identity, both individual and regional, fuelled by internal conflicts and clashes between religious groups, political agendas, state and citizens, and so on. I will leave some further questions to ponder while we attempt to go beyond what is seen and visible in the images:
How could we really engage in a dialogue that goes beyond the theoretical mode and into the social realm? How could we erase the borders and memories of colonialism past and present and go beyond the old world views while its residues remain in place through the new structures of power? How could we re-invent and re-imagine ourselves in these two regions in ways that will not end in the trap of right-wing nationalist politics? How can the state offer a different mode of ideology that provides an equal paradigm among the people? How could the arts offer other modes of thinking and looking into the current situation? Can it tempt us into getting our hands dirty and become directly involved in the social realm?
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At first glance, Huma Mulji’s image of the camel in the trunk seems to face you with yet another exotic Other, using the traditional technique of taxidermy. For those who understand the context, her work can be intimidating. She uses the process of low-tech taxidermy, a skill used to treat skins of dead animals in the Lahore Zoo. Her recent work Arabian Delight, a focus of controversy at Art Dubai in March 2008, features a camel which has undergone taxidermy being squashed inside a large suitcase. The view among Arabs is that her representation of a camel, a national animal and symbol of pride in the Arab world, is an insult. The government therefore ordered it to be removed on the second day of the show. The work can also be seen as a reference to the smuggling of camel jockeys, which has become a constant problem, particularly in the United Arab Emirates, where in 1999 an 8-year-old Pakistani boy was kidnapped to work as a jockey in camel races. There continue to be reports of hundreds of young boys from South Asia who are used and sometimes smuggled across borders to become camel jockeys.
[ix]For me, this work sums up what is currently the most important aspect of postcolonialism. It is not a question of how one could unpack luggage with a camel inside, which can then carry the luggage somewhere: it is a question of how one could possibly pack and fit the camel in the luggage in the first place. How could we pack it in and expect things to stay the same by preserving it? I’m particularly interested in unpacking the way in which we attempt to pack meaning into some kind of container and try to seal it: something always spills over. It is important to start to criticize things from within, how we can develop the ability to notice what shapes our thinking, experience and memory. In other words, how we could begin to see what has always been there but we have never noticed. We can never understand what happens in Pakistan through the CNN or BBC news. We are always the outsider looking in.
Mulji’s new work, proposed for Guangzhou, attempts to give us an inside look into the current situation through the familiar scene of the street performance deeply rooted in Asian tradition. In the context of Pakistan today, Huma situates her works in, as she clearly puts it, “the rise of right-wing sentiments in Pakistan, a move towards an ‘Islamic’ as opposed to a ‘South Asian’ identity”. In the midst of the country’s search for its identity, her new work takes us through the moment, you could say, when hell breaks loose: the moment when the laughter of the street performance turns into tragedy.
Following on from the context of Arabian Night, she goes a step further by attempting to stage a full-scale event inspired by street performances, through sculptural installations, by using taxidermy animals, and particularly monkeys, often used in street performances, in her work entitled The Performers: Raju, Michael, Sanjay. Although in her works she uses the most traditional and primitive elements, such as camels, folk tales and street performance, as well as her technique of taxidermy, they become a compelling critique of the present climate, whether global trading in her last piece or the global economy as a scene of violence in this piece.
The Performers: Raju, Michael, Sanjay also points to the roots of violence in tradition itself, camouflaged as a form of entertainment. The monkeys are taken out of their natural environments and trained, as if they were human beings, to perform ridiculous tasks. These monkeys stand as a mark of abjection, reminding us of the moment of separation from our animal being, between culture and what preceded it. What will happen when that boundary is transgressed? That otherness invites us into its world, saluting us, mocking us, mirroring us, and in a way becoming us in the same way that we become them once that boundary is shattered. The absurd quality of the work may allow us forget the seriousness of the violence for a short while, but before long we are in that dark place where we realise that the nature of violence is part of us all.
Through her use of the most stereotypical and traditional materials within the region, Mulji constantly suggests the huge gap between the traditional and the global context. There is always the gap that forces violent change in one or other context. The gap may result from physical size or spatial conflict, as it is either the camel or the suitcase that needs to be altered. The new work The Performer suggests to us that the gap is also evidently in time. The street performance, the tradition left over from the old world, once transposed to the present has created a gap, a lapse of time, where the performers themselves could only be confused, malfunction or lapse into the primitive past. In this haziness, the violence is no longer local but has gone on to the international stage that she attempts to reflect.
While Mulji’s works take us to the heart of the conflict, those of her contemporary Hamra Abbas are a direct critique of the traditional male-dominated Muslim society. As in her previous works, Please Do Not Step 1& 2 suggest the difficulty of finding a place for female individuality in the Muslim world as well as being a Muslim in the larger society. Her new works in the Love series are a blunt and powerful commentary on sexual politics: that it may only be within the realm of the arts that women can launch such criticism. Her last piece in the series, recently featured at the Istanbul Biennale, is the sculpture based on the Kama Sutra called Lessons in Love, with the sculptures of the Kama Sutra armed with rifles.
Continuing with the Love series, her new work for the Guangzhou Triennial, Love Yourself, is a sound/movement installation consisting of toy-like fighter jets resembling ‘dildos’. While Lessons in Love and Love Yourself both address the myth of masculinity, the former is rooted in tradition and the latter explores the military domain. The images of fighter jets occupying the sky in a way emphasise the forceful power of masculinity, suggesting both destruction and desire.
The fact that these fighter jets are manufactured in China, in the same way as Mulji’s cheap mechanical monkeys could also have been made in China, reminds us of all the commodities, from cheap toys to advanced innovations, made on Chinese soil nowadays. Even the most traditional and local artefacts can be produced and distributed globally through China, as most countries’ souvenirs are. The displacement of production also raises the question of identity and place in relation to the changing geography of world economics that informs these two works. The globalisation of the economy has further complicated the already complex history of Asia, extending also to the intimate life of the individual, as suggested by Archana Hande’s works.
Hande’s Arrange Your Own Marriage is another mutation of complex traditions in the virtual world. Her installation with various objects that are supposedly tokens of celebration reminds us of secret imaginary pink stores where you can get everything you desire and possibly find true love. It is the little girl’s dream, only to find out one day that it cannot become reality in the present conditions of society. The caste system, sexual discrimination and age-old customs are still in place and so ingrained within the society that without looking beneath the surface through the microscope, one cannot find any mutation in such strict traditions. She looks under the microscope at such delicate matters as love and purity of blood, where even the most idealised notions can find ways to mutate. The marriage between the two different worlds, tradition and virtual reality, East and West, man and woman, is to be re-imagined through the short-lived, convenient, packaged ceremony, much like India itself is looking for a fast lane to a successful marriage to capitalism.
My own interest in the issue of gender and sexuality has attracted me to these works by female artists who often create a stir in their own cultures, and to how they project alternative ways of looking into traditions and the construction of the postcolonial world. By mapping out South Asia from a female perspective, we could begin to unpack the many layers of postcolonial discourse that these artists set out for us, which are often obscured by gender.
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Only ten years ago or so, Ackbar Abbas observed that the unique cultural position of Hong Kong as a ‘culture of disappearance’, as well as its relationship with China as ‘quasi-colonialism’, in a way suggested the disruption of the equation of colonised/coloniser.
[x] While the concept may have been appropriate for its time, a decade later Hong Kong still retains its unique position in Asia, if not in the world, in a continuing search for its own identity. However, the disappearance discussed by Abbas was intensely felt in the aftermath of the Handover in 1997, with many communities actually disappearing for different reasons. Sham Shui Po, previously the hub of commercial and industrial activity, was the worst affected as many factories closed down to take advantage of cheaper labour forces in China, and is now under a government urban renewal project. Bundith Phunsombatlert, a Thai artist, traces his Hakkien roots during his residential programme in Hong Kong, through the father of a Thai friend who lives in Sham Shui Po, only to find many of the residents have dispersed around the globe as a result of the effects on the local economy. In Sham Shu Po: Retelling the Stories from the Past, he tries to piece together the story of Sham Shui Po through a string of interviews with the residents, which could never be completed as many of them left the area.
The book has been symbolically used in his previous work, Bangkok: the Story of a City (2005), to represent the discourse on Bangkok through the virtual contested space of history, cultures, social issues, and so on. He brought together the books on Bangkok in the central library to make a virtual replica of a bookshelf that turns books into a brick game. Bangkok becomes a constantly changing narrative through time and the dynamic of different players. In the same way, Sham Shui Po is a changing narrative with different narrators through time. His work becomes not merely a record but a testament to that changing narrative as well as the changing geography.
He has mapped out the kind of geography where, as Doreen Massey argues in relation to another metropolis, the city of London, ‘places do not lend themselves to having lines drawn around them’ and that there is a ‘vast geography of dependencies, relations and effects that spreads out from here around the globe.’
[xi] She reminds us that it is necessary to follow the lines of its engagement elsewhere.
[xii] The cultures or identities are no longer local but extend beyond geographical boundaries. Phunsombatlert’s record of the memories of the people living in Sham Shui Po cuts across time and space, in turn creating a new geography of space. His work renegotiates physical and imaginary boundaries, which fuse together and depend on each other. It suggests to us that border changes through the movement and displacement of people do not always follow established geographical borders. People are constantly changing the geography, not the other way around.
The collaboration between different generations – he himself included – despite geographical and temporal distance, is somehow a kind of reunion that produces different meanings to each participant. While older residents of Sham Shui Po can reunite with old pals from the band through playing Beatles songs and are thus able to re-live the memories of the past, for the younger generation of students the reunion with the past comes in the form of lessons that are reiterated but not fully understood. For Phunsombatlert, the reunion fulfils his wish of going back to his Chinese roots. In this meeting of generations through different forms of mediation – text, music, dialogue – the narratives retell our history, identity and culture in a constant dynamic. But the reunion, as Phunsombatlert reminds us, is only possible through the imagination and the virtual.
His presentation is in the form of a book and animation, painstakingly reconstructed, and stories are told and retold many times over through memory and reiteration. His handmade animation is in a way a dedication to his roots, his ancestry in the Chinese diaspora, growing up in Thailand where the Chinese has long been part of Thainess. At the same time, these handmade animations, a tracing of figures as a representation of real people and events, only confirm to us yet again the impossibility of fully mapping out history. The present is suddenly turned into history as time passes by, leaving only a trace or mark that cannot be not fully discovered. What is possible is to create a new mapping that traces across different times and spaces.
Another related work, by Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski, Great Wall of China in Australia, looks back two hundred years or so at the oldest Aboriginal archeological site, Lake Mungo, where Chinese workers helped to build the sheep station and called the crescent-shaped dune in the area ‘Walls of China’. Once again, the question raised by Chris Berry when the former Prime Minister Paul Keating said in 1993 that ‘Australia is a multicultural nation in Asia’ resounds in the present context.
[xiii] However, Prime Minister John Howard’s announcement, a decade later in the post-9/11 year 2003, perhaps did not go down so well with the Asian neighbours when he said that Australia would launch pre-emptive strikes against terrorists, wherever they were.
[xiv]Beyond the political agenda, Starrs and Cmielewski have reversed the notion: that in the same way we could say ‘Asia in Australia’ through the existence of ‘Walls of China’. By its appearance, it would be unthinkable to relate the landscape to China. But the Chinese immigrants have long been part of Australia’s history and landscape. Through the multi-media installation, the images of desert landscapes at night and Lake Mungo during the day are projected on two sided video screen. Through the movement of the audiences, different whispering voices are triggered. The history is reconstructed through a stream of whispering voices, reciting such details as the names of Chinese immigrants to Australia during the 1800s. The long-lost voices of history, the other that is part of Australia, are to be reawakened through the audience’s movement, triggering the re-emergence of the invisible landscape.
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The personal struggle, both physical and mental, has become part of the postcolonial terrain in Asia as the embodiment of Mahatma Gandhi’s approach of non-violence. Human struggle in a world filled with conflicts and wars is at the heart of Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s works. He is one of a new generation of Vietnamese artists born or raised abroad, whose works concern its history and identity under the influence of different powers, as well as reflecting an attempt to catch up with the rapid changes taking place today. Vietnam is still a country in search of its identity, attempting to escape the war-torn image painted across the globe. It is a country well-known for images of refugees, still fresh in people’s minds across the globe. It is this particular issue of history and refugees that is constantly explored in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s works.
His work-in-progress, Breathing is Free: 12,756.3, is also a reflection of what happened beyond the borders of Vietnam, as we witness the Chinese immigrants found dead in a truck at Dover, and more recently Burmese immigrants found dead inside a seafood container van in southern Thailand. The artist aims to run 12,756.3 km., a distance equivalent to the diameter of the earth. Running, for him, is both physically and symbolically part of the refugees’ life and human existence as a whole. It is an attempt to represent human struggle against any form of prejudice and injustice in the place called Earth. It is also the best statement he could give to the public of his personal view of the suffering of his nation. In a way, his running also becomes a form of meditation through repetitive foot movements. It is a meditation of the suffering. It is a struggle within the self to be free not only from physical suffering but also from the mind. He runs to cover a distance starting from the narrowest part of the Earth’s hemisphere, but too far away for any human to reach, to fathom out the real differences of the people inhabiting the same Earth. Through his graphics, created from carefully designed routes from air mapping, Jun gives us hope that maybe through the advanced technology of GPS, human determination can conquer all injustice and give voice to the other.
Physical and mental struggle is also featured in The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree (2004-2007), which he filmed in Laos. The three-part film symbolically uses a stadium, lanterns, the Mekong River and the Bodhi Tree to comment on the fast-paced development of a country where people are struggling to achieve success and striving for something to hold on to. It is a situation common elsewhere, particularly in Laos, with the high tide of capitalism forcing its way into the region, influenced by neighbouring countries like Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, who have close relations with China. It will be difficult to swim against the tide, and a strong will and physical preparation are needed.
The Bodhi Tree, under which Buddha achieved enlightenment, is seen here as symbolic of Buddhist wisdom. The Mekong River is seen as a unifying artery within mainland Southeast Asia, including Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and runs to China’s Yunnan. But such integration is dampened by politics and the unequal development within the area. It is Buddhism that truly reunites the differences along the two sides of the river. The Bodhi Tree stands tall on the bank of the river and it takes not only physical but mental strength to recognise its value, which could take us away from the race of capitalism and allow us to swim against the tide.
Both Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 and The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree, as well as his Memory Project, gives hope to the individual determined to achieve something greater. It only takes a single person to change or make a better world, and he himself shows us this possibility through a man running across the world, or the effort of struggling underwater with a cyclo. Although it could be seen as an aimless struggle by those with no awareness of the wisdom of Buddhism, with life perceived as a never-ending circle, it is in the simple acts of meditation through things such as breathing and running that one can find piece of mind.
In much the same way, physical and mental struggle is part of Kai Syng Tan’s Making a Living of Sorts in (Y)our Theme Park: Here/There/Where. As a Singaporean artist, Syng Tan occupies an interesting position in critiquing the postcolonial in a relatively young country where economic success supersedes the other aspects of life. While Singapore’s economic influence is at once much criticized as well as a model within the region, with its own state companies spreading across the region, its recent cultural phenomena are more welcome. She takes a poetic outlook on postcolonialism, the state of being in between conscious and subconscious while submerged in the water. With the artist in her liminal state, it is up to the audience to judge her position as that of winner or loser in the struggle to survive.
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While China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and recently India take centre stage in every possible way, the majority of South and Southeast Asian countries are nearly invisible in the world order. Apart from US influence in the region, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) needs to carefully balance the power play with China to maintain its position on the world map.
[xv] It is in the cultural realm that the assertion of their identities could be seen as individual. Filmic representation and the arts have become the focus of their identities and cultural exploration. Through them, we see different layers of complexities and that which has been invisible to our eyes. These visibilities of images, as Deleuze writes, ‘are not defined by sight but are complexes of actions and passions, actions and reactions, multisensorial complexes which emerge into the light of day.’
[xvi] Rey Chow, following Deleuze’s logic of visibility, offers a further view of the condition of visibility as rather a complicated one that ‘would need to involve a consideration of the less immediately or sensorially detectable elements helping to propel, enhance, or obstruct such visibility in the first place and, even where visibility has occurred, a consideration of the often vacillating relations between the visible and the invisible that may well continue at different levels’.
[xvii]It is precisely on this foundation and with such awareness that we should look at images or what is visible. Through some of the moving and still images featured in East-South, Out of Sight, as well as a selection of films from Southeast Asia that have been banned or censored in their own countries, some of these implications are being explored through different issues. What has been our short-sightedness in everyday life or has been overshadowed by the states is to be discovered and seen through such a microscope. There is always something ‘out of sight’ preventing us from seeing the whole picture. It is between what is seen and unseen, the official and the alternative, the serious and the playful, the extraordinary and the ordinary, reality and imagination, and so on that we could understand the mechanisms at work in the society. Some of the works are discussed below.
Linda Saphan’s Incognito is a series of images of Cambodian women, that through ink drawings on rice paper gives an honest picture of the fragility of the Cambodian identity amidst the changing phases of a deeply traumatised nation. On the one hand, Cambodian women through many layers of fashionable clothes, instead of veils, hiding their true identity from visibility, similar to the mystical figure of the Oriental woman. On the other, they stand for freedom. The layering of clothes works as a masquerade that allows them to gaze back freely under the strict control of the government. The fragility and impermanence of rice paper confirms the ever-changing nature of the cultural codes as once understood in the colonial context.
In a similar manner, Nadiah Bamadhaj, a Malaysian artist, imposes her body upon the map of Putrajaya, the Malaysian new federal administrative complex, predominantly Arabic in style despite being a multi-ethnic country. Surveillance Series looks at Malaysia’s racialised political and economic system through architecture. The map here also changes its meaning through the female body. Through another cultural code whose implications have been changing over and over again, Memory of the Last Supper, a series of photographic works by myself, explores the in-between conditions of immigrants displacing and resettling into the new country. Their memory of the last supper is at once a banal and significant moment in their life. The images capture the in-between moments of uncertainty and anxiety, both physically and mentally: departure and arrival, here and there, past and present, and so on.
Kristoffer Ardena’s Hapunan plays with a stereotypical culture icon of the East: food. An invitation to a party to eat Filipino food turns into a stage play in which the partygoers unwittingly take part, only to find that instead of the promised Filipino food they are offered a variety of other Asian cuisines. Food is not much different from national costume or other cultural icons these days. It is a readymade package that allows one to access the exotic land. We have created a national myth through food, which has us believe we can gain access to other cultures through it. In the playful works of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Pisut Ponnimit, Sarnath Banerjee, Yason Banal, Tintin Wulia, Sutthirat Supaparinya, postcolonialism is seen through city graffiti, animation, graphic novel, kitsch video, wedding ceremony and dialogue/online chatting, respectively. Most of these artists are part of the new generation born and raised in the postcolonial/digital era. Unburdened by any direct baggage, they make use of postmodern aesthetics to deconstruct the old frameworks of postcolonialism, and we need to pay serious attention despite their playfulness.
8
Chow responds to the recent Western European and North American fascination with East Asian cinema by asking: ‘should we try to direct such fascination back at some authentic, continuous Asianness lying beyond the alluring cinematic images, or would it not be more pertinent to see Asianness itself as a commodified and reproducible value, made tantalizing, visible and accessible not only by the filmic genres of the action or martial arts comedy, the love story, and the historical saga but also by an entire network of contemporary media discourses – economic rivalry, exotic cuisine, herbal medicine, spiritual and physical exercise, sex trade, female child adoption, model minority politics, illegal immigration, and so on – that are at once sustained by and contributing to the flows of capital?’
[xviii] It is a legitimate comment that works on many levels across the general interest in both images and culture from Asia as a whole and in the artists’ works discussed here.
The above suggestion reminds us to look at these images also as part of a global context, whether in arts or elsewhere. We need to look at them both from the outside and listen more to the voices within. They provide a space to rethink some of the issues that have been discussed earlier and beyond. These works are among many more, diverse in mediums, approaches and subject matter, proving that postcolonialism is not single entity but goes beyond geographical boundaries. They create maps upon maps, despite military borders or nation boundaries, allowing us to create our own maps, our own terrains, constantly redrawn in the midst of change, forever in the dynamic process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization at work in every domain in one way or another. In such circumstances, there is an urgent need to constantly re-engage with the others. There are many ways to do so, as explored in some of the works, by making the others a familiar and desirable, by learning from each other, or even by concentrating on the simple acts of breathing to learn to listen to others.
While we speak of the realm of representation inside the museum, the reality outside has recently focused on a significant symbolic form: the Olympic Torch. The Olympic Torch, a symbol of peace and unity from the Western point of view, puts into question whether it can still legitimately represent that unity. Through everyday visuals, it reminds us of the significance of visual representation that has forced its way into our current debates, as the Preah Vihear Temple has recently demonstrated. It is a call for us to further engage in the visual realm by thinking through the arts and beyond. So, saying farewell to postcolonialism is not so much a moment of departure as a moment that opens up possibilities of engagement and the opportunity to thoroughly look into ourselves until we meet again.
[i] The name itself has changed over time according to different relationships with superpowers. The more modern term ‘Southeast Asia’ only came into use after the Second World War, having been geographically and strategically marked out by Western powers during the Cold War. (D.G.E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia, London: Macmillan, 1955, p. 3.) At the end of the Cold War, the name was still evolving and changing from a military/political purpose to an economic one, as evidenced by various groupings serving different economic purposes, such as the Mekong Sub-region, or ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).
[ii] Srisak Wallipodom,
http://www.muangboranjournal.com/.
[iii] Dhida Saraya, Preah Vihear: Sri Sikharesvara, Bangkok: Muang Boran Publishing House, 1994, p. 15.
[iv] Hastings Donnan & Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State, Oxford: Berg, 1999, p. 3.
[v] ibid., p. 1
6 David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 8.
7 ibid., p. 11.
8 Sarat Maharaj, ‘Unfinished Sketch of an Unknown Object in 4D: Scenes of Art Research’ in Lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd: the Bangkok Invisible Landscapes Catalogue, 2005.
9 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 71.
10
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2000/nea/824.htm11Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 4.
12 Doreen Massey, World City, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007, p. 13.
13 ibid., p. 13.
14 Chris Berry, A Bit on the Side: East-West Topographies of Desire, Rose Bay: EmPress Publishing, 1994, p. 21.
15
www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/natint/stories/s880036.htm.
16 ASEAN is a geographical and economic organization in Southeast Asia. The members include Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. The organization is based on economic interests but its existence also extends to maintaining peace within the region, with its strong principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of each member.
17 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (trans. Sean Hand), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988, p. 59.
18 Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 12.
19 ibid., p. 12.
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