Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia

To Look, To See and To Find the Right Words
Yin Ker

Reflections on the teaching of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art in this tour d'horizon are beholden to opportunities between 2006 and 2014 as a lecturer at the diploma level, a teaching assistant then an assistant professor at the undergraduate level and an interim supervisor of a Masters thesis at two art academies in Singapore and two universities in Singapore and India, and since 2015 as an assistant professor working with both undergraduate and graduate students in Singapore. In most instances, I have only taught the history of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art within the context of survey courses including the premodern. My thoughts on this activity are nourished—and likewise conditioned—by my training and interest in South and Southeast Asian early, folk and Hindu-Buddhist arts, whose instruction at the introductory level I remain committed to, as well as an approach to knowledge-making owing to the Sorbonne University and INALCO. Before elaborating on what and how I have been teaching more recently, I shall address concerns whose implications—as shop-soiled or as trivial as they might be to veteran colleagues—have been determinant in the pedagogical strategies devised piecemeal. These strategies are far from being methodically defined and only serve to facilitate what I seek to achieve in each class.

Art institutional infrastructure in Singapore, scholarship on Southeast Asian art and academic culture have evolved considerably since my first class as a teaching assistant. Yet, in spite of the appreciable increase in scholarly publications, courses, lectures, exhibitions, internships and other avenues to deepen engagement with modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, it is questionable if the rigour of its academic instruction has been commensurate. [End Page 103] To date, no local or regional institution of higher learning offers a comprehensive structured training in art history at the undergraduate level, despite the rising number of students envisaging further studies or even a career in art history with a specialisation in Southeast Asia; graduate programmes are developed, marketed and run in the absence of any credible undergraduate curriculum, as if art history were a discipline of exception that required zero foundational studies. Admittedly, most of the graduate students I worked with had received training in neither art history nor Southeast Asian studies—as is the case of even some instructors—and the course on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art could actually be their first and last art history class prior to entering the industry. With respect to the medley of art-related courses offered at the undergraduate level, if I am moreover right to observe the absence of any systematic curriculum delivery, along with any consistently rigorous evaluation designed to register a progressive assimilation, how do I teach that might be beneficial? Students who have completed core and elective modules in art history profess bafflement at the most rudimentary notions of iconography and style; graduate students writing theses on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art still flounder with respect to the distinctions between art history and overlapping and adjacent fields of study like aesthetics, art criticism, visual studies and history.

In response to these circumstances, in addition to acquainting students with art historically significant episodes, individuals and works in modern and contemporary Southeast Asia, it has been urgent to familiarise them with the discipline's methods. Assuming that one who knows where to look, what questions to ask and what words to use are likely to be capable of approaching Jim Supangkat's Ken Dedes (1975) as diligently as he or she does the Singhasari Prajñāpāramitā that is its reference—or ancient Athenian red-figure amphorae, Habib Allah's Conference of the Birds (c. 1600) or Yinka Shonibare's Jardin d'amour (2007), for that matter—in the instruction of art historical methods, the how, takes precedence over the what that is modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art. With undergraduate students, I consider it vital that they acquire a strong foundation in description and visual analysis beginning with Erwin Panofsky's method, and become aware that the deceptively simple description constitutes the first of a series of critical engagements with any work of art as well as one's own reading of it, and that, regardless of Panofsky's biases, it is a valid preliminary means of scrutinising a work of art, which ought to be learnt, even if only to be unlearnt.¹ It is precisely because it is unavailing for a conceptual work like Cheo Chai Hiang's 5' × 5' (Singapore River) (1972) that it is a pertinent tool of thought: what does not work, why, how can it be adapted, and what other methods might remedy the inadequacies? [End Page 104]

In parallel is the training of visual memory and the eye. Ready access to abundant (quality) visual, textual and oral resources does not systematically boost visual and critical acuity or even curiosity, and if the idola temporis denounced by E.H. Gombrich in his "Research in the Humanities: Ideals and Idols"—"newly developed intellectual and mechanical tools which seem to promise prestige to those who 'apply' them to the humanities"²—are quick to juggle, as is the completion of many Masters degrees today, the training of the eye is a prolonged endeavour that is probably best attempted from the undergraduate level. In class, selections of reproductions are arranged in such a way as to solicit comparisons and associations amongst them; weekly, students are asked to identify works of art seen in the previous class. The oral presentation through which they hone skills in description and are confronted with Panofsky's method serves the same purpose: what do you see, and what terms and concepts best translate what is seen and known? Might the mindful study of images (and their contexts) additionally displace the indiscriminate bricolage of terms, concepts and arguments plucked from discourses du jour ranging from true erudition to recherché claptrap, which is often mistaken as the demonstration of criticality and intellectual energy?

Given that many Southeast Asian artists, whether purposefully or not, continue to draw on local thought systems and imagery of earlier origins, students are prompted to investigate their contexts and their interstices so as to be more mindful of nuances and liminalities which are otherwise conveniently obscured by fallacious terminology and facile frameworks, such as the recurrent reductive binary opposing the villain authoritarian regime and the heroic victim artist. When evaluating an artist's bearing in the network of transfers of style, terminology, concepts, categories of representation, etc., they are urged to consult adjacent disciplines like history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology and aesthetics, as well as scholarship on the premodern that is likely to cross-examine and fertilise prevailing approaches and theses in modern and contemporary art. To unpack the "expressionism" imputed to Affandi or the "Buddhistness" of Montien Boonma, for example, they are enjoined to examine the artist's practice and oeuvre in tandem with its contexts (life, culture, society, history, etc.). The aim is not to propose 'original' theses, but to apply oneself to the rigorous study of works of art within their multifarious contexts of production and reception; it is less to devise conjurations of Southeast Asian distinction, than to complicate our understanding of how modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia has been created, consumed and made sense of.

At the graduate level, the advancement of befitting academic standards overrides the want of grounding in foundational concepts and skills. With students writing theses on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, the [End Page 105] goal is to expose them to a broad spectrum of approaches within and beyond the modern Western construct of 'art' and its categories, so as to augment their methodological 'toolbox' for thinking about and writing on their research topic. They are prompted to reflect on why art historians wrote the way they did, and eventually, to identify, adapt and synthesise appropriate tools of thought resourcefully. In one of my courses, for example, four categories of assigned readings are critiqued in view of their applicability to modern and contemporary works of art from Southeast Asia. The first consists of a selection of texts by scholars working within the region as well as from outside it. They are discussed at the beginning of the course and again at the end of it. The second comprises of texts by not only art historians from the Western world—beginning with Giorgio Vasari and ending with Michael Baxandall and Hans Belting—but also seminal thinkers like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Gell. This selection is not designed to lay claim to any interdisciplinary approach, but to facilitate the appraisal of how a range of approaches to studying the material world beyond art history might enrich our undertaking. For graduate students new to art history—practically the entire class this category of texts moreover dispenses an overview of Western art history.

Next are texts on modern and contemporary South Asian art by Nandalal Bose, Geeta Kapur, Iftikhar Dadi and Sonal Khullar, for example. From a neighbouring region with multiple shared historical and cultural experiences, they provide a compelling model to learn from. To further expand students' aptitude in seeing and experiencing modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, they are introduced to taxonomies and theories of 'art' from ancient China and India where there is no lack of literary and historical texts on what has been loosely labelled 'art' only quite recently in the protracted history of humanity. Finally, returning to the texts on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, we ask: what are the prevailing approaches and narratives, how do they compare with those beyond the region and historical period, and what and how does one build on them? The proposed syllabus is deliberately overwhelming—an intimation of the wealth of tools of thought for studying 'art', a trove for subsequent study beyond the one-semester course, and a reminder that an enduring engagement with modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art demands an extensive culture beyond the modern and the contemporary as well as the construct of 'Southeast Asia' and its confines.

Before I end, I address the challenge that is the starkly uneven student capacity and commitment at the undergraduate and graduate level alike. To begin with, their unfamiliarity with the discipline's methods, and the strangeness of thought systems, imagery and events so close yet so foreign to them, necessitate the provision of support both in and outside the classroom. To provide [End Page 106] guidance to those who have yet to gain proficiency in the subject, without neglecting those of a more advanced level who are keen to delve deeply into the subject, in addition to the topics covered in class, more 'difficult' materials are regularly posted onto a shared digital platform for optimal exploration and assimilation at the individual pace: publications, collections, exhibitions, symposiums, news, etc. These links opening up to a variety of perspectives and possibilities seek to fuel intellectual brio, encourage the exploration of potential research topics and promote an awareness of the field, including its politics. To foster a culture of dialogue and mutual support amongst them, students from different disciplines and cohorts are put into groups to work on reading assignments without the pressure of being graded.

From what I understood from my own teachers, my task as a teacher is to transmit and to nurture discerning eyes and minds that see, think, connect ideas and employ words conscientiously. It would be gratifying if it still is; or do I collaborate in awarding degrees to whoever has the resources and cleverness to thrive in a social circle where posturing and networking supersede? A growing awareness of my own limitations, the unevenness of nascent scholarship on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, and trends in an increasingly pragmatic and even mercenary culture in higher education have been revelatory. Regardless, I hope the students I work with might grow to exercise independent thought and to appreciate rigour as an effective means of distilling what could be real from the sea of shadows confounded with knowledge, a measure against sophistry and nonsense. I also hope that they might cultivate curiosity in other art forms—beyond the modern and the contemporary, beyond Southeast Asia—without which their appreciation of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art is likely to be blinkered. To look, to pause, to look again and to think; to wonder, and to take the time to do so. [End Page 107]

When Students Become Lecturers
Thanavi Chotpradit

As a former undergraduate student (1999-2002) and a current lecturer (since 2015) of modern and contemporary art in Thailand in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Archaeology, at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, I have observed closely, and also taken part in, the development of the pedagogical structure of the programme which had originally been rooted in the country's archaeological mission—to produce knowledge and trained professionals capable of working with historic monuments and other forms of pre-modern art.

When I was a student, the 'Contemporary Art in Thailand' course [ศิลปะร่วม สมัยในประเทศไทย Sinlapa Ruam Samai Nai Prathet Thai] was taught by a guest lecturer, Sutee Kunavichayanont, from the Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts. Narawan Pathomvat of the Reading Room, a non-profit contemporary art library in Bangkok also spent a few years as guest lecturer before I returned from my studies at Birkbeck, University of London in early 2015. For several decades, there had never been any faculty member to facilitate courses in the history of modern and contemporary art in Thailand, let alone in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the scope of the programme has been slowly expanding to include modern and contemporary art with some new faces who received scholarships from the Thai government: Eksuda Singhalampong, Vipash Purichanont and myself. All of us are products of the department's undergraduate programme (Eksuda is an exception as she completed her MA here too) and now serve as full-time lecturers, all thanks to the Thai government. Our scholarships, which enabled us to study in the UK—Birkbeck, the University of Sussex and Goldsmiths—were part of the Thai Government [End Page 109] Scholarship Program for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which has ceased to exist.

When we modified the curriculum for the 2016 academic year, I proposed some new courses on modern art in Thailand, Thai art and visual culture during the Second World War, and Thai art and visual culture during the Cold War for our undergraduate programme. Back when I studied with Sutee, the 'Contemporary Art in Thailand' course covered the entire Rattanakosin period (1872-present) with, nevertheless, a focus on contemporary artistic practices and a few gallery visits. We went from a public institution such as the National Gallery of Thailand to a private gallery like Tadu Contemporary Art and some commercial galleries in Silom Galleria Building. However, a period from the 19th century to the present is long, too long to cover within a semester of 16 weeks (with one week for mid-term exams and one week for final exams).

The problem with time frame, terminologies and methodological approaches towards the variety of artistic practices urged me to rethink and design how I should teach art history. Apart from the Second World War and the Cold War periods, which are my personal academic interests, the distinction between the modern and the contemporary needs to be made through two different courses, though it is not easy since the two entities often overlap. More challenges arose: while the topics and issues in the course 'Modern Art in Thailand' [ศิลปะสมัยใหม่ในประเทศไทย Sinlapa Samai Mai Nai Prathet Thai] are arranged chronologically from the reign of King Rama IV, with the arrival of 'realism' from Western pictorial tradition, to the 'Art for Life' of the 1970s, this could not be done for the 'Contemporary Art in Thailand' course, since I strongly believe that it is necessary to catch up with what is going on in the Thai art scene during the semester. But how to balance getting to know the contemporary/contemporaneity and learning about its beginning in the late 1980s with the names and works of artists and works students should know? I still struggle with attempting the historicisation of the contemporary while introducing students to the art circle. There is a need to develop both professional skills and networks, to show them the possibilities in working with contemporary art or continuing their studies at a higher level of art history or shifting to other related fields like art management, curating, art marketing or museum studies. Internship is not compulsory here, but I highly encourage the practice as it would help students to navigate their own direction, preparing them for life after graduation. The inclusion of Vipash Purichanont to the department in 2017 led to an opening of a new course on museums and art galleries, which provides additional opportunities for students to engage with the contemporary art world. The department is still very much at the beginning stages and is limited to an undergraduate programme, but it is gradually [End Page 110] growing, with new courses from Eksuda and Vipash, such as Occidentalism in Thai art, contemporary visual culture and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, being added to the curriculum, with the hope of moving towards graduate and postgraduate programmes. Archival materials, other resources and facilities may still be very under-developed here, but we hope to continue building up the field. [End Page 111]

The Art Historian and the Sommelier
Stanley J. O’Connor

Art historians study the connection between visual form and human experience. They transfer the realities implied by sense and form into meaningful or propositional thought. Thus, because of its in-betweenness of focus, art history is not governed by any single logic of inquiry or body of empirical theory but is instead a bundle of activities each responsive to diverse criteria and theoretical discourses. Learning is fluid, interdependent, and is progressive or developmental only in the sense that it becomes more complexly linked to pertinent contexts and theoretical perspectives. The practical consequence is that an Art History curriculum, unlike accounting or chemistry, is typically loosely structured, neither sharply sequential nor zoned off by prerequisites. After an introduction to the discipline, its contours, typical fields, topics and characteristic modes of reasoning and demonstration, students should be able to grasp an art historical argument and respond to it critically.

Most students are drawn to study art history by the same impulse that makes them deepen their engagement with such other realms of absorbing human interest as religion or literature. The undergraduate teaching mission is not pre-professional, and it is this that I am concerned with here. Instead, it is directed towards broadly humane learning and the development of such fundamental skills as reasoned inquiry, logical argumentation, analytical rigor, appreciative discrimination and effective written expression.

We know now from discoveries of hand stencils on cave walls in Borneo and Sulawesi, that art has a long history in Southeast Asia: at least 40,000 years.¹ On the other hand, the 'art world' in which we participate, with its network of museums, commercial galleries, art schools, critics and journals, took its origin in Europe in the 18th century with the development of a new audience: the leisured, urban, middle-class.² To serve this emerging market, the concert hall was developed along with the museum, whose products were solely works [End Page 113] of art 'as such', set apart from specimens of manufacture or natural history. The social forces that moved art from private collections to public institutions to serve this emerging market continue today under conditions of globalisation.

One of the features of this world is its organization into specialized realms of intellectual inquiry. The rise of disciplinarity is part of a general disaggregation of knowledge into separate realms in the 19th century.³ Art history is organized separately from the broader discipline of History because its primary focus is the artwork itself. It draws its warrant from specialized methods for assessing the authenticity, meaning and style of the work as a cultural document.⁴ In the United States, the professional society for ensuring scholarly norms, forums and professional advancement is the College Art Association founded in 1911.

If we return, however, to the evidence of reality as experienced, we find that cultural framing is inescapable: we are all art historians. I refer to that evening, now some months ago, when people all over the world watched Notre Dame Cathedral burning as falling ash exploded into red flowers and a forest of dried ancient timbers became a black, smoking ruin. We were experiencing a swerve of time, as a cultural afterlife became part of an uncertain present. The shape of time was altered and with it came a restatement of an ancient phrase, "the pathos of things, the tears of things".

So, how should we teach art history to undergraduates? We might wish to put knowledge into a wider perspective overcoming some of the compartmentalizing of inquiry. I suggest, too, that we introduce our subject in a relaxed conversational voice; that we adopt the wandering, digressive style of the personal essay rather than the scholarly article, which after all, is not much read for pleasure, and is largely of interest to specialists.

Do I have a model? Yes, it is a bit of a reach, but I would suggest something like the comprehensive focus, the quality of discrimination, the sense of tact, taste and judgement that the wine sommeliers bring to their practice. Wine, like art, is the spirit of matter and, yet, it is profoundly a product of the geologic and climactic regime of place. It is an agricultural product wholly at the mercy of weather, water and the social organization of the harvesters. As is the case with art, there are products of breathtaking quality which the sommelier is also able to identify and appraise in a series of exact discrimination, much like art criticism. Like art, wine is both immanent and potential: an exchange between the sun-filled leaves on the trellises and pneuma of the rich swelling spheres. Like art, wine is simply all the facts but always the product of something unaccountable by the facts. By embracing this wider perspective, we would encounter artwork, as such, but also see them in their environment, the manner in which they are entangled in the world. [End Page 114]

I have two practical suggestions. The art history programme should be oriented toward engaging with the art of one's time and place as part of the ongoing definition of the self. I would suggest that, in the senior year, students might be offered a seminar designed to cause them to look back on their experience, integrate what they have learned in courses ordered diversely by period, place, medium or topic, revise what they now see to need revision, and to gain some sense of how what they have learned can be fitted to their lives. Such a seminar could be the Great Books course referred to below. Alternatively, the same aim might be met by a broad topic such as 'Art and the Sources of the Contemporary Self', built around a major book such as Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self or Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity. The aim is to cause students to engage with their own time as part of the ongoing definition of the self.

Art criticism is the intellectual frontier of the art world: to see something as something, to discuss the meaning or value of what we see, to connect that to other regions of concern, we are required to see from some perspective, with a focus of attention and some procedures for making distinctions and judgments about what we see. Theoretical perspectives shift with time, but critics must inevitably adopt one or more.⁵

But art criticism is also the literature of art history. It is rarely prescribed to undergraduates, if it all, as anything more than asides supporting an art historical argument. In the Western canon, works by Vasari, Diderot, Goethe, Ruskin, Pater, Baudelaire, Rilke, D.H. Lawrence could form the equivalent of a Great Books seminar. And, of course, many contemporary poets also write art criticism. But, an equivalent Asian canon could be developed and become part of art history programmes in Southeast Asia. It might ultimately lead to a more complex way to talk and think about art wherever we are encountering it. [End Page 115]

Learning from the Region; Learning in the Region; Learning from the Internet
Simon Soon

I came to join the Visual Art Program, Cultural Centre, University of Malaya, about three-and-a-half years ago, in mid-2016. At that point, I was still considering the option of a career in institutional curating. But it was Patrick Flores (Professor of Art Studies, University of the Philippines) who told me prophetically that I would find my home in the university, and so I should give this teaching opportunity a go. Having never been trained in a local Malaysian public university, naturally I was concerned. Not only have Malaysian public universities acquired the reputation of academic mediocrity, I was afraid that collegial life would be less than stimulating. I was of course proven wrong on all counts.

To get to a place where I have begun to finally feel comfortable with the subjects that I am to teach, took me about three years. The first year was really laying out the plan, and getting over my prejudices and expectations, so that I too could begin to learn from the journey that I take students through when I teach modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art for one semester each year, as well as a pre-modern to early modern Southeast Asian art survey in the next semester. Because our program does not offer the study of art and architecture at an undergraduate level, students enrolled in our MA program are generally required to take a number of survey courses that serve as an introduction to art in Malaysia and the region. We have inherited this focus from the program's founder, Redza Piyadasa.

Established in 2003, the Visual Art Program at the Cultural Centre was originally a one-man teaching institution. Piyadasa taught every single subject, [End Page 117] and that testified to the comprehensiveness of his interests and knowledge. Upon his passing in 2006, the program was sustained by an appointed successor, who kept it running, albeit without the level of care and fiery commitment that defined Piyadasa's singular passion for the arts. I joined the university in mid-2016. In the few years since then, teaching has also became a process of learning.

A lot of what I have gained from teaching has depended on the size of each class. When I have a bigger class, it is enlivened by a desire to undertake group activities. Normally, this means planning a study trip to one or more of our neighbouring countries. Often, I am required to rely on the kindness and hospitality of colleagues from around the region, who display nothing but generosity in accommodating us by taking time out of their busy schedule to speak to my students and share with them the knowledge and the excitement that they find through the study of art.

Other times, with a smaller group, the activities tend to turn inward, to explore what the students' main interests are. This happened in my second year into the job. There was one semester in which the only student enrolled in the pre-modern and early modern Southeast Asian art class was an Iranian. While providing her with the general overview of Southeast Asia, we also spent a good part of the semester exploring Persianate cultural history and its connection to Southeast Asia. It was that focused exchange with one student that spurred my interest in the topic, which then allowed me to develop subsequent teaching materials on the Persianate cosmopolis and Islamic arts in the Zirbadat (the land below the winds).

Learning has taken place in diverse settings, including a dragon kiln in Perak, a mamak coffee shop, the conservator's lab at the Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia, the entrance steps of the National Museum of Malaysia, the Ceylonese Bar in Ipoh, the wooden gazebo (Wakaf) in the courtyard of the Cultural Centre, along the circular pathways towards enlightenment at the Borobudur stupa. Most of the time though, the students sit in a dim air-conditioned classroom and allow the projection of slides on the screen to take them across universes. Time travelling doesn't stop there.

By the time I reached my third year, I had acquired a solid understanding of the 'quantum psychics' of the digital world. Today we have innumerable digital archives out there awaiting the discovery of future scholars. This allows us to access innumerable resources at any one time, which marks a real shift in reckoning with the question of parity in knowledge access. This is all the more pronounced in art history, a discipline of inquiry that historically was obfuscated by elitism. It was seen as the exlusive domain of 'gentlemen' and 'girls with pearls'. But it doesn't take a Kantian to agree that the transformative, [End Page 118] humbling and levelling power of beauty or other sensorial experiences through our encounter with objects made by other humans, are essentially common.

In the past few years, what I have been doing is also relearning how to find resources. Rather than complain about the lack of institutional funding in building up the perfect 'classical' art history facility, I have learned how to rely on the kindness of strangers (digital archivists, librarians, hackers, nerds) to build up a vast reservoir of teaching resources and research materials. In this way, whenever a colleague overseas asked if I have found the condition of working in a less-than-perfect public university wanting, it often makes me remember what was the anxiety that drove that line of questioning.

In my teaching, 'Southeast Asia' exists as a term only to allow this narrow idea of the region to be taken apart, so that other networks and circulations that overlap in Southeast Asia can be explored. On this note, the region is not a centripetal frame that moves inward. Rather, the region provides a centrifugal force that invites students to explore how our locality is connected to our neighbours, and to many different parts of the world. Two larger orbits are relied upon here.

For the pre-modern and early modern course, Southeast Asia is discussed through the Indian Ocean at one end, the Nanyang in another instance, and also the Pacific. Besides elucidating the basic religious principles or world-views that underpin these cultural geographies, thematic inquiry encourages students to think about questions of power (how does it manifest itself? What role does art play in this?), gender (what is the role of women? How does sexual difference inform artistic practices?), memory (how is the past recorded? How is art a technology of remembering? What are the politics of memory?) and translation (what are the adaptive principles that inform cultural encounters? What is retained and what changes?).

For the modern and contemporary art course, Southeast Asia is by turns inflected not only by high imperialism and resistance against European powers, but also by the desire to forge new political affinities. The Third World therefore also informs the cultural aspirations of Southeast Asian artists and their circulatory pathways. Under this expanded trans-continental regionality, the course then explores the modern as a procedural engagement with the continuities and discontinuities of visual knowledge systems from a pre-modern or early modern past. In the process, we explore various theoretical apparatuses to provide explanatory accounts of modernism, neo-traditionalism and the avant-garde, as these phenomena have emerged in many worlds besides that of mainstream movements from Europe/North America.

You might say that teaching Southeast Asian art through these expanded scopes is overly ambitious and overwhelming. I can only answer that I cannot [End Page 119] imagine a history of Southeast Asia that isn't so. Given such circumstances, what is left for me to do is to learn how to tell this story convincingly, powerfully, persuasively. While I am nowhere close to succeeding, each year offers me a chance to move towards that goal. [End Page 120]

Undergraduate Teaching of Art History in a Studio Context
Sarena Abdullah

At Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), art history papers are offered as core papers to Fine Arts students at the School of the Arts. Thus, I have developed Art History courses for Fine Arts, rather than Art History students. This required me to re-strategize the approach and learning outcomes of my classes to suit the needs of studio major students. Most of these Fine Arts students are accepted based on their Form Six Sijil Tinggi Persekolahan Malaysia (STPM) results or diploma certificates. Besides their academic qualifications, they are screened by way of a drawing assessment and an interview process. Thus, developing art history pedagogy subjects for Fine Arts students required further consideration of whether their backgrounds and interests are based on studio rather than art history.

Every year, around 30 students majoring in Fine Arts have to take 'Introduction to Fine Arts' and 'Theories and Methods of Art History' courses, both of which I teach. As these classes are the first few introductory classes to fine arts and art history, building knowledge on an already established knowledge of art and art-making can be slightly challenging.

First, most first-year students majoring in Fine Arts have a very limited knowledge of art history and, in particular, Malaysian art history. As a case in point, their knowledge of modern artworks and Malaysian artists are limited to a few artists like Hoessein Enas and Dzulkifli Buyong—the former was a realist painter who is mostly known for his realistic portraitures, and the latter rendered his childhood memory of playing with boats and the common night scene of siblings putting up a mosquito net in the room at night. As for [End Page 121] international artists, the only name that is known by most of the students is Leonardo da Vinci, which I suspect is due to the Mona Lisa and perhaps the movie The Da Vinci Code.

Second, their knowledge of the mediums used in visual arts is limited to drawing and painting. Hence art is merely seen as representation-making, rather than as an attempt of media exploration or visual communication to portray critical and conceptual thinking. Thus, it is very common for a first-year bachelor degree student to not have any idea what installation, conceptual and performance arts are. Their knowledge of art and art-making does not go beyond producing likenesses and cartoonish and/or manga-like sketches—as seen in their high school portfolios during entrance interviews. Cartoons and manga are the more popular forms of 'art' among teenagers. Their knowledge in crafts-making techniques is also limited and fundamental; thus art appreciation, aesthetic discourse and knowledge are very limited in their first-year of studies.

As a way of re-strategizing my approach and to make art history relevant and interesting to studio students, I had to approach Art History pedagogy by systematically building on the students' own experiences and knowledge of art and art-making. Art history pedagogy has to be built around their limited studio knowledge of the first semester of undergraduate studies. In the first semester, 'Introduction to Fine Arts' is set as a survey that looks into both studio practice and art history in general at a very fundamental level. In the second semester, another course called 'Theories and Methods of Art History' introduces students to a few main theories that underline and discuss what art is, and the changes of the meaning of art through several selected readings, such as Plato, Hegel, Danto, Pollock and others. On top of that, students are also introduced to the writing of research papers: elements such as citation, references and bibliography are discussed and practised in exercises to equip students with the skills that are very much needed at a tertiary level. In both of these classes, the theories and histories of Asia/Southeast Asian/Malaysian art are not directly included in the curriculum; nevertheless, a few Malaysian examples are included in the 'Introduction to Fine Arts' class.

The twofold Malaysian Modern Art course is offered in the second year. The first part of the course is to introduce modern Malaysian art in terms of historical periodization—from the visual renditions already produced in the late 19th century in local Malay manuscripts and early print media, to the forms of current practices of modern and contemporary art. The second part of the course, with a special focus on Malaysian art since the 1990s, concentrates on discussing Malaysian art practice in terms of mediums used, subject matters and thematic approaches. Although this second section does not concentrate [End Page 122] on situating the post-1990s practices in a regional or international context, the idea of a Malaysian 'art world', especially in the relations between artists, dealers, curators, critics, collectors and auction houses, is introduced.

Besides the usual lectures, presentations and discussions, students are given a major group assignment that involves fieldwork. If theory classes provide students with an introduction to several theoretical approaches in art, as well as the academic aspect of writing, this assignment introduces students to fieldwork. These Fine Arts students interview artists or other figures who play a significant role in Malaysian art such as curators, gallerists, art historians, etc. This fieldwork is not only for the sake of doing research—getting firsthand information—more importantly, it exposes the students to various visual artists, their studio practices and the Malaysian art scene in general. Although this seems like a simple task, it actually exposes the students to the idea of becoming professional artists. Thus, an art history course actually boosts their studio practice knowledge and exposure to the different kinds of art scenes out there.

Another class that I am teaching at the level 200, 'Modern Asian Art', is yet another take on the building of these scaffoldings of knowledge. As these students have prior knowledge of Malaysian art history and the Malaysian art scene in general, this class tries to expand and link their knowledge in the context of Asia, or Asia-Pacific at least. Besides the active learning that requires students to present their understanding of assigned readings, students are asked to investigate the functions of art galleries and art museums across Asia. Of course, because these students cannot afford to travel far, the coursework tasks have been designed so that the students find out about various galleries and museums by way of the Internet. They are required to examine the websites of three to four selected museums and/or galleries, then present their findings in class. As such, the students would learn about the programming of these institutions—past and upcoming exhibitions, educational activities, administrative structures and others. Although this exercise does not require the students to examine any artworks in particular, they are exposed to how works circulate and the economical exchanges in the art market. On top of that, the value of art in a collection and the question of loans between institutions is discussed in class.

Besides the main approach of assignments for each class as discussed above, other pedagogical approaches, such as flipped classrooms and even the use of technology, are also applied. Students are required to upload their research on an assigned art history topic in the form of three-minute video presentations on YouTube channels. Whether we like it or not, various technologies are here, and sometimes alternative approaches can be more relevant [End Page 123] and effective to art students who can be quite poor in writing. Synthesising and communicating their research on art history can be more challenging through this exercise, as they have to converse and display their comprehension verbally through videos that could be viewed by others on online platforms.

After undergoing art history courses at 100 and 200 levels, students have to take a 'Western Modern Art' course at the 300 level, and subsequently an internship in the same academic year. Although I do not teach at this level, it is hoped that the base of knowledge of art history acquired in my classes enable the students to see themselves working and partaking in the Malaysian art scene, even if they decide not to pursue their artistic endeavour after graduation. It is hoped that the discussions on galleries, art institutions, art markets, exhibitions and others, will open their minds in seeking internship placements and subsequently job opportunities within the industry.

As I have discussed here, various approaches in teaching art history to Fine Arts students are needed to sustain their interest and, most important of all, to place their art history knowledge in the context of studio practice. Although assignments such as research-based term papers are still required, the approach of art history studies must not be limited to the analysis of artworks or to an art historical study through discussions of art styles and movements. As these are trained fine arts studio students, for whom art history and art theory subjects are seen as uninteresting, a slightly different approach in teaching art history has to be introduced. [End Page 124]

Some Questions on the Relationship between Institutions that Teach and Institutions that Exhibit, in Southeast Asia
Roger Nelson

It is often observed that museums, galleries and other venues for display have generated much—perhaps most—of the published writing on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. T.K. Sabapathy, for example, observes that "[e]xhibitions are dominant sites for the production of discourse on contemporary art in Southeast Asia".² This is true also for modern art, as evidenced by Sabapathy's own role in organising and writing for numerous widely-cited exhibitions (and accompanying publications) relating to modern art, held at state-funded institutions such as Singapore Art Museum and various university galleries, as well as in commercial galleries and other venues. The texts produced by or on the occasions of exhibitions may vary in tone, but it is clear that this "production of discourse" includes many catalogues: texts which are generally briefer and more tightly focused than other forms of essayistic discourse such as journal articles, comparative essays, and so on.³

Yet, although there is a clear relationship between exhibiting art and writing about art, in Southeast Asia, there remains, perhaps, more work to be done to think though the implications and effects of this relationship on the nature and shape of scholarship. For example, have ephemeral artworks, lost or destroyed artworks, or artworks housed within inaccessible collections been under-studied, or less often taught, compared to extant artworks that are available for exhibition? Has the growing market (and rising prices) for modern and contemporary art in some (but not all) locations within Southeast Asia affected the nature and volume of writing published, even outside of explicitly [End Page 125] commercial settings? Have either of these (or other) factors worked to isolate discussion of 'visual art' and 'fine arts' from discourses on other aspects of 'visual culture' and 'material culture' including performance, cinema, design, craft and so on? These and other questions may reward further consideration.

If matters arising from the relationship between exhibitions and scholarship demand more attention, then the question of what relationship exists between exhibitions—and institutions that organise and host them—and pedagogy is even less often discussed. I do not have sufficient experience teaching the history of modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia to feel qualified to venture a position on this. However, my limited experience of teaching Southeast Asia's modern art history (in Singapore, briefly, and in guest lectures in Australia, Cambodia and Thailand) and Australia's modern art history (in Melbourne, briefly), as well as my conversations with colleagues much more experienced in teaching than I am, has raised for me some questions I will share here.⁴ First, I will briefly offer a reflection on teaching the history of 'Australian art', which has brought some of these questions into focus for me.

In Australia, it is common practice among many teachers of Australia's modern art history to substitute examples of works by canonical artists given in reading materials for other examples of works by the same artists that are available for students to view in person, in local museums or galleries. Would this be possible—or desirable—when teaching histories of Southeast Asia's modern and contemporary art, in Southeast Asia?

In Australia, this is possible due to the existence of substantial collections of 'Australian art' exhibited in state, national and university museums in most Australian cities. I adopted this practice myself when teaching an undergraduate survey course on Australia's art history at the University of Melbourne in 2016. I found that students engaged more deeply and with greater enthusiasm with artworks that they could see in person, probably for a range of reasons having to do with their increased attention to embodied, affective experiential reactions to the work, rather than only intellectual responses to it. This seemed to be the case even if the artworks students saw in person were different from the works that had been discussed in the texts that they had read. This made for more rewarding discussions in class, and better essays. It also had the added benefit of encouraging students' engagement with the art institutions of their city, beyond the classroom.

Another rewarding result of this approach was that it made it feel possible for me, at least in some instances, to simultaneously teach students the canon of 'Australian art', while also interrogating that canon (and by extension, the concept of canons more broadly). I attempted to do this, for example, by facilitating discussions about why it is that some works by any given artist may be more often written about than other works by the same artist, or why some [End Page 126] artists are extensively studied, but others whose work appears similar or comparable have been rarely written about. Would such discussions be possible—or desirable—when teaching 'Southeast Asian art' in Southeast Asia?

It should be noted that these discussions that attempted to at once teach and question Australia's canon were only possible for two reasons quite specific to the teaching of 'Australian art' in an Australian university. First, the students had already been introduced to (mostly, but not entirely, Euro-American) art history as an (ever-changing) discipline and (expansive) set of methods, through compulsory prerequisite introductory survey courses. Second, there exists an established and relatively stable canon of 'Australian art', consisting of artists who are represented in most major museum collections, are written about substantially from multiple and often opposing perspectives, and who are, in many cases, widely known outside of specialist circles.

These circumstances are, in my experience, not shared in many Southeast Asian contexts. First, many universities do not equip students with an introduction to art historical methodologies or disciplinary debates before immersing them in the study of Southeast Asia's modern and contemporary art. This can cause particular challenges for those teaching at universities that offer postgraduate courses to students who have no undergraduate training in art history, or sometimes even in any studies in the humanities or social sciences. Examples of such courses are Nanyang Technological University's MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practice, where I briefly taught in 2017, and the University of Malaya's MA in Visual Arts, where Southeast of Now editorial collective member Simon Soon teaches. Second, there is not an established canon of modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia. There are nationally-specific canons, to varying degrees—more so in Indonesia and the Philippines, for example, and less so in Cambodia and Laos—but there is not a widely accepted set of artists who are extensively written about and exhibited throughout the region and widely known across the region outside of specialist circles.

That is, I contend, there is no canon of 'Southeast Asian art': a circumstance which I believe should not be lamented, but rather can be embraced as an exciting opportunity that facilitates new, inventive, challenging and (multiply, transversally) connected ways of thinking—and of teaching. To be sure, in recent years there is a growing consensus among specialists about the importance of certain artists, institutions and other narratives, but this sense of scholarly and curatorial agreement does not (yet) constitute a Southeast Asian canon, in my opinion, for two reasons. Firstly, the number of specialists interested in pan-regional art histories is very small, and the people and stories they agree to be regionally (rather than nationally) important remain largely unknown outside of these specialist circles. For example, while Juan Luna may be well known by diverse publics in the Philippines, he remains almost totally [End Page 127] unknown, even among artists and art historians, in Cambodia. Secondly, the sense of growing consensus even among that small group of specialists is very recent, and continues to shift swiftly, without the anchoring force of long-established academies or museums taking on a pan-regional purview.

And yet, a relationship certainly exists between institutions that exhibit and institutions that teach, in many parts of Southeast Asia. For example, students from teaching institutions in Singapore such as LASALLE College of the Arts, Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore routinely visit the National Gallery Singapore, as well as other museums and galleries, as part of their studies. Students of art history from universities elsewhere in the region, from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur, have also visited National Gallery Singapore with their teachers since I began working there in January 2019. I also know that art history teachers at universities in these and other Southeast Asian cities routinely ask students to make use of online materials as part of their syllabus. These include online materials made available by National Gallery Singapore, as well as other museums and galleries and archives, such as artworks digitised in high resolution as part of the Google Arts and Culture project.

Therefore, might decisions about the artworks (and publications) that the National Gallery Singapore and other museums and galleries (and libraries) choose to (and are able to) collect, exhibit, and—importantly—digitise and make available online, have an effect on the teaching that takes place in universities elsewhere in the region? What role might digitisation—be it legally and officially carried out by institutions, or individually done and informally circulated through private or pirate networks—have in teaching? Are artworks that cannot be found online less likely to be taught? Or perhaps less likely to be studied or written about by students? Academics often lament that students are more likely to cite texts that are available to them digitally than those only found in books and printed publications. Surely the same might be the case when students are selecting artworks to investigate? Might it be the case that artworks made by women, or by artists from minority populations, are less likely to be digitised or made available online? What of the fact that auction houses and other commercial institutions make many images of artworks available online which may then be used in teaching?

Might the fact that nationally-funded museums in most Southeast Asian cities other than Singapore usually exhibit only the art of their host countries serve to perpetuate nationally-siloed studies and interests? What about cities—like Manila and Kuala Lumpur—in which commercial galleries regularly exhibit contemporary art from other parts of Southeast Asia, but in which nationally-funded museums usually exhibit only modern art from the Philippines and [End Page 128] Malaysia, for example? What effect does this have on teaching and studying art history, if students are exposed to examples of modern art from the rest of the region only in reproduction, but are regularly able to experience in person examples of contemporary art from other parts of Southeast Asia?

Might the ready availability of illustrated publications from some other nationally-funded museums in Southeast Asia—such as the Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi, for example—mean that teachers are more likely to include modern artworks from their collections in their syllabus? Or perhaps not, if they are not available digitally? Might modern artworks held in the collections of museums that do not issue illustrated publications featuring modern artworks—such as the National Museum of Cambodia, for example—be less likely to be taught elsewhere in the region, for this reason (perhaps among others)?

Might it be mutually productive for there to be more dialogue, exchange and sharing of resources between institutions that exhibit and institutions that teach? If curators and others working at museums and galleries are already often reliant on scholarship produced by universities, and scholars are in turn already often reliant on exhibitions for the production of discourse, then a clear relationship between exhibitions and scholarship can be established—albeit one that raises many questions which might reward further attention. But what of the mutual reliance between exhibitions and pedagogy? Is it not the case that museums and galleries already rely on teachers to educate their audiences, and that teachers already rely on museums and galleries for their teaching materials (including images, as well as texts)?

If so, then how might people in institutions that exhibit and people in institutions that teach potentially work together to make this circumstance of co-dependence more fertile, fortuitous and perhaps even liberatory? [End Page 129]

How Should I Watch Today? Reflections on Film Programming and Pedagogy
Patrick F. Campos

Teaching Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art in the US
Nora A. Taylor

The question is not only how do I teach Southeast Asian art history, but also why? In the era of global contemporary art, one may question the purpose of using the geopolitical entity of Southeast Asia to identify an art historical subject. I teach it because I still believe in what Southeast Asian art history can teach us about art history. Sure, the field has changed and what PhD students in Southeast Asian art history are studying today differs vastly from the curriculum 30 years ago, when I first entered the PhD Program at Cornell University. In 1989, shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre and as I watched the Berlin Wall collapse in my first semester, I was fortunate to have studied with the pioneering and relatively unconventional art historian Stanley O'Connor. His approach to Southeast Asia corresponded to my recently discovered interest. We were likely attracted to the region for the same reasons. We understood that it was one of the most diverse and interesting areas of the world to study, partly because of its artificiality as a Cold War construct, but also because of its constant state of flux. As a discursive site by definition, it was a perfect field for challenging Western assumptions of art historiography.

Far ahead of his time, before the advent of global art history, O'Connor considered Southeast Asian art to be a living art, as opposed to a repository of inanimate objects sealed in museum vitrines. This approach enabled my classmates and I to think more broadly about what kind of art we could study. Even though he exposed his students to wayang, textiles, ceramics and other so-called traditional art forms that continued to be made in the [End Page 137] present, that he encouraged us to "learn the language and go to the field", gave us the opportunity to consider living artists as subjects of research. It is no surprise that he counted among his students Apinan Poshyananda, who wrote the first study of modern art in Thailand for his dissertation, and Astri Wright, who was among the first scholars to focus on contemporary Indonesian artists. It was Stanley O'Connor's open-mindedness that also convinced me to take the scholarly pursuit of modern painting in Hanoi seriously, even though when I was doing research in Vietnam, contemporary Asian art had not yet entered academia.

After completing my doctoral studies in 1997, there were very few jobs for Southeast Asianists and I was lucky to land a position in the history department at the National University of Singapore. I was thrilled to be teaching Southeast Asian Art in Southeast Asia but was immediately faced with the dilemma that students in Singapore, although they knew everything about the region, knew nothing about art history. The university did not have a slide collection and I had to make black-and-white transparencies from a photocopy machine, which was not very conducive toward teaching contemporary art. Thus, my syllabus veered more toward visual and material culture and less toward art. It also covered more ancient than modern history. In 1998, I moved back to the United States to teach at Arizona State University and although in 1999, I organized a symposium on colonial and post-colonial Southeast Asian art, it still proved difficult to teach modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art because of the lack of digital access to updated scholarship. It was not practical to assign texts from exhibition catalogues. It wasn't until the year 2000 that I could assign chapters from John Clark's edited volume Modern Asian Art published in Sydney in 1998. Still needing to rely on slides, my classes remained somewhat interdisciplinary and thematic, covering Indonesian shadow puppets, Cambodian statuary, Vietnamese ceramics, but very little contemporary art. It took me a while to collect enough material to properly teach modern and contemporary art. The dilemma that presented itself was the reverse of the situation in Singapore, whereby most students knew about art history but very little about Southeast Asia. In 2004, I was invited to teach a graduate seminar on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian Art at UCLA and was finally able to cover the region's art from colonialism to the present. That year was also when ASU also finally acquired a high-speed scanner and I was able to create Powerpoint presentations from a growing array of books and exhibition catalogues, including my own Painters in Hanoi published that same year. It was also gratifying that ASU's first PhD in Art History was produced by Deborah Boyer on the topic of Filipino artists at the 1904 World Exposition in Saint Louis, Missouri. [End Page 138]

Fast forward to the present, since 2007, I have been teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have been able to incorporate much more innovative and contemporary material. Aside from a few Bachelor and Master's degree seekers in art history, my students are mostly artists. Since my institution only grants BA, BFA, MA and MFA degrees, I have not had the opportunity to supervise doctoral theses at SAIC. But I have been working with doctoral students working on Southeast Asian art history topics at other universities such as Cornell, the University of Sydney, Nanyang Technological University and the University of Michigan, thanks to inter-collegial networks. At SAIC, while I aim to teach American students about Southeast Asian art, my most rewarding pedagogic experiences come from teaching Southeast Asian students who come to the US to study. This includes one of my first MA in art history students, Vipash Purichanont, who has gone on to join curatorial teams for the Thailand and the Singapore Biennales; Loo Zihan, an interdisciplinary artist who is now starting a PhD in performance studies at the University of California Berkeley; and two artists from Vietnam, Ly Hoang Ly and Phan Thao Nguyen. To them, studying Southeast asian Art history is one of critical engagement with the art of their own countries without the pressures of national bias. In turn, for me, it is a means of inserting their art practices into the discourses of art history.

For the other students, classes in modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art encourage them to think critically about the category of Asian art and its exclusion in the canon of modern and contemporary art. We question the practice of segregating artists by their place of national origin so as to expand themes across borders and not restrict artists to an interpretation based on their ethnicity. My classes often start with the founding of colonial art schools in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. I continue with independence movements and national art discourses in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. I also cover themes such as Buddhism and Islam with artists such as Montien Boonma and A.D. Pirous. I discuss the rise of Biennales and the impact of diasporic identities. Since I do not teach exclusively Southeast Asian art—I take turns teaching a graduate survey of modern and contemporary art for example—I try to insert Southeast Asian content whenever I can. I also look at the issues that concern contemporary artists such as politics, gender and religion.

As contemporary artists from Southeast Asia have received increased attention from art collectors, curators and museums around the world, I am able to include a greater variety of artists. I teach a class, for example, called 'Post-Asia' that looks beyond the framework of the category of Asian art and includes Asian and diasporic artists who challenge cultural assumptions and stereotypes. I look at historiography and meta-art histories; how art history has [End Page 139] been constructed; and transmissions of knowledge from one generation to the next, such as the more recent debate surrounding the 2011 re-performance by a young Singaporean artist of a 1994 work by another and the debates that ensued. This new work that references an earlier work provides an opportunity to revisit a time period when the Singaporean government imposed restrictions on artists and discuss the role of state politics in the shaping of contemporary Singapore. It also provides an example of how artistic ideas flow from one generation to the next in complicated ways, much like how Stanley O'Connor had taught us to look at artworks across time and space that defy logical chronological time. Finally, an aspect of teaching Southeast Asian art that has fundamentally changed over the decades is the increased access to scholarship written by Southeast Asians, either in translation or because many of them publish in English. Since I teach in a non-traditional art history department in art school and am not beholden to the category of 'Southeast Asian Art', I want students to understand the complexities of art historical canon formations and be aware of the history of the field of Southeast Asian art history and why it matters, precisely because it defies categorization. [End Page 140]

Teaching a 'Dangerous' Subject: The History of Malay Political Cartoons
Muliyadi Mahamood

Falling off the Edge: Teaching Modern Southeast Asia and Architectural History
Lawrence Chua

In architecture, edges are critical to understanding space. They define not only the hard parameters of a territory but also the transitions between different places and activities. For historians of architecture, pushing the edges of the discipline are a crucial part of developing a liberatory pedagogy that emphasizes acts of cognition over transferring information.¹ Describing the stakes of writing what she calls "universal history", historian and political scientist Susan Buck-Morss has written:

Liberation from the exclusionary loyalties of collective identities is precisely what makes progress possible in history, which is not to say that global trade fosters understanding, peace, or universality (it connects directly with the sale of arms, the initiation of wars, and the degradation and displacement of laboring people). Instead, it is to argue that one of the feared 'risks' of long-distance trade (exploited by imperialists and anti-imperialists alike) is the fear of falling of the cultural edge of one's own world and its self-understanding.²

To fall of the edge of the modern is to see beyond the flat terrain of a narrative that organizes the local and the global into centre-periphery relations. Those of us who study geographies that have been deemed peripheral to the [End Page 149] history of modernity know well that critical historical scholarship of a place requires not only knowledge of local histories but a broader understanding of where the local sits within global narratives of the built environment. This requires an extensive knowledge of the ways the modern metropole was forged in the crucible of imperialism, slavery and genocide. The myopia of conventional art and architectural histories rarely allows for the centrality of the colonial project in the development of modernism and the rise of the so-called West. How then does one teach the history of architecture and urbanism in a narrative that has traditionally emphasized the rise of the industrial ecumene as an insular phenomenon? Specifically, where does one locate regions like Southeast Asia in the global history of modernity?

The lectures and seminar courses on the history of architecture that I teach for both undergraduate and graduate students in a professional school emphasize the ways that the built environment has emerged not only in response to contemporary local conditions but developed out of a global dialogue between the past and the present. In the survey lecture I teach, students encounter Southeast Asia through case studies that are part of a larger history of the global built environment from 1500 to the present. This is the second part of a two-semester required sequence that students encounter in their first and second years of a five-year programme. The two survey courses comprise about half of the required history courses that students must take in a diverse curriculum that includes building systems, theory, and—the mainstay of their education—design studio. These examples of architecture in Southeast Asia that make their way into the survey are not intended as additions to the canon of modern architecture ("Add Southeast Asia and stir…"), but rather as provocations to disrupt preconceived understandings of the development of modernism. Because Southeast Asia is where the confluence of multiple approaches to modernity can be taken apart, discussed and critiqued, these case studies offer a way of looking at the dominant narrative of modernity from the transitional zones of the edge.

In the survey, I have used Swati Chattopadhyay's concept of the "colonial uncanny" to frame discussions of the circulation of neo-classical and Gothic revival idioms across European empires.³ This allows for not only a formal comparison of St Martin in the Fields cathedral (James Gibbs, London, 1720–26) with cathedrals that were built in South and Southeast Asia like St John's (James Agg, Calcutta, 1784), but a discussion of the ways colonial networks facilitated the circulation of forms, expertise and labour. We examine the use of chu nam (a plaster made of shell lime, egg white, coarse sugar, water and coconut husks) by convict labourers brought to Singapore from India to build St Andrew's Cathedral (Ronald McPherson/J.F.A. McNaire, Singapore, [End Page 150] 1856–62). Further introducing case studies like Saigon's Notre Dame Cathedral (1863–80) and the ubosot hall of Wat Niwetthamprawat (Joachim Grassi, Bang pa-in, 1878), a Buddhist ordination hall built in the Gothic idiom, into the comparison expands the discussion to understand the ways architectural forms were transformed into a stylistic appliqué through this movement. By looking at how the design process is embedded within larger social, economic and political events, we are able to better understand the relevance of Adolf Loos' early 20th-century critique of ornament as primitive, degenerate and criminal to not only European modernism but to the colonial project as well. Contextualizing the career of architects like Kenzo Tange within Japan's mid-century imperial project in China and Southeast Asia enables us to discuss the import of Metabolism after World War II, as well as the exploded, fragmented forms that their innovations have engendered in cities around the world, including Mahanakhon (Ole Scheeren, Bangkok, 2011–16). Examining the complex agency and authorship of art and architecture in this way places the history of formal and intellectual innovation within global histories of economic and political modernization. This not only gives students access to a rich set of global historical precedents and design approaches for the studio, it also creates an intellectual base for them to project into the future and imagine beyond accepted cultural borders to speculate on the kind of world in which they want to practise architecture.

To fall off the edge is to push at the boundaries of the known world, a world that has been constructed through disciplinary knowledge. Implicit in the project of decolonizing knowledge is the need to interrogate the borders of the disciplines that have ordered our worlds rather than simply enrich and entrench their canonical repositories. Architectural history has long been dominated by narratives of the triumphant rise of modernity, driven by an avant-garde of mostly-white, mostly-male practitioners and their portfolio of exceptional works. This historiographical approach might be traced back to the 16th century and Giorgio Vasari's Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori [Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects] and suggests that many of the problems of the discipline were inherited from its long subordination to art history. In the intervening four centuries, architectural history has become increasingly autonomous of art history's biases and its purpose more recently re-defined in relation to the study of architectural design. This is due, at least in part, to the increasing number of historians like myself, who are embedded within professional schools of architecture.⁴ Teaching history within a professional school is not without its own interesting set of problems, like the operative use of history to idealize an era as a model for design, but it has also been accompanied by critical self-examination and the development [End Page 151] of rich inter-disciplinary methods.⁵ As the profession acknowledges the rising importance of regions like Southeast Asia to the global building economy, architectural history as it is taught in professional schools has had to expand its focus.⁶ Our students, many of them from outside of the United States, are aware of the importance of achieving cultural competencies as the key to succeeding in an increasingly diverse and global marketplace, but they are also eager to learn about the ways the building sits within larger world networks of power, society and commerce in diverse historical circumstances. Because many of our students are attuned to the ways architecture today sits within an expanded field, it opens up the possibility of moving beyond the building as the primary focus of teaching history, and to examine the political role of infrastructure space, the reformulation of the so-called vernacular, and the influence of diverse forms of knowledge of space (like the Traiphum, the Indic cosmology of the Three Worlds prevalent throughout Southeast Asia) across different historical periods and geographic locations.

Area studies, the field that has structured Southeast Asian studies, has also had to confront its borders, often literally. Does Southeast Asia incorporate only the territories defined by the strategic concerns of post-World War II imperialism? To fully analyse the complex ways architecture and urbanism have developed in Southeast Asia requires a deeper understanding of the ways transregional discourses on culture, politics and economy have been rooted in the circulation of forms, labour, capital and ideas. To understand the ways the region was historically understood by the populations that inhabited it further requires rethinking the colonial as a rigid framework that ties back to a European (or North American) metropole and instead understanding its multiple centres and relationships to overlapping empires and spheres of cultural influence. The lecture course that I teach on so-called 'Buddhist architecture' attempts to do this as it presents a diverse image of ecclesiastical architecture that draws on multiple periods and regions. Here, Southeast Asia is placed at the intersection of multiple historical trajectories and considered as an extension of sacred landscapes that have been reproduced throughout the Theravada (and Mahayana) Buddhist ecumene. These landscapes tie the region to other places, both symbolically, intellectually and formally, as in the case of relic stupas that are based on material and ideological exchanges across regions and periods not defined by Cold War-era geographies. In this way, Southeast Asia becomes not just a field rich with case studies but a "method" for what cultural studies scholar Chen Kuan-hsing has described as "deimperialization".⁷ Understanding the ways the development of Southeast Asian architecture and urbanism has been embedded within translocal exchanges of ideas, forms and labour, on the one hand, and unequal global power relations, on the other, [End Page 152] reframes disciplinary and geographic boundaries as transitional zones. By softening these borders, we can challenge students to 'fall freely' off the edges of the known world and imagine new modes of space and social relations beyond late capitalism. [End Page 153]

Reflections on Teaching Art of Southeast Asia
John N. Miksic

For six years (1994–99), I taught a course on the art of Southeast Asia in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. I approached the subject from a multidisciplinary perpsective, with an analytical framework mainly taken from anthropology and sociology. My objective was to inspire students to think about the relationship between art, artists and society, rather than arts in isolation. Music played a major role in the course. I had assistance from other scholars who gave guest lectures. These included ethnomusicologists Prof. Geoffrey Benjamin, then in the Department of Sociology, Joseph Peters (then assistant director, Centre for Musical Activities, later subsumed under the Centre for the Arts), and Dr Nancy Cooper. For several years, before NUS had its own gamelan, tutorials on gamelan were held at LASALLE/SIA Institute of Art. Mas Widyanto, visiting scholar, led a gamelan workshop there in 1996.

Architecture was covered by Prof. Pina Indorf (Architecture, NUS: visual dynamics of Southeast Asian architecture) and Prof. Roxana Waterson, sociology of Southeast Asian architecture (especially houses). T.K. Sabapathy taught contemporary issues regarding creative practice, including live theatre. Patricia Pelley, visiting lecturer from Cornell University, taught modern Vietnamese art, including Chinese influences. Kate Crippen contributed lectures on textiles. I discussed the gardens of Southeast Asia (which I later expanded into a complete module); Islamic art; textiles; jewellery; and books (including book design). I took students to visit the Singapore Art Museum, especially when the exhibition Modernity and Beyond was there.

Some of my goals included the importance of social engagement by Southeast Asian artists and the continued influence of past artistic traditions [End Page 155] in contemporary art. The following are some of the questions I asked students to think about.

What is the meaning of the social, ritual and economic matrix of a work of art?

What should be the goal of the student of Southeast Asian art: to learn to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' art, or to understand the intentions of the artists? What role should the study of aesthetics have?

How can the study of Southeast Asian art help to illuminate other aspects of Southeast Asian societies?

What are some of the main themes of Southeast Asian contemporary art?

What is Southeast Asian about contemporary Southeast Asian art?

How do contemporary Southeast Asian artists make use of the past? Anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson have argued that artists of all cultures share common traits. One of these traits or skills is the ability to communicate on a non-verbal level, which might be termed subconscious or subliminal. How have Southeast Asian artists manipulated artistic media in order to communicate on this non-verbal level?

Many Singaporeans do not visit art museums. How can adult Singaporeans who avoid museums be educated about and exposed to art? In Singapore, the Art Museum is separated from the Museum of Asian Civilisations and the Singapore History Museum. What are the advantages and disadvantages of such an organizational structure?

Stanley O'Connor has argued that:

the place of Southeast Asian art in America and in the liberal arts college…is in the museum. …The university as a learned community has said that a museum belongs where it does at the centre of the campus because it is more than merely a facility to house, to preserve, and to exhibit discrete objects; that it is more than an efficient machine for the housekeeping of curious treasures and marvels. The museum stands there because it is a sign of relationship, of things in relation to one another, and how if taken all together, as a collection, they embody a meaning.¹

Would you agree that this statement applies with equal validity to Singapore?

Discuss the limitations and potential misconceptions associated with the expressions 'traditional Southeast Asian art', 'primitive art', 'ethnic art'.

Claire Holt divided her book Art in Indonesia into three sections: The Heritage; Living Traditions and Modern Art. Are these appropriate divisions of the subject? How can these (or alternative) divisions of the study of art be justified? [End Page 156]

A 'sound group' is a group of people who share a common musical language, together with common ideas about music and its uses.² With this suggestion in mind, and citing two or more relevant examples, discuss how the different musical languages (both Asian and Western) found in Southeast Asia relate to other social categories (such as ethnicity, nationality, age, educational level, degree of modernity).

Can the same intellectual categories that are used to study Western art be applied to the analysis of Southeast Asian traditional art? Why, or why not? What new categories or approaches must be developed to understand the indigenous arts of Southeast Asia?

In learning the basics of Javanese gamelan music, what have you learned about cross-cultural encounters that might help you to understand and adjust to other cultural environments? [The objective here was to show students how music has been traditionally taught in Southeast Asia, which is quite different from the Western style of education.]

In this course, we studied many examples of continuity in Southeast Asian art of the 19th and 20th centuries with the art of earlier centuries. How much influence will tradition exert over Southeast Asian art produced in the 21st century? Different parts of Southeast Asia may display different characteristics.

In what ways are the Indonesian films Akibat Kanker Payudara and Kawin Lari alike, and in what ways are they different? Kawin Lari and Surat Untuk Bidadari are seen by critics and the filmgoing public as being somewhat outside of mainstream film-making. In what ways is this true? In what ways are these films similar and different in their approaches to alternative cinema?

The concept of a 'national cinema' is especially important in such multicultural nations as Indonesia. In what ways do (and/or don't) these films reflect Indonesian culture? Are any of the films more 'Indonesian' than the others?

I am happy that the study of Southeast Asian art has expanded at NUS, with two professors (Irving Johnson and Jan Mrazek) teaching a range of courses on the topic.

Teaching Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art
John Clark

I retired from postgraduate supervision in 2013, which is very distant to make comments, but I have some observations.

Choose a good supervisor. It is more important to have someone committed to seeing you through to final thesis submission than someone who is theoretically compatible or necessarily sympathetic.

Aside from the normal requirements of PhD research including a prior grasp of local history and literature, I should stress that a sine qua non is linguistic acquisition through family background, private tuition or some larger public course. Usually the latter is most effective for the postgraduate, requiring intensive teaching to above-intermediate level reading capability. The two Southeast Asian languages I am most familiar with—Thai and Indonesian—also require considerable personal help from friends or academic advisors in acquiring everyday speech for the understanding of linguistic games, including those used in advertising, newspaper articles and the cross-linguistic puns deployed by artists in their verbal and online communications. This is necessary when making artist interviews. Despite learning the language, PhD students may also need to make honest provision for use of interpreters and transcribers.

PhD output often requires demonstration of prior reading and fluency with theory. This requires considerable skill and time in integrating with in-country literature reading or interview-based field research, and a simple methodological transfer is likely to be unrewarding for the final thesis and other publishable research outcomes. [End Page 161] PhD research on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia is on the front line of art historical engagements with the modern outside Euramerica, and all prospective students should be encouraged that they are entering an area with great potential for their own intellectual growth and institutional acceptance.

Your invitation to make comments about undergraduate teaching are beguiling despite my long separation from it (having ceased teaching at undergraduate level in 2006). But the status of art history undergraduate courses from first year through to honours graduation is so problematic in each institution—and I have not followed these changes in any detail—that making statements about them may be misleading in the absence of any administrative and financial capacity to implement them.

Perhaps the best way into Southeast Asian art history, in addition to survey courses designed to make the student aware of very complicated art histories which are non-Euroamerican, is a dedicated field course in-country at senior level whereby the student realizes this depth in situ. After that, specialized honours thesis writing from available sources that increase every year about particular art cultures in particular time frames could fix a topic for postgraduate research. The language training should ideally start in the first undergraduate year, perhaps enabling the undergraduate to do interviews with artists from the culture by their third year for local contemporary art publications. But training could also be accomplished as part of an intensive course at Honours level, prior to in-country PhD research. These are really teaching and student resource issues depending on the home institutional context. [End Page 162]

Some Critical Reflections on Designing and Teaching an Asian Modern and Contemporary Art Histories Programme
Jeffrey Say

When I convened what was then—in 2010—a pioneering programme in Asian modern and contemporary art histories (the MA in Asian Art Histories Programme at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore), there were many questions relating to terminologies, pedagogical structure, philosophical positioning, as well as methodological challenges that needed to be addressed. As Asian modern and contemporary art histories was a new field of academic study, there were virtually no precedents to benchmark it against. But this also provided an opportunity to generate new discourses, new knowledge and new methodological approaches from the research done by faculty and students.

At the core of these questions is the term 'Asia', itself a historical and political and indeed discursive construct as much as a geographical entity. The Programme circumvented the limitation imposed by this term by adopting a thematic or topical approach as a pedagogical strategy, rather than a country-based one as with most programmes that deal with pre-modern Asian art. Lessons for each theme or topic are supported by visual examples drawn from Southeast Asia, South Asia (notably India) and East Asia. By doing so, it ran the risk of pre-supposing a certain 'regional coherence'. The Programme is conscious of this conundrum and the challenge has been to navigate between and across local, national, regional and global narratives, and understanding the particularities of individual contexts as much as any cross-cultural currents. One of the aims of the Programme is also to allow further interrogation of the [End Page 163] connectivities between the art, artists and art worlds of the countries that make up Asia and Southeast Asia.

In recent years, the Programme has come to focus increasingly on the Southeast Asian region as it is where its knowledge, expertise and resources lie. The opening of the National Gallery, Singapore in 2015 has also made artworks, exhibitions and archival materials of the Southeast Asian region much more accessible, and such experiential learning will undoubtedly have pedagogical and research implications on the way that Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art histories are being taught and received.

The MA Programme was structured to move beyond the Western epistemic tradition and ontological definitions of art as well as its limitations in understanding the diverse art practices of the region. This becomes all the more challenging in a modern and contemporary art history programme in terms of trying to appropriate these paradigmatic concepts and contextualizing them within the art writing, histories and practices of the region. It became necessary as a result to foreground and problematise these concepts at a theoretical level (together with alternative concepts developed to explain local and regional contexts such as multimodernisms, neo-traditionalism and decoloniality), so that students understand that the unique local conditions and contexts of the region, such as the encounter with colonialism and belatedness in art historical developments, mean that the 'modern' and the 'contemporary' cannot be discussed in strictly Euro-American terms.

The use of the plural 'histories' rather than the singular 'history' was much debated. The use of the plural 'histories' in the title of the Programme represents its philosophy and, in many ways, its theoretical position. The plural 'histories' is an assertion that that the diverse traditions, cultural specificities as well as complex racial, ethnic and religious mix of the region do not conform neatly to preconceived and stereotypical ideas of a homogenous 'Asia', the 'Orient' or 'Other', as seen through the lens of Western paradigms. It suggests the intersecting histories (and art histories) of the region, as well as the engagement of the countries in the region with one another, their shared historical experiences and confrontation with the West. By taking this approach, the Programme affords variegated and multilayered readings and considerations of Asian art, reflected in the complexities of the historical specificities and cultural traditions and complicated by the specificities of social and political contexts within and beyond national boundaries. The use of the plural 'histories' thus defies any attempt to homogenise Asian art into a singular history' that does not take into account the complex processes of tradition and change that have shaped and continue to re-shape it. [End Page 164]

There was also the question of time frame. Although the Programme's scope covers the modern and contemporary periods from the 19th century to the 21st century, such a linear sequencing is avoided in the module structure and pedagogical approach of the Programme. For example, both modern and contemporary examples are juxtaposed during lessons to illustrate a particular issue or case study, which also reflects the rather ambiguous relationship between these two terms in the context of the region's art historical development. Being an art history programme, there is also the question of the historicization of the contemporary. What should the historical distance be between the time of what is produced and what is being taught and how does this impact on what students can or cannot research? As such, there is this tension between the need to keep current of the art scene and the need to maintain a certain distance in order to research, write and evaluate with a more critical eye.

The pedagogical approach of the Programme is predicated on the position that Southeast Asian art histories should be taught on its own terms as far as possible. But how do we do this without falling into essentialist tendencies and still be able to engage in a global discourse? The Programme had sought to develop pedagogical strategies that tried, in very deliberate and selective ways, to move away from the Western lens of looking at art history by, for example, privileging the reading of texts by Asian scholars (or Western scholars who have formulated alternative models of studying Asian art), by provoking students to think of the possibilities and limits of Western methodologies in framing Southeast Asian art and by recontextualizing theories and terminologies that have a Western point of origin.

The year 2019 marks the 10th year of the MA in Asian Art Histories Programme. The Programme continues to evolve in a rapidly changing art ecosystem of the region. In the first few years of the Programme's existence in the early 2010s, where discourse of the field was under-developed and secondary materials were scarce and were approached via Western art theory and other non-regional material, students needed to do fieldwork as a primary form of research. Writing and research in the field have grown exponentially in the past decade. However, I am still of the view that field research such as interviews and archival research are vitally important in building up discourse in a relatively new field. Primary fieldwork will also allow students to research and write about Southeast Asian art histories from the perspective of the various players and practitioners of the region. I am delighted to say that students and graduates of the Programme have made and continue to make original contributions to the field through their primary research, which have helped to build up the regional art historical discourse. [End Page 165]

The final point of reflection is the challenges of running an MA programme with students from a diversity of background and of not having a corresponding BA programme that could have provided students with the relevant training and knowledge. This is mediated by instituting a bridging course that offers a series of introductory lectures and basic texts to build up the foundational knowledge of students before they start the actual programme. The lectures include pre-modern Asian art, Western modernism as well as basic art theory and key art historical concepts that will equip students with the necessary knowledge to cope with the more intellectually challenging readings and lessons when the programme starts. [End Page 166]

Teaching Southeast Asia's Architecture: A Cursory Survey of Challenges and Prospects
Imran bin Tajudeen

The question of teaching Southeast Asia's architecture, in part, concerns the search for appropriate resources for a survey course. What are the useful texts to use at an introductory level? Trying to answer this simple question entangles us in an examination of the state of research on architecture in Southeast Asia, however we may define this.

This essay asks the questions: What is the state of the field(s) of Southeast Asian architectural history, how has its component entities been defined, and what foundational and critical literature provide the fodder for a survey course? It will be apparent that we are dealing not with a singular domain but multiple circles of scholarship, each springing from entirely different concerns and looking at various artefact categories. Next, and perhaps more crucially, given the state of the field(s), what are the challenges in trying to teach across disciplinary domains and national boundaries for a more integrated understanding of the production of architecture via transregional and cross-cultural flows?

On Teaching the Demystification of Early Modern Thai Art under Royal Patronage
Eksuda Singhalampong

Since the second semester of the 2016 academic year, I have contributed to undergraduate teaching on early modern art in Thailand, particularly during the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. Chronologically, this course sits between the Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin art and the modern art in Thailand courses, within the art history programmes of the Silpakorn University. It could also be related to the art in the Thai royal court course. Arguably, the early modern and the modern art of Thailand are still situated in the Rattanakosin period. However, the teaching of Rattanakosin art as well as art in the Thai royal court primarily discusses traditional-styled works of art—respectively Buddhist art and Thai handicrafts—whereas the early modern art in Thailand course aims to examine so-called non-traditional and secular subjects.

Works of art created during the early modern period of Thailand display forms, elements and aesthetics of the Western style, which differs greatly from those of traditional Thai art. Westernised art generally does not meet the criteria of 'traditional Thai art'. The majority of Thai art represented in 'classical' Thai art history textbooks is that of a traditional style, i.e. Buddhist and Hindu art.¹ There is a Thai custom of stepping over a threshold to the sacred place, which can also be applied to the position of Westernised art in Thai art historiography in my view. Few cases of Westernised art that make their way to textbooks or other conventional medium are the work of art under royal patronage, for instance, palatial and governmental buildings.

Western-style Thai art of this period had scarcely been examined until recently. This course, which is one of the newest ones, offers wider approaches to investigate and reinvestigate the works of art, to put it broadly, in Western [End Page 177] style and ideology. These comprise palatial architecture, shophouses, governmental and infrastructure buildings, portrait paintings and public monuments. Nevertheless, art is not exclusively concerned about forms, styles or aesthetics, as all art historians are well aware of; the Western style exhibited in early modern Thai art thus could not be seen as a mere stylistic influence. They were the products of socio-cultural and, to a lesser extent, political changes in fn-de-siècle Thailand.

Considering that arts in the 19th and 20th centuries were largely commissioned by the royal court, the non-traditional or Westernised art taught in my course can fill in the gap left by the teaching of traditional Thai art, Buddhist art and handicrafts, as well as art under royal patronage, in the Rattanakosin period within the courses mentioned above. Since it could be said that early modern Thai art stands on the threshold of a new movement which embraced the styles and ideology of Western art, I consider that this course is also another approach to the understanding of modern art in Thailand.

From my experience researching the field for over half a decade, early modern Thai art poses as complex and challenging questions as its historical background to many Thais, including scores of my undergraduate students. During the course of the 19th century, the Thai monarchy under the Chakri kings was immensely active in commissioning artworks. This royal endeavour has been interpreted and linked to Thailand's modernisation by scholars. But how does this present a complication in studying the history of art?

The complication starts from terminology. One major issue is the subject of colonialism. Many Thais believe in the deep-seated notion that Thailand narrowly avoided being colonised in the late 19th century by the machinations of 'royal modernisation', a perception that is difficult to question, especially with the country's strict lèse-majesté law. In addition, the non-colonial status of Thailand is perceived as a nationalist as well as royalist concept, which further complicates the issue. Another issue that has often been discussed is the Western aspirations of the Thai royalty and aristocrats, and its effects on art. In my point of view, this is where the complication begins. Despite its lack of criticism in the grand narrative of Thai art history, this type of Westernised art occupies a special position frequently related to the subjects of modernity and the independence of Thailand. The Westernised art commissioned by the royalty has always been shrouded in mystification and glorification, presenting another challenge for examining the history of the early modern art of Thailand without venerating the makers.

My frequent warm-up question in the classroom is: can we describe Westernised art in Thailand as a colonial style? By interrogating the political climate, urban development and socio-cultural changes of Thailand at that time, the certainty on the 'non-colonial' side gradually diminishes over the [End Page 178] coursework. Challenging the grand narrative or conventional plot of Thai national history—i.e. Thailand is the only non-colonised country in the region—can be achieved through the criticism and investigation of the artworks and the roles of the monarchy in their art commissions. This line of questioning also clarifies the ideology behind the structure of Thai art historiography as mentioned earlier, whereby the Westernised art has been generally excluded due to the polarisation in teaching Thai art history between East and West. Westernised art has usually been discussed only for its roles in the glorification of the monarchy, which feeds the royalist-nationalist concept.

In this spirit, teaching the history of art in the early modern period of Thailand should help broaden the horizon of understanding the role of art as the result of transcultural exchange navigated by the colonial encounters between Thailand, the colonies and the West. This is also another challenge and a reward in itself. Colonial and post-colonial conversations in Thai art history are almost nonexistent. The understanding of our neighbouring countries' colonial pasts is also a rarity in orthodox Thai academia. However, the issue of colonialism in other disciplinary fields such as Thai cultural studies and history is quite well developed. Thai art history of the early modern period could profit from these conversations among prolific Thai studies scholars, namely, Michael Herzfeld, Thongchai Winichakul, Rachel Harrison and Peter Jackson. By deploying related methodologies and theories on colonial and post-colonial issues, Thai art history may become less isolated from its neighbours, as has previously been the case; the notion of 'Thai uniqueness' in terms of art could cease to be a prominent narrative.

I also consider that teaching this class at the Silpakorn University, Wang Thaphra campus benefits greatly from the campus' location in the heart of the old quarter, where the 19th-century Westernisation programmes mostly occurred. Not only can accompanying field trips be easily conducted, one is also able to immerse oneself in the centre of this historic space. This gives an advantage and in-depth understanding of early modern Thai art history to Silpakorn students. [End Page 179]

Art, Nation and World: Reflections on Teaching Indonesian Art in South-Eastern Australia
Chaitanya Sambrani

Choreography as Play: Playing It as Filipino
Basilio Esteban S. Villaruz

You have to know the rules…before you can play the game, so it also brings discipline…. That is not about submitting to a particular power but … enables you … to participate in the loss of power … to lose yourself and the illusion of an undivided unified self…. … As play … which also has the power to undo and reconfigure power relations … in … a more just and free world.¹

Once I was asked what I value most. I replied, "How children taught me to teach. To reckon with their bodies and minds, be one like them. To share dance—its time and space—with them. They could only walk and run, turn and roll, skip and leap, sometimes over me. It was a game—with rules—we played together."

Now with college students, I still do this, a strategy by which they take off on their own. It's a class in improvisation and composition that leads to choreography.

In the past, choreography only meant to record movement. There are systems and I trained in one.² Now it means making a dance, a time-consuming work of imagination and experimentation, of research and collaboration. A societal act.

At its base, choreography deals with time and space, shape and energy. With just these, how do we make a dance? To do that, you further deal with concepts or themes, situations or narratives, furthered by music and designs. [End Page 187] A choreographic work may be jocular or serious, mythical or historical, political or spiritual, even controversial. How do we do these?

Becak, Bike and Beyond: One Story of Teaching Modern Southeast Asian Art Abroad
Astri Wright

An inveterate margin dweller throughout life and here on the western-most edge of Canada, it is an honour to be invited to submit a piece here. I do so as a member of a small, fine community web and in anticipation of reading what everyone else shares. In particular, I am excited to hear what the younger generation of art historians of/in/from Southeast Asia have to say. As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, this roundtable offers a rare overview of post-secondary teaching within our young field, born into action and global visibility in the last 30 years.

I will share some reflections on my teaching story, as perhaps the earliest outsider-scholar of modern and contemporary (mo-co/glo-mo-co¹) Southeast Asian art history in North America to have developed annual undergraduate and graduate courses, birthing this part of the field shoulder to shoulder with Australia-based colleagues. A year before finishing my PhD in Art History and Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell in 1991, I had somewhat miraculously landed a job as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Canada. The University of Victoria (UVic)'s position in South Asian art had just been reframed to Southeast Asian art history, and the first people on the short list—more senior and experienced than myself, all researching historical topics—were not chosen. UVic's History in Art Department was ready for global mo-co: perhaps not surprising, giving this Department's history. [End Page 195]

A Full Professor since 2007, I have now been teaching undergraduate and graduate students (totalling around 3,500), at the University of Victoria, in the city of Victoria (not the Australian state), on Vancouver Island (not the metropolis of Vancouver on the mainland), in British Columbia, Canada (not the USA, though inexplicably our two nations' telephone country codes are the same) for 28 years. Invited to develop regular courses in modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art history from my first term on, I knew, off the bat, that I would want to present these courses as part of a story of multiple modernisms, developing at their own pace and incentives, starting in the colonial period and coming into their own after independence, within a dialectic of local and international conversations.² While the department still had the traditional 'silos' of separate specialities, it also fostered conversations between us, in particular in our introductory art of the world course. The students in the 1990s were curious and open to new courses, including Southeast Asian art history.³

The first big challenge for the modern art courses was finding reading materials. In 1991, with the grand exception of publications from the Philippines (mostly artist monographs, dating to the previous three decades), there were hardly any texts available in English. For Indonesia alone, there was Holt's pioneering section of her book Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change. There were my own dissertation chapters and additional case studies (and after 1994, my book). There were articles in the 1991 Festival of Indonesia exhibition catalogue edited by Joseph Fischer (for which I had been honoured to be co-curator with Joe and three Indonesian art world experts) and some articles buried in popular media, in English or Indonesian (which I could translate for students).

For Asia as a region, there was soon John Clark's edited volume Modernity in Asian Art (1993) and his later publications. While Southeast Asian art history has always easily been overshadowed by the art histories of India, China and Japan, writing the modern art histories of any and all parts of Asia had in common that it demanded a whole new paradigm shift from the Euro(derived)-academic mindset. But the snowball was rolling: each year brought new exhibitions and publications for our field. In 1993, the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane broke exciting new curatorial ground, offering excellent catalogues and also contextualizing Southeast Asia in the larger Asia Pacific region; other biennials in Asian and African venues began to sprout up. All of this planted the seed for Western museums to pick up the challenge of looking further afield than before. And, alongside all of this, a viable, publicly accessible thing called the Internet was coming into itself. We were living in dynamic times. [End Page 196]

Not having much reading material in the beginning kept space open in students' weekly readings for some of the area studies materials (history, anthropology, political science, gender studies, etc) to help them better understand a region they had never studied before. Having more images than texts available from my research and from sources in languages other than English (for example, Vietnamese artist books or catalogues borrowed from a new friend who collected Vietnamese art), opened up the possibility for us to look more closely at artworks without verbal intervention. We looked at artworks that had not yet been incorporated into any canon or discourse, and came up with descriptions and interpretations in preliminary, collective as well as individual, visual and interdisciplinary analyses.

This multi-pronged method rehearsed not only the visual analysis skills so fundamental to art history and visual studies, but also inspired an assignment I have continued to use over the years, where I ask students to write short personal responses about a work of art they choose from a collection of unknown images. Without researching them, they write, essay-style, about the work's visual and evocative qualities, posing questions while drawing on free-ranging associations, personal reflections or memories. This brings us into a role-play experience of open-ended fieldwork, laying aside assumptions and 'knowledge', and looking at a work of art from many angles. This method also rehearsed students to not always lean on published authority, but to trust that they themselves are, or have, the 'instrument' to respond to art directly, without intermediaries, as a valid point of entry and enrichment (the very thing that drew them/us to art in the first place). In short, it rehearses them to explore new knowledge from their own authentic place.

Other pedagogical methods I developed for my courses involved storytelling (histories, biographies and cultural stories) and guiding students in visualizations, eyes closed, as we 'travel' back in time to 'see' performers, rituals, pilgrims, vendors, preachers, the poor, the rich, the sick seeking cures, etc. This offers contextually informed enlivening of historical monuments devoid of life in archaeological photos or transformed into tourist-laden piles of stone.

As I developed undergraduate courses and graduate seminars alongside the historically focussed courses on South and Southeast Asia, colleagues around the world were collectively making a dent in the European art historical canon. We all contributed to the emergence of discussions of how to frame a global art history, notably featured by the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA)'s conference, "Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence", held in Melbourne in 2008. And so, quite naturally, 15 years into teaching, [End Page 197] I began including case studies from China and Africa, exploring how modern art worlds in these places were also instigated by artists and artist groups. The Artists Alliance and Gallery in Accra, Ghana, started by Ablade Glover, became one favourite case study.⁴ And as I trace international and globally expanding careers of artists I had written about in the late 1980s, like Heri Dono, Dadang, Semsar and Arahmaiani, that of Nigerian El Anatsui is added into the picture.

By now, teaching mo-co Southeast Asia has become a matter of choosing between so much material, both in print and online, including video art and film footage of performance events, interviews and conferences. It has become hard to select what to assign for a 14-week seminar or undergraduate course. (With good mental wushu, one rises to each new challenge and only puritans complain about abundance.) I can now bracket my Southeast Asian history courses with Ho Tzu Nyen's video art problematizing how one defines the region and how one ascribes the founding of any given place, like Singapore, as a single historical moment in time.

Nearly 30 years since its beginnings, our field has made huge leaps forward, online and in print, in exhibitions and documentaries, as well as in the establishment over the last decade of curatorial positions at major art institutions throughout the world. Publications by new generations of scholars abound. I thrill to the names and ideas: the region is producing its own discourses as well as engaging new outsiders. The processes of decolonization have come a long way. And they still have a long way to go, in questioning the allegiance to certain styles of scholarship, curation and teaching.