Artists write Southeast Asian art history

The disciplinary study of art history has been in crisis for some time. One of the premises of Roger Nelson’s remarkable Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices (Cornell University Press 2026, 246 pages) is to overcome the distinct quality of this crisis. That is, a sense of the irredeemable. In recent years the UK has seen a drop in enrolments in the humanities, with art history particularly diminished, in favour of allegedly more “reliable” areas of study such as business and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Yale University abolished its introductory survey course in 2020 due to concerns of Western-centrism. The eminent Claire Bishop uploaded a syllabus to academia.edu that pointedly debunks many of the traditional methods of art history (comparison, periodisation, intentionality etc.). Her course description insists “As a discipline, art history is largely coeval with colonial modernity, and many of its foundational values replicate its racist and misogynist biases.”

These controversies about art-historical scholarship are not new. In 1996 a famed edition of October edited by Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss sought to defend the discipline against the theoretical and expansive impact of then emergent Visual Culture, or Visual Cultural Studies. They alleged a potential problem characterised as “[…] a newly wrought conception of the visual as disembodied image, re-created in the virtual spaces of sign-exchange and phantasmatic projection”. According to the editors, art seemingly risked being understood on a par with consumerist spectacle.

And, of course, there are more examples.

Thanks to Nelson, the study of contemporary art in Southeast Asia has now entered the fray. How to account for its increased international visibility? And, as Foster and Krauss intimate, what can we make of history itself? Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia sharply avows an aim to challenge, as the author quotes elsewhere, art historian and critic T. K. Sabapathy’s characterisation of a “subscription to the tyranny of ‘authentic origination’”.

In a word, there is little reason to continue to hang on to inherited scholarly conventions; and there are surely more productive ways to approach the subject of art history than abolishing, marginalising, or, well, attacking or defending “it”. And in this regard, “history” is hardly sacrosanct. Nelson addresses these challenges by centralising research-based contemporary art practices, and embraces the idiosyncratic, subjective, and exploratory in terms of the knowledge produced. Here artists are the progenitors of art history; and the local lack of formal educational programs in the region is taken as a distinctive strength. How we understand current art and its relationship to the past can be an open field of inquiry; not, again, tied to conventional methods or disciplinary procedure.

Organised by five deceptively succinct chapter titles that frame detailed discussions of a wide range of artists, the categories include “Honoring” and “Autotheorizing” as means of unpacking the range of what research can mean and do. But the work of regional artists is not particularly part of a generic notion of research-based art, which has become widespread in recent decades. Rather, the mantle “artistic art histories” rejects the scientific paradigm that “research” typically implies, preferring a more politicised project of decolonisation (p9). The former emerged from shifts in Anglo-Saxon university bureaucracy while Southeast Asian practitioners offer a radical, grassroots inquiry into the critical promise of forging continuums between past and present, displacing artificial categories and activating new views of histories.

Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia is bracketed by a detailed introductory discussion of Thao Nguyen Phan’s three-channel video Reincarnations of Shadows (2023-ongoing) which sees the artist engage with a sculpture from an earlier time by Diem Phung Thi (1920–2002). In this work, amidst scenes of gentle homage, a voiceover recounts Vietnam’s political history and archival footage of the late artist is also included. The Epilogue (“Teaching”) tells us how this engagement is not mere influence from one generation to the next but a means of thinking, theorising, and teaching; partly through the prism of post-colonialism as a bricolage of perspectives, but also a means of displacing such a default through the artist’s more personal account.

Ideas of thinking, theorising, and teaching run throughout the book. Examples include Indonesia’s Emiria Sunassa’s (1894–1964) painterly transformations of photographs by the queer Walter Spies, which Nelson elaborates as offering a more eccentric view than the formalist interest of art-world theories of “appropriation”. Or Ho Tzu Nyen’s televisual 4×4: Episodes of Singapore Art (2005) where two hosts offer different interpretations and disagreements about local artworks and thus stage the problems and instabilities of attributing meanings. Araya Rasdjarmreansook’s texts and artworks exemplify methods that question the conventional means by which knowledge is exchanged, such as her famed video “lectures” to corpses. All is underwritten by the Nelson’s contention that Southeast Asian artist-researchers don’t take art history as a given but actively communicate complex ideas about how understandings may be produced and consumed. This, per the opening references, claims the conventions of traditional art historical scholarship as “a site of epistemic injustice that may be best addressed through an intersectionality that is necessarily political as it is poetic” (p165).

Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia is a resource as well as an argument because of its consistently elaborate exegesis. It would be impossible for a reviewer to map the manifold references in the book succinctly, moving as it does from, for example, theoretical accounts of fandom to examinations of the multi-sensory and embodied aspects of knowledge. There are also examples of archival work and detailed interviews. This move across, or collapsing of, a binary between the theoretical and historicist is another of the book’s achievements, as it contributes to sustaining a complex discussion on regional art beyond the predictable shibboleths of colonialism and nationalism, while opening out the study of art history as a multi-disciplinary, inventive, and a deeply important subject for how we can understand the world.

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