Southeast Asian contemporary art ready to step out of the West's

Southeast Asian contemporary art ready to step out of the West's shadows

Gail Wan Agence France-Presse Singapore

Standing amid a controversial new exhibition featuring corpses and a dog-headed Miss Thailand beauty queen, two cutting edge curators declare the West is no longer the benchmark for contemporary Southeast Asian art.

Iola Lenzi has just returned from the Venice Biennale, regarded as the world's oldest and most important international visual arts event, and believes Southeast Asian artists are as good as their more famous colleagues in the West.

"What I saw of Southeast Asian art compares favorably with Western art. It can certainly stand on its own," Lenzi, the Southeast Asia correspondent for the Asian Art Newspaper in London, said.

"The notion of using the West as a benchmark for contemporary Southeast Asian art is finished."

Tay Swee Lin, a Singaporean curator-cum-educator who manages the city-state's Sculpture Square, also urged regional audiences to avoid the temptation of looking to the West's famous artists.

"Some people have a branded idea of art that good art must be from someone famous. That idea needs to be left behind at the doorway," Tay said.

"Good art is perceived by looking with your eye and feeling it here in your gut," Lenzi added.

The two curators spoke to promote the opening of Sculpture Square's fourth anniversary exhibition, Subverted Boundaries, which features nine contemporary artists from Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore.

The line-up includes Thailand's Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Saravudth Duangjumpa, Vietnam's Vu Dan Tan and Nguyen Minh Thanh, and Singapore's Ho Tzu Nyen, all of whom were selected for their commitment to developing and transforming sculptural art beyond traditional boundaries.

"These artists are on the cutting-edge, miles from the conventional mainstream in their respective countries," Tay said.

"Their work can be dangerous, sexual, and explicitly politically provocative. One artist, Vasan Sitthiket is so committed socially that he even went to Iraq to act as a human shield (during this year's US-led war)."

The exhibition, which includes interactive installation sculptures and mixed media is scheduled to run until August 31, has caused much local controversy.

Araya has led the confrontational theme of the exhibition by reading to corpses in her video, Thai Medley I, II, III.

Araya told local media her exhibit aimed to offer respect and dignity to the recently deceased and seek a return to purer values by removing elaborate funeral ceremonies.

"Simple acts of one living person dressing, reading and telling stories and singing traditional Thai songs to the dead bodies, cut straight to the close ties that do exist between the living and the dead," the New Paper quoted Araya as saying.

Other exhibits include a dog-headed Miss Thailand with muscular legs, glowing columns of pure light, a cross-shaped airplane atop three bicycles and a "reversed" photo montage -- self-portraits of Ho by 252 people in the streets of his home city over one week.

Even though the artists hail from countries with divergent cultural histories, they share an increasing awareness for the need of political empowerment and social emancipation.

"They each have different timelines brought to the same plane at this exhibition," Lenzi said.

Tay added: "You can find the similarities (in their work) like the handmade quality. In Thanh's work with the hand-painted images on cardboard, Vasan's use of plywood, you can see the rawness. It is not the slickness you see in other contemporary art -- there is connectiveness with the material."

The curators hope to bring the exhibition overseas after its run here, ideally to Europe, although Tay said this would not be easy.

"Plans are tentative at the moment. We have to get sponsorship since we are a non-profit organization and freighting of the works is really expensive. But we really hope to show the collection to the rest of the world."

Sculpture Square, an independent arts organization, is Singapore's first and only art space dedicated to the promotion of contemporary three-dimensional art.