Like many regional terms, ‘Southeast Asia’ captures a hazy concept. ‘It’s hard to make sense of it, even for myself,’ says Valentine Willie, a pioneer in the promotion of Southeast Asian contemporary art, who operated commercial galleries in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Broadly defined by 11 coastal and island territories situated between the North Pacific and Indian Oceans – 10, if you go by membership of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – the region is home to more than 650 million people. The largest portion resides in Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population and is the world’s largest archipelagic nation and third-largest democracy. Next is the Philippines, the world’s second-largest archipelagic nation, with the world’s third-largest Catholic population after Brazil and Mexico. Then there is the independent Islamic sultanate of Brunei, the majority Buddhist nations of Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, the latter two bordered by Vietnam, and the secular, multi-ethnic yet Chinese-majority republic of Singapore, established after splitting from Malaysia in 1965.
Considering this myriad of cultures, the idea of Southeast Asia as a singular bloc could not be further from the truth. ‘No one in Manila goes around saying they are Southeast Asian,’ says Isa Lorenzo, cofounder of the city’s Silverlens Galleries. But if one thing does define the region, it’s the historic straits and seas that acted as superhighways for ships from the Middle Kingdom and Indian subcontinent long before the Europeans and Americans – who pushed the Southeast Asia label as part of the Cold War agenda – arrived on the scene.
That complex entanglement feeds into the hybrid art fair/cultural platform model of Singapore’s S.E.A. Focus and its proposal to rethink this shared geographical space. ‘Southeast Asia is a constellation of identities, but because of proximity we have become one region,’ says S.E.A. Focus Project Director Emi Eu. Hence the theme of the event’s 2022 edition: ‘chance...constellations’. Having replaced booths with a curated show since 2021, the fair gathered more than 140 works presented by 24 galleries that explored the region’s ‘histories, geographies and converging cultures,’ says Eu.
Exemplary of this framing are four 2021 paintings by the Vietnamese-American artist Tammy Nguyen, presented by Tropical Futures Institute, which is based in Cebu City in the Philippines. The portraits depict Zhou Enlai, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Carlos Peña Romulo, who attended the anti-colonial Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 as the premier of China, prime minister of Egypt, prime minister of India, and secretary of foreign affairs of the Philippines, respectively. Rendered in a graphic pop style, they have titles that identify each subject, key figures in the Cold War era’s Non-Aligned Movement, as Commanders of Sea, Space, Air, and Field. Their images are intersected by tropical leaves, green and blue stripes, and parts of a white circle – signs conjuring Nguyen’s speculative flag design for Forest City, a tax-free urban development located in the special economic zone of Malaysia’s Iskandar that takes up four man-made islands in the Straits of Johor.
In this collapsing of historical and contemporary projections and constructions, Nguyen’s portraits both agitate and engage with the context of S.E.A. Focus as a government-supported initiative extending Singapore’s cultural policy and broader geopolitical aims of establishing itself as a global ‘Renaissance City’ at the center of Southeast Asia.
Rather than becoming subsumed by state-driven agendas, however, the galleries participating in S.E.A. Focus navigated the regional discussion on their own terms. ‘I try not to look at Southeast Asia from a Westphalian perspective,’ explains Tropical Futures Institute’s founder, Chris Fussner, circling back to the fluidity of Southeast Asia’s complex cultural landscape. Jun Tirtadji of ROH Projects, Jakarta, echoes these sentiments; within Indonesia alone, hundreds of languages are spoken, which means the gallery is constantly spanning registers, whether local, national, regional, or global.
For S.E.A. Focus’ pop-up screening room, Projector X, ROH Projects partnered with Hong Kong’s Edouard Malingue Gallery and presented a series of videos by the Bandung-based collective Tromarama. Extending its Art Basel Hong Kong participation of 2021, which featured Companion – a three-channel video produced collaboratively during lockdown by the artist Gary-Ross Pastrana in Manila with Tromarama and the photographer and artist Davy Linggar in Jakarta – the gallery’s current group show, ‘Last Words’, includes Snake (Attempting to Recall) (2021) by Tanatchai Bandasak, who worked collaboratively with local tour guides to take photographs of the once-bustling Chiang Dao cave in Chiang Mai amid pandemic travel restrictions.
The potential to network was a big draw of S.E.A. Focus, which officially defines itself as a ‘meeting point’ that facilitates and extends efforts by galleries to connect. A good example of how exhibitors reached beyond their borders is Tokyo’s Gallery Side 2, which showed works by Udomsak Krisanamis, Thaiwijit Puengkasemsomboon, and Rirkrit Tiravanija – a continuation of ‘Tokyo-Chiang Mai-Tokyo’, a show it staged in Tokyo in 2020. Geographical overlaps like Southeast Asia’s with the Asia Pacific open cultural horizons. It’s all about finding the links. One of them is the legacies of traditional and Indigenous craft that infuse contemporary art practices, such as that of Citra Sasmita, whose acrylic on Kamasan canvas works presented by Yeo Workshop center female stories through Balinese motifs.
But as expansive or inclusive as the region might look from the perspective of artists and galleries, the question of whether a cohesive Southeast Asian art market actually exists remains.
Institutions have led the way. Veteran gallerist Willie points out that Singapore Art Museum was among his only clients in the 1990s and early 2000s as the museum’s collecting policy was systematically focused on Southeast Asia, as was the case with other public institutions in Singapore. (The National Gallery Singapore now houses the world’s largest collection of modern art from the region.) Willie also placed works with the Queensland Art Gallery and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Both organizations have been integral to discourses surrounding Asia and Asian art at the turn of the 21st century – and launched the Asia Pacific Triennial and Fukuoka Triennale respectively.
Back then, Willie notes, collectors tended to focus on their own countries, but in recent years they have broadened their scope. Many of them live in Singapore, which some see as an exception to the region’s domestic-first art market rule. Local collectors of note include Michelangelo and Lourdes Samson, who began collecting Philippine contemporary art in the early 2000s before expanding to Southeast Asian art, and Jim Amberson, whose collection features works from across the region, including by members of the Indonesian art collective Jendela. But when it comes to expanding Southeast Asia’s collector base, and in turn developing a region-wide market, the work continues. ‘Generally speaking,’ says ROH Projects’ Tirtadji, ‘we have some ways to go to truly blur the borders further.’
This is where S.E.A. Focus comes in. The idea, Eu notes, is not only to show the best of contemporary art in the region, but to platform galleries putting in the long-term work to develop their artists and expand their marketplace on an international stage – a conscious and strategic decision when domestic markets are often a safer bet. By extension, the hope is to activate new collectors who can continue to shape the contours of the region’s art history and, in turn, participate in a redefinition of the region itself.
S.E.A. Focus is a showcase of contemporary art from Southeast Asia. It took place from January 15 to 23, 2022 at Tanjong Pagar Distripark in Singapore.
An accompanying virtual conversation, titled 'Is Southeast Asia a Single Market?', took place on January 23, with Isa Lorenzo (Silverlens Galleries), Valentine Willie (Ilham Gallery), and Jun Tirtadji (ROH Projects), and moderated by Stephanie Bailey.
Stephanie Bailey is a writer and editor from Hong Kong.
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Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Tromarama, Consonant #8 (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artists and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong and Shanghai. 2a (desktop view). Chua Mia Tee, Singapore River (detail), 1978. Collection of Lim & Tan Securities Pte Ltd. 2b. Chua Mia Tee, Pagoda Street, Chinatown (detail), 1980. Collection of Benny and Rosemary Oh. 3a (desktop view). From left to right: Tammy Nguyen, Commander of Air, Jawaharlal Nehru, 2021; Commander of Field, Carlos Peña Romulo, 2021; and Commander of Space, Gamal Abdel Nasser, 2021. 3b (mobile view). Tammy Nguyen, Commander of Field, Carlos Peña Romulo (detail), 2021. 4. Citra Sasmita, Land of Our Ancestors (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Yeo Workshop, Singapore. 5. The entrane to S.E.A. Focus 2021. Courtesy of S.E.A. Focus.