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Artists Without Borders A new initiative by the Guggenheim Foundation challenges Eurocentric views of art with a wide-ranging investigation into Asia’s artistic practices. Words Carren Jao
European empires may have long since languished, but their legacy of selective history lives on, especially on the subject of art. Now the art world is slowly unshackling itself from the bonds of Eurocentrism, which held nonWestern art as primitive or incidental – the kind of attitude that saw African sculpture as relevant only in relation to Picasso. As border after border is rendered meaningless in this hyperlinked age, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Swiss bank UBS have embarked on an ambitious five-year project that aims to enrich our view of art around the world. The Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative
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invites a curator from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa to New York for overlapping twoyear residencies. Working with a team from the Guggenheim, the selected curator will help the institution identify and acquire new and recent works representative of cultural practice in those regions. The acquisitions will be the focus of an exhibition in Guggenheim New York, and will travel to two other locations in the region. Its first area of focus? South and Southeast Asia. No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia is on show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from
(Counter Acts) IMAGE COURTESY OF POKLONG ANADING (Volcanic Ash Series #4) IMAGE COURTESY OF ARIN DWIHARTANTO SUNARYO
art
(OPPOSITE) Artist Poklong Anading reflects the flash back into the camera in “Counter Acts,” questioning how identity can really be preserved in photography. (THIS PAGE, FROM TOP) Vincent Leong photographs in the style of Malay sultanate depict minority families incongorously garbed like the major ethnic group in Malaysia; In 2010, villagers near Mount Merapi experienced more than 500 volcanic earthquakes causing immeasurable loss. Using ash from the site mixed with resin, Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo makes the nation’s melancholy tangible.
February 22 to May 22, after which it will travel to Hong Kong and Singapore. Works from 22 artists and collectives from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India will be on view, showcasing the region’s diversity of expression in the area as well as its unique challenges. The exhibition will evolve as it moves on to venues in Hong Kong and Singapore, adding new acquisitions along the way. Despite its scope, No Country doesn’t aim to be the last word in the unfolding story of South and Southeast Asian contemporary
art. It’s “not intended to be representative of the region in that it encapsulates everything that’s happening,” says curator June Yap. “It’s just a glimpse of questions that I would like to pose through the exhibition about the region” – questions she hopes will prod us to look beyond China when it comes to Asia. In the shadow of its neighbouring economic powerhouse, the rest of Asia’s artistic practice continues to mature and flourish in surprising ways. “A lot of the countries in the region have only been constituted in the past century, but their culture, practices and life have a longer history,” says Yap. Within the region, artists face a multitude of challenges—“challenges of representation, problematic histories, censorship, production”—that inform their work, resulting in unique, nuanced expressions. “What I find interesting is the wealth and depth of experimentation and subject that artists were exploring, and the kinds of media they were getting into,” says Yap, who visited each country on research trips during her residency. By exploring painting, sculpture, photography, performance, video, works on paper, and installation, artists cannot help but become testaments to their histories, giving us an inkling of how to grapple with
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(White Stupa Doesn’t Need Gold) IMAGE COURTESY OF AUNG MYINT
ART
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(OPPOSITE) In “White Stupa Doesn’t Need Gold”, Aung Myint metaphorically strips away the worrying excesses of faddish culture to reveal the original beauty and significance of the Myanmar stupa. (THIS PAGE, FROM TOP) Filipino artist Norberto Roldan’s image of an F-16 jet fighter over a post 9-11 Afghanistan; Pakistani artist Bani Abidi takes viewers through the fictionalised life of a Muslim convert, who dresses as conquerer Mohammad Bin Qasim and poses in front of major Muslim sites, showing reconstruction and revivals (especially
(F-16) IMAGE COURTESY OF NORBERTO ROLDAN AND TAKSU, SINGAPORE (The Ghost of Mohammed Bin Qasim) IMAGE COURTESY OF BANI ABIDI
of history) are never fully accurate.
the region ourselves. In “F-16” Filipino artist Norberto Roldan sets an image of a fighter aircraft gliding over a post-9/11 Afghanistan side-by-side with a text from former American president William McKinley defending his decision to govern the Philippines after the US-Spanish war at the turn of the 20th century. Indian artist Shilpa Gupta questions the notion of division in “1:14.9.” She displays a tightly rolled handwoven ball of thread on a pedestal with a plaque that reads, “1,188.5 miles of Fenced border—West, North-West Data Update: Dec 31, 2007,” alluding to the length of fencing used to delineate India and Pakistan. As we ponder the girth of the ball,
we see the strangeness of finding the limits of national jurisdiction. Malaysian artist Vincent Leong tackles the sensitivities of assimilation in “Keeping up with the Abdullahs.” Digitally aged photographs done in the style of 19th century Malay sultanate portraits show families of minority Chinese and Indian groups dressed in the clothing of the predominant ethnic group in Malaysia. “These works address poignant issues of the past but issues still present in these countries,” says Yap. “It’s not just isolated within the countries themselves but it extends to countries in relation to each other.” In other words, while the exhibition is ostensibly about
the South and Southeast Asia region, life today is borderless. Issues spill over imposed confines and smudge whatever perimeters we stubbornly impose on it. The participating artists themselves are evidence of this. Though unfailingly identified with specific countries, artists are very mobile, moving wherever their work pulls them. Take Navin Rawanchaikul, a Thai artist born to a Hindu-Punjabi community in what is now Pakistan. He divides his time between Fukuoka, Japan, where he is a permanent resident, and Chiang Mai, Thailand where his artistic practice is based. His work expresses the same multicultural bent. Understanding Asia is a lifetime’s work. But the Guggenheim offers a foothold with a cadre of artist talks, film screenings and educational programmes that will be calibrated to the different venues. Online, the Guggenheim has also tasked writers and artists of South and Southeast Asia to shed light on their local scenes, revealing, for example, how rightwing Hindu extremist tendencies can swiftly censor and repress creativity in Bombay; how tea stands, demolished homes and even the humble t-shirt become art spaces in Vietnam; and how Australia has gradually turned its gaze toward Asia. As we sift through the various aspects of this ambitious project, we are faced with the manufactured quality of divisions we unthinkingly impose on ourselves. It is what underscores the exhibition theme, “No Country,” taken from William Butler Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” and later Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, and it is also this tension between definition and dissolution that subtly informs our daily lives as we navigate a world filled with entangled allegiances. guggenheim.org/map
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