Singapore Art Museum presented an extensive two decade survey of Southeast Asian art produced from 1991 to 2011, featuring works by Agus Suwage (Indonesia), Vasan Sitthiket (Thailand), Suzann Victor (Singapore), Wong Hoy Cheong (Malaysia), Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan (Philippines), and Tran Luong (Vietnam) among others from these same six countries.
The exhibition, envisioned and curated by Iola Lenzi in collaboration with SAM’s Director Tan Boon Hui and Curator Khairuddin Hori, offered audiences an insight into recent Southeast Asian art practices which have emerged over a period of political and social flux and which, while presenting specific works from diverse countries across diverse mediums, seem to be in dialogue with one another. Most pertinently, though, this exhibition allowed for Southeast Asian art to be viewed in the context of its own regional history and on its own terms rather than being curated from a comparative Eurocentric perspective or in context with ‘Western’ theories of modernism/post modernism.
Says Iola Lenzi: ‘I have wanted to curate a big Southeast Asian contemporary show for many years. My goal was not to demonstrate that the best of the region more than holds its own in an international context, for this we knew. But rather, my ambition was to present works from six very diverse Southeast Asian nations in visual and conceptual conversation together. Despite the linguistic, religious and ethnic differences of Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, there are significant commonalities shared by these countries’ peoples that allow the critical comparison of their respective contemporary practices.
‘I think “Home, History and Nation” proves that this conversation is a natural one, not forced. “Home, History and Nation” is not the definitive Southeast Asian show, but