The roving eye: Contemporary art from Southeast Asia
Following her exhibitions of Southeast Asian (SEA) contemporary art, including Negotiating Home, History and Nation, at Singapore Art Museum (2011), and Concept, Context, Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia, at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2013), Singapore-based SEA art specialist Iola Lenzi curated The Roving Eye: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia. The largest and most comprehensive regionally curated exhibition to show at an institution outside Asia, Roving Eye opened at ARTER, Istanbul, with over forty works by thirty-six artists from Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia.
The title suggests a restless oeuvre, and Lenzi explained, ‘among the characteristics that define and distinguish regional contemporary art, is a particular way of looking at the world. It is a trait whereby the artist looks at issues from both inside and outside his or her home base. He or she develops the work thinking about multiple positions and viewpoints. It’s a sophisticated play of perspectives that many artists from the region engage in quite naturally’.
Roving Eye takes into account artists’ juggling of complex perspectives. Works by pioneer as well as later generation artists critique power, authoritarianism, religious extremism, xenophobic tendencies, social exclusion and transcultural flux, through photography, installation, video, sound and sculpture. But the main draw on the opening day were three masterful performances by Melati Suryodarmo, Jason Lim and Bui Cong Khanh.
In her seminal performance I Love You (2007-ongoing) Suryodarmo supports a thirty kilogram glass panel for five continuous hours, occasionally saying out loud ‘I Love You’. Seeing the artist perform in a pant-suit and high heels, staggering, perspiring, balancing, persisting with love towards an object that only weighed heavily in return, was
Lee Wen, Ping-Pong Go Round, 2014. Installation view, The Roving Eye, ARTER, 2014. Photograph Murat German.
