Bianca Winataputri

A Regional Imaginary: Contemporary Southeast Asian Art and Exhibition-Making Then and Now

Over the past three decades, exhibiting and collecting contemporary Southeast Asian art has increasingly become more prominent with the rising number of international exhibitions, biennales, art fairs and, more recently, with the opening of new museums and galleries within the Southeast Asian region.

It can be argued that a sense of consciousness of the region, in the context of contemporary art, was heightened through exhibitions and curatorial projects in the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as the ASEAN Art Shows held throughout Southeast Asia since 1968, the Fukuoka Asian Art show (1989 – 1995) which later transitioned to the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (1999 – present), the Artists’ Regional Exchange (ARX) initiated in Perth (1987-1999), and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) (1993-ongoing).

Following these exhibitions, there has been a continued interest in ‘regionalising’ Southeast Asia within the context and rise of global contemporary art. Why does this regional interest continued to persist? How does this manifest similarly or differently more recently compared to these earlier moments? It is thus timely and critical to the ongoing historicisation of ‘the contemporary’ in Southeast Asian art to reflect on these earlier moments in the ‘90s and to situate them alongside the continuing interest in the twenty-first century to develop regional narratives for art and exhibition-making in Southeast Asia.

To this end, this research project enquires into key exhibitions and art projects to identify the different narratives that have been produced in and of the region, and to discern what has or has not changed over the past three decades in relation to the regional consciousness of Southeast Asia. While the regional imaginary remains constant, this thesis acknowledges that Southeast Asia, is a shape-shifting entity that functions according to different political, social, cultural, and historical agendas including national and extraregional representations.