Research-Based Art Practices in Southeast Asia: The Artist as Producer of Knowledge

285 Pages·2022·6.891 MB·English

by  Caroline Ha Thuc

Research-Based
Art Practices in
Southeast Asia
The Artist as Producer
of Knowledge
Caroline Ha Thuc
Research-Based Art Practices in Southeast Asia
Caroline Ha Thuc
Research-Based Art
Practices in Southeast
Asia
The Artist as Producer of Knowledge
Caroline Ha Thuc
Department of Visual Studies
Lingnan University
Tuen Mun, Hong Kong
ISBN 978-3-031-09580-1 ISBN 978-3-031-09581-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09581-8
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C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Research-based Art Practices: Context and Framework 7
3 Birth of a New Art Language 43
4 The Artist-Researcher 87
5 The Artist as a Producer of Knowledge: Cultural Activism
in Tiffany Chung’s TheVietnam Exodus Project (2009–) 107
6 Research as Strategy: Reactivating Mythologies in Wah Nu
and Tun Win Aung’s The Name Series (2008–) 145
7 Beyond the Artist’s Discourse: Implicit and Sensuous
Knowledge in Khvay Samnang’s Preah Kunlong (2017) 177
8 Emancipatory modes of knowledge production in Ho Tzu
Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia
(2003/2012–ongoing) 211
v
vi CoNTENTS
9 Conclusion 247
Bibliography 257
Index 279
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Nguyen Trinh Thi, Letters from Panduranga. Single-channel video, colour and
b&w, sound, 35’ (2015). Courtesy of the artist
Panduranga is the former name of a Vietnamese province, once a territory
of the vast Hindu Champa Kingdom that dominated the region for more
than a thousand years.1 Today, only a small community of Cham people
remains there, estranged both from their own cultural heritage and from
the dominant Vietnamese culture. For her 2015 video Letters from
Panduranga, Vietnamese artist Nguyen Trinh Thi spent two years visiting
this ethnic minority, enquiring about its traditions and customs against the
backdrop of a nuclear plant construction project on their territory. The
video takes the form of an exchange of letters between the narrator, who
studies the Cham minority, and a man who is traveling north on his
1 See in particular Maspéro Georges, Le Royaume du Champa (Paris : Les Editions Van
Oest, 1928); Hubert Jean-François, L’Art du Champa (Art of Champa) (ParkstonePress
International, 2005) and the works by Cham historian and activist Po Dharma, in particular
Po Dharma, Le Pˉaṇḍuran˙ga (Campˉa), 1802–1835: Ses rapports avec le Vietnam (Paris:
Publication de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1987).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2022
C. Ha Thuc, Research-Based Art Practices in Southeast Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09581-8_1
2 C. HA THUC
motorbike, looking for archaeological sites of the Cham culture. Both
share their feelings and reflexive doubts about their own investigations.
The narrator/artist conducts interviews of the local people as an ethnog-
rapher would do but is portrayed as constantly searching for the right lens
and for the right angle to photograph her subject. Although she seems, at
first, to get well acquainted with the people she studies, she then confesses
to being an “outsider,” and eventually turns to the landscape as a photo-
graphic subject and as an alternative mode of representation. Suddenly,
she asks herself: “I am not a researcher, I am not an ethnographer nor a
journalist, so why am I doing this?” Why would an artist study an ethnic
community from her own country with an ethnographic perspective? Why
would the artistic field intermingle with an academic discipline?
Nguyen’s video, indirectly at least, gives this community a voice, and
implicitly criticizes Vietnam’s current policies towards this ethnic minority,
whose rights are often ignored and whose culture has been mythicized and
locked up in museums. Simultaneously, the artwork raises the significance,
and highlights the complexities, of engaging in an artistic practice that uses
ethnographic methodologies as a means to reflect upon the treatment of
ethnic minorities, especially in a country where scholarly work on social sci-
ences is still heavily controlled by the government.2 In this case, the combina-
tion of art and research succeeds in offering a critical perspective on Cham
culture and history, embodying an original mode of knowledge production.
Nguyen works here at the edge of ethnography. Similarly, an increasing
number of artists in Southeast Asia are engaged in academic research pro-
cesses. They work as historians, archivists, archaeologists or sociologists in
order to produce knowledge and/or to challenge the current established
systems of knowledge production, whether those knowledge systems con-
sist of Western academic frameworks or of the local official narratives mod-
elled on authoritarian ideologies. As artists, they are in a position where
they can freely draw on academic research methodologies and, at the same
time, question or divert them for their own artistic purpose. The outcome
of their research findings is exhibited as an artwork and is not published or
presented in an academic format.
These artistic forays into the academic world originate in the artists’
desire to learn, transmit and participate in a local, thus reflexive, production
of knowledge. Research appears here as a strategy to convey legitimacy to
2 More on this artwork, see Ha Thuc Caroline, “Nguyen Trinh Thi: Letters from
Panduranga,” Arts of Southeast Asia, Vol 1(4) (Sept.–Oct. 2020): 85–90.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
their enterprise and notably to confer value to their critical counter-narra-
tives about social, cultural, historical and political issues. Simultaneously, the
practice of research brings forth new creative possibilities, and a singular
language of art is emerging from these cross- disciplinary practices. Research,
conceived as a new artistic material, provides a novel perspective from which
the artists capture and reflect on an increasingly complex reality.
Like Nguyen Trinh Thi, these artists are engaged in what I will refer to
as research-based art practices. These can be broadly defined as artistic
practices grounded in a research process that is borrowed from the work
methodologies and from the languages of the social scientists, the out-
come of which is displayed or transformed into an artwork. The objective
of this book is to examine this creative and mutual entanglement of aca-
demic and artistic research in Southeast Asia. In short, the Why, When,
What and How of research-based art practices in the region.
This investigation originates in my personal interest for these practices
as an art writer and curator, and from the difficulties I have encountered
in defining their scope and in considering their cross-disciplinary and cog-
nitive specificities. For instance, how to assess these practices and the
knowledge they generate, since research is here conducted in an artistic
way and not in an academic way, and therefore escapes any existing forms
of evaluation? How to critically approach their research material and work
methodologies? Here, there is a fundamental distinction to be made
between practice-based research that unfolds under the umbrella of the
institutions, conforming to the academic conventions and peers review
systems, and research-based art practices which develop outside, and actu-
ally challenge, these established frameworks. Although the desire of the
latter to generate emancipatory and empirical forms of knowledge is clear,
whether the artists have achieved indeed their claim in the field of knowl-
edge (i.e. not just in the field of art) remains a difficult question. Besides,
research-based practices do not only aim at developing artistic modes of
research and knowledge production: they also search for innovative lan-
guages of art. As such, they require expanded critical tools able to com-
bine and question their dual cognitive and aesthetic approach.
Above all, this book seeks to demonstrate the important emancipatory
dimension of these practices, which arises from two factors. First, with their
independent research processes, the artists escape any established system of
knowledge and can thus freely question their framework and foundations.
Their practice often points to the constructed features of these systems.
This allows the artists to better grasp their nature, and, if necessary, to
4 C. HA THUC
criticize their legitimacy, which represents a fundamental liberating process.
Secondly, by combining artistic and cognitive elements, these practices
suggest the possible plurality of modes of knowledge production that can
positively coexist and complement each other constructively. Especially,
they contribute to value forms of knowledge based on sensitive experi-
ences, intuition and on imagination as means to expand the academic field
and our conception of knowledge based on science. This movement can be
seen therefore as part of a world-wide trend challenging the central role of
science in society. Since the scientific revolution that took place in the sev-
enteenth century in Europe, science has been separated from other forms
of knowledge, which became therefore inferior. This model was exported
with colonisation. Science subsequently expanded to the high levels we see
today, at the top of the ranking of knowledge systems. However, this hier-
archical, dominant and exclusive conception of knowledge is increasingly
criticised, and knowledge not based on science is revalorised. In Southeast
Asia where the academic spheres are mainly under the control of the domi-
nant political ideology, and still often modelled on the colonial heritage,
creating original forms of knowledge outside the existing established
frameworks appears thus as a liberating social opening, bestowing a new
and promising role to the artists within the society.
A word is needed here about Southeast Asia as a region. Donald
Emmerson compares Southeast Asia’s name to “names that simultane-
ously describe and invent reality.”3 As we will see with Ho Tzu Nyen’s
series of work dealing with the definition of Southeast Asia, the notion of
Southeast Asia, as a constructed reality, remains controversial and the
choice of this regional framework is open to debate.4 However, a greater
number of scholars are using Southeast Asia as a framework, underlining
its numerous historical, socio-cultural, religious and even linguistic com-
monalities that have informed its history beyond today’s national bound-
aries. Anthony Reid and Maria Serena I. Diokno, in particular, trace the
3 Emmerson Donald, “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 15, no. 1 (March 1984): 1 quoted by John Tung In Tung John, “Southeast Asia: The
Geographic Question,” catalogue of the exhibition (Singapore: Singapore Biennale
2019), 46.
4 Van Schendel Willem summarises aptly the debate and in particular points out to an
essential question: who is defining Southeast Asia? See Van Schendel Willem, “Southeast
Asia, An idea whose time is past?” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- enVolkenkunde, Vol. 168 (4)
(2012): 497–503. See alsoChou Cynthia and Houben Vincent, ed., Southeast Asian Studies:
Debates and New Directions, (Singapore: ISEAS, 2006).