Major Exhibition in Singapore
Negotiating Home, History and Nation: two decades of contemporary art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011
Singapore art Museum
guest-curated by Iola Lenzi
12 March – 26 June 2011
From Iola Lenzi:
Several years in planning, this exhibition of Southeast Asian contemporary art is the first of its kind in depth, country-scope, and twenty-year breadth.
Including 54 artists from Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, the exhibition presents over 70 seminal Southeast Asian art works of the last two decades in conversation with each other. Artists from Vietnam documented include Vu Dan Tan, Tran Luong, Truong Tan, Nguyen Van Cuong, Nguyen Quang Huy, Nguyen Minh Thanh, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Dinh Q Le.
The survey showcases the visual brilliance and conceptual purpose of recent Southeast Asian practice. As well as offering a spectrum of unprecedented size, it provides regional comparisons, illuminating the common themes, aesthetic approaches, and conceptual tendencies surfacing since the early 1990s. Specifically Southeast Asian commonalities coming to the fore include a predilection for story-telling, the seamless meshing of concept and visual seduction, and a firm belief in art-as-social-voice. Shared themes abound as well, artists exploring the evolving place of faith in contemporary society, women’s centrality in regional culture, nation-building discourses, ongoing rural-urban tensions, the communitarian focus of regional practice, and the ownership of history and memory.
Negotiating Home, History and Nation argues for a view of the region’s practices on the region’s terms, the curatorial references used to contextualise the work mined in Southeast Asian history, geography, and culture. The exhibition is predicated on the contention that the confluence of recent regional political history, profound social shifts, and artists’ confidence vis à vis their deep-rooted cultural baggage, are significant causes explaining the creation of the visually potent and conceptually original art of the last two decades.
A fully-illustrated catalogue, including nine essays by specialists of the region (curatorial essay by Iola Lenzi) documents the exhibition.
