Amidst uncertain, turbulent times — marked by runaway technological development, geopolitical conflict, and increasing alienation from ourselves and each other — what does art still have to offer?
Through their respective practices, these four artists put forth hopeful answers to the question.
Giang Lê, Choy Chun Wei, Benedict Yu, and Taiki Sakpisit are just four of the artists participating in this August’s UOB-NAFA Southeast Asian Arts Forum, an annual forum that invites artists, researchers, and creative professionals from the region to respond to pressing issues in the arts and beyond.
Now in its 5th edition, the Forum is organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Arts (ISEAA), an agency within the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) that supports practice-led research on art in Southeast Asia. Past editions covered themes ranging from the role of tradition in modern life (2019) and tangible cultural experiences in the Internet age (2021) to sustainability in the production and consumption of art (2022, 2023).
This year, the Forum’s theme is Way of the Valiant: Paving Art Through War. Responding to moments of conflict, violence, and destruction in the region and beyond, the Forum ponders how art can help us process difficult experiences and work towards a different future.
Conducted in a hybrid format, this year’s Forum features in-person presentations and performances with livestreaming, video-on-demand content, breakout discussions, dialogue and roundtable sessions, and two on-site art exhibitions. It’s an opportunity to hear from artists themselves about recent and ongoing projects and have stimulating conversations with like-minded peers.
As August draws near, the artists give us a preview of what to expect.
1) Giang Lê: Excavating forgotten histories
During the Forum, Vietnamese artist Giang Lê will introduce audiences to two works that probe the tangle of her country’s history. These works are anchored in the đình — a kind of communal house found in Northern Vietnam that serves as a centre for gathering, ceremonies, and celebrations. As important spiritual sites, these buildings often contain altars and elaborate carved decorations representing villagers’ beliefs.
Vestige of the Land (2017) is a plaster sculpture that replicates a quarter of one such building on a 1:1 scale. Born and raised in Hanoi, Lê only became acquainted with the đình in adulthood, and travelled extensively through Northern Vietnam to document these buildings and their adaptations to contemporary times.
While Lê tells us that many đình did survive the Vietnam War (and thus bear witness to decades if not centuries of history), her plaster version is in ruins — succumbing inevitably to the ravages of time.
At the Forum, Lê will also discuss her embossing series, developed during a three-month residency at Paris’ Cité internationale des arts. There, Lê looked into Vietnam’s presence in colonial expositions of the early twentieth century and conducted research on the Vietnamese artist Lebadang, one of the many Indochinese workers employed (often forcibly) in French arms factories during the Second World War.
During her research, Lê also serendipitously learned about a đình that had been commissioned and shipped from Vietnam to Paris for exhibitions in 1906 and 1907, and later converted into the Indochinese Memorial Temple honouring soldiers killed in the First World War. Her work thus draws upon archival photographs of these exhibitions, and pays tribute to Lebadang through his trademark medium of embossing on paper.
“Most of my practice,” says Lê, “has been interested in history and how it is portrayed through the lens of the people.” To her, it is crucial to have a clear-eyed perspective on history, including its multitudinous and complex conflicts. “When we were in school, we only knew about history through books, which were written by the winners. I think it’s very important to know both sides, and also to have a desire to investigate and understand what we went through.”
“What I would like to present,” she concludes, “is a way to look at archives and reinterpret them in our own way.”
2) Choy Chun Wei: Confronting a digital world
“The tools that we have created — we cannot control them.”
For Malaysian artist and educator Choy Chun Wei, one of the most significant clashes of our time is between humanity and its own technological creations. Choy is best known for his large-scale mixed media collages, which emerge from a background in graphic design that immerses him in a vast world of manmade typefaces and images — a “built-up world” at once real and unreal.
In his work, Choy plucks these elements out of their original contexts and assembles them into spectacularly dense compositions, capturing the dizzying experience of living in a fast-paced society and oversaturated media environment. Informed by thinkers including Lewis Mumford, Michael McLuhan, and Nicholas Carr, he feels that technology’s promises are undercut by its adverse effects on human physical and mental wellbeing, and gestures towards a history of material transformations like the Industrial Revolution leading to new forms of war. “Currently, we have more tools and more infrastructure at our disposal, and we are not doing any good.”
In conjunction with the Forum, Choy is presenting Xenomech: Enigmas Inside the Margins, an exhibition of 19 works from the past few years. These include recent experiments with clear resin, a medium which he uses to convey how technology has forever changed human relationships. By creating what he describes as a “cold surface between the audience and my expression,” Choy mimics the distance created between us by our screens. Besides wall-based collage works, he is also showcasing totemic figures made of found materials that feel like uncanny mirrors of ourselves.
Now is the time, Choy says, “to address the relevance of art within the conflict of human nature and machine,” with the Forum offering a platform to reveal art “as a form of, not fixing, but hopefully slow reflective healing.” To him, art remains crucial in shaping our perspectives of the world — “as reflection, as declaration, as, at least, something you see in the margins.”
3) Benedict Yu: Creating spaces for healing
To transdisciplinary artist Benedict Yu, however, technology can also provide a path towards community and healing. For the Forum, Yu, who splits his time between Singapore and Taiwan, is creating a video-on-demand presentation about his 2023 residency with the SomoS art space in Berlin.
During the three-month residency, Yu recruited and interviewed 27 Berlin-based participants in order to represent their life stories in the virtual reality (VR) space. While the participants recounted their experiences, either Yu or the participants themselves would trace their bodies, creating three-dimensional virtual portraits resembling wire figures or anatomical diagrams.
Living in cosmopolitan Berlin, which houses a large immigrant population, Yu was struck by the city’s acceptance of people from different backgrounds. With about a third of his participants hailing from outside Germany, he focused especially on stories of diaspora, as well as building person-to-person connections. Besides conducting interviews, he also invited the participants back to his studio for meals, and introduced individuals with similar experiences to each other. These included three Ukrainians taking refuge from war, who had not known each other before Yu’s project.
Yu has built what he calls a “VR sanctuary” to house these various portraits and stories. In order to preserve the anonymity of his participants, the voices narrating the stories are changed, and the figures abstract, devoid of any identifying features. But this also functions to strip away the superficial differences that divide us. Describing the experience of entering this VR sanctuary, Yu says, “The moment you step closer to the bodies, you are able to hear the stories. But when you stand [farther away], it sounds like a harmonious choir humming and singing.”
This vision of harmony emanates from Yu’s belief in technology like VR as a tool to bring people from different religious, political, and national backgrounds together. For him, technological development can counterintuitively lead us to a sharper realisation of our own humanity: “The scarier technology is, the more sensitively humans will be looking back at themselves — that is how I see technology helping us.”
Ultimately, Yu hopes that Forum attendees will take away from his presentation the two key themes of “VR spirituality” and communal healing. “In this context, the artist [does] more than just expression. The artist is facilitating, translating, and interpreting — all these different aspects of community.”
4) Taiki Sakpisit: Expressing emotions through art
Taiki Sakpisit is a filmmaker and artist whose works delicately express the complexities of Thailand’s past and present. At the Forum, he will introduce audiences to Dark Was the Night, an exhibition currently showing at Bangkok’s SAC Gallery.
The show’s title references a song that was included on the Voyager Golden Record — two discs NASA sent to space in 1977 to convey Earth’s sights and sounds to interstellar listeners. Consisting of a video installation, prints, photographs, and an “orbiting sculpture,” Dark Was the Night draws parallels between the pull of gravity and the inescapable force of family and memory.
Sakpisit’s other historical keystone for the exhibition is the 6 October 1976 massacre, in which right-wing paramilitaries brutally killed student protestors at Bangkok’s Thammasat University. Besides connecting NASA’s attempt to communicate with alien life with the students’ desire to assert political ideas, Sakpisit also cites an incident in the life of Thai politician Pridi Banomyong, whose home was attacked on the night of his exile. While Banomyong swam to safety, his wife Poonsuk shouted for the military to stop shooting at the women and children in the house. “The idea,” Sakpisit says, “[that] just one woman stood up to protect her family [in] the face of monsters — for me, this is the core of the work.”
But where other artists might address these historical moments more directly, Sakpisit prefers a light touch, seeing art as a diary to express personal thoughts and feelings. Even righteous anger can be alchemised into something more subtle and poetic — an earnest attempt to understand. In this vein, Dark Was the Night eschews edginess and aggression, instead relying on a hypnotic dreampop soundtrack and the “blurry, dreamlike image” created by a Helios 44-2 camera lens for its atmospheric effects.
“The oppression or suppression of art, thinking, and freedom is everywhere,” Sakpisit warns. But even in dark times, there are people willing to stand up.
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Curious to learn more? The UOB-NAFA Southeast Asian Arts Forum 2024 takes place at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and virtually on Friday, 2 August 2024 (10 a.m. – 5 p.m.) Find out more and register at https://seaartforum.nafa.edu.sg/registration.
The Forum is accompanied by two exhibitions. Light permeates the wounds by Vietnamese artist Hoang Duong Cam runs at the Ngee Ann Kongsi Galleries from 5 July to 7 August 2024, while Choy Chun Wei’s Xenomech: Enigmas Inside the Margins runs at the Lim Hak Tai Gallery from 19 July – 18 August 2024.
Header image: Giang Lê at work on Vestige of the Land (2017). Image courtesy of the artist.
This article is produced in paid partnership with the Institute of Southeast Asian Arts at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA). Thank you for supporting the institutions that support Plural.
