Afro-Southeast Asia and Its Discontents
Kathleen Ditzig, Carlos Quijon Jr. and Sooyoung Leam
Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities is an iterative research and curatorial project. A result of Kathleen Ditzig’s and Carlos Quijon Jr.’s meeting and participation in the seminar Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (2019–2020), co-organised by the Dhaka Art Summit, Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University and Asia Art Archive, Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities (2021–2022) is a response to the cultural legacies of the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955 that have till very recently been overlooked. As a project, it posits “Afro-Southeast Asia” as a field of inquiry into the geopoetics and pragmatics of the imaginations and symbolic solidarities of Southeast Asia during the Cold War. By examining moments of encounter and exchange between the two regions, the project investigates how Southeast Asia as a region was conceived in relation to an imagination of solidarity with African independence and Black civil rights project.
Focusing on Southeast Asia as both geopoetic and geopolitical framework in a post-WWII anticolonial project of world-making, the project traces the historical lines of affinity that drew together Southeast Asia with other regions of the world. An itinerant project, Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities is constructed through the shifting perspective of a traveling exhibition and through the addition of new artists and curators with each programme and exhibition, thus expanding its objects and field of study over time.
On the one hand, Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities is a provocation that advocates for a collaborative and research-led curatorial method of working on regional exhibitions, wherein the desire to think regionally is actualised through a long iterative and shared research project between curators with different research interests. This process seeks out the productive affinities of artistic and curatorial practices that do historical research and mobilises this in turn to “re-write” or at least annotate history from disciplinary margins.
In this regard, Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities is also a series of art exhibitions that through the examination and traveling of artworks across the region produce an ambient knowledge of suspended relations that are brought out through the different exhibition projects and in the act of bringing artworks together with archives. Here, the curatorial collaboration—as embodied by artworks placed in relation to archival material—is expanded beyond the curators to the exhibition display itself.
The first “cycle” of research and exhibitions undertaken by Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities was enabled by KONNECT ASEAN, a development project supported by the Republic of Korea and administered by the ASEAN Foundation. The ASEAN Foundation, which is the non-profit charitable arm of the ASEAN, is an extension of the ASEAN Committee for Culture and Information (ASEAN COCI) set up in October 1978 to enhance mutual understanding and solidarity. The ASEAN COCI is a diplomatic organisation that from the 1980s to 1990s sponsored and facilitated regional art exhibitions and events that have been the foundation in the consolidation of Southeast Asian art. In considering the history of ASEAN’s support of regional art exhibitions and the seeding of Southeast Asian art discourse, we can consider their support as an indication of the changing idiom of “Southeast Asian” regionalism and perhaps a move away from a wholly geopolitical reading of the region through nation-state membership. Moreover, funding from the Republic of Korea speaks to international interest in expanding cultural regionalism and projects that excavate histories of an expanded framing of Southeast Asia as a region.
The first iteration of this inaugural cycle of research and exhibitions was hosted and sponsored by the Nanyang Technological University School of Art, Design and Media (ADM) Gallery in Singapore. In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities During A Cold War (22 January–13 March 2021) presented contemporary artworks and archival material that nuanced the Afro-Asian legacies that grew out of the Cold War. The exhibition brought together art works by Fyerool Darma, bani haykal, Ariko S Ikehara, Eisa Jocson, Simon Soon and Munirah Manor, Vuth Lyno, Ming Wong and Yee I-Lann that considered the complications and contexts including multi-ethnic and mixed-race communities engendered by wartime occupation, as well as the inadvertent legacies of international peacekeeping missions, cultural exchanges and intimate economies that characterise the afterlives of anti-colonial geopolitics.
The exhibition’s title “In Our Best Interests” is a quote from a conversation between Carl T. Rowan, an African American journalist who traveled through Southeast Asia under the auspices of the US state department and Senator Claro M. Recto of the Philippines, who was the leader of the “Filipino First” movement that criticised US “neo-colonialism.” Referencing the Bandung Conference, Recto said to Rowan that “it is in the best interest of the Philippines to identify with Asians,” emphasising the need for Asian solidarity while extending this affinity to Africans. Focusing on Southeast Asia as a geopolitical imagination alongside a post-WWII global anti-colonial resistance to racism, the exhibition traced a historical line between early regional imaginations such as MAPHILINDO (1963–1964) to contemporary appropriations of Afro-Asian histories, such as China’s development of cultural infrastructure in Senegal.
Installation views of Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities During A Cold War (22 January–13 March 2021).
Images courtesy of ADM Gallery.
Installation view of In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities During A Cold War showing the artworks of Fyerool Darma and Yee I-Lann alongside an archive of material related to Southeast Asian diplomats traveling to Africa to solicit support for their imagination of Southeast Asia as region.
Image courtesy of ADM Gallery.
The second exhibition supported by KONNECT ASEAN was hosted by the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center in Manila, the Philippines. Cast But One Shadow: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities (24 September 2021–15 January 2022) was an expanded examination of Southeast Asia as a compelling coordinate to review the continued resonances of global solidarities. It further pursued the thematic threads of racial presence, anti-colonial struggle and the interventive ways of navigating colonial and neocolonial relations through Southeast Asia. Expanding the historical provocations of the first exhibition to exchanges facilitated by empire and pre-colonial imaginations of regional civilisations, Cast But One Shadow reviewed an intricate expanded history of Southeast Asia as a prolific source of illumination that fleshes out the region’s complexity through artworks by Lesley-Anne Cao, Fyerool Darma, Jean Claire Dy, bani haykal, Ariko Ikehara, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Elia Nurvista, Ahmad Fuad Osman, Sim Chiyin, Simon Soon and Munirah Manor, Isola Tong, Ming Wong and Yee I-Lann. Their contemporary artworks were presented alongside selections from the museum’s collection and from paintings that had been gifted to the Philippine president Macapagal from the Indonesian president Soekarno.
Installation views of Cast But One Shadow: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities. Images courtesy of Vargas Museum.
Foreground: Untitled and undated painting signed by R .D. Saleh from the Diosdado and Evangelina Macapagal Family Collection.
Background: Materials from the Jorge B. Vargas Permanent Collection and Library.
Image courtesy of Vargas Museum.
Untitled and undated Balinese painting from the Diosdado and Evangelina Macapagal Family Collection.
Image courtesy of the Vargas Museum.
The title of the exhibition “Cast But One Shadow” was spun from a 1962 novella authored by Han Suyin, a Eurasian physician, novelist and public intellectual with Chinese and Belgian parentage. Originally drafted as a script for Cast But the Same Shadow (1963), one of Cathay Keris of Malaya’s first international co-productions with French and Italian film production companies, Cast But One Shadow was written after Han had found the film unsatisfactory. The novella, like the film, was based on the story of Maria Hertogh or Nadra Adani whose repatriation from her adopted Muslim family in Malaya to the Netherlands resulted in one of the earliest racial riots in Singapore in 1950 and captured an international decolonial imagination. It was one of the last books she published while living in Malaya. The exhibition focused on the complex regional historical milieu that Han worked in as an important source of illumination in the history of archipelagic Southeast Asia and the discourses around geopoetic aspirations and geopolitical affinities.
The third exhibition of the series was curated with Sooyoung Leam. To A Faraway Friend: Beyond Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities similarly took inspiration from the 2021 novel 미래 산책 연습 (Future Stroll Practice) by Park Solmoe. The book unfolds across the historic streets and quiet alleyways of Busan, tracing historic moments in the Republic of Korea’s democratisation movement, which shares affinities with wider histories of independence movements in Southeast Asia and Africa. In the story, slow walking becomes a form of remembering the city’s forgotten past and a way of practising the future to which we aspire.
The exhibition similarly adopted an itinerant and iterative approach to unpacking granular histories of regionalisms constellated through the Republic of Korea’s Cold War history in the region. The exhibition presented artworks by fifteen artists from the Republic of Korea and the nations of ASEAN—Rimbawan Gerilya, Ming Wong, Heaven Baek, Vuth Lyno, Simon Soon and Munirah Manor, Yee I-Lann, Nayoung Jeong, Yeoreum Jeong, Jason Wee, Daejin Choi, Tada Hengsapkul, Cloud Projects, Fyerool Darma and Pio Abad—while reflecting on the geopoetics of diplomatic encounters, moments of friction, and strategic alignments that have shaped and continue to shape geopolitical landscapes across the globe since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The turn to looking to Afro-Southeast Asia through the Republic of Korea’s Cold War history and entanglements in the region was productive in bringing into stark relief the geopolitical contours of the Cold War, informing the framing of the archival material that sought to knit together the parallel roles played by art in democracy movements and by the US military occupation across East and Southeast Asia.
Installation views of To A Faraway Friend: Beyond Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities at ASEAN Culture House, Busan.
Images courtesy of ASEAN Foundation for KONNECT ASEAN.
As much as Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities is an art project that is historically informed by the geopolitics of the region and a provocation for a historiography that can be produced out of an “art world”, the project is also one that is subject to whims of contemporary geopolitics and the resurgent imagination and national interventions into Cold War histories of the region. Examinations of Afro-Asia solidarities have curried popular interest and cultural currency in the art world in recent years because of its resurgent significance in light of the competition between China and the US as world powers. Racialist arguments born out of the transition between the colonial and postcolonial worlds, between the transition from an international order defined by the colour line to one defined by national sovereignty, have renewed significance as the funding of research and marshaling of these histories are taken up by states as well as civil society groups trying to articulate a critique against the inequalities of globalisation. In this regard, the project was conceptualised in part through the creative privileges of working through regional organisations and university art galleries that allowed us to explore artistic practices and historical connections beyond the parameters drawn out by nationalist mandates.
Hence, there is a responsibility that must be shouldered alongside the actual artistic and cultural work of artists and curators turning their lens to the Cold War and to Cold War imaginations of transnational solidarities. It is not enough to merely highlight the spectres, mythos and nostalgia for the performative and radical rhetoric of a moment of world order transition. There is a need to be responsive to the historical contingencies and nuances. We need to look at cultural actors also as political actors and to not take them at their word in spite of our yearning for an idyllic past of political fervor and a righteousness that can only be found in retrospect. Complicated times beget complicated agents. We should lean into density over reductively posturing a “decolonial” positionality that is convenient and ever so lucrative to enable the production of another museum show or to accrue some personal capital that serves our “brand”. The Southeast Asian art world is not yet eclipsed by an overtly financialised art market as we see in other parts of the world. We do not need to be silver tongued. We need instead to be responsive and responsible to living historical legacies we contend with when we try to speak to, display or even make art.
This responsibility, we believe, is found in the collaborative and generous practices of research beyond disciplinary boundaries and in the recovery of a material and visual history of the geopoetic—the fodder that can speak to the pragmatism and historical conditions that made some solidarities and regionalisms possible where others have failed. We advocate for a necessary realism that recognises how cultural and artistic practices have an exceptional purchase and are essential to navigating the contemporary geopolitical landscape that exists between and beyond nation-states and against which our lives unfold.
Still from Sunu Jappo/ 手拉手/ Hand in Hand (2019). Image courtesy of the artist. In the video, the artist Ming Wong visits the sites of Sino-Senegalese “friendship” in the guise of a “cultural ambassador”. Sunu Jappo/ 手拉手/ Hand in Hand was one of a few works that traveled through the region as part of Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities.
