MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Title: The Darker Shades of Unity in Diversity: Testing the Limits of Regionalist Tendencies in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art

Many scholars consider the 1955 Bandung (Asian-African) Conference as a catalyst for the global decolonisation movement, uniting leaders across political and colour divides through its anti-imperialist posture. However, despite the significant depictions of racial and ethnic plurality widely celebrated in journalistic accounts of the Conference, visual depictions of this so-called “Bandung Spirit” are rare as explicit citations within Indonesian visual arts. Although the Conference has been historicised by “black and brown scholars” alike as a moment of exceptional international solidarity, its impact on the localised regional context of Southeast Asia demonstrates a less straightforward impact. For example, through examining artworks which reference the contested territories of Timor Leste and Irian Jaya (also known as West Papua) within Indonesia, this paper can unpack how the “Bandung Spirit” intersects with a regionalist understanding of Southeast Asian art in an attempt to critique homogenising nationalisms. Through scrutinising the language of tokenistic inclusion, we can see how terminologies which have characterised racial difference reveal limitations in application across a more globalised discourse. Monocultural categorisations, often applied through artistic frames can both open up and limit the nuances surrounding cultural difference. By examining the dynamics of race, tradition and modernity within the context of Southeast Asian regionalism, we can achieve a nuanced view of how art operated between the local demands of specificity against the global insistence of terminologies of race and ethnicity.

Bio: Vera Mey is a Ph.D. candidate at SOAS, University of London. Her research looks at regional tendencies of Southeast Asian art during the Cold War eras in Cambodia, Indonesia and Singapore. Before this, she worked as a contemporary art curator at ST PAUL St Gallery, AUT University, New Zealand and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, among others. More recent independent work includes co-curating ‘Sunshower: Contemporary art from Southeast Asia 1980s to now’ (2017) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo, the largest survey of Southeast Asian artists to date. She is a co-founder of the peer-reviewed journal SouthEast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia (NUS Press).