The hot and humid boundaries of Southeast Asia aspire to become boundless in next the three years with the establishment of the Asean Economic Community. It is an intriguing aspiration; in terms of culture, it seems inevitable that to realise the dream of Asean solidarity, each member must first examine its memory of past solitude.
Bomb Pond , photography by Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana.
That's the subject of the new exhibition at The Jim Thompson Art Centre. "TRACES" is a photography and video exhibition of 10 artists representing seven Asean nations: Moe Satt (Myanmar), Nattapas Jirasatitwarakul and Sompot Chidgasornpong (Thailand), Patty Chang and David Kelley (Laos), Nguyen Trinh Thi (Vietnam), Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), Wong Hoy Cheong (Malaysia), Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore), and Philip Jablon (an American who's worked in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam).
Unfortunately Brunei, Indonesia, and the Philippines are not present; somehow they seem far-flung, despite Indonesia having Asean's biggest population.
"TRACES", curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong, is on show in a space wrought with memories. The exhibition can be metaphorically and historically connected to Jim Thompson, the American on whose property the art centre is located. Thompson lived in Southeast Asia for many years and, in 1967, disappeared without a trace. The colonial past is one of the sub-themes of the works, and Thompson, a World War II soldier from "imperial America", was known for his dislike of neo-colonialism.
The story of his disappearance _ corruption, espionage and myth have mixed together in a blur of history and fiction _ also seems to characterise most nations in the region.
The noise and limited space of the installation indirectly represents how the region has been living together: we're so close, yet we speak in different tones and tongues. Uncanny photographs of Moe Satt's F n' F (Face And Fingers) evokes the feeling of an outsider who arrives and becomes fascinated by the primitive/indigenous behaviour, just like the eyes of the colonisers toward the locals, as well as the eyes of audiences who come to an exhibition, searching for the photos' meanings.
Moe Satt, a visual and performance artist, is a founder and director of Beyond Pressure, an international festival of performance art in Yangon. Because of the political condition in Myanmar, using the body is the most convenient and powerful means to subvert and dare authority; performance art is not objectified _ it speaks to the audience at its moment of happening, at a particular time and space. It can choose to leave no trace (photography does, though). The expressions made by his face and fingers generate various looks that can be meaningful or meaningless _ apparently Moe Satt realises how much gestures can speak.
School Uniforms , by Nattapas Jirasatitwarakul.
Instead of liberating the body, two Thai artists show how the body is controlled. Nattapas Jirasatitwarakul's School Uniforms show pictures of students in the military-style haircuts that are compulsory in most Thai schools.
Meanwhile Sompot Chidgasornpong's video called Bangkok In The Evening relates Thais' pre-programmed behaviour of standing stiff to the national anthem twice a day.
In School Uniforms, black-and-white photographs of girls and boys with very short haircuts, their eyes shut tightly, implicitly shows how hopeless the future is as long as children are taught to be tame. The effect is creepy. Military hairstyles stigmatise students since they can't take it off, like they can at least do with their uniforms. The claim of unity, therefore, has to be questioned.
Nattapas's dull and dry photographs effectively reflect the atmosphere of aborted intelligence, which is an enduring feature of the Thai education system.
Another weird behaviour of Thais is to freeze when hearing the national anthem at 8am and 6pm. This is the focus of Sompot's Bangkok In The Evening. The act of standing still on hearing the anthem is visually strange _ as Sompot sees it _ and just like other propaganda it prevents questioning. In the video, the reaction is even more absurd since the anthem is replaced by Erik Satie's music, and it seems like the people are being collectively hypnotised.
In the middle of the gallery, there's a small, curtained-off area constructed for the pleasurably sadistic fantasy of Wong's Re:Looking, a video that re-imagines Malaysia as a superpower that has total control over Austria. Audiences are invited to sit comfortably on a sofa watching a "documentary" programme by MBC, the Malaysian Broadcasting Corporation. All is invented: the space, the TV channel, and of course, the history.
The imagination of being a coloniser is quasi-revenge: reality doesn't work, yet art does. The documentary looks so real on the TV screen, just like a dream looks so real when you're sleeping.
A number of photographs of ruined stand-alone cinemas in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam by Jablon cover a wall and give a sense of decay, nostalgia and romance _ the crumbling traces of what once stood. On the opposite wall we're treated to simple yet eye-catching photographs by Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana, titled Bomb Pond, and here the ghost of violence and history lurks, subtly and intelligently.
Bomb Pond consists of pictures of ponds, some filled with earth and some with water, and they're chosen to emphasise the Khmer proverb that says "you can hear something a thousand times and not know it, yet if you see it with your eyes just once, you know".
The Khmer proverb is not quite right, for people don't always realise the truth by seeing something just once. What we see also depends on what we know. In the photos, something has mysteriously left the scars on the earth or hollowed out the land. They appear to be landscapes at first, but knowing the history war in Cambodia opens the images to a much more sinister interpretation.
There is not enough space to mention all the artworks, but also of note is a video work by Ho that satirises the colonial past of Singapore, an experimental documentary by Nguyen from Vietnam, and the video and photography Route 3 by Chang and Kelley from Laos. Just as the exhibition cannot include all Asean nations, maybe the idea of absence is crucial to our dream of unity. The plan to blur the boundaries among the bloc can be done not just by considering what appears or what we share, but more importantly, by what's neglected, absent, and dissimilar.
