Artist-Curator Collectives in Southeast AsiaEva Bentcheva

The ‘Artist-Curator’ in Southeast Asia

Before exploring the role of collectivity, it is important to foreground the figure of the ‘artist-curator’ in Southeast Asia.88The history of groups and collective initiatives was highlighted in the touring exhibition Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia, 1960s–1990s (2019–20) at the National Gallery of Singapore, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and the Japan Foundation Asia Center. In a prominent study on curating, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008), art historian Patrick Flores identifies individuals such as Raymundo Albano from the Philippines, Apinan Poshyananda from Thailand, and Jim Supangkat from Indonesia as having influential Beginning of page[p. 81] hybrid roles as artists, curators, and political figures since the 1960s.99Patrick Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (NUS Press, 2008).

Importantly, these individual ‘artist-curators’ also operated in conjunction with collectives (both purely artistic ones and some that encompass both curating and artistic practice) across the region. In the Philippines, Albano practised simultaneously as an artist and a curator in experimental collectives such as ‘Karioka’ and ‘Liwayway Recapping Co.’ during the 1970s.1010For the works of these groups, see Eva Bentcheva, ‘From Ephemeral Experiences to Lasting Legacies: Discourses on Experimental Art in the Philippines during the 1960s and 1970s’, Tate Papers, 32 (Autumn 2019) <https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/32/discourses-experimental-art-philippines-1960s-1970s> [accessed 17 March 2023]; Eva Bentcheva, ‘Three Kings and Sound Bags: Revisiting Three Kings and Sound Bags (1979) as Philippine “Experimental Art” of the 1970s’, Southeast of Now, 6.2 (2022), pp. 187–94 <https://doi.org/10.56159/sen.2022.a871499>. Likewise, Supangkat was a formative figure within the aforementioned Indonesian New Art Movement. These examples illustrate the close-knit relationship between the ‘artist-curator’ on an individual level and their role within bigger collective practices. Moreover, they signal the need to explore social and political circumstances that have shaped different manifestations of collectivity across the region. Here, collectivity is less orientated towards reflecting the autonomy of the artist, or embodying participatory democracy via art.1111See Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, ed. by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, NED-New edition (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Boaventura de Sousa Santos broaches this topic when he describes art’s varying relationship to epistemologies in different parts of the ‘global South’:

(there is) a diversity that encompasses very distinct modes of being, thinking and feeling, ways of conceiving of time and the relation among human beings and between humans and non-humans, ways of facing the past and the future and of collectively organising life, the production of goods and services, as well as leisure.1212Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South’, Africa Development, 37.1 (2012), pp. 43–67 (p. 51) <https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ad/article/view/87540> [accessed 20 August 2024].Beginning of page[p. 82]

This idea may be expanded to thinking about the relationship between artistic practice and collective modes of artist-curator collectivity in Southeast Asia. It points towards the need to recognize not only different internal structures of collective formations, but also different genealogies and relationships to the ‘public sphere’. With this in mind, we can now explore three short case studies: the Artists Village in Singapore, the Chiang Mai Social Installation in Thailand, and Green Papaya in the Philippines.

Different Approaches to Collectivity

The Artists Village in Singapore is one of the earliest examples of artist-curator collectives in the region. Following Singapore’s independence from the British Empire in 1963 and subsequent separation from Malaysia in 1965, this city-state was marked by a crisis of cultural identity and a strong drive towards modernization. Despite the city’s growing infrastructure in the 1960s and 1970s, little state funding was afforded to the artistic scene. During the 1980s, the government became aware of the arts’ political capital and the contribution the arts could make to economic growth, resulting in a wave of corporate patronage. Faced with this comingling of ‘experimental art’ and politico-corporate co-option, a number of artists in Singapore came to search for alternative spaces for creative production. In 1988, the artist Tang Da Wu conceived ‘The Artists Village’. This was established as an ‘artist colony’ on a chicken farm in Beginning of page[p. 83] the district of Ulu Sembawang outside the metropolitan centre. It initially followed an open studio format, whereby artists had direct contact with one another’s work. The Village quickly developed into a site of interpersonal, informal, and collaborative curating. Artists not only created works, but also took on curatorial roles, exhibiting their own works and that of their peers. Given the strict political censorship in Singapore at the time, many of the works produced here sought to navigate censorship on an aesthetic level, avoiding forms of direct political critique. Furthermore, collaborations between artists, and the opportunity for artists to act as curators of their own work and their peers’, enabled a context of exchange and discourse. While artists often worked with experimental media such as performance, participatory art, and installation, it was the very act of getting together and fostering interpersonal exchange that played a significant role, serving as a crucial mode of engaging with public discourses while remaining under the radar of censorship.

Similar to The Artists Village, the Chiang Mai Social Installation (CMSI) in Thailand originated in a shared desire to move away from Bangkok during the 1980s. In the wake of student protests in the capital, censorship of the arts and restrictions on what could be said, particularly when it came to the Thai monarchy, a number of artists sought a location away from the government’s watchful eye in the capital. The northern city of Chiang Mai served as such an ‘alternative space’. With an old city centre densely packed with temples, Chiang Mai became Beginning of page[p. 84] home to a series of events and exhibitions every two to four years which were open to local and international artists. These took place during the 1990s and early 2000s, with artists responding to public spaces, monuments, temples, and places of gathering within the proximity of Chiang Mai.1313See David Teh, ‘Baramee. Thai Relational Art and the Politics of Withdrawal’, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (MIT Press, 2017), pp. 109–44.

Neither The Artists Village nor CMSI were structured around a unanimous goal. Rather, they represented a fluid organizational network whose collective endeavours manifested in the form of temporary programming and a nomadic network. This idea of the collective as a hybrid artistic and curatorial mode of network-building is particularly important. Whereas artistic collectives in Europe and North America throughout the twentieth century were often celebrated for striving towards activist and experimental agency, in many Southeast Asian countries, which lack infrastructure and state support for the arts and suffer from restrictions on freedom of speech, collectivism creates sustainable networks of friendship and exchange. This has been at the heart of the Green Papaya Art Projects.

Established by artists and cultural organizers Norbeto ‘Peewee’ Roland and Donna Miranda in Metro Manila in 2000, Green Papaya describes itself as having an ‘amorphous set-up’, between an art, exhibition, event, and social space, as well as an archive.1414Green Papaya Art Projects, in Roundtable on Collective Work, pp. 275–78 (p. 276). Since its formation, Green Papaya’s activities have encompassed national and international connections, solidarities with activist movements, visits from foreign scholars, artists, and speakers, and the development of on-site works within its Manila spaces.Beginning of page[p. 85] In line with this, Green Papaya’s organizers have emphasized that they do not identify as a collective. Following internal reorganizations in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, they stated:

The entire team has voted to keep the ‘hierarchy’ wherein Peewee acts as Papaya’s ‘leader’. This is worth mentioning as it complicates the idea that Papaya is a ‘collective’ or a ‘horizontal’ organization. It is also worth articulating how this leadership is hardly totalitarian; rather the set-up is somewhat more akin to democratic centralism: although we still focus on our specific tasks and de facto ‘committees’, any member can join discussions on matters that affect all Papaya members and can participate in the decision-making process.1515Ibid., pp. 277–78.

Unlike the open studio model of The Artists Village on the periphery of Singapore or the festival nature of CMSI, Green Papaya’s activities have been less linked to a specific site. Rather, they embody an understanding of artistic-curatorial collectivity predicated on ‘hanging out’, or tambay in Tagalog. Underlying this is a desire to bridge local forms of knowledge and artistic practices to broader national and transnational areas of concern, such as sustainability, ecology, human rights, and education.

Thinking about the broader role of artistic-curatorial collectives in Southeast Asia beyond their roles in the art world(s), what emerges here is an understanding of collectivity predicated also on staying localized, network-creation, and pedagogy. Nuraini Juliastuti has described this as a process Beginning of page[p. 86] of non-extractive ‘commoning’ through the medium of art.1616See Juliastuti, Commons Museums. Here, collectives are seen as not only pursuing their own creative agendas, but as continually coming into conversation about what it means to exist at the nexus of culture, ecology, and society in Southeast Asia. Despite coming into existence at different points in time and under different socio-political and cultural contexts, the examples of the Artists Village, the Chiang Mai Social Installation, and Green Papaya all illustrate the broad impact that such modes of artistic-curatorial collaboration have had within their respective local and international contexts. Returning to Carlos Quijon, Jr.’s comment at the beginning of this essay, collective formations in Southeast Asia offer a particularly stark example of the ‘untenability of any form of self-sufficiency’ in art.