Installation view of FX HARSONO’s Burned Victims, 1998, burned wood, metal, shoes and performance video with sound: 8 min 41 sec, dimensions variable, at “After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History,” Asia Society Museum, New York, 2017. Photo by Perry Hu. Courtesy Asia Society Museum.

After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History

Bansie Vasvani

Asia Society Museum

Indonesia Vietnam Myanmar USA

A lasting impression one got from the exhibition “After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History” at the Asia Society Museum in New York was the sense of art’s power to propel. Walking a tight rope between personal aesthetics and the repressive sociopolitical conditions of their countries, seven artists and a collaborative group—from Indonesia, Vietnam and Myanmar, respectively—demonstrated their roles as radical emissaries of change.

While the show might be too small to be called a survey exhibition, it certainly spawned a conversation about the roots of the artists’ practices. Far from being gratuitous anti-government propaganda generated for international consumption, the exhibits represented the humanity in the various countries. Perhaps the most iconic in the exhibition and exemplifying this spirit was the elder, sapient artist FX Harsono’s performance-video and sculpture Burned Victims (1998). Harsono’s political activism, which stems from before the rise and fall of Indonesian dictator Suharto’s New Order regime, brought a palpable immediacy to the artist’s subject matter. Burned Victims commemorated the deaths of hundreds of innocent people in the artist’s hometown in Jakarta. These victims were locked in a mall that was set on fire during the riots that protested Suharto’s dictatorship, just days before the president stepped down. They were burned alive. In the installation, scorched wooden logs resembling torsos are strung in metal armatures, while charred shoes placed at the base of each sculpture brought home the horror of the situation. The accompanying video captured Harsono’s public performance in 1998 in which he lit the logs later used in the installation on fire as a proclamation of the government’s wrongdoing. This act of fury, unfolded in an urban setting, was the artist’s means to convey the urgency of his beliefs to the general public. Harsono—as well as his compatriots who incorporated political dissension into their practices—saw art as a vehicle to mobilize passive observers.

HTEIN LIN, A Show of Hands, 2013– , installation with surgical plaster, dimensions variable. Photo by Perry Hu. Courtesy the artist and Asia Society Museum, New York.

It is this galvanizing aspect of art-making in highly restrictive conditions that can also be seen in Htein Lin’s large-scale installation, A Show of Hands
(2013– ). Lin’s active involvement in protesting the military rule in his native Myanmar began in the 1980s and led to his incarceration from 1998 to 2004. His experiences engendered a practice that pits itself deliberately against oppression, seen evidently in the way he surreptitiously continued to make art while in prison. For A Show of Hands, made following the dissolution of the military junta in 2011, Lin gathered hundreds of fellow prior political prisoners to participate in his mission, casting their hands in surgical plaster. By tagging each cast with the identity of its owner, Lin’s intention was not to replay history as much as it was to create a space for communal reflection.

The exhibition made for the case that artists in Southeast Asia fuse their individual practices with their commitments to reveal the lives of the disenfranchised. In the show’s catalogue, co-curators Boon Hui Tan and Michelle Yun questioned, “Did art change the world or did the world change art?” For photographers like Nge Lay from Myanmar, whose practice advances a deep connection between art and activism, the impetus to provoke a strong response against the brutalizing of women in her country led to an embrace of a sensational stance. This methodology can be seen in her horrifying but deeply evocative self-portraits, Observing of Self Being Dead (2)(3) (2011), which depicts what resemble tortured, violated and rotting female bodies.

NGE LAY, Observing of Self Being Dead (2), 2011, color photograph, 91.4 × 137.2 cm. Courtesy the artist and Asia Society Museum, New York.

NGE LAY, Observing of Self Being Dead (3), 2011, color photograph, 91.4 × 137.2 cm. Courtesy the artist and Asia Society Museum, New York.

A more nuanced retelling of his country’s gruesome history can be seen in Dinh Q. Lê’s video and installation of 70 drawings, Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (2012). Here, Lê, who is also an educator and curator, unveils a more personal, almost dreamy view of the American-Vietnam War, as chronicled by local artists who accompanied the North Vietnamese soldiers on duty. Lê’s interviews with the artists in the video and their pastoral drawings of tanks and soldiers evoke the simplicity of the soldiers’ lives, their hopes, and compelling sense of duty.

In “After Darkness,” each artist’s complex relationship with art, ideology and the assertion of activism to portray history was writ large. Never straying from the aesthetic quality of their work, whether it is Harsono’s beautifully designed armatures, Lay’s exquisitely engineered photography, or Lê’s poignant inquiries, the larger issues about capturing the impact of inhumanity on the artists’ people remained enormous and paramount.

Installation view of DINH Q. LÊ’s Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War, 2012, 70 drawings in pencil, watercolor, ink, and oil with single-channel video: 35 min, dimensions variable, at “After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History,” Asia Society Museum, New York, 2017. Photo by Perry Hu. Courtesy the artist, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

“After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History” is on view at the Asia Society Museum, New York until January 21, 2018.

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