Shaping Geographies: Art, Women, Southeast Asia

In the 1980s and ’90s, feminist geographers established approaches to studying how sites are embedded with patriarchal power structures, influencing how women exist and behave in them. In their curatorial essay for “Shaping Geographies: Art, Women, Southeast Asia,” at Singapore’s Gajah Gallery, art historians and curators Michelle Antoinette and Wulan Dirgantoro explained their research as a quest to plot the “intimate geographies” of the region’s diverse women artists. Attending to and agitating boundaries, ideas, and images of Southeast Asia, the exhibition brought together 11 artists who subtly responded to their sociopolitical surroundings with works considering notions of the body, domesticity, and community. 

Some of the most striking projects teased out frameworks for more intimate and cosmopolitan explorations of women and artmaking practices in Asia. A cross-cultural collaboration between Lao-Australian artist Savanhdary Vongpoothorn and Japanese poet and calligrapher Norika Tanaka, Footsteps to the Nigatsu-do (2017–19) comprises a series of paper rubbings of intricately engraved steps leading to a Buddhist temple in Nara. These repeated rectangular tracings stretched across two walls of the gallery, separated by vertical columns of traditional Japanese tanka poems in gold on bronze paper that reference the temple’s site, in addition to creating visual space for the detailed patterns of waves, hexagons, sloping curves, and latticed grids. The artists spent hours tracing the steps, their bodies bent as if in prayer, thereby connecting the work to the physical and spiritual path to enlightenment expounded in Buddhist traditions across Asia. 

Hung nearby was Yee I-Lann’s intricately woven bamboo tikar mat, LOUVRE (2019). Worked into the tan mat are several black angled lines that reference the rectangular pillars or slats often found in tropical building designs. Unlike Goh’s carefully delineated spaces, this vernacular structure makes no clear distinction between interior and exterior. Made in collaboration with four local women weavers in Sabah, LOUVRE is part of a series of tikar mats, which are traditionally used for communal activities like eating and resting, produced by Yee to foster the community of women in her hometown. 

More directly demonstrating the interplay of gender and site was Suzann Victor’s Promise (2019). Two white dresses hung facing each other from Gajah’s high ceiling, their trains one seamless stretch of cloth that ran over a table bearing woks and four hollowed-out loaves of bread, illuminated from within. Encircling this scene were concentric rings of curlicued words, sculpted from red hair, that allude to female sexuality, such as “hymen,” “virginity,” and “vulva.” As an adaptation of Victor’s His Mother is a Theatre (1994), conceived in response to Singapore’s ban on funding performance art, Promise not only invokes the female body and attendant expectations of chaste domesticity, but also critiques the state structures that control bodies more generally.  

“Shaping Geographies” presented projects that both subvert “feminine” conventions—as in Victor’s Promise—and reclaim women-led practices long ignored in the art world, exemplified by Yee’s tikar mats. Exploring trajectories of difference and connection across nations, bodies, communities, and artistic media, “Shaping Geographies” allowed for new “maps of intimacy and belonging” to be drawn, offering a fluid understanding of women, art, and Southeast Asia.