In-Person Panel PS1.1

Revolutionary Visions and Social Spaces: Art and Media in Southeast Asia

Negotiating Properties and Meanings of Online Graphic Narrative in Southeast Asia Social Media: Cases from Indonesia and Malaysia

Indah Santi Pratidina

Graphic narratives can be studied as a means of political communication. This notion expands when artists share them online via social media, which enables negotiations of meaning between artists and audiences. During the COVID-19 pandemic, online communication thrives, and selecting the proper mode of address to engage audience is more critical than technical drawing skills. This continues after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. This study observed artists from Indonesia and Malaysia with a notable online presence. The two countries, with large social media users in Southeast Asia, have turbulent histories of political cartoons, particularly with governments’ media censorship throughout regimes. The Indonesian artists are Kendra Paramita, Hary Prast, and Rizal Fahmi. The Malaysian artists are Ernest Ng and VulpineNinja. They all share works discussing topics of politics, religion, and the efforts surrounding COVID-19. The study aims to explore the artists’ motives and perceived outcomes by consciously choosing social media to reach their audience. Data is obtained through interviews and observations of their social media accounts. Findings show that the production process has become more audience-oriented when artists are highly aware of online platforms’ characteristics and audience responses. Produced works become producer-consumer-owned narratives, and negotiations between artists and audiences motivate political activism.

TERBUKA: Spirit, space, and the ‘open turn’ in post-1998 Indonesian art 

Caitlin Hughes 

After the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime on 21 May 1998 came Indonesia’s Reformasi: a near-decade of political and social reform that radically reshaped Indonesia’s contemporary art landscape. In the clamour of life in the post-authoritarian era, space became significant as an explorative, experimental and expressive medium for art making. Existing scholarship on Reformasi-era Indonesian art has framed this trend through repeated references to pop culture, public space, and artists’ participation in international biennale circuits.  

But for a select number of artists, the concept of ruang terbuka (open space) had currency as an environmental and – importantly – spiritual ideal; transcending beyond Eurocentric definitions of ‘spatial practice’ into an embodied, relational, and total immersive environment. This paper draws from key artworks and texts made in the immediate, early Reformasi period between 1999-2000 to illustrate the parameters of this trend, before mapping its expansions geographically and temporally. I contend that the continuing relevance and resonance of this principle of ‘open space’ to Indonesian art practice today lies in its emphasis on translation; on embodying spirit in ambience and environment, and extending this spatial language into global contemporary art contexts across a fluid world map.

Socially engaged art in Hong Kong: Hi! Hill project in Chuen Lung Village as a case study 

Hung Sheng 

Located in a Hakka village, Chuen Lung in Tsuen Wan, Hi! Hill (2018) was a site- and community-oriented project. The site was widely known to locals as a place for hiking and 'yum cha'. This project offered an alternative to imagine and demonstrate other dimensions of this rural neighbourhood of Hong Kong. Thirteen groups of artists from different backgrounds were involved, and many of the works were site-specific. The interaction and collaboration between the villagers and the artists provided insights to rethink the substance of the village as well as the broader context of Hong Kong. 

By observing, interacting and researching Chuen Lung, the artists incorporated and transformed the soil, Hakka plants and Hakka dialect into their works. This paper attempts to illustrate the works that engaged with the Chuen Lung community in the making process, as well as the changes that the project brought to the villagers and the village.

Memory and Martial Law Art: Visual artistic responses to historical revisionism in the age of Duterte and Marcos Jr. 

Arthur Knight 

This paper reflects on how martial law has been remembered by analysing Philippine visual art as a medium of cultural memory, interfacing art recalling resistance and revolution against Dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos with representations of widespread authoritarian nostalgia for the so-called ‘golden age’ of Marcos’ dictatorship. Drawing on interviews with Filipino artists, curators, and activists, I argue that Filipino protest artists have come to represent resisting the Drug War killings, historical revisionism of martial law and rising authoritarianism as interconnected struggles. I explore how the praxis of resistance in the Philippines today draws on historical protest movements. 

Anti-Marcos Art Again forms part of a larger study into the connections between visual art and cultural memory in post-Marcos Philippines, and more specifically the link between memorialisation of martial law and the revolutionary dreams which defined the martial law period. These dreams include Marcos’s revolution from the centre, but also the anti-authoritarian, democratic and socialist revolutionary hopes which were briefly materialised in the People Power revolution of 1986. Memorialisation of martial law beyond the personal cannot escape these latent, still-today unfulfilled political and economic aspirations, evidenced by how Filipino artists have continually engaged with these dynamics while making art about martial law.