Hyphen–Cinema: Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia – Part I

In Southeast Asia, artists aren’t always just artists. In the previous century, the artist-intellectual, the artist-poet, the artist-teacher, or the artist-agitator were among those who contributed to the region’s art histories. Moreover, their expressive and organisational agencies were also part of broader histories of anti-colonial insurgency and postcolonial nation-building. In the present, many prominent Southeast Asian artists based in the region and the diaspora practise as artist-activists, artist-researchers, artist-writers, or artist-curators. The hyphenated mode is central to the dynamism and distinctiveness of their work.

This online screening series draws inspiration from the art historian Roger Nelson’s newly published book, Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia, which proposes that the region’s hyphenated artists play an important role in researching and expanding the possibilities of art histories by creating multimedia and expansive forms of ‘artistic art histories’. Featuring four moving-image works by Sriwhana Spong, Thảo Nguyên Phan, Grace Samboh, and Tom Nicholson, this two-part screening programme shows the artists recalling, retracing, researching, and echoing historical methods and contexts of making art in Indonesia and Vietnam during periods of rupture. Spong’s double bill, an atmospheric animation video and an artist documentary, alchemises kinship with the painting of her Balinese painter-tailor grandfather, the late I Gusti Made Rundu. Phan’s poetic offering to the Mekong River shadows and displaces the expedition and the field trip, modes of travel that had been utilised by the colonisers and, later on, the nationalist state, to commission drawings and paintings for purposes of consolidating power. Samboh and Nicholson’s video essay records a conversation with the late Edhi Sunarso, the renowned sculpture and public artist commissioned by Sukarno, the first Indonesian President, to make a series of dioramas monumentalising the story of the birthing of the nation. Here, in one of the dioramas, art history brushes against the murkiness of a devastating moment in the country’s life. 

This programme coincides with the Taring Padi’s exhibition Rakyat Pasti Menang at Ibraaz, London, which runs until 22 November 2026.

And the creeper keeps on reaching for the flame tree animates the insects found in the last painting by Sriwhana Spong’s grandfather, the Balinese painter I Gusti Made Rundu. Painted in the traditional Kamasan style, unusual for him, it depicts a battle scene from the Bhomāntaka: The Death of Bhoma, a twelfth-century Javanese epic by an unknown author. These insects can be found in the white spaces between the warring figures, where, mosquito-like, they function like the small motifs called aun-aun or ‘haze’, which represent fields of energy, and are found in nearly all the traditional schools, which represent dust particles in the air. The film animates these insects, producing a swarm that follows the artist’s voice as she recites a circular, looping text formed from a section of the Bhomāntaka that describes a hermitage left in ruins after a battle. The film images ancestry not as a linear succession but as an accumulation of energy, as a vibration full of shimmering diversions ‘charged with potentiality’.

The painter-tailor constructs a family portrait from 16mm film and HD video footage collected by the artist, her relatives, and the family dog. The hook to which the film repeatedly returns is an untitled painting by Spong’s grandfather, I Gusti Made Rundu (1918–93). This painting, the intimate surroundings of the family compound, and her father’s memories weave a net in which fragments relating to the effects of colonisation, invasion, and tourism on image-making in Bali gather.

Further reading:

Roger Nelson, Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia, Cornell University Press, 2026.

Sriwhana Spong: HA HA HA, Perimeter Editions x MUMA, 2026.