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

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 history through diverse multimedia and experimental practices. 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 sculptor 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.

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

Becoming Alluvium is an open-ended installation project comprising an eponymous video as one of its elements. The video manifests the artist’s belief in the moving image as a cascade of metaphoric and literal reincarnations. The plot follows the aftermath of the collapse of a dam on the Mekong which brought death to many inhabitants of a village downstream. Two adolescent siblings who lost their lives in this event are reconciled in their next life in reincarnated forms: the older brother reincarnates into the Irrawaddy dolphin and the little brother into the water hyacinth. Together, they share memories of their past lives as a writer, a ferry driver, a rat, a princess. Whichever reincarnations they inherit, the Irrawaddy dolphin and the water hyacinth still linger around the Mekong, their maternal mother, also their greatest enemy.

In July 2015, Tom Nicholson and Grace Samboh visited Pak Edhi Sunarso with the artist Jimged. Sunarso, who passed away in January 2016, was one of Indonesia’s most eminent sculptors. He is best-known for his large-scale public monuments, commissioned by President Sukarno in the years following decolonisation, which were part of the creation of a new urban landscape for Jakarta, the capital of the new nation. President Sukarno also commissions Sunarso to create a vast cycle of dioramas, depicting the coming into being of the Indonesian people, for the History of National Struggle Museum. The film – which centres around an interview with Sunarso conducted at his studio in Yogyakarta – explores the complex intersections of public art, state-sponsored propaganda, and personal memory in post-independence Indonesia. Here, in one of the dioramas, art history brushes against the murkiness of a devastating moment in the country’s life. 

Further reading:

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

Thảo Nguyên Phan, Becoming Alluvium (2020), Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2020.

Grace Samboh & Tom Nicholson, ‘Towards Figures of Dedication, and a Flood (2015)’, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 221–30.