Five Artists Reimagining Southeast Asian Art
Like a vibrant mosaic of scattered pearls, Southeast Asian art defies simple categorization, with each country contributing its own blend of cultural heritage and historical narratives
Filmed at the heart of the Bantayan Island seas in the Philippines, a group of men make their way underwater. Leading this aquatic procession, a man carries a statue of Santo Niño, an infant representation of Jesus. Elsewhere, another figure carries a piece of cardboard inscribed with the words “Yolanda Survivor,” referring to the 2013 typhoon, considered one of the deadliest on record in the country. Caught in a nexus of socio-political turmoil and religious imagery, this surreal parade of performers comprises the strange and submerged world of Dutch-Filipino video artist Martha Atienza’s work titled Our Islands, 11° 16’58.4”N 123°45’07.0”E.
Last July, Martha’s video work made its debut in New York City, blown up across the wide LED screens of Times Square every night of the month. For a moment, New Yorkers were transported to Bantayan Island where Martha’s critiques of climate change, migration, and commercial fishing took center stage. It was a breakthrough moment that made evident the Western world’s curiosity, and hunger, for Southeast Asian art.
To designate a category such as “Southeast Asian art” assumes some kind of stability and consistency—a set of shared characteristics that make up a regional identity. But, just as the title of Martha’s piece makes explicit, Southeast Asia is scattered, brimming with cultural practices, historical entanglements, and genre explorations specific to each country. This is the challenge (and also the fun) in crafting a list that tries to sketch out and bridge emerging tendencies and trajectories across Southeast Asian art.
Philippines: Ayka Go
A warped and tactile beauty characterize Ayka Go’s dewy paintings. The Filipino visual artist deploys a distinctly layered approach that begins with paper models, stitched or torn or folded, that are photographed and then painted onto a canvas. This method exudes the feel of a whimsical yet sharply defined sculpture that emits its own light from within.
Ayka’s paintings capture a playfulness that draws attention to scenes of childhood and domestic life—rustles of memory that invite self-reflection. Play House, exhibited in Finale Art File, found the artist returning to old diaries as she memorialized remnants of her girlhood. Her vision comes through in a carefully compartmentalized dollhouse, which is also her largest work to date. It’s a perceptive and wondrous undertaking signaling Ayka’s wider ambitions without sacrificing the specificity of her point of view.
Malaysia: Alvin Lau
Nestled in the northern region of Kuala Lumpur, the suburb of Sentul was once a neighborhood teeming with lush coconut trees, fruit orchards, and vegetable farms. Today, Sentul tells a tale of failed development, drained from the forces of gentrification. The photographer Alvin Lau has documented Sentul, his hometown, with a visual acuity that highlights an estranged yet heartfelt personal relationship.
“When it comes to making work around Sentul,” Alvin said in a 2022 interview, “I am deliberately making a conscious decision to take an ironic approach. There is a nudge or instinct to present the beauty in destruction.” Alvin’s clear-sighted photos are direct and cutting indictments of the various degradations that accompany industrialization. His art spotlights a quiet intensity—a feeling of loss entwined with nostalgia—that makes vivid the idea that criticism, as contrarian as it gets, is also a form of love.
Thailand: Mary Pakinee
Born in the sprawling city of Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand, the interdisciplinary artist Mary Pakinee, through a practice that combines 3D modeling, illustration, video work and more, asks us: is there intimacy to be found in digital spaces? Can they co-exist? Her work has the collagist’s tendency to sprawl and broaden as she incorporates unconventional materials to capture moments of awe and attachment.
Mary’s first solo show, My Hands Remember How Your Body Felt, was made up of drawings of an ex-boyfriend’s bare skin through the use of cosmetic materials like blush, eye-shadow, and foundation. Over time, she has explored wider themes, like the interconnections of the digital and natural worlds as seen in exhibitions Artificial Nature and Garden in the Desert. In the latter show, Mary depicted plants and natural formations thriving in a desert through 3D models and digital painting. It’s a fitting showcase for Mary’s unique sensibility of hybridizing the digital and natural worlds.
Singapore: Shen Jiaqi
There’s a patently Singaporean touch to Shen Jiaqi’s wonderfully saturated paintings, which often feature figures and things caught in the decaying maze of urban life. Her latest show, exhibited at Cuturi Gallery, found the visual artist mulling over images of women workers during Singapore’s industrialization era over the sixties and seventies. Piecing together narratives, photographs, and archival accounts of that period, Shen turned to blue-collar women as her primary focus: women in factories, kitchens, stores.
Calling attention to the professional roles women play in Singaporean society, Shen pays tribute to a generation of women that struggled, survived, and passed on their perseverance and strength. Just as crucially, the exhibit points to a rising talent in Singaporean visual art—a rigorous mind whose elaborate and visceral techniques never overshadow the vital stories she seeks to tell.
Vietnam: Truong Cong Tung
The titles of Truong Cong Tung’s exhibitions read like verses to some kind of ancient poetry: The Sap Still Runs, We The Soils Soul Society, Maya in the circle of time. His art practice, though deeply informed by the ecology, philosophy, and geopolitics, has a lyrical quality that doesn’t buckle under the weight of those weighty themes.
In the project The Sap Still Runs, Truong crafted mixed media installations that incorporated roots salvaged from his home village in Gia Lai province (a consequence of ongoing urbanization), funeral garlands, and fertilizer bags, into a sculpture that resembled a mystic forest. A kind of reverse engineering, the works in his ongoing project are brimming with ideas that are boundless in scope yet deeply informed by the historical and political implications of the ongoing climate catastrophe.
