Iola Lenzi’s Power, Politics and the Street

In December 2013, visitors to the Bangkok iteration of “Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia,” a traveling show curated by Iola Lenzi, took pictures against a hand-painted photo studio backdrop inspired by old Saigon, played ping-pong on a circular table, photocopied pages of politically charged Indonesian comics, and wrote down in a notepad what they would do if the handgun-shaped pink rice crackers piled on the gallery floor were real firearms. Coinciding with sit-ins by an anti-government pressure group on the streets outside, the show felt like living proof of the proposition fleshed out in Lenzi’s new book. The “aesthetics of agency” engendered by such works is, she argues, a coded and often covert response to historical contexts and real-world conditions in illiberal locales: a subtle form of empowerment. As a result, the western modes it is tempting to label them with (social sculpture, relational aesthetics, and so on) are a poor fit. “Art of this book,” Lenzi states near its beginning, “has a disrupting effect, priming independent thinking.”

Over the course of seven illustrated chapters, she authoritatively (if somewhat wordily) positions this hallmark within a wider reconnaissance of Southeast Asian contemporary art’s piecemeal evolution between the 1980s and 2020s, including its forays into public space, responses to repressive dictatorships and urbanization, and snowballing international mobility. But first, she sets out to trace the “early contemporary shift” that heralded it.

Three 1960s paintings, by furnishing her discussion with a clement sociohistorical backdrop, set the scene: Liu Kang’s luminous National Day (1967) depicts a celebration of Singapore’s independence; the cityscape of Sindoesoedarsono Soedjojono’s National Monument, Jakarta (1969) signposts Indonesia’s infrastructural invigoration amid President Suharto’s New Order; and Queen Sirikit (1964), by Piriya Krairiksh, presents “an image of Thai progress, rather than Thai citizens,” with the titular monarch looming benignly over a rural scene. For Lenzi, these sunlit paintings encapsulate how “forward-looking post-colonial optimism fizzed” across Cold War Southeast Asia during the 1960s and ’70s – even among Thais, who while “never formally under the imperial yoke, also sensed this mid-century unchaining.”

Yet no sooner has she invoked these seemingly stable, nation-affirming pictures than she unsettles them. “Optimism did not preclude uneasy politics,” she stresses, before outlining how this period also saw state repression and ethnic, class and ideological factionalism surfacing across recently enfranchised Southeast Asia. Artists, like wider publics, found themselves standing at this precipice. A handful were compelled to respond.

After briefly discussing the three works of 1960s “consensus art,” Lenzi introduces a proto-contemporary installation: a plywood coffin painted with the Malaysian flag, standing upright on a mirror. Titled May 13, 1969, and first exhibited in Kuala Lumpur the following year, Redza Piyadasa’s response to the city’s Sino-Malay race riots, in which 196 died,1 deviated from what Lenzi calls “regionally prevalent apolitical art.” In so doing, it “prefigured a radical expressive shift” that took place patchily across the region: five years later, the artist group Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia (Indonesian New Art Movement) challenged the officially-defined Modernist landscape of Indonesian art; in Thailand, another collective, the Artists’ Front of Thailand, hijacked street space to counter military authoritarianism.

Startlingly, Lenzi’s interviews have revealed that the small minority of artists responsible for this turn operated “unbeknown to each other.” While she acknowledges the possible influence of Euro-American vanguards and colonial-era links between, say, Yogyakarta and Amsterdam, iconoclastic works with a conceptual underpinning initially arose in the 1970s as “individual answers to surrounding conditions.” Episodes of repression and violence, such as Indonesia’s 1965–66 mass killings and Thailand’s Thammasat University massacre of 1976, provided this tiny, non-conformist pool of artists with impetus, as did a growing disconnect between economic development and “absent political empowerment.” For them, the representational and abstract painting taught in art academies was not up to the task of describing the “entanglements of power, cultural change, urbanisation, and resistance” defining the time.

“I didn’t think of them as novel, but as necessary,” recounts Imelda Cajipe-Endaya in the second chapter, referring to the print series she produced in 1970s Manila. Her innovative works juxtapose handwritten snippets of Tagalog, English, and Spanish grafted from archival and cultural documents with appropriated colonial-era ethnographic images. The net result, Lenzi asserts, are “provocative visual-semantic conversations on cultural imperialism and the place of indigeneity in post-colonial/contemporary Philippines.”

Such extrapolations of contemporary discourse from granular examinations of artworks reveal the influence of John Clark’s The Asian Modern (2021), a publication that traces the evolution of modern art across broader Asia over 200 years. Yet Lenzi’s mission, whilst acknowledging his method and his call for scholars of Asian art history to unearth transnational tendencies,2 is very much her own: Power, Politics and the Street is chiefly concerned with elucidating how Southeast Asian artists’ contextually incisive approaches made, and continue to make, audiences complicit in their provocations. “Not social realism or slogan-toting protest art, it proclaimed nothing, but asked,” she writes at one point.

The exhaustive nature of Lenzi’s historicizing—200 artworks over the past fifty-plus years—can make for tiring reading, but vividly captures the empowering capacity of its subject. It also aligns with Norman G. Owen’s assertion that, as the colonial era recedes, the role of historians of the region is to envisage “all Southeast Asians trying to work out their own destinies, not simply reacting to whatever others did to them.”3

Yet the book’s eagerness to signpost artists’ tussles with similar social stresses and to ascribe agency to audiences comes at the expense of nuances, particularly in respect of artists’ often interdisciplinary practices and varying interactions beyond the region. Framing Southeast Asian art as “a conduit of twenty-first-century resistance for people in danger,” for instance, is not squared with the homogenizing effects of the global biennale model. And while such art is, today, visible and legible around the world, Lenzi’s causal inferences (such as the claim that the relational quality of FX Harsono’s pink rice cracker guns and blank notepad “recalls unscripted, participative vernacular culture in Indonesia and Southeast Asia”) sometimes downplay international influences or links. Her search for the sociohistorical antecedents, attributes, and arc of the art made in Southeast Asia from the 1970s to the present is rigorous and edifying. But fencing it off almost entirely from Euro-American inflows, hegemony and theory feels, at points, like wishful thinking.

Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970 was published by Lund Humphries on November 4.