Sedimented Acts: Performing History and Historicizing Performance in Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore
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Sedimented Acts: Performing History and Historicizing
Performance in Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore
Nora A. Taylor
Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, Volume
6, Number 1, March 2022, pp. 13-31 (Article)
Published by NUS Press Pte Ltd
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sen.2022.0001
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/851953
[ Access provided at 14 Jun 2022 00:07 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]
Sedimented Acts: Performing History and Historicizing Performance in Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore 1 NORA A. TAYLOR Abstract This article examines three works from three different Southeast Asian countries— Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore — that can loosely be defined as “performance art” or live events and which took place outside of official art institutions. Because the three events were poorly attended and therefore poorly documented, I argue that they challenge conventional forms of art historicization. They constitute instances where the means of documenting, recalling and therefore historicizing live events becomes precarious and relies on alternative methods such as word of mouth and memory. Whether the performance is recalled based on a single photograph, poor video footage or oral testimony, these works illustrate how alternative forms of historiography can shape the writing of performance art history in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is a region that presents a challenge to art historians intent on finding local libraries or archives containing written or photographic sources on artists, art works and exhibitions prior to the 21st century. The Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive, founded in 2000 for the specific purpose Southeast of Now Vol. 6 No. 1 (March 2022), pp. 13– 31 © Nora A. Taylor 13 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
14 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
of collecting materials pertaining to exhibitions and art events, and the
National Gallery of Singapore’s library and archives notwithstanding, collec-
tions of art historical documents in the region are rare. This disparity can be
explained by a number of factors. For one, the humid and tropical environ-
ment makes storing paper and photographic documents difficult without
proper climate control equipment. For another, decades of political and
economic upheaval have contributed to the damage and erasure of official
documents. Whether due to censorship or fear of censorship, or simply lack
of resources, artists, scholars and museums in Vietnam and Myanmar, to
name two of the countries under study in this article, have not built and/or
maintained collections of historical material. This non-presence is worthy
of a study in itself. As Ashley Thompson observed in the case of Cambodia,
one must remember not merely the history that is erased by this neglect, but
rather value the conditions under which historical documents disappeared,
and recognize them as historical in themselves. The absence of a physical
object or document from the past is as much a part of the process of remem-
bering as is the historical trace. The history of the event is embedded in its
disappearance, in its deletion.2
Asia Art Archive also acknowledges these gaps. Because it cannot retro-
actively recover lost materials, Asia Art Archive created a platform that could
reflect on the archiving process—a kind of living archive that does not
claim to be authoritative or comprehensive but rather is designed to be deli-
berately fragmented in order to allow researchers to question the gaps and
debate the very nature of an archive.3 In his book Oblivion, Marc Augé wrote
that “one must know how to forget in order to taste the full flavor of the
present, of the moment, and of expectation, but memory itself needs forget-
fulness: one must forget the recent past in order to find the ancient past
again.”4 In the dearth of art historical documents, therefore, how are works
of art remembered? Prior to the age of digital cameras and financial means
for acquiring computers, artists in Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore kept
very few snapshots of their art works. Without proper documentation, works
of performance art, that is, live art that entails scripted and/or improvised
actions or gestures with the body, in particular, an art form that became
popular in the decade between 1990 and 2000, precisely at a time when
analog photography was still the only method of capturing events, were
often not properly documented. What can one recall of a performance based
on a snapshot? How can a performance be recreated if one only has an oral
account of it? What impact can a work of performance created in defiance
of government regulations have if very few people have viewed it? The three
performances discussed here constitute three different instances where theSedimented Acts 15
means of recalling a past event or events, that is, a document, a photograph
or a video, have faded and yet the event itself remains imprinted in the
art historical imagination. What can we learn art historically from these
gaps? How can we reconcile the missing documents with what we know
historically? The answer lies in how artists themselves engage with historio-
graphic material.
The three case studies under examination here might illustrate what
French psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Derrida sees as a manifestation
of Sigmund Freud’s Wunderblock or “Magic Mystic Pad”, the psyche’s ability to
remember without a recording instrument.5 In his series of lectures that were
compiled in the book Archive Fever, he examined how a spontaneous memory
is killed as soon as a recording device is used to archive it. In Derrida’s view,
it becomes a palimpsest, thus erasing the mind’s ability to simultaneously
recall what has been recorded. And yet, I will point out, in these cases, some
form of documentation does exist. Only it is sparse or nearly erased. Mechtild
Widrich calls this process monumentalisation, whereby the photograph of
a performance erases the original experience of the event or a “fixation of a
possibly fictional interpretation of history through physical reconstruction in
the present, a reconstruction that, in turn is often so thoroughly documented
as to make possible a continuous point of reference in opposition to the often
fragmentary or sparely documented original”.6 When appearing as an image
in lieu of the real-time event, the work enters the public sphere as remains,
a relic, a fractured memory. Rebecca Schneider has also examined perfor-
mance remains as historiographic explorations, documentary encounters that
occur in and within the archive.7 The researcher, certainly, but also the
art viewer, short of attending a performance live, will likely encounter an
artist’s work via a document. Such is the nature of art history.
This essay considers not only the residue of a performance, or its afterlife,
but also its previous life, prior to its documentation. These three cases point
to ways in which performance art specifically can act as a method of docu-
menting historical moments or ideas from a particular artistic environment.
It will also point to how the absence of a historical trace becomes the genesis
for a performance. Although the three performances in question differ in
content, context and intent, they offer an opportunity to understand how
art history can be written thanks to and in spite of the gaps in art historical
information. These cases illustrate what I may argue are practices of alter-
native modes of historiography, that is, they critically engage with historical
records or reflect on the means of recording past events through performance.
I am interested in how they call upon us viewers to think critically about
the historical process, the archive as a tool and source of inspiration, the16 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
photographic and the filmic document, and the tensions between fictional
time and actual time in art.
Vietnam and the Memory of War
The Vietnam-American war provides a case in point where photographic
images have supplanted actual memories of real-time events. Pulitzer-winning
author and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen once wrote that the war is impossible
to forget but difficult to remember.8 Photographs of the Vietnam War are so
entrenched in the memory of the generation of television viewers and Life
magazine subscribers that few have the capability of recalling what exactly
took place. Susan Sontag has likened this to Plato’s cave where viewers of
photographs mistake them for reality. “Photography has become one of the
principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of
participation.” 9 The photographs of re-enactments of the Vietnam War by
Vietnamese-American artist An-My Lê (b. 1961) can be seen as operating
along the same lines. Her series titled “Small Wars” dated from 1999 to 2002,
captured men who spend their weekends re-enacting battles from the
Vietnam War in the forests of Virginia (Figure 1). Karen Irvine, curator of the
exhibition of her photographs at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
in Chicago wrote that:
while her pictures present men—some of them veterans, others
history buffs— as they simulate combat and war routines using
detailed props such as grounded airplanes, tents, and uniforms,
the images do not include the glaring anachronisms that may have
been present. It is the landscape that provides the most telltale
signs of falsehood: the flora is typical of North American pine and
oak forest, nothing like the dense, tropical jungle that covers much
of Vietnam. Lê was often asked to participate in the reenactments,
her ethnicity presumably adding an element of authenticity to the
make-believe. She performed for the male audience that became, in
actuality, her real subject. Sensitive to the fact that what motivates
such men is often a complex web of psychological need, fantasy and
a passion for history, Lê did not make a mockery of their actions.10
The ambiguity of Lê’s photographs raises questions about the reliability of
seemingly objective historical accounts such as news photographs, which
greatly influence how war is communicated and remembered. She uses a
large-format camera that recalls early war photography such as Civil WarSedimented Acts 17
photographers who were interested in achieving a level of clarity and crafts-
manship to heighten the sense of direct reportage. Many of those photographs
arranged some of their scenes aesthetically, thus pointing to the history of
war imagery blending reality and artifice that is precisely her goal in photo-
graphing not real combat, but staged battles. Lê’s photographs might fall
under Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s definition of the para-fictional or art projects
that have one foot in the field of the real and one foot in the fictional. “In
para-fiction,” she explains, “real and/or imaginary personages and stories
intersect with the world as it is being lived.” 11 A two-channel video work titled
“The Guerillas of Cu Chi” (2012), made by the Ho Chi Minh City collective
The Propeller Group, composed of the three artists Phunam Thuc Ha (b. 1974),
Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976) and Matt Lucero (b. 1976), can also fall under
this category. The film installation consists of a 1963 Hanoi-produced propa-
ganda documentary facing, on the opposite wall, a film taken by the three
artists of tourists conducting target practice at the same site’s shooting range,
which provides an ironic twist to the blurring of the lines between fact and
fiction and the way in which the war in Vietnam has been represented.
The tunnels of Cu Chi, an intricate 121-kilometer long underground complex
of chambers and passageways, were part of the Viet Cong’s “weapons” of
defence, one of their most successful strategies in eluding the air raids and
bombs dropped by US forces during the decades of war between the two
countries. They are among the most popular tourist destinations in Vietnam
today. The irony is not lost on the artists whose work often plays with the
slippery boundaries between reality and fiction: the “real” site is now a play-
ground for tourists to shoot “fake” bullets, and the “real” footage of the “real”
soldiers hiding underground is placed across it as if it were the “fake” target
of the tourists’ game and a prop for a staged re-enactment instead of the
“real” deal.
These artists play with iconic representations of the war and the way that
it is remembered. For as much as the war has been “played” over and over
again, it continues to haunt the living. For this reason, art works pertaining
to the war can be seen as an act of repair for the survivors. By reviving them
through what essentially can be considered re-enactments, they can serve to
remedy the past or, at least, rethink it. As Rebecca Schneider has suggested,
resuscitating past events, bringing them back to life, so to speak, reanimating
them through performance re-enactments and performance remains, recalls
a method of historiography through ritual. Schneider considers performance
a means of the rethinking of historiography as event, and a series of docu-
mentary encounters that occur in and with the archive. “History,” she says,
“is a set of sedimented acts which are not the historical acts themselves but18 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
the act of securing any incident backward.”12 They are both commemorative
and critical of the processes of verifying historical memory, because they
serve, as Jane Blocker has argued, as “unorthodox historical methodologies
that are not about the archive, but are the archive.”13 By inserting them in
contemporary art contexts, they also disrupt standard notions of temporality
and location. When performance art first appeared as an art form, it was not
as a result of an evolutionary process from modernism to contemporary, nor
was it a case of imitation of Western art practices; rather it was precisely the
outcome of a kind of absence—the absence of infrastructure, funding and
an art public.
An-Historicizing Performance Art in Hanoi
The first performance events to take place in Vietnam were poorly docu-
mented and so short of falling into oblivion that most of them are remem-
bered thanks either to hearsay or snapshots, some of which have taken a
life of their own, akin to the monumentalisation described by Widrich. In
January 1997, when Trần Anh Quân (b. 1970) and Nguyễn Văn Tiến (b. 1970)
staged a performance on the campus of the 15th-century Confucian Temple
of Literature, also known as Vietnam’s first university, painting and sleeping
on straw mats and tying themselves with ropes, their actions were not imme-
diately recognised as “art”. They “performed” for three days before the police
came and arrested them for trespassing. Rumours about the artists’ actions
circulated widely in the art world. Upon looking at the photographs that
the artists circulated in a small pocket-sized album of prints, which was the
way in which artists shared photos in coffee shops and artists’ homes, many
were confused by the nature of the installation but were more upset that the
artists were caught in what could be considered a “criminal act”. Actions in
the name of art such as this had rarely been performed in Vietnam so the
confusion was understandable, but because it occurred in a public space, it
gave performance art a reputation for mischief. In a society that had already
created mechanisms for regulating art activities, this provided the authorities
with an opportunity to distrust this new art form of performance art.
The precarious nature of performance art is a condition that is shared
across Southeast Asia and to which I will return later. For now, it is interesting
to analyze the aftermath of the event, the photographs that were taken and
how it was remembered. There are only a few photographs of the installation
that have been saved by the artists. These were eventually placed on a blog
by one of the artists, Nguyễn Văn Tiến, who took the name Tiến Văn Miếu.14
Since there was no audience attending the performance, the performanceSedimented Acts 19
is represented and embodied by the photographs. The photograph of the
artists tied to each other near a tree seems especially poignant as it seemed
to foreshadow the artists’ arrest (Figure 2). In the photograph, the artists are
wearing surgical masks and appear to be wrapped around the tree, although
that is just an illusion. The rope is wound rather loosely around the artists
as if they had casually looped it around themselves and not secured it very
tightly. The masks suggest they may have been silenced or silenced them-
selves, and the rope alluded to being imprisoned, reined in or demobilized.
Could the artists be illustrating government censorship of the arts? The
blog includes a somewhat badly written or poorly translated text by Patrick
Raszelenberg that refers to the “desacralisation” of the Temple of Literature
and the artists’ critical engagement with the site itself. The author writes:
The above action renders ineffective the place occupied by the
Temple of Literature in national history, demanding the spectators
another view and their much more valiant effort to approach the
work of art. And thus, the two artists have broken the system of
ideas ruled by the state, because the state has the monopoly in the
determination of the Temple of Literature’s meaning.15
The author seems to be stating that the artists selected the Temple of Litera-
ture in order to engage with its meaning and thus were in dialogue with it or
were rebelling against it. It is true that, in the rumours that spread about the
artists’ actions, few mentioned its location. That it took place in the Temple
of Literature could be significant, but what is equally important is that it
did not take place in a gallery or an art space. Nor did they stage it on the
street or in a crowded public place. They chose a park, a garden, a national
landmark, a sanctuary where they could essentially go both unnoticed and
on display. Because they photographed the event, the goal was essentially
to have an audience, or the semblance of an audience at least, and draw
attention if not to the Temple of Literature, then to performance art and to
themselves as artists.
While the perception that performance art was somehow tied to illicit
activities may have adversely affected some artists afraid to go against the
state, it had the opposite effect for others intent on challenging official dis-
course on art. This may be why performance art after the mid-1990s became
the dominant art form for rebellious artists. Trần Lương (b. 1961), a painter,
for example, began to incorporate installation and performance into his work
as early as 2000. A strong voice in opposition to government control over art
and culture, he developed a performance work that could be interpreted as20 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
a critique of communism. Variously titled “Red Scarf/Welts” and “Lap Lòe”,
it consisted of the artist inviting audience members to lash his back with a
wet red scarf, the kind worn by young pioneers or communist youth. The
artist related how in the 1970s he and his classmates would play games in
the schoolyard, whipping each other with the scarf, the very gesture that
he invited audiences to reenact. However, he developed this work not as a
sign of nostalgia but rather as a means of teaching his son about the perils
of falling prey to communist indoctrination. His son, born in the late 1990s,
came home wearing the said scarf one day, which gave the artist pause. The
actions of thrashing his body would create marks or welts on his body, a
temporary scar, reminding him of having once been educated in Marxism/
Leninism, a fate he did not wish for his son. For the purposes of this essay,
rather than belabour the point of his performance, it suffices to say that, like
Quân and Tiến’s performance in Văn Miếu, the memory of the event stayed
beyond the event itself. In Lương’s case, as a mark on his body, but for Quân
and Tiến, as a rumour and a photograph.
Performing under the Burmese Military Junta 16
In May 2005, in Yangon, Myanmar, two artists staged a performance on
the streets of the capital (Figure 3). Titled “Mobile Art Gallery and Mobile
Market”, the work entailed peddling cheap drawings and inexpensive house-
hold objects to passers-by. In 2005, the military junta had a firm grip on
citizens and artists were sorely lacking materials for art-making. They made
art from whatever they could find at hand. The idea behind the performance
was to protest currency inflation and price increases by selling goods at “old”
prices. Chaw Ei Thien (b. 1968) hawked combs and make-up for pennies and
gave back change in expired Kyat bills while Htein Lin (b. 1966) sold small
watercolour paintings on paper at equally low prices. Similar to the Hanoi
artists’ performance, the Yangon artists’ small market stalls were not imme-
diately recognized as an artistic gesture and drew the attention of the public,
who expressed interest in and gratitude for the artists’ gesture of empathy
toward injustices suffered by the public. The artists managed to elude the
authorities but were eventually followed and interrogated by the police.
Htein Lin had reason to fear the police as he had already been incarcerated
as a political prisoner between 1998 and 2004. During the six-and-a-half
years that he spent behind bars, he was not permitted to paint but managed
to produce several hundred paintings secretly, using white cotton prison
uniforms painted with cigarette lighters, syringes or his hands in lieu of paint
brushes. While in political exile, he had also developed a performance artSedimented Acts 21
practice mostly due to the lack of materials for art-making but also because
performance art allowed him to express himself without words. Both Htein
Lin and Chaw Ei went into exile after their performance. Chaw Ei travelled
to the US thanks to a grant from the Asian Cultural Council and Htein Lin
emigrated to the UK. It took new elections and a series of reforms for them
to feel safe enough to return. But politics have stayed with their art and their
performances since. I do not have time to recount the history of their works.
Chaw Ei performed water boarding and impersonated Daw Aung San Suu
Kyi while Htein Lin has been making plaster casts of the hands of political
prisoners and carved prison soap bars. Both made works in response to the
Saffron Revolution.
Unlike the Văn Miếu performance, “Mobile Art Gallery and Mobile Market”
were not among the first works of performance art in Yangon. Before the
term “relational aesthetics” was coined, the Burmese artist San Minn invited
an audience to share a meal before a painting of a street hawker serving
Chinese noodles in 1983, and that same year, Po Po walked on the grounds
of Yangon University with his thoughts written on his jacket.17 But Htein Lin
and Chaw Ei’s actions received more attention because they were performed
at a time of extreme hardship and frustration after decades of repression.
Not to undermine Po Po and San Minh’s actions, nor is it productive to
compare the Hanoi of 1997 with the Yangon of 2006, but it is interesting to
note some parallels in the Văn Miếu and the “Mobile Art Gallery and Mobile”
Market performances. One could say that the conditions for art-making were
similar and it is not surprising that two clandestine performances made
an imprint on the art historical memory of the two countries. It is not so
much the works themselves that became memorable—not their form or visual
quality, since neither were very elaborate—but precisely their lack of sophis-
tication and documentation, leaving much to the imagination and space for
rumour, contention and polarity, that gave them prominence. Unlike the
high visibility of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “Pad Thai” cooking events or Lee Wen’s
“Yellow Man” performances, just to name a few iconic works from the region,
these two works fell completely under the radar of the art world outside of
Burma and Vietnam, because they were not intended to have wider audiences.
A few photographs and low-tech footage remain of these works for scholars
such as myself to discuss, but these documents are mostly superfluous. The
true documents were their lore, the verbal transmission and gossip that
ensued. Before the advent of social media, artists had no means of sharing
news or announcements of their artistic events other than by word of mouth
or by mail. Before the turn of the century, “hanging out” was the foundation
of the Southeast Asian art world.18 It was both a practice and a method of22 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia communication, information sharing and developing discourses surrounding art. Karin Zitzewitz has also pointed this out in relation to India. Studying the “talk in the air as art is made and circulated, allows us to unpack key questions of value, while a focus on the relationship of talk to particular works of art will maintain an analytical connection between social forma- tions and artistic practice.” 19 Art talk, she contends, forms an everyday art historical archive. Performance as Antidote and Anecdote For 35 minutes on the evening of 19 March 2011, at the Defibrillator Space on Milwaukee Avenue on the West Side of Chicago, audiences at a School of the Art Institute of Chicago performance event were transported back to 1993 Singapore when Josef Ng performed “Brother Cane”, a seminal work for which he was charged with an offence and which provoked a ten-year ban on funding for performance art. After introducing himself, then School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA candidate in Film, Video, New Media and Animation, Loo Zihan (b. 1983) stood up in front of the audience at the event “Touch then Push or Pull and Maybe Nothing” and proceeded to read from Malaysia-based artist and documentarian Ray Langenbach’s (b. 1948) retelling of the original “Brother Cane” performance before re-enacting Josef Ng’s movements from his 1993 piece.20 Ng staged his performance in protest against an undercover raid on a homosexual cruising district off Tanjong Rhu. Wearing a black bathrobe, he proceeded to lay blocks of tofu and newspaper clippings of the police entrapment, on ceramic tiles with small plastic containers of red dye. Armed with a rattan cane, he thrashed the tofu blocks, spattering the red dye, mimicking the punishment inflicted on the men. Loo’s re-enactment of these gestures had his audience mesmerized (Figure 4). Although most of the audience members were likely completely unfamiliar with Ng’s piece, they were transfixed, broke into laughter at some moments, and stood up and clapped wildly at its completion. That an audience in Chicago would be moved by a revision of a now iconic performance piece from Singapore is interesting enough. What is more interesting to me, is the way in which the artist performed it. By re-performing not only Ng’s work, a work the artist had never seen, but also Ray Langenbach’s retelling of it— Langenbach’s affidavit was published on the Internet—Loo was calling the audience to not only witness a piece of performance art but participate in the narrative of an act of protest. He was thus inviting the audience to both witness and act as witnesses in the protest as a kind of public commemo- ration of an act of ‘real’ violence and police brutality and persecution of
Sedimented Acts 23 homosexuals in Singapore. More importantly, and pertinent to our discussion, is that he based his performance on an oral account of the performance, thus translating or remediating Langenbach’s words into actions, rather than mimicking Ng’s original gestures.21 In a review of Francis Alys’ retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art this spring, Peter Schjedhal spoke of Alys’ criterion for his work: the ability “to be describable with the brevity of a rumor”.22 Or as the artist says: “Maybe you don’t need to see the work, you just need to hear about it.” While it is not a criteria by any means for what makes a great work of performance art, the capacity of a work of performance art such as Josef Ng’s “Brother Cane” to generate acclaim through its retelling is a significant factor in elevating a work of art—from an unknown, ephemeral, time-specific event to one that is remembered, retold over and over again. No artist in Singapore working in the mid-1990s, whether they witnessed the actual performance or not, could ignore the impact of “Brother Cane” on the local art scene.23 As the journalist Ng Si-Lan recently recalled, it is a performance that all Singaporeans of a certain generation will remember. That, and the headline in The New Paper the day following the performance—“Pub(l)ic Protest”— or as he called it, “the headline that launched a thousand hissy fits”.24 Its notoriety is due more to the consequences of the performance on the art community than on the actual performance itself, even though it was created as an act of protest and its content had potency, relevance and influence on the political circumstances of Singapore at that time. A year after his performance in Chicago, on 19 February 2012, Loo was invited by The Necessary Stage to present “Cane” as a Fringe Highlight for the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. The performance took place at The Substation, an independent art space in Singapore. Different from both Ng’s original performance and Loo’s first re-enactment, “Cane” was staged in a room with multiple screens. Loo performed live in between the video footage of Ng’s original “Brother Cane” filmed by Ray Langenbach on one screen, and the film of the Chicago performance on the other. The event was preceded by a slide lecture by Loo presenting the archival material that he had obtained in the process of researching the piece. The three performances presented simultaneously gave the work a historiographical dimension, a genealogy of the impact of Ng’s original performance on the artist and the history of censorship in Singapore. Performing the work in Singapore, in contrast to Chicago, re-contextualised it within the conservative cultural atmosphere of Singapore. Ng’s “Brother Cane” on New Year’s Eve of 1993–94, was part of a week- long interdisciplinary project that culminated in a 12-hour event from
24 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
31 December–1 January. The video programme had been given the necessary
permissions, but according to Susie Lingham, there was no specific licence
for performance art, which was new to Singapore.25 During the evening, a
reporter and a photographer from The New Paper were allowed to enter with
the verbal agreement that they would inform the organizers before going to
press. Lingham recounted that “sometime after midnight, the photographer
snapped an image—a 30 second snippet of the 20 minute performance by
Ng—that became the misrepresentation that resulted in years of controversy
and confusion”.26 The photograph showed Ng from the back, with his briefs
lowered, accompanied by the headline “Pub(l)ic Protest”. It was taken when
Ng presumably had snipped his pubic hair, although no audience member had
witnessed it. Ng was subsequently charged with committing an “obscene act
in public” and fined accordingly. The repercussions led to a ban on govern-
mental funding for performance art but also contributed to a polarization
within the community and strained relations between artists and the state.
The photograph on the cover of The New Paper is precisely the kind
of monumentalization that Widrich describes, an image that supplants, in
people’s memory, the details of the original performance. Ng’s work was
conceived as a statement against a police raid on a homosexual cruising
district, and the cutting of pubic hair was, as the artist stated toward the end
of his performance, a form of silent protest, but it was portrayed as an act
of gratuitous exhibitionism. Given the controversies, misrepresentations and
fallout from Ng’s performance, it is not surprising that Loo’s re-performance
revived a heated debate. Whereas his Chicago performance of “Cane” followed
Langenbach, who had witnessed first-hand and filmed the event up close,
the Singapore version was adjusted to suit the 2012 situation. The venue
for the performance, The Substation, received authorization by the Media
Development Authority, for the artist to perform nude. So, instead of turning
his back to the audience, like Ng, when the moment came in the script, Loo
removed his bathrobe to reveal his fully naked and clean-shaven body. The
art writer Ho Rui An called this deviation from Ng’s performance narcissistic
and served to “cathartically purge Loo’s personal demons in his negotiation
of his identity as a gay Singaporean man”.27 Melissa Wansin Wong, on the
other hand, argued that “Loo’s act of substitution has to be read within the
historical and political context, where his questioning of the political efficacy
of the art of protest manifests the complexity of the state’s current control
mechanism towards LGBTQ rights and media censorship”.28 Loo himself had
told her that “by not replicating Josef’s piece exactly, I guess it is also a form
of protest, a refusal to allow authorities to co-opt his original action. If cutting
hair is a form of silent protest—and there is no hair left to cut—how can the
protest still happen.” 29 Wong reiterated that Loo’s performance needs to beSedimented Acts 25 considered within the environment of 2012 rather than the time of the 1994 performance, pointing to Loo’s historiographic intent or his questioning of the relevance of the historic event today. Loo was recovering Ng’s original intent in protesting the victimization of gay men rather than capitalizing on the media frenzy that followed the New Year’s performances. Conclusion The performances of documents and documents of performances discussed here prompt us to reflect on the process of historicization of performance art and the performativity of history in Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore. In these places where institutions are often unreliable, where notions of the truth are somewhat ambiguous, performance and aesthetic practices create critical platforms for debates about the past. This is made evident in Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing, where the performative not only recalls brutal historical acts but also serves as a discursive act of remembering. Like Tran Luong’s red scarf lacerations in “Lap Lòe”, performance awakens memories of trauma and returns the artist and the viewer to a past expe- rience. This phenomenon may be likened to what Joan Gibbons has described as post-memory, which “provides ideological and political alternatives to previous historicizations of the past. Post-memory is the inheritance of past events or experiences that are still being worked through. Post-memory carries an obligation to continue that process or working through or over the event or experience that is not yet in the process of reply. However, as with counter-history and counter-memory, post-memory is still a type of social memory that has been inhabited in the memories of the primary witnesses of the previous generation.” 30 These performances, in the absence of more complete and less fragmented documentation, may serve the new generation of performance artists in Southeast Asia with a memory from which to draw and learn from and reformulate new histories. They also reveal how art history often stands on fragile ground. That fragility can, in itself, be a site of art historical inquiry. As Brynn Hatton wrote in relation to the discovery of an incomplete archive of films from Vietnam in Amman, Jordan: “Incon- sistencies and opacities within images themselves also inject uncertainty into positivist attempts to reconstruct or understand the past through extant visual records. Facticity and positive identification, particularly in the context of wars and conflicts, during which much may be destroyed or misrepre- sented, will always produce fungible and uncertain terrains of knowledge.” 31 These artists, working from and in obscure matter, vague recollections and deleted documents, shed light on the historiographic process of recovering art historical material.
26 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia BIOGRAPHY Nora A. Taylor is Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (University of Hawai’i Press, 2004 and NUS Press, 2009), co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art (Cornell SEAP Press, 2012), as well as numerous essays on modern and contemporary Vietnamese and Southeast Asian art.
Sedimented Acts 27 figure1: An-My Lê, Lesson 1999–2002. Photo courtesy An-My Lê. figure 2: Trần Anh Quân and Nguyễn Văn Tiến, Văn Miếu Performance, January 1997. Photo courtesy of the artists. figure 3: Htein Lin and Chaw Ei Then, Mobile Market/Mobile Gallery. 2005. Still from a YouTube video uploaded by Htein Lin on 2 January 2017, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=bHj4xPrwYRE. figure 4: Loo Zihan, Cane, performance at Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago, USA, 19 February 2011. Photo Nora A. Taylor.
28 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
NOTES
1
A version of this essay was presented at the “Pathways of Performativity in
Contemporary Southeast Asian Art”, at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 27 June 2019. I
am indebted to Eva Bentcheva and Annie Jael Kwan, the conference convenors,
for their encouragement and kind invitation to present, Roger Nelson, and
anonymous readers for their generous feedback, comments and suggestions for
improvements and kind collegiality. The author would also like to thank the
John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation and Nanyang University of Singapore’s
Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore for sponsoring research of portions of
this article.
2
Ashley Thompson, “Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Curatorial Practice and
“Cambodian Art” in the Wake of Genocide”, Diacritics 41, 2 (2013): 83.
3
https://aaa.org.hk/en/about/about-asia-art-archive [accessed 20 February 2022].
4
Marc Augé, Oblivion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 3.
5
Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”,
Diacritics 25, 2 (Summer 1995): 15.
6
Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art
(Manchester, 2014).
7
Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical
Reenactment (Routledge, 2011).
8
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
9
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta Books, 1973), p. 10.
10
Karen Irvine, “Under the Clouds of War”, An-My Lê: Small Wars, Museum of
Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 27 October 2006–6 January 2007, https://
www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2000/6/an-my-le-small-wars.php [accessed 28 August
2020].
11
Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility”, October
129 (Summer 2009): 54.
12
Rebecca Schneider, “Archives Performance Remains”, Performance Research 6,
2 (2001): 105.
13
Jane Blocker, Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 72.
14
http://tienvanmieu.com/en/mies_portfolio/the-art-space/ [accessed 29 August
2020].
15
Ibid.
16
This article was completed in 2020 before the 1 February 2021 military coup
that deposed the democratically elected members of the National League for
Democracy party. Since then, more than 800 poets, filmmakers, intellectuals and
artists, including performance artist and “Beyond Pressure” performance festivalSedimented Acts 29
founder Moe Satt (b. 1983), have been arrested. This article does not address the
current situation in Myanmar.
17
Yin Ker, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Premises
for Burmese Contemporary Art with Po Po, Tun Win Aung, Wah Nu and Min Thein
Sung”, Afterall 46 (Autumn/Winter 2018): 27.
18
The term “Deep Hanging Out” as a method of immersive research was first coined
by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) in 1998. Clifford Geertz, “Deep
Hanging Out”, The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998. But it is also a
term used by artists in Southeast Asia to designate informal gatherings, evenings
of eating and drinking and art-making, in artists’ homes, outside of official art
spaces. In Vietnamese the term chơi is used, in Tagalog it is tambay and in Bahasa
Indonesia, it is nonkrong, which is also the concept behind the curatorial project
led by the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa for Documenta 15, 18 June–
25 September 2022.
19
Karin Zitzewitz, “The Archive in Real Time: Gossip and Speculation in the World
of South Asian Art”, Art Journal 77, 4 (Winter 2018): 98–9.
20
American-born performance artist and educator Ray Langenbach lived and taught
in Malaysia and Singapore between 1991 and 1996. After teaching in Australia
and Finland, he now resides in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Langenbach’s video
documentation of performance events in Southeast Asia between 1994 and 1998,
including footage of Josef Ng’s “Brother Cane” are currently preserved at Asia Art
Archive in Hong Kong.
21
This discussion of Loo Zihan’s performance is centred on memory and the use
of oral testimony as a script rather than on an interpretation and analysis of the
work through the lens of the queer body. I would like to acknowledge a previous
essay on that subject by Aiden Magro, “Exposing the State: Loo Zihan’s Queer
Performance”, Southeast of Now 5, 1&2 (October 2021): 175–203.
22
Peter Schjeldhal, “For Laughs: Things that Francis Alys Does”, The New Yorker,
23 May 2011.
23
Personal conversation with artist Lee Wen (1957–2019) in 2014.
24
Ng Si-Lan, “We are artists”, http://judeananas.wordpress.com/2011/07/23 [accessed
24 August 2011].
25
Susie Lingham, “A Quota on Expression: Visions, Vexations & Vanishings”, in
Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in
Southeast Asia 1991–2011, ed. Iola Lenzi (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011),
p. 63.
26
Ibid.
27
Ho Rui An, “Making Life Again, Between Josef Ng’s Brother Cane (1994) and Loo
Zihan’s Cane”, in Archiving Cane, ed. Loo Zihan and Louis Ho (Singapore, 2012),
pp. 73–85.30 Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
28
Melissa Wansin Wong, “Performing Singapore’s Queer Quandary: Walking the
Tightrope Between Sexual Illegality and Neoliberal-Enabled Subjectivity at Pink
Dot and in Loo Zihan’s Cane”, in Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives
on Where Performance Leads Queer, ed. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier
(London: Palgrave, 2016), p. 72.
29
Loo Zihan, conversation with Melissa Wansin Wong, in Wong, “Performing
Singapore’s Queer Quandary”, p. 72.
30
Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and
Remembrance (London: I.B. Taurus, 2007), p. 73.
31
Brynn Hatton, “On Impossibility: Finding Vietnam in a Jordanian-Soviet Film
Archive”, ArtMargins 9, 2 (June 2020): 24.
REFERENCES
Augé, Marc. Oblivion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Blocker, Jane. Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”.
Diacritics 25, 2 (Summer 1995).
Gibbons, Joan. Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and
Remembrance. London: I.B. Taurus, 2007.
Hatton, Brynn. “On Impossibility: Finding Vietnam in a Jordanian-Soviet Film
Archive”. ArtMargins 9, 2 (June 2020).
Ho Rui An. “Making Life Again, Between Josef Ng’s Brother Cane (1994) and
Loo Zihan’s Cane ”. In Archiving Cane, ed. Loo Zihan and Louis Ho. Singapore,
2012.
Irvine, Karen. “Under the Clouds of War”, An-My Lê: Small Wars, Museum of
Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 27 October 2006–6 January 2007.
https://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2000/6/an-my-le-small-wars.php [accessed
28 August 2020].
Ker, Yin. “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Premises
for Burmese Contemporary Art with Po Po, Tun Win Aung, Wah Nu and Min Thein
Sung”. Afterall 46 (Autumn/Winter 2018).
Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility”. October 129
(Summer 2009).
Lingham, Susie. “A Quota on Expression: Visions, Vexations & Vanishings”. In
Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in
Southeast Asia 1991–2011, ed. Iola Lenzi. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2011.
Magro, Aiden. “Exposing the State: Loo Zihan’s Queer Performance”. Southeast of Now
5, 1&2 (October 2021): 175–203.Sedimented Acts 31
Ng Si-Lan. “We are artists”. http://judeananas.wordpress.com/2011/07/23 [accessed
24 August 2011].
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2016.
Schjeldhal, Peter. “For Laughs: Things that Francis Alys Does”. The New Yorker,
23 May 2011.
Schneider, Rebecca. “Archives Performance Remains”. Performance Research 6,
2 (2001).
. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Routledge,
2011.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York, NY: Delta Books, 1973.
Thompson, Ashley. “Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Curatorial Practice and
“Cambodian Art” in the Wake of Genocide”. Diacritics 41, 2 (2013).
Widrich, Mechtild. Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art.
Manchester, 2014.
Wong, Melissa Wansin. “Performing Singapore’s Queer Quandary: Walking the
Tightrope Between Sexual Illegality and Neoliberal-Enabled Subjectivity at Pink
Dot and in Loo Zihan’s Cane”. In Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives
on Where Performance Leads Queer, ed. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier.
London: Palgrave, 2016.
Zitzewitz, Karin. “The Archive in Real Time: Gossip and Speculation in the World of
South Asian Art”. Art Journal 77, 4 (Winter 2018).
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Southeast of Now Vol. 6 No. 1 (March 2022), pp. 13 – 31You can also read
