What defines the curatorial role in Asian contemporary art, and are its parameters different elsewhere? However much our contemporaneity pretends or aspires to be global, however pivotal curators may have been in art’s globalization, the terms ‘curatorial’ and ‘contemporary’ are still too rarely scrutinized, and in any case far from universal. As one of the main actors qualifying the contemporaneity of contemporary art, the curator has nevertheless become a salient figure in the latter’s history, at least where Southeast Asia is concerned. In this paper, I will address particularities of the curatorial function in the region, setting aside some (Western) professional assumptions which have not historically attended the role in this geography, looking instead to the curator’s ambivalent relationships to state power, to bureaucratic labor, and to authorship. Such structural questions may have been deferred while Asian curators sought to consolidate their profession on an equal footing with the nomadic, visionary taste-makers of the international art system. But as that system’s center of gravity shifts in our direction, they cannot be put off any longer.
David Teh
David Teh is a writer, curator and Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore, specializing in Southeast Asian contemporary art. His curatorial projects have included Returns (12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018), Misfits: Pages from a Loose-leaf Modernity (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2017), Transmission (Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok, 2014), Video Vortex #7 (Yogyakarta, 2011), and Unreal Asia (55. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2009). Teh’s essays have appeared in Third Text, Afterall, Artforum International, Theory Culture & Society, and ARTMargins. His book Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary was published by the MIT Press in 2017, and he was co-editor (with David Morris) of Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992-98 (2018), for Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series.
Respondent/Moderator: Hsu Fang-Tze
Hsu Fang-Tze is a curator in the National University of Singapore Museum. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the National University of Singapore. Her dissertation research, Cold War Acousmêtre: Artist Films and the First Island Chain, was supported by the President’s Graduate Fellowship and the FASS Promising Graduate Scholar Award. From 2010 to 2013, she served as the digital manager for the Asia Art Archive. She was appointed as a curator for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in 2013. In 2019, she presents Gendered Bodies in Southeast Asia in collaboration with Tessa Maria Guazon at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. In 2016, she co-curated Negative Horizon:5th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, 2016, with Lu Pei-Yi, and presented the curated research project, Working-Through: Vandy Rattana and His Ditched Footages, at TheCube Project Space, Taipei. Her other cross-disciplinary research projects include Singaporean artist Loo Zihan’s Artists' General Assembly: The Langenbach Archive (2013), FIELDS: An Itinerant Inquiry Across the Kingdom of Cambodia (2013) co-organized by the SA SA BASSAC (Cambodia) and the ST PAUL St Gallery (Aotearoa, New Zealand), and On Site: A Centennial Retrospective of Robert Capa at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Her research interests include contemporary knowledge formation, Cold War aesthetics, memory, philosophies of technology, and the embodiment of artistic praxis in everyday life. Her writings can be found in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Art Critique of Taiwan (ACT), and LEAP (China).
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