Dr Simon Soon: “’Contemporary’ is having one idea ricocheting through a field of possible connections, unsure of what forms it might land on.”
Insights on the evolution of Southeast Asian art from the modern era into the contemporary
Dr Simon Soon is a scholar and curator whose research focuses on 19th and 20th century art and visual culture in Southeast Asia. He has curated major exhibitions such as ‘Bayangnya Itu Timbul Tenggelam: Photographic Cultures in Malaysia’ (2021), and ‘Love Me in My Batik: Modern Batik Art from Malaysia and Beyond’ (2016) for ILHAM Gallery in Kuala Lumpur. Simon is also currently Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at University of Melbourne.
In this interview, Simon offers his insights on the evolution of Southeast Asian art from the modern era into the contemporary. The topic is addressed from multiple perspectives, touching on Simon’s experience as an educator teaching art history as well as his involvement in publications that enrich the discourse.
You describe your research interest as “approaching art history from below”. What do you mean by that?
I suppose this idea of approaching art history from below is about an orientation and a vantage point. It stems from the fact that I do not come into the field of art history by happenstance entirely. Reading art history, developing artistic research, and sustaining curatorial practice are often seen as inter-related but clearly distinct fields in the study of art. However, I would like to propose how these seemingly disparate parts contribute to a sustained inquiry into the connected or intersecting cultural histories of specific forms and ideas.
Professor Patrick Flores in his essay, “Curatorial Circulations in Southeast Asia” for Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and Professor TK Sabapathy in his curatorial notes for the exhibition Intersecting Histories: Thoughts on the Contemporary and History in Southeast Asian (2012) at ADM Gallery, School of Art, Design, and Media at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, have discussed how exhibitionary and curatorial practices serve as effective methods for exploring new ways of understanding.
I am also fascinated by how different modes of “seeing” can generate “imagistic” power that may not be fully comprehensible through the theoretical frameworks commonly used by academic art historians. This suggests the need for alternative approaches to interpretation.
You recently joined the University of Melbourne, after teaching for eight years at the Faculty of Creative Arts, Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. How has your perspective/approach on the teaching of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art changed over time?
For the past eight years, I taught two subjects in Southeast Asian art history: Modern Southeast Asian Art and a survey of Art and Architecture of Southeast Asia. I believe these subjects were inherited from the late artist, curator and art historian Redza Piyadasa, who founded the Visual Arts Programme at Universiti Malaya in 2003. Modern Southeast Asian Art explores the region’s modern art in relation to its social, political, and economic contexts from the 19th century to today, focusing on narratives of “worlding”. The survey course examines Southeast Asia’s diverse cultural histories over 2000 years, emphasising connections with global cultural influences. In both instances, the focus is to challenge the idea of Southeast Asia as a fixed region entity.
Joining a new university is an opportunity to take a step back from a regionalist approach centered on Southeast Asia as a geopolitically determined configuration. It allows me to see how my understanding of the region can contribute to the teaching of more connected or comparative art histories. I look forward to working with colleagues to deliver subjects that foreground a more Asia-Pacific focus as well as a study trip to Indonesia and Singapore.
You are a co-editor of Narratives in Malaysian Art Vol. 4, the final volume in the series which was published in 2019. In your observation, what are important shifts in the discourse on Malaysian art from the modern period into the contemporary?
My main role in Narratives in Malaysian Art Vol. 4 which has a focus on “Perspectives” was to prospect different ways in which art history of Malaysia has been written and direct readers’ attention to some of the issues that have been foregrounded by colleagues in the field. Towards this end, we have present-day researchers reflecting on seminal texts that have by and large shaped the tenor and tone for what we understand loosely as Malaysian Art.
We also featured new writings that problematises the category of what counts as Malaysian art (Ray Langenbach), discusses the challenges to our understanding of knowledge that new media raised (Roopesh Sitharan), spotlight colonial women artists as an occluded category of artistic agents within Malaysian art history (Yvonne Low), and also discusses how the “revolutionary” image is missing from how we write Malaysian art history (Au Sow Yee). Collectively, they raise questions that challenge the idea of the nation, imagining new connections, perspectives, and positions that could create a more inclusive and meaningful art history for future generations. In turn we see how the shift from modern, with progress idealised as a linear and singular narrative, into contemporary discourses that recognise that the narratives of Malaysian art are always already plural and sometimes even playful.
As a follow-up to the previous question, do these shifts play similar roles in the development of artistic styles in other regions in Southeast Asia?
I suppose it would be a reckoning with what the national or one’s locality means through form-making or form-expressing. As such, it is also about the kind of artistic genealogy one is constructing. To paraphrase the title of Paul Gauguin’s 1897 painting, this requires us to ask ourselves: where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going?
I like my long-term colleague Professor Roger Nelson’s idea of tentacular thinking, which draws on Mieke Bal’s concept of the unfaithful octopus where the adaptive agency of artists, curators and researchers are foregrounded. This concept posits that artists, curators and art historians are giving themselves the permission to connect with a wide array of timelines, materials, histories. The purpose is to spotlight their comparative value or bring them into collision to produce a different way of seeing how we understand ourselves, through often playful means.
I believe this is something that is happening not just across Southeast Asia but also more broadly across an increasingly connected world. In doing so, we might take on a much more fluid definition of locality and how it shapes our sense of self and belonging in this world. Therefore, it also informs how we think through images and communicate through forms that are not necessarily wedded to the discourse of the nation or any easily identifiable framework. This uncertainty may be a cause for consternation and anxiety for an earlier generation of scholars who came into art history through the certitude of modernism. Scholars, artists and curators working today are departing from many more diverse vantage points.
What does the term “contemporary” mean to you?
I believe the composite is a methodological principle that undergirds many of the things I do. This principle has a long history in the study of art. One could trace it back to German art historian Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, which is given a low-brow update in the form of a Gen-Z vision board. It is not like I do these vision boards particularly well, but it fulfils the type of angin (wind) that courses through me. In the East Coast of West Malaysia, the concept of angin as channels of desire that shape personalities speak to an idea of how we are driven and motivated by inner winds of desire. A vision board as an approach allows me to connect this concept to the Germanic concept of geist or spirit in some tenuous way although the worldviews that these concepts emerge from might be continents apart.
It helps me to think about possibilities of connection which is the hallmark of the contemporary. It does not have the certitude of a clear explanatory grid which is the attribute of modernism in all its idealised systemic and structural purity. It makes for a more amusing and fascinating world if we are willing to let ourselves go a little. I like to think of the contemporary in this way: one idea ricocheting through a field of possible connections, unsure of what forms it might land on. It is an imagistic form of thinking that has certain power and resonance.
From your observations, how have Southeast Asian artists adapted to the shifts between these two art historical periods?
There is no easy answer to the question. However, we can begin to understand the complexity of this shift through a report on the “Terminologies of ‘Modern’ and ‘Contemporary’ Art in Southeast Asia’s Vernacular Languages” (2018) published by the journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, which I contributed to. In my section, I reflected on Ismail Zain’s 1980 lecture “Seni dan Imajan” (“Art and Imagery”), which outlines a way of seeing that characterises artistic forms in our time.
Ismail Zain contrasts two types of artistic vision: “syncretistic” and “analytic”. The “syncretistic” vision embraces everything at once, drawing from diverse cultural references across time and geography, blending art, craft, and popular culture. This store of cultural resources was viewed as the inheritance of the contemporary artist. In contrast, the “analytic” vision focuses on one specific point and maintains neat distinctions. Learning to see the world in “syncretic” terms also then leads to the recalibration of our understanding of art and culture. In doing so, Ismail Zain proposes that the re-imagination of creativity in the contemporary era challenges the power of modernity and colonialism in shaping the production and reception of art.