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Michelle Antoinette, Reworlding Art History: Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990

One of the perceived characteristics of contemporary art is its heterogeneity, which results in a resistance to singular aesthetic, ideological, political, geographical or social frameworks. For many art historians, this multiplicity presents a challenge that requires agile theorisation. Michelle Antoinette’s Reworlding Art History: Contemporary Southeast Asian Art after 1990 1 aims to answer this demand through a study of the ways in which Southeast Asian artists have entered into contemporary art circuits within and outside the region, as well as some of the key themes explored by these artists. In doing so, Antoinette posits Southeast Asia as a paradigmatic example of the ways in which a “reworlding” of contemporary art has challenged the Euramericancentric nature of art markets, worlds and histories. Antoinette’s definition of “contemporary” art in Southeast Asia rejects a strict periodisation that would clearly distinguish it from “modern” art. Indeed, she contends that “modern art may coexist alongside contemporary art in Southeast Asia, as elsewhere”.2 Yet, at the same time, she frames the 1990s as being a watershed moment in the advent of the contemporary. This focus on the 1990s contrasts with some previous studies of contemporary art in the region, which locate its foundations in the 1970s and 1980s.3 Antoinette acknowledges the significance of developments in this earlier period by referencing Malaysian artists Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa’s 1974 exhibition Towards a Mystical Reality, the establishment of the Kaishan group in the Philippines in 1976 and the activities of the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru [New Art Movement] in Indonesia from 1975–79. Within these examples, she finds “precedents of the Southeast Asian contemporary”4 as manifested in an artistic tendency towards a “questioning of ‘internationalism’” as a