Visual Representations of the Cold

War and Postcolonial Struggles

The essays and artworks gathered in this volume examine the visual mani-
festations of postcolonial struggles in art in East and Southeast Asia, as the
world transitioned from the communist/capitalist ideological divide into the
new global power structure under neoliberalism that started taking shape
during the Cold War.
The contributors to this volume investigate the visual art that emerged
in Australia, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Korea, Okinawa, and the Philip-
pines. With their critical views and new approaches, the scholars and curators
examine how visual art from postcolonial countries deviated from the com-
munist/capitalist dichotomy to explore issues of identity, environment, rapid
commercialization of art, and independence. These foci offer windows into
some lesser-known aspects of the Cold War, including humanistic responses
to the neo-imperial exploitations of people and resources as capitalism trans-
formed into its most aggressive form.
Given its unique approach, this seminal study will be of great value to
scholars of 20th-century East and Southeast Asian art history and visual and
cultural studies.

Midori Yamamura is an Assistant Professor at CUNY Kingsborough.

Yu-Chieh Li is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual

Studies, Lingnan University.
The Cold War in Asia
Series Editor: Professor Malcolm H. Murfett

A series of books that both explores and addresses some of the more impor-
tant questions raised by the Cold War in Asia. This series isn’t confined to
single country studies alone, but welcomes contributions from research
scholars who are tackling comparative issues within Asia during the time
of the Cold War. Quality is our goal and this series reflects this objective by
catering for work drawn from a number of disciplines.
If you work in the broad field of Cold War studies don’t hesitate to get
in touch with the series editor Professor Malcolm Murfett at King’s Col-
lege London ([email protected]). Books, both single authored and
edited manuscripts, should preferably be within the 60,000 – 100,000-word
range, although we are also interested in shorter studies (25,000-50,000
words) that focus on elements of the Cold War struggle in Asia.
If you are working on a project that seems to fit these guidelines, please
send a detailed proposal to the series editor. Every proposal will, of course,
be subject to strict peer review. If the proposal is supported by experts in the
field, it will be our aim to begin publishing the next volumes of this series
within a year to eighteen months of the issuing of a contract to the author.
We look forward to hearing from you.

Information Regimes during the Cold War in East Asia

Edited by Jason Morgan

Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles

Art in East and Southeast Asia
Edited by Midori Yamamura and Yu-Chieh Li

For the full list of titles in the series, visit https://www.routledge.com/

The-Cold-War-in-Asia/book-series/CWA
Visual Representations of the
Cold War and Postcolonial
Struggles
Art in East and Southeast Asia

Edited by Midori Yamamura and

Yu-Chieh Li
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Midori Yamamura and
Yu-Chieh Li; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Midori Yamamura and Yu-Chieh Li to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-61529-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-61531-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10539-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Galliard
SPi Global, India
Contents

List of Figures vii

List of Contributors xv

Introduction: Locating Asian art in the Cold War 1

YU-CHIEH LI AND MIDORI YAMAMURA

PART I
Joining the game: Trauma and regionalism 7

1. “The New Chinese Landscape” in the Cold War era 9

LESLEY MA

2. Before and beyond the Cold War: Visual accounts

of the “Secret War” in Laos (Pha Khamfan’s collection of
photographs and Terry Wofford’s paintings of planes) 31
ROGER NELSON

3. Affects, trauma, and experimental art in New

Order Indonesia, 1970–1977 66
WULAN DIRGANTORO

4. Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation:

Kidlat Tahimik and Roberto Villanueva’s
neo-indigenous response in the Philippines and beyond 84
MIDORI YAMAMURA

5. Imagining a region: Australian exhibitionary

turns to Asia in the late Cold War 110
RUSSEL STORER
vi Contents
PART II
Visual gallery and primary documents 139

6. FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE 141

HIROSHI SUNAIRI

7. Dinh Q Lê: Works and primary documents 147

DINH Q. LÊ

8. Reconfiguring history 152

FX HARSONO

9. Voyage into the COLD SEA 160

SOW YEE AU

10. From cities into the mountains and the fields:

An archaeology of lives in dark ruins 166
JUN HONN KAO TRANSLATED BY YU-CHIEH LI

PART III
The continuous Cold War 173

11. Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies:

Post-Mao artists on the tides of globalization 175
YU-CHIEH LI

12. Performance, memory, and affect in Yamashiro

Chikako’s Mud Man 196
REBECCA JENNISON

13. Undoing Cold War temporality: Transnational

adoption in Agnès Dherbeys’s Omone and Retired 212
JUNG JOON LEE

Bibliography 232
Index 248
Figures

1.1 Third hanging scroll from left in the vitrine: Liu Kuo-sung,
Early Spring, 1964, ink on paper, hanging scroll, 86.4 ×
55.3 cm. The first two hanging scrolls from left and all
handscrolls laid flat are works by Fong Chung-ray; the rest are
by Liu. The New Chinese Landscape, 1968, negative 38802F,
Cleveland Museum of Art Archives. 17
1.2 Chuang Che, Sublimation, 1964, ink and paper collage on
canvas, 119 × 86 cm. Pink Bear Collection (Elgin Chan and
Anne Goh) © Chuang Che. Exhibited in The New Chinese
Landscape. 18
1.3 Fong Chung-ray, 65-35, 1965, ink and color on paper, handscroll,
56 × 119 cm. Collection of the artist.
© Fong Chung-ray. Exhibited in The New Chinese Landscape. 19
1.4 C. C. Wang, Sailing Boats and Misty Mountains, 1964, ink
and color on paper, 40 × 60 cm. Collection
Museum Rietberg, Gift of Charles A. Drenowatz. © Museum
Rietberg. Exhibited in The New Chinese Landscape. 20
1.5 Chen Chi-Kwan, Panorama, 1957, ink and watercolor on
paper, 23 × 122 cm. FranzArt Collection, Hong Kong.
© Chen Chi-kwan Education and Cultural Foundation.
Exhibited in The New Chinese Landscape. 21
1.6 Yu Cheng-yao, Deep Ravine, Rushing Torrent, early 1960s,
hanging scroll, ink on paper, 135.8 × 68.4 cm. Harvard Art
Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, The Chu-tsing Li
Collection, Gift of B U.K. Li in honor of Chu-tsing Li and in
memory of Yao-wen Kwang Li and Teri Ho Li. © President
and Fellows of Harvard College. Inscription on upper right:
“Deep Ravine, Rushing Torrent. Gigantic rocks pile up
on lofty peaks. Spring waters, green as jade, splash across
dangerous paths. White clouds hover above the emerald
valley. When can I return home? Done by Yu Cheng-yao” 22
viii Figures
1.7 Chuang Che, Homage to Du Fu, 1966, oil and collage on
canvas, 152 × 112 cm. Collection of Longmen Art Projects
Shanghai. © Chuang Che. 23
2.1 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan
Silasangvaro. Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin
print. British Library Endangered Archive Programme
record number C-1111. Reproduced with permission of the
Buddhist Archive of Photography. 35
2.2 Terry Wofford. Dropping Supplies. Oil on canvas, 45.7 ×
61cm. Private collection. Reproduced with
permission of the artist. 36
2.3 Terry Wofford. Night Mission Over Laos. 1971. Oil on canvas,
50.8 × 61cm. Private collection. Reproduced with permission
of the artist. 38
2.4 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan
Silasangvaro. Undated, circa 1960s-1975.
Silver gelatin print. A caption in Lao on the verso of the
image states: “A thousand temples in Laos were damaged by
bombing in the American war.” British Library Endangered
Archive Programme record number C-1113. Reproduced
with permission of the Buddhist Archive of Photography. 43
2.5 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan
Silasangvaro. Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin print.
A caption in Lao on the verso of the image states: “Peace
and independence are strongly wished for by all Lao people.”
British Library Endangered Archive Programme record
number C-1115. 43
2.6 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan
Silasangvaro. Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin print.
British Library Endangered Archive Programme record
number C-1116. 44
2.7 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan
Silasangvaro. Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin
print. A caption in Lao on the verso of the image states:
“Although the country is at war, people always tried to hold
festivals for the solidarity of the local people.” British Library
Endangered Archive Programme record number C-1119.
Reproduced with permission of the Buddhist Archive of
Photography. 44
2.8 Terry Wofford, photographer. Studio, Nongduang House.
1971. Reproduced with permission of the artist. 52
2.9 Terry Wofford. Runway Zero One. 1968. Oil on canvas, 45.7 ×
61cm. Collection of the artist. Reproduced with permission
of the artist. 53
 Figures ix
2.10 Terry Wofford. Air America Helio Over Remote Village.
1968. 45.7 × 70cm. Private collection. Reproduced with
permission of the artist. 55
2.11 Terry Wofford. Taxi. Circa 1986-87. Oil on canvas, 45.7 ×
61cm. Private collection. Reproduced with permission of
the artist. 58
3.1 FX Harsono, Pistol Plastik, Kembang Plastik dalam Kantong
Plastik (Plastic Gun, Plastic Flower inside Plastic Bags),
1975, mixed media, variable dimension. Image courtesy of
Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA). Exhibited in the first
Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia. 73
3.2 FX Harsono, Rantai yang Santai (The Relaxed Chain),
1975, mixed media, 67 × 97 × 56 cm. Image courtesy of
Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA). Exhibited in the first
Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia. 74
3.3 BM Ardhie, Monumen Revolusi Diresmikan oleh Pak Bejo
Tukang Becak (Revolution Monument Inaugurated by
Mr Bejo, Becak Driver), 1977, mixed media, variable
dimension. Image courtesy of Indonesian Visual Art Archive.
Exhibited in the second Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia. 76
3.4 BM Ardhie, Menara ASEAN (ASEAN Tower), 1977, mixed
media, variable dimension. Image courtesy of Indonesian
Visual Art Archive. Exhibited in the first Kepribadian Apa? 78
4.1 Unknown Photographer, Hiroshima, around
October 1945, The National Archives. 85
4.2 Roberto Villanueva, plan for Sacred Sanctuary: Acupuncture
the Earth, 1994. © Eva Corazon-Abundo-Villanueva
and Napoleon A. Villanueva. 86
4.3 Kidlat Tahimik, A still from The Perfumed Nightmare, 1977.
Kidlat driving a Jeepney. © Kidlat Tahimik 88
4.4 US Information Agency, “Information Media Services,” in
1949 United States Advisory Commission on Information,
1949, The National Archives. 90
4.5 Kidlat Tahimik, The Perfumed Nightmare, 1977, film still,
Kidlat taking a mythical super-breath © Kidlat Tahimik 93
4.6 Kidlat Tahimik, The Perfumed Nightmare, 1977, film still,
white carabao (white water buffalo) © Kidlat Tahimik. 94
4.7 Roberto Villanueva, Archetypes Cordillera’s Labyrinth, 1989,
Runo reeds, stone, wood, etc., 150’ wide 2,000’ long. © Eva
Corazon-Abundo-Villanueva and Napoleon A. Villanueva. 100
4.8 Kidlat Tahimik and Baguio Artists, Healing Our Planet
Earth (HOPE) after Hiroshima, August 6, 1995.
Courtesy of the author. 103
x Figures
5.1 Anti-Chinese immigration cartoon, Melbourne Punch,
10 May 1888. Illustration by “B.” Reproduced courtesy of
the National Library of Australia. 112
5.2 Ann Newmarch, Vietnam Madonna, 1975. Screen print on
paper, 67.2 × 42.0 cm (image irreg.), 76.3 × 42.0 cm (sheet).
South Australian Government Grant 2005. Art
Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. © Courtesy of the artist. 115
5.3 Arthur Boyd, Shearers playing for a bride, 1957. Oil and
tempera on canvas 150.1 × 175.7 cm. National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne. Gift of Tristan Buesst, 1958 (11-5).
© National Gallery of Victoria. 116
5.4 Installation view of Jasper Johns’s (L-R) Periscope (Hart
Crane) 1963, White flag (1955), Target (1958), Map (1961),
on display as part of Two Decades of American Painting, at
the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1967. © 2020
Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Geoff Parr. 117
5.5 Installation view of The Field, National Gallery of
Victoria, 1968. © NGV. Photo: George Mehes. 118
5.6 Gough Whitlam with Premier Zhou Enlai on his departure
from China, 1973. From the collection of the
National Archives of Australia. NAA: A6135. 121
5.7 Entombed Warriors exhibition in Canberra, 1983. From the
collection of the National Archives of Australia. NAA: A6135. 123
5.8 Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Sculpture installed in the domain for the
1976 Biennale of Sydney, Nov. 17 1976. National Art Archive
/ Art Gallery of New South Wales Photo:
AGNSW. ARC40.3.1. 129
5.9 Installation view, Watermall, First Asia Pacific Triennial
of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane,
September – December 1993 / Photograph: Richard Stringer
/ Image courtesy: QAGOMA. Foreground: Shigeo Toya
(Japan), Woods III, 1991-92 / The Kenneth and Yasuko
Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1994
with funds from The Myer Foundation and Michael Sidney
Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation and
with the assistance of the International Exhibitions Program
/ Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern
Art. Water: Kamol Phaosavasdi (Thailand), River of the King:
Water pollution project one, 1993. Right hand wall: Vassan
Sitthiket (Thailand), Resurrection 1992, (left); Buddha returns
to Bangkok ’92, 1992 / Collection: Chulalongkorn University,
Bangkok. Above escalator: S Chandrasekaran
(Singapore), Duality, 1993. 132
 Figures xi
6.1 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021,
film still, Mao Ishikawa. © Hiroshi Sunairi. 142
6.2 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021,
film still, The cover of Mao Ishikawa’s photography book,
Red Flower – The Women of Okinawa
/Akabana – Okinawa no on’na (2017). © Hiroshi Sunairi. 144
6.3 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021,
film still, Mao Ishikawa in the picture from the photography
book, Red Flower – The Women of Okinawa
/Akabana – Okinawa no on’na (2017). © Hiroshi Sunairi. 144
6.4 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021,
film still, Mao and her boyfriend, Sir on the right in
the picture from the photography book, Hot Days in
Okinawa (2013). © Hiroshi Sunairi. 145
6.5 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021, still
from film “BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL” (1974), a poster from
the German chapter of the international Black Is Beautiful
movement | Junge Union [Young Union]. © Hiroshi Sunairi. 146
7.1 Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled (Tom Cruise & Willam Dafoe,
Born on the 4th of July/Highway 1), 2000.
C-print and linen tape, 40 × 60 in. © Dinh Q. Lê. 148
7.2 Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled from The Hill of Poisonous Trees series
(man and woman), 2008. C-print and linen tape,
47.25 × 78.75 in. © Dinh Q. Lê. 148
7.3 The Farmers and The Helicopters, 2006. 3-channel video
installation. Duration: 15’, edition of 5 with
1 AP. Dinh Q. Lê in collaboration with Tuan Andrew
Nguyen and Ha, Thuc Phu Nam. © Dinh Q. Lê. 149
7.4 Dinh Q. Lê, South China Sea Pishkun, 2009. Single channel
hi-definition digital animation video. Duration: 6’30”.
Edition of 7 and 1AP. © Dinh Q. Lê. 150
7.5 Dinh Q. Lê, South China Sea Pishkun, 2009. Single channel
hi-definition digital animation video. Duration: 6’30”.
Edition of 7 and 1AP © Dinh Q. Lê. 150
8.1 Hendro Subagyo (Oh Hok Tjoe), Karangbendo, 1951, gelatin
silver print on paper, 6 × 6cm. Image courtesy of FX Harsono. 153
8.2 FX Harsono, Screening Shot Pilgrimage, 2013,
single channel video, color, 17’41”. © FX Harsono. 156
8.3 FX Harsono, Screening Shot Pilgrimage, 2013,
single channel video, color, 17’41”. © FX Harsono. 157
8.4 FX Harsono, Screening Shot Pilgrimage, 2013,
single channel video, color, 17’41”. © FX Harsono. 157
8.5 FX Harsono, Writing in the Rain, 2011, single channel
video performance, color, 6’11”. © FX Harsono. 158
xii Figures
8.6 FX Harsono, Gazing on Collective Memory, no. 2, 2016,
installation with wood, found objects, books, ceramic bowls,
3D digital prints, frames and photographs, and
electric candle light, 80 × 190 × 270 cm. © FX Harsono. 159
9.1 Au Sow Yee, Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria,
Tin Mine, Spices and the Harimau, 2016, single channel
video, 15’2”, film still. © Au Sow Yee 162
9.2 Au Sow Yee, Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria,
Tin Mine, Spices and the Harimau, 2016, single channel
video, 15’2”, film still. © Au Sow Yee 163
9.3 Au Sow Yee, Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria,
Tin Mine, Spices and the Harimau, 2016, single channel
video, 15’2”, film still. © Au Sow Yee 163
9.4 Au Sow Yee, Kris Project II: If the Party Goes On, 2016,
single channel video, 13’52”, film still. © Au Sow Yee 164
9.5 Au Sow Yee, Prelude Kris Project II: To the Party, 2016,
single channel video, 4’42”, film still. © Au Sow Yee 164
10.1 Kao Jun-Honn, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: Ten Scenes,
2013. Site-specific drawing in an abandoned military camp in
Yi-Lan, based on a photograph of “Divine Wind Attack Units”
taken by an anonymous photographer during the second
world war. © Kao Jun-Honn. 167
10.2 Kao Jun-Honn, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: Ten Scenes.
Site-specific drawing in an abandoned military camp in Yi-Lan,
2013. (Depicted is Chang Cheng Guang, A Taiwanese member
of “Divine Wind Attack Units” during the Pacific War.)
© Kao Jun-Honn. 167
10.3 Kao Jun-Honn, Bo’ai: Taiwan Motor Transportation Factory,
2016, photo-documentation of a screening on site as a socially
engaged component of the Bo’ai project. © Kao Jun-Honn. 168
10.4 Kao Jun-Honn, Apparatus of Topa, drawing on paper, 2018.
© Kao Jun-Honn. 169
10.5 Taoist Trinity Fairyland, single channel video, color, 14’39”.
© Kao Jun-Honn. 171
10.6 Taoist Trinity Fairyland, single channel video, color, 14’39”.
© Kao Jun-Honn. 171
11.1 Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism—Coca Cola, 1990-93, oil on
canvas, 200 × 200cm. © Wang Guangyi. 178
11.2 Wang Guangyi, Cold War Aesthetic—People Living in Fear,
2007–2008, Installation with colored fiberglass and video,
dimension of sculptures 215 × 60 × 30 cm each.
© Wang Guangyi. 182
11.3 Wang Guangyi, Cold War Aesthetic—People Living in Fear,
2007–2008, Installation with colored fiberglass and video,
 Figures xiii
dimension of sculptures 215 × 60 × 30 cm each.
© Wang Guangyi. 183
11.4 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Mr. Cheng, colour photo,
120 × 155.7 cm, 2007. © Polit-Sheer-Form Office. 185
11.5 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Polit-Sheer-Form-16, oil on
canvas, 200 × 300 cm, 2007. © Polit-Sheer-Form Office. 186
11.6 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Do the Same Good Deeds,
performance on Times Square, November 3, 2014.
© Polit-Sheer-Form Office. 186
11.7 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Fitness for all, installation view
at Queens Museum, 2014. © Polit-Sheer-Form Office. 188
11.8 Song Ta, Why do they never take colour photos, 2013-16.
© Song Ta. 189
11.9 Song Ta, Why do they never take colour photos, 2013-16.
© Song Ta. 190
12.1 Yamashiro Chikako, Seaweed Woman, 2008 version.
Video, 7’15”. © Yamashiro Chikako, courtesy of Yumiko
Chiba Associates. 198
12.2 Yamashiro Chikako, Choros of the Melodies, 2010.
Chromogenic print, 600 × 900 mm. © Yamashiro Chikako,
courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates. 201
12.3 Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2017. Video,
2016 version, 3-channel video installation, 23’00”,
in cooperation with Aichi Triennale 2016. © Yamashiro
Chikako, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates. 203
12.4 Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2017. Video,
1-channel 2016 version, 3-channel video installation,
23’00”, in cooperation with Aichi Triennale 2016.
© Yamashiro Chikako, Courtesy of Yumiko
Chiba Associates. 204
12.5 Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2017. 2016 version,
3-channel video installation, 23’:00”, in cooperation with
Aichi Triennale 2016. © Yamashiro Chikako, Courtesy of
Yumiko Chiba Associates. 205
13.1 Agnès Dherbeys, #K76-3613, 2013. C-print. Courtesy of
the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys. 214
13.2 Agnès Dherbeys, “Ms. Yang Hay Suk with her daughter,
Laure, and her boyfriend, Romain,” from Omone, 2013.
C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys. 215
13.3 Agnès Dherbeys, “Ms. Yang Hay Suk and Laure’s hands,”
from Omone, 2013. C-print. Courtesy of the artist.
© Agnès Dherbeys. 216
13.4 Agnès Dherbeys, “Ms. Lee Suk Yun,” from Omone,
2013. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys. 217
xiv Figures
13.5 Agnès Dherbeys, Snapshots of “Ms. Lee Suk Yun’s daughter,”
from Omone, 2013. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès
Dherbeys. 218
13.6 Agnès Dherbeys, “Ms. Park Woo Sik and Mr. Lee Sun Hwa in
their farm in Nonsan,” from Omone, 2013. C-print.
Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys. 219
13.7 Joo Myung Duk, from Sŏkkyŏjin irŭmdŭl (The Mixed
Names), 1965. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist.
© Joo Myung Duk. 221
13.8 Agnès Dherbeys, “After three generations, December 2014,
Romans, FR,” from Retired. 2013-2015. C-print. Courtesy
of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys. 224
13.9 Agnès Dherbeys, “Last day, March 2014, Romans, FR,” from
Retired. 2013–2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès
Dherbeys. 225
13.10 Agnès Dherbeys, “Daily grocery shopping, December 2014,
Romans, FR,” from Retired. 2013–2015. C-print.
Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys. 226
13.11 Agnès Dherbeys, “Robert Dherbeys, March 2015, Romans,
FR,” from Retired. 2013–2015. C-print.
Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys. 226
13.12 Agnès Dherbeys, “Vercors, September 2014, FR,” from
Retired. 2013–2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès
Dherbeys. 227
Contributors

Au, Sow Yee­  Born in Kuala Lumpur, Au Sow Yee now lives and works in
Taipei. Au’s works focus primarily on questioning, exploring and expand-
ing the relation between images, image making, history, politics, and
power through video installation and other mediums. A finalist for the
2018 Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize, Au’s works
were exhibited in MMCA (Seoul), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), HKW
(Berlin), Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum, Singapore Film Festival,
Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul (ExiS), BACC (Bangkok)
and various other venues. She is a guest writer for the online magazine No
Man’s Land and co-founded Kuala Lumpur’s Rumah Attap Library and
Collective in 2017. Au currently holds a research position at Centre for
Art and Technology, Taipei University of the Arts.

Dirgantoro, Wulan
McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Culture and Communication,
University of Melbourne, Australia
Dirgantoro’s research interests are gender and feminism as well as trauma and
memory in Indonesian modern and contemporary art. Her publications
include Feminisms and Indonesian Contemporary Art: ­Defining Experi-
ences (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and “Aesthetics of Silence:
Exploring Trauma in Indonesian Painting 1970-1980” in A ­ mbitious
Alignment: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art (Power Publication and
the National Gallery of Singapore, 2018). She has also contributed to var-
ious art publications in Asia, Australia and the UK on Indonesian modern
and contemporary art.

Harsono, FX FX Harsono was among a group of young artists who founded

Indonesia’s New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru), which
emphasized an experimental, conceptual approach, the use of everyday
materials, and engagement with social and political issues. Over recent
decades that have seen vast transformations in Indonesia, Harsono has
continuously explored the artist’s role in society, particularly in terms of
his relationship to history. During Indonesia’s dictatorial Suharto regime
(1967-98), his installation and performance works were eloquent acts of
xvi Contributors
protest against an oppressive state. Following the regime’s fall in 1998,
he embarked on an ongoing exploration of his own family history and
the position of minorities in society, especially his own Chinese-Indone-
sian community. Harsono received the first Joseph Balestier Award for
the Freedom of Art and the Prince Claus Fund Laureate Award. He has
participated in key local and international biennales, including the 20th
Biennale of Sydney (2016), the Jogja Biennale XII, Yogyakarta, Indone-
sia (2013), the 4th Moscow Biennale (2011), the 3rd Kwangju Biennale,
South Korea (2000), and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,
Australia (1993).

Jennison, Rebecca
Professor Emerita, Department of Humanities, Kyoto Seika University.
Rebecca Jennison has collaborated with scholars and artists in Japan work-
ing on diaspora and contemporary art in East Asia, including the “Asia,
­Politics, Art” (2006-2008), and has published in such journals as Asian
Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and Inter-Asia Cultural ­Studies
as well as anthologies such as Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neo-
liberal Times (Palgrave, 2017) and Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia,
Politics and Art to Come (Cornell East Asia Series, 2015). She received an
MA in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Cornell University and
has been based in Kyoto for several decades. Her current research focuses
on Tomiyama Taeko and other contemporary artists from the perspective
of postcolonial and transnational studies and visual culture.

Kao, Jun-Honn Kao Jun-Honn lives and works in Shulin District, New
Taipei City, Taiwan. His artistic practice focuses on decoloniality and the
voices of the working class under the suppression of neoliberalism and the
Asian Cold War, through video art, performance, and writing. Having
studied Fine Arts at Taipei National University of the Arts, Kao is now a
council member of Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC) and pro-
ject director of “East Asia Multitude Meeting 2013: Post-Occupy (art/
activism) Study.” His solo exhibitions include Taoist Trinity Fairyland
(Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, 2018), Abandoned Path: A Creator’s
Geopolitical Method (A+ Contemporary Project, Taipei, 2017), Overtime in
Tokyo (Amateur’s Revolt, Tokyo, 2015), and Pass–Platform of Friends (Audi-
torium of Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture, Taipei, 2008).
His group exhibitions include Wild Rhizome–2018 Taiwan Art Biennial
(National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, 2018), The Essential:
New Acquisitions (Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, 2018), Tai-
pei Biennial 2016: Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future
(Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2016), and Asia Triennial Manchester–
Harmonious Society (Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester, 2015).

Lê, Dinh Q. Growing up in Vietnam near the border of Cambodia, Lê and

his family fled Vietnam when the Khmer Rouge invaded his hometown
 Contributors xvii
in 1978. Lê studied photography at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, and received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
He most famously grapples with sociopolitical issues around the Viet-
nam War. Lê has exhibited extensively in museums around the world,
including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Mori Art Museum in
Tokyo, and the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. He had a
major mid-career survey, A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q. Le, at
Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington. His works are in the collections of
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Mod-
ern Art, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, The Bronx Museum, New York,
and The Israel Museum. A co-founder of the Vietnam Foundation for the
Arts (VNFA) and Sàn Art, he now lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.

Lee, Jung Joon

Associate Professor of History and Theory of Photography, Rhode Island
School of Design.
Lee is an art historian whose interests span the intersections of art and poli-
tics, transnational militarism and decoloniality, and gender and sexuality.
Lee received her PhD from The Graduate Center, The City University
of New York. Her current book project examines how the medium of
photography and its subjects have been politicized through transnational
militarism—a legacy of the Cold War—shaping life in the two Koreas
and beyond. Lee has published in such journals as History of Photography,
Journal of Korean Studies, Trans-Asia Photography Review and photogra-
phies as well as anthologies such as Photography and Imagination (Rout-
ledge, 2020) and Constructing the Memory of War in Visual Culture since
1914: The Eye on War (Routledge, 2018).

Li, Yu-Chieh
Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies, Lingnan
University.
Prior to joining Lingnan University, Li was a Judith Neilson Postdoctoral
Fellow in Contemporary Art at UNSW Art and Design, Sydney (2018-
2020), and an adjunct researcher at Tate Research Centre: Asia (2017-
2018). Her interests encompass performance art and artist-led research
responding to decolonial discourses in the Sinosphere as well as the ten-
sion between locally generated art discourses and neoliberal globaliza-
tion. Currently, she is working on a book about the artistic autonomy of
post-socialist China. Her edited volume Xu Bing: Beyond the Book from the
Sky was recently published by Springer Verlag.

Ma, Lesley
Curator, Ink Art, M+.
At M+, the museum of visual culture in Hong Kong, Ma curated The Weight
of Lightness: Ink Art at M+ (2017-18). Previously, she co-curated the Para
xviii Contributors
Site exhibition Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s – Japan,
South Korea, and Taiwan (2013-16). From 2005 to 2009, she was Project
Director at Cai Guo-Qiang Studio, New York and, from 2011 to 2012,
Curatorial Coordinator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Ange-
les. Ma received a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the
University of California, San Diego.

Nelson, Roger
Curator, National Gallery Singapore.
Roger Nelson is an art historian, and curator at National Gallery Singapore.
He is author of Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z
(National Gallery Singapore, 2019) and translator of Suon Sorin’s 1961
Khmer novel, A New Sun Rises over the Old Land (NUS Press, 2019). He is
also co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary
and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press. Nelson com-
pleted his PhD at the University of Melbourne, on Cambodian arts of the
20th and 21st centuries. He has contributed essays to scholarly journals, spe-
cialist art magazines such as Artforum, books, and exhibition catalogues.
He has curated exhibitions in Australia, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand,
and Vietnam, including And in the Chapel and in the Temples: Research in
Progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Cama-
cho (The Lab, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, 2018-2019).

Storer, Russell
Director (Curatorial & Collections), National Gallery Singapore.
Former Head of Asian and Pacific Art at the Queensland Art Gallery /
Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, Storer was a member of the
curatorial team for the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
(APT6) in 2009-2010, APT7 in 2012-2013, and APT8 in 2015-16. He
was previously a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney,
co-curator of the 3rd Singapore Biennale, Open House in 2011 and visiting
curator at documenta 12 in 2007.

Sunairi, Hiroshi Born in Hiroshima in 1972, Sunairi is a filmmaker and

visual artist. His earliest work, A Night of Elephants, was a sculptural
installation using hibakuju (atom-bombed trees). That work developed
into the process-based art for which he is best known, Tree Project, in
which Sunairi asks volunteers to grow seeds from atom-bombed trees.
By way of recording this project, Sunairi began filming documentaries on
social issues. His second feature-length documentary, Air, captures a road
trip to Fukushima, Japan, in August 2011, just months after the nuclear
disaster. His latest film follows the documentary photographer Mao Ishi-
kawa, who has been documenting the lives of US soldiers stationed in
Naha since the Cold War. Her photographs focus on American soldiers
and the sex workers of the Philippines.
 Contributors xix
Yamamura, Midori
Assistant Professor, CUNY Kingsborough.
Yamamura is a modern and contemporary art history specialist with a focus
on feminism, Asian, and Asian diasporic art. The author of Yayoi Kusama:
Inventing the Singular (MIT Press: 2015), she is currently working on
her second book, Japanese Contemporary Art Since 1989: Emergence of
the Local in the Age of Globalization. Yamamura received her PhD from
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She taught art
history at Okayama University, Fordham University, Hunter College, The
Museum of Modern Art, and Pratt Institute. Her essays can be found
in major museum catalogues, including Tate Modern and the Whitney
Museum of American Art.
Introduction
Locating Asian art in the Cold War

Yu-Chieh Li and Midori Yamamura

The Cold War has conventionally been viewed as the binary opposition
between American-style democratic capitalism and Soviet-style communism
from 1945 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the communist regimes
of Eastern Europe in 1989. During this time, as media theorist Marshall
McLuhan observed, it developed a “War of the Icons” that was fought with
“information technology.” 1 In the bid to win such a psychological war, art
became important ammunition as propaganda for both the United States
and the Soviet Union, and art historical studies of the Cold War proliferated.2
Early studies assessed the ideological split between capitalism and com-
munism, echoing the divide between US-style abstract expressionism and
Soviet-style socialist realism. At the start of the Cold War, the US Infor-
mation Agency promoted contemporary American art exhibition abroad,
while the Soviet government disseminated socialist realism in the former
Eastern bloc. However, as recent studies reveal, civil protests in the United
States over the artworks included in the Advancing American Art exhibition
(1946) compelled the government to eschew fine art and focus instead on
popular culture.3 Soviet cultural politics also failed to make a lasting impact
on Asia, as the original wave of communism merged with local left politics
and transformed into various postcolonial struggles.
In newly independent countries, the left responded critically to socio-­political
power relationships, with the local authoritarian government oftentimes being
backed by the United States. These circumstances inevitably influenced artis-
tic production of such diverse places as Indonesia, Korea, Okinawa (former
Ryukyu Kingdom), and the Philippines, among other countries. However, not
only are studies of contemporary Asian art history relatively scarce but, as noted
by cultural historians Chen Kuan-hsing and Sun Ge, local decolonial discourses
were hindered by the intervention of colonial powers, particularly the United
States.4 Furthermore, for their critical views and new perspectives, artists from
newly independent countries who were still struggling with postcolonial con-
ditions deviated from the communist/capitalist dichotomy to explore issues
of identity, environmental exploitation, market-­economy and independence,
among other topics. These new emphases offer windows into lesser-known
aspects of the Cold War, as capitalism morphed into its most aggressive form
after the 1970s. Without attending to postcolonial issues more broadly, we
2 Yu-Chieh Li and Midori Yamamura
could end up confining ourselves to the binary rhetoric that has surrounded
the Cold War. Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles:
Art in East and Southeast Asia addresses these alternative aspects of the Cold
War to examine how postcolonial struggles manifested in art, while bringing
to light some lesser-known facts and new artistic expressions from Australia,
Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Okinawa, the People’s Republic of China, the
Philippines, Republic of Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
In the history of the Cold War, Asia has played a pivotal role. Among various
accounts of the Cold War’s beginnings, Marc Gallicchio explained in 1988
that it started with the United States’ East Asian policy after Japan’s defeat
in 1945.5 Further examination of the regional history reveals the US govern-
ment’s desire to become political and economic hegemon of the world. The
Bandung Conference (1955), now generally known as the first conference to
promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and anti-colonialism,
was “far from representing a united front against racism, neo-colonialism, and
imperialism,” as Gerard Greenfield put it. Rather, it “reaffirmed the legiti-
macy of US imperial ambitions,” as implied by the Thailand Minister of For-
eign Affairs relaying “greetings” from President Eisenhower.6 By 1963, the
US Atomic Energy Commission was strategically promoting their programs
throughout Asia.7 Two years later, the United States was using a network of
Asian countries to escalate its military aggression against Vietnam, not to men-
tion supporting a military coup in Indonesia. While communist combatants
were struggling for the independence of their own destiny, the US military
intervened, and Washington sided with authoritarian regimes in Korea, the
Philippines, and Indonesia, and pursued commercial interests.
In stark contrast to the ideological flexibility shown by the United States,
Soviet policy in Asia collapsed due to poor cross-border communication and
the government’s failure to incorporate local diversity.8 As in the cases of
Hukbalahap Rebellion (1946–54) in the Philippines, the Communist-led
peasant uprising in central Luzon, and the ethnic conflict in Taiwan since
1949, local anti-government movements in Asia adopted Communism and,
as a result, developed into heterogeneous factions.
With the Korean War currently in a state of armistice, Okinawans facing
the controversial relocation of the US base, and China being the world’s sec-
ond-largest economy, posing a new threat to the United States, the Cold War
in Asia is nowhere close to ending; however, as Edward Said observed in 1993,
one thing that became apparent after the fall of the Soviet Union was the “tri-
umph of the United States as the last superpower.”9 This led to the emergence
of “a new set of force lines,” whereby “the less economically developed lands are
subjected to the more economically developed [countries].”10 The new global
power structure, with loosely regulated capitalism that was based on “the free-
dom to make inordinate gains without commensurable service to community,”
as historian Karl Polanyi observed in 1971, was the hallmark of the type of
capitalism that spawned at around that time, known today as “neoliberalism.”11
The present volume examines visual manifestations of the postcolonial
struggles in artworks from East and Southeast Asia that were made while the
 Introduction 3
world was being shaped by neoliberal political, ethical, and economic pres-
sures. In the age of globalized capitalism, art also became internationalized.
In the recent art historical study of the Cold War, Global Art and the Cold
War (2018), John J. Curley urges readers to look past the binary rhetoric to
explore the gray areas between and beyond. Whereas Curley broadens the
scope of art historical studies on the Cold War, the present volume deep-
ens our understanding of arts from East and Southeast Asia as consequences
of the Cold War, especially in relation to neoliberalism, the rise of US neo-­
imperialism, and artists’ decolonization struggles and postcolonial visions.
Approaching myriad issues through varied methodologies, the two sections
of scholarly writings (Sections 1 and 3) focus, respectively, on regional diver-
sity and the legacy of the Cold War. To complement the scholarly essays, these
sections are bridged by works and writings from five artists in Section Two.
Section One, “Joining the Game: Trauma and Regionalism,” opens with
Lesley Ma’s analysis of the first major exhibition of Chinese abstract ink
paintings that toured the United States between 1966 and 1968. Exploring
it by way of curatorial approach and diplomacy, Ma argues how interpreta-
tion of The New Chinese Landscape: Six Contemporary Chinese Artists oscil-
lated between traditionalism and neo-imperial ideology, even though the
artworks were unrelated to Cold War’s ideology.
If diplomacy is key to understanding the Cold War’s regionalism in
art, then physical and psychological trauma from postcolonial struggles is
essential to the artworks that emerged from newly independent countries
in Southeast Asia. Roger Nelson’s eye-opening object-based study exam-
ines how US involvement in the regional conflict in Laos impacted ordi-
nary people’s everyday life, as revealed in a body of works painted by the
self-described British aviation artist Terry Wofford and the black-and-white
photo-­collection belonging to senior Buddhist monk Pha Khamfan. In sharp
contrast to Nelson’s object-based study, Wulan Dirgantoro interprets the
works of Indonesian experimental art groups such as the Indonesian New
Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia) and PIPA, based on the
analysis of artists’ subjectivity using trauma psychology. Drawing from archi-
val materials, Dirgantoro investigates the impact of the military government’s
anti-communist killings (1965–1966) across the archipelago on the postco-
lonial subjects. In Asia, trauma was not limited to people but included envi-
ronmental devastation. Based on an ecocritical analysis, Midori Yamamura
discusses how the impact of neoliberal economy on the environment shook
Filipino artists Kidlat Tahimik and Roberto Villanueva from the media-im-
posed American dream, resulting in their rejection of the capitalist mode of
production. Instead, they re-embraced the indigenous model of regenerative
economy and the community-based art-making, promoted these concepts
through their respective art. The section ends with Russell Storer’s seminal
research on the exhibition history of Australia, which emerged as the main
hub for contemporary Asian art in the 1990s. Assessing that art can be seen
as a visual manifestation of collective perceptions of time, Storer explores the
transition of Australia’s postcolonial cultural identity through artworks and
4 Yu-Chieh Li and Midori Yamamura
exhibition history during the Cold War, which was decisively influenced by
the traumatic experience of the country’s participation in the Vietnam War.
The second section, “Visual Gallery and Primary Documents,” features art-
works and writings by five artists from East and Southeast Asia that further
articulate postcolonial struggles. In some cases, the decolonial process did not
necessarily come with the independence of the occupied territory. Hiroshi Suna-
iri’s excerpts from the film FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE (2020) reveals
Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa’s complex rejection of the dominant
neocolonial narrative in works that capture the relationships formed between
African American soldiers and Okinawan women. In the subsequent section,
the Vietnamese and American artist Dinh Q. Lê critically examines the Vietnam
War (1955–1975) by way of disclosing the discrepancies between American
perception of the war and the lived experience of the Vietnamese, juxtaposing
war imagery from popular media with interviews of Vietnamese war survivors,
or restaging the scenes from the war. In the next section, Chinese-Indonesian
artist FX Harsono questions the legitimacy of the dominant history of Indo-
nesia by disclosing a little-known event—the ethnic cleansing of Indonesian
Chinese (1947–1949)—through his written accounts and video documentaries
of site visits to cemeteries as well as his father’s archival photographs.
Occupying a key position in the first island chain of US bases, Taiwan
remains a battlefield for an extension of the Cold War conflicts. In Topa
Project (2012–), Kao Jun-Honn depicts the exploitation of the land and
people in Taiwan that resulted from multiple waves of imperialism and neo-
liberalization. His site-specific drawings, documentaries, and social actions
are inspired by “critical geology”—his collaborative research with blue-collar
workers and indigenous tribes. The section concludes with Malaysian artist
Au Sow Yee’s archival research that reveals the continuities and discontinui-
ties of cultures bound by sea routes and diaspora in South-East Asia, poign-
antly captured in her video series Kris Project (2016–2020). These primary
documents reveal postcolonial struggles in Asia against local authoritarian
powers and distant empires. The artist-led research, which incorporates
media images, becomes its own form of storytelling. Situated at the center of
the collection, the artists’ writings and artworks offer a fuller understanding
of the issues that spun out of the Cold War.
As stated earlier, the lasting influence of the Cold War can still be felt in
Asia. Section Three, “The Continuous Cold War,” opens with Yu-Chieh Li’s
investigation of Post-Mao Chinese art under the country’s turn toward a neo-
liberal economy in the 1980s, which resulted in the development of a hybrid
system where the Cold War’s dichotomy was no longer applicable to foreign
policy or internal propaganda. As observed in the works by Wang Guangyi,
Song Ta, and Polit-Sheer-Form Office, artists became increasingly critical of
domestic policies that aimed to ignite consumerism and control the market
without liberal democracy. Following Li’s essay is Rebecca Jennison’s analy-
sis of Okinawan artist Chikako Yamashiro’s three-channel video Mud Man
(2016). With close scrutiny, Jennison brings out conflicting histories and
memories of Japan’s colonial past in Okinawa and Jeju Islands, South Korea.
 Introduction 5
Partially shot in Vietnam, Yamashiro’s Mud Man reveals the neoimperialism
underlying everyday life in Okinawa and elsewhere, awakening her audience
to the ongoing consequences of the Cold War, hidden in plain sight.
The legacy of the Cold War is irreducible in the politics and culture of
the two Koreas and beyond. In the final chapter, Jung Joon Lee examines
another critical outcome of the Cold War—namely, transnational interracial
adoption. Despite European and Japanese precedents, it was the Korean War
that brought widespread awareness of transnational adoption to the Ameri-
can and European public. This chapter examines the ways in which the lin-
earity of Cold War temporality is complicated by French photographer and
Korean adoptee Agnès Dherbeys’s photographs of Korean birth mothers
and her own adoptive father; in turn, it exposes the neoliberal effects under-
pinning the politics of Cold War temporality.
The three sections of this volume elucidate new research across East and
Southeast Asia, discerning the complexities of the Cold War beyond the
dichotomy of capitalism and communism. Shedding new light on heterogene-
ous events, the volume invites readers to examine asymmetrical power relations
on the national and international levels in East and Southeast Asia, to stimulate
reflection rather than pushing particular answers. In these areas, the social pre-
dicaments generated by the neoliberal economy and neoimperial relationships
with global super powers offered critical views and insights into postcolonial
and postsocialist subjects. Visual arts addressed in this book reveal the varied
perspectives that emerged from the processes of decolonialization, whereby
artists seek to resolve relationships with colonial and neocolonial powers.
Neoliberalism exploited the newly independent, economically insignifi-
cant, politically unstable countries; yet, media disguised its impact. These new
nations often inherited the economic system that had been established under
colonial administration, resembling an inverted pyramid where wealth was not
to be distributed among the workers but collected at the narrow end; the elites
were supported by the neocolonial matrix. As seen in the cases of Indonesia,
the Philippines, and Taiwan, decolonial practices resonated with what Wal-
ter Mignolo designated as “delinking” from the authoritarian states, which
involves a search for alternative values.12 As in the case of Tahimik’s Perfumed
Nightmare, decolonization does not always occur immediately after national
independence. In Taiwan and Okinawa, decolonization took place without
national independence. Still it is in this decolonial process that artists con-
ducted new research that brings a more holistic view of the Cold War. In this
respect, regional histories help determine the future of our humanities.

Note to readers
Asian names are spelled how they are usually published in English: in some
examples, we follow the traditional order (family name before given name),
such as Chuang Che or Wang Guangyi. Some people, however, upon emi-
grating to the English-speaking world, adopted the western order when
transliterating their name, such as C.C. Wang or Chu-tsing Li.
6 Yu-Chieh Li and Midori Yamamura
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all authors, the five blind reviewers and the editors
and production team at Routledge, particularly Simon Bates and Malcolm
Murfett. This book is supported by the PSC-CUNY Research Award, The
City University of New York, and the Faculty Research Fund of the School
of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales.

Notes
1 Marshall McLuhan, “Weapons War of the Icons,” in Understanding Media: The
Extension of Man (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1964, reprint, 1994),
338–39.
2 See, e.g., Serge Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract
Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983); Michael Krenn, Fall-out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American
Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);
Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Culture Policy and the Cold War (MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013); John J. Curley, Global Art and the Cold
War (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2018).
3 Yuka Tsuchiya and Kishi Toshihiko, eds. De-Centering the Cultural Cold War: The
U.S. and Asia (Tokyo: Kokusai Publishing Co. 2009); 15–19; Tony Day and Maya
Ht Liem, eds. Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast
Asia (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2010). However,
under the Kennedy administration, there was a policy change. As discussed in
Chapter Five of this volume, the government again promoted fine art in overseas
with nationalistic tones. For example, a 1964 memorandum indicates promoting
the “dynamic image” of Abstract Expressionism as a symbol of “democracy” and
to assert the “creative free spirit which is America.” Robert Sivard, “The Venice
Biennale Art Exhibit,” a government memorandum to “Mr. Harris” (first name
not given), August 14, 1964. USIA (64-045). Venice Biennale Files. Record Unit
321. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.
4 Sun Ge, “The Epistemological Implications of East Asian Ways of Seeing,” Taiwan:
A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 70 (2008): 213–44; Chen Kuan-Hsing,
“Why is ‘Great Reconciliation’ Im/Possible? De-Cold War/Decolonization, or
Modernity and Its Tears,” Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 43
(2011): 41–110.
5 Marc Galliocchio, The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and
the Fall of the Japanese Empire (New York: Columbia University Press).
6 Gerard Greenfield, “Bandung Redux: Imperialism and Anti-Globalization
Nationalisms in Southeast Asia,” in Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded,
eds. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (2005): 167.
7 Box 4162, RG 53, The National Archives.
8 Sergey Radchenko. Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End
of the Cold War. Oxford Studies in International History Series. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014.
9 Edward W. Said, “Freedom from Domination in the Future,” in Culture and
Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 282.
10 Michael Barratt-Brown, After Imperialism (rev., ed. New York: Humanities,
1970), viii.
11 Karl Polanyi, “Our Obsolete Market Mentality,” in Primitive, Archaic, and
Modern Economies, ed. George Dalton (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 74.
12 For the idea of “delinking” and “decoloniality,” see Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality
Is Far from Over, and So Must Be Decoloniality,” Afterall 43 (2017): 40.
Part I

Joining the game

Trauma and regionalism
1 “The New Chinese Landscape”
in the Cold War era
Lesley Ma

From 1966, as the Cultural Revolution was reaching full force in mainland
China, until 1968, The New Chinese Landscape: Six Contemporary Chinese
Artists toured the United States. Sponsored by the John D. Rockefeller III
(JDR 3rd) Fund and managed by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) in
New York, it was the first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese art in the
postwar Western hemisphere.1 Organized by Chu-tsing Li, a Chinese-Ameri-
can art historian, the exhibition introduced a new style of painting, one that
not only referenced traditional Chinese landscape painting but also incorpo-
rated the ideas and techniques of American and European abstraction. The
exhibition featured 60 works by mainland-born artists living in Taiwan and
the United States: C.C. Wang, a mid-career artist in New York; Chen Chi-
Kwan, an architect and artist who had moved from New York to Taichung;
Yu Cheng-yao, a self-taught senior painter in Taipei; and Liu Kuo-sung,
Chuang Che, and Fong Chung-ray, three young painters of Wuyue huahui
(Fifth Moon Painting Society), a modernist art group in Taiwan. The timing
was remarkable. While the Red Guard denounced tradition and artists pro-
duced socialist-realist paintings in mainland China, this exhibition brought
to America a cosmopolitan version of a traditional painting genre, created by
Chinese artists living outside of the mainland, thus announcing divergent,
contrasting developments of art on either side of the Bamboo Curtain.
A multi-city US tour of Chinese contemporary art at the height of the
Cold War invites further exploration of the complex web of forces involved
in its making. Against the backdrop of Cold War geopolitics where the
Republic of China’s Kuomintang (Nationalist) government in Taiwan was
an American ally on the Pacific Rim and the only “China” recognized by the
Free World, the exhibition was a product of the alignment of various inter-
ests: a US-based Chinese curator championing artists in Taiwan; a group of
young artists modernizing their painting traditions by embracing American
and European modernist abstraction; and funding from a prestigious New
York-based private foundation promoting Asian art in the US. The exhibi-
tion press release effused positive internationalism:

Recently emerged and flourishing are many painters of all ages whose
techniques refer to the great and ancient tradition of Oriental painting,
10 Lesley Ma
but carry it forward in many highly personal ways due to the impact of
modern Western art styles.2

Celebrating a highly adaptive and cosmopolitan version of Chinese art, the

statement announced an unprecedented moment where Chinese painting—a
discipline with its own system of training, technique, vocabulary, and circu-
lation—discovered new creative potential by absorbing Western, “modern”
influences and entered transnational dialogues. While international exchange
in the form of touring exhibitions is a familiar trope in cultural diplomacy,
that an American private foundation proselytizing modernist ideals sup-
ported Chinese painters honoring centuries-old ink painting philosophies,
and that landscape painting, a traditional art form, found affinity in mod-
ernist abstract art from America and Europe, are curious phenomena. This
chapter thus parses the factors contributing to these developments.
Previous scholarship on the exhibition has focused on the personal triumphs
of the artists. Indeed, a celebratory exhibition at the National Museum of
History in Taipei prior to the tour demonstrated the endorsement from the
Taiwanese establishment and officially crowned the Fifth Moon artists as
the vanguard of Taiwanese art. As a result of the exhibition, Liu Kuo-sung,
Chuang Che, and Fong Chung-ray, who had never been abroad, received JDR
3rd travel grants to the US and Europe that transformed their lives and careers.3
However, the geopolitical circumstances and art historical significance of the
exhibition merit deeper examination. My research reveals a curatorial frame-
work and the aesthetic choices conditioned by Cold War geopolitics that
impacted the modernization of Chinese painting in the mid-20th century.
The exhibition cannot be understood without taking into consideration the
underlying national interests—even though its organization did not involve
any government; these included American cultural influence in Taiwan and
the Nationalist’s self-promotion as the bastion of legitimate and enlightened
Chinese culture. For the curator and artists, these forces created an urgency—
as well as an opportunity—to construct a modern Chinese cultural identity
distinct from that of Socialist China and the prewar era. They chose landscape
painting at this critical juncture for its aesthetic value in Chinese culture, its
role as a platform for intellectual expression during national crises, and its for-
mal and conceptual affinity with abstract art, the lingua franca of the art world
at the time. On a macro level, their work expanded the political dimension
of landscape painting and brought new meanings to the genre. The exhibi-
tion, conceived in part due to the physical inaccessibility of mainland China,
became a marker for the artistic and ideological differences—and synthesized
the artistic with the ideological—on either side of the Taiwan Strait. As a
result, Taiwan, a former Japanese colony and a peripheral island in Chinese
history, was elevated to become the new center for Chinese art, expanding
its geographical footprint to include the Chinese diaspora in America. The
circulation of The New Chinese Landscape in the US, as this chapter lays bare,
inadvertently validated contemporary ink painting from Taiwan and the dias-
pora as the representative voice of Chinese art in the postwar decades.4
 The New Chinese Landscape 11
The geopolitics of the exhibition
Chu-tsing Li (1920–2014), who immigrated to the US from China in 1947
and was one of the first scholars to establish modern and contemporary Chi-
nese art as a field of study in postwar America, conceived The New Chi-
nese Landscape in 1964 under serendipitous circumstances. At the time an
art history professor at University of Iowa, on a research trip to Taiwan on
Yuan dynasty paintings, Li saw the works of several young painters in Taipei,
describing his discoveries as follows:

I found the situation in art in…Taiwan very much the same as that of
the time when I left China. There is still a sharp dichotomy between
traditionalism on the one hand and Westernization on the other. Young
artists simply have to choose between the two, but are not supposed
to embrace both….However…I did encounter a number of interesting
artists who seem to be able to absorb both the Chinese tradition and
Western influence to achieve a new expression. The number of artists in
this direction is very small, but, from my point of view, they represent
the genuine creative effort in China today outside the mainland.5

After almost 20 years abroad, Li seemed delighted to observe novel attempts

to solve a lingering issue that in his view had rendered Chinese art stagnant.
His observations summarized the high stakes for 20th-century Chinese art;
at the heart of the question of modernity in painting is its compatibility with
Western art. This perennial question was raised by the May Fourth movement
in 1919, when “traditionalism” and “Westernization” became two sides of
the cultural debate. Painting practices in China since then were divided into
“national painting” (guohua), which referred to painting in ink on paper or
silk following the centuries-old tradition of Chinese ink painting, and “West-
ern painting” (xihua), which employed materials, techniques, and styles of
late-nineteenth, early-20th-century European painting. Early 20th-century
ink painters like Huang Binhong (1865–1955) and Pan Tianshou (1897–
1971) cited traditions while innovating in brushwork, composition, and use
of color.6 Their peers in oil painting, who had studied in Europe, such as Lin
Fengmian (1900–1991) and Pang Xunqin (1906–1985), experimented with
Cubist and Fauvist styles.7 Both camps argued for the progressive modernity
and patriotic motivations of their chosen medium. However, their endeavors
were interrupted by the Japanese invasion and the subsequent wars from
1937 to 1949.
When the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan in late 1949 after
the catastrophic defeat by the Chinese communists, they brought with them
the unfinished cultural debate. The dichotomy between “traditionalism” and
“Westernization” in postwar Taiwan was further complicated by colonial
Japanese influence. During this tumultuous period, the Nationalists strug-
gled to maintain peaceful governance on the island, where mainland refu-
gees clashed with the local Taiwanese, who had previously been steeped in
12 Lesley Ma
Japanese culture. Chinese ink painting—formerly excluded by the Japanese
from official exhibitions8—was reinstated by the Nationalists in an effort to
decolonize society and accommodate the tastes of the mainland elite. The
colonial aesthetic standards, once a symbol of modernity for the colonial
subject—with their Japanese-style painting (nihonga) and oil and gouache
paintings (yōga)—fell out of favor due to political incorrectness. In this era
when political ideology reigned over artistic merit, tensions divided the aca-
demic art community between painters who had trained in Japan and those
trained on the mainland.9
The post-colonial reorientation compounded by a Cold War mentality
heightened the urgency of reclaiming a national, Chinese culture. Under
martial law, the Nationalist government’s staunch conservatism exerted strict
control over intellectuals and artistic productions. The quest for a national cul-
ture in Taiwan—to shed the peripheral, colonial identity and differentiate itself
from the PRC—intertwined with the country’s efforts to establish an interna-
tional reputation. Being recognized, especially by its international allies, as the
sole, authoritative representative of Chinese culture became a priority. This
position was bolstered by the presence of the Palace Museum treasures that
the Nationalists had brought to Taiwan in 1948 and 1949. Symbolically and
politically, the museum collections, comprised of the crème de la crème of the
imperial treasures, ranging from prehistoric artifacts and paintings and calligra-
phy to decorative arts and first-edition classics, bestowed the dynastic heritage
on Taiwan and transformed it into the center of Chinese culture. Scholars from
all over the world who wished to research classical Chinese culture turned to
Taiwan to access primary materials; Chu-tsing Li’s 1964 trip there was for this
purpose. The collections thus became an asset for diplomatic soft power and
cultural development in Taiwan for the years to come.
The Palace Museum collection’s role in diplomacy was best demonstrated
by a landmark touring exhibition to five major US museums from May 1961
to June 1962: The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; The Metro-
politan Museum in New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Art Institute
of Chicago; and De Young Museum in San Francisco. These encyclopedic
institutions in major metropolises, the sites of American cultural power and
cosmopolitan taste, all hold impressive collections of Asian art and artifacts.10
Feeding into the American imagination about the glorious imperial past of
Chinese culture, the collection highlights tour testified to the ROC’s legiti-
macy and confidence on the international stage, cementing the island nation
as the representative of Chinese civilization. This in fact was the first time
that the imperial collection had traveled abroad in 30 years.11 Making the
US its first destination served as an indication that America had overtaken
Europe as the Western cultural powerhouse and signified the importance of
the relationship to the ROC.
In the immediate postwar years, as the threat of military conflict with the
PRC persisted, the Nationalist government was eager to secure its international
alliances, with the US being its top priority. Initially the US government was
ambivalent to throw its support behind them, despite the shared ideology of
 The New Chinese Landscape 13
anti-Communism. Only after the Korean War broke out, however, did that alli-
ance take root.12 The Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty in 1955 officially
sealed the United States’ commitment to the Republic of China in Taiwan
and acknowledged its sovereignty and international stature. Since then, Amer-
ican aid on all fronts—including economic, military, medical, educational—
poured into Taiwan along with American arts and culture. Literature and the
arts mostly came through the library of the United States Information Services
(USIS), the government-run outlet for American information following the
State Department policy of fostering exchange with allying countries to curb
the spread of Communism.13 Private organizations operated with a similar mis-
sion. The JDR 3rd Fund, bankrolled by a scion of the powerful Rockefeller fam-
ily, brought Asian art and artists to America,14 with the hope of spreading the
influence of American culture and values worldwide through cultural exchange.

The rise of the Fifth Moon

In this complex cultural ecology, the Nationalist government-backed con-
servative orthodoxy dominated the art establishment, yet a laissez-faire atti-
tude arose in parallel that allowed for pluralistic artistic explorations. The
artists of the Fifth Moon Painting Society—half of the artists included in
the exhibition—emerged under such circumstances. Born on the mainland
and emigrating to Taiwan as adolescents around 1949, they were form-
atively shaped by the wars and their aftermath, entangled in the nation’s
self-strengthening aspirations. Their experimentations in art were motivated
by a desperate need to find expression for their personal experiences of dis-
placement and loss of national identity, as well as by an intellectual responsi-
bility to redefine Chinese culture from outside the mainland. The Society’s
founding members—who named themselves after the Parisian avant-garde
group Salon de Mai (“fifth moon” is the transliteration of “May”)—were
graduates of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, the country’s
most prestigious department of Fine Art. Fifth Moon’s first annual exhibi-
tion in 1957 announced their deviation from the official course. They first
pursued early 20th-century European modern art styles, including Cubism
and Surrealism. Around the early 1960s, however, they turned to Euro-
pean and American abstract art—primarily Informel and Abstract Expres-
sionism—that they had learned through reproductions in American books
and magazines. Though they were attracted to the freedom of expression,
virtuosic individualism, and new visual possibilities offered by the abstract
styles popular in the Free World, they also sought inspiration from their
own cultural heritage, especially landscape painting. Three young abstract
painters in The New Chinese Landscape were core members of this group: Liu
Kuo-sung (b. 1932), who had co-founded the Society in 1956 and worked
primarily in ink and paper; Chuang Che (b. 1934), who joined the group in
1957 and devoted his efforts to oil painting and collage; and Fong Chung-
ray (b. 1933), an artist working in abstract ink paintings, joined Fifth Moon
in 1961.
14 Lesley Ma
The young artists’ innovations in painting first came as a shock to society
but gradually attracted official support as the government learned of con-
temporary art’s currency in the international art world. The ROC’s partici-
pation in several early editions of the Bienal de São Paulo—an international
showcase of contemporary art founded in 1951 and organized by national
pavilions—from 1957 to 1973, instigated this change of attitude.15 Upon
the revelation that abstract art was favored by the biennial, the ROC govern-
ment devised a strategy to “introduce the long history of the great Chinese
culture” and show “radical new art” that emphasized the country’s proud
tradition as well as its contemporaneity with the rest of the world.16 To the
ROC, this was an opportunity to boost the country’s international status
by showcasing its cultural assets—exhibiting replicas of Chinese antiquities
alongside contemporary paintings—to edge out the PRC’s presence in the
cultural arena. The international exhibition prompted the government to
recognize “radical new art” for its international appeal, even as they contin-
ued to champion traditional art. Fifth Moon’s Liu Kuo-sung, Chuang Che,
and Fong Chung-ray, as well as young artists of other avant-garde groups,
sent their abstract paintings abroad at the government’s recommendation.
Abstract painting thus became “a tool that was being experimented with
and improved upon in the diplomatic war between Nationalist and Com-
munist China.”17 Artistic innovations of this period were understood within
the framework of national reputation and the context of the Cold War era
cultural war. Indeed, before The New Chinese Landscape embarked on its
American tour, the National Museum of History hosted a preview exhibi-
tion, only because it would be traveling to the US under the sponsorship of
the Fund.18 Though Li’s exhibition was organized independently from gov-
ernmental initiatives, it was inseparable from these factors. Yet Li also pushed
the boundaries beyond the conventional national construct.

The new landscape painting

Li chose landscape painting—shanshui hua, paintings of mountains and riv-
ers—as the exhibition’s theme because it “is traditionally the most respected
mode in Chinese painting”19 and “distinguishes the Chinese tradition from
those of other parts of the world.”20 Yet the choice also has important his-
torical and political connotations, ones that reflect the Cold War realities. A
genre of painting that evolved from the Chinese understanding and depic-
tion of the cosmological world in the second century BCE, landscape paint-
ing emerged in the late Tang dynasty (618–907), reached an impressive
height in the Northern Song period (960–1127), and further developed
into a subject matter with profound humanistic meanings in the Southern
Song era (1127–1279). It was the preferred genre of the educated elite—the
literati. A product of visual observation of nature, imagination, and skill-
ful use of the brush and ink, landscape painting often hovers between the
realistic and the fantastic and is defined by an aspiration for unity between
the cosmos and the artist. While it could depict actual sights and scenery,
 The New Chinese Landscape 15
it places greater emphasis on the role of the painter’s mind in the act of
reflection; thus, abstraction is inherent in landscape paintings. The Southern
Song dynasty, forced to move its capital to the south with a much dimin-
ished territory due to foreign invasion from the north, marked a time when
landscape painting served as a vehicle for literati artists to express feelings of
frustration, longing, comfort, and patriotism in the aftermath of invasions,
forced migrations, and political turmoil.21 It thus became a link between the
personal and the national. Thereafter, it sustained these symbolic meanings
and acquired new ones, as an outlet for declaring aspirations and express-
ing personal misfortunes, longings for redemption, opposition to the status
quo, or celebration of enlightenment. Most of these meanings subscribe to
the lineage of the educated class looking to nature for guidance, solace, and
strength for renewal.
In the 1920s and ’30s, facing territorial and economic threats from the
West, landscape painting acquired a strong nationalistic tenor, as an exten-
sion of the literati sense of cultural responsibility. Ink painting became
known as “national painting,” and many artists insisted on painting ink land-
scapes, with references to a wide spectrum of styles, from the courtly, mon-
umental landscapes of the Northern Song to the lyrical scenes of the Ming
(1368–1644), during a national identity crisis to assert a patriotic, unapolo-
getic Chinese identity. Ink painting thus became synonymous with Chinese
modernity and closely linked with national pride.22 Landscape painting’s his-
torical significance as an allegory for national territory and a spiritual dwell-
ing of the learned gentry, as well as its versatility in accommodating various
usages and meanings, is crucial in understanding Chu-tsing Li’s curatorial
framework as well as the artists’ choice of genre.
Li, as a scholar of Yuan (1271–1368) paintings, was especially sensitive
to the aspect of landscape painting as a salvage operation and a marker of
dignity for intellectuals. Many Yuan painters resisted the Mongolian rulers
and directed their feelings of loss, resentment, and humiliation to landscape
painting, bringing the genre’s development to a high level. The forced retreat
of the Nationalists in 1949, along with two million refugees, to Taiwan,
represents the most recent southern migration in Chinese political history.
With this knowledge, one can recognize the lens through which Li viewed
contemporaneous painters who were transforming their frustration toward
their country’s misfortune into a new version of landscape painting. For
the diasporic artists and curator, “landscape” represented the homeland they
were forced to abandon, and a literati tradition with which they wished to
maintain dialogue. Thus, Li’s choice of landscape painting as the exhibition’s
theme underscores its historical and political associations, in addition to its
artistic significance; the artists’ engagement with the landscape tradition
continued the genre’s art historical legacy, even as they sought to update it
in unorthodox ways.
With landscape painting as an affirmation of cultural identity, the 60 paint-
ings in The New Chinese Landscape formed a strong statement on the genre’s
vitality, its connection to historical memories and contemporary conditions,
16 Lesley Ma
and its evocative potential. So, although it was a Chinese artistic tradition
to turn to landscape painting after a major political upheaval, the young
painters of the Fifth Moon Painting Society, Liu Kuo-sung, Chuang Che,
and Fong Chung-ray, chose to do so while shedding the formal qualities of
traditional landscape paintings. Inspired by modernist abstract paintings in
Europe and America, and especially the latter, they invented techniques and
materials. In other words, Fifth Moon artists made their paintings look less
like those by their predecessors, but maintained the same aesthetic and con-
ceptual backbone, while striving for affinities to the language of international
abstraction. Their motivation was to rebel against the status quo and connect
more deeply with Chinese culture, a paradoxical objective that allowed for-
eign painting ideas to catalyze and boost their cultural capital. This choice
signaled a new kind of painting under the unique geopolitical and cultural
conditions of Taiwan.
The Fifth Moon artists’ Western-inspired abstraction appeared in the early
1960s. Liu Kuo-sung’s signature technique of removing fibers from cot-
ton paper after painting it with ink to reveal sinewy white lines as the new
“textured strokes” developed in early 1963 and was prominently featured
in The New Chinese Landscape. Liu’s works in the American tour had none
of the traditional landscape painting forms or structures, yet they embodied
its spirited atmosphere. Early Spring (1964) (Figure 1.1), a hanging scroll
with black masses of ink swept across the paper: left to right, top to bot-
tom. A large void occupies the center and bottom half of the composition.
The interplay between black and white makes the painting dynamic. This
calligraphic abstraction—though no calligraphic principle was exercised—
conjures no landscape image. Yet the title references a prized possession of
Taipei’s Palace Museum—the landscape masterpiece by the Northern Song
painter Guo Xi (ca. 1020–1090), whose majestic painting and influential
theories greatly inspired Liu. He used “Early Spring” to name at least three
works in this period, an homage not in form but in spirit. In Liu’s work,
Chu-tsing Li saw a quality that resonated with both Chinese and Western
painting: abstraction was a way “of capturing the mystery and essence of
nature—still a traditional characteristic of Chinese painting.”23 Here, Li
asserted an important concept of his exhibition, that classical ink painting
had long shown ambivalence toward representation, a revelation that Liu
had also addressed in his writings.
While Liu subtracted substance from the painting’s surface, Chuang Che
added layers. Beginning in 1963, Chuang pasted paper onto canvas and
slathered it with broad slashes and washes of oil and ink, fully embracing the
unruliness of the painterly instinct. One of the most poignant examples in
the exhibition was in the collage style, representing a state of brokenness and
turmoil with a hint at reconstruction. Sublimation (1964) possesses the mon-
umentality of a mountain peak looming above stacked rocks, a classic paint-
ing composition (Figure 1.2). Yet Chuang’s “mountain” was constructed by
overlapping paper and paint washes. No brushwork is distinguishable; only
saturated masses. He consciously integrated the ink wash effect with the
 The New Chinese Landscape 17

Figure 1.1 Third hanging scroll from left in the vitrine: Liu Kuo-sung, Early Spring,
1964, ink on paper, hanging scroll, 86.4 x 55.3 cm. The first two hanging
scrolls from left and all handscrolls laid flat are works by Fong Chung-ray;
the rest are by Liu. The New Chinese Landscape, 1968, negative 38802F,
Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.

collage technique while letting accident reign. The inscription on the right
by the artist’s father, a renowned calligrapher, obscures the link between the
forms and a mountainous scene: “So elated I have forgotten myself and kept
painting. But it doesn’t look like anything.”24 The ambivalence suggests that
the elder Chuang saw traces of the xieyi (writing the mind) method—albeit
a measured kind—where the artist would let the ink and paper interact to
achieve an uninhibited state. “Sublimation” thus refers to how the spirit of
painting—and of landscape—renders all form and content secondary. Here,
Chuang Che shows that the motivation for abstraction, rooted in Chinese
painting philosophy, is first and foremost the painter’s emotions and beyond
the scope of figuration.
By 1961, Fong Chung-ray had already forgone any kind of figuration or
traditional brushwork. Fong was a co-founder of Sihai huahui (Four Seas
Painting Society), which was comprised of painters in the navy, and their
artistic mandate had never followed classical conventions. Around 1963, he
began to create idiosyncratic ink marks in different shades and gradations by
sweeping rolled palm fibers across paper. To make marks with an instrument
so unwieldy, Fong had to raise his arms, putting him farther from the paint-
ing surface, which guaranteed little adherence to formal principles and liter-
ally distanced him from the mannerisms and habits of traditional painting.
Instead, the materiality of ink and paper took over. Chu-tsing Li thought
Fong’s ink marks resembled “the flung-ink technique of Jackson Pollock.”
18 Lesley Ma

Figure 1.2 Chuang Che, Sublimation, 1964, ink and paper collage on canvas, 119 x
86 cm. Pink Bear Collection (Elgin Chan and Anne Goh). © Chuang Che.
Exhibited in The New Chinese Landscape.

Yet, “he is never so forceful or violent as the American expressionist.”25 Li

considered Fong’s work the closest to Western modern art in his pursuit for
“more universal and absolute of form,” but noted that it originated “from
the traditional approach to nature.”26 While his work and Pollock’s share an
affinity for the dynamic appearance of their marks, Fong’s paintings retain
 The New Chinese Landscape 19
a subtler, more introverted emotion, much like the temperament of literati
paintings. And like the work of his Fifth Moon peers, Fong’s abstraction
relies on the contrast between inked and blank areas for movement and vari-
ety on the painting’s surface and an illusion of depth in the pictorial space.
His paintings, all titled by numbers indicating the year and sequence of pro-
duction, avoid representational connections. Yet they were all mounted on
scrolls. The diffuse edges of the ink masses, created by the unruly palm fib-
ers, became one of the most recognizable features of Fong’s paintings from
this period (Figure 1.3).
In their own ways, the three artists retained a nuanced relationship with
classical Chinese painting. More prominently, though, their work reveals an
obsession with surface textures, a strong feature of mid-century American
abstract painting. It also resonates with the “textured strokes” technique
in landscape painting that provides a tactile quality to the forms of moun-
tains and rocks. The artists seem to be taking the best of both worlds—the
features that mattered the most to them—to make their work legible to
a broader audience. This characteristic is also true for C.C. Wang (1907–
2003), who was, in addition to being a painter, considered one of the best
connoisseurs of his generation. Wang moved to New York from Shanghai
in 1948 and never returned. Experiencing the heyday of New York Abstract
Expressionism prompted his interest in the painting’s surface. To form the
underlying structure of a painting, he used what Jerome Silbergeld later
called “impressed texture”—using crumpled paper to dab ink marks onto
paper—before applying brushwork.27 Thus, in his paintings, the brushwork,
the foremost element of painterly endeavor in Chinese art, had become sup-
plementary to textural and compositional concerns (Figure 1.4).
Two other artists did not make abstract ink paintings but were selected
based on their landscape styles. Chen Chi-kwan (1921–2007), a modernist
architect who worked under the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in Boston,

Figure 1.3 Fong Chung-ray, 65-35, 1965, ink and color on paper, handscroll, 56 x
119 cm. Collection of the artist. © Fong Chung-ray. Exhibited in The New
Chinese Landscape.
20 Lesley Ma

Figure 1.4 C. C. Wang, Sailing Boats and Misty Mountains, 1964, ink and color
on paper, 40 x 60 cm. Collection Museum Rietberg, Gift of Charles A.
Drenowatz. © Museum Rietberg. Exhibited in The New Chinese Landscape.

drew lines using a traditional brush and incorporated multiple perspectives

within the pictorial frame (Figure 1.5). That he and C.C. Wang, who both
lived in New York, remained devoted to ink landscape and renovated it based
on contemporary ideas and their own expertise testifies to the ways that
landscape paintings could accommodate visual and technical varieties and
fulfill cosmopolitan aspirations. Li’s inclusion of their works expanded the
geography of Chinese painting and put New York on the map of Chinese
art. By adding Yu Cheng-yao (1898–1993), a retired, disenchanted army
general whom he described as the “Chinese Grandpa Moses” or a “Chi-
nese Henri Rousseau,”28 Li championed the practice of an outsider who had
been excluded from the Taiwanese cultural world, further challenging the
status quo. The only artist in the exhibition who did not cite Western art
and lacked formal art training, Yu painted boxy landscapes with raw, clumsy
textured strokes that he invented to interpret the spectacular scenery of the
mainland in his memory (Figure 1.6).
The artists in The New Chinese Landscape, never before discussed in the same
conversation, demonstrated their effort in deviating from traditional expres-
sions. All the artists in the exhibition harnessed literati aspirations and com-
plex emotions in their paintings. What also united them—perhaps the most
important commonality—was their experience of exile after the Communist
takeover of the mainland. They either left China for the US before 1949—as
in the cases of C.C. Wang and Chen Chi-kwan—or moved to Taiwan with the
Nationalists—as with Yu Cheng-yao and the Fifth Moon artists. (Chen moved
from New York to Taiwan in the early 1960s). To varying degrees, their land-
scapes fulfilled a recuperative mission, whether as a therapeutic outlet for their
 The New Chinese Landscape 21

Figure 1.5 Chen Chi-Kwan, Panorama, 1957, ink and watercolor on paper, 23 x
122 cm. FranzArt Collection, Hong Kong. © Chen Chi-kwan Education
and Cultural Foundation. Exhibited in The New Chinese Landscape.

displacement, or as critical device pushing for change. Beneath the landscape

forms retained by the senior artists lies a deep sense of loss and longing. Yu
Cheng-yao’s paintings are said to be his way of surrounding himself with the
landscape and the vista he desired—as a form of consolation.29 C.C. Wang,
never returning to live in China, later admitted in the 1970s that he “misses
his home country tremendously,” giving his lifelong devotion to landscape
an emotional context.30 In Chuang Che’s Untitled, a verse from a poem by
Tang-era poet Du Fu (712–770), “The country has fallen; only the mountains
and rivers remain,” incorporated into the composition, particularly captured
the ethos of the postwar Chinese diaspora. It applied the historical experience
of “a country being torn apart”31 to the trauma of the present, quite literally
through the poetry and the patched surface of the painting (Figure 1.7). Like
Chuang, the other young painters, while they shared the nostalgia and mel-
ancholy, drastically transformed the visuality of landscape painting that signi-
fied a broader ideological shift. Their migration and new identity in Taiwan
prompted a decisive break from the traditional styles.
From the outset, Li’s formulation of Chinese art for the exhibition com-
plied with the parameters drawn by Cold War divisions.32 In this sense, the
New Chinese Landscape was not just the theme of the exhibition but a
geopolitical metaphor, indicating that the center of Chinese contemporary
art—proclaimed and supported by this exhibition—had shifted away from
the mainland, and that the boundaries of Chinese art had been expanded
partly by the political and cultural ideology of the Free World and partly
by the location and trajectory of diasporic communities. For this reason,
artworks that embraced the expressionist quality of American abstraction
were heralded as modern. It is also why Wang, Chen, and Yu—three older
artists who were never recognized or placed in the Taiwanese artistic dis-
course—were included in this narrative. Also worth noting is that half of the
participating artists—Yu, Chen, and Fong—served in the Nationalist mil-
itary, which underscores how the wars set the stage for the exhibition. By
normalizing the condition of a “national” culture detached from its original
territory and recognizing the multiplicity of expressions of Chinese paint-
ing, this exhibition literally created a “new landscape” for Chinese art. It
ultimately celebrated the generative power of the diasporic condition in the
effort to internationalize Chinese painting and put artists working outside of
the mainland—especially in Taiwan—at the core of a new paradigm.
22 Lesley Ma

Figure 1.6 Yu Cheng-yao, Deep Ravine, Rushing Torrent, early 1960s, hanging scroll,
ink on paper, 135.8 x 68.4 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler
Museum, The Chu-tsing Li Collection, Gift of B U.K. Li in honor of
Chu-tsing Li and in memory of Yao-wen Kwang Li and Teri Ho Li. ©
President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Inscription on upper right: “Deep Ravine, Rushing Torrent. Gigantic rocks pile up on lofty peaks.
Spring waters, green as jade, splash across dangerous paths. White clouds hover above the emerald
valley. When can I return home? Done by Yu Cheng-yao”
 The New Chinese Landscape 23

Figure 1.7 Chuang Che, Homage to Du Fu, 1966, oil and collage on canvas, 152 x
112 cm. Collection of Longmen Art Projects Shanghai. © Chuang Che.

The exhibition’s Chinese title, Zhongguo shanshuihua de xin chuantong,

has a subtly different meaning from the English one. Translated as “The
new tradition of Chinese landscape painting,” it legitimized the artists’
approach that “absorb[ed] both the Chinese tradition and Western influence
to achieve a new expression.”33 By calling these works a “new tradition,”
Li seemed to suggest that the new style succeeds the older one. However,
not all artists subscribed to Li’s curatorial characterization of their work as
24 Lesley Ma
landscape painting. In a letter to his poet friend, Chuang Che expressed
this dissatisfaction: “Now I start to suspect that the motivation for Mr. Li
to make this exhibition was completely limited by a vision based on his-
tory and tradition. Otherwise why name it the new landscape tradition.”34
Chuang felt the characterization was inadequate because his artistic journey
had begun with Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist principles, in search
for their intersections with Chinese traditions.35 Liu Kuo-sung apparently
“only nod[ded] noncommittally” when responding to viewers who noted
traces of landscape elements in his abstract paintings.36 However, later in
life both artists adamantly discussed their art in the context of the landscape
tradition. Fong Chung-ray, who did not directly engage with the landscape
tradition but allowed his work to be categorized as such, acknowledged Li’s
projecting onto the young painters his hope that the genre would continue
to evolve.37 The unwillingness to be understood only through association
with tradition reveals the dilemma of modernizing Chinese painting. Yet the
reluctance to openly reject the curatorial interpretation was perhaps due to
a genuine appreciation for the curator’s belief in their work. Such support
from a Chinese-American curator and a prestigious American organization—
especially a powerful name like Rockefeller—was a weighty endorsement.
This phenomenon itself was a circumstance of the times, as American recog-
nition mattered greatly to these young artists desperately seeking validation.
Whether the Chinese title was a curatorial strategy to convince conservative
elites in Taiwan to accept the new kind of painting was unclear, but the
fact that renowned calligrapher and deputy director of the Palace Museum,
Chuang Yen (1899–1980, father of Chuang Che), inscribed the title for
the catalogue—a customary act for endorsement—supports this speculation.
The curator advocated for the construction of a new Chinese visuality that
drew from the political division across the Taiwan Strait, the diasporic experi-
ence, and the historically and politically significant subject of landscape, with
the consideration of what would benefit their work’s circulation in the West.

The exhibition and its reception

The exhibition took quite some effort for Li to realize. He approached Por-
ter McCray (1908–2000), the director of the JDR 3rd Fund in 1964, and
received the funding more than a year later. McCray, a former board chair-
man of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was one of the most
influential operators of American cultural diplomacy in the 20th century.38
In response to Li’s exhibition proposal, he wrote that Asian artists would
“come to grips with the spirit of Western painting rather than its outward
forms and in the process acquire a vitality which frequently produces a new
and stronger expression of their own.”39 What McCray meant by “the spirit
of Western painting” is anyone’s guess—bold individualism, unapologetic
confidence—the traits of New York Abstract Expressionist paintings that he
had championed through MoMA-organized exhibitions in Latin America,
Europe, and Asia throughout the postwar decades.40 His attitude toward
 The New Chinese Landscape 25
Asian art was telling of the foundation’s true view and what they had hoped
to achieve through these exchanges.
More telling is the inadequacy of the American cultural environment even
as it promoted its values internationally. Contemporary Chinese art did not
fit with the American imagination, conceptually or museologically. Asia
House (later Asia Society), a non-profit institution dedicated to traditional
Asian art also founded by the Rockefellers, did not have space for contempo-
rary art in their building.41 Li himself had determined that his exhibition was
“not for major museums,” so he targeted galleries in Midwestern “Big Ten”
universities. He explained, “the intellectual atmosphere of the universities,
the international outlook of their faculty and students, and the artistic inter-
est of their art departments, will be able to appreciate the ideas and aesthetic
quality of the exhibition.”42 The exhibition eventually reached 15 regional
and university museums across 12 states, mostly in the Midwest and sev-
eral on the coasts, including AFA’s gallery in New York’s Upper East Side.
The New Chinese Landscape served a niche, academic audience with limited
access to the mainstream powerbrokers and tastemakers.43 The physical lim-
itations and conventional thinking of the American museums dictated how
contemporary Chinese paintings were displayed and thus interpreted. At
the Cleveland Museum of Art, for example, the scroll paintings were placed
in vitrines reserved for classical Chinese art and artifacts.44 Such enclosures
gave the works an antiquated context that seemed to also highlight their
Chineseness.
The American media did not give much attention to the exhibition, com-
pared to the situation with the Palace Museum exhibition five years earlier.
Reviews were rather superficial, based on the dichotomy of Chinese and
Western, traditional and contemporary, regardless of whether the encounters
took place in cosmopolitan centers like New York or regional cities like Den-
ver or Ann Arbor. Only trained Chinese art experts were equipped to offer
more profound observations on technique or to decipher the references to
classical paintings. Moreover, the popularity of Abstract Expressionism had
waned in American art; Minimalism, Pop Art, Hard Edge, and more con-
ceptual practices had taken over. Therefore, the ideas of “abstraction” and
“landscape” that the exhibition championed hardly qualified as new attrac-
tions. Liu Kuo-sung and Chuang Che were the only ones mentioned in the
reviews. Liu’s work, especially due to its material of ink on paper, seemed to
be the easiest for American critics to digest. The Kansas City Star praised
Liu’s work for the “wonderful values of Chinese painting: a blend of aus-
terity and sensuousness, great delicacy, an almost ethereal atmosphere….”45
In his review of Liu’s debut at the Lee Nordness Gallery in January 1967,
a more discerning critic, John Canaday of The New York Times, noted the
ambiguity between pictorial space and the physical surface: “seas, mountains
and valleys appear and disappear…the paper seems to have been rent by
weights and forces that open up chasms—but it is only collage.”46 Canaday
called Liu “a dashing exponent of traditional Chinese landscape painting
hybridized with modern abstraction.”47 The surface textures were crucial for
26 Lesley Ma
the hybrid quality of the work, yet neither critic picked up on Liu’s new tech-
nique—Canaday even thought it was collage, while in fact Liu had removed
pieces of fiber from the paper—or the political significance of landscape.
More obvious to both of these critics was the rather vague “atmospheric
effect” that they had taken as an indicator of the Chinese quality. Liu’s work
seemed to them a natural heir to the traditions of Chinese painting, and Can-
aday’s deeming it “modern abstraction” certainly furthered its validation.
Chuang Che’s paintings—framed canvases covered in collage and gestural
strokes—were more challenging to Americans, even though the images dis-
played a strong resemblance to Abstract Expressionism. To some degree, the
paintings suffered as a result of Chuang’s use of the western medium, with
no immediately recognizable formal qualities of traditional Chinese art—
except for those with inscribed Chinese characters. At Chuang’s 1968 one-
man show in Ann Arbor, Jean Paul Slusser, a former art museum director of
the University of Michigan, criticized the work as “the stereotype of current
abstract expressionism…but retains some of its Chinese flavor.” 48 He contin-
ued: “Surprisingly enough, certain…tenets of Western abstract expressionism
seem not far removed from which have long been commonplaces of oriental
expression. Accordingly, Far Eastern painters have had little trouble in adapt-
ing to them.” Though he seemed impressed to find traces of Western abstract
expressionism in Chuang’s paintings, not acknowledging the semi-abstract
nature of ink landscapes—“an openly declared utilization of the nature of his
materials; the cult of a direct, and practically calligraphic, type of handling,
and the mobilization of a wide range of textual effects”—he was uncomfort-
able with Chuang’s ambitiously sized canvases and virtuosic mark-making.
Identifying “subtlety” as one of the key virtues of Chinese literati art, he
declared, “Frankly, I prefer the canvases of Chuang Che in which he retains
some of it.”49 Chuang’s bold works seemed un-Chinese in this critic’s mind.
His dismissal was ever more evident when he considered Chuang’s exhibition
a mere “footnote” to a concurrent exhibition of Qing painter Shitao at the
University of Michigan Museum of Art.50 Evidently, Li’s confidence in the
Midwestern audience and the internationalism of the American art world did
not reward him or his artists with sophisticated or deserving responses.51

Conclusion
The New Chinese Landscape made space in the canon for modernist ink paint-
ing that synthesized classical Chinese and modern Western ideas. Sensitive
to the cultural relations between the Republic of China and the US, the
new landscape painting took on the political dimensions and philosophical
underpinnings of its Chinese heritage, absorbed aesthetic values and tech-
niques from American abstraction, and received validation through its US
tour. It was a product of a national identity crisis compounded by personal
awakenings, due to the mass migration, decolonial efforts, and rise and pres-
ence of American cultural power in Taiwan. Just as the Cold War had ele-
vated Taiwan and transformed it from a peripheral island into the center of
 The New Chinese Landscape 27
international politics—at least on the Pacific Rim—the exhibition thrusted
the art and artists of the Chinese diaspora, especially those in Taiwan, onto
an international platform. The process of internationalization legitimized
the works as modern, even though its intended American audience did not
fully appreciate the conceptual depth and the radical nature of the artistic
decisions made by these artists. The exhibition nonetheless confirmed the
path of modernizing ink painting for these artists and inspired generations
to follow. Li’s belief in the evolution and staying power of ink paintings also
made him a tireless champion of the new landscape—stylistically, technically,
and geographically—of Chinese art.

Notes
1 Selected exhibitions of modernist artists from Taiwan in the US prior to The
New Chinese Landscape include: Ton Fan Painting Society artists at the Mi
Chou Gallery, New York (January and November 1960), reviewed by Dore
Ashton in The New York Times, January 11, 1960; The Chinese Contemporary
Painting Exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton, New York
(1963), organized by painter Sun Duo-tzi, former art professor at the National
Taiwan Normal University in Taipei; an exhibition of Chinese painters, the
Woodrow Wilson Society of Princeton University, organized by Chu-yuan Lee,
a Princeton architecture student from Taiwan (March 1965). These exhibitions
were smaller in scale and more informal and thus had less impact than The New
Chinese Painting.
2 Press release, “Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan,” Exhibition 66–22, The
New Chinese Landscape, The American Federation of Arts (AFA) archives.
3 The JDR 3rd Fund’s activities in Taiwan began with this exhibition and contin-
ued until 1979. The Fund supported overseas travel and studies for Taiwan-
based scholars, artists, writers, educators, and museum professionals. Liu and
Chuang received the travel grants between 1966 and 1967, and Fong in 1971.
4 Thomas Lawton, then a Harvard PhD student in Chinese art history on a
Fulbright scholarship in Taipei and later a curator at the Freer Gallery of Art,
served as the local liaison for Chu-tsing Li and was billed as co-author and co-
curator of the exhibition. However, Lawton played a supporting role in han-
dling the correspondence and logistics in Taiwan during the preparation stage.
Most importantly, the curatorial ideas were Li’s, according to the archival docu-
ments. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to Li as curator of the exhibition.
5 Chu-tsing Li, letter to Porter McCray, June 27, 1964, Grant B-6625 AFA,
Exhibition-China, JDR 3rd records, Asian Cultural Council (ACC) collection,
Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC). Li’s letter explains that the “traditionalists”
he saw were those who emulated the classical ink painting styles, while those
painting in “Western styles” were those imitating what they had seen in foreign
periodicals and exhibition catalogues.
6 Many scholarly volumes and exhibition catalogues are dedicated to this subject,
including Yang Xiaoneng ed., Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink
Painters in Twentieth-Century China (Milan: 5 Continents, 2010).
7 For an overview of the history of modernist painting in the Republican era, see
Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2012), 27–113.
8 Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, 242.
9 For the conflicts between Japanese-trained and mainland transplant painters, see
Hsiao Chong-ray, Wuyue yu dongfang: zhongguo meishu xiandaihua yundong
zai zhanhou Taiwan zhifazhan 1945–1970 (Fifth Moon and Ton Fan, The
28 Lesley Ma
Development of the Modernization of Chinese Art in Postwar Taiwan, 1945–
1970) (Taipei: Dongda, 1991), 133–86. Jason Kuo summarizes how the crises
in national and cultural identities in postwar Taiwan are reflected in the island’s
visual art in Jason Kuo, Art and Cultural Politics in Postwar Taiwan (London:
University of Washington Press, 2000), 1–14.
10 Li Lin-t’san (Li Lincan), “Guobao guihang manji” (On the Return Journey of
the National Treasures), Wenxing 58 (August 1, 1962): 30–34.
11 For more on the migration of the treasures, see Tsuyoshi Nojima, Liangge gugong
de lihe (The Separation and Reunion of Two Forbidden Cities), trans. Zhang
Huijun (Taipei: Lianjing, 2012), 109–16, 122–47. A selection from the collec-
tion traveled to the British Museum in 1932, the last time it had left Chinese soil.
12 For details, see Hsiao-ting Lin, Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States,
and the Making of Taiwan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
13 The USIS established a branch in Taipei in 1945, headed by the renowned
Sinologist John Fairbank. See Wang Mei-Hsiang, “Susha suiyue de meili/meili?
Zhanhou meiyuan wenhua yu wuliushi niandai fangong wenxue xiandai zhuyi
sichao fazhan zhi guanxi” (Beauty/American Force: The Relationship between
Postwar American Aid Culture and the 1950s and 1960s Anti-Communist
Literature and the Development of Modernism) (MA thesis, National Cheng
Kung University, Taiwan, 2005), 39.
14 For example, in 1966 and 1967, The Fund sponsored The New Japanese
Painting and Sculpture, which had a nine-city tour in America, including the
Museum of Modern Art. The JDR 3rd Fund became the Asian Cultural Council
in 1980, an important funding body that continues to support cultural
exchanges between Asia and America.
15 The participation ended after Brazil terminated diplomatic relations with the
ROC in August 1974.
16 These were directives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Education,
and the ROC Embassy in Brazil for the 1961 Bienal de São Paulo. Cited in Chiang
Po-shin, “Mirror of Modernity: Piecing Together/Installing ‘New Painting’ in
Taiwan and Brazil (1957–1973),” in Collision between Regions and Styles of Times—
Collected Papers from the Academic Conference on Subjectivity of Taiwanese Art, ed.
Tsui Yunghsueh (Taichung: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2007),
193–94.
17 Chiang, 201.
18 Thomas Lawton, letter to Porter McCray, August 28, 1965. Folder B-6625,
Box 98, AFA-Grant, Exhibition-China, JDR 3rd Fund, ACC, RAC.
19 Chu-tsing Li and Thomas Lawton, The New Chinese Landscape: Six Contemporary
Chinese Artists (New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1966), 4.
20 Li, letter to McCray, June 27, 1964, RAC.
21 Many scholarly publications provide in-depth studies on the landscape painting
tradition and case studies. Peter C. Sturman’s article provides a useful summary
from prehistory to the Qing dynasty. Sturman, “Landscape,” in A Companion
to Chinese Art, eds. Martin Power and Katherine R. Tsiang (Chichester: John
Wiley & Sons, 2015), 177–94.
22 For scholarly studies on twentieth-century Chinese landscape painting as a
nationalist endeavor, see Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, “The Golden Age of
Guohua in the 1930s,” in The Art of Modern China (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012), 93–113; Andrews and Shen, “Traditionalism as a
Modern Stance: The Chinese Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society,”
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1–30; Andrews
and Shen, “The Traditionalist Response to Modernity: The Chinese Painting
Society of Shanghai,” in Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s-1930s, ed. Jason
Chi-sheng Kuo (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007), 79–93.
23 Li and Lawton, New Chinese Landscape, 10.
 The New Chinese Landscape 29
24 Ibid., 18.
25 Ibid., 12.
26 Ibid.
27 Jerome Silbergeld, Mind Landscapes: Paintings of C.C. Wang (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1987), 71.
28 Li and Lawton, “The New Chinese Landscape,” Art Journal 17, no. 2 (Winter
1967–68): 147 and Li, letter to McCray, June 27, 1964.
29 Chu-tsing Li, “Chikai de huaduo: yu chengyao” (The Late Bloomer: Yu
Cheng-yao) in Shih Shou-chien ed., Qianyan jingxiu (Majestic Mountains:
Yu Cheng Yao At Ninety) (Taipei: Hanart Gallery, 1988), 9.
30 Joan Stanley-Baker, Huayulu: wang jiqian jiao ni kandong zhongguohua (C.C.
Wang Reflects on Painting) (Taipei: Artco Books, 2013), 309.
31 Li and Lawton, The New Chinese Landscape, 11.
32 In Li’s first proposal in June 1964, eight artists were listed as candidates—the
five included in the final exhibition (aside from Fong Chung-ray), Hong Kong
artists Lui Shou-kwan and Kwong Yiu-ting, and California-based artist Lü
Wujiu. In February 1965, he settled on the final six, five in Taiwan and one in
the US. See “The New Chinese Landscape: An Exhibition of Paintings by Six
Artists in Taiwan and Hong Kong,” May 1965. Grant B-6625, Exhibition-
China, JDR 3rd group, ACC collection, AFA records, RAC. Though it may have
initially been to simplify shipping logistics, Li’s choice to eliminate the artists
from Hong Kong and California heightened the exhibition’s focus on develop-
ments by artists in Taiwan. Thus, the choice had historical importance.
33 Chu-tsing Li, letter to Porter McCray, June 27, 1964.
34 Translated by author. Chuang Che, letter to Wai-lim Yip, June 19, 1966, Wai-
lim Yip personal archive, Del Mar, CA.
35 Ibid.
36 Thomas Lawton, “A Foreigner Looks at Contemporary Chinese Painting.”
Folders B-6612, B-6723, Box 108, Liu Kuo-sung, Painting/Sculpture-China,
ACC collection, RAC.
37 Fong Chung-ray, interview by author, Walnut Creek, CA, June 4, 2013.
38 Before and during World War II, McCray worked for Nelson Rockefeller at the
Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a privately funded agency
promoting cultural exchange between the Americas. In 1947, McCray was the
board chairman of the Museum of Modern Art in New York with major support
from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
39 Porter McCray, letter to Chu-tsing Li, July 20, 1964, Grant B-6625 AFA,
Exhibition-China, JDR 3rd records, ACC collection, RAC.
40 For an understanding of the export of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of
the New York School on a global stage, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York
Stole the Idea of Modern Art (London and Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983).
41 Li, in his letter to McCray July 20, 1964, mentioned that Asia House might
not be able to host the exhibition due to its dedication to traditional Asian art,
and asked McCray for help. In his reply on July 27, 1964, McCray, who was on
the gallery committee, did not think that Asia House would support the
exhibition.
42 According to Li, interest was shown by the following institutions: University of
Minnesota, University of Michigan, University of Chicago, University of Illinois,
University of Nebraska, and University of Iowa. “A Request for Support for a
Travelling Exhibition, ‘The New Chinese Landscape,’” February 5, 1965. Grant
B-6625 AFA, Exhibition-China, JDR 3rd Fund records, ACC collection, RAC.
43 Li rallied the support of historians of Chinese art, including James Cahill, at the
time curator at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC., and Laurence
Sickman, curator of Asian Art at the Nelson Gallery of Art (now known as the
30 Lesley Ma
Nelson-Atkins Museum) in Kansas City, and approached other museums with
“Oriental interest.” Sickman’s words quoted in Chu-tsing Li, letter to McCray,
November 27, 1965. Li mentioned to the AFA that he had shown pictures of
the works to George Kuwayama of the Los Angeles County Museum, Max
Loehr of the Fogg Museum, Hsio-yen Shih, Far Eastern Department, Royal
Ontario Museum, Toronto, and Betty Maurstad, curator of the University
Gallery at the University of Minnesota. Chu-tsing Li, letter to Robert Luck,
October 8, 1965, Grant B-6625 AFA, Exhibition-China, JDR 3rd Fund records,
ACC collection, RAC. The two bigger museums that the show visited were the
Cleveland Museum of Art and the Nelson Gallery of Art, both of which have
strong holdings in Chinese antiquities.
44 The exhibition period ran from January 17 to February 25, 1968. One portion
of the exhibition (the non-scroll portion) was closed on February 11 and the
rest on February 25. Press release, Folder 8, Box 31, Exhibition Compendium,
Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
45 Donald L. Hoffmann, “Art in Mid-America,” Kansas City Star, April 2, 1967.
46 John Canaday, “Art: Sample of Americana, From Copley to Calder. Other New
Exhibitions are Summarized,” The New York Times, January 21, 1967.
47 Ibid.
48 Jean Paul Slusser, “Local Oriental Conquest Continues,” Ann Arbor News,
August 18, 1967, 10.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Half of the works by the three Fifth Moon artists in the exhibition had been sold
to American expatriates prior to the tour. These Americans—academics,
historians and curators of Chinese art, benefactors of Asian cultural affairs, and
family members of State Department employees—lived in Taiwan and knew the
artists personally. They were the first patrons of the young artists and gave them
a source of income and confidence. But because they were hardly seasoned
collectors or art world insiders, their support did not impact the critical recep-
tion of The New Chinese Landscape in the US.
2 Before and beyond the Cold War
Visual accounts of the “Secret War” in
Laos (Pha Khamfan’s collection of
photographs and Terry Wofford’s
paintings of planes)

Roger Nelson
It is often noted that research on art and visual culture relating to the “Cold
War” in “Southeast Asia” has expanded in scope and intensified in volume in
recent years. Less widely recognized, however, is that most studies begin with
and proceed from a shared methodological and epistemological assumption at
their foundation: that increased attention to the art and visual culture of Cold
War-era Southeast Asia will, in turn and inevitably, offer insights into the his-
torical events and contexts that images relate to or depict. In particular, recent
studies have often highlighted the entanglement of internal and external forces
shaping art, culture, society, and politics in the period.1 But is it always the
case that images offer insights into the contexts from which they emerged,
and is this always the most sensitive and generative way to approach art and
visual culture emerging from Cold War-era Southeast Asia? Such images are
enmeshed in a dense multiplicity of networks and narratives that often extend
geographically out of and away from this region and are historically rooted
before this moment. Might this mean that the process of analyzing images
sometimes complicates—rather than clarifies—our understandings of these
various conflicts? Despite the burgeoning scholarship on the Cold War and
the arts, many aspects and details of the ideologies, micro-histories, and affec-
tive experiences of the period remain unknown and perhaps unknowable: art
makes this elusiveness most powerfully apparent. Might it sometimes be possi-
ble—even preferable—to approach the art and visual culture of this period not
only (or mainly) with the aim of elucidating regional geopolitics but also (or
instead) to enrich our appreciation of other, even seemingly unrelated (micro-)
histories and connections that extend before and beyond the Cold War?
This essay will consider these questions while examining two corpuses of
images that depict the United States’ “Secret War” in Laos. My aim here
is both to introduce some under-studied historical material relating to this
conflict and to venture some theoretical and methodological thoughts about
studying the art and visual culture of Cold War-era Southeast Asia. Chief
among these thoughts is the suggestion to study images from this place and
time in multiple, overlapping frames, which also allows attention to their
intersections with other contexts. In essence, I am hoping to reckon more
fully with the Cold War period while at the same time decentering the conflict.
32 Roger Nelson
The “Secret War,” waged as part of the Second Indochina War—and never
a “secret” for those in Laos2—was a conflict that involved covert aerial bomb-
ing on a scale that was historically unprecedented, as well as a proxy war
fought by Hmong and other highlander soldiers, armed and often trained by
the US, and aided by Thai mercenaries and other military support.3 It began
around 1959 and continued for 16 years until 1975. During this period, ten
percent of the Laotian population died, twenty percent were wounded, and a
quarter became refugees.4 While the “Secret War” has given rise to what one
historian describes as a “cottage industry” of studies,5 the literature tends to
neglect visual accounts of the conflict.
The first body of images we will consider comprises photographs collected
by a senior Buddhist abbot in Luang Prabang, Pha Khamfan Silasangvara
(1901–1987), who (like many Luang Prabang monks in the 20th century)
was also a celebrated maker and collector of photographs. Among the eleven
hundred prints that he has collected over several decades, 28 images (all dat-
ing to the 1960s) relate explicitly to the “Secret War,” depicting human and
nonhuman victims of bombing campaigns, as well as gatherings of Pathet
Lao communist figures with senior Buddhist clergy from Luang Prabang,
together with laypeople. The original prints are held in the Buddhist Archive
of Photography, at Vat Suvannakhili, in Luang Prabang. Digital versions are
also available online.6
Second is a series of paintings depicting Air America planes that were
deployed, under the order of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
for clandestine military and other purposes. These paintings were made by
British-born self-described “aviation artist” Terry Wofford (née Gilbert,
1943– ), who lived and worked in Vientiane from 1968 to 1972, while her
US-born husband was a pilot for Air America. This was a commercial airline
secretly owned and operated by the CIA, which was used as a front for mili-
tary operations in Laos, including the delivery of arms and other supplies to
proxy fighters, as well as the transport of refugees and soldiers, surveillance,
and other activities. Most of the original paintings made by Wofford in Vien-
tiane are dispersed in private collections, chiefly in the United States; digital
images of many are also available for viewing online.7
These two sets of pictures are among the very few major visual accounts of
the “Secret War” made in Laos, aside from photojournalism and snapshots
taken by American pilots. The two sets differ in many ways but are linked
by the historical event they depict: the photographs show victims of and
responses to the “Secret War,” while the paintings show the military planes
used to perpetrate that violence. Pha Khamfan and Wofford, as makers and
collectors of the images, represent perspectives from both “sides” of the
conflict, to put it crudely, but the works themselves also seem in some ways
to challenge binary understandings of the war, due to the ambiguity and
ambivalence of their imagery, and the nature of their circulation. Moreover,
and importantly, while the works depict moments from the “Secret War” in
Laos, they are also deeply linked to discourses and narratives that geograph-
ically reach beyond Southeast Asia, and temporally extend before the Cold
 Before and beyond the Cold War 33
War period. Wofford’s paintings may be most productively considered in
light of the little-studied hobbyist and commercial genre known as aviation
art, which is concentrated in North America and Western Europe, and which
is not known to have many followers in Southeast Asia.8 Pha Khamfan’s
collection of photographs, on the other hand, may be most productively
understood in relation to the longstanding practice of monks making and
collecting photographs as Buddhist pedagogical tools, in several monasteries
in Luang Prabang (as elsewhere in the Theravada world). This practice orig-
inates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, long predating the Cold War
period, an important factor as discussed below.
Like most art and visual culture originating in modern Laos, these two
collections of images have never been substantially studied,9 yet they reward
close scrutiny not only for their rarity but for aesthetic, methodological,
and historiographical reasons as well. Aesthetically, despite their obvious
differences in form and subject matter, the photographs in Pha Khamfan’s
collection and the paintings by Wofford share a particular attention to com-
position and framing, affording us carefully cropped views of scenes not oth-
erwise represented in visual form. Despite their evidently aesthetic qualities,
these bodies of images sit outside of a mainstream discourse of “formalist
art-historical narrative” and may be considered “vernacular,” in the terms
set out by photography scholar Geoffrey Batchen, even though they are also
far from the “ordinary photographs” that have been “made or bought…
by everyday folk,” which Batchen takes as his central object of inquiry.10
Methodologically, the works resist easy incorporation into museological or
other canon-making processes. One reason for this is that the photographs
can only be exhibited as reproductions, as the original prints must remain
in Laos under the care of the Buddhist Archive of Photography in Luang
Prabang. Moreover, the identity of the photographer/s is unknown. The
paintings, too, are unlikely to be exhibited in Southeast Asia. This is due not
only to their somewhat dated and sometimes amateurish appearance (and
the awkward counter-canonical position of aviation art as a genre) but also
to the general reluctance, widespread in Southeast Asian museums and other
exhibitionary settings, to exhibit artworks made by white, Euro-American
artists, especially those made in the latter half of the 20th century, and espe-
cially those artists (like Wofford) who spent only a short time resident in
Southeast Asia, and had limited contact with local artists and art worlds.11
Historiographically, the works foreground anonymous participants in and
victims of the “Secret War,” and thus counter the prevailing tendency in
most studies of that conflict to privilege American rather than Laotian per-
spectives, and to focus on a small number of commanding officers with larg-
er-than-life personalities (such as infamous CIA paramilitary officer Bill Lair,
and Hmong proxy army leader General Vang Pao), rather than the rank and
file of soldiers and civilians involved and affected.
My primary aim in this essay is simply to provide a basis for further research
by others in future,12 and this is reflected in its three-part structure. After first
embarking on a comparative and somewhat speculative discussion of selected
34 Roger Nelson
images from both corpuses of work, I will then follow the fairly conven-
tional path of introducing each body of images in turn, enabling the expli-
cation of greater detail about Pha Khamfan’s collection of photographs and
Terry Wofford’s paintings of planes. In the first section, which focuses on the
images themselves rather than their contexts, I draw on recent experimental
anthropological writing about Laos in the aftermath of the “Secret War” in an
attempt to point to the affective qualities of ambiguity, mystery, and “haunt-
ing” which are shared in the photographs and paintings.13 Both provoke
questions that are unanswered and unanswerable but also, as I will highlight,
demonstrate an ability to foreground under-privileged perspectives. In the
second and third sections, I discuss Pha Khamfan’s photographs and Terry
Wofford’s paintings of planes in relation to discourses on other topics, such as
photography in Theravada contexts—which directs our attention to a period
before the Cold War—and the amateur and commercial genre of aviation art
in the US—directing our attention away from Southeast Asia.

“Oblique, riven by silences”: images as deathly and unyielding

Now that we have begun, let us begin again: by looking at (and listening
to)14 images.
The first image is a photograph, untitled, printed in silver gelatin on inex-
pensive paper, depicting two human figures, dated circa 1960s (Figure 2.1). In
this image, a young child tilts its head back, resting on the cheek and shoulder
of a young woman, perhaps the child’s mother. The skin of the child’s face
blisters, discolored. It appears to have been burned, by flames or chemicals,
or both. The child’s mouth is open, as if in the fitful sleep of exhaustion, yet
not open enough to be actively crying; the corners of the lips turn slightly
downwards, as if in some kind of pain that cannot be expressed by crying. The
child’s eyes are closed, and the knitting of the brow suggests that they have
closed tightly, as if to shut out the world. The woman averts her eyes from
the photographer’s lens and thus from our gaze: she looks down to the child,
her brow, too, furrowed in a frown, an expression of care and concern, again,
seemingly silently. The entire image is printed in black and white and closely
framed around the two faces; yet the blurred shapes in the background suggest
the lush tropical foliage of a Laotian jungle, with its sounds of fertile life and
lethal violence. On the reverse of the photograph, a typewritten caption in Lao
asserts that “the disaster of the war” brings sadness “for life and nation.”15 By
activating both sides of the photographic print, the makers of this inexpen-
sively produced image transform what photography conservator Paul Mess-
ier terms “functional” photography paper into “expressive” paper, and thus
simultaneously signal both “objective reality” and “interpretive subjectivity”
in not only the image itself but the whole print as a two-sided object.16
But who is this child in the image? Who is this woman? What specific
“disaster of the war” has befallen them? Are they victims of the covert aerial
attacks, which—terrifyingly and deafeningly—detonated one bomb on aver-
age every eight minutes for a decade?17 Or are they casualties of ground
 Before and beyond the Cold War 35

Figure 2.1 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan Silasangvaro.

Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin print. British Library
Endangered Archive Programme record number C-1111. Reproduced
with permission of the Buddhist Archive of Photography.

battle, in which proxy soldiers were known to have indulged in extreme

brutalities, encouraged by their US backers, such as severing their victims’
ears?18 Are this woman and child just victims, or might they also be perpe-
trators of violence? Have they posed for this image or been caught unawares
by the photographer? Did they survive? When this photograph was taken,
was the child, perhaps—do we dare to imagine—already dead?19 These are
but some among any number of questions that the photograph provokes. So
too do the other photographs among the 28 collected by Pha Khamfan Sila-
sangvara that relate specifically to the “Secret War.” These questions remain
unanswered and will remain unanswerable. The image may invoke the illu-
sion of a visceral appreciation for the experience of the war in Laos; but for
most, this illusory sensation offers no real insight into the historical context
that produced the photograph, and which it depicts.
This photograph, made by an unknown photographer likely involved
with the communist organization known as the Pathet Lao, was collected
by Pha Khamfan Silasangvara, presented to him after a visit to a commu-
nist-controlled “liberated zone,” and kept in his kuti, or abode, within the
Vat Suvannakhili temple and monastery in Luang Prabang. It was discovered
there in 2007, two decades after Pha Khamfan’s death, by researchers work-
ing for the then-newly established Buddhist Archive of Photography, which
is housed on the same grounds as the temple, and available online.20
A second image: a painting, titled Dropping Supplies, done in oil on can-
vas, in a pastel palette of saccharine hues, and dated 1971 (Figure 2.2). The
36 Roger Nelson

Figure 2.2 Terry Wofford. Dropping Supplies. Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 61cm. Private
collection. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

painting’s sun-drenched hues recall the family-friendly “technicolor” films

made by Disney or Paramount in the 1960s and ’70s. This is the palette of
an all-American fantasy far from the horrors of the war in Laos. Filling the
frame, extending to all four sides of the portrait-oriented picture, is the pale
cerulean blue and pristine chalky white of a lightly clouded sky.21 This is not a
realistic depiction, but a fantasy. The artist has carefully framed the imagined
composition to give the impression of looking upwards. There is no horizon
line, no visible land, just endless sky. The airborne objects that comprise the
painting’s real subject—the wooden crates—hang from parachutes and fall
toward the viewer, as a small aircraft flies off, having made its delivery and now
making its exit. The crates seem identical, unlabeled. The largest in the frame,
 Before and beyond the Cold War 37
foregrounded to appear closest, seems to be made of at least 12 boards of
timber, with double reinforcements on each side, suggesting that it holds sub-
stantial cargo. The crates hang from parachutes that have ballooned to their
maximum inflation; they are the round “jellyfish” parachutes, which rely on
drag caused by wind resistance to slow the object’s descent, for gentler land-
ing. These full parachutes, together with the blue sky, and the plane dimin-
ished in optical size as it flies off—all of these elements combine to suffuse the
scene with an air of calm, an almost childlike sense of wonder and peace.
Yet defying this cheery mood of almost cartoonish calm—which is at
odds with the foreboding atmosphere in most of Wofford’s contemporane-
ous paintings of planes done in Laos, as we will see below—is the fact that
this aircraft is a war plane. More specifically, it is identified by the artist as
a Fairchild C-123K: an American military plane used throughout the Sec-
ond Indochina War (of which the “Secret War” in Laos was part), which is
described by the National Museum of the US Air Force as a “short-range
assault transport used for airlifting troops and cargo from small, unprepared
airstrips,” an “essential part of US Air Force airlift during the Southeast Asia
War [sic],” and the plane used for the spraying of Agent Orange (officially
known as Operation “Ranch Hand”).22 This was one of the Air America
planes flown by Bob Wofford, an Air America pilot whom the artist, then
named Terry Gilbert, would marry the following year, changing her name
to Terry Wofford. The crates that this “short-range assault transport” plane
dropped were filled with arms and ammunition, which the Air America pilots
and their crowd called “hard rice,” to distinguish it from the actual, edi-
ble rice (sometimes called “soft rice”23) that was also sometimes airlifted
to remote areas and air-dropped, the sacks often bursting upon impact.24
According to The History of Air America, military activities in Laos intensi-
fied in the years between 1968 and 1973, meaning that “Air America had to
transport more troops, more ‘hard rice’ and more big guns than before…
[and] more Company aircraft were shot at or even shot down.”25 This period
of intensified aerial warfare—which also saw an explosion in the number
of refugees fleeing bombing26—coincides exactly with the period in which
Terry Wofford lived and worked in Vientiane. Yet no sense of that violence
and danger is conveyed in the cheerful colors, quiet tone, and placid atmos-
phere of Dropping Supplies. The artist explains that she believes Air America
was “performing a service that was primarily humanitarian and in exception-
ally dangerous circumstances,” and that “[t]he majority of [Air America]
missions were delivering aid of all sorts.”27
This optimistic conviction is belied in another painting made that same
year, titled Night Mission Over Laos, which depicts an Air America spy plane
flying a night reconnaissance mission over a rural Laotian village (Figure
2.3). Quite at odds with Dropping Supplies, the palette in this work is dark
and ominous; the gentle silvery light of the moon, which illuminates the irri-
gation channels crisscrossing the rice fields, is drowned out by the inscruta-
ble blackness that dominates the left side of the canvas. Barely visible shapes
emerging from this darkness may be clouds, or craggy mountains, or both:
38 Roger Nelson
their appearance imbues the image with a threatening atmosphere, and sig-
nals danger for the small plane that is the painting’s principal subject. This
plane, the artist explains, is “a highly modified, electronics-filled spy plane
that flew night patrols and also stayed aloft during the day for many hours.”
The aircraft’s operation was unaffected by cloud cover, according to the
artist, yet the clouds in her depiction “are symbolic of the hidden nature of
these missions.”28 We know, from military archival records, that this model
of plane—officially called a Douglas B-26 and commonly referred to as an
On Mark aircraft—was dangerous to fly. One Air America pilot’s logbook
records being “quite well shot up today! Left engine, nose cameras, rear
[high frequency] radio station, etc., five hits from 14.5mm anti-aircraft
fire.”29 Who was doing this shooting? It was the Laotians, on whom the Air
America planes were spying. The pitched-roof houses of the Laotian village,
visible on the ground below, all have lights burning inside, visible through
small rectangular windows or doorways. The careful inclusion of this detail
leaves us wondering, as the spy plane’s operators must have been: what is
happening in this village, what is being said or planned or done? With retro-
spective knowledge of the scale of destruction during the “Secret War,” we
might also wonder: did this village survive? Or was it bombed into oblivion,
by another American plane? The sense of danger and mystery in Night Mis-
sion Over Laos leaves us guessing, and fearful.

Figure 2.3 Terry Wofford. Night Mission Over Laos. 1971. Oil on canvas, 50.8 ×
61cm. Private collection. Reproduced with permission of the artist.
 Before and beyond the Cold War 39
Did Bob Wofford sincerely believe he was doing “humanitarian” work
when he knowingly dropped crates of weapons called “hard rice” in Laos,
and did Terry Wofford sincerely believe this when she depicted the scene
in Disneyesque hues, and such an unrealistic composition, depicting more
of a fantasy than a war? The artist’s generosity in sharing, her openness and
reflexivity, suggest nothing but frank honesty in her recollections. But how
might her bright-eyed faith in Air America square with the fact that on her
first date with her future husband, the artist “shocked” the pilot “by asking
him about [Air America’s] CIA connection”?30 How might the optimistic
atmosphere in Dropping Supplies square with the darker hues and persistent
air of mystery and foreboding in Night Mission Over Laos, and most of the
artist’s other paintings of planes made during her years in Laos? Might the
sweet, innocent appearance of Dropping Supplies, which depicts weapons of
war being delivered, have been a tongue-in-cheek provocation, a gesture
deliberately a bit off-key? Like the questions provoked by the photograph
of a woman and child in agony discussed above, these questions also evade
an answer. Wofford affirms that she holds multiple perspectives on the infra-
structures of the “Secret War”: views which might seem contradictory, or
at least cause tensions that remain obscured in the placid appearance of this
painting. She earnestly claims to have “had and still have nothing but the
highest regard for Air America and all the people associated with it,” while
also decrying “US government policies that enabled such wanton destruction
by the US military machine, destruction that continues unabated today.”31
Indeed, other observers have noted that the mode of warfare preferred by
the US today—as carried out in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—was pio-
neered during the “Secret War” in Laos.32 It was impossible for Wofford to
have anticipated the long-lasting impact of the activities she depicted in her
paintings of planes. Yet, does this sufficiently explain the dulcet and other-
worldly appearance of Dropping Supplies?
Although it differs strikingly from Night Mission Over Laos, and most of
the other paintings of planes that Wofford made in Laos during the “Secret
War,” the work shares with those others a stubborn resistance to any attempt
at establishing direct or clear links between the image and its context. As we
will see, when we turn to examine other works by Wofford and consider the
artist’s biography and interests, these paintings may reveal more about the
position of amateur and commercial aviation art as a genre (and women as
artists within that genre) than they do about the military operations under-
taken by Air America in Laos. Yet their eeriness—the ghastly and hushed
sweetness of Dropping Supplies and the uneasy foreboding of the artist’s con-
temporaneous works, including Night Mission Over Laos—suggests that they
are, nonetheless, not only made possible by that military context but indeed
haunted by it.
Let us add to these captivating yet obstinately mysterious and unyielding
pictures another image: one conjured in words. Unlike the pictures described
above, this image was not made while the “Secret War” was raging in Laos
in the 1960s and early ’70s; rather, it describes the everlasting aftereffects
40 Roger Nelson
of that war, as experienced in Laos in the 2010s. The image describes lefto-
ver bombs from the “Secret War” as looking like fruit—“cucumber bombs”
and “guava bombs” and “bael bombs” and “pineapple bombs” and “melon
bombs”33—that lie near the surface of the ground in a forest in Laos, unex-
ploded and thus (so to speak) live, and therefore lethal. They are, more-
over, “bombs as numerous as fruit, needing to be harvested before they
explode.”34 These bombs are haunted, possessed—“the ghosts of war are
said to have triggered explosions, or evil spirits are said to have animated
bombs in order to control their detonation”35—and, thus, these are bombs
that necessitate the invention of a language to describe “the deadly agency
of bombs (to kill, to haunt, to explode).” These are bombs that embody the
“deadly, haunting quality of military waste.”36
This image, conjured in deliberately experimental and poetic words by
anthropologist Leah Zani, is richly descriptive but also purposefully eschews
narrative. In this sense, Zani mimics in literary form the close-up, tightly
framed compositions of the photograph and paintings described above. She
focuses in on an image without showing or telling us what happened in
the moment before or after its appearance. Zani’s deliberately non-narra-
tive prose, like those carefully composed pictures described above, invokes
the sense that perhaps we are glimpsing just one mysterious instant in an
unfolding sequence of unknowable moments, whose horror might be not
only unknowable but also unimaginable, or at least beyond the ability of
words to convey. That is, all of these images imply that we are accessing
only a partial, incomplete view of the experience of the “Secret War” and its
deathly afterlife. This strategy of closely cropping and tightly framing images
“builds toward [Zani’s] larger claim that narrative language does not have a
monopoly on truth,”37 while also pointing to the value (and sometimes the
necessity) of speaking indirectly, of silence or “nondisclosure,” or at least of
a disclosure that is always already only ever partial and muted.
As well as highlighting the incomplete nature of knowledges and nar-
ratives of conflict, Zani’s approach—in particular, her focus on embodied,
affective understandings and embrace of experimental and unusual modes of
writing—foregrounds anonymous, everyday experiences of violence. In this
way, this mode of scholarship counters the prevailing tendency, found in a
review of most literature and research on the “Secret War” in Laos, to privi-
lege American over Laotian perspectives, and to emphasize the role of a small
number of well-known individuals (American and Laotian) more than the
experience of a larger number of unknown people. For example, many stud-
ies examine US foreign policy rather than considering competing ideological
policies within Laos, and many studies focus on high-ranking soldiers rather
than rank and file or civilian participants in—and casualties of—the “Secret
War.” The approach taken by Zani, as well as in the photographs collected
by Pha Khamfan and the paintings made by Wofford, shifts our attention
away from these prominent, mostly male figures toward the unnamed Lao-
tian villagers, who included women and children, as well as American pilots,
and other anonymous cogs in the war machine. These visual accounts of the
 Before and beyond the Cold War 41
“Secret War” thus complement a small but compelling tendency in the liter-
ature on Cold War-era Laos that may help to enable a kind of history from
below, focused on the lived experience of conflict.
These images—Zani’s drawn-in words, the others rendered in paint and
silver gelatin photography—are, as Zani writes, “oblique, riven by silences.”
They make for “ghostly, read-between-the-lines, fingers-crossed” accounts
of the “Secret War” in Laos. They do not necessarily show or tell us what
happened, at the level of policy or command; nor do they really reveal what
that felt like, at the ground level.
These images do, however, make us see that what happened during this
lethal is little-known, and we do not know what it felt or smelled or sounded
like—or what it might continue to feel like today. Their precious value, then,
is not only to offer insight into the Cold War-era context from which they
emerged, but to also do the opposite: to make manifest the elusiveness of
that moment, and the difficulty of gaining affective insight into the “Secret
War” in Laos.

“Of benefit both to its receiver and its donor”: Pha Khamfan’s
collection of photographs
Having registered the haunting and mysterious qualities of the images
described above, and their tendency to provoke unanswerable questions, we
now shift from a focus on individual images to considering, instead, each
corpus of work as a whole, in its broader context. It is hoped that this expli-
cation of further detail about each body of work may enable further research
or alternative interpretations in future. In this section, I will argue that Pha
Khamfan’s collection of 28 photographs is best understood not in connec-
tion to the “Secret War” or the Cold War period but to the longer duration
of history. In the next section, I will argue that Wofford’s paintings are best
understood not only in connection to Laos or the Second Indochina War,
but also in connection to the field of practice known as aviation art, which is
concentrated in Europe and North America.
Pha Khamfan’s 28 photographs of the Laotian Civil War are but a small
component of a much larger collection, totaling over eleven hundred
images, assembled by a man who was a monk for more than six decades,
the abbot of Vat Suvannakhili for half a century, and held numerous other
senior positions in the Theravada Buddhist clergy, while also being active as
a painter, photographer, and designer and restorer of monasteries and tem-
ples.38 Pha Khamfan’s collection includes many photographs and drawings
by the late monk himself, as well as others covering his travels throughout
the Theravada world and Asia, and portraits, depictions of the late monk
making artworks, scenes of landscapes and architecture, and records of reli-
gious festivals and ceremonies.39 His collection is, in turn, but one among
many collections of photographs assembled by Luang Prabang monks, now
gathered at the Buddhist Archive of Photography, where more than 35,000
photographs are housed in total.
42 Roger Nelson
The sheer volume of this archive indicates that photography was widely
practiced and collected in Laos, throughout the 20th century. It was largely
an activity for amateurs, or else for commemoration or journalism. In Laos
during the 20th century, there were no “fine art” photographers in the West-
ern sense.40 While the full extent of amateur or other photography practices
is unknown, it is very likely that photographers were commissioned by the
Pathet Lao and other communist organizations to document aspects of battle
and life during wartime, and that the resulting images officially “belonged”
to the authorities that had commissioned them, as was the case in North
Vietnam; more research is needed on this aspect of photographic practice
during the Second Indochina War in Laos. Certainly, monks were not the
only Laotians with an active interest in photography, yet their practices and
collections are today perhaps the most accessible of any from the 20th cen-
tury in Laos, thanks to the efforts of the Buddhist Archive’s founders.
Each collection in the Buddhist Archive has an individuated emphasis and
feeling—they are, in Hans Georg Berger’s words, “distinct, and each lay
out a different focus”—and Pha Khamfan’s is among the more aesthetically
cohesive, reflecting his own artistic and photographic practice.41 Included
in his collection are images he made, images he collected, and album pages
in which he placed images in careful relation to each other, decorating the
paper of the page by hand. This indicates not only that Pha Khamfan was
particular about the appearance of the photographs he made and collected,
but also that he paid special attention to their edges, framing, and relation-
ships to each other. This is reflected also in the composition of the pictures of
the “Secret War,” and in their use of both sides of the print, including with
typewritten captions in Lao appended behind the images, as noted above.
Despite the diverse subject matter of the 28 photographs in this collec-
tion, the images are all carefully framed, with every picture tightly focused
on its principal subject. Of the 28 photographs collected by Pha Khamfan
that relate to the “Secret War,” three depict human victims of bombing
(Figure 2.1, as discussed above), one captures a destroyed Buddhist temple
(Figure 2.4), and the remaining 24 show groups of monks, Pathet Lao mem-
bers, and laypeople engaged in various activities together, including political
demonstrations (Figure 2.5), classes (Figure 2.6), religious ceremonies (Fig-
ure 2.7), and festivities. The tight framing of the subject in these depictions
of diverse scenes suggests either that they were made by the same photogra-
pher, or compiled by a single authorial figure, before being presented to Pha
Khamfan. Identically formatted typewritten captions in Lao on the reverse
of the images—rarely found in any of the other collections within the Bud-
dhist Archive—further suggest the hand of either a single maker or single
compiling author.
As these (undated) captions indicate, the photographs were all taken in
the “liberated zone” of north-eastern Laos and probably presented to Pha
Khamfan after a visit to this communist-controlled area. By the late 1960s,
the conflict between the Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao Government had split
the country between communist-controlled “liberated zones” and royalist
 Before and beyond the Cold War 43

Figure 2.4 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan Silasangvaro.

Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin print. A caption in Lao on the
verso of the image states: “A thousand temples in Laos were damaged
by bombing in the American war.” British Library Endangered Archive
Programme record number C-1113. Reproduced with permission of the
Buddhist Archive of Photography.

Figure 2.5 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan Silasangvaro.

Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin print. A caption in Lao on the
verso of the image states: “Peace and independence are strongly wished
for by all Lao people.” British Library Endangered Archive Programme
record number C-1115. Reproduced with permission of the Buddhist
Archive of Photography.
44 Roger Nelson

Figure 2.6 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan Silasangvaro.

Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin print. British Library
Endangered Archive Programme record number C-1116. Reproduced
with permission of the Buddhist Archive of Photography.

Figure 2.7 Photographer unknown. Collected by Pha Khamfan Silasangvaro.

Undated, circa 1960s-1975. Silver gelatin print. A caption in Lao on the
verso of the image states: “Although the country is at war, people always
tried to hold festivals for the solidarity of the local people.” British Library
Endangered Archive Programme record number C-1119. Reproduced
with permission of the Buddhist Archive of Photography.
 Before and beyond the Cold War 45
strongholds, such as the capital Vientiane, where there was the strongest
American military and civilian presence. The division was determined largely
by the intervention of foreign powers: the eastern provinces were controlled
by North Vietnamese forces backing the Pathet Lao, while the northern
provinces were held by Chinese-backed Pathet Lao, leaving the west to the
Royal Lao Government with the backing of the US (and Thailand).42 This
splitting of the newly independent nation into mutually antagonistic zones
was commonplace in the Second Indochina War, as elsewhere in Asia and
beyond, especially in conflicts during the Cold War period. In the Laotian
context, it predated the “Secret War.” A letter dated 1950 from a disciple to
a senior Buddhist monk in Luang Prabang apologizes for a “slow response”
due to the “obstacle” caused by fighting guerrilla factions: the writer’s “jour-
ney back home lasted more than a month as the roads were difficult due to
[the activities of] the Itsala [guerrilla movement].”43 Even earlier, the bor-
ders of Laos shifted repeatedly during the colonial era, with the former royal
capital of Luang Prabang switching from Thai to Laotian control several
times, in part as a result of negotiations between Thai and French colonial
authorities.44
This notion of a divided land may seem abstract to those who have not
experienced it first-hand; histories of the making and/or presentation of sou-
venir images after a visit from one side to the other makes manifest the palpa-
ble sense of distance and difference between opposing zones within a single
nation. In Laos, repeated visits by the same monks resulted in repeated gifts
of differing photographs. For example, in May 1975 (after the official end of
the Laotian Civil War, and the cessation of bombings related to the “Secret
War”), Pha Khamfan traveled to the “liberated zone” of Xam Nua province,
accompanied by other senior monks, including Pha Khamchan Virachitta
(1920–2007), who would later establish the Buddhist Archive. Again, pho-
tographs were presented to the visiting monks to record that “they visited
many important political and religious places.” As Khamvone Boulyaphonh
has argued, “[t]hese photographs demonstrate that the Liberated Zone
was a peaceful place and that the Pathet Lao movement respected Buddhist
monks and believed in Buddhism.”45
The presentation of photo souvenirs to visitors of “liberated zones” during
Cold War-related conflicts is, of course, not unique to Laos. For example,
numerous images recording such visits between the US-backed zone and the
communist-controlled “liberated zone” during a different (but related) civil
war were also collected by Cambodian prince and former head of state Noro-
dom Sihanouk, in 1973, at the height of conflict between the US-backed
Khmer Republic and the communist Khmer Rouge.46 The existence of such
photographs—and the knowledge that they were frequently made to offi-
cially record the passage of notable individuals from one zone to another, in
the context of Cold War-era civil wars—indicates the perceived importance
of such cross-border visits.
In this way, Pha Khamfan’s collection of photographs suggests that in
the under-studied context of Laos, images behave in a similar manner to
46 Roger Nelson
elsewhere in Cold War-era Southeast Asia: offering insight into the lived
experience of the effects of the political machinations of the times. Yet, in
other ways, the images also intersect with older narratives that predate the
Cold War and are derived from even older habits of image circulation, some
of which may be pre-modern in origin. We will now turn our attention to
the narratives that tie this corpus of images to histories before the Cold War.
The presentation of photographs as souvenirs of cross-border or inter-
zone travel is consistent with—and may be understood as a continuation
of—a long-standing tradition of Theravada Buddhist monks in Southeast
Asia being presented with photographs as souvenirs of travels and meetings,
which predates the Cold War by some decades, and has attracted scholarly
attention within regional discourses. Held in the Buddhist Archive of Pho-
tography are numerous examples of studio portraits of monks and novices
from the 1930s with inscriptions on the reverse, as well as cartes de vis-
ite that had been presented by monks and novices from elsewhere in Laos,
Cambodia, and Thailand. The handwritten Lao inscription on one 1936
photograph presented by a Lao student in Bangkok to a Lao novice monk in
Luang Prabang indicates something of their purpose and meaning:

I hand over this picture to Novice Suvankeo as a token of memory, so

that we might not forget each other both in this life and the next lives. I
hope you will receive it with happiness so that it may be of benefit both
to its receiver and its donor.47

As these words suggest, the presentation of photo-portraits as souvenirs had

both a sentimental quality (“we might not forget each other”), and a religious
merit-making and devotional effect (“of benefit to both its receiver and its
donor”). Similar examples are found in Thailand. Photo-souvenirs of this kind
attest to the dynamic network of exchange that existed within the Theravada
world of the early 20th century (and long before), with monks from Cambo-
dia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and beyond frequently traveling to study at
temples, schools, universities, and institutions in each other’s countries.
The tradition of monks and novices gifting photographic portraits of
themselves as souvenir cartes de visite may also be considered a renewal and
adaptation of an older trope, established during the colonial era in the mid-
to late-19th century, when visiting European photographers also made post-
cards featuring images of Buddhist monks of Southeast Asia.48 Such images
exoticize and objectify in their colonial gaze, produced for circulation in a
world far removed from that of the Buddhist clergy themselves. The studio
portraits exchanged by monks have a different quality, resulting from their
circulation between monks and novices, without the obvious intervention
of Europeans or colonial authorities. This transformation in the purpose,
tone, and circulation of photographic portraits of monks is continued and
expanded with the presentation of more varied kinds of photographs, not
only portraits, as souvenirs of travels between political zones, among not
only Buddhist clergy but also laypeople, political figures, and so on.
 Before and beyond the Cold War 47
The exchange of photographs as special, commemorative gifts among
monks, laypeople, and others is not only derived from colonial cartes de
visite but can also be seen as a reworking of an older, pre-modern Thera-
vada Buddhist religious practice, in which the replication and proliferation
of miniature sculptural images (in bronze and other materials) representing
various deities is understood to increase and disperse their symbolic power,
through the process of copying and circulation. Scholars linking pre-mod-
ern practices for the exchange and adornment of sacred images (such as
bronze sculptures) to modern photographic technologies and networks have
observed that the circulation of photography, like the distribution of sculp-
tural images made in older media, functions to communicate power, in the
Theravada Buddhist contexts of Cambodia and Thailand.49 While similar
studies have not yet been conducted in Laos, the many similarities in the
practice of Buddhism there—and the many historical links between clergy in
Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand—mean that observations made of the latter
countries may also offer insights into the Laotian case.
By surveying the scholarship on photography’s uses in Buddhist contexts
in Cambodia and Thailand, I have identified three key elements that scholars
have posited as necessary to enable the symbolic functioning of photography
as a communicator of power.50 The first and most important is the distribu-
tion of multiple copies of photographic images, ensuring that the authority
being communicated in photography is widely distributed. The second ele-
ment is the replication of images of royals and other important persons at
varying scales, ranging from billboards to pocket-sized prints.51 The third is
the worshipful adornment of photographic images, typically with gold leaf
on the surface of framed prints, and more recently in the form of digital
enhancement through image editing software, in which “the virtual hand
touches up and reworks the image as an act of devotion and of imagina-
tion.”52 All three elements have been argued to be modern extensions of
already extant pre-modern practices to do with the replication and circula-
tion of miniature statues, and other devotional and talismanic objects.
Significantly, none of these three elements appear to be present in the
history or uses of Pha Khamfan’s collection of photographs relating to the
“Secret War,” even though all elements can be seen in the circulation and
reception of other examples of photography in religious contexts in Laos.
The crucial first element—that of image replication and distribution—is
most notably absent. None of the 28 photographs from the “liberated zone”
are known to have been replicated. The photographs are not known to have
been published in any journalistic or other accounts of the “Secret War,”
in Laos or elsewhere. It is possible, indeed likely, that copies of the images
were presented by the Pathet Lao to other visitors to the “liberated zone”
and have since been lost; indeed, their survival in Pha Khamfan’s carefully
protected collection is remarkable, a matter we will return to shortly. How-
ever, that the photographs have not, to date, been found or published in any
other contexts suggests that their circulation was extremely limited. Insofar
as the images may be understood to communicate power—or to function
48 Roger Nelson
as “propaganda” for the Pathet Lao—their reach appears to have been very
small. Therefore, their function must be reconsidered. In terms of the sec-
ond element—namely, that of scale—the general situation in Laos is com-
parable to that in Cambodia and Thailand: many photographs and postcard
portraits of senior monks and abbots are enlarged for display at varying sizes
in Buddhist temples in Laos. Again, however, the 28 photographs relating
specifically to the “Secret War” are an exception: since none are known to
have appeared in other contexts, they are not known to exist in any other
sizes. Finally, on the matter of adornment, one point is of particular interest.
As mentioned above, all 28 images feature Lao captions on their recto side,
which is unusual in the collections of the Buddhist Archive. Yet other than
this, none of the images have been altered or enhanced. This places them
at odds with many photographs in Pha Khamfan’s larger collection, which
are carefully displayed in hand-painted album pages, or else formally manip-
ulated by applying chemical or other treatments to the negative or printed
image.
In all of these (and other) ways, the 28 photographs relating to the “Secret
War” collected by Pha Khamfan fail to display the elements typically iden-
tified as necessary for photography to operate as a tool for communicating
power; therefore, another function for this collection of images must be con-
sidered. One clue may lie in the 1936 Lao inscription, quoted above, which
suggests that the presentation of photographs is intended not only “as a
token of memory” for “this life and the next lives” but also a merit-making
act that “may be of benefit both to its receiver and its donor.” Many of the
28 photographs depict monks working together with Pathet Lao politicians
and laypeople: in the celebration of religious festivals, or while marching in a
political demonstration, or in studies. Unlike in Cambodia, where the radical
communists known as the Khmer Rouge banned religion and violently tar-
geted Buddhist monks, in Laos, communist ideology has almost always not
only tolerated Buddhism but celebrated it as a key tenet of “Lao” identity.53
Indeed, as Khamvone observes, the photographs collected by Pha Khamfan
demonstrate that the Pathet Lao “aimed to propagate Buddhism and Lao
tradition as symbols for peace.”54 The production and presentation of the
28 photographs relating to the “Secret War,” by the Pathet Lao, and their
collection by Pha Khamfan, may be seen as an instantiation of the mutually
merit-making collaborative bond between communist and Buddhist forces
at the time.
If the photographs can be understood as enacting an alliance between
communists and Buddhists in resisting the “Secret War” in Laos, this is evi-
dence of the failure of the US in their attempt to co-opt Buddhism to coun-
teract communism’s appeal in Southeast Asia. Recent research, focused on
the sangha or monastic order in Thailand but with broader relevance across
the Theravada world in the post-WWII period, has shed light on covert
cooperation between US forces and some Buddhist leaders.55 This is one
example of an exciting new area of scholarship on Cold War-era Southeast
Asia, which has roots in older approaches to studying the region.56 More
 Before and beyond the Cold War 49
work needs to be done to explore how the secretive partnership between
the US and the Theravada Buddhist sangha played out in the realm of art
and visual culture in this period. Yet the evidence from Pha Khamfan’s col-
lection of photographs also suggests that this pro-American coalition was far
from all-encompassing, and indeed that the opposing, anti-American alliance
between communists and Buddhists deployed photographic technologies
not only for propaganda purposes but also for merit-making as well. This
analysis “localizes” our understanding of anti-American forces in the Cold
War context, moving beyond left/right binaries to point to the imbrication
of modern political positions within older spiritual practices.
It is possible to conceive of Pha Khamfan’s collection of photographs
relating to the “Secret War,” and indeed of many of the other, larger collec-
tions held within the Buddhist Archive of Photography in Luang Prabang,
as constituting in their very existence an act of defiance of the violence and
upheaval of the Cold War period. As the Archive co-founder Hans Georg
Berger has described, the “collections were carefully protected from dangers
during the civil war and the destructions of the ‘Secret War on Laos,’ when
the country was most savagely bombed.” Moreover, this protection contin-
ued and endured:

During the revolution [of 1975], and in following years, these collec-
tions were preserved and hidden in the abodes (kuti) of the collecting
abbots. This collection was so efficient that, in the 1990s, when the
country opened again to the West, very few people knew about their
existence.57

These photographs derived their symbolic power not through their replica-
tion, circulation, adornment, rescaling, and proliferation but from their mere
existence, which may itself have been understood as merit-making.
This understanding of the symbolic function of photography, like the con-
text in which the photographs were collected and preserved for safekeeping,
links the narrative of the Cold War to older histories predating this period,
and precede its links to Euro-American political disputes. These older his-
tories and understandings are rooted in the encounter between Theravada
belief systems and image-related practices, on the one hand, and photo-
graphic technologies on the other—not the encounter between rival super-
powers that was played out in the Cold War.

“The emotional side of flying”: Terry Wofford’s paintings of

planes
If Pha Khamfan’s collection of photographs related to the “Secret War”
requires us to be more inclusive and look to networks and understandings
from a time before the Cold War, rooted in the Theravada world rather
than the geopolitical construct that is Southeast Asia, and prompts us to
see the images in the context of a longer duration of history, then Terry
50 Roger Nelson
Wofford’s paintings of planes ask us to look to discourses centered outside
of this region, seeing the works in a broader context that extends beyond
Southeast Asia. Wofford, we will see, was a highly atypical resident in Laos
during the “Secret War” and had a distinctly individual experience of this
period, which is reflected in her paintings. Therefore, we will examine some
salient aspects of Wofford’s biography, to reveal the exceptional nature of
her positionality. This inversely mirrors our examination, above, of aspects of
Theravada approaches to the production and circulation of images, in order
to reveal the consistent nature of photography’s relationship with these older
understandings.
Terry Wofford first began making paintings of airplanes soon after her
arrival in Vientiane in 1968. Prior to this, she had been working as a com-
mercial artist while traveling around East and Southeast Asia throughout
1967 and 1968, including visiting Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the
Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Thailand. Her
motivations for this travel were undoubtedly multiple and likely included
romantic fantasies about adventure—yet the desire for a kind of autonomy
or “freedom” as an artist who was also a woman was also a factor, as we shall
see below. Although Wofford remembers having “found traveling alone as a
woman to be a big advantage as it seemed to make me more approachable,”
she also recalls being an oddity in many locations.58
More than sometimes feeling herself to be out of place, she also expe-
rienced more acute difficulties due to her gender. Wofford recalls, of the
experience of working as a commercial artist at the time, that “in general
during my travels it was the usual problem of being paid less as a woman.”59
At times, she managed to overcome gender-based injustice—an obstacle by
no means unique to Southeast Asia or the Cold War period—and her corre-
spondence from the time demonstrates a palpable pride in this achievement.
In Bangkok, she was employed to make fabric designs for the reputable Jim
Thompson silk company, writing home in letters dated April 1968 that she
had “thousands of ideas” for designs that the company “loved,” and that the
fee she had “agreed on” with the company was sufficient to “be very nice…
For a few weeks anyway!”60 This feeling of success enabled more than the
ability to buy fleeting comforts during her travel. It made possible a deeper
sense of freedom and accomplishment.
Wofford’s professional training as an artist—studying first at the Moseley
Road Art School in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, from 1956 to
1959, and then at the Birmingham Art College for five years—had equipped
her with the skills necessary to freely find her own path, traveling far from
her birthplace in Leicester. She also managed to far exceed the social expec-
tations of women who studied art at the time, which dictated a more modest
and contained career trajectory; as Wofford recalls, “it was assumed back
then, in fact almost mandated that girls would pursue teaching.”61 After
her time in Laos, Wofford relocated to Arizona, and helped to establish the
American Society of Aviation Artists.62 She attributes her ability to repeatedly
transcend expectations of women and women artists not only to her tenacity
 Before and beyond the Cold War 51
but also to her name: “I know I was taken far more seriously due to my name
being Terry, spelled with a Y and presumed male,” she recalls. The name was
unusual for a girl at the time, and Wofford explains that “I think that helped
give me the sense I was not limited by gender.”63
While it is clear that a feminist approach is necessary for understanding
the relationship between Wofford’s gender and her artistic practice and pro-
fessional biography, it is also clear that her circumstances were particular to
her being an expatriate white woman—albeit a slightly out-of-place one, as
a British citizen in an American enclave—and thus offer no special insight
into the Laotian experience of the “Secret War,” or the experience of most
women in Laos at the time. Rather, studying Wofford’s paintings of planes
and the circumstances in which they were made indicates the extent to which
her world was insulated from that of the Laotians affected by the conflict,
despite her sincere respect for and interest in their culture, and concern for
their plight, which is evident in many of her paintings and also photographs
from the period.
As well as feeling “not limited by gender,” Wofford lived a privileged and
cloistered life in Vientiane, due to being a white woman, partnered with (and
later married to) the Air America pilot Bob Wofford. Although the artist
laments that “Air America pilots were on their own when it came to finding
accommodation and most else for that matter,” she also recalls that she and
Bob had access to the US Information Service (USIS) swimming pool and
the commissary. These and other privileges in their lives, setting them apart
from most Laotians, were directly tied to and made available because of
American covert military operation in Laos. This is made evident by the fact
that the artist and her partner chose to rent an apartment on a block infor-
mally known as ‘the USIS apartments,’ thus named “because the entire bot-
tom floor was taken up by USIS with a library and rooms, including secretive
electronic equipment.”64 One American government body employed spies,
while Air America employed pilots; each were dependent on the other, and
both were afforded various luxuries in Laos, including imported consumer
goods, which effectively insulated the American community from locals.
A 1971 photograph of the artist’s studio in Vientiane (Figure 2.8) suggests
that her consumption of goods commercially available in the US was equal
to or greater than her patronage of markets in Laos, despite Wofford having
taken many striking photographs of the “Morning Market” in Vientiane.65
The 1971 photograph shows an easel and paints that she had acquired from
a departing American and “augmented from a Sears [US department store]
catalog,” as well as, tellingly, a cardboard carton bearing the label “American
dinner.” To complete the sense of disconnection from the city and country
in which she was hosted, Wofford’s studio also housed a “shortwave radio
[which] provided news and entertainment from the outside world.”66
This picture of deliberate self-insulation from Laotian life, encapsulated by
the photograph of Wofford’s 1971 studio, is in keeping with the recollections
of Penelope Khounta, an American woman who was also resident in Vientiane
at the time. In her published memoirs, Khounta recalls that the US commissary
52 Roger Nelson

Figure 2.8 Terry Wofford, photographer. Studio, Nongduang House. 1971.

Reproduced with permission of the artist.

“sold American food, laundry products, cosmetics, clothes and other items,
mostly not available locally… Americans living in Vientiane never had to go to
the local markets, and some of them never did, except for perhaps a sightseeing
expedition.”67 She also describes the wife of the Air America airport fire chief
having “taught ballet to young girls from the American and other schools.”68 In
a letter dated October 1968—just a few months after her arrival in Vientiane—
Wofford enthused about the opportunities available to her as an expatriate artist:

It’s very cheap to live here, and after so much traveling I really have the
painting bug. Plus, there is a large expat. community and I think proba-
bly a good market for ‘European’ art. Anyway I’m going to give it a try.
I’m just itching to paint again.69

Wofford does not recall meeting any Laotian artists, other than woodcarvers
and other “artisans working in the basement of Gregory Rogers…the head-
master of the International School at that time.”70
As these various accounts show, Wofford’s life in Vientiane was quite
removed from the Laotian community, and it was precisely this racialized
separation that contributed to her desire to practice her art, and facilitated
her ability to do so, on her own terms. These circumstances were a direct
result of the American covert war effort in the country.
Studying the artist’s work in order to gain insights into the “Secret War” is
therefore unavoidably limiting: Wofford’s paintings and the context in which
 Before and beyond the Cold War 53
she made them demonstrate her separation (and that of the Air America
community) from Laos. These works and their world are quite far removed
from Cold War-era Southeast Asia, even though they were made here, in
that period.
The new freedom that Wofford found in her cloistered community in
Vientiane, together with the singular nature of her life in Laos during the
“Secret War,” and the artist’s developing relationship with the Air America
pilot Bob Wofford, swiftly catalyzed a significant shift in her painting prac-
tice. Wofford made her very first painting of a plane in 1968, “soon after I
met Bob,” motivated by a desire to prove to him that her work was different
from the “gaudy” and orientalist work that was “prevalent in that part of
the world at that time [such as] Chinese junks against garish sunsets, knotty
praying hands, Philippine nudes on black velvet etc.”71 The first painting of
a plane that Wofford made, Runway Zero One (Figure 2.9), depicts a plane
above a runway at night, in a sky turbulent with clouds. “This painting is
really a narrative of my own experiences flying from one country to another
without any plan,” the artist explains.72 The sense of possibility tinged with
uncertainty is reflected in the painting’s many ambiguities. Is the plane land-
ing or taking off? Is the sky pink because the sun is rising, or setting? Or is it
perhaps a sign of distant flames? Is this a passenger plane or a military plane?
Is its presence cause for hope, or despair? A compelling feature of Runway
Zero One is its openness to multiple interpretations.

Figure 2.9 Terry Wofford. Runway Zero One. 1968. Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 61cm.
Collection of the artist. Reproduced with permission of the artist.
54 Roger Nelson
Beyond its affective undecidability, Wofford’s first painting of a plane is
striking also for its negotiation and rejection of conventions of the (amateur
and commercial) genre of aviation art, which is dominated not by open-
ended suggestive imagery but by precise and technically detailed illustrations
of aeronautical engineering.73 From the outset of her career in aviation art,
Wofford rejected the genre’s usual technical precision. The artist explains
that completing “Runway Zero One…eventually led to my decision to focus
on aviation and from the emotional side of flying rather than the technical
and illustrative which it seemed limited to back then.”74 This “emotional
side of flying”—referring to her own experiences as a passenger, as well as
accounts from her husband of piloting—is evoked through the ambiguous
elements in the work, described above; the “technical and illustrative” is flatly
refused through the painting’s deliberate obfuscation of aeronautical detail.
The blurred depiction of the plane in Runway Zero One, its indistinct out-
line and lack of identifiable features, makes it impossible to pinpoint exactly
what kind of aircraft it is. This is completely at odds with most aviation art.
Yet the stridency and consistency of Wofford’s later self-identification as an
“aviation artist” means that even Wofford’s early paintings of planes reward
investigation through the lens of this genre.
The little-studied genre of aviation art—popular among hobbyists and
commercial artists, but “fall[ing] outside the critical mainstream” and almost
never discussed in scholarly settings or exhibited outside of aircraft-related
institutions—has been described (in one of very few scholarly articles about
the phenomenon) as being “strongly representational” in style, with artists
aiming “to portray with careful realism the form and color of particular air-
craft and the events that mark the history of aviation.”75 In Runway Zero
One, as in several of Wofford’s other earliest paintings of planes done in Laos,
it is impossible to identify the “particular aircraft,” as insufficient detail of
the “form and color” of the plane’s design is depicted. This is likely due to
a combination of Wofford’s limited understanding of the aircraft’s construc-
tion, and her apparent preference for a semi-impressionistic style in which
brushstrokes are visible and details indistinct. It is unlikely that security con-
cerns were a factor in Wofford’s withholding of detail in her depiction of Air
America aircraft, since most were standard models masquerading as commer-
cial planes, anyway.
In Air America Helio over Remote Village (Figure 2.10), for example, the
form of the airplane is radically simplified to just a few straight lines. Moreo-
ver, the plane is painted in just white and gray, this reduced palette serving to
emphasize the contrast between the steel aircraft and the many greens, blues,
browns, yellows, and purples of the farmlands and forested mountains below.
The clean precision of the plane’s rendering works in tandem with this tonal
contrast, highlighting in its difference the shift from staccato impressionistic
brushstrokes in the depiction of the lowland farm areas to the heavy washes
along the broad mountains and moody skies. Wofford recalls that her earli-
est paintings of planes—of which this 1969 work is one—feature “the most
abstract airplanes.”76
 Before and beyond the Cold War 55

Figure 2.10 Terry Wofford. Air America Helio Over Remote Village. 1968. 45.7 ×
70cm. Private collection. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Clearly, Wofford’s initial interest in painting planes was not to “portray

with careful realism” any “particular aircraft.” In Air America Helio over
Remote Village, the artist seems instead to have been exploring the striking
incongruity between the sleek appearance and humanmade nature of the
aircraft in the sky, and the variously wild-looking natural forms of the farm-
lands and mountains below. In this painting, it may even be imagined that
the plane stands in for (American?) modernity and culture (by way of tech-
nology), in contrast to the Laotian natural environment, in which the artist
56 Roger Nelson
depicts no traces of modernity or culture, and in which even the habitation
has been rendered so indistinct as to be effectively invisible: small spots of
brown offer the only hint of the huts and houses that would have dotted
these lowlands. In Runway Zero One, however, the artist’s interest seems to
have been less formal and aesthetic than in Air America Helio over Remote
Village, and more psychological and emotional. If the latter painting explores
the contrast between the plane and the land, then Wofford’s first depiction
of an aircraft explores the feelings and memories that its appearance invokes.
Despite these differences, both of these early paintings of planes explore
aspects of aviation in general rather than any aircraft in particular. This marks
a significant divergence from most aviation art, which typically attempts to
illustrate the appearance of an identifiable aircraft as faithfully as possible.
By 1971, when she painted Dropping Supplies (Figure 2.2), Wofford
had evidently become interested in depicting specific aircraft, and included
enough details to ensure they were recognizable, at least by informed view-
ers. And indeed, most of Wofford’s viewers were informed. We have seen
that the artist lived a cloistered life in Vientiane, surrounded mostly by Air
America employees and their families; as a result, pilots and their spouses
were initially an important client base, while the artist was resident in Laos.77
After her migration to the US, she became involved in a network of aviation
artists, participating in the founding of the American Society of Aviation
Artists (ASAA) in 1986, following a gathering of aviation artists in Virginia,
organized by historian Luther Gore.78
Yet while Wofford’s involvement in the ASAA and her increasing interest
in portraying identifiable aircraft brought her closer to the mainstream of
aviation art—a chiefly hobbyist genre which, as noted above, itself “fall[s]
outside the critical mainstream”—she was also in important ways marginal
from this field of practice. She later recalled that although “the ASAA was
instrumental in improving my technical skills, it is in my opinion too lim-
ited in scope, too concerned with nuts and bolts accuracy, and too tra-
ditionalist in methods.” She takes specific issue with aviation artist Keith
Ferris, “the primary founder and driving force behind the association…
who is a stickler for technical accuracy and a three color limited palette,
and who strongly encourages use of his ‘descriptive geometry.’” Wofford
positions her practice as involving more “free expression as well as innova-
tive materials and concepts” than is allowed by Ferris or advocated by the
ASAA.79 This pointed assertion of divergence from Ferris is a bold position.
In one of the only scholarly articles on aviation art, Ferris is described
as “probably the best-known aviation artist today,” one who “has been
instrumental in promoting recent American interest in the genre.”80 His
work appears as a mural in the National Air and Space Museum, which was
established in 1976 in Washington, DC, and is described as an “institution-
alizing force.”81
Wofford has also been involved in promoting aviation art to North Amer-
ican audiences, but unlike Ferris, her focus has often been on amateur artists
rather than official institutions. In 1990, she authored an article on aviation
 Before and beyond the Cold War 57
art in a magazine popular among hobbyist painters.82 As well as offering “tips
on perspective, accuracy and marketing,” the article insists that “Feeling is
what turns painting of aircraft into a work of art.”83 This conviction, marking
Wofford’s disagreement with Ferris and other aviation artists, is illustrated
in five finished paintings, with sketches and photographs to document the
painting process.
Strikingly, all five images in Wofford’s 1990 article relate directly to
the Cold War, yet only one is drawn from the artist’s years in Laos. Two
paintings (The Observer and Arizona Thunder) depict American military
technological prowess, through detailed depictions of the interior and
exterior of advanced warplanes of the kind in use at the time. In their
boastful celebration of the scientific achievements of the US military, the
paintings are similar in tone to many Hollywood war movies. Another
work, titled Open House, depicts the annual welcoming of the public to
visit the Arizona Air Guard, an event surely intended, at least in part, to
demonstrate US military technologies and win support from the taxpay-
ers who fund them. And a painting titled Spirit of Discovery, made from
sketches done in the dark at the Kennedy Space Center, depicts a space
shuttle illuminated by dramatic floodlights. The artist describes “the mag-
nificent and ethereal look of the shuttle against the endless night sky,”84
and the message of American dominance over that vast celestial terrain is
plainly evident, with the stars-and-stripes visible on the port-side wing of
the shuttle. All four of these paintings convey a sense of US prestige, in
which the artist’s careful focus on “feeling” does not detract from techni-
cal precision or an uncomplicated message of allegiance to America in the
context of the (official) closing of the Cold War around the time of the
article’s publication in 1990.
Yet in the fifth painting, Taxi (Figure 2.11), which depicts a scene during
the “Secret War” (made by drawing on “memory, sketches and the dozens
of photographs I took in Laos”85), the message is much more complex and
ambiguous, and the “feeling” of the work is ambivalent and undecidable.
The painting depicts two adult women and three young children, standing
on a patch of grass alongside a dirt runway, where a small plane is landing.
The figures are all dressed in the distinctive garments of the Hmong peo-
ple or another highland community; their home is likely in the mountains,
shrouded in the distant haze in the background of the painting. Four of the
figures look toward the approaching plane, their faces turned away from
view, while the eldest child looks directly at the viewer, with an ambig-
uous facial expression. Wofford describes the work as a “typical scene of
tribespeople awaiting an aircraft bringing aid to and transportation out of
the mountains,”86 yet the atmosphere is one not straightforwardly hopeful
but also anxious and full of uncertainty. Are the “tribespeople” sure that
the plane will bring assistance, and not more “hard rice” or other dangers?
How do they feel about their increasing reliance on “aid” and “transpor-
tation” provided at the discretion of Air America, anyway?87 And what of
the pilot, how might he feel? Wofford was keenly aware of the dangers that
58 Roger Nelson

Figure 2.11 Terry Wofford. Taxi. Circa 1986–87. Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 61cm.
Private collection. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

her husband faced flying missions that must have looked very similar to the
one depicted in Taxi. In a letter dated September 1972, she described one
such event:

Two days ago Bob was flying over an area…A group on a craggy outcrop
were waving frantically and he went in close…As he flew just 20’ away,
they suddenly opened up with 5–6 machine guns…The airplane was
riddled, one bullet going up the wing strut close to Bob’s head. The fact
that they didn’t blow them out of the sky is nothing short of a miracle.88

How was the pilot, or the artist—or we, the viewers of the painting—to
know if this “group on a craggy outcrop” as depicted in Taxi are friends,
happily awaiting “aid,” or enemies, fearful of “hard rice” and ready to
shoot?
These questions are unanswerable, and this is reflected in the uncertain
atmosphere of Taxi. Unlike the stridently technophilic and patriotic tone
of the other four paintings accompanying Wofford’s article introducing avi-
ation art to a broader public of North American amateur art enthusiasts,
this depiction of a scene from the “Secret War” in Laos is ambiguous and
ambivalent. Perhaps this reflects the artist’s wish to convey the complexity
of her experiences in Laos, or perhaps it is an unintentional reflection of her
mixed feelings regarding the conflict. The painting is also compositionally
 Before and beyond the Cold War 59
atypical of aviation art. The human figures are the largest and most colorful
elements in the composition, rather than the aircraft; our focus is on their
distinctive appearance, and their indistinct emotional response to the plane’s
arrival, rather than on the aeronautical details of the approaching vehicle.
This clearly reflects Wofford’s sincere interest in and concern for the Laotian
people.
Yet, like all of Wofford’s paintings, Taxi is not made for the Laotian peo-
ple. It offers insights not into the “Secret War” that it depicts but instead
into the idiosyncratic and highly individual trajectory of one woman’s prac-
tice, and her negotiation of the strictly conservative and male-dominated
genre of hobbyist and commercial aviation art.
It is unlikely that Wofford’s paintings of planes, or Pha Khamfan’s col-
lection of photographs relating to the “Secret War” in Laos, will ever be
considered canonical. Yet given that art historians and other scholars now
generally feel “free to pursue diverse, extra-canonical subject areas,”89 will
these corpuses of images (and others like them) nevertheless become sub-
jects of further study, in the ever-expanding field of discourse on the art and
visual culture of Cold War-era visual culture?
This is possible, but only if these bodies of work can be approached on
terms of their own, and not with the assumption that they will offer insights
into the geopolitical and historical context from which they emerged.
Insights can emerge from the study of these images, and these may con-
tribute to a history from below, focused on the anonymous individuals and
communities imbricated in the “Secret War” in Laos. Most powerfully, how-
ever, these insights will highlight the persistently elusive nature of the ideol-
ogies, micro-histories, and lived experiences of the Cold War in the Laotian
context.

Acknowledgements
I thank the editors for their gracious invitation to contribute to this book,
and their helpful comments on an earlier draft. I also extend great gratitude
to Khamvone Boulyaphonh, the chief archivist at the Buddhist Archive of
Photography in Luang Prabang, as well as the artist Terry Wofford, for their
tireless generosity in sharing images and stories over a period of several years.
It has been a great pleasure to learn from them both. It was also a great
honor to be able to invite Khamvone to Singapore in 2018, during an exhi-
bition I curated featuring digital images of photographs from Pha Khamfan’s
collection, among other works in the collection of the Buddhist Archive
of Photography. For a Postdoctoral Fellowship during which I developed
that exhibition and conducted further research in Luang Prabang, I thank
Nanyang Technological University; for hosting the exhibition, I thank the
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. For many inspiring conver-
sations about the Cold War in Southeast Asia more broadly, I thank Kathleen
Ditzig, Chairat Polmuk, Simon Soon, Thanavi Chotpradit, and other friends
and colleagues.
60 Roger Nelson
Notes
1 One example is a Getty Foundation-funded research project during 2015 and
2016, titled “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art,” in
which I took part alongside 14 other researchers. See: http://ambitiousalign-
ments.com/, accessed November 1, 2019. The project resulted in an edited
volume that reflected most of the research conducted. See: Stephen H. Whiteman,
Sarena Abdullah, Yvonne Low, and Phoebe Scott, eds., Ambitious Alignments:
New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945–1990 (Sydney and Singapore: Power
Publications and National Gallery Singapore, 2018). Another widely cited earlier
example is: Tony Day and Maya H.T. Liem, eds., Cultures at War: The Cold War
and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia
Program, 2010). These and other publications also indicate that Southeast Asia
constitutes a vibrant but also relatively self-contained field of discourse, despite
its many and deep interconnections with Asia more broadly.
2 Even for those in Laos not affected first-hand by the bombings, detailed infor-
mation about the war was available in both the Lao and Vietnamese languages:
“The air war in Laos was not officially revealed to the American people or
Congress for the best part of five years, despite being meticulously reported by
both Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese radio.” Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of
Laos (Cambridge, UK, New York, NY, and Melbourne: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 139.
3 The Hmong and other highland peoples in Laos are part of the vast, dispersed
communities collectively referred to as “Zomia.” Following the widely cited
work of James C. Scott and others, it may be possible to interpret their partici-
pation in the Second Indochina War as proxy soldiers for the US as part of a
larger historical resistance (over a longer duration) to the formation of Southeast
Asian states, like Laos, which are governed from centres of power in lowland
areas. See: James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History
of Upland Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010).
4 Joshua Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth
of a Military CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 13.
5 Seth Jacobs, The Universe Unravelling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War
Laos (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), n. 57, 296.
6 “Collection of Photographs at Vat Suvanna Khili [1910–1987],” Endangered
Archives Programme, British Library, accessed November 1, 2019, https://eap.
bl.uk/collection/EAP177-3?page=9.
7 “Terry and Robert Wofford Laotian Image Collection,” Digital Collections,
University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, accessed November 1, 2019, http://
digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/LaosImages.
8 The genre of aviation art under consideration here is chiefly practiced by ama-
teurs and commercial artists and has little intersection with mainstream dis-
courses on global modernisms, or with professionalised art worlds. In these
ways, the genre of aviation art as practiced by Wofford is quite distinct from
movements such as Futurism (and in particular the aeropitture or “aeropaint-
ings” embraced by many Futurist artists during the 1930s, including many
women) which also engaged with depictions of flight. On the genre of aviation
art, as practiced by amateurs, commercial artists, and Wofford, see: Luther Y.
Gore, “The Winged Paintbrush: Aviation Genre Art,” Leonardo 21, no. 1
(January 1988): 71–75. On Futurism and aeropitture, see: M. Barry Katz, “The
Women of Futurism,” Women’s Art Journal 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1986 –Winter
1987): 3–13.
9 Wofford appears only in journalistic, rather than scholarly, publications. See, for
example: Stephen Canner, “Music on the Hippie Trail: Laos and The Third
Eye, 1968,” Mediated Signals, March 10, 2018, accessed November 1, 2019,
 Before and beyond the Cold War 61
https://mediatedsignals.com/2018/03/10/music-on-the-hippie-trail-laos-
and-the-third-eye-1968/. Pha Khamfan’s photographs have been more exten-
sively studied, in various publications relating to the Buddhist Archive of
Photography, and in an unpublished doctoral thesis which details the Archive’s
establishment and the life and work of its co-founding abbot, Pha Khamchan
Virachitta Maha Thela (a follower of Pha Khamfan). These sources are cited
throughout this essay. They provide invaluable insights and information, yet
because they survey the entirety of the Buddhist Archive of Photography’s col-
lection (numbering some 35,000 images), they are unable to focus closely on
any single body of images, such as the 28 pictures relating to the “Secret War”
discussed here.
10 Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” in Each Wild Idea: Writing
Photography History (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000), 57.
11 These observations draw on my experience as a curator at National Gallery
Singapore, where (since January 2019) I have been part of a team of curators
working on a long-term (but constantly changing) exhibition of the modern art
of Southeast Asia, drawn largely from Singapore’s permanent collection. Within
that exhibition, several artworks by European and American artists made in the
19th and early 20th century are shown, but very few (if any) made in the latter
half of the 20th century. Since 2019, three reproductions of photographs from
Pha Khamfan’s collection have been exhibited, but these are among just a hand-
ful of reproduction prints on show. For an overview of the exhibition as it
appeared in 2015, see: Low Sze Wee, ed., Between Declarations and Dreams:
Art of Southeast Asia Since the 19th Century, exh. cat. (Singapore: National
Gallery Singapore, 2015).
12 I am not from Laos, nor have I been a long-term resident of the country. I am
an “outsider,” looking in. For these reasons and others, I refrain from offering
more interpretation than is prudent, here, instead presenting some aspects of
the stories about Pha Khamfan’s and Wofford’s images in the hope that perhaps
some “insiders” might be inspired to tell their own stories of these works in
future.
13 Although the notion of “haunting” may recall Jacques Derrida, within a
Southeast Asia-centered discourse, a more pointed touchstone for my thinking
here is Arnika Fuhrmann, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular
Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press,
2016).
14 More work can be done to situate visual materials, such as those discussed in this
essay and the 35,000 images in the Buddhist Archive of Photography, in a mul-
tisensory epistemology in which the sonic plays an important role. Few scholars
working in the field of Sound Studies have turned their attention to the
Theravada world, and none (to my knowledge) have yet approached Laos. Yet,
as one scholar has argued of Sinhala Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka, “sacred
sounds are not merely ‘devotional,’ if we take that word to mean the self’s out-
ward expression…Rather, sounds in Sinhala Buddhism are best understood as
objects that are separate from the self, which gain their meaning through their
(frequently public) exchanges with nonhumans and their positioning in relation
to stars, gods, objects, and so on.” Jim Sykes, “Sound Studies, Difference, and
Global Concept History,” in Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, eds., Remapping
Sound Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 207.
15 This and other details about the photographs are drawn from a number of bilin-
gual (Lao and English) spreadsheets which serve as a database for the entire
Buddhist Archive of Photography; they consist chiefly of information about the
photographs, including their inscriptions and locations, with minimal interpre-
tation involved. Although unpublished, these spreadsheets were kindly provided
to me by Khamvone Boulyaphonh, who has been an invaluable guide to
62 Roger Nelson
navigating their rich resources. Translations from Lao to English are derived
from these spreadsheets. See also: Khamvone Boulyaphonh, “The Life, Work
and Social Roles of the Most Venerable Sathu Nyai Khamchan Virachitta Maha
Thela (1920–2007),” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, 2015, esp. 253–254.
16 Paul Messier, “Image Isn’t Everything: Revealing Affinities across Collections
through the Language of the Photographic Print,” in Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann
Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg, eds., Object: Photo. Modern Photographs:
The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949 (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2014), 1, accessed June 1, 2020, http://www.moma.org/interactives/
objectphoto/assets/essays/ Messier.pdf.
17 Kurlantzick, Great Place to Have a War, 8.
18 Kurlantzick, Great Place to Have a War, 25.
19 Another picture, of the same mother and child, captures them both at full length.
In this photograph, the child is naked, its legs scarred and wrapped in bandages,
but its eyes—hauntingly—closed.
20 On the founding of the Buddhist Archive of Photography, see: Volker Grabowsky
and Hans Georg Berger, “Introduction. Buddhist Collections of Luang Prabang:
A History of Research (2005–2015),” in The Lao Sangha and Modernity: Research
at the Buddhist Archives of Luang Prabang 2005–2015, ed. Volker Grabowsky and
Hans Georg Berger in collaboration with Bounleuth Sengsoulin and Khamvone
Boulyaphonh (New York and Luang Prabang: Anantha Publishing, c. 2015),
26–36. In the same volume, see also: Martin Jurgens, “The Buddhist Archive of
Photography: Archival Organization, Digitization and Conservation in the
Context of Research Projects of the British Library (2006–2014), 267–290.
21 This kind of cloud is named altocumulus, and was later described by Wofford (in
an instructional article written for amateur artists) as “stretch[ing] to the hori-
zon in dramatic perspective.” Terry Wofford, “Controlling the Sky,” The Artist’s
Magazine (February 1992): 54–57.
22 Terry Wofford, email to the author, January 4, 2018.
“Fairchild C-123K Provider,” National Museum of the US Air Force, posted
February 15, 2011, accessed November 1, 2019, archived at https://web.
archive.org/web/20140204001303/http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/
factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=310.
23 Jacobs, The Universe Unravelling, 202.
24 Terry Wofford, email to the author, January 4, 2018.
25 Joe F. Leeker, “Air America in Laos I – Humanitarian Work. Part II,” in The
History of Air America, 2nd ed., (Dallas: Eugene McDermott Library, University
of Texas, 2015) accessed November 1, 2019, https://www.utdallas.edu/
library/specialcollections/hac/cataam/Leeker/history/index.html.
26 Grant Evans, A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between, revised ed. (Chiang
Mai: Silkworm Books, 2012), 164.
27 Wofford, email to the author, January 15, 2018.
28 Wofford, email to the author, January 4, 2018.
29 Logbook of pilot Ed Eckholdt, quoted in: Joe F. Leecker, “Air America:
Douglas B-26s/On Marks,” in The Aircraft of Air America, 5th ed., (Dallas:
Eugene McDermott Library, University of Texas, 2015) accessed November 1,
2019, https://www.utdallas.edu/library/specialcollections/hac/cataam/
Leeker/aircraft/index.html.
30 Wofford, email to the author, February 14, 2018.
31 Wofford, email to the author, February 14, 2018.
32 Kurlantzick, Great Place to Have a War, esp. 13–20.
33 Leah Zani, “Fieldpoem 11: The Fruit Eaters,” in Bomb Children: Life in the
Former Battlefields of Laos (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2019), 36.
 Before and beyond the Cold War 63
34 Zani, Bomb Children, 21.
35 Zani, Bomb Children, 12–13.
36 Zani, Bomb Children, 13.
37 Zani, Bomb Children, 33.
38 For a short biography of Pha Khamfan, including details of his ecclesiastical
appointments, see: Pha One Keo Sitthivong and Khamvone Boulyaphonh,
Great Monks of Luang Prabang 1854 to 2007 (New York and Luang Prabang:
Anantha Publishing, c. 2010), 66–69.
39 For an overview of Pha Khamfan’s collection, see: “Collection of Photographs
at Vat Suvanna Khili [1910–1987],” Endangered Archives Programme, British
Library, accessed November 1, 2019, https://eap.bl.uk/collection/
EAP177-3.
40 Pictorial photography is not known to have emerged in Laos, nor are exhibiting
artists known to have practiced photography alongside other media. Painting
(and sculpture) dominated fine art in 20th century Laos.
41 Hans Georg Berger, Monks and the Camera (New York and Luang Prabang:
Anantha Publishing, 2015), 17. For a further introduction to Pha Khamfan’s
biography and practice of making and collecting images, see: 60–66.
42 Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos, 135.
43 Letter dated May 17, 1950, sent from Vat Chan, Vientiane, to Pha Khamchan
Virachitta, abbot at Vat Saen Sukharam, Luang Prabang, in “Appendices:
Translations and Annotations,” trans. Volker Grabowsky, in The Lao Sangha
and Modernity: Research at the Buddhist Archives of Luang Prabang 2005–2015,
ed. Volker Grabowsky and Hans Georg Berger in collaboration with Bounleuth
Sengsoulin and Khamvone Boulyaphonh (New York and Luang Prabang:
Anantha Publishing, c. 2015), 345–347.
44 See: Søren Ivarsson, Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina
and Siam, 1860–1945 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008), esp. 24–59.
45 Khamvone Boulyaphonh, “The Life, Work and Social Roles of the Most
Venerable Sathu Nyai Khamchan Virachitta Maha Thela (1920–2007),” unpub-
lished PhD dissertation, Hamburg University, 2015, 253–254.
46 See, for example: “Trip to the Liberated Zone of Cambodia by Norodom
Sihanouk, March/April 1973 [29],” Norodom Sihanouk Archival Collection,
Monash Collections Online, Monash University, accessed November 1, 2019,
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.1/484516.
47 Berger, Monks and the Camera, 21. The inscription is translated from the Thai
original.
48 See, for example, French-born photographer Émile Gsell’s Portrait of Vietnamese
Priest (Carte de visite), c. 1866, collection of National Gallery Singapore, avail-
able online at Roots, National Heritage Board, accessed April 1, 2021, https://
www.roots.gov.sg/Collection-Landing/listing/1150507. The man depicted is
dressed in the robes of a Theravada Buddhist monk.
49 On the Cambodian case, see: Joanna Wolfarth, “Lineage and Legitimacy:
Exploring Royal-Familial Visual Configurations in Cambodia,” Trans Asia
Photography Review 8, no. 1 (Art and Vernacular Photographies in Asia, Fall
2017), accessed November 1, 2019, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/
spo.7977573.0008.104. On the Thai case, see: Clare Veal, “The Charismatic
Index: Photographic Representations of Power and Status in the Thai Social
Order,” Trans Asia Photography Review 3, no. 2 (Local Culture/Global
Photography, Spring 2013), accessed November 1, 2019, http://hdl.handle.
net/2027/spo.7977573.0003.207.
50 This draws on my reading of work by Wolfarth, Veal, cited above, as well as
Morris, cited below, and Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the
Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).
51 Wolfarth, “Lineage and Legitimacy.”
64 Roger Nelson
52 On digital adornment, see: Joanna Wolfarth, “Royal Portraiture in the
Cambodian Politico-Cultural Complex: Norodom Sihanouk and the Place of
Photography,” Udaya Journal of Khmer Studies 12 (2015): 163. On the use of
gold leaf, see: Veal, “The Charismatic Index;” see also: Rosalind C. Morris,
“Photography and the Power of Images in the History of Power: Notes from
Thailand,” in Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and
Southeast Asia, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2009), 121–160.
53 Martin Stuart-Fox, Buddhist Kingdom, Marxist State: The Making of Modern
Laos, 2nd ed. (Chiang Mai: White Lotus, 2002), esp. 91–122.
54 Khamvone, “The Life, Work and Social Roles of the Most Venerable Sathu Nyai
Khamchan Virachitta Maha Thela (1920–2007),” 254.
55 Eugene Ford, Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in
Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). See also:
Patrice Ladwig, “‘Special Operation Pagoda’: Buddhism, Covert Operations,
and the Politics of Religious Subversion in Cold-War Laos (1957–60),” in
Changing Lives in Laos: Society, Politics, and Culture in a Post-Socialist State,
eds. Vanina Bouté and Vatthana Pholsena (Singapore: NUS Press, 2017),
81–108.
56 See, for example: Robert N. Bellah, ed., Religion and Progress in Modern Asia
(New York and London: The Free Press and Collier-Macmillan, 1968).
57 Berger, Monks and the Camera, 17–22.
58 Wofford, email to the author, December 22, 2017.
59 Wofford, email to the author, December 29, 2017.
60 Letter from Wofford to “home,” dated April 4, 1968, sent by email to the
author, February 14, 2019.
61 Wofford, email to the author, December 29, 2017.
62 Wofford, email to the author, January 4, 2018.
63 Wofford, email to the author, December 29, 2017.
64 Wofford, email to the author, January 4, 2018.
65 See, for example: Terry Wofford, “Morning Market 2,” 1969, “Terry and
Robert Wofford Laotian Image Collection,” Digital Collections, University of
Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, accessed November 1, 2019, https://digital.
library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/524LUXPUT66DP8F.
66 Terry Wofford, “Studio, Nongduang House,” 1971, “Terry and Robert
Wofford Laotian Image Collection,” Digital Collections, University of Wisconsin-
Madison Libraries, accessed November 1, 2019, https://digital.library.wisc.
edu/1711.dl/R3AT45RRANTZP9B.
67 Penelope Khounta, Love Began in Laos: The Story of an Extraordinary Life
(Walnut Creek, CA: PBK Press, 2017), 50. Thanks to Anna Koshcheeva for
bringing this book to my attention.
68 Khounta, Love Began in Laos, 180.
69 Letter from Wofford to “home,” dated October 16, 1968, sent by email to the
author, February 14, 2019.
70 Wofford, email to the author, December 29, 2017. Rogers’ story is fascinating,
and merits further research. According to Wofford (in an email to the author,
January 4, 2018), “Gregory arrived in Laos as a Jehovah’s Witness missionary.
Like so many of us he was captivated by the country and stayed on as headmaster
of the International School in Vientiane. … He was very involved with the Laotian
culture and at one point had an affair with one of the royal princesses which
caused him to be persona non grata for a while. His large home off the Mekong
was filled with valuable antiques and artifacts along with work produced by his
artisans who he supported financially but I don’t know the details. He also hosted
parties in his huge main living room where Royal Lao dancers would perform. …
[H]e was a very secretive person, never allowed photographs of himself. When the
 Before and beyond the Cold War 65
Pathet Lao entered Vientiane he escaped across the river losing everything. He
was found murdered in Bangkok not long after that.”
71 Wofford, “How It Began…,” unpublished note, sent by email to the author,
December 29, 2017.
72 Wofford, “How It Began…”
73 As noted above, the genre of aviation art to which I am referring here, largely
practiced by hobbyists and commercial artists, exists outside of mainstream dis-
courses. It is quite distinct from the “aeropaintings” made by Futurist artists,
for example, and is discussed in magazines aimed at amateurs, offering tips on
technique (as we will see below), rather than in magazines such as Artforum.
For an introduction to this genre of aviation art, see: Gore, “The Winged
Paintbrush: Aviation Genre Art.”
74 Wofford, “How It Began…”
75 Gore, “The Winged Paintbrush: Aviation Genre Art,” 71.
76 Wofford, email to the author, January 4, 2018.
77 Wofford, email to the author, January 4, 2018.
78 Wofford, email to the author, February 14, 2018.
79 Wofford, email to the author, February 14, 2018.
80 Gore, “The Winged Paintbrush”: 72.
81 Gore, “The Winged Paintbrush”: 71. On the museum, see: Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum, accessed November 1, 2019, https://airand-
space.si.edu/.
82 Terry Wofford, “Painting the New Frontier: Flight,” The Artist’s Magazine
(October 1990): 58–65.
83 Wofford, “Painting the New Frontier: Flight”: 58.
84 Wofford, “Painting the New Frontier: Flight”: 64.
85 Wofford, “Painting the New Frontier: Flight”: 60.
86 Wofford, “Painting the New Frontier: Flight”: 60.
87 It is widely accepted that the “history of aid to Laos during the period 1955–
1975 revolves around the US and its allies giving assistance to Laos to contain
the expansion of communism, specifically to prevent the communist Pathet Lao
from entering the governing coalition.” Viliam Phraxayavong, History of Aid to
Laos: Motivations and Impacts (Chiang Mai: Mekong Press, 2009), 63.
88 Letter from Wofford to “home,” dated September 12, 1972, sent by email to the
author, February 14, 2019.
89 Anna Brzyski, “Introduction,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.
3 Affects, trauma, and
experimental art in New Order
Indonesia, 1970–1977
Wulan Dirgantoro

Introduction
The development of Indonesian contemporary art, which can be traced to the
experimental period of the 1970s, has been viewed as closely intertwined with
socio-political events in the country.1 Indeed, this period was considered to be
one of the defining moments in Indonesian art history when socio-political
issues were incorporated back into artmaking despite the oppressive environ-
ment of the authoritarian regime. While most scholars agree that the radical
nature of the practices was a strong reaction against the conservatism in the art
academies, this chapter proposes that the new trend of happenings and instal-
lations as practiced by the artists in the experimental groups PIPA and GSRBI
(Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia, Indonesian New Art Movement) in the
1970s not only was driven by dissatisfaction with the art institutions but also
transects with the trauma of the anti-communist killings of 1965–66.
The genocide between October 1965 and July 1966 marked the end of
Indonesia’s Guided Democracy (1959–66) and the rise of anti-imperialist
political rhetoric, supported by the growing Cold War climate,2 where artists
and cultural activists became divided over political views.3 The chapter will
discuss the aftermath of the mass killings by examining the roles of two art-
ists—FX Harsono and Bonyong Munny Ardhie—as witnesses and recipients
of historical trauma. In doing so, the chapter’s discussion on trauma will shift
from the widely understood definition of trauma art—that is, artworks cre-
ated in therapy by survivors—to how artmaking can contribute to a broader
understanding of trauma in Indonesia.

The anti-communist killings and Indonesia’s cultural trauma

While PIPA and GSRBI’s use of found objects and their spontaneous, pro-
vocative happenings are already well discussed,4 to date, there has been no
discussion linking the anti-communist mass killings with artistic practices,
apart from passing references that link the socio-political interest of the
group to the time before 1965–66.5 While some artists engaged with social
issues in their works, the topic of 1965–66 remained untouched, yet it pro-
foundly affected artmaking during this period.
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 67
The anti-communist killings of 1965–66 took place in the context of Major
General Suharto and the military takeover of the Indonesian state. The kill-
ings were triggered when an attempted coup by a group of Left-leaning sol-
diers calling themselves Gerakan 30 September (30th September Movement)
failed. The poorly planned and executed coup became the tipping point for the
annihilation of the Indonesian Left. Spurred by military propaganda blaming
the attempt on the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party,
hereafter, PKI), many Indonesians joined the military in waves of violence and
mass killings targeting members and sympathizers, real or imagined, of the
PKI across the archipelago.6 The victims came from diverse ethnic, gender,
religious, and class backgrounds. According to most contemporary analyses,
up to half a million Indonesians were killed between October 1965 and
mid-1966, with up to one and half-million people detained in mass arrests.
The mass-killings caused a reorientation of Indonesian society and the
rise of a military-dominated government that labeled itself as the Orde Baru
(New Order). Against this background, the state of the arts in Indonesia’s
New Order radically shifted. With the left-leaning artists and intellectuals
disappeared, imprisoned or exiled during the anti-communist purge, the art-
ists who survived turned away from any socio-political subject matter that
could be linked to leftist ideology. From 1966 to 1998, public discussion of
the killings was forbidden. State agencies actively intervened to censor any
mention in public documents, including visual displays, artistic representa-
tions, or allusions to the killings, PKI, or Marxist-Socialist ideas.
Accordingly, the mass killings were absent from public discourse for the
32 years of the authoritarian regime. Indonesians had to pretend that the
killings did not happen, even though the millions affected were family mem-
bers, friends, neighbors and business partners—they were the victims, wit-
nesses, collaborators, and perpetrators.7 The absence was also reflected in the
visual art scene by the lack of direct references to the events in the artworks
and art historical writing under the New Order.
After Suharto’s resignation in May 1998, Indonesian visual artists began
to speak more openly about their memories of the chaotic period. For exam-
ple, FX Harsono, in a public seminar titled “Art Movements during the New
Order” organized by the Faculty of Fine Arts and Design at the Bandung
Institute of Technology in 2013, described how once, as a high school stu-
dent in 1965, he saw a horse-drawn carriage piled with corpses in his home-
town. In another instance, he described discovering a human ear that had
been placed in his pocket as a prank by a friend who had gone “communist
hunting” the night before. Yet, despite witnessing these events, however,
he stridently claimed in 2013 that “this trauma is not ours.”8 Harsono’s
claim came from his understanding that trauma can only be experienced by
those who directly experienced the violence of the anti-communist purge,
not those who witnessed it or the generation that came after it.9
However, another artist, Siti Adiyati Subangun, offered a different recol-
lection than Harsono in the same seminar and later repeated her statement
in a recorded interview in 2015.10 She explained that their generation was
68 Wulan Dirgantoro
traumatized by witnessing the killings of their friends and teachers during
the time, “it remained in our memory, and it is always at the back of our
mind when we created our art.”11 It should be noted that these statements
were made public nearly 50 years after the events, thus indicating the belat-
edness of the collective trauma of the mass killings.
“Trauma” in this chapter is used to describe the events and assaults on the
psyche that cannot be processed by a conscious mind and whose understand-
ing is often, at best, deferred.12 Furthermore, scholars have also established
how traumatic memory can be transmitted across members of a community
and even across generations and time.13 In discussing the broader impact of
trauma, Alexander’s study explains that trauma has a social dimension that
impairs the basic sense of communality.14 The study emphasizes how collec-
tive trauma works insidiously where it lacks the suddenness typically associ-
ated with individualized trauma, as in Harsono’s comment above. However,
it is still a form of shock, particularly when combined with the realization
that the community no longer exists as effective support.
Eyerman reiterated that in cultural trauma, the trauma need not necessar-
ily be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any, or all.
While it may be necessary to establish an event as a significant “cause,” its
traumatic meaning must be established and accepted for the trauma to be
worked through and resolved.15 Harsono and Subangun’s statements above
bring us back to the context of Indonesia’s collective memory of 1965–66.
In this regard, the silencing of the 1965–66 narratives caused the trauma
of the killings to never fully be established or accepted in Indonesian soci-
ety. The socio-political challenges of elaborating the event that caused the
trauma and its exclusion from the nation’s conscious memory means that the
repressed thought recurs in the same form. This memory continues to haunt
long after the end of the New Order.

Mapping trauma: affect and the collective memory of 1965–66

The aftermath of the anti-communist killings marked an art scene that mostly
turned inwards and became resistant to change. By the time the experimental
art groups were forming in the early 1970s, Indonesia had experienced rel-
ative stability in the forms of economic growth and political stability. Under
the New Order, the cultural sector was an integral part of the regime’s Pem-
bangunan (developmental) philosophy.16 Under this philosophy, cultural
actors and producers were encouraged to develop Indonesian culture and
identity to contribute to the nation’s economic progress.
An example of such participation was the exploration of the languages
of modernism, with a focus on abstract formalism where painting and
sculpture were the dominant media. Visual artists were inspired by Islamic
culture, classical Hindu-Buddhist mythology and the traditional arts from
across the archipelago while at the same time responding to the devel-
opment of modern art and aesthetics from the West. The focus on mod-
ernism was to amalgamate Indonesia’s cultural heritage with Western art
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 69
and aesthetics to create a distinct Indonesian character in the visual arts.
The artistic direction of the period can be seen in G. Sidharta’s (1932–
2006) sculpture Tangisan Dewi Bathari (Weeping Goddess, 1976–77),
which depicted the Hindu goddess Bathari (or Betari) in a cubistic style,
combined with intricate decorative patterns inspired by Sidharta’s Java-
nese background. The result is a hybrid work that showcases a modernist
expression with an Indonesian face.17 Most importantly, it was also a way
to emphasize the new development of non-political artistic expression, to
contrast with the social-realism genre that dominated the art scene before
1965–66.
However, despite the regime’s efforts to suppress the discussion of the
killings, communities across the archipelago were aware. Scholars noted that
while the mass-killings were absent from public discourse, people knew that
certain places, such as edges of forest, rivers, and caves as well as build-
ings, had served as sites of mass killings or mass graves, as well as torture or
interrogation.18 The paradox created by the public denial and the common
knowledge of the killings caused an epistemological crisis in the Indonesian
collective memory.
Furthermore, the afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit) of trauma means that
an interval exists between the event and its consequences. This interval means
that trauma can also be interpreted as causally determined by specific event/s
and emerging after other events, internal and external, that may offer differ-
ent perspectives of the trauma.19 The search for a different perspective is thus
important in Indonesia as the trauma of the killings cannot be located in the
images, words, and phrases that facilitate the story of the mass killings.
Importantly, Jill Bennett’s work on trauma and affect in contemporary art
outlines pathways for investigating the link between artmaking and the non-
causal notion of trauma. An affinity exists between trauma, she notes, and
experimental artistic practices:

Trauma’s inherent unintelligibility, and consequently “unrepresentabil-

ity,” has become something of a trope. Derived from clinical and psy-
choanalytic accounts of trauma, the configuration of traumatic memory
outside the normal cogitative process is, as Ruth Leys demonstrates, a
discursive organisation with its own genealogy. But it is a modelling that
allies trauma with avant-garde projects in the arts. That which is categor-
ically “beyond representation: may find expression within experimental
formal languages.”20

Bennett further suggests that trauma-related art is best understood as trans-

active rather than communicative.21 To understand the transactive nature of
affect, we need to examine how affect is produced within and through the
work, and how it might be experienced by viewers. However, she cautions, if
this affective transaction does not in and of itself convey the meaning of the
trauma, we need to pursue the question of how it led us toward a conceptual
engagement with trauma.
70 Wulan Dirgantoro
Bennet’s cautionary approach is highly instructive in examining PIPA and
GSRB’s use of objects and happenings in their work. In contrast to “trauma
art” where artworks are created by survivors in therapy or as a documenta-
tion of the true violence or devastating loss, the artworks discussed in this
chapter make little to no direct references to the mass killings, either due to
strict government censorship or self-censorship by the artists. The chapter
instead seeks to examine traces of collective trauma as it emerged from non-
causal and other pathways—namely, the affective, sensorial, and political—to
discuss the affective operations of art and the ways in which art intersects
with trauma. Following Bennett’s approach, the focus on affect enables us to
engage with emotions and sensations as more productive forms of engage-
ment with trauma when no form of direct representation was available.
Hamilakis suggests that affects are best understood as assemblages that
cohere around in-betweenness. Key features of assemblage thinking are
sensoriality, memory, multi-temporality, and political effects. Drawing from
Deleuze and Guattari, he argues that sensoriality cannot be separated from
affectivity: in other words, the primary role of the senses is not to allow
the organic body to operate but to enable affectivity, to establish affective
connections, to allow us to be “touched” by other bodies, by things, by the
atmosphere, and by the world in general. He states:

…in addition to the material components that are brought together and
arranged to produce a co-functioning entity, there are other compo-
nents, which are seemingly immaterial, but which require materiality to
be enacted: I am referring to discourses, memories and affects, not just
linguistic utterances and signs.22

Hamilakis’ proposal in linking objects and affect with memory echoes Sub-
angun’s earlier statement about the background of their artistic practice.
Relatedly, as Susan Best explained, affect is one aspect of the expressive
dimension of art; it provides the tone of the work and some orientation for
the viewer. To map this pathway, the artworks discussed in the following
section will be considered through the framework of traumatic affect, or
the ways in which objects and the materiality activated by the sensorial may
engender collective trauma.
Importantly, while dissatisfaction with art academies mostly drove the
experimental practice of GSRB and PIPA, members of the groups also partic-
ipated in broader student movements that criticized the widening class and
economic gaps. More importantly, this was also the period when tapols (a
contraction of tahanan politik, political prisoners, former inmates of prison
camps) of 1965–66 events were gradually released into the community due
to the increasing pressures from international human rights organizations
who had visited some of the prison camps.23 Perhaps for the first time after
the mass killings, Indonesians directly faced the narratives of violence and
loss brought by the re-emergence of tapols among them. Yet, not much is
known about the community reception of the tapols after their immediate
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 71
release. The artworks that emerged from these experimental groups seemed
to project disturbance onto the façade of the kerukunan (social harmony)
that the state aggressively promoted.

Artistic rebellion and traumatic affect: FX Harsono and Bonyong

Munny Ardhie
GSRBI was comprised of 17 artists from academies in Jakarta (Jakarta Art
Institute, IKJ), Bandung (Faculty of Fine Art and Design, ITB), and Yogy-
akarta (Indonesian Art Academy, ASRI). Between 1975 and 1977, the mem-
bers of GSRBI were Ries Purwono, S. Prinka, Anyool Subroto, Satyagraha,
Nyoman Nuarta, Pandu Sudewo, Dede Eri Supria, Jim Supangkat, Siti Adi-
yati Subangun, Bachtiar Zainul, Nanik Mirna, Hardi, Wagiono S., FX Har-
sono, Agus Cahyono, and Bonyong Munny Ardhie. In 1977, some members
of GSRBI who were based in Yogyakarta—namely Bonyong Munny Ardhie,
Dede Eri Supria, and Ris Purwono—organized the exhibition Kepribadian
Apa? (What Identity?) along with other Yogya-based artists who will be dis-
cussed more below. While other collectives were formed during the New
Order, and other artists were also interested in experimental works, such as
the poet and artist Danarto (1940–2018) and ceramicist Hilda Soemantri
(1945–2003), these two groups were notorious for provocative works and
artistic strategies that directly challenged the dominant aesthetic direction of
the time. In parallel with other artistic practices in Southeast Asia during the
1970s, these young artists sought new ways of making, understanding, and
experiencing works of art to break the status quo.
GSRBI’s founding reflected this push. They were interested in bringing
social issues back to artistic practices and focusing on the emotional impact
of the artworks on the audience. In contrast with the previous generation
that favored aesthetic formalism with its attendant objectivity, GSRBI’s (and
subsequently PIPA’s) artworks rejected the previous generation’s highly per-
sonalized approach to art. Instead, they called for more open and socially
engaged practices. When GSRB first presented their works in 1975, they
boldly stated that “social problems rather than personal emotions expressed
through art should be the basis of new Indonesian art.”24
Furthermore, the group called for art to enter the realm of the everyday
and to erase the boundary between “high” and “low” art (as represented by
folk or traditional forms). The group’s core aesthetic strategy of bridging the
everyday with artistic practice was to utilize utilitarian items, such as toys and
food items, alongside mediums conventionally used in art such as canvas and
paint. However, embedded in the group’s aims to provoke and challenge, I
would like to speculate that these strategies also emerged in close proximity
to trauma, as highlighted by FX Harsono and Bonyong Munny Ardhie’s
works in the following section.
FX Harsono (b. 1949), one of Indonesia’s eminent contemporary art-
ists, regularly represented Indonesia in regional and global contemporary
art exhibitions. Born in Blitar, East Java province, he was trained in the
72 Wulan Dirgantoro
Indonesian Visual Art Academy (ASRI) from 1969 to 1974 and Jakarta Art
Institute from 1987 to 1991. His interest in socio-political issues had already
emerged in his student days at ASRI. He became known for participating
in the December Hitam (Black December) protest in 1974 that galvanized
the experimental movement in Indonesian visual arts.25 In the first GSRBI
exhibition in 1975, Harsono created four installation works—Paling Top
(The Most Top, 1975), Manusia Terbelah (The Divided Human, 1975),
Pistol Plastik, Kembang Plastik Dalam Kantong Plastik (Plastic Gun, Plastic
Flower inside Plastic Bags, 1975), and Rantai yang Santai (The Relaxed
Chain, 1975). The discussion below will focus on the latter two.
For the installation Pistol Plastik (1975), the artist hung three plastic bags
in a row (Figure 3.1). In one of the few existing documentation of this art-
work, each large translucent bag contains a single object suspended from a
string in the middle. Two bags, each containing a plastic gun, flank a central
bag containing a plastic flower. The artist’s interest in plastic’s materiality
can be seen as a critique of the growing consumerism in Indonesia’s increas-
ingly modernized society. The plastic objects in his works seem to be full of
meaning but always ready to become junk or transform into something else.
Another work by Harsono, titled Rantai Yang Santai (The Relaxed
Chain, 1975) (Figure 3.2), further exemplifies this intersection between
objects and the possibilities for transformation. The installation comprised
of a pillow and two bolster cushions arranged on a baby mattress that is
encircled by a chain, one end of which dangles to the floor. The artist offers
that the installation was about the pervasiveness of the military in everyday
life. He explains:

At the time, people did not feel secure in their daily lives because we
did not feel free even in our private space. It was like we were chained,
tied. It was as if the regime installed a surveillance camera in people’s
houses. Even in our private houses, people did not want to talk about
the military at all.26

As scholars have noted, by the early 1970s, Indonesia’s armed forces had
established dominance over four major areas: the political sector, the econ-
omy, the military, and the socio-cultural arena.27 In the latter, the govern-
ment exercised tight censorship of media and cultural activities with writers,
painters, and musicians often jailed or socially marginalized for expressing a
critical attitude.
Measuring only 67 × 97 × 56 cm, the installation’s soft materials contrast
sharply with the metal chain. The artist’s explanation implies that the chain
represents a sense of fear toward the military for many Indonesians during
the early New Order regime. Simultaneously, as the chain sinuously encircles
the bolsters and pillows, the work also suggests that such fear has become an
intimate part of everyday life.
The use of weapons and chains in these works gestures toward social and
political issues, particularly Rantai yang Santai as explained by the artist
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 73

Figure 3.1 FX Harsono, Pistol Plastik, Kembang Plastik dalam Kantong Plastik
(Plastic Gun, Plastic Flower inside Plastic Bags), 1975, mixed media,
variable dimension. Image courtesy of Indonesian Visual Art Archive
(IVAA). Exhibited in the first Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia.

in his statement above. However, it should be noted that the artist’s expla-
nation of this work was made long after the work was completed. As this
explanation was not available during the original exhibition, I offer another
reading of both works to capture how the artist’s works might be created
in close proximity with trauma and how trauma’s affect is present in the
artworks.
Harsono’s installations, though they might appear to represent violence
through the use of guns and chain, could also be seen as representing the
shutting down of the senses. The Plastik installation depicts the stillness of
74 Wulan Dirgantoro

Figure 3.2 FX Harsono, Rantai yang Santai (The Relaxed Chain), 1975, mixed
media, 67 × 97 × 56 cm. Image courtesy of Indonesian Visual Art Archive
(IVAA). Exhibited in the first Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia.

the objects encased in the plastic bags. Everything seems to be temporarily

suspended; the guns are forever poised to shoot, yet nothing happens, and
nothing will. The chains that bound the pillows and the mattress together
further emphasized this sense of stillness where the metal constrained any
possibility of movement. Both installations seemed to capture the almost
imperceptible affect of trauma. While trauma’s effect is violent and discord-
ant, its affect is often quiet and insidious.
In this regard, the stillness and the shutting down of senses in Harsono’s
installation captures the sense of paralysis and disconnection caused by
trauma where language and meaning have broken down. While the artist
made the political decision to avoid direct narratives in his installation, the
paralysis palpable in the works also compelled the viewers (including our-
selves) to search for a sense of narrative or marks that speak of intelligibility.
Sanento Yuliman, the late Indonesian art historian and critic, highlighted
this search:

Can we say from this exhibition that we are being introduced to a new
aesthetic experience where the “sense of concreteness” becomes the
basis to that same experience, hence transforming the experience qual-
itatively into a different one from the “conventional”… as though to
shock us with the materiality of the banal?28

Yuliman’s reading about the sense of shock points out the group’s strategy
in foregrounding the objects’ political agency. At the same time, it was also
applicable to the way in which Harsono’s works resist narrativization. Trauma’s
belatedness disallows narrative closure and can only be expressed through its
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 75
symptoms, which are made possible through artistic representations. Here, the
symptoms are manifested in the shock that Yuliman registered and the paralysis
captured by Harsono’s works. These reactions possibly emphasized trauma’s
affect as it insidiously entered the making and reading of the works.
Indeed, around the time of Black December in 1974 and the first GSRBI
exhibition in 1975, the Indonesian government was also under international
and domestic pressures to reconsider its treatment of political prisoners.
Exposure by non-governmental organizations from outside Indonesia of the
appalling conditions in prison camps, combined with the government’s need
to increase its aid from foreign economic and military assistance, showed
the early release of around 1300 Category B prisoners in December 1975.29
However, after their release, ex-tapols’ movements were significantly con-
strained, and they were effectively under town arrest.30 Most ex-tapols also
had to restart their lives as their properties, including their businesses, often
had been seized by the government or military members who had evicted
ex-tapols’ families. Homelessness was rife, families were separated and dis-
persed across Indonesia, and strong social stigma was attached to both ex-ta-
pol and their families. It was clear that this situation had caused severe trauma
to the individuals and a rupture of the social fabric in many communities.
The New Order’s notion of kerukunan (social harmony) that emphasized
community consensus was heavily promoted for the 32 years of the regime.
As such, difficult and traumatic narratives such as those brought by the tapols
were silenced by the state. Moreover, the silence was also internalized by
many survivors and their families to maintain their already tenuous relation-
ship with their communities.
The lack of signification about the mass killings in Indonesian public dis-
course seemed to cause the trauma to be buried in the public memory. Nev-
ertheless, trauma’s insidious affect on the body can be illustrated, this chapter
argues, through the processes of material transformation represented in
Bonyong Munny Ardhie’s works below. Bonyong Munny Ardhie (b. 1946)
was born in Malang, East Java province. He studied at ASRI, Yogyakarta,
from 1969 until 1980, majoring in painting. His early practice was shaped
by the desire to challenge artmaking conventions; he used the Javanese term
waton suloyo (loosely translated as “being reckless”) to describe his interest
in experimental art forms and media.31
In comparison with Harsono’s works that captured paralysis as a psychic
wound, Ardhie’s objects bear the imprints of trauma on the body. His works
appeared to echo what happened in the real event where hundreds and
thousands of bodies experienced deprivation, neglect, starvation, pain, and
systematic assault to the psyche during the events of 1965–66. The discus-
sion below examines how Ardhie’s works engage with the materiality of the
medium, the body, and mnemonic practices.
After the initial shock of their first exhibition in 1975, the second (1977) and
third exhibitions (1979) of GSRB saw a deepening of conceptual and artistic
strategies in the group. In 1977, for example, for the group exhibition at the
French Cultural Centre in Bandung, Ardhie presented Monumen Revolusi:
76 Wulan Dirgantoro
diresmikan oleh Pak Bejo Tukang Becak (Monument of Revolution: inaugu-
rated by Mr Bejo, a becak driver, 1977) (Figure 3.3). The sculpture consisted
of seven military boots placed haphazardly on a pedestal and drenched in thick
black paint that dribbled to the floor. Before the pedestal, the artist had placed
a plaque with the title. Pak Bejo, the official recognized by the monument, was
the driver of a becak, a popular mode of transport in small neighborhoods of
Indonesia that has long been seen to symbolize the urban poor.32
The textual element in this work primarily defines its interpretation as a
commentary on many ex-combatants’ forgotten fate after Indonesia’s inde-
pendence in 1945. Ostensibly, the word Revolusi (revolution) refers to the
period of 1945–49, when Indonesia defended the young republic from a
series of military takeovers by the Dutch. However, it was also used in the
New Order’s military propaganda to describe the so-called PKI’s council of
military officers (Dewan Revolusi, the Revolutionary Council) that allegedly
claimed responsibility for the failed coup.33 The use of military boots tanta-
lizingly suggested both meanings, in particular, the way state propaganda
permeated the making and reading of the work. Here, I offer a reading into
the paint’s thick and viscous materiality where it might have transected with
trauma to deepen the meaning of the work.
The title Monumen Revolusi might have referred to a monument for
national remembrance. However, as the artist reminds the viewer, it was not
a government official that officiated the monument but Pak Bejo, a symbol
of the urban poor—invisible to the viewer, yet very much present in this
work. Ardhie’s strategy in depicting an abject object (the decaying boots)

Figure 3.3 BM Ardhie, Monumen Revolusi Diresmikan oleh Pak Bejo Tukang Becak
(Revolution Monument Inaugurated by Mr Bejo, Becak Driver), 1977,
mixed media, variable dimension. Image courtesy of Indonesian Visual
Art Archive. Exhibited in the second Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia.
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 77
and invisibility (the figure of Pak Bejo) mobilized the work’s materiality to
evoke death and decomposition as marking the traumatic narratives that
were suppressed during the period. Ardhie intentionally used thick paint
to emulate putrefying objects where the paint’s materiality transformed
the symbolism of the military boots from order and strength to decay and
decomposition. The seemingly soft and yielding material mimed a kind of
surrender to a natural condition that pulled the body down and became a
reminder of transient mortality. As one critic noted, the work had a getir
(bitter or painful) tone as deeply embedded in everyday life.34
While the artist’s intention might be to push the boundaries of artistic
mediums, the work also highlighted violence’s cyclical nature. Indeed, the
artist’s interest in an emotive approach created a work with haptic and mne-
monic qualities; it highlighted that Indonesia’s independence from the colo-
nial powers and the emergence of the New Order both stood on the sheer
material weight of multitudes of damaged bodies. While trauma may not be
“present” in this work, the emphasis on death and decay gestures toward
what needs to be forgotten in Indonesia’s history (the mass killings); yet,
in doing so, the artwork through processes of signification might reveal the
trauma that it sought to suppress.
The mutability of the industrial substance used by Ardhie not only repre-
sented an attack against the art establishment—a material rebellion against
conventional art forms—it also became an expression of protest aiming to
disrupt the social order. Ardhie and his peers’ attempts to disrupt the con-
ventional order through artmaking continued to gain support from cultural
institutions and notable art critics such as the late Sanento Yuliman and Sudar-
madji. The group also increased in numbers as more artists joined the spirit of
the experimental art scene in cities such as Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta.
In Yogyakarta, some artists that joined GSRB expanded the spirit by produc-
ing group exhibitions, notably in Kepribadian Apa? (What Identity?).
The works in Kepribadian Apa departed in several ways from GSRB’s
exhibitions, particularly with the higher number of performative works and
the strong protest content. Ardhie, Ries Purwana, Gendut Riyanto, and
Ronald Manulang introduced aesthetic approaches that the discussions at
the GSRB had honed. Other artists who participated in the exhibition were
drawn by the spirit of discontent and openness that permeated the artistic
and cultural atmosphere in Yogyakarta during the time.35
Kepribadian Apa? (What Identity?) was the original title of the group exhi-
bition. After the controversy, the title was then adopted to describe the artists
in the show. The title was the group’s rhetorical response to the pervasive
debate about “Indonesian identity” in art and cultural circles. Artists and
writers were expected to produce works that expressed a sense of Indone-
sianness.36 Thus, the exhibition strategies struck a decidedly political note by
rejecting this demand. PIPA also published a manifesto that can be summa-
rized as expressing a strong desire to break down the conventional system and
the art establishment. As a group, they intended to unify all forms of artistic
practice into one type of art that was “free from jargons and definitions.”37
78 Wulan Dirgantoro
Ardhie presented several works in this exhibition, including a participatory
performance titled Mimbar Bebas (Podium for Free Speech, 1977) and instal-
lations Etalase (Display Case, 1977) and Menara ASEAN (ASEAN Tower,
1977). His works, already political in GSRBI, became more pronounced
in Kepribadian Apa. His Menara ASEAN (Figure 3.4) echoed Monumen
Revolusi’s critical approach as an anti-monument, yet it also reinforced the
challenges in remembering early New Order Indonesia’s atrocities.
As Alexander (2004) argues, to construct the meaning of trauma within
a community, the original event must be supported by processes of signifi-
cation within that community; the cultural construct of trauma depends on
how the event is perceived as traumatic. In this regard, it is both the event
and the meaning that provide shock and fear. As discussed above, the New
Order’s denial and suppression of the anti-communist killings pointed to the
lack of signification of the trauma in the nation’s conscious memory, which
may explain its absence in Indonesia’s visual arts. In contrast to Monumen
Revolusi, which may inadvertently reveal the hidden narratives, Ardhie’s
Menara ASEAN illustrated the consequences of this lack of signification.
Menara ASEAN was comprised of a three-meter wall of bamboo with
a figure slumped against it. On the wall were several signs ranging from
a large one stating Disini Akan Dibuat ASEAN Tower Bertaraf Interna-
sional (ASEAN Tower with International Standards Will Be Built Here) to a
smaller sign stating the name of the developer as C.V. Suhartono (Suhartono,
Inc.), a play on Suharto’s name.

Figure 3.4 BM Ardhie, Menara ASEAN (ASEAN Tower), 1977, mixed media,
variable dimension. Image courtesy of Indonesian Visual Art Archive.
Exhibited in the first Kepribadian Apa?
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 79
The installation’s focus was a life-sized male figure with suitcases, clothes,
and shoes scattered around him. The figure is presented as thoroughly abject,
slumped against the wall with eyes closed, bare feet, and torn clothing. The
figure’s face and hands, Ardhie explained, were life-casts of his body, thus giv-
ing the figure the uncanny semblance of a living figure.38 Hamilakis’ study on
assemblage thinking is instructive to reconsider the political reading of this
work beyond its textual elements, particularly how the assemblage of objects
might constitute a selective mnemonic practice. Ardhie’s installation as a
deliberate arrangement of objects assumes a social agent’s ability and power
that brought social and political consequences. While on the one hand, the
abject figure has been read as symbolizing one of many victims forced to
become homeless and displaced by the New Order’s relentless developmen-
talism,39 another reading of the work offers the narratives of many ex-tapols
who faced similar, if not worse, fates at the hands of the authoritarian regime.
However, nothing of the latter exists in the installation; there are no sym-
bolic images of the ex-tapols or their narratives. By this stage, obliteration
and invisibility seem to be the primary keys to understanding the strate-
gies of control and domination set in motion by the authoritarian regime.
Indeed, the political force of the installation could be seen as emerging from
the selection of specific instances (“the poor and the homeless”) and the
forgetting of others (ex-tapols). Such selection also, potentially, actualized
distinct modes of remembrance in Indonesian visual art practices that can be
instrumentalized for the present and the future—namely, that the forgetting
of others can erase a difficult or inconvenient truth.

Conclusion
Fifty-five years after the events of 1965–66, challenges still exist in Indonesia
on how to deal with its dark past. To this day, no one has been held account-
able for the mass-killings of 1965–66; victims and perpetrators continue to
live side by side in everyday life. More often, the victims and their families
are silenced by intimidation and terror. Despite visual artists’ alignment with
socio-politically engaged practices, our discussion in this chapter has demon-
strated that visual artists were also profoundly impacted and possibly also
implicated in forgetting the events.
Ardhie stated, in his typically understated way, that his works were about
“playfulness” (main-main).40 However, his works were also consciously cul-
tivated to express a sense of freedom in artmaking. Together with FX Har-
sono and their peers, the artists’ intention to represent reality was consistent
with their aesthetic strategy to incite emotions without any filter or aes-
thetic mediation. By so doing, they also offered a cathartic release through
representations of dissent and chaos. The arrangement of objects in their
artworks challenged the restrained and distanced approach of the dominant
mode of artmaking of the time—formalist abstraction—and questioned the
notion of kerukunan (social harmony) through their portrayal of human
action and suffering.
80 Wulan Dirgantoro
The debate on identity or “Indonesianness” that foregrounded many young
artists’ rebellious and experimental practices during the 1970s was shaped by
the localized inflection of the cultural Cold War in Indonesia. While their works
did not directly represent the anti-communist killings, the freedom and rebellion
they conveyed through the installations were often shadowed by a charge of
subversi (subversive) or accusations of sympathizing with PKI—both of which
were dangerous in early New Order Indonesia.41 Their practices aimed to push
the boundaries of artmaking and what was permissible in terms of subject matter
but still were bounded by the fear and trauma of 1965–66. Their works instead
pivoted to capture the different registers: the sensorial and the affective that
channeled the silencing of critical voices and the inability to mourn collectively.
Nonetheless, I caution against a total reframing of the experimental practices
in Indonesia in the 1970s through the lens of trauma. To identify any art in a
post-conflict society as being about trauma may open new readings. Still, it may
also reduce the meaning of the artworks to a singular definition, which can be
counterproductive. Instead, this chapter seeks to capture the experimental prac-
tices’ encounter with collective trauma by highlighting the intricacies underlying
given ideas about artmaking and art historical writing. In illustrating trauma’s
affect as quiet and insidious, yet ever-present, trauma’s belatedness deals with a
past event or with the objects of memory and the present experience of memory
as captured in the experimental artworks during Indonesia’s authoritarian era.

Notes
1 Research funding for this chapter was partially supported by the Art Histories
and Aesthetic Practices program at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin,
2016–17. The author also wishes to thank Dr Amanda Katherine Rath (Goethe
University Frankfurt) for her generous feedback. Unless otherwise noted, all
translations are by the author.
2 John Roosa, Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 in
Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020).
3 See Tony Day and Maya Liem, eds. Cultures at War: Cold War and Cultural
Expression in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010) and
Jennifer Lindsey and Maya H.T. Liem, eds. Heirs to World Culture:Being
Indonesian 1950–1065 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012).
4 See Asikin Hasan, ed. Dua Seni Rupa: Sekumpulan Tulisan Sanento Yuliman
(Two Visual Arts: Selected Writings of Sanento Yuliman) (Jakarta: Yayasan Kalam,
2001); Jim Supangkat, ed. Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia: Kumpulan
Karangan (Indonesian New Art Movement: An Anthology) (Jakarta: Gramedia,
1979); Asikin Hasan, Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia (Indonesian New Art
Movement), unpublished Bachelor’s Thesis, Bandung Institute of Technology,
1992; Amanda Katherine Rath, Contextualising ‘Contemporary Art’: Propositions
of Critical Artistic Practice in Seni Rupa Kontemporer Indonesia., unpublished
PhD dissertation, Ithaca: Cornell University, 2011; Seng Yu Jin, “Descent to the
Everyday: The Emergence of Critical Exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1970s,”
in Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum 34 (2018): 39–64.
5 Brita L Miklouho-Maklai, Exposing Society’s Wounds: Some Aspects of Indonesian
Contemporary Art Since 1966, vol. 5 (Adelaide: Flinders University Asian
Studies Monograph, 1991).
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 81
6 The scholarship for this topic is extensive. See, e.g., Geoffrey Robinson, “‘Down
to the Very Roots’: The Indonesian Army’s Role in the Mass Killings of 1965–
66,” Journal of Genocide Research 19, no. 4 (2017): 465–86; Katharine
McGregor, Jess Melvin, and Annie Pohlman, eds. The Indonesian Genocide of
1965: Causes, Dynamics and Legacies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018);
John Roosa, Buried Histories, 2020.
7 Adrian Vickers, “Where Are the Bodies: The Haunting of Indonesia,” The
Public Historian 32, no. 1 (2020): 45–58.
8 FX Harsono, Gerakan-gerakan Seni Rupa Pada Masa Orde Baru (Art
Movements during the New Order). Seminar April 21–23, 2013, Faculty of
Fine Art and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology. Audio file. Selasar
Sunaryo Art Space. For discussion of Harsono’s recollection of the anti-Chi-
nese violence see Karen Strassler, “Zones of Refuge: Fugitive Memories of
Violence in the Works of FX Harsono,” History of the Present 8, no. 2 (2018):
177–208 and Agung Hujatnikajennong, “Things Happen When We
Remember: History and Memory in FX Harsono’s Art,” in Things Happen
When We Remember: FX Harsono Solo Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, 6–28
September 2014 (Bandung: Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, 2014), 30–45. See also
Harsono in this edition.
9 However, Harsono later corrected his statement and explained that all
Indonesians, in fact, experienced the trauma of 1965–66. See Grace Samboh
and Haruko Kamakura. Video interview with FX Harsono. 2015a, accessed
August 10, 2020. https://youtube.com/watch?v=CQIFLp42Qsk.
10 Siti Adiyati Subangun, Gerakan-gerakan Seni Rupa Pada Masa Orde Baru (Art
Movements during the New Order). Seminar April 21–23, 2013. Faculty of
Fine Art and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology audio file. Selasar
Sunaryo Art Space, accessed July 19, 2020, and Grace Samboh and Haruko
Kamakura. Video interview with Siti Adiyati Subangun. 2015c, accessed August
10, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= HyswDenI2rg&t=158s.
11 Subangun, Gerakan-gerakan Seni Rupa Pada Masa Orde Baru, 2013.
12 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
13 See, e.g., Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual
Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012);
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004); Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the
Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
14 Kai Erikson, “Notes in Trauma and Community,” in Trauma: Explorations in
Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
1995), 183–199 and Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil
J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
(California: University of California Press, 2004).
15 Ron Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African
American Identity,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey C.
Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Alexander
Sztompka (California: University of California Press, 2004), 60.
16 Indonesia’s developmentalism philosophy is distinct from the forms of develop-
mentalism deployed in other developing countries. Feith (1980) labelled the
New Order as ‘repressive-developmentalist’ where its modernizing mission was
built on conservatism. See Herbert Feith, “Repressive-Developmentalist
Regimes in Asia: Old Strengths, New Vulnerabilities,” in Prisma, 19 (1980):
39–55. Also Ariel Heryanto, “The Development of ‘Development’,” in
Indonesia 46 (1988), 1–24.
82 Wulan Dirgantoro
17 See Jim Supangkat, “A Brief History of Indonesian Modern Art,” in Tradition
and Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, ed. Caroline Turner (St.
Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1993), 47–57. See also Sanento
Yuliman, “Tradisi dan Kekinian” (Tradition and Contemporaneity) in Dua Seni
Rupa: Sepilihan Tulisan Sanento Yuliman (Two Visual Arts: Selected Writings
of Sanento Yuliman), ed. Asikin Hasan (Jakarta: Yayasan Kalam, 2001),
133-137.
18 See Leslie K. Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, “Posttraumatic Politics: Violence,
Memory and Biomedical Discourse in Bali,” in Understanding Trauma:
Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives, eds. Laurence J.,
Lemelson, Robert, Barad, and Mark Kirmayer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 403–32; Adrian Vickers, Where Are the Bodies? 2010.
19 Patrizia Violi, Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Space, History (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2017).
20 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 14–15.
21 Bennett, Empathic Vision, p. 7.
22 Yannis Hamilakis, “Sensorial Assemblage: Affect, Memory and Temporality in
Assemblage Thinking” in Cambridge Archeological Journal 27, no. 1 (2017),
172.
23 See Greg Fealy, Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners: Domestic Versus Foreign
Policy 1975–1979. Working Paper, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash
University (Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 1995), vol. 43.
24 Brita L. Miklouho-Maklai, Exposing Society’s Wounds, 113.
25 See Jim Supangkat, A Brief History of Indonesian Modern Art, 1993 and Asikin
Hasan, Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia, 1992.
26 See Harsono in Grace Samboh and Haruko Kamakura, Video interview with FX
Harsono, 2015a.
27 See Marcus Mietzner, Military Politics, Islam, and the State in Indonesia: From
Turbulent Transition to Democratic Consolidation (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009).
See also Katharine McGregor, History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the
Construction of Indonesia’s Past (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007).
28 Sanento Yuliman, “Perspektif Baru” (New Perspectives), in Gerakan Seni Rupa
Baru Indonesia: Kumpulan Karangan (Indonesian New Art Movement: An
Anthology), ed. Jim Supangkat (Jakarta: Gramedia, 1979), 97–98.
29 Category B prisoners were alleged PKI functionaries, members or sympathisers,
and also those who, considered by the Indonesian military, allegedly express
support by words or deeds for the failed coup attempt. See Justus van der Kroef,
“Indonesia’s Political Prisoners,” in Pacific Affairs 49, no. 4 (1976), 625–47
and Greg Fealy, Release of Indonesia’s Political Prisoners: Domestic Versus Foreign
Policy, 1975–1979, 1995.
30 They were also forbidden to write books or for news media, speak in public, join
political or mass organisations, or go abroad. Every Indonesian had to have an
identity card stating their identity number, address, occupation, and religion;
for ex-tapols, their identity card was stamped with the code ET (from ex-tapol),
which often blocked them from employment. Amnesty International described
such treatment as being similar to the discrimination by the Third Reich against
the Jews. See Amnesty International, Collection of Material Relating to Political
Imprisonment in Indonesia, 1980, 10–12, accessed August 12, 2020. https://
www.indonesia1965.org/wordpress/index.php/1980/01/31/collection-of-material-
related-to-political-imprisonment-1980/.
31 See Grace Samboh and Haruko Kamakura. Video interview with Bonyong Munny
Ardhie. 2015b, accessed August 10, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=QAcQ-mrKuzU
 Affects, trauma, and experimental art 83
32 Amanda K. Rath, Contextualising ‘Contemporary Art’, 160–62. Also
“‘Monumen Revolusi’ Karya Murni Ardhi Membawa Kesan Tersendiri”
(Monument of Revolution: Artwork by Murni Ardhi Carried an Impression) in
Pikiran Rakyat, April 13, 1977. Indonesian Visual Art Archive, accessed July
30, 2020. http://archive.ivaa-online.org/ khazanahs/detail/3232.
33 John Roosa, Buried Histories, 16–17.
34 Putu Wijaya, “Bukan Hanya Sex atau Protes” (Not Only Sex or Protest). Tempo,
12 March 1977. Indonesian Visual Art Archive, accessed July 30, 2020. http://
archive.ivaa-online.org/khazanahs/detail/3242.
35 Imam Budi Utomo, Prosa Indonesia Di Yogyakarta: 1960–1970-an (Indonesian
Prose in Yogyakarta: 1960–1970s) (Yogyakarta: Balai Bahasa Yogyakarta,
2008).
36 Asikin Hasan, Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru, 1992 and Jim Supangkat, A Brief
History of Indonesian Modern Art, 1993.
37 PIPA organised three exhibitions between 1977 and 1979. Most documenta-
tion and media reviews came from the first controversial show on 01–03
September 1977, and very little is known about their second and third shows,
the latter which opened on August 27, 1979 at the same venue. Until today,
only one review existed from their third exhibition that indicated the group has
somehow modified their artistic approach to become less political. See Joko
Sulistyo Kahar, “Dari Pergelaran Grup Kesenian PIPA” (From PIPA Group
Exposition) in Forum, October 1977. Indonesian Visual Art Archive, accessed
August 01 2020. http://archive.ivaa-online.org/khazanahs/detail/3958.
38 Critics who reviewed the exhibition implied that the real reason for its closing
was because of the criticism toward social injustice through the representation
of the poor and the thinly veiled reference toward Suharto. See Hardi, Pameran
Kepribadian Apa Ditutup Polisi, 1977 and “Surat Ijin Pergelaran Seni
Kepribadian Apa di Seni Sono Dicabut” (Permit for What Identity Exhibition
Revoked) in Bernas, September 1977, Indonesian Visual Art Archive, accessed
July 30, 2020. http://archive.ivaa-online.org/khazanahs/detail/3229
39 Amanda K. Rath, Contextualising ‘Contemporary Art’, 160–62.
40 Ardhie in Grace Samboh and Haruko Kamakura, 2015b.
41 Bonyong Munny Ardhie. Interview by IVAA. Audio file. 2003, accessed August
13, 2020. http://archive.ivaa-online.org/khazanahs/detail/74. See also
Subangun in Goethe-Institut Indonesien. BINGKIS: Tertempa dan Lahir:
Manifesto Seni di Indonesia Bersama Gunawan Muhammad, Siti Adiyati
Subangun, Taring Padi (BINGKIS: Forged and Born: Art Manifestoes in
Indonesia with Gunawan Muhammad, Siti Adiyati Subangun, Taring Padi), 2020,
accessed June 4, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrGpj-LJmyE.
4 Asia’s Cold War and
environmental devastation
Kidlat Tahimik and Roberto Villanueva’s
neo-indigenous response in the Philippines
and beyond
Midori Yamamura
On August 6th, 1945, an American B-29 bomber, The Enola Gay, dropped
a bomb containing uranium-235 on the city of Hiroshima. A fission-chain
reaction generated a lethal wave of heat and radiation, a blast that—in sec-
onds—terminated more than 140,000 human lives.1 Some cited that horrific
event as the point when the “hot war” became a “cold war.” A photo taken
in 1945 reveals two charred trees standing amid the rubble. The image is
a testimony that the bomb destroyed not only people and buildings but
also the city’s biosphere where each organism—including plants and ani-
mals—played a distinct role (Figure 4.1). Like humans, the trees survived
the bombing suffered from its aftereffect; they stunted in growth on the
side facing ground zero.2 Despite the toll on the people or the environment,
three days later, yet another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
The United States’ lack of environmental concern became quite literal
between October 3rd and 7th, 1945, when a group of 21 Manhattan District
officers and enlisted personnel arrived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their
mission was to assess only the distractive effects of the atom bombs.3 After
the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon, the RDSS-1 on August
29th, 1949, the nuclear arms race between the two superpowers resulted
in an average of 55 nuclear tests per year between 1955 and 1989. With
such unprecedented environmental violation, in recent years, geologists
have begun to recognize how these nuclear tests contributed to the current
situation in which “the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.”4
Although the commencement of such a significant human impact on the
ecosystem is now generally traced back to the Industrial Revolution, some
see Hiroshima as ending 12,000 years of climate stability and marking the
start of human-caused climate change.
Considering Hiroshima as a symbolic site for the Anthropocene, in 1994,
the Filipino environmental artist Roberto Villanueva (né Robert Gorospe
Villanueva, b. 1947–1995) proposed Sacred Sanctuary, Acupuncture the
Earth to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the atom-bombing. The
artist had been grappling with environmental issues since the early 1970s,
trying to influence the course of what he once described as “massive destruc-
tion working against nature.”5 When he conceived Sacred Sanctuary, the
artist was battling leukemia. Whereas his earlier works had focused on
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 85

Figure 4.1 Unknown Photographer, Hiroshima, around October 1945. The

National Archives.

environmental sustainability, his last two including Sacred Sanctuary, cen-

tered on healing the Earth, as if his failing health were part of the ailing
environment, as all aspects of an ecosystem are intertwined (Figure 4.2).
The central concept of Sacred Sanctuary was to merge “modern tech-
nology and ancient wisdom to focus on healing the Earth.”6 Villanueva’s
plan entailed using feng shui to interpret the Earth’s energy flow and erect
“eight oversized needles (15 cm diameter, 914.4 cm length) of copper or
copper alloy. Each needle had a “2 cm diameter hollow space” inside and was
perforated from outside at about 152 cm above the ground. Through this
hole, people could “hear the sounds from inside the earth,” such that the
“participant immediately senses a connection to the earth.” As described by
the artist, this “increased awareness or sense of the earth” opens the door for
an “exchange of healing energies between the participant and the earth.”7
Based on the age-old Chinese method of treating ailments, Villanueva’s
precolonial idea was a characteristic of a particular group of Filipino artists.
According to the Manila-based sculptor Agnes Arellano, there was a move-
ment in this country [the Philippines] to reassess indigenous culture. In art,
this was so clearly seen during the heyday in the early ’90s of the Baguio Arts
Guild, with Santi[ago] Bose and Roberto Villanueva taking the lead.8
After Villanueva’s passing in February 1995, his good friend and fellow
Baguio artist, the filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik (b. 1942, né Eric Oteyza de
Guia), continued the project. He renamed it Healing Our Planet Earth
(HOPE) after Hiroshima and executed it with his son, Kawayan de Guia (b.
1979), and four other artists from the Cordilleras. The project resulted in
two films, entitled Our Bomb Mission to Hiroshima (1995) and Our Bomb
Missions to Hiroshima/Celebrating the Year 2021 (2020).
86 Midori Yamamura

Figure 4.2 Roberto Villanueva, plan for Sacred Sanctuary: Acupuncture the Earth,
1994. © Eva Corazon-Abundo-Villanueva and Napoleon A. Villanueva.

This chapter explores how Tahimik and Villanueva responded to the envi-
ronmental destruction during the Cold War as part of their postcolonial
endeavor. To avoid President Marcos’s martial law (1972~1981), the two
moved to Baguio in 1978, where Tahimik was from. In this strategically
situated city in the Cordillera mountains, the local inhabitants had resisted
Spanish colonial control for more than three hundred years and preserved
their rich indigenous heritage. While most of the world's population pre-
ferred to live in thee metropolitan centers, Baguio artists formed a new com-
munity in the province. They embraced indigenous principles to develop a
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 87
more sustainable environment. “Think globally, act locally” was their slogan,
and their proposals aimed at the world more broadly. These artists arrived
at their postcolonial identity only after awakening from a hypnotic state that
had trapped the former colonies in a chronic cycle of consumption, con-
formed them to Western ideals, and compelled them to devalue their cultural
heritage.9

The perfumed nightmare

For 33 years . . . I slept in my cocoon of Americanized dreams. After this
anaestheticized [sic] state, I found myself stirring. I knew I was coming
out of my perfumed nightmare. In 1977, I was reborn.10

For Kidlat Tahimik, the making of his first film, Mababangong Bangungot
(The Perfumed Nightmare, 1977) was comparable to his decolonization pro-
cess. The semi-autobiographical film follows the self-searching journey of a
­jeepney driver named Kidlat; the filmmaker himself played this role. One of the
most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies," as
­Werner Herzog described it. And the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum pointed out,
“a conscious technical primitive like Luc Moullet,” a French Nouvelle Vague
director, known for his anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive
aesthetics adopted from American B-movies.11 Beyond Tahimik’s search for
identity, the poetic and primitive are the characteristics of this film.
Tahimik’s unique aesthetics will be the topic of the following section.12
Going back to Herzog’s point, with scrutiny, Tahimik establishes conscious
ties with Euroamerican films, which evoke poetic nostalgia in its audience.
He creates a dialog with filmmakers he admires; in others, he reveals the
profound impact of the foreign films on Filipino psychology. As a whole, the
film renders Kidlat’s extrication from what he describes, the “nightmare of
progress.”13
The film begins by portraying how deeply Western ideas have permeated
the psychology of Filipino life. The impact is apparent in the protagonist’s
image, who looks like an indigenized version of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp,
with the traditional Igorot hairdo and typical American attire; Kidlat wears
jeans and a T-shirt. His appearance suggests the co-existence of strong US
influence and primitive culture: his hairstyle is often identified with the
headhunters of the Cordilleran tribes. 14 This deliberate reference can be the
filmmaker’s ironic statement on how Filipino urbanites conceive their indig-
enous heritage—one of colonial legacies (Figure 4.3).
As the film opens, Kidlat stands before the only bridge to Balian, where
he lives and works. Mimicking Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague film, the
scene starts with the protagonist speaking directly to the camera: “I am Kid-
lat Tahimik. I am trying to make that final crossing to freedom. I choose my
vehicle, and I can cross all bridges.” A brief colonial history of the Philippines
is given in an explanation of the bridge, which was first a bamboo bridge,
built by Kidlat’s Filipino grandfather, then converted to concrete, taken over
88 Midori Yamamura

Figure 4.3 Kidlat Tahimik, A still from The Perfumed Nightmare, 1977. Kidlat
driving a Jeepney. © Kidlat Tahimik.

by the Spanish, Japanese, and Americans, respectively. At the end of each

sequence, Kidlat appears with his vehicle—from a toy to a real jeepney. Each
time, the size of his jeep becomes larger. He then looks at the camera, repeats
the phrase: “I am Kidlat Tahimik. I am trying to make that final crossing
to freedom. I choose my vehicle, and I can cross all bridges.” However, he
cannot cross the bridge, unable to make “that final crossing to freedom.”
The lasting nature of US colonial influence is suggested in this sequence
by the way filmmaker reordered the chronology. The actual colonial history
was 333 years of Spanish rule followed by 47 years under the United States,
and three years under the Japanese. However, positioning the United States
after Japan, with the narration starting in Tagalog but switching to English,
conveys the continuous American influence on its former colony.15
The camerawork of the first scene pays homage to the French filmmaker
Jean Renoir, borrowing from his introduction of Monsieur Lange, the pro-
tagonist in Renoir’s 1936 film The Crime of M. Lange. While Kidlat sleeps,
the camera surveys the wall of his bamboo hut as a reflection of his character.
It captures an illustration of the Katipunan (Filipino revolutionary society),
and a history of the Philippine flag’s development from the revolution in
1896 to the present day. The sequence informs us of the protagonist’s ardent
nationalism. All the while, popular American music plays from the radio.
Next, we see a pin-up of Miss Universe−svelte, white, blonde—symbolizing
the emblematic colonial mindset of longing for whiteness. The soundtrack of
this scene, the radio tunes in to Voice of America, an American government
English-language program, as the camera captures Kidlat waking from a
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 89
dream. His first act of the day is to kiss Miss America. Tahimik shot the film’s
first half in the Philippines, the second half in Europe. Throughout the first
section, the radio soundtrack plays a significant role, linking the provincial
setting to major events in the West, particularly in the United States.
American soft power drives Kidlat’s obsession with progress and his
dreams of high-tech society and Cape Canaveral (Kennedy). He is the Pres-
ident of Werner Von Braun Fan Club. Von Braun is a rocket scientist who
contributed significantly to the US space program. Despite his pro-American
fever, simple phrases in the film, such as “American space imperialism” and
“Can St. Marco protect us from the atomic bomb?” suggest Kidlat’s distrust
toward the voice of the neocolonial master that still murmurs deep in his
psyche.
His disbelief in the neo-colonial power becomes most obvious in a black-
and-white flashback featuring Kidlat’s father, who fought in the Philippine
Revolution against the Spaniards with a rifle given to him by an Ameri-
can soldier. The father celebrated a brief victory after the Spanish surrender,
believing that the United States is the ally of the Philippine Revolution. But
in the following scene, while crossing a bridge, a US soldier suddenly mur-
ders him. In this film, the bridge is a metaphor that leads to freedom. The
murder of Kidlat’s father symbolically diminished the path to freedom, while
the narration sarcastically informs us: “For twelve million dollars, the Ameri-
cans bought your soul and mine . . .”16 In the actual history, after the Filipino
revolutionaries’ brief victory, the Spanish government ceded the archipelago
to the United States in 1898 for 20 million dollars in the Treaty of Paris.
The deflated value was probably Tahimik’s satirical gesture, suggesting that
Western nations viewed Asia’s first revolution as a trifle event.
Even though the American soldier killed his father and the United States
bought the Philippines for a pittance, Kidlat is apparently pro-American. In
his Sunday prayer, even the Virgin Mary replies in the hard-boiled cadences
of Anne Sheridan: “You’re okay in my book, baby.”17 Kidlat’s mindset attests
to how US soft power—like radio programs, film, and entertainment—aided
the United States’s gradual ascent into the cultural influence and the world
superpower in the Cold War. As Takeshi Matsuda’s 2007 study convincingly
argues, US government had already asserted its hegemonic position at the
onset of the Cold War by promulgating its culture in the Axis countries of
Germany, Italy, and Japan.18 The government’s strategic plan was laid out in
a diagram in the 1949 United States Advisory Commission on Information
(Figure 4.4). The three main categories International Broadcasting, Inter-
national Press and Publication, and International Motion Pictures system-
atically propagated the American industrial, economic, and cultural merits
in 84 countries, including the Philippines. Because US soft-power enters
through fantastic American dreams rendered in cinema, Tahimik describes
Hollywood film, “the Trojan Horse of American culture.”19
Cultural programs especially stoked a tremendous intellectual appe-
tite in war-torn countries where people longed for news, commentaries,
books, magazines, movies, and photographs of any kind. To generate pro-US
90 Midori Yamamura

Figure 4.4 US Information Agency, “Information Media Services,” in 1949 United

States Advisory Commission on Information, 1949. The National Archives.

opinions, US Information Service agents established contact with receptive

government officials, political leaders, newspaper editors, writers and jour-
nalists, directors of radio newscasts and program producers, motion picture
producers and distributors, education leaders, school teachers, labor leaders,
people in business, industrialists, church officials, scientists, and artists. These
grassroots efforts ultimately permeated civic psychology and generally led
people to accept all things American in the occupied territories and beyond.
It is this soft-power that makes US environmental exploitation less promi-
nent. However, with the acceleration of climate change and intensifying envi-
ronmental disasters, the relationship between the Cold War and ecological
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 91
history has become a topic of recent scholarship. In The Polar Regions: An
Environmental History (2016), Adrian Howkins’ chapter, “War and Peace:
The Cold War,” discusses the nuclear tension between the United States and
the Soviet Union in the highly militarized Arctic zone.20
The environmental hazards were not limited to the testing of nuclear bombs.
According to the “US Atomic Energy Commission” files kept at the National
Archives, the US Department of State has “looked to develop nuclear pro-
gram system with [the] economic appeal” in the global market since 1958,
peddled nuclear power plants country to country throughout Asia. According
to Edwin O. Reischauer’s letter to the US Secretary of State dated November
1, 1963, for Japan alone, the Atomic Energy Program was a 20-billion-yen
project, six-year-spun.21 Despite being the only country to endure a nuclear
bombing, Japan eventually built 54 nuclear plants during the Cold War. Its
only solution for managing radioactive waste was the deep burial.22 Toxic
materials were brought to disposal sites far from urban centers or exported to
developing countries. In the Philippines, Japan is “infamous . . . for its prefer-
ential treatment of toxic wastes, hazardous chemicals, and nuclear wastes.”23
This transboundary waste disposal deeply impacted people in the archipelago.
In Sacred Sanctuary, Villanueva may have wanted to call attention to such
interconnectedness, linking disparate locations through a seismic sound that
could be heard from the ground through his giant needles, illuminating dia-
strophism by demonstrating how the Earth knows no national boundaries.
Nuclear waste anywhere in the world taints the ecosystem shared by all.
Nevertheless, during the Cold War, despite its lethal effects on people and
the environment, an estimated 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange were
sprayed on Vietnam between 1962 and 1971. This toxic herbicide caused
severe health damage such as cancer and Parkinson’s disease to humans
and deformities to newborns. Defoliated 90–95% of the cultivated fields,
and 36% of the mangrove forests had no small impact on the ecosystem.24
Notwithstanding the severe health threat, a less hazardous version of Agent
Orange remained in use for forest management in the US homeland until
1985.25 Agent Orange remained in the market due in part to the post-WWII
shift in US environmental regulation approaches, which was based more on
economic merit than on the people and environment’s wellbeing.26 The new
safety concerns about hazardous chemicals like Agent Orange centered only
around animal testing. Furthermore, the cases before the Food Additive
Amendment of 1958—Agent Orange was in use since the 1930s—were par-
doned from premarket testing.27
The impact on the economy is equally essential in The Perfumed Night-
mare, as it eventually shakes Kidlat from his enthrallment with progress.
His awakening occurs during his sojourn to Europe. The opportunity to
leave the Philippines arrives coincidentally one day, as Kidlat meets a wealthy
American Boy Scout who offers him a job tending vending machines in Paris.
Kidlat accepts, and the whole village holds a party to wish him farewell. Kid-
lat promises, when he becomes rich abroad, to donate a traffic light for the
village bridge. The scout leader takes Kidlat to Paris. The film demonstrates
92 Midori Yamamura
what the cultural critic Frederic Jameson has assessed, both contextually and
methodically, as the influence of economics.28 The Scout leader reveals his
corporate strategy in Paris: “First, sell my chewing gum empire, then buy a
blue jeans factory, after that army jeeps, and then jet planes . . . progress my
boy, progress.”
After arriving in Paris, Kidlat blindly follows the Scout leader’s plan, and
every day earnestly fills the vending machines. His only friend in Paris is Lola,
one of the “last merchants of four seasons,” an ambulant vendor, selling
eggs from the stall. Her business is under threat of obsolescence due to the
construction of a huge supermarket nearby. Lola worries that mass-produced
synthetic eggs will eventually overtake her small organic egg business. Kid-
lat is sympathetic, but the Scout tells him: “One market vendor less is one
parking space more.”
In real life, Tahimik’s wake-up call came with a research project he did
for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Initially, Tahimik left the Philippines to earn an MBA from the prestigious
Wharton School of Finance in 1967, and then he worked as an economic
researcher for almost four years at OECD in Paris (1968–1971). While con-
ducting comparative studies on “fertilizer distribution in third-world coun-
tries,” he realized that the “real intention behind the official aid from the
OECD participant countries was to promote their chemical inputs—‘The
Miracle Rice Program of 1968.’” 29
Funded by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, the goal of
the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) began in Mexico to increase
agricultural production worldwide by developing High-Yielding Varieties
(HYV) of cereals, especially dwarf wheat and rice. The IRRI packaged the
miracle rice with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, and a specific irrigation
system and, converted rice fields into a factory of crops.30 Growing up in
Baguio and being familiar with indigenous rice farming, Tahimik saw the
potential of miracle rice to cause “detriment of indigenous natural farming
practices.” Thus, deciding that it was time to drop his career as an econo-
mist, he returned to his writing.31
Before his career abroad, Tahimik had written a musical while attending
the University of the Philippines as a drama major. In his last summer with
OECD in 1971, he worked on a Norwegian farm, where he pitched hay in
the mornings and wrote in the afternoons. He remembers today, on his last
day there, how he decided to quit his consultancy job at OECD and “tore
up my Wharton MBA diploma . . . started growing my hair . . . . And never
looked back again.”32 Ultimately his project transformed from a career in
theater to indie filmmaking.
In The Perfumed Nightmare, Kidlat witnesses the inauguration of the
supermarket, an event attended by influential leaders of the First World—
from Henry Kissinger to Queen Elizabeth. “If the small markets work,”
Tahimik asks, “why the supermarkets?”33 Furthermore, these economically
powerful countries control the developing world. In the film, Kidlat “takes a
mythical super-breath to blow down his nightmare’s mega-capitalist icons”
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 93
that eliminate the small street vendors and exploit countries like the Philip-
pines and its indigenous farmers (Figure 4.5). “The perfume of my night-
mare had finally worn off.”34
After awakening to his values, Kidlat makes a pilgrimage to Germany, Wer-
ner Von Braun’s homeland. On the way there, he witnesses the rapid gentri-
fication of Europe. He starts seeing progress and destruction as dual effects
of modernization. A white carabao (water buffalo) that sporadically appears
throughout the film is most probably the symbol of progress, which accord-
ing to Kidlat’s good friend in the Philippines, a builder of traditional bam-
boo huts, Kaya, is: “born against nature. It is beautiful, but inside it is cold
and aggressive. Its sweetness is like the chewing gum the American soldiers
gave you. It is sweet in the beginning, but soon you feel like spitting it out
(Figure 4.6).”35 The forceful intervention of artificial technology, like the
chemically-laden miracle rice that threatens biodiversity, could enchant peo-
ple and change those indigenous farmers’ attentiveness for maintaining the
delicate balance between humans and nature. The entire “nature-friendly”
production system can easily shift into the “super-profit” -generating econ-
omy that paid a little attention to the environment.36
Kaya also complains to Kidlat that nobody wants to learn traditional
bamboo arts any longer, and everyone goes to engineering school instead.
Eventually, though, Kidlat starts seeing more value in the indigenous way of
thinking as an alternative to the progress promoted by US soft power. For
example, the jeepney was a form of mass transportation, recycled from the
US military jeeps left in the Philippines after World War II. Filipinos cut its

Figure 4.5 Kidlat Tahimik, The Perfumed Nightmare, 1977, film still, Kidlat taking a
mythical super-breath. © Kidlat Tahimik.
94 Midori Yamamura

Figure 4.6 Kidlat Tahimik, The Perfumed Nightmare, 1977, film still, white carabao
(white water buffalo). © Kidlat Tahimik.

body in two, stretched the jeep’s length using recycled industrial materials,
painted them with original designs, and transformed the “vehicle of the war
into a vehicle for life.”37 Under capitalism, people compete to purchase the
latest models of cars and other household appliances, which often resulted in
overspending and excessive materialism. After awakening from the perfumed
nightmare, Kidlat begins to see more value in indigenous ways of thinking
about sustainability, such as repurposing excess resources.
Kidlat’s journey to Europe, in a way, became his search for his Sariling
Dwende, “an inner esprit that is autonomously creative,”38 which could dis-
sociate him from the society filled with the politically purposed information
that colonizes everyday life in the Philippines. The American “Trojan Horse”
media incorporates people into capitalist circuits from within, and drives
them into unnecessary spending without thinking of the consequences. On
one end, this leads to environmental abuse. Capitalism also removes human-
ity; for example, it evaluates people not by their character but by the price
of their labor.
Tahimik’s decision to dissociate himself from the dominant beliefs, which
he addresses to his “MBA Echo Chamber,”39 came after he had experienced
“the tensions, which develop when the members of one culture try to meas-
ure themselves by the standards of a foreign culture. Quite often the end
result is an explosion.”40 The tension between the profit-based rationalism
represented by the miracle rice, and the 3,000-year-old traditional rice farm-
ing in the Cordillera terraces became Tahimik’s explosive point. It freed Kid-
lat from his fascination with “progress.” In the film, Tahimik uses a large
butterfly tattoo on Kaya’s chest to symbolize spiritual freedom and a strong
sense of self. Kaya tells Kidlat, “When the sleeping typhoon blows off its
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 95
cocoon, the butterfly embraces the sun.” The emblematic phrase means
that one can embrace true freedom only by reaching a sense of one’s own
“native” substance, or Sariling Dwende.41 Kidlat finally realizes that his real
strength lies not in mimicking the West but in having critical eyes to measure
the progress imposed upon the Filipinos, based on his cultural values, and
to find ways of advancing humanity. His “declaration of the independence”
comes not with the physical revolution but a psychological liberation from
colonial values. Ultimately, Kidlat decides to return to Balian.

“Waste nothing” aesthetics

At The Perfumed Nightmare’s New York premiere in 1980, critics unequiv-
ocally assessed the film as “underdeveloped” and “primitive.”42 Although
their intentions were positive, the tone was also the lack of technological
sophistication came from the country’s underdeveloped status. However,
the Philippine cinema has a surprisingly long. The Lumiere Brothers bap-
tized the industry in 1897, concurrent with the European film industry.43
Although Tahimik admits in an interview, he “didn’t even know rules of the
editing,”44 the industry consists of different specialists. Thus, keeping out
a professional camera operator, sound engineer, and editor was Tahimk’s
deliberate choice.
Often out of focus, with its total absence of technological sophistication,
but the Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman was right to assess The Perfumed
Nightmare as establishing a unique genre, which he called “‘waste nothing’
aesthetics.”45 The film was shot with an old Kodak camera, with rental equip-
ment, expired film stock, recycled documentary footage, and second-hand
audiotapes, in 16-mm format. The self-funded 90-minute production cost a
mere $10,000 in total. In such a context, Tahimik not only appreciated all
that was given to him—currency, human resources, materials—but also rit-
ualized the act of filmmaking. As he says: “If you don’t have resources, you
squeeze things out of the cosmos. If things are easily available, you probably
won’t try so hard.”46 This concept, according to Tahimik, is rooted in the
indigenous Filipino idea of Bathala-Na (trust the cosmos). According to
the German-Filipino psychologist and his wife, Katrin De Guia, this ancient
belief is based on the idea that when a human being surrenders his or her
maximum effort to the cosmos, a person can “become a co-creator with the
supernatural force.”47 Similar to how tribal shamans enter an altered state to
commune with the cosmos, the Bathala-Na concept made Tahimik’s film-
making style closer to the indigenous rituals.
Furthermore, Tahimik’s indigenous filmmaking enabled the filmmaker to
stay outside of the capitalist mode of production. For example, with $10,000,
he could not hire professional actors. He thus plays the lead role and gets
the Balian residents to play their roles. Tahimik’s unique filmmaking style
resulted in a community production where each volunteer was not just a staff
member but also a co-author. The kind of community participation Tahimik
encouraged is similar to how people get involved in tribal rituals. In this sense,
96 Midori Yamamura
Tahimik’s filmmaking was not a process of making but of becoming. It awak-
ens creative thinking in the participants, as Tahimik remained open to ideas.
Consequently, he does not use a strictly planned script, nor make people fol-
low his ideas. Instead, Tahimik converted his film into a joint production.
With his indigenized filmmaking, the ex-economist challenged the capital-
ist mode of production:

The big production is like a taxi-meter, where time becomes money….

In the commercial film industry, money would tell you how to make the
film. Because the film business has to make money, so the purpose of the
film becomes money.48

Film can be the costliest form of art, as it requires high-cost expertise, high-
tech equipment and involves an army of people. So the Hollywood scale
production, the costs affect both the content and quality of the final produc-
tion. Thus, the first creative freedom that Tahimik secured as a filmmaker
was freedom from the penetration of capital.
With his “‘waste nothing’ aesthetics,” Tahimik proposed something new;
he was replacing the production model of the social system that had existed
since the Industrial Revolution, which converted human labor into units of
money, and commodified land and natural resources. Instead the systemic
model that the former economist proposed was the regenerative economy.
He made The Perfumed Nightmare in such a way. Circumventing the Hol-
lywood style of sex and violence that can hike up a film’s revenue. Perfumed
Nightmare proved Jean Renoir’s claim; technological sophistication has little
to do with film’s quality.49 Ultimately, The Perfumed Nightmare was praised
for its poesy and humor and received an International Critics Jury Prize at
the Berlin Film Festival in 1977.

Bagong Sibol ang Gubat (The forest is newly grown)

Tahimik was not alone in recognizing the deleterious effects of capitalism
on the people and the environment. During the Cold War, against the rapid
deforestation taking place under the Marcos regime, Roberto Villanueva
and his colleagues—Antonio Gerena, Jaime Fabregas, and Anton and Cesar
Natividad—formed the United Filmmakers Organization (UFO) and pur-
sued the Bureau of Forestry’s film project. Since funding came from the
government, UFO members “had to put the Bureau in a good light,” as
Gerena remembered. Nonetheless, the young artists sought to make changes
from within the administration.50 The film became the award-winning doc-
umentary The Forest Is Newly Grown (1982).51 Unfortunately, the film no
longer exists.52 But Gerena remembers that it captured “how the forest[s]
were exploited for financial reasons” and covered “legal and illegal logging”
as well as “‘kaingin’ (swidden agriculture).” The final section “encouraged
people in reforestation,” based on indigenous knowledge of forest preserva-
tion practices.53
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 97
It is noteworthy that in pre colonial society, land was a communal asset.
No one can own land under the tribal policy because such tribal communities
as the Bataks in Palawan Island, for example, maintained a delicate balance
between humans, nature, and spirits, based on their knowledge of forestry.
They believed that humans could not conquer or control nature and instead
should “strive to be in perfect harmony with nature through adapting to and
worshipping it.”54 However, the local conviction began to change with the
arrival of Spaniards in the lowlands and their introduction of land ownership.
By commodifying the land and natural resources, Spanish governance cut
forest cover in the Philippines by 0.16% annually on average. The numbers
aggravated under US colonial rule, which slashed forest cover by almost five-
fold.55 Conditions worsened during the Cold War when the United States
mandated the Philippines, as part of the war reparations, to export timber to
Japan—a vast wood-consuming country in Asia. In 1950, forest cover in the
Philippines was at 49.06%, that number dropped to a “mere 8 percent” by
1992 for the entire country.56
The rapid decrease in forest cover occurred in tandem with the 1975 intro-
duction of President Marcos’s Decree 705 (The Revised Forestry Code),
which required loggers to plant one hectare of trees for every hectare they
harvested.57 With this decree, the government allowed up to 100,000 hec-
tares of logging per concession for 25 years. It mandated a filing fee of one
peso for one hectare per year and imposed a 1.5-peso tax for every cubic
meter of timber, essentially converting the forests into a timber factory. As
neoliberalism spawned public-private partnerships that sapped the capacity
of the public sector and promoted private interests, the new logging enter-
prise became an “arena for rent-seeking politicians.” Aid for these projects
came from the United States’ Cold War ally, Japan—specifically, the Official
Development Assistance (ODA) and the Japan International Cooperation
Agency (JICA).58 After the completion of their war reparations, these Jap-
anese agencies provided loans to the Forestry Bureau of the Philippines for
the reforestation of 358,000 hectares.59
Unfortunately, the government’s postwar reforestation efforts led to a
large-scale monoculture forest that lacked the biodiversity that tribal com-
munities in the uplands had long maintained. With their in-depth knowledge
of the forests, indigenous peoples such as the Igorots, had resisted colonial
powers and maintained a tenuous balance with the natural environment,
based on the belief that all lives are interconnected. But the new decree gave
Marcos vast political control over public land, mandating that indigenous
highlanders obtain government permission before accessing their ancestral
lands.60
In response to the negative impacts of the government’s logging industry,
the regime created programs in the 1970s that involved upland commu-
nities in forest management. These included Forest Occupancy Manage-
ment (FOM) in 1975, Family Approach to Reforestation (FAR) in 1976,
and Communal Tree Farming (CTF) in 1978. These were the forerunners
of community-based forest management programs. Due to poverty in the
98 Midori Yamamura
uplands, the administration promoted community involvement in reforest-
ation, which led to the social forestry program of 1982 and made funds
available for a promotional film, The Forest Is Newly Grown.
The film was shot in different areas; some, still rich with indigenous her-
itage. The Forest Is Newly Grown highlights the importance of indigenous
forestry, which aims to conserve species’ diversity, enabling the Earth to
maintain its balance among them.61 The film was made widely accessible on
Channel Four, and the Bureau of Forestry toured it in schools throughout
the provinces. 62
For Villanueva, who was mainly known as a surrealist painter, the film’s
production became a turning point in his career. After traveling to various
destinations and becoming familiar with the diversity of Filipino culture, he
gave up his teaching position in Manila to join the government’s cultural
magazine. The job involved traveling across the archipelago and getting to
know the tribes.63 In the early 1980s, together with a group of artists, he
received a grant from the Ford Foundation to live, work, and interact with
artisan communities in Ilocos.64 His solo project from this period, a film on
Tinggian Festival, demonstrates his interest in indigenous rituals.65 Despite
Villanueva’s environmental concern and in-depth knowledge of indigenous
forestry, he could only be integrate these ideas into his art after partaking in
the collective indigenous art movement in Baguio, where he and his family
had moved in 1978 and after traveling abroad.66

The Baguio Arts Guild

During President Marcos’s Martial Law (1972–1981), more than 70,000
people were imprisoned, 30,000 tortured, and 3,000 killed.67 For progressive
artists seeking political asylum, the political and cultural makeup of Baguio
became attractive. After the film production designer, Adelaida Lim Perez,
migrated from Manila to Baguio in 1973, Tahimik returned from Europe to
his hometown in 1978. The same year, Villanueva moved to Baguio. Within
a decade, the painters Santiago Bose (1949–2002) and Benedicto Cabrera
(b. 1942, better known as “BenCab”), respectively, moved from New York
and London to Baguio, where Bose was born.
Empowered by the People Power Revolution (1986), Bose, Cabrera,
Tahimik, and Villanueva, along with the anthropologist David Baradas,
established the Baguio Arts Guild (BAG) the following year with Bose as the
first President. With its members counting around 100, the guild’s overall
mission was to contribute to “a cultural climate that [strengthens] Filipino
identity,” as stated in the guild’s brochure.68 One of the goals of the art-
ists was locating their postcolonial identity in their pre-colonial roots. They
achieved this by regularly engaging in lunchtime discussions and organizing
exhibitions.
This period coincided with the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ (CCP)
attempts to explore ways of decentralizing the administration of cultural
affairs. Eventually, the BAG became one of the local arts councils that the
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 99
CCP linked up with each other in Bacolod, Bulacan, Cebu, Iloilo, Laguna,
Silay, Tuguegarao, and Viganto to promote the new local policy. Within this
context, the CCP assisted in the BAG’s planning of cultural activities by gen-
erating local support for artists and art activities. In August 1987, the guild
opened their first official project, A Day’s Portrait of a City, which toured
several cities in Mindanao as part of the CCP Outreach and Exchange Pro-
gram. The November 1987 exhibition, Marapait (Installation), was admin-
istered with support from Cordillera Cultural Foundation.69
A year after the People Power Revolution, fueled by the government’s
cultural decentralization project,70 BAG had good prospects for influencing
the country’s future. “The Artist and Nation Building” was the title of their
statement. In it, they observed, “Filipinos of olden times integrated ‘art’
as part of their lives.” Pre-colonial Filipinos were “skilled craftsmen, arti-
sans, boat builders, and weavers. Art was manifested in rituals, tattoos and
equipped with a wealth of materials used as symbols of communication.”
Unlike modern Western art that revolved around individual artists, the guild
artists modeled their work after indigenous art. They saw art as a collective
endeavor: “The rice terraces in Ifugao were built . . . by tribal communi-
ties, and is a monument made collectively,” as articulated in their statement.
However, “400 years of colonization imposed the colonial worldview, and
miseducation of the Filipinos made them believe that foreign culture was
better than their own.” 71 Such was the mentality that the Baguio artists had
to renounce. Within this context, Villanueva came up with the idea of his
first “ephemeral art.”

Ephemeral art: Villanueva’s sustainability aesthetics

In December 1988, at the local mini–Baguio Arts Festival, Villanueva
premiered The Labyrinth, an early version of his chef-d’oeuvre, Arche-
types: Cordillera’s Labyrinth (1989). Like Tahimik’s indigenous filmmak-
ing, social engagement was essential to Villanueva’s practice. The “giant
walk-in nature-installation,” creating a spiral maze, was built in collabora-
tion with the northern Luzon mountain tribe, the Ifugaos.72 During the
festival, the dap-ay—a sacred meeting spot for the Ifugao people—became
a communal ground. A bonfire was set, “food was distributed, people
gathered, made music and danced around the fire.”73 Predicated on the
Cordilleras’ indigenous customs, The Labyrinth centered on a traditional
sense of community.
The work’s ethnic roots drew interest from the CCP curator to create a
new version. Ultimately the artist reinterpreted the work and retitled it as
Archetypes: Cordillera’s Labyrinth, and erected on the grounds of the CCP.
An architecturally scaled 150-foot-wide spiral of 2,000 feet long, when set
against the urban context, Archetypes evoked many thoughts in its viewers
(Figure 4.7). Since I have interpreted this work in depth elsewhere, I will not
analyze it in detail here.74 Suffice it to say, however, that the work certainly
challenged how we interpret urban space.
100 Midori Yamamura

Figure 4.7 Roberto Villanueva, Archetypes Cordillera’s Labyrinth, 1989, runo reeds,
stone, wood, etc., 150’ wide 2,000’ long. © Eva Corazon-Abundo-
Villanueva and Napoleon A. Villanueva.

According to Marxist geographer Neil Smith, “specific spatial patterns and

processes characterize capitalist society,” with “development at one pole and
underdevelopment at the other.” 75 Smith’s image of contrasting poles is
founded upon the division between town and country, industry and agricul-
ture, with the former being more desirable for people who are absorbed in
its tenets, since the land has auxiliary value. Capitalism is the force behind
urbanization, and as the information society advanced its principles, people
flocked to metropolitan Manila. There, as with the deforestation of the Phil-
ippines, also with Miracle Rice’s mono-cropping, profit-based competition
drove irresponsible development and commodification of nature. Villanue-
va’s first “ephemeral art,” Archetypes, demonstrated how indigenous com-
munity preserved a delicate balance of nature, or in his words, “collaborating
with nature” through “‘borrowing’ [materials] from the natural environ-
ment—earth, wind, fire, and other elements having organic cycles.” In due
time, his artworks would “vanish” by returning to the Earth, with communal
rituals that raised environmental awareness, marking its beginning and end.76
Among different artistic approaches to the environmental problem, this
type of socially engaged practice to ameliorate environmental despoliation
by building community is what I have termed “sustainability aesthetics.”77
Like Tahimik’s “‘waste nothing’ aesthetics,” Villanueva arrived at his dis-
tinctive aesthetics only after affirming his postcolonial identity by distrust-
ing what the historian Renato Constantino termed as the “miseducation”
of Filipinos. Like all BAG-funders, who had once lived abroad and then
rediscovered local traditions, Villanueva embraced indigeneity only in 1987,
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 101
after his travels to Europe and Asia (1983–1985). His various encounters
with archaic ideas in Germany and different parts of Asia led him to think
that there existed “archetypal forms” which are “identical among all humans
regardless of time, culture, and geography.”78 The idea “harks back to the
depths of antiquity,”79 wrote Villanueva in one of his artist statements.
His pathbreaker was the November 1987 Renaissance Gallery exhibition,
Ugat (Root): A Tribute to the Ifugao Tribe Heritage. At this exhibition, Vil-
lanueva collaborated with the anthropologist David Baradas, who published
an article, “Roberto’s Archetypal Art,” in December 2, 1987, The Manila
Times. It explained how Villanueva conceived tribal art as archetypal, similar
to how Claude Lévi-Strauss had observed the psychic unity of all human
beings. In Baradas’s ideas, the “nature of archetypal forms is identical among
all humans regardless of time, culture, and geography,”80 which became the
eponymous principle of Villanueva’s Archetypes.
Naming his magnum opus Archetypes, Villanueva dealt with universal issues
of humans’ relationship with their environment. Seeing “indigenousness” as
an “inherent direction of ‘Filipino art,’” 81 like Tahimik’s anti-capitalist film
production, at Ugat, Villanueva notoriously refused to sell his artwork when
Jaime Zóbel de Ayala asked to buy it. His refusal was because, in indigenous
societies, art was not created for sale.82 Thereafter, Villanueva’s rejection of
capitalism became the crux of his artistic practice. But his anti-capitalist con-
cept worked adversely for preserving the legacy of his work. Before his death,
Villanueva was part of the critical international exhibitions that defined con-
temporary Southeast Asian art. However, since he did not issue a certificate
for his ephemeral art and deliberately made them unsuited for the capitalist
circuit, 25 years after his death, his work has almost been forgotten.

Healing Our Planet Earth (HOPE) after Hiroshima, 1995

On the steaming hot afternoon of August 5th, 1995, six artists arrived in
Hiroshima from Baguio. They included the Ifugao elder, Lopes Nauyac,
the artist Kawayan de Guia, the musicians Arnel Banasan and Raffy Kapuno,
performance artist Rene Aquitania, and Tahimik. “Armed with our gongs,
nose flutes, kubings and tungatongs (plus the bomb bell!),” wrote Tahi-
mik in his reflection 25 years later. After Villanueva’s death in February
1995, the artists held an “auspicious peace ritual” at Sacred Sanctuary,
which became part of Hiroshima Art Document 1995 exhibition, directed
by Sachiko Ito. I was the organizer of the project on the Japanese side.
My methodology in this section is my participation in Villanueva’s, what
would become “relational aesthetics,” based on the French curator Nicolas
Bourriaud’s 1998 definition. My involvement in this work provided indis-
pensable insights.83 With Tahimik spearheading the project, Sacred Sanc-
tuary became part of the larger project Healing Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
after Hiroshima. As mentioned earlier, out of this project, the filmmaker
made two short films, Our Bombing Mission to Hiroshima (1995, 2020),
out of this project.
102 Midori Yamamura
To complement Villanueva’s acupuncture needles, Tahimik brought an
unexploded WWII bomb-head that had been converted into a church bell
from Baguio. Tahimik’s Ifugao mentor, Lopes Nauyac, had found an intact
bombshell from the 1944 American carpet-bombing raids of the Cordil-
lera mountains. Using a hacksaw, Nauyac spent two weeks patiently sawing
off the bomb’s cast-iron head and repurposed it as the bell for the chapel
that Nauyac had built for his congregation in 1994. The unexploded bomb,
which had slept for 50 years in the river bed, uncovered just six months
before this project, according to Tahimik’s Bathala-Na concept, was des-
tined for HOPE after Hiroshima. Thus, the group borrowed the 108-kilo-
gram bell from the church and brought it to Hiroshima as a bomb for peace.
The second Hiroshima film, Our Bomb Missions to Hiroshima/Celebrating
the Year 2021 (2020), begins with Tahimik’s third son, Kabunyan, uncov-
ering wartime stamps from his grandfather’s old chest. Some stamps and
postcards are printed in Japanese; others have Japanese printed over the US
stamps. These stamps unwittingly became a testimony to the complex colo-
nial history of the Philippines. The film uses a montage technique by jux-
taposing the scenes from the project in Hiroshima with scenes shot in the
Philippines. The major takeaway of this film comes in the form of people’s
prayers for peace. Some of the Baguio scenes are from a “no nukes day”
event at a local elementary school. Small children protest France’s resump-
tion of atomic bomb tests in Bikini Atoll with their hand-made signs read-
ing “No nukes!” The scene is juxtaposed with the Baguio artists discussing
where to hang the bell by consulting with feng shui. In this film, a coherent
narrative of the ritual ceremonies at planting the needles, erecting the bell,
and a solemn ceremony on August 6th morning, intercut with scenes of the
bomb’s discovery in Baguio, Nauyac sawing off the bomb-head, and removing
the bell from the church.
As understood from the film, many parts of Sacred Sanctuary were altered
from Villanueva’s original plan. Due to limited funding, instead of casting
copper or copper alloy needles, they were made by cutting a readily available
industrial iron pipe. The number of acupuncture needles reduced from the
original eight to three. They were intended to be manually erected following
feng shui on the morning of August 6th.84 However, due to the city’s safety
requirements, the needles had to be planted by drilling the ground with
machinery. If the artist were alive, he most probably would have disapproved
of the needles’ forceful intrusion into the Earth (Figure 4.8).
Before dawn on August 6th, there was “barely audible sound [of a nose
flute] merging into the surrounding environment.” As the sun rose, “a
ritual for marking a sanctuary took place . . . with people from the mountain
province of Baguio in G-strings offering their traditional dance. People who
were gathering became barefooted and felt tender earth with their feet.”85
Except for the three needles erected in the background that reiterated part
of Villanueva’s drawing, all the activities were unscripted and spontaneously
performed. My impression is that the prearranged needles were the least
animated part of the ritual, whereas the spontaneously brought bell for peace
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 103

Figure 4.8 Kidlat Tahimik and Baguio Artists, Healing Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
after Hiroshima, August 6, 1995. Courtesy of the author.

from Baguio was vigorously alive. After the ritual dance and music, people
were invited to toll the bell for peace and healing. According to the former
curator of Fukuoka Asia Museum, Masahiro Ushiroshōji, who first intro-
duced Villanueva’s ephemeral art in Japan, the artist “initiates activities,” and
“the operation itself becomes art.” Ephemeral art is “not about art that is
good or bad in art historical context. The most important aspect of it is the
moment of the work’s becoming.”86
Contemplating HOPE after Hiroshima from a distance, I now realize how
the entire theater operated on different principles. In a capitalist society,
everything—from labor to objects—is traded for money. While organizing
Sacred Sanctuary, I had to realize how deeply capitalism had saturated my
life. For example, the easiest part of managing Sacred Sanctuary was paying
for the fabrication and gardeners to install the needles. A few grassroots envi-
ronmental activists and other sympathizers came to participate from Kyūshū
to Hokkaido—areas Villanueva had visited during his stay in Japan for the
New Art from Southeast Asia exhibition in 1992. The participants included:
Hisako Nitta, a gallerist who had helped build Villanueva’s ephemeral Dream
Weaver (1992) at Fukuoka Art Museum, musician Haruomi Hosono, a
member of Yellow Magic Orchestra who happened to meet Villanueva in
Tokyo, and the Mikami family, whom the artist had met in Hokkaido while
visiting Ainu tribes with Tahimik. The project compensated nobody, and
participation was purely voluntary.87 While organizing the project, I felt most
awkward accepting volunteers’ participation, which I could not compensate
for because of the limited budget.
104 Midori Yamamura
But that discomfort stemmed from the capitalist convention. Like the
communal forests in pre-colonial Cordilleran society, no single person can
claim credit for ephemeral art in its entirety. Villanueva’s art belongs to each
participant who traveled to Hiroshima and partook in Sacred Sanctuary. It
comes into being only with the participants’ earnest desire and creativity. And
it becomes effective only with each participant’s care for the environment.
Likewise, Tahimik’s film’s visible part is only one aspect of Our Bombing
Mission to Hiroshima. Equally significant was how he shot his film. Tahimik’s
anti-capitalist mode of production kept the work outside of the dominant
system. The filmmaker compensated nobody for this film. Almost no money
was involved in transporting Filipino artists since Tahimik used free-mile-
age tickets for the trip, probably donated by his family members. In Hiro-
shima, the group camped near the installation site of Sacred Sanctuary. The
group then stayed at places offered hospitably by their sympathizers. Once
you decide to stay outside the market economy, you cannot solve things by
merely opening a wallet; instead, human relationships are built based on
trust and sympathy. The relationship helped nurture empathy that provided
insights for others’ needs.
Contrasting the Hiroshima event with life in the twenty-first century New
York City, under neoliberalism, the essential human rights, such as housing,
are converted into global investment targets. Prominent hedge fund farms
are buying lands with a goal to increase auxiliary value in the city’s primary
locations. Their investment leads to the gentrification of the area, which
dismantles the original residents’ community. Deregulated investments
in housing inflate the rent, resulting in almost 60,000 Gothamites being
homeless, whereas three times that number of vacant residences quietly lay as
assets—stripping financially precarious citizens of their dignity and security.88
Housing is one consequence of deregulated capitalism. Since neoliberalism
is profit-driven, it takes advantage of financially insignificant countries where
the costs of human labor and natural resources are low, which can generate
massive revenue for capitalists. As demonstrated in this seminal research,
during the Cold War, the new globally-scaled production-based economy
led by the advanced nations resulted in the abuse of the environment and
human resources. The damages are evident in the economically vulnerable,
politically unstable, newly independent countries. In these nations, infor-
mation played a tremendous role in hypnotizing people. While American
dreams wreaked havoc on the Philippines’ environment, dismantled com-
munities, and rendered tradition obsolete, the art by Tahimik and Villanueva
demonstrated the power to transcend our conventional views and prejudices.
25 years after Villanueva’s death, his ephemeral art that left the capitalist
circuit is now posing a critical question for collecting, maintaining, and pre-
serving it. By answering these questions, his anti-capitalist practice will help
us to come up with new systems and new ways of thinking. While neolib-
eralism deprived people’s welfare and a healthy environment, Tahimik pro-
posed a regenerative model of economy; the idea that has been present since
his first indie film, The Perfumed Nightmare, which can work as the most
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 105
feasible revolution for change. In these respects, Tahimik’s “waste nothing”
aesthetics and Villanueva’s ephemeral art can be seen as the most farsighted
proposals in the Anthropocene.

Acknowledgments
My utmost gratitude goes to YuChieh Li, my co-editor, whose insights and
organizational skills were crucial to this project. I also cannot thank enough
for Kidlat Tahimik for commenting on this manuscript in his busy schedule.
I am also indebted to Katrin de Guia for sharing her research and insight. I
also thank the following individuals: Eric Berlin, Benedict Cabrera, Eva Cora-
zon Abundo-Villanueva, Agnes Arellano, Rica Concepcion, Kawayan de Guia,
Antonio Genera, Adelaida Lim, Annie Sarthou, and Roberto Yñiguez. The
initial research for this text was done for my master’s thesis. I thank Anna C.
Chave for overseeing the project. Last but not least, I thank my husband, Luis
H. Francia, for his vast knowledge of the Philippines.

Notes
1 Yūko Ishida, Hiroshima no ki ni ainiiku [To go meet trees in Hiroshima] (Tokyo:
Kaiseisha, 2015), 31.
2 My own observation from visiting these trees with a tree doctor, Chikara
Horiguchi, in 2016. I thank Hiroshi Sunairi for introducing us.
3 The United States’ lack of environmental concern is apparent in its agenda.
The researchers’ mission was to investigate the “total effects of the atomic
bombs on the cities and the people exposed” to the radiation. Their objectives
were twofold: 1) “to investigate any unique effects due to radiation,” and 2)
“to observe and record residual evidence of physical damage in the bombed
cities and to evaluate these observations in relation to physiological effects.”
See “Record of the Office of the Commanding General, Manhattan Project
General Administrative Files, Reports Pertaining to the Effects of the Atomic
Bomb,” 1945–46, n.p., in RG 77, Entry 6, Box 9, National Archives, College
Park, MD.
4 The term “Anthropocene” was recommended to the International Geographical
Congress in Cape Town on 29 August 2016. Damian Carrington, “The
Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Human-Influenced Age,”
The Guardian, August 29, 2016.
5 Roberto Villanueva, “Archetypes,” artist statement probably from 1989. File,
“Roberto Villanueva,” Pinaglabanan Galleries, San Juan, Manila. The term
“ephemeral art” was coined by the artist.
6 Roberto Villanueva, “Sculpture Description,” June 15, 1994, n.p., folder
“Roberto Villanueva,” Pinaglabanan Galleries, San Juan, Manila.
7 Roberto Villanueva, “Sculpture Description.”
8 Agnes Arellano, email to author, May 23, 2017.
9 This hypnotic state, according to Tahimik is also known as “benevolent assimila-
tion.” Kidlat Tahimik email to author, November 21, 2020.
10 Janet Susan Rodriguez, “Baguio’s ‘Quiet Lightning’ finds his place in the sun,”
PARADE III, no. 14 (August 22, 1981): 8.
11 Werner Herzog, cited in "Kidlat Tahimik: Perfumed Nightmare," Roy and Edna
Disney/Calarts Theater. April 20, 2015. Accessed April 11, 2021. https://
www.redcat.org/event/kidlat-tahimiks-perfumed-nightmare.
106 Midori Yamamura
12 Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Mudpie Modernism,” Soho Week News, November 26, 1980,
accessed November 20, 2020. https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1980/11/
mudpie-modernism/.
13 Tahimik, email, November 21, 2020.
14 The Igorots—a collective term for the natives of the northern Luzon Cordillera
mountains—until the early twentieth century, had a custom of headhunting,
and are often regarded as savages by upper- and upper-middle-class Filipinos.
15 While Tahimik was growing up, in many schools attended by upper and upper
middle-class Filipinos, the local language was suppressed and English was used.
Jojo Legaspi, interview with author, New York, Art in General, April 12, 2001.
16 The actual purchase price of the Philippines was $20 million. In this film,
Tahimik fantasizes about different details but avoids making them too politi-
cized lest viewers get offended. Instead, he infuses humor to make the critical
issues more approachable. The depreciated value also conveys a satirical thought
about colonialism—namely, that for colonizers, the value of colonization is a
trifling matter; that it makes little difference whether the price was $12 million
or $20 million, but under capitalism, cheaper is definitely better.
17 Jim Hoberman, “Jungle Fevers,” The Village Voice, November 28–December 2,
1980, p. 48.
18 Takeshi Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils: US Cultural Policy in Japan and
Permanent Dependency (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
19 Tahimik, email, November 21, 2020.
20 Adrian Howkins, “War and Peace: The Cold War,” in The Polar Regions: An
Environmental History (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016), 132.
21 Edwin O. Reischauer, letter for the US Secretary of State. “General Records of
the Department of State Central Foreign Policy Files 1963,” RG59, Box 4163,
the National Archives. One billion yen in 1963 is about 4,547,511,312 dollars
in the value of 2017. Japanese money value calculator, accessed November 21,
2020. https://yaruzou.net/hprice/hprice-calc.html?amount=1000000000&c
y1=1963&cy2=2017. Based on the same box file, the Philippine scientists failed
to build the reactor, whereas Japanese scientists did the job too well, though the
scientists were very skeptical of constructing the nuclear powerplant in Japan.
22 This account is based on Hitomi Kamanaka’s well-researched film about nuclear
waste in Japan. Rokkashomura Rhapsody, dir. Hitomi Kamanaka, 2004.
23 “Radioactive Waste Management,” World Nuclear Website. www.world-nuclear.
org; Raffy Cabristante, “Six Years after JPEPA: PHL the World’s Toxic Waste
Site?” GMA News Online. October 8, 2014. www.gmanetwork.com/news.
24 Liane Clorfene Casten and Paula Anne Ford Martin, “Agent Orange,” in
Environmental Encyclopedia, 4th ed., vol. 1. (Gale, 2011), 20–24.
25 Clorfene Casten and Ford Martin, “Agent Orange.”
26 Linda Nash, “From Safety to Risk: The Cold War Contexts of American
Environmental Policy,” The Journal of Policy History 29, no. 1(2017): 2.
27 Nash, “From Safety to Risk,” 5.
28 Fredric Jameson, “‘Art Naif’ and the Admixture of Worlds,” in The Geopolitical
Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 192.
29 Kidlat Tahimik, email to author, October 10, 2020.
30 For the International Rice Institute, see https://www.irri.org/about-us.
31 Tahimik, email, October 10, 2020.
32 Tahimik, email, October 10, 2020.
33 Tahimik, email, October 10, 2020.
34 Tahimik, email, October 10, 2020.
35 Tahimik, email, October 10, 2020.
36 Emphases are Tahimik’s comments from Tahimik, email, November 21, 2020.
37 Tahimik, email, November 21, 2020.
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 107
38 Tahimik, email, November 21, 2020.
39 Tahimik, email, November 21, 2020.
40 Ronn Ronck, “The Cup-of-Gasoline Approach to Filmmaking,” The Honolulu
Advertiser, April 11, 1985, sect. C, p. 8.
41 Emphasis by the filmmaker. November 21, 2020. According to Karin de Guia’s
definition, Bathala-Na is the “cosmos” giving way to the “ever-present spiritual
principle.” Bathala means cosmos. It is a “benevolent, life-enhancing force”
that “permits its ‘children’ much ‘playing’ and experimentation.” Katrin Luise
M. De Guia, Filipino Artists as Culture Bearers: Lifestyles and Worldviews of Some
Contemporary Filipino Artists, vol. 2, Ph.D. diss., University of the Philippines,
1997, 238.
42 The Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman wrote that it was a “blueprint of the
underdeveloped films,” and The New York Times critic Vincent Canby evaluated
it as unbelievably primitive. Vincent Canby, “Movie: From Philippines,
‘Perfumed Nightmare,’” The New York Times, November 28, 1980; Hoberman,
“Jungle Fevers.”
43 After the US takeover of the country, Edison films came in, and most production
companies were US-owned up until World War I. The first Filipino-owned pro-
duction company, Malayan Movies (est. 1919), emulated Hollywood produc-
tions. The massive US influence started to change during the period of martial
law, and some film directors—such as Lino Brocka and Marilou Diaz Abaya—
who were concerned with contemporary social issues rose to prominence. Another
prominent genre in the Philippine cinema is the “bomba,” soft-core sexploitation
films that make tons of money. Luis H. Francia, “Philippine Cinema: The Struggle
against Repression,” in Film and Politics in the Third World, ed. John. D. H.
Downing (New York: Autonomedia, Inc., 1987), 209–15.
44 Kidlat Tahimik, interview by author, Baguio City, the Philippines, July 7, 1998.
45 Hoberman, “Jungle Fevers.”
46 Rodriguez, “Baguio’s ‘Quiet Lightning,’” 10.
47 Tahimik, email, November 21, 2020.
48 Tahimik, interview, July 7, 1998.
49 Daniel Garrett, “Honor, Humanism, Humor: Notes on Jean Renoir’s film The
Rules of the Game and the Book Jean Renoir: Interviews,” Off Screen 12 issue 8
(August 2008) accessed November 21, 2020. https://offscreen.com/view/
honor_humanism.
50 Antonio Gerena, email to author, May 29, 2017; January 7, 2018.
51 Gerena, email to author, May 29, 2017; January 7, 2018. The film won a silver
medal at the 1982 XII Internationaler Agrarfilm Wettbewerb (International
Agricultural Film Competition) in Berlin.
52 According to Gerena, the only copy that he owned “melted one hot summer
when I left it in a steel cabinet.” Gerena, email to author, May 29, 2017.
53 Antonio Gerena, email to author, 13 January 2018.
54 Bao Maohong, “Research Note: Deforestation in the Philippines, 1946–1995,”
Philippine Studies 60, no. 1 (2012): 120.
55 Bao, “Research Note,” 120.
56 Between 1964 and 1973, Japan’s timber imports grossed 62% of the total tim-
ber production in the Philippines. Ohno Takeshi, “United States Policy in
Japanese War Reparations, 1945–1951,” Asia Studies 13, no. 3 (1975): 39;
“Paralleling the legal export of timber,” Bao Maohong estimated that “almost
the same amount of timber was smuggled to Japan during the 30 years after
1946.” Bao, “Research Note,” 119, 121.
57 Bao, “Research Note,” 125.
58 Bao, “Research Note,” 125.
59 Bao, “Research Note,” 125.
108 Midori Yamamura
60 Bao, “Research Note,” 122–23, 25–26.
61 “Give at Least (5) Ecological Importance of Forest Ecosystem,” Martins Library
Blog Spot, accessed May 30, 2017. http://martinslibrary.blogspot.jp/2012/10/
give-at-least-5-ecological-importance.html.
62 Unidentified writer, “The Person,” in “Roberto Villanueva, ‘Ephemeral Art,’”
unpublished research paper, 1. Folder, “Roberto Villanueva,” Pinaglabanan
Galleries, San Juan, Manila.
63 Unidentified writer, “The Person.”
64 Gerena, email to author, May 29, 2017; “The Person,” Roberto Villanueva, 1;
Showman/Shaman, dir. Egay Navarro, 2003.
65 The scene from this film is featured in Showman/Shaman. According to Gerena, the
film was part of the Ford Foundation grant. Gerena, email to author, May 29, 2017.
66 Eva Corazon Abundo-Villanueva, the artist's former wife, email to the author,
May 8, 2014.
67 Ringo Bunoan, “The 70s Objects, Photographs & Documentation,” in The 70s
Objects, Photographs & Documents (Manila: Ateneo Art Gallery, 2018), 9.
68 Baguio Arts Guild (Baguio City, Philippines: published most likely in 1991), n.p.
69 Michele T. Logarta, “Off the Fast Track,” November 29, 1987, Philippine
Daily Inquirer, newspaper clipping, folder “Roberto Villanueva,” Pinaglaban
Galleries, Manila.
70 The new government project provided funding for not-for-profit artistic activities
such as exhibitions and art festivals that the BAG conceived for the community.
71 “Miseducation” is a term coined by the historian Renato Constantino. Renato
Constantino, The Miseducation of the Filipino, original, 1959, reprint (Quezon
City, Philippines: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1982); “The Artist and
Nation Building.”
72 Elizabeth V. Reyes, “A Heaven for Lowland Artists: New Arts, New Visions,
New Life,” Mabuhay 10, no. 11 (November 1989): 28.
73 De Guia, Filipino Artists as Culture Bearers, 114.
74 See Midori Yamamura, “Making the Art Object Disappear: Roberto Villanueva’s
Response to the Anthropocene,” in Mountains and Rivers (without) End: An
Anthology of Eco-Art History in Asia, ed. De-Nin Lee (New Castle upon Tyne,
UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). The work bears affinity with
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). But the inspiration for Archetypes was
not Spiral Jetty but uma ti biyag, the Cordilleran way of planting rice.
75 Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and Production of Space
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 3, 6.
76 Roberto G. Villanueva, “Artist Statement,” in Yasuko Furuichi, ed., New Art
from Southeast Asia (Tokyo: Japan Foundation ASEAN Cultural Center, 1992),
133. Villanueva’s idea of ephemerality might have drawn from Asian tradition
outside the Philippines. For example, Tibetan Buddhist monks practice ephem-
eral art by constructing sand mandalas and, when they are done, pouring the
sand in a nearby stream. Their intention is not necessarily ecological but more
philosophical: everything in this world is impermanent.
77 I distinguished Villanueva’s social practice by calling it his “sustainable aes-
thetic” because people were brought together for the sake of creating a more
sustainable environment.
78 David Baradas, “Roberto’s Archetypal Art,” The Manila Times, December 2,
1987, p. 16.
79 Roberto Villanueva, “Archetypes by Roberto,” a typescript in folder “Roberto
Villanueva,” Pinaglabanan Galleries, San Juan, Manila.
80 Baradas, “Roberto’s Archetypal Art.”
81 Baradas, “Roberto’s Archetypal Art.”
82 Katrin de Guia, email to author, 4 June 2017. Although he sold some old works
after this point, but not his ephemeral art.
 Asia’s Cold War and environmental devastation 109
83 Relational Aesthetics is the term created by curator Nicholas Bourriaud in the
1990s, and published in 1998 as the book of the same title, which is the ten-
dency to make art based on, or inspired by, human relations and their social
context. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, Frans: Les Presses Du
Reel, 1998).
84 Roberto Villanueva, “Sculpture Description,” June 15, 1994, n.p., folder
“Roberto Villanueva,” Pinaglabanan Galleries, San Juan, Manila.
85 Mayumi Nakayama, “Daichi ni hari, fuhatsudan de kane, chikyū ni iyashi
(Needles puncturing the ground, a bell made out of an unexploded bomb, heal-
ing the Earth),” newspaper clipping, probably from August 6, 1995. Midori
Yamamura papers, New York.
86 Masahiro Ushiroshōji, former curator of Fukuoka Art Museum, described his
experience of inviting Roberto to create his ephemeral art on the grounds of
Fukuoka Art Museum as part of the New Art from Southeast Asia exhibition in
1992. Masahiro Ushiroshōji, response to the author’s presentation of the earlier
version of this research. October 3, 2016, Tokyo, Tokyo National Research
Institute for Cultural Properties.
87 Tahimik and I functioned as organizers for the event. I was responsible for having
the needles fabricated and obtaining permission from City Hall to use the park.
88 Some hedge fund farms, such as Blackstone Capital infamously buying the lands in
popular destinations. The process and people’s testimonies are recorded in the new
documentary film, Push: A Documentary Exploring the New, Unavailable City, dir.
Fredrik Gertten. I thank Robert Robinson for bringing my attention to this film.
5 Imagining a region
Australian exhibitionary turns to Asia in
the late Cold War
Russell Storer

In her 1992 study of Australian impressions of Asia, the academic and

former diplomat Alison Broinowski identifies the persistent divergence
between those Australians for whom history—with its colonial alignment
to British identity—dominates, and those for whom geography is more
important, with a conception of Australia as “part of the Asia-Pacific
hemisphere.”1 This dichotomy in how Australians define themselves has
underpinned modern Australian perceptions of Asia, and consequently its
political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural approaches to the region,
which have lurched over time from the purely transactional to desires
for deeper “enmeshment.” As Broinowski’s book traces in detail, artists
have been important chroniclers of this ambivalent Australian condition.2
Art can make collective perceptions visible, often before they are com-
monly understood, and is therefore an important means of understanding
a national psyche in retrospect. If we look to the late 1960s and early
’70s, we can see that the artistic landscape in Australia fundamentally
shifted in a way that reflects wider cultural and social transformations that
would unfold over the next two decades and continue to resonate today.
It was the final phase of the Cold War as it played out in Asia: the British
Empire had withdrawn, the United States was recalibrating, Japan was
economically ascendant, China was beginning to reach out, and newly
independent Southeast Asian nations were becoming increasingly asser-
tive and prosperous. Under these new conditions, Australia was forced to
take up a new, more independent postcolonial identity, which required
a reckoning with the interrelated issues of its own colonial history, the
treatment of its First Peoples, and how it would relate to its Asian and
Pacific neighbors.
Until the 1960s, Australian artists traditionally looked to London, and to
a lesser extent Paris, for their education, inspiration, and affirmation. That is
where they understood their identity to lie, and where they could seek access
to the powerful artistic narratives and infrastructures of Europe. While the
center of the Western art world had shifted from Paris to New York by the
1950s, it was not until the mid-1960s that American art began to have signif-
icant impact in Australia through museum and gallery exhibitions, and artists
returning from working and studying in the United States, even though
 Imagining a region 111
American popular culture had been flooding in via television (introduced
in 1956), cinema, and music since the end of World War II. In both con-
texts, Australian artists struggled to find a distinctive position in relation to
the overwhelming cultural hegemony of the north Atlantic, working either
through the perception that Australian Modernism was somehow “dimin-
ished”—with their efforts “essentially imitative, pale effects and always too
late”—or that it was entirely different, a local development in response to
local conditions.3
For some artists, however, and increasingly from the 1970s onward, a
willingness to see themselves within Asia became a powerful, if necessarily
complicated, grist for the thought-mill of figuring out how to work from a
deeper sense of place. Asian art and cultures helped Australian artists forge
a geographical connection as part of the “Asia Pacific,” to find a sense of
solidarity and resistance against the dominance of “the center,” and in turn,
rethink their own history. Art institutions were also deeply invested in these
questions, both within Australia and in how they projected and connected
the country to the region and the world more broadly. “Asia,” long per-
ceived and described in Australia as an undifferentiated, uniformly threaten-
ing entity, was crucial to this rethinking as its people, countries, and cultures
began to take a more defined, diverse, and complex presence in the nation’s
consciousness through tourism, trade, investment, immigration, and popular
culture. The exhibiting of Asian art in Australia, and Australian art in Asia,
grew significantly at this time via cultural diplomacy efforts and curatorial
enterprise, underpinned by emerging postmodern and postcolonial theory
and greater mobility. Yet by the late 1990s, this seemingly inexorable course
toward closer cultural engagement had shifted again as the nation pivoted
politically back to Britain and the US, with institutional funding and activity
subsiding accordingly.
This chapter considers several key art exhibitions in Australia over the lat-
ter two decades of the Cold War as the nation’s identity shifted; they are set
against a backdrop of foreign and cultural policy, particularly regarding Asia,
in which a geographical perspective began to take precedence over a histor-
ical one. Beginning in the late 1960s, a moment of “internationalization”
for Australian art, it then looks at the emergence of the Biennale of Sydney,
inaugurated during Gough Whitlam’s watershed government (1972–1975),
which promised to take “Australia in a new direction in its relations with the
modern world,”4 and ends by looking toward the early 1990s, during the
governments of Bob Hawke (1983–1991) and Paul Keating (1991–1996),
which sought to “establish Australia’s ‘rightful presence’ in the Asia-Pa-
cific”5 and ushered in what was arguably the high point of artistic dialogue
between Australia and Asia. The focus here is on the visual arts, although
there was also extensive activity in theatre, literature, music, and dance, and
on exchanges with East (China and Japan) and Southeast Asia. In studying
exhibitions, the reception of artworks, along with the networks of social,
economic, and cultural forces that circulate through and around them, can
be analyzed.
112 Russell Storer
White Australia
The Commonwealth of Australia was formed on the first day of the 20th
century, 1 January 1901, by the federation of the six self-governing British
colonies that were founded across the continent between 1788 and 1859.
The federation was driven significantly by the fear that these small, isolated
outposts of the Empire could easily be overrun by the more populous and
powerful Asian countries to the north, and that the growing numbers of
Asian and Pacific workers in Australia, particularly Chinese migrants and
Melanesian indentured laborers, were taking job opportunities from whites.
They were increasingly seen as a threat to Anglo-Celtic Australian culture,
morality, employment, and national security, and among the first pieces of
legislation enacted by the new parliament were the Immigration Restriction
Act and Pacific Island Labourers Act. Collectively known as the White Aus-
tralia policy, these acts aimed at curbing those two groups but also to halt
non-British migration overall.6 The policy provided a basis for Australia's
formative identity as staunchly British and ethnically “pure,” supported and
protected by an allegiance to the Empire and visualized through virulently
anti-Asian films, cartoons, and novels (Figure 5.1).
A mixture of economic pragmatism, realpolitik, and xenophobia has been
an enduring feature of Australia’s relations with Asia since. Over the 20th
century, fears of invasion or attack continued with Japanese expansionism
in the Asia-Pacific until the end of World War II, followed by an adherence
to the American domino theory of Chinese-backed communism overtaking
a decolonizing Southeast Asia during the Cold War. In this century, the
threat of terrorism has been used to justify the draconian border policies

Figure 5.1 Anti-Chinese immigration cartoon, Melbourne Punch, 10 May 1888.

Illustration by “B.” Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Australia.
 Imagining a region 113
enacted against South and West Asian refugees coming to Australia by sea,
while long-standing fears of China have been revived by its rapidly expand-
ing power and influence in the region, unsettling diplomatic and hugely
lucrative trade relationships. After World War II, in which the Americans led
the Allied forces in the Pacific, Australia increasingly turned to the United
States for its security and direction in foreign affairs, enshrined in the 1951
Australia, New Zealand and United States Security Treaty (ANZUS). The
rise of communism in East Asia also brought Australia closer to non-com-
munist Southeast Asian states such as Thailand and the Philippines, which
joined Australia, the United States, Britain, France, Pakistan, and New Zea-
land to form the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), in 1954
to contain communist influence in Asia. Australia’s relations with the region
were also developed through organizations such as the Colombo Plan
(founded 1951), which aimed to foster social and economic development
for Asian nations within the British Commonwealth (and during the White
Australia policy period, was one of the few avenues for Asians to live in Aus-
tralia, largely for education and training); and the Asian and Pacific Council
(ASPAC), founded in 1966, a diplomatic grouping which included Australia,
New Zealand, Japan, and the non-communist countries of Southeast Asia.7
Following a preventative “forward defence” strategy, Australia deployed
troops across Asia throughout the Cold War, joining the British in Malaya
and Borneo, UN forces in Korea, and the Americans in Vietnam. These
military engagements honored key alliances while being driven by local fears
about perceived threats in the region. The dangers of communism and its
subtext of Asian invasion dominated domestic political debate about the
Cold War, minimizing more complex discourse and marginalizing dissent,
which “contributed to an impoverishment of Australian understandings of
Asian decolonization and social movements.”8 Australia was notably absent
from the 1955 Asian-African Conference in nearby Bandung, for example,
with then Prime Minister Robert Menzies refusing to consider participat-
ing—despite lobbying from the opposition leader, the US State Department,
and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru—viewing the conference as a
promotion of “color prejudice” against western nations like Australia “under
the guise of peaceful co-existence.”9

Vietnam, Americanization, and internationalism

Australia’s Cold War orthodoxy was upended by its military involvement in
Vietnam. This was the longest and most controversial of the country’s Cold
War engagements, with its first troops committed in 1965 and the last with-
drawn in 1973. It was the first to receive widespread public condemnation,
dragging the peace movement from the social margins of far-left politics,
where it had lingered through the 1950s and early ’60s, into the center of
public debate. With television and newspaper images of the war flooding in,
particularly of the My Lai Massacre in March 1968, mass protests such as the
1970 Moratorium marches took place in cities and towns across the country,
114 Russell Storer
following similar demonstrations in the United States and across the world.
While the government continued to justify its commitment, the withdrawal
of troops had begun, under mounting pressure from all sides. Such open
displays of public opposition “marked the end of the Cold War epoch which
had produced the Vietnam intervention….It finally reclaimed the political
use of the public sphere against a Cold War which had intended to silence
it.”10 The changing position on Vietnam ruptured the unquestioned main-
stream consensus on the traditional East-West divide, opening the door for a
new perspective on Australia’s role in the region.
Culturally, Australian resistance to the Vietnam War and American impe-
rialism was linked to broader social upheavals manifesting around the world
in the late 1960s, embodied by the protests of May 1968. As art historian
Charles Green has written, “Although Australian artists were distant from
late-1960s American and European turmoil, they were far from unaffected
by the sense of utopian possibility current in popular culture and the fine arts.
The anti-Vietnam movement was only one aspect of an often inconsistent
mood of social change in Australia.”11 A number of artists worked with the
protest movement and responded directly to events in Vietnam, such as the
Melbourne-based painter and printmaker Noel Counihan, who had been a
member of the Australian Communist Party and was long involved in anti-
war activities. Counihan’s social realist works include anguished portraits of
boyishly young soldiers as, simultaneously, oppressors and victims, drawn into
a war they barely understood. Artists such as Chips Mackinolty and Toni Rob-
ertson in Sydney and Mandy Martin and Ann Newmarch in Adelaide contrib-
uted to the burgeoning political poster movement, with their witty and luridly
colored photo-stencil silkscreens plastered across public spaces and university
campuses. The artists drew on collective labor and alternative distribution net-
works, operating outside of established channels of artistic production and
display, a community-based approach that was to expand during the ’70s as
artists sought to reimagine the relations between art and society (Figure 5.2).
These various expressions of political resistance were part of more pro-
found artistic shifts taking place in Australia during the late ’60s and ’70s in
step with a wide range of emerging social movements: feminism, Aboriginal
land rights, gay liberation, environmentalism, and anti-capitalism, as well as
anti-war. The traditional forms and institutions of art, perceived as propping
up the old order, were, in Australia as elsewhere, starting to be challenged
by dematerialized, anti-market, anti-art forms such as conceptual art, process
art, earth art, and performance: a postmodern array of styles that self-reflex-
ively addressed local specificities within global artistic flows. These practices
also provided a contrast to “international” (read Euro-American) formal-
ist styles of hard-edge and color-field abstraction and minimalism that had
emerged in Australia in the mid-1960s, which eschewed local references or
content. Both developments marked an embrace of an international avant-
garde, and a transition away from the local modernist figuration and allegor-
ical narrative that had dominated Australian art since the 1940s, through the
work of artists such as Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd (Figure 5.3).
 Imagining a region 115

Figure 5.2 Ann Newmarch, Vietnam Madonna, 1975. Screen print on paper, 67.2
× 42.0 cm (image irreg.), 76.3 × 42.0 cm (sheet). South Australian
Government Grant 2005. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
© Courtesy of the artist.

Australia’s opening up to concurrent tendencies in American art coincided

with US actions in Vietnam and Australia’s own involvement there. The
influx of American art and culture therefore became a local bone of con-
tention, as it was elsewhere in the world. Major institutions and the general
public largely embraced it, while artists and critics of all stripes criticized the
“Americanization of art,” with conservatives lamenting its apparent slick-
ness and cynicism, and progressives attacking its attendant cultural imperi-
alism. Such divided views met the first major exhibition in Australia of the
116 Russell Storer

Figure 5.3 Arthur Boyd, Shearers playing for a bride, 1957. Oil and tempera on canvas
150.1 × 175.7 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Gift of Tristan
Buesst, 1958 (11-5). © National Gallery of Victoria.

American post war avant-garde, Two Decades of American Painting, which

showed at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne and the
Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney in 1967. Two Decades
was organized as an Asian touring exhibition by the International Council
of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), with support from the United
States Information Service (USIS), and traveled to Tokyo, Kyoto, and New
Delhi before coming to Australia. It was one of dozens of exhibitions sent by
MoMA and the USIS during the Cold War to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, to disseminate American art and culture throughout the world
while promoting American values of liberty, individualism, and creative free-
dom. Two Decades was no different, tracing a lineage of changing styles in
American painting from 1946 to 1966, reinforcing a modernist sequence
of innovation as well as New York’s primacy as the hub of advanced artistic
development. It featured significant works by Abstract Expressionists such as
Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and Willem de Koon-
ing; Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichten-
stein; and proto-Minimalist painters such as Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella,
along with selections of works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and
Josef Albers, among others. The exhibition was the first Australian showing
for most of these artists, introducing the general public to American post-
war art of monumental scale (in contrast to the more modest dimensions of
 Imagining a region 117
Australian painting at the time). It attracted huge crowds and sold hundreds
of catalogues, even while works such as Ad Reinhardt’s three severe black
monochromes bewildered many visitors (Figure 5.4).12
In response, many older and leftist artists criticized the exhibition’s works
for presenting a nihilistic worldview, as expressed to Melbourne’s Commu-
nist Party newspaper Tribune by the social realists Counihan (“dehumanised
values”) and Herbert McClintock (“Contempt for the cultural achievements
of mankind”).13 For younger artists at the leading edge of the local scene, it
was influential in the sense that it helped legitimize their practices, “giving
authority to the range of styles encompassed by New York art,”14 although
there was also the recognition that it foregrounded styles—Abstract Expres-
sionism, Pop—that were already receding into the past. As noted later by
John Stringer—then exhibitions officer at the NGV, instrumental in con-
vincing MoMA to extend its Asian tour to Australia—“Though not without
admiration, the vanguard quickly concurred that abstract expressionism had
already run its course. It was equally apparent that the abrasive commercial-
ism of pop art was being eclipsed by the more disciplined, cool, pure and
restrained formalism of minimal art.”15 The mixed response to Two Decades
demonstrated the complex ways that Australian artists were now thinking
about their place in a globalizing world.

Figure 5.4 Installation view of Jasper Johns’s (L-R) Periscope (Hart Crane) 1963, White
flag (1955), Target (1958), Map (1961), on display as part of Two Decades of
American Painting, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1967.
© 2020 Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS),
NY. Photo: Geoff Parr.
118 Russell Storer
The following year, the NGV followed Two Decades by launching its new
brutalist building with The Field (Figure 5.5), a large survey of recent Aus-
tralian art (it then traveled to the AGNSW). Curated by Stringer and fellow
NGV curator Brian Finemore, the exhibition foregrounded hard-edge and
color-field abstract painting and sculpture by 40 young artists (including
only three women). A number were associated with the artist-run Central
Street Gallery, including Sydney Ball, James Doolin, Tony McGillick, Wendy
Paramor, and Vernon Treweeke. Founded in Sydney in 1966 as a hub for
artists working with “international” modernism, Central Street quickly came
to be considered Australia’s first New York-style white cube gallery. Others,
such as conceptual artists Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden and abstract sculptor
Clement Meadmore, had already left Australia and were living in New York.
The exhibition consisted primarily of large canvases featuring geometric
shapes in bold, flat fields of color, hung on silver-painted walls, along with
several abstract sculptures in industrial materials such as steel and acrylic.
Although some artists were already moving away from abstract painting into
conceptual art and other modes, this was the first time that an Australian art
institution had promoted contemporary Australian art linked to a relatively
current international avant-garde, making “a more deliberate alignment of
Australian art with the modernist tradition.”16
The Field unambiguously announced a new phase of Australian ­artistic
and curatorial practice that looked toward American, rather than Brit-
ish art. As with Two Decades, the exhibition split the local art community,

Figure 5.5 Installation view of The Field, National Gallery of Victoria, 1968. © NGV.
Photo: George Mehes.
 Imagining a region 119
with conservative critics lamenting its internationalism and apparent lack of
local specificity.17 In his review in the national daily The Australian, Laurie
Thomas wrote that “in abandoning all subject matter, the Americans and
their faithful followers have left us, and themselves, with something nice and
cool like a logical deduction, but only occasionally ever resembling a work
of art.”18 Meanwhile, participating artist Sydney Ball credited The Field as
marking

the period that liberated Australian art from its provincialism to a

‘Golden Period’ of work by emerging artists of the time determined
to take on not only the best Australia had to offer, but to excel on the
world stage.19

Ian Burn, who contributed one of the few conceptual artworks—a pair of
framed mirrors—was more equivocal, later writing that the legacy of The
Field was “the institutional sponsorship of an avant-garde context for con-
temporary art in Australia.”20 Burn was highly critical of the American
impact on global art: in 1975, he and Karl Beveridge had offered a sting-
ing rebuke to Minimalist artist Donald Judd’s provocative article in Studio
International in 1970, in which Judd declared, “I think American art is far
better than that anywhere else, but I don’t think that’s desirable.” Burn
and Beveridge wrote that the “remark blatantly reproduces the ambitions
of US hegemony and economic and cultural imperialism—where “interna-
tional values” are dictated by the US’s “national interests.”21 In his 1981
reflection on conceptual art, “The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath,” published
in the inaugural issue of the internationalist Melbourne journal Art & Text,
Burn wrote that the “consequence [of Americanization] was, in places like
Australia, that a generation of young artists became alienated from their own
cultural specificity.”22
As Burn observed, The Field’s institutional championing of emerging
­artists within a global framework defined a new role for Australian art muse-
ums, which began to move toward an American-style modernist institutional
model à la MoMA. Around this time, American art also began to enter local
museum collections, which until then were comprised primarily of Austral-
ian and British works. Several paintings from Two Decades were acquired
by the NGV and AGNSW, including those by Albers, Frankenthaler, and
Morris Louis.23 In 1973, the newly established acquisition committee for
the planned Australian National Gallery (now National Gallery of Australia),
with a brief to purchase “International Art of the Modern Period,” acquired
Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952) for a record-breaking USD$2M. This
was followed by purchases of other significant American works, including de
Kooning’s Woman V (1952–1953), Warhol’s silver Elvis (1963), Reinhardt’s
black monochrome Painting (1954–1958), and major sculptures by Robert
Morris, Richard Serra and Judd. The Pollock purchase generated enormous
controversy in the press and with the general public, primarily due to its mas-
sive price, but also for the seemingly random, incomprehensible aesthetic of
120 Russell Storer
the work, which made the extravagant cost even more difficult for the public
to correlate. For many Australian artists, the purchase of Blue Poles repre-
sented “a slap in the face,” again along divided lines: for older, conservative
artists, the work was an affront to their more traditional forms of art-making,
while for younger and leftist artists, the purchase was “merely an example
of Australia’s sycophantic embrace of American cultural imperialism.”24 It
was both a progressive and a regressive move, marking a new international-
ist confidence and embrace of the modernist avant-garde at the same time
that American “neo-colonial” influence was being questioned more than
ever before, and when Australia was starting to take a more independent
approach to foreign affairs under the prime ministership of Gough Whitlam.

Gough Whitlam and the geographical turn

Whitlam was elected as Prime Minister in December 1972. Leading the
center-left Labor Party to power for the first time since 1949, he entered
government with a raft of domestic policies and new diplomatic commit-
ments with the aim of forging a more independent stance in relation to
Britain and the United States and strengthening Asian ties. The White Aus-
tralia policy was finally ended in 1973 and replaced with an official policy of
multiculturalism and non-discriminatory immigration. Conscription, intro-
duced in 1964 at the start of the war in Vietnam and widely unpopular, was
also abolished, and the last Australian soldiers were pulled out of Vietnam
amidst strong criticisms of American actions in Indochina, creating sub-
stantial tension with President Richard Nixon’s administration.25 Whitlam’s
new regional diplomacy took shape in the context of détente and the 1969
Nixon Doctrine, in which the United States scaled back its engagement in
Asia and required its Asian allies to take greater responsibility for their own
security and defense. He took the opportunity to move away from Cold
War i­deological alliances and the containment of Communism by reducing
Australia’s military presence and reshaping diplomatic relationships in Asia.
One proposed measure was “a new regional community geared to the reali-
ties of the ’70s,”26 which caused further friction with the United States and
failed to enthuse Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, which con-
sidered it a potential threat to the recently formed Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN).27 Whitlam’s call was therefore not heeded at the
time, although Australia was invited to be the first ASEAN dialogue partner
in 1974 and went on to found the regional economic forum APEC (Asia-­
Pacific Economic Cooperation) in 1989.
Whitlam’s geographical perspective was made clearest in his reform of
relations with China. In 1971, while Leader of the Opposition, he traveled
to Beijing to conduct talks with Premier Zhou Enlai on trade and diplo-
matic recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the midst
of the Vietnam crisis in Australia, the Beijing visit was “a bold expression of
Whitlam’s foreign policy vision, which prioritized regionalism and interna-
tionalism over ties with ‘great and powerful friends’ [former Prime Minister
 Imagining a region 121
Menzies’ term for Britain and the United States].”28 As countries around
the world were shifting their stance toward the PRC, Australia had become
increasingly isolated, and the trip aimed to convey the Labor Party’s policy
of recognition, to be enacted on winning the pending election. The visit
received significant attention in China and at home, with Whitlam harshly
criticized by the then Prime Minister William McMahon as “becoming a
spokesman for those against whom we are fighting [in Vietnam].”29 Yet
Whitlam had unknowingly arrived in Beijing just a few days before Henry
Kissinger held the secret meetings with Zhou that paved the way for Nixon’s
historic visit in 1972. He had been in the right place at the right time, and his
meeting with Zhou was widely promoted to Australian voters in his election
campaign’s television advertisement, however uncertain they might be about
the “China syndrome.”30 Whitlam returned to China as Prime Minister in
1973, receiving an audience with Chairman Mao Zedong and a spectacular
greeting and farewell (Figure 5.6).
Whitlam’s recognition of China brought significant opportunities for cul-
tural exchange in both directions. Cultural diplomacy was activated early
in the China relationship, with the Beijing embassy establishing a Cultural
Counsellor position in 1975. By the late 1970s, Foreign Affairs set up a
cultural council for China (one for Japan followed soon thereafter) to advise
on and fund bilateral cultural diplomacy efforts. Among the cultural activ-
ities that Foreign Affairs helped support were exhibition exchanges, which
had been undertaken since the 1940s with South and Southeast Asia but
on a relatively ad-hoc basis, featuring modest groups of works and held in

Figure 5.6 Gough Whitlam with Premier Zhou Enlai on his departure from China, 1973.
Sources: From the collection of the National Archives of Australia. NAA: A6135.
122 Russell Storer
small venues.31 The Chinese exhibitions were undertaken on a far more ambi-
tious scale in terms of their size and quality and attracted large audiences in
both countries. The Chinese Exhibition: A Selection of Recent Archaeological
Finds of the People’s Republic of China, featuring antiquities from the Neo-
lithic period to the 14th century, traveled state galleries in 1977 and drew
595,000 visitors, the most attended international exhibition in Australia at
the time.32 It was followed by Entombed Warriors, an exhibition of nine terra-
cotta soldiers and related artefacts, which toured six cities in 1982–1983 and
attracted almost one million visitors (Figure 5.7). The show’s enormous suc-
cess demonstrated a broad interest in Asian art and has been acknowledged as
helping spawn “the age of the blockbuster” in Australian art museums, which
continue to stage large exhibitions of Asian traditional and contemporary art,
particularly from China, India, and Japan.33 Australia reciprocated by sending
survey exhibitions of Australian landscape painting to Beijing and Nanjing in
1975 and to Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou in 1983, each attracting tens
of thousands of visitors over just a few weeks.34 Given the lack of access to
Western art and art books during the Cultural Revolution, the 1975 exhibi-
tion made a particular impact; it was described as “the first public display in
China, within living memory, of art from the western world.”35
On the domestic front, Whitlam introduced policies to drive artistic devel-
opment, which would also enable Australian artists to engage internationally
on a stronger footing. In 1973, the smattering of cultural boards, arts funds,
and advisory bodies established by previous governments were consolidated
to form a single organization, the Australia Council, with greatly increased
funding.36 Its International Program was set up to co-ordinate international
exhibitions and artist exchanges in collaboration with agencies such as the
Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) and the Department of Foreign
Affairs. While the Council’s sights were still overwhelmingly on Europe and
North America at the time, cultural and diplomatic attention was beginning
to shift toward Asia.37 The vision of the Council’s inaugural Chairman, H.C.
Coombs, was to develop an unique Australian cultural identity, “ ­ drawing
on its colonial heritage but not simply deriving from British and European
cultural sources… artists and writers could find inspiration in indigenous
traditions and could also look to Asian and other non-European cultures.”38
With travel, funding, and information now becoming more accessible, inter-
est in Asia began to grow through the 1970s as artists and curators looked to
broaden their horizons beyond Europe and the United States.

Homegrown internationalism: Biennale of Sydney

One of the most significant artistic events during the Whitlam era was the inau-
gural Biennale of Sydney, Australia’s first homegrown exhibition of ­international
contemporary art, which opened in November 1973. Sydney’s Biennale
is one of the most enduring of what Charles Green and Anthony Gardner
have described as the “second wave” of biennials, “which emerged along
the art world’s so-called “peripheries”—in São Paulo in 1951, for instance,
 Imagining a region 123

Figure 5.7 Entombed Warriors exhibition in Canberra, 1983. From the collection of the
National Archives of Australia. NAA: A6135.

and in Alexandria, Egypt and Ljubljana, Yugoslavia in 1955—long after the

inauguration of the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International in the
mid-1890s.”39 Biennials—regularly recurring exhibitions of international
contemporary art—became the primary platform for the circulation of con-
temporary art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They have helped con-
nect a wide global network of curators, critics, artists, dealers, and audiences,
and have therefore acted as crucial conduits for cultural translation from one
site to another, and for the circulation and legitimation of artists, particularly
from outside the established centers of ­Western Europe and the United States.
The mid-century “­second wave” biennials arising in cities in Eastern Europe,
124 Russell Storer
North Africa, South America, and Asia were often linked to regional forma-
tions arising out of Cold War p ­ olitics, such as the Non-Aligned Movement,
promoting “cultural independence in the a­ftermath of national independ-
ence… neither neo-nationalist retreat nor hubristic drives towards globaliza-
tion but an insistence on reimagining the regional.”40 Each biennial negotiates
its own complex combinations of the local, the regional, and the global: aim-
ing to strengthen local culture while projecting it into wider networks, and
resisting the hegemony of Europe and North America while opening up to
global artistic flows. Australia in the early 1970s had undergone a significant
“internationalization,” with artists and institutions embracing new forms of
practice informed by American and European developments, yet ­criticism of
Americanization as a form of neo-colonialism was strong, and local culture was
developing a new confidence. These tensions flowed through the Biennale of
Sydney, which sought to connect Australia with the world while at the same
time, at least initially, create a new regionalist position.
The Biennale of Sydney was conceived and largely funded by the industri-
alist Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, an Italian migrant who felt Australia’s cultural
isolation acutely, and was inspired by the “flavor of international extrava-
ganza, originality and explosive vision” of the Venice Biennale.41 Having
funded a local art prize named after his construction company, Transfield,
since 1961, Belgiorno-Nettis wanted to expand it into an international exhi-
bition, as “such an event was exactly what Australia needed, a link to the
world.”42 The first Biennale was held in the Exhibition Hall of the Sydney
Opera House as part of its opening celebrations. With its spectacular mod-
ernist architecture, the Opera House served as another powerful symbol of
Australia’s cultural “coming of age” in the early 1970s (although its design
had been approved in 1957) and it was pitched as “a center for national and
international performers and artists.”43 Running for one month, the inaugu-
ral Biennale was a small exhibition of only 37 artists, selected by a committee
under the aegis of the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board, which also con-
tributed funding. The exhibition struck a somewhat conservative note in this
era of conceptual art, comprising a mix of abstract and figurative painting and
sculpture, along the lines of the local art prize from which it emerged; the
catalogue notes that “no artists of what may be regarded as the right-wing
of art, neo-realism, or of the left-wing, post-object, have been selected.”44
It was a modest, rather tentative beginning. In his catalogue text, AGNSW
curator Daniel Thomas writes that “Since it is not a large exhibition, it will
be more easily enjoyed and comprehended by the public, and hence it can
perform its traditional function of generating international understanding
and cultural uplift.”45 One critic assessed it as a “rather haphazard and uncer-
tain effort,”46 while another described it as a “piccolo Biennale” featuring
artists that had been “so long established that they hinder the recognition of
newer talents.”47 It was left to a more expansive exhibition held concurrently
at the AGNSW, Recent Australian Art—also as part of the Opera House’s
opening festival—to show the work of 60 local artists involved in the latest
forms of practice, including installation, video, and performance.
 Imagining a region 125
What was innovative about the inaugural Biennale, however, was its sig-
nificant and surprising focus on artists from the Asia Pacific region. Out of
the total of 37 artists, 22 were from Australia, two were from New Zealand,
and seven from Asia: Biren De (India), Affandi (Indonesia), Minami Tada
(Japan), Park Suk Won (South Korea), Joseph Tan (Malaysia), Solomon
Saprid (the Philippines), and Sawasdi Tantisuk (Thailand). The other artists
were Clyfford Still (United States), Emil Schumacher (Germany), Renato
Gutusso (Italy), Antonio Pelaez (Spain), and Patrick Heron (Britain). The
Asian artists were mostly well-established modernists, chosen through dip-
lomatic channels via the Department of Foreign Affairs rather than from a
specific curatorial premise or local research, suggesting that the selection
was pragmatic and opportunistic. Japan, for example, was Australia’s larg-
est trading partner at the time, and high-level ministerial visits had been
undertaken with the new Whitlam government in the months prior to the
Biennale, including discussions about a bilateral treaty that included cultural
awareness. The Japan Foundation had also just been established (in 1972) by
the Japanese government as part of an active drive to promote international
cultural exchange. The selection of Tada to represent Japan in the Bien-
nale suggests diplomatic connections—she was a prominent winner of sev-
eral national prizes—and it could be speculated that “the design simplicity
and technical sophistication of her glass and plastic sculpture [the minimalist
Poles (c.1972) promoted the nation’s culture as well as its strength as an
industrial producer.”48 Tourism, then the primary means by which Australi-
ans experienced Asian cultures, was heavily promoted in the catalogue’s final
pages, which sport advertisements for Air New Zealand, Thai International,
Garuda, and Philippine Airlines.
The catalogue introduction outlines the Biennale’s geographical ambi-
tions, stating that “Sydney is making a virtue of its remoteness by confining
its choice of countries to Australia’s regional neighbors and to the countries
with well-established international exhibitions of contemporary art.”49 In the
closing note, Transfield’s Anthony Winterbotham suggests that this direc-
tion would continue, stating that “the vision for the future of the Biennale
encompasses a cultural focus on the expanding Pacific Basin.”50 While the
exhibition offered a rare opportunity to see recent Asian art—critic Elwyn
Lynn noted that “it was blessed by excitingly new principles of selection that
recognize the recent, contemporary art of the Pacific”—it was difficult to
appreciate them without any context; the review went on to state that “We
are presented with alternative traditions that, because of a local conformity,
are felt to be oddities and eccentricities.”51
The content of the first Biennale had little impact on the local scene; how-
ever, the project’s regional scope was taken in a more deliberate direction for
the second edition in 1976. This exhibition took up a tighter curatorial prem-
ise, with the title Recent International Forms in Art, and artists were selected
through local and regional advisors as well as on-the-ground research. The
exhibition was held at the AGNSW, and with increased funding from the Aus-
tralia Council, Foreign Affairs, and Transfield, the 1976 Biennale was a more
126 Russell Storer
ambitious affair in terms of scale and vision. It featured 80 artists, with over
half from Australia, New Zealand, Korea, and Japan, along with several lead-
ing European and American artists such as Giovanni Anselmo, Lynda Benglis,
Joseph Beuys, and the late Robert Smithson.52 It established the curatorial
model that continues for the Biennale today, with an independent artistic
director appointed to shape the curatorial direction and select the artists.
The direction of the 1976 Biennale was largely inspired by the Mildura
Sculpture Triennial, the most important platform for experimental art in Aus-
tralia at the time, held in a small city in regional Victoria. The Triennial’s artistic
director, Tom McCullough, had organized four successful editions since 1967,
shifting it from an art prize format into a more curatorial direction in 1970, and
titling it Sculpturescape from 1973 on. This enabled McCullough to shift the
focus away from the discrete objects favored by art prizes in order to respond
to the anti-formal and ephemeral nature of sculpture in the late 1960s and early
’70s: environments and installations, serial objects, earthworks, process art, per-
formance, and film. The Triennials were organized like festivals, including per-
formances, screenings, and talks, and featured artists from Australia and New
Zealand working in the newest forms of sculptural practice. McCullough’s
focus on sculpture aligned him with the most experimental international prac-
tices of the period, which had “nurtured a shift ‘from object to context.’”53
While the funding had increased for the second Biennale, the budget for
travel was meagre. McCullough later wrote:

I visited only two countries while preparing for the Biennale, as we

didn’t have much money. I was only allowed two weeks overseas so I
decided to focus on a Pacific triangle (the first Biennale had quite an
emphasis on Asia). New Zealand, California and Japan were selected for
their ambience of experimentation that would suit Australian attitudes
to sculpture and art generally.54

He had previously traveled to Japan, Europe, and the United States on a

Gulbenkian fellowship in 1970, which had informed his development of the
Mildura Triennial, and thus had learned of recent artistic developments in
the region.55 Such a specific configuration was unusual in Australia for the
time—critiqued as being “at the moment far more desirable than real”56—
yet it intriguingly echoes an earlier geographical proposition by modernist
painter Margaret Preston, who in 1942 wrote that:

Australia will find herself at the corner of a triangle: the East, as repre-
sented by China, India and Japan, will be at one point, the other will
have the United States of America representing the West. It will be in the
choice of one of these corners that the future of Australian Art will lie.57

Preston had traveled through Japan, China, and Southeast Asia in the 1920s
and ’30s, and was also deeply interested in Aboriginal art, incorporating aes-
thetic aspects of each culture into her work at different points in an attempt
 Imagining a region 127
to develop a specifically Australian modernism, grounded in its geography.
As Broinowski observes of Preston and others, “A characteristic of artists
who were concerned to relate Australia’s identity more closely to its location,
and hence to make connections with Asia in their work, was that they tended
also to be interested in Aboriginal culture.”58 While Preston’s regionalist
position was rare in her own time, her statement reflects a desire long held
by Australian artists to find connections that would place them on an equal
footing with artists from elsewhere.
Using his thematic focus of experimental sculpture, McCullough’s curatorial
selection, while opportunistic to a degree, enabled him to draw formal, con-
ceptual, and material connections between artists and across contexts, rather
than along national lines. Through this approach, he was able to position Aus-
tralian artists within current international debates around the status of the art
object, as had been undertaken by curators such as Harald Szeemann, who
had been brought to Sydney and Melbourne by philanthropist John Kaldor in
1971 to curate two exhibitions of local conceptual art, between his ground-
breaking When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and documenta 5 (1972).59
For critic Margaret Plant, McCullough’s curatorial approach placed Australian
artists “perhaps for the first time in Australia—side-by-side with their interna-
tional colleagues—John Armstrong, Marr Grounds, John Davis beside Stuart
Brisley, Robert Grosvenor, and artists from California, Japan, and Korea.”60
The position taken here was contemporaneousness within a highly pluralistic
art world, rather than whether Australian art was derivative, and temporally
and conceptually lagging behind the avant-garde elsewhere. In making his
Biennale selection, McCullough turned to the artist-advisors with whom he
had worked in Mildura, such as the earth artists Ross Grounds and John Davis,
who urged him to look toward Japan and California.61 Another advisor, artist
and critic Terry Smith, later wrote that they encouraged McCullough to give
“local artists and audiences a chance to see whether a regionalist response does
not have more to offer than provincialist dependence by mounting a show free
from the internationalist, i.e., US-dominated Official Culture.”62
Smith had recently articulated this sentiment in his essay “The Provincial-
ism Problem,” published in Artforum in 1974 and illustrated with images
from the 1973 Mildura Sculpturescape. In this essay, Smith questioned the
global art system centered around New York, and called for a rejection of
“an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural
values,” which had so deeply infused artistic practice and discourse in Aus-
tralia and other countries.63 Smith wrote that whether intentionally or not,
New York artists and institutions—also provincial in themselves—“cannot
but carry the condescending implication of superiority,” which he likened
to the authoritarian operations of Cold War US foreign policy. This “vicious
circle” could only be broken by exhibitions that aimed for a “display of
the very problematic which its own incursion into a provincial situation
raises.”64 That is, to reflexively acknowledge and critique the dynamics of the
center-periphery structure—which, with its carefully balanced geographical
co-ordinates, the 1976 Biennale made a valiant attempt to do.
128 Russell Storer
McCullough’s Japanese selection was assisted by several local advisors.
These included the Yokohama-based Australian artist Stelarc, best known
for body performances in which he suspended himself in different positions
and locations from cables hooked into his skin. Stelarc’s interest in these
works was to treat the body as a sculptural object among other objects, emp-
tied of agency and action. The first of these, Event for Stretched Skin (1976),
in which Stelarc was suspended horizontally from a wooden beam over a
large stone at the Tokiwa Gallery in Tokyo, was included in the Biennale as
photographic and video documentation. Another advisor was Father Joseph
Love, an American art history professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, who
had curated a 1973 touring exhibition of Japanese postwar art, The Art of
Surface, on the invitation of the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales.
This exhibition included works by leading avant-garde figures such as Jirō
Takamatsu, represented by Slack of Net, a floor grid constructed from string;
Yoshishige Saito, who gouged the surfaces of his abstract paintings with elec-
tric drills; and New York-based Tadaaki Kuwayama, known for his minimal-
ist monochrome canvases. Love noted that the exhibition did not include
“younger artists working in three dimensions in a more environmental or
conceptual context,” even though “they represent a serious and profound
mainstream of art right now.”65
This omission was somewhat rectified by the 1976 Biennale selection of
younger Japanese and Korean artists experimenting with site and materials
based on rigorous philosophical inquiry. They included Lee Ufan, Kishio
Suga, Koji Enokura, and Noboru Takayama, associated with the Mono-ha
(School of Things) movement that foregrounded the placement of natu-
ral and industrial materials such as stone, wood, metal, and glass to create
an unmediated “encounter” between object, space, and viewer. Similarly,
the Korean artist Quac Insik presented a series of stone boulders with tiny
dots tapped into their surfaces. These works found conceptual and material
connections with the Australian artists, who also used elemental materials
in their exploration of sculptural process and the status of the art object,
particularly Davis, Marr Grounds, Ken Unsworth, and Stelarc (the latter two
also using stones in their work).66
McCullough organized his Biennale along the festival model of his Mil-
dura Triennials, with a series of events taking place throughout the city, and
an engagement with students through educational activities. One of the spe-
cial commissions for the Biennale was by the Japanese environmental artist
Fujiko Nakaya, who created one of her signature “fog sculptures” in the
Domain, a large park adjacent to the AGNSW.(Figure 5.8) The work was
subsequently purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for its collec-
tion. Nakaya was one of several participating artists sent around the country
to give lectures at art schools and independent spaces, building connections
that eventually led to her co-organizing, along with Stelarc and others, a mul-
ti-venue project in Melbourne in 1981 titled Yoin: Ideas from Japan Made
in Australia. Comprising video, installation, and site-specific sculpture, and
including several artists from the 1976 Biennale, the project employed local
 Imagining a region 129

Figure 5.8 Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Sculpture installed in the domain for the 1976
Biennale of Sydney, 17 Nov 1976. National Art Archive/Art Gallery of
New South Wales
Sources: Photo: AGNSW. ARC40.3.1.

art students to realize the works in situ. The success of the endeavor led to
another multi-venue exchange, Continuum, which sent 27 Australian artists
to Tokyo in 1983 and brought 33 Japanese artists to Melbourne in 1985.67
Momentum for more regular and diverse artistic exchange was starting to
build and continued to grow through the 1980s and early ’90s.

Conclusion: postcolonialism and a new regionalism

The 1980s saw a rapid consolidation of the tentative regionalist cultural
direction begun in the early 1970s, with the development of numerous plat-
forms for artistic exchange with Asia. As Australia’s primary economic and
demographic sources shifted decidedly toward the region by the middle of
the decade, Prime Minister Bob Hawke advocated what he called “enmesh-
ment with Asia” and greater “Asia literacy” as national imperatives.68 This
resulted in increased support for Asian cultural diplomacy and greater align-
ment between the objectives of Foreign Affairs and the Australia Council,
including the introduction of new country-specific programs and funding.69
This included increasing the proportion of the Australia Council’s interna-
tional budget that was spent on projects in the Asia Pacific region to 50%
(from its then level of around 12%), which was adopted as policy in 1991.70
The government also partnered with the philanthropic Myer Foundation to
found Asialink in 1989, with the aim to “create an Asia literate Australian
community and to help build and maintain Australia’s role and influence in
130 Russell Storer
the Asian region,” hewing closely to Hawke’s vision for Asian engagement.71
Its cultural arm, Asialink Arts, established in 1991 by curator Alison Car-
roll, set up residencies for Australian artists across Asia, and organized an
intensive program of touring exhibitions of Australian art and craft to Asian
venues (around 80 between 1992 and 2010), supported by institutional col-
laborations and funding from the Australia Council and Foreign Affairs.72
Asialink had been proposed by Carrillo Gantner, former Cultural Counsellor
in Beijing and on the boards of the Australia Council and the Myer Founda-
tion, after encountering perceptions of Australia as “racist and colonial” on his
travels in Asia during the late 1980s.73 Besides its history of restrictive immi-
gration policies, Australia’s negative image in the region was closely linked to
its brutal treatment of its First Peoples. By the 1980s, the questioning of Aus-
tralia’s postcolonial identity as a white British outpost had intensified across
the country, particularly in the lead-up to the 1988 Australian Bicentenary of
British settlement, controversially framed by the government as a “celebration
of the nation.” Indigenous art and culture was by then gaining unprecedented
art-world visibility, having steadily grown in prominence over the previous two
decades, galvanized by the land rights and self-determination movements that
had begun in the mid-’60s and expanded through the ’70s. Indigenous Austral-
ian artists’ deep connection to the land, and their complex negotiation between
local tradition and imported modernity, offered an entirely different perspective
on what it means to make art in Australia. First Nations art became intrinsic to
any postcolonial reassessment of Australian art in its relationship to Euro-Amer-
ican art history, as well as to how it navigated its place in the region. The official
promotion of Australian art abroad also began to shift during this time, from
largely European-Australian landscape painting to include Aboriginal art; the
Australian pavilion at the 1990 Venice Biennale, for example, featured Aborigi-
nal artists for the first time, with an exhibition of pioneering Kimberley painter
Rover Thomas and the Adelaide-based urban artist Trevor Nickolls.
The 1988 Biennale of Sydney, renamed the Australian Biennale for the
bicentenary, featured as its centerpiece an installation of 200 burial poles by
Aboriginal artists from the Ramingining community in Arnhem Land. The
work marked 200 years of European occupation and stood as a memorial
for the many thousands of First Nations people who had died as a result.74
This positioning of Aboriginal artistic practice alongside contemporary west-
ern art had first been made in the third Biennale of Sydney in 1979, titled
European Dialogue, which, while consciously countering the dominance of
American art in Australia over the past decade, also shifted the Biennale away
from its initial Asia Pacific direction. In this edition, bark paintings by artists
from Arnhem Land were shown among works by European artists, “the first
time [Aboriginal artists] had been shown in an international contemporary
context.”75 The following Biennale in 1982 featured a floor sand painting
and performance by Warlpiri artists from the Lajamanu community in the
Northern Territory, placed at the center of the AGNSW and surrounded
by works by artists from around the world. Its inclusion influenced curator
Jean-Hubert Martin—who visited Sydney as commissioner for the French
 Imagining a region 131
artists—in his development of the highly influential 1989 exhibition Magi-
ciens de la Terre in Paris, the first major exhibition in Europe to juxtapose
artistic practices from the “West” and “non-West,” and to expand beyond
established definitions of contemporary art to incorporate craft, folk, and
customary forms.76 This curatorial methodology for showing First Nations
art has become standard for Australian institutional collection displays and
survey exhibitions ever since.
As contemporary Asian cultures became more visible and accessible in
Australia, through immigration, cheaper travel, and closer economic and
diplomatic ties, Australian art institutions also began to look beyond “time-
less” traditional Asian art—which had comprised almost all of their collec-
tions and exhibitions of Asian art to date—to encompass contemporary art.
Yet influential early projects emerged from individual artist initiatives and
independent art spaces rather than museums, such as Continuum between
Melbourne and Tokyo in the mid-1980s, and the Artists Regional Exchange
(ARX), which was established in Perth in 1987 as a biennial exhibition and
residency for artists from Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. ARX
had itself emerged from a series of exhibitions, titled ANZART, held in
Christchurch (1981), Hobart (1983), and ­Auckland (1985), organized by
Australian and New Zealand artists in an attempt to develop a regional
platform, both as trans-Tasman and presented outside the major cities of
Sydney and Melbourne.77 The interpersonal connections that grew out
of these grassroots projects, along with the Asialink exhibition and resi-
dency program and the growing presence of Asian art students and art his-
tory research in the tertiary education sphere, were formative in building
regional networks.78
The most prominent of these initiatives was, and remains, the Asia Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG)
in Brisbane, which held its first edition in 1993.(Figure 5.9) The exhibition
included artists from Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and East
and Southeast Asia, a remit that stretched to encompass South and West
Asia and the wider Pacific over subsequent editions. The QAG was able to
build on ground laid over the previous decade by a host of smaller projects,
including its own Japanese Ways, Western Means exhibition of contemporary
Japanese art in 1989, and initiatives such as Asialink and ARX.79 As Singapo-
rean art historian TK Sabapathy observed,

ARX really was seminal and germinal for the Southeast Asian connection
with Australia… you could say that what happened in APT in Brisbane
in 1993 was in part a continuation, at least from our point of view, and
an amplification of that moment in 1987.80

Also in 1993, the art magazine Art and Asia Pacific (now ArtAsiaPacific)
was established in Sydney as a sister publication to Art and Australia, with
contributions from many of the curators, artists, and writers involved in
ARX, Asialink, and the APT. Collectively, such projects took an active role in
132 Russell Storer

Figure 5.9 Installation view, Watermall, ‘First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary
Art’, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, September – December 1993/
Photograph: Richard Stringer/Image courtesy: QAGOMA.
Sources: Foreground: Shigeo Toya (Japan), Woods III 1991-92/The Kenneth and Yasuko
Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1994 with funds from The Myer
Foundation and Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation and with
the assistance of the International Exhibitions Program/Collection: Queensland Art Gallery |
Gallery of Modern Art. Water: Kamol Phaosavasdi (Thailand), River of the King: Water pollution
project one 1993. Right hand wall: Vasan Sitthiket (Thailand), Resurrection, 1992 (left); Buddha
returns to Bangkok’92 1992/Collection: Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. Above escalator: S
Chandrasekaran (Singapore), Duality, 1993.

trying to recalibrate Australian art as part of a regional configuration, with

the catalogue for the first APT states that:

given that Australia in its world view is no longer solely a Euro-American

country, that an Australian art museum would take up the challenge of a
major series of exhibitions and forums concentrating on the vitality and
diversity of the region’s contemporary art at the beginning of what is
undoubtedly a new era for both Australia and the region.81

Terry Smith identifies the regionalism that emerged in Australia in the 1980s
as “an element within the two critical tendencies” of “anti-modernism and
post-colonial critique”; “a conscious turning of the tables against” what
curator Bernice Murphy described as “monolithic centers and the repos-
itories of “international culture” located elsewhere.”82 The shift from the
 Imagining a region 133
internationalism of The Field to the tentative regionalism of the early Bien-
nales of Sydney, to the more fully realized world-making of projects such
as ARX and the APT, follows to some degree the changing conception of
regionality in Australia through the final two decades of the Cold War, as
the country struggled to find a distinctive place within a volatile global land-
scape. It saw an expansion from a parochial, colonial view of Australia as a
British remnant of Empire in the Pacific, to being an active participant within
the Cold War sphere of the United States in Asia, into joining a post-colo-
nial, cosmopolitan arena that incorporated far broader cultural horizons.
Yet those earlier regionalities never really went away. This progressive
trajectory has been tempered somewhat since the mid-1990s, impacted by
the highly partisan nature of Australian politics. The Asia-directed vision
promoted by Whitlam in his brief three years in government, and by his
longer-serving Labor Party successors Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, was
not always so visibly embraced by Liberal Party leaders. On becoming Prime
Minister in 1996, Keating’s successor John Howard declared that Australia
did not need to choose “between our history and our geography,” and reaf-
firmed an emphasis on American and European ties amid what he described,
rather disingenuously, as an “Asia first or Asia plus, not Asia only” policy.83
For artists and art institutions interested in Asian engagement, this pivot
led to a reduction in support and focus as the priorities of national funding
bodies and cultural diplomacy programs changed, with a consequent drop
in regional programming. The brief ascendancy of a geographic view of Aus-
tralian identity that emerged as the Cold War waned seemed then to revert
to the prioritizing of a historical one, with Howard often accused of seeking
a retreat to the 1950s. Australia is of course, however, a far more complex
country, and in a far more complex world, than half a century ago; and this
binary is in fact deeply intertwined. The door that opened back then onto
a cultural identity more deeply connected to place can never be fully closed
again.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Abigail Moncrieff for research assistance,
as well as the following for information, suggestions, and support: Amy
Barrett-Lennard, John Barrett-Lennard, Max Bourke, Alison Carroll, Julie
Ewington, Carrillo Gantner, Simryn Gill, Julian Goddard, Marco Marcon,
Matthew Ngui, Les Rowe, TK Sabapathy, Shahmen Suku, Caroline Turner,
and Yao Souchou.

Notes
1 Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.
2 See Broinowski, “Images of East and West,” in The Yellow Lady, 198–203.
134 Russell Storer
3 Terry Smith, “Introduction: Mismatch/Misfit: Modernism and Aboriginality,”
in Transformations in Australian Art Volume Two: The Twentieth Century -
Modernism and Aboriginality (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002), 11–12.
4 Lindsay Barrett, The Prime Minister’s Christmas Card: Blue Poles and Cultural
Politics in the Whitlam Era (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001), 142.
5 David Walker, “Significant Other: Anxieties about Australia’s Asian Future,”
Australian Foreign Affairs, no. 5 (February 2019): 6.
6 For a brief summary of the White Australia Policy, see the National Museum of
Australia’s Defining Moments in Australian History: White Australia Policy.
Accessed August 2, 2019. https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/
resources/white-australia-policy.
7 For a discussion of SEATO, ASPAC and the role of anti-communism in binding
Australia with the region, see Dan Halvorson, “The Cold War and Non-
Communist Solidarity in East Asia’ Commonwealth Responsibility and Cold War
Solidarity: Australia in Asia, 1944–74 (Canberra: ANU Press, 2019), 71–101.
For Australia’s role in the Colombo Plan, see David Lowe, “Colombo Plan: An
initiative that brought Australia and Asia closer,” The Conversation, 17 October
2011, accessed August 5, 2019. https://theconversation.com/colombo-plan-
an-initiative-that-brought-australia-and-asia-closer-3590.
8 John Murphy, Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia’s Vietnam War (St.
Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993), xix.
9 See Amatav Archarya, “Studying the Bandung Conference from a Global IR
Perspective,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 70, no. 4 (2016):
343; see also Tim Dunne and Andrew Phillips, “The ‘Bandung Divide’:
Australia’s Lost Opportunity in Asia?,” The Conversation, April 24, 2015,
accessed 2 August 2020. https://theconversation.com/the-bandung-divide-
australias-lost-opportunity-in-asia-40484.
10 John Murphy, Harvest of Fear, 249.
11 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art, 1970–1994
(Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995), 14.
12 Charles Green and Heather Barker, “The Watershed: Two Decades of American
Painting at the National Gallery of Victoria,” Art Journal of the National
Gallery of Victoria, no. 50 (2011): 70–71.
13 Green and Barker, “The Watershed,” 75.
14 Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, Charles Merewether, and Ann Stephen, The Necessity
of Australian Art: An Essay About Interpretation (Sydney: Power Publications,
1988), 95.
15 John Stringer, “Cultivating the Field,” in Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968–2002,
ed. Charles Green (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2002), 18.
16 Patrick McCaughey, “The Significance of The Field,” Art and Australia 6, no.
3 (1968): 235, quoted in Jim Berryman, “The Rhetoric of the New: The Field
and the Foundations of an Institutional Avant-garde in Australia,” Journal of
Australian Studies 38 no. 3 (2014): 335.
17 See Beckett Rozentals, “The Legacy of The Field,” in The Field Revisited, ed.
Mark Gomes (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2018), 24–29; and
Patrick McCaughey, “The Significance of The Field,” Art and Australia 6, no.
3 (1968): 235–42.
18 Laurie Thomas, “Art with a Bit Less Logic,” The Australian (August 27, 1968):
6; quoted in Berryman, “The Rhetoric of the New,” 340.
19 Sydney Ball, quoted in Rozentals, “The Legacy of The Field,” 37.
20 Ian Burn and Nigel Lendon, “Purity, Style, Amnesia,” in The Field Now
(Bulleen: Heide Park and Art Gallery, 1984), 21.
21 Ian Burn and Karl Beveridge, “Don Judd,” The Fox, no. 2 (1975): 139.
22 Ian Burn, “The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath (Or The Memoirs of an
Ex-Conceptual Artist),” Art & Text, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 58.
 Imagining a region 135
23 Green and Barker, “The Watershed,” 71–72.
24 Barrett, The Prime Minister’s Christmas Card, 103.
25 Andrea Benvenuti and David Martin Jones, “With Friends Like These: Australia,
the United States, and Southeast Asian Détente,” Journal of Cold War Studies
21, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 37–41.
26 Benvenuti and Jones, “With Friends Like These,” 42.
27 Benvenuti and Jones, “With Friends Like These,” 42–44.
28 Billy Griffiths, “Whitlam in China,” Inside Story, October 22, 2014, accessed
August 4, 2019, https://insidestory.org.au/whitlam-in-china/.
29 Griffiths, “Whitlam in China”.
30 A voter survey had identified “the fear that Labor wasn’t afraid of the China
syndrome’ as a potential negative to be rebutted in the election campaign. It’s
Time Original Campaign Proposal, Hansen-Rubensohn-McCann-Erickson
agency, 6. Whitlam Institute online archive, accessed August 4, 2019, https://
www.whitlam.org/collection.
31 For a detailed discussion of Australian travelling exhibitions to South and
Southeast Asia from 1949–1969, see Neil Manton, Cultural Relations: The
Other Side of the Diplomatic Coin (Canberra: Homosapien Books, 2003),
65–120.
32 Caroline Turner, “International Exhibitions,” Understanding Museums:
Australian Museums and Museology, National Museum of Australia, Canberra,
2011, accessed December, 29, 2019. https://nma.gov.au/research/under-
standing-museums/CTurner_2011.html.
33 Turner, “International Exhibitions,” accessed December 29, 2019.
34 Jocelyn Chey, “From Rosny to the Great Wall: Cultural Relations and Public
Diplomacy,” in Re-orienting Australia-China Relations, 1972 to the Present, ed.
Nicholas Thomas (London: Routledge, 2004) 169.
35 Chey, “From Rosny to the Great Wall,” 169.
36 The 1973 allocation of funds to the Australia Council was $15 million, “roughly
twice the Commonwealth’s aggregate expenditure on the arts in the previous
year.” Professor David Throsby, “Public Funding of the Arts in Australia: 1900
to 2000,” Year Book Australia 2001, Australian Bureau of Statistics, accessed
December 30, 2019, https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/0/ED192B
5A87E90DBECA2569DE0025C1A6?OpenDocument.
37 See Virginia Hollister, Audit of International Activity 1973–1993 (Sydney:
Australia Council for the Arts, June 1994), 7–9.
38 Chey, “From Rosny to the Great Wall,” 169.
39 Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials and Documenta: The
Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., 2016), 50.
40 Green and Gardner, Biennials, Triennials and Documenta, 87.
41 Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, “1973: The Biennale of Sydney,” in Biennale of Sydney
2000 (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, Ltd., 2000), 164.
42 Belgiorno-Nettis, “1973”.
43 Frank Barnes (General Manager, Sydney Opera House), introductory state-
ment, Biennale of Sydney, Opera House, Nov. 23, 1973 (Sydney: Biennale of
Sydney, 1973), n.p.
44 Harry Nicolson, “An Introduction to the Australian Artists,” Biennale of Sydney
1973, n.p.
45 Daniel Thomas, “Following in the Footsteps,” in Biennale of Sydney 1973, n.p.
46 Bruce Adams, “Review of 1976 Biennale of Sydney,” Art and Australia
(January–April 1977): 248.
47 Elwyn Lynn, “Biennale of Sydney,” Art and Australia (January–March 1974):
273, 270.
136 Russell Storer
48 Alison Holland, “Innovation, Art Practice and Japan–Australia Cultural
Exchange During the 1970s and 1980s,” Asia Pacific Journal of Arts &
Cultural Management 9, no. 1 (December 2012): 27.
49 Daniel Thomas, “Following in the Footsteps,” n.p.
50 Anthony Winterbotham, “The Birth of the Biennale of Sydney” Biennale of
Sydney, n.p.
51 Lynn, “Biennale of Sydney,” 270, 277.
52 Japanese artists: Koji Enokura; Noriyuki Haraguchi; Katsuhiro Yamaguchi;
Kyubei Koshimizu; Yutaka Matsuzawa; Shigeo Miura; Tsuneo Nakai; Natsuyuki
Nakanishi; Fujiko Nakaya; Minoru Nishiki; Morio Shinoda; Kishio Suga;
Noboru Takayama; Kakuzo Tatehata; Kenji Togami. Korean artists: Lee
Kang-so; Lee Ufan; Quac Insik; Shim Moon-Seup.
53 Leon Paroissien, “The Biennale of Sydney: A partisan view of three decades,”
Art & Australia 41, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 62.
54 McCullough, “1976: Recent International Forms in Art,” Biennale of Sydney
2000, 165.
55 Anne Sanders, “Made in Mildura,” Art Monthly Australia, no. 246, May 2013, 41.
56 Adams, “Review of 1976 Biennale of Sydney,” 248.
57 Margaret Preston, “The Orientation of Art in the Post-War Pacific,” in Society
of Artists Book 1942 (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1942), 7. Quoted in Manton, Cultural
Relations, 13.
58 Broinowski, The Yellow Lady, 199.
59 For a summary of Szeemann’s Australian projects, see Kaldor Public Art
Projects: Project 02: Harald Szeemann, accessed December 30, 2019. http://
kaldorartprojects.org.au/projects/project-02-harald-szeemann.
60 Margaret Plant, “Quattrocento Melbourne: Aspects of finish 1973–77,” in
Anything Goes: Art in Australia 1970–1980, ed. Paul Taylor (South Yarra: Art
& Text, 1984), 85–86.
61 See Thomas McCullough, “Recent International Forms in Art,” in Recent
International Forms in Art: The 1976 Biennale of Sydney at the Art Gallery of
New South Wales, November 13–December 19 (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney,
1976) n.p.
62 Terry Smith, “Biennale Notes,” Chimera, no. 5 (1979): n.p., quoted in Smith,
“Small Steps, Larger Journey: Biennales of Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s,”
Art Monthly Australasia, no. 305 (March 2018), 27.
63 Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” Artforum 13, no. 1 (September
1974): 54.
64 Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” 59.
65 Joseph Love, “The Art of Surface,” in The Art of Surface: A Survey of
Contemporary Japanese Art (Sydney: Art Gallery Society of NSW, 1973), n.p.
66 For descriptions of the Korean and Australian works in the 1976 Biennale of
Sydney, see Glenn Barkley, “Tell Me Tell Me: An Australian Perspective,” in Tell
Me Tell Me: Australian and Korean Art 1976–2011 (Sydney: Museum of
Contemporary Art; Seoul: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2011),
20–26.
67 For a summary of presentations of Japanese contemporary art in Australia dur-
ing the 1970s and ‘80s see Holland, “Innovation, Art Practice and Japan–
Australia Cultural Exchange,” 24–31.
68 “I said in my first days as prime minister that Australia's future depended upon
becoming more enmeshed with Asia. And that indeed happened in the period
of which I was speaking... demography is working as inexorably as economics to
make Australia's future be part of Asia. And I have no doubt that when people
look at this in the year 2038 they will know then that the sort of vision I had in
1983, of Australia's future being enmeshed with Asia, will have become a real-
ity.” Bob Hawke, The Hawke Memoirs (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1994), 230.
 Imagining a region 137
See also David Walker, “Significant Other: Anxieties about Australia’s Asian
future,” Australian Foreign Affairs, no. 5 (February 2019): 5–27; and on “Asia
literacy.” David Walker, “The time has come: histories of Asia literacy’,” in Asia
Literate Schooling in the Asian Century, ed. Christine Halse (London and New
York: Routledge, 2015), 29–43.
69 Manton, Cultural Relations, 60–63.
70 See Virginia Hollister, Audit of International Activity, 12–13.
71 Asialink website, accessed December 2, 2019, https://asialink.unimelb.edu.
au/about-us/what-we-do/shaping-the-future-an-uncommon-
history-of-asialink-1989-2017.
72 See Alison Carroll and Sarah Bond, “Every 23 Days…,” in Every 23 Days: 20
Years Touring Asia, eds. Sarah Bond, Alison Carroll and Claire Watson
(Melbourne: Asialink, 2010), 17–21.
73 Carrillo Gantner, interview with Ali Moore, in Asialink: Shaping the Future: An
Uncommon History 1989–2017 (Melbourne: Asialink, 2017), 15.
74 The work is now permanently installed in a specially constructed gallery at the
entrance to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, accessed September
18, 2019. https://nga.gov.au/aboriginalmemorial/home.cfm.
75 Nick Waterlow, “1979: European Dialogue,” in Biennale of Sydney 2000
(Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 2000), 169.
76 See Lucy Steeds, “Magiciens de la Terre’ and the Development of Transnational
Project-Based Curating,” in Making Art Global (Part 2): Magiciens de la Terre
198 (London: Afterall Books, 2013), 1833–34.
77 For an overview of the ARX projects, see Pamela Zeplin, “The ARX Experiment,
Perth, 1987–1999: communities, controversy & regionality,” Australian Council
of University Art and Design Schools, http://acuads.com.au/wp-content/
uploads/2014/12/zeplin1.pdf, and Christine Clark and Caroline Turner, “Cross-
Cultural Exchanges and Interconnections from the 1980s and 1990s: ARX and
APT,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 16, no. 2 (2016), 167–84.
78 From the 1980s, several Australian art schools and universities began actively
recruiting students from Asia, as well as developing artist residencies. In 1991,
art historian John Clark organized the conference “Modernism and Post-
modernism in Asian Art” at the Australian National University, the first in the
field to be held in the West, which brought scholars from across Asia to Canberra.
79 See Clark and Turner, “Cross-Cultural Exchanges and Interconnections,” 177.
80 T. K. Sabapathy, interview with Christine Clark and Caroline Turner, May
2015, quoted in Clark and Turner, “Cross-Cultural Exchanges and
Interconnections,” 171.
81 Caroline Turner, “Introduction: From Extraregionalism to Intraregionalism?,”
in The First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed. Suzanne Grano
(Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1993), 8.
82 Terry Smith, “Between Regionality and Regionalism: Middle Ground or
Limboland?” Periphery, nos. 40 and 41 (Spring 1999–Summer 2000), 4.
83 John Howard, The 5th Annual Sir Edward “Weary’ Dunlop Asialink” Lecture,
Melbourne, November 11, 1997. Transcript available at PM Transcripts:
Transcripts from the Prime Ministers of Australia, accessed October 4, 2019.
https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-10606.
Part II

Visual gallery and primary

documents
6 FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE
Hiroshi Sunairi

Okinawan photographer Mao Ishikawa (b. 1953), worked as a barmaid in her

early twenties in establishments that catered to African American GIs in Koza
City and Kin Town. At the time, black soldiers still faced considerable dis-
crimination in the United States and the US military. And Okinawan women,
like Ishikawa, who had relationships with these men were derided as pan pan
(prostitutes). Ishikawa produced photographs documenting the intimacy of
friendships, love affairs, wild nights, and domestic accords in her social circle.
The images were published as Hot Days in Camp Hansen!! (1982), Hot Days
in Okinawa (2013), and Red Flower - The Women of Okinawa /Akabana -
Okinawa no on’na (2017). Together, they offer a frank, defiant, and joyful
exploration of the freedom of youth and personal connections.
From 2017 to 2019, Hiroshi Sunairi visited Ishikawa in Okinawa to docu-
ment the landscape, Ishikawa’s struggle with cancer, her intimate reflections
on her three books, her life in the ’70s, and her visits to Koza City and Kin
Town. The outcomes were three feature-length documentaries—the OK3,
or Okinawa Trilogy. OK1 - OKINAWA OKINAWA is a history of the sexual
crimes committed by the US military from 1945 to 2016. OK2 - FROM
OKINAWA WITH LOVE explores Ishikawa’s life and her three books—Hot
Days in Camp Hansen!! (1982), Hot Days in Okinawa (2013) and Red Flower
- The Women of Okinawa (2017). OK3 - Okinawa Philadelphia follows the
life of an American soldier once deployed in Okinawa, back in Philadelphia.

Story about a rape victim

As far as I remember, it was in the 1960s, in the neighborhood of Uruma, what
was then known as Ishikawa. A girl a few years older than me, around 5 or 6,
was abducted and raped by an American soldier. The girl's private parts were left
looking like mutilated by a knife. Her clothes were ripped with only underwear
remaining. Her hands gripped weeds and her teeth clenched tight. On a rainy
day outside the American base, she was left like that at the dumping grounds.
If I was the little girl's parent, I would have killed the criminal. She was
only five years old, raped and killed by an American military man, and left in
a dumpster on a rainy day. She was discarded like a piece of trash, basically
saying she's not human.
142 Hiroshi Sunairi
Until 1972, incidents like this happened as if they were normal. And we
are told not to hold a grudge against the American military? Impossible.
I’ve been thinking since then. What is Okinawa to Japan? Are Okinawans
Japanese? What is the “Japanese motherland” that my teacher spoke about?
You are all Japanese. Be aware of that, and study to be respectable Japa-
nese citizens. The Japanese motherland has the peace constitution [ARTI-
CLE 9] that will protect us from the American military. We must return to
the Japanese motherland as soon as possible.
That is what I remember from my primary school education.
In conclusion? Returning to Japan was not so great after all. It’s been
73 years since the war, but nothing has changed. Moreover, the Japanese
government and American military have joined forces. The Japanese gov-
ernment is basically there to please America. “Americans, you’re free to use
Okinawa as you wish, as long as you don’t bully the rest of Japan.” That’s
what I hear, and this attitude remains even today (Figure 6.1).

*ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on jus-

tice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign
right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling
international disputes.

How Japanese think of Okinawans

Right now, to build a new large-scale American military base, the coastal
seaside of Nago city, where the US military base Camp Schwab is currently
located, is roped off. Henoko Camp Schwab in Nago is only 30 kilometers

Figure 6.1 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021, film still, Mao
Ishikawa. © Hiroshi Sunairi.
 FROM OKINAWA 143
from Ginowan. They call this a relocation? It’s only 30 kilometers away! You
can drive there, and that much of a difference will eliminate danger? Even
if the airfield is relocated, the US military aircraft fly noisily. Whether it’s
over Okinawa’s mainland or remote islands, US military crafts fly above my
house. Japanese self-defense aircrafts too. They’re free to do whatever.

Why photography?
To photograph, you have to stand in front of your subject with a camera,
so you must meet the subject. You can’t just sit in a room and paint from
your imagination. When I talk to my subjects, I’m straightforward and hide
nothing from them, so they open up and talk to me honestly. This is not a
strategy. I was born this way.

Akabana
I titled this collection of photographs Akabana, a symbolic flower in
Okinawan culture. It’s a gaudy red flower, but at the same time it is just a
weed. Akabana, a red flower, or in other words, Okinawan women. I used
it as a metaphor for the women I photographed. These weeds survive no
matter how much they’re trampled on and show their glorious flashy red.
The women at bars who served black men were thought of as prostitutes.
That’s not true. There was genuine love and passion between them. Living
on the small island of Okinawa, these women chose to live as they desired.
“What’s wrong with loving black men? What’s wrong about living freely?”
I thought I was free until I met these women. Their provocative life influ-
enced me to strive for greater freedom. I am so proud of these women and
the photographs of them I took. You are free to work anywhere and love
anyone. These women are marvelous. I didn’t want their history to be lost
to obscurity, so I decided to republish this book in America. I cherish this
book. I lost the film negatives, but these photographs are magnificent (Fig-
ures 6.2 and 6.3).
Whether in Kin Town or Koza City, I always carried my 35 mm camera. It
was only black-and-white film I used back then. Hanging my camera on my
shoulder, I took pictures spontaneously. I took time to photograph just as I
might keep a diary.
I used to spend my day working at the bar or visiting my hostess friends’
apartment, and I photographed what was in front of me. All my friends
got used to me carrying my camera and taking pictures all the time. So,
when I photographed them, they never became self-conscious. They were
authentic as they were in my photos, sometimes drunk, sometimes seri-
ous. Some of the girls had children, so I photographed them together,
and when they were with their boyfriends too. Often, these boyfriends
were American soldiers. At first, I jumped into this world to photograph
the soldiers but gradually took more interest in the women who went out
with them.
144 Hiroshi Sunairi

Figure 6.2 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021, film still, The
cover of Mao Ishikawa's photography book, Red Flower – The Women of
Okinawa/Akabana – Okinawa no on’na (2017). © Hiroshi Sunairi.

Figure 6.3 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021, film still, Mao
Ishikawa in the picture from the photography book, Red Flower – The Women
of Okinawa/Akabana – Okinawa no on’na (2017). © Hiroshi Sunairi.

Okinawa may seem like a festive and tropical place, but people there worry
about how they are seen. That’s how provincial places work. But these girls,
once they fell in love with black men, simply dove into that world. No mat-
ter what happened, they stayed together through thick and thin. During
those days in Okinawa, there was a lot of hatred toward Americans due to
 FROM OKINAWA 145
family members being killed by the Americans in the war. On top of that,
Okinawans saw Whites as superior to Blacks.
Of course, among the black people, there were people who looked down
on us Okinawans. Because America had won the war, some had a swagger.
Many decades have passed since, but what I photographed during that time
was segregation of the White and the Black. I was able to capture that his-
tory. The island was full of soldiers. Cities were lively. Nowadays, girls come
here from everywhere. Then, it was mostly Okinawan girls, some from main-
land Japan. They all hung out intimately, really being human. “I love you so
much baby!” They let it all out—sperm, sweat, spit, banging each other. I
loved their rawness. “Why is such a life bad? I think my life is the best!” With
their outpouring of enthusiasm, they were so free and I was so stimulated.
What a world I found! Magnificent! Full of vitality for life, they loved freely
and said what they had in mind. They were naked, because it was hot. Why
is that bad? To be free on this small island, they lived life to the fullest. These
women were tough. They would get wasted sometimes, but never sloppy.
These girls would become defiant so mercilessly, “why the hell is it bad to do
what I like.” They were badass and nobody’s fool but never obscene.

Why identify with Black culture?

At the time, the slogan “Black is beautiful” was everywhere. The Blacks who
had been slaves and prosecuted before took this matter into their hands,
declaring independence in America. The Black Panther Party appeared and

Figure 6.4 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021, film still, Mao
and her boyfriend, Sir on the right in the picture from the photography
book, Hot Days in Okinawa (2013). © Hiroshi Sunairi.
146 Hiroshi Sunairi
held massive demonstrations, fighting for their rights. Even in Okinawa,
there were demonstrations (Figures 6.4 and 6.5).
The similarity between the blacks and the Okinawans is that the Okinawans
were prosecuted, looked down upon, and discriminated against by the Jap-
anese. This is what I sensed once I understood history. The blacks, too, had
been slaves for a long time, prosecuted, looked down upon, and discrimi-
nated against by the Whites. I came to realize the similarities between the
White/Black and the Japanese/Okinawans. I didn’t see it while I was work-
ing at the bar, only after I had left that world. I wondered, “ah, perhaps the
reason I was so drawn to the blacks was because I was feeling sympathy for
their history, so similar to the Okinawans.”

Figure 6.5 Hiroshi Sunairi, FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 2021, still from film
“BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL” (1974), a poster from the German chapter
of the international Black Is Beautiful movement | Junge Union [Young
Union]. © Hiroshi Sunairi.
7 Dinh Q Lê
Works and primary documents
Dinh Q Lê

Dinh Q Lê, photo-weaving work

Lê’s photo-weaving series consists of photo prints that have been cut into
strips. The artist then weaves them by means of crosshatching, a traditional
Vietnamese method for weaving grass mats that Lê learned from his aunt.
He made the technique his own by modifying traditional patterns, which
became the hallmark of his oeuvre (Figure 7.1).
In these weavings, Lê brings together found images from the Internet and
photographs that he has taken himself, cuts them into strips, and weaves them
together into a new image. The process disrupts the image’s coherency. The
new hybrid image with various suggestive elements actively engages his viewers
in the thought process while leaving it open to new interpretations. Untitled
from The Hill of Poisonous Trees series (man and woman) (2008) (Figures 7.2),
for example, is based on two images: 1) Angkor Wat; and 2) Tuol Sleng Geno-
cide Museum, located on the site of the brutal Khmer Rouge execution center
(1975–79). In this image, the Khmer Empire's greatest artwork and the hor-
rific dimensions of the Cambodian Genocide were placed in conversation with
each other. It also commemorates the victims of the Khmer Rouge, who were
notorious for taking photographs of everyone they brought to Tuol Sleng.

The farmers and the helicopters, 2006

In 2004, Mr. Tran Quoc Hai, a self-taught mechanic in the farming commu-
nity of Tay Ninh Province, began testing a homemade helicopter that took
him more than six years to research and build. When Vietnamese newspapers
asked why he built it, Mr. Tran spoke about his childhood obsession with
the helicopters he witnessed during the Vietnam-American War. Mr. Tran
also spoke about his desire to create an affordable helicopter for farming and
emergency evacuation purposes (Figure 7.3).
The helicopter has a deadly history in Vietnam. With more than 12,000
American helicopters, the Vietnam-American War was the first helicopter war.
More than 36,125,000 sorties were conducted, and some combat operations
involved more than one hundred helicopters at a time. Attack helicopters,
like the Huey Cobra, were heavily armed. The Vietnamese could suddenly,
148 Dinh Q Lê

Figure 7.1 Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled (Tom Cruise & Willam Dafoe, Born on the 4th of
July/Highway 1), 2000. C-print and linen tape, 40x60 in. © Dinh Q. Lê.

Figure 7.2 Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled from The Hill of Poisonous Trees series (man and
woman), 2008. C-print and linen tape, 47.25x78.75 in. © Dinh Q. Lê.
 Dinh Q Lê 149

Figure 7.3 The Farmers and The Helicopters, 2006

Sources: 3-Channel Video Installation. Duration: 15 Minutes, edition of 5 with 1 AP. Dinh Q. Lê
in collaboration with Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Ha, Thuc Phu Nam. © Dinh Q. Lê.

without warning, find themselves under assault from the helicopters flying
above. It has been over 30 years since the end of the Vietnam-American War.
Vietnam is slowly moving away from the trauma as new meanings and mem-
ories are being constructed daily in the country. Mr. Tran’s helicopter images
mark a shift in the perception of the helicopter. To Vietnamese today, heli-
copters are no longer machines of war and death but modernity and hope.
This three-channel video installation entitled The Farmers and The Helicopters
consists of Mr. Tran’s interviews with Vietnamese farmers. As they share their
memories of helicopters in the war and their view of helicopters today, they also
mention a desire for modernity. Intermixed with this footage are clips from Hol-
lywood movies of the Vietnam-American War and documentary wartime foot-
age. Somewhere between fact and fiction, between old memories and newly
constructed ones, The Farmers and The Helicopters presents a portrait of Vietnam.

South China Sea Pishkun, 2009

The United States military deployed 11,827 armed helicopters to serve in
the Vietnam War. A total of 5,086 were destroyed. “Pishkun” is a term used
by the Blackfeet American Indian for the site where they would drive wild
bison into panic and run them over a cliff. It can be loosely translated as
“deep blood kettle”.
On April 30th, 1975, as the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong
were marching toward Saigon and other cities in South Vietnam, thousands
of panicking Southern Vietnamese soldiers, American soldiers, and US dip-
lomatic personnel were trying to get out of South Vietnam. Hundreds of
150 Dinh Q Lê
US helicopters were fleeing toward the South China Sea, searching for US
aircraft carriers to land on. Many eventually were forced to crash in the South
China Sea when they ran out of fuel. Some helicopters found aircraft carriers,
but the carriers soon filled up leaving hundreds of helicopters hovering in the
air. At some point, decisions were made and an unknown number of helicop-
ters were pushed into the sea to make room for others to land. South China

Figure 7.4 Dinh Q. Lê, South China Sea Pishkun, 2009. Single channel hi-definition
digital animation video. Duration: 6’30”. Edition of 7 and 1AP. © Dinh
Q. Lê.

Figure 7.5 Dinh Q. Lê, South China Sea Pishkun, 2009. Single channel hi-definition
digital animation video. Duration: 6’30”. Edition of 7 and 1AP
© Dinh Q. Lê.
 Dinh Q Lê 151
Sea Pishkun (Figures 7.4 and 7.5) depicts these powerful machines in their
final moments, crashing, struggling, and sinking. These helicopters that had
rained terror on Vietnam for so long were also the technology that the US
military was counting on to give them the advantage they needed to win. In
their last moments, the failure was tragic and spectacular.
South China Sea Pishkun is a restaging of this last historical moment. With
America contemplating its position and strategies for withdrawal from Iraq
and Afghanistan, South China Sea Pishkun is a timely revisitation of this
tragic event.
8 Reconfiguring history
FX Harsono

Historical background
In 1946, after the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, the Dutch
returned to Indonesia and launched Police Action (Politionele Acties), mobi-
lizing the Royal Dutch Indian Army to the outskirts and rural areas in Java
and several cities in Sumatra in an attempt to regain its former colony. Their
maneuvers included forcing the Indonesian Chinese to cooperate with them,
due to the long relationship between the Chinese and the Dutch, as military
police, standby troops, and spies in various regions, particularly in Java.
The Indonesian army retreated and conducted guerrilla warfare in the
jungles and villages. Before they departed from each city, they burned the
buildings, factories, and important facilities. This strategy was called “bumi
hangus” or the scorched-earth policy. Amid this chaos, some militia ran-
sacked, robbed, and raped the Chinese whom they considered to have sided
with the Dutch, as their spies.1
Anti-Chinese sentiment emerged among the native Indonesians since the
Chinese were recruited as the Dutch’s standby troops. Being afraid, the Chi-
nese resorted to serving the Dutch since many of their family members had
been murdered, raped, or robbed during this political upheaval. However,
the Consulate General of the China Republic in Batavia, Chiang Chia Tung,
opposed this policy. In a letter to Lieutenant Governor H.J. Van Mook
and Lieutenant General S.H. Spoor, he stated that the presence of Chinese
troops might cause a grave misunderstanding between the Indonesian gov-
ernment and Chinese community in Indonesia, even jeopardizing the safety
of the Chinese community in other parts of the country.
The turmoil was also aggravated by the release of prisoners, like what hap-
pened in 1946 in Kalisosok Prison, Surabaya. Numerous inmates were freed
and individually recruited. They were invited to do as they pleased as long as
they scorched the city when they were done. These armed inmates looted,
robbed, killed, and raped the Chinese in several cities of East Java such as Bli-
tar, Caruban, Kediri, Kertosono, Madiun, Malang, Nganjuk, Tulungagung,
Wiingi.2 The scorched-earth policy was first used as a guerilla warfare strat-
egy and then misused by militia and Lasykar groups to rob, kill, and rape the
Chinese people. The Chinese were forced to flee. After they fled, their homes
 Reconfiguring history 153
were ransacked and burned. Most Chinese men were separated from the
others to be killed, but in some areas, women and children were killed also.

Bone cemetery
At first, I just wanted to reflect on the history of my parents. There was no
desire to trace the history of Chinese killings in Java. My father was a pho-
tographer. He had a photo studio called Photo Atom in Jalan Merdeka Barat,
Blitar. Located in East Java, Blitar is a small city where I was born in 1949.
There is one memory I will always remember. Once, I saw a black album
containing photographs of human bones and skulls that had just been dug
from the ground (Figure 8.1). There were about 60 photos, 6×6 cm. The
album was stored in the living room—documentation of the Chinese who
were killed in 1948–1949 in villages around Blitar.
As a photographer, my father was assigned to document the excava-
tion with a group of volunteers who were looking for buried victims. The
remains, mostly bones, were then reburied in a Chinese mass graveyard in
Karangsari village, Blitar. The excavation and reburial took place in 1951.

Figure 8.1 Hendro Subagyo (Oh Hok Tjoe), Karangbendo, 1951, gelatin silver print
on paper, 6×6cm. Image courtesy of FX Harsono.
154 FX Harsono
This was coordinated by a self-organized Chinese community called Chung
Hua Tsung Hui (CHTH) as an order from CHTH Jakarta.
The ritual of exhuming bones from the grave is still practiced by Chinese
people, though for different reasons.3 In the Chinese belief, the funeral ritual
for families and ancestors must be managed properly for the sake of life today
and a better future for the offspring of the deceased. In several writings, the
massacre is identified as an impact of Dutch Military Aggression that violated
the outcome of the Linggarjati Agreement (1947) between Indonesia and
the Dutch. The Indonesian government then mobilized the national army
for guerrilla warfare and scorched-earth tactics to confront the Dutch. At
the same time, the Chinese people were subjected to violence in the midst
of uncertain economic conditions because of political divisions within the
Indonesian government with some opportunist militant groups and militias
wanting to benefit directly.
As a visual artist, I am interested in further exploring what I have discov-
ered. Fortunately, my father wrote captions to each photo, complete with
the dates, locations, and number of victims in each location. Based on this
information, I visited several villages in search of witnesses and survivors. I
made a documentary called nDudah, which in Javanese means “to excavate.”
This video, 21 minutes and 18 seconds long, documents the exhumation of
the Chinese victims.

Mass graves
The research also traces the history of Chinese killings that occurred at
the same time in other places in Java. Subsequently, I found mass graves in
Tulungagung, Kediri, and Pare. Eventually, I visited the sites of more than
ten mass graves. Not all mass graves are still intact. Some were destroyed,
others were moved, and still others are simply gone. One can only say that
they used to exist.
The future of Chinese cemeteries in several cities is quite uncertain since
there is no official regulation from the government to protect them. Mean-
while, Chinese cemeteries will be maintained or are still functioning and
protected if the land belongs to local Chinese community organizations.
In certain cities, a number of wealthy Chinese businessmen have taken the
initiative to buy graveyards and take care of them. The Chinese cemetery in
Kediri is very well preserved because a famous cigarette company and several
businessmen purchased a large portion and assigned a Chinese community
organization to tend it.
Today, many Chinese graves that have been abandoned and neglected by
the Chinese Memorial Foundations exist. This fact indicates that the Chi-
nese community’s insecurity, mainly caused by political problems or racial
riots. Therefore, they prefer cremation over burial. In addition, cremation
has been a tradition for generations, as the ancestral ashes can be stored in a
columbarium or brought home for private purposes, keeping them or scatter
them in sea or river.
 Reconfiguring history 155
This lack of attention to care for and protect the Chinese graves has triggered
local residents in some cities to plunder the land and turn the plots into illegal
settlements. Chinese cemeteries in Kuto Bedah Malang were illegally made into
settlements by local thugs, and the Chinese community did not have courage to
ask for the land back. However, some wealthy families who cared for their fam-
ily burial sites successfully exhumed the graves for reburial or cremation. There
is a possibility that a mass grave from the killings of 1948 once existed there.
However, I did not dare to enter the area because the person who escorted me
said that it was controlled by thugs and thus was quite dangerous.

Feeling insecure
I started this research without adequate references, equipped only with a
book by Benny G. Setiono entitled Tionghoa dalam Pusaran Politik (Chi-
nese in Political Vortex). There is only one chapter that speaks of the killings.
This chapter quotes a memorandum written by Kwee Kek Beng in 1951,
published by Chung Hua Tsung Hui community in Batavia. It is called
MEMORANDUM: Outlining Acts of Violence and Humanity Perpetrated by
Indonesia Bands on Innocent Chinese Before and After the Dutch Police Action
was Enforced on July 21, 1947. This memorandum is a report that was later
sent to the United Nations in 1951.
I usually start my research by visiting the Chinese Memorial Foundation,
which has an office in most cities, and looking for information there. After-
wards, I went to the Chinese cemetery, seeking clues, assisted by graveyard
custodians. In researching the existence of mass graves, I found that many
undertakers at funeral homes knew nothing about it. Some had been born
after 1965, and some were newcomers unaware of the city's history. Besides
visiting the Chinese Memorial Foundation in each city, I also stopped by
Chinese temples looking for administrators or people over 70 years old, as
they might know more about the city's history. However, it was very difficult
since many people of this group had died, were sick, or had troubles with
memory.
When I finally met with eyewitnesses or survivors, they seldom wanted to
discuss their past. They all had similar reasons. They said that it was such a
dark history, it was better left untold. In fact, they did not even want their
own children to know. Thus, if no one is willing to tell the story, this oral
history will vanish.
The Chinese killings in 1947–1949 are considered as a dark history that
should be forgotten or buried. If this story is being told openly to the public,
they worry, then the fate of the Chinese people may be endangered in the
future.
From the research that I conducted from 2009 to 2017, I made pilgrim-
ages to ten mass graves and noted the number of victims buried there. They
were inscribed in the tombstones as follows: 191 at Blitar, 69 at Caruban,
300 at Kediri, 17 at Muntilan, 788 at Nganjuk, 68 at Pare, 78 at Purwok-
erto, 73 at Tulungagung, 155 at Wonosobo, and 25 at Yogyakarta.
156 FX Harsono
Arts and pilgrimage to history
A very strong impression that comes from my research is that of the inse-
curity among the Chinese. The Chinese people still have political and social
trauma from racial riots of the past. They do not feel safe as a minority group.
This insecurity manifests in their efforts to protect themselves from threats
of all sorts. Racist riots occur repeatedly, both small and large, as well as
persecution and other threats from the majority. The penalization of Basuki
Tjahaja Purnama or Ahok is viewed as a sign of the government's inability
to protect minority groups against majority political pressure. This causes
latent insecurity.
Acts of eliminating history, insecurity, threats, and ongoing political intim-
idation over an extended period led to a loss of trust. This impression is what
I would like to present in my works, but without resentment or anger. I
interpret this dark history as a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage for me is a ritual and
a very private ceremony to honor and pay homage to the victims. I raise this
issue through the arts (Figures 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4).
I recorded this pilgrimage through an installation work and video doc-
umentation entitled “Pilgrimage to History” (2020). This work is a man-
ifestation of my pilgrimages to the mass graves, where I rubbed pastels on
a cloth that I held to the tombstones. The rubbings produced 18 pieces of
cloth with the names of 1,764 victims imprinted on them. I also created a
documentary called The Last Survivor, 27:06 minutes long, which I have
been making since 2016 and only finished in 2020. The video shows the

Figure 8.2 FX Harsono, Screening Shot of Pilgrimage, 2013, single channel video,
color, 17'41". © FX Harsono.
 Reconfiguring history 157

Figure 8.3 FX Harsono, Screening Shot of Pilgrimage, 2013, single channel video,
color, 17'41". © FX Harsono.

Figure 8.4 FX Harsono, Screening Shot of Pilgrimage, 2013, single channel video,
color, 17'41". © FX Harsono.

humility of the survivors. They are well aware of what they experienced in
the past but not angry or vengeful. They never stop striving to continue
their lives and support their families. The story of the past is remembered
and celebrated as part of their dark history. The film focuses on three of the
last survivors. In their old age, they are able to release the burden of the past
through acceptance.
158 FX Harsono
Description of artworks4
Writing in the Rain, 2011, video documentation of performance, sin-
gle-channel video, 6’ 11” (loop) (Figure 8.5).
This video documentation of the performance features the artist behind
a transparent plate, writing his Chinese name (Hu Fengwen) with ink and
brush repeatedly, to the extent that the characters overlap and block his
face. At 4:36, an artificial rain starts to pour on the artist, who keeps writ-
ing, until the ink becomes a waterfall and the names exist only as traces.
This work is about remembrance and the attempt to recuperate cultural
identity.
Gazing on Collective Memory, 2016 (Figure 8.6), sculptures, installation,
wood, found objects, books, ceramic bowls, wooden butter mould, wooden
cookie mould, metal spoons, 3D digital prints, framed photographs, and
electric candle lights.
This installation is the artist’s response to the killings of ethnic Chi-
nese Indonesians between 1947 and 1949. It is composed of objects that
bear reference to their lives. The wooden stands, photographic portraits,
porcelain bowls, school books, and electric candles compose a ritualistic
atmosphere. The assemblage of these daily objects serves as a metaphor
for the cultural memories and identity of Chinese Indonesian people.
Harsono has written about the experience of the Indonesian Chinese in
2019 as follows: “Their collective memories had been partitioned, dis-
connected, and are not fully integrated into their lives today. A hybrid
Chinese was formed.”

Figure 8.5 FX Harsono, Writing in the Rain, 2011, single channel video performance,
color, 6'11". © FX Harsono.
 Reconfiguring history 159

Figure 8.6 FX Harsono, Gazing on Collective Memory, no. 2, 2016, installation with
wood, found objects, books, ceramic bowls, 3D digital prints, frames and
photographs, and electric candle light, 80×190×270 cm. © FX Harsono.

Notes
1 Benny G. Setiono, Tionghoa dalam Pusaran Politik (Chinese in Political Vortex)
(Jakarta: TransMedia Pustaka, 2008), 586.
2 Setiono, Tionghoa dalam Pusaran Politik, 616.
3 In Indonesian modern society, the ritual of unearthing bones is conducted
because burial grounds in urban regions are increasingly limited. Numerous
graves have been evicted to expand the commercial area. Furthermore, the
booming of business property in providing prestigious cemetery plots in subur-
ban areas has also led to a growing number of grave exhumations.
4 The description of these two works was compiled by the editors.
9 Voyage into the COLD SEA
Sow Yee Au

Discussing the relation between art and politics, French philosopher Jacques
Rancière once said that both require the construction of a “fiction.” Fiction, in
a way, is a strategy of composition, and composing is an ever-shifting chimera.
As a mythical figure made up of different living beings, a chimera is a meta-
phor for a political ideology assembled from various languages and forms. The
previous prime minister of Malaysia Tun, Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, returned
to office in 2018 and refurbished his Wawasan 2020 (Vision 2020) from back
in 1991, rebranding it as the Wawasan Kemakmuran Bersama 2030 (Shared
Prosperity Vision 2030). This vision is indeed a chimera, as no one knows
whether another twist of fiction will arise as 2030 approaches.
The title of this article includes two keywords—COLD and SEA. “Cold”
has multiple meanings, including the post-Pacific War era that still haunts
the region. “Sea” refers, here, to Southeast Asia. Thus, “COLD SEA” sug-
gests a northern body of saltwater. The water tends to warm as we approach
the equator, making it easier for ships to travel. COLD SEA thus also refers
to the dialectical and complex situation of natural phenomena and political
resonance. This article shares the story of an intermingling, how it problem-
atized the composition of a voyage into the cold sea, of the South and the
North, the East and the West.
Furthermore, the “SEA” is a stage for various theatrical and histori-
cal moments. The vastness of the sea and Southeast Asia has opened fluid
“ground” in our quest for unknown lands since the Age of Discovery, from
European kingdoms to the East India Company, from Indian to Arabic and
Chinese merchants throughout history.
When speaking about the SEA, there are always stories of lost voyages.
For instance, in The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the
Maldives, the Moluccas, and Brazil, there is a footnote describing a particu-
lar memory of getting lost among scattered reefs and rocks while crossing
through the Sunda Straits.

Then Raja Suran Padshah formed the design of subjugating China, and
for this purpose his men at arms, and the rajas dependent on him, assem-
bled from every quarter with their hosts, to the number of one thousand
and two lacs. With this prodigious host, he advanced against China,
 Voyage into the COLD SEA 161
and in his course, the forests were converted into open plains; the earth
shook, and the hills moved; the lofty grounds became level, and the
rocks flew off in shivers, and the large rivers were dried up to the mud.
Two months they marched on without delay, and the darkest night was
illuminated by the light of their armour like the lustre of the full moon;
and the noise of the thunder could not be heard for the loud noise of the
champions and warriors, mixed with the cries of horses and elephants.1

In this excerpt from Sejarah Melayu (The Malay Annals), an Hindustan

prince, while wandering through the Malay Archipelago, mistakenly con-
cludes that he has arrived in China. The Malay Annals shaped the story of the
founding of Malacca, one of the most important Malay Sultanates west of
the Malaysian Peninsula. The Straits of Malacca are an important waterway
that links the European west to the Bengal Bay, the Southeast, and the East.
The world is made one family, it is said, through the Strait of Malacca.
Here I would like to refer to a lyric entitled The World is One Family, which
identifies the frontiers and allies in each camp of the Cold War, from Hong
Kong, Kinmen, London, Malaya, Paris, Singapore, to Taipei.2 Written during
the ideological and territorial divides in the postwar period, it actually bears
a cosmopolitan view of the world being one family, regardless of skin colors.
The joyous song appears in a Mandarin musical and heart-breaking romance
Because of Her, produced by Motion Picture & General Investment Company
(MP&GI) in 1963, the year when Singapore and Malaysia united to form one
country, though they split again in two years. MP&GI’s mother company,
Cathay, was founded by the late Mr. Loke Wan Tho, son of the tin mining
tycoon Loke Yew, whose legacy was honored by the naming of the main road
in Kuala Lumpur’s urban center. Cathay Company produced films through
international collaborations, which was more difficult in that political climate.

In 1962, Cathay-Keris partnered a team of French filmmakers to pro-

duce Your Shadow is Mine, but the film was a box office disaster. In June
1962, Cathay-Keris co-produced A Star of Hong Kong with Cathay’s
Hong Kong studio. The film, starring Hong Kong star Yu Ming and
Japanese lead Akira Takarada, featured English, Mandarin, and Japanese
dialogue. In June 1963, Cathay-Keris produced its first overseas film,
Malam-di-Tokyo, which was shot in Japan.

This is a quote from an article on Singapore Infopedia by Joshua Chia

Yeong Jia.
Both MP&GI and Cathay participated in the Southeast Asia Film Festival,
founded in 1954 by Japanese film producer Masaichi Nagata in Tokyo. In
order to welcome the new member state South Korea, the Festival changed
its name to Asia Film Festival in 1957. Here again, you will notice the reve-
lation of Cold War alliances, linking the East and West across the Pacific. In
1964, Loke Wan Tho attended the Asia Film Festival in Taipei, which is cur-
rently named Asia Pacific Film Festival. There were rumors that Loke Wan
162 Sow Yee Au
Tho was to be hosting a party at the Grand Hotel the night after his daytrip
to visit collections from the National Palace Museum, which was then stored
in Taichung. However, the party never happened. And the mystery of Loke
Wan Tho’s death in a plane crash on his way back to Taipei was lost in the
sea of time. Not only did the incident end Loke Wan Tho’s film production
business, but there were also assumptions that the history of film in Taiwan
would have been different had the party taken place and Loke survived.
German writer Hermann Hesse writes in Singapore Dream about a song
he heard in a dream.3 The song describes the auditory hallucinations of a
wanderer in the mist, entranced by the ringing of a bell. He then reveals that
the song is “We are heading to Asia.” That was in the early 20th century; yet,
the sea of Southeast Asia remains shrouded in a similar tune today.

The Kris Project (2016 to 2020)

These stories intermingling from West to East and North to South trans-
formed into the context of The Kris Project—a series of video installations I
completed from 2016 to 2017 (Figures 9.1–9.5). Deep inside a forest of the
Malay Archipelago, secret agent “Loke” of The Kris Project, taking his name
from the famous Malayan film tycoon, acts in a series of video installations—a
troubling romance, mysterious adventures, problematic myths, secret codes.
I imagine The Kris Project as an SEA, a chimera that is ever-transforming
and evolving, loosening the rigid borders between politics, nation-states,
and ideologies, particularly those bounded by the Cold War. With videos
constructed of collages and cut-outs from “found” footage as well as shot
images, this is a journey also into the complex relations between popular

Figure 9.1 Au Sow Yee, Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria, Tin Mine,
Spices and the Harimau, 2016, single channel video, 15’2”, film still.
© Au Sow Yee
 Voyage into the COLD SEA 163

Figure 9.2 Au Sow Yee, Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria, Tin Mine,
Spices and the Harimau, 2016, single channel video, 15’2”, film still.
© Au Sow Yee

Figure 9.3 Au Sow Yee, Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria, Tin Mine,
Spices and the Harimau, 2016, single channel video, 15’2”, film still.
© Au Sow Yee
164 Sow Yee Au

Figure 9.4 Au Sow Yee, Kris Project II: If the Party Goes On, 2016, single channel
video, 13’52”, film still. © Au Sow Yee

Figure 9.5 Au Sow Yee, Prelude Kris Project II: To the Party, 2016, single channel
video, 4’42”, film still. © Au Sow Yee

movies of the 1950s and ’60s—at the height of the Cold War era—and the
hidden power structures of that time.4 This history still haunts us today,
transfigured into disputes over borders and indications of the Other.
Both as a self-reflection and a mirror showing us our fear for the Other, The
Kris Project embarked on an embodied voyage of collected, collaged, decon-
structed, reconstructed, and reimagined historiographical memories. While these
historiographical memories might have grown from the darkest waters, hovering
above the mystical surface of the COLD sea, here and again, arises a new fiction
 Voyage into the COLD SEA 165
Notes
1 “Malay Annals,” translation by Dr John Leyden, Monthly Review, vol. 98 (May
to August 1822), 247.
2 The original lyric was written by Evan Yang (Yi Wen, 1920-78). See “The World
is One Family,” My Music, accessed December 22, 2020, https://www.mymu-
sic.net.tw/ux/w/song/show/p000008-a0390794-s004840-t009-c8.
3 Herman Hesse dreamed of a ship voyage when he fell asleep in a movie theatre
in Singapore under British colonial control.
4 In the video, the fictional character Ravi creates a film studio in the forest.
10 From cities into the
mountains and the fields
An archaeology of lives in dark ruins
Jun Honn Kao
Translated by Yu-Chieh Li

In this article, I analyze my recent departure from the practices of critical

geology, investigation into dark ruins, and transitional justice of indigenous
sovereignty.1 I discuss the potential of creative processes to contribute to
“social movements.” Among those, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: Ten
Scenes uses abandoned buildings and sites to reflect upon the influence of
neoliberalism and transnational trade on Taiwanese society and offers situa-
tions to connect with various communities. The Topa project (2016–) inves-
tigates the Atayal Nation’s Topa Tribe to explore the various sovereignties of
Taiwan and the descendants of colonized peoples who were driven into the
mountains by the many waves of colonization that swept the island.
The Ruin Image Crystal Project (2012–) deals with a transitional moment
of the Taiwanese economy, as the secondary sector relocates to other third-
world countries, leaving many industrial ruins and personal stories of tragedy
due to job loss.
I undertook fieldwork to visit industrial ruins, which included defunct
mining sites, porcelain factories, entertainment parks, a toothbrush factory, a
car plant, jails, and residences of Nationalist military cohorts (juancun) that
were slated for demolition; evidence of Taiwan’s neoliberalization—and for
many people, sites of trauma and disillusionment.
For The Ruin Image Crystal Project, I convened a group of participants to
probe into microhistories based on my fieldwork into the ruins (Figures 10.1
and 10.2). These sites are still personal property albeit abandoned for many
years; uncountable people, stories, and objects have been dissolved there. We
gathered historical photographs, completed on-site drawings, put together
performances, interviewed protagonists, and edited these materials into vid-
eos, as if assembling a historical puzzle. In the first stage (2012–2016), we
worked on sites such as Haishan Mining (Sanxia), Taiwan Motor Transport
Factory (Shulin), Dale Garden (Jinshan), Investigation Bureau of Ankang
(White Terror Prison in Xindian), Refurbishment of juancun (Tainan City),
and shuttered vacation resorts along the seaside. The research outputs have
been shared at exhibitions internationally.
As the project developed, my team conducted research and actions on the
neoliberalization of those sites. We focused on commercial sectors of Tai-
pei, such as the Huaguang and Shaoxing Communities in Taipei City—two
 From cities into the mountains and the fields 167

Figure 10.1 Kao Jun-Honn, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: Ten Scenes, 2013. Site-
specific drawing in an abandoned military camp in Yi-Lan, based on a
photograph of “Divine Wind Attack Units” taken by an anonymous
photographer during the second world war. © Kao Jun-Honn.

Figure 10.2 Kao Jun-Honn, The Ruin Image Crystal Project: Ten Scenes. Site-specific
drawing in an abandoned military camp in Yi-Lan, 2013. (Depicted is
Chang Cheng Guang, A Taiwanese Member of “Divine Wind Attack
Units” during the Pacific War.) © Kao Jun-Honn.
168 Jun Honn Kao and Yu-Chieh Li
communities that constitute a kind of juancun “beyond governance.” They
were initially built as temporary dwellings for dependents of the National-
ist party military in 1949. After the commodification of national property
according to new laws in 1990s, even residents who had lived there for two
or three generations suddenly became illegitimate. The local communities
had initiated protests against forced urban renewal; we initiated art actions
with the residents. However, the case was declared illegal by the govern-
ment and the residents were eventually driven away. The buildings were
demolished.
The second and last phase of The Ruin Image Crystal Project is Bo-Ai
(Figure 10.3). For this work commissioned by the Taipei Biennale in 2016,
I focused on four locations from the first phase of my fieldwork and made
videos of various locations based on interviews in the documentary mode:
the Bo-Ai Market where I grew up; Haishan Mining where an explosion
sparked a human rights movement among the indigenous people in 1984;
the Taiwan Motor Machine Factory, representing the privatization of public
resources in the 1990s; and the Ankang Investigation Bureau. Bo-Ai is not
just the name of the market, it also means “universal love”—an irony for
those excluded by the “progressive” ideas of Taiwan’s modernization.
The process of research led to creative practices, so my approach is distinct
from that of realistic documentary; rather, my videos montage impressions
from my field research. I decided to host the first screenings in the locations
of the historical events listed above. This return to the original site is also for

Figure 10.3 Kao Jun-Honn, Bo’ai: Taiwan Motor Transportation Factory, 2016,
photo-documentation of a screening on site as a socially engaged
component of the Bo’ai project. © Kao Jun-Honn.
 From cities into the mountains and the fields 169
the purpose of possibly calling upon spirits—those who lived there before
and are now absent. Calling them back to the site, I believe, is a form of art
activism.
Secondly, I invited participants to visit, to enter into life politics (microhis-
tory) and the history of the space in the 1990s. For example, what happened
in the traditional market of Bo-Ai reflects the shift in the Taiwanese econ-
omy. In the 1990s, Taiwan became a location for entrepôt trade between
Mainland China and other countries. At this moment, many cheap made-
in-China products flooded Taiwan, and vendors of this market had to either
start selling cheap products of bad quality, or switch to temporary labor such
as driving taxis. This resonates with Michel Foucault’s comment on biopol-
itics: that under neoliberalization, the idea of a free market and the truth
about the market drastically pushed contemporaries into new class struggles.
I lived through those changes as I helped my mother sell clothes in the mar-
ket during my youth.
Continuing from Bo-Ai in 2016, I turned from urban ruins to the moun-
tains and fields, to launch new and wider spatial and temporal explorations,
which became the Topa project (Figure 10.4). If The Ruin Image Crystal
Project and Bo-Ai focused on abandoned spaces and their histories in the
1980s–90s, then Topa records the fate of the Atayal tribe, which was annihi-
lated by the Japanese colonial power according to official sources; I aimed to
recuperate the history through on-site investigation, creative practices, and
exploration into the complex colonial history of Taiwanese forests and lands.
The Topa project is based on my long-term fieldwork into the mountains
and fields of Taiwan. I discovered ruins of several military bases and fron-
tier guard posts at the border of Han-Chinese and indigenous tribes in the
northern mountains, which had been constructed in the early Japanese colo-
nial period (1895–1945) for economic benefit, and to conquer the “uncivi-
lized” aboriginal people. Their methods of control included setting up guard

Figure 10.4 Kao Jun-Honn, Apparatus of Topa, drawing on paper, 2018. © Kao
Jun-Honn.
170 Jun Honn Kao and Yu-Chieh Li
stations with high-voltage transmission lines, land mines, and fortresses, to
encircle indigenous communities and break connections among them, since
they were adept at fighting in the forests. The frontier guard posts were
thus the most instrumental in colonizing the mountainous areas throughout
the island of Taiwan. As a consequence, the Japanese colonial government
employed the frontier guard posts to govern and expand the economy of the
mountain, which was later taken over by the Nationalist government. The
new government was supported by American aid to more efficiently exploit
the resources of the mountain areas. In the 1980s and ’90s, the strategy
shifted to postmodern entertainment parks. In other words, from coloniza-
tion of indigenous lands to forestry and tourist resorts, the frontier guard
posts played a central role in exploiting the Taiwanese.
I thus began my investigation into the ruins of frontier guard posts during
the Topa incident (1900–1906, during which time the whole tribe was anni-
hilated), in the Northern Forest, which spans 100 km in total. The search
into those ruins was driven by a passion I cannot explain; it does not come
from a pure longing for knowledge. I see frontier guard posts as non-human
agents—objects that guide an artist like myself during the creative process.
I was able to identify surviving descendants, which helped me investi-
gate into the old paths and tribes of Topa. Striving for land sovereignty
and transitional justice in general is defined as social activism. Furthermore,
Topa involved creative practice, such as filming the documentary Llyong Topa
(River of Topa in Atayal language) between 2018 and 2020, writing and
publication, as well as video work and topographic transference of sites into
visual objects, which became an installation of archives, Abandoned Path:
A Creator’s Geopolitical Method (2017), and the video work Taoist Trinity
Fairyland (2018).
The research for the video Taoist Trinity Fairyland was initiated when I
encountered a dilemma about disclosing an illegal development and deforest-
ation project (Figures 10.5 and 10.6). While investigating Topa, I learned
of an old tribal area that had been exploited illegally. A local senate member
had cut the top off of a mountain to build a Toad Temple dedicated to a
deity of wealth, using the project to attract supporters. During that time, I
filed a lawsuit to demolish the huge temple and evoked the Toad Deity Liu
Haichan of Chinese folk culture who deals with wealth. To drive away bad
fortune, we performed an old ritual of “burning the toad” that is still prac-
ticed in Nanchung, Sichuan. My team performed this ritual while moving
against the current in a stream of the Topa. This action of mourning and
cleansing was edited into a video.
Indeed, the whole Topa project is an action of transitional justice to
retrieve land rights, supplemented by creative practice. In this process, I
benefit from the notion of “Critical Geology,” which was also applied to
The Ruin Image Crystal Project. The two projects share a lot in common. In
both, I disclose the process whereby the national apparatus and capitalism
(of various types and processes) exploit the land: The Ruin Image Crystal
Project reveals how individuals experienced the shift of society under global
 From cities into the mountains and the fields 171

Figure 10.5 Taoist Trinity Fairyland, single channel video, color, 14’39”. © Kao
Jun-Honn.

Figure 10.6 Taoist Trinity Fairyland, single channel video, color, 14’39”. © Kao
Jun-Honn.

neoliberalism (empire without borders); Topa is the result of exploitation by

classical imperialist violence. These events traumatized both urban and sub-
urban spaces. Thus, these two projects can be described as archaeology into
biopolitics through dark ruins; the former is an exploration into urban ruins,
while the latter is a creative process on war wreckages in the wilderness. Both
aim to raise our awareness of the violence that indigenous clans experienced
172 Jun Honn Kao and Yu-Chieh Li
and to push for transitional justice. They can be described as biopolitics of
the “populace/masses,” a process from space critique to identarian politics
of communities.2
My creative practices deal with various stages of global wars and postco-
lonial struggles, departing from relevant cases in Taiwan. I am particularly
concerned with the “action” and possibility of art. We usually see contem-
porary art as useful in a useless way—bearing its own political meanings and
critiques; but contemporary art cannot be understood without problematiz-
ing its production and commodification. Every artist should think through
their position on either intervening into the reality or maintaining a distance
from it. For me, art is a technique but not my only concern. Art only makes
sense when it pushes a concept, emancipates it further, and reacts to actions
in reality. Otherwise, art is reduced to a game of esthetic judgment among
elites.

Notes
1 Translator’s note: the author uses “dark ruin” to refer to sites inscribed with
colonial violence.
2 Many changes happened within those communities. Some descendants of the
Topa started to investigate into their history and are now establishing a connec-
tion. I also interviewed many elderly people to preserve old lore before the
tribe’s extinction. I am not trying to take credit: there have been lots of social
movements and discussions surrounding transitional justice in recent years
which pushed such actions further.
Part III

The continuous Cold War

11 Survival tactics within Cold War
ideologies
Post-Mao artists on the tides of
globalization
Yu-Chieh Li

Introduction: the postsocialist condition of People’s Republic

of China
Postsocialism in Central and Eastern Europe, as Uros Cvoro points out,
did not end with 1989—it is still in a state of transition with the continua-
tion of socialist ideology despite its incongruencies with the current market
economy.1 Due to its hybrid and often contradictory nature, the system is
sometimes referred to as “neoliberal postsocialism,” for which postsocialist
China is another notable example. Since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform
in 1978, the Chinese Communist Party similarly maintained the socialist
ideology in their governance but adopted neoliberalism as the economic
policy to create a hybrid system. Deng’s economic policy allows some pri-
vate ownership in business and property. The completion of various property
laws since the reform era has also encouraged the purchase of real estate
(although legally one can “rent” the land from the government for up to 70
years), whereby the government was able to boost the economy by selling, or
temporarily “renting out,” properties and encouraging foreign investment.
In the new economy that depends on surplus value, capitalism exploited
cheap labor, which proved effective for China’s rising GDP. The result was
the removal of lifelong positions for unit workers at national enterprises, and
their replacement by migrant workers that receive fewer benefits. There is no
longer a guarantee of jobs and economic equality comparable to that before
the reform era. In this hybrid system and with rising social inequality, the
government embraced privatization of businesses but never stopped med-
dling in the market. David Harvey describes this worldwide phenomenon
since the late 1970s as “accumulation by dispossession,” meaning a peculiar
freedom that exploits others for inordinate gains. Such accelerated capital-
ism was then globalized, and the artists in this chapter benefited from the
booming art market that arose with China’s turn to neoliberal postsocialism.
In this context, the Cold War in Asia is nowhere close to ending. China
has benefited from its hybrid governing system, ascending to the world’s
second-largest economy, and becoming a de facto leading power that com-
petes with various US interests, including aid to third-world countries
in Africa. Suddenly the triumph of democracy in 1989, as announced by
176 Yu-Chieh Li
Francis Fukuyama, requires further scrutiny. It is clear that the ideology clash
among the world’s leading powers has been used by the PRC to promote
nationalism at home against the US and its allies, turning it into their big-
gest national enemy—this had already begun in the Mao era and continued
throughout the Trade War. No contemporary artist could ignore this con-
flict which has been looming since the 1980s. This chapter examines crea-
tive practices of the post-Mao period to elucidate the ideological war, as an
outcome of China’s social and economic adjustment to the globalized free
market economy combined with authoritarianism.
The reign of Deng Xiaoping (1978–1994) was the watershed era when
the Sino-US relationship finally replaced the USSR-US Axis. After the
Sino-Soviet Split (1956–1966), the USSR became China’s rival, and their
officials observed how China gradually formed alliances with the US and
adopted military power to tackle the USSR.2 As China strives to become
one of the imperial powers, new-left scholars who lived through the demo-
cratic student protests of the 1980s are becoming critical of its embrace of
neoliberalism (both in the economic sense as well as the western democratic
system) as the source of oligarchy—and they often homogenize “neoliberal-
ism” as new imperialist power. Wang Hui describes the new neoliberal econ-
omy in China as an authoritative power that clashed with socialist democratic
movements initiated by grassroots intellectuals in the late 1980s. Although
it was a totalitarian political system under socialism, it still tolerated calls for
reform from the intellectuals, manifested in protests throughout the country
between 1980 and 1989 demanding democracy and equality for different
social classes.3 In Wang’s description, social stability in the 1980s could not
merely be attributed to government control, intellectuals supported peas-
ants and workers through systematic reform. Wang also pointed out that
these intellectuals calling for reform in the 1980s did not go beyond the
Cold War framework, as they primarily sought to adopt democratic models
from Euroamerica that may be incompatible with those in China, which is
why the indigenous democratic movement failed. Wang’s peer Gan Yang
attacks neoliberal democracy more ruthlessly, which he labels as rightist and
identifying with Euroamerican democratic values. His account downplays
the Euroamerican democratic system as a new authoritarianism that does
not lead to real democracy as it leaves the working class dispossessed.4 The
two sides—idealistic socialist democracy and looming capitalism—reveal the
transformation of the society facing the monopoly of a state-manipulated
market, and market-oriented approaches to art that replaced utopian think-
ing represented by the new left in old socialist paradigms. Different camps
within the Chinese Communist Party started to clash at the end of the 1980s,
as there was no liberal democratic system to legitimize the market economy.
It was not until the late 1980s that a capitalist economy proliferated. Pos-
itivism toward a more liberal society emerged with marketization, but the
ruling concept and pedagogical philosophy still followed the Chinese social-
ist paradigm. Artist Wu Shanzhuan’s performance piece at the National Art
Museum of China in February 1989 acutely reflected the shift of momentum
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 177
toward privatization—he started a small business by selling shrimp that he
acquired through friends in the fishing trade in Zhoushan. The work was
halted for lack of a license to sell, which indicates how new economic activity
was still strictly controlled. It would not be until the 1990s that bigger private
businesses could develop—as charted by Wang Guangyi’s work with abun-
dant foreign brands. After leaving the state-supported art academy system,
Wang secured the capital for his artworks by manipulating representational
images of socialism and capitalism, drawn from Chinese and US media. In the
process of economic reform, accumulation of wealth became a life pursuit for
commoners (which was already against credo of the communist revolution);
with a relatively stable life, people developed firm belief in the economic
achievements of the government, which was mobilized into new national-
ism; this in turn led to the Polit-Sheer-Form Office’s works addressing new
material life and the loss of socialist comradery. At the same time, historical
views of Mao and the bureaucratic system still persist in political rhetoric, as
reflected in Song Ta’s practice. The works addressed in this chapter appear
to be commemorating the Mao era on the material and symbolic levels, but
they also found a gap or space for voicing freedom through obscure political
references overseas. Their expressions and motivations are far more complex
than what appears on the surface—art representing anti-institutional or even
anti-authoritarian positions, or, a parody of socialist ideology. Their works
have thus become a double-edged sword using Mao-era political rhetoric as
a tool, while critiquing the Neoliberal camp of the Cold War as imperialist.
Here “imperialism” is adopted from Chinese leftist thinkers, which refers
to how the economic system exploits peasants and workers. The rhetoric is
developed as a survival strategy and has to do with the educational and social
background of Chinese artists.5 To live with the system, one must master the
political language and make works in line with the party guidelines.6

Wang Guangyi: art predicting “globalization?”

Artists who lived through the Cultural Revolution observed how the mar-
ket economy gave them hope for careers as independent artists. Some suc-
cessful cases in the 1990s profited from the imagination of freedom of the
Western world (US allies). Works they created made a spectacle of imagery
from the Cold War media. Wang Guangyi (b. 1957) brings mass culture of
the two Cold War camps into the same work of art with paintings and instal-
lations that reify the collective creation at the center of China’s propaganda
culture, particularly before the economic reform. In his Great Criticism
series (1990–2006), Wang depicts the marriage between American con-
sumerism and Chinese socialist political culture, which illustrates the shift
in this period from the credo of working-class people leading the nation to
personal freedom through consumerism. Among the works in this series,
Great Criticism—Coca Cola (1990–1993) became the first piece of con-
temporary Chinese art to be featured on the cover of Flash Art in 1992
(Figure 11.1). In retrospect, it stands as a prediction and admonition that
178 Yu-Chieh Li
China would soon be joining the US as a world power.7 Oil on canvas,
it features rigid strokes, angular transitions, sharp edges, and flat fields of
color modeled after woodblock prints—considered to be the most effec-
tive medium for distributing the socialist teachings initiated by Lu Xun’s
woodcut movement in the 1930s.8 A peasant, a soldier, and a worker are
depicted in three-quarter profile; their bodies and hands disproportionately
larger than their heads—a common feature of Chinese propaganda art.
The figures are rendered in an exaggeratedly strong and healthy manner;
together they hold a fountain pen, which serves as the pole for a large red
flag emblazoned on the lower right with the logo of Coca Cola.9 Wang
based his figures, with their firm gazes and strength, on propaganda books
circulated for the decoration of public posters and publications during the
Cultural Revolution.10 The primary colors and silkscreened numbers hint
at mass production. The depiction with the proletariat holding Little Red
Book, the bible of Mao’s teaching, in the central position, conveys the polit-
ical message that the working class under the communist regime is well
versed in the foundational teaching of the newly established PRC. Socialist
realism—the official figurative styles in communist countries until 1989, is

Figure 11.1 Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism–Coca Cola, 1990–93, oil on canvas,
200 × 200cm. © Wang Guangyi.
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 179
appropriated and juxtaposed with symbols of capitalist consumerism, which
endows Wang’s art with a global look. David Joselit remarks that the post-
modernist pastiche of symbols synchronizes different historical moments—
namely the two divergent worldviews in the Cold War, a situation that was
about to transition into a liberalized economy.11 For me, far more important
than the result of synchronization that opened up a global era is the belat-
edness of the reception of such ideological struggle. The mass cultures from
the two Cold War camps were part of the commoners’ life in the 1980s:
American jeans were being worn by artists, Coca Cola was being sold in
Friendship Hotels. Wang recycled the mass-produced images of socialist
propaganda, and ironically transformed pop art’s critique of capitalism into
a symbol of America’s hegemonic role in world politics since the Cold War.
What became appropriated were not merely images of official publications
but thousands of non-art professionals who transcribed and accumulated
the ill-defined style, which had already lost its origin.12 Although the style
of official illustration was first enacted by the ruling class rather than created
by the people, the effectiveness of the pictorial schemes comes from its
process of production, which is edited, disseminated, affirmed, and inter-
nalized through nobodies, and eventually reified into a piece of oil painting
circulated on the international art market. The consumption of such art
through international exhibitions further converted the propaganda images
produced for the masses into a luxury item—which addresses a cross-section
of the art market and privatization into the 1990s.
Distinguished by Li Xianting as “Political Pop,” Wang’s Great Criticism—
Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, and Great Criticism—Marlboro won the first prize in
painting at the first art fair in China, the Guangzhou Biennial, in 1992.13
Initiated by art historian Lü Peng, the event foresaw the flourishing of the
art market in China, which is interpreted by Jane DeBevoise as a chance to
leverage state control in art.14 The jury members especially encouraged the
use of East-West symbols, such as Pepsi Cola bottles and other trademarks,
in Wang’s Great Criticism series. The position derives from mixing the com-
mercial and academic values, since even superficial East-West contrasts may
bring commercial profit, a goal set by its organizers to liberate contemporary
art from its dependence on the official system.15 This approach of pairing
various symbols to achieve an effect of alienation might appear to be in the
Duchampian mode; in the artist’s own words, “emptying the content” of
symbols that are laden with political meanings emerged as early as the ’85
New Wave phenomenon.16 This discourse on emptiness signifies two layers:
one is the bureaucratic empty talk under the Chinese socialist system; the
other is a way to avoid censorship while claiming elusive poststructuralist
approaches to concepts—or “Zen” talking, which is shared by many Chinese
critics and artists. Artists of this generation favored the method of appropria-
tion and a favorable conceptual practice, as the alienation of specific symbols
and icons empowers diverse interpretations of works under strict censorship.
In the context of the 1990s, the re-interpretation of socialist symbols went
hand in hand with the soaring art market.
180 Yu-Chieh Li
The first appearance of the Great Criticism series in an art fair context turned
the objects of its critique into an irony, foretelling the rise of contemporary Chi-
nese art to a global capitalist power.17 It was this series inscribed with capitalist
brands such as Canon, Marlboro, and Chanel, that earned Wang substantial
US dollars and shaped his economic approach in stride with China’s economic
boom. Critic Andrew Solomon reported in 1993 that Wang’s paintings sold for
$20,000 a piece.18 And Wang himself claims in an interview, “I used to think art
is a spiritual object without concrete meanings; however today my art has value
both on academic and economic levels, which makes me happy.”19 The Great
Criticism series could be interpreted as a declaration of economic victory, by
reifying “the people’s hand,” as reflected in the process of copying the model
books, and foretelling how Chinese socialism would not shake the capitalist sys-
tem. The CCP’s mobilization of the masses during the class struggles has been
successfully converted into cheap labor for its conversion into a world factory.
China’s economic and military expansion, and effectiveness in adopting capital-
ism, gradually threatened the other Cold War camp led by the US.20

Privatization under neoliberalism in China

In Wang’s images, capitalism is an alluring but imperial power, and this
impression goes back to the economic growth and new capitalist cult of the
1980s and ’90s. The government on the one hand promoted a liberal image
of itself but on the other disseminated propaganda to fight US imperialism.
Harvey has already elaborated on how postsocialist China embraces market
economy and exploits land rights of the less privileged, including farmers.21
By boosting the real estate market, the government created surplus value as a
utopian goal for the middle class to pursue; and Harvey is critical of the result
of capitalist accumulation. In his research, China is depicted as a neoliberal
power that has authoritarian and imperialist characteristics but also aligns with
certain conservative tides in the United States, described as a “democracy of
consumption.”22 Teresa Wright offers an explanation as to why neoliberal
economic reform led not to democratic reform but to strong support for the
authoritarian government. As depicted by Wright, the educational system of
the early reform era promoted equality by focusing on merit and admitting
people who were not financially privileged. This shifted the course of the
reform era, as private businessmen gradually earned more than people with
higher education.23 Wang is an example of someone who climbed the social
ladder by means of the educational system, failing three entrance exams before
finally gaining admittance to the China Academy of Fine Arts. His trajectory
from being a railway worker in Northeast China to an art professor at Zhuhai
Academy had to do with the flourishing economy in the Pearl River Delta due
to privatization in the late 1980s. With the rise of the art market in the 1990s,
he finally became an independent artist with a stable income from his art. As
Wright states, at the start of the reform era, the centralized system—despite its
downsides—still offered a basic safety net of workers’ rights.24 With the shift
to a market economy, local businessmen and common people would only
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 181
support democratization if it benefited their social-economic mobility and
material well-being. Socialist legacy, market forces, and industrialization rein-
forced class inequalities, which in turn stabilized one-party governance. This
background shaped Wang’s view of the scene as a transformation from state
cult to an embracing of Western products, in which workers were consumed
as national emblems and deprived of steady employment by the restructuring
of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s.
Another feature of postsocialist status in China is the state-centralized art
system that split experimental artists’ efforts between the pursuit of auton-
omy and serving the people. It is impossible to identify a clear-cut boundary
between official artists and avant-garde or “underground” practices, as the
state-system infiltrates not just life but the ways in which art and culture
are practiced and facilitated. Artists were all employed by the state between
1980 and the mid 1980s.25 According to Julia Andrews, Chinese artists had
to live with the state system in order to retain a certain level of artistic auton-
omy, as being a professional artist in China meant receiving state support
financially or through the state-sanctioned art associations. Artists worked in
a world of “centralized social engineering,” with “far-reaching social, eco-
nomic, and political policies of the official sector; the Communist remolding
of Chinese art has thus had every opportunity to gain the upper hand.”26 In
the 1980s, the birth of avant-garde art relied heavily on support from official
sectors. Wang Guangyi, for example, received funding from Zhuhai Painting
Academy to organize the first conference on contemporary experimental art
in 1986. The Pond Society’s first experimental exhibition 85 New Space in
1985 was another example; it started out as a semi-official artist group and
received some state funding. The group was able to put on installations and
artworks with semi-abstract forms, which would have been criticized in some
circumstances in the same period. Their work opened up some significant
space for challenging authority, though only briefly, when the Art Academies
reopened after the Cultural Revolution. Zhang Peili’s well-known video
30x30 (1988), for example, depicts cyclic narratives, with the artist repeat-
edly breaking a mirror and gluing it back together. The absurd repetition
of empty political gestures rejects ideologies and discourses. This positiv-
ism and artistic freedom waned with the failure of student protests and calls
for democracy in 1989, and the emergence of the art market in the 1990s,
replaced by satisfaction of the growing GDP. Painters outside the state sys-
tem such as Zhu Jinshi and Zhang Wei were generalized as “dissidents” in
the Euroamerican art world in the 1990s, who are now earning capital by
selling colorful canvases. Meanwhile, artworks that cited socialist symbols
were turned into commercial devices.27 One sees here how opening the mar-
ket led to interdependence between socialism and capitalism.

Cold War images as propaganda

Already an independent artist who enjoys international fame, Wang contin-
ued to translate visual propaganda into three-dimensional works. The Cold
182 Yu-Chieh Li
War Aesthetics series (2007–2008) reflects on the brainwashing and the party
attitude toward the “West” before the reform era (Figures 11.2 and 11.3). It
recycles non-artistic visual material from public service brochures regarding
wartime evacuation into sculptures. Video projections of atom bombing in
Hiroshima appear beside a group sculpture of Chinese commoners molded
in fiberglass, drawing connections between war memories from Japan and
China. Painted in primary colors, the figures perform various instructive ges-
tures demonstrating self-protection. Some evacuate, some lay on the ground
face-down, some swat at flies, wear gas masks. Their physiognomies and
bodies are not individualized, and their gestures are mechanical; they look
rough and genderless like the dull, anatomically ill-defined figures in text-
books that aim to be informative. The roughness is due to the fact that the
illustrations were simplified and mass produced, to spread instructions or
ideologies quickly and effectively. The lack of physiognomy symbolizes not
just the socialist status but the anonymity of the workers who created Chi-
na’s GDP: each person is considered a cog in a larger machine, and their
bodies represent the national whole rather than any individual self. In addi-
tion to the sculpture, a series of oil paintings in 2007 contains illustrations
taken from such propaganda in the 1960s about how to evacuate, hide, wear
a gas mask, and treat radiation sickness.28 Though nuclear weapons are the
quintessential symbol of the Cold War, looking in retrospect, it is clear that
a hot war as such did not really happen on Chinese territory.29 The Cold
War in this context became the structural exploitation of the poor and lower
class by encouraging nationalism and continuous control of information.
The dissemination of such images conveyed wartime ideology, to unite the
new nation against Western imperialist powers, more than providing essen-
tial knowledge of safety.

Politics as aesthetic forms

The control of public space continued after the reform era, and the PSFO
responded to the widespread deprivation of Mao-era community life through
seemingly obscure art language. Several years younger than Wang Guanyi’s

Figure 11.2 Wang Guangyi, Cold War Aesthetic–People Living in Fear, 2007–2008,
Installation with colored fiberglass and video, dimension of sculptures
215 × 60 × 30 cm each. © Wang Guangyi.
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 183

Figure 11.3 Wang Guangyi, Cold War Aesthetic–People Living in Fear, 2007-2008,
Installation with colored fiberglass and video, dimension of sculptures
215 × 60 × 30 cm each. © Wang Guangyi.

generation, the members of Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) rode the wave

of China’s economic boom in the real estate market, gaining an interna-
tional advantage, as can be seen from the birthdates of its members: Leng
Lin (b. 1965), Song Dong (b. 1966), Hong Hao (b. 1964), Liu Jianhua (b.
1962), Xiao Yu (b. 1965). The displacement of political symbols in works
184 Yu-Chieh Li
by postsocialist artists is often read as a passive revolt against ideology and
content. PSFO identifies creative practice as reflecting pure forms of politics,
which are signifiers laden with various contents within their social-political
contexts.30 They create situations that address the changing values under
socialist market economy, and sometimes craft their work with pleasing and
non-political Chinese symbols, such as non-action in Zen philosophy and
objects that signify communal living. The emphasis on symbols with rich
visualization of socialist community life is open to various interpretations and
is considered safe in most exhibition contexts.
The failure to reform individuality is a trait of the neoliberal state of con-
temporary Chinese life. Consumerism enables the young generation to
access commercial goods and even name-brands, yet the power of capital-
ism has also become instrumental in monitoring individuals in the name of
national security, such as the apps Ali-pay and Wechat. PSFO’s work traces
the socialist convention of non-individuality and how personality has contin-
ued to be suppressed after the economic reform.
A problematic feature of contemporary China is its failure to reform indi-
viduality with visions of freedom and democracy beyond material life. The
PSFO celebrates the socialist convention of non-individuality while also
resisting straightforward political messages in their visualization of daily
scenes. Mr. Zheng (2007) appears to be a portrait mourning the loss of per-
sonal political rights: a computer-generated portrait that combines the facial
features of each group member: the hair of Leng Lin, the mouth of Song
Dong, the eyebrows of Hong Hao, the eyes of Liu Jianhua, and the face of
Xiao Yu (Figure 11.4). Mr. Zheng’s hair is combed neatly to the side. He
wears a white shirt with a blue PSFO badge on a gray background. The size
of the picture evokes the standard Mao portrait, as if the party leader has
swapped positions with a commoner. Mr. Zheng’s look is solemn yet plain,
perhaps even bureaucratic or pretentious, each of which implies strong polit-
ical messages when one discovers that the name “Zheng,” a homophone of
the first character in “Polit-Sheer-Form (Zheng chun ban),” is also the first
character in “Politics (zheng zhi).”
The PSFO’s artistic language is full of references to the superficiality of
performing political culture. The group calls itself an “office,” a dull name
referring to an official unit; thus, its self-presentation is already laden with
political implications. The blue of the badge is adopted as its representative
color, applied to various tools and props at performances and as keepsakes of
the group. In contrast to the red and yellow used on the party emblem of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), blue is a rather obscure color that avoids
direct connections to a specific political camp. The elimination of individual
politics is vivid in the visual language.
PSFO members are beneficiaries of the new economic system that intro-
duced international buyers of Chinese art between the international market
and state control. The gap between their claims about humanism in socialist
life, and their citation of Mao-era political culture, is intentionally kept, to
maintain critical voices as cultural capital. As artists who joined the boom of
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 185

Figure 11.4 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Mr. Cheng, color photo, 120 × 155.7 cm,
2007. © Polit-Sheer-Form Office.

the global contemporary art market in the 1990s, PSFO’s work maneuvers
between political symbols and nostalgia for communal life, opening a space
for cultural negotiation. Much of their work centers on the idea of “being
together” that comes from the loss of intimacy and trust among neighbors
and friends with China’s economic reform.31 These are critical of the privat-
ization that created interpersonal boundaries. Although the five artists grew
up with vague memories of the Cultural Revolution, community life under
socialist economics was still part of their childhood and is dramatized in
their performances. Documentations of their group activities become visual
objects.32 Restaurant menus and travel tickets are reproduced on wallpaper
and installed as installation. Work-out facilities of public sport spaces in resi-
dential areas are recreated for visitors to try out (Figure 11.5). Someone who
is well versed in contemporary art language might consider these works par-
ticipatory in anglophone art terms, but such equipment more importantly
signifies urban change and how it affects community living. Here, the incon-
gruency between socialist and neoliberal values is revealed in these awkward
and artificial situations. For example, danwei—the standardized living units
that were often identical in design and thus easier for local officials to man-
age—were strictly controlled. The diversity of urban life in the early reform
era waned drastically; in homogeneity with danwei today, which involves
both domestic living demand and public activities, through which the mid-
dle class created their picture of well-being.
Polit-Sheer-Form is a series of documentations in oil painting showing the
artists eating, drinking, or hanging out together (Figure 11.6). The illustra-
tions borrow the grayish tones and celebrative atmosphere of propaganda
painting: usually with a scene of collective activity and a line of socialist moral
instruction or a slogan. Although they evoke constructed happiness, they
186 Yu-Chieh Li

Figure 11.5 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Polit-Sheer-Form-16, oil on canvas, 200 ×

300 cm, 2007. © Polit-Sheer-Form Office.

Figure 11.6 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Do the Same Good Deeds, performance on

Times Square, November 3, 2014. © Polit-Sheer-Form Office.
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 187
are based on haptic, nonsensical moments caught on camera. This series
employs the visual language of socialist propaganda to narrate life under neo-
liberal economy, such as group trips to tourist sites and restaurants. Hong
Hao explains that the oil paintings and artist book of this series are inspired
by comic strips which they enjoyed in childhood. Yet unlike these comics,
PSFO’s images are devoid of linear narratives and instead show scenes of
daily life, such as cityscapes, travel vehicles, and dining places. These images
bear political messages similar to those of propaganda posters: people live
a happy life of prosperity.33 Astonishingly, propaganda and the PFSO are
similar in that neither provides realistic information, content, or person-
alized styles. In their view, contemporary artists became responsible for
finding links between culture and life in art. The emphasis on pure artis-
tic intent comes from the experience of evading censorship, which means
political interpretations are often dissolved in the name of art.34 An example
is PSFO’s artist book published in 2006, which turns communal life into
humorous comic strips. The sketches show the five artists visiting different
sites, including a Mao Zedong Souvenir Shop and a historical archive of the
Communist Revolution.35 Those sites once embodied Maoist thought and
party ideology but became the backdrop for neoliberal postsocialism, hold-
ing symbolic meaning as traces of Chinese socialist reform that only led to
greater economic inequality.
The mundane, prosaic quality of communal life is the collective’s aesthetic
source, as claimed in their manifesto: “We have personally experienced in the
later part of the political movements a stage of formalism lacking in content,
and from within this apparent ‘form’ of social movements we have gained
fresh notions of aesthetics.”36 This lack of “content” is the result of the super-
ficial performance of Maoist political culture: one has to conform to party
teachings, which follow certain norms and procedures without caring for
essential results. Do the Same Good Deeds (2015) delineates the collectivist
spirit encouraged by the state (Figure 11.7). It was a performance in which
four hundred participants washed the ground of Manhattan’s Times Square,
armed with mops and buckets in PSFO’s blue. The absurdity of this action
lies in the ill-defined “good” deeds that were practiced in vain: the open-air
square will not be cleaner when mopped. The unnecessary gesture even pre-
vents the normal flow of traffic on site. The idea of performing trivial work
comes from the political experience under the one-party system: one never
questioned what one was told to do, and the effect of deeds concerns their
use as propaganda. The slogan of good deeds refers to Lei Feng, a model
citizen in CCP’s propaganda. In the media, he is described as a good person
always doing good things, such as being helpful, loyal, and obedient to the
party.37 Yet, he makes no concrete contribution to the nation other than
never questioning authority. PSFO critiques the superficiality of this good-
ness. Time Square is symbolic of capitalist commercial success. By bringing
the everyday activity of mopping and the socialist connotations of this group
event to this spot, where free service is unthinkable, the artists acted out
the contradictions between the communist motto of serving the people and
188 Yu-Chieh Li

Figure 11.7 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, Fitness for all, installation view at Queens
Museum, 2014. © Polit-Sheer-Form Office.

the consumerist drive that keeps the contemporary economy running. As

curious onlookers watched, the performers appeared to be genuinely happy,
which created a live show that dramatized the politics of socialist service.

From Mao to Shanzhai art

Song Ta’s (b. 1988) generation grew up in a wealthier society compared with
Wang Guangyi with a relatively liberal education. Although propaganda was
common and governmental control over public space was strict, there was no
firewall and relatively little Internet censorship before the Beijing Olympics
in 2008. The state-funded art system was replaced by a soaring economy, a
proliferation of commercial galleries, and a general sense of nihilism in the
contemporary art scene. Shanzhai (cheap imitations of name brands) prod-
ucts satisfied the material needs of various social classes. Chairman Mao’s por-
trait became a collective memory and an irony of the workers’ revolution that
eventually was instrumentalized and exploited to benefit a few elites. Song
poked fun at this emblem that catered to the ambience of globalization in
which he had grown up: China’s capitalist economy was gaining momentum,
the nation embraced foreign tourists who consumed the Cultural Revolution-
ary culture, and the old infrastructure and ideologies that still existed in daily
life became incongruent with the capitalist economy. His early works paint
a humorous picture of how the postsocialist state system infiltrated ways of
thinking. Stories of commoners—such as bureaucrats, ugly pageants as partic-
ipatory performance, and an installation made of school children’s test sheets
that scored below the cut-off scores—present mentalities and ideologies under
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 189
state control and negligence of individuality. In the following, I will explore
Song’s idiosyncratic appropriation of the Mao icon to discuss how this image
plays with the Euroamerican expectation for Chinese art and also how he sees
the simulacrum and Shanzhai production as a creative process.
Why do they never take color photos (2013–2016) is a two-stage re-enactment
of a statue of Mao as young poet. This romanticized icon calls to mind vari-
ous moments of revolution and nationalism, which ironically have been made
into a consumerist product today. Song made reproductions of the Orange
Isle monument in Changsha––a bust designed by Li Ming, an art professor at
Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Completed in 2009, it is the largest Mao
sculpture in China to date.38 Although an official project, its iconography as
a young and melancholic poet with a subtle frown is rather unusual, showing
that Li aimed to debunk pure political narratives and focus on the romantic
sentiment of the Communist Revolution. Made of granite, the youthful Mao
is 32-meters high, wears long hair and frowns. Song transferred the monu-
ment into a series of actions from 2011 to 2016. First, he secretly placed a
replica of the bust of Mao near a lake on the Guangdong Academy of Arts
campus, cast from a miniature model that Li Ming made as a maquette for
the Orange Isle monument (Figure 11.8). The residents did not react to
this intervention, assuming that the statue had been placed there officially.
After several days, Song sprayed symbolic colors on the sculpture and vid-
eo-recorded the process: red for the foundation, standing for the Communist
Party, and a saturated, commercial blue for the Chinese long shirt. The color-
ing makes the sculpture more vivid but also desecrates it. The erection of the
sculpture did not cause a stir on campus, indicating how accustomed people
have become to propaganda culture and control of public space.

Figure 11.8 Song Ta, Why do they never take colour photos, 2013-16. © Song Ta.
190 Yu-Chieh Li
The playful act was not a parody of the leader’s cult, Song claims, but a
serious engagement with modern Chinese history which should be consid-
ered a grassroots culture.39 The political image is appropriated and continues
to be assimilated into various contexts of contemporary life: the process of
copying the monument and relocating it to residential England shows how
the icon of Mao mutates from a national monument into a landscape of
public sculptures under capitalist economy. The project was re-performed
in the CASS Sculptural Foundation, in a garden in West Sussex, UK, where
Song erected a second replica of Li Ming’s monument in gray fibreglass
produced by the same factory (Figure 11.9). The occasion was A Beautiful
Disorder (2016), a group show of 18 internationally renowned artists from
Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan, who submerged their different
agendas into the category of public sculpture. At the vernissage, several per-
formers sprayed the sculpture’s surroundings, including the green trees, in
a neutral shade of gray, creating an artificially monochromatic scene.40 The
gray encircles the monument as if filling a flat canvas, returning the historical
image to its symbolic status.41 Next to the installation, Song showed video
documentation of the first sculpture he made in Guangzhou. Young dancers
performed hip-hop dance before the sculpture at CASS. This interaction
led to the re-institutionalization of the icon and certainly some frustration
in viewing it. The editing on an official monument and its dialogue with
contemporary dance juxtaposes the historical Mao with subcultures but
cunningly keeps a distance from it. The artist attempts to bid farewell to
the sole association of Mao’s authoritative image in the mainstream national
narratives. First, the iconography of the youthful Mao is based primarily on
his identity as a poet, which reminds us of the aesthetic dimension, rather
than the function of art in socialism. Painting it with colors decenters and

Figure 11.9 Song Ta, Why do they never take colour photos, 2013-16. © Song Ta.
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 191
humanizes this modern icon. The various iterations in South China and in
West Sussex synced two temporalities and cultural-ideological spaces. The
icon’s strong symbolism does not create incongruences with the idyllic green
of the English garden. There, the statue looks not unlike other European
modernist sculptures—and is thus a perfect example of how art responds to
the needs of its audience in globalization.
Since the early 1990s, the attention of international audiences has been
caught by images of Mao in Pop style and the big bald heads of realist artists
with sarcastic smiles which are interpreted as dissident voices under Social-
ist hegemony.42 The resurrection of Mao portraits in contemporary art has
sparked heated discussions over its representation. Just like Warhol’s repe-
tition of famous icons, Mao has been re-contextualized as a global symbol
widely through the global media, creating a simplified image of the Cold
War. Art historians have identified the turn of Mao’s iconography since the
Cultural Revolution as a transformation from a monolithic cult to diverse
receptions of the history of Maoism, which in turn suggests how visual pro-
duction became complicit with neoliberalism. Barbara Mittler argues that the
Cultural Revolutionary culture involves different motivations, domestic and
foreign transformations, as well as official and non-official practices.43 Dai
Jinhua notes a displacement of political power with consumerism, as Mao
is made into a symbol of modern China available for sale at souvenir shops
with the country’s opening up.44 Dal Lago analyzes different pictorial lan-
guages that transformed the monolithic portrait of Mao into antithetical ide-
ologies.45 Valjakka describes the phenomenon of caricaturing Mao as a parody
of modern Chinese history.46 In these studies, the undemonized process of
the Mao icon is central to the argument that China’s monolithic leader cult
is liberated by individual gazes—which I consider an overinterpretation, as
there is little individualism with privatization and consumerist culture. Song’s
recycled Mao image neither narrates liberation of socialist history nor the
authority; rather, it makes use of the flexibility of political symbols maneu-
vered in the cross-cultural dialogue to cater to Euroamerican gaze, and like
Wang Guangyi, is an admonition of the cooption of economic and political
life in contemporary China. It references the youthful Mao as a melancholic
poet, summoning a less materialist image of socialism.47 Particularly in the
depictions of CCP’s Jinggangshan period of the late 1920s and early 1930s,
a heroic sentiment is apparent in the leader’s portraits, with scenic mountain
views and his gaze on the distant horizon, a convention with possible origins
in German Romantic painting. This iconography can be perfectly assimilated
into the English garden, and further reminds us of the utopian vision of early
socialism, which contrast with its process of materialization. The readymade
sculpture was cast from molds in a factory to negotiate with consumer-
ist-dominated globalization—Mao here becomes Duchamp’s urinal, which
can be endlessly copied in the contexts of capitalism and postmodernism. The
adaptation of this image is a revisionism of Mao’s caricature prevalent in the
international art and souvenir market since the 1990s and shows little hope of
liberating and reforming the mainstream narrative of PRC.
192 Yu-Chieh Li
The various replications of the Mao monument remind us of Shanzhai
art—a special copycat culture that enables specific luxurious foreign products
to flow to the market, as cheaper alternatives for middle and lower class to con-
sume. Shanzhai is sometimes interpreted as a creative way to fight capitalism
and the monopolies of certain entrepreneurs.48 More often, it is considered
beneficial as it fulfills materialist freedom for the lower class. In reality, it allows
minimal creativity as the consumerist effect is solely based on poor copying.
This phenomenon is tied to the production and consuming power of the work-
ing class in China. As the Shanzhai Mao affirms, the authenticity of Chinese
identity, Song’s “artistic” image, becomes even more tied to the contemporary
labor behind the global economy. The simulation of mass culture cunningly
reminds us of the current production context of China being a world factory
the production mode introduced in the art world. The spread of the Mao icon
is no longer related to class struggle or leftist positions; rather, it emphasizes
the exploitation of materials and images in the course of globalization.

Conclusion: the ideological war never ended

In the New Cold War equilibrium, China has gradually replaced Russia as the
enemy of the US; yet, both have their own agendas for globalization. This
competition is the backdrop of Chinese artists’ practices in the hybrid neo-
liberal socialism, which continued authoritarianism and embraced capitalism.
Since China’s open-up policy, economic life has undergone drastic change,
much of which is incongruent with the old cynical socialist values; yet in public
space and bureaucratic cultures, socialist instructions and the political rhetoric
are still followed, creating a gap between economic and technological progres-
sion and the state-dominated socialist system. Post-Mao artists have responded
to the contemporary condition of rootlessness; their simulation of Mao era
political culture is a below the cut-off symptom of the Cold War that de facto
connects them with the global art circuit, and it also creates approachable
identity as authentic Chinese. The political symbols that the artists adopted are
double-edged swords, which have the potential to continuously mutate and
open up biased interpretations within the Cold War binary: the bureaucratic
depiction of PSFO’s political portraits can be considered a critique of the mon-
olithic Chinese culture or the party guidelines as it had annulled through the
introduction of new economic policy. These “war” images ultimately depict
the cooption of consumerist and propaganda culture in contemporary China,
and further criticality attuned to the places where they show works. The artists’
staging of the socialist past could appear at times to be more nostalgic than
sarcastic. Surely, Wang Guangyi’s art that materializes the mass culture and
Song Ta’s sprayed Mao sculpture are genuine tributes to the proletariat in class
struggle and their original utopian visions. They also poke fun, however, at the
socialist past positioned in its neoliberal socialist present. Such work reacts to
socialist teaching and institutional critique in the contemporary art world, to
survive in neoliberal socialism. They are testimonies of how Chinese artists still
struggle to create a space for political voices domestically and overseas.
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 193
It should be noted that liberal democracy did not become a norm with
China’s growing GDP, and also that the government even at times used
contemporary Chinese art as a tool to boost its own appearance of liberal-
ism—proving that it allows plenty of freedom of expression. Co-operation
between the state and the commercial art system continues to thrive, which
led to the development of the 798 art district in Beijing and Shanghai’s West
Bund, which introduced branches of European mega museums such as the
Pompidou. Ultimately, the global art market commodified art’s free form of
expression. Coming from a different ideological space, Chinese artists not
only took part in art’s globalization, they also developed rhetoric to artic-
ulate critiques of authoritarian powers. However, the current reception of
contemporary Chinese art in the Neoliberal West remains stuck at the binary
of liberal versus authoritarian worlds. This is an ideological war in which
all artists who strive to be international inevitably participate. If we fail to
identify the survival tactics of Post-Mao artists in their visual production, our
understanding of art cannot be pushed beyond the borders.

Notes
1 Uros Cvoro, Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe
(Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2018), 10–11.
2 James Hershberg, Sergey Radchenko, Péter Vámos, and David Wolff, “The
Interkit Story: A Window into the Final Decades of the Sino-Soviet
Relationship,” Cold War International History Projection, Working Paper #63,
February 2011, 19.
3 Wang Hui, “‘Xinziyou zhuyi’ de lishi genyuan ji qi pipan—zailun dangdai
Zhongguo dalu de sixiang zhuangkuang yu xiandanxing wenti” (The Historical
Origin of ‘Neoliberalism’ in Mainland China and It’s Critique-Re-examining
the Intellectual Condition in Contemporary Mainland China and the Question
of Modernity),” Social Studies Quarterly in Taiwan 42 (June 2001): 1–65.
4 Gan Yang, “Zhongguo ziyou zuopai de youlai” (The Original of Liberal Leftists
in China),” China Labour Bulletin, August 5, 2002, https://bit.ly/33psTeA.
5 This is reflected in several exhibitions about Post-Mao art since the 1980s which
depict the East-West and Neoliberalist-Socialist binary after China-Avantgarde
(Beijing, 1989); China-Avant-Garde (Berlin, 1993).
6 See Yan Geng, Mao’s Images: Artists and China’s 1949 Transition (Stuttgart: J.
B. Metzler, 2018).
7 Wang created different versions of Great Criticism—Coca Cola between 1990
and 1993, some oil on canvas and some woodblock prints. This version is repro-
duced in Flash Art’s issue 162. The Great Criticism series was continued until
around 2007. Wang exhibited a triptych of Mao Zedong covered with black
grids at the China Avant-garde exhibition in 1989, which resulted in him leav-
ing the position in Zhuhai. He relocated to School of Industrial Design in
Wuhan. See Karen Smith, Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-garde Art in New
China (Hong Kong, Timezone 8, 2008), 63.
8 In the woodblock prints, especially as developed by the German Expressionists, Lu
Xun saw an effective tool for exposing the social ills of China. Although Lu Xun was
never an official member of the Communist Party, his emphasis on the exploitation
of peasants and the working class fit well with the revolutionary message of the
CCP. In 1937, after Lu Xun’s death, the Lu Xun Academy of Arts was established
at the Communist base of Yan’an to instruct artists in the art of propaganda.
194 Yu-Chieh Li
9 Coca Cola was imported to China in 1920 but only lasted until 1930. It re-
entered in 1979 and was sold at first only in “Friendship” hotels.
10 For example, Western Shanghai Workers’ Palace ed., Model Illustrations for
Posters at Factories (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing, 1975).
11 David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2020), 31.
12 This was confirmed as his interest during the author’s interview in August 2013.
13 See Jane DeBevoise, Between State and Market, 235; Political Pop not only
adopts consumerist or mass cultural symbols, it also translates ideologies into
popular symbols. Li Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of
Contemporary Chinese Art,” trans. Joan Tate, in China’s New Art: Post–1989,
ed., Johnson Chang (Hong Kong: Hanart TZ Gallery, 1993), XXII.
14 The Guangzhou Biennale Art Fair was established by Lü Peng in light of the
lack of an art market in China and the abundance of restrictions; the art fair was
not successful, but it was at this time that foreign foundations and collectors
started to buy his works.
15 The Guangzhou Biennale Art Fair was established by Lü Peng in light of the
lack of an art market in China and the abundance of restrictions; the art fair was
not successful, but it was at this time that foreign foundations and collectors
started to buy his works.
16 Yu-Chieh Li, “Interview with Wang Guangyi,” audio recording, Beijing, August
25, 2013.
17 In 2011, China became the world’s second-largest economy, after the US. See
Hugo Duncan, “China Overtakes Japan to Become World’s Second-Biggest
Economy (and will power ahead of US in a decade),” February 15, 2011, accessed
October 29, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1356788/
China-worlds-second-biggest-economy-Japan-falls-40-years.html.
18 Andrew Solomon, “Their Irony, Humour (and Art) Can Save China,” The New
York Times, December 19, 1993, section 6, 42–51, 66, accessed January 10,
2018. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/19/magazine/their-irony-
humor-and-art-can-save-china.html?pagewanted=allm.
19 Wang Youshen, “Zouxiang zhenshi de shenghuo—Wang Guangyi da jizhe
wen” (Heading for Real Life—An Interview with Wang Guangyi),” Beijing
Youth Daily, March 22, 1991, 6.
20 Yu-Chieh Li, “Interview with Wang Guangyi.”
21 See David Harvey, “Neoliberalism with ‘Chinese Characteristics’,” (Oxford
University Press, 2005), 120–51; here 146.
22 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 125.
23 Teresa Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China’s
Reform Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 61–2.
24 Ibid., 163.
25 Jane DeBevoise, Between State and Market (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 74.
26 Julia Andrews. Painters and Politics in the Republic of China, 1949–1979
(Berkeley; Los Angeles; Oxford: University of California Press, 1995), 400.
27 A similar situation happened in the USSR, see Piotr Piotrowski, in Art and
Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 58.
28 Gary G. Xu, “Wang Guangyi, Precisely,” in Thing-in-Itself; Utopia, Pop and
Personal Theology, ed. Huang Zhuan (Lingnan Art Publishing), 473.
29 Except for at the border of Vietnam in 1979.
30 “Pure Forms of Politics” is a slogan painted on their oil painting series, Polit-
Sheer-Form (2007).
31 Shen Ruiyun, Song Dong, Xiao Yu, Liu Jianhua, and Hong Hao, “Polit Sheer
Form!” November 3, 2014, Asia Art Archive in America, accessed January 28,
2017, http://www.aaa-a.org/programs/polit-sheer-form-2/.
 Survival tactics within Cold War ideologies 195
32 Shen et al., “Polit Sheer Form!”.
33 Mathieu Borysevicz ed., We Are Polit-Sheer-Form (Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher
Limited, 2011), 76–91.
34 Shen Ruiyun et al., “Polit Sheer Form!”
35 PSFO, Polit-Sheer-Form: Only One Wall, 2005, 78–79, 160–61.
36 Polit-Sheer-Form Office, “Only One Wall,” in We Are Polit-Sheer-Form, ed.
Mathieu Borysevicz (Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher Limited, 2011), 31.
37 Chen, Tung-lei. “Lei Feng, A Fine Example of Chinese Youth,” in Communist
China 1949 to the Present, eds. Franz Schurman and Orville Schell (New York:
Random House, 1967), 450–56; John Fraser, The Chinese: Portrait of a People
(Collins: 1980), 100–102.
38 The public monument was completed in 2009. Its designer, Li Ming, did not want
to repeat the well-known icons of Mao produced mainly from 1966 to 1976. He
followed Mao as a poet. See: ‘Sculptor Li Ming: I want to create a unique Mao,’
Changsha Evening Post, November 6, 2009, accessed January 30, 2017, archived
at http://news.ifeng.com/history/zhiqing/huodong/200911/1106_6853_
1423811.shtml. See also, Si Maogeng, “A Sculpture of Mao Standing at the
Orange Ile, Its Height is 32 Meters, Presenting a Heroic Image of the Great
Man,” People’s Daily Overseas, November 02, 2009, 2.
39 Li, “Interview with Song Ta.”
40 The sculpture, including the platform, is 7 meters high, 13 meters long. Li,
“Interview with Song Ta.” See also: the artist statement on CASS Sculpture
Foundation’s website, accessed January 28, 2017, http://www.sculpture.org.
uk/artist/song-ta.
41 Song Ta, “Artist Statement,” September 2015, unpublished.
42 Cynical realism (wanshi xianshi zhuyi) is a term that first appeared in curator Li
Xianting’s writings.
43 Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
44 Dai Jinhua, “Redemption and Consumption: Depicting Culture in the 1990s,”
Positions 4, no. 1 (1996), 129.
45 Francesca Dal Lago, “Personal Mao: Reshaping an Icon in Contemporary
Chinese Art,” Art Journal, 58, no. 2 (1999): 58.
46 Minna Valjakka, “Parodying Mao’s Image: Caricaturing in Contemporary
Chinese Art,” Asian Studies 15, no. 1 (2011): 90.
47 Yu-Chieh Li, “Interview with Song Ta,” January 31, 2017. Documentary pho-
tographs are archived at the CASS Sculpture Foundation, http://www.sculp-
ture.org.uk/artist/song-ta. The material relies on the author’s conversation
with the artist and visual documentation of the work.
48 See Rainbow Chan’s project Gloss (2019) at Cement Fondu, Sydney, accessed
May 1, 2020, https://cementfondu.org/blogs/past-projects/project-space-
rainbow-chan.
12 Performance, memory, and affect
in Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud Man
Rebecca Jennison

Introduction

Our visions of history are drawn from diverse sources: not just from
the narratives of history books but also from photographs and histori-
cal novels, from newsreel footage, comic books and, increasingly, from
electronic media like the Internet. Out of this kaleidoscopic mass of
fragments we make and remake patterns of understanding which explain
the origins and nature of the world in which we live.1

. . . [O]n a more fundamental level, history can only be a bodily experience.2

In The Past Within Us, Tessa Morris-Suzuki considers ways in which rep-
resentations of history in a range of media play a critically important role in
how we remember and make sense of history and in turn shape our under-
standing of the “world in which we live.” In her analysis of fiction, photogra-
phy, films, comic books, and other media, Morris-Suzuki also stresses that “Our
relationship with the past is not simply forged through factual knowledge or an
intellectual understanding of cause and effect. It also involves imagination and
empathy.”3 She looks closely at how photographs or films “can evoke empa-
thy and identity,” or become “a departure point for thinking about film as an
expression of the past.”4 Although Morris-Suzuki does not discuss works by
contemporary visual artists, as the editors of this volume rightly note, works
by such artists can also be points of departure for speculation about and imag-
inative and “affective” ways to understand history, and in the context of this
volume, of the Cold War and postcolonial struggles in East and Southeast Asia.
Yamashiro Chikako (b.1976) is a contemporary artist based in Okinawa
who draws on a variety of materials and techniques—including documentary
film, poetry, and music—to create innovative performance, video, film, and
installation works that communicate to viewers in powerful, visceral ways. At
the same time, Yamashiro’s works can be seen as what the editors suggest:
“windows into some lesser-known aspects of the Cold War” that can “deepen
our awareness of multiple, concrete, coexisting, yet disparate spaces within
the reality we inhabit.” Like other artists discussed in this volume, Yamashiro
 Performance, memory, and affect 197
is continuing to develop new and innovative practices and techniques that
Brett de Bary asserts resonate “on multiple registers and in multiple expres-
sive modalities, going beyond the conventional writing and rewriting known
as history” and that “can only be a bodily experience.”5
From early in her career, Yamashiro has made innovative use of perfor-
mance and engagement in site-specific photographic and video works. As her
practice has evolved from the use of photos and single-channel recordings
of live performance in sites such as graveyards or along the fences of US
military installations, she has come to produce more complex works using
actors, multi-perspective and multi-vocal film, sound editing, and installation.
Here, I aim to briefly discuss selected earlier works that highlight Yamashiro’s
development over the last two decades and then focus on the three-channel
film and sound installation Mud Man (Tsuchi no Hito), first shown at the
Aichi Triennale in 2016.6 Mud Man makes innovative use of performance,
sound, and moving image and was partly filmed in Jeju Island, Korea. The
work makes voices and memories of Okinawans tangible, but at the same
time, alerts us to the entangled colonial histories beyond Okinawa and their
legacies that underlie present-day tensions in the region. As I will try to show,
Yamashiro’s imaginative exploration and uses of film technique both literally
and figuratively take us on a journey into sites of significance in the Cold War.

Growing to sense Okinawa: fences, seaweed, meat, and mud

In a time which continues to try to jettison and erase, as if they were just
noise, those memories which come to terms with and struggle with its
past, Okinawa’s present remains a fraught one.7

I first came to know of Yamashiro Chikako and her work through the Asia,
Politics, and Art project initiated by poet and political philosopher, Lee
Chonghwa in 2006. This project brought practicing artists together with
scholars, curators, and activists of diverse backgrounds working in Japan to
consider new meanings of “Asia,” “politics,” and “art,” and to probe con-
nections between these terms to see links between past histories and ongoing
geopolitical tensions in the region. Okinawan writer and scholar Shinjō Ikuo
writes that the project helped us to see those whose lives have been “erased
from the front stage of Asian politics,” and called for artists to continue to
make works that might help us hear the voices of those

who wait with bated breath in a disappearing ‘past’ for a time that will
recall their lived experience in word, sound and form. What else is asked
of us other than to listen to the silent call of the mourned?8

Yamashiro’s works might well be seen as one artist’s response to Shinjō’s call.
I first saw Yamashiro’s installation of photographs and the single-chan-
nel video Seaweed Woman (2008) in an exhibition titled, Okinawa
198 Rebecca Jennison
Prismed: 1872–2008 (2008). This work had evolved out of a series titled
Okinawa Complex Volume I that included another short video work, “Shore
Connivance—Shore of Ibano, Urasoe City” filmed at what Yamashiro called
“Mokunin hama,” a stretch of undeveloped shoreline where local people
gathered to fish and spend their free time. The term mokunin derives from
mokunin kōsaku chi, or “tacitly-approved farmlands,” referring to lands
along the fences of US military installations that are technically off limits,
but where local residents can continue to engage in fishing and agriculture.
As we will see, the notion of “mokunin spaces” comes to play an important
role in this artist’s work. One segment of Seaweed Woman was filmed in Oura
Bay in Henoko, where for more than 20 years non-violent protestors have
continued to try and stop the construction of an offshore landing strip adja-
cent to Camp Schwab, a so-called a “replacement facility” for Marine Corps
Air Station Futenma.9
I still vividly recall the powerful images, movements, and sounds of the
character “Seaweed Woman”, performed by Yamashiro who was filmed swim-
ming and diving in the waters of Oura Bay. The shifting camera angle con-
veys to viewers the sensations of floating, drifting, swimming with the creature
(­Figure 12.1) swathed in seaweed; we follow her as she crosses the invisible
border between local fishing waters and those controlled by the US and begin
to look back at the shoreline from “her” point of view, breathing with her
as she swims and dives in the cloudy waters and encounters the Japan Coast
Guard boat patrolling to disperse peaceful protestors in canoes.
Camp Schwab and Marine Corps Air Station Futenma are just two of
more than 20 US bases located in Okinawa that makes up only 0.6% of the
total land area of Japan. More problematically, of all US military facilities in
Japan, about 74% are located in Okinawa. In addition, 20 air spaces and 28

Figure 12.1 Yamashiro Chikako, Seaweed Woman, 2008 version. Video, 7’15”,
© Yamashiro Chikako, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.
 Performance, memory, and affect 199
water areas surrounding the archipelago are designated for the exclusive use
of the US Forces for their training purposes.10 Issues of territorial control of
islands and seas, rich with natural beauty and resources, have plagued the
people in what was once the independent Ryukyu Kingdom, for centuries.
In 1879 the Kingdom became a prefecture of Japan, and according to some
scholars, Okinawa has been “treated more like a ‘colony or conquered terri-
tory than an integral part of the motherland.’”11
In 1945, the Battle of Okinawa—the single and most devastating land
battle of the Pacific War in which almost one-third of the civilian population
perished—and the subsequent atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
brought an end to World War II. But for Okinawa, the “postwar” era began
with what was to become a 28-year US occupation. Local farmlands were
confiscated as US bases were expanded during the Korean and Vietnam
Wars and Okinawa became a pivotal “launching pad” for US forces in Korea
and Southeast Asia and later, in the Middle East. With the escalation of US
involvement in the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement in mainland Japan
and Okinawa grew, and many began to advocate Okinawa’s “reversion” to
Japan which was carried out in 1972.
Yamashiro was born in Okinawa in 1976—four years after Okinawa’s
reversion to mainland Japan. She grew up surrounded by both the lush
natural environment that characterizes the Ryukyu archipelago, and count-
less miles of fences marking the division between US military bases and
local communities, agricultural lands and shoreline still legally owned by
the Okinawans. Beneath the surface of Okinawa’s fraught present lie many
layers of history. As Shinjō Ikuo notes, a deeper understanding of these
histories uncovers connections to other places that have suffered from war
and colonization.
It is against this background that Yamashiro began to question what she
had seen growing up. She studied painting at the Okinawan Prefectural Uni-
versity of Arts, and as a graduate student studied at the Surrey Institute of
Art and Design in the UK where she saw films of live performance art by
Gilbert and George and was inspired to begin her own experiments with
film, performance, and photography. After her return to Okinawa and grad-
uation from the MFA program there, she began to exhibit new works—pho-
tographs and single-channel videos filmed in graveyards, along the fences of
US bases or in tourist sites—that can be seen as activist-performance inter-
ventions that playfully disrupt the stereotypical “tourist gaze” at Okinawa.12
As her work began to attract more attention in Okinawa and Tokyo, she took
up new themes and experimented with new techniques, developing unique
ways of addressing the question of intergenerational memory and delving
more deeply into specific sites in Okinawa. Yamashiro’s practice has evolved
out of intuitive responses to materials and specific sites, and a strong curiosity
about the many-layered histories, memories, and voices discovered in them.
She has continued to push against the boundaries of performance and art
activism while developing new film, sound, and installation techniques that
are reaching ever-widening audiences.
200 Rebecca Jennison
As Yamashiro experimented with techniques such as underwater filming,
camera-angle, and sound editing seen in Seaweed Woman, she also began
the “Inheritance Series” and produced photographs like Virtual Inheritance
(2008) capturing gestures and facial expressions in large photos that were
part of a “reminiscence therapy” workshop with elder survivors of the war.
In Your Voice Came out through My Throat (2009), the last single-channel
video work in which she herself performed, Yamashiro experimented with
double exposure of the film and “lip synch” in the sound track in an attempt
to convey the voice and memory of one survivor’s traumatic experience of
war: as a nine-year-old boy, he had witnessed his mother and sister as they
leapt from “suicide cliff” during the Battle of Saipan. Directly facing the
camera in a close-up shot, Yamashiro’s image is shown while she attempts to
lip-synch the voice of the survivor who is giving his testimony. As he slowly
tells his horrific story, the image of the man’s face appears and is juxtaposed
with hers; as his voice fades away, we begin to hear hers in its place. It took
Yamashiro 18 attempts to create the video which conveys the visceral experi-
ence of the speaking subject and the listener, but this attempt to “swallow”
and give voice to the trauma of one elder survivor left her with the sense that
she could never fully digest or transmit his voice or experience. His and other
“undigested” voices felt like lumps of meat that “swayed back and forth at
the bottom of [her] belly as if they would never dissolve.”13 The more lit-
eral attempt to embody memories through performance led Yamashiro to
create other, more abstract works as she continued to experiment with film
techniques and explore questions of memory, place, and history. In Sink-
ing Voices, Red Breath (2010), she filmed an elderly woman whose narrative
monologue is indecipherable. The microphones used to record voices of
elders in Virtual Inheritance (2008) and Your Voice Came out through My
Throat (2009) are seen sinking into the sea. Like a bouquet of kelp, they sink
deeper into what the artist imagines to be the body of the sea, as we hear the
sound of swirling bubbles that rise again to the surface.
In a series of still photographs and video installation titled, Choros of the
Melodies (2010), the “undigested voices” seem to wash ashore and find their
way to the floor of a dense, tropical forest where they reappear as fragments
of faces and bodies half-buried in earth, glimpsed among the flickering shad-
ows and light through the leaves. A closer look shows that some of the “cam-
ouflaged” women’s faces are smiling, some are old, and some are young. 14
Asanuma Keiko writes that Choros with its assemblage of “nature motifs like
soil, water, sea and plants in [sites] blended with human beings, can be con-
sidered as the most poetic representation of inheritance from death/former
generations to life which Yamashiro has pursued as her theme from the ear-
liest stages.”15 The images are haunting and poetic, and suggestive of the
theme of death and regeneration that reappears in Mud Man (Figure 12.2).
As Asanuma notes, it is not necessary to know the actual site where the
images in Choros of the Melodies were photographed or filmed in order to
engage with the work. But the fact that Yamashiro shot half of the forest
scenes in Mabuni, Itoman-shi, and the Peace Memorial Park there—a site
 Performance, memory, and affect 201

Figure 12.2 Yamashiro Chikako, Choros of the Melodies, 2010. Chromogenic print, 600
x 900 mm. © Yamashiro Chikako, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

where thousands of Okinawans died in the Battle of Okinawa—alerts viewers

to a deeper understanding of these “fertile” images of death and regenera-
tion. Through “scooping up the voices from the site in which human beings
and natural materials are intertwined and synthesized,” a new awareness of
the connection between human history and natural motifs is awakened in
the viewer.16
According to Asanuma, Yamashiro’s attention to specific sites in natural
settings can be seen throughout her work. Her choice of “mokunin hama”
as the site for her 2007 work, Shore Connivance, led to the creation of Sea-
weed Woman. Interestingly, when mokunin is translated as “tacit approval,”
the viewpoint of the authorities who grant approval is highlighted, while
“connivance” places emphasis on the subjectivity (and precarity) of the local
people who “connive” to use spaces designated as “off-limits.” Film scholar
and critic Higashi Takuma situates Yamashiro’s works in relation to both
resistance “movements” and cutting-edge art practices that convey “move-
ment=filmic image.” He writes:

Like mokunin no kōsaku chi, Mokunin hama is a place where people

can come and go, but only with the tacit approval of the authorities.
The place Yamashiro has “discovered” is in a precarious and constantly
changing state. At the same time, it can be understood as a space of
ajir—or asylum.17

Yamashiro chose another precarious, “mokunin place,” a weekend flea

market found along a municipal road named Vietnam Street next to the
chain-link fence inside Kadena Airbase, as the setting for the three-channel
film/video installation Woman of the Butcher Shop (2012), first exhibited at
the Mori Art Museum.18 Suzuki Katsuo argues that Yamashiro’s use of such
places as settings for her works allows her to uncover and re-map “com-
plex power relations” embedded in them and to re-imagine and reorganize
202 Rebecca Jennison
them new ways.19 Suzuki goes on to suggest that Yamashiro’s attention
to “mokunin places” might be understood in connection with Foucault’s
notion of heterotopia, “a single real space” juxtaposed with other incom-
patible places in order “to increase sensitivity toward an actual place of a
historical nature and to urge others to pay attention to the memories that
have accumulated there.”20 He goes on to state that Yamashiro’s works
bring viewers face to face with “the multi-layered reality of Okinawa.” In the
moment of encountering the work, “A heterotopia where different spaces
coexist and heterochrony where different times coexist undoubtedly cre-
ates an opportunity poetically to reorganize the rigid spatial order and sin-
gle-track temporal axis.” As we will see in the discussion of Mud Man that
follows, Yamashiro makes use of the concepts, images, materials, and film
techniques developed in her earlier works to re-map and reorganize spatial
and temporal order, interweaving images of reality and fiction, acting and
natural behavior, activism and art. The sites and spaces explored in Mud
Man not only bring us face-to-face with many-layered sites in Okinawa, they
show links between these spaces and other postcolonial locations such as Jeju
Island in Korea and Vietnam. As we will see, in Mud Man, the artist has con-
tinued to develop more sophisticated film and sound-editing techniques that
take viewers “below the surfaces” of sea and land, through space and time.

Viewing Mud Man (2016)

It was on a sweltering hot day in August, 2016 that I first saw Mud Man
at the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya. The three-channel film and sound work
was installed on the third floor of an old, abandoned building; viewers had
to wind their way through a dark and dusty first floor space, climb a nar-
row stairway to the third floor, and finally enter a large room at the back
of the building that housed the installation. At the entrance to the gallery,
there was a handout with poems in Korean, Japanese, and English, and
words from one of the poems, “And they had wings,” were inscribed on the
wall. Inside, the narrow room was dark, the air heavy. We made our way to
benches in front of the three screens, and sat watching and listening, sud-
denly immersed in a world of images and sounds so loud that they seemed
to pound against our bodies.
The images were moving in rapid sequence on the three screens in a
non-linear visual narrative. A tall figure walks toward us through a field as if
out of another era, another world. Overhead views of lush green fields with
rows of crops appear and alternate on the screens; then scenes of grassy fields
follow. We see people who might be sleeping or dreaming, lying face-up on
the ground, their faces caked with yellow-gray mud. From time to time, they
quiver slightly. And suddenly, an arm reaches up, like the stalk of a growing
plant (Figure 12.3).
One man slowly stands and looks up at a tree and gazes at a nest high in
its branches. Soft clumps of mud or earth begin to fall from the sky on the
people who begin to stir as he places a clump of soft earth to his ear and
 Performance, memory, and affect 203

Figure 12.3 Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2017. Video, 2016 version, 3-channel
video installation, 23’00”, in cooperation with Aichi Triennale 2016.
© Yamashiro Chikako, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

listens, as if it is a conch shell from the sea. A soft chorus of voices in Korean,
Japanese, and Okinawan dialects murmur words that resonate as sounds and
build into a rhythm. The poems are like music and at the same time fill the
space with voices in multiple languages. Although the words are mostly inde-
cipherable, the multi-lingual, multi-vocal chorus itself hints at the artist’s aim
to bring multiple “minor literatures” such as works by Korean poets under
Japanese colonial rule, Okinawan poets writing in dialect and a poem by
Kafka translated into Iejima dialect, together in the work in a way that gen-
erates and circulates new meanings and disrupts hierarchal relations between
languages that co-exist in postcolonial and neo-colonial territories.21
The artist imagined that the dung of a mythical bird contained “poetry
seeds” fell on the people and that from them grew the words of poets who
gave voice to those who had died in battles. As the voices fill the entire
gallery, poetic images of plants, seeds, flowers, and laments for lost home-
lands fill the screen. A voice declares that wings are “useless” and asks, “Why
should I fly away from my home town? Why leave my homeland, the dead
and the gods?” Later in the work, Nakazato Yugo, an Okinawan poet who
also appears in several segments of the film, recites a poem with the refrain
using the words “bogo” (mother tongue) that “burbles” from within, that
can be “lamped, clomped and thumped,” but never “dumped.”22
In another segment, one man tumbles down a hole into a cave and finds
himself in an underground tunnel; bent over, he breathes heavily as he slowly
makes his way through a dimly lit concrete bunker where missiles and war-
heads were once stored. He climbs up through another narrow passageway
and emerges to the surface, now in a trench with others who are looking up
in horror at a dark sky, filled with flashing lights and sounds of battle. Soon,
204 Rebecca Jennison
they also begin to see flashbacks of black and white documentary films of the
Battle of Okinawa and the Vietnam War (Figure 12.4).
Here, Yamashiro’s experiment with sound design and forms of popular
music produce an especially strong visceral impact: the images move rhyth-
mically, along with the sound of weapons shrieking through the air above
the mud people. The sounds of warfare, produced by a voice percussion art-
ist, hip-hop musician, and DJ, are skillfully transformed into contemporary
music.
Kohara Masashi discusses Mud Man in connection with the artist’s earlier
works, Your Voice Came out through My Throat (2009) and Choros of the Mel-
odies (2010).23 Here, two Cold War sites—Okinawa and Jeju Island in South
Korea—are linked. In Okinawa, citizen protestors have continued to resist
the confiscation of Okinawan lands and the construction of new US bases.
Similarly, citizens of Gangjeong Village have protested the construction of
a trilateral naval base there. Both islands were once kingdoms, both were
colonized, and parts of both have become resorts for tourists. Kohara writes:

We can see that Okinawa and Jeju are closely related. In their connec-
tions with the United States, and with mainland Japan and South Korea,
they are like siblings, cursed with having great geo-political value as stra-
tegic location for military bases. Gradually, viewers come to recognize
that these references to specific geopolitical sites are like missing pieces
in a puzzle that when recovered, help us to see new connections, and
imagine an alternative historical narrative, both past and present.24

Figure 12.4 Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2017. Video, 1-channel 2016 version,
3-channel video installation, 23’00”, in cooperation with Aichi Triennale
2016. © Yamashiro Chikako, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.
 Performance, memory, and affect 205
In one of the final segments of Mud Man, we follow the man as he descends
into the caves and crawls underground through tunnels that were once war-
time bunkers or storage sites for missiles. Suddenly, there is silence, as the
camera pans over a field of luscious white teppō yuri (coronet-shaped Easter
lilies, cultivated today on Iejima). Images of the lilies swaying in the breeze
come in and out of focus. Again, we see the mud people, lying in the field
among the lilies. One by one, their hands and arms reach upward, like plants
with flowers that are beginning to bloom. As they reach toward the sky, the
hands slowly begin to clap, first randomly and then in unison. The sound and
rhythm build to a crescendo in a vibrant musical cadence that reverberates
throughout the gallery space and our bodies. In the final moment, all is silent,
and the camera rests on a field of dried, tangled vines spreading on the earth,
a metaphor for the cycle of death, decay, and regeneration (Figure 12.5).

Mud Man and Cold War sites: Marine Corps Air Station
Futenma, Kadena, Iejima, Jeju Island, and Beyond
In Mud Man, Yamashiro continued to develop the technique of suturing
and editing film segments she had developed in Woman of the Butcher Shop
(2012) in her “risky” endeavor to come to terms with the voices of others and
engage in dialogues with places of historical and geo-political significance. As
we have seen, the artist juxtaposes film segments of sites in Okinawa, includ-
ing clips from her own earlier works, with images of Gangjeong Village in
Jeju, South Korea, and black and white documentary footage of the Battle
of Okinawa and the Vietnam War.

Figure 12.5 Yamashiro Chikako, Mud Man, 2017. 2016 version, 3-channel video
installation, 23’:00”, in cooperation with Aichi Triennale 2016.
© Yamashiro Chikako, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.
206 Rebecca Jennison
A closer look at the histories of Okinawa and Korea reveals other clues
about the sites Yamashiro has chosen for this work. The process of force-
ful confiscation of Okinawan lands began immediately after the end of the
Pacific War and continued during and after the Korean War.25 Marine Corps
Air Station Futenma, located in present-day Ginowan City and the source
of the controversial plan to build a “replacement facility” at Henoko, was
also built at around this time. In 1953, US forces drove people in Iejima off
the island and took control of sixty-three percent of the island.26 Kadena Air
Base, situated on forty-six square kilometers of prime Okinawan farmland,
was also built at around that time, and during the Vietnam War, an estimated
one million military flights transported troops and supplies from Kadena to
Vietnam. It is now known that toxic chemicals such as Agent Orange that
were stored and transported from Kadena to Vietnam not only caused enor-
mous damage there, but have left areas in Okinawa contaminated today.27 As
we have seen here, the weekend market filmed in Woman of the Butcher Shop,
fragments from which are seen again in Mud Man, was located on Vietnam
Street that runs through the center of the base.28 In 1959, Camp Schwab,
adjacent to Henoko and Oura Bay, was built after local landowners were
pressured to give up their land. As we can see, this trajectory of expanding
land grab by the US is closely connected to the escalation of tensions during
the Cold War era.
Iejima, where many scenes in Mud Man were filmed, is a small island in
the archipelago, off the northwestern coast of the main island. After the US
military landed on the main island on April 1st, 1945, US forces moved north
and 16 days later, landed on Iejima, the site of “Asia’s biggest air base.”29 In
Mud Man, we not only see images of lilies and other crops cultivated today
on Iejima, but also scenes shot in subterranean tunnels that were once used
as nuclear storage facilities constructed by the US in 1953 along with the
expansion of military installations during the Cold War.30 Iejima, where 35%
of the land is still controlled by the US military today, was seen not only as
a strategic location for the execution of US “containment” policy during
the Cold War, but also an apt testing site for low altitude bombing. It has
been reported that over a thousand missiles with nuclear warheads aimed
at the Korean Peninsula were installed and “launch-ready.”31 In Mud Man,
Yamashiro uses film segments and footage from US wartime documentaries,
weaving them into her own alternative, allegorical narrative that is “transna-
tional” and thus de-constructs and de-colonizes existing linear narratives of
Cold War history.
In the period immediately after WWII, tensions and conflicts on the
Korean Peninsula, particularly in the South Cholla region and Jeju Island,
were escalating. Resistance by local organizations of farmers and workers
were violently suppressed, and Jeju island was the site of a violent massacre
in which, 30,000 or more civilians were killed. The tragic events known
as the “4.3 incident” (April 3, 1948) and deeply traumatic experiences of
the Jeju Islanders were left unaddressed for many decades.32 This and other
early “postwar” violent incidents are viewed as a precursor to the Korean
 Performance, memory, and affect 207
War. Limited space does not allow for a more detailed discussion of these
entangled histories, and the many ways in which the US and Japanese gov-
ernments have been complicit in them, but in the context of this volume, it
is important to note that poets, writers, and artists have played, and continue
to play—a vitally important role in bringing about a deeper understanding of
the enmeshed histories of the region 33
In 2018, Yamashiro collaborated with young musicians and perform-
ers to create the live performance work, And I Go Through You... (2018)
presented alongside Mud Man as part of the Kyoto Festival at the Kyoto
Arts Center. The artist’s aim was to return to the question of intergenera-
tional memory and to create a live performance in which participants might
“draw closer to others through the body, through bringing the voice of the
other into the body.”34 Mud Man had been shown in a number of venues
and was attracting more attention internationally. But knowing that many
of the elder survivors she had interviewed ten years earlier were passing
away and that younger generations would never have the opportunity to
hear their testimonies first hand, Yamashiro felt the need to “return to the
source, to the voice” in a live performance space in order to communicate
the testimonies of elder survivors in Okinawa to a younger generation.
She noticed that when speaking of their experiences, survivors often use
“giongo” or sound words to convey their experiences, and so she asked
sound artists—beatbox artist, ShOh; DJ, Shota; and rapper, Tokii—to join
her in the collaboration. At each of three hour-long performances, a small
audience was invited to sit on the floor of the auditorium. Community vol-
unteers worked together with voice percussionist, rapper, and DJ to create
an environment of sound, moving image and live performance linked to
Mud Man.

Conclusion
Yamashiro Chikako has continued to produce powerful performance, video
and film works that help us imagine and understand entangled histories and
present contemporary struggles in Okinawa and the Asian region in new
ways. In the context of this volume, Yamashiro offers “critical views and
new perspectives” and explores issues of identity, environmental destruction,
as well as neoliberal/neo-imperial exploitations of indigenous peoples and
natural resources. The questions raised through her work touch on Okina-
wa’s double-bind in “postwar” Asia as a place that is still “made to exist as
a front line/link to the violence encroaching on the lives of those living in
Asia,” and at the same time “this Okinawa that continues to be an alternative
name for war, has claimed those living in Okinawa itself in its fires of war.”35
Needless to say, complex multimedia works like Mud Man cannot be grasped
in words alone, and must be experienced in a “bodily” way. The artist’s
ongoing explorations of actual and imaginative spaces reveal diverse states of
precarity and continue to open up new possibilities for dialogue and lead to
unexpected ways of “seeing” Okinawa. As Shinjō Ikuo writes,
208 Rebecca Jennison
It is as if Yamashiro’s work is fiercely resisting understanding Okinawa.
I get the sense that while in the process of fleeing Okinawa, at the very
moment of the desertion, there’s a moment when an Okinawa that no
one has been able to notice before materializes, or becomes visible as
something physical.36

Yamashiro’s most recent single-channel video installation, Chinbin West-

ern: Representation of the Family (2019) returns to Henoko and Camp
Schwab and the citizens continuing to engage in non-violent protests against
the construction of the US base at Henoko; the artist draws on the Western
film-genre, also, highlighting the destruction and “desertification” of Okina-
wa’s indigenous natural environment.37 Here, the artist focuses on a narra-
tive of two families living near a mine or quarry where sand and gravel are
being extracted and transported to Henoko by land or sea. As the melodrama
unfolds, we see how the lives of the characters are entangled with the ongoing
issue of construction of the “replacement facility” in Henoko and how the
natural environment is being destroyed by the extraction of sand and gravel
required to make the thousands of pilings being used in Oura Bay. In this
modern day, “Western” (chinbin is a local snack food and a pun on the Ital-
ian “macaroni or spaghetti”) Yamashiro juxtaposes a variety of performative
styles including opera, Okinawan poetry, and traditional drama. Underlying
the work are the ongoing issues surrounding the relocation of Marine Corps
Air Station Futenma to Henoko, but it is clear that such issues—environmen-
tal destruction, militarization, the impact on local cultures and communi-
ties—are not limited to Okinawa. Rather, they are universal problems facing
countless communities around the world. The work leaves the viewer asking
questions not only about the future of Okinawa, but also about that of other
precarious, postcolonial locations in the Asian region and beyond.
As the landscapes and seascapes that are sites for Yamashiro’s works
continue to undergo drastic transformation at the expense of the natural
environment and local communities, Yamashiro continues to record the
layered dynamic, and complex histories embedded within them. Her prac-
tice integrates art, performance, and activism, as it pushes the boundaries
of existing fields and continues to show how both Cold War histories and
present-day struggles are interconnected. At a time when historical reckon-
ing has become the focus of attention in the region and around the world,
Yamashiro’s works constitute a timely interventions and point to new ways in
which contemporary art offers insights into postcolonial histories and strug-
gles. As the editors of this volume rightly state, “the Cold War is nowhere
near over.” Okinawa and the entire East and Southeast Asian regions will no
doubt continue to play a role in this drama. Yamashiro’s works will undoubt-
edly continue to help us make sense of the past, the present, and an Asia,
politics, and art to come.
I am grateful to Hanashiro Ikuko, Kawamura Masami, and Sakamoto
Hiroko for their generous advice and support.
 Performance, memory, and affect 209
Notes
1 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “The Past is not Dead,” in The Past Within Us (New York;
London: Verso, 2005), 2.
2 Brett de Bary, “Afterthoughts, ‘Afterlife’ on the Occasion of Translation” in
Still Hear the Wound, ed. Lee Chonghwa, trans. and eds. Brett de Bary and
Rebecca Jennison (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2015), xxxiii.
3 Morris-Suzuki, “The Past is not Dead,” 22.
4 Morris-Suzuki, “The Past is not Dead,” 118, 122.
5 De Bary, “Afterthoughts, ‘Afterlife’ on the Occasion of Translation,”
xxxii–xxxiii.
6 In Japanese, the title is written with the characters 「土の人」 and read tsuchi
no hito. It might also be translated as “earth people,” and is meant to counter
the racist, derogatory term dojin that has sometimes been used to discriminate
against Okinawan people.
7 Shinjō Ikuo, “The Contours of Sound,” trans. Andrew Harding, Still Hear the
Wound, ed. Lee Chonghwa, trans. and eds. Brett de Bary and Rebecca Jennison
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 4.
8 Shinjō Ikuo, “The Contours of Sound,” 8.
9 See Douglas Lummis, “The Most Dangerous Base in the World,” Asia-Pacific
Journal 16, Issue 14, no. 1 (2018).
10 See Okinawa Prefecture Website, accessed November 19, 2020. https://www.
pref.okinawa.jp/site/chijiko/kichitai/documents/us%20military%20base%20
issues%20in%20okinawa.pdf.
11 See Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson, “Introduction,” in Southern Exposure:
Modern Literature from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2000), 18. Also see Davinder L. Bhomick and Steve Rabson, “Introduction,” in
Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2016).
12 See Kondō Kenichi, “Seeking Okinawa’s Real Face: The World of Yamashiro
Chikako,” Yamashiro Chikako, MAM Project 018 (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum,
2012); Shinjō Ikuo, “ ‘Open Wounds: What Chikako Yamashiro Portrays,’
Interview with Kondō Kenichi,” in Yamashiro Chikako, trans. Pamela Miki
Associates, ed. Naoko Fukuda (Tokyo: Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2012); Ayelet
Zohar, “Camouflage, Photography and [In]visibility: Yamashiro Chikako’s
Chorus of the Melodies series (2010),” accessed, September 20, 2020. https://
quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0003.105/--camouflage-photography-
and-invisibility-yamashiro-chikakos?rgn=main;view=fulltext; Idem., “Beyond
Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed. Wartime Memory, Performativity and
the Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photography and Video Art.” In
Beyond Hiroshima (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2012), 11–2; and Rebecca
Jennison, “Unspeakable Bodies of Memory: Precarity and Performance in
Recent Works by Yamashiro Chikako,” in Bi-Annual Bulletin, no. 44 (2014):
183–200.
13 Yamashiro Chikako, “Tōkereba toi hodo todoku kotō mo aru” (Though far away
they reach us. Interview with Yamashiro Chikako), in Bijutsu Techō (Art
Notebook) no. 1044 (November 2016): 168–175.
14 See Ayelet Zohar, “Camouflage, Photography and [In]visibility: Yamashiro
Chikako’s Chorus of the Melodies series (2010) and Beyond,” accessed September
20,2020.https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0003.105/--camouflage-
photography-and-invisibility-yamashiro-chikakos?rgn=main;view=fulltext.
15 Asanuma Keiko, “Circulating World,” in Circulating World: The Art of Chikako
Yamashiro (Tokyo: Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2016), 103.
16 Asanuma, “Circulating World,” 105.
210 Rebecca Jennison
17 Higashi Takuma, “Mizu no On’na,” in Zanshō no Oto, ed. Lee Chonghwa
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009), 171. Higashi also discusses the films of
Takamine Gō, whose works Yamashiro greatly admires, in “The Angels of
History in Okinawa,” in Still Hear the Wound (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2015), 75.
18 See Kondō Kenichi, “Seeking Okinawa’s Real Face: The World of Yamashiro
Chikako,” in Yamashiro Chikako MAM Project 18 (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum,
2012). As Kondō explains, Yamashiro admires the Thai video artist Apichatpong
Weerasethakul who incorporates amateur actors and interweaves acting and
natural scenes.
19 Suzuki Katsuo, “Conflicting Spaces: Questions from ‘Mokunin’ Places,” in
Circulating Worlds (Tokyo, Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2016),143.
20 Suzuki, “Conflicting Spaces,” 151.
21 Here, the term “minor literature” is used in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari
defined it in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986). Okinawa and Jeju, both
once independent kingdoms, share a history of colonization.
22 Other poems used in the sound track and distributed on a handout include
zainichi Korean poet Gim Shijong’s translations of such works as Jo Myeonghul’s
“A Marvel” and Joeng Ji-yong’s “Homeland.” Found in artist’s statement and
handout from Mud Man.
23 See, Kohara Masashi, “Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud People,” in Kyotographie
International Photography Festival 2017, ed., Sayaka Sameshina (Kyoto:
Kyotographie, 2017), 36–37.
24 Kohara, “Yamashiro Chikako’s Mud People,” 37.
25 See Gavin McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa
Confronts Japan and the United States (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, Inc. 2012), 78.
26 McCormack and Norimatsu, Resistant Islands, 78.
27 See Jon Mitchell, “Agent Orange on Okinawa: Six Years On,” The Asia Pacific
Journal (2017). Also see Jon Mitchell, “Informed-Public Project Seeks
Environmental Justice in Okinawa,” Japan Times, November 19, 2016, accessed
September 20, 2020. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/11/19/
national/informed-public-project-seeks-environmental-justice-okinawa/for
information about environmental justice in Okinawa today.
28 So-named by local people because of the B52’s taking off from Kadena to
Vietnam. Since this writing, the market has been shut down to make room for
new construction on the base. Kadena is also the base where US Forces were
allowed to enter Japan without strict testing for the Covid-19 virus resulting in
a surge of cases in August, 2020.
29 Okinawa-ken heiwa kinen shiryō kan, sōgō an’nai (Okinawa Prefectural Peace
Memorial Museum: General Guide) (Itoman: Okinawa Prefectural Peace
Museum, 2017), 63.
30 NHK Special Documentary, Sukū-pu Dokyumento: Okinawa to kaku (Scoop
document: Okinawa and Nuclear Weapons) NHK Archives, September 10,
2017, accessed November 19, 2020. https://www2.nhk.or.jp/archives/
tv60bin/detail/index.cgi?das_id=D0009050820_00000. See also, Haruna
Miko, Kamen no nichibei domei: Bei gaikō kimitsu bunsho ga akasu shinjitsu
(Behind the mask of the US-Japan Alliance), Bunshun shinsho 1053 (2015).
31 NHK Special Documentary, Scoop document, accessed November 19, 2020.
32 Left-wing, communal areas on Jeju island that sought to remain independent of
control by the new nationalist government under U.S. occupation were brutally
suppressed by police and right-wing youth-group terrorism. See Bruce Cumings,
“The Cheju Insurgency” in The Korean War: A History (New York: The Modern
Library, 2011), 121–31.
 Performance, memory, and affect 211
33 See also Jane Jin Kaisen, Dissident Translations (Denmark: Arhus Kunstbygning,
2011).
34 Yamashiro Chikako, “Artist’s Statement,” And I Go Through You . . . (2018).
35 Shinjō Ikuo, “Contours of Sound–A Place Connecting the Music of Takahashi
Yūji and the Performances of Ito Tari,” Still Hear the Wound, trans. by Andrew
Harding (Ithaca: Cornell East Asian Series, 2015), 6.
36 Shinjō Ikuo, “Open Wounds: What Chikako Yamashiro Portrays,” Interview
with Kondo Kenichi, ed. Naoko Fukuda, trans. Pamela Miki Associates (Tokyo:
Yumiko Chiba Associates, 2012), 70.
37 See Naoki Yoneda, “Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art” in Hanashiteiru
no wa dare / Image Narratives: Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art)
(Tokyo: The National Art Center, 2019), 34.
13 Undoing Cold War temporality
Transnational adoption in Agnès
Dherbeys’s Omone and Retired
Jung Joon Lee

The Korean War was a defining event in the early stages of the Cold War,
resulting in the nation’s partition and seemingly intractable state of war. Of
the continuing ramifications of the conflict, one of the most insidious has
been the transnational adoption of Korean children and its legacy. Although
there had been European and Japanese precedents, it was the Korean War
that brought widespread awareness of transnational, and interracial, adop-
tion to the Euro-American public.
The rise of transnational adoption from South Korea to the West, particu-
larly to the United States and western and northern European countries,
was, in fact, initiated when the UN troops in South Korea began “adopting”
war orphans from the streets to live at their base camps; some became “mas-
cots” of the camps, others what they called “houseboys.” Soon, American
servicemen, usually with their spouses or occasionally as bachelors, began
adopting Korean children. After the United States’ two-per-family interna-
tional adoption limit was annulled in 1955—so that Harry and Bertha Holt
could adopt eight Korean war orphans—mass Western adoption of Korean
children commenced. The Holt Orphanage (now Holt International), which
the Holts established in 1962 in South Korea, was a clearinghouse where
mixed-race orphans awaited adoption, mostly by Americans.
Although the physical specter of the Cold War is widely treated as obsolete
in the West, it continues in the Asia-Pacific region. Indeed, the first major
battle remains open, as North and South Korea have yet to sign a peace
treaty. This continued state of war has placed various concepts and experi-
ences of temporality in the Asia-Pacific on the homogenizing plane of trans-
national militarism, flattening Cold War ramifications into a series of causes
and effects that have defined postwar national sovereignty and extra-national
influences. Within the framework of the Cold War dominated by transna-
tional militarism, the varying experiences of decolonization, American occu-
pation, and militarization are charted according to a homogenizing time.
According to Bliss Cua Lim,

Modern time is thus projected in every direction to include even what

exists outside of or prior to its minting as a concept, entertaining an ‘ideal
of objectivity,’ a belief that its conception of history is the ‘overarching
 Undoing Cold War temporality 213
language,’ the universal narrative to which all specific instances can be
subsumed.1

The Cold War is defined from the standpoint of this modern time, a force
that homogenizes temporality—which I refer to here as homotemporality—
even though its “national contexts” (of different times) are provided as a
distinguishing backdrop. The homotemporal desire to collapse the multiple
experiences of the Cold War works to consolidate the histories of the Cold
War under the history. The disciplining “guidelines” of homotemporality are
passed on to produce an epistemology of homogenizing time.
Likewise, where an artwork historicized by “nationhood” embodies tem-
poral fissures, modernity as episteme can collapse all times into a homog-
enizing time. While it could fall under the force of a homogenizing time,
a photograph, for example, can nevertheless complicate an experience of
temporality: The moment a photograph is viewed is also the moment that
the captured event is re-presented and thus cognitively experienced by the
viewer. As such, the representation of the past event is recognized in the
current moment—which results in a multitemporal, usually transtemporal,
experience of the image, often without the viewer recognizing (to say noth-
ing of acknowledging) this multitemporality.
In recent years, artists and scholars have critically reexamined and chal-
lenged homotemporality and encouraged others to scrutinize how it insists
on a stagnant designation of adoptee identity. This chapter examines the
ways that two photography series by the French photographer and Korean
adoptee Agnès Dherbeys disrupt the temporality of the Cold War. Eschewing
the expected visual rhetoric of transnational adoption based on the narrative
drama of abandonment, benevolence, success, and return, Dherbeys juxta-
poses the sending and receiving ends of the adoption narrative. While both the
state and adoption studies typically visualize transnational adoption through
the figure of adoptee, Dherbeys redirects the focus to other long-neglected
subjects of transnational adoption: birth parent(s) and adoptive parent(s).
Dherbeys’s photography projects Omone (2013) and Retired (2013–2015)
present, respectively, several Korean birth parents—largely birth mothers—
and the stories they told Dherbeys of giving up their children for adoption,
and her adoptive father in France. Together, Omone and Retired compli-
cate the stereotypical reading of adoption imagery, and thus identification
of the adoptee subject in the photograph, a learned practice of the positivist
“knowing” of a subject supposed in the mimetic reading of photography.
Both projects expose the specter of the Cold War in imperial liberalism,
underpinning the politics of race and gender in transnational identities.2 Fur-
thermore, they transcend the favored documentary approach and reception
of photography, particularly in adoption-related studies. Acknowledging the
work of other adoptee artists and scholars, as well as pioneers in the field of
adoption studies and beyond, this chapter offers a holistic understanding of
the purpose and impact of Dherbeys’s works as a critical part of the Cold War
image culture, which this volume is committed to investigating.3
214 Jung Joon Lee
#K76_3613: Omone
In the winter of 2016–2017, the Museum of Photography, Seoul (MoP),
held an exhibition, 아녜스 데르비Agnès Dherbeys #K76_3613, consisting of
Dherbeys’s two photography series, Omone and Retired. It was the result of
the museum’s year-long effort to introduce selected French photographers
in collaboration with various French institutions in celebration of “2015–
2016 Korea France Year.” As visitors proceed through Omone and Retired,
the exhibition frontispiece, like the brochure, shows a twin-lens reflex cam-
era and an old manila folder, labeled “#K76-3613,” the cryptic code of the
exhibition title; a large handwritten Korean name and date of birth, “Song
Dong Hee 12-17-76 (KF)”; along with two small black-and-white photo-
graphs of an infant. The baby in the photographs is the artist, Agnès Dher-
beys, who, after spending three months at Paekhap Orphanage in South
Korea, was adopted by a French couple at the age of five months and fifteen
days (Figure 13.1).
Dherbeys is one of the 167,353 South Korean children who had been
adopted transnationally as of 2018.4 South Korea was long the top sending
country of transnational adoptees, before the dramatic drop in transnational
adoption of Korean children from the mid-1990s on. Dherbeys first visited
South Korea in 2011 and returned in 2013 with a grant for a project to
meet, collect oral histories from, and photograph birth parents.5 In initial
meetings with members of adoption-related organizations to scout possi-
ble subjects and locations, things unfolded rather unexpectedly. Dherbeys

Figure 13.1 Agnès Dherbeys, #K76-3613, 2013. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. ©
Agnès Dherbeys.
 Undoing Cold War temporality 215
was contacted by Sister Theresa, a nun who cared for children at Paekhap
Orphanage. Through her, Dherbeys was soon connected with the elderly
residents of Kŏnch’ŏn, the town of her birth, and introduced to a woman
who seemed likely to be her birth mother.6 As it turned out, they were not
related, as revealed by DNA test—and, with a certain sense of guilt, Dher-
beys found herself relieved.
Following this bittersweet episode, Dherbeys continued on her journey
to meet with other birth mothers (and occasionally birth fathers), who most
likely went through similar experiences as her birth mother would have. As
Dherbeys does not speak or read Korean, she was accompanied by a Korean
photographer, who interpreted for them. The result of these meetings, which
took place across South Korea, was Omone (2013). The name comes from
the Korean word for “mother” (ŏmŏni). The series consists of short testimo-
nies and photographs of Korean birth parents, mostly birth mothers, who—
in most cases against their will—sent their children to adoption agencies.
For Omone, Dherbeys works in a photojournalistic manner, taking pho-
tographs where the subjects appear engaged in candid moments rather than
posed for portraits. In the exhibition and articles that introduce her work,
each photograph is shown alongside her words in English and translated into
Korean; the practice of oral history is a critical aspect of Omone. The text
discusses the photograph and presents oral histories narrated by the birth

Figure 13.2 Agnès Dherbeys, “Ms. Yang Hay Suk with her daughter, Laure, and her
boyfriend, Romain,” from Omone, 2013. C-print. Courtesy of the artist.
© Agnès Dherbeys.
216 Jung Joon Lee
parents—stories of their experiences in giving up their children for adoption.
Dherbeys also contributes her first-person voice to the narrative, incorpo-
rating her experience—as an artist, researcher, journalist, and adoptee—of
meeting birth mothers. Her voice yields a profound sense of intimacy for the
viewer, which proves critical to the different ways that Dherbeys represents
birth mothers, challenging the stereotypical picture of tormented women
regretting the loss of their children (Figure 13.2).
One photograph shows a birth mother as she gazes at her visiting daugh-
ter. The daughter, in the foreground, is out of focus (Dherbeys and her
translator are also present, outside the frame). The birth mother, Ms. Yang
Hay Suk, appears in a domestic environment featuring everyday fixtures—
the refrigerator adorned with magnets and photos, plates, and glasses on
the table. Despite the intensity expected in the meeting of the birth mother
and her daughter, the photograph yields a sense of tranquility—no dra-
matic reunion, nor a refusal to interact, just subtle signs of confusion on Ms.
Yang’s face, as she is probably having difficulty understanding the conver-
sation between her daughter and her boyfriend, who has accompanied her.
Another photograph depicts two pairs of hands as the mother and daughter
seek similarities between their hands (Figure 13.3).
The sense of placidity surrounding these subjects intensifies the frustrat-
ingly consistent story of misogyny undergirding the adoption narratives. For

Figure 13.3 Agnès Dherbeys, “Ms. Yang Hay Suk and Laure’s hands,” from Omone,
2013. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys.
 Undoing Cold War temporality 217
example, several testimonies in Omone include painful backstories in which
birth fathers, and often these men’s mothers, push birth mothers to put their
daughters up for adoption—in some cases going as far as to kidnap them—
specifically in order to reserve resources for prospective sons. A diptych (as
installed in the exhibition) shows a crying birth mother, Ms. Lee Suk Yun,
and several snapshot photographs of her holding her infant daughter on a
table. In the accompanying text, Lee tells the story of losing her child:

My husband was not a good husband. I got divorced. I was very poor
and at the time, it was mainly the fathers who take care of the child. He
put [sic] her for adoption without asking me first, and with no help from
adoption agencies. Maybe he sold her. I have no idea at all how to find
her (Figures 13.4 and 13.5).7

In another text, Ms. Shin Kyung Hee speaks of her abusive husband who
took her daughter to France for adoption:

My husband used to beat me up. While I was in hospital (because I broke

my pelvis while trying to escape his violence), he and his new girlfriend

Figure 13.4 Agnès Dherbeys, “Ms. Lee Suk Yun,” from Omone, 2013. C-print.
Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys.
218 Jung Joon Lee

Figure 13.5 Agnès Dherbeys, Snapshots of “Ms. Lee Suk Yun’s daughter,” from
Omone, 2013. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys.

took my child and put her up for adoption. I have never forgotten her
and I can’t stand not knowing what my little daughter has become.8

Dherbeys states in the descriptions that a number of the birth parents have
sought their children without success. They can only hope for their adopted
children to find them. Nonetheless, not everyone has the same experience
and, compared with other imagery involving adoption narratives, Omone
is striking for its subtlety in the telling of individual stories. This allows for
images of birth mothers who were pressured into giving up their children to
be juxtaposed with the rare image of both birth parents present. They stand
in an orchard where they work, accompanied by their narration of the cir-
cumstances that led to their daughter’s adoption. The presence of the birth
father—to say nothing of his continued relationship with the birth mother—
is a rare case of men taking on responsibility for their child’s transnational
adoption (Figure 13.6).
While the efforts of transnational adoptee communities to write their histo-
ries, and of adoption studies scholars to establish this branch of the field, have
been especially impressive over the last two decades, birth parents are rarely
their focus. Dherbeys has repeatedly mentioned great difficulties in finding
preexisting work on birth mothers, whether artistic, scholarly, or journalistic.9
Dubbed “socially and legally dead” by the adoption studies scholar Hosu
Kim,10 birth mothers have been silenced by the collective shaming of unwed
mothers and the resulting lack of support systems for single parenting. This
 Undoing Cold War temporality 219

Figure 13.6 Agnès Dherbeys, “Ms. Park Woo Sik and Mr. Lee Sun Hwa in their
farm in Nonsan,” from Omone, 2013. C-print. Courtesy of the artist.
© Agnès Dherbeys.

legal erasure has at the same time supported the systemization of transna-
tional adoption: “The birth mothers’ legal erasure is a critical step for the
child to be considered adoptable by prospective adoptive parents[.]”11
The lack of studies and interest in birth mothers is itself telling of the breadth
of Cold War anti-communist ideology in South Korea, interwoven with the
patriarchal nation-building efforts in the wake of the Korean War. The mas-
culinist nationalism, particularly tied to military governance and everyday mil-
itarism, also contributed to the conditions of Cold War norms, including the
imagining of the kukka (the nation-state) not as a political entity of govern-
ance but a patriarch who protects, nurtures, and punishes his subjects.
Persuading or coercing birth mothers to “surrender” their children for
adoption is related to the military regime’s reformation of the family as the
most basic unit of a national community striving for global-capitalist eco-
nomic advancement. For the regime’s multi-phase development plans, the
family needed to become compact and easily relocatable. Major family plan-
ning campaigns were launched, encouraging each household to limit their
children to two, and even one, in the 1970s and ’80s.12 The biopolitics of the
family, including the practice of transnational adoption, hence, is irreduci-
bly aligned with the geo- and cultural politics of the Cold War. Hosu Kim
argues, “By surrendering a child born out of wedlock, or into dire poverty,
[birth parents] participated in a national security policy that linked the idea
of a self-reliant family with the nation’s economic development.”13
220 Jung Joon Lee
In the period of “strengthening” South Korea in the face of North Korean
communist threats, the 20th century nuclear family was established as the
ideal foundation for the militarized, developmentalist agenda of the Park
Chung Hee regime (1963–1979). At the same time, the state established
and systematized the operation of special districts in camptowns to provide
“services,” following the system of “comfort stations” established during
the Japanese colonial period, for the United States Forces Korea (USFK)
deployed across the Peninsula.14 Not coincidentally, their work was a lucra-
tive, if informal, source of millions of US dollars for the military regime.
Nonetheless, they were scorned by their fellow Koreans for both their
work and for having given birth out of wedlock. Their mixed-race children
often experienced severe racism in addition to the social stigma linked to
their mothers. The collective negligence and social ostracization of birth
mothers, and later pity and sympathy, was combined with a general accept-
ance and scant criticism of birth fathers abandoning their children and part-
ners. This history of the collective discrimination of unwed mothers, and
mothers bearing daughters (sons being the socially preferred outcome) and/
or mixed-race children with GIs, was both a major contributor to the prac-
tice of transnational adoption and remains one of the reasons behind the lack
of scholarly and creative interest in birth parents.
Likewise, creative works involving birth mothers were scarce during the
early days of the phenomenon. An exception is a photograph of a Korean
woman and (most likely) her mixed-race child.15 The image was part of
Joo Myung Duk’s 1965 exhibition in Seoul, Sŏkkyŏjin irŭmdŭl (The Mixed
Names), which portrayed children of Korean women and USFK servicemen
and contractors. I have not encountered any other images of birth mothers
that were publicly on view during the military regime (Figure 13.7).
Instead, commemorative self-victimization through images of war orphans
became the common approach to numerous memorial events of the Korean
War. Through these collective rituals, the faces of Korean war orphans came
to symbolize the nation itself. And in the annual ritual of symbolization,
South Koreans are supposed to identify themselves with the war orphans.16
In this process of identification, the viewer already understands that the pho-
tographed orphans persevered and overcame devastation, both personal and
national, following the war: the rapid development of national economy
during the military regime, dubbed “the miracle of the Han River” in the
1980s, and the hosting of the Asian Games in 1986 and the Summer Olym-
pic Games in 1988, coinciding with the democratization movements, estab-
lish the national narrative as a neoliberal, global democratic success story.
While neoliberalism has been viewed by nationalists as a global-capitalist force
endangering the “independence” of South Korea’s free market, the irrevers-
ible impact of deregulation and privatization is also due to market-oriented
political practices, whereby the state and powerful family-owned conglomer-
ates, i.e., chaebŏl, strive to “advance” the nation. Repeated, almost obsessive,
recognition of national achievement continues in the collective pursuit of
equal status with other sŏnjin’guk—advanced, leading nations.17
 Undoing Cold War temporality 221

Figure 13.7 Joo Myung Duk, from Sŏkkyŏjin irŭmdŭl (The Mixed Names), 1965.
Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist. © Joo Myung Duk.

Remembrance of the traumatic experience of the Korean War through war

orphan photographs makes multiple contributions to the nationalist-mascu-
linist narratives of nation-building. Another is the acceptance of the violence
inherent in “modernizing the family” toward economic advancement—and
as a consequence, the forgetting of injustice toward and collective negligence
of marginalized birth mothers and children, as their stories and sufferings
are folded within the collective experience of the Cold War as national trag-
edy: a tragedy to be overcome with capitalist—thus anti-communist, i.e.,
anti-North—advancement.
The media has consistently portrayed birth mothers’ lives and stories
through this rhetoric of national trauma and collective victimhood in a man-
ner that ends up, once again, erasing their voices. In the grand narrative
of national tragedy vis-à-vis the Cold War, transnational adoption has been
represented in the South Korean media as a journey of the adoptee depart-
ing the country as an infant, growing up in the adoptive country (a country
recognized as “advanced”), and returning in search of their birth mothers;
reunion is its climatic closure. As a number of adoption studies scholars have
noted, TV programs such as morning talk shows regularly broadcast the first
meetings of adoptees and their birth mothers.18 The stories tend to end in
tears, either through successfully reuniting with their “foreign” children or
the publicly aired failure to find them.
Dherbeys’s oral histories—and their intertextual workings with the
images—pose a stark contrast to this standard, eschewing such melodramatic
turns in both the photographs and the narrative texts. Where literary or visual
222 Jung Joon Lee
ruptures, e.g., climatic reunions, typically produce the accepted adoptee narra-
tive, Dherbeys focuses instead on the birth parents’ sense of loss. Through the
absence of the adoptees—including Dherbeys herself—from her photographs,
the stories of the birth parents in Omone convey deep grief, suppressed and
carried throughout the birth parents’ lives since the adoption, both for the
loss of their children and the ensuing sense of loss that pervades their lives.
As such, although absent from the photographs, the subjectivity conjured by
Omone is that of the adoptee. Their absence permeates the work, reproducing
the affect of the birth mothers’ inability to mourn or celebrate the sending
off of their children for adoption.19 While the affect of loss is profound, the
photographs remain calm, belying the narrative that the viewer may be uncon-
sciously expecting, thereby denying the viewer the self-identifying catharsis of
melodramatic expressiveness. By instead representing non-climactic encoun-
ters between birthparents and Dherbeys, the photographs refuse to reproduce
the nationalist, triumphal narrative of suffering-sacrificing-overcoming, which
treats individuals as merely gears in the clockworks of progress.
The simultaneously familial and national (pan-familial) loss that takes place
through the experience of transnational adoption is rarely examined in the con-
text of either the trans-Pacific theater of World War II or the Cold War. Situat-
ing the practice of transnational adoption and its representation in the context
of the continuing Cold War in the Asia-Pacific, it is critical to examine how such
loss is part of what Jinah Kim calls postcolonial grief. Especially within the con-
text of Asian diasporic subjectivity, the specter of World War II lingers in various
forms, because “the notion of letting go of the attachment to grief… resolved
through a new attachment to a proper replacement” is made impossible, “as
some losses cannot ever be replaced, but rather are erased or lived as loss.”20
For Korean birth parents and adoptees, the Cold War entails the most pro-
found loss: for parents, of their children; for adoptees, according to Kim Park
Nelson, “alienation from others and their birth race [...].” 21 At the same time,
the public representations of this loss are primarily propagandistic celebrations
of successful recovery: tearful reunions of birth parents and adoptees, occasion-
ally followed by heavily scripted and edited “oohs and ahhs” from adoptees
“impressed” with their (now equally “advanced”) motherland.22 Indeed, these
contrived spectacles are presented as a pan-Korean or “global Korean” event,
bypassing the reality of the personal tragedies behind them.
The revamping of the nation as transnational—and, now, as encompassing
a diaspora—is crucial to the process of simplifying and isolating the practice
of transnational adoption in the history of the Cold War, itself the next step
in global advancement. When transnational adoption is valorized as “the
gift of freedom,” the feelings of loss and grief on the part of both birth par-
ents and adoptees are treated as a symptom of the Cold War condition, an
unfortunate but unavoidable norm.23 For the postcolonial/postwar nation-
states of the Asia-Pacific region, the end of WWII also meant the start (or
continuation) of US occupation, and thence to alliances and/or military
conflicts with the United States: the Cold War. The Cold War is thus read
as a historical chapter, progressing linearly from a starting point through
 Undoing Cold War temporality 223
conflict and culmination, and achieving closure through events such as trea-
ties, reparations, and capital aid/investments. This Cold War temporality,
however, ignores the multitemporal (and in this case transnational) experi-
ences of its participants, and the continued state of transnational militarism
in the Asia-Pacific and beyond.
To Jinah Kim, this complex reality of the Asia-Pacific arena is a “palimp-
sest” of the history between the United States and the Asia-Pacific. Accord-
ing to Kim, it

challenges a neoliberal temporality that fetishizes closure and linear pro-

gress, thus seeking to force a refusal to see how the past, present, and
future exist simultaneously. But that simultaneity is impossible to ignore
when thinking of how past wars and the violence of colonialism shape
the postcolonial present.24

Anachronistically Bergsonian or not, there is a critical point to take from Kim’s

argument. The first step of probing the Cold War temporality is, then, to
unlearn its teleology: its lineal progression of developments and fallouts that
perpetuate the South Korean state’s positioning of itself as a victim, a position-
ality on which the state has depended for its transnational adoption practice
and in their current “efforts” for reparation. Rather than treat transnational
adoption simply as a symptom of the Cold War and an inevitable consequence
of militarism, its foundation and the current official reaction—what has
allowed the continued practice and ostracization of birth mothers and, at the
same time, the ethnonationalistic repatriation of adoptees, whether they them-
selves desire or not—need to be scrutinized in consideration with individuals’
differing experiences, including the multitemporality of adoption experiences.
The stories that Dherbeys presents and represents in her narrative texts and
photographs conjure the multitemporality and spatiality of the Cold War as
experienced daily by birth parents and adoptees. Their stories disinter the
history of transnational adoption since the Korean War and the patriarchal
nation-building processes that resulted in female infanticides and ongoing
transnational adoption. And their different kinds of loss are perhaps irreconcila-
ble, if we focus on the ways in which transnational adoption is merely the fallout
of the Cold War—a repetition of a positivist approach to its history summated
in binaries, particularly as in cause and effect; senders vs. receivers; and global
superpowers vs. Third World victims. Yet the subject formation of the adoptee
in the Korean transnational adoption narrative does not occur in Dherbeys’s
work, since her subject is not herself, or other transnational adoptees, but birth
parents in South Korea. The adoptees remain outside of the photography—
extra-photographic—and can only be imagined, as most of the birth parents
themselves have no idea where their adopted children live or what they do.
Also striking is the narrative’s first-person voice. Dherbeys herself is an
adoptee who has experienced emotionally overwhelming encounters and
feels highly uncertain about her search for her birth mother.25 As she openly
admits that she was not ready to move forward quite so speedily as the
224 Jung Joon Lee
townspeople, who thought they knew her mother, the expected documen-
tary mode in the reading of Dherbeys’s photographs thus becomes some-
thing more intimate. Omone and Retired, Dherbeys has said, were turning
points in her photography practice that “allowed her to reinvent herself as
a photographer.” 26 This candidness and artistry allows the images and texts
of Omone to blur the distinctions between the “genres” of photojournalism,
ethnography, documentary, and art photography.

The multitemporality and multispatiality of transnational

adoption: Retired
The second half of Dherbeys’s exhibition, Retired, creates an equally power-
ful rupture in the rhetoric of transnational adoption and the temporality of
the Cold War. The affect of intimacy remains constant despite the complete
change of subject and location: an aging white man, Mr. Robert Dherbeys,
Dherbeys’s adoptive father; and the small southwest French city, Romans-
sur-Isère, where he was born and she grew up. 27 Retired was conceived and
executed in 2013–2015, upon Dherbeys’s return from South Korea. Dher-
beys moved back in with her father for about three months to do the initial
shooting, returning later to photograph him several times more (Figures
13.8 and 13.9).28

Figure 13.8 Agnès Dherbeys, “After three generations, December 2014, Romans,
FR,” from Retired. 2013–2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. ©
Agnès Dherbeys.
 Undoing Cold War temporality 225

Figure 13.9 Agnès Dherbeys, “Last day, March 2014, Romans, FR,” from Retired.
2013–2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys.

Romans, with 34,095 residents, appears indistinctive and rather desolate

during the daytime.29 Dherbeys includes photographs of streets and build-
ings that she left behind at age 17 to embark on her studies. One shows an
empty storefront with blue signage reading “J. Dherbeys.” In the next, Mr.
Dherbeys stands in a vacant store with a few shelving fixtures intact. Titled
“After Three Generations” and “Last Day,” these images allow viewers to
deduce that the Dherbeys’ three generations of family business have come
to a close due to the city’s ailing economy as well as the family’s lack of
offspring interested in continuing the business (Figures 13.10 and 13.11).
Photographs show Mr. Dherbeys grocery shopping in a supermarket alone,
standing beside but not making eye contact with his new companion, and
looking out the window of his apartment, the same unit in which Dherbeys
grew up. The richness of soft yet clear details in the apartment interior, and
the closeups of Mr. Dherbeys’ aging features, produce an intense intimacy.
Another photograph shows Mr. Dherbeys holding his granddaughter—
Dherbeys’ daughter. As in all of the photographs of Mr. Dherbeys, there
is no notable expression of affection as he holds the baby. Unlike the other
photographs, however, he is making eye contact with another person, as if
engaging in a kind of conversation. This is particularly notable as he rarely
faces Dherbeys or seems to communicate with her as she takes the photo-
graphs. Most of the images seem to be filled with awkward silences and the
trials of living together again after many years (Figure 13.12).
226 Jung Joon Lee

Figure 13.10 Agnès Dherbeys, “Daily grocery shopping, December 2014, Romans,
FR,” from Retired. 2013–2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. ©
Agnès Dherbeys.

Figure 13.11 Agnès Dherbeys, “Robert Dherbeys, March 2015, Romans, FR,” from
Retired. 2013–2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys.

In showing her retired, unexpressive, adoptive father who struggles with

insomnia and feelings of emptiness,30 Dherbeys does much more than capture
an aging man in retirement or document uneventful days in an uneventful
 Undoing Cold War temporality 227

Figure 13.12 Agnès Dherbeys, “Vercors, September 2014, FR,” from Retired.
2013–2015. C-print. Courtesy of the artist. © Agnès Dherbeys.

town.31 The photographs convey the sensation of a quiet yet revealing reun-
ion between father and daughter—which is particularly striking given the
absence in Omone of socially conditioned reunion scenes, and the environ-
ment in which the exhibition was held, in South Korea and for mostly South
Korean viewers.
To the South Korean viewer, transnational adoption—in this case represented
by birth and/or adoptive parents—is the embarrassing result of (past) poverty
and ignorance. As national development and enlightenment continues in the
shadow of the militarized past and present, the state seeks to curtail criticism
on transnational adoption by perpetuating the public rhetoric of victimhood:
a story of children abandoned due to war and poverty, and the ignorance and
low morale of birth parents. In the process of remembering the Korean War and
the struggle for postwar recovery through the imagery of orphans, the affect of
shame in sending children for adoption to “advanced nations” transforms into
acceptance and hope. In the “tradition” of constant development and progress as
a nation, the viewer sees that the advancement of the country remains the most
critical aim, and that the history of transnational adoption was deeply unfor-
tunate but ultimately inevitable (especially since most returnees are adults and
presented as belonging to both their adoptive and birth countries). This narra-
tive presents the ongoing, if greatly lessened, practice of transnational adoption
as terminable only through even more economic and cultural advancement, as
befitting a neoliberal temporality, a temporality of unrestricted growth based on
the conception of a free market that can erase everything else in its path. Indeed,
this self-legitimization continues to allow the adoption agencies—and the state
that promoted their growth—to do their work without public scrutiny.32
228 Jung Joon Lee
The small French city of Romans and the small towns that Dherbeys
visited in South Korea to meet the subjects of Omone provide pairings
and similarities that reinforce the multispatiality of transnational adop-
tion. Despite the viewer’s unfamiliarity with these places, the towns’
declining economies and aging populations can be inferred. The adop-
tive parents get older as the birthparents get older. Mr. Dherbeys’s days
appear empty, like the family store that he is about to exit for the last
time. Although the number of residents slowly increased over the years,
many young people, like Dherbeys, have gone elsewhere in search of
opportunities. The closure of the Dherbeys’ family business is related to
both the adoptive daughter’s departure and her “not so close” relation-
ship with her father, which she describes as “distant and filled with misun-
derstanding.”33 Dherbeys, the photographer, is also grappling with these
places rapidly becoming more and more irrelevant on the “advanced”
global stage, where France once reigned and to which the South Korean
state aspires. In this way, Retired ties in with Omone as part of the larger
context of neoliberal temporality.
As such, although Dherbeys’s two series bring to mind points of com-
parison between South Korea and France, they do not create the expected
binary between the distinct worlds of her birth and her upbringing. This is
crucial, given the ways in which transnational adoptee identity is typically
represented. Nelson finds that the field of transnational adoption studies has
traditionally forced adoptees to subjectivize themselves between their native
and adopted homes.34 In this process of subjectivization, what is made visi-
ble is not the postcolonial geopolitics that seeps through the global state of
imperialist capitalism or the face of the receiving countries but the subjectiv-
ity of successfully grown adoptees returning to their “roots”—or tormented
adoptees to be, belatedly, nurtured by their birth country.
The feeling of loss prevalent throughout Omone is thus sustained, differ-
ently yet equally intensely, in Retired. In Dherbeys’s photographs, the sense
of personal loss expands and permeates the town’s landscape as well, and
further: across France, across middle-class Europeans, where the declining
European bourgeoisie feel they are a victim of “other,” relatively younger,
capitalisms on the other side of the globe.
***
While recent exhibitions featuring Dherbeys and other adoptee artists are
valuable recognitions of their individual works, it is also noteworthy acknowl-
edgement of the adoptee diaspora as a critical aspect of Korea’s modern
history.35 Like many other histories of marginalized communities that do
not represent the officially sanctioned national history, this recognition did
not take place overnight. It is a product of decades-long creative endeavors,
especially of adoptee artists, their collective activism, and scholarly activi-
ties that have made adoption studies in the trans-Pacific context a critical
field within humanistic studies. Despite the potential for Dherbeys herself—a
globally successful photographer who has garnered prestigious awards and
solo shows—to be treated as a representation of adoptee success, her work
 Undoing Cold War temporality 229
defies the narrative of transformative subjectivization of an adoptee in the
Western world. She thereby offers a new way to envision the multiple tem-
poralities of transnational adoption and, ultimately, the Cold War.

Notes
1 Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 18.
2 Imperial liberalism has allowed the affect of benevolence and care regarding
international/interracial adoption to create massive systems enshrining the
practice. While the act of international adoption began as liberal democracy’s
righteous extension of generosity to Third World children, it is intrinsically
entangled in the imperialist power struggles that shaped much of the geopolitics
of the Cold War in Asia and the Pacific.
3 The list of adoptee artists and scholars is long and varied. The Copenhagen-
based artist Jane Jin Kaisen was one of the three artists shown at the Korea
Pavilion in the 2019 Venice Biennale; Tobias Hübinette, based in Karlstad and
Stockholm, has published numerous works in adoption and cultural studies,
including Comforting an Orphan Nation: Representations of International
Adoption and Adopted Koreans in Korean Popular Culture (2006); Kim Park
Nelson, a Minnesota-based scholar, has published a monograph titled Invisible
Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial
Exceptionalism (2016); the Berkeley-based producer, director, and writer Deann
Borshay Liem has directed and produced award-winning films, including First
Person Plural (2000), In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2010), and Geographies of
Kinship—The Korean Adoption Story (2019).
4 Unyŏngjiwŏnkwa, “Kuknaewoe Ipyanghyŏnhwang,” The Ministry of Health
and Welfare, June 25, 2019, http://www.mohw.go.kr/react/gm/sgm0601vw.
jsp?PAR_MENU_ID=13&MENU_ID=13040201&page=2&CONT_
SEQ=342151.
5 Dherbeys was based in Thailand from 2005 to 2011 and was awarded the
Overseas Press Club of America’s Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2010 for her
work in Thailand.
6 Agnès Dherbeys, Omone, 2013, Color photographs and text, 2013.
7 Agnès Dherbeys, Omone, 2013. Reprinted with permission of the artist.
8 Agnès Dherbeys, Omone, 2013. Reprinted with permission of the artist.
9 Agnès Dherbeys, “A Personal Look at South Korea’s Long History of
Adoptions,” MSNBC, February 12, 2015, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/
personal-look-south-koreas-long-history-adoptions. The few exceptions include
the work of Dherbeys and Hosu Kim, whose monograph on what she calls vir-
tual mothering is, as she states, “the first academic work to focus on birth moth-
ers, who have relinquished babies to transnational adoption[.]” See Hosu Kim,
Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual
Mothering (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3.
10 Dherbeys, “A Personal Look at South Korea’s Long History of Adoptions,” 14.
11 Dherbeys, “A Personal Look at South Korea’s Long History of Adoptions,” 8.
12 For discussions on photographic representations of the family in family planning
campaigns, see Jung Joon Lee, “Envisioning Modernity, Practicing Desire:
Baby and Family Photographic Portraiture in Korea,” History of Photography
37, no. 3 (August 2013): 323–24. The campaigns extended to the sterilization
of women with disabilities.
13 Hosu Kim, Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea:
Virtual Mothering (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 38. Kim continues
on the systemic exploitations of birth mothers: “The birth mothers’ accounts
230 Jung Joon Lee
describe, a prevalence of domestic violence, spousal neglect, and economic hard-
ship, fraught with interpersonal gendered violence, and multiple exploitations.
Furthermore, the birth mother’s separation from the child is fraught with insti-
tutionalized gendered violence, such as the economic marginalization of women;
the absence of legal recognition for single motherhood; the lack of custody
rights for divorcees; and the unavailability of public relief for battered women.
Their life stories poignantly convey the concrete effects of gendered violence at
both the interpersonal and institutional levels, illustrating how a family crisis can
escalate into a family’s disintegration, due to a dearth of public provisions.”
14 See, for example, Naoki Sakai, “On Romantic Love and Military Violence:
Transpacific Imperialism and U.S.-Japan Complicity,” in Militarized Currents:
Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 205–21.
15 In the 1990s, the series was published as a photography book in South Korea,
gaining much attention for the photographs, as well as the topic of mixed-race
orphans at Holt Orphanage (Holt International). See Myung Duck Joo, The
Mixednames: Photographs by Joo, Myungduck (Seoul: Shigak, 1998).
16 For an examination of the ways in which the Korean War has been commemo-
rated with photography, see Jung Joon Lee, “No End to the Image War:
Photography and the Contentious Memories of the Korean War,” The Journal
of Korean Studies 18, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 337–70.
17 The United States and Scandinavian countries are often compared as such.
18 Hosu Kim, “Television Mothers: Birth Mothers Lost and Found in the Search
and Reunion Narrative,” in Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice
in South Korea: Virtual Mothering (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016),
115–43.
19 While the feelings of loss and grief discussed here mainly concern those of the
birth parents, I am also referring to the loss and grief of adoptees in absence.
Kim Park Nelson discusses transnational adoptees’ “profound sense of isola-
tion,” including “alienation from others and their birth race… Other adoptees
described feelings of loss and grief about their birth culture.” See Kim Park
Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American
Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism (New Brunswick: NJ, 2016), 84.
20 Jinah Kim, Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 9.
21 While the feelings of loss and grief represented here mainly concern those of the
birth parents, I am also referring to the loss and grief of adoptees in absence.
Nelson discusses transnational adoptees’ “profound sense of isolation.” See
Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American
Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism, 84.
22 Dherbeys described her experience of appearing on a program about returnees
on Arirang TV, an English-speaking Korean cable TV channel mainly targeted
toward an international and diasporic viewership. Agnès Dherbeys, FaceTime
interview with the author, January 11, 2020.
23 Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012).
24 Kim, Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas, 8–9.
25 In a conversation with the author, Dherbeys expressed that she was never eager
to look for her birth parents, nor felt comfortable identifying herself with other
transnational adoptees. Dherbeys, FaceTime interview with the author.
26 Email correspondence with the author. December 12, 2019.
27 While Dherbeys was growing up, there were eight other transnational adoptees
in Romans, including one from India with whom Dherbeys became close.
Considering the city’s size, I find this number to be rather high. Dherbeys,
FaceTime interview with the author.
 Undoing Cold War temporality 231
28 Dherbeys mentioned that her [adoptive] mother, Jacqueline, had died of cancer
in 2007, suggesting that she would have photographed her if she were alive.
Dherbeys.
29 “Populations Légales 2016 - Commune de Romans-Sur-Isère (26281)” (Institut
national de la statistique et des études économiques), accessed December 31,
2019, https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3681328?geo=COM-26281.
30 For this series, the individual photographs come with brief captions hinting at
what is going on: for example, a caption for one depicting Mr. Dherbeys’s din-
ing table reads “Ever since I can remember, my father has been hammered by
insomnia. Every night around 4 am, he sets up the table for breakfast for the
morning after.” Reprinted with permission of the artist.
31 Dherbeys first noticed during the shooting that her father’s face was “very cin-
ematic, like an actor.” Dherbeys, FaceTime interview with the author.
32 Comparatively, the steep rise in transnational adoptions from China is an alarm-
ing indicator of where transnational adoption stands in neoliberal temporality.
Over 150,000 children, mostly girls, were adopted internationally since the
introduction of the one-child policy in 1979, the annual number peaking in
2005. It has been decreasing since. See Monica Dowling, “Globalisation and
International Adoption from China,” in Handbook on the Family and Marriage
in China, ed. Xiaowei Zang and Lucy X. Zhao, Handbooks of Research on
Contemporary China (Cheltenham and Northamton: Edward Elgar Publishing,
2017), 305–20.
33 Agnès Dherbeys, Retired, 2013–2015, Color photographs and text, 2013–2015.
34 Nelson, Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American
Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism, 152–53.
35 As noted earlier, the Korean Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, for example,
included works by Jane Jin Kaisen, who was born in South Korea in 1980 and
grew up in Denmark. Her work in Venice highlighted her decade-long project
on the issues of transnational, interracial adoption that also unpacks the work-
ings of the Cold War politics on race, gender, immigration, kinship, and more.
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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Page numbers followed by “n” refer
to notes numbers.

Numbers and Symbols ASEAN (ASEAN Tower 1977),

65-­35, 19 78; Mimbar Bebas (Podium for
Free Speech 1977), 78; Monumen
Aboriginal art, 126–127 Revolusi: diresmikan oleh Pak Bejo
abstract expressionism, 1, 13, 19, Tukang Becak (Monument of
25, 26 Revolution: inaugurated by Mr Bejo,
accumulation by dispossession, 175 a becak driver 1977), 75–76
Advancing American Art exhibition Arizona Air Guard, 57
(1946), 1 Arizona Thunder, 157
AFA, see American Federation of Arts Armstrong, John, 127
(AFA) Art and Asia Pacific (now
Affandi, 125 ArtAsiaPacific), 131
Agent Orange, 37, 91, 206 Artforum: “Provincialism Problem,
Agus Cahyono, 71 The,”, 127
Air America, 32, 37–39, 51–54, 56, 57 Art Gallery Society of New South
Albers, Josef, 116, 119 Wales, 128
Alexander, Jeffrey C., 68, 78 Article 9 (Japanese constitution), 142
Ali-­pay, 184 Art Institute of Chicago, 12
American Federation of Arts (AFA), artistic rebellion, and traumatic affect,
9, 25 71–79
Americanization of art, 113–120 Artists Regional Exchange (ARX), 131,
American Society of Aviation Artists 133
(ASAA), 56 Art of Surface, The, 128
America, see United States (US) Art & Text, 119
Andrews, Julia, 181 ARX, see Artists Regional Exchange
Anselmo, Giovanni, 126 (ARX)
Anthropocene, 84, 105 ASAA, see American Society of Aviation
anti-­communist killings, 66–79 Artists (ASAA)
Anyool Subroto, 71 Asanuma Keiko, 200, 201
ANZART exhibition, 131 ASEAN, see Association of Southeast
APEC, see Asia-­Pacific Economic Asian Nations (ASEAN)
Cooperation (APEC) Asia Film Festival, 161
APT, see Asia Pacific Triennial of Asia House (later Asia Society), 25
Contemporary Art (APT) Asialink, 129, 130
Aquitania, Rene, 101 Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC),
Ardhie, Bonyong Munny, 66; Etalase 113
(Display Case 1977), 78; Menara Asian art in Cold War, locating, 1–6
 Index 249
Asia-­Pacific Economic Cooperation Ball, Sydney, 118
(APEC), 120 Bamboo Curtain, 9
Asia Pacific Film Festival, 161 Banasan, Arnel, 101
Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Bandung Conference (1955), 2
Art (APT), 131–133 Bandung Institute of Technology:
ASPAC, see Asian and Pacific Council Faculty of Fine Arts and Design, 67
(ASPAC) Baradas, David: “Roberto’s Archetypal
ASRI, see Indonesian Visual Art Art,”, 101
Academy (ASRI) Batchen, Geoffrey, 33
Association of Southeast Asian Nations Bathala-­Na, 95, 102, 107n40
(ASEAN), 120 Because of Her, 161
Au, Sow Yee, 160 Benglis, Lynda, 126
Australia, 110–133; Art Gallery of New Bennett, Jill, 69, 70
South Wales (AGNSW), 116, 129, Berger, Hans Georg, 42, 49
136; Recent Australian Art, 124; Beuys, Joseph, 126
Australia Council, 125, 129, 130; Beveridge, Karl, 119
Visual Arts Board, 124; Australian Bienal de São Paulo, 14
Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Biennale of Sydney, 122–130
122; Australian Modernism, 111; Biren De, 125
Australian National Gallery (now Birmingham Art College, 50
National Gallery of Australia), Blackstone Capital, 109n87
119, 128; Biennale of Sydney Bliss Cua Lim, 212–213
(Australian Biennale), 122–130; Bose, Santiago, 98
Department of Foreign Affairs, Bourriaud, Nicholas: Relational
122, 125, 129, 130; identification Aesthetics, 109n83
with Asia, 111; identification with Boyd, Arthur, 114; Shearers playing for
Britain, 110–112; National Gallery a bride, 116
of Victoria (NGV), 116–118; Boyong Munny Ardhie: artistic
Field, The, 118, 118–119, 132; Two rebellion and traumatic affect, 71–79
Decades of American Painting, 116, Brazil, 160
117, 118; Yoin: Ideas from Japan Brisley, Stuart, 127
Made in Australia, 128; Political Broinowski, Alison, 110, 127
Regimes; Aboriginals, 127, 130; Burn, Ian, 118; “Sixties: Crisis and
anti-­Chinese, 112, 112; Australian Aftermath, The,”, 119
Communist Party, 114; Australia,
New Zealand, and United States Cabrera, Benedicto (“BenCab”), 98
Security Treaty (ANZUS 1951), 113; Cambodia, 46, 47
Australian Modernism, 111; Bob Canaday, John, 25
Hawke government (1983–1991), capitalism, 2, 5, 94, 96, 100, 101, 103,
111; Gough Whitlam government 104, 106n15, 170, 175–177, 179,
(1972–1975), 111; Paul Keating 180, 181, 184, 191, 192; democratic,
government (1991–1996), 111; 1; globalized, 3; imperialist, 228
Southeast Asian Treaty Organization Carnegie International, 123
(SEATO 1954), 113; Vietnam War Carroll, Alison, 130
military involvement, 113–114; CASS Sculptural Foundation, 189
White Australia, 112–113; Transfield, Cathay Company, 161
125; US influence, 87, 107 CCP, see Cultural Center of the
Australian Bicentenary of British Philippines (CCP)
settlement (1988), 130 Chen Chi-­Kwan, 9, 20; Panorama, 21
Australian, The, 119 Chen Kuan-­hsing, 1
Chinese Exhibition: A Selection of
Bachtiar Zainul, 71 Recent Archaeological Finds of the
Baguio Arts Guild (BAG), 85, 98–100, People’s Republic of China, The
108n69; Day’s Portrait of a City, A, exhibition, 122
99; Marapait (Installation), 99 Chinese Memorial Foundation, 155
250 Index
CHTH, see Chung Hua Tsung Hui Dherbeys, Agnès, 5, 212–230; Omone,
(CHTH) 213–224, 214–219; Retired, 213,
Chuang Che, 9, 10, 13, 14, 24, 26; 224–227, 224–228
Homage to Du Fu, 23; Sublimation, Dirgantoro, Wulan, 3, 66
16–17, 18; Untitled, 21 Disini Akan Dibuat ASEAN Tower
Chuang Yen, 24 Bertaraf Internasional (ASEAN
Chung Hua Tsung Hui (CHTH), Tower with International Standards
154 Will Be Built Here), 78
Cleveland Museum of Art, 25 Doolin, James, 118
Cold War, 14, 31–33; Asian art
in, locating, 1–6; Australian East Asia, 3–5
exhibitionary turns to Asia in, Enola Gay, 84
110–133; and environmental Enokura, Koji, 128
devastation, 84–109; geopolitics, 9, Entombed Warriors exhibition
10; ideologies, survival tactics within, (Canberra 1983), 122, 123
175–193; images as propaganda, environmental devastation, 84
181–182; temporality, 212–230 ephemeral art, 99–101, 103–105,
colonialism, 223 108n75
Communal Tree Farming (CTF), 97 Etalase (Display Case 1977)
Communism, 1, 2, 5, 13 (Ardhie), 78
Continuum, 129, 131 Europe, modernist abstract art, 10
Coombs, H.C., 122 Event for Stretched Skin, 128
Counihan, Noel, 114
critical geology, 4 Family Approach to Reforestation
CTF, see Communal Tree Farming (FAR), 97
(CTF) FAR, see Family Approach to
Cubism, 13 Reforestation (FAR)
Cultural Center of the Philippines Fifth Moon Painting Society, 9, 16, 19,
(CCP), 98, 99, 180, 184, 187, 191, 20, 30n51; rise of, 13–14
193n8 Finemore, Brian, 118
Cultural Revolution, 9 Flash Art, 178
Curley, John J.: Global Art and the Cold FOM, see Forest Occupancy
War, 3 Management (FOM)
Cvoro, Uros, 175 Ford Foundation, 92
Forest Occupancy Management
Dal Lago, Francesca, 195 (FOM), 97
Danarto, 71 Frankenthaler, Helen, 116, 119
danwei, 185 Free World exhibition, 9–10
Davis, John, 127 FROM OKINAWA WITH LOVE, 4,
December Hitam (Black December) 141–146, 142, 144–146
protest (1974), 72, 75 Fuhrmann, Arnika: Ghostly Desires:
decolonial/decolonialization, 1, 4, 5 Queer Sexuality and Vernacular
Dede Eri Supria, 71 Buddhism in Contemporary Thai
Deep Ravine, Rushing Torrent, 22 Cinema, 61n13
de Guia, Katrin, 95 Futurism, 60n8
de Guia, Kawayan, 85, 101
de Kooning, Willem, 116; Woman V, Gallicchio, Marc, 2
119 Gantner, Carrillo, 130
Deleuze, Gilles, 70, 210n21 Gan Yang, 176
Deng Xiaoping, 176; economic reform Gardner, Anthony, 122
in, 1978, 175 geopolitics: Cold War, 9, 10; of the
Derrida, Jacques, 61n13 exhibition, 11–13
Dewan Revolusi (Revolutionary Gerakan 30 September (30th September
Council), 76 Movement), 67
De Young Museum, San Francisco, 12 Gertten, Fredrik, 109n88
 Index 251
Gilbert, Terry, 37 Igorots, 106n14
globalization, 177–180 imperial liberalism, 229n2
Godard, Jean-­Luc, 87 Indonesia, 1, 152–159; anti-­communist
Green, Charles, 114, 122 killings, 66–80; authoritarian regimes
Greenfield, Gerard, 2 in, 2; cultural trauma, 66–79; New
Grosvenor, Robert, 127 Order Indonesia, 1970–1977, 66–80;
Grounds, Marr, 127 Police Action (Politionele Acties), 152
GSRBI (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesian Chinese, 152–159; in 1947–
Indonesia, Indonesian New Art 1949, 155, 158; Chinese killings,
Movement), 3, 66, 71, 72, 75, 78 153; mass graves, 153–156
Guangzhou Biennale Art Fair, 194n15 Indonesian Visual Art Academy (ASRI),
Guattari, Felix, 70, 210n21 72, 75
Guo Xi, 16 information technology, 1
Gutusso, Renato, 125 ink painting, 15, 17
International Council of the Museum of
Hardi, 71 Modern Art (MoMA), 116
Harsono, FX (Hu Fengwen), 4, 66, internationalism, 113–120
152; artistic rebellion and traumatic International Rice Research Institute
affect, 71–79; “Art Movements (IRRI), 92
during the New Order,”, 67; arts and Ishikawa, Mao, 4, 141–146; Akabana,
pilgrimage to history, 156, 156–157, 143–145; Hot Days in Camp
157; artworks description, 158–159; Hansen!!, 141; Hot Days in Okinawa,
bone cemetery, 153, 153–154; feeling 141, 145; photography, 143; Red
insecure, 155; Gazing in Collective Flower – The Women of Okinawa/
Memory, 158, 159; historical Akabana – Okinawa no on’na,
background, 152–153; Last Survivor, 141, 144
The, 156–157; Manusia Terbelah,
72; mass graves, 154–155; nDudah, Jane Jin Kaisen, 229n3, 231n35
154; Paling Top, 72; Pilgrimage Japan: Japan Foundation, 125; Japan
to History, 156, 157; Pistol Plastik, International Cooperation Agency
Kembang Plastik Dalam Kantong (JICA), 97
Plastik, 72–74, 73; Rantai yang Japanese Ways, Western Means
Santai, 72–73, 74; Screening Shot exhibition (1989), 131
Pilgrimage, 156, 157; Writing in the jeepney, 87, 88, 88, 93
Rain, 158, 158 Jennison, Rebecca, 4, 5, 196
Hosono, Haruomi, 103 Jim Supangkat, 71
Harvey, David, 175, 180 John D. Rockefeller III (JDR 3rd)
Hawke, Bob, 129, 130, 133 Fund, 9, 13, 27n3
Heron, Patrick, 125 Johns, Jasper, 116; Map, 117; Periscope
Hesse, Hermann, 162, 165n3 (Hart Crane), 117; Target, 117;
Hiroshima, 84, 85 White flag, 117
History of Air America, The (Leeker), Joo Myung Duk, 220, 221
37 Judd, Donald, 119
Hmong, 32, 33, 57, 60n3
Hoberman, Jim, 95 Kaldor, John: documenta, 5, 127; When
Holt, Bertha, 212 Attitudes Become Form, 127
Holt, Harry, 212 Kao Jun-­Honn, 166; Abandoned Path:
Holt Orphanage (now Holt A Creator’s Geopolitical Method,
International), 212 170; Apparatus of Topa, 169; Bo’ai:
Hong Hao, 183, 184 Taiwan Motor Transportation Factory,
Howard, John, 133 168; Llyong Topa, 170; Ruin Image
Howkins, Adrian: Polar Regions: An Crystal Project: Ten Scenes, The, 166–
Environmental History, The, 91 171, 167; Taoist Trinity Fairyland,
Huang Binhong, 11 170, 171; Topa Project, 4
Hukbalahap Rebellion (1946–54), 2 Kapuno, Raffy, 101
252 Index
Kennedy Space Center, 57 Lu Xun, 178, 193n8
Kepribadian Apa? (What Identity?), 71, Lu Xun Academy of Arts, 193n8
77, 78, 78
kerukunan (social harmony), 71, 75, 79 Mackinolty, Chips, 114
Khamvone Boulyaphonh, 61–62n15 Magiciens de la Terre exhibition, Paris
Khmer Rouge, 48 (1989), 131
Kim, Hosu, 219, 229–230n13 Malam-­di-­Tokyo, 161
Kim, Jinah, 223 Ma, Lesley, 3
Kissinger, Henry, 92, 121 Manulang, Ronald, 77
Kohara Masashi, 204 Mao Zedong, 121, 187, 188–192,
Korea, 1; authoritarian regimes in, 2 193n7
Korean War, 2, 212 Mao Zedong Souvenir Shop, 187
Kris Project, The, 4, 162–164, 162–164 Martin, Jean-­Hubert, 130
Kuwayama, Tadaaki, 128 Martin, Mandy, 114
Kwee Kek Beng, 155 May Fourth movement (1919), 11
McClintock, Herbert, 117
Laos: Buddhist Archive of Photography McCray, Porter, 24–25, 29n38, 29n41
in Luang Prabang, 32, 33, 35, 41, McCullough, Tom, 126–128; Mildura
46, 49, 59, 61n9, 61n14, 61n15; Sculpture Triennial, 126–128
regional conflict, 3; Secret War, McGillick, Tony, 118
31–65 McLuhan, Marshall, 1
Laotian Civil War, 45 McMahon, William, 121
Lawton, Thomas, 27n4 Meadmore, Clement, 118
Lê, Dinh Q., 4, 147–151; Farmers and Melbourne’s Communist Party, 117
the Helicopters, The, 147, 149, 149; Menara ASEAN (ASEAN Tower 1977)
photo-­weaving work, 147; South (Arshie), 78
China Sea Pishkun, 149–151, 150; Menzies, Robert, 113
Untitled (Tom Cruise & Willam Metropolitan Museum, New York, 12
Dafoe, Born on the 4th of July/ Mignolo, Walter, 5
Highway 1), 148; Untitled from The Mildura Sculpture Triennial, 126
Hills of Poisonous Trees series (man Mimbar Bebas (Podium for Free Speech
and woman), 147, 148 1977) (Ardhie), 78
Lee, Jung Joon, 5, 212 Minami Tada, 125
Lee Suk Yun, 217 Ming dynasty: landscape painting, 15
Lee Sun Hwa, 219 Miracle Rice Program of 1968, The, 92
Lee Ufan, 128 Mittler, Barbara, 191
Leng Lin, 183, 184 Mohammad, Mahathir: Wawasan
Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 101 2020 (Vision 2020), 160; Wawasan
Lichtenstein, Roy, 116 Kemakmuran Bersama 2030 (Shared
Li Chu-­tsing, 9, 10, 12, 14–17, 20, 21, Prosperity Vision 2030), 160
23–24, 27, 27n4, 27n5 Moluccas, the, 160
Lin Fengmian, 11 Mono-­ha (School of Things)
Linggarjati Agreement (1947), 154 movement, 128
Liu Jianhua, 183, 184 Monumen Revolusi: diresmikan oleh Pak
Liu Kuo-­sung, 9, 10, 13, 14, 24–26; Bejo Tukang Becak (Monument of
Early Spring, 16, 17 Revolution: inaugurated by Mr Bejo,
Li Xianting, 178 a becak driver 1977) (Ardhie),
Li, Yu-­Chieh, 1, 4, 166, 175 75–77, 76
Loke Wan Tho, 161–162 Moratorium marches (1970), 113
Loke Yew, 161 Mori Art Museum, 201
Louis, Morris, 119 Morris, Robert, 119
Luang Prabang, 32, 33, 35, 41, 45, 46, Morris-­Suzuki, Tessa: Past Within Us,
49, 59 The, 196
Lui Shou-­kwan, 29n32 Moseley Road Art School, Birmingham,
Lü Peng, 194n15 50
 Index 253
Motion Picture & General Investment Official Development Assistance
Company (MP&GI), 161 (ODA), 97
Moullet, Luc, 87 Okinawa (former Ryukyu Kingdom), 1,
MP&GI, see Motion Picture & General 197–202; American military presence,
Investment Company (MP&GI) 141; Ginowan, 143; Heneko Camp
Mr. Zheng, 184, 185 Schwab, 142; Kin Town, 141, 143;
Murphy, Bernice, 132 Koza City, 141, 143; Nago city, 142;
Museum of Fine Art, Boston, 12 Uruma, 141
Myanmar, 46 Okinawa Complex Volume I, 198
Myer Foundation, 129, 130 Okinawans, 142–143, 145
My Lai Massacre (1968), 113 Okinawa Prismed: 1872–2008
exhibition (2008), 197–198
Nagasaki, 84, 199 Operation “Ranch Hand”, see Agent
Nakaya, Fujiko: Fog Sculpture, 128, 129 Orange
Nanik Mirna, 71 Organization of Economic Cooperation
National Gallery of Art in Washington, and Development (OECD), 92
DC, 12
National Gallery Singapore, 61n11 Pandu Sudewo, 71
National Palace Museum, Taipei, 12, Pang Xunqin, 11
16, 25 Pan Tianshou, 11
Nauyac, Lopes, 102 Paramor, Wendy, 118
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 113 Park Chung Hee, 220
Nelson, Roger, 3, 31 Park Suk Won, 125
neo-­imperialism, 3, 5 Park Woo Sik, 219
neoliberal economy, 3–5 Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian
neoliberalism, 2, 3, 5 Communist Party, PKI), 67, 76, 80,
neoliberal socialism, 192 82n29
New Art from Southeast Asia exhibition Pathet Lao, 35, 42, 45, 47, 48
(1992), 103 Pelaez, Antonio, 125
New Chinese Landscape: Six People Power Revolution, 98
Contemporary Chinese Artists, The, 3, People’s Republic of China (PRC):
9, 10, 12, 14–16, 20, 25, 26 China Academy of Fine Arts, 180;
new landscape painting, 14–24, 17–23 postsocialist condition of, 175–177;
Newmarch, Ann, 114; Vietnam privatization under neoliberalism in,
Madonna, 115 180–181
New Order Indonesia 1970–1977, 66–80 Pha Khamchan Virachitta Maha
new regionalism, 129–133 Thela, 61
85 New Space exhibition (1985), 181 Pha Khamfan Silasangvara, 3, 61n9,
New York Abstract Expressionism, 19 61n12; collection of photographs,
Night Mission Over Laos (Wofford), 31–49, 35
37–39 Philippines, 1; Cordilleran region, 87,
nihonga, 12 104, 108n73; Hukbalahap Rebellion
Nixon, Richard, 120 (1946–54), 2; Katipunan, 88; Marcos
Nolan, Sidney, 114 Regime; Decree 705, 97; Martial
Non-­Aligned Movement, 124 Law (1972–1981), 86, 98
Norodom Sihanouk, 45 PIPA, 3, 66, 70, 71, 77, 83n37
Northern Song era: landscape painting, 14 PKI, see Partai Komunis Indonesia
Nyoman Nuarta, 71 (Indonesian Communist Party, PKI)
Polanyi, Karl, 2
Observer, The, 57 Polit-­Sheer-­Form Office (PSFO), 4,
ODA, see Official Development 177, 182–187, 185, 186, 192; Do the
Assistance (ODA) Same Good Deeds, 186, 187; Fitness
OECD, see Organization of Economic for all, 188
Cooperation and Development Pollock, Jackson, 17, 116; Blue Poles,
(OECD) 119, 120
254 Index
Pond Society, 181 SEATO, see Southeast Asian Treaty
postcolonial, 1–5, 86, 87, 98, 100, 110, Organization (SEATO)
111, 130, 172, 196, 202, 203, 208, Second Indochina War, 32, 42
223, 228 Sejarah Melayu (The Malay Annals), 161
postcolonialism, 129–133 Serra, Richard, 119
PRC, see People’s Republic of China Setiono, Benny G.: Tionghoa dalam
(PRC) Pusaran Politik (Chinese in Political
precolonial, 85, 87 Vortex), 155
Preston, Margaret, 126 Shanzhai art, 188–192
Prinka, S., 71 Shin Kyung Hee, 217, 217–218, 218
PSFO, see Polit-­Sheer-­Form Office Shitao, 26
(PSFO) Sidharta, G.: Tangisan Dewi Bathari, 69
Purwana, Ries, 77 Silbergeld, Jerome, 19
Push: A Documentary Exploring the Singapore Dream, 162
New, Unavailable City, 109n87 Sino-­American Mutual Defense Treaty
(1955), 13
QAG, see Queensland Art Gallery Sino-­Soviet Split (1956–1966), 176
(QAG) Siti Adiyati Subangun, 67–68, 71
Quac Insik, 128 Smith, Neil, 100
Queen Elizabeth, 92 Smithson, Robert, 126
Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), 131 Smith, Terry, 127, 132
Soemantri, Hilda, 71
Ramsden, Mel, 118 Sŏkkyŏjin irŭmdŭl (The Mixed Names),
Rancière, Jacques, 160 220, 221
rape victim, 141–142 Song Dong, 183, 184
Rauschenberg, Robert, 116 Song Ta, 4, 177, 188, 189; Beautiful
Recent International Forms in Art, Disorder, A, 189; Why do they never
125 take color photos, 189, 189, 190
Red Guard, 9 South China Sea Pishkun, 149–151,
Reinhardt, Ad, 116; Painting, 119 150; see also Lê, Dinh Q.
Relational Aesthetics, 109n83 Southeast Asia, 3–5, 31–33, 46, 48–50
Renoir, Jean, 88, 96; Crime of M. Southeast Asian Treaty Organization
Lange, The, 88 (SEATO), 113
Rice, Miracle, 100 Southern Song era: landscape painting,
Ries Purwono, 71 14, 15
Riyanto, Gendut, 77 Soviet Union, 1, 2
Robertson, Toni, 114 Spoor, S.H., 152
Robinson, Robert, 109n87 Sri Lanka: Sinhala Theravada Buddhism,
Rockefeller Foundation, 24, 25, 92 61n14
Rosenquist, James, 116 Star of Hong Kong, A, 161
Rothko, Mark, 116 Stella, Frank, 116
Royal Dutch Indian Army, 152 Still, Clyfford, 125
Royal Lao Government, 42, 45 Storer, Russell, 3, 110
Stringer, John, 117
Sabapathy, T.K., 131 Studio International, 119
Said, Edward, 2 Sublimation (Chuang Che), 16–17, 18
Saito, Yoshishige, 128 Suga, Kishio, 128
Salon de Mai, 13 Suharto, Major General: New Order
Saprid, Solomon, 125 (Indonesia), 66–80
Sariling Dwende, 94, 95 Sunairi, Hiroshi, 4, 141–146;
Satyagraha, 71 OKINAWA Sungari (film), 141;
Sawasdi Tantisuk, 125 Okinawa Philadelphia (film), 141;
Schumacher, Emil, 125 Okinawa Trilogy, 141; FROM
Scott, James C., 60n3 OKINAWA WITH LOVE (film), 4,
Sculpturescape, 127 141–146, 142, 144–146
 Index 255
Sun Ge, 1 military base, 141, 143; modernist
Surrealism, 13 abstract art, 10; National Museum
Suzuki Katsuo, 201–202 of the US Air Force, 37; neo-­
Szeemann, Harald, 127 imperialism, 3; “Secret War” in Laos,
31; Sino-­American Mutual Defense
tahanan politik, 70 Treaty (1955), 13; soldiers, 141,
Tahimik, Kidlat (Eric Oteyza de Guia), 144–146; State Department, 13, 91;
3, 87–105; Bathala Na, 95; Healing US Information Agency, 1
Our Planet Earth (HOPE) after United States Information Services
Hiroshima, 85–86, 101–105, 103; (USIS), 13, 51, 116; 1949
Our Bomb Missions to Hiroshima/ US Advisory Commission on
Celebrating the Year 2021, 85, 102; Information, 89, 90
Perfumed Nightmare, The, 5, 87–96, Untitled (Tom Cruise & William Dafoe,
88, 93, 94, 95, 104–105; Sariling Born on the 4th of July/Highway 1),
Dwende, 94, 95 148; see also Lê, Dinh Q.
Taipei, 166–167; National Museum Untitled from The Hills of Poisonous
of History in, 10; National Palace Trees series (man and woman), 147,
Museum, 12, 16, 25 148; see also Lê, Dinh Q.
Taiwan: Kuomintang (Nationalist) Ushiroshoji, Masahiro, 103
government, 9–13, 15, 20, 21, 166, US, see United States (US)
168, 170
Takamatsu, Jirō: Slack of Net, 128 Valjakka, Minna, 191
Takayama, Noboru, 128 Vang Pao, 33
Tang dynasty: landscape painting, 14 Van Mook, H.J., 152
Tan, Joseph, 125 Venice Biennale, 123, 124
tapols, 70, 75, 79 Vietnam, 2, 113–120
Taxi (Wofford), 57–59, 58 Vietnam War (civil war, 1955–1975),
textured strokes, 19 4, 149–151; Vietnam-­American War
Thailand, 46, 47 (foreign intervention), 147–149
Thomas, Laurie, 119 Village Voice, 95
Topa, 4, 166, 169–171 Villanueva, Roberto (Robert
Trade War, 176 Villanueva), 3, 84–86; Archetypes:
traditionalism, 11 Cordillera’s Labyrinth, 99–101,
trauma: art, 66–80; cultural, 66–80; 100; Bagong Sibol ang Gubat
mapping, 68–71 (The Forest Is Newly Grown, film),
traumatic affect, artistic rebellion and, 96–98; ephemeral art, 99–101,
71–79 103–105, 108n76; Sacred Sanctuary:
Treweeke, Vernon, 118 Acupuncture the Earth, 85, 86,
Tribune, 117 101–104
Voice of America, 88–89
UFO, see United Filmmakers Von Braun, Werner, 93
Organization (UFO) Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the
Ugat (Root): A Tribute to the Ifugao East Indies, the Maldives, The, 160
Tribe Heritage (Renaissance Gallery
exhibition, November 1987), 101 Wagiono, S., 71
United Filmmakers Organization Wang, C.C., 9, 19; Sailing Boats and
(UFO), 96 Misty Mountains, 20
United States (US), 1, 12–13; Air Wang Guangyi, 4, 177–180, 192; Cold
Force, 37; anti-­Communism, 13; War Aesthetic–People Living in Fear,
Atomic Energy Commission, 2, 91; 181–182, 182, 183; Great Criticism,
Black culture, 145; Black Panther, 177, 180; Great Criticism—Coca
145–146; Black soldiers, 143–146; Cola, 178, 178; Great Criticism—
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, 179; Great
32, 33, 39; East Asian policy, 2; Criticism—Marlboro, 179; Little Red
environmental degradation, 84; Book, 178
256 Index
Wang Hui, 176 Yamamura, Midori, 1, 84
Warhol, Andy, 116; Elvis, 119 Yamashiro Chikako: Chinbin
Washington, 2 Western: Representation of the
“waste nothing” aesthetics, 95–96, 100, Family, 208; Choros of the Melodies,
105 200–201, 201, 204; And I Go
Watermall, ‘First Asia Pacific Triennial Through You..., 207; “Inheritance
of Contemporary Art,’ Queensland Series,”, 200; Mud Man (Tsuchi
Art Gallery, Brisbane, 132 no Hito), 4–5, 196–208, 203–205;
Wechat, 184 Seaweed Woman, 197–200, 198;
Westernization, 11 Shore Connivance, 201; Sinking
Whitlam, Gough: and geographical Voices, Red Breath, 200; Virtual
turn, 120–122, 121 Inheritance, 200; Woman of the
Winterbotham, Anthony, 125 Butcher Shop, 201–202, 205, 206;
Wofford, Bob, 37, 39 Your Voice Came out through My
Wofford, Terry, 3, 61n12; Air America Throat, 200, 204
Helio over Remote Village, 54–56; Yang Hay Suk, 215, 216, 216
Dropping Supplies, 35–37, 36, 39; yōga, 12
Night Mission Over Laos, 37–39; Open Your Shadow is Mine (Cathay-­Keris),
House, 57; paintings of planes, 31–41, 161
49–59, 52, 53, 55, 58; Runway Yu Cheng-­yao, 9, 20, 21; Deep Ravine,
Zero One, 53, 53–54, 56; Spirit of Rushing Torrent, 22
Discovery, 57; Studio, Nongduang Yuliman, Sanento, 74–75
House, 52; Taxi, 57–59, 58
World is One Family, The, 161 Zani, Leah, 40–41
Wright, Teresa, 180 Zhang Peili, 181
Wu Shanzhuan, 176–177 Zhang Wei, 181
Wuyue huahui (Fifth Moon Painting Zhou Enlai, 120, 121
Society), 9 Zhuhai Painting Academy, 181
Zhu Jinshi, 181
Xiao Yu, 183, 184 Zóbel de Ayala, Jaime, 101