The City in Time

For decades, as talk of an “Asian Century” has buoyed Asian art and its promoters, academic art history has lagged behind. Publishers have not waited for it to catch up. On a recent trip in East Asia, in a few days I accumulated over twenty kilos of newly minted art histories—remarkably, almost all of them bilingual—part of a regional glut driven by collecting institutions and the art market. Hence the long-awaited launch of the National Gallery Singapore's two-volume doorstopper The Modern in Southeast Asian Art, hot on the heels of English editions of hefty compendiums from Japan and South Korea, all produced with substantial state backing.1 This official historiography still broadly follows “Free World” narratives spun during the Cold War and consolidated through exhibitions, narratives of modern art as expressive vehicle of national modernity, and an inexorable, if fitful, democratization. As in other regions, though, few histories are dedicated to contemporary art; fewer still open comparative perspectives beyond a single nation. Bucking those trends, The City in Time emits a new energy unleashed by studies of Southeast Asia's hitherto underresearched postsocialist bloc.The book has a transparent, logical structure: two chapters from Ho Chi Minh City and two from Phnom Penh are built around measured profiles of individual artists situated in national and larger contexts. Grouped together, the profiles attest to larger trends, each exemplifying a specific urban contemporaneity and municipal conscience. The book's central dialectical premise is that urban form determines artistic ones, while art “simultaneously consolidates the city as an image” (8). Corey emphasizes, and in a salutary way isolates, the qualification “contemporary,” which secures visibility and value in lucrative global markets. But if contemporary art and the city are both agents of and subject to globalization, their interplay, she insists, cannot be understood as a homogenization. For even in places “most affected by crisis globalisation” (a term she borrows from T. J. Demos), creative practices can develop independently of that larger dynamic of trauma, or friction and synthesis—interpretive pigeonholes from which the art of war-torn Vietnam and Cambodia have indeed proven hard to dislodge (5).Corey's urban settings do effectively displace those national ones dominated by legacies of political violence. This is healthy because so many artists’ formation and professional experience are now transnational; and while they are subject to national politics, many prefer not to make artworks about it. Readers may yet wonder about the divide between the US-educated viet khieu and those trained more recently and locally, who are less preoccupied with Vietnam's traumatic history. Corey's urban filter softens that generational distinction, but it remains relevant for understanding the returnees’ preponderance as initiators and mentors of grassroots activity as these countries entered into global exchange.Cambodian art's recent shift toward installation and photo media, meanwhile, though consequential for art history, might indeed be better understood within a “post-Khmer Rouge archival project” (135) that reaches beyond visual art. This is the book's great underlying promise: to historicize art and “urban form” on a single register. But their mutually transformative powers prove harder to demonstrate in the entrepôt Ho Chi Minh City than in the smaller Cambodian capital, its modernity neatly attributable to Norodom Sihanouk and Vann Molyvann, chief architect in the “golden age” of Khmer independence. That renewal—Cambodia's “most significant contribution to global modernism” (145)—left a durable, plastic creation with its own generative force. So when its destruction is resisted by a contemporary creative community, the struggle is far more than symbolic. In Corey's vivid account, a storied residential block (the “White Building”) becomes a social and aesthetic crucible in which new art forms and histories are forged, in an affirmation of past and present that is performative, relational, acoustic, and architectural.Corey's urbanism proves to be more of a narrative scaffold than an analytical rubric. The fruit of comparison here is not descriptive precision but, on the contrary, a “conjunctive” and refractive kind of regionalism: to diversify the conceptions of place that inform contemporary art, displacing in particular the “stubbornly iterative” ones “prescribed by the nation” (169–71). To this end, Corey might have dwelled longer on how the memorialization of postcolonial modernism—now a staple of global contemporary art—asserts a “unique” contemporaneity (145), by referring to artistic engagements elsewhere, like quasi-realist (but often nostalgic) treatments of Singapore's public housing or activations of 1960s cultural infrastructure by artists of Indonesia's reformasi generation.Though squarely art historical, Corey's lucid account of art's critical purchase on fast-changing cities will be of interest to those studying urban Asia in other disciplines. She moves with agility between discourses that normally are kept apart in academia but that address the same city-centered economy of appearances. Modern art rubs against transnational cinema in the recuperation of painter Bui Xuan Phai, once shunned for his “apolitical” modernism, only to be reimagined as paragon of national artistic virtue since Vietnam's Doi Moi reforms (47–48). Elsewhere, fictional literature frames artists’ interrogation of late Socialist culture (60–62), while further interdisciplinary handles are afforded by geographers, photography theorists, and urbanists. These lateral glances could have sustained more methodological reflection, as when Corey notes historian Keith Taylor's attention to surfaces rather than the “imagined unifying depth” of nation (32).Corey has a keen eye for art's historically situated reception—for instance, in her notes on Vandy Rattana's improvisational photography, not “outwardly noteworthy yet . . . groundbreaking” in a place where craft was celebrated over intellection (119). Her sensitivity rewards artists who have challenged the spatial regimes of state ideology but received scant critical recognition (93). At best, the central theme and generously reproduced artworks illuminate each other, as with Lim Sokchanlina's Wrapped Future photographs featuring construction-site fencing that demarcates public from private space, and thus also the “dislocated” past from a “future urban form” (113).Despite a few signs of haste in the argumentation (e.g., 57, 132) and occasional opacity in the prose (e.g., 167), this valuable study successfully avoids numerous pitfalls of a discipline that has yet to flourish in Asia

Ancient history · Economic geography · Genealogy · Geography · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies