Power, Politics and the Street Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970

Providing a recent history of Southeast Asian art linked to the social and political contexts in which the illustrated work emerged, this groundbreaking book reveals the innovative creative strategies, often covertly encroaching on public space, developed by regional artists to ensure the communication of sometimes provocative, even seditious, ideas to a general audience. Surveying work created by Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean and Filipino artists, the publication’ s broad regional spread provides valuable insights for a global audience perhaps unfamiliar with the pioneering utilisation of the street, public locales, and techniques of audience co-opting that have made Southeast Asia, and continue to make it, a region instrumental in facilitating social change through art.

Iola Lenzi is an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art, a subject that she teaches at undergraduate and graduate level in Singapore.

Remarks on the text; 1 Introduction; 2 The early contemporary turn in Southeast Asia: Messy politics, new art; 3 The formative 1980s: Southeast Asian contemporary art’ s social and structural traits in focus; 4 Art and resistance in the early-1990s: Tiananmen, state power, globalisation, the assault of capitalism, urbanisation; 5 Southeast Asian contemporary art at millennium turn: The Asian Financial Crisis, a dictator falls, flashpoints of history and nation, urban-rural tensions; 6 Southeast Asian contemporary art in the 21st century: Consolidations and ecosystems; 7: Conclusion; Bibliography; Acknowledgements; Index