An Exceptional Inclusion: On MoMA’s Exhibition Recent American Prints in Color and the First Exhibition of Southeast Asian Art

Abstract

The exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition in Manila in 1957 was one of the first post-war events that sought to bring together the then contemporary art from the region. Unusual and worthy of study about this exhibition is that not only was it the first survey exhibition of Southeast Asia, it also included the Museum of Modern Art International Program’s travelling exhibition, Recent American Prints in Color. This article studies how this exhibition emerged and how MoMA came to be included on this unprecedented platform. Looking at Southeast Asia as a conceptual and exhibitionary frame, the article examines the complicated factors and stakes of art’s role in constituting soft power during the Cold War, and how this soft power and its associated infrastructures was used by the receiver of these cultural products—in this case the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP)—towards its own ends.

The exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition in Manila in 1957 was one of the first post-war events that sought to bring together the then contemporary art from the region.¹ What is unusual and worthy of study about this exhibition is that not only was it the first survey exhibition of Southeast Asia, it also included the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) International Program’s travelling exhibition, Recent American Prints in Color.² Little is known of the history behind the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition. There have been no studies which recount in detail how the conference and competition came to be, who it served and what it represented.³ Even less is known about how the MoMA exhibition came to be included in this unprecedented platform. However, its inclusion as a participant in the one-room survey exhibition complicates an indigenous art organisation’s attempt to present Southeast Asia as a cultural region within an exhibitionary frame. The inclusion raises questions as to how Southeast Asia was perceived as a cultural region by those who lived within its geographic boundaries and, equally importantly, questions of how American diplomacy and culture fit into such a construction of Southeast Asia.

In addressing such questions, this article examines Recent American Prints in Color as a case study of the complicated factors conditioning art’s role in constituting soft power during the Cold War. Focusing on the active inclusion of Recent American Prints in Color by an indigenous art organisation, the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP), this article is indebted to a legacy of revisionist studies which have criticised the export of American art during the 1950s and 1960s as US Cold War propaganda and, in the process, contributed to research that uncovers the complexities and conflicting agendas that constructed the cultural offensive of the United States during the cultural Cold War.⁴ This article does not examine the incongruence between the players seeking to promote American art, though this is an important background to how MoMA’s exhibitions came to be unevenly circulated across the world. Instead, this article offers a different perspective: that of the receiver of the cultural products of American cultural institutions and policies of the US, namely the AAP. This is the perspective which the United States Information Services (USIS) sought to convince of American liberal modernism or, as Greg Barnhisel has suggested, a “Cold War modernism”—a redefinition of modernism as an “affirmation of Western bourgeois liberal values that were considered particularly integral in the American self-construction”, that through its proliferation knit the parts of the world it touched into America’s “Free World”.⁵

A Case Study of Exceptionalism: Recent American Prints in Color in Manila, 1957

Among the first exhibitions developed in the early years of MoMA’s International Program, Recent American Prints in Color was one of five new exhibitions launched in January 1957 and one of seven exhibitions of contemporary American prints organised by the international programme.⁶ Curated by Walter Lieberman, then curator of prints at MoMA, the exhibition brought together a range of artists who had recently begun to experiment with printmaking, or begun to use colour in their prints. According to its press release, the exhibition “focus[ed] on the increased emphasis on prints in colour, the technical ingenuity in woodcuts, [and] the great advance in the art of serigraphy and to a lesser extent in lithography” across a range of styles. It included works inspired by German Renaissance drafting, as well as forms of neo-romanticism, expressionism, realism, surrealism and abstractions based on calligraphy and geometry.⁷ The exhibition foregrounded the latest technological developments in printmaking and artistic experimentation coming out of the USA.

A relatively small exhibition requiring only 66 square feet of exhibition space, Recent American Prints in Color included 25 prints and a panel of wall text. As such, the exhibition was not a grandiose presentation of American art, but was geared towards presentations in small centres for educational purposes and the fulfilment of the International Program’s self-mandated role to provide for the “systematic encouragement and organisation of the flow of the arts across national frontiers”.⁸ The small scale of the exhibition did not suggest any lack of commitment on the part of USIS or MoMA’s International Program; rather, it was a practical adjustment to available infrastructures. The International Program deliberately scaled travelling exhibitions to be easily adaptable to a variety of spaces, however small and limited in resources. The goal was to make art accessible to international audiences and also to further American national welfare through international understanding.

In order to reach new audiences in Manila, Porter McCray, Director of the International Program at the MoMA in New York, wrote to the Country Office of USIS in the Philippines to request their assistance in securing a suitable space and local partners to host the exhibition.⁹ McCray requested that the exhibition be presented by an important cultural institution in collaboration with the USIS, and proposed the National Museum, the University of the Philippines or the Santo Tomas Museum as ideal partners.¹⁰

Instead, the USIS selected, as the host of Recent American Prints in Color, the AAP, a private artist association and the organiser of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition. While there is no archival evidence to account for this selection, it was possibly a result of the network of AAP founder Purita Kalaw-Ledesma. Kalaw-Ledesma was known to be close to the Exhibits Officer of the American Embassy in Manila, Harold Schnaiderman, who is noted in correspondence with the MoMA International Program, and who would later approach Kalaw-Ledesma to set up a cultural centre under the auspices of the Philippine–American Cultural Foundation.¹¹

Heralded in the Philippine press as the biggest foreign participation in art ever gathered in the East, the exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition set a precedent for the Philippine art scene, and for the communities that it sought to map and with which it sought to build regional ties.¹² The exhibition was envisioned as a vanguard political and cultural event due to its representation of Southeast Asia as a cultural region. This contextual exhibitionary frame, a new regional rubric, was ultimately not what McCray had initially requested, let alone aspired to, when he requested USIS support to have Recent American Prints in Color travel to the Philippines.¹³

Once Recent American Prints in Color arrived in the Philippines in 1957, the exhibition’s discursive framing left MoMA’s control and was, instead, overseen by the USIS office in Manila. Crucially, the exhibition ultimately served the interests of the AAP, and was repositioned with a more local discourse within Southeast Asia, in which it can be supposed that USIS in Manila and AAP sought to present the best possibilities of a regional alliance of art and cultural scenes.

This shift was most visibly articulated by the conference “Art in the Southeast Asia and Today’s Problems”, which ran alongside the exhibition from 27–30 April 1957 at the Philippine Women’s University. The conference emphasised the importance of art in addressing the most pressing issues of the time. Based on a competition to judge the best art from the region and to learn from each participating nation’s contribution, the exhibition reiterated this project. The exhibition and conference brought together, for the first time, what was then contemporary art from Southeast Asia, with participation from the Philippines as well as Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand and South Vietnam.

The artworks in the exhibition were considered to be exemplary of their respective nation-states, with all foreign entries selected by a committee appointed by the participating country prior to submission. It is worth noting that the definitive paradigm of what was considered the best art from each country was not recorded. However, a survey of the selected works betrays a tendency towards the representation of nationally specific motifs or styles. Furthermore, while there are no known resources of how the selection of artworks was made or who sat on the selection committee, the artworks had to be endorsed by the respective nations that sponsored them through their embassies. These respective countries assumed responsibility for transporting the work to and from Manila, and their embassies were responsible for receiving and returning the work from and to their country of origin. In addition, each country had to provide a representative to act as a member of the jury in the competition.

Participation in the exhibition and competition was a highly stratified and bureaucratic process, which ensured that each participating country had a stake and part to play in determining the best art from Southeast Asia. Furthermore, the logistical demands of realising such an exhibition required the participation of state bodies that endorsed the artwork on show and imbued the event with diplomatic legitimacy and, if not by extension, artistic legitimacy as well.

Recent American Prints in Color was an American exhibition that was ultimately contextualised within a survey of Southeast Asia. The US participated as the only “Guest Country” and, unlike the other participating countries, its artworks were not considered competitively. Notwithstanding its exclusion from the competition, the US contributed an American representative to judge the competition, Mrs Horace Smith, identified in the Manila Times of 30 April 1957 as the wife of the American chargé d’affaires Minister Horace Smith, who was not related to MoMA and had not contributed to the development or presentation of Recent American Prints in Color. She was a political representative, most likely chosen by USIS in Manila. As such, Recent American Prints in Color was an exceptional inclusion in the exhibition, and did not conform to the rules of participation to which the other countries adhered.¹⁴

Its inclusion was an anomaly that positioned Recent American Prints in Color as above judgement, in spite of its inclusion within Southeast Asia. Was this inclusion meant to position American art as peripheral within the cultural frame of Southeast Asia, or was it a benchmark by which the rest of the works in the exhibition were to be compared? Given the lack of archival evidence, we cannot know what its inclusion was intended to mean; it was, nonetheless, significant.¹⁵ In the evaluation report of the print exhibition sent to McCray at MoMA’S International Department, John E. Reinhardt, Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer at the American Embassy in Manila, an officer of USIS, reported an enthusiastic response to the work presented and that many people enquired of the possibility of purchasing the prints. Press coverage on the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, while limited to one-liners in articles, would also cover the exhibition as presenting “rare prints”.¹⁶

For its audience at the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, Recent American Prints in Color was valued more as a cultural object than as a MoMA exhibition. The Manila Chronicle would, on 8 May 1957, go so far as to inaccurately credit the exhibition and museum as “rare prints from the Museum of Contemporary Arts of the United States”,¹⁷ a response far from the aspirations of McCray and the International Program in profiling American art from the MoMA.

Recent American Prints in Color was an object of ideological significance. While not originally created as a representation of the US, it came to represent the country on a nationalistic platform in a foreign region. Though not the main feature of the exhibition of Southeast Asian art, it was still noticed by a receptive audience, an audience that was open to and found value in it being included in a discourse on the pressing issues of Southeast Asia.

Figure 1.

Image of the First Southeast Asia Art Competition Exhibition, Manila, 12 May 1957. Courtesy of Vanessa Ban. Original source can be found in the MoMA Archives, New York IC/IP I.A.408

Of Subtexts and Agendas: What Recent American Prints in Color Offered AAP

The significant decision to place Recent American Prints in Color in the first exhibition of Southeast Asian art was made by AAP and not by USIS or MoMA.¹⁸ The only known installation image of the exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition (Figure 1) presents a one-room exhibition of “the foremost works of Southeast Asian artists” in the Northern Motors showroom.¹⁹ Thus, the decision to include Recent American Prints in Color in the exhibition’s one-room schema was not just to include it in the platform but to physically encapsulate it within the exhibitionary frame of Southeast Asia.

This framework of inclusion, subsuming American printmaking inside Southeast Asia, was not just desired and acted upon by AAP, but also by USIS. The image of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, sent by USIS to MoMA presents a perspective of the “local” entries of the competition, implicitly equating them with the MoMA exhibition.²⁰

This gesture of inclusion, taken almost to the point of occlusion, was reiterated in the production of the catalogue of the First Southeast Asia Art Competition’s exhibition, which USIS designed, producing a total of 3,280 copies, of which USIS distributed 3,000 copies. Sent to MoMA along with the image, the catalogue inspired a tactfully written response from McCray on 28 May 1957 expressing the International Program’s pleasure at the exhibition being included at the invitation of the sponsoring organisation, but also highlighting the concern that MoMA was not properly acknowledged and credited.

Although the catalog makes no reference to it, I hope that it was possible during the exhibition itself to retain proper identification of The Museum of Modern Art as the organiser of Recent American Prints in Colour.²¹

McCray received a response only days later from William Copeland, an exhibition officer of the USIS, stating that “The American prints were properly identified when they were displayed at the recent Manila exhibition of Southeast Asian Art.”²² No additional material would be sent. While the incident likely suggests a mere oversight in crediting, it also reveals the agency that AAP and USIS had in the representation of Recent American Prints in Color. These organisations were able to sideline the intentions of MoMA’s travelling programme to represent collections from New York internationally, so as to include the exhibition firmly inside the rubric of Southeast Asia.

In order to understand the interests invested in realising such a gesture of inclusion that neglects to credit MoMA, one has to begin by looking at the narrative of American printmaking offered in Recent American Prints in Color and, specifically, what it invested under the rubric of “American” and the medium of printmaking. While the exhibition travelled, MoMA sent with it images of a selection of works to be used in all printed material, whether for advertising or the development of a catalogue. Reading this selection of images provides an insight into the common thematics that defined this exhibition and its works, beyond them being made in the US. The images included: Nativity (1949) by Andre Racz, Monument to a Butterfly (1952) by Eugene Berman, Birds (1952) by Irving Kriesberg, Inscription of T’Chao Pae (1952) by Seong Moy, Third Avenue Elevated (1952) by Ralston Crawford, Memory Machine (1947) by Dorr Bothwell and Italian Landscape (1953) by Irving Amen.

As an exhibition on the advancements made in serigraphy and lithography in the fine arts, the foremost defining thematic of the exhibition was its focus on American innovation. This focus was not only technological, but also reflected experimentation across artistic mediums. Ralston Crawford, painter, printmaker and photographer, is one of the more well-known of the exhibited artists, and his Third Avenue Elevated is today perhaps the best-known work from the exhibition. Crawford had only taken up printmaking in 1949, beginning by exploring lithography. Known for his abstract representations of urban life and industry, Third Avenue Elevated was based on a photograph he took of a painted steel support for an elevated railway. The work is often discussed with regard to its cross-medium exploration.

American innovation was also present in the literal subject matter of some of the work. Dora Bothwell’s Memory Machine is a key example of this: the work is representative of “indigenously American” innovation in its focus on the television set. Colour television was a distinct product of American innovation during the Cold War and would later figure in the Kitchen Debate as one of the key symbols of the virtues of American democracy and capitalism.²³

In addition to emphasising the technological prowess of American printmaking, the exhibited works reflected cultural diversity. Speaking to an “American” identity as a culturally accepting and diverse construct, most of the artists were immigrants. Andre Racz, for example, was a Romanian American artist who came to the US in 1939. The artworks themselves were also reflective of cultural diversity, such as Seong Moy’s Inscription of T’Chao Pae, which uses archaic Chinese calligraphy and draws from the methods of formal self-expression in abstract expressionism.²⁴

The artworks in the exhibition also highlighted the position of the artist as a liberal subject. Most, if not all, the works are guided by a self-reflexive subjectivity. Irving Kriesberg, for example, was an American painter whose works combine elements of abstract expressionism with figural human and animal forms, and who made his debut with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in the canonical 1952 exhibition titled 15 Artists, at MoMA. Even the most figural of the exhibited works, Racz’s Nativity, is inspired by personal experience. Printed in sanguine on gray paper, Nativity celebrates the birth of the artist’s son.

While most of the works are guided by the radical subjectivity that abstract expressionism proposed through its ambiguous, non-objective imagery, some of the works are indebted to other abstract traditions of subjectivity, such as surrealism. Eugene Berman was a leading surrealist and neo-romantic painter, while Dorr Bothwell’s Memory Machine recalls a surrealist television set. While this was not surprising for an exhibition from a museum built on a collection of European modernists, these inclusions linked developments in American printmaking to the Parisian art scene. Creating such a relationship with Paris was a key strategy of the programme that sought to validate American art internationally. In the years after World War II, Paris seemed poised to regain its status as the capital of the art world, as it was imagined by artists in the US and Europe. European artists previously exiled to New York or elsewhere returned to Paris, and many young American artists still considered Paris to be the place to study and become an artist. As such, with a cultural elitism from the pre-war era still intact, many artists based in Paris, and those exiled in New York regarded American art as a poor imitation of what they did. This was particularly important because many pre-war artists in Asia were also educated in Paris and Europe, and still referred to Paris as an art capital. In order to validate American art, it was necessary that American art be seen as equal with the avant-garde practices of Paris and Europe.²⁵

Related to such strategies of validation, the selection of artists and artworks also suggests that the exhibition was developed to represent the innovations of American printmaking in relation to modern painting. Advancements in lithography and screen-printing were used for realising works with pop and minimal aesthetics, as well as the more painterly approaches of expressionism. All of the artists represented in the exhibition were also accomplished painters. Irving Amen was a muralist who had his first woodcut show in 1949. With the development of silkscreen printing, artists at the time had specifically begun to experiment with colour in printmaking, lending itself to translation across media, including painting or photography to print. Until the 1940s, most American artists viewed print as a lesser medium, practised by those who were concerned solely with the technical aspects of making art, rather than with the importance of creative expression. The development of print studios and printmaking programmes in American art schools in the 1950s lent validity to the medium as a fine art form. This validity was based on a relationship of the medium to painting, which was taught at these schools.²⁶

The exhibition also represented MoMA’s recent acquisitions in relation to American culture and values, demonstrating the relevance and virtues of the museum’s collection and, more importantly, the value of American connoisseurship.²⁷ In defining the prints as “American”, the selection of artists was validated by the elite of New York’s art scene or by the State Department. The artists were Guggenheim Fellowship recipients or recipients of equally prestigious awards such as the Fulbright Fellowship, and belonged largely to two generations, those in their thirties and those in their fifties and sixties. The prints were recent acquisitions, made between 1945 and 1952.²⁸ Firmly rooted in the validating structure of New York as an art centre, the rubric of “American” that brought together this selection of prints was defined as a concept that was innovative, culturally diverse, inclusive and liberal. Printmaking was a stand-in for technological advancement and a wholly American modern development of painting, seen as the highest form of modern art. Printmaking, in the exhibition, was representative of a new, advanced and validated modern medium.

Beyond being a significant international event, the exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition was also the tenth annual exhibition of AAP. Consequently, the inclusion of Recent American Prints in Color should be read also as being folded into AAP’s annual exhibitions in addition to being folded into a rubric of Southeast Asia. Founded in 1947, AAP developed from the initial desire of Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, Alfredo Pestaño and Antonio Dumlao to hold a reunion of the University of the Philippines (UP) School of Fine Art (Escuela de Bellas Artes).²⁹ However, the association was not confined to UP alumni, as its membership also included self-taught artists and those from the University of Santo Tomas (which was the only other school offering the arts at that time).³⁰ The UP alumni gathering grew from Sunday meetings in which artists met and exchanged ideas, to an incorporated organisation with a constitution and a membership that included “artists in the graphic and plastic arts, art collectors, persons giving material support for the maintenance of the association and those who were lovers of the fine arts”. From its inception, then, AAP aspired to build a broad audience for the fine arts, “bringing art to the people, or vice versa” through education. It aimed to provide artists with an audience and sustainable commercial galleries to support them.³¹ To do this, it sponsored and developed exhibitions, art classes, lectures and other public activities.

Of all AAP’s activities, it was the annual exhibitions which were the most successful in furthering artists’ interests. Established in 1948, the exhibitions were competitions that offered incentives to artists as a strategy to improve the quality of art in the Philippines. This was significant as AAP was only one of the few art associations geared towards providing artists the means of developing financial sustainability for their practice at the time. AAP’s annual exhibitions brought together a cross-section of artistic practices in the Philippines as well as a large audience that comprised political, educational and artistic circles under one roof. It was reported that 3,000 people visited the exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Competition, which included delegates to the conference, diplomats, civil leaders, local and regional press, and student groups. The local art enthusiasts who provided the funding for the annual prizes were well-established business people or high-profile members of society who were invested in Filipino politics. The first annual exhibition included a pencil sketch of the Filipino flag by then President of the Philippines, Elpidio Quirino, who officiated the event. The annual exhibitions in the early years of AAP were officiated by the Philippine presidents who were personally invested in the art platform. For example, President Carlos P. Garcia headed up the fundraising committee for the First Southeast Asia Art Competition and Conference and donated generously to the organisation.³²

In galvanising participation from a broad spectrum of artists in the Philippines, each annual competition and exhibition registered the varied artistic climate of the Philippines of its time. For example, the first AAP competition evidenced the undercurrents of antagonism between conservative and modernist artists. According to Kalaw-Ledesma, conservative artists were seen as being “bound by a strict tradition. They painted what they saw and as closely as possible to the original. They painted from one point of view, adhering closely to the rules of perspective and composition, not to mention propriety.”³³ Often narrative-based and employing symbolism, their palette was known for the use of brown, sombre and neutral colours. Eventually, they would be associated with commercial and poor quality of art, founded on mere variations of a uniform style. The “Moderns”, as Kalaw-Ledesma would refer to them, painted from different points of view, demanded freedom from tradition, rejected the view that a painting must be as close as possible to the original and advocated artistic integrity. The Moderns asserted that “(h)aving gone through a war and having known the meaning of suffering, it was impossible for Filipino artists to paint idealised pictures of the masses toiling happily in the fields … painting was not an escape from daily problems; it was an interpretation of life”.³⁴ For the Moderns, subject matter was secondary; what counted was the impact and total effect of a work of art. They wanted to develop new colours, shapes, textures and perceptions in art.³⁵

The first competition awarded all the prizes to this emerging group of Moderns. This was a historic event as it was the first time that the Moderns, an emerging group of artists, were recognised so publicly. When the winners were announced, the conservatives protested the results. Before the competition, the antagonism between the conservatives and the Moderns was confined to newspaper articles or forums. The outcome of the competition was a public defeat and raised the profile of this antagonism. In the following years, the Moderns continued to win the annual competition, leading to growing discontent among the conservatives. The tensions were, in part, due to the conservatives’ fears that the art market was going to the Moderns. Hostilities were based on concerns that they were losing their livehood. Modern paintings, which were formerly bought only by foreigners and artists, were being purchased by an increasing number of people.³⁶ The following year, in 1949, AAP made efforts to quell tensions by mounting two kinds of competition: one for the conservatives and another for the Moderns. However, the intense rivalry continued to grow and came to a head when the Rotary Club of Manila, in celebration of its anniversary, awarded Galo B. Ocampo a cash prize for best painting. At the 1955 annual exhibition, the conservatives, in retaliation, took down their paintings. They carried them across the street from where the exhibition was being held and placed their work on display on the sidewalk. This walkout of the conservatives from AAP signified a turning point in the history of Filipino art. The conservatives formally withdrew from the association,^, allowing AAP to consolidate its community and direct itself more specifically to the support of Modern art.³⁷ AAP dropped its dual classification of prizes and adopted only one set of awards. Kalaw-Ledesma, in recollecting this period, states that “in effect this acknowledge(ed) the superiority of modern art … and [subsequent] winners [of the annual competition] were considered simply ‘the best in contemporary Philippine painting’”.³⁸

The First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition was the second annual AAP competition after this significant split following the walkout of the conservatives. Kalaw-Ledesma notes that, in addition to focusing on championing modern art, “the most significant medium of this period was the then untapped field of the graphics arts [or printing making] … spearheaded by Manuel Rodriguez Sr”.³⁹ From its inception as an organisation, AAP made it a policy to encourage the graphic arts. However, following the split, AAP applied itself to furthering the influence of this medium. The graphic arts were not generally studied or understood during the late 1940s and early 1950s in the Philippines. Graphic arts were, for the most part, considered a lesser form, a hobby, because materials were inexpensive and one could print as many copies as one wished.⁴⁰ Kalaw-Ledesma, as one of the leaders of AAP, was particularly invested in printmaking and supported the work of Manuel Rodriguez Sr, who would come to be regarded as the “father” of graphic arts in the Philippines.⁴¹ Rodriguez made his name by winning AAP awards and designing silkscreen Christmas cards. One of the few artists invested in the medium at the time, he conducted hobby classes for wives of military personnel at the Clark US Air Force Base in Pampanga, north of Manila. Rodriguez had learned the medium from his American supervisors, who included Robert Windquist.

Kalaw-Ledesma considered printmaking the “wave of the future, the medium of the general public” and was strongly invested in seeing it develop. She sourced a printing press from Carmelo and Bauermann Company, which printed AAP’s invitation. The printing press, the first lithograph press brought to Manila during the 19th century, was installed in a garage rented by the Association before Rodriguez was allowed to bring it to his studio where, with his etching press and other equipment, he began to teach printmaking.⁴² With growth in art students over time, Rodriguez began teaching the medium in schools and, by 1956, a year before the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, AAP organised its first Inter-Asian Graphic Arts exhibition in recognition of the growing number of printmakers in the Philippines.⁴³ Thus, in many ways, printmaking, as it came to be practised as a Modern art form, had American origins through Rodriguez Sr, who would teach a new generation of Modern artists, including his sons. It is perhaps worthy to note in this regard that the exhibition for the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition featured a total of 16 pieces, outside of the MoMA contribution, that were woodcuts or serigraphy across a range of painting categories, namely “graphic arts”, “representational painting” and “abstract painting”. Most of the contributions were from members of AAP. However, two woodcuts were contributions from India.

In addition to focusing on printmaking, the break from the conservatives meant that AAP became an art organisation particularly invested in developing a greater understanding and sympathy for the position of the Modern artist. This was apparent with the first fundraiser that AAP ran: a screening of Lust for Life (1956), a million-dollar Hollywood production centred on the life story of Vincent Van Gogh, played by Kirk Douglas. The film was, according to reports of the time, selected for the narrative it presented of the struggling, unrecognised artist, which resonated with what AAP described as the lack of social recognition and commercial sustainability that faced Philippine modern artists. In addition, the film reproduced 200 of Van Gogh’s original paintings, sourced from hundreds of museums and private collections, in a new colour process called “metrocolor” that presented the paintings in vivid detail.⁴⁴ AAP saw the screening as an educational opportunity for its Manila-based audience to encounter Van Gogh’s paintings. The premier of the film in Manila included an art exhibition in the theatre lobby of masterpieces by local modernist and conservative painters and the distribution of unique souvenir programmes designed by leading AAP members, inspired by Van Gogh’s style of brushwork.⁴⁵ Adopting a similar strategy to that employed by MoMA and USIS in Recent American Prints in Color, AAP’s decision to screen a Hollywood production based on Van Gogh showed that the association aligned itself with a narrative of European modernism. Focusing on Van Gogh’s life story and creativity, AAP highlighted the image of the heroic artist as a maverick outsider championing a reflexive subjectivity in the appreciation of art and, by extension, modern Philippine art.

Given these existing investments and the trajectory of AAP by 1957, this article’s earlier contention that the inclusion of Recent American Prints in Color should be read also as being folded into AAP’s annual exhibitions bears revisiting. Recent American Prints in Color emphasised modern art practices that together privileged narrative frames of innovation, technological prowess and radical subjectivity, and some of the AAP artworks submitted and included within the exhibition were also sympathetic to these positions. In his article “Filipinism in Art”, Ricaredo Demetillo explains the contextual demands upon the modern artist (of which he regards Hernando R. Ocampo as the epitome):

Technical discoveries in the arts are being shared more widely than ever today by a community of artists. All our artists have been influenced one way or another, some more pronouncedly than others, by certain recognisable influences: thus cubism, surrealism, futurism, expressionism, expressionist abstraction, impressionistic pointillism and other influences may be traced directly into the world of our various artists, with the important reservation that these artists have managed to keep their individuality, their signatures … The machine age, with its attendant complexities, has changed the tempo and the tenor of our ways. Depth psychology has given us a world no longer wholly ordered by the rational mind but lashed by the egoistic urges of the Id of the subconscious. The rise of corporate loyalties has tended to shrivel the individual and his erstwhile freedom. The artist should, but until a decade ago, did not respond to this responsibility.⁴⁶

In principle, Demetillo’s description could be applied to many of the works of Recent American Prints in Color, which betray European modernist influences and champion technological innovation in art, and radical subjectivity. In this regard, Arturo R. Luz’s City, Fernando Zobel non-objective Painting, Cesar F. Legaspi’s Carousel and Hernando R. Ocampo’s Fiesta and Sacramental, paintings submitted and exhibited as part of the exhibition of the First Southeast Art Conference and Competition, all betray the same stylistic and subject matter investments of Eugene Berman, Irving Kreisberg, Dorr Bothwell, Irving Amen and Ralston Crawford.

However, this relationship begins to become slightly more tenuous when it comes to the prints submitted to the exhibition, which allow for a deeper insight into the complex relationship of adaptation that arises out of presenting both practices—American modernism and Filipino modernism—alongside one another. The prints are based on subject matter that privileges a representation of the everyday Filipino person. This is evident specifically in the prints submitted by AAP members, such as Two Women by Anita Magsaysay Ho and Girl with Flowers by Chua Keng Keng. Though the prints are figurative and more impressionistic than abstract, they do share an affinity with Andre Racz’s representational practice that focuses on the everyday and domestic. Magsaysay Ho’s style was credited by critics at the time as a creation of a more “expressive, more powerful, indigenous art”.⁴⁷ In the above mentioned essay by Demetillo, he refers to Magsaysay Ho art as “folksy”.⁴⁸

This “folksy” style was identified also in the work of another artist who submitted a painting. Vicente Manansala’s Give Us this Day is an everyday scene with religious overtones, depicting a family eating at a table. Demetillo writes of Manansala’s work as being “rooted in his rural backyard, where he watches the vegetables grow and the chickens cluck … in the love of his wife and children and friends … and in the cacophony of deepness on the highways and boulevards. All these create the soil where his creative spirit receives nurture; and they are real, human and cultural roots.” Where Demetillo is critical of Zobel’s “iberian temperament” and praises Ocampo’s canvases as “abstract renditions of our tropicality”, Demetillo reserves for Manansala the high praise of making a “vital” art that is not patriotic but expresses the “soul of a people”. Demetillo further elaborates that “Our roots are planted in the soil of our past, in the sod of our time and place, in our modernity. Who takes sustenance from this soil creates vital art.”⁴⁹

Within such a discourse, the everyday scenes by Magsaysay Ho and Manansala represent a marked deviation from the narratives of Recent American Prints in Color. These works are more socially specific and embody an attitude wherein artistic innovation is meant to serve the soul of a people, an aim paralleled by lofty intentions of the MoMA International Program in crafting the exhibition, but not one inherent to the prints and artistic practices that Recent American Prints in Color put on display.

In this regard, it is important to note how different the political projects of modern art were, as framed by MoMA on the one hand, and by art discourse in the Philippines at the time on the other hand. These differences are evident despite the seeming affinities in style and artistic media. Demetillo wrote at the time of the exhibition that “Since our artists are Filipinos, they will express themselves as Filipinos, unless their sensibility has been made phoney by imbibing the foreign indiscriminately.”⁵⁰ The point in encountering American or European modernistic practices was not necessarily to emulate but to co-opt forms, styles and designs towards a Filipino artistic identity. It is in this frame of reference that Recent American Prints in Color resonated with the AAP artistic practices with which it shared exhibition space. It may have served a contextual function in AAP’s definitive annual exhibitions to not only provide an “international” frame for the practices of AAP artists but also to highlight AAP artists’ discriminate co-opting of “the foreign”.

Kalaw-Ledesma never accounts for the exhibition in The Struggle for Philippine Art, yet this occlusion is not an unproductive one art historically. Recent American Prints in Color as a selection of artwork was not important, rather what is significant is what it represented and what it provided as an exhibitionary moment—a particularly pivotal moment in AAP’s history. In light of the walkout of 1955 and the developments leading up to the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, the decision to include Recent American Prints in Color in its annual exhibition can be read as a reiteration of AAP’s investment in the development of art, which included a focus on printmaking and on developing a greater understanding and sympathy for the position of the modern artist. Furthermore, AAP’s mission to bring art to the people and to develop opportunities or tools for art education should not be overlooked.⁵¹ With the end of World War II, Europe’s economies were devastated and cultural products from Europe were not being travelled extensively. Instead, with the onset of the Cold War, cultural products from the Soviets, such as the Russian ballet, and from the Americans, such as exhibitions like Recent American Prints in Color, travelled more widely, allowing Filipino artists exposure to these cultural products. American art resonated with them, and with more scholarship opportunities in the US becoming available to Filipino artists, the early 1950s in the Philippine art scene saw a shift in influence from the school of Paris to the school of New York. In addition, due to a dollar shortage, few foreign art magazines could enter the Philippines except those from the United States. As a result of the exposure to American art criticism, the Philippine art scene began to be influenced by what was happening in New York. Given this, the inclusion of Recent American Prints in Color spoke to an emergent Philippine modernism that was influenced by and open to consuming products of an American modernism.

However, this tie to American modernism was also a tie to an infrastructural framework of internationalisation. The Moderns were not just the future, as Kalaw-Ledesma states, but they represented a means to connect the Philippine artist to the world. In a published interview from 1956, the American art critic Elizabeth Lyons observes that:

[In the Philippines] it is the young artist who is the modern artist. In the West, it is mostly the older artists who take to abstract, subjective painting. The world’s most admired contemporary artists are all old and mostly French, among them Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Dufy and Rouault – the geniuses of the “School of Paris” … there is no ebb in sight for the tide of abstract expressionism in this area, the modern Asian artist has to face up to the fact that he [sic] is just as neglected, misunderstood and crucified as his counterpart in the West. Lack of public encouragement and economic insecurity is a problem the artists of today still share.⁵²

This quote, while taken from a Philippine magazine, shines a light on what caught the eye of the travelling curator and how the lineage of abstract expressionism that ties Recent American Prints in Color to European movements such as surrealism also ties Philippine modern art in the same way. The cultural Cold War led to greater educational opportunities for Filipino artists, either through the exposure that American travelling exhibitions provided, scholarships from American patrons, cultural content that the USIS library provided, and also through education which connected them to a new international art scene, crafted as part of the American “free world”. In the early 1950s, the Philippine Moderns were aware that “time had stood still for Philippine art” and were anxious to raise artistic standards to what they deemed a more “international” level. They relied on illustrations in the American magazines Time and Life, and read the limited art books at USIS libraries to learn more about an assumed international style. There were no museums that presented international contemporary art, and reproductions of masterpieces were unavailable. In fact, Recent American Prints in Color was MoMA’s first exhibition in the Philippines and Lust for Life among the first opportunities for Filipinos to see reproductions of famous masterpieces.⁵³ As an educational opportunity, Recent American Prints in Color not only epitomised AAP’s push for modern art practices, but also aligned the Philippine art scene to an international art scene it was determined to become a part of.

The Rubric of Southeast Asia in an International Art World: What Southeast Asia Provided AAP

In The Struggle for Philippine Art, Kalaw-Ledesma explains that AAP’s drive towards an international perspective reflected a desire to compete with the rest of the world, in effect to “crash the international scene”.⁵⁴ To achieve this, it was widely believed that one had to paint in an international style, in other words a style determined by a “Cold War modernism”. It was believed that the Filipino artist was “as good as anyone”. Filipino artists sought recognition towards such ends by competing on international platforms.⁵⁵ The exhibition of the First Southeast Art Conference and Competition was not only part of the effort to make Philippine art international, but was also an attempt to make Manila the artistic centre of Southeast Asia. These efforts were primarily motivated by a desire to improve art education and infrastructure in the Philippines, a key tenet of AAP’s mission. In effect, the First Southeast Art Conference and Competition built an international community around the Philippine art scene through the rubric of Southeast Asia.

AAP’s definition of “Southeast Asia” can be seen from the international exchange partners that were identified as part of the region and were invited to attend the conference. This group initially included Australia, Burma, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaya, Pakistan, South Vietnam and Thailand. From this initial selection, it is clear that AAP aspired to map the region of Southeast Asia geographically, as well as include nations with which it had a strong relationship, such as China, Japan and India (all of which have diasporic communities in the Philippines) and Pakistan (which was geographically on the borders of South Asia and Southeast Asia). Ultimately China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Vietnam and the US attended, providing delegates to the conference to represent the “national art” of their countries, speaking to their histories, contemporary art and trends.⁵⁶ The US was the only exception and did not provide a participating conference delegate.⁵⁷ In lieu of such representation, Recent American Prints in Color stood in for a delegate to speak to the history, contemporary art and trends in American printmaking. Its Manila-based audience would already be familiar with representations of the “national art” of the US from USIS libraries throughout the region, and other travelling American exhibitions. Besides printmaking being taught at Clark Air Base in Manila, Recent American Prints in Color was the second exhibition of serigraphy that USIS had presented.⁵⁸

The outcome of the conference was that seven countries (Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaya, South Vietnam and the Philippines) formed the permanent secretariat of the Pan Asia Art Conference and Exhibition, with Manila as the site of the next biennial. In the establishment of this permanent body, it is recorded that:

the conference adopted a number of resolutions advocating 1) Exchange of literature on art and culture between member nations 2) Inclusion and emphasis on the teaching of oriental art in the curricula of fine arts and humanities 3) Exchange of art exhibits 4) Exchange of personnel and 5) Free flow of cultural and art material between member nations. The conference also adopted resolutions on a) a code of ethics among asian art and b) the adoption of copyright laws for the protection of Asian artists.⁵⁹

Figure 2.

Patrick Ng Kah Onn, Batek Malaya, 1957

Source: Private collection of the estate of the late Gregorio Lim (President of AAP in 1957). Image courtesy of Patrick D. Flores

In addition to being unified by this set framework in which the countries and their respective art scenes would collaborate, the competition brought together an “international panel” of judges to decide on the best of Southeast Asian art.⁶⁰ The panelists selected winners from the local and international participants of the competition and, in effect, determined a standard for Southeast Asian art. The competition covered a range of media for local participants, including sculpture, photography and painting. While foreign participants were only allowed to contribute paintings, this was taken broadly and some paintings were painted on wood or silk. In addition, the Indonesian participation included wood carvings. There were three cash prizes awarded for overall winners that the local and foreign participants competed for.⁶¹ Batek Malaya by Patrick Ng Kah Oun of Malaya won the first prize (Figure 2). Filipino modern artist Vicente Manansala’s Give Us this Day won the second prize, and the third was won by Village Family by India’s Shanti Dave.⁶²

Reporting on the participation in the competition, Cultural News from Asia, a bulletin published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom in New Delhi, emphasised the distinct styles of each country which, it claimed, represented the “realities” or conditions of the lives of their citizens.⁶³ While international, Southeast Asia was described as made up of distinct cultural and national representations:

“Batek Malaya” (The winning painting of the competition) in oil, is a flat design of a “batik” pattern showing familiar surroundings in Malaya. The Filipino and the Indian prize winners had both chosen family themes for their oil paintings. Many schools of painting were represented. The entries ranged from the simple bamboo paintings of Chinese style to the tapestry style paintings of Indonesian artist. The ebullient though poetic outpourings of the modernists jostled along with the quiet compositions of the conservatives … Some of the Indonesian paintings were reminiscent of Van Gogh’s flat canvases. The Japanese entries were distinguished by an exquisite handling of colour and a bold formalism each acting as a foil to the other … Malaya displayed the comparatively new medium of art that of “batik painting.” The Vietnamese collection though small was interesting. It included four paintings depicting four seasonal flowers “Ladies in the Garden” executed in lacquer on wood and the doll-like “Trung sisters” (Joans of Ark of Vietnam) made of embossed silk.⁶⁴

In effect, this competition, selected by representatives invested in Southeast Asia, was a means to lay the work for a collective Southeast Asian aesthetic, despite perceived differences. A Southeast Asian aesthetic was one that reflected the shared conditions of the nations of Southeast Asia, that used modern terms or methods, while still being specifically Asian. STM, a magazine in Manila, in reporting on the conference, chose Malaya’s Chuah Thean Teng’s painting Batik of Boats in the Wharf to represent the conference and competition, on account of the subject matter being highly characteristic of all the participating nations. In this particular case, the binding condition of the nations was maritime trade. Furthermore, Chuah’s oil painting used a Western medium to represent batik, a Southeast Asian art form. It was the same method employed in the winning artwork Batek Malaya, in which a traditional art form is represented through the “newer” modern Western medium.⁶⁵

While “Southeast Asia” was being defined on aesthetic terms by AAP, it was primarily a rubric of political value. A recent concept that had only emerged as a significant political term in the summer of 1943, the construction of “Southeast Asia” was a response to the Japanese military army effectively controlling the entire stretch between British Burma and the Hispano-American Philippines (British Burma, Malaya and Singapore, the American Philippines and the Dutch Indies all fell to direct Japanese military assault) and with the creation of Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command, an offshoot of the more traditional India Command. The concept of “Southeast Asia” was not normalised until 1955, with the publication of former British colonial civil servant D.G.E. Hall’s A History of South-East Asia.⁶⁶ While there were early inklings of a Southeast Asian formation in 1947 with an attempt of the prime minister of Siam’s to launch a Southeast Asian League to build regional networks of mutual help against imperialism, Southeast Asia at this moment in history has been argued to be a concept primarily built on the prevailing American interests that the diversity of political positions and states from the Philippines, Malaya, Vietnam and Indonesia were not “lost” to communism.⁶⁷ Towards this end, SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), based on the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty or Manila Pact signed in Manila in 1954, would act as an umbrella over an area of the world defined under the rubric of “Southeast Asia” in an alliance to contain communist power. The Philippines and Thailand were its only geographically Southeast Asian members; its membership consisted largely of countries located outside of the region but with an interest either in the region or the organisation itself.⁶⁸

For an art world shaped by AAP’s efforts to internationalise Philippine art, such geopolitical formations were not just territorial maps of allegiance but also underpinned networks of travel and circulation. In The Great Migrator, a study of the transitional network of modern art in the 1960s and the increasing dominance of American art through the lens of Rauschenberg’s work, Hiroko Ikegami notes that “the ‘global’ rise of American art was in fact restricted” to the “Free World”. In other words, the geography of post-war modern art overlapped with “the geography of international politics of the time”. The travel of American exhibitions connected art scenes with major players who shared a mutual interest in working together to promote post-war American art, engendering an increasingly Americanised “international” art scene.⁶⁹ Within this emergent field, Southeast Asia was a space and concept that existed between the dichotomies of the Cold War.

As a liminal space, Southeast Asia was—in the words of then ambassador of the Philippines to the United States Carlos P. Romulo—“the theatre of conflict between the free world and the Soviet world” and represented “the margin between victory and defeat for freedom”.⁷⁰ Moreover, as Romulo delineates, “Southeast Asia” was a formidable region in political and economic terms:

From this area comes 2/3 of the world’s exportable rice and were this rice to fall into communist hands the position of India and Japan would be in serious jeopardy. From Southeast Asia also come the raw material such as rubber, tin, rope and oil which provide the sinews of the economy and preparedness program of the West … Southeast Asia dominates a vital corner of the globe and controls the communication lanes across the Pacific and the Indian oceans. (In addition) by accepting payments for its exports in consumer goods without requiring dollars, Southeast Asia has contributed immensely to the economic recovery of western Europe without the trade of Southeast Asia there could scarcely by a multilateral free world economy.⁷¹

The Philippines was not shy about the idea that association with such a Southeast Asian regionalism could benefit its interests.⁷² As early as 1949, Elpidio Rivera Qurino, the second president of the Philippines, had tried to initiate this in the form of a regional alliance.⁷³ Quirino wanted to bring the US into the planned alliance but it declined. Without the support of major powers, the alliance did not materialise. For the most part, according to political analysts of the time, “regionalism was not very strong”.⁷⁴ Asians had too many conflicting colonial associations and any alliance to counter the positions of the Soviet Bloc or the American “Free World”—even the alliance of an Asian-African bloc—had little appeal beyond financial practicality.

Where statecraft had failed, the exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition succeeded in bringing together a regional alliance of states in support of their artists. The terms of participation, in being reliant on the respective states supporting their artists, framed the contributions as specific nationally endorsed artistic practices. This is evident in the reporting of the exhibition, which essentialised artistic practices by national and cultural identities. The inclusion of Recent American Prints in Color was in a sense no different. It framed an “American” modern art regardless of whether the participating artist identified as such.

It should be noted, however, that the characteristics of these nationally defined modernities—as defined by narratives of innovation, technological prowess and radical subjectivity—were broad enough to include other cultural identifies within its discourse. For example, Malaya’s Chuah Thean Teng’s painting Batik of Boats in the Wharf and Patrick Ng’s Batek Malaya, both of which use the medium of oil painting to emulate the designs of batik painting, can be read as technological innovations in painting by “reinventing” the use of batik painting. While the work of these two Malayan artists did not directly relate to works presented in Recent American Prints in Color, they did resonate with the key principles being touted by the exhibition. Ng’s Batek Malaya, winning first prize at the competition, was especially valued for its innovativeness. As such, AAP’s inclusion of nationally endorsed artistic practices alongside Recent American Prints in Color speaks to a construction of Southeast Asian regionalism built on the infrastructure of the nation, coinciding with the values of MoMA’s “international art”.

This attempted artistic regionalism, however, was seemingly not built on a direct exchange between artists, but rather though art and diplomatic organisations, that in coming together articulated broad principles of modern art to which they mutually could commit. After all, there is no evidence to suggest that Seong Moy’s Inscription of T’Chao Pae that is based on a “discriminate adaptation” of Chinese calligraphy and abstract expressionism were highlighted in local discourse.⁷⁵

In spite of the First Southeast Asia Art Competition and Conference’s chartering a Southeast Asian aesthetic and bringing a community together on the pretext of establishing what would be the “best art” from the region, of the most interesting outcomes of the conference was the quick dismissal of the rubric of Southeast Asia. Instead of a Southeast Asian conference, organisers decided to name the next edition the Pan-Asia Art Conference. The change from “Southeast Asia” to “Pan-Asia” was made to include more countries and to lend the organisation long-term sustainability. This was a particularly significant outcome because the rubric of Southeast Asia was deemed unsustainable, in that it was not inclusive and representative enough for the cultural producers invested in the region.⁷⁶ Despite being so quickly discarded, Southeast Asia was not an insignificant rubric, nor was it too nascent a concept to have no impact. It is worthy to note that a subsequent pan-Asia event never materialised.

“Southeast Asia” did not just offer AAP a conceptual frame with which to build an international community. Much like the practical motivations that encouraged Southeast Asian nation-states to enter SEATO and other political alliances with major powers such as the US, the concept afforded AAP tangible and practical benefits. For one, it did ensure access to the global distribution network of the USIS office in Manila. USIS in Manila was supportive of AAP’s First Southeast Asia Art Competition and Conference, because it addressed its goals in promoting the Philippines as a centre or exemplary nation to lead and collaborate with its neighbours.⁷⁷

In addition, the rubric of Southeast Asia was also sustained and supported by many political organisations in AAP’s exhibition. Funding for the First Southeast Asia Art Competition and Conference was derived from many sources including the Asia Foundation (an American public charity which was primarily funded by the CIA at the time); the Department of Foreign Affairs; Northern Motors, a local subsidiary of General Motors; the Philippine National Museum; and the embassies of the USA, Australia, Belgium, the UK, China, France, India, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand and South Vietnam. Carlos P. Garcia, President of the Philippines in 1957 and one of the key fundraisers, commented that AAP’s goal of encouraging the exchange of different artworks produced by Southeast Asian countries furthered one of the aims expressed by the 1955 Bandung Conference, which was to bring unity among other Southeast Asian Countries through a renaissance of their cultural, artistic and social activities. He encouraged the Philippine people to support the event, a credit to the nation, in bringing together such different nations in terms of the sponsorship, initiation and fundraising for the event.⁷⁸

In remembering the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, Kalaw-Ledesma states:

The plan was to make the competition an annual, round-robin affair, but somehow a new Southeast Asian exhibition never materialised. Nevertheless, two important ideas emerged from the competition. The first was that all men are brothers and art transcends all barriers because it is universal. The second—and this may not be as diametrically opposite as it may seem—was a belief in national identity.⁷⁹

In organising the first regional platform and exhibition for Southeast Asia, AAP found that the rubric of Southeast Asia was only of limited conceptual value. Member nations themselves identified with the broader term of “Asia” rather than “Southeast Asia”. A regional framework was only useful insofar as it could speak to the diversity of the region, to transcend Southeast Asia’s national and political borders.

Following the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, the next Southeast Asian exhibition would be the 1st ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) exhibition in Jakarta in 1968. It would feature artists from Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Years later, under the auspices of the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information (COCI), T.K. Sabapathy would write about the legacy of attempts to “foster a sense of region-ness in Southeast Asia by means of art exhibitions”. Sabapathy’s points of reference included the exhibition 36 Ideas from Asia: Contemporary South-east Asian Art at the Singapore Art Museum, which he curated.⁸⁰ Sabapathy proposes that ASEAN-initiated exhibitions, from the Association’s inception in 1967, are enterprises affirming relations within the geographic region based on a perceived shared history. In effect, these exhibitions were crafted to convince Southeast Asians of a Southeast Asa that had cultural relevance. Yet Sabapathy aptly notes that “the sense of Southeast Asia as a region was a failed or incomplete project”.⁸¹ Even within the logistical framework of ASEAN exhibitions, there was a lack of a cohesive narrative. Each country determined the extent and content of its participation, presenting what it perceived to be its mainstream art and artists for display and publication. Similarly, the framework of Southeast Asia as it were in the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition was a performance of “aspirational” regionalism. As seen through Sabapathy’s analysis of the ASEAN COCI projects, there was little difference in future administration of Southeast Asian exhibitions. The framework for participation was largely the same in both the exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition and the ASEAN-initiated exhibitions. The artistic relationships were associative more than direct, with invitations awarded to state-endorsed agents and facilities by state bodies such as embassies. However, the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition differed in the ways in which it enacted a pragmatic diplomacy for self-development through co-option and collaboration. The occasion of the exhibition in 1957 was a means to visualise the relationship of the different national groups that the conference brought together, which together articulated certain goals for professionalism and collaboration for such a region (for example, the exchange of literature on art and culture between member nations and exchange of art exhibits, see n. 58). Even if the exhibition of 1957 and its frame of Southeast Asia served AAP’s interests of development and internationalisation, the exhibition and frame, unlike successive iterations in ASEAN, sought to create a regional identity to host and encourage collaboration. This was fundamentally different than creating a narrative for Southeast Asia or an identity for all its participants to adhere to, it was a tool for self-development through the sharing of resources and collaboration.

As Sabapathy concludes in his essay on international exhibitions of Southeast Asian art, there is a “shadow” to the definition of the region based in political diplomacy: that of a regional perspective not immersed in narratives of the nation-state in which the actors who take up the terms of the region and who willingly participate in these frameworks cast themselves as “active, self-determined subjects” that construct the region on “its own terms, exigencies, historical and material conditions”.⁸² The First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, as a precursor to more recent ASEAN or Southeast Asian exhibitionary frameworks, is exemplary of this relationship, wherein an artists’ association takes up the notion of “Southeast Asia” and defines it by and for its own agenda.

An Exceptional Inclusion

Returning again to the inclusion of Recent American Prints in Color in the rubric of Southeast Asia, this was an anomaly. Never again in its travels would the exhibition be hosted by such a historic and international platform. Furthermore, never again would MoMA contribute to a travelling exhibition that sought to map a region such as Southeast Asia. As an exceptional inclusion in the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition, in terms both of its treatment and the conceptual exceptions that AAP undertook to include an American presence at this foundational exhibition of Southeast Asia, this case study pushes against a conventional understanding of how cultural imperialism works, and the assumed binary dynamics of the cultural Cold War. Southeast Asia as a regional concept was conceived as a liminal theatre between the two fronts of the cultural Cold War. As seen from the inclusion of Recent American Prints in Color, for AAP, as much as for Southeast Asian political elites, the Cold War provided an opportunity on which nations in the region could capitalise on. Rather than determining the cultural expression and identity of Southeast Asia, the travelling of American exhibitions enabled Southeast Asia, in the form of AAP, to maintain and even generate agency to develop art infrastructure and utilise networks they did not already have locally.

Recent American Prints in Color did not entirely achieve what was intended for it, either by MoMA, by a US state office anxious to garner support for American liberal modernism and American policies or by Filipino artists anxious to link themselves and their modern art to an international art scene. Thus, study of this iteration of the travelling exhibition offers insight into the dynamics of the reciprocal processes that contributed to the influence of American art on the development of art practices in Southeast Asia. As much as USIS intended for the exhibition to develop affinity between American and Philippine culture and MoMA wished to develop cultural exchange and educate foreign countries on American culture and connoisseurship, the extent to which their projects were successful were based solely on how useful they were to AAP in a time of considerable transition and consolidation of artistic practices. Besides the seeming triumph of the Moderns in ascertaining a foothold as leaders in the Philippine art scene over the conservatives, the other major transition at the time was a desire to internationalise the Philippine art scene. Purita Kalaw-Ledesma would later write that the period of 1953–57 was a particularly important period in which art as a carrier of social protest shifted to focus on technique and its perfection, with artists instead aspiring to international recognition. This drive in turn pre-empted “the quest of cultural identity”.⁸³

Benedict Anderson argues that national identity in Southeast Asia arises out of three institutions: the census, the map and the museum, which together “profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it rules, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry”.⁸⁴ The map and census shaped the way we think about nations, making possible such identifications as “Southeast Asia” and “Southeast Asian”, “Philippines” and “Filipino” but it was in the museum, in its imagining of power and history, that these concepts were concretised.

The exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition exemplifies this concretising of power and history in the construction of national identity within the region. In a one-room schema, it made visual a Southeast Asian culture and aesthetic, making concrete a concept that reflection political aspirations more than real affinities. Through the inclusion of Recent American Prints in Color, AAP tied a nascent concept of a modern Southeast Asian art to power in the form of the US, and history in the form of an American modernist lineage. Making concrete, in the form of the exhibition, an “international” definition of Southeast Asia, AAP not only sought to carve a space for Philippine art at the epicentre of Southeast Asian culture, it also sought to affirm its investments in modern art at a time of contentious change when a definitive aesthetic of Philippine art was only just emerging.