Editorial Introduction: Pathways of Performativity in Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia

In many Southeast Asian languages, as in English, the terms used in discussions of modern art—such as nghệ sĩ, a Vietnamese word for "artist", or silpa, a Khmer word for "art"—can refer both to visual arts such as painting and sculpture, and also to performing arts such as dance, music and sculpture. Moreover, the terms used when discussing contemporary art—such as khit pyaing, a Burmese word for "contemporary", or seni kontemporari and seni kontemporer, Malay and Indonesian words for "contemporary art"—often connote artists' embracing of "alternative idioms" including performance art.¹ These linguistic accommodations make clear the proximity between the visual and the performative in Southeast Asia's modern and contemporary art worlds. Built into the very words used to discuss art in the region are the conditions of possibility for slippery, inter-animating and transmedial exchanges between visuality and performativity.

Yet performativity has been substantially less well studied than other artistic phenomena in the region. One of the aims of this special issue of Southeast of Now is to gather together new writing that may enlarge our understanding of performativity, as a concept or category for research or practice. The five peer-reviewed articles and fourteen shorter responses that follow propose not one but multiple approaches to performativity.

These texts are like pathways: they convey travelling ideas, not definitive routes, and they reflect a vibrant and continuing practice and method. Like pathways, some of these approaches may intersect or fork, at times reaching the same destinations, despite coming from different directions. Also, like pathways, some of these approaches may run in parallel, deviate or cross over each other, sometimes causing confusion or even conflict. Some of these pathways forge journeys within circumscribed locales in Southeast Asia, while others enable expansive cross-border trajectories and exchanges within and beyond the region. Pathways, thus, are enacted by their usage and denote lines of desire, access and affinity. In these ways, the "pathways of performativity" proposed in the following articles and responses reflect the many and varied historical, political and cultural strands of influence and inquiry that converge in, and disperse from, the region and its art worlds.²

Why "Performativity"?

What does it mean for art to be "performative"? The expansive nature of performativity as a concept in recent studies of Southeast Asia's art often departs from the term's meaning in linguistics. Scholars in the West, engaged chiefly in critiques of Western knowledge³—most famously J.L. Austin and Judith Butler—have theorised performativity as a quality of language,⁴ in which the utterance of words doubles as the doing of actions: that is, the power of language to effect change, which the latter also extended into the transformation of public space by the assembly of bodies.⁵ This linguistic sense of performativity is sometimes, but certainly not always, connoted by scholars' use of the term in the discourse of Southeast Asia's art, including in the articles and shorter responses that follow. And perhaps this is also indicative of how the art, documentation and discourses of Southeast Asia thread in, through and beyond its regional framing.

Why are we proposing "performativity" as a frame of reference here, rather than the more familiar "performance art"? The broad and porous nature of performativity as a term and a concept enables a larger scope of inquiry, and refers to a wider range of artistic and other practices. Scholarship on performativity can and does include research on the performing arts (such as dance, music and theatre), as well as on performance art and performance artists. Yet it also can and does include research on other forms of practice, for example on the qualities of visual art and material culture that in some way relate to, borrow from, or are shaped by the qualities of performance. Such performative qualities may include the ephemeral or time-based and the bodily or live, among others. Emerging from these "live" iterations is also an understanding of performativity rooted in documentation and archiving. This prompts thinking about how recordings and other remnants left behind at a given moment in time may be performatively reactivated in the future.

In light of these many dimensions, we propose performativity as a frame of reference cognisant of a performative turn that we observe unfolding in the scholarly discourses on Southeast Asia's art. This performative turn builds on—while also sometimes marking a shift away from—the scholarly interest in the region's performance art, which has been on the rise since the 1990s.

Foundational scholarship on performance art in the region has included four key areas of interest. One has been studies of festivals as sites for performance artists to meet and practice.⁶ A second has been studies of artists' collectives and other groups that have fostered exchanges between performance artists.⁷ In addition to these infrastructural lines of inquiry, a third area of interest has been in protests and activism and their relationship to art and artists. Fourthly, scholars have studied the role of the body in performance art, thus linking the practice of performance artists to questions of gender and identity.⁸

In light of this existing scholarship, this special issue of Southeast of Now configures "performativity" as its pathways in and out of the region, as reflected by the range of contributions in the publication. Several of the contributions here were developed from papers first presented at a conference convened by Eva Bentcheva and Annie Jael Kwan in 2019, titled "Pathways of Performativity in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art" at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, with the support of the Goethe-Institut.⁹ The conference was held to coincide with an exhibition at the same venue, titled Archives in Residence: Southeast Asia Performance Collection, which was curated by Eva Bentcheva, Annie Jael Kwan and Damian Lentini, in consultation with Sabine Brantl. This drew on an archive of performance-related materials from Southeast Asia that was collated and launched in the UK by Something Human (directors Annie Jael Kwan and Alessandra Cianetti [2014–18]) and other partners and collaborators. This issue builds on, as well as departs from this conference, by developing an editorial approach that is richly informed by the conference participants, while it also looks to further expand the remit of "performativity" by inviting further contributions.

This issue is structured around two modes: longer, peer-reviewed articles by both emerging and established scholars, and shorter responses by artists, curators, writers, scholars and others. The articles present in-depth historical and theoretical work, while the shorter responses include speculative ideas and work in progress.

What "Performativity"?

The artists, curators, scholars and others whose writings follow embody the performative turn in a number of ways which we find exciting and enabling, and suggestive of new pathways for research and practice.

First, the following texts look beyond the physical body as the main focus of performance art. Many of the contributors to this special issue propose a revisiting (or even a revisionist reappraisal) of how performance and identity intertwine in the work of Southeast Asia's artists.

Second, in looking beyond the artist's body, many of the contributors in this issue explore performativity as it appears in documentation, in archives, or in works of visual art such as photographs.

Third, they explore the relationships between works of visual and performance art and other media and art forms, such as music and theatre. Many of the contributors draw on these transmedial intersections in their analyses, or propose them as key to the practice of artists.

Fourth, many of the following texts explore the connection between performances by artists and other realms of social, cultural and religious practice. The performativity of artworks may be experienced and approached in relation to the performativity of other aspects of daily life and spiritual activity.

Articles

The first two articles in this issue delve into the question of how the notion of "performativity" may be expanded beyond studies on performance art and the body. Nora A. Taylor considers the relationship of documentation to live events and their afterlives. Taylor focuses on how artists in Vietnam, Singapore and Myanmar have engaged with hearsay, archival and documentary materials in order to produce performative reenactments, translations and remediations of historical moments and archival records.

In her study of Fluxus "resonances" in Southeast Asia, Eva Bentcheva proposes that performativity may also be traced with experimental art practices involving objects, instructions and mail art, which have been presented in contemporary Southeast Asian art since the 1970s.

The two subsequent papers by Wong Binghao on the experimental music installation-performances of Sriwhana Spong and Sally Oey's study of Marintan Sirait's performance artworks, take up the question of how performativity has also been mobilised to represent and contest identities. They examine the ways in which artists have looked not only to the visual arts, but also to performative practices from religious rituals, experimental and traditional forms of music, as well as popular culture in order to examine "identity" as a performative and dynamic dialogue between past and present. The article by Michelle Lim presents a historical study of the Flying Circus Project, a notable and under-studied offspring of the well-known Theatreworks Company, which has dominated the theatre sector in Singapore since the 1990s. Lim attempts to recall the Flying Circus Project in Myanmar and speculates on the shifting formations of "audience" across the unfolding of the project and its different local, regional and international contexts. In so doing, her essay points to the tension in exploring performativity as shifting between theatre and the visual arts.

Shorter Responses

In addition to the long articles featured here, this issue has also invited shorter responses that offer reflections-in-progress around key practices and concepts associated with performativity in Southeast Asia. These comprise three overlapping sections.

First, "ruminations": in which curators, scholars and others reflect on theoretical concepts that enable their approaches to performativity. Contributors here include Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, Claudia König, Annie Jael Kwan, Carlos Quijon, Jr, Adele Tan, Charmaine Toh and meLê yamomo.

Second, "conversations": in which several contributors introduce key artworks and historical moments that have illuminated their understandings of performativity, through a dialogue or exchange. Contributors here include Veronika Radulovic on Lee Wen, Tuan Mami with Eva Bentcheva, and Đỗ Tường Linh with Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên.

Third, "artists' reflections": in which artists write on their own practices. In most if not all cases, this is not simply writing about performance; rather, the mode of writing is performative too. For example, Anida Yoeu Ali draws on her longstanding practice as a performance poet while writing about her practice as an artist, while Judy Freya Sibayan cites expansively and effusively as part of a deliberate strategy that works to situate her artistic-curatorial-scholarly practice within broader historical and other discourses. Bill Nguyễn's epistolary contribution draws on his practice as an artist and curator, as well as on his shared yet solitary experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, while Nicholas Tee reflects on harnessing the club space in his curatorial project for the inclusivity and visibility of diasporic pan-Asian bodies, and the subsequent transition of nightlife into the digital realm.

Seen collectively, this body of shorter responses is intended to open up and trigger further historical, experimental and discursive explorations of where, how and when the pathways of performativity in contemporary art of Southeast Asia may be located, and where they may yet lead us.