Project MUSE®: Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2017) through current issueLatest Articles: Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in AsiaTWOProject MUSE®Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia2425-01472424-9947Latest articles in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Correction and Note of Apology from the Editors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978919
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Since the publication of our most recent issue, we have identified an editorial oversight in one article, published as part of the Emerging Writers Fellowship in our March 2025 issue (vol. 8, no. 2 and vol. 9, no. 1).The originally published version of "On Difficulties: The Postwar Vietnamese Art Historian in the Face of Ethnography" by Tam Nguyen included the publication of private correspondence without consent. We, the editors of Southeast of Now, recognise that this was unethical, and constituted research misconduct. With the author's consent, the offending section of the text will be removed, and the text has been slightly revised by the author, to accommodate this correction, ensuring that only the author's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallCorrection and Note of Apology from the Editors2026-01-06text/htmlen-USCorrection and Note of Apology from the Editors2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®38102026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Preserving Embroidery Patterns through a Manuscript: The Sino-Singapore Trade of Teochew Buddhist Textiles since the 1930s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978920
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Charitable halls (shantang 善堂), originating from the Teochew (Chaozhou 潮 州) region of China during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), are religious organizations managed by lay Buddhists. When Teochew people migrated from China to Singapore, they brought with them the charitable hall culture, establishing the first temple in 1916. This study investigates contemporary Teochew embroidered textiles produced in China that are hung in Singaporean charitable halls, recreated from an old manuscript of embroidery patterns preserved in Singapore. Through visual analysis and oral history interviews, I answer three research questions: How do textiles evoke traditional Buddhist architecture in the contemporary landscape of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallPreserving Embroidery Patterns through a Manuscript: The Sino-Singapore Trade of Teochew Buddhist Textiles since the 1930s2026-01-06text/htmlen-USPreserving Embroidery Patterns through a Manuscript: The Sino-Singapore Trade of Teochew Buddhist Textiles since the 1930s2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1483462026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Coordinating Body: Black Artists in Asia and the Practice of Maintenance in a Time of Hunger
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978921
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The term, 'cultural work/worker', is often used by practitioners in the field of art and culture in the Philippines today. It was first introduced during the rise of the national democratic movement in the late 1960s to describe "activist cadres who were sent to infiltrate urban poor communities and rural villages with instructions patterned after the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China".1 While cultural activists retain its initial association with mass struggle, the term has gradually expanded its scope to embrace a wide range of arts and cultural practices brought under an umbrella idea of promoting "culture's value to the individual and the people" that is essential for "human development".2 This open
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallCoordinating Body: Black Artists in Asia and the Practice of Maintenance in a Time of Hunger2026-01-06text/htmlen-USCoordinating Body: Black Artists in Asia and the Practice of Maintenance in a Time of Hunger2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1103662026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Listening for Queer: The Intermedial Circuits of a Raw Aesthetics in Bangkok's Nightlife
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978922
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The summer of 2023 saw the return of Pride Month in Bangkok, organized with official government endorsement and collaboration from nonprofit organizations and major businesses, including the luxury shopping mall CentralWorld. CentralWorld sponsored the Pride Stage, which served as the final location along the parade route and hosted a series of drag performances, concerts and fashion shows. Like many of the high-end malls in Bangkok during this period, CentralWorld was saturated with rainbow signage, its walls emblazoned with its "centralwOrld citizens" campaign, a series of 26 archetypes based on each letter of the English alphabet, such as "achiever", "believer" and "creative" for the letters a, b and c
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallListening for Queer: The Intermedial Circuits of a Raw Aesthetics in Bangkok's Nightlife2026-01-06text/htmlen-USListening for Queer: The Intermedial Circuits of a Raw Aesthetics in Bangkok's Nightlife2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1233822026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Malleable Pasts: Fictional History and Radical Art History in Pagburo at Pag-alsa: Natural Depictions and Illustrated Prophecies (Gelacio, 1910) (2020)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978923
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Jo Tanierla, Doon kung saan halos patag ang tubig at tumitigil ang mga alon, doon mababasag ang tanikala (2020), Graphite on paper. Courtesy of Jorge B. Vargas Museum & Filipiniana Research Center.Jo Tanierla's Doon kung saan halos patag ang tubig at tumitigil ang mga alon, doon mababasag ang tanikala (It is where the water is almost still, and its waves cease, that chains will be broken)1 (2020) deftly renders hyperrealist waves with painstaking detail, arresting the calm movement of the body of water and framing almost a close-up of the presumably wider expanse. Tightly composed, the waves overlap with one another, with only their tonal gradation setting them apart. The graphite-on-paper illustration is not
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallMalleable Pasts: Fictional History and Radical Art History in Pagburo at Pag-alsa: Natural Depictions and Illustrated Prophecies (Gelacio, 1910) (2020)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USMalleable Pasts: Fictional History and Radical Art History in Pagburo at Pag-alsa: Natural Depictions and Illustrated Prophecies (Gelacio, 1910) (2020)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®401102026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific by Alison Carroll (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978924
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If Socialist Realism had such a strong impact on artistic developments in Asia for the better part of the twentieth century, why has it not been given more attention in art history books? This is the question that Alison Carroll asks in her thought-provoking book. In five succinct chapters, her study traces the historical legacy not only of Socialist Realism in Asia, but also of Soviet art more generally. This investigation into a more expansive interrogation of the role Socialist Realism has played in Asian art since the term was first coined in 1934 in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, sheds light on the multiple ways in which Asian artists have incorporated both realism as a style and political content into
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallSoviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific by Alison Carroll (review)2026-01-06text/htmlen-USSoviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific by Alison Carroll (review)2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®207962026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Of Opaque Poems and Paper Sculptures: Nguyễn Thúy Hằng's Intermedial Practice
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978925
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In his essay "Modernist Painting" (1960), Clement Greenberg opened with the statement that art can save itself from going down the criticality-deprived path of religion by demonstrating that its values, and the experience that it provides, are unique and self-validated. To achieve this task, Greenberg encouraged artists and critics to explore and define the ways in which an art medium can be self-critical, self-synthesizing and thus able to establish itself as necessary and competent. His call for a medium-specific criticism, which continues to shape contemporary art discourse today, posits medium as something that is best understood through the very material or means that embody and convey distinct facilities and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallOf Opaque Poems and Paper Sculptures: Nguyễn Thúy Hằng's Intermedial Practice2026-01-06text/htmlen-USOf Opaque Poems and Paper Sculptures: Nguyễn Thúy Hằng's Intermedial Practice2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®321752026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Introduction: Intermedial Inquiries
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978926
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When Fluxus founding member Dick Higgins introduced the concept of intermedia in his 1966 essay of the same name, he also offered an art historical account of his time. Tracing the waning of Abstract Expressionism in the mid-1950s, Higgins delineates the emergent trajectories of experimental art exemplified by Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg and Wolf Vostell, whose works foreground both the conceptual and material fusion of diverse media forms.1 First published by his own Something Else Press, the essay attests to Higgins' practice as an intermedial artist working across painting, performance, poetry, happenings, film, typography, publishing and theory. In his 1981 postscript to the original essay, Higgins
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallIntroduction: Intermedial Inquiries2026-01-06text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Intermedial Inquiries2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®360772026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06Drawing Encounters of an Intertidal Landscape: Autotopography as Counter-Mapping Practice
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978927
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For six months, across the low spring tides from July to December 2021, my research had brought me to one of Singapore's remaining intertidal coasts, on the island of Sentosa (formerly known as Pulau Belakang Mati,
Figure 1
Photographic Walk: Tanjong Rimau Intertidal Flats, 7 November, 2021, from the author's research archive, Reassembling the Intertidal (2019–23).
[AI Generated Alt Text] Framed horizontal collage of coastal panorama showing rocky shoreline and distant city skyline in vertical photo segments with handwritten timestamps
or the "Island from Behind"). The site is located along the western fringes of the historic Tanjong Rimau coastline, and within the infrastructural bay waters of the Keppel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallDrawing Encounters of an Intertidal Landscape: Autotopography as Counter-Mapping Practice2026-01-06text/htmlen-USDrawing Encounters of an Intertidal Landscape: Autotopography as Counter-Mapping Practice2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1030392026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06The Impossible Self-Portrait: Translation, Transmogrification, Transmediality
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978928
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Tan Zi Hao, The Mercurial Inscription, 2022, video animation, aluminium, touch sensor, dimensions variable. Collection of Singapore Art Museum. Courtesy of Kenta Chai.Where does the research end, and the artistic practice begin? We're sometimes asked questions like this, and we don't know how to answer: Research and practice, we feel, are not separate endeavours that connect or come into contact only peripherally or intermittently, like two books placed next to each other on a shelf for a while; rather, research and practice are mutually reliant endeavours, which are overlapping, entwined, sedimented and inseparable, like the pages of a book, or the lines of typographically justified text that you're reading now
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716/image/coversmallThe Impossible Self-Portrait: Translation, Transmogrification, Transmediality2026-01-06text/htmlen-USThe Impossible Self-Portrait: Translation, Transmogrification, Transmediality2026-01-062026TWOProject MUSE®1130312026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-01-06