Art After “Emergence”: Why Southeast Asia Can’t Recognise Itself in the Mirror

As ART SG, Southeast Asia’s leading international art fair, returns to Singapore from 23–25 January 2026, questions of visibility, framing, and identity remain central. For the first time, the fair will co-present S.E.A. Focus, an exhibition platform dedicated to showcasing contemporary art from the region. In this essay for Something Curated, John Z.W. Tung, Curator of S.E.A. Focus, reflects on how Southeast Asian art is seen, measured, and understood within the structures of the international art world.

This rumination continues a line of inquiry first set out in Southeast Asia: The Geographic Question, published in the exhibition catalogue for the 2019 edition of the Singapore Biennale, Every Step In the Right Direction. There, I examined the instability of Southeast Asia as a geographic, political, and cultural construct, tracing how the region’s boundaries and meanings have been repeatedly assembled through contingent frameworks, colonial administration, Cold War area studies, and institutional regionalism, rather than arising from any singular or intrinsic coherence.

That earlier essay did not set out to replace one definition of Southeast Asia with another, nor did it abandon the geographic question altogether. Rather, it examined the limits of geography as an explanatory foundation, showing how cartographic, geological, and cultural frameworks each produced partial and often contradictory accounts of the region. Southeast Asia emerged not as a coherent entity awaiting clearer definition, but as a construct continually assembled through overlapping historical, political, and institutional processes, processes whose internal tensions were exposed rather than resolved by closer scrutiny. What the essay ultimately proposed was not a rejection of geography, but an insistence that Southeast Asia could only be approached relationally and historically: through attention to how people move, inhabit, remember, and give meaning to space, rather than through borders or regional membership alone.

What remained unresolved, however, was not how Southeast Asia came into being as a concept, but how that instability continues to operate, how it is seen, evaluated, and reflected back, particularly within the contemporary art world.

In the years since, these questions have not settled. If anything, they have sharpened. They have fermented through my curating of S.E.A. Focus over its last two editions, and through the forthcoming edition titled The Humane Agency, which considers how artists respond to conditions of displacement, ecological precarity, and political fracture not through spectacle, but through proximity, care, and ethical attention. Increasingly, it has become apparent that the problem (indeed) of Southeast Asia is no longer only one of geography, but of reflection: of how the region comes to see itself, and how persistently that image is mediated through external mirrors.

In recent years, I have been asked with striking regularity, most often by journalists, about the rise of an “up-and-coming” Southeast Asian art scene. The phrase appears almost instinctively, as though self-evident. Yet its meaning is rarely specified. Is this up-and-comingness a matter of market confidence, evidenced by auction results or gallery representation? Is it about visibility, marked by the presence of Southeast Asian artists in international biennales and museum exhibitions? Or is it infrastructural, referring to the proliferation of art fairs, residencies, non-profit spaces, and institutional platforms across the region?

The lack of clarity is revealing. “Up-and-coming” functions less as a descriptor than as a temporal positioning. It places Southeast Asia in a state of becoming, always oriented toward a future point of arrival that remains undefined. The region is imagined as approaching something already known, already established elsewhere. The mirror it is asked to look into reflects not its own conditions, but a set of expectations inherited from other art ecologies.

The question of benchmarking inevitably follows. When Southeast Asia’s artistic development is discussed, the implicit points of comparison are rarely neighbouring regions with equally complex colonial and postcolonial trajectories. Instead, the benchmarks tend to be East Asia, particularly China, or, more persistently, Euro-American centres. Market maturity, institutional depth, and critical discourse are measured against models whose historical formation was shaped by vastly different political, economic, and cultural circumstances.

What is perhaps most telling is that these benchmarks are often invoked by Asian interlocutors themselves. This suggests not simply an external imposition, but a deeply internalised equation of Westernisation with progress. The idea that development must resemble an already dominant form reveals how thoroughly Eurocentric frameworks continue to structure the global art world, even as it proclaims greater inclusivity. That this worldview is reproduced from within Asia only underscores the extent to which the mirror has been accepted as authoritative.

Yet such comparisons flatten difference. They obscure the unevenness through which art infrastructures have emerged globally, and they disregard the fact that artistic practices in Southeast Asia have long evolved under conditions that resist linear narratives of progress.

In Singapore, the short-lived but pivotal space Fifth Passage (1991 to 1994) functioned as an artist-run platform for performance, installation, and experimental practices at a moment when state-led cultural infrastructure was still nascent. Its closure, following controversy surrounding performance art, reveals how artistic experimentation in the region has often developed through friction, interruption, and constraint, rather than through steady institutional consolidation. In Indonesia, the post-Reformasi period saw collectives such as ruangrupa articulate community-based, discursive, and pedagogical modes of practice that emerged from specific socio-political conditions, operating in dialogue with global contemporary art while remaining resistant to Euro-American market logics. In Thailand, the Chiang Mai Social Installation (1992 to 1998) unfolded as a series of self-organised, ephemeral interventions across temples, streets, cemeteries, and public spaces, positioning social embeddedness and locality as primary conditions of artistic production rather than institutional validation. Taken together, these histories point to practices shaped through multiple, overlapping centres, local, regional, and transnational, rather than along a single axis of influence.

To describe Southeast Asia as only now “emerging” is therefore to overlook a longer, entangled history in which questions of modernity, community, and exchange were already being actively negotiated, often under conditions far less stable than those assumed by contemporary benchmarks of progress.

The emphasis on “Southeast Asia” as a regional frame compounds this tension. On the one hand, it offers a pragmatic shorthand, enabling curatorial platforms such as S.E.A. Focus to operate as sites of encounter, comparison, and visibility. On the other, it risks reinforcing the notion of the region as a discrete subset, positioned in relation to a larger “international.” That this international remains tacitly Euro-American is rarely acknowledged, yet it structures the field nonetheless. The universal, once again, presents itself as neutral.

This dynamic becomes particularly evident in the way Southeast Asian art is often framed through thematic lenses that emphasise difference, postcoloniality, hybridity, informality, resilience. While these qualities are not without relevance, their repetition risks turning them into performative markers, demanded by an external gaze. The region is asked to recognise itself in a mirror that has already decided what it should look like.

Concrete developments in recent years complicate this picture. The growth of independent institutions and artist-run initiatives across cities such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Yogyakarta has generated discursive and experimental spaces that do not map neatly onto market-driven narratives. Similarly, renewed attention to art histories, from modernist movements shaped by anti-colonial struggle, to conceptual practices emerging under authoritarian regimes, has begun to unsettle the idea that Southeast Asia lacks historical depth.

At the same time, the increasing presence of Southeast Asian artists in global exhibitions has not necessarily translated into a recalibration of the terms through which their work is understood. Visibility does not automatically confer epistemic equity. Too often, inclusion operates through assimilation, requiring practices to be legible within pre-existing curatorial and institutional frameworks.

It is within this context that my approach to the curatorship of S.E.A. Focus proposes a different orientation. Rather than positioning Southeast Asia as a region to be measured against external standards, the project foregrounds practices that insist on relation, between people, histories, and environments, and that treat empathy not as sentiment, but as method and urgency. In doing so, it shifts the focus from representation to agency, from identity to action. This is not an attempt to define Southeast Asia anew, but to attend to how artists within and beyond the region are already operating, responding to shared conditions without reducing them to regional tropes.

To approach a more egalitarian understanding of art emerging from Southeast Asia, it may be necessary to abandon the language of arrival altogether. Rather than asking whether the region is “up-and-coming,” we might ask how its artistic practices complicate dominant narratives of development and progress. Rather than positioning Southeast Asia as distinct from a presumed international, we might recognise that the global ecosystem has always been uneven, constituted through asymmetrical exchanges rather than a singular centre.

The difficulty Southeast Asia faces in recognising itself is not a lack of self-knowledge, but the accumulation of reflections that do not quite align with lived experience. Clearing the mirror does not mean rejecting comparison or global engagement. It means acknowledging that the image has long been shaped elsewhere, and that other modes of seeing, and valuing, are both possible and necessary. Perhaps the task now is not to perfect the image, but to recognise the conditions under which it is produced, and to allow Southeast Asia to appear not as a region perpetually on the verge of becoming, but as one already entangled, already contributing, and already in motion.



Feature image: Wan Hai Hotel: Breaking the Waves, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2024. Photo: Cra. © Rockbund Art Museum