Exhibiting transnationalism after Vietnam: The Alpha Gallery in pursuit of an authentic Southeast Asian art form

• Main Author: NGOEI, Wen-Qing (WEI Wenqing)
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Vietnam War; Southeast Asia; regionalism; culture; colonialism; U.S. empire; Asian Studies; Civic and Community Engagement; Fine Arts; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3643; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4901/viewcontent/Ngoei_Exhibiting_Transnationalism_after_Vietnam__JAEAR__Sep_2022_.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This essay examines how the Alpha Gallery, an independent artists cooperative established by Malaysians and Singaporeans, curated and staged art shows in the 1970s that advanced its project to unearth and promote an intrinsically Southeast Asian aesthetic. The cooperative pursuit a transnational vision of inter-regional connections between the Bengali Art Renaissance of the early twentieth century and Balinese folk art. It also harbored ambitions of sparking a cultural renaissance in Southeast Asia, though these were ultimately unfulfilled. Importantly, as this essay shows, the cooperative’s transnational vision mirrored the racist thinking and paternalism of Euro-American colonial discourses about civilizing the region’s indigenous peoples. These colonial discourses persisted in large part because Southeast Asian states such as Malaysia and Singapore transitioned smoothly from a European-dominated colonial order to informal U.S. empire. This process, facilitated by the decisions of west-friendly regional elites to align with the United States during the Vietnam War, also meant the Alpha Gallery’s key members derived much of their worldview from institutions and thinkers in Britain and the United States, thereby reinvigorating old colonial mindsets. The civilizing mission sprung from such colonial discourses likely inspired the cooperative’s transnational vision in the first place.