Return Engagements
Contemporary Art's Traumas of Modernity and History in Sai Gon and Phnom Penh
Published on 11. June 2021
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-1-4780-1038-8 (ISBN)
Description
In Return Engagements artist and critic Vi?t LE examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Vi?t Nam to rethink the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art. Highlighting artists tied to Phnom Penh and SAi GOn and drawing on a range of visual art as well as documentary and experimental films, LE points out that artists of Southeast Asian descent are often expected to address the twin traumas of armed conflict and modernization, and shows how desirable art on these themes is on international art markets. As the global art market fetishizes trauma and violence, artists strategically align their work with those tropes in ways that LE suggests allow them to reinvent such aesthetics and discursive spaces. By returning to and refashioning these themes, artists such as Tiffany Chung, Rithy Panh, and Sopheap Pich challenge categorizations of "diasporic" and "local" by situating themselves as insiders and outsiders relative to Cambodia and Vi?t Nam. By doing so, they disrupt dominant understandings of place, time, and belonging in contemporary art.
Reviews / Votes
"Vi?t LE writes with flair and passion of difficult subjects: war, trauma, the art and visual culture of the Vietnamese and Cambodian diasporas. With a critic's nuanced eye and a practitioner's sensitivity, his framings and readings of provocative, complicated work evoke the beauty of the artists' visions and yet always return us to the history and the present of the artists' lives, careers, and countries. Return Engagements is a brilliant work to which I will return." - Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of (The Sympathizer) "Vi?t LE moves the scholarly conversation about displacement away from the traditional state boundaries toward a much-needed examination of diaspora, (un)settlement, and return while offering a capacious rethinking of refugee-ness, displaced personhood, and diasporic selfhood. Return Engagements is a provocative and compelling work of curatorially driven art criticism." - Cathy Schlund-Vials, author of (War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work) "In this elegantly produced study of contemporary art in Cambodia and Vietnam, Vi?t LE explores the multiple valences of return-as a yield that is more than financial, a journey that is deeply personal and a recurrence of history that is multi-temporal." - Penny Edwards (Sojourn) "LE's Return Engagements is a welcome addition to scholarship on Southeast Asian cultural production. LE's emphasis on diaspora's multimodal returns rather than one-way movement and on the dangers of recuperative models of trauma and memory and liberal multiculturalist approaches to representation as emancipatory, and his articulations of strategic cartographies within the context of neoliberal global markets and global racial capitalism, provide a transnational approach that blurs traditional disciplinary boundaries and reorients essentialist approaches to Southeast Asian art and visual culture."- Lina Chhun (Journal of Asian Studies)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
27 illustrations, incl. 16 page color insert
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
680 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-1038-8 (9781478010388)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Vi?t LE is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts and coauthor of White Gaze.
Content
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction. Risky Returns, Restagings, and Revolution 1
1. What Remains: Silence, Confrontation, and Traumatic Memory 57
2. The Art Part: Vi?tt Ki?u Artists, Divides and Desires in SAi GOn 105
3. Personal and Public Archives: Fragments and (Post)Colonial Memory 150
4. Town and Country: Sopheap Pich's and Phan Quang's Urban-Rural Developments 189
Epilogue. Leaving and Returns 239
Notes 245
Bibliography 301
Index 315
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction. Risky Returns, Restagings, and Revolution 1
1. What Remains: Silence, Confrontation, and Traumatic Memory 57
2. The Art Part: Vi?tt Ki?u Artists, Divides and Desires in SAi GOn 105
3. Personal and Public Archives: Fragments and (Post)Colonial Memory 150
4. Town and Country: Sopheap Pich's and Phan Quang's Urban-Rural Developments 189
Epilogue. Leaving and Returns 239
Notes 245
Bibliography 301
Index 315