The national question
A Guggenheim exhibition puts a spin on Asian countries' sense of identity and cultural stereotypes, writes Richard James Havis
What is a nation? Is it a population enclosed by a geographical boundary? A group of people with a shared history? An ethnicity? Ideas like these, with a specific relation to Southeast Asia, are explored in a thought-provoking exhibition called "No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The show, curated by June Yap, illustrates the difficulties of assigning nationhood by presenting a diverse collection of contemporary art that the museum bought for the exhibition. It's the first part of the Guggenheim's UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, announced in April last year, that sets out to augment the museum's collection with works from under-represented regions. The exhibition will travel to Hong Kong in October, where it will show at the Asia Society.
"'No Country' is about the paradox of nation," says Yap, an independent curator from Singapore who has a two-year residency at the Guggenheim.
"We use the word nation to define identity, but in practice, it does not define them, because it does not encompass the limits and extent of that identity. The way that we understand nations today usually refers to a group of people living within a geographical delineation. But those spaces are usually very congested, and you have groups fighting against each other from within. Some people want to cross over to other countries and identify with something else. So there is a sense of borderlessness."
The exhibition brings together works from several countries including Vietnam, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, India and Pakistan. Those unfamiliar with the art movements of the region may be surprised at the modernity of the works: manipulated photography from Pakistan, video art from Vietnam, and metallic sculpture from Bangladesh, for example. The exhibits run counter to the general preconceptions of art from these countries. That was the point, says Yap: "I wanted the exhibition to show what contemporary art practice is in the region today, and show it in a very diverse way. The idea was to put together a show that featured exhibits that visitors to the museum would not expect to see from these places."