Mekong and Metaphor: Contemporary Art and Regional Imaginaries in Mainland Southeast Asia
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Room
- Khalili Lecture Theatre (KLT)
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
This reflection on region departs from an earlier essay, “Metaphor as Method: Curating Regionalism in Mainland Southeast Asia” (2013), which examined controversial curatorial uses of geographical metaphors (such as the Mekong and the Ho Chi Minh Trail) to promote contemporary artists and foster artistic collaboration in mainland Southeast Asia.
I now consider metaphor more explicitly as an artistic method that emphasizes the temporal and tacit dimensions of regional imagination. I revisit “Mekong” as metaphor to focus on imaginaries associated with the Greater Mekong Subregion, using the 2023 Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai and featured artworks by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nguyễn Trinh Thi as case studies. Through the theatricality of Blue Encore’s automation and Ri s̄eīyng’s indexical soundscape, these works materialize regional identification not as something fixed, but as a process of intuitive understanding grounded in non-linear time, sound, ecology, and technology. This approach proposes regionality as a form of local knowledge - constituted in the recursive movement of a curtain or the algorithmic translation of riverine data into sound - rather than as an identitarian project imposed from above. Ultimately, these artistic practices offer a more situated, opaque, and sensorial mode of engaging with place, one that resists geopolitical abstraction to articulate the Mekong region as a multitude of lived realities and increasingly as an unsettling metaphor for futurity.
Registration
This event free, open to the public, and held in-person only.
Organisers
Jointly organised by the SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies and the SOAS School of Arts, South and Southeast Asia Research Seminar Series.
Contact
Header image credit: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Blue Encore, 2023, installation with automated curtains, painting on fabric. Installation view at Baan Mae Ma School, Thailand Biennale 2023, Chiang Rai, Thailand.
About the speaker
Pamela N. Corey is an associate professor of art history in the Art and Media Studies program at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary art history, focusing on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. Prior to joining Fulbright University Vietnam in 2021, she was a Lecturer in the History of Art & Archaeology department at SOAS University of London. She is the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021), guest co-editor of “Voice as Form,” a special issue of Oxford Art Journal (2020) and “On Modern and Contemporary Cambodian Art and Aesthetics,” a special issue of Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies (2014). She currently serves on the International Advisory Board for Art History (the journal of the Association for Art History), the Editorial Board of Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos, and has been a member of advisory committees for National Gallery Singapore and The Flow of History: Southeast Asian Women Artists (Asia Art Archive / AWARE).
