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In Return Engagements artist and critic Vi¿t Lê 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 Sài Gòn and drawing on a range of visual art as well as documentary and experimental films, Lê 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 Lê 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.
List of contents
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 SÀi GÒn 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
About the author
Vi¿t Lê is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts and coauthor of
White Gaze.
Summary
Vi?t Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Vi?t Nam to trace the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art.
