Through a reflection on the writing, and therefore the fiction, of the art historical text in a post-colonial site like Southeast Asia, the paper speaks to the anxiety to reconsider the formation of the global or the making of emergent worlds across different times. It attempts to address the question: how can the discipline of art history, which situates the production of art in the context of history, through both its material and method create a Southeast Asian world discursively and aesthetically, through the making of ideas and the making of art. It undertakes this through the analysis of signs, artistic gestures, and social structures so that an ecology can be imagined. The exhibition curated by Vuth Lyno titled When the River Reverses for the Condition Report project implicates a similar anxiety: how the reality of the present forms and transforms in a condition constituted by water and its contradictory processes. This paper tries to peel the layers of this “nature” in terms of the conceptions of both body and metaphor and the reclamation of the sea to resettle the homeless. The moments of this process are gleaned in the iconography of a colonial painting, a failed development project in the seventies, and the kinetic art of David Medalla. It explores the levels of the word nature as, on the one hand, a kind of character or quality, and on the other, a relatively stable range of traits that in art history may be called style or iconography. On the other hand, nature may mean the ecology of forces that creates a material, broadly speaking, its environment. Therefore, the nature of the historical, specifically the art historical, refers to the logic of its formation and to its formative condition.

About the speaker

Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila. He is Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999, and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010) and a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). He convened in 2013 on behalf of the Clark Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines, the conference ‘Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia’ in Manila. He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014.

About “Vetika Brovoat Selapak: Art History Forum”

“Vetika Brovoat Selapak: Art History Forum” is a platform for meeting and talking about Cambodian and other art histories. “Vetika Brovoat Selapak: Art History Forum” presents an ongoing series of educational and scholarly events, in the form of lectures, discussions, workshops, or symposia. The aim is to facilitate the discussion of art histories with primarily Cambodian audiences in Phnom Penh.