Southeast Asia

AExGTF Chats: “Between Tiny Cities (រវាងទីក្រុងតូច)” at George Town Festival

Between Tiny Cities (រវាងទីក្រុងតូច), a two-hander dance performance dovetailing b-boy vocabulary with contemporary dance, was the result of a three-year cultural exchange between Tiny Toones in Cambodia and Darwin City Rockers in Australia. It was presented at George Town Festival 2018, running over the opening weekend of 4 – 5 August. We interview choreographer Nick […]

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Photo project examines how food challenges the notion of poverty (via SEA Globe)

Since 2010, photographer Stefen Chow and his economist partner Lin Huiyi have been challenging perceptions of what it means to be poor across the globe. Their award-winning project The Poverty Line, which will exhibit at this month’s George Town Festival in Malaysia, compares 29 countries through photographs of the food choices available to those living on the poverty line

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Mentorship Corrie Tan

OPEN CALL: Performance Criticism Mentorship with Corrie Tan

Performance Criticism Mentorship by Corrie Tan, Resident Critic, ArtsEquator.com How does it work? You’ll attend six performances between September 2018 – March 2019. Within three days of watching each show, submit a 500-word review to ArtsEquator’s Resident Theatre Critic, Corrie Tan. Based on Corrie’s feedback, edit & resubmit the final review within two days for publication

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The World Cup, The Japanese Occupation and Our Painful Inheritance

This article is republished from the Singapore International Film Festival editorial. It is part of New Waves 2018, an annual series of screenings and dialogues with regional filmmakers. For this third edition of the New Waves series, SGIFF invites participants the festival’s Youth Jury and Critics’ programme to offer an introductory analysis on the four

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Once-thriving Myanmar cinema readies for new wave (via Nikkei Asian Review)

YANGON — Change is afoot in Myanmar’s now moribund movie industry. Just over two decades ago, the country’s current de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi was imprisoned by all-powerful military generals and Western sanctions made it nearly impossible to import film reels into the isolated and impoverished Southeast Asian country. But in the cinematic heydays

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Ho Keen Fi

Lim Chin Huat and Negotiating Positionalities across Time (via Talking Circles)

Lim Chin Huat shares about his journey of learning one artistic discipline after another, his approach to creating work, his struggle with calling himself an artist, and how his current project In Her Hands traces its origins back to more than ten years ago. He currently teaches movement full-time at the Intercultural Theatre Institute. CH: I was a science

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Saengjun Limlohakul/NUS Museum

The Artist-Curator’s Eye: Manit Sriwanichpoom’s “Rediscovering Forgotten Thai Masters of Photography”

By Elaine Chiew (1,600 words, eight-minute read) Art historian Patrick Flores first addressed the phenomenon of the artist-curator in his seminal essay Turns in Tropics [1] as someone who holds a certain power and who has become a key figure in shaping the art history of contemporary Southeast Asian art. Manit Sriwanichpoom’s exhibition Rediscovering Forgotten

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Nabilah Said

Making Our Own Centres (Of) Ourselves: Latiff Mohidin’s “Pago Pago (1960-1969)”

By Nabilah Said (2,220 words, 11-minute read) Had Malaysian artist-poet Latiff Mohidin been French, he might perhaps strongly identify with the idea of the flâneur. Coined by French poet Charles Baudelaire, the French word for someone who strolls in the city found cachet as a description of the artist-poet who drew inspiration from the city

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Mayfly Docus: “Die Tomorrow” and “14 Apples” at SIFA’s “Singular Screens”

By Dan Koh (1,715 words, 15-minute read) At this year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), the two films from Southeast Asia are documentaries, or hybrid-documentaries—just like last year’s three, curiously. Despite the glaring gaps that remain in the funding, distribution, marketing, and audience reception of our internationally overlooked non-fiction, plus their increased local censorship

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Art Hub

Is Singapore losing its standing as the art hub of Southeast Asia? (via SEA Globe)

Despite the government’s desperate attempts to position Singapore as Southeast Asia’s arts hub, flagging figures at major shows and accusations of artificiality have put the city-state’s art scene under more scrutiny than ever Singapore has long tried to combat its reputation as a cultural desert. An influx of state funding in the past two decades

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Victoria Milko

Nathalie Johnston: Creating a home for contemporary art in Myanmar

Despite being nearly 14,000 kilometres from her hometown in America, Myanm/art gallery director Nathalie Johnston has managed to create a home for herself – and Myanmar’s growing contemporary art scene – in the bustling city of Yangon. Johnston’s first encounter with Myanmar took place over two decades ago, in 1997, when her family visited a

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2018 Sony World Photography Awards

Cambodian photographer’s image honoured as one of the best in the world (via SEA Globe)

Cambodian photographer Ly Min has been recognised in the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards, with his image Cave of Skulls being selected among the top 50 in the world in the Open Travel Category The Open competition rewards the best single image across ten categories, and Min’s photo has been acknowledged as one of the

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Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab

Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab unveils second round of projects (via Screen International)

Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab (SEAFIC) has finalised the selection for its second edition, focusing on first-time filmmakers from Laos, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. Established producers such as Fran Borgia (A Yellow Bird) and Anthony Chen (Pop Aye) are attached to some of the projects, which cover topics including family strife, sociopolitical bureaucracy, cross-cultural humour

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Book Review: “Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia” by June Yap

How does contemporary art in Singapore and Malaysia reflect an alternative to the dominant narrative of history? June Yap’s book produces a concept of ‘Malayan’ history from the 1950s till 2010s through a selection of contemporary art from the region. In re-defining history through these works, Yap is reformulating the vocation of an art historian,

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Same same but different: ASEAN 50 at the Singapore Writers Festival 2017

By Akanksha Raja (840 words, 8-minute read) “Language is born from imagination, and imagination is what makes language real. Without language, we have no memory: therefore, literacy (the mastery of language) is important. Our sense of language is the most intimate access to what is real, and our literature is our people’s memory; through language,

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Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey

Book Review: “Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey” by Zhuang Wubin

Photography arrived in Southeast Asia soon after its discovery in Europe in 1839, provoking contrasting reactions and developing in different ways according to the environment where it was introduced, yet having indeed an important impact in the modernisation of the region. Photography in South East Asia: a Survey offers us the opportunity to venture on

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Tikam-Tikam Japan: Table and Chairs

Recently I caught a round of theatrical experimentations by Southeast Asian and Japanese directors in Tokyo. Called One Table Two Chairs Meeting 2017, it was the second of a 3-year series at the Za-Koenji Theatre. Taking part were Prumsodun Ok (Cambodia), Kamei Juntaro (Japan), Fasyali Fadzly (Malaysia), Chey Chankethya (Cambodia) and Liu Xiaoyi (Singapore). One

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