Iola Lenzi’s Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970 (Lund Humprhies, 2024, 240 pages) is the latest addition to a narrow but deep bibliography aiming to account for contemporary art in Southeast Asia. Amidst a handful of volumes from university presses, art criticism from the region now regularly appears in Artforum, Frieze, and other august publications. This is emerging in tandem with established biennales in the region and the participation of local artists and curators in major platforms abroad. But while a presence in the annals of so-called global contemporary art is increasingly assured, the most notable thinking tends to complicate ideas of region and the wider world.

Lenzi’s book is ambivalent in this respect, its basic thesis is that regional artists distinctly avow “social agency”—the supplying of resources to a general public in order to enable insight and resistance to illiberal political contexts (p13). Such is held to explain the preponderance of the ready-made, appropriated imagery, text, and other everyday materials that, further, are typically coded, or inexplicit, in order to avoid official censure. The examples are copious, ranging from Redza Piyadasa’s coffin painted as the Malaysian flag and atop a mirror, titled May 13, 1969 (1970) after a deadly race riot in Kuala Lumpur, to Jakkai Siributr’s Campaign Promises (2011), an assemblage of rough-hewn rice bags, associated with a rural poor and embroidered with Thai electoral slogans in gold.

This thesis is ambivalent because it is not an end in itself. That is, not an argument. In spite of the fact that the monograph repeatedly asserts that the contemporary art of Southeast Asia can be understood differentially from “the West” and the modernist era, the ultimate claim is “to locate regional contemporary in global contemporary” (p205). This is the matter of “art as a conduit of 21^st-century resistance for people in danger” which can “serve empowerment in plural contexts” (p205). Here is a slide between exceptionalism and comparability. In order to maintain the former Lenzi would have needed to debunk other major writing which typically emphasises multiple influences and circuits of exchange for Southeast Asian artists. Examples include Pamela Corey’s The City in Time (University of Washington Press, 2021), exploring the variable impact of urbanization on artists’ practices, and Việt Lê’s Return Engagements (Duke University Press, 2021) which probes the theoretical instabilities of “local”. But in shifting to a “softer” ambition, essentially proffering a case-study in contemporaneity, art, and politics, the assertions of difference in Power, Politics and the Street hang heavy.

As a case-study, the book does speak to Lenzi’s authority as a longstanding writer and curator based in Singapore. Wide and granular, dozens of artworks, including performances, are discussed. These include Bagi Aung Soe’s innovative, orthodoxy-breaking painting from the 1980s and the well-known Dinh Q. Le, here represented by Damaged Genes (1998), a project selling two-headed dolls in a Saigon shopping centre as a sign of the after-effects of Agent Orange from the Vietnam War. There is Lee Wen’s famed Yellow Man (1992) where the yellow-painted artist walks in public in his underwear, a performance he has repeated over decades. Its racial politics resonate in many directions. A discovery, for this reviewer, is Eko Nugroho’s satirical zine Daging Tumbuh (Growing Flesh) (2000) in the wake of Indonesia’s post-authoritarian reformasi era from the later 1990s.

The detail and trajectory are quite remarkable, and the political touchstones—between war, nationalism, autocracy and so on—go some way in mediating the significance of artworks that typically teeter on agitprop but are usually more rhetorically complex. The extent to which we can accept Lenzi’s understanding that this is a matter of an appeal to a general public while consciously skirting censorship is an open question. That art can serve coded, ambiguous ends is already a given. And in building a “case” for Southeast Asian specificity in this respect, Power, Politics and the Street entails some clumsy claims. Gerhard Richter is erroneously referred to as West German (he actually grew up and studied in Dresden) and “unconnected to social critique” (p12). In fact, Richter’s blurring of distinctions between painting and photography, arguably the elite and popular, and “indirect” imaging of state violence (e.g. the Baader-Meinhof portraits) fits with Lenzi’s thesis quite well. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s famed re-creations of regional street cafés in major galleries are dismissed as “events for their own sake”, against allegedly more critical forms of community-building around food (p131). But to look closer at Tiravanija’s long-standing engagement with so-called Relational Aesthetics would be to discern an insight that this monograph could have productively heeded: between the well-heeled art world eating phad Thai and the street life of Southeast Asia, the public is a highly variegated entity. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge the complex role that art plays in social life—indeed, not universal but hardly more critical for one strata and region than another.

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