Lee Weng Choy considers the distance between us, while ruminating on reading, writing, and region.

1. You wake up in the middle of the night, as you often do. This time, instead of trying to fall back asleep after going to the bathroom and having a drink of water, you turn on the lights, open the laptop, and start writing. For days, you’ve been struggling with an essay. You say to yourself, c’mon, it can’t be that complicated. But with you, it’s always complicated.

Anyhow, you feel that maybe, this time, in the middle of the night, you might finally get somewhere. Because there’s something about the interruption of sleep and this particular essay. Your topic is art criticism. Which, of course, is very broad. But even as you try to narrow it down, you wonder, what is there to say? You’ve written on the importance of criticism in Southeast Asia many times before, and, yes, those arguments bear rehearsing and repeating. You haven’t lost faith in art or criticism, despite your doubts, and you have many. Still, you feel exhausted by the task.

No, it’s not just you who is exhausted. It’s as if criticism itself is exhausted. So much has been written, but to what purpose, what effect? In today’s attention economy, it’s not just the printed word, but writing in any sustained form that has become drowned out by social media and the loudest noises online. Has criticism become irrelevant? And, yet, it refuses to fade away. Or so you insist. It gets up in the middle of the night, foggy-brained and determined to go on. Although maybe this faith, this perseverance, is just another of those constitutive fictions you tell yourself (“we are not the stories we tell ourselves,” you once wrote; it was the opening sentence for an essay on the artist Ho Tzu Nyen for his catalogue of the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale).¹

_{Image: Ho Tzu Nyen, The Cloud of Unknowing (2011). HD projection; 13-channel sound, smoke machines, floodlights, show control system.}²

You flail about and grasp at different ideas…you remember a talk, earlier this year, on art writing and Vietnam, presented at the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre—you were the guest moderator. What strikes you now is not something any of the speakers said, but, as you all walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner, a Vietnamese artist had struck up a conversation with you. You could not recall her name, and wanted to ask, but she was on a roll. She was talking about what was overlooked during the evening’s discussion.

You recall quite vividly what she said. In Vietnam the idea of criticism is so disconnected from the motivations of collectors; they seem almost entirely interested in past dollar value, return of investment, and have so little concern for how an artwork has been socially, culturally, or artistically received, she said. Criticism should be as fundamental to art appreciation as reading, writing, and arithmetic is to the school student, she said. It would be great if collectors would read and study. If they were investing in tech stocks, they’d do their research, but with art, they don’t bother. Maybe if Vietnam had a more international collector base, that would change the situation, she said.

But, no, as important as the topic is, you don’t want to write about art criticism and the market. You flail about some more. Then you hit on the words “discursive density.” It’s a term you’ve used many times, though not your own invention. You’ve taken it from Marian Pastor Roces³—or, at least, that’s who think you got it from. Discourse—isn’t that just reading and writing? Keep it simple, you say to yourself, break it down into actions, the things that people do. Like talking about reading and writing, talking’s part of discourse too. But what about institutions like museums, universities and established art spaces? And our very language—how it shapes and frames and limits our thoughts? It’s never simple, you mumble to yourself.

No, you don’t want to get bogged down trying to define “discourse.” Because it’s the density—that’s what you’ve been arguing about. Density in our discourses, depth in our conversations, that’s what we need. People reading, writing, and debating, with nuanced positions. Delving into our complexities, our different stories, our intersecting histories. Or so you’ve put it, time and again, in public talks and essays, even grant proposals for the support of some publication.

As you’ve said repeatedly: what’s fundamental to art is the conversation. Though sometimes it’s less important to say something, than to listen. Because when we listen, we often realise what we ourselves have overlooked. Also: it’s not just our agreements, but there is a need to disagree, especially among friends, colleagues, and allies. As you’ve also said repeatedly: ideally, our friends are the people with whom we have our most honest conversations. We share references and experiences, providing the basis for a deep sympathy, yet as friends, we also disagree. And when we debate our disagreements, we create an opportunity to strengthen our relationships as well as sharpen and develop our own thoughts and positions.⁴

You think of the many conversations with friends, in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and even the Philippines—with their “more developed archive of art history”—where you all lamented how people in the arts aren’t reading each other’s writing.⁵ How too often curators crank out catalogue essays at the last minute, with insufficient care. It’s the exhibition as spectacle that gets attention and priority. As if curatorial writing was the neglected object of curation.⁶

You reach for the word, but once you get a hold of it, you drop it right away: “region.” You hesitate, pick it up again, hold it for a little longer. The problem’s not in just one country but across the region.

Now, however, in the middle of the night, you’re having serious doubts. Not about discursive density. That old horse is still good to ride. But you think of the correspondence you just had with Zoe Butt, from the Factory, who finds the word “region” reductive; it’s a “‘catch-all’ term that collapses an understanding of space into a geo-political frame.”⁷

2. He wakes up in the middle of the night, as he does. But instead of going back to sleep, after a trip to the bathroom and a drink of water, he turns on the lights, opens the laptop, and resumes work on an essay he’s been struggling with.

After an hour or so, he seems to have made progress. He asks himself, how do we understand “space”? He’s thinking of a range of things—from the space of a gallery to that of a whole city, from a neighbourhood park to vast stretches of countryside, from an island to even…a region.

If “region” is a troubled term, what then about “local”? The problem with the local, he feels, is that the local problems we have in places like Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, and so on—at least when it comes to a lack of discursive density—well, these are not just local problems. Or rather, local solutions, necessary as they may be, are insufficient. We’re not going to get to the density we need just by staying local. On our own, each of our separate local arts communities in this corner of the world, we don’t have the critical mass for critical density. He reflects on his experiences working in Singapore for two decades, and all the arts publications he’s been involved with over the years. He recalls the many conversations he’s had with colleagues overseas. He says to himself: we have to reach out to our neighbours, conjoin our different localities to achieve critical mass and density. Moreover, he reminds himself, in order to enlarge upon and deepen the conversations, they should take place across different localities—what’s at stake are comparative conversations, comparative localities.

Are we then talking about a regional discourse?, he asks himself. Is that the shape of our dream for discursive density? But too often when we speak of Southeast Asia as a region, as in, “our art from Southeast Asia,” it’s as if we’re talking about this one large nation. The nation is our default framework for large spaces. Which is the wrong way to go about it, he would argue, because the grammar of the nation is containment and exclusion: the control of borders and identities. In contrast, what artists often do is not define, but play with ideas and categories, opening them up to interrogation.

He wonders, might a shift in perspective towards questions of scale and adjacency open our thinking of region and space, beyond the default framework of nation? Scale, of course, is not about size, but proportion and perspective: how one fits into one’s world—like how you fit into your corner of your own city or community. Then there are larger scales. The scale of contemporary art has shifted from the international to the global (as art historian Joan Kee has noted).⁸ The international suggests a series of lateral multi- or trans-national encounters, whereas the global implies the total view from above. Yet in other ways, the global view is like the ultimate expansion of the national view—both offer analyses from above and surveillance from a distance, which enables the mapping and control of boundaries.

Adjacency—at least, as he understands it—is fundamentally lateral, in contrast to the verticality of the global or national. Adjacency precludes such certainties as borders, because it’s about constant exchanges and communications with one’s neighbours, as well as miscommunications—translations and mistranslations across different languages and vernaculars. It’s not about an abstract spatial relationship; it’s about specific lived and shared experiences, and the complicated relationships between actual beings.

When speaking about adjacency, he likes to mention the companion relationships that humans and dogs and cats have with each other. With dogs we both look at each other face to face, as if in mutual recognition. For the cat, however, the direct gaze is a threat. So we sit side by side, and mind our own business. Then, once in a while, we glance at each other and slowly blink—that is how we affirm our living next to each other. The cat is a figure of intimate familiarity and radical divergence at the same time.⁹

_{Image: Trương Quế Chi, Cuộc sống ở đây / Life is here (2017). HD video; credits: acting and editing by Đỗ Văn Hoàng, and sound by Hoàng Thu Thủy.}¹⁰

3. It’s a little after 4am when I wake up. I turn on the lights and open the laptop. For a few hours, I work on an essay, get into a groove, but then my concentration flags. I feel alternately restless and sleepy. So I shut the computer, turn off the lights, and go back to bed. Surprisingly, it doesn’t take long before I fall into a deep sleep. I start to dream.

In my dream, I’m a character in a black-and-white film, the husband in a long married couple that has grown apart. It seems the relationship is coming to its end. My wife explains to me how she has tried, over the years, but, now, cannot, not anymore, bridge the distance between us.

My wife and I are now at a bar, somewhere in Kuala Lumpur. We have just watched an old black-and-white movie. But we’re not married. We’re not even dating. We’re just two friends, discussing film theory, or rather, she’s talking and I am listening. She’s giving me her take on Walter Benjamin, montage, cinema, and history.¹¹ I am very impressed.

My friend has fixed onto that phrase, “the distance between us.” Jumping from the film to art theory to Southeast Asia, she says the phrase suggests that whoever or whatever these actors are—the “West” and “Asia,” or Malaysia and Vietnam—they are separated by a distance and yet, one can still assert a conjunction, which constitutes an “us.” Moreover, these actors are also temporally, historically, situated. She says: “Remember Marian Pastor Roces’s keynote speech at the Third Asia Pacific Triennial in 1999? Marian argued how our time, our contemporary, is haunted, terribly, by the nineteenth century—by those nineteenth-century epistemes: ‘culture,’ ‘nationalism,’ ‘modernism.’ Who are ‘we,’ any ‘we,’ but a plurality of conjunctions?—between diverse pasts, presents, and places. And who are our neighbours? They’re not just those next to us geographically or temporally, but also conceptually, spiritually. If even a single individual person is already multiple, then how so a whole country, or region. We are multiples, and yet we can still conjoin. But how we do, that’s what matters. Can we, and how do we, bridge the distances between us?”

Meanwhile, I am occupied by dreams. In this next one, I am in Hong Kong, at the Asia Art Archive,¹² waiting for a talk to start, sitting next to Ho Tzu Nyen, one of the most well-read artists I know. I had sent him a draft of an essay, “Brilliant Errors are Missing Here: Contemporary Art Criticism in Southeast Asia” (I haven’t actually written the text; it exists only in the dream). Tzu is telling me what he thinks I’ve overlooked: I need to consider not only discursive diversity in the region, but also discursive disparity—a great range of differences—as well as discursive incommensurability. In the last instance, one cannot reconcile all the different voices and shifts, perspectives, personas, and narrative registers within a single larger framework. As he speaks, I nod repeatedly, almost quivering with recognition: yes, yes, I mutter quietly. Then he says something—it’s a breakthrough insight for me. But before it can register, I wake without remembering what I dreamt he just said.

It is late in the morning when I am roused from sleep. The first thing I do is open the laptop. Rather than dive back into the essay I’ve been struggling with, I send an email to Tzu Nyen. I know, of course, that it was just a dream, and that I cannot expect him to reveal the missing insight. But I also know that as a critic, the core of my arts education has come from listening to artists, and Tzu and I haven’t spoken in a while, and we are overdue for a conversation.

Acknowledgements

This essay was written in 2020, commissioned by Zoe Butt, then director of Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Saigon, for an intended magazine project. Because of the pandemic and its effect on funding, the magazine was not realised, and eventually the art centre closed. Zoe went on to establish in-tangible institute in Chiang Mai, and at one time we did revisit its publication, if and when they develop a platform for regional writing. She has granted permission to publish the text with Asia Art Archive’s LIKE A FEVER. My thanks to Zoe Butt, Bill Nguyen, Do Van, Uyen Lee, and Ben Valentine for their comments.

Lee Weng Choy is an art critic based in Kuala Lumpur. His essays have appeared in journals such as Afterall and anthologies such as Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art (2012), Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 (2012), and The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Art in Global Asia (2022). From 2000 to 2009, he was Artistic Co-Director of The Substation in Singapore. Lee has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore. He has worked with various arts organisations, including in-tangible institute, Ilham Gallery, A+ Works of Art, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, and National Gallery Singapore. 

Notes

^{1. In these notes, I reference examples of my own criticism. I’ve written a number of essays that discuss the art of Ho Tzu Nyen, such as: “On Wanting & Letting Go: Ho Tzu Nyen, the Screen, the Frame and the Edges of Narrative” (2011), in The Cloud of Unknowing by Ho Tzu Nyen, exhibition catalogue, Singapore Pavilion, Biennale of Venice, published by Singapore Art Museum; there’s also: “The Assumption of Love: friendship and the search for discursive density” (2012), in Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: a Critical Anthology, edited by Boreth Ly and Nora Taylor, published by the Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University.}

^{2. Created for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the piece is titled after a fourteenth-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between God and humans can only be traversed by the senses, and not the rational mind. Ho’s work is set in a deserted, low-income public housing block in Singapore; it unfolds in eight vignettes, each centred on a character who meets an unexpected ethereal cloud.}

^{3. See Marian Pastor Roces, Gathering: Political Writing on Art and Culture (2020), co-published by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, and ArtAsiaPacific. Roces is a major thinker on the interactions of politics, privilege, state patronage, creativity, tradition, and contemporary art in Southeast Asia; she works across the fields of art history, cultural theory and policy, museum creation, and social activism. The book is the first collection of her writing, and brings together forty-three essays from 1974 to 2018.}

^{4. See my essay, “Friends with Disagreements” (2017), on the Spirit of Friendship website, published by the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre.}

^{5. In October 2002, I was invited to the Locus 2: Interventions in Art Practice conference in the Philippines. My presentation, “Reading Each Other,” noted that we don’t read each other enough, and proceeded to discuss three texts by art historian and curator Patrick D Flores, who was one of the conference directors.}

^{6. See my essay, “The Neglected Object of Curation” (2019), in A Companion to Curation, edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos, published by Wiley Blackwell.}

^{7. From an actual email correspondence with Zoe Butt, 9 July 2020.}

^{8. See Joan Kee, “The Scale Question in Contemporary Asian Art” (2016), in Furuichi Yasuko and Hoashi Aki (ed.), The Japan Foundation Asia Center: Art Studies, Vol.2, The 1990s: The Making of Art with Contemporaries, published by the Japan Foundation Asia Center.}

^{9. See my essay, “Coincidence and Re-collection; Lateness and Insight” (2020), in Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000, published by Afterall Books in association with Asia Art Archive and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. There I suggested that my role in the volume could be considered as one of adjacent reflection or blinking. Unlike the rest of the contributors, I neither research exhibition histories nor write on Chinese art. The book itself is arguably structured around a set of adjacencies between the three events that are its subject matter: the third Shanghai Biennale and the satellite shows “Useful Life” and the infamous “Fuck Off.” If these exhibitions are important not just for Chinese art history, but have larger regional and global significance, then a “by-the-side” perspective might be useful, and my hope was to provide that. Of course, the notion of adjacency as a happy coexistence amongst neighbours is an idealisation. For Southeast Asia, China looms large and, often, threateningly. I wrote the essay over the course of 2019, and it was impossible to think of adjacency with China without also addressing the protests in Hong Kong.}

^{10. The following caption was written by the artist and translated by Hiếu:}

^{A man’s presence through his silhouette. Corporeality as a form of existence. A substance. In and out of the frame. Life is a form of maintenance, endurance, and tolerance, inside and outside the body. Events or incidents, like blows of any intensity, make rhythms. A man whose face can’t be seen. And his face is the only thing that he can’t refuse and can’t hide.}

^{Life is elsewhere. And life is here.}

^{11. Art historian James Elkins observes that theorists like Walter Benjamin are often “quoted, but they are not argued with; and most important, they are seldom related to their own social contexts. […] I’m not at all sure that we’re doing Benjamin any good by citing him so frequently, and for so many purposes.” Elkins is right. But the very act of citing a German Jew—who died in 1940 attempting to escape the Nazis—when thinking about contemporary art in Singapore reveals the problem underlying how to think about any contemporary. Who exactly are our contemporaries? Yes, the social contexts of Benjamin are profoundly different from today’s Southeast Asia, but to accept that this disqualifies “us” from citing him, is to think history in terms far too linear and territorial. I’m not advocating careless comparisons. I’m arguing that to think history is already to make comparative contemporaries—each moment in time is comprised of several citations of disparate pasts and presents. To think history is to imagine a present; and to think the contemporary is to imagine multiple pasts. These imaginings are foundational to the purpose of criticism. See my essay, “The Distance between Us/ Comparative Contemporaries/ Criticism as Symptom and Performance/” (2005), in Knowledge + Dialogue + Exchange: remapping cultural globalisms from the south, edited by Nicholas Tsoutas, published by Artspace.}

^{12. See my article on Asia Art Archive, which also touches upon the topic of discursive density, “Tomorrow’s Local Library: the Asia Art Archive in Context” (2005), in Yishu, Vol. 4, No. 4.}