Editorial Introduction: Pathways of Performativity in Contemporary Art of Southeast Asia

Abstract

In many Southeast Asian languages, as in English, the terms used in discussions of modern art-such as nghệ sĩ, a Vietnamese word for "artist", or silpa, a Khmer word for "art"-can refer both to visual arts such as painting and sculpture, and also to performing arts such as dance, music and sculpture. Moreover, the terms used when discussing contemporary art-such as khit pyaing, a Burmese word for "contemporary", or seni kontemporari and seni kontemporer, Malay and Indonesian words for "contemporary art"-often connote artists' embracing of "alternative idioms" including performance art. 1 These linguistic accommodations make clear the proximity between the visual and the performative in Southeast Asia's modern and contemporary art worlds. Built into the very words used to discuss art in the region are the conditions of possibility for slippery, inter-animating and transmedial exchanges between visuality and performativity.Yet performativity has been substantially less well studied than other artistic phenomena in the region. One of the aims of this special issue of Southeast of Now is to gather together new writing that may enlarge our understanding of performativity, as a concept or category for research or practice. The five peer-reviewed articles and fourteen shorter responses that follow propose not one but multiple approaches to performativity.