Book Talk: Power, Politics and the Street. Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970

When did contemporary art emerge in Southeast Asia, and what field traits are shared across our diverse region? Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970 (Lund Humphries, 2024) is a comparative transnational history of Southeast Asian socially-probing contemporary art, spanning its 1970s beginnings to recent production. Taking a granular approach to artworks, the book examines how, why, and when artists in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and later Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar developed comparable innovating contemporary art languages—initially unknown to one another. It exposes intraregionally connected aesthetic, conceptual, and circulatory modes, showing their relationship with local social-political-cultural contexts. The book thus makes a case for Southeast Asian contemporary art’s distinctive identity within global contemporary art.

This presentation will summarise the book’s central arguments and illuminate the continuity of Southeast Asian contemporary art features.

Dr Iola Lenzi is a Singapore historian and curator of Southeast Asian contemporary art. Her writings and exhibitions frame Southeast Asian contemporary art in Asian cultural and historical contexts, arguing for its distinctive aesthetic and conceptual voice within global art. Lenzi teaches Southeast Asian Contemporary Art History and curatorial methods at NTU, and in the Asian Art Histories MA programme, UAS. She has curated some 40 exhibitions in Asia and Europe, and authored-edited five multilingual anthological research publications. Her most recent book is Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970 (Lund Humphries, 2024).