A polemic
By Jason Wee

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

A shorter version of this polemic was performed at Objectifs Centre for Photography & Filmmaking on 17 September 2021. Image courtesy of the 'Inventory: Reconsidering Curatorial Practice' conference.

1. Collaboration is such an aspirational word, like transformation, consultation or inclusion. STPI does not represent artists; they collaborate with them. So do sneaker brands, with celebrities and designers. Even art councils, previously touting partnerships, now announce collaborations. But collaboration in times of social violence is a denigration, a working together but with the enemy. These theses are not the naming of the enemy, or an enemy, or its inversion. The etymology of sneaker is instructive; what used to refer in the 16th century as something vulpine, vixenly, sly, furtive by the early 20th is popularised as a comfortably weightbearing footwear that silently, too-sneakily steps out onto the streets. The artist Gary Carsley in an upcoming text considered queering curating as colluding, and it is this sense I am stepping out. The theses are not an aspiration, but a conspiration. Not to take a breath ahead of ourselves, in anticipation, but to breathe together, to consider this time of cautious, guarded breathing. To think of conspiration as in conspiracy, breathing together, but very deliberately muffled, out of earshot or detection, with a touch of the extralegal, a buc king of a proper education for a truancy.

2. To consider a truant curating as a failure to attend to the normative practices which many of us are informally educated in. This informality is a matter of history rather than inevitability. Up till this moment, there was only occasional education on curatorial practice, histories and habits. What took its place is the formalisation in the academy and the museum of art history as the near- synonym for curatorial history, writing and/or history, a formalisation that mistook these historical precedents for future thinking. Meanwhile, instructional sessions on grant-writing and cultural policy are embedded in college and university academics. This spawns adepts who excel at reading shifts in bureaucratic whims and policy lurches while eliding the constraints on grant-reliant activity (no openly queer activity, no commentary on multicultural matrixes, no rights-based advocacy). Demands swarm us, to respond to policy, facilitate their enactment, enact good standing for subsequent proposals and CV submissions. It is as though these are the central activities in what can be formalised as professional practice. As though these activities limn the foci of our cultural consciousness as the most neglectful, rather than the overdetermined, the well-framed and mainstreamed, the already obsessed over.

3. To be truant is to neglect one’s duty in our anxiously patriotic times to represent country, state, institution, and blood. To be truant is to state infra-filiations, to name or perform our care for other bodies, other selves. As the Hokkien saying goes, chew doe boh doe lao gao ma si swa. Whether the tree falls, it is the monkeys’ time to scatter.

4. It is not to curate as though they (country, institution) do not exist, or to assist in imagining for them their alternate lives; it is to do so insisting on our coevality without continuity. Country or institutionality, for that matter, is not the aim or consequence of our activity as artists, artist-curators and collectives. Neither are institutions the necessary end of a pipeline within which we register the “experimental” as “early” or “prototyping” or chronologically “young” that undergoes subsequent development in the larger, generously funded spatialities. It seems obvious yet necessary to state that even a scalar continuity is illusory, in both directions – country is not an institution writ large, institutionality is not truancy writ large, and truant curating simply is not institutional curating on a smaller scale.

5. To have coevality without continuity is to seize upon a temporal expansiveness, to be in the same time without moving at the same time. An expansive temporality to labour, to demonstrate, to perform, offer and trade at speeds, periodicities, and with moments of acceleration and deceleration contingent only on changes to our social material – our friendships, ally-ships, loves, publics, partners, even antagonists. In the past 18 months, when conversations around racial discrimination finally broke out of comment threads into newsprint, public discussions, parliamentary record and the recent National Day Rally (Beow Tan’s public transport harassments, brownface national advertisements to name two moments), I recall only artist- run spaces taking the time with it, while the museums and university galleries remained silent.

6. The notion recently raised of curating nothing puts a hyphen between the two syllables of “no” and “thing” to emphasise the absence of physical production, the missing object or the floor sans performance or body. It does not go far enough. In all of these scenarios cited, no-thing belies the curate- thing à la Marina and that performative superego. The curator is always and still present, the naming has taken the place of the making. Let’s rewrite “curating nothing” as an imperfect anagram: Think no curating. Truant time clears art of itself, a truancy in the ontology of art, of what art is, in the demand to grasp the passage of its appearances, the mechanisms and matter through which art becomes. To have more time for art is necessary to make no time for it, to neglect its productivity, its naming. In order to have time for art, the space for art is not the space for art; it is not for the care of art to name it as such; the curator un-names their labour, themselves. To refuse the expectation to show up as “curate”. It is time for art to attend to itself by not marking attendance. It is time for truancy.

“To have more time for art is necessary to make no time for it, to neglect its productivity, its naming. In order to have time for art, the space for art is not the space for art; it is not for the care of art to name it as such; the curator un-names their labour, themselves. To refuse the expectation to show up as “curate”. It is time for art to attend to itself by not marking attendance. It is time for truancy.”

7. We can only be truant conspiratorially. No one must give those playing truant up. Can anyone keep a secret? No one divulges it all away. If all truants are caught and named, attendance is full. When we are caught, we become poach-types, i.e. scrutinised by institutions as prototypes of emergent or successful structurations that said institutions could poach for subsequent and scalar iterations. Contemplate ways to avoid capture: absent oneself from institutional examination; insist on non-attendance in the face of demands for greater publicity; attend nonetheless but to offer no work; slow down institutional work.

8. To create extra-institutionality in this way is to take opacity, inaccessibility, obscure and eccentricity not as points of didactic critique and turn them towards forms of production and explication. It is to demonstrate the obscure as they are. To bemoan inaccessibility is to return again and again to Civic District and Museum Roundtable programming as the centre of both cultural production and urbanity. In these times of watchful breathing, fewer people now travel into the city than in any other time since independence. The city is everywhere. In ‘Walk Walk Don’t Run’, our upcoming month-long islandwide open studios, you can see Malaysian waters from the vicinity of one of our friend’s studios. You can taste the sea in the air.

In situating his projects in the inaccessible and the obscure, the curator Nadim Samman considers the exhibition as a para-state or a parasite, a wandering-off that takes curatorial vectors away from the transnational with its categorically geopolitical demarcations towards the translocal, allowing “functional proximities” (his words) to span geographical distances. There are lessons here for me. I point out two crucial separations. First, that truant vectors free these parasites, if they are to be described as such, from host-dependence. Like protozoa that can live off the humanoid, even adapt to be entirely subsistent on their human host, they can also have utterly and entirely independent lives in other oceans, other vessels.

9. Second, that a disidentification exists between parasite and host, beginning with a dissimilation (“we are not the same”) that pushes against an encroaching assimilation (“we cannot be together”). A year ago, a museum leadership once gathered other museum professionals as well as a handful of non-museum folks in generating keywords for everything a museum could envision itself in Singapore’s “museum landscape”: a public square, a forum, a residency, a laboratory, a classroom, an archive, a collection. In other words, an everything-in ark holding all that in the great and coming deluge, the outside- museum becomes bereft of.

“A year ago, a museum leadership once gathered other museum professionals as well as a handful of non-museum folks in generating keywords for everything a museum could envision itself in Singapore’s “museum landscape”: a public square, a forum, a residency, a laboratory, a classroom, an archive, a collection. In other words, an everything-in ark holding all that in the great and coming deluge, the outside- museum becomes bereft of. ”

No, we are not the same. The disidentification is a breaking away through which the fragments are read as they are, not for the whole. The Greek word for pottery shards with inscriptions or poetry fragments is ostracon. Think of the proximity between the words ostracon and ostracise. These are the pieces of the possible. We are the ostracons.

10. There is something to be said for incompleteness. I do not have all the answers. I am given only so much space, and time, so it ends here.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Art & Market.

This essay was first published in CHECK-IN 2022, A&M’s second annual publication. Click here to read the digital copy in full, or to purchase a copy of the limited print edition.

Read all My Own Words essays here.

About the Writer
Jason Wee is an artist and writer. He works between art, architecture, poetry and photography. His art can be seen recently in ‘Curtains’, ParaSite Hong Kong, Other Futures Festival Amsterdam, his solo ‘Cruising’, Yavuz Gallery Singapore, and in the upcoming Kochi-Muziris Biennale. He is the author of three poetry collections, including the Singapore Literature Prize finalist An Epic of Durable Departures. He is the artistic director of Textures Sing Lit Festival 2021-2023. He founded and runs Grey Projects.

Note from Associate Editor Ian Tee

In May 2020, I wrote a two-part essay on independent spaces and artist-founded galleries across Southeast Asia. My goal was to consolidate the reasons why such spaces were established as well as how they have engaged with market forces. The piece was a testament to the imagination and resourcefulness of artists, and their ability to inhabit — and even flourish — in different roles. Revisiting the essay today, I am even more conscious of the overlaps between artistic practice and the daily operation of these spaces. Crucially, they are about the state of being independent.

In this collection of essays, three practitioners are invited to share observations and personal sentiments about their respective spaces. Unchalee Anantawat, co-founder of Speedy Grandma in Bangkok, reflects on the space’s decade-long run. She charts the evolving needs of her community and the different collaborators who have left their mark. Curator Van Do writes about her experience working with two independent art spaces in Vietnam: The Factory in Ho Chi Minh City and Á Space in Hanoi. She meditates on the interplay between site and space by mapping recent community-based projects. Engaging with the topic on an ideological level, Jason Wee, founder of Grey Projects in Singapore, issues a polemic for dissimilation.

Taken together, their essays help us think through what it means to make space for oneself and for one’s community, as well as the freedoms and sacrifices doing so entails.