Book Review: ‘The City in Time’

22 Feb

Pamela N. Corey on art in Vietnam and Cambodia
By Danielle Khleang

Book cover of ‘The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia’ by Pamela N. Corey (University of Washington Press, 2021).

Pamela N. Corey’s new book, ‘The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia’, diverts from the post-war lens that is usually used to situate art from the two countries. Instead, she takes the reader through a spatial inquiry on the work of some of the most prominent artists since the mid-1990s, focusing on the influences of urban form on the artistic practices in Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh.

Corey offers the theorisation of urban form as a key creative trigger that has been overshadowed by traumatic socio-historical events. Like urban imaginaries and urban aesthetics, urban form is intended to call to mind “complex compositions” of urban space, including the forces of globalisation, neoliberalism, and post socialist state-building. However, Corey favours urban form over the other terms for its ability to encompass these forces and refer to an individual place like a market, street sign, or performative routine, among other possibilities. With urban form, the author brings to light how globalisation, neoliberalism, and post socialist state-building have impacted art practices. She also discusses how artists, against state control, have contributed alternative narratives that function as “self-making” and “community formation rooted in locality”. By creating an interdisciplinary spatial framework, Corey opens different ways to think about contemporary art in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Urban form in Vietnam is framed in reference to Đổi Mới reform policy that transitioned the country to a socialist-oriented market economy whereas Cambodia’s urban form is set as the terrain that made visible “the hollowness of the social contract between citizen and state” following the 1993 UN-sponsored general elections and enduring presence of NGO-driven development initiatives. The book first considers works created in Ho Chi Minh City. The first chapter focuses on the affective provocations of work by artists including Ngô Đình Trúc, Trần Anh Hùng, and Tiffany Chung, particularly as multitemporal mediations of memory and nostalgia. The next chapter considers art from Vietnam that directly intervenes in urban space or engages socialist pictorial language to open “creative space for dissonance, resistance, and possibility” with attention paid to the practices of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phan Quang, and Bùi Công Khánh, among others. In their works, Corey reads the state as a “spectral antagonist” and the city a site of “authority, resistance, and fascination”. This tendency for art as civic participation overlaps with the documentary art considered in Cambodia.

Khvay Samnang, ‘Preah Ream Thlaeng Sor’, 2012, Digital C-print, 80 × 120 cm. Image courtesy of the artist. From ‘The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia’ by Pamela N. Corey (University of Washington Press, 2021).

Corey argues that the sense of urgency during the 1990s nudged artists in Cambodia to explore different formats of expression. Photography and later the moving image became vital platforms for artists like Sovan Philong, Lim Sokchanlina, and Vandy Rattana among others discussed in the third chapter. In the fourth chapter, Corey turns to how artists transcend scale through engagements with architecture, community, and performance. The artists she discusses include the Stiev Selapak collective, Svay Sareth, and others. She also highlights the White Building as a particularly potent example of urban form as a creative trigger for Stiev Selapak.

Built during the 1960s New Khmer Architecture movement, the White Building was intended as low-cost urban housing. Over three decades, following the 1979 repopulation of Phnom Penh post Khmer Rouge control, the White Building continued to house low-income tenets including prostitutes, policemen, and artists among others. In the absence of state-funded support, the residents would continually shape the morphology and structure of the place for their needs. Between 2011 and the demolition of the building in 2017, Corey details how Stiev Selapak operated Sa Sa Art Projects in the White Building. Stiev Selapak engendered numerous carefully enacted artistic and civic engagements as well as cited it in individual artworks. Among them, Corey points out the care given to the treatment of both people and place in Khvay Samnang’s ‘Human Nature’ series (2010-11).

In the ‘Human Nature’, Samnang photographs residents of the White Building in their homes wearing papier-mâché masks made by the artist. Corey recalls the artistic tradition of masking-making in Cambodia while noting that these masks function to conceal the identity of the sitters for their comfort. She illuminates how through anonymity of the subjects, Samnang was able to capture the “scarcity and precarious domesticity” of the White Building as well as the warmth of personal objects that they arranged in their homes. Through engagements like this, Corey explicates how Sa Sa Art Projects and associated artists have captured community formation and self-making at the White Building as well as state violence, particularly through neglect. The eventual state-initiated erasure of the building from the city further demonstrates the interplay of neoliberal spatial policy that artists must navigate.

Another engagement with the changing face of urban form that Corey writes about is Bùi Công Khánh’s ‘The Past Moved’ (2010) in Vietnam. Confronted with the demolition of a street for a road expansion project, the artist recreated the place on the walls of his studio and photographed members of the neighbourhood and friends in front of it. She assesses that considering the inevitable impact of urbanisation, Bùi dislocated the site from place, thus reproducing it as a “non-site through the… image.”

Tiffany Chung, ‘Gò Vấp’, 2008, Oil and alcohol-based markers on paper and vellum, 140 × 92 cm. Image courtesy of the artist. From ‘The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia’ by Pamela N. Corey (University of Washington Press, 2021).

While offering urban form and the forces that shape it as a method to read contemporary art in Vietnam and Cambodia, Corey also leaves other less explored intellectual triggers throughout the text. For example, she briefly mentions the possibility of positioning Tiffany Chung’s practice within feminist craft as an intervention in statecraft. She also references the ecological dimensions to be read in Vandy Rattana’s ‘Bomb Pond’ (2009) series. Another generative observation she makes concerns how in Cambodia, gendered privilege has limited the support female artists have received to take risks in their work, which is reflected in the gender representation in this book.

Through ‘The City in Time’, Corey reframes contemporary art in Vietnam and Cambodia which is usually seen from a post-war lens. It is a valuable asset to any syllabus of Southeast Asian contemporary art history to inspire new writings.

The book is available for purchase from University of Washington Press.

About the writer:

Danielle is an art writer based in Phnom Penh. She was born in the pacific northwest of the United States and split most of her time between Seattle, Phnom Penh, and London. Her writing is influenced by these places as sites of intellectual, social, and ecological engagement.