Contemporary Southeast Asian Self-portraiture: a Strategy for Socio-political Investigation

The art of self-portraiture is not an indigenous tradition in Southeast Asia. When Southeast Asian artists adopted Western techniques and stylistic elements in their art-making, they also adopted the genre of self-portraiture. Artists became independent individuals with their own ideas and expressions. However, the collective frame of art-making did not disappear; and even in the depiction of the self, there exists a collective identity. In contemporary Southeast Asian art, the self-image has been co-opted as a site and strategy to make commentary about society and politics. Self-portraiture in contemporary Southeast East Asia further attempts to constantly stabilize the sense of self in a fast changing and pluralistic environment. This book will look into how contemporary Southeast Asian artists, through questioning the self, raise questions about identity within a globalized, pluralistic, continually changing and politically charged world that is contemporary society.