David Teh's essay critiques national frameworks in Southeast Asian contemporary art history

David Teh's essay, published on February 5, 2017, argues that Southeast Asian contemporary art cannot be fully understood through national historical frameworks alone, despite being often pulled into them. He proposes calibrating national, regional, and international perspectives to analyze art that engages globally while resisting assimilation. Teh examines two manifestations of contemporaneity: the Cold War-era work of Sino-Thai modernist Chang Sae-tang and post-historical twenty-first-century art and film addressing Cold War trauma. He contends that contemporaneity complicates national frames rather than transcending them, requiring specific histories of the international for contemporary art studies, just as modern art studies relied on national histories. The essay is available via MIT Press under subscription access, originally published on ARTMargins Online.