“Fear No Power: Women Imagining Otherwise”

The five women artists in this galvanizing assembly came of age in Cold War Southeast Asia, when hard-won national sovereignty depended on reabsorption into an insidiously paternalistic Euro-American world order. (Bar the Kingdom of Siam, now Thailand, which ostensibly maintained independence by joining the so-called “family of nations” as a modernized state in the nineteenth century.) With that in mind, works and ephemera from the 1960s to the 2020s illuminate how these multifaceted creators have strived for restorative justice amid overlapping patriarchal traditions, revealing how women’s liberation is a trans-cultural movement that exceeds modern concepts of national self-determination.

Take Phaptawan Suwannakudt. She worked with her father, master Buddhist muralist Tan Kudt, until his death in 1982, after which she supervised the completion of a major commission they had been working on for the Bangkok Peninsula Hotel. At 22, Suwannakudt became the first woman to helm a temple mural workshop in Thailand, going on to lead commissions for temples, hotels, and government offices—a position she held until 1996. Then, a project in Phayao triggered a shift marked by Suwannakudt’s “Nariphon” paintings, including the acrylic-and-gold-leaf Nariphon II (1996) shown here. Expertly painted in neo-traditionalist allegorical style, armed men retrieve maidens born as fruit from the Nariphon, a mythological Buddhist tree they just hacked with their swords. This was the artist’s response to learning that a twelve-year-old girl from whom she bought noodles was sold into a brothel by her parents, which compelled Suwannakudt to reroute her practice. The acrylic-on-hemp My Mother was a Nun II (1998) doubled down on that turn. It portrays Suwannakudt’s mother, who disrobed as a Buddhist nun after being excluded from meditative practice and assigned to kitchen duties, as a venerated monk: a protest against traditions barring women from becoming fully ordained.

Suwannakudt’s paintings are presented in the first of three thematic zones, titled “Where the Body Thinks, Worlds Open,” which amplifies the embodied politics women have honed through constellated experiences of patriarchal conditions. Works by the late Malaysian artist Nirmala Dutt are especially visceral. Two triangles meet at a central explosion of blood-red splatter in the crimson acrylic-and-oil-on-canvas Self-Portrait (1999), forming an X where the lower triangle’s white outline penetrates the top. A color photo of Dutt appears within that puncturing space, while a black-and-white copy of that image appears at the puncture—the diagram of a dissociative split legible to any survivor—as black cursive letters across the surface read: “When are you all going to say enough! And stop it.” It’s a devastating interrogation. But what makes it more so are the trio of small, coolly confident and formally brilliant hard-edge black-and-white distillations of the female silhouette from Dutt’s oil-on-canvas “Woman” series (1999) hung nearby. Dutt once said she was “an artist first and foremost—not necessarily just a woman artist or feminist artist or political artist.” Still, experiential rage against patriarchal violence must go somewhere, if not for self-preservation then to contribute to a generation-spanning struggle: something that unites the artists in this show.

That struggle consciously connects with related systemic issues in the following zone, “Refusal and Hope.” Here, Dutt’s searing 1988 red-scale acrylic-on-canvas Anti-Nuclear Piece (Commemoration of Hiroshima Day), depicts Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev as wayang kulit shadow puppets forming a phallic mushroom cloud over a wheel of life  composed of printed HSBC logos; while her black-and-white acrylic-and-collage Friends in Need (1986), shows Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as villainous caricatures flanking newspaper clippings including the article behind the composition, regarding British support of the US bombing of Libya, and a central photo of a Libyan child being pulled from the rubble.

Matching Dutt’s commanding critique is Dolorosa Sinaga’s Solidarity (2000/25), a powerful bronze of seven women standing in a defiant line, their arms interlinked save for one with a raised fist: a response to the 1998 riots in the artist’s native Indonesia, amid severe economic crisis and government corruption, which targeted a scapegoated ethnic Chinese minority and included mass sexual violence.1 Nearby, Home Service (2003) gathers video documentation and promotional materials for Home Service Agency, which Amanda Heng operated in Singapore in 2003 with Twardzik Ching Chor Leng and Vincent Twardzik Ching. Providing domestic labor in exchange for conversations about the value of domestic work and the increasing reliance on domestic workers in Singapore, the team serviced more than twenty homes in four months, connecting household politics with discourses around gendered and class-based migration and exploitation within global capitalism.

The exhibition’s concluding section, “Imagining Otherwise,” grounds these discourses with documentation and artworks mapping collective communities associated with exhibiting artists. Among them is Womanifesto, founded in Thailand in 1997 to support women’s artistic development through programs bridging the international and local, of which Suwannakudt is a founding member. And KASIBULAN, the longest-running feminist art collective in Southeast Asia, co-founded in 1987 by Imelda Cajipe Endaya, alongside artists Julie Lluch, Anna Fer, Ida Bugayong, and Brenda Fajardo, to redress male-dominated historical narratives in the Philippines. Here, four mixed-media collages from Endaya’s 2004 “Conversations on the Spoliarium and Women’s Work” series, take as their base a silkscreen reproduction of celebrated Filipino artist and activist Juan Luna’s monumental oil painting Spoliarium (1884), which indicts Spanish colonialism through the depiction of slain gladiators. Collaged onto each surface are images and marks referencing Filipina artists, from nineteenth-century still lifes by Paz Paterno in Juan Luna and Paz Paterno, to twentieth-century trapunto circles, crosses, and swirls rendered in paint, foil, and textile in Juan Luna and Pacita Abad.   

Endaya, whose artistic activism was forged under the Ferdinand Marcos regime, describes the series as a discourse on art history’s classification of male artworks as masterpieces. “Women artists work with paint, words, images, embroidery, weaving, clay, and crafts, and often have no illusion that they are creating masterpieces,” Endaya has pointed out, and she should know.2 In common with the artists in this show and so many others like them, she is also an educator, organizer, and writer.3 Her practice has manifested as space-making, network-weaving, and knowledge-production, too.

Tracing that expanded field across a spectrum, is documentation of various gatherings, the effects of which are both measurable and intangible—like those organized by Women in the Arts Singapore, a platform established in 2000 by Heng, who credits Womanifesto with enabling her practice and network to grow, and those initiated by Sinaga in Indonesia, first as Full Moon Discussions in the 1990s and from 2014 as the People’s Veranda of Garuda. Many of these occurred in parallel, evidencing a decentralized network extending across the region and beyond, making We Will Fight (2004/25), Sinaga’s bronze of women holding each other to create a churning wave, a fitting introductory and concluding statement to “Fear No Power,” given its lone placement outside the gallery. Both titles transcend time and place.