Southeast Asia

About Southeast Asia

Bronze drums cast by the Dong Son culture of northern Vietnam more than two thousand years ago were traded across the islands. Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms later built on a monumental scale: Borobudur in Java around 800, the temple fields of Bagan in Myanmar, and Angkor in Cambodia. Everyday and courtly arts are just as distinctive, from wax-resist batik to the flat leather shadow puppets of Javanese wayang kulit.

Colonial encounters brought oil painting. The Javanese painter Raden Saleh trained in Europe in the 19th century, and Juan Luna's Spoliarium (1884) became a Philippine national emblem. In Singapore in the 1950s, Nanyang artists such as Georgette Chen joined Chinese and Western methods to local subjects. Contemporary artists include Rirkrit Tiravanija, who cooks and serves food as art, Arahmaiani, whose performances address religion and gender in Indonesia, and the painters I Nyoman Masriadi and Ronald Ventura.