And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho
Research Presentation
 

This presentation pairs two ongoing research projects, which draw on histories of modern art in Southeast Asia with radically unlike methodologies: one is archival, the other artistic.

And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho

1 December 2018 - 10 February 2019

How are aspects of Southeast Asian modern art imaginatively engaged in contemporary practices—by artists, by archivists, and by others? This presentation pairs two ongoing research projects, which draw on histories of modern art in Southeast Asia with radically unlike methodologies: one is archival, yet innovative and unconventional in nature; the other is artistic, yet includes work from archives and involves other kinds of looking. The experimental curatorial juxtaposition of the two projects explores unlikely resonances between them, suggesting unexpected connections across the region, and across times. Among these synergies are the presences of spirituality and the Cold War, and the refiguring of forms and images within differing developments of the modern.

The Buddhist Archive of Photography in Luang Prabang, Laos, has gathered over 35,000 photographs either taken or collected by monks since 1890. The photographs have recently been digitised and catalogued, using innovative methodologies attentive to climatic, cultural, and religious circumstances. This Archive is, therefore, a fascinating instance of specifically 21st-century contemporary practice, as much as it is a unique collection of 19th and 20th-century modern photographs. This is the first time images from the Buddhist Archive of Photography are publicly presented in Asia, outside of Luang Prabang. The Archive has also published a series of bilingual English and Lao research volumes, which are made available in this presentation.

When considering this vast repository of images, several tropes and questions recur. What is photography’s relationship to anicca (impermanence), dukkha (suffering), and anatta (non-self), the three marks of existence in Buddhist thought? What role did Buddhists and photographers play in the Southeast Asian theatre of the global Cold War? And what are the limits of architectural modernity? These questions are explored in three distinct collections of photographs selected for this presentation. The first is a series of portraits of the late Most Venerable Pha Khamchan Virachitta Maha Thera (1920–2007), co-founder of the Buddhist Archive, taken every year from the age of seven until his death. The second selection comprises photographs collected by photographer-monk Pha Khamfan Silasangvaro (1901–1987), which protest the effects of civil war in Laos from 1959 to 1975, as well as photographs taken by another photographer-monk Pha Oun Heuane Hasapanya Maha Thela (1928–1982), who chronicled rarely seen aspects of Buddhist life, such as women’s vipassana meditation retreats. The third selection of images depicts the 1950s modernising renovations of Wat Saen Soukharam temple, under the direction of the late Most Venerable Pha Khamchan. These photographs, and the publications which accompany them, reward historical, spiritual, aesthetic, and other modes of attention and analysis.

And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho is conceived and organised by Dr Roger Nelson, an art historian and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and currently Postdoctoral Fellow at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The presentation draws on Nelson’s ongoing art historical archival research in the Buddhist Archive, and his ongoing curatorial dialogue with Lien and Camacho.

Presented as a Fringe Programme of the 6th Singapore International Photography Festival.

Roger Nelson thanks Dr Khamvone Boulyaphonh, Hans Georg Berger, the Acuña family, Lynda Tay, the caretakers of Gillman Barracks, Drusilla Tay, Marc Glöde, Guo-Liang Tan, Patrick D. Flores, Simon Soon, and others who assisted in the development and realisation of this presentation.

Behind the Scenes: Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho on Alfonso Ossorio’s Angry Christ mural, a public programme of And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho.
Images
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And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, December 1 2018 – February 10 2019, The Lab, Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.
And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, December 1 2018 – February 10 2019, The Lab, Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.
And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, December 1 2018 – February 10 2019, The Lab, Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.
And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, December 1 2018 – February 10 2019, The Lab, Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.
And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, December 1 2018 – February 10 2019, The Lab, Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.
And in the Chapel and in the Temples: research in progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho, December 1 2018 – February 10 2019, The Lab, Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.
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Contributors
Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho
Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho
Artist-in-Residence
Philippines

Amy Lien (b. 1987, United States) and Enzo Camacho (b. 1985, Philippines) perhaps recklessly assume the near total dissolution of creative agency as participants in the financially networked public sphere commonly referred to as “art world”. Yet, this does not prevent them from generating ever more questions via an image-oriented material production, continuously inaugurating a kind of affective and data-frantic cartography of places connected and disconnected to each other, while employing the standard theoretical rubrics of economics‚ and contemporary art. What results is something like mixed media sculpture, or installation art.

The two artists began collaborating in 2009, between New York and Manila. They both received their Bachelor’s degrees from Harvard University (Lien in 2009; Camacho in 2007), and their Master’s degrees from the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (both in 2014). Most recently, they were Artists-in-Residence at Gluck50 in Milan, where they curated a group exhibition including artists based in New York, Taipei, and Cairo. They have had solo exhibitions at 47 Canal (New York, USA), Mathew Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Republikha Art Gallery (Quezon City, Philippines), and Green Papaya Art Projects (Quezon City, Philippines), as well as participated in recent group exhibitions at the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf and the Künstlerhaus in Bremen.

Dr Roger Nelson
Dr Roger Nelson
Research Fellow
Singapore, Cambodia

Roger Nelson is an art historian interested in the modern and contemporary art of Southeast Asia. He was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore and Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University and NTU CCA Singapore. Nelson is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne on Cambodian arts of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nelson has contributed essays to scholarly journals, as well as specialist art magazines such as Artforum, books, and exhibition catalogues. He has curated exhibitions and other projects in Australia, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Nelson’s translation of Suon Sorin’s 1961 Khmer novel, A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land, will be published in 2019. His Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z was published in 2019.

Research Focus

Roger Nelson’s research is on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on trans-media intersections between visual and other forms of art, as well as with urban spaces and other texts. The role of women in discourses of the modern and the contemporary is a recurring concern in his research, which is mostly concentrated on Cambodia, Laos, and other areas of peninsular Southeast Asia. Interested in historiographies of art in Southeast Asia, Nelson recently published a major research report on terminologies of “modern” and “contemporary” “art” in nine Southeast Asian vernacular languages, co-authored with ten other contributors, all based in the region, and published in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. Also historiographical in nature, Nelson recently completed a journal article on recent independent curatorial initiatives in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which is currently under peer review; in that essay, he argues that independent curatorial research and practice performs art historical functions in these contexts. Nelson’s translation of a 1961 Khmer nationalist novel by Suon Sorin, titled A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land, is forthcoming with NUS Press; in his introduction to that publication, he argues for the value of the literary text as a resource for art historical and other forms of research. He is a participating scholar in a two-year Getty Foundation-funded project titled “Site and Space in Southeast Asia.” There, Nelson’s research focuses on downtown Rangoon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, considering the dynamic relationships between painting, photography, sex work, and discourses about women in the booming and cosmopolitan Burmese port city. Also relating to discourses about women, gender, and feminisms, Nelson is co-editor with Yvonne Low and Clare Veal of a forthcoming special issue of Southeast of Now, and co-convenor with them of international research gatherings on gender in Southeast Asian art histories.