On being socially relevant, on being indigenous

Dear friends and colleagues

I have been in the UK and Europe for almost all of October. The outstanding exhibition I saw was the big Brueghel show in Vienna – I had not realised just how phenomenal his drawings were. But he is...

Dear friends and colleagues

Eheu, I have fallen in the way of being late.

I don’t like making generalisations about race or nationality,

Which is, of course, a cue for me to do so.

What always impresses me in Manila is that...

Dear friends and colleagues

Maybe friendship is a sufficient reason.

I was asked if I would curate an exhibition in Jogjakarta of two Malaysian artists (Jailani Abu Hassan (Jai) and Zakii Anwar) and two Indonesian artists (Agus Suwage and Jumaldi Alfi.) They are all people I like and artists I respect, so of course I said “yes”. But it...

Dear friends and colleagues

My father as well as being a clergyman was a serious historian. Having come from a very disadvantaged background he was very proud of having published books on medieval history and of being elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. One day he showed me something he had just read and then showed me something he had published earlier. The author had clearly...

Dear friends and colleagues

I have returned to that pile of books I spoke of two weeks ago and have been reading Art after War 1948-1969 by Patrick Flores. It is part of a series of five books that he is writing collectively entitled Philippine Artscape dealing with art in the Philippines from 1928 to the present.

In the publicity for the...

Dear friends and colleagues

Apparently, I come from a cool country.

Welcome to the New Year and many thanks to those readers in other parts of the world who have sent me images of triangles or cones masquerading as Christmas Trees. Obviously, it is a trend one can see all around the world. Even in countries where real trees are available...

Dear friends and colleagues

I really like Christmas. Whenever I think of Christmas, I think of my Christmases back home in the West Country with my parents and brothers: midnight communion, walking home feeling the frosty air, a warming drink round the log fire, my children leaving messages for Father Christmas, waking up hoping for snow, roast turkey, crackers, stupid paper hats, opening...

Dear Friends and colleagues

At the start of the day I either read the Guardian News or BBC news on the internet – or sometimes both. Last Thursday I was reading a very interesting BBC report (http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/dec/02/louvre-abu-dhabi-guggenheim-art) about the growth of art museums in...

Who lives in my patch? What sort of people live in Maritime South-East Asia? (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore).

As I understand it, and it is very complex and many details are in dispute, there is a vestigial negrito population – small, dark skinned people that arrived maybe fifty thousand years ago and are called orang asli (original people) in Malaysia, Igorot in the...

Dear friends and colleagues

As I related last week, I went to the Thirteenth Jogja Biennale, curated by Rain Rosidi and Wok the Rok, held in the Jogja National Museum – which is the building where the art school (ISI) used to be. The show was entitled Hacking Conflicts. I presume the word “Hacking” refers to breaking into computer systems not to having a bad cough: the catalogue...