The prevailing lens for Southeast Asian art practice is often framed in a stereotyped agricultural setting, favouring typical images of serene mountains and small communities where social harmony is its core language. These practices are romanticised deeper with the idea of lumbung (communal barn), a common practice in some Southeast Asian countries, that serves as a shared harvest storehouse for the community, a shift away from rigid hierarchical system, towards generous community-based resource sharing, co-creation and sustainability.

From a bird’s eye perspective, Southeast Asia unfolds from the peak of Myanmar to the islands of Timor Leste, a region where borders between countries are defined as much by the sea, river and mountains as by invisible lines drawn across the land. It is an area populated by almost two thousand ethnic groups who speak approximately fifteen hundred different languages. These diverse people with diverse cultures try to find ways to be under a democratic system, a concept of governance younger than a century for the region. Beyond the richness of Indigenous diversity, the region is further enlivened by diasporic contributions, along with the cultural and political tensions that entails. Systemic cultural repression and tragic periods of mass violence like what the Peranakan and Chinese diaspora in Indonesia had to endure, further intensify the negotiation of identity and belonging. The incredible diversity of Southeast Asia has been both a strength and vulnerability of the region; manipulated by colonists who strategically practiced a divide and conquer mentality, as well as by postcolonial governments where diversity is subsumed under the label of nationalism. Numerous Indigenous ethnic groups, like the Rohingya in Myanmar, Cham people in Cambodia, people in West Papua, have been targeted for cultural and physical genocide in the place that they call home.  

Shifting to an urban point of view, we are caught, drenched in polluted sweat, in the buzzing of Jakarta-Manila-Bangkok traffic jams. Here, amid ongoing shifts of power that look to corral diverse cultures and languages, artists negotiate and blur the space between art, collaboration, survival and cultural identity. Across a vast region that is marked by colonial legacies, authoritarian regimes, and cycles of reforms, persists the people’s unrelenting effort to keep facts remembered. History is a site of struggle. Narratives of the nation have been repeatedly rewritten by those in power, silencing collective trauma and dissent.

Resisting the will to forget becomes both a human rights principle and political gesture.

Contemporary art practices in Southeast Asia have taken up the responsibility to articulate multiple socio-political urgencies, from reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty, human rights, preventing the erasure of histories of genocide. While doing so, it has evolved through the absence of a systematic funding infrastructure, ongoing power shifts, and postcolonial complexity. In most countries of the region cohesive state support for the arts is limited, compelling artists to develop alternative models of production. These grassroots networks, informal, community-based, and process-oriented, are both pragmatic solutions as well as resistant to neo-colonial frameworks that continue to overshadow the region.

Coming together is a method to be, coming together is necessary to be.

Stitching Borders

In the periphery between Thailand and Myanmar, through his textile installation work, There’s no Place (2020-ongoing), Jakkai Siributr brings together the voices of the Shan community. Intended to bring attention to the plight of the stateless Shan community refugees who fled military violence in Myanmar, in Thailand, Siributr has been engaging with communities around the world through stitching workshops. Run as a part of the presentation of the artwork, the workshops enable participants around the globe to acknowledge the protracted refugee situations of the Shan people.¹

Unrecognised as refugees by the Thai government, the community remains highly vulnerable to exploitation. The artist notes that gaining acceptance by the Thai government is a central concern for the community. While living within these spaces oscillates between safety and invisibility: residents cannot legally work, move freely, or claim belonging in either nation, the large Shan population in northern Thailand plays an important role in preserving ancestral traditions. 

Through There’s no Place, Siributr invited Shan women to embroider scenes from their memories—homes that they were forced to abandon, rivers crossed, lives rebuilt in limitation, repression and longing, as well as texts and words from their language. The collaboration enables the community to share their stories and traditions while bringing their voices to the forefront. His intention was to empower collaborators. Not a refugee himself, Siributr works with Shan Youth Power to ensure respectful engagement, regularly updating collaborators on exhibitions so they can take pride in their contributions. Young people aged 8–20 were provided with temporary paid employment through embroidery. During the pandemic, many Shan children used their earnings to buy mobile phones to continue schooling online.² As the embroidery pieces are collectively created by the Shan community and global participants, the artist maintains limited control beyond the project’s concept.

Through his practice, Siributr exposes how nationalism can both define and erase identity, bringing the voice of the stateless to the forefront, including through his earlier work, The Outlaw’s Flag (2017). Created in response to the genocide of the Rohingya people from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, the work comprises a series of re-invented flags made from beads, shells, cotton longyi, and fragments of monks’ robes, representing faith and fragility. Crafting flags for the denied ones, Siributr transforms a symbol of power into a gesture of critique of the power itself. 

‘To share even when we don’t have much’³

Meanwhile, in a small quiet town of Solo (Surakarta), in Central Java, Indonesia, performance artist Melati Suryodarmo has become a central figure who shapes independent artistic ecosystems in Southeast Asia. Known for durational performances, such as Exergie-Butter Dance (2000), Why Let the Chicken Run (2001), and her longest durational work I’m a Ghost in My Own House (2012) Suryodarmo explores the body, endurance, and consciousness. Further from that, Suryodarmo has extended her practice beyond individual performance to community building, education, and cultural regeneration. Through her main platform, Studio Plesungan, established in 2012, a studio, residency space and performance art laboratory, she operates some of her major initiatives, such as Undisclosed Territory—an annual international festival that provides a dedicated platform for experimental body-based practice in performance art—and PALA Project, an international laboratory and platform for performance artists and writers to collaborate, share working methods and engage in critical discussion.

Suryodarmo’s earliest initiative, Undisclosed Territory was first introduced through Lemah Putih in 2007, founded by her father Suprapto Suryodarmo, which shaped her integrative approach to art and education. Since its inception, the festival has engaged with hundreds of artists such as Boris Nieslony, Mella Jaarsma, Jason Lim, and Agus Margiyanto, as well as a number of curators, and art administrators. The festival stands as one of Southeast Asia’s most enduring independent platforms. Emphasising process, experimentation, and peer learning within a decentralised, collaborative framework Undisclosed Territory challenges institutional hierarchies. The program was later developed in her own Studio Plesungan. The studio has transformed into a laboratory for performance, movement research, and interdisciplinary collaboration, emerging from the lack of formal support for both traditional and contemporary art in Indonesia.

Her pedagogy introduces performance art to traditionally trained dancers, encouraging awareness of the body and space, resonating with suwung—a Javanese concept of emptiness akin to the Buddhist value of non-attachment. This has functioned twofold. Firstly, she responds to the marginalisation of performance and dance in Indonesia, asserting that ‘We are not entertainers; only a repressed society is looking for entertainment.’⁴ And secondly, to expand movement vocabulary as the artist states is a desire, ‘(t)o learn ways to use the body beyond the set standard of movements taught in traditional dance.’⁵ Her curatorial vision resists the colonial and anthropological gaze that once exoticised Indonesian expression, framing Undisclosed Territory as a model of interdependent independence—where collaboration, education, and community engagement sustain art as a language of humanity and cultural resilience.

In the aftermath of colonial expansionism, it still can remain challenging to view traditions beyond a westernised exoticising lens. Looking back to this distant and painful histories, in Indonesia Bertutur (2022 and 2024), Melati Suryodarmo’s artistic vision confronts this perspective, framing tradition as living, evolving knowledge rather than an exotic spectacle. Through the PALA Project, she extends this approach internationally, fostering cross-cultural exchange as a form of artistic and cultural regeneration. Central to her practice is the idea of situating tradition within contemporary life, bringing it into contexts where it has too often been overlooked and reaffirming its ongoing relevance.

Indigenous Sovereignty and Alternative Economy

In Vietnam’s Central Highlands, the Art Labor Collective and Indigenous Jrai community create relational spaces of knowledge exchange to bring forth Indigenous craft and assert the community’s connection to land. Large-scale deforestation, coffee and rubber plantations, and hydroelectric projects have displaced many Jrai people from ancestral territories, disrupting traditional ecological and spiritual relations with the land. State policies promoting national unity have further suppressed Jrai language, rituals, and animist cosmologies, accelerating cultural loss, while activists advocating for Indigenous rights risk arrest. Economically, the community remains among Vietnam’s most disadvantaged, with limited access to education and healthcare. In response, collaborations such as Art Labor’s seek to reclaim Jrai agency by translating Indigenous cosmology and ecological knowledge into contemporary art practice and dialogue.

Their project Jrai Drew is based on the Jrai peoples’ cosmology of the cycle of existence, where human ultimately dissolved into dew—a state of non being that serves as the origin of a new life cycle. This concept was presented poetically in a sculpture garden installations made of Jrai woodcarving, at the same time presenting the disappearing practice of Jrai’s woodcarving under the pressure of industrialisation and modernisation.⁶

Founded in 2012 and based in Ho Chi Minh City, Art Labor is led by artists Thảo Nguyên Phan, Trương Công Tùng, and curator-writer Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần. The collective practices beyond the conventional production of art objects, favouring long-term projects that develop into rhizomatic networks of research, collaboration with communities, and public engagement.

Art is Care

Across Southeast Asia, artists and collectives are redefining art as community practice that refuses the dissolution of cultural identities. Further afield in Malaysia, Yee I-Lann collaborates with Sabah weavers to merge feminist and postcolonial narratives through traditional mat-making,⁷ while Womanifesto, founded in Thailand in 1997, pioneered feminist collective practice through decentralised, process-oriented models that create intergenerational dialogues to deepen regional feminist discourse.⁸ In the Philippines, Kawayan de Guia’s AX(iS) Art Project transforms Baguio’s Cordillera region into a living exhibition fostering regional collaboration amid limited institutional support.⁹ In Indonesia, Jakarta-based artists Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett merge environmental activism, social engagement, and performance—through works like 1001st Island and Ziarah Utara—turning public spaces into dialogues between art, policies and ecological consciousness.¹⁰

Art practice becomes a collective labour centralised in care, resistance, and cultural preservation. Operating within conditions of limited support and ongoing socio-political pressure, artists work together with the community to mobilise tradition, emphasising collaborative values and rearticulating identity. Art practice is a governance of care.