“Kritik sebagai siasat”: ArtsEquator’s Fellows go to #TaiwanWeek
Notes from a small island... from another small islander
Prelude
This diary of short meditations on #TaiwanWeek (April 16-20) marks the conclusion of my 2024 Fellowship with ArtsEquator. As a professional development programme for mid-career arts critics and journalists, the Fellowship been completely invigorating for my work at this juncture in my life; it’s consistently prioritised regional networking, connecting arts writers across various backgrounds and fields. Encountering each Fellow has felt like consulting an interactive repository of resources and relationships—and bringing us together in-person in Taiwan did feel like the assembling of a living and thriving archive of South-east Asian creative and critical practices.
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Day One: remembering not to forget
It’s our first sunset over Taipei City, and we’re picking our way up a small hill to Guanyinshan Reservoir, a subterranean former water supply that shuttered in the 1970s. It’s a cool evening and the birds are trilling, but we’re silent and focused, headphones clamped over our ears, a procession—no, a pilgrimage—of a couple dozen theatregoers listening to letters from the dead. We linger in some of the lushest green spaces in the city while also revisiting some of its most painful histories: the return of a cache of intimate letters from political prisoners executed during Taiwan’s era of White Terror.
As archipelagic South-east Asians with our own histories of communist purges, we know this story and its political tensions well—except that so many of our states wouldn’t dream of sanctioning an oral history performance like this one, Book of Lost Words by Against Again Troupe, as part of the formal lineup for a national arts festival. I think of all the Singaporean families shorn apart by Operation Cold Store and Operation Spectrum. I think of the historical amnesias brought to light by Five Arts Centre’s A Notional History, or Tan Pin Pin’s To Singapore, With Love, and the Singaporeans and Malaysians who continue to live, and die, in exile.
A Taiwanese political prisoner describes receiving a blank piece of paper from a fellow dissident: “I said nothing,” they communicate, wordlessly, “please, say nothing too.” We audience members all clutch our blank rolls of paper, tiny cigarettes of faith and fortitude. Then we burn them on the bank of the river, the same river that’s witnessed both malaria outbreaks and mass executions. Tiny wisps of smoke curl into the air and disappear. It feels important to say goodbye, even if they’re no longer here. It feels important to remember. Their pages were empty, but my notebook is full.
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Day Two: “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot”
A month ago, real estate developers destroyed a small but sturdy forest across the street from where I live, one of the last few wild green patches in urban Singapore. As the excavators rolled in, I often spent hours away from home so I wouldn’t have to hear the sounds of ancient banyans slowly dying. I used to wake every morning to the sounds of hundreds of birds and cicadas in conversation; a circadian alarm clock of squawks, trills, burbles and whistles. The husky oo-woo of the koel; the shrill kak-kak-KAAAKKK of the hornbill calling its mate. I often wondered where this small city of winged ones would go, following this violent displacement from their home.
Sounding Light by Cloud Gate Theatre brought me back to the petrichor of leaf litter after rain, the mottle of light through canopy, an entire sonic landscape thrumming through the bodies of a dozens dancers as they morphed from bird to gecko to bug—chirruping, clicking and chattering in the undergrowth at dusk and dawn. On the spare stage, you could see the sheen of sweat glinting off their bodies, the reddened palms and chests from the rhythmic slaps of body-as-instrument. But no panting escaped their pursed lips, no strain or struggle crossed their beatific faces.
This troupe has made a name for itself by its virtuosic performers and romantically remote location, and perhaps that’s what beauty and budget allows you to do, separate yourself from the ugliness that the rest of us must often contend with. It’s transporting and sublime—and also produced in me a strange kind of envy, that paradise might exist in a small rural bubble outside of Taipei City, and that only a few of us might sit within reach of its pearly gates. When I go home, there will still be an ugly brown scar where paradise used to be. But for a moment, in my mind, it’s still here.
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Day Three: building a homeworld
“Torchlight Prometheus”, “Lascaux paintings”, “fast butoh”: these were the first three phrases I’d scribbled in the dark watching Bulareyaung Dance Company’s tiaen tiamen Episode 2《我·我們》第二部曲.
As we stumbled out of the theatre, our eyes readjusting to the light, Thai film critic Billy Vorakorn exclaimed to the rest of us: “That was TECHNO BUTOH.” He’d nailed it. The indigenous dance company, one of Taiwan’s most prominent troupes, transports us from wind-whipped seas and monstrous deities to unabashedly homoerotic pas de deux set to throbbing house beats. This work is helmed by an all-male group of dancers aged 20 to 40, all hailing from tribes across the island, and it’s a slick mix of ancient spiritualities and contemporary sensibilities.
You could probably describe South-east Asia the same way. Some of us (*cough* Singapore *cough*) over-fetishise that mash-up of the traditional and the modern, and appoint ourselves custodians of these crossroads. But all us South-east Asian folk know what it’s like to sit at this busy intersection and feel ourselves shaped by the pushes and pulls in either (or both!) directions. This week hasn’t just been an extraordinary encounter with Taiwanese artistic production. It’s also been an affirmation of the shared vocabularies and worldbuilding of this varied region we call home.
I often think of South-east Asia as a geopoetic entity as much as a geopolitical one. Even if we aren’t having exactly the same debates about indigenous recognition, political polarisation, historical amnesia or environmental extraction, our adjacencies and affinities immediately afford us some kind of common ground. I may not be standing where you are. But I’m standing beside you. Our languages and lexicon may have branched away from each other. But they’re still mutually intelligible.
Last night, as we “yam-senged” in our little South-east Asian corner of the closing party, and earlier today, as we formed the “Dub Club” (in honour of our magnificent artist liaison officer and benevolent cat-herder, Dub Lau), I thought: I’m so glad I get to build a homeworld with these folks.
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Day Four: practicing an expanded—and expansive—criticism
We ArtsEquator Fellows had spent a few days together in all-consuming artistic communion at this point, elbowing and whispering to each other in our seats, notebooks constantly open on our laps, vibrating to the rhythms of both dialogue and bodies on stage. Many of us shared similar impulses. I took an afternoon to wander through the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, expecting to take a solo journey; who else did I find but Sharmilla Ganesan contemplating possessed household appliances in one of the gallery spaces.
But the final day of our #TaiwanWeek experience is when this constellation of critics finally took shape. Six of us presented on our local contexts and critical journeys at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB), a space for both creative incubation and international exchange, alongside six Taiwanese peers. It quickly became clear that the South-east Asian arts critic must practice an expanded form of criticism—out of necessity. Here, the critic is advocate, activist, archivist, analyst, accompanist, even anarchist, and not just an ardent arts lover. Kritik sebagai siasat, said Raka Ibrahim. Criticism as strategy; the critic as strategic shapeshifter.
Bilqis Hijjas (Malaysia) accompanied senior contemporary dancers on their creative journeys and produced a mini manifesto for ageing with generosity and grace. Pauline Miranda (the Philippines) traced theatre’s recovery from the pandemic in Manila, and how the “revenge watching” phenomenon has reinvigorated the sector. Billy Vorakorn (Thailand) teleported us through speculative worlds of Mekong sci-fi, often unabashedly queer and unflinchingly decolonial. Do:Na (Myanmar) spoke powerfully of the cultural labour of the critic and artist as resistance to military rule, and resilience in the face of absolute disaster. And Raka (Indonesia) transported us aboard the Arka Kinari, a 70-tonne vessel and floating stage that has been traversing the farthest flung islands of the planet’s archipelagoes as both an alarm for environmental trauma and a beacon for climate hope.
I offered something small: criticism as an act of care, something I’ve shared many times, and will again. For what animates all our critical endeavours, if not love?
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Epilogue
Almost a decade ago, in May 2016, Kathy Rowland wrote to me with an email tantalisingly titled “arts site”.
It was my penultimate month at The Straits Times (my time of indentured servitude was almost up) and, as luck would have it, she and Jenny Daneels—the brains behind Malaysia’s previous incarnation of Kakiseni—had just co-founded an arts platform in, and for, South-east Asia. She wrote:
We’re interested in staring a cities-based arts website – starting with Singapore, KL and Penang to begin with, but eventually covering SEA […] essentially the idea is for it to focus on generating discourse on the arts. We’d like to promote more cross-city/regional knowledge amongst artists and audiences in the region. One feature we’re hoping to build is a way to discuss the individual performances, exhibitions, issues and more importantly, to discuss the reviews and audience generated commentary of these works too.
At least that’s the plan.
I was young, not yet 30, and both inspired and intimidated by the prospect of being part of independent arts media. Over a couple of meetings, Kathy convinced me to be the first custodian of the site, the interim editor of what we now know as ArtsEquator.
That decision changed my life. I was now part of a tiny but fiercely committed group of people (all women, in fact), who were determined to thicken arts discourse in the region. We were also determined to identify South-east Asian creative practice as part of, rather than adjacent to, global contemporary arts. At C-LAB, as I listened to Kathy talk about everything ArtsEquator had achieved in during the brief span of its editorial lifetime, from the Asian Arts Media Roundtable to the Southeast Asia Artistic Freedom Radar (an ongoing database on arts censorship), I felt a burgeoning sense of pride in what this small clutch of passionate people had produced. ArtsEquator has witnessed a nascent solidarity between creative critical practices across the region, and also nurtured it, with scant financial resources but substantial human ones. If that was the plan, ArtsEquator’s far exceeded its initial blueprint, even as it pivots to longer-term research projects, network- and community-building, and the crucial disbursal of micro grants.
How might we sustain this polyphonic, pluralistic ecology? I wondered. It isn’t just the deforestation of critical landscapes we’re preventing, but a wider-spread reforestation we must embark on. This Fellowship may have ended, but the strategic, long-term work of sustaining a critical ecosystem has just begun.
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Postscript
Aaand… the journey continues. I’ll be chatting with Kathy about arts criticism as a personal vocation and life quest on May 24th (this Saturday afternoon) at Sing Lit Station, in fulfilment of the 2025 Jalan Besar Fellowship. Come hang out, and have some teh. It’s free! Register here.
The ArtsEquator Fellowship Critics Network, including this trip to #TaiwanWeek, was made possible with the support of Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Malaysia.