This reflection on region departs from an earlier essay by speaker Associate Professor Pamela Nguyen Corey titled “Metaphor as Method: Curating Regionalism in Mainland Southeast Asia” (2013), which examined controversies around the curatorial use of geographical metaphors (such as the Mekong and the Ho Chi Minh Trail) to promote contemporary artists and foster artistic collaboration in mainland Southeast Asia.
The speaker considers the relationship between metaphor and region again, but this time in relation to perception rather than representation. “Mekong” as metaphor can be used to consider the temporal and tacit dimensions of regional imagination, using the 2023 Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai and featured artworks by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nguyễn Trinh Thi as case studies.
Ultimately, these artistic practices offer a more situated, opaque and sensorial mode of engaging with place, one that resists geopolitical abstraction to articulate the Mekong region as a multitude of lived realities and increasingly as an unsettling metaphor for futurity.
Associate Professor Pamela Nguyen Corey is a scholar of modern and contemporary art history whose research and teaching focus on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts.
She is currently Associate Professor of Art History and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Fulbright University Vietnam. She is the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021).
Nguyen Corey is co-editor with Nora A. Taylor and Đỗ Tường Linh of Signs and Signals from Vietnam: Essays on Contemporary Art (NUS Press, forthcoming), and co-editor with Iftikhar Dadi, Salah Hassan, Mari-Carmen Ramirez, John Tain and Ming Tiampo for a major book project on global modernisms.
Image: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Blue Encore (2023). Photograph by Pamela N. Corey.
