Setting out to accomplish the important work of historicizing—and in historicizing, theorizing—contemporary art in Southeast Asia, Iola Lenzi’s Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia after 1970 is an ambitious attempt to weave together the art and history of the expansive and often unwieldy region. Power, Politics and the Street surveys five decades’ worth of artistic practice, from the 1970s to the 2020s, in Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar, and historicizes it as “contemporary art in Southeast Asia.” In this sense, the book carries out an interwoven study: the historicization of contemporary art alongside the historicization of regional imagination, alongside the emergence of these practices as “contemporary art in Southeast Asia.”

Each book chapter covers a decade. The book’s scope and survey are admirable and very useful, especially in its endeavor to tease out the social and political conditions that shaped the history of art and the place of art in the history of Southeast Asia. Within this framework, Lenzi looks at practices that interface the political and the aesthetic as exemplary of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, covering installation, performance, and mixed media. Lenzi’s approach combines a formalist analysis with social history. While this sounds straightforward, Lenzi does not delve deeply into either methodology. The breadth of the scope trumps any attempt to engage with the works and timeframe in a deeper manner.

In Lenzi’s account, artists from this period in Southeast Asia created new idioms that “combin[ed] formal potency and social-political activation” (12). These “active rather than activist art” works (19) “idiosyncratically enlist[ed] audiences with coded aesthetics that covertly afforded agency in socially politically restricted locales” (13). The book’s argumentation is built on a number of representative works from the 1970s. For Lenzi, Redza Piyadasa’s May 13, 1969 (1970), is an exemplary work in the way its mirror element “optically integrates viewers into the artwork, inducing them to decode its ideas, a literal-conceptual aesthetics of agency” (23). Meanwhile, FX Harsono’s Apa yang anda lakukan jika krupuk ini adalah pistol beneran? (1977) is a provocative work of “image-text association” that “summon[ed] unpredictable viewer intervention via questioning . . . forc[ing] critical involvement in issues of pervasive violence” (33). Lenzi flags characteristic strategies of the works under focus: covert, nonantagonistic, nondescriptive, and formally seductive and playful, participatory through enlisting or soliciting involvement, breaching viewer-artwork separation through the demand for decryption, among others.

For Lenzi, these tendencies distinguish the art that emerged in the region in the 1970s from Euramerican political art or from the practices characterized in terms of their “relational aesthetic” or the period’s own iterations of social realism. While Lenzi’s examples of contemporary art in Southeast Asia “confronted ordinary viewers with social conditions, creating interrogation,” Euramerican political art directly “opposed social-political realities” (39). Relational aesthetics, meanwhile, stopped at sociability, failing to cultivate ways to address political conditions (18). Perhaps the most interesting distinction that she claims relates to Southeast Asia’s social realist aesthetic: “Unlike social realist description, socially quizzing regional contemporary art dissolves the artwork-viewer separation, integrating life via encroachment into public space, physical and civic” (16).

While the book aspires to clarify the conditions of the contemporary in regional art history, its methodology is not sharp enough to render the interfacing of the contemporary and the regional and its complications. From the outset, Lenzi frames the book as “art history from Asia.” She states, for example, that “Accounts of global contemporary art often begin in 1989, but regional, contemporary artworks . . . are detected in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. Comparable visual languages surfaced in the 1980s, proliferated in the 1990s, and are ubiquitous regionally today” (13). This observation should have redirected the book’s critical tenor. If art in Southeast Asia already exhibited signs of contemporaneity in the 1970s, then shouldn’t we first and foremost question our present theorizations of “the contemporary” through these works?

While attempts to flesh this out in the text can be discerned, there is no earnest interrogation of how the choice to look at the history of contemporary art in Southeast Asia reconsiders the category of the contemporary, and thus no questioning of the necessity to think about its regional valence. Beyond the intermittent glossing of the illiberality of Southeast Asia, and sometimes particular nation-states in Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia (23), the book reverts to the nation-state model.

Did the consciousness of the contemporary emerge with the consciousness of the context of the region? Such a question is important, especially in a book that argues for a regional approach to engaging with history, politics, and the public. The question clarifies the need for a more interventionist method of how this account of the contemporary is, in many ways, elusive to Laos, Brunei, and Timor-Leste, areas that Lenzi did not cover in the book “for want of sufficient material” (14). To be clear, this sentiment is not an argument for an exhaustive account of the region without which the regional fails as a conceptual framework. Instead, it is a call for a more attentive methodology that takes the region, especially within the substantial period that the book covers, as a dynamic category. If, like the regional, the contemporary stakes a coevality among times and places, then how the region consolidated and dilated across historical and artistic moments should be addressed. It is crucial to annotate the potency of imagining a regional contemporary: how the ways in which the region is adopted and resisted by its constituents, how it has made sense of its unevenness, also have a history.

Despite the expansiveness of the project, the argument about the formal seduction of the works enlisting publics in their social and political agency is not fully fleshed out. The idioms around the aesthetic effects of the works that the book studies change throughout the book: drawing [viewers] into, soliciting, quizzing, marshalling, integrating, corralling, and [audience-]enveloping, to name a few. In the chapter about the 1990s, the idiom takes a more active and violent tenor: “jolting [audiences] into dialogue” (67), “ambushing audiences on contemporary polemics” (67), and even “co-opting audiences” (73). Lenzi does not seem to distinguish between these tropes. Thus, the shifts to which these works might be responding are left unstudied, failing to account for how artists continually calibrate these strategies throughout the decades covered in the book.

For a theoretical framework that examines how contemporary art in Southeast Asia “idiosyncratically enlist[ed] audiences with coded aesthetics that covertly afforded agency in socially politically restricted locales” (13), the language that Lenzi relies on instead simplifies this tendency as a recurring, unchanging strategy, glossing over important aspects of the politics of the aesthetic. Instead of sharpening this strategy against a turbulent and changing regional history throughout the decades covered in the book, Lenzi uses a language that, by the third chapter, has stopped becoming informative. In a more analytical sense, works produced in other decades and places were just made to confirm the book’s theoretical model of enlistment and solicitation of the viewer’s involvement. If the main interest of the book is how “art, answering the times, developed new idioms as much from necessity as from artists’ quests for formal innovation” (16), how then did the artists conceptualize the political potency of enlisting or involving their publics? How can we better contextualize the publics that they were imagining? How does this enlistment or involvement of local publics operate beyond the aesthetic prompts that Lenzi belabors?

If the crux of the argument is how art solicits publics to get involved in political conversations, thus catalyzing political consciousness, then should the argument also think about the kind of public that is formed through the different vectors of enlistment? This demands a more robust ideation of the public and the modes of circulation of the works, more so because a salient narrative of Lenzi’s account is the act of staging and restaging of works from street to exhibition space, typically because they needed to evade state or other censoring bodies. How does the public of the street differ from the public of the exhibition, for example? How do we conceptualize the public in the multiethnic and drastically class-divided spaces of Southeast Asia?

Despite the recognition of Southeast Asia’s illiberality or “low-quality democracy” (79), Lenzi’s account of politics and the aesthetic that is mobilized to engage with it is unproductively simplified. Instead of conceptualizing a contemporary from these artistic practices—the work of imagining the potency of artistic practice, and even of cultivating the ground for this labor to bear fruit—what we have is an account that diminishes these into instantly recognizable gestures and prompts emptied of the specific inflections of Southeast Asia as a regional construct. Without recognizing how the categories of the region and the contemporary, like the aesthetic, also play out the political, any attempt to collocate Southeast Asia with terms like the contemporary, the art historical, or the aesthetic will only be a caricature of the delicate and intelligent political work that artists in Southeast Asia have been doing—as Lenzi astutely pronounces but insufficiently argues—a contemporary aesthetico-political sensibility that gained traction about twenty years ahead of its global emergence.