ABSTRACT
A guiding premise of our program, Unreal Asia, was that reality in contemporary Asia is informed by notions foreign to Western rationalism. Despite an explosion of activity, Southeast Asia’s video makers seem disinclined to compete with the official truths of the nation. Decades of authoritarianism have cheapened film’s epistemological claim, and artists generally seem unconcerned with restoring it. One of the videos in Unreal Asia offers a neat example, a four-minute excerpt from a compilation of “filmed jokes” called Phapphayon kom. Following the regional financial meltdown of the late 1990s, anthropologist Aihwa Ong sketched a new structure of sovereignty for the “post-developmentalist” economies of Southeast Asia as they repositioned themselves to court multinational capital. For Ong, sovereignty rests on a discrimination interior to nation, and to the extent akin to the strategies of modern, authoritarian regimes of the past.
