Art on the Back Burner: Gender as the Elephant in the Room of Southeast Asian Art Histories

Despite the operative skepticism about the way compensatory art history appears to have reduced the feminist project to merely expanding rather than challenging the canon, the assertion here is that still too scant attention has been paid to studying the critical role that primarily woman artist-organisers have played in shaping narratives of practice. In focusing on their visible tasks through variable degrees of sublimating art practice in deference to less visible tasks like archiving, art education, organising and publication, the research also privileges the aspects of circulation and reception as it revisits the shaping of artworlds in stories that have ironically kept such ‘maintenance’ tasks virtually off the record.