Visual arts maintain a colourful presence at Buddhist funerals in Northern Thailand. These arts are not made for mere decoration but serve an active and essential role in the ceremonies that take place after death. They echo funerary themes of the impermanent nature of life and the importance of a life filled with merit. This article examines cremation structures and funeral banners of Northern Thailand and argues that these arts not only hold significance for the living and the dead, but that in giving form to abstract concepts they have the power to guide observers in their beliefs regarding the dynamics of life and death.

The Orang Sakai of Mainland Riau, on the east coast of Sumatra, have an elaborate performing art genre through which they physicalise the unseen spirit-dimension in a shamanic ritual called dikei. Their shamanic ritual utilises songs, dance as well as comedy. This article elaborates on how songs and dance visualise the unseen beings and provides detailed examples of Sakai performances during which shamans ‘dance with’ or ‘move with’ the spirits. A second theme of the article is the question of the relationship between the meaning of ‘performance’ and fakery, and suggests that there are three types of performed fakery, two of which are accepted as valid and necessary performances which technically contribute to the performance of medicine and the physicalisation of spirit presence.

This article examines wayang potehi, a cloth glove puppet theatre of southern Fujian origin performed on Java. It outlines the genre's emergence in Fujian, its arrival in the archipelago, and historical and contemporary practice. This article seeks to respect potehi's Hokkien roots, Indonesian practice, and the place of its genre in a dynamic regional history as it traces the development, practice and uses of the genre. Contemporary potehi patronage often exhibits the strategies of the mixed-culture non-Chinese-speaking communities of East and Central Java to perform a streamlined, integrationist, and loyal Sino-Indonesian identity.

In 2010, La Galigo, a Bugis mythological epic describing the founding of the human world, was included in UNESCO's Memory of the World register. This accolade again brought La Galigo into the international spotlight, as had occurred when Robert Wilson's stage play I La Galigo, based on this epic, debuted in Singapore in 2004. Wilson's production received acclaim and critique, with reviews primarily focusing on his ability to achieve an authentic representation of Bugis identity and their past. These responses raise questions around the presupposition that there is an authentic Bugis identity and past that can be publicly recreated. This article analyses the concept of authenticity through reviews of Wilson's production and the work of key theorists to show that for many people, authenticity is achievable and of critical importance in underpinning any sense of a unified and singular ethnic identity, while for others, identity is always already a mix of different global influences and as such is either irrelevant, or liberated from a sense of a singular heritage.

This article looks at two contemporary films by Vietnamese women. In Việt Linh's Travelling Circus (1988) and Phạm Nhuệ Giang's The Deserted Valley (2002), a female gaze is sutured to that of an ethnic minority character's, a form of looking that stresses a shared oppression between women and the ethnic Other. While clearing a space for a desiring female gaze in Vietnamese film, they nonetheless extend an Orientalist view of racialised difference. A feminist film optic, one that does not consider industry history and constructions of race, fails to mark out the layered relations of looking underlying Vietnamese filmmaking. This study attends to the ways women filmmakers investigate gendered forms of looking, sexual desire and otherness within the constraints of a highly male-dominated film industry.

This article aims to recover the background to the post-Second World War growth of local art activities, art education and the rise of the professional artist on the island of Singapore and peninsular Malaya. It examines how the transitional period spanning the dissolution of British colonialism and the establishment of two independent nations stimulated unique conditions for the development of local art education and created an amateur–professional artist divide. The promotion and support of fine arts and related activities were in tandem with nation-building strategies that sought to construct a common ‘Malayan’ culture and identity.

From the mid-1920s, Indian music scenes developed in Singapore that were not just about the construction of regional and religious forms of Indian diasporic belonging. Drawing upon European, Chinese and Malay influences (musical and otherwise), and performing in contexts that were uncommon in India, Singaporean Indian musicians contributed to non-Indian musics, while incorporating non-Indian influences into Indian genres. Such musical–communal interactions functioned in colonial Singapore to locate the island as a hub for the constitution of a ‘Malayan Indian sonic geography’. By encouraging links between various Indian and other communities throughout the peninsula via radio, films, recordings, touring networks, and performances at hotels and amusement parks, music became a means for Indian communication and integration in colonial Malaya — a sonic geography that would be significantly transformed, though not eliminated, after Singapore and Malaysia parted ways in 1965.

The spiritual power of dance in Cambodia has been valued since pre-Angkorian times, and the plentiful images of dance and music in the bas-reliefs of the great monuments of Angkor suggest that this tradition was markedly enhanced in the reign of Jayavarman VII, as a contemporary Chinese report attests. This article explores the ‘halls with dancers’ of the Ta Prohm, Preah Khan and Bayon temples built by king Jayavarman VII and concludes that here dance became a determinant in some Khmer sacred architecture.