The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia

By Pamela N. Corey

In The City in Time, Pamela N. Corey provides new ways of understanding contemporary artistic practices in a region that continues to linger in international perceptions as perpetually “postwar.” Focusing on art from the last two decades, Corey connects artistic developments with social transformations as reflected through the urban landscapes of Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh. As she argues, artists’ engagements with urban space and form reveal ways of grasping multiple and layered senses and concepts of time, whether aligned with colonialism, postcolonial modernity, communism, or postsocialism.

The City in Time traces the process through which collective memory and aspiration are mapped onto landscape and built space to shed light on how these vibrant Southeast Asian cities shape artistic practices as the art simultaneously consolidates the city as image and imaginary. Featuring a dynamic array of creative productions that include staged and documentary photography, the moving image, and public performance and installation, The City in Time illustrates how artists from Vietnam and Cambodia have envisioned their rapidly changing worlds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780295749242

Pamela N. Corey

Pamela N. Corey is assistant professor of art and media studies at Fulbright University Vietnam

Book preview

THE CITY IN TIME

PAMELA N. COREY

THE CITY IN TIME

Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia

University of Washington Press . Seattle

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Corey, Pamela N., author.

Title: The city in time : contemporary art and urban form in Vietnam and Cambodia / Pamela N. Corey.

Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: lccn 2021001622 (print) | lccn 2021001623 (ebook) | isbn 9780295749235 (hardcover) | isbn 9780295749242 (ebook)

Subjects: lcsh: Arts, Vietnamese—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City—21st century. | Arts, Cambodian—Cambodia—Phnom Penh—21st century. | Arts and globalization—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City. | Arts and globalization—Cambodia—Phnom Penh. | Arts and society—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City. | Arts and society—Cambodia—Phnom Penh. | Arts—Political aspects—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City. | Arts—Political aspects—Cambodia—Phnom Penh.

Classification: LCC N7314.2.H63 C67 2021 (print) | LCC N7314.2.H63 (ebook) | DDC 700.9597/7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001622

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001623

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ISBN 978-0-295-74923-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-295-74924-2 (ebook)

The paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48–1984.∞

For H and M, world travelers and world makers

Contents

Acknowledgments

IntroductionOn Contemporary Art, History, and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia

Chapter 1Affective Communities

Imagining Saigon/Vietnam

Chapter 2Art and the Urban Order

Spatial Interventions in Ho Chi Minh City

Chapter 3Making Space

The Documentary Impulse and Civil Spectatorship in Cambodia

Chapter 4Jumping Scales

Performing the Postcolonial Cityscape in Phnom Penh

ConclusionCities in Conjunction and Comparative Prospects

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The support of numerous individuals and institutions around the world made this book possible. In its preliminary stages this project was supported by various grants and organizations. Aspects of its germination took place during the Historical Photographs of Cambodia project in 2007, funded by Arizona State University Libraries and the Northern Illinois University Southeast Asia Digital Library project. Language training for my fieldwork in Vietnam and Cambodia was supported by SEASSI Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships and by academic-year FLAS fellowships provided by Cornell University. Primary research was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant and a Center for Khmer Studies PhD Dissertation Research Fellowship, with additional research supported by the Cornell Department of the History of Art, the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap, the Cornell Graduate School, and the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme at SOAS University of London. I would like to thank supporting institutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, in particular Sàn Art and the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City, and Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture and SA SA BASSAC in Phnom Penh. I was only able to carry out substantial work on the manuscript through the two terms of Early Career Researcher leave provided by SOAS University of London, and for that I am incredibly thankful. And I am sincerely grateful for the enthusiasm and support of Larin McLaughlin at University of Washington Press, the critical and constructive feedback provided by the anonymous readers, and the professionalism of the UW Press editorial team. I thank the College Art Association for awarding the book a Millard Meiss Publication Fund and Fulbright University Vietnam for providing additional support for the book’s production through a Professional Development Fund.

I am indebted to the artists whose works animate the words in this book and who have been immeasurably generous in sharing with me their time, ideas, and images. The art is complex, surprising, and inspires new questions with each reencounter. For this rich and enduring engagement with their work, I thank Nguyễn Như Huy, Brian Doan, Ngô Đình Trúc, Trần Anh Hùng, Dinh Q. Lê, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Propeller Group, Phan Quang, Bùi Công Khánh, Sovan Philong, Kong Vollak, Meas Sokhorn, Tith Kanitha, Lim Sokchanlina, Vandy Rattana, Miles El Mac McGregor, Vuth Lyno, Sa Sa Art Projects, Khvay Samnang, and Svay Sareth. While this book provides one story of contemporary art in Vietnam and Cambodia, there are many others whose practices and creative productions did not find their way into the narrative, even if they inspired my thinking and continue to capture my imagination. In the future I hope to find time and space to do justice to the works of these artists, who are too numerous to name here. I also could not have carried out my research without the many artists and organizers who took the time to share stories, resources, and materials with me in Vietnam and Cambodia. In Ho Chi Minh City I would like to thank Zoe Butt, Hoàng Dương Cầm, Dinh Q. Lê, Ngô Thúy Duyên, Nguyễn Kim Tố Lan, Quynh Pham, Richard Streitmatter-Tran, and Vũ Liên Phương. In Phnom Penh I would especially like to thank Erin Gleeson, Dana Langlois, Ly Daravuth, Lydia Parusol, Sopheap Pich, Linda Saphan, Tith Veasna, and Vuth Lyno. I would like to thank Nguyễn Hà in Ho Chi Minh City and Lim Ratha and Tith Veasna in Phnom Penh for their assistance with Vietnamese transcriptions and Khmer translation and transcriptions. I would like to also share my deep appreciation of Việt Lê’s collegiality and friendship as an interlocutor in the field.

Even if not explicitly so, the book has been shaped in dialogue with colleagues near and far, from Ithaca, New York City, Chicago, London, Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, and Singapore, with whom I shared sections of the book or future, broader aspects of the project. The venues for these presentations and fora are too many to name here, but I thank those individuals for their camaraderie as well as their inspiring comments, questions, and suggestions. I also want to express my profound thanks to colleagues and mentors who have graciously read and provided feedback on portions of the book in its various iterations and incarnations: Iftikhar Dadi, Kaja McGowan, Roger Nelson, Stanley O’Connor, Lorraine Paterson, Nora Taylor, and Wenny Teo.

It has also been immensely generative to have had the opportunity to develop my teaching at SOAS University of London around many of the themes and questions that have shaped this book. It was through the experiences of teaching the postgraduate courses Contemporary Art and the Global and Issues in Contemporary Southeast Asian Art that I was able to continuously hone my thinking through the work of pedagogy and in dialogue with the many fantastic students who so enthusiastically and committedly probed these ideas with me. I am furthermore indebted to two formidable women who, as friends, colleagues, and mentors, have been more influential in my development as a scholar than they could possibly realize: Nora Taylor and Ashley Thompson. But none of this would have been possible without the unwavering patience and encouragement of Cuong Pham, and the energy and inspiration provided by our children, to whom the book is dedicated.

Parts of the book have been developed from existing publications. These include Crafted Signs of Obsolescence: Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Aesthetic Artifacts, Art Journal 71, no. 3 (2012): 46–57; Tiffany Chung: Between Imagination and Historicity, in Tiffany Chung, ed. Tiffany Chung and Tyler Rollins (New York: Tyler Rollins Fine Art; Ho Chi Minh City: Galerie Quynh, 2015), 8–17; Vandy Rattana: When Time Becomes Still the Landscape Will Speak, in Hugo Boss Asia Art Award for Emerging Asian Artists 2015 (Berlin: Sternberg Press and Rockbund Museum of Art, Shanghai, 2015); Beyond yet toward Representation: Diasporic Artists and Craft as Conceptualism in Contemporary Southeast Asia, Journal of Modern Craft 9, no. 2 (July 2016): 161–81; and Siting the Artist’s Voice, Art Journal 77, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 84–96.

For any inaccuracies or errors found in this book I hold sole responsibility.

THE CITY IN TIME

INTRODUCTION

On Contemporary Art, History, and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia

Over the course of August 1998, a stall at a busy marketplace in central Ho Chi Minh City displayed an initially unremarkable array of goods that only upon closer inspection might disconcert the shopper. These included various customized products for conjoined infants and children, such as small plastic dolls, pacifiers, and clothing such as pajamas, dresses, and double-hooded knitted sweaters each accompanied by two sets of booties. The soft pastel hues of the garments complemented a range of seemingly mass-produced plastic dolls, including blond-haired and blue-eyed cherubs, unexceptional except for their bicephalic condition. Also on display was a range of adult-sized clothes featuring the names of companies that had produced the chemical defoliant Agent Orange. The panoply of clothing hung on racks and along the walls contributed to the condensed experience of the space, typical of the covered marketplaces found throughout the urban nodes of the Southeast Asian region. Weaving one’s way through the maze of narrow aisles and stalls packed with commercial products hones the everyday shopper’s instincts for efficient navigation and perceptual scrutiny, habitual practices on which Dinh Q. Lê, the artist who had conceptualized the market stall as a public artwork titled Damaged Gene, could rely. In this case, local patrons would either deliberately turn away or stop to query his curious selection of wares. Only tourists would make purchases.

In 2009, photographer Vandy Rattana began a series documenting the numerous craters left by the US government’s 1969–73 covert bombing campaign in then-neutral Cambodia, sanctioned in order to destroy communist supply routes and base camps in response to the escalation of conflict following the 1968 Tet Offensive. Vandy’s project included a video documentary charting his search for what villagers referred to as bomb ponds, as well as a photographic series revealing the craters’ ongoing topographical synthesis with the landscape. The photographs capture a range of rural settings, many of which appear untouched by human cultivation. From flat horizons rhythmically dotted with sugar palm trees or patches of overgrowth, to forested thickets through which sky and water appear inversed, the images are meticulously composed. Evocative of the Romantic landscape painting traditions of nineteenth-century Europe, the beauty of the Bomb Ponds’ bucolic and rustic settings is undeniable, as is their perturbing history.

The two abovementioned artworks have largely been interpreted, either individually or collectively, through the prism of their authors’ biographies and the geopolitical backdrops of their places of birth. As artists born in, emigrated from, and/or currently residing in Vietnam or Cambodia, the majority of their works that have gained favor with major international art institutions, curators, and academics have predominantly been viewed through the lens of war and trauma. Preliminary interpretations as well as deeper theoretical investigations have largely attended to their capacities for historico-political representation and psychological reconciliation. While interrogations of the past undoubtedly continue to shape the concerns of artists like Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968, Hà Tiên, Vietnam) and Vandy Rattana (b. 1980, Phnom Penh, Cambodia), this book queries whether such a topical focus on historical causality is sufficient for understanding how these artworks were conceptualized intellectually, aesthetically, and materially within the critical praxis of each artist.¹ Rather than isolating their works as singular narratives of historic rupture, as so often characterizes the framing of artists characterized as postwar subjects, much more may be understood by considering other stretches of time and space informing their artistic formation. Diachronic readings can be enriched by the concepts and strategies engendered by site, place, locality, scale, and metaphor that their artworks embody. While their art has been well-theorized as doing historical work, they have been less understood as spatial practices. Despite their visibly discrepant spatial orientations (one toward the city and one toward the countryside), this book illuminates the ways urban form has enabled the artworks described above to come into being.

Cities, Contemporary Art, and the Global

Any consideration of urban form participates in broader discourses of contemporary art and the global by virtue of the city’s standing as the most visible arena of globalization’s structural and cultural forces, a matrix of transformations from which artists source creative triggers and materials. It describes shared experiences of parity and difference fueled by globalization, the household term referencing a range of large-scale economic, technological, and politico-cultural developments tied to accelerating movements of global capital. Studies of contemporary art have emphasized the emancipatory potential of artistic practices across cultural and political domains, often accentuating the context of what T. J. Demos has termed crisis globalization as a shared condition for numerous artists working in diverse sites across complex geographies encapsulated by the term the Global South.² Demos uses crisis globalization to name a coalescence of high-impact events, from deepening economic inequality, refugee crises and mass migrations, and intensifying violence spreading over widening conflict zones. In the present, this constellation appears to have reached unimagined proportions, with the resurgence of both physical and legalistic territorial claims and the vehement clamor of surging neonationalist sentiments. Cities serve as national theaters but also as bastions of antagonism and identity-making, sites of collective strategizing to transcend scales of representation. If the rise of identity politics in the art world was both conditioned by and reactive to debates on multiculturalism in the 1990s, then artists from those countries most affected by crisis globalization today often face the expectation that their artworks serve as either signs of synchronicity and confrontation, like conceptual reportage, or as forms of historical accounting and address.

The global also gestures to the institutionalized desire to traverse scales of representation in museums, biennials and periodic mega-exhibitions, where patron states and organizations have often sought to profit from the ambitious exhibition model by articulating the national and the international embodied in the figure of the city. As Tim Griffin has suggested, biennials have staged the city in an almost cinematic way, rendering site as scene, where the city becomes something akin to an image, within which art has been placed.³ The portrait of the city plays into the ethnographic dimensions of community-engaged artistic commissions for such exhibitions, but the contemporaneity of the urban experience provides a means of assimilating difference. The biennial’s predilection for site-specific commissions relies on the ability of such works to illustrate a sense of locality in their narration and performance of place—for example, Tiffany Chung’s research-based cartographic drawings that earned her the 2013 Sharjah Biennial Artist Prize, or the Indonesian collective ruangrupa’s community-sourced archival project at the Singapore Biennial in 2011. While such gestures compellingly localize place and history within a globalized ecology of artistic presentation, these exhibitionary platforms—alongside art fairs and museums (e.g., Art Basel, the Guggenheim, the Louvre)—also risk consolidating the city as brand. The city comes into focus not only as an organizing site for the nation but also for art history, prompting art historian Sonal Khullar to ask whether through such mechanisms, the city—as a discursive framework for art history—has lost its critical yield.⁴

The so-called global turn in contemporary art, with its watershed periodization of 1989, has drawn into its selective embrace contemporary artists once deemed to occupy the margins of a Euro-American artistic geography and teleology.⁵ In this regard, Vietnam and Cambodia have long experienced a double marginalization within art historical fields, neither central to the historical canon of Asian art, long governed by China, Japan, and India in standard undergraduate surveys and museological representation, nor given equal treatment in studies of modern and contemporary art in Asia or even Southeast Asia, which have privileged more economically developed nations in the region, such as Thailand and Singapore.⁶ Things have begun to change, as artists today from all corners of the globe find themselves increasingly networked within international communities and circuits of exhibition, and reified for their roles as agents of discursive and aesthetic developments at the intersection of art, culture, and politics. Limited local infrastructures for education and exhibition in developing cities have foregrounded curatorial interests as well as emerging artists’ increased access to international workshops, gallery representation, and inclusion in exhibition projects seeking to unveil uncharted art worlds.

In many instances, as in the places discussed in this book, the simultaneity of local limitation and international mobility experienced by these artists have often resulted in formal and critical innovations. In Cambodia, artists’ affinity for photography can be brought into dialogue with deeper theorizations of the documentary approach in global contemporary art and further afield. As T. J. Demos describes with reference to the revitalization of documentary art, Artists have invented critical documentary strategies and new modelings of affect, creative modes of mobile images and imaginative videos, with which to negotiate the increased movements of life across the globe.⁷ Many of the artworks featured in the book similarly participate in critical acts of cultural intervention centered around recuperating and producing historical documents. Following Hal Foster’s frequently referenced term, variations of an archival impulse have been particularly salient in projects addressing the scarcity of historical texts and gaps in the national accounts of controversial historical episodes, rendered acute in the contexts of Vietnam and Cambodia.⁸ Yet alongside such documentationoriented practices are those equally drawn from ethnographic methods as well as strategies sourced from media infrastructures and informal production and craft economies.

These are some of the ways in which works by Cambodian and Vietnamese artists have gained currency, or—following David Teh’s study of Thai art’s currencies of the contemporary—became legible, desirable, legitimized by and legitimating of global contemporary art.⁹ Of course, the specificities of their conditions of emergence and response to context (geographical, sociocultural, temporal, and political) complicate convenient analogies, whether psychogeography, performance, the archival impulse, or social engagement. If the city presents itself as a physical, politico-economic, and ideological structure, the often aleatory, subjective, and probing experiences of its urban forms recorded by artists provide us with the interface through which we can understand artistic practice not only as a claim to or imbrication in global contemporaneity, but as an ongoing act of self-making and of community formation rooted in locality and practices of inhabitation.¹⁰ These are tactics developed through lived experience and keen attention to one’s environment—ever-shifting engagements with place. As such, my study of these artworks, which approximately span 1995 to 2015, is in large part informed by over a decade of interviews and studio visits during extended and short-term visits. At the same time, the analyses presented here are imbricated in on-site observations made during those periods of the near-frenetic acts of destruction and construction in what are increasingly new urban landscapes, and their physical and symbolic intersection with concurrent aesthetics of political resistance, emergent discourses and forms of contemporary art, and cross-disciplinary productions in the creative industries.

Theorizing Urban Form

Either in the wake of or in conjunction with broader comparative studies of contemporary art and globalization, a return to the discourse of urbanism and artistic subjectivity would seem to herald from canonical texts siting the metropolitan nodes of the West reacting to the experience of modernity. From the disciplines of sociology, geography, and philosophy, the writings of such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Raymond Williams, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Edward Soja, and Neil Smith have left deep imprints in the study of the distinctively spatial strategies deployed by modern and contemporary artists.¹¹ Across an interdisciplinary field of discussion on cities and their role in shaping creative subjects, terms such as urban aesthetics and urban imaginaries have been used and, in some instances, may appear at risk of losing their critical traction as cities in the Global South are perceived as becoming more homogenous in appearance and infrastructural developments. Cognizant of this possibility, Andreas Huyssen refutes the potential jettisoning of the term urban imaginary:

In the wake of Charles Taylor’s use of the term social imaginary and Henri Lefebvre’s argument about the social production of space, the notion of urban imaginaries has become quite commonplace. However, there are different usages of the term. Some focus more on media images, cyberspace, and global popular music that connect cities with each other. Others focus on translocal social movements around land rights, squatting, and housing or on transnational Web-based grassroots efforts concerned with human rights or ecological issues. Yet others see the linkages between local embeddedness and translocal business connections and practices as key for urban imaginaries. Indeed, all of these are key dimensions that, together with the longue durée of customs, languages, and everyday practices, generate the urban imagination of today.¹²

It is the longue durée of cultural and material forms that renders the notion of urban imaginaries useful in comparative contexts, and that has the potential to index the processes of imagination and subject formation that continue to mutually shape and be shaped by the city. Like Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling, the notion of urban imaginaries is largely affective, processual, and temporally reflexive in character, renewed by nostalgic responses to the city’s perceived loss of distinction on the horizon of post-globalization.¹³

The City in Time unfolds against the ramifications of urban transformation as a rearticulated state modernization project structured by neoliberal, postsocialist conditions.¹⁴ Postsocialist operates in different ways for Cambodia and Vietnam. Whereas Cambodia is nominally postsocialist following the end of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (1979–89), Vietnam’s postsocialism (as a result of its economic and structural transformations in the 1980s and 1990s) characterizes a merging of paradigms characterized more by flexibility, continuity, and complex adaptation between socialism and neoliberalism. But my focus is on how macro and micro scales of the urban imagination within these contexts are brought into conscious conversation and realization through tangible art forms. In other words, this book considers how urban form has served as a catalyst—and even as a mold—for contemporary art in Vietnam and Cambodia. At the same time, in both the conceptual reach and plasticity of such investigations, the city has simultaneously been refocused and reenvisioned as a target of reform, renewal, and promise.

As it becomes evident, the city shapes artistic practices while art simultaneously consolidates the city as an image. The concept of urban aesthetics has come to attention as a broader category within which episodes of modernism have been framed and metropolitan sites have served as laboratories and landscapes for the avant-garde. As broadly descriptive and evocative as urban imaginaries, the emphasis on aesthetics orients its meaning toward the material and phenomenological dimension of urban productions, embracing a wide range of cultural representations and experiences that find expression in such realms as planning, architecture, cinema, media, fashion, and the arts.¹⁵ Urban aesthetics conjures image systems, denoting an interlinked web of perceptual moments that in their relationship to one another produce, as Henri Lefebvre described it, the city as image and ideology.¹⁶ Therefore, the term indexes a more encompassing experience of the city as a phenomenological field that produces a distinctive urban identity expressed through visual cadences, very often structured by discourses of modernity and/or postmodernism. In her study of urban aesthetics in postsocialist China, Robin Visser considers the term as a strategy, fundamentally interdisciplinary, that is key to understanding the reciprocity between the shaping of contemporary subjects and of the aesthetic formation of the city as a collective space: Proceeding from the premise that the built environment is not an autonomous realm, but rather an economic and social field with important political implications, Visser considers how the aesthetics of the urban environment shape the emotions and behavior of individuals and cultures, and how individual and collective images of and practices in the city, whether consciously organized or not, produce urban aesthetics.¹⁷

The term urban aesthetics also indicates a discursive field, as in Rosalyn Deutsche’s influential body of work on art and spatial politics. Deutsche’s reference to the urban-aesthetic or spatial-cultural specifically designates an interdisciplinary discourse that combines ideas about art, architecture, and urban design, on the one hand, with theories of the city, social space, and public space, on the other.¹⁸ Urban aesthetics thus denotes an object as well as field of study that, according to Deutsche, gained dense application in the 1990s following the alignment of urban restructuring with the growth of neoliberalism, and the rise of influential texts connecting postmodernism, Marxist critique, human geography, and cultural criticism.¹⁹

While these are potent terms that animate important discussions about the role of cities as theaters of interdependent economic, political, and cultural forces, I instead rely on urban form for this study of artistic practices in Vietnamese and Cambodian cities. While both imaginaries and aesthetics invoke fields and systems of urban image production in their conceptual, virtual, or material manifestations, my concern lies with the sourcing and artistic appraisal of those particular forms either in their singularity or within more complex compositions. The term urban form gives rise to aesthetics and imaginaries, but I suggest that it lends a specificity to the individual image—whether a sign, building, street, performative routine, market, or map—that needs to be referenced when it is instrumental in inspiring how artists conceive of forms of their own making.

Urban form encompasses both the individual features as well as the broader morphology of the city, and in this book denotes an analytical approach that draws from a distilled focus on the physical aspects of the image, a method more simply referred to in art history as formalism. While this disciplinary methodology has undergone scrutiny, critique, and, more recently, modification and revival in the context of the debated global turn in contemporary art studies, the use of the term form also finds similar referential capacities in a broader interdisciplinary field.²⁰ It holds legibility as something to be potentially instrumentalized in the realms of creativity and historical production, more so than urban imaginaries or urban aesthetics. Abidin Kusno has considered the role of Indonesian urban form in the making of ethnic identity and political consciousness as oriented toward past and present temporalities, and Lu Duanfang has argued for the pervasiveness of social collectivity shaped by lingering socialist urban forms in China.²¹ Beyond the term’s application in urban studies, Arnika Furhmann has used Buddhist form as shorthand for Buddhist-inflected forms of representation, practice, and affect in the works of contemporary Thai filmmakers and artists.²² Even without deep explication, Buddhist form immediately connotes the creative and material mediation of textual, visual, and performative Buddhist elements that might otherwise be overshadowed by the aesthetic and philosophical.

Urban form itself has been most directly aligned with discourses of planning and architecture. Yet its referencing of built morphologies, and the social behaviors they engender, lends itself to art historical application. One avenue is through its connection to discourses of medium and form in contemporary art theory and criticism. As Irene Small suggests, form may more effectively describe the aggregation of mediums such as performance, painting, sculpture, and photography, whose porous boundaries are symptomatic of artistic intermediality and medium aspecificity today.²³ In a broader sense beyond the disciplinary realm of art history, form enables acute analysis of built space and its artistic applications. A pertinent example here, as I explore in the book, is the case of what locals referred to as The Building in Phnom Penh. A now-demolished modernist structure built in the 1960s, its urban form was sourced by artists for its potential to unfold local, national, and global histories, but also for its possibilities as a medium in itself as well as a vehicle through which other mediums, such as