Organizer: Center for Khmer Studies
Type/Location: Virtual
Description:
This webinar examines the conjoined genealogies of the Musée Albert Sarraut (Phnom Penh, 1920) and the National Museum of Bangkok (1927). The designs of both museums embraced conflicting temporalities: their ground plans sought to map out the respective times and spaces of Cambodge and Siam while their façades drew on local historicist idioms to make claims about architectural purity. Embedded within two sometimes competitive, sometimes cooperative imperial projects, both drew upon sacred images from the realm of religious practice and embedded them within a new economy of image production and a new culture of public exhibition. As instruments in the colonial production of difference, the two museums thus fulfilled three major roles: they spatialized a history of Siam and Cambodge as two distinct but related states, both threatened by disappearance; they exhibited the antiquities of these states to a racialized public as evidence of that race’s unique origins; and they were part of a new economic and educational system that sought to transform “worldmaking” into a rationalized form of production that reduced powerful tools of imagining to objets d’art and imbued them with a serial identity.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Lawrence Chua is the author of Bangkok Utopia: Modern architecture and Buddhist felicities, 1910-1973. He is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, Syracuse University and co-edits the book series ArchAsia for Hong Kong University Press. In addition to his recent fellowship at the Center for Khmer Studies, he has held research fellowships at the Getty Research Institute, California; the International Institute of Asian Studies, the Netherlands; the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany; and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University.
About the Moderator:
Professor Magnus Fiskesjö is originally from Sweden. He has long been fascinated with Cambodia and its history, but he visited Cambodia for the first time only in 2012. He received his education in Sweden, Denmark, China, and the US, where he completed his doctoral studies in Anthropology and Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. His doctoral work focused on the history and political anthropology of the Wa people of Myanmar and China. Before earning his PhD, he worked in Sweden’s foreign service and was stationed in Beijing and Tokyo. Later he served as the Director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden, one of Europe’s foremost museums of Asian art and archaeology. During this period, he began to take an active interest in the politics of heritage and the issue of repatriations from Western
Registration:
To attend the event online, please register here.