A glossary of global art terms, alongside jargon and phrases coined in Southeast Asia. These definitions cite examples of artists, exhibitions, techniques, and more, in which the phrases have been applied.
Banal Objects
Banal objects are regular objects that we see in everyday life.
Source: AWDB team. AWDB Highlighted artist: Singaporean artist Boo Sze Yang treats banal objects, modern architectural interiors, and destructive scenes as metaphors for the human condition.
Batik
Batik is a technique of wax-resist dyeing applied to the whole cloth and is Javanese (Java, Indonesia) in origin. The root word is bathikan and means "drawing" or "writing". Batik is made either by drawing dots and lines of the resist with a spouted tool called a canting, or by printing the resist with a copper stamp called a cap. Batik is now also part of the culture in other parts of Southeast Asia including Malaysia and Singapore. Source: tate.org.uk and the AWDB team. AWDB highlighted artist: Pacita Abad.
Bauhaus
Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919.
The Bauhaus teaching method replaced the traditional pupil-teacher relationship with the idea of a community of artists working together. Its aim was to bring art back into contact with everyday life, and architecture, performing arts, design and applied arts were therefore given as much weight as fine art. The name is a combination of the German words for building (bau) and house (haus) and may have been intended to evoke the idea of a guild or fraternity working to build a new society. Teachers included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers.
The Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925–6 where Gropius created a new building for the school. In 1932 it moved to Berlin where it was closed in 1933 by the Nazis. Its influence was immense, especially in the USA, where many artists moved before and during the Second World War.
Source: tate.org.uk AWDB Highlighted artist: Irfan Hendrian
Biennial (biennale)
In the art context, biennial has come to mean a large international exhibition held every two years. The first was the Venice Biennale in 1895, which was situated in the Giardini, a public park, and now houses thirty permanent national pavilions and many smaller temporary structures hosting art from around the globe. The late twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in biennials and by 2007 there were some fifty across the world. This explosion of large-scale international art exhibitions mirrors the financial boom in international art buying. The first Southeast Asian country to present a biennial was Indonesia in 1968 with the Grand Exhibition of Indonesian Painting (Pameran Besar Seni Lukis Indonesia). The name was changed to Jakarta Biennale in 1975. Source: BiennalFoundation.org and Tate.org.uk. Highlighted Biennale: Bangkok Art Biennale.
Body art
Body art is art in which the body, often that of the artist, is the principal medium and focus. It includes much performance art, where the artist is directly concerned with the body in the form of improvised or choreographed actions, happenings and staged events. It is also used for explorations of the body in a variety of other media including painting, sculpture, photography, film and video. It is generally concerned with issues of gender and personal identity. A major theme is the relationship of body and mind, explored in work consisting of feats of physical endurance designed to test the limits of the body and the ability of the mind to suffer pain. In some work, the body is seen as the vehicle for language. Source: tate.org.uk. AWDB highlighted artist: KV Duong.