HBO Asia’s miniseries Folklore presented tales of the supernatural from six Asian countries, based on each region’s traditional legends. One standout was Thailand’s entry, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaurang (Last Life in the Universe, Headshot), who visited the Freer for a retrospective in 2014. Ratanaurang takes on the myth of the pob, a ghost known for devouring human intestines. When an American corporate executive is found murdered, a photojournalist covers the story, only to find himself meeting the pob who committed the crime and now wants to tell its side of the story. Shot in rich black and white tones, this film mixes horror and humor with a touch of politics. One of the the pob’s beefs, it turns out, is that the arrogant American refused to believe in ghosts.

Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo premieres a durational performance work IF WE WERE XYZ at Asia Society. In this new work, she explores dreams—both in the sense of the subconscious experiences we have while sleeping and the conscious aspirations we have when awake. Drawing upon Javanese mysticism, traditional beliefs, the artist’s own dreams documented in a self-devised sleep laboratory, and other sources, Suryodarmo’s intensive research process leads to a visceral and immediate three-hour performance.

The International Labor Rights Forum and Labor Notes are co-hosting a webinar, Snapshots of Organizing Across Asia, on how labor activists across Asia are building power in the face of multinational corporations. 

What are the opportunities and challenges for strengthening solidarity across the region? How can we organize in our own unions to build a movement that can tackle rising inequality across borders? How is state repression impacting how activists organize? These are some of the questions we hope to discuss with activists from Japan, Myanmar, and the Philippines. 

Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo premieres a durational performance work IF WE WERE XYZ at Asia Society. In this new work, she explores dreams—both in the sense of the subconscious experiences we have while sleeping and the conscious aspirations we have when awake. Drawing upon Javanese mysticism, traditional beliefs, the artist’s own dreams documented in a self-devised sleep laboratory, and other sources, Suryodarmo’s intensive research process leads to a visceral and immediate three-hour performance.

Remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora have played an important role in  Vietnam’s post Cold War economic development, providing important inputs to a range of  household spending areas, from education to health care. In the case of Vietnam, however, remittances are also caught up with memories and traumas of war, betrayal, separation and exodus. Conceptually examining remittances as money, but also gifts, this talk by Ivan V. Small (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Central Connecticut State University) illustrates how Vietnam’s particular postwar refugee and remittance histories and channels exacerbate  inherent contradictions in the mobile flows of finance, people and goods across borders that define globalization.

One of Asia’s most important performance artists, Melati Suryodarmo, has been creating powerful, immersive performance work for nearly 25 years. In this talk, she discusses her creative journey, philosophy, and artistic practice, shaped by multiple influences from traditional Javanese meditation to Japanese butoh to her study of performance art with Marina Abramović. She will be in conversation with Asia Society’s Vice President of Global Arts & Cultural Programs and Museum Director Boon Hui Tan.

Vietnam Finance Society (VFS), Columbia University’s Southeast Asian Student Initiative (SEASI) and New York Southeast Asian Network (NYSEAN) are proud to bring together two leading scholars on Vietnam – Dr. Edmund Malesky of Duke University and Dr. Anh Tran of Indiana University Bloomington in an event – A dialogue on Vietnam’s Economic Development. Dr. Malesky and Dr. Tran are among a handful of U.S.-based scholars who have done extensive research and seen the ebb and flow of the Vietnam story. Join us for an open dialogue about the state of Vietnam’s economy and market, as we bridge the gap between Vietnam and the United States.

The New York Academy of Sciences Anthropology Division is hosting the Distinguished Lecturer Series this year with a new theme, Sustainable Humanity: Social, Political, and Ecological Considerations.

The first lecture of the series, 21st Century Plantations and the Sustainability Fix, features Tania Murray Li. Drawing on ethnographic research on Indonesia’s massively expanding oil palm plantations, she explores the human dimension of 21st century plantation life and explains why sustainability standards cannot fix it.

Gamelan Çudamani is a 24-member music and dance ensemble from Bali that weaves layers of intricate sound from deep bronze gongs to the delicate sounds of the flute in the Indonesian gamelan tradition. The group also performs dances such as the legong - one of the island’s most revered and demanding classical dances, historically seen only by the royal family. These talented young performers bring to life vivid tales of gods and heroes of Balinese mythology and history and explore the shifting dimensions of human emotion, nature, the spirit world, and the cosmos.

Indonesian guest artists Danis Sugiyanto on violin and vocalist Endah Laras join the American keroncong band Rumput to demonstrate and discuss the traditional string band music of Indonesia and its connection to the arrival of Portuguese sailors and freed slaves to the archipelago in the sixteenth century.

These performances are part of “Performing Indonesia” and are presented in cooperation with the Embassy of Indonesia.

Join us for a raucous reading & celebration of Ricco Villanueva Siasoco’s debut collection of stories, The Foley Artist. Co-sponsored by Gaudy Boy and Kundiman.

Ricco Villanueva Siasoco is a writer, educator, and activist. He has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a board member of Kundiman, a national literary organization dedicated to Asian American literature. Ricco lives in Los Angeles and The Foley Artist is his first book.

Held on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Hồ Chí Minh, this international colloquium will interrogate Hồ’s role in the formation of modern Vietnam and explore the country’s position in world affairs in the 20th Century. Participants will share their new multi-lingual and multi-archival research and past works on the life, career, and legacy of Hồ Chí Minh. This colloquium also serves to announce a new partnership between Columbia University and the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi.

This is a Weatherhead East Asian Institute 70th Anniversary event.

Motorcycle taxis are everywhere in Bangkok, serving millions of trips a day throughout the city. Rent-seeking activities and informal governance at the street level have allowed the operators and the "influential people" to capture monopoly rents from the relatively captive market for a long while now. Things have changed since global ride-hailing firms started to provide comparable, if not more convenient, services a few years ago, luring away their passengers and chipping away their market power and income. In this talk, Ratanawaraha uses the concepts of economic rent and competitive dynamics to explain the competition and contention between the two groups of informal operators and to discuss policy options.

In 2017, the Cambodian government dismantled the Cambodian National Rescue Party, clamped down on civil liberties and organized elections in 2018 without the presence of a credible opposition party. The presentation examines the reasons underlying the government’s decision to close down democratic space.

Alfredo Matugas Coro II, Vice Mayor & Former Mayor, Municipality of Del Carmen, will discuss the significant partnership that his rural community launched in 2012 with NYU Silver, and the role of Dr. Robert L. Hawkins and social work students in critical community, economic, health, and social development.

The George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture in International Studies Presents Bilahari Kausikan
Bilahari Kausikan is currently the Chairman of the Middle East Institute, an autonomous institute of the National University of Singapore. He has spent his entire career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before retiring as Ambassador-at-Large in 2018. During his 37 years in the Ministry, he served in a variety of appointments at home and abroad, including as the Second Permanent Secretary and Permanent Secretary.

Based on a famous Thai legend that has inspired movies since the silent era (not to mention plays, TV shows, comic books and even an opera), Nang Nak is, according to some, a true story illustrating the dangers of earthly attachments. It is so deeply rooted in Thai culture that to this day a shrine to its tragic heroine still exists in Bangkok. In it, a soldier goes to war, leaving behind his pregnant wife. After nearly dying in battle, he returns home to his wife and newborn son. The problem is, he’s the only one in town who doesn’t know they are both ghosts. Set in a lush jungle village, Nonzee Nimbutr’s elegant, hauntingly beautiful adaptation is the most acclaimed cinematic expression of this heartbreaking tale.

The contours of Philippine cinema’s archival crises are alarming: of over 350 films produced before the outbreak of World War II, only five Filipino films from the American colonial period survive. The dupe negative of the last surviving Filipino film on nitrate, Ibong Adarna (Vicente Salumbides and Manuel Conde, 1941), was destroyed shortly after its 2005 restoration.

Drawing on postcolonial historiography, archival theory, and the on-the-ground realities of the Philippines’ decentralized audiovisual archive advocacy, this talk by Bliss Cua Lim examines three issues that emerge as keywords for the crises of moving image preservation in the Philippines.

Asia Society is delighted to host His Excellency Prayut Chan-o-cha, Prime Minister of Thailand, for an address and discussion with Tom Nagorski, Executive Vice President of Asia Society. The discussion will be on Thailand's perspective on the evolving international landscape -- with special attention to Asia -- and Thailand's role as Chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations this year.

Asia Society is delighted to host His Excellency Teodoro L. Locsin Jr., Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the Philippines, for an address and discussion with the Hon. Kevin Rudd, President of the Asia Society Policy Institute. The discussion will be on the country’s relations with China, and the situation in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea.

The New York Center for Global Asia’s Fall 2019 Friday Colloquium Series is a venue for discussing Global Asia research in a wide range of disciplines. It is also a graduate course in History open to students in any discipline in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium.

On September 20, the Colloquium will feature Phillip Bowring, a journalist, and Zoe Griffiths from Baruch CUNY.

Phillip Bowring is a journalist based in Asia since 1973 and previously in Sydney, Africa and London. He has variously been correspondent for the Financial Times, Editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, columnist for the International Herald Tribune, and independent columnist and consultant on regional political and economic issues. He has an MA in History  from Cambridge University where he is a Fellow Commoner of St. Catharine’s College.

What is strategic thinking? Are the foreign policies of some Southeast Asian states more strategic than those of others? If so, in what way, and with what implications for US policy?

Donald K. Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Program in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he is also a faculty affiliate of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Throughout the past five years, a small band of committed Thai civil society leaders and activists has defied military rule to mount a struggle for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Two prominent figures from these movements are traveling to Washington, DC and NYC to speak about the ongoing challenges and threats to human rights and democracy in Thailand.

 This talk will be given by Sirikan “June” Charoensiri, a lawyer with the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, received the State Department’s International Women of Courage award in 2018. Yingcheep “Pow” Atchanont is the Program Manager for iLaw, a Thai civil and political rights policy research and campaigns organization.

The Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale’s Brown Bag Seminar Series presents “Constructing an Asian Look: Beauty Ideals and Cosmetic Surgery in Malaysia.“

About the Speaker: Alka Menon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University, where she is also a research fellow at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Her research examines the effects of globalization and medical consumerism on physician authority and healthcare. Currently, she is working on a book project on cosmetic surgery in transnational perspective, focusing on the multiethnic cases of the U.S. and Malaysia. Her work has received support from the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. Alka received her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2018.

This talk examines the critical narratives of refugee migration and community formation from a Hmong epistemological perspective. By analyzing Hmong women’s narratives against U.S. redacted archival records that erase Hmong and Laos history during the U.S. “secret war,” the talk explores the politics of knowledge formation which has generated a historiography about the Hmong refugee as a masculinized refugee soldier and a distinct U.S. ally.

Accounts gathered by Nasir Uddin from the Rohingyas living in Ukhia and Teknaf unfold the horrible ways they were dealt with as if they were lesser than human beings what Uddin terms “subhuman” life. This talk presents the first-hand narratives of the Rohingya refugees, the voices of the victims, in the broader spectrum of statelessness, refugeehood and human rights in the world.

Huge numbers of deaths have gone uncounted in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war. What does that mean for due process, and for the countries that emulate him? 

Sheila Coronel is the Dean of Academic Affairs, Toni Stabile Professor of Professional Practice in Investigative Journalism and Director, Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, at the Columbia School of Journalism. She co-founded the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and has written and edited more than a dozen books on the Philippines, freedom of information and investigative journalism.

Why has aggregate economic expansion in Southeast Asia so often been accompanied by individual and community decline? How do we explain the persistence of poverty in the context of growing wealth? These are old questions but they have not been adequately answered, let alone resolved; they remain pertinent and vital at national and individual levels. In this talk, Professor Rigg will bring together work from across Southeast Asia to argue that illuminating this puzzle requires that we go beyond explanations rooted in the political economy of inequality and instead pay attention, first, to academic questions of methodology and academic framing and, further, to empirical issues linked of trans-local relations and emergent articulations of deprivation. He does this by connecting land reclamation in Singapore with sand mining in coastal Cambodia, livestock-raising in peri-urban Hanoi with maize cultivation in upland Houaphan, isolation in Flores with integration in Luang Prabang, and vulnerable farming in Khon Kaen with precarious industrial work in Ayutthaya. Each of these pairings opens up a different view onto the issue of the co-production of wealth and poverty across the Southeast Asian region.

Take a break for fun, flavor and friends at our annual Experience Thailand event!

We have invited fourteen of New York’s best Thai restaurants to take part of this event! Enjoy a variety of flavorful Thai food or grab a refreshing fresh coconut juice while enjoying many cultural activities and fun that we have prepared for you!

The cultural festival is free and open to the public from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. In cooperation with the Thai community in New York, the festival will simulate an atmosphere of Thailand in the multicultural city of New York.