Organizer: Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University
Type/Location: In Person / Ithaca, NY
Description:
Join the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University for a talk by Lawrence Chua, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, who will discuss the colonial museum practices.
This lecture examines the conjoined genealogies of the Musée Albert Sarraut (Phnom Penh, 1920) and the National Museum of Bangkok (1927). The architecture 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 cultural purity. Embedded within two sometimes competitive, sometimes cooperative imperial projects, both withdrew heterogeneous 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 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 Speaker:
Lawrence Chua is the author of Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist Felicities, 1910-1973. His scholarship on the history of Asian architecture and the built environment has been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Urban History, Architectural Histories, South East Asia Research, อ่าน, October, and Platform. He is a founding member of the queer artist of color-led arts organization, Denniston Hill and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and positions: asia critique. He is also co-editor of the book series “ArchAsia” for Hong Kong University Press. He has been the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies as well as research fellowships at the Getty Center, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, the International Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University, and the Center for Khmer Studies. He has taught at Chulalongkorn University, New York University, and Hamilton College. He is currently associate professor in the School of Architecture, Syracuse University.
Registration link:
To attend the event in person, please register here.