Postwar Abstraction and Practices of Knowledge: Fernando Zobel and Chang Saetang

Abstract

This dissertation offers an account of the artistic practices of Fernando Zóbel (1924–84) and Chang Saetang (1934–90), figures widely considered pioneers of abstract painting in the Philippines and Thailand, respectively. If, in these two key sites of American cultural imperialism, abstract art has long been treated as international style, this study reframes its emergence in a broader socio-cultural terrain in relation to the visuality of projects of urbanism, charismatic state-building, and religious reform. The dissertation builds up a set of concepts and frameworks—mediation, autonomy, disfluency, lyricism—for the study of a liquid postwar, unmoored from entrenched coordinates of style and politics. It looks beyond overriding concerns of Greenbergian modernism—oil painting’s exceptionalism, self-reflexive autonomy of the medium, purity of the non-representational image—in order to address other patterns of belief that motivate ethical seriousness in postwar art. That Zóbel and Chang held such conviction in their artistic practice was in large part because of their understanding of art as knowledge. Referencing multiple artistic lineages from East Asian calligraphers to European Old Masters, Zóbel’s paintings and drawings recalibrate the value and efficacy of images and art history in a moment when the postcolony’s relationship with its heritage was under revision. Chang’s paintings and concrete poetry, in their deformation of artistic inheritance and mastery of literary tradition, reflexively worked through the fissures of Thai-Chinese diasporic memory. Within this framework, abstract art sheds light on anxieties about the coherence of religious, ethnic, and national community in a period of postwar reconstruction and postcolonial transition.