09/06/2026
Join the UP Vargas Museum on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, at 3 PM for the lecture “Abstraction, Assemblage, and the Orientalist Gaze: Ad Reinhardt and Khmer Sculpture” by Adeena May.
Register at https://bit.ly/AdeenaMeyLecture
In the catalogue for the exhibition Khmer Sculpture, held at the Asia House Gallery in New York in 1961, American artist Ad Reinhardt published the essay ‘An Assemblage of Comments on the Mystery and Clarity of Khmer Art.’ Best known for his Black Paintings and for articulating the hard-line modernist position of ‘Art as Art,’ Reinhardt’s interest in the ‘Art of the Orient’ or ‘Art of Asia’ – the title of his classes at Hunter College – remains little known. The first book in English on the Khmer arts of the Angkorian period appeared a decade earlier, in 1951, written by the American diplomat Lawrence Palmer Briggs. Reinhardt himself traveled to Cambodia in 1958, producing notes and photographs that later informed his teaching on the classical arts of East and Southeast Asia. His 1961 essay thus stands as one of the earliest contributions to US scholarship on the subject. While the essay was criticized by specialists in Southeast Asian art history and archaeology, Reinhardt’s engagement with Asian aesthetic thought and art has generally been read positively by commentators on his work, often in relation to how these ideas were synthesized and to how they operated in his paintings. This attempt to articulate the ancient in the modern is paralleled by Reinhardt’s writing itself, which uses the language of post-War Western art criticism and theory to engage with Khmer sculpture, making ‘An Assemblage of Comments on the Mystery and Clarity of Khmer Art’ an oddity within Asian art historical discourse.
This talk retraces Reinhardt’s project, situating it both within the artist’s adaptation of Asian aesthetics into his own artistic system and within the growing interest in Cambodian culture in the US at the time. In doing so, Reinhardt’s engagement with Cambodia will be read as part of a broader history of the politics of American philanthropy and of its gaze towards the Southeast Asian nation, outlining the potential of mainland Southeast Asian epistemologies for critically addressing Reinhardt and the modernist paradigm.
About the speaker
Adeena Mey, PhD, is a researcher, editor and curator. Engaging with contemporary art and the history of exhibitions, the main strands of his research are artists' film and video, practices from the Global Majority, especially East and Southeast Asia, cosmotechnical thought, and their interactions. His writing has been published in Afterall, e-flux, and post (MoMA) and he is the co-editor of several anthologies on artists’ film, video, and exhibition histories, including Exhibiting the Moving Image: History Revisited and Cinema in the Expanded Field (both JRP Editions, 2015). Since 2021, he has co-convened the workshop series ‘Writing and Publishing Art in Southeast Asia’, supported by the British Academy, and in 2021–22 was Principal Investigator of the digital research project 'Black Atlantic Museum' funded by the Paul Mellon Centre. He is Editor of Afterall journal and a Research Fellow at the Afterall Research Centre (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London), and is currently Archive Fellow at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
About the UP Vargas Museum
The University of the Philippines Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center is a center for Philippine art and culture with research, curation, and education as its core thrusts. The Museum is home to collections of art, books, archives, memorabilia, coins, and stamps from Jorge B. Vargas, a significant political figure in the twentieth-century Philippines and an alumnus of the University of the Philippines. An avid collector with a vision of sharing Philippine art with future generations, Jorge Vargas donated the holdings he acquired across his illustrious career in public service, sports, and scouting to his alma mater in 1978. Since its opening in 1987, the UP Vargas Museum has been visited by students, researchers, scholars, and the general public. The Museum has galleries for permanent, long-term, and temporary exhibitions. The galleries also serve as spaces for educational events, including workshops, lectures, symposia, walkthroughs, and talks by artists and curators. The library accommodates researchers, scholars, students, and artists; it also hosts small exhibitions within its spaces.
