Primitivism and affiliation: Yeh Chi Wei’s Borneo images

Yeh Chi Wei was a leading figure in the Ten Men Art Group, an informal group of artists who initiated an ambitious programme of travel throughout Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Borneo was a privileged site in Yeh's overall body of work, which he often presented as a place of a more authentic and enlivening mode of being, in contrast to the monotony of industrialised modern life. The approach shown in the works, as well as in the surrounding discourse, bears similarities with the Euro-American model of primitivist modernism, which has itself been linked to hierarchical cultural relations and tied to the history of colonialism. If we understand 'primitivism' as a conceptual relation between self and other, then we might ask what relations were being articulated by Yeh's paintings of Borneo, and what meanings they held in the context of a decolonising Southeast Asia? This essay proposes some speculative answers from three registers: displacements and itineraries; objects and archaism; and nation and region. Each register is intended to hold in tension aspects of primitivism, alongside new possibilities for meaning generated within the specific context in Southeast Asia.