Perspective
Of Prints and Reproductions: Southeast Asia and the US Cultural Cold War
Kathleen Ditzig, Curator, National Gallery Singapore, posits a blueprint to think about the development of print in 20th century Southeast Asia as partially shaped by American initiatives during the US Cultural Cold War.
Kathleen Ditzig •
Perspective presents original research and provocative ideas anchored to art histories and contemporary practices that are shaping forms of print and paper-making across generations and geographies.
The role of printmaking or the graphic arts in Southeast Asia during the US Cultural Cold War has been critically understudied. Thus, the picture of the geopolitical and cultural dynamics that artists engaged in developing print, and more generally contemporary art in the region, is incomplete. As a first brush to map out the contours of this historical period, this essay constellates a series of exhibitions and artist case studies that open up a framework for thinking about how the development of print in Southeast Asia was partly shaped in the 20th century by American initiatives within the context of the Cold War. This account displaces the popular belief that the US Cultural Cold War was primarily evidenced through the advancement of abstract expressionism, and instead considers how US cultural influence operated in Southeast Asia through the reproduction and circulation of images via post-war developmental infrastructure.
Scholars have often noted that the Cold War was primarily “an ideological, psychological and cultural contest for hearts and minds.”1 This contest has been conventionally viewed through the dichotomy of US-style democratic capitalism and Sino-Soviet communism, and is historically earmarked as taking place from the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Cultural Cold War is defined as “cultural diplomacy between the [two] blocs, and within them, in areas of high culture (literature, the arts, music) or popular culture (television, pop and rock music, films),”2 which coincided with and was informed by cultural projects that were part of decolonisation.3 During this period, printmaking found financial support and mobility through intellectual networks associated with official and unofficial US cultural diplomacy conducted by American private foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and museums like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
MoMA in Southeast Asia
Between 1957 and 1983, MoMA sent a total of 15 traveling exhibitions to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar (then Burma). Finding their way into festivals, libraries, corporate showrooms, new museums and cultural centres, these travelling exhibitions map a variety of art spaces that were emerging in Southeast Asia. MoMA’s international programme relied on the local offices of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the United States Information Service (USIS) around the world. When the USIA or its officers did not cover all the associated costs for an exhibition to go abroad, the presentation of a MoMA exhibition was predicated on a partnership with the local USIS office that would provide some degree of support and make the proper introductions to local advocates or partners, who would often take on the labour of installing the exhibition, promoting it and running associated events. Thus, when the USIA and its USIS officers were not as committed to presenting an exhibition, local agents had considerable agency in determining the ways in which shows were framed and incorporated into local (and national) discourses around modern art and culture.4
It was through this model that MoMA’s International Program’s travelling exhibition, Recent American Prints in Color, was included in the exhibition of the First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition in Manila in 1957. Curated by Walter Lieberman, then curator of prints at MoMA, the exhibition foregrounded the latest technological developments in printmaking and artistic experimentation coming out of the United States, bringing together a range of artists who had recently begun to experiment with printmaking, or use colour in their prints.5 According to its press release, the exhibition “focus[ed] on the increased emphasis on prints in colour, the technical ingenuity in woodcuts, [and] the great advance in the art of serigraphy and to a lesser extent in lithography” across a range of styles. It included works inspired by German Renaissance drafting, as well as forms of neo-romanticism, expressionism, realism, surrealism, and abstraction, based on calligraphy and geometry. The exhibition turned printmaking into a stand-in to showcase American technological advancement and a wholly American modern development of painting, which was positioned as the highest form of modern art.
Southeast Asian Exhibitionary Frameworks Before and After MoMA
The First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition in Manila was organised by the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) in 1957, becoming one of the first post-war events that sought to bring together contemporary art from the region at the time. The AAP incorporated and subsumed Recent American Prints in Color into this first discursive framing of Southeast Asian modern art to such an extent that Porter McCray, then-director of MoMA’s International Program, would inquire as to MoMA’s proper accreditation. The exhibition’s important inclusion into the formative framing of regional art spoke to the AAP’s interest in printmaking. From its inception as an organisation in 1948, AAP made it a policy to encourage the graphic arts. The graphic arts were not generally studied or understood during the late 1940s and early 1950s in the Philippines, but the 1957 exhibition included 16 prints by Filipino artists. Moreover, in 1956, AAP organised its first Inter-Asian Graphic Arts exhibition in recognition of the growing number of printmakers in the Philippines.6
Beyond its incorporation into the first exhibition of Southeast Asia art, the touring of Recent American Prints in Color between Saigon, Singapore and Manila was predicated on support from art societies, which speaks to a trans-regional interest in print. The Singapore Art Society co-hosted and co-sponsored the programme with the USIS in Singapore in September 1957 at the British Council Hall, with a limited run of 10 days.7 The target audience for the show were artists, described in the reports to the MoMA as “a Singapore audience for contemporary Western art [that was] discriminating but small”.8 Cheong Soo Pieng, one of Malaya’s leading artists at the time, was said to have remarked that the exhibition was of a high standard, unlike any art that had been seen anywhere in the country before.
Cheong Soo Pieng, one of Malaya’s leading artists at the time, was said to have remarked that the exhibition was of a high standard, unlike any art that had been seen anywhere in the country before.
In 1959, the Singapore Arts Council, an association of art societies and groups from the visual arts, dance and music that formed in 1952, organised the first Singapore Arts Festival. Coordinated by the council’s chairman alongside art historian and then-curator at the University of Malaya Art Museum, Michael Sullivan. The festival included the travelling exhibition, Twentieth Century Highlights of American Painting, a presentation of reproductions of paintings originally shown at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1958, which was sponsored and produced by the USIS as part of its international art programme.9 The point of the festival was to make Singapore the “Paris of Southeast Asia.”10 Sullivan emphasised to the press, “There is no reason, nevertheless, why this city, which for 150 years has been the trading centre of Southeast Asia, should not become its cultural centre as well.”11 Once again, in an expanded exhibitionary framework of the region, American print would surface as part of a critical modernist idiom for its imagination. The USIS travelling exhibition was an exhibition of reproductions, as prominently indicated on the color collotype printed exhibition collateral that was made for the exhibition. Its key ideological narrative was less about the art than it was about the presentation of American art and the innovation of printmaking.
Once again, in an expanded exhibitionary framework of the region, American print would surface as part of a critical modernist idiom for its imagination.
US Print Infrastructure, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Promotion of Printmaking
If we take the development of Manuel Rodriguez Sr.—regarded as the father of graphic arts in the Philippines—as a lens, the reproduction of art is an important facet of the development of printmaking in Southeast Asia. Rodriguez made his name by winning AAP awards and designing silkscreen Christmas cards. He cut his teeth at the Clark US Air Force Base in Pampanga, north of Manila, where he was hired as an artist to make collateral-like posters and cards to lift morale. He credits the resources afforded to him by the army in terms of art materials, books, a printing press and the tutelage of drafted American artists as advancing his practice. By the end of the 1950s, his acclaim in printmaking would draw the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation. In Beatrice Harding’s account of Rodriguez’s life, she notes:
“The Rockefeller team was looking for someone to send abroad to study Graphic Arts in detail and return to the Philippines to establish some workshops. The survey team, headed by Boyd Compton, a Director of the Rockefeller Foundation went first to the University of the Philippines hoping to find a suitable candidate. But they were unsuccessful; there was no one there studying Graphic Arts, for in fact there was no one teaching it. The University was not at that time equipped to handle this new medium. Their hunt led the team to the Art Association of the Philippines and eventually to the Contemporary Art Gallery and Manuel Rodriguez."12
This meeting with Rodriguez saw the artist present his innovative use of photographic silkscreens. At the time, he was making coloured photographs of his oil paintings, and looking into the reproduction of such images, which impressed Compton. This lent to his scholarship to attend the Pratt Graphics Center in New York in 1960.13 By 1966, Rodriguez was organising exhibitions of his peers at Compton’s gallery, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Manila, and Compton would credit the growth and education of printmaking in the Philippines to Rodriguez.
In the Philippines and across the region, the Rockefeller Foundation and in particular the John D. Rockefeller III’s JDR 3rd Fund (1963–1975) also supported the development of printmaking in the region by funding artists such as Sharifah Fatimah, Latiff Mohidin, Jyoti Bhatt, Arun Bose, Hon Chi Fun and Prawat Laucharoen to study at the Pratt Institute in the 1960s and 1970s. It also funded Khoo Sui Hoe, Ibrahim Hussein, Praphan Srisouta and others to study printmaking more generally in the US. The Rockefeller Foundation also funded art schools such as the Bandung Institute of Technology in 1969,1971 and 1973 and provided them with printing material. In 1974, it purchased a printing press for the Mekpayab Art Centre in Bangkok and in 1971 provided printmaking equipment and books for the University of the Philippines.14 This type of support helped build up an infrastructure and community for printmaking in the region.
Lim’s exhibition at Alpha Gallery in Singapore 1974 presented his collection of prints which he had assembled while studying in at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the Harkness Foundation Grant from 1957 to 1958. The exhibition also presented prints selected by Lim, with work by Southeast Asian artist such as Latiff Mohidin, who had studied at the Pratt Institute from 1969 to 1970 as well.
The Establishment of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute
Inheriting the Cold War nexus of technology, cultural prestige, and geopolitical positioning evidenced by US and Southeast Asian cultural institutions outlined in the case studies above, was the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). STPI was established in 2002 with the support of then-Chairman of the National Arts Council (NAC), Dr. Liu Thai Ker, who became the founding Chairman of STPI. Dr. Liu later credited the art dealer Bjorn Wetterling for approaching him with the idea.15 Wetterling is associated with the expansion of American modernism, because he dealt artworks by Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and others in Sweden. He is also known for bridging the American art world with Asia by dealing American art in the region in the 1990s: particularly American prints in Malaysia and Singapore. In 1994, Wetterling joined a delegation including Dr. Earl Lu, Chairman of the Singapore Art Museum and a representative of the Singapore Tourism Board, to visit Kenneth Tyler’s printmaking workshop and collection in New York. Tyler had been looking to sell his equipment, and the trip resulted in the 1996 exhibition Beyond Print: Masterworks from the Ken Tyler Collection at Lasalle College of the Arts.
Liu Thai Ker notes in his account of the development of STPI that buying Kenneth Tyler’s equipment appeared to be a good idea because Tyler’s print art technology was advanced (he described them as unique, given Tyler’s modifications).16 Liu also had an affinity for Tyler wanting the workshop to be in Singapore because he believed that print came from Asia. Liu felt that Tyler’s print workshop would give Singapore an ‘edge’ as a global city and could make it the print capital of the world through a combination of Asian print art traditions and what he termed “Tyler’s high-tech approach”. Once again, technology was an important part of the arrangement, and a key part of imagining the region within an international art scene and market.
Liu [Thai Ker] felt that Tyler’s print workshop would give Singapore an ‘edge’ as a global city and could make it the print capital of the world through a combination of Asian print art traditions and what he termed “Tyler’s high-tech approach”. Once again, technology was an important part of the arrangement, and a key part of imagining the region within an international art scene and market.
Decentring Abstract Expressionism as an Idiom of the US Cultural Cold War
The popular narrative is that abstract expressionist painting was the cultural medium of US Cold War propaganda around the world. Spurred by anti-Vietnam War protests and revelations of associations between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and cultural organisations such as the Congress of Cultural Freedom, artist and writer Eva Cockroft wrote the oft-cited article “Abstraction Expression, Weapon of the Cold War,” criticising MoMA’s International Program for being a tool of American propaganda.17 Published in 1974, the text formed the basis for a generation of revisionist historians of American art writing about Abstract Expressionism and American modern art in general. This can be seen in the work of Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983), and later in 1999 by Frances Stonor Saunders around the connections between the CIA and the MoMA in Who Paid The Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.18
Yet, abstract expressionism was not necessarily what travelled through Southeast Asia, nor did it resonate so significantly as American printmaking. Instead, what we find is an aspiration found in printmaking. Here, it functioned as a technology that enabled the mobility and reproduction of art on the one hand, and as a form of regional and international place-making on the other. Both imaginations unsettle the ideological basis of individualist liberalism as the defining paradigm of the US Cultural Cold War and a historical bridging of American modernism and the post-Cold War world order, inviting a more critical examination of the historical geopolitics of print in the region.
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This essay was developed for the panel The Politics of Print, organised for The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, staged in January 2026 as part of STPI’s annual Print Show & Symposium.