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The first time I stood before Lee Ufan’s From Line (1978) series was at Museum MACAN in Jakarta. The museum framed Ufan’s work as offering an Asian post-war critique of Eurocentrism and as belonging to the Mono-ha movement. The series’ lines and intervals were here cast as refusals of Western painterly gesture, a resistance to fullness or plentitude. Six years later at Tate Modern in London I stood before another work from the same From Line series—the institution having completely recontextualized it. Here Ufan was placed within a Western narrative of painting’s evolution, cited alongside Richter as fitting into or exemplifying a different genealogy of restraint. What had clearly changed was the field of articulations or legibility surrounding this series, and with it the work’s temporal address.
My dear friend Ina replied to the photo of the Tate collection I posted online—I had quietly wondered whether anyone would recognise this same series in Jakarta. She implied that I did not have to go so far to see this particular series for we can see it at home, in Indonesia: “This exists even in Museum MACAN, haha.” She recognised Ufan’s work, and we did not have to name either the series or the artist in the chat. In this instance of intersubjective beholding, recognition is named through the encounter of shared memory—having stood before the same object in the same institution, in the same city, by grace of the same proximity.
Were I to define “institutional,” I would include those who build and inhabit such public spaces: the curators, educators, guards, critics, and the public itself—all of whose habits and styles of looking give those rooms their precise temporality.