 Hello, welcome all to what this decolonial curatorial practice look in the global and Southeast Asian context. This is the inaugural lecture in the Decolonizing Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia series, jointly organized by the Southeast Asia Art Academic Programme, Soyes University of London, and the Asian Civilizations Museum Singapore. So let me just share the other webinars in the series and you can scan that QR code to get the registration links for the others in the series. Just to know that we are recording today's session and it will be available on the Soyes Center for Southeast Asia Studies webpage afterwards. So my name is Conan Chiao. I'm a curator at the ACM. And I will be your host for this online event. The rundown is as follows. In the first 10 minutes, we will have opening addresses by Dr. Ashley Thompson from Soyes and by Kenny Ting, the ACM director. Our speaker today, Dr. Steven Murphy, will deliver his lecture. And then Dr. ML Pataraton, chair of property, will respond to it. We will then, in the final 15 minutes, take questions from the audience so you can type your questions in throughout the event today using the Q&A function on the bottom of your screen. The dash will just click on Q&A and type your questions in. And we'll take it in the last 15 minutes of the event. So without further ado, let's begin with Dr. Ashley Thompson, the Hiram Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art at Soyes. She has recorded her opening address, which we will pay now. I'm delighted to welcome you all here today and every Thursday for the coming five weeks to this promising and I believe necessary series on decolonizing curating and the museum in Southeast Asia. Here in London, it feels as if the drumroll for the launch of the series has magically come through the airwaves with the Pandora papers investigations into the global financial structures which have brought looted Southeast Asian art into museums worldwide, including, of course, those closest to home. Times are changing to be sure. We're witnessing, and I hope, provoking heightened public awareness of the ways in which colonial violence operated through art object appropriation, physical and interpretive appropriation, and of the ways in which that violence lingers or is even further enabled today. Yet if there is an increasingly widely recognized imperative to decolonize, the ways and means of doing so are not so obvious. The broad imperative itself implies paying close attention to the specificity of each and every context. Decolonizing can only take on meaning through highly localized work. The application of any single decolonizing template would, of course, risk repeating the violence it attempts to escape. In our case, this means work on the specificity of the Southeast Asian context, which itself comprises many heterogeneous contexts across the region, with very different experiences of colonialism. I look very much forward to learning and to listening from our expert panelists from both museum and university sectors today and in the coming weeks. Today also marks what I hope will be a new phase of collaboration between SOAS and the Asian Civilizations Museum. Let me thank the ACM for this initiative, for their hard work, and, of course, for the funding that they have contributed to making this series happen. As director of the ACM, Kenny Ting's dynamic, unflagging support has been crucial. As an assistant curator at the ACM and SOAS alumnus with a critical art historical eye and a keen sense of integrity, Konan Chong has been at the beating heart of the work. I extend my deep thanks to both of you. Let me thank also the SOAS Southeast Asian Art Academic Program and its funder, the Alpha Wood Foundation, for its support for the series. And in particular, my colleague Stephen Murphy. Stephen's expertise gained both as an academic at SOAS and also as a curator at the ACM has likewise informed the work from the very start. This is a new turn in a sustained collaboration between Stephen and Konan, which will no doubt bear many fruits. I wish also to thank all the speakers and discussants for giving so generously of your time and expertise. And a final thanks to Charles Taillon-Dier-Ustel of the SOAS Centers and Institutes Office for advertising the series. And to Anna Dumutis, the SOAS International African Institute and Administrative Officer for her professional organization of the event. So thank you again for coming. And please enjoy, learn today and for the coming weeks. Thank you, Ashley. Let me now invite Mr. Kenny Ting, Director of ACM and the Paranakan Museum and Group Director of Museums at the National Heritage Board of Singapore to give his opening address. Kenny, please. Good evening, good afternoon, good morning, everyone, wherever you are. And first of all, thank you so much to Professor Ashley Thompson for your very kind words and for your opening address. It's such a pleasure to be here at the first of the SOAS ACM Decolonizing, Curating, and the Museum in Southeast Asia webinar series. Now the ACM began actually as a classic colonial ethnographic museum. We inherited the archeology and ethnography collection of the 19th century Raffles Library and Museum in Singapore. We recently completed a seven year total revamp of our mission in our permanent galleries. And with our revamp completed, we have shifted quite drastically away from our colonial past in three ways. Firstly, by adopting cross-cultural pan-Asian thematic approaches to presenting our collection, emphasizing connections between cultures rather than cultures as silos here in Asia. Secondly, by championing Asian craftsmanship and aesthetics and putting the spotlight onto the often unnamed Asian artisans, craftsmen, and craftswomen past and present who made or have made the beautiful objects in our collection, whose stories and voices deserve to be heard and whose excellence deserves to be celebrated. So artisans instead of artists, artisans tend to be forgotten because they are less sexy, but they work hard for a living and to make a livelihood for themselves, their families, and their communities. And they are extremely important here in Asia. So thirdly, and also precipitated by COVID, we have shifted towards partnering more closely with our communities in Singapore, whether it's the fashion and design community or communities of faith and belief in the acquisition of objects for the collection and in the curation and creation in general of content in the museum. And the intent of all of this is actually to try to experiment with new art historical and museological approaches from the perspective of Asia. I'm so very pleased that ACM is partnering with the Southeast Asian Art Academic Program or S-Triple AP at SOAS to run this webinar series. I wish to thank Tamsin Barton, the chair of the S-Triple AP and the S-Triple AP Program Board for making this collaboration possible. I appreciate how we can collaborate virtually even with a pandemic rendering travel practically impossible. Thank you to Chris Foundation for funding ACM talks in the 21st, October session. And also a big thanks to Dr. Steven Murphy, an old friend and a colleague of mine or at least a former colleague of mine at ACM and to Pad Patratorn at Chirapravati for helming today's inaugural session. Since we are here to discuss decolonizing the museum from the perspective of Southeast Asia, I feel that it is very important that we also problematize the very concept of decolonization itself and call out the fact that it too is rooted in a Eurocentric enlightenment frame of reference and a critical thought and analysis. My own hope for the future is that we're able to suggest new frames of reference by which we can approach this question of decolonization, such a loaded word. Perhaps here in Asia, it may be a matter of having new vocabulary, words that allow us to perhaps recolonize or assimilate our shared colonial past. In short, exert our own narratives on this issue because narratives are power then as well as today. So whatever it is, I'm looking forward to some degree of creative tension in the weeks that follow. And I wish you all a very good evening. Thank you so very much. Back to you, Conan. Thank you very much, Kenny. Today, we are very pleased to have Dr. Steven Murphy with this lecture. What does the colonial curatorial practice look like in a global and Southeast Asian context? Steven is Pratapathitya Pal, senior lecturer in curating and museology of Asian art at Sova's University of London. He specializes in the art and archeology of first millennium CE Buddhism and Hinduism in Southeast Asia, and looks at connections between this region and the wider Indian Ocean world. His museological focus engages with issues surrounding colonialism and post-colonial studies and debates surrounding the decolonizing of museums. Steven, over to you. Right, thank you, Conan. Thank you, Kenny, as well. It's really a pleasure to be here. Yeah, first of all, I'd also just quickly like to express my thanks to the ACM. It's great to be working in collaboration with them to Kenny Ting, of course, and Conan, also to the Alford Foundation for the support, financial support for this lecture series. And as you'll see, I think it's actually alluded to a number of the contributors, our Alford alumni, and part of the series is intended to provide a platform for them in their continuing development. I think as Kenny just said now as well, it's really important for Southeast Asians to be leading in the field and give them a voice. So that, again, is part of the rationale behind the lineup as well. Of course, I wanna thank all the other contributors as well. I'm really looking forward to all of the talks. In particular, Mamluong, Professor Pataratorn, who is joining us at 4 a.m. in the morning. So I really appreciate this. Technology can solve a lot of things these days, but not time zones, unfortunately. And yeah, finally just a quick shout out to Panga, our the answer for updating and maintaining the SAP website, Facebook page, or as triple A as Kenny, triple AP as Kenny was calling, I think I quite like that. All right, I also wanna say a big thank you to everybody that's turned up. It's an amazing turnout. We've got 427 people registered or joined so far, which is remarkable and also slightly nerve-wracking for me. But I will do my best. So I better jump straight into this. What I wanted to do today really is to provide an overview of what decolonizing means, particularly in terms of a museum context and then globally and then within a SAP de-station context. As Kenny rightly pointed out, this term is loaded and it can mean different things to different people in different contexts. And of course it has arisen within the Western Academy or Western social justice movements as well. So what does that mean when we take an idea like this and apply it or utilize it in a SAP de-station context? And is there a danger of just being one more Western concept that's applied onto the other, so to speak? So I think that's really important to stay upfront. And yeah, and again, of course the idea of decolonization expands much more beyond museums into many different areas, universities and so forth. But for this lecture series, I'll really focus on what I see it meaning in a museum context. And hopefully this will set the stage then for the lectures to come, which are all dealing with very specific SAP de-station case studies. Yeah, and then of course we'll have the discussion afterwards with Pataratorn. And you may probably recognize the statue below, that's Edward Colston will get back to this in due course. All right, so as I think both we've alluded to already, sorry, just give you a moment. Rearranging my Zoom, my Zoom tags. All right, great. Museums and colonialism, yeah. Museums by deaf are part and parcel of the colonial endeavor. Museums in Southeast Asia, of course, a lot of them as Kenny mentioned with ACM, but many other ones as well, have colonial origins. The West, in the Western museum world, particularly anthropological and the encyclopedic museum, they're really entwined with colonialism. And you can't really understand what it means to decolonize without really first understanding the origins of museums in this respect. So I'm gonna spend a short sort of introduction on this. Obviously, I don't have time. This would be a lecture in itself, but what you see with anthropological and encyclopedic museums is a particular display of different cultures of the colonized and so forth. There's many ways in which these collections came about. They could be through looting, through acquisition, through excavation, scientific research exposition, and so forth, gift exchange. So there's a huge variety of ways in which they came into collections. On the other hand, what you see originally is art museums, when they evolved traditionally in the West that is celebrating achievements of Western civilization. So you think of sort of Greek and Roman sculpture and Renaissance painting and so forth. So you have this quite clear divider dichotomy early on between how museums set themselves up Western materials of high art, material from other parts of the world classified as ethnographic. So you see straight away certain structures taking shape. And of course, this image on the right is an example of one of these early expeditions. This is the first French mission to Cambodia to Angkor in 1866. Yeah. So as I was saying, the methods of display of classification were key in developing colonial viewpoints. And I really want to emphasize this, that museums were and still are integral parts of the apparatus of colonialism. I think there's been a sort of, in the past, the sort of idea that museums are somehow just sort of passive recipients of this material coming from colonies, but that's really not the case that they were active agents in that. I think there's quite a lot of literature and research today showing that. So that's really important to keep in mind. They are different museums in different parts of the world are beginning to face up to these legacies to varying degrees. So I think, again, Ashley talked about specificity. And I think this is really important because it's a very uneven landscape in terms of how museums react and try and deal with these issues. Yeah. And there has been, I think, a questioning or debunking of the idea that museums are neutral. Interestingly, academics started talking about this about 30 years ago and pointing this out. And it's only maybe in the last sort of maybe five years that it sort of entered into sort of activism and social justice movements. So yeah, I'm not sure is that a good thing it takes about 20 years for academic ideas to permeate through society. But yeah, so it's there. And of course, in the last two years or so this has all really been brought into much sharper focus by movements like Black Lives Matter, the sort of statue debates that we see going on and so forth. So we'll talk a little bit about this. This of course is Hans Sloan who's a British museum and was recently re-displayed in a more contextual showcase to start to at least engage with his connections with slavery. But again, we can debate whether that goes far enough or how successful those movements are. As Kenny said, yeah, the Western frames of knowledge that museums operate under have their origins in modernity and enlightenment thinking. And this is really important because I think what's happened today is that even in post-colonial societies, museums still operate pretty much along these frameworks. So again, we have this issue where the country and the nation may be now independent or post-colonial, but the systems of knowledge that they're working under, the frames of knowledge, the epistemologies as we would say in an academic sense are still very much Western. So this really raises the question of when museums or how museums operate what are the consequences of that? But when we look into the 19th century, we see this thinking going hand in hand to justify colonialism, non-European societies and cultures, of course, were great and classified and lo and behold, the Europeans always end up at the top and everybody's ranked in order below them and museums, again, were essential in actually manifesting this physically through their displays. And we still see the legacy of that today. I think Kenny alluded to it earlier as well about the difference between artisans or artists or whose voices are getting represented. The British Museum has an Enlightenment gallery. Now you can go and take a look and see what you think. You can do it virtually as well. A little bit of scholarship, but one of the major scholars on decolonization in general is Walter Mignolo. He has written some works specifically on museums and he's important because again, he talks about the frames of knowledge within which we work in and how we still are trapped in a sense within these colonial frames of knowledge. But in terms of museums, he's optimistic to a certain extent. How do we, he asked the question in reference to Fred Wilson's mining the museum exhibition that I won't go into today. Pamela and Vera are going to talk about this, I think in their lecture. How to assess the decolonial option reorientating the work museums can do. So in a nutshell, reproducing the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of colonnady, or do we enter into a spirit of what he calls epistemic and aesthetic disobedience and doing what museums did in the modern and imperial history and learning to unlearn and to enact museums for decolonization of being a knowledge. And this is really important because, there's a sort of paradox that of course museums are, as I've said, have been one of the main apparatuses to promote these colonial frameworks, but they're also the ideal place to break them down and challenge them. So I think there's room for optimism if we can actually start to look at these issues. Yeah, and then this is another sort of key work. And it's important to remember that actually what he calls decoloniality, which is another term, actually emerges from the shortcomings of the historical process of decolonization. So as I said earlier, even if the country itself is post-independent, it's still functioning under certain Western frames of knowledge. We see that really clearly in maybe education systems, legal systems as well that were inherited and carried on and so forth, but we also of course see it in the museum framework. So it's really important not just to change the content of the conversation, so not just to re-display objects in a museum in a new and different way, but we have to really look at the frame. Maybe we would call this institutional, the structures under which these institutions function. So it is a big challenge and there's no doubt about it, but I think we need to be aware of it. And I wanted to run through some attempts and sort of grad museums that have actually tried this. In the European context, the only one that's really grasped the net was the Tropa Museum and it did so quite early on. The Pitt Rivers in general is in a way being forced into this because of the nature of its collection, but it has started to make movements in this area. The idea of co-curation of course is another way in which decolonization can happen, bringing in different voices from source communities or ethnic minorities and underrepresented groups, depending on the cultural context. Public consultation I think is another really important way forward and we'll see this with the Colston statue. And of course, repatriation. Sometimes there's I think somewhat of a misunderstanding that decolonization means repatriation of objects. And I would like to say that in my opinion anyway, at least it doesn't. Repatriation is part of the decolonial process, but they're not synonyms, right? They're not, it's not the same thing. Decolonization is a much wider range of issues that I hope I've at least done a somewhat passable job of explaining just now. And I'm much more interested in the decolonial point of view of what happens when objects are actually returned. That's much more important to me as well. That's what we never seem to hear about. And how do they get re-displayed? But the Tropa Museum, like many, it was set up as actually called the Colonial Institute originally. And it was precisely that to display the cultures of the colonized, whether that's the Ghana, Angola, Indonesia. Fourth, but from the 1950s onwards, it started to shift its mission to look at things more cross-culturally. In the 1970s, it took a very, quite, I think, I guess at that time, quite a radical shift where it started looking at what they would then were described as third world countries. Of course, we wouldn't use that term today. And trying to display developmental issues between them and what they would call consciousness-raising. So quite a shift. And in 2008, they completed a 10-year renovation, where they really attempted to look at Dutch colonial history. And it's one of the only museums that really actually tried this in a museological way in a display setting to actually deal with and educate the public as to what Dutch colonialism is and was and how it functioned. In more recent times, they've moved much more into issues of contemporary issues and using the museum as a platform. So the afterlives of slavery was an exhibition that was on about two years ago. And again, there's a lot of public consultation. This was co-curated with local communities of African descent in the Netherlands. You can look, there's the link is there. So it's still up. You can look in more depth at this. If you're interested. So again, there has been shifts and ways in which museums have tried to decolonize. Yeah, the Pitt Rivers. Actually, if you go on the website, you will actually see statements. So this is critical changes to displays as part of the decolonization process, particularly in terms of works of art or objects that are now considered problematic, such as Shrunk and Heads, which is sort of what the museum was famous for. And again, they have put up this set of panels now at the entrance when you go in where they address their colonial legacies and histories. This is actually what they say from the website. I won't go through it all today due to time constraints, but you can have a look at it. But so we're starting to see attempts by museums to deal with it. So again, I would see this as that they're maybe changing or adding to the content of the conversation, but the frame in which the museum operates is still very much a sort of a colonial or has its legacies in colonialism. But again, this is something that you will see where this is a good example of working with source communities, as we call them. This happened in 2017 where delegates from the Maasai culture saw objects on display in the pit rivers. And they were concerned in particular about five of them because these are sacred objects. And they said the ways that they were displayed was disrespectful or harmful. So they had a process of consultation with the museum curators in which they discussed these different ideas about how they should be stored, how they should be displayed. And this is an ongoing dialogue now between them, also how they were framed as a culture, something that existed in the past as opposed to an actual living culture still. So I think there's positive outcomes here. And these are ways in which museums, I think must really start to engage with local communities. And I think what you see when you start to do that is that it's beneficial for both sides. Museums gain more knowledge on the objects they have, appropriate ways to display them, obviously potentially some repatriation if necessary. I think what's interesting here is they're not, Maasai are not calling for repatriation per se. It's just, they want their objects displayed and their culture interpreted or presented in a way that they find appropriate. So again, through engagement with communities, I think a lot of positive outcomes can come. But yes, speaking of, this is maybe a good segue into when this is what happens when you don't engage. When issues are not dealt with and fester and build up over many years, you start to get statues being thrown into the harbor. So this is the topic of the Colston statue. I'm gonna talk about it purely from a museological point of view, again, because this is, I think it's too wide a debate for me to get into in terms of overall. But what I'm interested in is what happens afterwards. So the Colston statue, as you may or may not know, was toppled last year in Bristol, June 2021, I was like, June 2020, as part of the Black Lives Matter protests in the UK. It was fished out of the harbor the next day. And then a year later, so in June, 2021, it was put back on display at M Sheds, which is a sort of a social history museum or a history of Bristol Museum. And it's on the on the key side as well. And it's a very good example of, I think, how to deal with contentious issues and very like flash points. They don't shy away from the conflict. They make it into a very contextual display, where they outline what happened. And then very important, they asked the public to, it's a public consultation as well. And they do it through an online survey. So this is what you first see when you go in. It's straight away, you get to realize the context within which has happened. And this is really interesting musologically because I'll talk, hold on, I'm jumping ahead on myself, sorry. Yeah, so you can see the protest signs that they collected after the protest. And then they actually contextualized not just the protests themselves, but why the statue was there in the first place, the history of it, who Colston was. And so forth. And then the statue is displayed lying down within this exhibition space. And then it's what they do is they project different comments from people who are there on the day or people from Bristol. And you see different reactions. I was euphoric, really I was horrified. So just to provoke and create that sense of idea of the differing reactions to it. But also what I find fascinating here of course is if you see that, so they've put him back on display, but they've put him horizontal, right? He's not upright, he's not standing back. And they've left the graffiti on as well. So it's very interesting from a museological point of view, this object, one of the main I think points is that the meaning of an object will change depending on the way you display it, right? And this is obviously one of the issues with decolonization. And in this case, what started as a statue of an individual from Bristol honoring him. In this display, it is now changed. It's meaning is shifted. And now it represents a moment in history, moment of contestation within the history of Bristol and history of the UK and so forth. And that's really clear by the way they've displayed it and by leaving on the graffiti. They haven't cleaned it off back to its original pristine state and put it back up on a pedestal. So that's, I think, a very good way of dealing with the issue of using an object to have that debate. And I think there's parallels here from maybe what we could do in a Southeast Asian context. Yeah, and then you can scan, if you scan this QR code right now, it'll still work, but the survey is closed. And apparently in June 2022, they will be in another phase where they talk about the results. So it's really a good example of how to use public engagement to decide what to do with contentious historical statues or monuments or parts of history. But of course I just wanted to put this in really quickly. This is a huge challenge that museums face. So in the next gallery, which is the galleries that were obviously set up about 15, 20 years ago, they haven't been updated. So you walk from that into a display celebrating the Jubilee in 1977. And so again, sort of a very colonial display. So again, it's just a strange juxtaposition. But of course this is one of the big challenges with museums because the re-display of whole galleries takes years, takes a huge amount of funding as well. So it's not always as easy as it sounds, but not that that's an excuse for museums not to do it, but we still need to be somewhat cognizant of the restrictions in the which museums function. I realize I'm running out of time a little bit and I wanna get to the discussion and the Southeast Asian material, but I just really quickly wanted to show another example from the UK called The Past is Now that happened in Birmingham in 2019. And again, it was a co-curation project where they looked to re-display material to show that engagement between the British Empire and Birmingham residents. So this is again, if you go to the, you can go to this website, it's still up. But one of the things I wanted to point out here is of course, one of the issues with museums of course is this idea of museum neutrality that I think is quite central to issues around decolonization. And this is what the guest curators found in this case as well where the museum process encourages use of passive terms in its statements on historic events, especially those that could be challenged as inaccurate and the sanctioned texts by museum authorities favored to be less visceral descriptions and a greater use of qualifying terms. So this kind of gets to another key issue in museums about the way labels are written and what information is there. And I think again, this is something that needs to be reflected on in terms of how we actually describe objects and so forth. Yeah, so what purpose does false neutrality serve who benefits, who's the imagined audience? I think that, yeah, you need to also highlight the complicity of museums in the erasure of real effects of the consequences of the British Empire from public consequence. So even though they co-curated this exhibition, they were also quite critical in certain ways of, I guess the limitations they run up against when working with a museum. So again, there's these tensions and contestations. And again, I think this gets again to the sort of frames of knowledge that museums work on there and how we have to I think rethink them. All right, let's look at, so how does that play out in Southeast Asia? We see in general museums promoted as secular spaces. This is a very Western-centric concept. The museum effect, we call it, where it turned any object into a work of art, even though that wasn't their original purpose. In archeological museums, we see the application of what we call a three age system, which is a Western form of classifying the past into Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and so forth. So again, all of these frames of knowledge, even though the museums are post-colonial, they're still using Western methods and Western concepts of history. The architecture is also very tricky to get around. Of course, the ACM is in an old colonial building and it's not alone in that sense. So even the whole experience of walking up to a museum can trigger a colonial sense of colonial domination. There's a desire to be modern but to be seen as up-to-date or best practice. And that can negate a lot of local and indigenous forms of knowledge from actually being used and incorporated into museums. And of course, this leads to tensions between the public and the museum. Sometimes people just don't really think the museum is relevant, you know, in a way why should they if it's a sort of still structured along Western forms of knowledge. So this is a good example. This is the newly renovated gallery at the National Museum Bangkok where you see they've gone for a very sort of art historical approach. It looks beautiful. You can see the sculptures in the round and so forth, but it gives you very little sort of context in terms of the history of these pieces. Again, just a quick example. This is Museum Nagara where they are applying the three age system which was developed by Danish archaeologists. So this on the left is from the National Museum Copenhagen where they talk about in quite some depth. And this you can see in Museum Nagara quite a lump or using this system of classification. And just a quick sort of blurring the lines. We, you know, we ACM when I was there and still we sort of tentatively sort of moved into trying to maybe, you know, challenge these ideas somewhat. You know, this was a exhibition that we did with National Museums in Myanmar. This particular piece is from the Archaeological Museum in Bagan and it's still worshiped in the museum in Bagan as a sacred object in its own right. So we were quite myself and Conan, we were quite cognizant when it came to the ACM that we should, you know, maintain that idea that spiritual aspect of it. And so we arranged for monks to come and welcome it and during the course of the exhibition people could actually make offerings in front of it. So again, we sort of tried to challenge, I guess sort of gently challenged these Western frames under which we operate. The rest of the exhibition was pretty much set up in quite a standard way. But, you know, it's again, the ways in which we can maybe start to think about about how to break down these boundaries. And you see it in the National Museum Panang Pen even though it's set up as a sort of art museum but it's kind of hidden, you know. So you see these offerings hidden behind the statues. So again, there's this idea I think even from the museum staff that this shouldn't be visible and maybe if tourists saw this, Western tourists saw this, that'd be sort of disapproving. So again, the sort of ideas of how and why they creep into the Southeast Asian museums but they're not explicit. So again, something to think about. Repatriation, I'm not gonna talk about this in any depth because some of the other speakers are, of course it's a hot topic. But the main reason is because we had a whole lecture series on it last term and we've got, there's a book out on it as well. So go by that. And if you wanna watch the lectures, again, you can go to the Center for Study Decision Studies website and they're all recorded. So they get into a lot of the practical and also conceptual issues of restitution. But what I do wanna, I wanna just finish up quickly in the last five minutes to talk about what happens when objects go back because what I've been arguing so far is that museums in Southeast Asian general still function along Western sort of frames of knowledge. So when objects go back, they're displayed in that way and this is a good example. This is, it's a fascinating story if you're not familiar with it. The head of this Harihara was taken to the Ghee major in the colonial period. And at the time, they didn't realize that they also had the body and the body was in Pnom Penh Museum again since probably the 1920s. And it was only, I think at some point in time they realized that the two were the same piece. And it was only in I think 2017, 2018 that this head was sent back and it was reattached and just coincidentally happened to be there when this was happening. But the issue here is that as far as I understand it the museum caption in the museum doesn't explain this at all doesn't actually talk about the fact that these objects were separated for over 100 years but instead just explains it as a Harihara figure from I think it's the 9th century. So I think again, here is the sort of, you know with these objects when they go back there's a real opportunity here to start to deal with colonial legacies and to use them as entry points into this which is a very difficult and painful discussion of course sometimes about colonial legacies and this is what we would sort of call the afterlies of objects. So could this object instead be used as a way of explaining that? There's also of course the history of the object doesn't stop at a certain point in time it didn't stop in the 10th century. So these objects have had histories of say 150 years in France. And so that's now part of the object history the object life. And so there's a danger that we are raised part of the history by not evoking it in museum context. And I think there's a lot of potential there to really look at interesting issues. And actually the public in general are usually very interested in these types of subjects. These narratives become much more meaningful to them I think than just looking at a sculpture as a work of art or as a religious object. And but of course we see this particularly in museums in the West as well where objects are returned. So Denver returned objects recently. I think again it was some of the Latchford material and National Museum Cambodia reciprocated by giving them a long-term loan of this Ganesh. So again, trying to build relationships but there's nothing on the display in Denver Museum about this. There's no information about, but again this would be a really good way to actually start broaching these issues in a museum context and having people understand these complicated entangled histories. So again, I think there's plenty of potential there. And finally, yeah, this is another example that you all might be familiar with and I'm sure Pataratorn is very close to this as well. The lentils that very recently got sent back from Asian Art Museum San Francisco. But again, when things go back, you get other types of dynamics and other types of conflicts occurring because you get this competition between putting it in a National Museum versus a regional context versus the local context. So these lentils come from two very specific sites in Boriram and the local communities would like to have them back. Whereas I think right now they're in National Museum Bangkok. So again, you get to see these push and pulls between different aspects as well. And again, sometimes the local community gets silenced in these debates and sort of national narratives take over. So again, I think we need to look a bit more closely at how and what we do when objects come back. All right, great. And to conclude, all right, I almost stayed on time. Yeah, I think the need to decolonize arises from the colonial legacies of museums and the systems of knowledge, the epistemologies in the academic sense, we would call them. That's still operate today in many institutions. And we need to realize that museums are not neutral spaces. Even the statement of neutrality, of course, is a position that you're taking. There's definitely a history of a mission, I would call it, in many museums, the darker side of empire and that's in the West, of course, but also in the repatriation of objects. Sometimes there's maybe they don't wanna deal with some of these painful issues and so forth. It's really varied. I think you'll see from the discussions that we'll go on over the next five weeks of the level and the progress of commitment and it varies from country to country and depends on the type of institution as well. Anthropological and ethnographic museums have really been forced to confront this because their whole legacy, their whole way their collections are set up, have their origins in colonialism, they can't get around it. Art museums and encyclopedic museums, much less so that they're still pushing this idea of universal values or universal art, which again, we can argue is a very Western-centric way anyway. So there's been much less in terms of those museums, of course, the British Museum comes to mind straight away. Repatriation is also an even, the question of what happens upon object return is seldom discussed and I think this is something that needs to be looked at more carefully. Yeah, but I just wanna say at the end, museums that had a problem or a solution, they're both obviously. I'm still very much, I guess, hopeful that I think, again, like I said at the start, museums have their legacy in colonialism. They were apparatuses of the colonial state. That's very clear. But at the same time, they have the potential to really be part of the solution here. The issue is that a lot of the museums have just not grasped that nettle or have not maybe felt confident or willing to do that. And I think that's why at this point, we're seeing a lot more contestation than would have happened if museums had been more flexible say 20, 30 years ago when academics were already pointing out to them that these issues need to be confronted. But yeah, these are two maybe examples that the guillemets mentions nothing about how the objects got there or French colonialism whatsoever. Whereas the Tropa Museum now is puts the colonial history of the Netherlands front and center. So, and what does, yeah, what does it mean for Southeast Asia? Not just Southeast Asia, but Southeast Asian material in museums worldwide. And I think that's the question we're asking, yeah, in this seminar or this web series, webinar series. So I hope you've found that a useful introduction and I will stop sharing, okay. Okay. Great. Thank you very much, Steven. And now to respond to Steven's lecture, we have Dr. ML Pataraton, chair of property who's a professor at California State University Sacramento and the former director of the Asian Studies program. She specializes in Buddhist art and Southeast Asian visual cultures. She has published extensively on ancient Buddhist art and modern Southeast Asian art. She co-curated two major art exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and titled The Kingdom of Siam Art from Central Thailand, 1530 to 1800 and Emulsities, Arts of Siam and Burma 1775 to 1950. Dr. Pataraton, please. Thank you very much for a wonderful introduction of me Conan and Steven. Thank you for including me into this interesting and exciting subject my campus last year during the artistry symposium. We also addressed the same issue of decolonizing art museum. I became really involved and thank you very much for the fantastic talk. This is very important and exciting. And as you said, this is the beginning that we need to do. We need to be able to educate the new generation of what are these objects for? The art object that we see in museum, thinking of it as art, they are not. They have ritual function. They are a ritual object, a religious object. They are part of rituals that many people in different parts of the world practice in their religion. So I became really involved with the decolonizing objects because one year, actually almost five years ago, the Thailand Department of Fine Arts which control art objects around the world, I mean around Thailand, appointed me to be on the committee of repatriate objects, Thai objects that were abroad. There were 133 objects altogether. So they were, you know, we call Thai right, but in reality, many of them were Khmer objects that were in Khmer temple in North Eastern part of Thailand. So we are like, I have to die sick of many things, different ethnic groups living in Southeast Asia. They are not the Thai majority of Thai Buddhists. We also have people practicing Hindu or Islam, but the majority are Thai. So these religious objects, you're almost the last slide of the lintel that were returned to Bangkok recently from the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. The National Museum in Bangkok had them on display. People were so excited about it, they came and your slides have the pictures of the pieces being venerated in the museum and decorated with floral motifs and all those. So the question that you had, which I found very important is that what happened after the object returned, right? So what will they do? They are, are these Thai, no, they are Khmer object in the North Eastern Thailand from a temple. I remember that because I'm on the committee in Thailand, but I am also used to be a curator at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. How am I going to deal with this? One are the objects at the Asian Art Museum that need to be returned. But the object in the West actually at the Asian Art Museum don't really belong to the museum, they belong to the city. So there's many layers of when acquisition could be the act, you know, deaccession the objects. So because of that, it took a long time before these objects would be returned to Thailand. And this is really interesting also because many of the objects that were taken in around, around the world, as you said, Stephen, that they were, they came out during the colonization period of Asia. So that is before the UNESCO sign, there's a contract that museum signed with the UNESCO right in 1969, 1970. So many museum things that we don't really need to return these objects because it came out before the UNESCO contract, contact. Do you want to address that a little bit? Cause like for the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the every brandish collection came to the museum in 1966, that is before the UNESCO. And so they were, the first object that got returned was by Prince Patera de Diskun, tried to get the lintel that belonged to a temple in North Eastern Thailand, Pimai. Back that was in 1988 that there were student protesting in Chicago, getting the piece to return to Bangkok. Once it returned to Thailand, the piece is actually placed in a national museum, local in Pimai. And what they decided to do is that they have a replica of the piece made and they put the replica in the temple instead. What is your idea of this kind of the question of what are we going to do with the object after it returned? Yeah, no, I mean, that's, yeah, you've raised like so many issues that again, I think, yeah, the UNESCO one is interesting and I have encountered this as well that it's a very strange mentality, but the idea that, oh, if because the UNESCO convention was signed in 1970, therefore anything that was collected or came into a museum before 1970, oh, it's fine. I mean, and so that seems to be a sort of mentality among museums, but actually theft is theft, no matter what took place in December 1969 or January 1970, right? But so I think obviously I'm not probably the best person to get into the legal and the legal side of how repatriation works, that's not my area of expertise, but I think, yeah, there needs to be some sort of rethinking about that as well, that if an object is clearly stolen and the evidence is there, even if it's before 1970, I think this strong case is for it to be repatriated. Of course, this is direct bearing on the, what we call the Prakorn Chai bronzes in Thailand, right? In Northeast Thailand, the Blaibat two, Blaibat song. The issue is that they were looted in the 1960s in Northeast Thailand and made their way into many museum collections worldwide. And so one of the argument is that, well, I think the Thais were hesitant as well because they were, oh, it's pre-1970, therefore we can't apply for repatriation. But I think anyway, in most cases, like with the Met and with Denver and a lot of museums with the Latchford material that they did repatriate in 2012, actually in the end, they did it voluntarily. It wasn't legally, they weren't legally bound to do it. So I think probably the most successful way to repatriate is public pressure and so forth. And usually museums obviously would, the basis of evidence that was there, they repatriated. But yeah, for me, I think it's, what's interesting and myself and Ashley Thompson wrote a short contribution in The Guardian about the Latchford pieces in particular. And her, what she really, I think emphasized as well is that with the same, for example, the Cambodian pieces is that, yes, you can return these pieces to the museum and you can display them. But the damage that's done to local communities, to the monuments, sort of rips out the heart of the fabric of a society, that is much more difficult to, can we say, repatriate. Those issues are really difficult. And I think that gets lost in this debate. I mean, of course, the repatriation part of it is extremely important and so forth. But like I said, for me, I think what I'm looking at much more and I think what Ashley looks at as well is that, okay, but what happens when these pieces go back? How can they be used in meaningful ways by Southeast Asian communities or by the local communities, by museums as well? What type of narratives and dialogues can we use these pieces for? And of course, you've pointed out with the Thai examples, of course, that it gets even more complicated because it is beyond what we now consider the nation state. A lot of the material in Northeast Thailand is Khmer. It's culturally Khmer. It's today in what is the nation state of Thailand. But again, all of these cultures are interwoven, interlocked and influence each other. And maybe today that gets lost in the sort of quite chauvinistic narratives that the politicians are promoting. So again, I think there's a role for Southeast Asian museums to try and count it out as well and try and, you know, and so those the Khmer example, that the Boriram lentils are a good example of that. Yes, mm-hmm. Yeah. I was also, I think, you know, we talked a little bit. You have, like you said, you've worked in, you know, as a Southeast Asian, you know, in a major US museum. And I was just wondering about your experience over, say, the past 20, 30 years, you know, how, what challenges did you face in terms of, you know, trying to bring in Southeast Asian perspectives to the exhibitions or to your research or what you were curating when you're, like, when you're actually operating when in this very formalized Western framework of knowledge. Yeah. It's very difficult these days to curate shows. The two that I did, we tried to do the kind of Thai kingdoms, very specific and focused on that. But at the same time, we wanted to bring in the diversity within each of these kingdoms. So at one point, we did Emerald City that compare Burma and Siam together at the same time at the same period of time. And that came out really well. We feel that there's a lot of interest in the dialogue between these two countries that they still continue the majority still continue practicing Buddhism, right? Especially a similar type of Buddhism. So that came out, well, we got a lot of nice turnout. Another important point is that these days, objects were returned like Douglas Latiford's pieces were returned and they are going to be even more, like already five of them got into Cambodia the other day, right? So there's a lot of celebration. So now we all have to think, where are they going to put all of these art objects? Which museum? So are they going to temples, you know, not in Nongpen or like that? So it's interesting that you point that out. Also, I'm interested in fighting out also in museums. I remember many years ago when I was still a graduate student, Professor B. N. Mukudji, very famous Indian scholars came to visit. I was a student intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I walked Dr. Mukudji around the galleries and Dr. Mukudji right away when he saw Ganesh, he used his hand to touch Ganesh, doing his veneration because in Hinduism, that's how they practice. See here, touch spells and those are important. The guard right away came to grab Dr. Mukudji and said, Sir, you cannot touch the object. Yeah, and we had that in Singapore with the example that the Burmese example as well. We had to tell the guard. The first day the guards were telling people not to worship in front of them. So again, we are into the things about religious object or art object in the art museum. Is there any way in the future you teach a museum studies how are we going to deal with these things after we try to decolonize it in different ways? Yeah, this is a question I struggle with as well. And I think it's a difficult one. And I think your example and the example I both gave are so we can try to do it. But then of course, even our security guards are trained to do it. So it's to react in a certain way. But again, I do think it is a case of just shifting that narrative and shifting that perception that when you did that museums are the objects and museums are works of art and that religious ideas or religious practice can't bleed in as well. This is the problem with museums is they set themselves up quite ironically as sort of temples or shrines, but shrines to modernity or shrines to secularism. This is a very Western concept. And so it's been transplanted into Southeast Asia or Southeast Asia and so forth. So I think obviously the first point is to be aware of it. And then it's the start, I think it's just experimentation, right? So give curators the leeway to start trying new approaches. And again, it's enough to be one or the other. You can look at an object as a religious icon but also a work of art, right? And most people would sort of, if you're in a place of worship anyway, you would probably do that subconsciously. The more maybe powerful the work of art, the more of a spiritual or religious aura it may evoke. So they're not disconnected either, but in museums we completely disconnect those two aspects of the object. So again, I think it's just ways of bringing back in those type of understandings and ways of thinking about it. So. Yeah, I remember that at the Asian Civilization Museum, the Indian government, there's a long-term loan for 30 years that objects from India because India has all these beautiful objects that they couldn't have enough. I mean, they have too many to put in their own museum. So they did a long-term loan. And I think that's what do you think of that? I think it's a- Yeah. So this is the other, this is absolutely there. There's, they're from the ASI, right? The Archaeological Survey of India. And when ACM first opened, they negotiated a, I think it was 10 years first and then it's now being renewed for another 10. And yeah. And so this is, I think again, this is one way in which, you know, and this has been discussed as well. We actually borrowed three pieces on long-term loan from National Museum Panampan as well. Because, you know, again, I think when we get to the issue of what's happened with repatriation, I think is, or maybe I rewind. Yeah. I think there's this sort of, if museums could coordinate much more and be much more open about sharing material, you know, and material rotating, you know, around different museums, because as you and I both know, and it's an often quoted figure that in most museums they're only displaying about 5% or maybe 10% of their overall collections. And the Indian example is a good one because they have so much material that there's enough to go around for everybody. But again, the issue here is that it has to be reciprocal, right? That, you know, if the Metropolitan Museum or for Western Art Museum wants to borrow these, you know, six Hindu sculptures and the Indians say, great, no problem, but we want one of your monies or we want one of your lesser, you know, or we want some of your Greek and Roman sculpture because it would be great to display that in our museum. Then, you know, it should be that that's how it works, right? But of course, one of the issues with museums is that the power dynamic is uneven. All of the universal museums, the so-called universal museums are all based in the West. You know, there's no universal museum in Africa anywhere or South America or in the global South. So it's all well and good, but again, you know, again, you don't have a quality of outcomes there or an equity of exchange between the museums. So again, it's definitely, I think a way to do it, but the relationships have to be equal and that's not the case right now and it hasn't been the case for many years. So like a museum, another important point is that museums in Asia, they have objects from their country that were found in archaeology sites or places like that. They are there to just keep it, you know, inside of the museum, but who are the viewers? In reality, by nature, Southeast Asians are not going to, will not go to museums because for them, they rather go to temples. Right, and this is the point, right? And I've read examples of this in African context as well in colonial African context where museums were set up by, you know, the white colonialists and arranged along, you know, colonial lines and colonial viewpoints and in post, I think the example, one example I was reading was in Zimbabwe once they gained independence. No, nobody came to the museum, but it was because the museum was not relevant to the society and culture because it'd been set up along Western lines, you know, and so again, it's a case that's the really clear case studies there. And I think over about the period of 10, 15 years in the Zimbabwe case, they totally reorientated the museum and what the museum does and made it into a community space and they turned it around and it was successful. So there's ways of doing it, but you know, if you think, yeah, but if we just keep displaying them along Western sort of frameworks and then expect Southeast Asians to come, well, it's not relevant. Like you say, because I'm gonna go to the temple because that's what I'm used to. So, yeah, okay, I think we have to jump to the Q and A actually, yeah, because- So, yeah. Yeah, yes, I hate to throw out that one. I think there's 39 questions as well. So we have received a lot of questions from the audience. Let's try to answer a few of them in the few minutes we have. So let me, let's answer, how about, so this question comes from Vanira Razak who asks, who reminds us that the modernity, coloniality complex, the coloniality of knowledge is very much linked to local and global power dynamics. And her question is that Southeast Asian countries and a lot of post-colonial states in general have states that gatekeepers to knowledge production. So some states in Southeast Asia reiterate a certain narrative of colonial history resulting in some contentious history. So she wants to ask how the museum can have a decolonial practice in such political contexts while interacting with other spaces of knowledge production. And I think it's an interesting question also about how decoloniality might be different in different parts of Southeast Asia as well. We don't have one size fits all for all the different countries. And how do we deal as curators and museum scholars talking about museums with a different political context in Southeast Asia? Yeah, actually, so that's thank you for that question because that actually really pinpoints another very important aspect of this that I didn't go into particularly but we're sort of talking in this context as if sort of everybody supports decolonization which is not the case. It's not just museums that are resistant to it. There is definite political will and political influence that in certain places is completely resistant to it. And what's happening in the UK right now is a perfect example with the Tory government. There was, for example, with Royal Museum's Greenwich about five months ago, one of the trustees who's an academic and I'm an old hope that Goldsmiths was not reappointed to the Board of Trustees because they teach on decolonization in education and they were vetoed. So again, we see concerted efforts sometimes by political interests to stop this debate from even happening. So that's one case I know of in the UK. So yeah, so the challenges are very real and yeah, there is, I think this is sometimes also the case where museums or curators may wish to engage with these issues and realize that they're really essential but are either hesitant to do so or unable to do so because of certain power structures that are in play. And I think when myself and Prataratorn talked earlier about the Thai example is very interesting as well because it becomes, these repatriation cases become such high profile nationalistic narratives that again, the sort of the local voice gets lost, right? Like you said, these were Khmer pieces but in the Thai newspapers, it's like Thai, right? This has gone back to Thailand. So again, that's the problem I haven't, yeah, the question is what do we do about it? And yeah, it's very difficult. I think it requires walking that sort of fine line between how much you can sort of push the envelope as a curator or as a museum to move that debate forward and to start to carry out decolonial practice. Obviously in an ideal situation, the ministries or governments, if you're, and I think in the Southeast Asian context is pointed out most of the major museums are national museums that are under national ministries of culture or so forth. So you run into or you have to negotiate with that aspect as well. So yeah, I think it is a real challenge but again, I think museums can start to have that debate. They can start to gradually bring in decolonial practice. Maybe they don't have to be explicit about it or maybe they do and just, you know, but again, consultation, I think that's why public consultation is important because if the public wants these things to happen and that voice becomes clear, then usually governments fall in line and hopefully in an ideal situation. But yeah, so I don't have the obviously specific example, like a specific way of doing that. I'm going to add to Stephen's answer. Sorry, Pat, do you have any thing to add? Sorry, I'm sorry, I can't hear. Well, it's the internet. Just asking if you had, oh, so sorry about that. Just asking if you had something to add to the artist. I think yes, yeah. Okay, actually kind of related to that. There was another interesting question. Sorry, I just didn't scroll down a bit. Kind of related to that, a question by Perrita Chalunpao Konantaku. Asking, you know, saying in Thailand, there are a large number of local community that emerged in the last 30 years of so and that displays range from artifacts representing local history, local heritage to narratives that actually contest national official history, but they do not operate under the framework of decolonialization explicitly. So how relevant is this concept of decoloniality in that case? Yeah, sorry, I was trying to find the question as well. Yeah, I mean, again, that's, I think, you know, that the local museums are really, you know, good examples of how, because by definition, local communities drive them and sometimes local community museums are set up exactly for that because they felt left out of the national narrative or they feel underrepresented as well. So I think, you know, just again, maybe they don't consciously say that they're decolonizing. Actually, you know, those type of processes we might sort of consider under that wider decolonizing rubric. You know, actually what we see as well is the term decolonizing, decolonization. Interestingly, it's sort of only in the last maybe sort of 10 years in particular in a museum context that it's become, you know, used very clearly and people talk about decolonizing the museum. This is sort of not something that you would see, you know, before that. So I think, yes, I mean, but of course, you know, again, like decolonization can, I think can take place at a national level. It's not just an international level. So if we're looking at the Thai example again, you know, that these museums provide a space or provide a venue for these contestations to take place. I think the trick is then is how do they then maybe try and influence what's happening at a national level and whether that's possible and I'm not always sure. Yeah. I think the repatriate objects that return to Thailand, the past, the two lentil became almost like a national movement of pride of the Thai, you know, for the objects to return and these are religious objects. So many people actually visit the museum during the time when these two objects are in Bangkok to venerate them before they are sent back to their provincial museums. So I think they tried, they kind of treat it in both ways. As, you know, religious object rather than straight, you know, kind of object in that context. Yeah. So that seems to be the way Southeast Asian do in also in Cambodia. Great. We have a question on whether museum this decoloniality also shapes contemporary art spaces as well. I think we have a couple of talks later in the series that deal with the contemporary art scene in detail, details on it. Unless Steven or Pat, you want to add something? Yeah, no, I think the answer is yes, obviously. But I think we should, yeah, in terms of like obviously time. And yeah, I think obviously tune in next week because both Pam La Corrie and Vera May and we have Shabir Hussain Mustafa as well from National Gallery Singapore. They're going to they're going to deal with this explicitly and they're much more qualified to talk about the contemporary realm than I am. But yeah. A question by Diane Sim on what what you think on and this kind of deals talk story to the Khmer Thai example as well. What the speakers think of regional regional colonization and the dynamics between, you know, Southeast Asian countries. How does that play into this? OK, I'm just reading that she's got two. Right. How can we confront this without sidelining of the themes that are central? Yeah, I mean, OK, yeah. And so the regional colonization, yeah. And I mean, this is this is one of the things, of course, that comes up in this debate about decolonization is of course that that colonization is not that obviously there's been other forms of colonization throughout the world and different times and places. And of course, Southeast Asia is no different if you look at sort of Myanmar, for example, and its sort of conquest of Thailand or Thailand, vice versa, you know, at one point colonizing Cambodia and Laos. But I think as I, you know, I remember Farsh Noor talking about this. Yeah, but the sort of power dynamics and the scales are completely different to say what the British Empire was doing. Right. I mean, so so it is there. I think in terms of museums, though, I think if in terms of sort of museums and the origins of museums, it's still very much a sort of this happened as part of Western colonialism and it was an apparatus of Western colonialism. So that's why I sort of focused on that. But absolutely, I think within the Southeast Asian context as well. You know, the National Museums of respective countries will tell a specific narrative. And I think, you know, I think one of the things that this lecture series, you know, really hope we can achieve is to get that Southeast Asian specificity and look at how, you know, maybe getting back to the last person's question as well about local museums. Yeah, it's how relevant this this term is in a Southeast Asian context. Is it relevant? Are Southeast Asians doing it sometimes anyway without being calling it that or self identifying as that? Yeah, so I think it does. And hopefully, yeah, I won't I think I won't say any more in terms of I would just say, hopefully over the next five weeks, we'll get, you know, more examples of that might talk today. I think, you know, I was being more in general, but the next five talks really drill down quite specifically on these topics. OK, so we're kind of down to the last five minutes. And I think we should just take one last question, which I think kind of a broader one for both for both Steven and Pat from from Cheng wants to ask, you know, given given that, well, also given that museums have this sort of colonial origins, colonial beginnings, what do you have an ideal vision of what a museum can do in a decolonized space? What was the ideal role of a museum if the should if museum should still exist? Big question, yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, I guess I tried to say, I think museums should still exist. I'm not I'm not I'm not calling for the bathwater or the baby in the bathwater to both be thrown out. But I do think museums really need to start to rethink yeah, how they how they go about their displays. But, you know, a lot of the key things are are really yeah, engaging with source communities, with public consultation. Yeah, sorry, and I was just looking at a question from Tim Winter as well about, you know, the even in terms of the language we use and decolonization is quite a Western centric it developed in the West. So I think what she was saying and one of the issues here is is how do we even discuss it in a Southeast Asian context or in a non Western context? Is there a vocabulary and is there a means of doing that? And so I think that's the role that one of the roles that museums can play is to start to actually explore what it means in a Southeast Asian context for Southeast Asians, I think primarily first and then, you know, it can move out from there. So that's I would like to see, you know, I think museums have to be a bit more brave as well in terms of of engaging with leaning in maybe the contestation as long as it's productive, of course, you know, I think that's important as well. But again, just, you know, maybe to start having museums that reflect maybe Southeast Asian values and Southeast Asian systems of knowledge, I think there's lots of ways they can be brought in more explicitly and and so forth. Any final words? I kind of like the concept that they do in Thailand for provincial museums. In each province, they have their own little museum and the museum acquire objects that they found within the province and showcase what they have there. So kind of keep it there. They at the beginning, when, you know, the museum got started in Thailand, like other countries, they tried to bring objects from different different parts of the country to start it from, you know, early on prehistoric into you name it, you know, Sukkotai Bangkok and like that is Bangkok. But not anymore. They do it in a smaller scale. Just to introduce that to who goes to museum anyway, they are mainly tourists who go to museums when they come to Southeast Asia. But for the Southeast Asians, provincial museum were visited by people and people found things they donated to provincial museums. So that kind of a nice way to have museum upkeeping materials culture within that region. I think museum still has very significant role that way. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you, Stephen and Pat, for the really interesting presentation and response. This kind of brings us to a conclusion. It's 8.30. I'd like to thank the audience really for the very vivid active discussion and participation. And I'm sorry we didn't manage to get to all your questions. Just a reminder that the recording of this will be put on the SOAS Center for Southeast Asia Studies website afterwards, so you can access it again afterwards. So, yeah, just lastly, I would just like to share this again. Once again, you can sign up for the other webinars in the SOAS ACM Decolonizing, Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia series by scanning that QR code in the top right hand corner. There will be one a week every Thursday at 7 p.m. Singapore time until 11 November. That's the last one. So again, thank you, everyone, for attending our inaugural lecture of the series. And yeah, I'd like to end the event right now. Thank you, everyone. Bye.