The New Chaos of Asian Dance Scenes

Japan, in particular, has had a lingering fascination with regionalism after World War II: Fukuoka’s Asian Art Museum, opened in 1999, claims to be “the only museum in the world that systematically collects and exhibits Asian modern and contemporary art.” And many of the Japanese selectors unearthing sounds from Asia might be considered modern-day ethnomusicologists: Shibuya party DUGEM RISING has been spinning funkot since 2010; Tokyo DJ collective Soi48 spread their love for mor lam throughout the region; Murakami Kyoju and Kishino Yuichi make regular pilgrimages to Myanmar to dig for the country’s percussive court music hsaing waing; and Hasegawa Yohei, who played in seminal Korean indie bands like Kiha and the Faces, flexes his encyclopedic knowledge of Korean and Sinophone rare groove in his mixes. In the realm of noise music, Otomo Yoshihide’s Asian Meeting Festival and Far East Network have linked Ryu Hankil (Korea), Yan Jun (China), Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore) and dj sniff (Hong Kong) with improvisers across the region.

The history of pan-Asianism in Japan, however, is not innocent. Since Japanese art historian Okakura Kakuzō’s 1903 declaration that “Asia is one,” the imagined unity of this region has served as a rallying cry against Western imperialism, although the idea would become a pretext for Japanese conquest of large swaths of the region during World War II. So it’s important to ask: Is this so-called new inter-Asianism any different from what we’ve seen in past artistic and political movements? Yes and no. It’s a common critique that pan-Asianism is mainly invoked by East Asian countries or individuals, leaving out their Southeast Asian counterparts. Indeed, the first attempt at a modern pan-Asian movement in music might’ve been the Asian Composer’s League, founded in 1973. Its founding members were from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea, all composing in the Western classical tradition and hailing from countries on this side of the Iron Curtain. But the new inter-Asian underground, led increasingly by Southeast Asian artists, rearticulates that history on a bottom-up, scene-to-scene level, acknowledging these irreconcilable differences while imagining new ways to think about mutual recognition and connection.

DIY organizations are leveraging institutional funding to help local Asian scenes gain broader recognition. From 2018 to 2022, Manila’s experimental arts festival WSK participated in Nusasonic, a project in collaboration with Indonesia’s Yes No Klub, Singapore’s PlayFreely, and Berlin’s CTM Festival that aimed to research “experimental sound and music cultures in Southeast Asia, enabling dialogue within the region, with Europe, and beyond.” Featuring English-language articles on budots, dangdut, protest music, and noise, Nusasonic’s research, along with their events and 2022 compilation album Common Tonalities, make a case for a new inter-Asianism in the underground.

The upshot is that Asian underground artists are looking less at the West and more to their neighbors as sources of inspiration. Berlin is no longer the center of the universe for club heads, though these DJs sometimes pay them a visit. At CTM this year, Thai producer Pisitakun curated a series titled The Three Sound of Revolution, calling up Korea’s C Bong Sae (one of the owners of Seoul DIY venue ACS), Teya Logos, and Malaysian DJ Wanton Witch to draw together the common threads of protest and sound in their respective contexts. Coupled with the diaspora’s shared experience of being marginalized, this inter-Asian solidarity has the potential to link together a widely disparate group of people.