With the exception of Siam, 19th-century Southeast Asia was predominantly colonized by European powers determined to subjugate and conquer. Visual regimes that classified and documented native subjects within racialized hierarchies were hugely popular during colonial rule. Photography, ethnographic display, and early film became tools of colonial governance, naturalizing foreign authority while disciplining indigenous bodies into legible colonial types.

In his seminal book The Myth of the Lazy Native, Malaysian academic and sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas notes: “The negative image of the people subjugated by Western colonial powers […] was drawn based on cursory observations, sometimes with strong built-in prejudices, or misunderstandings and faulty methodologies”.¹ Colonial administrations justified extractive labour systems and paternalistic governance simply by branding the colonized subject as indolent, irrational, and backward. Alatas exposes these forms of epistemic violence, prompting us to question the methodological frameworks through which knowledge about Southeast Asia was – and continues to be – produced. His intervention remains urgent today as inherited colonial stereotypes persist in subtler forms, demanding renewed critical vigilance toward the images and narratives that shape regional identities.

In their attempts at countering harmful representations, contemporary artists in the region have since experimented with the decolonial potential of digital technologies. Through the work of Yee I-Lann and Agan Harahap, this essay suggests that photography today, enabled by digital manipulation and online circulation, can offer new readings of colonial history.

Shot by the European François-Constant Girel, Coolies in Saigon heralds the beginning of filmmaking throughout French-occupied Indochina. The film depicts twelve Vietnamese coolies engaged in manual labour, arduously pushing a cart. The coolies’ cone-shaped hats cast a deep shadow over their faces, obscuring their facial expressions. Denied any sense of individuality, these coolies appear to be wearing particularly long indigenous garments as they continuously toil under the scorching sun. Produced in 1896, the associated recording technologies of the time were no doubt inherently limited. This is expressed through the film’s low resolution and heightened blurriness, which fails to sharply accentuate the bodily outlines of the individual coolies.
 

As media theorist Tilman Baumgartel notes, the Vietnamese coolies themselves remain a “strange subject for the first film made by a young European during his first encounter with the Orient”.² The coolies’ frequent appearance in “travelogues and photographs” of the 19th and early 20th-century reduce them to mere subjects of Western exotica denied any extent of personhood.² As postcolonial scholar Edward Said once theorized, the Orient remains integral to the “European Western experience” for it becomes part of their “contrasting image, idea [and] personality”.³ 

In this context, the Vietnamese coolies become an anonymous labouring body that confirms Western fantasies of passivity, primitivism, and difference. Such images transform power asymmetries into spectacles of ethnographic curiosity. By situating the coolies within this Orientalist visual economy, we begin to see how early cinematic and photographic practices participated in stabilizing the binary between a rational, observing Europe and a silent, observed Southeast Asia – an opposition whose afterlives continue to shape contemporary regimes of looking.

In Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, Rosalind C. Morris proposes several thematic functions associated with the colonial-inherited medium since its inception. For instance, she considers at length Southeast Asian photography’s “capacity to disseminate, dislodge, and transmute the category of the foreign” whilst simultaneously acknowledging the camera’s role in “political domination and suppression”.4 Her observations certainly ring true when we turn to Malaysian contemporary artist Yee I-Lann’s Study of Lamprey’s Malayan Male I & II. In this photomontage, the artist digitally manipulated an archival photograph that is John H. Lamprey’s Front and Profile Views of a Malayan Male taken during the 19th-century.

The original image depicts a fully naked Malayan male with his genitals exposed, positioned carefully in front of an anthropological grid that is typically used to study the bodily anatomy of its subject matter. Here, the man appears to be avoiding awkward eye contact with the photographer who takes his shot as he is seen looking slightly towards his left. Furthermore, the man’s bodily contours are heavily accentuated when juxtaposed against the black and white grid behind him — in addition to the measuring stick he is made to hold with his right hand — allowing for detailed anthropometric study by Lamprey himself.

Yee I-Lann’s version conveys agency back onto the man. Instead of shying away from the camera’s shutter by deliberately avoiding eye contact, the man now confronts the photograph’s viewer by staring directly back at her. His intentionally unwavering gaze, seemingly transfixed, alongside furrowed brows and a clenched fist connotes a determined sense of narrative agency. No longer is he the passive colonial subject of the European gaze, but he has, in some ways, transcended his colonial subjugation.

In the second iteration, the artist carefully crops the man out from the photograph and substitutes his corporeal absence with the ghostly contours of his bodily outlines to indicate his haunting ontological presence. Here, the artist goes so far as to superimpose herself onto the picture plane in her attempts at simulating a direct interrogation with the man who was once there. Placing both hands on her hips, Yee appears to silently contemplate the lineage of her people amidst their continuous subjugation under a long history of British colonial oppression. 

In other words, Yee reverses the colonizer’s gaze by imposing an equally powerful and confrontational Oriental gaze back onto the European viewer. Pertaining to these images, the perceptive remarks of Alexander Supartono and Alexandra Moschovi are equally worth mentioning:

Yee challenges the authority of the colonial gaze [and asserts] that the presence of the naked ethnic identity of the Malayan male through his absence is most pertinent when Malaysian society ‘is particularly obsessed with framing, measuring, indexing identities and subjugating its populace to notions of racial supremacy and otherness’.⁵

As Lamprey’s anthropometric study makes clear, 19th-century depictions of the colonized subject resemble what Syed Hussein typifies as “the indolent, dull, backward and treacherous native”.1 What Yee does really well then is to reinscribe agency back onto the subjugated native, effectively liberating this individual posthumously from colonial oppression well within the digital possibilities offered by the media technologies of the 21st-century.

Similarly, Indonesian contemporary artist Agan Harahap employs digital manipulation, albeit in different ways. His 2015 series entitled Mardijker Photo Studio comprises entirely fictitious studio portraits made to resemble actual 19th-century colonial photographs. Accordingly, the ‘individuals’ depicted in these pseudo-portraits reference the colonial subjugation experienced by the Mardijker community, descendants of freed slaves who remained in Dutch-occupied Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia). Linguistically, Mardijker (translated as Merdeka) implies “freedom from troublesome control [...] a slogan for national independence, uncompromised by any kind of subservience to previous colonial powers […] a demand for liberty”.⁶

I go so far as to argue that the exhibition of Harahap’s photographic works in the style of a salon hang within the confines of a highly reputable gallery space works toward a combined decolonizing effort undertaken by the artist and viewer alike. For the 21st-century viewer, the fabricated 19th-century archival images function as a spatiotemporal proxy, posthumously exposing the enduring habits modernity/coloniality has instilled – its ongoing negation and distortion of marginalized knowledges and subjectivities.⁷ On the other hand, the contemporary white cube “[bleaches] out the past” by invoking “transcendental modes of presence and [spectatorial] power”, thereby collapsing the distance between colonial domination and postcolonial independence.⁸ 

The salon-style hang confronts viewers with a dense accumulation of images that demand active scrutiny rather than passive consumption. Here, decolonization becomes a shared and participatory labour in which the artist destabilizes the evidentiary status of the photograph while the viewer is compelled to interrogate their own desire for authenticity and coherence. In exposing the archive as constructed rather than neutral, Harahap’s work models a critical spectatorship attuned to the power structures embedded in both past and present image-worlds.

At this juncture, I turn to examine one such pseudo portrait entitled Sutirah: The first woman animal tamer ca. 1885, West Java. Unlike the Malayan male who was denied a name in Lamprey’s original photograph, the woman who dominates the composition of Harahap’s image is instead ascribed an Indonesian-sounding name, Sutirah. Beyond simply identifying who this woman might potentially be, Harahap takes his invented character a step further by revealing her occupation, that of an animal tamer — not just any but the first in the entirety of 19th-century West Java. Here, Sutirah is depicted as a fearless Javanese woman adorned in traditional apparel with both hands wrapped around a crocodile which appears to be subdued by her presence. Her posture remains somewhat relaxed with eyes cast in a seemingly absent-minded gaze in the direction of the viewer. The white garment that she wears offers a stark visual contrast when juxtaposed directly against the dimmed background of what seems like a tropical landscape comprising pieces of flora submerged in a shallow riverbank.

Interestingly enough, Harahap has since taken to various social media platforms to disseminate these pseudo-images to a wider range of audiences. Any simple Google search of the phrase ‘Sutirah Pawang Buaya’ [Sutirah the Crocodile Tamer/Shaman] would reveal multiple images of the same woman across Facebook and TikTok alike. By way of democratizing access to such ‘archival images’ within the digital realm, Harahap “[interrupts] the authority and integrity of the archival record […] raising questions about the validity and veracity of the photographic image as evidence and historical record”.⁹ In their discussion of another such image, Moschovi and Supartono write:

Concentrating on portraiture, the studio platform allows the artist to creatively revisit attributes and changing traits of colonial representation in Java [...] These absurd scenarios vernacularise colonial portraits and events, making the photographs appealing to audiences who otherwise have little interest in photography and colonial history.⁹

Although fabricated, Sutirah nonetheless represents the undeterred Indonesian woman who firmly resists any attempts at being orientalised for European fantasy. Rather than falling victim to the Western colonial enterprise, Sutirah outwardly refuses to be racially indexed only to be classified as the inferior Other.

While colonial image-making grew tremendously throughout the 19th-century, it most certainly did not end there – its logic endures in archives, museums, and digital platforms. Shifting from passive recovery to active reimagination, the works of Yee I-Lann and Agan Harahap expose colonial violence, reauthor subjectivity, and democratize historical narration through networked publics. Most importantly, these case studies reveal how contemporary practitioners – and we as viewers – can intervene critically and continue to question inherited visual regimes, ultimately reshaping the narratives that continue to define postcolonial identities.