Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
Volume 5, Numbers 1 & 2, October 2021
This article revisits the First Hygiene Exhibition in the Netherlands Indies (Eerste Hygiëne Tentoonstelling in Nederlansch-Indië) held in Bandung, 1927. Rather than operate as part of the Dutch hegemonic project, the exhibition engaged with the medical and public health discourse at that time by promoting preventive measures, a method deemed to be more statistically significant than investing in curative acts. Accordingly, various sorts of spaces beyond medical facilities, including houses, streets, restaurants and public transportations, were presented in this exhibition as sites of interventions through drawings, photographs and architectural models, in juxtaposition with various forms of statistics. While addressing the population at large, Dutch hygienic propaganda, however, was inflected by the differences between the colonisers and the natives. A close look at the textual and visual materials produced for the exhibition reveals the ways in which the hygiene exhibition turned into a projection of colonial anxieties experienced by the Europeans as they were constantly in contact with native figures in their daily lives.
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