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M+, Hong Kong
Unknown (Europe) 佚名（歐洲）
Poster, 'Visit Java Bali', Travellers Official Information Bureau of the Netherland Indies 荷屬東印度旅遊資訊局「來爪哇和峇里一遊」海報
1930s
These tourist posters are reminders of Southeast Asia’s colonial past, in 1930s French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. The first poster depicts a group of female labourers returning from a farmland characterised by lush vegetation and thatched-roof houses, in a scene that advertises the idyllic landscape of the Tonkin Delta in northern Vietnam. The second poster presents Java and Bali as tourist destinations with an imposing, hand-painted portrait of a Balinese performer of the Djanger dance framed to outline her headdress, and cropped at the chest to conceal her costume. As finely photographed and illustrated graphic works, the posters can be seen as aestheticised colonialist constructions of the tropics as Edenic, exotic, and primitive, legitimising the extraction, promotion, and commodification of natural and cultural resources in the colonies.
In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections. M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong, 22 June–30 September 2018
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