The Glamour of Strangeness
by Jamie James
by Jamie James
Erudite, colourful and packed with intriguing anecdotes, Jamie James’ Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the Last Age of the Exotic is a romp through a bygone era, studying the lives of six artists who left their homelands to pursue creativity elsewhere.
While it’s not specifically Southeast Asian focused, a few figures from the region feature: chiefly Walter Spies (1895-1942), the German painter who settled in Bali after a period in Java, and also Raden Saleh (1811-80), a Javanese painter who found fame by going, unusually, in the other direction (East to West; hot to cold) to Europe.
In addition is a great introduction about how James’ came to relocate to Indonesia in 1999, which includes a fabulous visit to a near-deserted Angkor Wat temple complex largely still under Khmer Rouge control back in 1989. (The others in the book are painter Paul Gauguin (Tahiti); Russian-Swiss writer Isabelle Eberhardt (the Sahara); filmmaker Maya Deren (Haiti); and Victor Segalen (China).)
James calls his subjects “exotes”. While a traveller or an expatriate eventually goes home, his subjects do not; we aren’t sure why he doesn’t call them simply immigrants, though he does note that they tended to roam at least initially in search of a new home. It was notably only a privileged few — socially, economically, usually both — who were able to do this back when passports were yet to be invented. Today, when millions are displaced and seeking a home of their own — not for artistic reasons but simply to survive — the book is a reminder of how things have changed (of course it still remains easier for the wealthier to migrate).
While this is not an academically rigorous study — James left out many other artists simply to control the size of the project — it’s a meticulously researched work that also manages to ask questions about the artist and their relation to the world.
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