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Thinking and Talking about the Arts in Southeast Asia

ArtsEquator.com is an online arts and culture platform that brings together information, events, ideas and people in Southeast Asia in one easily accessible, carefully curated site. The site’s primary objective is to promote arts and cultural discourses that are regionally-orientated and cross-genre.

28/07/2026

In Aug 2025, RADAR was selected as a Community Partner with UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies. Led by Asst Prof Cindy Anh Nguyen, the course, Information & Visualization and Digital Humanities Project Management was attended by 36 students from the BA, MA and PhD programmes.

The students used RADAR’s raw data to create three data visualisation projects:

- Challenge Chain sequences to visualise the complex relationships throughout the censorship process
- A heatmap to show where each case occurs in the region
- An article, Safety as a Scapegoat: Indonesia’s Art Censorship, by Kylie Bach, Kaitlyn Cui and Jasmine To which looks at the way that the discourse of public safety can be deployed to constrict artistic freedom.

We love the insights the students brought. Thank you to Dr Cindy Anh Nguyen for inviting us to collaborate with UCLA on this project, and all the students for their beautiful projects and feedback on how we can improve our data collection.

RADAR’s research is meant to be shared and used by all those who want to build an open, conducive environment for artists to make works that matter to them, and for audiences to have free choice to access arts and culture. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about how we share our data with researchers, students, advocates and artists.

27/07/2026

A different kind of Odyssey.

In 2023/24, theatre educator, researcher, writer and dramaturg Charlene Rajendran went on a 9-month wandering sabbatical, encountering art, and art makers in the region.

After, Charlene’s Surat ke Kawan, 8 intimate letters which capture the emotional and intellectual range of her experiences, was published on ArtsEquator, in a deceptively simple keywords interface designed by Jun Kit.

Last night, excerpts of Surat ke Kawan were turned into a performance, at the opening of the Asian Playwright Meeting in Yogyakarta. Music by a DJ, a room full of artists surprised by cue cards and a call to spontaneous performance, created a new work of art out of Charlene’s words.

Charlene set off on her wanderings three years ago with the question, “What does it take to turn up for each other?” APM and the artists last night gave one answer. May the journey continue.

08/07/2026

“With everything different now, why were we still making and producing performances like nothing had changed?”

In this essay, writer Fezhah Maznan reflects on care-based, alternative approaches to performance-making in Southeast Asia as strategies for survival amid ongoing crises.

Read the full article in the link in our bio.

Co-presented by ArtsEquator and Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, the ArtsEquator-Esplanade Offstage Fellowship 2026 commissions the development and publication of four opinion pieces that are topical, of the moment and reflect critically on contemporary performing arts in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Selected by both arts organisations, the four fellows are mid-career or emerging Singapore cultural practitioners and writers.

24/06/2026

How does one “make it” in the music scene here in Singapore?

In this article, writer Daniel Peters explores what it means to make it in music in an era of AI, slop and social media.

Read the full article in the link in our bio.

Co-presented by ArtsEquator and Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, the ArtsEquator-Esplanade Offstage Fellowship 2026 commissions the development and publication of four opinion pieces that are topical, of the moment and reflect critically on contemporary performing arts in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Selected by both arts organisations, the four fellows are mid-career or emerging Singapore cultural practitioners and writers.

19/06/2026

What is “normal” mean anyway?

In this essay, writer Claire Teo reflects on reshaping accessibility in Singapore’s theatre scene, considering access as an art form and the expanded possibilities that inclusion can bring.

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Co-presented by ArtsEquator and Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, the ArtsEquator-Esplanade Offstage Fellowship 2026 commissions the development and publication of four opinion pieces that are topical, of the moment and reflect critically on contemporary performing arts in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Selected by both arts organisations, the four fellows are mid-career or emerging Singapore cultural practitioners and writers.

18/06/2026

Is the next pandemic of the arts already upon us?

Chong Tze Chien reflects on the long shadow of COVID-19, shifting audience behaviours, AI, funding pressures, and evolving ideas of the value of the arts and patronage.

Read the full article now in the link in our bio.

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Co-presented by ArtsEquator and Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, the ArtsEquator-Esplanade Offstage Fellowship 2026 commissions the development and publication of four opinion pieces that are topical, of the moment and reflect critically on contemporary performing arts in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Selected by both arts organisations, the four fellows are mid-career or emerging Singapore cultural practitioners and writers.

08/06/2026

A snapshot overview of some of the RADAR findings from 2025 which documented violations of artistic freedom in 7 countries in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Myanmar. Read the full country reports that are now available on radar.artsequator.com!

[For access to the Myanmar report, please email [email protected] for the password. Please state your name, organisation and email address.]

28/05/2026

Our RADAR country reports examine key cases and provide detailed analysis of the state of artistic freedom in each country. Read them now on radar.artsequator.com .

26/05/2026

A return to more authoritarian leadership, recent armed conflicts and geopolitical realignments have negatively impacted civil and political spaces in Southeast Asia.

Against this backdrop, repercussions on artistic freedom are inevitable. In 2025, RADAR documented 159 challenges to artistic freedom in 7 countries in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, The Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Read the full country reports now on radar.artsequator.com and explore our searchable database which now has over 1000 cases of challenges to artistic and cultural freedom in Southeast Asia going back to 2010.

(For access to the Myanmar report, please email [email protected] for the password. Please state your name, organisation and email address.)

19/05/2026

When we piloted this project back in 2022, one of the most frequent questions we received was, 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 6 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦’𝘴 11 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘈𝘴𝘪𝘢? As a long term research project, our aim has always been to cover the region. While we may have started out with only 6 countries, we are continually finding ways and resources to add other countries in the region progressively over the next few years.

We’re happy to share that from last year, we’ve added Myanmar to our study. Our upcoming country report takes a look at the struggles for artistic freedom in Myanmar against its current political climate and the conditions that perpetuate oppression. Stay tuned and read all about it in the report coming out soon!

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