Ruins Into Reckoning: Southeast Asian Artists Are Building Monuments From Colonialism's Garbage

In a repurposed warehouse on the outskirts of Semarang, Indonesian artist Syaiful Garibaldi is surrounded by rust. Not the decorative, artisanal rust of a Brooklyn loft renovation, but the real thing — corroded sheets of corrugated iron stripped from the walls of a Dutch colonial-era sugar factory, stacked eight feet high and smelling of decades. He runs his hand along a warped edge and says something that sounds simple but isn't: "This material remembers more than I do."

Garibaldi's practice centers on what he calls "colonial residue" — the physical stuff that extractive economies leave behind when they're done extracting. Old machinery. Broken infrastructure. The architectural bones of buildings that were never meant to outlast their usefulness to empire. He doesn't clean it up. He doesn't neutralize it. He builds with it, and the resulting sculptures are among the most unsettling, beautiful things being made in Southeast Asia right now.

The Material Carries the History

There's a theoretical concept in material culture studies about how objects hold memory — how the history of a thing is embedded in its physical substance, not just in the stories told about it. Southeast Asian artists working with colonial-era and industrial salvage material are making this idea visceral and undeniable.

When you're looking at a sculpture built from the corroded machinery of a rubber plantation, you're not just looking at a formal arrangement of shapes. You're looking at the device that processed the labor of hundreds of workers who were paid almost nothing, in a system that enriched a European economy while impoverishing a local one. The rust is not incidental to the aesthetic. The rust is the point.

This is fundamentally different from the Western tradition of found-object art, which tends to treat the source material as formally interesting but ideologically neutral. When Robert Rauschenberg incorporated junk into his Combines, the junk was generically American consumer culture. When a Filipino artist incorporates the shell casings from a US military base into a sculpture, the material is not generic. It is specific. It has names and dates and body counts attached to it.

Scavenging as Scholarship

The research that goes into this work is serious. Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich — probably the most internationally recognized figure in this space — works primarily with rattan and bamboo, materials deeply embedded in Khmer agricultural and domestic life, but his process involves extensive historical investigation into how those materials were commodified and exported during the French colonial period. The work looks organic and beautiful. It is also a documented argument.

In Vietnam, a younger generation of artists is working with the detritus of the American war — not the sanitized, museumified version, but the actual physical leftovers that are still turning up in rice paddies and fishing nets fifty years later. Artist Nguyen Trinh Thi has incorporated unexploded ordnance casings (rendered safe, obviously) and American military-issue materials into installations that force a confrontation with what "cleanup" actually means when an empire leaves. Spoiler: it means the people who were bombed do the cleaning.

The Indonesian Upcycle Underground

Indonesia has a particularly rich ecosystem of artists working in this mode, partly because the country has such a layered colonial history — Dutch, Portuguese, British, Japanese — that the physical residue is literally everywhere. You cannot drive through rural Java without passing buildings that were constructed for the plantation economy and are now falling apart in ways that are simultaneously beautiful and enraging.

Yogyakarta has become something of a hub for this practice, with artists like Heri Dono and a newer generation of makers incorporating everything from colonial-era batik factory machinery to discarded electronics from the global tech supply chain (much of which, it's worth noting, passes through Indonesian manufacturing facilities before being exported to American consumers).

The electronics angle is particularly sharp. There is something clarifying about an artist building a sculpture from the broken components of devices manufactured in Southeast Asia for Western markets, then discarded by those markets and shipped back to Southeast Asia as e-waste. The material literally traveled from the Global South to the Global North and back again, carrying value in one direction and toxicity in the other. Putting it on a plinth in a gallery doesn't neutralize that history. It illuminates it.

What "Upcycling" Gets Wrong

It's worth pausing on the word "upcycling," because the mainstream American version of that concept is very different from what's happening here. In the US, upcycling tends to mean: take something discarded, make it charming, sell it at a premium to people with good taste. It's a consumer category. It has its own section on Etsy.

What Southeast Asian artists are doing with salvaged colonial and industrial material is not that. It is not about making something charming. It is about making something that refuses to let the history of the material be forgotten or aestheticized away. The goal is not to transform the object into something pleasant. The goal is to make the object's unpleasantness impossible to look away from.

Singaporean artist Zai Tang puts it directly: "I'm not recycling history. I'm confronting it. There's a difference. Recycling makes something new and neutral. Confrontation makes something that still has teeth."

Showing Up in American Spaces

This work is increasingly appearing in American galleries and museums, and the reception is instructive. Audiences who come in expecting the aesthetic pleasures of found-object art — the visual interest of unusual materials, the satisfaction of repurposing — often find themselves ambushed by the political weight of what they're looking at.

That ambush is intentional. These artists are not making work for audiences who already agree with them. They're making work that finds people who thought they were just looking at something interesting and leaves them holding a history they didn't expect to encounter.

The material does the work. The rust, the broken porcelain, the corroded machinery — it carries the argument in its body. The artist just builds the structure that makes you stand close enough to feel it.

And once you've felt it, the object that you thought was made from garbage starts to look like the most honest thing in the room.