This paper takes the recently established archive of Philippine conceptual artist Roberto Chabet (1937-2013) as a starting point for discussing how the histories of performance art and conceptualism in Southeast Asia have come to be mapped via archive building. Compiled by artist Ringo Bunoan after Chabet's passing away, the archive drew largely on the private collections of his former collaborators, friends and colleagues who donated the bulk of the materials in the collection. These include photographs capturing the artist at work, off-guard and in the midst of creative experimentation, as well as correspondence, itineraries and publicity materials. With the ongoing emergence of new materials, the archive continues to grow and shed light on Chabet's expansive career as an artist, teacher and curator. Yet, I would argue that there is an urgent need to look beyond the archive's ability to chart the artist's social relations-an oft-discussed feature of Chabet's legacy. Instead, recognising that the archive also exposes the slippages of definitions and media inherent in Chabet's conceptual practice feeds into the larger aim of discerning the unique features of conceptual and performance-based activities in the Philippines since the Second World War.

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In many Southeast Asian languages, as in English, the terms used in discussions of modern art-such as nghệ sĩ, a Vietnamese word for "artist", or silpa, a Khmer word for "art"-can refer both to visual arts such as painting and sculpture, and also to performing arts such as dance, music and sculpture. Moreover, the terms used when discussing contemporary art-such as khit pyaing, a Burmese word for "contemporary", or seni kontemporari and seni kontemporer, Malay and Indonesian words for "contemporary art"-often connote artists' embracing of "alternative idioms" including performance art. 1 These linguistic accommodations make clear the proximity between the visual and the performative in Southeast Asia's modern and contemporary art worlds. Built into the very words used to discuss art in the region are the conditions of possibility for slippery, inter-animating and transmedial exchanges between visuality and performativity.Yet performativity has been substantially less well studied than other artistic phenomena in the region. One of the aims of this special issue of Southeast of Now is to gather together new writing that may enlarge our understanding of performativity, as a concept or category for research or practice. The five peer-reviewed articles and fourteen shorter responses that follow propose not one but multiple approaches to performativity.

Recognised as one of the formative artistic practices after theSecond World War, Fluxus emerged in the 1960s comprising a diverse and dispersed international community of artists. Their works were bound by creative exchanges of found objects, mail art and instruction-based performances open to re-enactments by others. While Fluxus activities have been extensively studied in relation to Western Europe, North America and East Asia, this paper argues that Fluxus 'resonances', or parallel developments in practices and concepts, may be charted within Southeast Asian visual art and performative practices since the 1960s. Seen alongside Fluxus resonances across Latin America and Eastern Europe, a study of Fluxus in Southeast Asia reveals a performative 'translation' of ideas and practices which continue to survive in the work of artists such as Philippines-based Judy Freya Sibayan.

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