Dreaming, laughing, screaming. The realm of the imagination is an important "playground" for contemporary Southeast Asian artists. The region’s rich folklore and mythology, and continuing rituals and performances, are rife with the fantastic, the grotesque and the frightening, often linked closely to the world of dreams, but also to the horrors of real cruelty and battles fought.

Working with this imaginative interface, contemporary artists can enjoy a sort of continuity with their traditional past, re-inventing and re-invigorating their approach to relate to contemporary experience. Often the agony of personal suffering extends to the nightmare of suffering for a wider community; the use of the grotesque can reflect, viscerally, the corruption and injustices felt to haunt whole societies.