Returning to belong? Reflections from “Scenes from a Repatriation” and more

Last month, a new play by playwright, Joel Tan, finished a four-week run at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Scenes from a Repatriation comprises a series of vignettes—first in London, then in mainland China—witnessed by, intervened in, and responding to a statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin, an imagined object of the British Museum’s collection, soon discovered to be one victim of the violent looting by British forces during the Second Opium War. Each vignette presents a new set of characters who relate to each other only through passing references to the events of the previous scene.

Scenes makes a winding and disparate narrative of a return which touches on the multivalent and often hard-to-stomach realities of the Guanyin. The spectres of a Chinese palace servant and a Scottish soldier donning a bright red uniform, tormented and seeking escape, plunge out of the spirit realm into the scenes’ action. The violence of the past and its repercussions in the present are impossible to ignore.

On May 19, Tan spoke at SOAS about the conception of his work, part of a series of talks organized by the Provenance, Accessibility, Repatriation and Restitution (PARR) working group. The play began as Tan’s MA dissertation at the Drama Centre, Central Saint Martins. Tan described his feelings of discomfort walking through the British Museum for the first time, circumambulating (via the grand North Stairs) a monumental Amitābha Buddha, located outside the South Asia and China gallery. Unable to be confronted from afar, the Buddha seems trapped within the spiralling stairs. Along with the references Tan’s talk added to an already rich text (everything from art heists to ghost stories), I was struck by the emotions of a diasporic experience which had clearly made their way into the play.

As a person living ‘from elsewhere’ myself, this theme was apparent already watching the performance. A particularly poignant moment occurs towards the end of the Guanyin’s time in London, in which a young poet speaks candidly to the Guanyin—who has been described in an earlier scene as a ‘maternal figure.’[1] Feeling deeply the disparate identities which they occupy—queer, British, Chinese, British Chinese, poet, grandson—they lament (in verse),

Last summer, replication, authenticity, and ownership anchored discussion during the CO-OP annual seminar. But often my own reflections, and the discourse of the group more broadly, broke out of these themes and entered into grappling with what it means to belong. Listening to Tan speak about the encounter which sparked Scenes, I was brought back again to this question: can objects belong to somewhere, someone, sometime? how can one tell or decide?

Restitution based on arguments of cultural significance (i.e. not clear and documented instances of stolen property, but the much more wieldy and larger category of displaced material culture) will always be troubled by this question. And in some hands, the question can lead to an attitude of doing nothing.

In fact, it is much easier to name ‘not belonging’ as part of the human experience—or in the case of restitution, as part of the ontology of contested and circulating objects. The genealogy of object lives (and their siblings, object stories, object afterlives, etc.) attends to this not belonging by making belonging relational. At any point in the play, one could relate Guanyin to the different people and places which are meaningful to her, and which make her meaningful. And, as Panggah Ardiyansyah wrote here recently of the Repatriasi exhibition at the National Museum of Indonesia, the formal process of repatriation within the colonialism-nationalism paradigm relies on a specific definition of the local which conserves a specific time-place of meaning-making as the ‘most meaningful’.

Since many of the characters in Scenes ask themselves this question as well, I asked Tan if he thought Guanyin ever wondered it of her own position, as she journeyed from quarry, to palace, to museum, to mansion, and finally, to the Shanghai airport. And if she found a resolution to the crisis of belonging. In short, the answer was no. But fascinatingly, Tan mirrored again Guanyin’s position to the position of the diasporic body—always unsettled, always searching, always unbound.

A compass for those searching for some solution could come from the young poet’s plea: “this chain/ of my folks pulling me back/ saying/ no, no, no.”

On our last day together in Yogyakarta, the cohort spent the afternoon amongst fervent artists, activists, collectives, individuals, and knowledge holders and creators at the Indonesian Visual Art Archive. The message which rang loudest was that the material outcomes of their work seemed a by-product of a deeper calling to protect cultural knowledge for the next generation. A generational chain, if the metaphor will be allowed.

It felt fitting to end our trip here, with this message, with an annual theme of replication, ownership, and authenticity. What could be more authentically productive than individuals ensuring their own survival? Moreso, belonging is best ensured when the community to which one belongs is cultivated, cared for, and sustained into time. The effect of the rupture of that community—by the violence of colonialism, imperialism, and the continuing defining of culture by outside (often capitalist) forces—cannot be understated.[2] This rupture continues in a re-routing of posterity, inheritance, or ‘patrimony’, to use the museum’s own terms. The troubled separation of the categories of object and being has recently been explored in the case of the Piprahwa Relics (See Cheong & Thompson 2025). The case, and authors, remind us that belonging is also a noun, a material extension of the body which enables a continuity of oneself into the future.

The way these forces impact a global horizon of the future matter to heritage as well. This horizon of the future has become increasingly occupied by a “frontier mindset”—a taming/seizing of resources, but also of space and time (Adams & Groves 90, but outlined especially in Chapter 5 and 6). Echoed on a smaller scale, Deborah Stein’s study of a Hindu temple from a diachronic perspective highlights the difference between a multivalent time and that of colonial ‘dead time’ and even of post-colonial ‘living time’. The latter two “seize and possess” the past, “grasping it by one’s will,” albeit for different aims (Stein 2018, 16-17).

How do these abstracted futures in the making/taking, saving the present (and past) for an uncertain outcome, contrast with the futures which the Yogyakarta artist-activist communities are making, via cultural knowledge? For one, they attend to the future itself by actively, and materially, shaping it. Lifepatch and Kawan Pustaha’s practices with indigenous Batak, for instance, reinscribe not only manuscripts but the teachings they contain. The existing harmony between the future and ‘heritage’ (as opposed to ‘history’) is one which could be utilized to understand the relations of care which help societies adapt to change over time (Sanford 2019, 14). All of this requires a release of attachment to the stability which the market desires and the museum promises. As Stein remarks, “to preserve history is, in many ways, to kill it” (Stein 2018, 18). As the ghosts of Guanyin suggest, however, perhaps it is not fully dead. These objects which the museum preserves, are instead rather like diasporic bodies, constantly in flux. The question is, then, if these stable preservations invite belonging of these bodies, rather than enforce or define it. And, further, if this invitation is one which is open to both acceptance and refusal.

To conclude, I return to the statue’s fate in Scenes, which is perhaps not the happy ending one might expect. A young Uighur man, having taken a woman hostage, for reasons which the text leaves somewhat ambiguous, lays at the base of the Guanyin in the Shanghai airport. His family is missing, and he has reached utter desperation and despair. He exchanges with the police, who is at this point undercover,

Critical museum studies often speaks of agency as the ability to speak for oneself and to voice that self on a public platform. In practice, returning agency comes by way of calling on diverse demographics to speak to the museum’s collection or displaying objects via alternative narratives. In this final scene, however, the Guanyin rejects this definition of agency, which offers the non-choice of either speaking up or being spoken for.

Daring to pose a question perhaps possible only from the outside, Tan asks, What if the past, as it is remembered by the present, does not belong in our future? The impetus for the concept, after all, was the haunted British Museum, full of objects (and human beings!) tormented by an immortality they did not ask for. Restitution alone cannot right past wrongs, as the Guanyin alone could not intervene in the scenes to which she bore witness. But the moment of restitution can give all of us permission to ask more pressing questions of objects, both inside and outside the museum.

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Notes

[1] Guanyin is the Chinese name for the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, the Chinese translation being 觀[guan] (to observe) and 音[yin] (sound). Depicted particularly in female form, Guanyin “is conscious of the voices of the suffering calling for help and is committed to rescuing these beings in various ways.” Guanyin’s position as observer in the play draws on these nurturing resonances. From: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2020/02/guanyin.html

[2] For more on dispossession of culture as part of the broader colonial violence of dispossession of social agency, see Thompson, 2025, forthcoming.

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References:

Adams, Barbara & Chris Groves, Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics, Brill, 2007.

Cheong, Conan & Ashley Thompson, “Selling the Buddha’s Relics Today,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Volume 32 (2025).

Sanford, Richard, “Thinking with heritage: Past and present in lived futures,” Futures, 111(August 2019): pp. 71-80.

Stein, Deborah L, “The ‘Hindu’ Temple in a Diachronic Context,” in The Hegemony of Heritage: Ritual and the Record in Stone, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018, pp. 1-21.

Tan, Joel, Scenes of a Repatriation, Nick Hern Books, 2025.

Thompson, Ashley, “On Decoloniality and Restitution: Invoking Ganesha in Cambodia Today,” Art History, Special Issue, 2025, forthcoming.