Tacking between the god’s eye experience of deterritorialised ‘art’ and molecular experience on the ground, this talk will examine the case of the 11th century Khmer bronze statuary portrait of Shiva to probe the realities and potentialities of restitution in Southeast Asia today.
On December 15, 2023, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its intention to deaccession an 11th-century gilded bronze statue which had been a highlight of the Southeast Asia holdings at the MET since its acquisition in 1988. Thought to represent an 11th-century Khmer monarch in association with his preferred divinity, Shiva, the statue is considered an exceptional example of the ancient Khmer imperial tradition of statuary portraiture. Following years of pressure from Cambodian and American authorities, the museum had identified the statue as one of a number in its Khmer collection associated with Douglas Latchford, a Bangkok-based British-Thai dual national indicted for antiquities trafficking by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in 2019.
The ancient Khmer empire, centred in Cambodia, had extended across a now hotly contested Cambodian-Thai border. The statue’s physical return, to Thailand, triggered an extraordinary outburst of nationalist fervour on both sides of the border. As the coveted statue settled into the Bangkok National Museum, tensions between Cambodia and Thailand simmered – until exploding again one year on, this time in deadly conflict at ancient Khmer temple sites along the border. Between May and August 2025 at least 40 people and untold numbers of other living beings were killed, injured, displaced and traumatised, three ancient temples were damaged, borderland economies and ecologies were left in shreds. As of August 2026, the two nation-states remain in a volatile stand-off over responsibilities for care and suffering in the heritage-rich borderlands.
Professor Ashley Thompson is currently the Hiram W. Woodward Chair in Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London. She is a graduate from of Université de Paris 8, SFHEA, and Harvard University. Ashley is a specialist in Southeast Asian Art Histories, with particular expertise on Cambodia. She maintains a focus on premodern Cambodian arts and literatures and complements this with more punctual work on the contemporary period and the arts of the larger Southeast Asian region.
Through recent work on restitution in Southeast Asia, Ashley has begun to develop explicitly decolonial perspectives, including analyses of ecologies encompassing the human and the more-than-human, the latter ranging from the animal to the vegetal to the ancestral-spiritual to AI. Recent publications include Decoloniality and the Purchase of the Premodern: Views from Southeast Asian Fields, Special Issue of Art History, Editor’s Introduction and Chapter ‘On Decoloniality and Restitution: Invoking Ganesha in Cambodia Today’.