Worlds of Modernity: Southeast Asia The countries of Southeast Asia that are the focus of this exhibit were all colonized by European powers. The Philippines came under Spanish control in the 16th century, and was transferred to American dominion following the Philippine American war in 1889; it was granted Commonwealth status in 1935 and full independence in 1946. Burma was ruled as part of British India from the 1880s to 1935, and was granted independence in 1948. Vietnam was gradually brought under French colonial rule from the 1860s, and won independence with the defeat of French forces in 1954. This peace was interrupted by U.S. intervention aimed at preventing the communist-leaning nationalist movement established in the North from taking power in the South. In all these countries colonialism brought a privileged education to the children of the local elites, establishing a class of collaborators whose interests were linked to those of the colonial powers. These elites brought back ideas from their educations in Europe, including artistic styles, and notions of modernity based on material well-being and the scientific progress of Europe. It was in the interest of these elites, who tended to control the newly expanding news and entertainment media, to promote the promise of this modernity. The proliferation of advertising and coercive images of "the modern" presented here demonstrates those strategies. The images from Vietnam, however, also show the beginnings of an ideological division between those who associated modernity with materialism and individual freedom and those who interpreted it in terms of overturning oppressive colonial conditions. In all the countries of Southeast Asia some voices opposed the degradation of traditional values by decadent modernity and materialism: the traditional Confucian elite in Vietnam, the established Buddhist hierarchy in Burma and Catholicism in the Philippines. Despite these conservative voices, most countries of the region developed an accommodation with modernity, engaging increasingly in its excesses and corruption. In the case of the Philippines, it was the corruption of the Ferdinand Marcos years in the 1970s that brought to the fore the same kind of social movements that had contested the decadence of bourgeois modernity in Vietnam in the 1930s. The example of socialist realist art shown here demonstrates that move towards leftist politics.