This talk will discuss “Southeast Asia” as an idea, and its implications for exhibition-making and art history writing. The first part of the talk will look at how cartography, ethnography, and geopolitics have defined a region of vastly different histories and cultures. The second part of the talk will look at how art historians, artists, and curators have dislocated and reconfigured the idea of “Southeast Asia”. Our case studies will be Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia and the exhibition Cities on the Move.