The Cold War in the North-South Axis: Asian Art Beyond the U.S.-Soviet Dichotomy
In the bid to win the psychological war within and beyond the U.S. and the Soviet blocs, culture became an important ammunition during the Cold War. In Art History, since Serge Guilbaut’s seminal work, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985), studies of the cultural Cold War have thus proliferated. The initial research focused mostly on Europe. However, because the Cold War spread over the globe like an ideological pandemic, later it has become a significant topic in Asia. There, the Cold War is not the one that we know of—namely, the U.S. policy of aggressive containment without a state of war—but an era marked by bloody civil wars and independence movements, including the United States’ active military engagements in Korea and Vietnam and its support of oppressive regimes against emerging democratic or indigenous movements and left-nationalism. These conditions inevitably influenced visual arts from the region. Without expanding the attention to the Global South, we could end up with a myopic view of the Cold War. Through widening the geopolitical arena and examining a range of mediums, this panel will bring out the entanglements and conflicting consequences of the Cold War in Asia. Featuring papers by a curator and art historians, the panel will shed light on new researches in China, Okinawa, Australia, and Southeast Asia to convey a more holistic yet complex picture of the Cold War.
Field of Study:
Chairs:
Midori Yamamura,The City University of New York, Kingsborough Community College - myamamura3524@gmail.com
and
Yu-Chieh Li,University of New South Wales, Sydney - elise.liyuchieh@gmail.com
Discussant:
Jeehey Kim,University of Arizona - jeehey@gmail.com
