Animating History in Contemporary East Asian Art
Session will present: In-PersonIn Imperial Debris (2013), Ann Stoler writes that concepts like “colonial legacy” “...fail to capture the evasive space of imperial formations past and present as well as the perceptions and practices by which people are forced to reckon with features of those formations in which they remain vividly and imperceptibly bound.” How then, does contemporary art intervene to help register the “...ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation” that follow violent incursions at the national level? This panel examines contemporary artistic practices in East Asia that animate these ongoing processes as they relate to transnational power struggles such as American imperialism in Korea, Japanese colonialism in Singapore, and fraught episodes of civil war and Japanese imperialism in twentieth-century China. We will consider the use of time in Qiu’s Anxiong’s Minguo Fengjing, Ho Tzu Nyen’s animation of spaces once occupied by kamikaze soldiers, and Eunji Cho’s use of “suspended matter” to bring forth the contradictory modes and histories of nation building in South Korea.
Field(s) of Study:
Geographic Area: Asia
Geographic Area: Japan
Geographic Area: Southeast Asia
Geographic Area: Korea
Geographic Area: China, Modern (post-1911)
Chair:
Namiko Kunimoto
Discussant:
Pamela Nguyen Corey
Abstract Submissions Closed