Communal Art History: New Methods for Comparative Studies of East Asian Art

This panel seeks scholars developing new comparative approaches to studying art made in East Asia between the 1960s and the 1990s, a time marked by distinct regional transformations and the rise of “globalism” in the art world. Examining East Asia as a discursive, not geographic category, this panel welcomes papers on art from countries conventionally grouped under East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan), as well as polities such as Vietnam that have been historically entangled with them.

Colonialism and imperialism, though experienced differently across East Asia in the twentieth century, are shared structures in which postwar artistic practices unfolded. At the same time, such practices were formed through local histories of development, mass political movements, and military conflicts. We invite submissions that explore this tension between locally specific and globally shared conditions, which are linked to thematic tensions in the study of art from this period: urbanization and rurality; collectivity and subjectivity; development and tradition to name a few. Moving beyond formal or conceptual comparisons often developed with models based on “contemporaneity” and “pseudo-morphology,” our panel explores how material changes and resonances between art in East Asia can be grounded more historically. Beyond remapping art practices in the region, this panel proposes a “communal history” that imagines new forms of global art history, which escape from the nation-state framework and the market logic, presentism, and institutional imperatives of globalism. Instead, we advocate for art historical narratives anchored in the layered entanglements that connect different regions.