As struggles for democracy resonate yet again throughout the East Asian region, this panel looks to the near past of contemporary struggles and their mediation in order to reconsider what can be created and what emerges from the act and practice of protest. Transnational identifications--whether real or imaginary--and transhistorical resonance through sometimes contradictory reiterations mark the depiction of protest and its art in this panel. By exploring moments of insurgency and their contingent significations the panelists combine to reimagine democratic struggle as ongoing and constantly mutating. By turning specifically to technologies and media--of song, woodcut print, photography and art exhibits--the panel seeks to juxtapose humanistic explorations of protest art alongside the more frequent discussions of histories of movements entrenched in the social science disciplines. It thus seeks to join and expand recent rethinking of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the work of Jacques Ranciere, for example.
Yucong Hao's paper "Afro-Asian Resonance" revisits the mass demonstrations organised by the Chinese state during the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s. While China’s military involvement in the Congo Crisis was tangential, the political event served as a symbolic struggle for China in the global Cold War that channeled its ideological anxiety and geopolitical precarity. Hao reenvisions these carefully orchestrated rallies as a mass mediated event that contributed to a Maoist media network of agitation and mobilization. Demonstrations, performances, woodcut prints and photography exhibits worked to mobilise participants with little prior knowledge of Congo's history and ongoing revolutionary movements. Yet participants protested the imperialism of Western powers and rallied support for the country in the wake of independence from Belgium. Media technologies enabled this transnational encounter to resonate in complex relation to the Chinese state.
With "The Perilous Journey of a Song" Eileen Chow traces the contradictory ideological itinerary of a song first composed in 1946 in Shanghai to commemorate the students and faculty martyred in Taiwan during brutal KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) suppression. Chow shows how reiterations of the song took it from being a People's Republic of China liberation anthem, to a Taiwanese underground resistance song during the White Terror, to the soundtrack of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's celebrated 1980/90s films and now resurfacing in contemporary Shanghai to voice Republican nostalgia. As its location and ideological meaning shifted and turned, the song both accumulated and accrued new meaning throughout China's long twentieth century.
In "Standing with Myanmar" Hieyoon Kim turns her attention to South Korean protest art and two recent (2021) art exhibits that attempt to publicise and stimulate support for the Burmese democracy movement. Kim's explores the different temporalisation of the two exhibits: the first one draws comparison between the Burmese movement and South Korea's Gwangju Uprising of 1980 but in doing so its narrative of linear progress leaves the potential for horizontal solidarity unfulfilled; the second exhibit presents the Burmese coup as a global crisis of democracy and is more successful in mobilising a form of borderless solidarity. Kim advocates a critical rethinking of democracy as a constant struggle rather than a goal which remains once attained.
To stimulate discussion we have invited Susan Hwang as a discussant. Hwang's expertise in South Korean protest poetry and song from the height of the anti-dictatorship protests of the 1980/90s will allow her to bring together these disparate strands of the arts of protest in the context of the late twentieth century East Asian region.
In order, to allow plenty of time for audience discussion, we will limit the three papers to just under 15 minutes each, with Hwang offering some leading comments and questions for a further five minutes. This should allow twenty-five minutes for general discussion.