Compelled by dramatic urban transformations in cities across Asia that have been ongoing since the late 20th and into the 21st century, artists in this region have engaged the built environment in innovative new ways. These artists move beyond simply depicting the city in earlier photojournalist, documentary, and modernist approaches to incorporate the effects of the specific sites they investigate into their modes and processes, and often even in their artistic materials. Emerging from local and interregional contexts within Asia, these creative approaches are in dialog with Western urban aesthetic forms and traditions yet also depart from them by incorporating … Read more

As art historians and curators have attempted to foreground African artists in the name of decolonization, there has been a certain forgetfulness of previous postcolonial attempts to reckon with colonial knowledge production. Questions around the relationship between political decolonization, postcolonialism, decoloniality, and current demands to decolonize have come to the fore in recent years. Nugent addresses these concerns as they relate to African art through two studies: Pierre-Philippe Fraiture’s Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization 1945–1960 and Ferdinand de Jong’s Decolonizing Heritage: Time to Repair in Senegal. Both books intervene in such instances of forgetting by looking to the … Read more

The influx of tourism capital in its post-war years has seen the terraforming of Sri Lanka’s natural, socio-political, and cultural landscapes. Among its many neo-Orientalist implications is the marginalization of traditional professions, transforming them into performative roles. Examples include stilt fishermen who now fish primarily to serve the tourist gaze. And the persistent invisibility of structural violence and the exoticization of indentured labor in the tea industry, a colonial remnant that continues to thrive. More recently foreign entrepreneurs, posing as tourists, have exploited Sri Lanka’s economy by acquiring long-term property leases, thereby pricing out locals and fostering new forms of … Read more

Wu Wenguang’s article ‘Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It’ is one of the first attempts to theorize the Chinese concept of xianchang, or working on site. A location-based practice common to filmmakers and experimental artists, xianchang evolved in 1990s China both as a reaction against Socialist Realist aesthetics, and as an attempt to recuperate their socially engaged potential. This introduction explores Wu’s understanding of the distinct spatial, temporal, and everyday qualities of xianchang, while locating the emergence of on-site practices in relation to the period’s rapid socio-economic changes, particularly the challenges and opportunities presented by … Read more

Wu Wenguang’s article ‘Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It’ is one of the first attempts to theorize the Chinese concept of xianchang, or working on site. A location-based practice common to filmmakers and experimental artists, xianchang evolved in 1990s China both as a reaction against Socialist Realist aesthetics, and as an attempt to recuperate their socially engaged potential. This introduction explores Wu’s understanding of the distinct spatial, temporal, and everyday qualities of xianchang, while locating the emergence of on-site practices in relation to the period’s rapid socio-economic changes, particularly the challenges and opportunities presented by … Read more