Category: Volume 13, Issue 3
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
In 1990s Hanoi, Vietnam, many contemporary artists navigated the written form as crucial to the logic of the pictorial field. These included Vũ Dân Tân (1946-2009), Trương Tân (b. 1963), and Nguyễn Văn Cường (b. 1973), among others. I examine these artistic experiments as integral to what many have hailed as the emergence of contemporary art in Vietnam, linked to the early effects of globalization and the impetus to freely engage with questions of selfhood following over forty years of a socialist realist mandate. However, I also suggest the significance of site to these practices, in particular the postsocialist graphic … Read more
This article analyzes South Korean photography of the 21st century that reconstructs urban landscape to critically reflect on the country’s continuing spatial transformation. Focusing on two photographers, Park Chanmin and Keum Hyewŏn, it explores the connection between photographic representations of urban spaces and actual spaces. In doing so, they contribute to a compelling dialogue that can be traced through South Korean photographic practices of the earlier generations and connects with those of adjacent East Asian countries. Taking the concept of banality, which is characterized by a preoccupation with the mundaneness of life under capitalism, a turn away from the spectacular, … Read more
Since around the turn of the 21st century, contemporary multimedia artists and filmmakers from China have employed the moving image as a tool to capture temporalities shaped by urban-industrial decline in northern China. A counterpoint to massive economic prosperity within the Pearl River Delta, fueled by investments in new technologies and globalizing industries since Deng Xiaoping-era reforms, northern manufacturing zones have witnessed the dismantling of labor-driven forms of socialized production. Throughout the north, once thriving factory complexes and surrounding locales have been reduced to a ghostly shell of their former selves. Artists Wang Bing (b. 1967), Wang Mowen (b. 1989), … Read more
This article explores the moving image practice of the India based queer artist Tejal Shah. Acknowledging their preeminent status as a queer artist and activist whose media works have been exhibited widely in urban locations since the early 2000, this approach opens with a Chingari Chumma/Stinging Kiss (2000), a video work completed in collaboration with Anuj Vaidya. In this reading, we note their investment in queer subculture tied to an equally intimate rehearsals with the archive of popular Indian cinema. The second move of this articles is reserved for their five-channel video installation Between the Waves (2012). Attending to its … 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
