Co-organized with the Department of Visual Studies at Lingnan University (Hong Kong), the editors of Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles: Art in East and Southeast Asia, Midori Yamamura and Yu-Chieh Li, will lead a panel discussion with select contributors: Hiroshi Sunairi, Lesley Ma, Roger Nelson, and Kidlat Tahimik. The essays and artworks gathered in this volume examine the visual manifestations of postcolonial struggles in art in East and Southeast Asia, as the world transitioned from the communist/capitalist ideological divide into the new global power structure under neoliberalism that started taking shape during the Cold War.
Contributors to this volume investigate the visual art that emerged in Australia, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines. With their critical views and new approaches, the scholars and curators examine how visual art from postcolonial countries deviated from the communist/capitalist dichotomy to explore issues of identity, environment, rapid commercialization of art, and independence. These foci offer windows into some lesser-known aspects of the Cold War, including humanistic responses to the neo-imperial exploitations of people and resources as capitalism transformed into its most aggressive form.
Midori Yamamura is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY, and the author of Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular (MIT Press: 2015). Prof. Yamamura is a specialist in post-WWII Asian and Asian Diaspora art. She is currently working on her second book, Japanese Contemporary Art Since 1989: Emergence of the Local in the Age of Globalization, and co-edited Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles
Art in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2021).
Prof. Yamamura has taught art history at Fordham University, Hunter College/CUNY, Pratt Institute, and lectures regularly at the Museum of Modern Art. She has received fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Terra Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Center for Place Culture and Politics at CUNY, Terumo Foundation, and Ford Foundation. Her essays have been published in major museum catalogues, including the Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the co-curator of UnHomless NYC (Kingsborough Art Museum).
Yu-Chieh Li is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies, Lingnan University. Li was a Judith Neilson Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art at UNSW Art and Design, Sydney (2018-2020), and an adjunct researcher at Tate Research Centre: Asia (2017-2018). Her research engages with aesthetics of performance art in Asia and socially engaged practices and curation resisting neoliberal globalization. Her publications appear in Third Text, World Art, Art in Translation, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, and post: notes on art in a global context, with an edited volume Xu Bing: Beyond the Book from the Sky recently published by Springer. Currently she is working on a book project examining affect and the artistic autonomy of post-socialism.
Hiroshi Sunairi, born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1972, is a filmmaker and visual artist. His earliest work, A Night of Elephants, was a sculptural installation using hibaku (atom-bombed trees). That work developed into the process-based art for which he is best known, Tree Project, in which Sunairi asks volunteers to grow seeds from atom-bombed trees. By way of recording this project, Sunairi began filming documentaries on social issues. His second feature-length documentary, Air, captures a road trip to Fukushima, Japan, in August 2011, just months after the nuclear disaster. His latest film follows the documentary photographer Mao Ishikawa, who has been documenting the lives of U.S. soldiers stationed in Naha since the Cold War. Ishikawa's photographs focus on American soldiers and the sex workers of the Philippines.
Lesley Ma is curator of Ink Art at M+, the museum of visual culture in Hong Kong (opening in late 2021). Since 2013, Ma has led the museum's acquisition and programming on ink art and is on the core planning team of the opening exhibitions and publications. She curated The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art at M+ (2017-18). Previously, she co-curated the Para Site exhibition Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (2013-16) which toured to two other cities. From 2005 to 2009, she was Project Director at Cai Guo-Qiang Studio, in New York and, from 2011 to 2012, Curatorial Coordinator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles. Ma received a Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego.
Roger Nelson is an art historian, and curator at National Gallery Singapore. Nelson is author of Modern Art of Southeast Asia: Introductions from A to Z (National Gallery Singapore, 2019) and translator of Suon Sorin’s 1961 Khmer novel, A New Sun Rises over the Old Land (NUS Press, 2019). He is also co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a journal published by NUS Press. Roger completed his Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne, on Cambodian arts of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has contributed essays to scholarly journals, specialist art magazines such as Artforum, books, and exhibition catalogues. He has curated exhibitions in Australia, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, including And in the Chapel and in the Temples: Research in Progress by Buddhist Archive of Photography and Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho (The Lab, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, 2018-2019).
Kidlat Tahimik (née Eric Oteyza de Guia, 1942) is an independent Filipino film director, writer, and actor whose films are commonly associated with critiques of neocolonialism. Trained as an economist at Wharton School of Business, Kidlat tore up his MBA diploma in 1971 to make non-commercial films-- whereby he would sort out his own colonial contradictions and rediscover his roots. His first film Perfumed Nightmare (1977) received the International Critics Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1977, which cited it as a rare Third Cinema work full of poesy and humor. Consistent with his quirky indigenous framing, Kidlat captures extraordinary scenes in everyday life. He has been consistently producing personal films vastly outside the capitalist mode of production, inventing his singular style of storytelling. Like his latest work BalikBayan#1 (which took 4 decades to complete 1979-2021) about the first circumnavigation in 1521 by Magellan's slave Enrique, whose quincentennial is being celebrated in 2021. He became a National Artist of the Philippines in 2018, for his contributions to the development of an indie cinema generation. Kidlat gives his Bamboo Camera Award to indie filmmakers whose works avoid the formula of Hollywood flics-- to encourage their local-worldview framings.
