Image, Metaphor,Text: Approaches to Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia Lecture by Pamela Corey

While exhibitions have been important building blocks in structuring a narrative of "Contemporary Southeast Asian Art," they have also had the effect of rendering the regional formation more problematic. Because the original ASEAN nations have been seen as the drivers of artistic development according to this exhibition history, the place of such countries as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar have remained ambiguous, often isolated as trajectories independent of broader regional developments. This talk considers alternative regional conceptions in two parts. The first part draws from her essay "Metaphor as Method: Curating Regionalism in Mainland Southeast Asia," in which she discuss how geo-historical metaphors, such as the Mekong and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, were used - often problematically - to construct curatorial rationales for cultural coherence across borders. The second part of the talk considers the formal and conceptual dimensions of image and text in contemporary artworks to consider how object-based "readings" may provide another way of thinking about contemporaneity in the region.

For Further information or RSVP Please contact Jim Thompson Art Center T.02-612-6741 Email: [email protected]