Mapping Contemporary Asian

Art

Lee Bul. The Divine Shell. Sorry for suffering do you

think Im a puppy on a picnic? Performance, Kimpo
Airport, Narita Airport, Downtown Tokyo, Dokiwaza
Theatre, Tokyo 1990
BA3 Special Option 1
 Overview of course document,
expectations and assessment
Assigning presentations
Key concepts, reading discussion.

2
 Week 2
2. Mapping Asian Art - Historiographical
and Theoretical Issues

This discussion class focuses on

historiographical and theoretical concerns.
How might 'Asia' be defined, and how has
Asian art history been written? What is its
relationship with Euro-American art historical
discourses, and how might this have changed
in the contemporary period?

3
 Week 3 (Japan)
3. Painting the Void
and the School of
Things
- Presentation 1 :
Gutai
In emptiness . . . we
find new possibilities
and new issues that
entirely disregard the
status quo. That is
where implications and
revelations are lurking.
YAMAZAKI Tsuruko,
The Gutaians in
Tokyo, 1956

4
 Week 2, Presentation 2
Mono-Ha The School of Things * And visit to Tate Modern
Nobuo Sekine, Phase of Nothingness
Water 1969

5
4. Anti-Art, Public Space: Radical Art Groups in Post-
war Japan (late 60s early 70s)

Presentation 3: Zero Jigen/ Hi-Red Center

6
 PRESENTATION 4 Yoko Ono/ Yayoi Kusama

Yoko Ono. Cut piece, New York, 21 March

1965.

7
 Week 4 (Korea & China)
5. The Urgency of Method & the Art of Resistance

PRESENTATION 5 Ibentu (event)

Lee Kun-yong, Body Drawing.
1976

8
 PRESENTATION 6 Minjung Art of the Masses

9
10
 6. The Cultural Revolution
Presentation 7 Photographing the Revolution (Li
Zhensheng)

11
Presentation 8 Wuming

12
 Week 5 (China & 1989)
7. No U-Turn The Chinese Avant-garde in the 1980s

8. 1989 (Discussion class)

13
 Week 6
9. Individual Tutorials
WT's office - Study room 13. Times TBC.

10. Artful Marketing

PRESENTATION I
Artist case studies: Takeshi Murakami (JP), Wang Guangyi (CN)

14
 Week 7
11. Cities on the Move

PRESENTATION II
Artist case studies: Yin Xiuzhen
(CN) Kim Sooja (KR)

Yin Xiuzhen. Portable Cities

(shanghai) 1990s early 2000s.

15
 12. The Post-Human

PRESENTATION III
Artist case studies: Lee Bul (KR),
Sun Yuan & Peng Yu (CN)

Lee Bul. Untitled Cravings,

White. 1988, reconstructed
2011.

16
 Week 8
13. Thai Artists Against Spectacle
PRESENTATION IV
Artist case studies: Rikrit Tiravanija, Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

17
 14. Re/presenting Viet Nam
PRESENTATION V.
Artist case studies: Danh Vo, Dinh Q. Le and Tiffany Chung

18
 Week 9
15. The Polytropic Philippines
PRESENTATION VI
Artist case studies: David Medalla, Maria Taniguchi

David Medalla, Cloud Gates, 1964. 19

16. The State of the Arts in Singapore

PRESENTATION VII
Artist case studies: Tang Da Wu, Heman Chong, Ming Wong

Tang Da Wu, Vincent Leow & Lee Wen, Serious Conversations. Raffles
Place, Singapore, Festival Fringe, Singapore Festival of Arts 1990, 20
Photo by Koh Nguang How
 Week 10
17. Virtual Subjects, Virtual Realities.
PRESENTATION VIII
Artist case study: Cao Fei

Cao Fei, LA TOWN. Video, 2014. 21

 18. From Boom to Bust and Back Contemporary Indian Art
Guest speaker Dr Zehra Jumabhoy.

Subodh Gupta. Spill. 2007 22

 Week 11
19. Ai Weiwei and the Political Space of Art

20. Individual Tutorials

Plus 2 revisions sessions in the Summer Term

23
 the visibility of contemporary Asian art owes much more to
the formation of a distinct contemporary Asian art discourse.
Such discourse extends beyond oppositional models of
West versus non-West, or even to the renewed prominence
of certain nation-states in a world order based on the
untrammelled flows of economic capital.

Joan Kee - Field and Stream:: The terrain of contemporary Asian

Art

What factors led to the formation of intra-Asian networks and

a newly recalibrated geography of artistic circulation?
What is the paradox of the global turn?
Why is authenticity a problematic term?
Why might rapid rates of economic development, combined
with significant changes in political governance, blur the
divisions between such formerly sacrosanct spatial markers
as region, nation, city, neighborhood, and street?
24
What, according to Tuan are some of the differences between
space and place ? How might this apply to our understanding of
contemporary Asian art?

25
 Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1977.

Yi-Fu Tuan examines the interactions and implications of "space" and "place"
the "basic components of the lived world"within the perspective of
experience. One of the interesting dialectics Tuan uses is "Place is security,
space is freedom."

One of the central themes of the book is the experience of the subject in
spacein Tuan's own words"how the human person, who is animal,
fantasist, and computer combined, experiences and understands the
world." Tuan's definitions of "place" and "space" flow throughout the book in a
fluid fashion while they shift as he applies different aspects of experience to his
focus. ()The "spatio-temporal" world he discusses shows how time and space
go hand and hand in interpretation. As Tuan applies his concepts to cultural
examples throughout the work he shows how, above all, we are oriented in
place, space, and time. " [N. King]

26
 Space is not a single thing, but rather, can be approached as a
multiplicity of mental constructions which rely on the interaction
between the human body and its environment. Eg:

- Space and the body

Body implicates space; space coexists with the sentient body ()
the recognition of objects implies the recognition of intervals and
distance relations among objects and hence of space.
- Space and the individual
Structures of power (vertical vs horizontal etc), work associated
with directed space, leisure with non-directed space etc.
- Space and the group
Beyond a personal experience of space, Tuan considers human
interaction, group activity and how it imbues spatial experience
with collective meaning and identity. Eg crowdedness as a singular
human phenomenon.
- Mythical Spaces
Occupies a position between the space of sense perception and the
space of pure cognition the imaginary or symbolic dimension of
space. Naming and dividing.
27
 Place has more substance than the word location
suggests: it is a unique entity, a special ensemble
(Lukermann 1964) it has a history and meaning. Place
incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a
people. Place is not only a fact to be explained in the
broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be
clarified and understood from the perspectives of the
people who have given it meaning.

Public symbols vs fields of care meaning invested

from the viewpoint of those inhabiting or using them.

28