
2015 GAX Symposium: GLOBAL ASIAS | ART
Global Art and Diasporic Art in Japan and Asia
Symposium jointly organized by Mori Art Museum, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Integrated Human Sciences Program for Cultural Diversity (IHS), The University of Tokyo as part of the 2015 Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange initiative (GAX)
This symposium is set in the background of an ongoing investigation under the rubric of Global Asias Art and Visual Cultures, which includes reflections on changing connotations of Asia, the modern and the global with its sets of networked economies and circuits of artistic production and visual flows. The symposium will continue with an evolving awareness of transcultural and transnational mobilities in relation to artistic production, but with a view toward internationalisms and the possibility of new internationalisms—a reexamining of the global, in part through a look at the reinscription of the national and international in the global context, which may also be taken as a push toward local specificities in relation to the global. This is also producing developing practices of global responsibility, including socially engaged and environmentally conscious forms of art practice that point to a planetary ethics of the visual. Thus, participants will cover topics from the national to the global and the planetary, from a history of Asian American and other diasporic Asian art to current global tendencies. Global Asias | Art will engage scholars, arts professionals and artists with a critical look at the field in response to the concept of Global Asias including the conceptual intentionality, possibility and limits of these frameworks.
Image: Chalana (Big) , 2014, oil on canvas, 227 x 333 cm / 90 x 132 inches. Courtesy: Oscar Oiwa Studio NY
See the full schedule here




Thanks for support of the 2015 Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange initiative by:
NYU Office of the Provost Global Research Initiatives
Major Travel Sponsor Hawaiian Airlines
SYMPOSIUM OUTLINE
Friday, June 26, 2015 and Saturday, June 27, 2015
Day 1: Friday, June 26, 2015, 9:30AM-5PM
Venue: Roppongi Academy Hills (Mori Tower 49F)
Organized by: Mori Art Museum and New York University Asian/Pacific/American Institute Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange
In cooperation with: Academy Hills, University of Tokyo
Free and open to the public. RSVP required.
For questions, please contact Public Programs at the Mori Art Museum: ppevent-mam@mori.co.jp
Day 2: Saturday, June 27, 2015 9:30AM-6PM
Venue: The University of Tokyo Komaba Campus, Auditorium, Administration Office Bldg (3F)
Organized by: Integrated Human Sciences Program for Cultural Diversity (IHS), The University of Tokyo
In collaboration with: Mori Art Museum and New York University Asian/Pacific/American Institute Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange
Free and open to the public. No RSVP required. Seating on a first-come basis.
For questions, please contact Integrated Human Sciences Program for Cultural Diversity (IHS), The University of Tokyo: project1@ihs.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp
SCHEDULE
Day 1, Friday, June 26, 2015:
Roppongi Academy Hills, Roppongi Hills Mori Tower 49F, Auditorium
9AM Registration
9:30-10AM Introduction
Nanjo Fumio, Director, Mori Art Museum
Alexandra Chang, NYU, Asian/Pacific/American Institute
Thomas Looser, NYU, East Asian Studies
10AM-12PM Session 1: From Global Toward the International
Patrick Flores, Professor, University of the Philippines
Being International
Kim Sunjung, Director, Asian Culture Information Agency, Asian Cultural Complex
MoMA’s International Program and its changing relationship with Asia
Jay Levenson, Director, International Program, Museum of Modern Art
Nanjo Fumio, Director, Mori Art Museum
Oscar Ho, Professor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Discussant:
Deity, Pop Culture and the Umbrella Movement
John Tain, Curator, Getty Research Institute
Introductory talk and moderated by Kataoka Mami, Chief Curator, Mori Art Museum
12-1PM ランチ _Lunch
1-1:40PM 基調講演:アジアン・アメリカン・アート、汎太平洋地域のアート _
Keynote: On Asian American and Transpacific Art
Margo Machida, Professor, University of Connecticut, Storrs, 30 min
Q&A moderated by Thomas Looser, Associate Professor, New York University
1:40-5PM Panel 2: Trajectories of Asian diasporic scholarship and practice
Yuki Kihara, Interdisciplinary Artist, Samoa and New Zealand
Tomie Arai, Artist, New York
Oscar Oiwa, Artist, New York and São Paulo
Kuniyoshi, Noguchi and Ishigaki: Japanese Artists in New York in the 1930s
Tom Wolf, Professor, Bard College
Discussants:
Alice Ming Wai Jim, Associate Professor, Concordia University
Anna Kazumi Stahl, Director, NYU-Buenos Aires
Introductory talk and moderated by Alexandra Chang, Curator of Special Projects and Director of Global Arts Programs, NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute
DAY 2, Saturday, June 27, 2015: IMAGINING ASIAN ART IN GLOBAL ASIAS
The University of Tokyo Komaba Campus, Auditorium, Administration Office Bldg (3F)
This symposium, organized by the University of Tokyo’s Integrated Human Sciences for Cultural Diversity Program, aims to interrogate the notion of Global Asias and the contemporary situation of Asian art in and beyond geographical Asia.
The idea of Global Asias, which refers to the global dislocation, relocation, and transformation of goods, ideas, and people originating in Asia, calls attention to transnational conflict and negotiation at multiple intersecting levels. It is concerned with relationships not only between indigenous cultures inside Asia, but also between Asian-derived cultures outside of Asia. Global Asias looks, for example, not only at the relationship between Japan and the United States or Japan and Brazil, but also the relationship between Japanese-American and Japanese-Brazilian.
The symposium proposes to focus specifically on contemporary art practices in relationship to the global diffusion and transformation of Asian art and culture. We would like to explore how local art history in Asian countries is reconfigured by, and also reconfigures, the globalization of Asian art and its discourses. We are also interested in examining how art practices within a given country relate to art practices by those who are from that country but live and work elsewhere.
In addition, we would like to consider how the idea of Global Asias, which represents a plural and transnational concept of Asian culture, figures in the processes of globalization that in some way exercise hegemonic effects on local and indigenous art practices. The symposium will also consider global framings in relation to the concept of Global Asias which may include a call back to the international or may examine practices that call upon the global in terms of the planetary.
9:30AM Opening Remarks:
Uchino Tadashi, Professor, Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, University of Tokyo
Thomas Looser, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, New York University
10AM-12PM Panel 1: Beyond Boundaries in East and Southeast Asia
Synthetic Experience in Contemporary Korean Art: The Alternative and Cinematic Medium in the Age of Anxiety and Disaster
Chung Yeon Shim, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Theory, Hongik University, Seoul
Coordinates of Region, Latitudes of Locality
Patrick D. Flores, Professor, University of the Philippines, Manila
Perception and Distance of the Globalization: How Japanese Contemporary Art Has Been Delivered to New Audience
Kataoka Mami, chief curator at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Globalized East and Ecological Globe: Is There a Way for Chinese Art to Take?
Wang Chunchen, Associate Professor, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing
Discussants:
Inaga Shigemi, Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto
Miriam Wattles, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
Moderator:
Kajiya Kenji, Associate Professor, Archival Research Center, Kyoto City University of Arts
12-1PM Lunch
1-3PM Panel 2: Imagining Japan in Contested Sites of Contemporary Art
Hybridity, Precarity and Possibility in Recent Works by Yamashiro Chikako and Soni Kum: “Imagining an Asia, Politics and Art to Come”
Rebecca Jennison, Professor of Humanities, Kyoto Seika University, Kyoto
Global Asias: Diversity of Nipo-Brazilian Artists
Michiko Okano, Professor of the Undergraduate and Graduate Programs of History of Asian Art, Federal University of São Paulo
To the Ubbeboda station: Yoshio Nakajima in Northern Europe
Shimada Yoshiko, visual artist based in Japan
Mahatma Gandhi, Mao Zedong and Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes Viet Cong Captain Nguyen Van Lem: The Asian Images of Morimura Yasumasa, 1991-2010
Ayelet Zohar, Curator and Lecturer, Department of Art History, Tel Aviv University
Discussants:
Kuraya Mika, Chief Curator, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Ido Misato, Visiting Fellow, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University
Moderator:
Nakajima Takahiro, Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo
3:15-5:15PM Panel 3: Localized Mobilities / Mobilized Localities in Transnational Asias
Sociologies of Artistic Consumption and Education
John Clammer, Visiting Professor, United Nations University, Tokyo
Scale Drawing: Contemporary Art and Globalization in South Asia
Sonal Khullar, assistant professor of South Asian art, University of Washington, Seattle
Behind the Waves
Jawshing Arthur Liou, Professor, Indiana University, Bloomington
Art in the Centre of Asia: an Identity Crisis or a Multicultural Modernity?
Yuliya Sorokina, curator, lecturer and writer, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Behind the Waves”
Discussants:
C.J. Wee Wan-ling, Professor, Division of English, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Imamura Yusaku, Director, Tokyo Wonder Site
Moderator:
Uchino Tadashi
5:30-6:30PM Wrap-up Discussion
Kataoka Mami
Thomas Looser
Inaga Shigemi
Uchino Tadashi
Moderator:
Nakajima Takahiro