Birth and Decay in Sites of Flux: Agentive Traces from Art of mid-20th Century in East and South-East Asia
Across East and Southeast Asia, modernism is neither imitation nor rejection but an active reorientation. Through acts of translation and resistance, artists from China to the Philippines recast aesthetic modernity as a space of decolonial possibility, where inherited forms are unsettled, renewed, and made to speak otherwise.
This session discusses how East and Southeast Asian artists worked through the intertwined cultural, political, and institutional changes that shaped the region from the early 20th century into WWII. It examines how cross-regional encounters, shifting artistic hierarchies, and anxieties about influence or perceived belatedness informed both image-making and the evolving dynamics of the art world. Through the practices of Fang Junbi, Pan Yuliang, Kuroda Seiki, Nguyen Gia Tri, Georgette Chen, and Nena Saguil, the session highlights how gender and mobility shape access to training, exposure to different artistic languages, and the capacity to move between local and transnational networks. By tracing these entanglements and restructurings, the discussion shows how artists in this period negotiated broader forces of change while formulating new visual strategies rooted in their specific cultural and historical conditions.
January 28, 2026 - from 6 PM to 8 PM CET
· Reserve you place to the course here: LINK
· Discover the single class here: LINK
