SYMPOSIA

Urgent Talk 048: American Art in Asia

* Booked Out

Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation available

The “Urgent Talk” series provides a platform for discussion around artists, curators, critics, activists and others across the globe engaged in significant, innovative work that demands urgent attention.

How do we think and talk about “American” and/or “Asian” art, at a time when the production and display of contemporary art is taking place across diffused borders, under the fluid conditions of a world dramatically transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental crisis, and the recent wars on multiple fronts in Europe and the Middle East?

This panel brings together art scholars Kajiya Kenji and Michelle Lim, with artists James Jack and David Kelley, to reflect on how postwar notions about national and personal identities have given way to new conversations about ecological sustainability, migration and migrants, community and the Global South issues. Their critical perspectives about the long history of exchanges between the Americas and Asia bring fresh insights into how cultural vicissitudes of Japan are complex and multi-layered, when seen from within and the outside.

This discussion is based on the recently published anthology American Art in Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence (Routledge, 2022), which includes contributions from the four guest panelists, as well as other leading scholars, curators and artists around the world.

Date & Time

19:00-20:30, Monday, December 11, 2023 (Doors open: 18:45)

Appearing

Kajiya Kenji (Art historian)
James Jack (Artist)
David Kelley (Artist)
Michelle Lim (Art historian, Curator)

Moderator

Yahagi Manabu (Assistant Curator, Mori Art Museum)

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Kajiya Kenji

Kajiya Kenji is an art historian who focuses on post-World War II art and art criticism in the United States and Japan. He is a professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo and the deputy director of The University of Tokyo’s Art Center. Before moving back to Tokyo, he was an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts, Hiroshima City University, and at the Archival Research Center, Kyoto City University of Arts. He also serves as the director of the Oral Art History Archives of Japanese Art since 2006. His book, Emancipated Painting: Color Field Painting and 20th Century American Culture, was just published by the University of Tokyo Press this fall. He edited Usami Keiji: A Painter Resurrected (University of Tokyo Press, 2021) and co-edited From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945−1989: Primary Documents (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012), Shaping the History of Art in Southeast Asia (Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2017) and 12 volumes of Selected Works of Art Criticism by Nakahara Yūsuke (Gendai Kikakushitsu + BankART 1929, 2011–2024) and others.

James Jack

James Jack is an artist who weaves ecological stories of human and more than human resilience. Exhibitions include documenta fifteen (Kassel, Germany, 2022), Setouchi Triennale (Japan, 2013, 2016, 2022), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017), nichido contemporary art (Tokyo, 2019), Honolulu Museum of Art (2018), Busan Biennale Sea Art Festival (South Korea, 2013), Donkey Mill Art Center (Hawaii, 2021), Fukuoka Prefectural Museum of Art (Japan, 2016), Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016, 2019) and Oku-Noto Triennale (Japan, 2021, 2023). Published writings include “Peripatetic in the Pandemic,” Art Journal Open (2022), “Dirt Stories,” ANTENNAE (2021), “Spirits of Tsureshima” Shima (2018) as well as chapters in books including Place-Labor-Capital (NTU CCA Singapore, 2018) and Mono-ha: Requiem for the Sun (Blum & Poe, 2012). Jack holds a PhD in art practice (Tokyo University of the Arts), was a Crown Prince Akihito scholar (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa), postdoctoral fellow at Social Art Lab (Kyushu University), Archipelagic Artist-in-Residence Founding Director (Yale-NUS College), Georgette Chen fellow (Singapore) and is Associate Professor of Intermedia Art and Science (Waseda University, Tokyo).

David Kelley

David Kelley is an artist working with photography, video, and installation. His recent projects draw attention to the effects of global capitalism, resource extraction, and shifting physical and political landscapes. Influenced by a range of visual traditions, Kelley draws upon elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, performance, and avant-garde cinema. By working at the intersection of these strategies, he encourages an understanding of his subjects that is simultaneously direct and speculative.
His work has been shown in galleries and museums nationally and intenationally. Recent exhibitions include the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Fotofest Biennial, Houston. Other exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, The Bank in Shanghai, the deCordova Biennial in Boston, BAK in Utrecht, MAAP space in Australia, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok.
Kelley received a Master of Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine, and was a 2010-2011 resident at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is currently based in Los Angeles, CA, and is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at University of Southern California.

Michelle Lim

Michelle Lim is an art historian and curator based in New York and Singapore. She holds a PhD in art history from Princeton University and was a Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program 2009-2010. Michelle has worked on research and curatorial projects for institutions such as the Asia Society Museum (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Princeton University Art Museum (New Jersey, USA), and Singapore Art Museum. She taught Asian art history at The Cooper Union and contemporary curating at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York before taking up the faculty position at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2014.