主編語

Abstract

Toward the Future of the Archive: Revisiting the History and Movements of East Asian Contemporary Art

The No.34 issue of the Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum is composed by the theses from the international symposium titled Archival Turn: East Asian Contemporary Art and Taiwan (1960-1989). Collaborating with Taipei Fine Art Museum and Spring Foundation, I planned the conference, which took place on 8th and 9th April 2017, with the participation of scholars from various countries, such as Australia, Germany, America, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, France, the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan. Fifteen essays and eight case studies were presented at the venue, and it was an international symposium with relatively massive scale and academic depth in the Taiwanese art circle lately. The conference aimed to make a response to the recent trend to re-explore the history of contemporary art in various countries of East Asia after World War II. 

Modernism is regarded as the paradigm of art in the past and has been challenged by emerging forms of art since the 1960s. How countries in East Asia accept modernism and develop the paradigm shift in contemporary art experiment has their own historical context. Regarding the style of local art as the exotic specimens of western modernism has gradually been discarded by the academia separating itself from western centrism. Instead, the framework of multiple modernities or alternative modernities is used to examine the singularities of art in the various countries of East Asia. Departing from the performance with distinctive particularity, modern art is not confined to the role mimicking those from western concepts or schools, but reflects the shared issues about modernity among various countries in East Asia with some key archives acquired firsthand, for example, artistic sovereignty in the post-colonial context, cultural rebellion within the framework of the Cold War, the evolution of the historical avant-garde and left-wing movements before and after World War II, and experiments in the new avant-garde or post-war curatorial spaces.

Against the background of globalisation, governments, art museums and private organisations throughout East Asia have gone about establishing art archives respectively in recent years to promote the establishment, translation and curation of primary textual and audio-visual data about their own countries and Asia as a whole. Art archives have elevated the concept of historical materials from a static direction to a newer and more dynamic one. The concept of archives gets blurred; it is no longer in an eitheror status—either a document or a piece of art. An Archive can be illustrations, official documents, invitations, letters, manuscripts, journals, notes, sketches, drawings, drafts, models, photos, sounds, images, etc. This is not only a "visual turn" within the academia criticising visual-centrism and expanding research materials but also a new revolution in the habit of archival installations, applications and concepts. How can the expanding movement of carriers and media be dealt with when the archives are re-settled and involved in curation? How can the trace of struggling against biopolitics be excavated under the transnational counter-memory in and out of the genealogy of global art history and archive management?

Archives are the residence of memories. Re-archiving history in contemporary art suggests that modernity in East Asian art history is not merely a singular narrative of progress toward enlightenment, but the specters of the past reverberating along the island chain, driven by the force of archives. Four articles in the issue respond to the abovementioned concern surrounding archives. Hee-Young KIM's "Indeterminate Temporality Embedded in Nam June Paik's Early Experiments from 1959-1963" traces back to the avant-garde artistic creation in Nam June Paik's youth, primarily focusing on the practice in his first solo exhibition in Germany. Seng Yu Jin's "Descent of the Everyday: The Emergence of Critical Exhibitions on Southeast Asia in the 1970s" examines how the conceptual exhibitions in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia in the 1970s under the Cold War structure were conducted to be critical to everyday life. Clare Veal's "The Photographic Conditions of Contemporary Thai Art" focuses on how Thai contemporary art circle develops the experimental aspects differing from photographic ontology under the specific political transformation of local context. Song- Yong SING's "Delayed Plasticity: On the History, Aesthetics and Theory of 1980s Sinophone Single-channel Video Art" displays the critical image creations under the impact of democratization in Chinese speaking countries including Taiwan, Hong Kong and China in the 1980s. In these articles, archives are not empirical data purely used to construct linear history but the mental mapping redrawing the collective memories. The establishment and recalibration of archives herald an overturning of the genealogy of East Asian art in the historical imagination and writing. This is the active meaning of an "archival turn."