The talk on City of Art: State, market and the urban reinvention of Shanghai and The Rise of the Art Fair in Hong Kong is now online!
Please join session B >>here<< with 2 speakers on Vietnamese art:
Session B1: Kissinger’s Letters in an Art Museum? Danh Vo’s Historical Provocations on Display at the Guggenheim
Date: 23/03/2021 19:00-19:45
Venue: Online on Zoom. Zoom link will be sent to successful registrants 3 days prior to the event.
Abstract:
Walking into Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo’s 2018 solo retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim museum in New York, visitors might not suspect that none of the works on display were made by the artist. Fragmented statues, hanging swaths of vinyl, handwritten manuscripts and wooden boxes could easily pass as the oeuvre of an interdisciplinary installation artist. Yet, the pieces on display were not fabricated, and instead carefully selected at auction, purchased and then artfully displayed in the museum by the artist. That in itself would not raise any eyebrows in the Post-Production and Post-Duchampian age of the artist as curator if the objects that Danh Vo collects were not so heavily loaded with historical symbolism. White house menus, Kennedy Administration chairs, chandeliers that hung above the Paris Peace Accords and catholic statues looted from Vietnamese churches are among the not so ordinary ready-mades on view. This paper will examine the how these historical documents function within an art museum, the role of the artist in provoking and engaging with both the institution and the public in macabre history lessons.
Speaker:
Nora A. Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her PhD from Cornell University and has taught at UCLA, National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2014 and serves on the Academic Advisory Board at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. She is the author of “Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art” (Hawaii 2004 and NUS Press 2009) three edited volumes and numerous articles on Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian and Vietnamese Art. More recently she co-edited a special issue of the “Art Journal” titled “History as Figure of Thought in Contemporary Art in South and Southeast Asia,” Winter 2018.
Session B2: The musealization of the North Vietnamese propaganda poster: the consequences on the status and function of the object
Date: 23/03/2021 19:45-20:30
Venue: Online on Zoom. Zoom link will be sent to successful registrants 3 days prior to the event.
Abstract:
The North Vietnamese propaganda poster emerged in 1945 during the rise of the Vietnamese independence movement against the French colonial regime. Following the recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1954, it became an official state tool intended to convey the messages of the leaders to the population. The institutionalization of its production and distribution led to the proliferation of the prints and increased its visibility. Originally designed to be an ephemeral object, since the 1990s, the propaganda poster has entered private collections and State museums. This paper will examine the consequences of the transformation of the nature and function of the poster due to its museumizing, including the process of selection, acquisition and presentation.
Speaker:
Jade Thau is a graduate of the Ecole du Louvre in Arts and Archaeology of India and Southeast Asia, and of the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Vietnamese Studies. In 2018, she began a PhD thesis at Aix-Marseille University under the supervision of Philippe Le Failler and Nora Taylor. Her research focuses on the evolution of production methods and the place of the propaganda poster in North Vietnamese society from 1945 to the present day. She is the recipient of a European grant (2019), a scholarship from the EFEO and one from the Flora Blanchon Foundation, which will enable her to carry out her field research in various institutions in Vietnam as well as interview with local actors in the coming year.