Thursday, January 11–13, 2018
Application deadline: Monday, April 10, 2017
The University of Hong Kong
Pok Fu Lam
Hong Kong
Organisers: Asia Art Archive in collaboration with The University of Hong Kong
This symposium asks how periodicals in Asia across the 20th century have fostered conversations about art and emergent forms of visuality. We are interested in how periodicals constitute genealogies of language and nomenclatures around the modern, the contemporary, the indigenous, the nation, arts and crafts, and tradition.
Light, affordable, and foldable, periodicals travelled with unprecedented speed from writer and artist to printer, and from mail service to reader. These circuits of ideas, practices, and readerships created (and were created by) new sites of experimentation in print technologies, illustration, graphic design, and forms literary and artistic. Their portability opened possibilities for the translation and transposition of ideas across media, language, culture, and geography.
“Periodical time”—the monthly, the fortnightly, the weekly, or at times, the single issue—became a way of serving and forming diverse publics, with spaces including popular, cultural, and literary magazines; newspapers; self-published zines; artist-run magazines; and journals.
For some artists and intellectuals, the print platform remains appealing for its visual, archival, discursive, and dissemination functions. We seek to understand how periodicals map, compile, translate, and republish texts as they define what it means to be modern and contemporary in specific locales.
This symposium invites contributions anchored around periodicals from Asia published between 1900 to the present.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
(1) How did periodicals in Asia shape and disseminate debates around discourses on modernism, aesthetics, the avant-garde, and the contemporary? How were these related to broader affinities such as those of the non-West, the post-colonial, the indigenous, or the alternative?
(2) How might we chart the contexts and economies of their production, conditions of publication, circuits of distribution, and networks of readership? What kinds of material content and collection did the form of the periodical make possible?
(3) In what ways did periodicals serve as sites of exhibition? What were the languages of visuality constituted within them via images of artwork, advertisements, covers, design and typography, and the very form of the periodical?
(4) What intersections between art and writing did periodicals enable? How did the periodical form facilitate experiments in language and new genres of writing? Who were the writers who made significant contributions to periodicals, and what new imaginaries around art did they introduce?
(5) What are the implications of digitalisation for the study of periodicals? How has large-scale digitalisation of periodicals opened new ways of seeing, perceiving, annotating, and researching the fields of modern and contemporary art?
Submission guidelines
Material may be submitted in English or Chinese. Please submit the following by Monday, April 10, 2017, to [email protected] (use the subject line: Art Periodicals Symposium):
(1) A 200-word abstract
(2) A two-page curriculum vitae with e-mail, phone number, and mailing address
Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered. Final papers must be in English or Chinese. There may be funding for speakers, subject to availability.
Asia Art Archive (AAA) is an independent non-profit organisation initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. With one of the most valuable collections of material on art freely available from its website and onsite library, AAA builds tools and communities to collectively expand knowledge through research, residency, and educational programmes.
Supported by the S. H. Ho Foundation Limited and the C. K. & Kay Ho Foundation
