Conceptualizing TRANS-ASIA:Introduction
Conceptualizing TRANS-ASIA is a challenge to the essentialist geography identified as "Asia," the name and recognition of a place, discourse, visuality, and, most of all, of an identity of humans. In the field of visual arts, the subject of Asia serves a specific function in global capitalism, representing different nation-states, cultural heritages, and traditions, all of which continue to be promoted by museum collections and the art market. It is here that Asian art constitutes a monolith of national identities under the rubric of "Asia." In contrast, TRANS-ASIA reflects migration, diaspora, and transnational flows that have reshaped this nationalist norm of normative citizenship in art. To conceptualize TRANS-ASIA, we convened a group of researchers working on disparate studies of art and art histories that illustrate the diversity of the aesthetic field.
The TRANS-ASIA concept is informed by an interdisciplinary discourse. Kuan-Hsing Chen, in his seminal book Asia as Method, endeavored to reconceive Asia as the object of study, formulating instead a "geocolonial historical materialism" that could deimperialize and decolonize contexts of Asian knowledge production.1 Since the 1990s, the "trans" lexicon developed from what Kōichi Iwabuchi describes as a "critical engagement with transnational circulation of capital, people, and culture and uneven connections it engenders."2 The goal was to delimit the postcolonialist obsession with critiquing the West on behalf of a generative discourse that acknowledges statist imperialisms and the heteronormative conditions of life in the late aftermath of colonization. [End Page 393]
Transcribed for ASAP/Journal, the dossier editors' discussions with two prominent contemporary artists, Shahzia Sikander and Patty Chang, illustrate the shift from the presumptions of a monolithic Asian art to a TRANS-ASIA perspective. The conversations have been edited for the journal, but they are accessible in video form for anyone who wants to view them.3 We offer the discussion as materials to understand TRANS-ASIA further, but beyond our short descriptions here, we have avoided "analyzing" them so as to allow the artists' words to be read in their own right. In Alpesh Kantilal Patel's engagement with Shahzia Sikander, the artist discusses her creative process—from transmedial connections of painting, drawing, and sculpture—while reviewing works that cross South Asian and Greco-Roman traditions in the context of transtemporal expressions: past, present, and future intermingled over decades of exhibitions. For instance, Sikander's Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), her sculptural entwining of the female sexual figures Celestial Dancer and Venus De Milo, is exemplary of transtemporal and transgeographical Hindu and Greek icons. This representation of queer female desire illustrates the capacity for bridging Asian studies and queer/trans studies, the potential of which is articulated in the special issue of TSQ, "Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans" (2018), guest edited by Howard Chiang, Todd A. Henry, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung.4
Jane Chin Davidson's conversation with artist Patty Chang underscores the radical shift that TRANS-ASIA contributes to the ecofeminist discourse. Chang's recent Learning Endings project saw the development of a "touch ritual" (a phrase she used in our conversation, an excerpt of which is published as part of this dossier) for the scientific process of necropsy on sea mammals, which was an outcome of the artist's collaboration with scientist Aleksija Neimanis and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis. Chang asked that Aleksija place a hand on the body of the animal as a ritual gesture of animal/humanity before conducting the necropsy. The finding of milk in one of the animal's bodies led to a discussion with Chin Davidson about the connections among Chang's other performative works, such as Letdown (Aral Sea) (2017), completed in Uzbekistan, and Milk Debt (2020), presenting breast pumping in Hong Kong and all over the world as an action of care during COVID. In Buddhism, a child's debt to their mother for breastfeeding them is so great that it cannot be repaid until the next life. Through long-standing spiritual cosmologies, Chang's TRANS-ASIA work puts into question the human–nonhuman binary. [End Page 394]
The interviews transcribed below were part of a double panel on TRANSASIA at the ASAP/14 (2023) conference, "Arts of the Fugitivity." Included were short panel presentations from scholars based in Hong Kong, Canada, the United States, and Germany. For this dossier, we asked the panelists to contribute short, pithy statements to initiate further research on the topics they presented. The statements are not fully-fledged articles, but are instead thought pieces that could become their foundation. Andrew Gayed writes that Arab, Middle Eastern, and Islamicate regions are often elided within the discussion of Asia. He queries how gender and sexual freedoms are frequently used to justify violence and imperialism imposed on the Middle East, particularly in the wake of the continuing war on Palestine. Jessica Baum suggests that a TRANSASIA framework allows for a more nuanced understanding of the "plurilocal subjectivity" of Kim Lim, a Singaporean-British sculptor and printmaker of Chinese descent, and the "residues of colonialism that saturate her biography … profoundly shaped her [works'] unique reception and creative reflection." Vivian K. Sheng describes how in London, Shen Yuan's exhibition Un Matin Du Monde (One Morning of the World, 2000), a reproduction of a rooftop from a Chinese courtyard (composed of material from the artist's hometown), produced multisensory connections with visitors yet simultaneously visually obstructed ones. Moreover, the work points to the artist's increasingly precarious and disembodied relationship to these disappearing dwellings in China. Meng Yi, based in Cologne, Germany, considers women's bodies represented in artworks produced primarily in post-1949 China. Yi's essay shows the shift from statist to global capitalistic China, resulting from a robust production of artworks exploring gender in the country. Finally, we asked each scholar to examine TRANS-ASIA through five images of their choosing. The images need not be the artworks discussed in the essay (although some are), but they should provide an opportunity to address the concept by thinking through the standalone visual image. Collectively, the dossier of images and text presents a snapshot of approaches to TRANS-ASIA as we continue to explore and expand our understanding of what the concept can offer.
Before the conversation below took place, Sikander and Patel talked over Zoom. Patel shared a range of words/concepts he had been thinking about regarding "trans" as a prefix as part of the exhibition "Form and Formless," organized for UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, which included a glass mosaic piece of Sikander's that she had never exhibited. While discussing [End Page 395] the concepts, Sikander brought up images from her archive of work. This became the spark for the forty-five-minute conversation. Exploring TRANS-ASIA has engendered a methodology that results in a coproduction of knowledge. To give the reader a sense of the back-and-forth, screenshots of the images Sikander brought up are interspersed throughout the selected excerpts.
Thank you, Alpesh, for inviting me. I absolutely love this concept [TRANS-ASIA] that you're exploring. It was also tough to select images because they all seemed to work fluidly within all these categories.5 And as you know, I have been engaged with this idea of the in-between for years, and that space is so fecund for me. It is a counter that can slow down consumption or resist a predetermined understanding of my work.
I wanted to begin with the sculptural work Promiscuous Intimacies because we had an opportunity to discuss it before in your anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2021). This sculptural work is intimately connected to the painting Intimacies, which I did more than two decades ago. How does one capture time in an artwork? In this case, I am taking a detail out and imagining its multiple possibilities that can still be expanded and pushed by
Shahzia shows Intimacies, 2001, watercolor on tea-stained wasli paper, 20.3 × 27.9 cm, and Promiscuous Intimacies, 2020, patinated bronze, 106.7 × 61 × 45.7 cm.
[End Page 396] shifting the medium. It is an exercise I took on myself.
And I think we're talking about "transmedia," too—moving from painting and drawing to sculpture and making connections over time.
Yes, as someone who frequently draws and paints, I also constantly look at sculpture. I am also interested in what happens when the two-dimensional drawing is pushed into three dimensions.
[Shahzia shows two views of Promiscuous Intimacies (2020)] These two figures ostensibly come from different geographies/traditions, Greco-Roman and South Asian. However, the way in which you've aligned the figures makes it clear that they are interconnected: There's no way to distinguish between them. Art history, though, has separated these representations into different genealogies of knowledge.
That's so true. Much of nineteenth-century scholarship has been about creating these silos—like East, West, Asian, or Islam—as if there were no crossovers or relationships between cultures. But we're talking about syncretic visual histories. Treating them as persistent bounded categories is dispiriting. … The underlying sentiment is that one is oppressive and another is oppressed: This creates a hierarchy and structure for Western art history.
Shahzia shows Maligned Monsters I and II, 2000, aquatint with sugarlift spit bite, dry point chine colle, 76.2 × 55.9 cm.
[End Page 397]
I often create works that sit for decades, and then I return to them and add more. There's this refusal I feel in being determined in ways that don't organically function in how one thinks—or the way one lives or behaves or makes art. All of this becomes fodder for my practice.
You're talking about temporality being trans: past, the present, and the near future—all intermingled. As you said, you're drawing on works that you've done before. You're finishing works that have come together over decades.
Oh, I remember this! So you've also used a variation of the sculpture form at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2000. I hadn't made that connection.
Yes! I am constantly seeking multiplicity within a form. When this was made, I was reading Partha Mitter's 1977 book Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Here, I was interested in how to entangle aesthetics outside of the classical art historical canon—in this case, Mannerist and broadly classical South Asian styles—and create representations that become "monsters" of another kind. This is a critique of Winckelmann's art historical premise.6
I'm also citing Celestial Dancer (Devata). This year [2023], the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Shahzia shows Maligned Monsters, 1999–2000, drawing and installation at the Museum of Modern Art, part of Projects 70: Janine Antonia, Shahzia Sikander, and Kara Walker, 2000–2001.
[End Page 398]
Shahzia shows Bronzino, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, 1545, oil on wood, 146.1 × 116.2 cm and Artist unknown, Celestial Dancer (Devata), mid-eleventh century, 88.3 × 50.8 × 31.8 cm.
returned it to India. But for three decades (as far as I remember), it was the Met's poster child for South Asian collections. In the '90s, the term was "postcolonial," but now it's "decolonial." I was engaged with these ideas in terms of wanting to identify the problematic provenance but intuitively and implicitly rather than consciously.
If you look at these two characters, they may be archetypal, but they also carry the weight of the world that women often have to bear. But then you don't know who's in a position of power. You can guess who is in power or what the nature of the relationship is. All of that is deliberately left open-ended, while the actual work is incredibly precise.
It's not clear if a figure is being pushed down or lifted up. It's somewhere between these. I'm also thinking here about one of the phrases I shared with you: "chiasmus/intertwining."7
You think they are both looking at each other, but actually, the form resembling Celestial Dancer is looking a little away, but Venus is seeking her attention.
Let's talk about fugitivity since it is part of the conference title. For instance, looking here at the Times Square work, there's an inability to really pin down figures. They escape meaning before we can identify them—this quality, I feel, emerges in a lot of your work. [End Page 399]
Shahzia shows the making of Promiscuous Intimacies, 2020, patinated bronze, 106.7 × 61 × 45.7 cm.
Shahzia shows SpiNN, watercolor on paper, 2002–2003, vegetable color, dry pigment, watercolor, and tea on wasli paper, 20.3 × 27.9 cm and then shows stills of Gopi-contagion, shown on electronic billboards in Times Square, New York City, 2015.
[End Page 400]
That work is connected to an animation I made alongside the drawing SpiNN, where the bodies disappear, and what is left is a trace: what they leave behind is their hair. As they multiply and move, they become this particle system. It can function as something that has in its kinetic possibilities the ability to have many multiple associations, whether it's bats descending at midnight or migratory patterns of birds or spheres. The work can fluctuate between something solid and liquid, so that, for me, is an exciting possibility.
This also makes me think of Édouard Glissant's notion of the "archipelago"—each island of which it is composed is a singular unit, but the island is also a part of a larger whole. It is both multiple and one, and the forms you mobilize have this kind of feeling of being always singular and plural.
Yet I can't help but think about the planetary and celestial. Moving beyond even thinking about humans and geological formations on our planet, something much bigger is happening in your work.
When you're thinking about the transitory or the untranslatable or unknowable—there is a mystery that is incredibly rich to explore. Then it's also power, powerlessness, human, and nature.
Drawing allows me to explore these ideas—it's a connecting tissue and is elastic. Also, it's not just a foundation to build an idea, but also
Shahzia shows a still of Parallax, 2013, 3-channel, single-image HD digital animation with 5.1 surround sound, 15 mins., 26 sec. music score and sound design by Du Yun; installation view, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2015.
[End Page 401]
Shahzia shows a still from Parallax, 2013, installation view, MAXXI, Rome, Italy, 2016–2017.
a collaborative tool, whether aligning yourself with radical feminist poets or as a libretto, when you're working with composers, musicians, as well as singers. That freedom is something critical and can be something that can be present in the material or the iconography that emerges out of that material.
You know, there's this amorphousness to your figure. As you said, what we're looking at is never quite clear. Is it even a human figure? We're asked not to know, or we don't have to know or pin it down.
There's also a connection between my material experiments and the depiction of gender—my forms are not male or female or masculine or feminine. There are multiple masculinities and femininities. This quality of amorphousness comes from the nature of gouache against the background of charcoal. There will be resistance when the two materials come together. I enjoy that I have to think on my feet. Like, I have to really think fast because I'm tapping into multiple things, so it's an exercise where you can think broadly and then believe that all of that will filter through. Then, you know, of course there are times when it will be more successful, and there will be times when it won't be, but that's the beauty of pushing the boundaries of any medium or even coming back.
And yet the idea of the drawing—even like something like these figures—a sort of a lexicon begins to emerge. You know, in coffee [End Page 402]
Shahzia shows a different still from Parallax, 2013, as installed in MAXXI, Rome, Italy, 2016–2017.
Shahzia shows Écriture Feminine series, 1993–1995, gouache and charcoal on paper, 31.8 × 45.7 cm.
[End Page 403]
Shahzia shows A Slight and Pleasing Dislocation, 1993–1994, ink on paper, 16.5 × 64.8 cm each.
table books on Indian art, you have these objects isolated in photographs that cast long shadows. To me, the figures I am drawing emerge from these shadows—they are like little monsters trying to crawl out from the page. In my drawings, they have freedom.
I can't help but think of Glissant's idea that the right to opacity is the birth of freedoms (and I am paraphrasing him).8
It is like a strategy to deal with these after-effects of colonial histories of war. Where are those histories floating around, and how much of that is accessible to the Global South? To people with privilege, like ourselves, there are times when you want to go and look into material that is in storage in Western institutions, and often you don't even have access to it. So, you know, we're still talking about "empire."
Speaking of that, I want to bring up the idea of liquidity, one of those terms that aligns with my exhibition Form and Formless of which you are a part. "Liquidity" is also a financial term—there's a lot of power and money interconnected with museums and collections.
When you bring up these museums with collections that harbor and prevent access … you've had this experience recently where you wanted to go to an institution and look at something, and the process was really difficult. [End Page 404]
I wanted to photograph some artwork at the Met but couldn't.
I didn't want to reveal the institution we were discussing—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—in case you didn't want to do so, but I'm glad you did!
Often, you're told the works are digitally available online. But so many of the premodern manuscripts have enormous amounts of detail. Those details are not visible to the naked eye. You need a magnifying glass so you can dig deeper into the details and there are times when you see painted things that otherwise are invisible.
Also, there is so much material that has yet to be archived, and only a tiny part of what is there is available to view. You know, prioritizing materials from outside Western visual traditions is at the bottom of the list.
Yes, this leads to the idea of the "porous archive" I shared with you. The archive is leaky and only comes into being with our engagement with it. So what happens when engagement's not possible, as you describe it at the Met?
[to audience:] Shahzia and I plan to go to the Met, walk around, and record our conversation about what we are seeing (and not seeing) and use some of the lexicon developed in the interview like porous archive, chiasmus/intertwining, fugitivity, liquidity, and right to opacity, and expanded affinities.
[to Shahzia:] That is, I'm happy that we have avoided using some details (where you were born, where you live, and fixed ideas of gender) typically used to discuss your work and find other language/words.
Yes, thank you Alpesh. It's so inspiring and generative for me to have conversations with you because there are so many incredible ways in which you can open up one's own understanding of what one creates. It's the frustration of being boxed in by language. Even though written language is not my domain, I try to take responsibility as a visual artist. But I often find that no matter what I am doing, the same frameworks are used and this can be so limiting—and this has been happening for decades. That's the only language that will be used again and again and again in curatorial spaces. How can we dismantle that relationship between the work and the language being used in the curatorial circuits?
What frustrates me is that I traffic in words and language and am aware of how oppressive or constraining they can be. I've loved engaging with your work because it gives me a different vocabulary than I may have anticipated. That is, there is a sense of the language as becoming or emerging rather than as something that is restrictive.
This work reminds me that while your work is often discussed in terms of human figuration and trans/nationality, there's also much more there: ecology and land, the cosmos, and the universe. [End Page 405]
Shahzia shows Infinite Woman, 2019–21, watercolor, ink, gouache, and gold leaf on paper, 152.4 × 167.6 cm.
[Jane Chin Davidson joins Zoom talk]
This is such generative work because it brings alive that reproductive value. That is, it's a very ecofeminist view.
I often think about how to counter the very deeply entrenched, masculine ways of being and thinking. One way I do that is to consider the feminine as something that lurks at the boundaries between binaries and mobilizing that aesthetically can expose the fear that lurks around the same boundaries. It can melt them. At the same time, I think about how not to tie the work to a very heteronormative lineage either. So in that way, it cannot or can no longer be just a very conventional understanding of nation and diaspora.
[to audience] We are close to the end of our conversation, and this back-and-forth is part of a more extended conversation that Shahzia and I have been having and will continue to have. That is, I'll wrap this up to say "to be continued," because I think that these conversations will emerge, like when we go to the Met.
Absolutely. I look forward to that and I appreciate this way of our conversation to be so open and in the moment—and to be able to share this engagement that allows others to enter it. I appreciate all of everybody that's [End Page 406] listening in. Alpesh and I didn't predetermine a conversation ahead of time. It was very fluid. So thank you, Alpesh, for that.
Doing something performative like this involves a lot of trust. So thank you for your trust, Shahzia.
As shown in the following transcript of Patty Chang and Jane Chin Davidson's conversation for ASAP/14, Patty has long worked transnationally across Asia's borders and continues to expand her performative visualizations. Representing the fluidity of human and animal identifications, the concept of water changes the geocolonial mappings of territories and their cultural contexts. We're presenting the edited version of the transcript alongside the accommodating screenshots.
Thank you for inviting me, Jane and Alpesh. For today's presentation, I wanted to start with a video project that was shot in 2011, when my partner, David Kelley, was completing a residency at Fogo Island in Newfoundland, Canada. Just about a week before I was set to visit, a sperm whale had washed up to the shore. Everyone on the island seemed to know about it. My first impression when encountering the animal was just being
Patty Chang, Invocation for a Wandering Lake: Whale (2015), Fogo Island, Newfoundland.
[End Page 407] really overwhelmed; I didn't really understand the experience.
I couldn't stop thinking about this animal that had died and washed ashore. The young juvenile sperm whale died maybe within a week's time; the weather's really bad there, even in June in terms of rain and cold. I decided that I needed to do something about it. And so I went and bought waders, a sponge, and gloves at the local shop, and I created a performance by washing the whale. Later, this performance became part of a two-channel video installation called Invocation for a Wandering Lake, which is part of my larger The Wandering Lake project.
Much later, after I started working on the other main project that I'm going to talk about today, I realized that this was my stranding story, which is the first time that you encounter a stranded marine mammal out of place on the shore banks. The whale is dead and not in the environment where it was meant to be. It's something that I'll never forget and will also influence my work.
For The Wandering Lake project, I was looking at the movement of water through areas around the world, starting from Xinjiang, China, where this image was taken, set in Uzbekistan. And this image as well in eastern China, where the longest aqueduct was built around 2015.
Patty Chang, Mourning Sickness 2017, Muynak, Uzbekistan.
[End Page 408]
Patty Chang, Configurations, stills from video installation, 2017, North to South Water Diversion in China.
"I identify as a mammal."
This line begins the second paragraph of the introduction to Alexis Pauline Gumbs's book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. The next sentences are "I identify as a Black woman ascending with and shaped by a whole group of people who were transubstantiated into property and kidnapped across an ocean. And, like many of us, I am simply attracted to the wonder of marine life."9
The complexity of hearing those written lines together brings up many emotions. They tell me so many things about self-identification, about skills of belonging, about the depth of trauma, and about plain old joy and wonder at being alive. Further in Undrowned, Gumbs talks about the use of the word "identification" in science to recognize and name different species. She suggests that identification is also known as that process through which we say what is what, like which dolphin is that over there and what are its properties, to identification, that process through which we expand our empathy and the boundaries of who we are become more fluid, because we identify with the experience of someone different, maybe someone of a whole different so-called species.10 [End Page 409]
Touch Ritual Archive, Learning Endings Project, with Astrida Neimanis and Patty Chang, 2021. Photo by Aleksija Neimanis.
This here is an image of a gloved hand on a deceased harbor porpoise, which is a marine mammal that lives near the shore in saltwater seas. It breathes air like humans and comes up to the surface in order to survive. Harbor porpoises are described as being very shy and avoid coming up near boats. When surfacing for air, they do not splash.
I have been in a collaborative project named Learning Endings with Astrida Niemanis, a scholar in feminist environmental studies based in Canada, and Aleksija Neimanis, a wildlife pathologist in Sweden who works with marine mammals. We started working together in January 2021 at the height of the pandemic, and the question we asked ourselves was: What can we learn about endings during this period full of endings and climate crisis through necropsy? In scientific research, necropsy is the examination of an animal after it has died by cutting it open and observing—sometimes also smelling and listening—in order to find out why it has died. Samples are taken to add to databases of information stored for the future.
Since we live in three countries with multiple time zones, we met weekly on Zoom to try to think and feel through this question. These meetings were often very early in the morning and very late into the night because of our [End Page 410]
Patty Chang, Astrida Neimanis, and Aleksija Neimanis, Learning Endings, 2021.
physical distances. One of the many threads of working in interdisciplinarity was thinking about how our separate languages of science, humanities, and art are different. So when we listen and when we speak, we need to engage in hyperaware ways. We also attended Alexia's necropsy through online video chat. Since she's in Sweden, we would log on in the middle of the night for three to four hours while she talked us through what she was doing and what she's looking at and looking for. And we would ask questions; our presence online or our role as outside viewers somehow heightened the importance of this act. When we were beginning the collaboration, I asked if Aleksija would be willing to add a ritual before she began each necropsy.
I asked her to take a moment alone with the animal. Think about the animal, touch the animal with her hand, and then take a photo or video to hold the moment for others. This ritual took place alongside the other parts of our collaboration, which included doing interviews with scientists about their emotional selves in relation to this work they do for science, especially for this end-of-life care.
As one of the last to touch the animals and witness the deaths of sometimes an entire [End Page 411]
Screenshots 6 and 7. Photo by Aleksija Neimanis, Touch Ritual Archive, Learning Endings Project, with Astrida Neimanis and Patty Chang, 2021.
[End Page 412] species, this work can be difficult emotional work. How can we recognize the grief, especially when this aspect of the work of scientists is often overlooked by the public and also sometimes by the scientists themselves? We're currently asking other scientists who perform necropsies on marine mammals to also engage in this ritual with the idea of building a touch ritual archive.
Alexia goes through all the parts of the body carefully. Everything is normal and in good condition, except obviously that it's dead. She cuts through the blubber layer, the intestines, the spleen, the esophagus. When she cuts open the fore stomach, she finds breast milk. She says this is unexpected because the animal is older than a baby. Or maybe it is just a bigger baby. Meaning that scientists may not know how big porpoise babies can be.
This has woken me up. I didn't imagine breast milk in the stomach. I am fixated on how I didn't realize it could drink milk. It doesn't dawn on me until I see the milk in the body. I asked for a close-up as evidence that it is real. A layperson cannot imagine these things, I think, until we actually see them.
The milk is emotional. I can't recall much after this fact. A juvenile who already eats, with milk in its stomach, points to more unknowns. Scientific questions. Is this animal actually larger than we think it is at this age? Does it feed and drink at the same time for longer than we assumed? Unscientific questions. What was the porpoise feeling when it was caught in the net? Was it swimming alone or with others? What did the other porpoises do when it got caught? How do they feel? Did they try to rescue it? Did it know it was going to die? Was its mother there? Did its mother know it was going to die? What if it didn't drink before it was caught in the net, but after? Did its mother feed it breast milk to soothe it while entangled so that its last moments would be calm instead of frightening? Human intuition will lead us to assume the animal must have drunk milk just before getting caught in the net. But is it possible that the mother fed it milk after getting caught? Is it also human intuition to presume the mother knew something was very wrong and offered the breast in comfort to soften the suffering?
What would I do in this situation if my child were trapped in a net and was slowly drowning to death with no possible way to save him? Sometimes I imagine being in an earthquake or a car accident and he is crushed by a large piece of concrete or cut in half by a metal blade or pinned by the car. In the cruel series of events, he is still alive, although death is imminent. What would I do for him while he was dying? Say comforting thoughts to him? Touch him or hold his hand? Or give him the breast to soothe him like I did when he was tired and cranky or hurt his finger?
It dawns on me that we are three mothers with a dead baby. I'm not sure how to feel about that. [End Page 413]
This is so poignant, the moment of the video where the milk is discovered by you all. Your first-person telling is a performative action that fuses creative video with the documentary image. This is so powerful coming from a performance artist. Talking about how bodies can be this vessel for the archive as well as an empathetic touch now in the life of animals is so powerful coming from a performance artist. It is really what we need right now. This was extraordinarily moving for me as a mother of three children who breastfed all three of them. I wondered if this affects others, people who've never breastfed their child. So I wanted to ask you that question if you think it's particularly a "mother moment," why we were all so moved.
You know, this idea that this thing that lives in the water that looks like a fish could have breast milk in its stomach was so incomprehensible. And I really like that it was just a moment, all of a sudden, where I felt like I was related to the animal. It was really strange. The thing is, you know, the title of this project is We Are All Mothers. All of us collaborators are mothers.
I had just met these people, this being the first necropsy we witnessed together, with Alexia performing them and us observing. We had this really deep experience. So I don't know the answer to your question. I mean, I've shown it to people who are not mothers. It seems like the work affects them somehow. I don't know. Maybe it is just the fact that as mammals, this is like part of our DNA. And so perhaps it's just that connection.
Right, I mean that's what is affective about the whole work. You start out by citing
We Are All Mothers, Learning Endings Project, Aleksija Neimanis, Astrida Neimanis and Patty Chang, 2021.
[End Page 414] Alexis Pauline Gumbs—"We Are All Mammals"—it's a different way to think of our own bodies. In your other video work, the Milk Debt performance, which went through various iterations until 2021, you talked about breast pumping as an act of care. The Hong Kong protests began in 2019, and they were going on at the same time as Milk Debt, when you enlisted mothers everywhere to pump milk.11 I'm thinking about the Buddhist milk debt: Children can only repay their mothers for breastfeeding them in the next life after death. Watching We Are All Mothers, I started to bring all those threads together, thinking about the Uzbekistan photographs of your breast milk during the time you were weaning and your connection with the drying up of the Aral Sea. Your drying-up process was a part of your journey essentially, when you were in Uzbekistan gathering all this evidence about the dried-up Aral Sea, which constitutes the other part of Wandering Lake, Boat.
Yes, these projects were presented at the Queens Museum exhibition, along with the Fogo Island whale, when I started to have questions around this sympathetic loss of flow.
It was difficult to do this work in Uzbekistan, because it was a police state. Since you couldn't take pictures of what was going on, you decided to take snapshots of your pumped breast milk instead, right? Was that a sort of intuitive action on your part back then, with the dried-up sea and the experience of weaning? I mean, how did that all come together?
Yeah, I went to Uzbekistan twice. The first time, I was pregnant, so I was experiencing morning sickness. When you have morning
Patty Chang, Letdown (Aral Sea) 2017, from the photograph series in Muynak Uzbekistan.
[End Page 415] sickness, you just feel kind of ill and nauseated and very affected by smells, very sensitive to the outside world. I started at that point to think.
I remember that my body worked as a "lens" of some sort. At the time, I was doing research while meeting artists, all kinds of people, just trying to have an understanding. I felt like that research was being taken in not only intellectually, but through my body, and this really affected by this state that I was in. So I started thinking about it then, and when I returned after I had given birth, now in the weaning process, I had already been using my body to make milk for probably at least a year and a half, maybe even a little bit longer. So the process was very present, just thinking of my body as a "machine" around that time. When the baby's old enough to start weaning off milk, the body kind of slows down production and eventually just stops producing. The state of flux in these transitions was really present in my mind. I thought about how the body and the land are sort of parallel circumstances.
And so I just decided that I would document along the way as the first time I went to Uzbekistan; it was very sensitive to take pictures of anything that was infrastructural. People just also don't want you to take pictures. Mostly I think because it's uncertain what's an okay thing to take picture of. So all of those things led to me to focus on the milk.
It's really kind of a wonderful parallel, though, the body of the land, the sea.
The Wandering Lake was so impactful. The Invocation for the Wandering Lake was for both the boat and the whale, the inanimate object next to the once living animal. I was just at the NYU Abu Dhabi Gallery in May last year and your work was the centerpiece of the exhibition catalog cover in Arabic. This really moved the viewers who came to this environmental show, a group show. I happened to be invited there to give a talk for the Anthropocene Kitchen.12 The magic of your work is that you understand the body and performance and how the [End Page 416]
The Only Constant, exhibition catalogue cover, NYU Abu Dhabi Gallery, 2023. Patty Chang, Invocation for Wandering Lake, 2015, Newfoundland.
viewer's body is really important in this discourse. Going back to when you did a lot of live performance art, do you have anything to add to this element of performativity in terms of reaching audiences today? Is it different around these issues of our environmental emergency?
Well, I think I always come back to the body on some level because that's just been my practice and how I started my artmaking, but in terms of this current project that I've been working on for the last few years with the science collaborators, because we do come from other disciplines, a lot is just trying to figure out where we intersected, where we can speak at least a similar language. The most different relationship was in thinking about the body and ritual. And I think I took that experience into how I am trying to look at necropsy. When Alexia explained scientific work to me, she talked about it in terms of protocol and necropsy, really, a series of protocols that you don't waver from. It's always done the same each time so that the samples or the specimens can be looked at in the same way. For me, that really resonated as another word for "ritual." But in science they call it something else.13
For Queer Liberation and a Free Palestine
"TRANS-ASIA" is a term that to me brings out the possibilities in perceiving regions that may not traditionally be in conversation with one another. Within the scope of my research, I find it productive to think of the Middle East through a TRANS-ASIA lens to expand on the limitations posed by borders that has us only thinking through nation-states. We take for granted that Arab, Middle Eastern, or Islamicate regions—encompassing countries such as Turkey, Iran, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and other countries on the Arabian Peninsula—are part of Asia. When we bring different regions in conversation together, we unite oppressions, we connect colonialisms, we coalesce imperialist structures and can understand a fuller impact that extraction and global capitalism has on human rights.
Thinking through TRANS-ASIA means acknowledging the nexus of settler colonization around the world and acknowledging Israel as a British and U.S. colonial project made to protect their own military, capitalist, and extractive interests in the Middle East
Rah Eleh, Sham (2013). Light drawing photography. Courtesy of the artist.
[End Page 419] since 1948.1 Thinking through regions means thinking past borders, who made them, when they were made, and why. In asking these questions, the colonial apparatus of the nation-state becomes less important, and instead we grow to value the dignity, safety and self-determination of subjugated communities around the world. Within the ongoing colonial battle, gender, sexuality and sexual difference are often used as markers of cultural difference. How, then, are gender and sexual freedoms insidiously used by hegemonic states throughout time to justify violence and imperialism imposed on the Middle East, then and now?2
These questions are most salient for a serious study of the continuing war on Gaza and the colonial erasure of Palestine. This includes the issue of pinkwashing and a study of the relations between Israel's gay-friendly military and the issue of genocide in the name of equal rights. What are the civilizational arguments about Palestinian queers being oppressed? How exactly do gay settler Israelis live in relative freedom in places like Tel-Aviv, and how is this homonationalism used to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?3 In using gender and sexual logics and ideas of Western superiority, a study of the debates surrounding imperial tactics can shed light on the excuses used to inflict crimes against humanity and the colonial state's continuing land-grab of Gaza, further expanding the Israeli settler occupation in Palestine.4 In summary, how has Israel positioned itself as a beacon of democracy, gay rights, and gay liberation while simultaneously
Jamil Hellu, Be My Guest (2016). Upholstered life-size furniture with textile pattern digitally printed on fabric. Detail of the fabric used to upholster the furniture.
committing well-documented heinous war crimes? Are queer people at times being used to legitimize and justify this horrific violence?5
Ignoring Palestinian self-determination privileges the settler colonial state and privileges the rights of the Israeli state—a state that has illegally and increasingly occupied Palestine since 1967, when Israeli Defense Forces led onslaughts against Egyptian forces in Sinai and Gaza and against the Jordanian military in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The same settler colonial state of Israel that has enforced a [End Page 420]
Raafat Hattab, The Bride of Palestine (2012).
blockade on Gaza since 2007 to systematically impoverish the area and a punitive settler-colonial project that has killed over sixty thousand Palestinians and displaced two million since October 7, 2023 alone.6
There are direct parallels between Canada's settler colonial project and its support for the Israeli settler colonial dispossession of Palestinians. Acknowledging the overlapping histories of colonization between the Global North and Global South helps us to avoid the exceptionalism that has immunized Israel from international criticism, and this charts a crucial path for liberation and reconciliation in
Laurence Rasti, from There Are No Homosexuals in Iran series (2014). Courtesy of the artist.
different settler colonial contexts. Connecting different regions around the world can be a powerful exercise on behalf of advocacy and coalitional politics. The 2024 university campus demonstrations and student encampments across the world have showed that universities, banks, and other colonial institutions here on Turtle Island are all still involved in their own settler colonization of Indigenous communities; from the Mississaugas of the Credit, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat and Anishinaabeg peoples who have long ties to the land of Northern Turtle Island from which I write, all the way to the land of Palestine, we see the continued use of settler colonial structures to remove, expropriate, and silence Indigenous voices.7 It is vital to acknowledge the power [End Page 421]
(L) Kristine Rumman, Making/Taking Ground (2018). 27-hour performance with glass, sand, stone, turmeric, sumac, fennel and a broom. Courtesy of the artist. (R) Details of Liwan, Khalaf House, Ramallah (Recollection of Liwan of Rumman Residence, Beit Jala) (2018). Sumac, cumin and fennel with washed white sand, 10 × 30 × 28 ft. Courtesy of the artist.
structures at play in the wake of Israel's crimes against humanity and the genocide of Palestinian people being witnessed around the world in real time. How does this relate to other colonial nations that have demonstrated their complicities and their desire for maintaining imperial domination within the Middle East? Collectively we must demand that others live in the same peace and dignity we expect for ourselves. We must insist that others around us live free of violence and subjugation, and we must move towards living in relation to one another and not only in opposition to each other. It is vital to strike back against white supremacist legacies that position imperialism and colonial logics as the established order. Imagining, refusing, unbuilding, and tearing racism from the center of how we see and connect with one another helps to dismantle the infrastructures of white supremacy and its cultural unconscious.8
Kim Lim's Artistic Reflection of TRANS-ASIA
Art historian David Teh, whose research focuses on Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art, asserts that an artist's nationality is the first label applied in international contexts.1 However, attaching a national identifier to artist Kim Lim overlooks the shifting borders of nations during her lifetime. Lim's artworks are poetic meditations on place, and they serve as documents of her transnational praxis. Her prints and sculptures engage in a dialogue with her sources of inspiration, reflecting insights she gleaned from early exposure to various cultures and later from visiting sites of cultural importance through her travels. For example, in an archival interview conducted for the British Library, Lim recalled camping on the [End Page 423] beach in the Malaysian state of Terengganu in the mid-1960s to watch a sea turtle lay eggs in the sand. This profound experience inspired the sculptures Terengganu I–III (1967) and the intaglio print Ring (1970).2 Some titles cite places such as Langkawi and Batu, Malaysian and Indonesian islands, as well as Gobi and Dunhuang, which refer to a desert and city in Western China, a conceptually fertile place that inspired many of Lim's late prints and sculptures. Others make cultural or aesthetic references, including Padma, Caryatid, and Shogun. Still others, such as the prints interspersed throughout this essay, abstract or synthesize—rather than illustrate or signal—Lim's encounters.
Residues of colonialism saturate Lim's biography, shaping her plurilocal subjectivity, which
Kim Lim, Black Wash, 1993, Lithograph on paper, 430 × 437 mm, Tate, Photograph provided by Jessica Braum.
is rooted in her many cross-cultural encounters and affiliations during her formative years. Lim was born in what was then a British colony, later recognized in 1965 as the nation of Singapore, to a mother of Thai heritage and a father of Chinese descent. Her father, a magistrate for the British government, was assigned to various locations across Southeast Asia, relocating the family multiple times. Lim spent her childhood in Singapore, Malacca, and Penang. She was partially raised by a Chinese nanny, Ah Kuan, with whom she shared fond memories of attending Chinese operas. Lim spoke Cantonese with Ah Kuan, English with her parents, and received private tutoring in Mandarin. Her family's time in Penang overlapped with World War II, particularly the Japanese invasion and occupation of the region. Despite the hardships of war, Lim recalled adopting aspects of Japanese culture simply because it was "all around."3 After the war, Lim's family returned to Singapore, where she remained until 1954. One could argue that, as a child, Asia moved through Lim.
These early encounters contribute to the constellation of influences shaping Lim's cosmopolitan imagination, born from her geographic and cross-cultural movements. Rather than a fixed locus, each point in this constellation facilitates pathways that forge connections beyond and through their original contexts. At age eighteen, Lim moved from Singapore to England to study art at Central St. Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art. This international circuit would prove central to [End Page 424]
Kim Lim, Brown Aquatint, 1972, Aquatint on paper, 445 × 438 mm, Tate, Photograph provided by Jessica Braum.
Lim's education as she traveled between the two locations throughout her lifetime, regularly stopping in Greece, India, Japan, Malaysia, China, and other various locales to visit art museums, ancient architectural sites, and monuments. As an adult, Lim moved through Asia; she noted that her most influential art education came from travel.
This collection of Lim's visual references demonstrates how she thought through the global via travel, moving beyond the confining context of nation. As a diasporic artist whose encounters profoundly shaped her unique reception and creative reflection, Lim offers one way of conceptualizing TRANSASIA. Her movements across, beyond, and throughout Asia resulted in works of art that
Kim Lim, Bridge 1, 1960, Lithograph on paper, 512 × 762 mm, Tate, Photograph provided by Jessica Braum.
[End Page 425]
Kim Lim, Untitled (Artist's Proof), 1969, etching, Photograph provided by Jessica Braum.
reveal the nuances of cross-cultural encounters embedded in the global and geopolitical interchange.
One Morning of the World: The Notion of TRANS-ASIA
Between July 25 and September 9, 2001, the Chisenhale Gallery in London, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Arnolfini, Bristol coproduced the UK's first solo exhibition by Chinese French artist Shen Yuan (b. 1959). Presented at the Chisenhale was a large-scale installation work, Un Matin du Monde (One Morning of the World), which resembled the typical four-sided rooftop of traditional courtyard residences in Fujian Province in China (Fig. 1). All the materials used for making the work were collected in her hometown, Xianyou, a county in eastern Fujian, and shipped back to Europe.1 Atop the tiled roof were a rough and ready bamboo garment holder, a handmade television antenna, a porcelain frog, a few cured ducks, and some Chinese herbs and spices (Fig. 2). A little fan located next to the work created a gentle "breeze," waving the piece of cloth hanging from the garment holder.
Upon stepping into the space, viewers could immediately smell the strong odors emanating
Shen Yuan. Un matin du monde (One Morning of the World). 2000. Tiles, wood, mixed media. 8 × 5.9 × 1.5m. Courtesy of Shen Yuan.
[End Page 427]
Shen Yuan. Un matin du monde (detail). 2000. Tiles, wood, mixed media. 8 × 5.9 ×1.5m. Courtesy of Shen Yuan.
from the air-dried ducks and herbs and spices and could even feel the "wind" while hearing early morning sounds recorded in the artist's hometown, including birdsong, dog barking and vague murmurs of human voices. Viewers were implicated in a lively and remarkably compelling material setting, as though they were really inhabiting the courtyard setting of a distant culture. However, the work provided viewers with just a bird's eye view, hindering them from an in-depth investigation of the local life and culture concealed beneath the roof. This seemingly privileged viewpoint from above in effect gave rise to tangible experiences of alienation and exclusion that still more or less characterize the ever more frequent cross-cultural engagements. Similar situations of estranged encounter with an unfamiliar foreign living environment also came to the fore in Flying Bowl (2004) (Fig. 3), which Shen coproduced with her husband, the late Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping (1954–2019). Flying Bowl offered an aerial view of São Paulo's favelas that were gradually demolished in accordance with nationwide policies of urban growth and development since the 1990s, eliciting a strong sense of distance and displacement. Back to Un Matin du Monde: Created at a time when this traditional type of courtyard dwelling was rapidly vanishing due to the large-scale urban renewal construction taking place in mainland China, the work was Shen's testimony to a local history fading under the impact of global capitalism. In excluding viewers residing in Europe from a thorough exploration of a Chinese dwelling, the work parallels Shen's own inability to connect with a permanently lost past, revealing [End Page 428]
Huang Yongping and Shen Yuan. Flying Bowl. 2002. In the exhibition—Huang Yong Ping & Shen Yuan: Is Small Still Beautiful?, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (August 24–October 6, 2024).Wood, iron, fibreglass, soil. 800 × 800 × 275cm. Courtesy of Shen Yuan and Tang Contemporary Art.
ruptures caused by transnational migration as well as dramatic social changes in her home country.
Shen's practice, I suggest, gives distinctive insight into the notion of TRANS-ASIA in association with the Chinese diaspora. In this context, Asia is not perceived as a clearly defined geopolitical area. Rather, it is envisioned and actualized, as Kōichi Iwabuchi contends, as an alternative epistemological paradigm that engenders not only translocal dialogues, affinities and collaborations, but also inevitable collisions and antagonisms.2 As shown in Un Matin du Monde, Shen explores the capacity of art to forge connectedness beyond manmade barriers that separate nations and regions (Fig. 4), bringing to the fore a form of Chineseness that could be expanded, diversified, and pluralized through mutually formative encounters with different people, places, and cultures.
Moreover, TRANS-ASIA, as an epistemological approach, attaches significance to the production of "de-Westernized knowledge from Asian experience" that addresses trans-nationally shared issues, like the urbanization and migration investigated in Shen's work.3 Through the specific material configuration of Un Matin du Monde, Shen sheds light on how the complicated affective agencies of quotidian items can stimulate the embodied multisensory engagements of viewers that enable them to cultivate close interdependent relatedness with/in an unfamiliar local living environment beyond the territorial fixity of [End Page 429]
Shen Yuan. Extended Root. 2005–2023. In the exhibition—Huang Yong Ping & Shen Yuan: Is Small Still Beautiful?, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (August 24–October 6, 2024). Tree root, gris Lego. 960 × 500 × 260cm. Courtesy of Shen Yuan and Tang Contemporary Art.
nation-states as well as the physical geography of Asia. Despite perplexities and misunderstandings, viewers play an active role in Shen's ongoing artistic materialization of "home" in transnational and transcultural contexts, which disrupts rather than affirms the clear-cut division of us and others, inclusion and exclusion, local and foreign.
In this way, Shen's practice puts forward a mode of being and belonging embedded in and constitutive of dynamically intertwined relationships among things and bodies. Through this entanglement, a range of geographical, sociohistorical, and cultural parameters that frame and shape our habitual perceptions and understandings of various surrounding worlds can always be reconceived and reconstructed with differences. Additionally, by evoking sensuous relatedness while denying viewers' physical access, Shen's Un Matin du Monde articulates an ethical perspective on cross-border "homemaking"; at times, it is situations of uncertainty, incongruity and exclusion that bring forth more profound affirmation of relationality and connectivity, posing a challenge to any hegemonic systems that tend to obscure or negate the irreducible and the inassimilable. [End Page 430]
Shen Yuan. I am Watched, I have not Appeared, 2017. In the exhibition—Huang Yong Ping & Shen Yuan: Is Small Still Beautiful?, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (August 24–October 6, 2024). Light box, wire, resin, rubber boat. 980 × 820 × 530cm. Courtesy of Shen Yuan and Tang Contemporary Art.
In her later practice, Shen's reflections on home have been extended to explore the European migrant crisis, which, as shown in I Am Watched, I Have Not Appeared (2016) (Fig. 5), unsettles established hierarchical relations between natives and outsiders.
TRANS-ASIA Perspectives on Femininity: Artistic Narratives of Women's Bodies (1990S–Present)
What does it mean for women to be seen, yet unseen, in the complex landscape of contemporary art? In an era shaped by accelerating globalization and rapid economic expansion, artists navigate shifting cultural and economic forces that redefine the representation of bodies, particularly those of women. Contemporary art reveals their prominent visibility while simultaneously exposing the subtle mechanisms that diminish their agency within commercial, societal, and patriarchal structures. This study employs a TRANS-ASIA framework, using Chinese artists as primary examples and drawing comparisons with Japanese counterparts to reveal shared regional dynamics. By conceptualizing East Asia as a fluid and interconnected cultural space, this approach shows that women are often portrayed in visually prominent roles imbued with symbolic significance, yet paradoxically remain marginalized as autonomous and self-determined subjects.
Such paradoxes are particularly evident in the shifting portrayals of women during China's economic reforms in the 1990s. Wang Qingsong (b. 1966) exemplifies this evolution in his large-scale photographic work New Women (2000). This hyper-stylized and hypersexualized composition features women in revealing clothing, heavy makeup, and oversized floral accessories, presenting a critique of the commodification of femininity (Fig. 1). The title New Women carries an ironic undertone, invoking ideas of progress and liberation, yet the imagery ultimately perpetuates traditional objectification through the male gaze. Wang's work scrutinizes the influence of consumer culture on representations of femininity, challenging notions of emancipation by revealing how commercialization and spectacle continue to shape and constrain female identity.
Cui Xiuwen (b. 1970)' s Lady's Room (2000) employs hidden cameras to capture the clandestine interactions and self-presentation of female sex workers in a Beijing nightclub restroom. The video installation records the women as they touch up their makeup, adjust their clothing, and engage in conversation (Fig. 2). By focusing on their negotiations and deliberate manipulation of their appearance, Cui underscores the ways in which their economic survival is closely tied to their physical allure within a commodified environment. The nightclub restroom, a space that is both private and public, serves as a stage where the women navigate and, at times, subvert societal expectations of femininity. However, the covert nature of the surveillance transforms their bodies into objects of observation [End Page 432]
Wang Qingsong, New Women. 2000. C-print, 120 × 220 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Cui Xiuwen, Lady's Room, Still 3. 2000. Courtesy of the artist and Eli Klein Gallery. © Cui Xiuwen.
[End Page 433] without their consent, drawing attention to the persistent objectification they endure.
This contemporary wave of female commodification is not confined to China but resonates with similar dynamics observed in 1990s Japan, reflecting shared consumerist pressures across Asia. Yanagi Miwa (b. 1967) explores this phenomenon in her Elevator Girl Series (1997), drawing attention to the cultural significance of the "elevator girl" as a fashionable profession at the time. These young women, chosen for their youthful appearance and ornamental value, were positioned as visual spectacles within the polished environment of commercial spaces. By dressing them in identical uniforms and situating them within glass display cases, Yanagi critiques the societal expectation for women to embody passivity and aesthetic appeal. Her work exposes how such roles perpetuate objectified representations of femininity, reinforcing a commodified and externally defined sense of identity.
In Cui Xiuwen's Angel Series, the artist critiques the ways in which social and cultural environments shape, control, and marginalize female experiences. Angel No. 11 (2006) depicts a young, pregnant teenager dressed in a white jumpsuit, lying on the ground against the backdrop of towering red walls (Fig. 3). The stark contrast between the girl's fragile, youthful presence and the imposing red walls evokes a profound sense of vulnerability and isolation. This imagery disrupts traditional associations of pregnancy with joy and fulfillment, drawing attention instead to the societal pressures and stigmas often faced by young women in unconventional circumstances. By situating the figure in a public space imbued with historical and political significance, Cui highlights how such environments amplify feelings of exclusion and inadequacy, offering a nuanced reflection on the complexities of femininity in contemporary society.
In her subsequent series, Existential Emptines Series, Cui Xiuwen shifts to a more introspective and transcendent exploration of the body. In Existential Emptiness, No. 16 (2009), she draws inspiration from Japanese puppet theater, likening the body to a puppet suspended in the tension between control and submission (Fig. 4). By situating the female form in
Cui Xiuwen, Angel, No. 11. 2006. C-print, 119.31 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Eli Klein Gallery. © Cui Xiuwen.
[End Page 434]
Cui Xiuwen, Existential Emptiness, No. 16. 2009. C-print, 117 × 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Eli Klein Gallery. © Cui Xiuwen.
a desolate, almost timeless environment, Cui highlights the duality of the body as both a receptor of external forces and a vessel for inner consciousness. The panoramic composition and monochromatic palette evoke the aesthetics of traditional Chinese ink painting while simultaneously referencing the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, an appreciation of imperfection and transience. This synthesis of visual traditions underscores the cultural exchanges that have long occurred across TRANSASIA, demonstrating how these shared influences inform and complicate contemporary artistic practices.
Returning to Wang Qingsong's work, Forever and Ever (2017) offers an intergenerational perspective, portraying a procession of female figures from childhood to old age (Fig. 5). While ostensibly celebrating the different stages of life, it critiques the persistent weight of East Asian cultural norms surrounding lineage and heritage, reinforced by the inclusion of a young boy and the artist himself, emphasizing patriarchal structures shaping the narrative. Although shifting focus from the physical landscape of women's bodies, a central theme in earlier works, to a broader examination of life cycles, the piece continues to frame the female form as a landscape. The semi-nude representation of the figures not only highlights the body as a visual and symbolic site but also underscores its role as a vessel through which societal expectations of reproduction, lineage, and cultural norms are negotiated and reinforced.
Viewed collectively, these works construct a dynamic, multi-layered discourse on female representation in contemporary Asian art. Themes such as consumerism, societal norms, political spaces, philosophical concerns, and generational pressures are interwoven into a broader tapestry of critique. Across commercial, domestic, and [End Page 435]
Wang Qingsong, Forever and Ever. 2017. C-print, 250 × 180 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
spiritual realms, women's bodies are granted visual prominence, yet their deeper realities remain overshadowed by cultural, economic, and familial priorities. Adopting a TRANSASIA perspective enables us to trace the intersecting influences that cross national boundaries, illustrating how artists from diverse contexts engage with, resist, and reinterpret prevailing narratives about women. Ultimately, the concept of being "seen yet unseen" encapsulates a central paradox: women occupy a prominent place within the visual field, yet their aspirations, struggles, and lived realities are often obscured by the persistent fault lines of a rapidly transforming yet deeply patriarchal society. [End Page 436]
alpesh kantilal patel's art historical scholarship, curation, and criticism reflect their queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. An Associate Professor of global contemporary art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, they are the author of Multiple and One: Global Queer Art Histories, forthcoming from Manchester University Press, and Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (2017). Coeditor of the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2022) and a special issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021) commemorating Okwui Enwezor, they recently contributed to the volumes Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History and A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (both 2023). Grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Danish Art Foundation, Arts Council England, NEH, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and New York University have supported their research. Previously chair of the editorial board of Art Journal and Art Journal Open (AJO), they are associate editor of visual arts, architecture, and art history for ASAP/Journal.
jane chin davidson is Professor of art history/global cultures at California State University, San Bernardino. Her research in contemporary art focuses on performances of diasporic Chinese identities in addition to ecofeminism, environmental performance, and global expositions. Her recent publications include the compendium Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, coedited with Amelia Jones (Black-well, 2023); the monograph Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (Manchester University Press, 2022); and the coedited book Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum (Routledge, 2018), among many book chapters and journal articles such as for Case Studies in the Environment (2023). Her professional awards include fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Loughborough University, Getty Research Institute, and the Economic and Social Research Council. She completed her PhD as Postgraduate of the Year in Art History at the University of Manchester and her BA in Art History from Reed College.
shahzia sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary international art practices and launching the form known today as "neo-miniature." Engaging ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through feminist perspectives, Sikander's paintings, video animations, mosaics, and sculpture explore gender, sexuality, racial narratives, and colonial histories. Sikander is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation's Pollock Prize for Creativity, among others. Sikander serves on the boards of Art21, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is a member of the Asian American Arts Alliance's artist council.
patty chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects and impacted subjectivities. Her museum exhibition and book The Wandering Lake investigates the landscapes impacted by large scale human-engineered water projects such as the Soviet mission to irrigate the waters from the Aral Sea, as well as the longest aqueduct in the world, the North to South Water Diversion Project in China. Her most recent multichannel video project Milk Debt combines the act of lactation with people's unspoken fears. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.
andrew gayed is Assistant Professor of art history and visual culture at OCAD University, where he specializes in diasporic art, queer visual culture, and Middle Eastern art histories. An Egyptian-Canadian art historian, Dr. Gayed's research is located at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary and transnational inquiry in art history, gender studies, and critical race theory. His book Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art (University of Washington Press, 2024) shares innovative new research in visual art and culture that transforms our understanding of queerness and multiculturalism. The book explores premodern archives from the Middle East to show the rich and diverse homoerotic worlds that were disrupted by the colonial imposition of Western models of sexuality. By studying contemporary art, Queer World Making foregrounds decolonial politics and unexpected histories of homosexuality in the Middle East as a way of better understanding the issues today that queer diasporic people of color face.
jessica braum is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at Temple University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled Print and Sculpture in the Global Field: Transnational Feminism and the Recuperation of Kim Lim's Artistic Practice, examines how colonialism, globalization, and gender shaped contemporaneous engagement with Lim's work, resulting in a limited and misrepresentative canon of postwar British and Southeast Asian art. Jessica engages feminist theories and multidisciplinary research methods to study women artists working in transnational contexts. She currently serves on the College Art Association's Committee on Research and Scholarship and as the Graduate Representative for the Society of Contemporary Art Historians.
vivian k. sheng is an art historian working on contemporary Chinese and East Asian art in transnational contexts and Assistant Professor of contemporary art at the University of Hong Kong. Her research investigates the intricate interrelations between women, domesticity, and art practices that are closely tied to cross-border movement and relocation, posing challenges to the stable and absolute conception of identity, home, and belonging. Relevant issues are explored in her forthcoming monograph, The Arts of Homemaking: Women, Migration and Transnational East Asia. Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Third Text, Sculpture Journal, Yishu, and INDEX JOURNAL.
meng yi is a Ph.D. candidate in Art and Art Theory at the University of Cologne, specializing in body politics and contemporary Chinese art. Her research explores the representation of the body in post-socialist China, focusing on themes of gender, power, and artistic agency. Her dissertation, Embodied Narratives: Body Politics in Contemporary Chinese Artistic Discourse, examines the body as a site of resistance and renewal in visual culture. She actively engages in cross-cultural art collaborations, using her expertise to foster meaningful dialogues on identity and social change.
Notes
1. Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Duke University Press, 2010), 1.
2. Kōichi Iwabuchi, "Trans-Asia as Method: A Collaborative and Dialogic Project in a Globalized World," in Trans-Asia as Method: Theory and Practices, ed. Jeroen de Kloet, Yiu Fai Chow, and Gladys Pak Lei Chong (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 27.
3. To listen to and view the entire interviews and see better resolutions of the images in color, please visit https://www.alpeshkpatel.com/conference-panel-asap-2023.
4. Howard Chiang, Todd A. Henry, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung, editors, "Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans," special issue, TSQ 5, no. 3 (2018).
5. Concepts brought up by Patel to which Sikander is referring include: rhizomatic thinking; chiasmus/intertwining; sexuality, ecology, and land; becoming/borderless; fugitivity and effulgence of color; (super)natural, magic, and spirituality; liquidity; porous archive; right to opacity; and expanded affinities.
6. See Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Clarendon Press, 1977); see also Partha Mitter's feature on style in Artforum 49, no. 1 (2010): 261–62. The title of Mitter's book aligns with what he refers to as the interpretations and misinterpretations of Indian art by Western scholars who often saw monsters where artists had intended gods. Winckelmann is widely considered the "father" of art history as a discipline. He loathed the baroque-style work being made when he was alive and privileged Greek work instead.
7. I am referring to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's observation that seeing involves both the viewing and the viewed subjects, who are, importantly, both the seen and the seer. He refers to the site of reciprocal interpenetration between and within embodied subjects as the "chiasmus." See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1964; Northwestern University Press, 1968), 138, 140–41.
8. What Glissant writes is: "The right to opacity would not establish autism; it would be the real foundation of Relation, in freedoms." Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; University of Michigan Press, 1997), 190.
9. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), 11.
10. Ibid.
11. Worth noting is that the protests in Hong Kong began in 2019 on the last day of the ASAP Hong Kong symposium, for which Chang gave a keynote presentation that included discussion of Milk Debt.
12. Many thanks to Dr. Susan Ossman and the Anthropocene Kitchen at NYU Abu Dhabi.
13. Both interviews have been edited for space and language has been slightly changed for the purposes of clarity of reading. Our conversation went further, but this is a nice way to conclude the edited transcript.
Notes
1. This link between Israel as a settler-colonial state and the U.S as an imperial power is evidenced by President Trump stating that the U.S will 'take over' the Gaza Strip in a shocking announcement when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the White House on Feb 4th 2025. In fact, Netanyahu is a war criminal according to the International Court of Justice and they have issued a warrant for his arrest since November 2024 for his crimes against humanity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Trump not extraditing Netanyahu when he first landed on American soil, and instead solidifying a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza unequivocally links Israel as a colonial vestige of the imperial United States within the Middle East. See: Smith, David. "Trump says US will 'take over' Gaza Strip in shock announcement during Netanyahu visit." The Guardian, Wednesday Feb. 5th, 2025. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/05/donald-trump-plan-to-take-over-gaza-strip-netanyahu-visit)
2. Sarah Schulman, "Homonationalism," in Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (Duke University Press, 2012), 103–32.
3. Sa'ed Atshan, "Global Solidarity and the Politics of Pinkwashing," in Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020), 71–111.
4. Orla Guerin, "Jewish Settlers Set Their Sights on Gaza Beachfront," BBC News, March 24, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68650815; Patrick Wintour, "Jared Kushner Says Gaza's 'Waterfront Property Could Be Very Valuable,'" The Guardian, March 19, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/19/jared-kushner-gaza-waterfront-property-israel-negev.
5. Patrizia Gentile and Gary Kinsman, "National Security and Homonationalism: The QuAIA Wars and the Making of the Neoliberal Queer," in Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging, ed. OmiSoore H. Dryden and Suzanne Lenon (University of British Columbia Press, 2015), 133–49.
6. When I first drafted this essay, the Palestinian health authorities stated that Israel's ground and air campaign in Gaza had killed more than 41,500 people, with the majority of identified victims being women and children. Since then, the BBC has most recently estimated that the death toll could be significantly higher, and that up until June 30, 2024, 64,260 Palestinians had died from traumatic injury, showing an underreporting of deaths by 41%. Raffi Berg, "Gaza War Death Toll Could Be Significantly Higher, Researchers Say," BBC News, January 10, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqjvl4klzweo. See also Emma Farge and Nidal Al-Mughrabi, "Gaza Death Toll: How Many Palestinians Has Israel's Campaign Killed?," Reuters, October 1, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-death-toll-how-many-palestinians-has-israels-campaign-killed-2024-07-25.
7. Jeremy Wildeman and M. Muhannad Ayyash, eds., Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine (University of Alberta Press, 2023).
8. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2023. White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Page 15.
Notes
1. David Teh, Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (The MIT Press, 2017), 83.
2. Kim Lim, interview by Cath Courtney, October 1995, "Sounds of the British Library", British Library's National Life Stories, https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/Art/021M-C0466X0051XX-0006V0.
3. Ibid.
Notes
1. So far, the piece has only been shown several times in Europe.
2. Kōichi Iwabuchi, "Trans-Asia as Method: A Collaborative and Dialogic Project in a Globalized World," in Trans-Asia as Method: Theory and Practices, ed. Jeroen de Kloet, Yiu Fai Chow, and Gladys Pak Lei Chong (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 27–28.
3. Ibid., 27.
