The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia

This talk will introduce my forthcoming book, The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (University of Minnesota Press, fall 2026). 

Examining a range of photography and video work, The Empathic Lens explores how lens-based projects in Southeast Asia respond to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration—specifically by cultivating deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. In my analysis of lens-based art produced across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, I highlight work by artists such as Tuần Andrew Nguyễn, Khvay Samnang, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, and Zarina Muhammad, for whom rampant urban development, resource extraction, and environmental toxicity are close at hand. 

As each artist takes their lens to these realities, I show how they draw on Indigenous knowledge and local traditions that have long recognized the kinship and interdependency of humans and nonhumans. Engaging often-censored discourses of Indigenous land relations and environmental justice in a region with a long history of colonial and neocolonial development, my book traces genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate how these artworks develop sustainable visions for the future coexistence of planetary life. 

As the first critical account of marginalized artworks that depict the centrality of the more-than-human in Southeast Asian Indigenous worldviews, The Empathic Lens argues for the importance of Southeast Asian lens-based art in contemporary media practice and the art of the Anthropocene. 

Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts, and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney and the Power Institute.