The 2019 Sydney Asian Art Series presented four leading international voices on early, modern and contemporary Asian art, addressing the theme Art and urban cultures.
Convened by Olivier Krischer, and co-presented by the Power Institute, the China Studies Centre, and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.
From Isfahan to Edo, Kaifeng to Kolkata—cities have been major subjects, patrons and audiences for all fields of art. Indeed, the arts are part of the very fabric of urban life. These lectures explore the intersection of art, film and architecture in a range of Asian cities, historical and contemporary, considering urban spaces as sites of taste-making and sensorial plenty, as models for imagined futures, as vessels for us to recognise shared pasts, and as stages for the formation of political identities.
Events
Past
Seeing Taste: Art, Cuisine and Urbanity in Safavid Persia/Iran
In March 2019, Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld Institute) presented a talk entitled ‘Seeing Taste: Art, Cuisine and Urbanity in Safavid Persia/Iran’ as part of the Sydney Asian Art Series.
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Sussan Babaie
Sussan Babaie is a reader in the history of Iranian and Islamic art and architecture, Courtault Institute of Art
Kolkota “Rising”: The Politics of Place in Recent Bengali Cinema
A lecture about how recent films set in the city of Kolkata go beyond documentation to reveal the aspirations, desires and anxieties concerning the city’s global future.
People
Malini Guha
Malini Guha is an Associate Professor of Film Studies, Carleton University.
A History of Japanese Photography: Images of the City After Disaster
Part of the 2019 Sydney Asian Art Series.
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Yasufumi Nakamori
Dr Yasufumi Nakamori is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at the Tate Modern, London. Originally from Osaka, Nakamori initially studied law at the University of Wisconsin and practiced in New York City before undertaking a second career in art history following 9/11, going on to obtain his PhD in art history from Cornell University. Prior to joining Tate Modern, Nakamori was head of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. From 2008-2016 he was curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where his exhibitions included Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (2010) and For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979 (2015). His award-winning catalogue Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, which documented the collaboration between photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Pritzker prize-winning architect Kenzo Tange.
Displaying Reform: Exhibitionary Architecture and the Early Reform Era in the People’s Republic of China
We can think of design as an inherently anticipatory process. This lecture explores how a history of exhibitionary architecture that starts in the 1970s in China and abroad contributed to the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to reposition itself relative to the world at large.
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Cole Roskam
Cole Roskam is associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Architecture at The University of Hong Kong. His research examines architecture’s role in mediating moments of transnational interaction and exchange between China and other parts of the world. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees in art and architectural history from Harvard University.
His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Society of Architectural Historians, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), and the University Grants Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, among others.
His articles and essays have appeared in AD (Architectural Design), Architectural History, Artforum International, Grey Room, the Journal of Architectural Education, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. His first book, Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937, will be published by the University of Washington Press in early 2019. He is currently at work on his second book-length project, Designing Reform: Architecture in the People’s Republic of China, 1969-1989, which is under contract with Yale University Press.