CALL FOR PAPERS
TRAUMA AND UTOPIA: INTERACTIONS IN POST-WAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN ASIA

International symposium organised by Tate Research Centre:
Asia-Pacific, London and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

SUBMITTING YOUR PAPERS
250 words abstract in English or 500 letters abstract in Japanese by
16 May 2014

Selected speakers should be prepared to submit their full text in
English or Japanese for review by 9 September 2014

Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific, London and the Mori Art Museum,
Tokyo welcome contributions to a two-day international research
symposium on artistic practices and discourses in Asia from 1945 to
the present. This symposium demonstrates the shared focus on research
that Tate and Mori Art Museum have developed in recent years,
indicating an increasing need and benefit of scholarly research for
all aspects of museum activities. The sessions interrogate how
interdisciplinary and transnational artistic experiments from across
Asia address political, technological and environmental changes as
historical conditions to be celebrated or resisted. Taking the
specific characteristics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
Japanese artistic cultures as a starting point, this symposium aims to
examine their interactions within and beyond the Asian region as a
whole. How have shifting geo-political concerns within the region
determined the flow of human, financial and cultural capital, and
affected the character of artistic production? How have artists in
Asia responded to the history of their own nations, but also to
cross-cultural and international concerns? The symposium also aims to
generate conversations and debates that cross disciplinary boundaries,
by addressing an artistic commitment to multimedia and
interdisciplinary practice. How have artists in Japan and Asia
interacted with the contemporary environment in collaborating with
practitioners in architecture, fashion, design and urban planning?
What does it mean to question boundaries between media when facing
challenges posed by technological development, increasing urban
population and environmental issues, challenges that find parallels
throughout Asia?

We welcome papers that consider, but are not limited to:

The Urban Environment: City, Nature and Utopia

- how the physical geographic features of the Asian region have
determined artistic, architectural and design practices;
- social, population and humanitarian concerns and their impact;
- responses to natural disaster and environmental issues;
- artistic practice as a space for testing ambitious or fantastical
design, for modelling society, or for speculation on the future;
- the influence of scientific and technological achievements on
cultural production

The Human Body: Performance and Design

- gender, artistic and political identities;
- the body as a site, tool or subject for artistic enquiry within a
variety of media;
- the body as a nexus of interdisciplinary design approaches;
- the relationship of the body to its urban and natural environments,
and vice versa

Japan in Asia, Japan in the World: Conflict, Collaboration and
Pan-Asian Contributions

- artistic responses to war, occupation, revolution, imperialism,
displacement or migration;
- the role of memory, subjectivity, personal and official narratives
in artistic production;
- artistic engagement with radical politics;
- political contexts and social limits and their affect on artistic
production;
- performance art and its potential relationship to protest;
- the durability of local or national referents;
- the impact of diasporas on cultural dissemination

Please email abstract of up to 250 words in English or 500 letters in
Japanese for 20-minute papers and a short biography to
trc.asiapacifictate.org.uk AND ppmori.art.museum by Friday 16 May
2014. The papers can be presented in either English or Japanese.