Back to events
Join us as we explore Asia, Asia Art and the Artistic Challenge to Isolationism by Mr Tan Boon Hui, and Ink as a Pre-Modern, East Asian Language for Creating Contemporary Art by Mr Craig Yee.
Asia, Asia Art and the Artistic Challenge to Isolationism by Mr Tan Boon Hui
While critical literature on modernism now acknowledges its multiple roots, modern ideas and the art that expressed these ideas have manifested across specific local contexts across the globe, not just within the Euro-American metropoles. What is less mapped has been the ways in which specific local art for instance, what we refer to as “Asian Art” can have a more loose relationship with its specific contexts. Using examples from the artistic commissions of the Asia Society Triennial in New York City (2020), this presentation attempts to show that concepts such as “Asian artists” and “Asian Art” must be disentangled from their geographical and cultural containers and derive their power instead from their relation or tension with other places and times.
INK as a Pre-Modern, East Asian Language for Creating Contemporary Art by Mr Craig Yee
East Asian INK — carbon-based ink and water applied with a round, pliant brush on an absorbent ground such as paper or silk — is more than a medium, it is a language and a diachronic discourse spanning at least two thousand years that articulates the pre-Modern East Asian world view. Starting with the post-war Kyoto-based modernist calligraphers of Bokujinkai, modern and contemporary artists in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and most recently Mainland China have used ink as a medium and a language for the creation of international contemporary art.
Through case studies of Inoue Yuichi (Japan, 1916-1985), Li Huasheng (China, 1944-2018), Wang Dongling (China, b. 1945), Zheng Chongbin (China, b. 1961), Jeong Gwang-hee (Korea, b. 1969), Tao Aimin (China, b. 1974), Bingyi (China, b. 1975), Wai Pongyu (Hong Kong, b. 1982), Ethan Su (Taiwan, b. 1987) and Hung Fai (Hong Kong, b. 1988), the speaker will explore how post-war and contemporary East Asian artists have pursued art-making strategies that bridge the diachronic discourse unfolding in East Asia over the past thousand or so years with the synchronic, international discourse that defines contemporary art today.
About the speakers
Craig Yee | Founding Director, Ink Studio Beijing
Craig Yee is a founding Director of Ink Studio, a Beijing-based gallery and experimental art space devoted to documenting and exhibiting China’s leading contemporary ink artists. Yee previously worked as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company in New York, and received dual Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Symbolic Systems from Stanford University as well as an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was a Ford Scholar.
Tan Boon Hui | Executive Director, Arts House Limited
Tan Boon Hui is a curator, festival programmer and the executive director of Arts House Limited in Singapore, an interdisciplinary arts organisation which manages seven arts presentation venues and artists workspaces. In this capacity, he leads the organisation of the Singapore International Festival of Arts and the Singapore Writers Festival. Tan is a founding board member of The Institutum, a non-profit in Singapore dedicated to broadening awareness of global contemporary art practice and promoting and supporting the development of local artists beyond Singapore.
About the moderator
Yanyun Chen | Lecturer of Humanities (Visual Arts), Yale-NUS College; Georgette Chen Fellow; Fellowship recipient of the Andreas Teoh Contemporary Asian Art Programme
Dr Yanyun Chen is a visual artist, who runs a drawing, animation and installation practice. Her works delve into the aesthetic, cultural and technological inheritances on one’s body, unravelling fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment. She received the prestigious National Arts Council Young Artist Award, Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners, aged 35 and below in 2020. This event will be moderated by Dr Yanyun Chen.
This event is supported by the Andreas Teoh Contemporary Asian Art Programme. More information about the programme and Dr Teoh’s gift to Yale-NUS College can be found here.