H015: Radical Heritage: PostAsia in Performance and Media

Organizer(s)

• 

  Katherine Mezur

  Freie Universität Berlin, United States

Chair(s)

• 

  Katherine Mezur

  Freie Universität Berlin, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• YL

  Yatin Lin

  Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan (Republic of China)
• MP

  Minwoo (Minu) Park

  University of California, Irvine, United States
• 

  Haeree Choi

  The Graduate School of Performing Arts
  Ewha Womans University, Republic of Korea
• 

  Katherine Mezur

  Freie Universität Berlin, United States

Discussant(s)

• TL

  Tarryn Li-Min Chun

  University of Notre Dame, United States

 This panel dives directly into this moment of pandemic, protest, planetary degradation, and human crisis through the examination of convergence within and across contemporary performing and media arts and artists, who interact across "Asias." With the COVID-19 virus revealing the absurdity of borders and the danger of supremacist culturalisms and nationalisms, artists, artworks, and new media have moved faster and in greater numbers to "distant" and online experiments and critical discussions of art-making in a new normal beyond any one culture. As the virus spreads globally, the separateness of a mono-identity-culture breaks down with this sharing of a deadly illness. However, operating against the pandemic's revelation of global vulnerability, governments, here, Korea, China, Japan, and Taiwan, take pride in their "special" way of protecting their citizens. These regressive messages reflect separatist strategies. In contrast, performing and media artists from Korea, Taiwan, China, and Japan reveal much more futuristic, dynamic, and productive "PostAsia" methodologies where content, techniques, and critical thinking drive the artists' focus on issues. These methods operate now in the networked media of popular culture, like Instagram, facebook or YouTube, and international performance and film festivals. Our panelists suggest that when artists deploy media with art-making, they create radical activist acts of PostAsia convergence cultures. We crossover film, performance, and social media to work though these questions: What can we do beyond this COVID-19 moment? Do these artists' acts accelerate and propel us into a realm of radical heritage? While we valorize the local can we deploy an Asian-futurist vision? Can we create a diverse PostAsia to collectivize alternative futures through these creative acts?

Presentations:

• Decolonizing Disappearing Places through Moving Bodies: Transnational Festivals, Inter-Asia Collaborations, and Indigeneity in Taiwan
  

  Paper Presenter: Yatin Lin – Taipei National University of the Arts
• Compressed Modernity, Foreclosure, and Ghosts: Survival Anxiety in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite
  

  Paper Presenter: Minwoo (Minu) Park – University of California, Irvine
• Migration of Body: Resilience of Defected North Korean Artists through Making Dance Film with South Korean Artists
  

  Paper Presenter: Haeree Choi – Ewha Womans University
• In Girl-Time: Performing PostAsia in J-K Pop and Contemporary Dance Media
  

  Paper Presenter: Katherine Mezur – Freie Universität Berlin