From October 2021 through June 2022, Asia Art Archive will be hosting Art Schools of Asia, a closed-door online seminar series to develop a methodology and theory for thinking about the history of art schools, from the perspective of the complex artistic, social, and political histories across Asia. With a cohort of emerging scholars from around the world, the project will investigate existing scholarship on art pedagogy in general, and also devote specific case-study sessions to historical examples, including Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan; the teaching of socialist realism in China; the Akademi Seni Rupa Indonesia (Indonesian Academy for the Plastic Arts) in Yogyakarta and the Faculty of Art and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology; the National College of Arts in Lahore; the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul (now Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University); and the Hanoi University of Fine Arts (now Vietnam University of Fine Arts). All of them have served as important conduits for modernism and contemporary art, frequently as part of broader projects of infrastructure and institution‐building in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
The seminar will also host workshops with public and private archives, and presentations by artists and scholars working in the field to allow participants to work closely with primary source material, leading thinkers, and historical figures. Through this cumulative experience, the cohort will develop a comparative basis for thinking about art pedagogy, moving beyond frequently anecdotal or empirical treatments to develop a methodological framework for these histories. The project grows from Asia Art Archive’s long-term interest in pedagogy as a site where modern and contemporary art histories of the region have been written.
The Art Schools of Asia cohort comprises Alice Ashiwa, Katherine Bruhn, Shanshan Chen, Kiko del Rosario, Elizabeth Emrich-Rougé, Chabib Hapsoro, Vishal Khandelwal, Sooyoung Leam, Yiqing Li, Vera Mey, Deepti Mulgund, Zohreen Murtaza with Amina Ejaz, Minh Nguyen, Santhosh Sakhinala, Gemma Sharpe, Dipti Sherchan, and Yuliya Sorokina. Further information about the individual participants and their projects can be found in the right-hand column. The syllabus will be posted after the start of the seminar.
The sessions will be led by AAA Researchers Noopur Desai, Sneha Ragavan, John Tain, Chương-Đài Võ, Congyang Xie, and Anthony Yung, working with speakers including Gülsün Karamustafa and İz Öztat, Veronika Radulovic, Ming Tiampo, and Tsewang Tashi, and discussants such as Iftikhar Dadi, Chelsea Foxwell, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, and Shukla Sawant.
In addition, Art Schools of Asia will also organise a public symposium to take place at the conclusion of the seminar series, with speakers such as Julia Andrews, Lily Chumley, Clare Harris, R. Siva Kumar, Amanda Rath, T. Shanaathanan, and Zheng Shengtian, among others. A complete programme and schedule will be announced in the spring of 2022.
Sponsor:
The Art Schools of Asia project is made possible with the generous support of the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative.
