Art educators from Hong Kong, India, and Sri Lanka discuss building infrastructure for contemporary art education in their respective regions, as part of the upcoming Mobile Library: Kyrgyzstan.
Asia Art Archive and Bishkek School of Contemporary Art (BiSCA) gather art educators Siu King Chung (Hong Kong), Shefalee Jain (India), and T. Sanathanan (Sri Lanka) to share their experiences with contemporary art teaching methodologies and developing syllabi that respond to their local contexts. From formal tertiary education to informal settings, they explore a range of educational concerns, delving into the creative approaches they have cultivated to address them. By connecting art educators in the region, this conversation generates valuable insights on contemporary art pedagogy to be applied across regional contexts in Asia.
Mobile Library: Kyrgyzstan is the latest edition of Mobile Library, a periodic initiative organised in partnership with cultural collaborators in different countries throughout Asia to provide a platform for the exchange of ideas. For this iteration, AAA and BiSCA have collaborated to circulate books on contemporary art in Central Asia and to activate them by building art school syllabi that respond to local needs. The talk builds on BiSCA’s Curatorial School and its contemporary art curriculum. Since 2021, BiSCA has been developing the School of Artistic Research Methodology, which focuses on local art practices and aims to establish an art theory grounded in the Kyrgyzstani and Central Asian context.
Talk | Contemporary Art Syllabi: Case Studies from Hong Kong, India, and Sri Lanka
Sat, 22 Feb 2025, 6–8pm HKT / 4–6pm KGT / 3:30–5:30pm IST
Venue: Zoom
Language: English
Speakers
Siu King Chung, Hong Kong
Shefalee Jain, India
T. Sanathanan, Sri Lanka
Moderators
Bermet Borubaeva, BiSCA
Susanna Chung, AAA
Free and open to the public with registration.
Siu King Chung is an art and design critic, installation artist, and independent curator who led the Art and Design in Education and Social Design Programmes of the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the School before his retirement in May 2022. He co-founded the Designs You Don’t Know What to Do With Association and the Community Museum Project in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and was actively involved in arts policy and arts and design curriculum development in Hong Kong. Formerly President of the Hong Kong Society for Education in Art and a founding member of the installation group NUX, Siu produces experimental videos; explores possible approaches for installation art; and initiates collaboration among students, teachers, designers, and artists by curating exhibitions and publishing projects, such as The Blackbox Exercise, Lo Ting Archaeology, Home Affairs, Cityscapes Reading Guide, In Search of Marginalised Wisdom, Lesser Designs, Riverside Scene of Local Agriculture, and Undiscarded Everyday, among others.
Shefalee Jain is an artist, illustrator, and educator based in Delhi. She is the co-founder of BlueJackal, an independent publishing platform for visual narratives, comics, and picture books. She co-founded and co-edited the zine Drawing Resistance. She is a regular contributor to Chakmak, a children’s magazine in which she writes a column in Hindi, on contemporary art. She is the author and illustrator of the children’s book Ten (Tulika Publishers, 2005), jointly illustrated Mother (with Lokesh Khodke; DC Books and Mango, 2008), and illustrated School Mein Seekha Aur Sikhaya (Muskaan, 2022), Naram Garam Dosti (Muskaan, 2022), Dohri Zindagi (BlueJackal), and Adventures of Aditi and her Friends by Suniti Namjoshi (Tulika Publishers). Shefalee was Assistant Professor of visual art at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi, from 2012–22. She completed her PhD in visual art from the same institution in 2020.
T. Sanathanan is a visual artist and Professor of Art History at the Department of Fine Arts, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He is one of the co-founders of Sri Lanka Archive for Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Jaffna, and the founder of Kolam Craft Initiative. His artworks explore the meaning of home in the context of displacement and migration and have been exhibited at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane; Weltmuseum, Vienna; Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Dhaka Art Summit; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Lahore Biennale; and Sharjah Biennial, as well as exhibiting widely in Sri Lanka. Publications include artist’s books The One Year Drawing Project, The Incomplete Thombu, and The A To Z of Conflict; articles and book chapters on modern and contemporary visual art in Sri Lanka; Tamil-language books Tagore’s Visit to Jaffna: Art, Identity, and Discourse and Modernity and Visual Art in Jaffna: 1920–90; with Murals in Jaffna forthcoming. Sanathanan completed a BFA and MFA in painting from the University of Delhi and received his PhD in art history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Bishkek School of Contemporary Art (BiSCA), founded in 2020, is a self-organised, socially engaged eight-member collective, working on the principles of circulation, accumulation, formation, and dissemination of knowledge. BiSCA promotes practices, discussions, and experiences of art in its various forms.
This talk is developed by Susanna Chung and Bermet Borubaeva, with support from Jocelin Kee. BiSCA’s Curatorial School was developed by co-founders Diana Ukhina and Alima Tokmergenova.
Mobile Library: Kyrgyzstan is generously supported by Virginia & Wellington Yee.