SESSION: Archive as Method: Rewriting the Self in East Asian Art Practices
This panel explores how archival materials – formal and informal, institutional and affective – serve as catalysts for art practices that rework memory, identity, and narrative.
Artists working within and beyond East Asian contexts increasingly approach the archive-as-method to fiction the self through absences, ruptures, and material residues. This turn aligns with expanded uses of autotheory, embodied knowledge, and speculative narrative in contemporary art. Rather than focusing solely on recovering fixed pasts, East Asian artists actively engage with minor histories and everyday objects to displace dominant structures of subjectivity and imagine the archive as a site of self-inscription. The panel foregrounds the interrelation between material fragments, speculative narrative, and performative selfhood, asking how fictioning operates as a spatial, sensory, and political strategy within archival work.
We invite submissions that critically engage East Asian perspectives on self-writing, particularly those shaped by diasporic experience, asymmetrical power, and cultural incommensurability. We welcome proposals that resist patriarchal and colonial epistemologies by reimagining concepts through embodied methods, hybrid forms, and archival interventions. Approaches may include appropriation, translation, hybridisation, or dubbing and may work across installation, text, image, sound, or performance. By centring on self-formation, this panel seeks to challenge the subsumption of non-Western personhood into dominant Western frameworks and to propose new ways of thinking that advance anticolonial, decolonial, or postcolonial agendas.
Session Convenors:
Wenyi Pan, University of Edinburgh
Yiyang Chen, Glasgow School of Art
Speakers:
Tiffany Wu, University of Cambridge
Performance and Labor in the Archival and Discursive Afterlives of Patty Chang’s Fountain (1999)
Chinese American artist Patty Chang places a mirror on the ground of Jack Tilton Gallery, covers its surface with water, then kneels to drink from it repeatedly. This performance of bodily endurance, titled Fountain (1999), is livestreamed on gallery walls as a tightly-cropped footage rotated by 90 degrees—Chang’s face and reflection become upright in the resulting video. From 1999 until today, viewers encountering the video of Fountain do not see Chang’s kneeling body and are instead confronted with the close-up of an East Asian woman engaging in prolonged kisses with her own reflection. Critics discuss Fountain’s allusions to Narcissus and Duchamp, as well as the fluctuating and fragmented selfhoods of Asian American women.
This story, however, fails to account for a photographic documentation of Chang’s performance that exists in the Franklin Furnace Archive. Depicting Chang kneeling in a public restroom cubicle, the photograph’s abject image becomes affectively charged when compared to its video counterpart, a public portrayal of self-consumption and narcissism. In the wake of Chang’s performance, the three iterations of Fountain—performance, video, and photograph—have been repeatedly conflated in scholarly accounts, a discursive process that overlooks the specificities of artistic medium and Chang’s art-making labour. This paper argues that the archival remains (Schneider, 2014) of Fountain are “wholly fictive space[s]” (Stiles, 1990) offering a lens through which we could read Fountain’s own critical-discursive afterlives. Fountain’s performance lies precisely in its unfolding archival documents, which invite new modes of spectatorial encounter that recentre Chang’s meditations on self-formation through concealed and displayed labour.
Jason Waite, University of Oxford, St. Anne’s College
Contemporary Art and Anti-Archives of Intergenerational Knowledge: Kota Takeuchi, ‘Stone Monuments Twice’
Immediately after the 9.0 earthquake of the coast of Northern Japan on 11 March 2011, some residents were saved from the ensuing massive tsunami that killed thousands by the information carved onto ancient stones embedded in the landscape. Contemporary artist Kota Takeuchi considers the importance of these markers through his project Stone Monuments Twice (2013-2015) that reveal hidden histories with the potential to counteract future crises. He countered the loss of the ability to recognise this landscape is evident as well as uncovers a latent resilience that might be hiding in plain sight. Confronting this lost capacity to see the effects of time in the landscape, Takeuchi intervened with the time-based medium of photography to re-enact photographs of these moments placing his own body as a marker and record to transmit these critical geo-markers. In doing so, the artist contests philosopher Jacques Derrida’s reading of the domiciliation of knowledge in an archive, and instead, Takeuchi posits a new form of anti-archive that can be transmitted through inter-generational embodied knowledge.
Nam Joo Huh, Loughborough University
Fictioning the Self: Post-Internet Archives in the Works of Yarli Allison and April Lin 林森
This paper examines how contemporary East Asian artists use post-internet media to question the politics of self-representation within digital archives. Focusing on Yarli Allison’s In Virtual Return You (Can’t) Dehaunt (2018-21) and April Lin 林森’s Ritual for the Time Being (2021), it situates their work within the broader art-historical discourses on performative identity and speculative documentation. Both artists extend the archival tradition beyond preservation, using digital residues, video, and performance to build affective and fragmented portraits of diasporic existence.
The central question asks how post-internet practices enable East Asian artists to “fiction” the self; rewriting memory and authorship through technology while resisting the authority of institutional archives. Combining visual analysis and media theory, the research draws on Sadiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action to explore how the archive becomes a relational, rather than static, site of meaning.
The paper argues that Allison’s digital avatars and Lin’s ritual-based storytelling transform the archive into a process of becoming, where personal data, affect, and mythology converge. These practices blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, image and testimony, suggesting an alternative art-historical model that privileges multiplicity and embodiment.
By foregrounding East Asian perspectives on speculative self-inscription, the study contributes to a wider understanding of how artists mobilise post-internet archives to challenge linear historiographies and envision new modes of presence and belonging in global contemporary art.
Emily Clarkson, University of Edinburgh
Takako Saitō’s Archive: Self-Preservation and the Fluxus Counter-Narrative
In October 2007, aged 78, Takako Saitō returned from a reunion event in Milan with the realisation that a narrative of Fluxus was being written without her. This moment catalysed an intense period of reflective writing, for what was intended to become an autobiographical artists’ book, and self-promotion through the strategic circulation of materials from her personal archive, one of the most expansive and sentiment-driven collections of Fluxus-related materials in Europe.
After settling in Lörick, suburban Düsseldorf, in 1981, Saitō meticulously documented both her artistic experiments and her lived experience as a diasporic Japanese artist. Her handcrafted, seven-room studio-home became a spatial embodiment of memory and resistance to erasure. This paper investigates Saitō’s self-archiving as a strategy of resistance to art-historical marginalisation, positioning her as an autodidactic artist and “outsider archivist” operating beyond institutional frameworks and across borders. Drawing on the author’s observations during the archive’s forced dissolution in winter 2024–25, alongside photographs spanning four decades and conversations with the artist, the paper reconstructs the spatial and conceptual logic of Saitō’s archival practice.
Following Saitō’s death in September 2025, questions of legacy, preservation, and authorship intensify. Written from the privileged yet daunting perspective of someone jointly tasked with securing the archive’s future, this paper reflects on current digitisation and cataloguing efforts that seek to balance accessibility with respect for Saitō’s idiosyncratic organisational system. It interrogates the ethical complexities of determining what is preserved and how, while proposing strategies to sustain Saitō’s playful spirit and ensure her rightful place within art history.