111. Writing Art History Otherwise: Artistic Practice, Exhibitions, and Museums in East and Southeast Asia

Who writes the history of art from and based in East and Southeast Asia, by what means, and from where? This session addresses a persistent tension in the field: how to account for practices rooted in local, postcolonial, and post-socialist histories when critical frameworks and institutional languages adopted were largely developed elsewhere. Rather than treating East and Southeast Asia as regions to be inserted into a global art history, the session approaches them as active sites where art history is written, challenged, repaired, and staged.

The proliferation of contemporary art institutions across the region from the 1990s onwards reflects a concentrated investment in the legitimacy of its modern and contemporary art, opening new and contested platforms for art-historical discourse. Critical scholarship has responded in kind: Ming Tiampo’s critique of modernism through Gutai; Patrick Flores’s theorisation of postcolonial curatorial histories in Southeast Asia; Joan Kee’s methodological challenges to canonical accounts of Korean contemporary art; David Teh’s writing on the currencies of the contemporary art in Southeast Asia; and Roger Nelson’s concept of “artistic art history,” in which artworks themselves perform historiographic work. Together they mark a field actively negotiating its own terms and methods.

We invite papers on exhibitions, museum displays, critical texts, or artists’ practices as cases through which alternative art-historical narratives have been constructed, challenged, or reimagined, attending not only to how East and Southeast Asian art expands art history’s objects, but to how it might transform its methods. The session comprises four presentations followed by an open discussion.

Themes: East and Southeast Asian art history, exhibition histories, artistic research.

Additional format comment: The session comprises four presentations followed by an open discussion..

Lead Convenor: Kahyun Lee, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom.

Co-convenors: Kay Min Soh, University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom.

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.