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 (Fournier, 2021; Cvetkovich, 2003). 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 (Hartman, 2008; Muñoz, 2009). The panel foregrounds the interrelation between material fragments, speculative narrative, and performative selfhood, asking how fictioning (O’Sullivan, 2019; Haraway, 2016) 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 (Stryker, 2012), 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.

The panel will consist of 20-minute presentations by each speaker, followed by a panel discussion including Q&A and collective reflections.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Wenyi Pan, University of Edinburgh, w.pan-18@sms.ed.ac.uk

Yiyang Chen, Glasgow School of Art, y.chen29@student.gsa.ac.uk