Conference – 2018 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand

This was my first public conference presentation on my PhD research, which was particularly exciting. I was invited to join a panel organised by Dr. Francis Maravillas titled “Memory and Performance Art in Southeast Asia.” My paper was titled “Lucid Dreaming: The case of Lee Wen’s Independent Archive.” Here is the abstract:

The art historian’s archive, in the historical Euro-American sense of the word, is losing its currency. While the institution called ‘archive’ still exists, it has been increasingly excavated not only for the writing of art histories but also the production of contemporary art. In a sense, art is becoming art historical, though perhaps not art history. How could we deal with the archive as a work of art, the archive in a work of art and the work of art that is an archive? When these categories coincide and implode upon each other and artistic value is derived from archival authority, the archive’s ability to hold on to memory is being called into question. Taking the publication Lee Wen: Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real (2012) as both an exhibition catalogue and an object that informs the work of art, this paper discusses how archives could be understood in artistic terms and argues that photographic documentation could be understood as both documentation of a performance and an activation of the viewer’s own performance. In this sense, Lee Wen’s Independent Archive could be seen not as an archival institution but as an artistic work predicated on the (artist’s?) performing body.

There is an event page here.