Searching Looks: Asian American Visual Cultures

Searching Looks: Asian American Visual Cultures

February 25-26, 2010

Slought Foundation
4017 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3513

“Searching Looks” explores the practice and materiality of Asian American visual culture. In highlighting visual technologies and their repercussions within Asian America, this event proposes to examine the concept of visuality as a critical lens for understanding minority cultural studies. The conference brings together practitioners and scholars of Asian American visual art to consider questions of art history and practice, new media, and the poetics of visuality.

Cultural theorists have been heralding and lamenting a turn to visual culture from at least the turn of the last century—and within Asian American studies, a rhetoric of racial invisibility and hypervisibility has defined the field from its inception in the late 1960s. At the start of the twenty-first century, how are we to see the image, firmly ensconced as a global commodity? A renewed call to transnationalism is presently transforming cultural studies in the academy, and Asian American studies marks a crucial site for understanding global flows of things and bodies. How can we theorize visuality in the context of a rigorously transnational understanding of Asian American studies?

Thursday, February 25
Keynote Address: Anne Anlin Cheng, “Strange Skin” (5pm)

Friday, February 26
Ways of Seeing: The Visual and Material Practice of Asian American Art (10 -11:45am)
Margo Machida, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, moderated by Bakirathi Mani

Desiring Images: Performing and Representing Asian American Cultures (1 – 2:45pm)
Patty Chang, and Mimi Nguyen, moderated by Homay King

Writing Seeing: Visuality in Asian American Poetics (3 – 4:45pm)
Brian Kim Stefans, and Timothy Yu, moderated by Josephine Park

For more information, visit: http://asam.sas.upenn.edu/visualcultures