Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong

Looking Closely at Distance

The riverine and coastal geography of Sei Yāp (四邑)—the Cantonese region adjacent to Macau and Hong Kong—has, for most of its history, produced water-based and seafaring cultures typical of Southeast Asia, distinct from the land-based cultures based in the plains of the north. This link to the sea enabled contact and exchange with distant cultures, and a familiar relationship with the faraway.

For centuries, however, Sei Yāp has also been a site of occupations and rebellions, a home of cultures colonized and erased, and the locus of one of the longest and most extensive exoduses of people throughout the world. This history has produced a culture defined not by the delineation of borders, but by their traversal.

Artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong will present his photographs from this region—including his series Lookout Towers— that examine how Sei Yāp culture expressed its transnationalism, and how it complicated the distinctions between foreign and local, distant and near. Leong will also contextualize this work by discussing his History Images series, which explores efforts to erase history and local identities; and by discussing how the themes of transnationalism, border-crossing, and distance have informed his international work.

Wei-I Lee

Thinking Photography in Taiwan: An Alternative Possibility

Liang-Pin Tsao

Towards an Open Photography Culture: the Mission and Purpose of Lightbox Photo Library

Kevin Chua

Associate Professor, Texas Tech University

Parmentier’s Photographic Archeology

While we know that European romantic photography of Angkorean temples in the late-19th and early-20th centuries installed an appropriating gaze and buttressed French colonial control of Indochina, historians have not paid sufficient attention to the diversity of the photography produced by the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), nor the varied uses of that photography. This talk examines the photography of EFEO architect Henri Parmentier (1871-1949), going beyond critics who have considered his photography secondary to his architectural drawing. I will argue that, more than drawing, photography was key to Parmentier’s archaeological investigations at these Angkorean sites. Resisting certainty, refusing closure, his was an unromantic photography that grappled with the unfinished and incomplete construction of buildings, thus offering a more ‘realist’ sense of time.

Susie Protschky

Associate Professor, Deakin University, Australia

War photography from colonial Indonesia in global context

This paper places the large archive of war photography from Dutch military conflicts in colonial Indonesia in the context of new historical research on other European imperial wars in South and Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I will survey continuities and changes in colonial photography across the wars in Aceh (c. 1873–1942), south Bali (1906–8), as well as the Indonesian National Revolution (1945­­50), and reflect on the theoretical and methodological challenges of interpreting this particular visual archive. 

Jeehey Kim

Assistant Professor, University of Arizona

Photographic Cold War and Visualization of Southeast Asia in Korea

This paper explores the ways in which Korean and Southeast Asian photographers played a crucial role in structuring Cold War politics through organizing and participating in international photography contests of the region during the post-WWII period. The paper aims to shed light on the practices of amateur photographers from the late 1950s to the 1970s, when they endeavored to establish photographic solidarity among the countries of what was called the Free World. The establishment of FAPA (Federation of Asian Photography Arts) went along with the creation of other regional institutions, including the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League and the Asia and Pacific Council in the 1960s. Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War also introduced Vietnamese photographers to the peninsula, such as Nguyễn Mạnh Đan and Nguyễn Ngọc Hạnh. The active participation of photographers from Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in the Korean photography competitions will be discussed in order to foreground the hitherto less discussed transregional photographic scenes of the Cold War period. 

Karin Zackari

Senior Lecturer, Lund University, Sweden

Countering epistemic violence through photographic practices: ‘Documentation of 6 October’ project (Thailand)

The project called ‘Documentation of 6 October’ (Doct6), is both an archival and historical project that counters the official Thai state historiography of the event known as 6 October 1976. The historical event was the Thai states atrocious suppression of a student led protest against the return of dictatorship. In my research I have traced the publications of photographs from the event, showing how after 1996, the event transformed from obscurity to a visual trope for human rights activism. The project Doct6, with an online photographic archive, has been a key factor in creating collective memory around the massacre and in making it part of a Thai human rights history.