UCI CFP on Asian Visual Landscapes

Call for Papers

The organizing committee of Asian Visual Cultures Workshop invites submission for:
/
Erratic Landscapes

/ University of California, Irvine
April 10, 2009

From the opening ceremony of the Olympic games in Beijing, to televised live reports of terrorism in Mumbai, “Asia” has appeared with numerous facades in the global circulation of images. In an age when visuality becomes identity, pictorial portrayals of these places are often stereotyped and ideologically constructed. In the contemporary world, “Asia” has become an easily consumable commodity in our everyday experience. However, it is ironic that in our well-trained visual literacy, people, cities, and natural sceneries that appear in representations become more and more homogenized, in other words, “faceless.” For this reason, our interest is to examine the conceptual affinities between “Asia” and “Landscape.” Since neither term can be interpreted as pregiven background, the workshop invites artistic and academic projects that explore new theoretical approaches to the politics of landscape.

By proposing “Erratic Landscapes” as the theme, we welcome works that problematize or reconceptualize the meaning of landscape. For example, we want to consider questions such as, what are the new definitions of “landscapes”? Which bodies, things, and emotions are conjured in representations? At which historical moment does landscape become an important question of intervention? In more general terms, the workshop is interested in exploring the relationships between power and space, segmented into issues of sexuality, globalization, and feminist ecology.

As the second annual Asian Visual Cultures Workshop, graduate students from UCI would like to continue our goal creating a space for dialogue among those interested in Asia and visual cultures (including but not limited to art, cinema, games, theater, architecture, animation) beyond disciplinary frameworks in order to explore methodologies, theories, and objects of analysis.

Possible Topics of Interest: – Landscape and new theoretical intervention – Affects and Landscapes – Feminist Ecology – Queering Spaces – Landscape of the Everyday – Bodyscape – Musical Landscape (music as landscape; noise, sound) – Politics of Emptiness (the lure of emptiness, silence, waste, evacuation) – Commodification and Consumption of Landscapes as image – Sovereignty and Territoriality Violence and Space – Mobility and Displacement (tourism/sightseeing, refugee camp, mail-order brides, domestic maids, outsourcing factory workers) – Volatile Contacts (new forms of intimate contacts, such as sexual, laboring, and intellectual contacts that were not acknowledged forms of contacts in history)

The deadline for submissions is Sunday, Febuary 15, 2009. Please email a brief abstract (200-300) to: eyhuang@uci.edu (Erin Y. Huang)

***Participants in the workshop might receive some amount of funding for the cost of traveling. Funding will be allocated based the distance traveled. Please feel free to contact us for more information at:
eyhuang@uci.edu (Erin Y. Huang) or hyunsp@uci.edu (Hyun Seon Park)

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