Talk | Charles Esche | Keynote: Reading the Zeitgeist

Charles Esche | Keynote: Reading the Zeitgeist

Art magazines and journals are always a product of their moment. They reflect debates through a generalised sense of time and context, rather than through artists or a specific institution. For this reason, they represent a rich vein for understanding how the art world itself changes, and how it relates to the rest of society. From this perspective, this lecture considers how Asian art and artists have been treated in certain European art magazines.

As the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Charles Esche also discusses the motivations for founding the publication in 1999, and developments of its parallel activities, including its exhibition histories titles. He looks at how Afterall has responded to the internationalisation of Asian art, and the slow and incomplete shift in European perceptions of its own centrality.

This talk is part of AAA's symposium series, It Begins with a Story: Artists, Writers, and Periodicals in Asia.

Organised by Asia Art Archive in collaboration with The University of Hong Kong, this symposium explores how periodicals have fostered conversations around art and emergent forms of visuality in twentieth-century Asia. A series of talks, discussions, and exhibitions will be presented leading up to the symposium.

Find out more about this talk here: https://bit.ly/2kFtmIn