Pamela N Corey
Fulbright University Vietnam, Art and Media Studies, Faculty Member
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In The City in Time, Pamela N. Corey provides new ways of understanding contemporary artistic practices in a region that continues to linger in international perceptions as perpetually “postwar.” Focusing on art from the last two decades,... more
In The City in Time, Pamela N. Corey provides new ways of understanding contemporary artistic practices in a region that continues to linger in international perceptions as perpetually “postwar.” Focusing on art from the last two decades, Corey connects artistic developments with social transformations as reflected through the urban landscapes of Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh. As she argues, artists’ engagements with urban space and form reveal ways of grasping multiple and layered senses and concepts of time, whether aligned with colonialism, postcolonial modernity, communism, or postsocialism.
The City in Time traces the process through which collective memory and aspiration are mapped onto landscape and built space to shed light on how these vibrant Southeast Asian cities shape artistic practices as the art simultaneously consolidates the city as image and imaginary. Featuring a dynamic array of creative productions that include staged and documentary photography, the moving image, and public performance and installation, The City in Time illustrates how artists from Vietnam and Cambodia have envisioned their rapidly changing worlds.
The City in Time traces the process through which collective memory and aspiration are mapped onto landscape and built space to shed light on how these vibrant Southeast Asian cities shape artistic practices as the art simultaneously consolidates the city as image and imaginary. Featuring a dynamic array of creative productions that include staged and documentary photography, the moving image, and public performance and installation, The City in Time illustrates how artists from Vietnam and Cambodia have envisioned their rapidly changing worlds.
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Book Review of Pamela N. Corey, The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia, and Viet Le, Return Engagements: Contemporary Art's Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh
This essay provides an overview of the work of British-Singaporean artist Erika Tan, in particular, a series of multimedia projects realized from 2015 to 2019 that focused on the historical figure of Halimah Binti Abdullah, a Malayan... more
This essay provides an overview of the work of British-Singaporean artist Erika Tan, in particular, a series of multimedia projects realized from 2015 to 2019 that focused on the historical figure of Halimah Binti Abdullah, a Malayan weaver who performed her craft at the 1924 Empire Exhibition in Wembley, England. A video presentation featuring the digitally rendered voice of Abdullah served as a threshold into the series, and is the focus of inquiry for my discussion. A Presentation by Proxy (2014) evokes questions about the ways in which the conjunction of speech, text, and voice in the digital medium elides the uncanny, the ventriloquial, and the parodic. The work “materializes” Abdullah as a simultaneously historical and posthuman presence, and I draw attention to the deliberate use of the glitch in this reenactment, arguing that Tan’s crafting of mechanized speech foregrounds irresolution as crucial to sustaining postcolonial address and decolonial work.
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To approach the broader question of how craft often serves as a constituent element in contemporary art, this essay traces the historical developments that catalyzed the ideological differentiation of art, craft, modernism, and the... more
To approach the broader question of how craft often serves as a constituent element in contemporary art, this essay traces the historical developments that catalyzed the ideological differentiation of art, craft, modernism, and the contemporary in colonial and postcolonial contexts. I suggest that this historical mapping, dating back to projects of industrialization and empire in the nineteenth century, is important in terms of tracing the transcultural routes to contemporary art’s desire for globalism today, and the role of craft therein. This also provides necessary context for considering craft as the hinge of an artwork but also as risk for artists from regions like Southeast Asia, whose works become instrumental in the making of a “global” contemporary art.
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This article centres on the work of Vong Phaophanit (b. 1961, Laos) and his collaborations with Claire Oboussier (b. 1963, UK). It first examines the problematic politics of identification made apparent by the media controversy... more
This article centres on the work of Vong Phaophanit (b. 1961, Laos) and his collaborations with Claire Oboussier (b. 1963, UK). It first examines the problematic politics of identification made apparent by the media controversy surrounding Phaophanit’s nomination for the 1993 Turner Prize, when theartist’s ethnicity was targeted in queries surrounding his eligibility for the prize.I further suggest that the historicisation of Phaophanit as a British black artist reveals limitations in the ways that his work has been interpreted within identity-based discourses. A deeper consideration of Phaophanit’s practice and his collaborations undertaken with Claire Oboussier reveals a deliberate and poetic obfuscation of such identificatory processes within the artwork itself, particularly through the artists’ blurring of the boundaries of visual and sonic images at the very level of perception. To that end, I emphasise the role of vocality in their work as it is implicated through various sonic modalities, including ventriloquial exchange, the sounding of things, and horizonal perception. This scrutiny of materials provides a basis from which we might understand the artists’ presentation of a different kind of voice: one suggestively and productively opaque in relation to representation as well as the often contentious metaphorisation of art as voice, too often construed through biography and identity.
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50 free copies of the final version can be downloaded from https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/h5aMassKXdvD8TZXIQ7A/full?target=10.1080/00043249.2018.1549879
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shared online access through eprint link http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6ata7pjNJwMbcPX3TABp/full
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Essay for the exhibition brochure for Unauthorised Medium (curated by Annie Jael Kwan), Framer Framed, 16 Sep – 18 Nov 2018
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A follow-up comment on the workshop “Histories of Art and Art as History in Contemporary Southeast Asia” (Forum Transregionale Studien, April 2017)
"While working to introduce a broad audience to its resources through education and public programmes, AAA has noted that many people experience difficulty knowing ‘where to begin’. To provide such users with meaningful points of entry,... more
"While working to introduce a broad audience to its resources through education and public programmes, AAA has noted that many people experience difficulty knowing ‘where to begin’. To provide such users with meaningful points of entry, AAA invites individuals with expertise in the related subject to compile ‘Shortlists’ of recommended readings from AAA’s collection accompanied by an introductory essay. Each Shortlist has an individual perspective and is intended to be useful to those who seek a general introduction to a particular area of contemporary art in Asia. "