The Artist as Curator: Dinh Q. Le’s ‘Light and Belief: Sketches of Life during the Vietnam War’ and the Problematics of History in Vietnamese Contemporary Art – a seminar by Dr Nora Taylor (Wed, 8 October 2014)

Speaker: Dr Nora A. Taylor (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA)
Date: Wednesday, 8 October 2014
Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm
Venue: AS3, Level 6, SEAS Seminar Room (06-20)

Synopsis
This talk will look at contemporary Ho Chi Minh City based Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Le’s project for dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany, 2012, an installation of 100 drawings made by artists in the 1960s during the war. The installation was accompanied by a film that contained interviews with the surviving artists and animated reconstructions of some of the sketches. The question that this talk wishes to address is what is the context for historic drawings in a contemporary art installation and what are the repercussions on audiences and art history more generally.

About the speaker
Dr. Nora A. Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research specialty is Modern and Contemporary Vietnamese Art. She is the author of “Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art” (Hawaii 2004 and NUS Press 2009) as well as numerous articles on Vietnamese artists and art history. She is currently a visiting professor at NTU’s Art, Design and Media department.

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