Public Programs @ the Institute
Series: Midday Matters
Pamela N. Corey, associate professor of art history in the Art and Media Studies program, Fulbright University Vietnam
Mekong and Metaphor: Contemporary Art and Regional Imaginaries in Mainland Southeast Asia
Thursday, Oct 30, 12:30–1:30 PM
In-person only, for IFA faculty, students, and staff.
Pamela Corey's talk, the inaugural session of the new Midday Matters series, departs from an earlier essay, “Metaphor as Method: Curating Regionalism in Mainland Southeast Asia” (2013), which examined controversial curatorial uses of geographical metaphors (such as the Mekong and the Ho Chi Minh Trail) to promote contemporary artists and foster artistic collaboration in mainland Southeast Asia. Corey will look at metaphor more explicitly as an artistic method that emphasizes the temporal and tacit dimensions of regional imagination, continuing to focus on imaginaries associated with the Greater Mekong Subregion. Using the 2023 Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai and featured artworks by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nguyen Trinh Thi as case studies, the presentation will explore the works' engagements with landscape, ecology, theater, sound, and automation, underscoring metaphor’s potential as a form of defamiliarization and refamiliarization. Whether the projects are aligned with concepts of critical regionalism or reflective nostalgia, they ground the Mekong as a multitude of lived realities and increasingly as an unsettling metaphor for futurity.
Pamela N. Corey is an associate professor of art history in the Art and Media Studies program at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary art history, focusing on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. Prior to joining Fulbright University Vietnam in 2021, she was an assistant professor in the History of Art Archaeology department at SOAS University of London. She is the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021), guest co-editor of “Voice as Form,” a special issue of Oxford Art Journal (2020) and “On Modern and Contemporary Cambodian Art and Aesthetics,” a special issue of Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies (2014).
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