Description

Celebratory Roundtable on Southeast Asian Cinema  featuring Sheron Dayoc, Sonny Calvento, Annisa Adjam, Andrea Nirmala Widjajanto, Donsaron Kovitvanitcha, Jeremy Chua, Jun Robles Lana, Wregas Bhanuteja and moderated by Elizabeth Wijaya.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Annisa Adjam is a film producer and CEO of SINEMA 5, an Indonesian independent creative company that elevates genre elements in filmmaking to champion authentic voices on important issues. She is also the chairperson of Inteamates, an Indonesian creative storyteller community for social impact that highlights minority perspectives to enact change. Both entities are established in Jakarta from 2019 and previously produced "SAWO MATANG," Andrea Nirmala’s latest short film with Pidgin Production. Annisa is an alumna of Kyoto Filmmakers Lab Masters, BIFAN NAFF Fantastic Film School South Korea, Objectifs’s Short Film Incubator Singapore, IF/Then SEA Lab by Tribeca, and Full Circle’s Creative Producer Lab Philippines who earned a master’s degree in Filmmaking from Kingston University London. Her upcoming feature debut under SINEMA 5 "A Ballad of Long Hair” won Most Promising Project from SGIFF’s Silver Screen Awards 2022.

Andrea Nirmala Widjajanto is an Indonesian writer and director who splits her time between Toronto and Jakarta. Her works utilize genre films as a medium to dissect sociopolitical, cultural, and environmental grievances through a female gaze. Her first short, Srikandi is a fantasy drama that premiered at the 46th Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival: Asia, and the 40th Vancouver International Film Festival amongst other international festivals. Following her debut, she wrote and directed Bawang Merah Bawang Putih, a body horror food film produced as a 2022 Get Reel Filmmakers Scholarship recipient and premiered at Sundance Asia 2022. More recently, she completed Sawo Matang, a political futurism short as one of the 2021 NFFTY Pitch Competition winners and premiering at the 48th Toronto International Film Festival. Other than fiction, she co-directed a short documentary called Brown Enough, now available in TELUS Optik. She is an alumna of the 2020 Experimental Forest Writing is Rewriting Workshop, 2021 VIFF Catalyst Mentorship Program, 2023 BIFAN NAFF Fantastic Film School, and the 2023 Objectifs Short Film Incubator. In 2022, she co-founded Pidgin Productions in commitment to bridging gaps through our shared pidgin of art and cinema. Andrea is currently in development for her first feature film among other shorts.

Sonny Calvento is a writer, director, and producer from the Philippines. His first short film, “Excuse Me, Miss, Miss, Miss” is the first Filipino short film programmed in the Sundance Film Festival. He is a recipient of Philippine Daily Inquirer’s IndieBravo Awards, The National Commission for Culture and the Arts’ Ani ng Dangal (Harvest of Honor Award) and a special citation from the Film Development Council of the Philippines. For 10 years, he worked as a scriptwriter for ABS-CBN Corporation, the biggest multimedia conglomerate in the country. The company was recently shuttered by the government. Now, he devotes his time to filmmaking and directing/producing for advertisements.

Donsaron Kovitvanitcha is very active within Thailand’s indepdenent film scene. He works as a film writer, critic, and journalist for magazines and newspaper in Thailand. He also works as programmer for film festivals in Thailand. In 2017 and 2018, he was advisor to CinemAsia Film Festival, Amsterdam. In 2019 and 2020, he was advisor to Cinema du Reel International Documentary Film Festival. From 2020 to present, he is the preselector of short films for Busan International Film Festival 2020. In 2022, he becomes festival director of World Film Festival of Bangkok. Donsaron is also an independent film producer, focusing on producing films from new talented Thai film director such as Nontawat Numbenchapol’s Boundary (2013), Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s The Master (2015) and Die Tomorrow (2017), Anucha Boonyawatana’s The Blue Hour (2015) and Malila: The Farewell Flower (2017), Wattanapume Laisuwanchai’s Phantom of Illumination (2018). In 2022, the film Arnold is a Model Student (first feature film by Sorayos Prapapan) which he produced is in Filmmakers of the Present competition at Locarno Film Festival

Jeremy Chua is a Singaporean film producer and screenwriter. Since 2014, he founded Singapore-based independent film label Potocol as a creative house for distinctive Asian auteurs to produce films, videos, installations and artwork. His work include Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell by Pham Thien An (Cannes Camera d’Or 2023), Tomorrow is a Long Time by Jow Zhi Wei (Berlinale 2023), Last Shadow at First Light by Nicole Midori Woodford (San Sebastian 2023), Autobiography by Makbul Mubarak (FIPRESCI Venice 2022), Glorious Ashes by Bui Thac Chuyen (Nantes Golden Balloon 2022), Rehana Maryam Noor by Abdullah Mohammad Saad (Cannes UCR 2021), A Family Tour by Ying Liang (Opening Film International Competition Locarno 2018), A Yellow Bird by K. Rajagopal (Cannes Critics’ Week 2016) and A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery by Lav Diaz (Silver Bear Berlinale 2016). He is an alumnus of EAVE Ties That Bind 2013, Produire au sud 2015, Berlinale Talents 2017, SEAFIC 2017 and Torino Film Lab 2018. He is also a programmer at Pingyao International Film Festival under Jia Zhangke and Marco Mueller since 2017.

Jun Robles Lana is the youngest Filipino to be inducted in the Palanca Literary Awards’ (Philippine’s Pulitzer Prize) Hall of Fame. In 2019 he won the Best Director Award at the Tallinn International Film Festival for Kalel, 15. Four years later, his film About Us But Not About Us won Best Film at the inaugural Critics’ Pick section of the same festival. His many directorial credits include the multi-awarded films Bwakaw, Barber’s Tales, Shadow Behind The Moon, Die Beautiful, and Big Night. His most recent film Your Mother’s Son is set to have its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.

Sheron Dayoc is a director/producer who shifts from Fiction/non fiction storytelling to TV Commercial directing. His notable films are HALAW/Ways of the Sea (NETPAC Jury -2011 Berlinale, NETPAC Award – APSA 2011, Cinemalaya 2010 Best film), The Crescent Rising (Best Documentary – Busan IFF 2016, Best Documentary – Gawad Urian 2015) and Women of the Weeping River, which won numerous local and international awards. As for Advertising, his most notable work includes 2018 VICKS’ “Touch of Care” of Publicis One Singapore, that ranked as one of the top 5 adverts globally for 2018  by Campaignasia.com. The same ad won awards in Spikes Asia and Kidlat awards (Philippine Advertising Awards) and Araw Value Awards.

Wregas Bhanuteja is an Indonesian film director and screenwriter. He studied film directing at the Jakarta Institute of Arts where he made his first short film, Senyawa. His second short, Lembusura, was selected in the Berlinale Shorts Competition in 2015. He then went on to work in a production house as a feature film assistant director. Alongside this, he carried on making short films. His latest, Prenjak, was selected at the 55th Semaine de la Critique where it won the Leica Cine Discovery Prize.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Biography courtesy of the University of Chicago Press

In the hypermediated world of Tamil Nadu, Francis Cody studies how “news events” are made.Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a “news event” is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself.

In The News Event, Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news, and subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Francis Cody is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, where he is the Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Contemporary Asian Studies and the Centre for South Asian Studies. He has been teaching at U of T since 2008. His research focuses on language, politics, and media in southern India.

After the event, we invite attendees to join us in room 202N, down the hallway from the book talk, for a book sale hosted by the University of Toronto Bookstore.

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ABOUT THE TALK

Over the past decade, as Chief Curator of Times Museum, Nikita Yingqian Cai has been focusing on curating a network of people, spaces, objects, and ideas in the region of the Pearl River Delta-a frontier of contemporary art in China.

Cai will present the research-based projects she initiated at Times Museum, and share her experiences in how artistic expressions and practices are translated, fabricated and contextualized in the curatorial process. She will also map a variety of human and non-human actors, such as labor, virus, river, port, island, plant etc., in the forming and relocating of a frontier-where the region transformed from an agricultural frontier to a frontier of “Reform and Open” in the 1990s, and subsequently redistributes its labor-intensive manufacturing resources and extracting capital to the southern of the world. By inserting artworks, artistic concepts, and investigations into already existing conditions and setting up a friction between them, shadowed context repressed by the developmental mentality is activated and may subsequently change what we think it is all about. In this sense, the curatorial incubates imaginations to blur boundaries and categorizations, thus challenge their constraining powers

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Nikita Yingqian Cai is Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Times Museum. She has curated exhibitions such as Times Heterotopia Trilogy (2011, 2014, 2017), Jiang Zhi: If This is a Man (2012), Roman Ondák: Storyboard (2015), Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows (2016), Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence (Villa Vassilieff in Paris and Guangdong Times Museum, 2017), Omer Fast: The Invisible Hand (2018), Zhou Tao: The Ridge in the Bronze Mirror (2019), Neither Black/Red/Yellow Nor Woman (Times Art Center Belin, 2019), Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison (2021), and One song is very much like another and the boat is always from afar (2021). She initiated the para-curatorial series in 2012 and launched “All the Way South” research network in 2016. She was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship in 2019.

Discussant: Yi Gu is an Associate Professor of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a focus on Asia especially China.Her research interests include cold war visual culture and post-socialist art, comparative media studies, Chinese photography history and contemporary photography in Asia, politics of aesthetics, data visualization, and visual methodologies across disciplines. Her book Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2020) points out an ocular turn of China’s twentieth century as a foundation for a revisionist history of modern Chinese art. She is currently completing a manuscript on socialist data visualization and China’s contemporary Digital Countryside initiative. She is a co-editor of open-access academic journal Trans Asia Photography and a convening member of the research project “Recalibrating Postwar Chinese Art: Digital Humanities and Alternative Archives.”

Chair: Tong Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies and the Graduate Department of History and Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute. His current book-length study employs lenses of media studies, environmentalism, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine the politics and poetics of mobilization in China’s special zones in the socialist and postsocialist eras. As a visual artist, Lam has utilized his lens-based work to uncover hidden evidence of state- and capital-precipitated violence—both fast and slow—across various contexts. At present, his research-based visual projects particularly delve into the intersection between technology and military violence, as well as the landscapes of industrial and postindustrial ruination. 

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ABOUT THE TALK

This talk explores the aesthetics and politics of objects in art, life, and society in the 1960s and the 1970s in South Korea. During this period, art and cultural practitioners adopted and developed the method of using objects – everyday, industrial, traditional, or natural objects and human bodies – in their practice in order to establish contemporary Korean art and culture that was comparable to the art of the world and close to the public, or everyday life, in Korea. Their practices ranged from utilizing objects’ association with life and society to abstracting the quality of objects and even rendering the human body into an object, as seen in the 1968 action piece Transparent Balloons and a Nude. In this “art of participation,” as I propose to call it, the idea and method of objects emerged from and gave form to the concept and aspiration of participation: from the avant-gardist notion of art’s participation in life to the participation of art and artists in the reconstruction of the country, which meant not only the reorganization of the art, cultural, and social systems and the economic development, but also the elimination of colonial remnants and the oppression of the society and the government. While contributing to the larger discussion of multiple modernisms in the realm of art and culture, this talk expands the discussion of objects and their relationship to art and society and complicates the understanding of the relationship between art and society, or politics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Camille (Ji Eun) Sung is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interest lies in artistic practices that actively employed non-conventional media, with a focus on their conversation with and operation within the socio-political conditions in Korea, and more broadly, in East Asia. Her research interests also include queer and feminist art practice, activism, and theory and the relationship between critical theory and praxis. She is working on her book project that examines how art and cultural practitioners responded to, participated in, or abstained from the modernization process in post-colonial Korea in the 1960s and the 1970s. Her work has been published in the Journal of History of Contemporary Art and will be included in the Routledge Companion to Art History and Feminisms.

Chair: Janet Poole is an Associate Professor at the Munk School fo Global Affairs and Public Policy. She is also the Distinguished Professor of the Humanities & Chair, Department of East Asian Studies. Poole’s research and teaching interests lie in aesthetics in the broad context of colonialism and modernity, in history and theories of translation, and in the creative practice of literary translation.

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ABOUT THE TALK

Energy has witnessed a surge of interest among historians and scholars in adjacent fields in recent years. This might be expected given the growing sense of urgency around our unfolding climate crisis, to which the extravagant burning of fossil fuels has been a leading contributor. Energy has been a compelling subject of study because of how important decisions related to its production and use will be to determining our collective present and future. At the same time, part of the appeal of energy has been its analytical promise. To environmental historian Richard White, it is a “protean and useful concept.” By following energy flows, one is able to weave together social and natural processes that are otherwise more commonly considered as separate threads. But the capaciousness of the energetic perspective presents its own challenge. In this talk, Seow draws on his recently published book, Carbon Technocracy, to offer some reflections on the utility of placing energy at the center of our historical and social analyses.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Victor Seow is a historian of technology, science, and industry, focusing on China and Japan and on histories of energy and work. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which has received several awards, including the Association for Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Book Prize and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History. He is currently working on a history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the present.

Discussant: Caleb Wellum is Assistant Professor of US History (CLTA). He writes and teaches about modern US history, politics, and culture. His book about the 1970s energy crisis in the United States—Energizing Neoliberalism—will be out in fall 2023 from Johns Hopkins University Press. Wellum is Editor of Energy Humanities and a member of the Petrocultures Research Group. He contributed to the collectively authored books After Oil and Solarities and is co-organizer of After Oil 3 at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Wellum has published on the history of film, documentary photography, oil futures trading, energy conservation politics, and the future of the humanities, among other topics. He is currently developing three research projects, books about the history of the ‘New Economy’ and the relationship between energy, theory, and the practice of history, and a critical carbon tracking app.

Chair: Tong Lam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies and the Graduate Department of History and Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute. His current book-length study employs lenses of media studies, environmentalism, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine the politics and poetics of mobilization in China’s special zones in the socialist and postsocialist eras. As a visual artist, Lam has utilized his lens-based work to uncover hidden evidence of state- and capital-precipitated violence—both fast and slow—across various contexts. At present, his research-based visual projects particularly delve into the intersection between technology and military violence, as well as the landscapes of industrial and postindustrial ruination.

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Information is not yet available.

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Join us for the opening night of Bryan Dickie’s photo exhibit, documenting a people’s unity and aspiration in a triumph against dictatorship.

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT

This gallery features photos from Bryan Dickie’s published photo book covering Myanmar’s ongoing civil war. The book focuses on civilians who joined together to form an opposition army dubbed the ‘People’s Defence Force’ who are actively fighting an entrenched military regime that took control of the country in the 2021 February coup. The gallery is free attendance and will be available starting Sept 22nd until the end of September. The opening night will feature a talk by Bryan Dickie. Register for opening night.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

On February 1st, 2021, Myanmar experienced its third coup in just under six decades. After the country’s largest opposition party to the military government, the National League for Democracy, won 930 of 1117 seats in the parliament, the highest number of seats ever achieved by the political party, the country’s leading General, Min Aung Hlaing, sent in his troops. In pre-dawn raids, the military fanned out across the country, rounding up the newly elected parliamentarians a day before they were to take their seats. After weeks of countrywide demonstrations and general strikes, civilians began to travel to border regions in search of military training from the ethnic armed organizations fighting the government for over seven decades. What was born out of this mass exodus is now known as the People’s Defence Force, a grassroots conglomerate of people’s militias tied together to oust the military government and reinstall democracy in their country.

The photographer Bryan Dickie and Aung Myat Phone will discuss the recent events in Myanmar and Bryan’s recently published photo book covering Myanmar’s ongoing civil war. The book focuses on civilians who joined together to form an opposition army dubbed the ‘People’s Defence Force’ who are actively fighting an entrenched military regime that forcibly took control of the country in February 2021.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Bryan Dickie is a Canadian-based editorial photographer interested in exploring humanity’s enigmas. Using his camera as a portal into people’s lives, Bryan has used photography as a tool to understand the world around him. In 2010, on a whim, Bryan decided to travel to Myanmar and serendipitously stumbled upon a historical moment that saw Aung San Suu Kyi released from house arrest after fifteen years of sporadic detention. The people’s excitement at their country’s transition resonated with Bryan on an extremely ephemeral level and sparked a relationship with the people of the South Asian Nation. Over the next decade, Bryan would be lucky enough to travel to the far reaches of Myanmar to photograph and interview refugees, child soldiers, warlords and various leaders of the many ethnic armed organizations that are still active throughout Myanmar today.

Aung Myat Phone is a Burmese refugee living in Yangon when the military took control of his country. He was one of the early protesters out on the streets and witnessed first-hand the military’s brutal crackdown on demonstrations that saw scores of civilians gunned down in cold blood. As the only member of his family who escaped during the coup, Aung Myat has many friends and family who had to stay and fight for their country’s democracy. His cousin was at the same training camp as photographer Bryan Dickie when documenting the People’s Defence Force.

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ABOUT THE TALK

The world is sizzling.  With record-setting global temperatures and wildfires sweeping across Canada, the climate crisis has reached a tipping point. Environmental governance has been trumpeted as an area for cooperation between the China and the West. Yet, cooperation on emission setting and other environmental standards are not always easy to achieve, given unabated political tensions. Join a panel of top China environmental experts for a timely discussion on opportunities and constraints in China’s role to curb the climate crisis.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Denise van der Kamp is an Associate Professor in the Political Economy of China at Oxford University. Her research examines environmental policy, regulatory uncertainty, and bureaucratic governance in China. Originally from Hong Kong, she received her PhD from UC Berkeley and has lived and worked in China, Tajikistan, Canada, the United States, and the UK.

Iza Yue Ding is an Associate Professor of Political Science. Her research explores the paradoxes and pushbacks attending economic, political, and cultural modernization, such as creative resistance against institutional rigidities, lingering moral traditions against legal development, enduring historical memories against rapid socioeconomic transformations, and humans’ simultaneous degradation of nature and attachment to nature. Ding is the author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a monograph on global historical waves of environmentalism.

Juliet Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forest Resources Management and the School for Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She is a political ecologist focused on the implications of China’s growing investments in land and other resources in Southeast Asia and beyond. Dr. Lu’s research examines conflicts and governance issues around resource extraction and intensive land use. She focuses on transnational land investments, namely Chinese rubber plantations in Laos, the promotion of monoculture plantations at the expense of more biodiverse systems, and the rise of private sector sustainable governance initiatives worldwide. She is looking to work with students interested in conducting grounded research around land conflicts, cash crop-driven land use change, and Chinese investments.

Diana Fu Diana Fu (Moderator) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at The University of Toronto and director of the East Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is a non-resident fellow at Brookings Institution, a China fellow at the Wilson Center, and a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. Her research examines civil society, popular contention, state control, and authoritarian citizenship in China. She is author of the award-winning book “Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China” (2018, Cambridge).

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ABOUT THE MASTERCLASS

In this session, Prof. Birla will introduce us to interdisciplinary themes in the study of speculation and financialization, and map questions she is posing about challenges to democratic representation in regimes of monetization.  With attention to Global South-sited contexts, we will discuss new approaches to capitalism and sign-value, the speculative subject, and the mediative techniques of financial governmentality.   Prof Cody will respond, followed by a general discussion. Registered participation will be sent links to required reading, newly published article by Prof. Birla, and one short background reading.

As this is a masterclass, attendees must read Ritu Birla, “Short-Circuits and Seizures: Currency and the Coding of the Global” in Public Culture (https://uoft.me/Short-Circuits-and-Seizures).

We also strongly recommend reading Laura Bear, Ritu Birla and Stine Simonsen Puri, "Speculation and the Futures of Capitalism in India” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East for further background (https://uoft.me/Futures-and-Capitalism-in-India).

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Ritu Birla is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and also directs a research project in Global Governance, Economy and Society in collaboration with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She has held positions as the first Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute at the Munk School, and before that, Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies.  Recognized for bringing the empirical study of economy and empire to current questions in social and political theory, her research has sought to build new conversations in the global study of capitalism and its forms of governing.

Discussant: Francis Cody  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, where he is the Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Contemporary Asian Studies and the Centre for South Asian Studies. He has been teaching at U of T since 2008. His research focuses on language, politics, and media in southern India.

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ABOUT THE TALK

Visceral sensations, exaggerated affects, and suffering subjects characterized leftist Korean cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. In popular fiction, print cartoons, reportage, cultural commentary, and other emergent forms of mass culture, scenes detailing the spectacular bodily harms endured by migrant workers, tenant farmers, factory workers, men, women, and children proliferated. Yet such representations were criticized as excessively grotesque and insufficiently political by leftist intellectuals at the time and have subsequently been overlooked by scholars in favor of socialist realism and its dynamic proletarian heroes.

This talk, by contrast, focuses on these textual and visual representations to tell the story of how the new affects and everyday experiences introduced by imperial capitalism and colonial modernity were mediated through the surface of the lower-class body. This talk traces the emergence of the sensational proletarian as a central semantic figure of colonial Korean print culture and reads its varied manifestations as emblematic of Korean cultural producers’ efforts not only to grapple with modernity, imperialism, and capitalism, but to do so using the political ideology and imaginary of Marxism. During this period, Koreans in rural areas suffered from abject poverty, spiritual confusion, natural disasters, punishing agricultural taxes, and a widening gap between the rich and the poor. Leftist Korean cultural producers in the early twentieth century also encountered and engaged with Marxism as a new political/theoretical framework. Their interpretations of Marxism led to a flourishing of different forms of cultural production and inspired a visual and textual language that used the sensations of the body to interpret and articulate class politics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Kimberly Chung is an Assistant Professor of Korean Literary and Cultural Studies at McGill University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from University of California, San Diego. Before arriving at McGill, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hongik University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korea Institute of Harvard University. She has published research on modern and contemporary Korean literature, visual culture, and art in scholarly journals like Journal of Korean Studies and Acta Koreana and was a special guest editor for the issue Sensibility and Landscape in Korean Literature and Film for Acta Koreana (Vol. 17 no.1, 2014). She is a co-editor of an anthology on Korean contemporary art titled Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation and Interaction (Phaidon Press, 2020). Her book The Sensational Proletarian: Affect and Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea is currently under review at Stanford University Press.

Chair: Michelle Cho is an Assistant Professor in the Department fo East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Cho’s research and teaching focus on questions of collectivity and popular aesthetics in Korean film, media, and popular culture. She has published on Asian cinemas and Korean wave television, video, and pop music.Before coming to U of T, Professor Cho was a Korea Foundation Assistant Professor at McGill University. Prior to that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow of International Humanities at Brown University, affiliated with the Departments of Modern Culture and Media and East Asian Studies.

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This event is part of the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Lecture Series on South Asian Art, History and Culture

ABOUT THE TALK

In this talk, Srinivas poses the following question: What is the relationship between Shirdi Sai Baba’s images, their powers, ocular or otherwise, and their  disposition in urban — rather than national — space? Beginning with the exploration of four routes or trajectories for the memory and transmission of Shirdi Sai Baba’s charisma through various gurus and teachers to Indian and global publics after his passing in 1918, then the exploration of the spatial refabulations of Shirdi Sai Baba’s presence by focusing on Bangalore, a major metropolis and global city of 13 million people in southern India. On several roads and transport arteries, in public temples, roadside shrines, and markets, we see how architectural forms, rituals and worship, quotidian lives and corporeal practices of devotees come to be repositories of Shirdi Sai Baba’s urban presence in the present, as they connect the biographical with the material and spatiality with religiosity. To conclude, Srinivas will reflect on these processes of spatialization and associated constituencies and their significance for the (devotional) present.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Smriti Srinivas is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, USA. She explores regimes of spatial, somatic, and symbolic production, particularly in cities and Indian Ocean worlds. Her most recent books include the coedited Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence (2022); Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020, coedited); and A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia (2015).

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ABOUT THE EVENT

This one-hour panel discussion, co-hosted by The Asian Institute and The Asian Gold Ribbon campaign, focuses on Redefining Asian Masculinity. It will engage debates about how North American societal expectations and definitions of Asian masculinity have relegated Asian men to the position of overlooked victims in a culture of toxic masculinity. The discussion will touch upon topics such as: mental health, social location, personal identity, societal influence, familial pressures, and immigration status. We invite you to join us in fostering an environment conducive to respectful dialogue and the development of safer spaces for difficult conversations. Together, let’s engage in a communal effort to deconstruct and reconstruct conceptions of Asian masculinity with the shared goals of understanding intersectionality/ies, enhancing visibility, instilling pride, and encouraging overall well-being.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Devo Brown (he/him), has worked in the broadcast industry with over 15 years of experience. He’s spent most of those years in Toronto where he has hosted morning and afternoon drive shows on FLOW 93.5 FM as well as the highly rated ‘Devo Brown Show’, evenings on KiSS 92.5 FM. Devo took his experience – and face made for radio – to make the leap into the world of television. Devo is currently seen daily across Canada on Breakfast Television – a national morning television show. His experience and reputation as a great interviewer has led him to chat with many of the industry’s most sought after celebrities: Drake, Jennifer Lawrence, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Billie Eilish, Jamie Foxx, Rihanna, Michael B. Jordan, Nicole Kidman, Jon Bon Jovi, Harrison Ford, Mariah Carey, Hilary Swank, just to name a few. Many athletes, filmmakers, creators, and entrepreneurs have also shared their stories with Devo. When he’s not connecting with viewers on social media Devo’s fun, upbeat, and laid-back personality keeps his schedule busy. He is a highly sought-after host of major events such as concerts, festivals, corporate functions, charitable events, parties, competitions and more across Canada and the United States.

(Welcome Remarks) Carol Chin (she/her), is an Associate Professor for the Department of History at University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests are in late nineteenth- through twentieth-century American foreign relations, specializing in U.S.-East Asian relations. Her particular interest is in the intersection of national identity with concepts of empire, culture, and gender and the ways in which these themes can enhance the study of international relations. She is the author of “Beneficent Imperialists: American Women Missionaries in China at the Turn of the Century” (Diplomatic History 2003); “Translating the New Woman: Chinese Feminists View the West, 1905-1915” (Gender and History 2006); and Modernity and National Identity in the United States and East Asia, 1895–1919 (Kent State University Press 2010). In 2022-23 she co-chaired the university’s Anti-Asian Racism Working Group.

Robert Diaz (he/him), is an Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI) at University of Toronto. His research focuses on the experiences of sexual minorities in Asia, with particular attention to diasporic communities in the transpacific, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. He examines transnational representations of sexual minority Filipinos in contemporary new media, film, and popular culture in order to better understand how notions of human rights, national belonging, and social justice are embodied across different cultural, historical, and political contexts. Collectively, his work broadly identifies the shared barriers that many sexual, gender, and racial minorities face globally.

William Lou (he/him), is a podcast and radio host and writer for TV. He hosts a TV and radio daily and a podcast. He has previously worked at theScore, Raptors Republic, and Yahoo Sports Canada.

Alex Wong (he/him), is a writer, author, and content producer based in Toronto. He has written about basketball and culture for publications including The New Yorker, GQ SLAM, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. He is the author of Cover Story: The NBA and Modern Basketball as Told Through Its Most Iconic Magazine Covers and PreHistoric:  he Audaciou and Improbable Origin Story of the Toronto Raptors.  He co-authored the Canadian bestseller We The Champs:  The Toronto Raptors’ Historic Run to the 2019 NBA Title. Alex also has experience producing content with athletes and brands, working as a consultant and producer on Serge Ibaka’s “How Hungry Are You” and helping with the launch of Red Bull Canada’s partnership with Pascal Siakam. He currently produces and co-hosts “The Raptors Show with Will Lou” on Sportsnet 590 The Fan.

(Moderator) Joseph Wong (he/him), is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, as well as in the Department of Political Science and serves as the Vice President, International, for the University of Toronto. He was the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School through June 2023. He previously held the Canada Research Chair in Democratization, Health and Development for two full terms, ending 2016. Wong’s research interests are in comparative public policy and political economy. His latest book, From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia, was published by Princeton University Press in 2002. Professor Wong is also the host of the award-winning video series, Joe’s Basketball Diaries.

ABOUT ASIAN GOLD RIBBON

The Asian Gold Ribbon (AGR) Campaign is a platform developed for social change. We focus upon and celebrate the beauty of our Asian cultures and heritages and are united against all forms of racism. We stand in solidarity and support Asian mental health and wellbeing, amplify Asian voices, and educate to raise awareness. We unite to celebrate rather than hate.

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ABOUT THE BOOK TALK

Photography and Korea is the first history of Korean photography for a Western readership. Going beyond nationalist historiography, my book avoids depicting Korea as a monolithic entity. Instead, it acknowledges that Korea, as well as Asia in a broader context, has always been interconnected within the intricate web of global socio-political forces.

In pursuit of this perspective, the book unveils various facets of Korea, encompassing the divided North and South, Korea as perceived through the lens of foreign observers, and the dispersion of Korean communities across the world.

The book introduces diverse foreign nationals—European, American, and Japanese—who were involved in visualizing Korea through photography, not merely to suggest that they influenced photographic practices in Korea, but, more importantly, to foreground the interconnectedness among photographic activities around the world. In turn, the history of Japanese photography during the 1920s and ’30s cannot be understood solely through exploring photographic practices on the island; its ambit can be fathomed best by also considering the dynamics of photography in its colonies. Likewise, European and American photographers’ enterprises on the Korean peninsula constitute a crucial part of the history of photography of the region, extending beyond the margins to which they have previously been relegated.

Jeehey Kim is an assistant professor in the art history program at the School of Art, University of Arizona. She earned a PhD in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has been writing on vernacular photographic practices and on documentary films and visual culture in relation to the Cold War and gender politics in East Asia. At the University of Arizona, she launched a series of symposia on Asian photography with the Center for Creative Photography in the Spring of 2022. She is currently working on her second book project on funerary use of portrait photography in East Asia.

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ABOUT THE TALK

Across Southeast Asia and East Asia real estate and hospitality ventures, cinema and new media, lifestyle brands, and wellness businesses currently draw on Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity as the privileged aesthetics of the good life. As film directors, hotels, bars, and clubs revive 1930s Shanghai and 1960s Hong Kong modernities—and exploit the materiality of Bangkok’s Chinese neighborhoods—this redeployment of (semi)colonial histories and urban pasts is emerging as the primary signifier of a desirable Asian cosmopolitanism but also as the grounds for political critique. Bangkok as a Chinese city stands at the center of these developments. Both nationally and internationally the city represents a paradigmatic site of fantasy that provides for a particular elasticity of place and time and, by extension, of personhood and belonging. This talk inquires into the ways that contemporary Thai films such as Happy Old Life (2019) and Bad Genius (2017) take part in this conversation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Arnika Fuhrmann, Profesor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political modernities. She is the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (2016) and Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong (2020).

(Moderator) Elizabeth Wijaya, Director of the Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. 

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ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

This workshop will be a space where scholars working between languages can consider feminist translation as an informative practice that helps us to be more deliberate about some of the many decisions that have to be made when presenting one language in another for the purposes of scholarly, activist and creative work. Guided by the concerns, questions and examples that participants bring with them, the workshop will be facilitated by literary translation scholar Sun Kyoung Yoon and graduate student and translator Sophie Bowman. We will explore various definitions of feminist translation and what it can mean in practice, using examples from recent translations and translation debates. Students, faculty and scholars from all disciplines are welcome. Participants are encouraged to prepare one or two questions or discussion points in advance. Lunch will be provided, but spaces are limited, so please register in advance.

ABOUT THE FACILITATORS

Sun Kyoung Yoon is an Associate Professor of literary translation at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Her research interests include English translations of Korean literature, decolonising translation, and translation and gender. She has published many articles on literary translation in international journals such as The Translator, Target, Perspectives, Journal of Gender Studies and Acta Koreana. Recently, her article ‘Fidelity or Infidelity? The Mistranslation Controversy over The Vegetarian’ that deals with translation and gender has been published in Target.

Sophie Bowman is a PhD candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on women’s textual depictions of everyday life in 1950s South Korea. Sophie has also translated multiple works of literature from the Korean, including Kim Boyoung’s I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories (with Sung Ryu, Harper Voyager, 2021) and Pak Kyongni’s “The Sickness No Medicine Can Fix” (published in The Age of Doubt, Honford Star, 2022).

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ABOUT THE TALK

This talk examines the works of the “New Woman” Myeong-sun Kim (1896-1951), focusing on her two Korean translations of Gerhart Hauptman’s Lonely People (1891), namely Lonely People (1924) and When You Look Back (1925). While Kim’s translations are often regarded as early Korean novels due to their departure from a literal translation of the German play, I argue that they should be seen as feminist adaptations of the original work, with a distinct emphasis on narrative and characterization. Unlike Hauptman’s German play, which centers on a male protagonist struggling against traditional ideologies such as family and religion, Kim’s Korean novels foreground women’s suffering, free love, and independence. In doing so, they critique the practices of early marriage, concubinage, and patriarchy in Joseon during the Japanese colonial period. The transformation of the male narrative into a female narrative in Kim’s works highlights the importance of the translator’s characterization, with feminism playing a crucial role. Male characters are portrayed as feminists who understand and respect female characters, in contrast to the patriarchal German protagonist of the source text. Meanwhile, female characters are depicted as more independent and active owners of their own lives in the target texts. Kim resists the oppressive and suffocating patriarchal society, rewriting the German play into two feminist novels of Joseon.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sun Kyoung Yoon is Associate Professor of literary translation at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Her research interests include English translations of Korean literature, decolonising translation, and translation and gender. She has published many articles on literary translation in international journals such as The Translator, Target, Perspectives, Journal of Gender Studies and Acta Koreana. Recently, her article ‘Fidelity or Infidelity? The Mistranslation Controversy over The Vegetarian’ that deals with translation and gender has been published in Target.

Chair: Camille (Ji Eun) Sung is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interest lies in artistic practices that actively employed non-conventional media, with a focus on their conversation with and operation within the socio-political conditions in Korea, and more broadly, in East Asia. Her research interests also include queer and feminist art practice, activism, and theory and the relationship between critical theory and praxis. She is working on her book project that examines how art and cultural practitioners responded to, participated in, or abstained from the modernization process in post-colonial Korea in the 1960s and the 1970s. Her work has been published in the Journal of History of Contemporary Art and will be included in the Routledge Companion to Art History and Feminisms.  

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The Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the Embassy of Mongolia in Canada present a conference on the occasion of the celebration of fifty years of bilateral relations between Mongolia and Canada. The conference reflects on the rich history of Mongolian Studies in Canada as well as issues connected to contemporary Mongolian society, economy, and security.

Event Program

2:00 – 2:15 p.m. Introduction and opening remarks

Welcoming remarks: Professor Peter Loewen, Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto

Introduction and opening remarks: Professor Joe Wong, Vice President International, University of Toronto

Her Excellency Sarantogos Erdenetsogt, Ambassador of Mongolia to Canada

Award Ceremony

2:15 – 3:30 p.m. Panel 1 (the last 20-30 minutes for Q&A)

Historical Reflections: Mongolian Studies in Canada

Professor Michael Gervers, University of Toronto Scarborough
Professor David Curtis Wright, University of Calgary
Elisabeth Rose, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto
Gerelt Trost, Research Support Specialist, University of Saskatchewan (Online Participation)
Moderator: Professor Jennifer Purtle, University of Toronto

3:30 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Break

3:45 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Panel 2 (the last 20-30 minutes for Q&A)

Economy, Security and Society

Mr. Munkh-Ochir Dorjjugder, Executive Office of the National Security Council of Mongolia, Deputy Chief and Director for Strategic Policy and Analysis (Online Participation)
Oyu Vasha is the Minister Counselor, Deputy Chief of the Mission, Embassy of Mongolia in Ottawa
Professor Jonathan Miller, MacDonald Laurier Institute (Online Participation)
Dr. Kongdan (Katy) Oh, Korea Economic Institute of America
Moderator: Professor Ed Schatz, Director, Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, U of T

5:00 p.m. – 5:05 p.m. Closing remarks, Ambassador of Mongolia to Canada, Her Excellency Sarantogos Erdenetsogt

Reception to follow

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

This talk explores how demographic shifts, economic transformations and changing conceptions of heterosexual adulthood relate to queer life in South Korea. Specifically, Wolff examine how queer Koreans in their 20s and 30s navigate the conflict between achieving a feeling of economic stability and a sense of queer selfhood. As economic instability and labor insecurity became normalized following the Asian Financial Crisis, corporate and civil servant jobs also became coveted for the sense of stability (anjeong-gam) they seemed to promise. With marriage and fertility rates at all-time lows due to factors like financial precarity and high-parenting costs, many idealize “stability” as a pathway back to these disrupted processes of “adulthood.” However, queer Koreans have historically experienced precarity on the basis of heteronormative conditions for achieving and maintaining economic stability.

Wolff”s research found that as queer college graduates labored towards “stable” careers, they were paradoxically beset by affective forms of instability, as queer embodiment and political participation threatened workplace discrimination and even dismissal. While academic theories of “precarity” often describe how the loss of economic stability leads to disrupted social reproduction and evacuated futures, this talk seeks to complicate the concept and its temporal associations. By elucidating how dynamics of heteronormativity have shaped notions of precarity,Wolff argue that instability and stability must be understood as emergent processes articulated through dynamics of kinship, class, gender, sexuality, and social difference.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alex Wolff (they/she) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto. Their research examines intersections of economics, gender, and sexuality through a focus on queer sociality and activism in South Korea. Building upon preliminary fieldwork (2017-19) and a year of ethnographic research in Korea (2020-21), they are currently writing a book manuscript that explores how class, economics of kinship, and structural marginalization relate to the ways LGBTQ+ Koreans build publics, politics, and their futures. Their work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Korea Foundation, and the Center for Critical Korean Studies. They received their PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, in 2023.

Chair: Jesook Song is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, university of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Mediating Gender, her co-edited volume with Michelle Cho, is scheduled to come out in the University of Michigan Press in early 2024.

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Join the Myanmar Culture Club at the University of Toronto for this important Town Hall Meeting.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

U Kyaw Za is a Spokesperson for the National Unity Government of Myanmar

U Aung Myo Min is the Minister of Human Rights of the National Unity Government of Myanmar

U Aung Kyaw Moe is the Deputy Minister of Human Rights of the National Unity Government of Myanmar

A THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS AND SUPPORTERS

This event is made possible thanks to the Asian Institute, Tea Circle, and the Burmese-Canadian Community including the Burma Canadian Association Ontario, the Canada-Burma Ethnic Nationalities Organization, Burmese Canadian Network, and the Myanmar Student Association Ontario.

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ABOUT THE EVENT

Following Mourning Itaewon: Korean Diaspora Speaks in 2022, the CSK is organizing Remembering Itaewon: Reflections on the Past and the Present to reflect on the tragic Halloween crowd crush that had taken many young lives. This year, we focus on the significance of Itaewon in Korea’s contemporary history, from the site of a U.S. military base to the site of multiculturalism and globalization. The panelists discuss how such history influences the political and public reactions to the crowd crush

ABOUT THE PANEL

Kim Ji Youn is a Senior Researcher in the Migration Humanities Research Project at the Institute of Humanities, Hansung University in South Korea. Currently, she teaches classes on contemporary issues in Korean society, urban issues, mobility, and migration from an anthropological and sociological perspective. Since her Ph.D. thesis on Itaewon, she has continued to research issues of multiculturalism, gentrification, and the spatialization of otherness centered on Itaewon. As an urban sociologist, her works interrogate the normative notions of urbanity, community, migration, and social minorities.

Mihye Cho is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Master Program in Inter-Asia NGO Studies at SungKongHoe University and Research Fellow at the Institute of Inter-Cultural Studies, Seoul National University. Her research interests include citizen subjectivity, urban studies, and cultural studies. Her current research explores valuation and social resilience in the process of social transformation. Her monograph, Entrepreneurial Seoulite: Culture and Subjectivity in Hongdae, Seoul (Michigan University Press, 2019), examines citizen subjectivity in the midst of restructuring processes following the financial crisis. Her co-edited book, Creative Ageing Cities: Urban Design with Older People in High-Density Asian Cities (Routledge, 2018), investigates the intersection of aging, citizen subjectivity, and place-making in Asian cities. Her recent articles include "Seoul 2022" (Streetnotes, 2023), "’Smart Nation’ and ‘Social Acceleration’: Imagining ‘Urban Kampung’ in Singapore, (Korean Association of Southeast Asian Studies, 2022), and "Quality of Life and Diverse Temporalities amid Fast Urbanism" (Asian Journal of Social Science, 2020).

Sohyeon Peik is a freelance researcher based in Seoul, South Korea. She graduated Sungkonghoe University with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and minors in Chinese Studies and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Her main studies during undergraduate were focused on history and peace issues in East Asia. They led her interest to state violence, war and memory, post-memory, and grievability. After Itaewon Halloween tragedy, occurred in her senior year, she started interviewing young people about their experiences of the incident and “surviving feelings” that was growing among the youth. She is currently working on the research paper about Itaewon tragedy and ‘survived youth’ based on the interview documentation. She also dealt with the issue in her recent article, "Seoul 2022" (Streetnotes, 2023) by drawing.

(Chair) Sherry S. Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Simon Fraser University. Her research explores multiculturalism, media, and social integration. She is the author of Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora: Korean Media in Vancouver and Los Angeles (2018, UBC Press) and the co-editor of Ethnic Media in the Digital Age (2019, Routledge) and The Handbook of Ethnic Media in Canada (forthcoming, McGill-Queen’s University Press). Her research also has been published in scholarly journals such as Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Journalism Studies, Television & New Media, Canadian Journal of Communication, Journal of Global Diaspora & Media, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Canadian Ethnic Studies.