IFA Contemporary Asia is pleased to present a panel discussion, “Asian Video Cultures on the Global Electronic Superhighway,” on the occasion of the exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World, on view at The Museum of Modern Art through July 8, 2023.

Flickering signals of video continually transform, convert, and reconfigure visual culture around the globe, as artists have harnessed video not only as an experimental medium for expression, but as a network for communication and agent of social change. Featuring over 70 media works drawn primarily from MoMA’s collection, the exhibition Signals explores the omnipresence of video in our daily lives and its global reach as a circuit for public participation, propagandistic persuasion, and even political resistance.

This discussion will develop from Signals’s spotlight on video practices from Asia, to question: what is the place of Asian video cultures within the relentlessly networked, seemingly borderless landscape of global media? How has video posed a promise of global access, technological power, and electronic democracy; and how have artists circumvented the medium’s co-optation into a means of state surveillance and control? Ranging from Fujiko Nakaya’s guerilla broadcasts and collective activism in the 1970s, Nam June Paik’s exuberantly international transmissions in 1984’s Good Morning Mr. Orwell, Amar Kanwar’s ode to the political and humanitarian situation in Myanmar, to Tiffany Sia’s urgent yet counter-spectacular documentation of the 2019 Hong Kong protests via iPhone, this discussion will situate new media practices from Asia within the contemporary transnational context.

Following a presentation by exhibition curators Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance and Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art; two scholars will discuss the ideas provoked by the exhibition’s exploration of Asian new media: Jeannine Tang, Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies at the New School; and Ryan Lee Wong, independent writer, critic and curator.

To read more about the speakers, please visit our website.

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