UNSW Art & Design and 4A present Survival Aesthetics: On Post Contemporary Art Practice in Japan

THURSDAY 9 SEPTEMBER | 7–8:30 PM
ONLINE

Panel discussion with Yuko Hasegawa, Yuki Okumura and Jesse Hogan, moderated by Prof. Paul Gladston

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Join artist and academic Jesse Hogan, Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and professor in Curatorial Studies, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts Yuko Hasegawa and artist Yuki Okumura for a discussion moderated by Prof. Paul Gladston, Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales.

This panel discussion will explore topics and subjects for critical consideration under the speculative framework of the Post Contemporary Condition proposed in the research treatise Survival Aesthetics completed by Jesse Hogan at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2019. Building upon previous interviews, this conversation will expand upon the ruminations of contemporary art practice and the conceptual methodologies contained within Hogan’s forthcoming publication Survival Aesthetics © Interview Series. The publication promotes cross-cultural discourse between Japanese academics, artists and writers, investigating issues of artistic practice relevant to Japanese, Australian and international audiences of contemporary art.

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Speaker biographies

Yuko Hasegawa | 長谷川 祐子 is a curator, academic, writer, arts and cultural worker and current Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and professor in Curatorial Studies, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. Hasegawa’s previous roles include Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2016–2021),  Curator of the 7th Moscow Biennale (2017), 11th Sharjah Biennale (2013), Co-Curator of 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), and Artistic Director of the 7th International Istanbul Biennial (2001). From 1999 to 2006, as Chief Curator and then Artistic Director, Hasegawa contributed significantly to the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa as a model for a new kind of “open 21st-century art museum” via her involvement in development of the museum’s concept, design of the museum building in collaboration with architectural unit SANAA, and building of the collection.

Inspired by the peculiar subjectivity of the translator, Yuki Okumura | 奥村 雄樹 explores the essential parallelity of worlds and the primary interconnectedness between individuals through overlaps and gaps amongst different artists, often including himself, in terms of work and/or life. As of September 2021, Okumura is appointed as a PhD researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp to perform a quadrennial project titled Any Body, My Self: Conceptual Art and Personhood, which rediscovers the methodology of conceptual artists of the ’60s and ’70s to reduce their personality to the limit as a program with potential double effects: simultaneously towards revealing one’s ‘corporeal self’ and regaining the state of ‘self-other unity’.

Jesse Hogan | ホーガン・ジェシー is a writer and contemporary artist originating from Sydney. Hogan works across multiple mediums with a particular interest in art spaces as critical sites of spatial, cultural, aesthetic, and socio-political development. Understanding the exhibition conditions as non-neutral, Hogan plays with a host of artistic practices that engage with installation as a complex topography of art language and connection. He has completed a Doctoral Degree in Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts (2020), a Masters of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts (2017), A Masters of Art Education at the University of Western Sydney (2009), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Sydney College of the Arts (2005).

Prof. Paul Gladston | ポール・グラッドストン教授 is the inaugural Judith Neilson Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales and was previously Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. Paul has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art with regard to the concerns of critical theory and, in doing so, has been formative on the development of a critically informed contemporary Chinese art studies both internationally and inside China. His recent book-length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), which received ‘publication of the year’ at the Awards of Art China 2015. He was founding principal editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art from 2014 to 2017 and an academic adviser to the internationally acclaimed exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China staged at the Hayward Gallery-South Bank Centre London in 2012.