Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Nora Taylor, (Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), who will discuss contemporary Vietnamese artistic responses to monuments.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center at 12:20pm, not in Goldwin Smith later in the evening as was previously advertised. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

What do monuments to war heroes and victims of colonialism and American imperialism say to the current generation of Vietnamese, in a country where 80% of the population was born after the end of the war? As demands for dismantling monuments that glorified racism and imperialism arose around the globe in the last decade, how can we consider - or as Mechtild Widrich’s recent book Monumental Cares evokes - care for and about commemorative statues in contemporary Vietnam? Are they still relevant in Vietnam’s rapid changing society or are they merely vestiges of the past? This talk will look at several projects by contemporary Vietnamese artists that engage with the paradoxical nature of monuments and the changing perceptions of historical memory in the aftermath of war and colonialism.

About the Speaker

Nora Annesley Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii 2004 and Singapore 2009) and the co-editor of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell SEAP 2012) as well as numerous essays on Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian and Vietnamese Art. In 2013, she was the recipient of a John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She is currently co-editing with Pamela Corey, Contemporary Art from Vietnam: A Critical Reader forthcoming from the Nguyen Art Foundation in Ho Chi Minh City.