Titled “We Live Here, Now: Rural Collectivity in East and Southeast Asian Art, 1972–1992,” my dissertation documents the histories of artist groups that engaged with land as the foundation for both living and artmaking. Central to this study is how each group’s artistic conception of rurality challenged and collaborated with models of land governance in East and Southeast Asia. For example, Yatoo Yaoe Hyeonjang Misul Yeonguhoe (hereafter Yatoo; 1981–present) highlighted the natural environment as an alternative to urban and institutional centrality amid the national democratization movements of 1980s South Korea. Similarly, THE PLAY (1961–present) distanced themselves from the dominant oppositional politics of 1960s and ’70s Japan, taking the borderlands as a testing ground for artistic and political experimentation. In the Philippines in the 1980s and early ’90s, the Baguio Arts Guild (1987–1995) presented an alternative artistic and political practice through sustained, reciprocal cohabitation with Indigenous communities as well as the unseen forces of the land. 

For the three groups, artworks were not merely site-specific; they introduced a new spatiality in which aesthetics became inseparable from ethical and practical considerations of land-based living. I refer to this aesthetic-ethical spatiality as hyeonjang 現場 (or genba in Japanese), translating to “the field of situated presence.” Across three chapters and an expanded conclusion, I examine how the imperative of hyeonjang motivated artists in late 20th-century East and Southeast Asia to move away from metropolitan centers, perform acts of inhabitation, and intimately link their artistic practices to the environmental, socioeconomic, and spiritual contexts of their chosen sites.

My fellowship period at the Center focused on fieldwork in Korea and Japan. Having begun my dissertation research in 2022, I traveled to, lived in, documented, and built relationships in over six rural regions. Some were long-term homes for artists, such as the Geum River in Gongju, the Cordilleran highlands of northern Luzon, and Jeju Island. Others were temporary sites of artistic exploration, including the Nakdong River near Daegu, Minami Daitō Island in Okinawa, and the Sarobetsu Plain in Hokkaidō. These rural areas existed outside conventional art-historical frameworks, perceived by the artists as distant from urban institutional life. The openness of this “terra nullius” also enabled experimental political practices beyond the oppositional politics of the 1970s and ’80s in East and Southeast Asia. During fieldwork on remote islands (ritō) in Okinawa and wetlands in Hokkaidō, for instance, I reenacted performances originally conducted by THE PLAY half a century earlier. By incorporating texts, sounds, videos, and my own performances, this reenactment created a multi-perspectival archive that fused historical research with my own evolving relationship with the land.

The fellowship further prompted me to expand the boundaries that constitute art-historical research. The prolonged commitment of groups such as Yatoo and the Baguio Arts Guild encouraged me to move beyond brief site visits toward embodied living. “Living” in this context involved sustained engagement with the site over extended periods, highlighting a sensory and at times spiritual experience often missing from archival records yet vividly present in the artworks themselves. Adopting “living” as a multi-sited research method also revealed its limitations, such as the disparity between my temporary engagement and the artists’ lifelong commitments, the ecological and financial consequences of repeated travel, challenges in maintaining accountability with communities, and difficulties in preserving critical distance. Among these, I found the tension between living and reenactment both productive and troubling, revealing a fresh horizon for art-historical research while posing ethical dilemmas regarding the competing commitments of my positionality as an art historian and a guest of these communities. Given the porous nature of performance documentation—where live experiences are fixed as photographs—my own performance of “situated presence” addressed archival gaps while also highlighting the difference between temporary visits and the committed living of inhabitants. This conflation, which I argue is a by-product of the ethos of hyeonjang, is acutely expressed in the artworks discussed in my dissertation.

Finally, the fellowship allowed me to integrate fieldwork with writing. Instead of following a traditional format of archival research followed by writing, I often wrote in the field. Writing about one location occurred while I was physically situated in another, blending my experiences of settling in with memories of previous sites into a comparative method. Throughout my research, points of contact between groups emerged situationally. Even in their absence, meaningful comparisons arose from shared histories of land, spatial governance, and differing uses of communal infrastructure by artists and residents. Echoing Donna Haraway, anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan advocates for “multisituatedness” in ethnography, aligning multi-sited sensibility with postcolonial and feminist principles. The twin experiences of fieldwork and writing confirmed multisituatedness as a necessary direction for my art-historical research, enmeshing endogenous artistic developments with their broader regional implications, both ethically and creatively.

University of Michigan
Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2024–2025

Starting July 2025, Soyoon Ryu will begin her position as assistant professor in East Asian art history at the University of Chicago.