Archive, Mediation, and Reflections on Colonization in Modern Asia

Abstract

This paper will use the artworks and exhibitions of Cai Yingqian, Chen Min, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, and Chen Chieh-jen to discuss how contemporary art reflects on modern colonial history through mediations. By employing ready-made media materials handed down through history, archival art moves from medium to mediation, mediating between subjects, media materials, and artistic works, and at the same time highlights the materiality and mediality of media, forming a historical picture where media and the message, objects and narrations, images and the deceased together form a unified entity. While the narrative and memory of history rely on media, mediation can summon the memory of the past. Artists can activate images and turn them into an “afterlife” to open sealed historical spacetime, resurrecting the forgotten experience of modern colonial history in Asia, and finally inciting us to face the colonial structure, which is nowadays still at the core of Asian geopolitics. Ultimately, every kind of mediation reverts back to the media itself. The construction of the archive, the production of knowledge, and the opacity of media are revealed by the close connection between colonialism and mediation.