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On Thursday, February 11, 2021, Dr. Karen Strassler gave a talk entitled, “Seeing/Unseeing the ‘Chinese’: Visuality, Race, and Contemporary Art in Indonesia.” Dr. Strassler is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY’s Queen’s College and the Graduate Center.  Her research interests include photography, visual and media culture, violence and historical memory. She is the author of two books, including Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Duke UP, 2010), a study of the role of everyday photography in the making of Indonesian national identity; and  (Duke UP, 2020), which explores the political work of images in post-authoritarian Indonesia. 

This talk examines recent work by contemporary Indonesian artists in order to think through the visual politics by which “Chineseness” has become both hypervisible and invisible in different ways and at different moments in Indonesian history. The aim is to trace a historically shifting “distribution of the visible” integral to the social process of racializing the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia, and to ask how these interlocking forms of seeing and unseeing “Chineseness” both enable and occlude violence. At the same time that they offer critical insights into histories of racialized violence, the artists whose work she examines also critically and reparatively intervene in the visual figuration of the Chinese in Indonesia, seeking to open up new ways of seeing.

[video:https://youtu.be/z7eteuKS344]