Duration

20th March 2025 - 11th May 2025

Venue

Exhibition Hall 7&Hall 8, Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, University Town

Opening

15:00, 28th March 2025

Opening Forum

8:30-18:00, 29th March 2025

Curators

CHEN Xiaoyang & XIONG Xun

Artists

Ekin Kee Charles (Malaysia)

Ho Rui An (Singapore)

Nguyên Trinh Thi(Vietnam)

Natasha Tontey (Indonesia)

QIN Jin (China)

ZHOU Tao (China)

Anthropologists

Aryo Danusiri (Indonesia)

BAO Jiang (China)

Kathleen Lei Limayo (Philippines)

Jenny Chio (USA)

Sorayut Aiemueayut (Thailand)

ZHANG Jinghong (China)

From 2020 to 2023, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts Art Museum conducted the inaugural Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial, pioneering an innovative approach to the triennial model through an "exhibition series" format and a decentralized curatorial methodology. This initiative comprised seven thematic research exhibitions and a final comprehensive exhibition, which accumulated valuable experience at the intersection of regional cultural studies and contemporary art curation. As a result, the project yielded a series of academic outputs, including scholarly papers, publications, and interdisciplinary research projects.

Building on this foundation, the museum launched the second edition of the Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial, Tropical Gaze, in early 2025. As the first thematic exhibition of this triennial, 'Our Gaze' - Art, Anthropology and Asian Imagery brings together 12 artists and anthropologists from China and abroad to explore the possibilities of visual media in interdisciplinary dialogue. The exhibition will open on March 28, 2025, with an accompanying opening forum scheduled for March 29. Through the interaction between artistic creation and academic research, the exhibition and forum examine the boundaries and potential of visual language in cultural interpretation, offering practical insights for regional art research.

Contemporary visual practices have increasingly become a focal point for interdisciplinary dialogue, with the intersection of art and anthropology opening new methodological possibilities for regional cultural narratives. Using the exhibition 'Our Gaze' as a research field, this forum explores how these two disciplines can, through dialogic collaboration, overcome the limitations imposed by single-perspective media studies and reconstruct a more critical and inclusive system of visual interpretation. At the core of this discussion lies a fundamental question: when artistic creation and anthropological research engage as equal counterparts in sharing field resources and expressive strategies, can visual media serve as an agent in loosening disciplinary centralism and reshaping the process of meaning-making?

The medium of visual imagery carries a dual significance in this context. On the one hand, it exposes tensions between disciplinary paradigms, such as the interplay between empiricism and fiction; on the other, it offers a platform for negotiating contradictions. The forum will revolve around two key questions: first, how do interdisciplinary methodological exchanges challenge the authoritative structures of traditional knowledge production? Second, how can the circulation and reception of visual media achieve academic rigor while responding to the demand for cultural democratization? By analyzing collaborative practices between art and anthropology, we aim to highlight that blurring disciplinary boundaries does not dissolve professional expertise but instead creates an experimental pathway toward the formation of pluralistic narrative communities. The artist-anthropologist collaborative projects featured in the exhibition illustrate that visual media—straddling both empirical and fictional dimensions—not only serve as a research tool for anthropology but also activate artistic language experimentation. This inherent tension manifests in three key areas: regional cultural exchange and connectivity, the public reorientation of knowledge production, and paradigm innovations in interdisciplinary collaboration. These three dimensions will serve as the foundation for this forum’s discussions, examining how visual narratives redefine their discursive coordinates through disciplinary dialogue.