On Thursday, February 11, 2021, Dr. Karen Strassler gave a talk entitled, 鈥淪eeing/Unseeing the 鈥楥hinese鈥�: Visuality, Race, and Contemporary Art in Indonesia.鈥� Dr. Strassler is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY鈥檚 Queen鈥檚 College and the Graduate Center.听听Her research interests include photography, visual and media culture, violence and historical memory. She is the author of two books, including听Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java听(Duke UP, 2010), a study of the role of everyday photography in the making of Indonesian national identity; and听听(Duke UP,听2020), which explores the political work of images in post-authoritarian Indonesia.听
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This talk听examines recent work by contemporary Indonesian artists in order to think through the visual politics by which 鈥淐hineseness鈥� has become both hypervisible and invisible in different ways and at different moments in Indonesian history.听The aim is to trace a historically shifting 鈥渄istribution of the visible鈥� integral to the social process of racializing the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia, and to ask how these interlocking forms of seeing and unseeing 鈥淐hineseness鈥� both enable and occlude violence. At the same time that they offer critical insights into histories of racialized violence, the artists whose work听she examines also critically and reparatively intervene in the visual figuration of the Chinese in Indonesia, seeking to open up new ways of seeing.