Still Motion: Truth, Memory and Image in East Asia

Maki Fukuoka, a Lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, is participating at an event in Chicago this April.

Still Motion: Truth, Memory and Image in East Asia will examine the concept of ‘image’ in East Asia across a diverse array of media and historical contexts.

The ‘image’ will be explored in its still and moving formats; as it relates to notions of iconicity, memory and recorded traces; and through embodied practices of reading and interpreting.

The workshop takes place from 5 to 7 April at various venues in Chicago. It forms part of the Media and East Asia Project which explores the emerging field of East Asian Media Studies through a series of collaborative workshops. Coordinated by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, the goal of the project is to explore the interplay of area studies and media studies, and the dynamics of how media presents different histories of cultural production across the region.

Maki Fukuoka is one of six panellists taking part, including academics, photographers, artists, filmmakers and dancers. She will focus on one portrait from the nineteenth-century Japan as a spring board to explore the role portraiture in the shifting political and social context of early Meiji period.

Using Yokoyama Matsusaburō’s portrait in ‘oil photography’, Maki will also re-evaluate the narrative of art history where ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ media are deemed to create visual tension.