New Media/New Asia: From Dominant to Residual Geographies of Emergent Video, Screen, and Media Arts (original) (raw)

2018, The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema

In his book, Asia as Method, Kuan-Hsing Chen characterizes Asia as "an open-ended imaginary space, a horizon through which links can be made and new possibilities can be articulated" (Chen 2010, 282). In so doing, Chen offers a way of reimagining the terms of connection and critique in an inter-Asian cultural context. This assertion resonates widely, yet differently, across a range of East Asian cultural production from well before the 1990s. For Chen, Asia is a space for engendering new, transnationally critical projects. Not simply defined in opposition to the West, Asia's locations instead "become one another's reference points, so that an understanding of [regional identity] can be transformed and subjectivity rebuilt" (Chen 2010, xv). For creative and cultural workers linked to emerging video, screen, and media arts, "Asia" has also become a platform across which new modes of production might be linked across the region's centers of media capital, be they of Tokyo or Shanghai, Taipei or Seoul, or Hong Kong or Singapore. What is often notable to the production of emerging media arts in this context, however, is their contested negotiation within commercial, cultural, and creative industry interests that "directly link the regional emergence and potential of [East Asian media production], and of Asia more generally" to the social benefits generated by "economic globalization" (Mackintosh et al. 2009, 10). A wide range of digital and media arts consortia expressed