“Asia”: An Introduction

In Spring 2010, Trans Asia Photography Review published its inaugural issue, featuring a virtual roundtable discussion on “Why Asian Photography,” that at the time offered a rare academic critical discussion explicitly on “Asian photography.” Eleven years later, although books, articles, and exhibitions on photography of various parts of Asia and its diaspora have mushroomed, TAP remains the only place where photography of Asia—defined expansively as signified by the prefix “trans”—is the focus of study. By now, critics widely acknowledge that Asia is a construct, which emerged as result of European geopolitical interest and its related drive of knowledge-making. And yet, Asian intellectuals have hailed the idea of “Asia” as a rallying point for epistemological decolonization, as illustrated by the continual fascination with “Asia as method,” a phrase first appearing in Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1961 talk and resurfacing after Kuan-hsing Chen’s highly influential book Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010).¹ Although Asia as “a desire for transcendence” could be adopted in anti-imperialist struggle and aspiration for political emancipation, it lent ideological support to Japanese military imperialism in the 1930s in the name of Pan-Asianism as well as to China’s imperial ambition in the rhetoric of Xi Jinping’s “an Asian community with a shared future.”² Put simply, the desire to carve Asia as a category is never natural or innocent. Hence, the question “why Asia” continues to lie at the core of TAP’s self-scrutiny.

This special issue reflects on the motivating factors behind our insistence on “Asia” through articles on topics that range from nineteenth century colonial photography of tea production to contemporary Southeast and South Asia artists’ portrait photos of transgender sitters. This issue is not about proposing unique Asian characteristics of photography, or how the photographic medium, despite its technology-based parameters, is always used, imagined, and understood in accordance with local norms. If anything, the studies of photography in Asia in the past decades have already taught us that. This group of articles point to shared characteristics that demonstrate why and how “Asia” matters today.

Significantly, the articles in this issue moved beyond the historiographic impasse of Asian photography as a permanent other to the study of photography in Euro-American context. A long-existing intellectual asymmetry, which privileged Western apparatuses of knowledge-making, which produces universal theories while construing the rest of the world, including Asia, as offering primary materials or case studies to be abstracted and normalized, is even more astutely felt in the photographic studies of Asia.³ Not only was photography invented in the West, but histories published in English, French, and German have haunted the study of photography in Asia. This sense of belatedness led to use of the Western canon as a critical touchstone to argue for or against, to foster a strong desire to locate and identify quintessentially Asian characteristics in photography, or to champion for a uniquely Asian mode of analyzing photography.

The articles in this issue move beyond this conundrum. They foreground the fact that Asia has always been at the core of photography, regardless of whether critical commonplaces recognize it. For instance, Leila Anne Harris’s “Two Leaves and a Bud: Tea and The Body Through a Colonial Lens” recontextualizes Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of Sri Lankan women in the photographic representation of labourers in tea plantations, which challenges widespread assumptions about Cameron. Similarly, Ying-lung Su and Yongquan Jin’s accounts of Henri Cartier-Bresson shines new light on another prominent figure in the history writing on photography. It is worth emphasizing that the studies of the articles in this issue are not conducted for the purpose of filling in the knowledge gap in photography studies or expanding its canon. While focusing on figures from the West who spent time in Asia, these articles demonstrate the many poles and axes beyond the dichotomy of Asia versus the West. Unearthing internal publications from the Chinese news agency and the state association in control of photographers, Jin’s account of Cartier-Bresson’s visit to China in 1958 reveals the transnational flows between China, the Soviet Union, and the global left, telling a story on the painstaking self-reasoning of photographic truth in a country of historical socialism. This poignant story, juxtaposed with Su’s thoughtful reflection on his experience working with Michel Frizot to comb through the untouched archives at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation while curating an exhibition on Cartier-Bresson’s China photos, shows the parallel constructedness of “truth” in both camps of the Cold War. The significance of such explorations almost renders the question of innovation and influence—which have stubbornly occupied the study of photography especially when the medium is hailed as art, and which have prompted so many early studies on photography in Asia tirelessly searching for Asian innovation—beside the point.

The question of “why Asia,” while generative, obscures other important questions including: “which Asia” and “whose Asia”? These are questions broached in many of the contributors to this issue, who live and work in Asia. I emphasize this critical location not to evoke the misplaced aura on “native informants,” but to remind our readers that the disciplinary contexts, and more importantly, the political contexts, of their research and writing are not only different from the North American norm and reality but are also different from one another.

In this special issue, two articles on photography of protests—Wing Ki Lee’s “Disobedient Photobooks: Photobooks and Protest Image in Contemporary Hong Kong” and Li-hsin Kuo’s seminal article on “Photojournalism and Social Movement as ‘Theatre’: A Critical Reading of The Sunflower Movement Photographs”—which the author kindly granted us the right to publish an English translation—both touch on ongoing political tensions in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the face of Chinese aggression. While Lee sees political potential in the “disobedient images” of photo books as a way of resisting the rapid political deterioration there, Kuo cautions an unquestioning embrace of the documentary photography tradition whose support from Euro-American liberal democracy and capitalism are entangled. These two places, like many other parts of Asia that are on the edge of empires, suffered dynastic colonialism and internal colonialism in addition to forms of power more familiar to Anglophone readers such as external colonialism and settler colonialism. Sometimes multilayered violence could be successfully exposed in one critique, such as Jun Zubillaga-Pow’s reading of transgender portraits, in “Why Trans People Stand: The Performance of Postcoloniality and Power in Portraiture,” as attempts to defy gender discrimination and colonial stereotypes. However, at other times, the authors’ critiques could make it obvious that different groups could imagine their path and tactics to decolonization and de-imperialization very differently, which might very likely be incommensurable with one another.

If Asia remains a meaningful concept to organize knowledge, to compare dis/similarity, to explore a way forward, its meaning might lie in a firm resistance to collapse the totality of struggles under the weight of any hierarchy of dichotomy. The contextual variety of the articles in this issue, and the subsequent critical tension in their emphases, foreground the incomplete views and inevitable fractions not just in topics and methods, but more importantly, in the intellectual and political drives ungirding them. In this regard, Asia could be a reminder for the necessity of a nimbleness in acknowledging the incommensurability of political struggles while exploring a common ground of emancipatory pursuits.

This issue closes with Yoshiaki Kai’s essay on Kaneko Ryūichi, a forerunner of Japanese photo studies and a former board member of TAP, whose recent passing has inspired wide commemoration in photographic communities in Asia. Kai’s thoughtful reflection on Mr. Kaneko’s life-long work outlines a history of photo studies in postwar eras very different from the one in the English-speaking world. Kuo, Jin, and Lee also emphasize these disciplinary and institutional differences, which become especially prominent in the translated pieces in this issue. While TAP itself is the product of the colonial legacy that made English a lingua franca in academia, this journal is proud to highlight the polyphonic nature of these articles and the loss and gain in the process of translation.

Notes