 We are now going to welcome Hankie Fould, who is joining us from Hawaii at the moment. We have all sorts of travel visa kinds of issues this year. So luckily we have this technology, let's hope it all works again as it did with Selena. So Hankie Fould is an archaeologist and project director at the International Research Institute in Honolulu. He received his PhD in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and before that he completed a bachelor's degree in archaeology in 2002 from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. People's research interests lie in archaeological, political economy, settlement patterns, state formation, and ceramic production and consumption. I'm also very happy to say that Pippoil has joined the editorial board of the of the NUS, the National University of Singapore Press and SOAS Publication Series which we have launched recently on the ancient to pre-modern Hindu Buddhist art of Southeast Asia. So I will ask Pippoil now to say hello to everyone while we can still see you and to switch your screen now so that we can follow your slides which you can control directly, okay? Thank you. Thank you. Morning everyone, morning from Honolulu. Morning, very good morning from NUS. Oh, now I can. Good morning. Nice to have you at home for a few minutes. We participated in this occasion. I apologize I can't make it to them and everyone, but it's time to announce sharing of this occasion. Put together a short presentation on my experience, my perspective on publication related to art and archaeology of Cambodia. So I hope that my presentation is an example to what I have done and again it's not in magic to publication, but it offers an example and that would be useful to some of you in the audience. Let me try now sharing my screen from this presentation. Can everyone see if they can see it? So what do you want to like to make? For this presentation I would like to start with the academic presentation where the training publication has to be based on perspective, on academic presentation. We will start with the presentation. Then my second point is the presentation. Who are the audience? Those venue for presentation and publication. My third point is the presentation. It's all the research I hope and lastly I will start to elaborate. Then the last point that has been an important aspect of my career. I hope to begin with as most of you are familiar with art, although I don't have to talk about it too much. But the research in the art history in Cambodia began with the colonial period. We have all of these scholars and scholars that who transcribe the whole field, history, art history, and so on. So the only presentation involved is the survey of the work in the arts, the site descriptions, and this gentleman on the left-hand side of the molecular, he wrote more about human possessions, Buddhism. And then on your right is the Buddhist venue, which was part of the medical experiment. The other part is probably the name of Cambodia on your left, and the name of Cambodia on your right. We are really close to do the systematic inventories of Cambodia, Southern Vietnam, and Northeast Thailand. But my point here is that our academic position is to believe on very much each work. So inventories survey, documentation site, and presentation. In the past, inventories on the archaeology part was ultimately linked. And I'm not saying that it's only happened in the past, but it's also happened in the present. In this case, we could see that in 1907, we kind of see when Manabow to Cambodia has a particular statement. The presentation of this piece, also the Amarca, was in the previous use as an evidence of Cambodian territory. So when you preach an object meant and used in political statements. So in this case, if there's legitimacy to the Cambodian states, as well as the colonial power, we see that in French territory, Uncle Bayam was used as a banknote on your left. There's a banknote from North Carolina from 1944, that's a payout. And on your right, it's a banknote from Middle China. It was in China in 1939, and then they take Uncle under. Another aspect of early research involved competition. And point out the obvious. Seattle Society was created in 1904. And three years after that, the Society of the Uncle, the Uncle Society was created in 1907 for a similar purpose. So the rivalry between political power, Seattle and France involved this kind of state-using research using an active object. So we'll move on to the post-independence of Southeast Asia because definitely it's a local period. Heritage was intended to be used in a way that carried political statements. Carrying the legitimacy of either the Cambodian states or the coast of this case. The post-independence of Southeast Asia and then Cambodia will see that the heritage, the symbol nation, the symbol nationality, that this is a snapshot from the period of this case. We can see the flags of Cambodian flags from the 19th century until now. Uncle has depicted all the flags. It's linked between heritage and the Cambodian nation. So the research in different views will find audience to make a statement nation, a statement national identity. He can say the same thing with Uncle Shahnadei, to say the same thing about the Donaldson, Donaldson who was born in Vietnam, got overgrown in Java and in Burma. So in this period in Cambodia there were a lot of public Cambodia in Thailand that targeted Cambodians Using uncle as the case that in the past, this was how we became an empire, for example. So heritage was used for research on heritage. It was used as a phase to stop our national pride. For the current purpose, I would like to talk about the writing in general. However, for the past few slides, I have made a statement about the use of research to target specific regions. So from a colonial view, we have looked at the general public at home, for example. So generally knowledge at home provides the general courtesy of the French spectacularity of Cambodia. At the same time, it provides the general courtesy of the French spectacularity of Cambodia as Cambodian youth for the past hour then. In the independent period, that audience should get to national consumption. So talk about it. I looked at the instructions after. Coins in mind, as a researcher, we should ask, I understood what do we intend to talk about, why, and how do we know about doing our research, what type of research. Documentation, the calendar analysis, and who are our kind of audience. Who are we talking about, Cambodians, or my studies, or where our research went into Southeast Asian studies, that our intended audience are scholars in the students of the same fields, meaning that our research, our publication, is intended to generate conversations and the advancement of the field, that are critical, that are critical. All of that we want to represent, you know, the public, the general public, to know if the information is correct, information, and how I raise it, of the field to the general public. But in a sense that my perspective on writing, my scope of writing, would be something like, well, in terms of the field of employment, this has been perfect. We couldn't take that as a little premise. You have to see the whole picture. Otherwise, you're only just like part of that picture or whatever you want to make. But my view on this, that if our research has quest for knowledge, so it's accumulated to fact, we could use this example here, an analogy, for having full field search on multiple bodies and describing research question, in understanding research questions, in solving research questions, with multiple methodology, multiple variables. So there's this issue, this is the slide that I hope you'll choose. From the perspective of researchers, the purpose of our research, the purpose of our publication is humanism and knowledge. We don't write a piece, you write a contribution to a general body piece of work. It is the same standing on a giant. So the more research we have, more contribution to everyone, whether it's the same field, the better the next interview. So that's my perspective on search and publishing. And I think that what has been useful today, football, is writing for a larger audience. A larger audience can be more than public, but it can be researchers, scholars, students of the same field that are most interested in lies and culture of comparison. Cross-culture of the third, of the 15, in this case, should our, as you say, focus to be on in the set descriptions, not the general site to conceptual claim it. We could share our approach of research, talking about inputs from higher culture to interaction between cultures. So that eliminates the hierarchy of the next. So that everyone can, we can engage with the top general school of studies, people studies, championed by Zoxida. If we could, if we could talk about the Indian perspective on the relationship of Southeast Asia, then we could move on back to talk about a general field piece. So in the 60s and 70s, there definitely was a famous archaeologist, actually he was the only archaeologist so far away, who an archaeologist who was an archaeologist. But his, I deployed hypothesis, his work in archaeology relating to exploitation of the land, what an ancient, ancient relationship with, with, I don't know, for example, that contributes to a general development hypothesis that does not, it's the best term. So this research not outdid it to the research of ourself, but it helped to build greater understanding of what the ancient, the culture, the civilization, and what I managed. And then across cultural themes, I found it interesting. So far back, I could probably be, as themes are recently as bothersome and political, because that theme was general. We don't describe, it's not necessarily a leap study, but it's a culture. It's cultural kind of business group that's connected. So we could talk about Williamson in Thailand, his work on Buddhism and Bodhi, how that fit, in fact, how this Bodhi, or Burmese adapted to why there's a difference. How similar are they? And in archaeology, the themes become this overall logic, which came, for example, on theolithic from Iron Age of Bodhi. So our research continues to this lot, even so we can't find a larger audience. That's the example of a particular group is, even for another way to approach our research is through methods. So on your left is photos of Bodhi's excavation and tractors in 1964. You see a series of square planks, these are 5 by 5 meters planks. It was expanded by more time, so more time for the group from the UK. It was popular at that time as far as the romance research in the common sense, because it's time-adjected, and it was here for a third time, and currently on your right is the application provider in our group. So methods like that has a great public interest. So our research can contribute to advancement of the field, to modernity and improvement of the field. If we talk about Bodhi's excavation, so this is just an example of the formation of Hinduism. How, what are the research into this? So our research is not inside, it's not. What village or location do you have for there? You have to follow these two of these large interactions. And we have had a lot of influence, like Robert Brown, VCLA, from the University of Hawaii, and we have had a lot of interaction, similarity, so that the premises of the research is that of the Buddha statues, the Vishnu statues, or Siva statues, searching for the world across Southeast Asia. The higher-band prototype from India, for example, the one on your right, from Peninsula of Thailand, that could have been prototype directly from India, but from here after that, while Southeast Asia is able to identify that characteristic, this input between the Buddha statues between the 6th century and 8th century. Then we could talk about Abhiyadu, to study the beats using methods like IACP and MS to identify chemical forgetment beats, so we could trace these two different concepts. In this example of the thousand colors for research on beats, we could trace the input of the origins of these beats from the start of Asia to East Asia, and some to local Asia. But the research on beats on each side levels and interactions across this region. So it doesn't help put our research in a regional perspective onto it, but we could use it for from down some parts of the view to spread across that data. Our research is a concept that if a reason happens to be that I move on to the application menu. So far in Cambodia, our application menu depends on the Buddhist Institute. It's one of the oldest journals in Cambodia. Rarely we have some Cambodian school doctors in the area of the world, the origin of the alphabet. But some who have a complex the origin of the alphabet is Cambodian, and various annual organizations will think about it. So each journal has different themes, different audience, and the article that will publish the purpose of that book. But if you look at all of these, there are multiple kinds of books. My Cambodian is English, French, and also Chinese. I think there are some Italian or Chinese. So far, it's an article that's been writing for conference. So my incentive, I think it's going to be a panel in the conference. So far we have the same regional organization, different department, or CMO, but there's not a lot to share. We have the Pacific Association, Association of Asian Studies, European Association, South East Asian, so all the conference organizations generally have panels related in the country based, Cambodia, Indonesia, for example, or it would be, there must be 15 days to be a part of. So my experience, that's the fact of the day, I think a lot of the Cambodian studies, sometimes I would be regional studies, region studies, and sometimes I must be part of it. A political economy is a reality. I use that opportunity as a set for this conference and I hope children make the purpose of writing Cambodian. Then comes down to our topic of the teaching journal also, but it's up to Asia. Can we finish on this slide because we're running out of time now. So could you finish on this slide? Thank you. Yes. So the last thing I want to say is is language of interaction, language of interaction. So in the past, we used Sanskrit, which is an alphabet derived from Southern Barmese as means of interactions. Now the meaning of interaction is more complicated in English. So our complication is more complicated in English. So my coverage should be in this medium to address this. But then we'll talk further, which is not perfect. I still need my friends, my colleagues, and for averages to help me through this and help me through this admission process. That has been the case. If you have all the funding, these are the steps. The final group leaders target the specific journal for the recap, because I've talked about academic books. I've talked about writing for a lot of these. We use all themes. I've talked about language of interaction and use both languages. Sorry, I know what to say. I hope this helps. Thank you. The Department of Planning and Statistics of the Ministry of Culture of Fine Arts in Cambodia and a lecturer at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Companiment to the Department of Archaeology, also graduated from there along with Kikbal, and has very, very recently submitted a final draft of his PhDs. Decolonizing my PhD. First of all, I would like to thank you, Professor Thompson and also the organizing team and committees for having me to speak here to share my experience of publishing in Cambodia in general. And this presentation is not an exhaustive survey about the publication on art and archaeology in Cambodia but it's just to give you an example of what it has to weigh forward so that you can understand it, like what are the issues, what are the problems. So I listened to the previous speakers and then I learned something that I also experienced in Cambodia. It is the problem of translation. I think it should be addressed in a very serious way. Otherwise, the translation cannot be used. And I think that this very, I also would like to discuss with all of that in our discussion today. So I will, the publishing initiatives for art and archaeology, it started roughly after, in 2000, something like that. There are certain institutions, public institutions, for example, starting in the late 1990s by the Apsara Authority. It is an authority that is managed the uncle areas. And the publication is called Udaya, the Rising Sun. The Udaya is the first aim as I learned from the co-author, which is the Professor Thompson and also Professor Anjulian, that the initiative ideas was to encourage the publication in Khmer language, much more than French and English. It doesn't mean that French and English is a competition or something, but it just for encouraging the reading, providing more materials for the local rising experts or rising researchers to learn more about the foreign countries. Those are the basic ideas in establishing, but it's not reached that level because of certain difficulties in the development of human resources in Cambodia. And also, there are NGOs that are involved in that. For example, CKS is one of the examples. CKS is providing the platform for... CKS is an international organization working in Cambodia involved with the engaging the... Christina is here can help me in correcting it. And Ron, she was the former director, executive director of CKS in Cambodia. And then those are trying to bridge the world between the French language, the English world, Francophone, Anglophone, and Khmer, all together. So those are the certain initiatives I will show you in examples here. And they are also one of the the most important one, I think, among all, is the Rayum. Rayum institution. Now it's not it's not function as it was. It was very, very active in early 2000s and then it's not active anymore. So this is the example. I said the rise and fall of publicizing house. For example, Rayum as the... I give you the example. Rayum is some of the organization that the local NGO created co-funded by Ingrid Mwan the late Ingrid Mwan and both of them are trying to make publication and also engaging the younger graduated from the Department of Archaeology in Cambodia so that they can be able to do research and hoping sometime like building the younger research in Cambodia. So you see that some of the publications here here it's like this is the Rayum and these are Rayum and these are Rayum you know like they try to engage all the providing the sources and then those publications are in Khmer in English I think as well. And there are also some others publication for example the Department of Archaeology I myself also involved in that creation of journals but it won't sustain like it depends it requires a lot of times it requires human resources if you're not really in it and then it died like this one it created and then we have sustained it for three years and then it's gone like three issues and then it's gone and there are many many other issues like that there are some sustaining publications that is still for example that is the Udaya that now it's coming to the an NGO the local NGO that is providing the publications on one of the it's called Yusato and then the the journal that published by the Yusato is Udaya and as well as the local language is called Khmer in the Sounds here and these are the publication I just show you that encouraging this is the publication calling the souls there are many materials published at that time it was very useful for the students and this is just an example and these are when this one died unfortunately this one died and arising this one which is the same from the same university and then it just one issue and died again this is the really issues how can you sustain how can you sustain the publications in art and archaeology and also others it's very similar art and archaeology just an example of the publication in Cambodia in general I will show you that and then I hope to discuss and engage and learn and then we try to deal with how can we sustain that kind of work here is the the organization the NGOs that I mentioned is called you Southall you can access it there are articles that you can access online it's open-ended you know like you can access and download those articles from Udaya and this is and what I can see Udaya I see Udaya is one of the platform that I can see here the easiest the platforms that engage the local the local researchers and into from the local into the international level you know from a very simple it is starting from the Khmer in the songs Khmer in the songs is one of the local language it published in Khmer based on one of the basic simple ideas what do you think about that so people can start writing you know learn how to write by providing examples of simple things that is the idea one of the ideas is to make people think and then step forward but at the same time from one of these the Khmer in the songs you know articles students from the department of archaeology can pick up from themes you know because it's very condensed it two pages in Khmer and then but it's very condensed they can develop it into the thesis and you know some other references and now it's very well organized in France they use those articles for lecture for teaching hand me because I might go off and so that this matter in the song the article for example I show you here it is it is the newly published about the art about Mr. Emsordetier published and you know like the the market depicted from the one of the bar reliefs at in Angkor and here is the comparative this is very very important you know you can see the continuity of a lady wearing the flowers in their and then it's continued from the past so this is a kind of you know approach new approach tested on that very simple platform two pages with images many images is you know like making people learn from that and this is another example that I say it is a platform from a very simple one into a very developed one so this is about the discovery of one of the in nearby Angkor the author claim that to be the big one in Southeast Asia by Mr. Emsordetier and he is later on published in Udaya you know like in the step you know like you can develop your article from here and then you can move forward and he publishes exactly the same I mean like the one is condensed in Khmer and a little bit more elaborated in Udaya here but like I just mentioned you know publish or die you know like that is a published or published and this is the you know he published in English so that he can gain more audience and stuff like that I think those kind of the question that should be addressed should be we all together should learn how to integrate the local people you know like how to bridge from the international research academy or the communities and then in the local how can we improve that these are Udaya, the Udaya is the example these are the last issues of that and this is you know like there are many many many useful articles that you can download and also the Khmer and Emsord I just said and Professor Thompson just mentioned about I just submitted or sending my draft to my Professor Berkeley and this is you know like in Khmer and Emsord I also have referred to that it's very useful if it is there are a lot of information in that you can refer to because some people even those very simple questions but they really address the issues concerned so these are the publication this is to show you the CKS the Center for Khmer Studies the international NGO in Cambodia so their publication is very useful too you know like the publication the availability of the publication is it means that encourage the people to come and do the you know writing and articles and stuff like that but there are challenges this is an example of another private enterprise to publish but it publish in Khmer I say this is the availability the availability of the articles and stuff in Khmer and there are problems there are problems in that you know in Khmer and Emsord I am involved with we don't have articles people don't submit it because what is the point of submitting it what I use credit for what going to the university that is the big problems in there they publish it in Khmer on Facebook rather than writing a short article or something that people can refer to they publish it on Facebook and I find it very astonishing for example this one it's very important I have never seen this one this is for me it's Lakshmi you know like it's very important you know like no one really further research but rather than writing many people they the spectacular discoveries of something putting on Facebook and then it transits the moral values of the research you know that is one of the big problems and what about that there are many challenges that discouraging researchers in Cambodians right now there are some expressions they say Senyapat and Senyakur Senyapat is for degrees and the other Senyakur you see it means like the practical knowledge that you can realize it but that expression is downplay the real researchers you know like you go to the degree oh I know that you come back and you cannot do something that is some notion after my roots showing that but now some people really try to get oh I get my PhD from here and there and also the older generation and younger generation oh I am the older so I know everything don't challenge me some of the speakers just mention about that kind of stuff you know like don't challenge me I challenge them sometimes but if you don't challenge them they will be you're old my older generation and there are there are some of the authors especially they practice them really quickly they refer to the text as the authority you know like that is my authority when I publish it no one no peer review nothing it exists at the end of the world it's like the the Buddhist canonical what is that yeah like or so it's like that and that is the you know like lack of interest discouraging them you know self publication is many many many publication but when you are really approach in a scientific way you cannot use it but you can use them as they some certain information that can glimpse out of it but not you know like really a reference it's big problem lack of editorial system peer reviews all of us we have the same problems in I think very very similar problem in Southeast Asia copyright you in Thailand is much better than in Cambodia I agree and I agree with Krishna too you know like that is the sum of the possibilities we cannot afford to buy $20 books you know our salary is $20 too back then but now it's getting better and plagiarism is the problem we copy and copy sometimes I copy from here and I copy from there and they say oh okay that's mine copy until it become mine so so this is all all of this is to say you know it is the way looking forward what can we do to enable that kind of stuff and I open to discuss that and I think everyone can engage in that and then we go further together and then helping the local you know researchers get researchers to move forward you know like engaging and decolonizing the you know research and stuff like that thank you very much sorry sometimes we don't recognize that we have become the older generation but that's okay so our next speaker is Seiko Netra who is the dean of the department of archeology she's all been referring to she's taking a break from that work to do an MA here at SOAS and she will be talking to us she's also a very accomplished researcher with a background particularly in recent archeological work on prehistory in Cambodia and the co-author of some important work a book and some important articles in that field so I will hand it over to Netra good morning everyone good morning people thank you Netra and the organizing committee for inviting me to talk here even if I don't feel comfortable but I don't do it today I'm going to today I'm going to talk about the current situation of the department of archeology and some issues concerning education and publication at the Royal University of Fine Arts first of all I will briefly talk about the curriculum at the department of archeology and then followed by the problems with teachers and teachers and also with the students and then I will highlight about the current situation of the library at the university and lastly the short description about the activity of the RUFA research center and I will conclude with a short conclusion at the end the Royal University of Fine Arts consists of five departments namely department of archeology department of architecture and urbanism department of plastic arts department of choreography and lastly the department of music we also have a research center but today I will focus mainly on the department of archeology and the research center how we work with the students and the publication the department of archeology the mission of the department is mainly to teach the classical art, my art and archeology the curriculum of its undergraduate program consists of one foundation year plus three regular year and the main subject main teaching subject is art my archeology, art history my epigraphy, historical ethnography Indian art history, Southeast Asian art history, linguistic and prehistory no option available unfortunately students have to take all the subjects they have so there is no option and finally in final year students have to write a dissertation for the last five years we have a special French and English program in cooperation with Inalco France and it will be finishing this year and hopefully we will continue for the in the following year we have a lot of problem concerning teachers and teaching at the department of archeology nowadays as most of most of our teachers are not permanent teacher at the department they have their full time job somewhere else like the mystery of culture and fine arts or at the abstract authority or at national museum and sometimes we have to encourage our admin staff to teach as well so they have to work as admin staff and also they have to teach so as we have we as we are in short of teaching staff so teachers qualification requirement is difficult to apply so we just accept those who have time enough time to teach so we cannot we cannot limit that the teacher have to have a PhD or have to have higher qualification so this is the difficult point for us and so from this it is hard to get teaching syllabus from the student as most of the teacher do not provide their syllabus or haven't updated them as they do not have enough time to do their research or to work for the university as they have to fulfill their duty at their own institution sometimes teacher provide the syllabus but sometimes in the class they do not have they do not even have a reading list for the student so it is hard for student to enlarge or to get more knowledge from reading outside or sometimes they do provide the reading list but the publication is not available in the library so it's also another difficult point and we still have the assessment style mainly based on exam and most of the exam are based on class lecture only so there is no some kind of like essays or research paper that student have to go to make their independent research in the library and so on so and then during their final year dissertation it is kind like their first time reading and doing research independent research so it is difficult for them to start at this time now let's move on to the students problem with students only foreign language is still a major concern for our students I think in other Southeast Asian countries too but mainly in Cambodia it is not our first language so it is still very difficult and only few students can read or write French or English despite the limited availability of publication in English and French in the library so it is a kind of barrier for them to get like updated knowledge about recent publication from local and international research what is also a point of concern about is there ability to conduct independent research or to produce any scientific analytical research as they were not trained to do so since they were young and access to research environment is also very limited and the last point is that the interaction between teachers and students outside of the classroom is very limited as well because teachers do not have enough time outside of the classroom now let's move to the library we do have a small library in our university since one year the situation of the library is improved as we extend the opening hours of the library from 7 hours to 9.5 it means open from 7.30 until 5 in the evening without lunch break and from Monday to Friday unfortunately we do not have internet when with very limited internet access we still have very few publication if comparing to so as I think we have the publication about Cambodian archaeology or art history I think less than one time so it is very unfortunate so the publication is problem and we do not have the online catalog or database we still use very old system in the library so students have to search the book in the catalog in the books and then most of the books we do not have duplicate books so that the students can borrow and read outside of the library so they have to be in the library during the day the last one is that we only two staff working in the library so mainly they barely had enough time to do anything else besides keeping record of the so the maintenance of the book and making any updates of the system in the library is also very little the research center of the university is starting to have some more activities since we have our freshly graduate from so asked Mr. Ajira Tha who graduated in 2018 and he is now the head of the research center and the mission of the research center is to conduct research related to the department interest, the five department interests in we also the the mission of the center is also to initiate the publishing research we try to to publish the bulletin of the Royal University of Fine Arts which mainly encourage students staff and teachers of the university to publish their research and so on and this the first bulletin of the University of Fine Arts just printed out yesterday I just got the information from Ratha fortunately and then I hope it will not die after one issue as we have said we will do our best to have more issue in the future and every year I hope yeah this is the the first bulletin that I just got the photo from Ratha yesterday and finally to conclude to sum up for the last 30 years since it's reopening after the Khmer Rouge some 700 students have graduated from the department of archaeology among those some have worked in the field including archaeology, art history conservation and so forth however concerning our our our present situation national and international we need both national and international support in order to strengthen the quality of education in the department of archaeology thank you we have another mover and shaper with us today we're very very happy to be able to welcome Krishna Uruk who is the senior advisor to the board of directors in charge of development outreach and strategic initiatives for the association for Asian studies prior to joining AAS as you've already heard this morning Krishna or this afternoon Krishna was the executive director of the city of Burkimer studies based in San Viet, Northern Cambodia she received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University for which she worked on the Jirai ethnic minority and produced a monograph as a result of that the monograph is entitled salvage cultural resilience among the Jirai of Northern East Cambodia so please join me in welcoming Krishna thank you, thank you very much Ashley for inviting me my presentation is really about what we're trying to do today the association for Asian studies and especially me in my role in creating new initiatives that are connected with Southeast Asia as a region but also connected with underrepresented fields of Asian studies including archaeology, art history and architecture so we're really going to focus on the recent international research development project just to give you an overview this is a sort of rough picture of how many members we have today a bit more than 6200 and the demography here shows that most of the people who are members of AS are essentially historian or anthropologist people specialized in literature religion studies Asian studies here this column here is sort of very sort of broad but here I sort of highlighted the ones who are working in art and art history and over there archaeology so as you can see they are present but they're quite underrepresented within the wider demography of our membership to give you another snapshot of how it looks like this is the Denver annual conference that we had last March and it will show you the type of people who participated in the conference so mostly art and art historian here highlighted in yellow only represent about sorry I think that things have moved a bit they've shifted a bit but it shows that about 158 people from that feel actually registered and yeah and it's representing 5.4% of the 3200 members who participate in the conference and then if you look at the registration by region here it shows that for Denver here you had 411 people so 14% which is slightly less than what we had in Washington DC last year in 2018 where 13% of the panelists and participants coming from Southeast Asia as you can see most of our annual conference really gather people from China and in Asia but also northeast Asia the regions of Asia that are often and consistently underrepresented are Southeast Asia and South Asia so starting with this sort of acknowledgement I sort of launched different initiative in order to bring together these underrepresented fields of studies with the underrepresented region so I started a special panel within the AS that was gathering Asian artists from different parts of Asia and the artist demography also is really quite small we don't have that many artists who can share their knowledge and experience most of the people coming are scholars as you know and students so this was an interesting way to sort of start a conversation with people with different types of skills and different types of knowledge so I invited two artists from Cambodia and Myanmar this was in Washington DC last year some of you know Saret Svai who is an artist based in Siem Reap he used to be the artistic director of Artisan d'Encore but he does some spectacular work using some form of cotton and sculpture this is the which was presented at the Biais now in Australia and the other person that I invited from Myanmar is Min Zayao you probably recognize this picture it's very well known he took this picture of Anson Suu Kyi just after the sort of landslide victory of her party in the latest election so the idea was to bring together these two artists to talk about Asian arts and resistant defined subject and their disobedient objects this was funded by the Fort Foundation and without focusing too much on Southeast Asia the idea was to put them in conversation with other artists from other regions and the other artists were Samsung Wong from Hong Kong who is a visual artist he's quite famous for creating this visual installation which shows a countdown here it says until 1st of July 2047 which is quite controversial and was stopped because a Chinese delegation came at that moment and then two film directors documentary director Niko and Tushamada from India who did a brilliant documentary about arts in Kashmir so it's really looking into different aspects of arts today in this place which is heavily occupied by the Indian military this was really quite successful the problem I think was that we also wanted to have some exhibition but we didn't really have the space as you know AS is really focused on panel the format is quite traditional so it's essentially going to scheduled panel and have PowerPoint presentation this was like an experiment which we continued this year with another round table so this is to put them together choose you what Saret did for Washington DC it's actually a puppet of Donald Trump this is Donald Trump the idea was to have him as a sort of a figure of America first and then we had a photo exhibition of Minsaya including pictures of the Rohingya that he followed all the way to Bangladesh and then got in prison for about two weeks this is also another image of what Samson Wong did in Hong Kong he participated by Skype and this is just a sort of screenshot of the documentary the idea again was not just to isolate Southeast Asia but to replace it into an Asian wider context where by Southeast Asia really appear relevant as a sort of artist and scholarship and art history this year we continued with the experiment but this time we were better organized because we had local partners so in addition to the round table that are organized this time on arts and the military occupation we pulled together selected different artists from different regions and asked my colleagues from the different council to give some ideas so for Cambodia again we had this time Sekhon Lien who did some actually spectacular painting and he had his solo exhibition at the Magnicle Civic Center in Denver this is Maria Madera who is from Timoleste although Southeast Asia is an underrepresented region within this underrepresented region you also have underrepresented countries and Timoleste is one of them and we're really chuffed because she's an incredible women artist so in conversation with these two Southeast Asian artists we had Roushan Ellari who is from Kashmir, he's Nondaguerre's MC Cash and he's a rapper and we also had Tenzing Rigdoll who is quite well known in Tibetan artwork and all of his work here is related to here monks, emulation and the concern about who will become the next Delay Lama so we had some really brilliant conversation this time with these artists and the structure in place to put together all these exhibitions including a performance by Roushan Ellari the hip-hop performance during the conference so this I think has helped re-race the profile of art history but also artists within the field and within the framework of our annual conference we're going to try to carry on the first initiative was funded by the Ford Foundation this one was funded by the Asian Cultural Council in New York and because it really exceeded their expectation especially with all the different types of ancillary activities that we provided we might be able to carry on in the next few years in addition to that we also had a special panel this year in Denver to cut a long story short we had this idea with Martin Polkinghorn with an archaeologist based in Cambodia to focus on latest research concentrated on the middle period because there's very little known on that and we had Kong Virat for example the director of the National Museum to come and talk but at the very last moment everybody cancelled so I called Miriam Stark at Hawaii the only person who did not cancelled was Tom Chandler from Monash University because he was involved in another panel I called Miriam and I said we really need an archaeology panel because again it's underrepresented and at the 11th hour we put together this panel focusing on Maritime Cambodia and Southeast Asia and we're extremely grateful to people who accepted to attend and be our main spokesperson and speaker at the very last minute Angelina actually can testify she was there at the round table we basically had Miriam there and discussion Tom who was part of the also organizing team and people are talking about beads in Southeast Asia and what happened is that we completely changed the format and instead of having two people doing PowerPoint we just threw a whole lot of conversation and questions to the audience the idea was this is the state of the research in modern period we have lots of gaps can people within the audience just fill in the gaps we had a lot of discussion extremely diverse, very dynamic the conversation instead of the usual 15 minutes Q&A was about 40 minutes so we really had the time to exchange information we had a historian architect archaeologist from Thailand, the Philippines and different parts of Southeast Asia and with these different types of format I think we're going to try to do that again and maybe organize something for Boston in 2020 whereby we have again different people who will be able to just basically brainstorm on what is being done and what are the main questions that people are trying to sort of find answers for there was also another panel that I helped put in place which this time focused on architecture architecture also within art history is not well represented enough so together with François Tinturier from the INIA Institute based in Yangon we put together this interesting panel that was talking about different sort of state building during the post-independence period in Southeast Asia and their social role this is a picture for you for those who know of the white building that was designed by and then here you have the chunking mention in Hong Kong so just to example from Cambodia Vietnam and Myanmar we also had something on Hong Kong which was great because again it brought together Southeast Asia in a sort of bigger sort of geographical plane where we could also talk about different places where similar occurrences and comparative studies could be made in addition to these different panels that were experimented this year in Denver with digital technologies exposition the idea was that a lot of the scholars today are working using virtual reality and that's the case of Tom Chandler but also different types of technologies to digitization and sometimes 3D printing so Tom was one of the highlights of this program which lasted a day and a half and represented all his latest work on visualizing ankle some of you know this work and it's really quite spectacular and the idea was to be able to share with other colleagues who might be interested in furthering their research in using this type of data and connecting with the people who are involved in furthering the technology but also including within this technology the latest research finding so I think that this is something that we will continue to do in Denver in Boston after Denver and we'll try to bring together people who are from the art history field but also archeology I think it's important that we try to sort of kill different birds with one stone and this was one of the case next year we're going to try to have maybe some people who can talk about the Dan Huang case and the incredible work that has been done in terms of digitization how these digitized image can be used by students and professors in school to finish this is what is in preparation for Boston next March we're working again with the Asian Cultural Council in maybe organizing another round table the topic at the moment is about arts and politics because we feel that it's a topic that there's a lot to say about but it's also much more sort of attractive in terms of funding and in terms of the people working on this issue today we're also together with the India Institute in Young Goan trying to bring together different architects and art historians who can present on Buddhist politics in the region and again we're trying to diversify the geography one of the main you know that you have to go through a sort of review process when you submit a proposal and one of the things that the program committee is looking at is really diversity so how is your panel really going to advance the research in this particular field the more diversity is and the more cutting edge the better chance you have to you know being accepted then together with the Harvard University and New York New York Southeast Asian Network we're trying to organize different types of exhibition and performances we haven't done very much of that in the past AAS Animal Conferences but we're trying to maybe organize some performances from Southeast Asian artists who are not necessarily baiting Southeast Asia but we're thinking about the diaspora in the US and reaching out to this young generation who were born in the US and who are interested in bridging the gap between you know the country of origin and who they are and where they are now and again the digital technologies exposition as I said I think will resume with more interesting perspective on what is being done with different subject areas and geographical geographical parts of the world thank you I feel like you are doing a very good job so I have a business but actually just now I just add one point when you say Facebook destruction I sort of don't agree with you because you know I'm a Facebook user but not very often I try to refrain and sometimes I deactivate my account just to focus on my writing but you know when I deactivate my account I think like I don't connect with the word outside because I know today there are a lot of like site surveys or like excavation somewhere in Vietnam and some of my friends when they are doing excavation they put something on Facebook yeah so in that way I know what's going on there yes I mean like I stay connected with Facebook but also I try to stay from a distance but still connected but I don't think it's a distraction but I think we should have the way to encourage people to write to develop the habit of writing, the culture of writing not just like photo essay but it's like analytical essay using the photos and I think Facebook is still a good channel to connect to the world I totally agree yes I mean it does seem to me that it's not a black and white issue certainly but I think I think a lot of what's coming out in the presentations thus far is also the question of editorial perspective, editorial work and a lot of it is you know it's these are larger questions it enters into the questions of fake news and how Facebook how the internet is unregulated and I think when you drill down to the Cambodia archeology level or the Vietnam archeology level how do you think about those questions which are complicated ones opening out, enabling access enabling exchange enabling knowledge but also disabling certain forms of quality control shall we say which are certain forms of quality control and certain forms of shall we say shall we say let's sort of segue into copyright how do we think about that and how do we manage that in a productive manner without opening up discourse, opening up exchange rather than closing it down and it seems that it's not a straight forward answer but the question of editorial perspectives and editorial work is a very important one there and I think an important one is the role facing with Brattu as well where do you intervene and where do you not intervene right so yeah they don't really deactivate they just pose and pose and pose and never have time to write an article or something we ask for I call directly to those people you know can you write a short article about your discovery and post it on my songs or something you know we have certain peer review or some kind of editing you know like but they don't really do it they say oh I cannot write oh I cannot write I'm sorry and they don't really deactivate their account like you thank you maybe I can share an example for the news part of your novel yes we have space for academic articles for the space for things like Facebook posts so what I call multimedia articles so if you want to put a video you can put a video order you did and I don't know if it's here but I found somebody on Instagram who started posting sketches of Sarah culture so she was an illustrator she started drawing artifacts from the museum she had a series of 30 days of drawing so every day she would draw a sketch of artifact from the museum and then she would put it on Instagram so I asked her could I use your work and use it as a multimedia article and that became our first multimedia article in this proper journal and that's one way I co-opted online content like that so I think I think we probably should stop this panel now in order to move on to our to our last group alright so I'm going to stretch your legs while we get ourselves a good start thank you very much short time so we're going to very briefly talk about what we don't need to know who I am and we have two pieces and that's all I have to see now please thank you so very briefly Ashley invited me to come to talk about Philippine Studies projects here so I'm just going to give a brief overview of publishing trends in the Philippines and kind of try to understand sort of the historical kind of background and see how this can be decolonized or how we are trying to decolonize that here to us so as we probably know the Philippines is kind of a it's kind of a an adopted child you might say a Southeast Asian I mean it's in a way we kind of have to decolonize Southeast Asian studies in relation to the Philippines I guess but it's an interesting sort of halfway house on the eastern edge of the Pacific so it has relations to America to the Americas and then it's on the eastern edge of the imperial empires of Europe so you kind of have this it's a kind of cross current in that sense and not to mention of course colonization from China from the north so because of this sort of in some sense the Philippines has been sort of times over so if you look at the roots of publishing in the Philippines much of it goes deep into the history of colonization so book publishing as an industry goes way back in the Philippines as early as 1593 with the first woodblock printed books in Manila published by Dominican friars at the University of South Mass interestingly these are religious books and these were produced mostly for foreigners so the market even then is a very foreign based sort of market this is the Dupina Hestiana it was published for friars in order to cataclyse the natives you might say and the interesting one here actually is this is a Chinese book that was supposed to be used for conversion as Manila was used as a base for conversion conversion missions to China Manila being sort of a chance shipment base I just wanted to show this to you this is very recently a Taiwanese scholar found this the world's largest and oldest Chinese Spanish dictionary in the USD archives and in the same university press that was publishing the Dupina Hestiana so they are looking into this trying to digitize it and trying to see it is by far the sort of the largest expand going on sorry kind of in a rush fast forward to the 19th century so we know the Spanish globalization to the 19th century and the coming of the Americans we see the sort of difference that we have in the Philippine culture with Americans there is the introduction of an American public school education and there is a at the very beginning of bilingual publications, Spanish and English at the beginning and these were mostly newspapers and like short stories towards the in 1908 the Philippine assembly under the American colonial administration enacted Act 1870 which was supposed to establish the University of the Philippines and this is sort of significant in the publishing sort of history of the Philippines this has become the biggest sort of publication source and journals and different things the existing in the Philippines there are of course other University presses the Ataneo and of course LaSalle and different and the Santa Tomas which continues the publication is said to be the oldest or second to the oldest publishing University House now as we go on from Spanish colonization to American we go to Spanish bilingualism and we have tapers down towards the Philippine commonwealth and then of course with the Philippine independence from America in 1945 so it's not surprising to see that 89% of publications from the American public school system as well as the market now 89% of publications would be all English there is of course some laws like the Tagalog as the national language but the market is not as big of course as the English literacy levels in the Philippines continue to be high it's 76% and here is an interesting development in the Philippines with the establishment of the National Book Development Board which is actually really very active in terms of what the publishing industry in the Philippines they come up with a lot of these readership surveys and a lot of initiatives actually like book prizes they also have workshops and different things and that is their sort of mission anyway the linguistic dominance of English in publishing however in 2010 starting got kind of a bit of a dent in a sense when the Board of Education established this law which was the K-12 curriculum and what they wanted to do was to mandate the teaching of from grades 1 to 3 the teaching of the mother tongue and as you know in the Philippines there's like 300 different regional languages so in that sense they sort of encouraged the publication of a lot of children's books in different regional languages all of course funded by the National by the MBTP and the CHED so this is kind of an interesting sort of grassroots but funded by the government but in a sense they're hiring like the people from each of the regions and starting at a very simple level in that sense for these are children's books so these are from grades 1 to 3 and from the same development board these are just some of the things that they have been using and trying to sort of maybe decolonize these ideas of publication so one is they encourage the use of indigenous art terms for example so there is a call for still in English probably the publication but they want people to focus on indigenous art terms so what they do is publish a lot of dictionaries and a lot of workshops trying to unpack all these indigenous terms another thing they do is to establish to codify what they call Philippine English and sort of legitimize it in some sense so as we know there's a lot of trending looks into world Englishes they might say you kind of look at the language and localize it and not only in terms of vocabulary but like syntax switching as well and of course a third thing they offer a lot of is translation workshops and translation studies so they not only translate works from from like Philippine works into English but vice versa so they do a lot of classics transferred into Philippine regional languages and interestingly in 2018 another law this time from the congress was they established the by by in which is the Philippine script and there was a law passed in 2018 that mandated the use of by by in as the national writing system so this is very significant in a way well since 1523 we've not had an indigenous script and that has always been sort of many have said because of the latinization of the alphabet we're very colonized so they are trying to address this now and it's weird because a lot of these it's a very sort of superficial so they want manufacturers to cook the labels of their products for example in by by in and then translate to English but anyway we'll see what happens just established in 2018 anyway now in that area of art and archaeology there are four major drivers for publishing so these are the four that are kind of commonly seen as sources for publications so again government sponsored publications the national board the book board and then there is also the CCP the cultural center in the Philippines it publishes a lot of encyclopedias this is the new one that came out recently a 10 volume compendium of art techniques and of course using sort of indigenous terms and trying to delve into those and then of course there's also the national culture sorry the national commission for culture and the arts so those are the two big governing bodies for art to the culture in the Philippines now more on the private side there is the private museums that are very well funded Ayala museum for example and the Uchenko museum they do a lot of art shows and then they come out with academic they give it to the university presses for publication for example so they come out with not just catalogs of art shows but they have essays and review period essays and these books and one of the biggest shows that Ayala did was the gold exhibit that was in the Philippines a permanent exhibit and it was brought to New York and now we have these publications coming out of those the third one is more commerce driven in a sense and the Leon gallery for example there's a sort of huge search and publication in relation to options the Leon gallery for example sort of it's the second biggest driver of the Philippine economy in terms of creative industries in the arts and they are publishing a lot of these again sort of academic quasi-academic but still kind of substantial books on not only Philippine contemporary art but also like historical pieces they discovered Juan Luna painting in Spain it was kind of the sketch for it and they did a huge study of whether it was fake or not of course in the end it was supposed to be auctioned off then all of the research was surrounding that but anyway and then of course lastly the university presses which I've already mentioned now now given all of this however the Philippines this is just one of the surveys from the National Book Board the Philippines the median price that anyone can afford in the Philippines for book-binding is very little but there is a lot of internet connection wifi or wireless connection and while the trend is still for books for actual books there is a definite trend working towards the digital so the CCP or the NCCA for example the CCP aside from all their other paper publications you can see a clear trend towards the digital they do a lot of television shows Dayao is one of the native terms for art for example and they have this documentaries on these arts they watch them and they come out in DVDs and they distribute them in libraries for example coming to SOAS which I really like to do was we looked at all these sort of barriers to access to print the publication and we tried to figure out what can we do to in a way use the Philippine studies program here at SOAS to address those issues so there were three things that we did one is that we digitized a lot of the materials of the SOAS archives, the Philippine archive at SOAS and statistically actually the biggest drivers of the views for this are based in the Philippines so it's actually, you can see in the Google stats that and it is the second highest use of SOAS a lot of downloads have come and it is with the grant money you can download and you can these are of course all free access but these are all copyright free so there's no issue so there is a lot of that if you're interested and we are actually open to, there's an open call to like see if there are materials that are at SOAS that we can the researchers are interested that we can digitize and we've heard in working with the Spanish archives in trying to digitize or link up with the indios and people in Syria because all of their stuff is digitized but their interface is very hard to navigate the indios so the second thing that we're doing is this geography of Philippine objects which is a visual sort of mapping of different objects that are in the UK so we are actually working on it but again this is an inventory you might say of objects in the UK of Philippine cultural culture up to the 19th century and what we're trying to do is crowdsource it we are looking at houses and different things and the back end is open so you can email if you find something of course we're linking with the museums as well in terms of just inventory sorry I'm rushing through anyway, thank you a slight schedule change our second speaker is IU Kang who is a PhD student here so thank you can you hear me okay great it's yeah I think I can multitask so it's wonderful to be here and view Hong Kong within the wider context of Southeast Asia which is something that I believe should really be done more often and I'm going to address a bit more of that later on so I'm from Hong Kong born and raised in Hong Kong and I actually consider myself when you ask a question who considers English as the first language I wasn't really sure there because I kind of consider myself bilingual and I think I speak for a lot of Hong Kong people who were basically taught their ABCs from day one and identify with an English name on their passport so I am very sick of people coming up to me saying that doesn't sound like the Chinese name tell me your real name and that is very much part of the fabric of Hong Kong society and culture that people don't really understand so my title Borrowed City Borrowed Art actually comes from a classic text on Hong Kong history so this comes from an author Richard Hughes who lived in Hong Kong for a long time but very much comes from a very sort of colonial British perspective when he wrote his book on Hong Kong and he said that it's a borrowed place living on borrowed time Hong Kong is an impudent capitalist survival China's communist area so it goes on and he actually borrowed this phrase himself from Hanzu Yin who was quite a well known Eurasian author and there have been Hollywood movies based on her work and she borrowed that term from a Shanghai businessman who moved to Hong Kong and his name was Tom Wu now these are the sort of perspectives that you get from this is a book written in the 60s so if you think about the wave of Shanghai immigrants going to Hong Kong sort of 1949 period up to the 60s Hong Kong was sort of seen as a voiceless community it was a borrowed place on borrowed time and this is where the British colonialists were and where people saw a place of refuge for political reasons for cultural revolution so that was all the context that was happening and now obviously Hong Kong's not on borrowed time anymore it's been returned to China as a special administrative region and this view on Hong Kong history obviously is extremely outdated and Richard Hughes actually in his book said that there's no demand for democracy in Hong Kong people are very pragmatic they put their heads down they just get on with it and obviously that is very not extremely untrue considering what's been happening recently with the umbrella movement and everything and so I don't actually feel like when we talk about decolonizing I don't feel like there is actually one single voice dictating the writing of Hong Kong art history in general right now and local Chinese have actually been extremely active in publishing in Chinese it's just whether Western scholars have bothered to read them or not that's a different question so I mean I personally feel like growing up I read a lot of history written by Hong Kong Chinese as well as Westernized Chinese or British facts teaching in Hong Kong so a quick summary this is stolen from historian Valdine Englund who's been great in summarizing Hong Kong historiography into three schools so first of all we can talk about the colonial school people who glorify you know the sort of British methods of modernizing Hong Kong which was just a fishing village and nothing more than that and then you get the sort of Marxist post-1949 Beijing centric view and they follow the narrative of colonial exploitation and oppression and seeing the Chinese as pure victims of this opium war and everything that was going on at the time so this is a view from a Beijing and not from Hong Kong itself and then now I think recently we really see the rise of what we call the Hong Kong school so they're neither sort of pro-colonial or pro-Beijing and we're really going back to archives in Hong Kong speaking to people there you know Eurasian communities Southeast Asian communities we're talking about labor unrest that happened and the complex rule of law how the British law did not really apply so the rights of being a British citizen did not particularly apply to a lot of Hong Kong citizens so there's a lot of complex research happening based in Britain, based in Hong Kong and in America as well now as a PhD student at SOAS right now I am trying to record the history of collecting Chinese art in Hong Kong which hasn't really been researched properly yet and I had some challenges and some pushback from people who say why are you writing this, there's no collecting history in Hong Kong it was just a temporary thing people needed a place to keep their art collections in light of the Cultural Revolution and because Hong Kong was a unique situation for the art market so it's interesting to see that you still have this kind of outdated kind of ideas that Hong Kong is not worth writing about it's just a particular place stuck in a particular time and it's all over now so this is what has been done on histories of collecting Chinese art there's a huge amount of research done on European and American collections of Chinese art but what I'm really trying to tackle is these people, these collectors and dealers and advisors who are active in China and in Hong Kong so I guess my research is really part of this effort to decolonize or to bring out more pluralistic voices so one example is I'm looking at a collector dealer, his name is Edward Chao and he was one of the very respected connoisseurs if you like from Shanghai so he actually set up his business in Shanghai and started collecting in the 1930s, 1940s and then he went to Hong Kong in 1949 and in Hong Kong he had a huge number of publishing opportunities available to him so I'm thinking about Hong Kong as a very important hub for publishing at the time especially in the 50s and the 60s there's a thriving business for printing and the press in Hong Kong so he actually published the catalogs for his private collection for the first time in Hong Kong when he had the resources to do so and what I'm doing is also going through his unpublished memoir written in Chinese and even as someone who reads Chinese it takes a lot of effort to dissect this because he writes in very sort of a messy cursive writing so this is very much what I'm trying to do and it's interesting to see that Hong Kong has actually benefited from a lot of publishing opportunities there's a lot of publications there and I think it's great that Hong Kong as a very bilingual place has always done a lot with translating English text into Chinese and vice versa so for instance if you look at the publications by the Hong Kong Museum of Art a lot of them are bilingual and the collector societies in Hong Kong who have the best the important collections they always make sure they have things published in Chinese as well as English but obviously this needs to continue I think especially after the handover to China in 1997 people obviously prioritized learning Mandarin over English now for a lot of the younger generation so when we publish do we publish in traditional Chinese that caters for Hong Kong Taiwanese audience do we publish in simplified Chinese cater for mainland Chinese audience do we bother translating into English anymore do people care about Western acknowledgement especially when it comes to Chinese art I think there's a sort of sense of arrogance sometimes that the research is now coming from Beijing and Shanghai why do we need to read English text and it's very interesting how things are actually changing every day and how a lot of English books are being translated into Chinese to cater for the Chinese market now so I open up those questions and I'm going to keep this short and that's all I have to say thank you so much I have no power point so may I sit here do I have the oldest thing in my hands do you have some I don't know is it a sacred conch shell or something like that password speak it speak it thank you my title do I what do I do with this put it in your pocket how's that so if you look at the title of my presentation you will see that it has three terms there and that's basically the structure of this presentation so two points before we begin first of all this is a very broad brush presentation because I am talking about an area from the Atlantic all the way through Central Asia so obviously people will be thinking of exceptions the second point I want to make is in the context of this workshop I want to highlight what I will be talking about term I will be using in my presentation I am sure has been used early on which is essentialism essentialist things like that so everybody knows that the Alpha Wood Foundation is not interested in the Islamic world there is a particular remit and I just want to raise without knowing why this happened or how it happened I consistently have students in my classes who want to study Islam in Southeast Asia for whatever reason I am not qualified to teach this I will not talk about this in my presentation but before I start I want to throw this out as a topic that I think is of interest and that I wish we could teach so as either within or without any other structure that is present now so Orientalism if we define Orientalist in the root sense of the word and not the sense as used by Edward Said it means somebody literally who studies the Orient and in early modern Europe this means generally the Islamic world at the time the world is not divided by language but is divided by religion or creed if you want and of course this is when it started right famously Hinduism becomes a religion in the 18th and 19th century in Europe studies of the Islamic world began and ended with Arabic Arabic is the language of the Islamic Holy Book of the Quran of course and language and religion are imbricated in Islam in ways they cannot be in Christianity Christianity with its multiple linguistic frames of Hebrew Aramaic Greek and Latin etc so as Orientalism developed in the 19th century Islamic languages came to be taught and studied in a fashion similar to the way classical languages are studied were studied and are studied in Europe we all know that the 18th century was a time in which in addition to Christianity Greco-Roman civilization was promoted as the basis for something that is called was called and is called modern civilization the hegemony of Greek over Latin Greek with its antiquity and sanctity provided a calc for the continued dominance of the study of Arabic over that of any other second or third or fourth Islamic language current academic study of the Islamic world continues in many ways to privilege the Arabic language culture associated with Arabs as original and therefore more authentic there's that word than those of other Islamic peoples and cultures if there was a second Islamic language it's Persian it's due to two major reasons one of them is the discovery of the Indo-European language group in the 19th century and the realization that Persian language group so people privileged Persian because it was it was a language related to European languages the second reason is the use of Persian as the administrative language of the Mughal empire so as British colonialism set up shop in the subcontinent Persian became a language which we don't think of it now as the dominant language that you needed in India and just to open and close the parenthesis here if you want to talk about the decolonization of SOS it might someday extend to the library classification system of SOS's library in which if you're interested in a book on Afghanistan it's considered to be part of South Asia and not Central Asia and not the Islamic world something I find a call back to the great game of course and the position of Afghanistan in relationship to the Russian sphere despite the fact that the Ottoman empire which was largely Turkish speaking was the largest nearest Islamic state to Europe the study of Turkish was a distance third to Arabic and Persian in the 19th and 20th centuries European colonial powers contented themselves with aiding revolutions or looking up those parts of the Ottoman empire that were to the west that were predominantly Christian or of course the parts that were predominantly Arab away from some sort of a Turkic core it's really only in my generation in the last 30 years that people have taken the study of Turkish the Ottoman empire seriously other before that it was derivative, doubly derivative of that Arabic so this is a really interesting moment actually for the study of the Ottoman empire and the Turkish language France had served as the main guarantor of Christians living in the Ottoman empire so French became the European language of Christian Arabs as well as through the establishment of Francophone Alliance Israeli schools in the 19th century Jewish communities and French colonial rule in North Africa means that French continues to dominate the study of Islamic North Africa today I went to the Louvre a few years ago to give a lecture and I was invited to the Soulbone afterwards to meet Islamic art students and we went around the room and they introduced themselves everybody was either from North Africa or studying North Africa with only two exceptions and those were people who were from the part of the world that were studying in Paris I'm exaggerating for effect but that's I think still more or less the situation today and it's interesting to see that it's not concomitant with the colonial relationship between India and Britain while Indian studies in many respects are doing well in this country there's not that intimate relationship that I have seen at least in Paris I don't know if Ashley agrees or not with the establishment of European scholarly research institutes in colonial territories previous colonial arrangements continue it is only in Iran that the relationship between national schools that is French, English and German and long standing excavations has been broken all foreign archaeological projects in Iran are now collaborative ones with local universities and the trend continues there is a panel scheduled for the annual meeting of the British Association of Near Eastern Archaeology in Oxford next January and the title of this panel is Still Digging with a question mark and that question mark only has partially to do with the rise of technologies that have to do with of course remote sensing as being more important than what is now called ground truthing it's an amazing term in the last 10 years at least for me the role of getting your spade into the ground as opposed to taking a satellite picture of a LiDAR radar sense of it so non-national field research expeditions to countries that traditionally hosted them in the Islamic world may be coming to an end with the exception of Germany the existence of European research institutes in Islamic countries at least may be in question and the British Academy has been slashing the already minimal budgets that are given to British research institutes everywhere actually but also in the Islamic world so I it's my guess that within a decade there will only be two British overseas research institutes they will be in those exotic countries of Italy and Greece back to the origins of Greco-Roman civilization and you have to remember that we have to trade with the world this is a period when Britain is wants to open up and break those bonds or some people want to break those bonds alleged bonds with Europe so will the EU step into fund EU wide research institutes in Islamic countries and aim both to increase EU soft power and move beyond the shadow of colonialism that's another question mark and it remains to be seen now in the world of Islamic art and archaeology it's still the norm for European and North American scholars not to know a modern Islamic language well enough either to converse in it or lecture in it let alone publish in it in archaeology departments in Western Europe and North America you can see my archaeological bias to this presentation in archaeology departments it is not normal for archaeologists to know the language of the country they are working in for this reason so asked this department of the history of art and archaeology is not considered an archaeology department by other UK archaeology departments one British archaeologist said to me we consider it to be a regional studies center with sarcasm dripping from her lips as she said it's not a place where you can study archaeology as recently as 10 years ago a prominent western Islamic archaeologist proposed a scholarly journal on Islamic material culture that would only contain articles and references in those articles in western languages and I kid you not that was only 10 years ago in addition to inheritances from orientalist and colonial epistemological structures there are the limitations of the modern nation state and that's where I'd like to end my presentation after the 1979 revolution in Iran which was after all a religious revolt knowledge of Arabic in Iran has declined the national narrative is imperative to all work the main Islamic museum in Turkey after all is not called an Islamic museum it's called the museum of Turkish and Islamic art with the ethnic aspect that's privileged when you go to Istanbul today you can see other religious developments but we don't have time to get into those and in the Arab world there are no journals but there's no international journal of Islamic art and archaeology in Arabic in the former territories of the Soviet Union a younger generation has largely abandoned Russian as a scholarly language but without a clear preference for publishing in English or any other western European language so despite this fragmented picture it's pretty clear that the purpose of national journals and the state organs like museums and academies in most Islamic countries the purpose of this is to foster nationalist narratives above religious you know so pan Islamic religious narratives despite the way Islam is being presented to us in the media with growing populations dwindling resources rampant economic development and new universities being funded pretty much everywhere in the Islamic world largely as a function of political patronage these local journals and books serve largely to record and not interpret data as Ashley talked about in her presentation this afternoon even with the rise of Islamist movements in much of the region the dominant narrative I repeat to sum up the dominant narrative is not pan Islamist but nationalist thank you very much should stay thank you Noel so the title I gave was publishing in Chinese and English in China Greater China and the Anglophone world and the the do colonization involves reflexivity so I guess in contrast with Scott's very polished presentation this is more extemporary and is more of a I guess it's a kind of selfie of me a figurative selfie of me within the publishing world of Chinese art history so I was very struck by the binary Ashley alluded to between a kind of empirical reportage mode of publishing in contrast with western analytical or synthetic approaches it strikes me when you add China to the mix you get another kind of binary or dialectic that's basically ideological so in China mainland China at least you're dealing with a Marxist or a Chinese communist even all sorts of words you could use a post socialist kind of command model at least and that seems to is there's some friction currently up against a kind of liberal capitalist model of the west so when it comes to decolonization you're dealing with China at least with another one of these ethno nationalisms that we've been alluding to the Chinese state promotes the idea of 5000 years of unbroken Chinese history and consanguinity which is an extraordinary claim to make it on top of the historical one so this has huge implications for how archaeology is presented in publishing in China but also historical modeling it's a command model which begins with slave society and it ends with this kind of sunny up lands of a glorious socialist future that's the trajectory now no use this interesting term of a two world problem and again I mean come to this construction of knowledge that is China I'm struck by the idea of multiple Chinas and I've alluded also to the idea you've got traditional Chinese the Hong Kong version of it the Taiwan version of it and then all the pre-modern texts that you read that have not been translated into simplified Chinese and then you've got simplified Chinese in the PRC in Singapore and then all the pre-modern texts that have been translated into simplified Chinese and you could also include in this mix Japanese who are highly literate who can read Chinese or Koreans or even Vietnamese who are part of the Sinosphere who are all kind of part of this construction of multiple Chinas so when it comes to oneself a number of well at least two Chinese artists have said to me that they think they knew me in a past life when I was Chinese so I make no claim and I haven't done a DNA test but from this pale face I think you can guess that I'm pretty much European which means that I am likely to be somewhere between 5 and 12 percent Neanderthal because most white Europeans have got that percentage of Neanderthals I'm not entirely human a little bit of something else here but anyway I'm sitting here mainly as a specialist in Chinese art history who publishes mainly on painting and calligraphy also a little bit on ceramics visual culture and I also have another sideline in curating contemporary art trained in the UK and the USA I have worked in the UK Ireland, USA, Taiwan Hong Kong and in mainland China as well so yeah I've got about a bit now publishing I've mainly published in English until now in the last three or four years various projects that I have done have managed to produce bilingual publications so this is a catalogue of a contemporary art exhibition that I did in Shanghai so this has a kind of commercial gallery behind it they produced a beautiful bilingual edition I have sitting on my desk burning a hole in it this is the Chinese translation of a monograph that I produced in English about ten years ago full of problems I don't know when that is going to come out the translation is appalling so I don't know what I can do about that I have also actually published I have often tried if I have worked with someone from China to put their name on the catalogue to recognise it as a collaborative effort so this is an exhibition of a catalogue of an exhibition in Dublin so co-authored with the curator from the Shanghai Museum and I thought it would do him some good it evidently has because he is now the head of the department and possibly a future director so it made me even more glad to have put his name on that but some of the I mean for some of these projects especially this kind of academic tone to publish that in Chinese I really have to rely strongly on like former doctoral students or other collaborators in China and for them there is an urgency there is a need that this should look good it reflects badly on them if I don't come across well in China it's very different from say in Japan where books are translated by someone of your same status so eminent professors in Japan would translate the work by eminent professors or mid-ranking professors would be translated by someone of an equivalent rank not at all like that in China the job of the translator is pretty low status unfortunately and that's partly why there are these issues with it there is also a real difficulty in being the one and the same person who writes in English and in Chinese and to give the example of my teacher one phone he would have had a classical education in China, left China in 1949 he was also a prodigy of calligraphy but published everything in English and couldn't write in Chinese in spite of that background so I mean how much more unlikely is that I'm ever going to write something in Chinese or even be able to edit it in Chinese and that's just not going to happen and actually when I go to China now in some places they don't want me to lecture in Chinese they would much rather lecture in English and provide a translator which is quite an irritating thing but there it is so I think my last point before I kind of I'm going to present a series of initiatives around what I see as some initiatives around decolonization so the last real point would be just to think about dealing with China and the censorship regime so translating into simplified Chinese is not simply a question of one language to another it's one ideological world into another and it involves the removal of all kinds of references or ideas so here are my four for what they're worth initiatives for dealing with this issue of decolonizing in the publishing world of Chinese art history the first one is we still have to engage we have to hold the line with academic freedom by publishing in Chinese and just doing the best that we can holding out to do the very best that we can all of the western scholars who publish in Chinese art history are very very closely followed in China they know who everyone is and the atmosphere of study in universities is almost fee-brile the degree to which people are looking at this thing but they still have quite limited access to anglophone publications in libraries for example if a dignitary or if a high official is coming they will often cover Chinese books so that they're not seen by official X of this level just to protect themselves that's the kind of climate you've got my second so essentially what I'm saying is we must engage even though there will be censorship we have to find ways to try and mitigate the worst elements of it and live with it but we've got to publish so my second initiative is to facilitate others doing the same and I for example have a publisher from a top university in China is coming on Friday she wants to meet to talk about publishing anglophone monographs on Chinese art history published by SOAS staff and she wants to publish them in Chinese with her university press I think we definitely have to facilitate my third initiative is to anticipate and support and I'm thinking here of bilingual publishing I think this has been mentioned earlier I think this is definitely something that's going to happen more one of my former doctoral students is quite interested in this and whenever I see her I kind of will say how's that going let's let you know what can we do so to move beyond the idea the idea current sort of standard of just having a title and an abstract in Chinese which isn't widespread in the anglophone journals in North America for example you think of Artipus Asii or Archives of Asian Art or these ones they don't have the other language or the likely other language included there and my fourth initiative is to is to is basically in advocacy so this means that if I spot a book published in Chinese that I think is a really really good book and should be published in English then I have to try and find a way for that to happen and luckily enough the last one that occurred to me I wrote to the person and said this is such a good book I really want to see this in English and he wrote straight back and said oh yeah someone just wrote to me yesterday and it's already in train so that was really wonderful to know so those are my four initiatives and I will finish it there thank you so much now there's a need against that but still relatively recent what kind of ideological distinction do you see there or do you see it is it the same thing that is published in both languages and are we moving from which language to which language generally is that right so which one which one is the underling so when I when Shane reached out to me about this he colonized a lot and I never really decided what I thought about this concept because from a Hong Kong perspective it wasn't so much of a conflict it was never really like that like living there and being there whereas I guess if you were just reading books and so on in English then maybe you see you have a different idea of it but I really do feel like there were so for instance I was going through a lot of archival documents in the medieval art in Hong Kong for the establishment they had they invited a lot of advisors who were westerners sort of British and but then somewhere down the line in the 17th and 17th and 18th they started really asking more sort of Chinese people from the mainland to get their advice and their advice would only be written in Chinese and then someone would separately translate for Hong Kong and I do feel like there was respect for the Chinese which would work as much as in English so I don't feel like there was really like someone it just strikes me that there's a specificity of Hong Kong maybe you could predict this would be simple in a library I don't know of a perfect widely known they would enable a kind of neutralization of hierarchies there are always scholars who prefer to publish in one specific language I think Hong Kong is a great and making sure things get translated very often compared to the people who offer that other places but I do feel like people do have one preference and I think there are a lot of places where the languages are compromised so if you write in both languages I think it's really quite impossible to get someone who has a right in Hong Kong I mean I know that I'm very good at translating and knowing how to make things sound right I've taken on a lot of MacBook translation projects but you know a lot of it is finding the right people to answer and knowing who will give you the right term but this is really possible and I've worked a lot with trying to find the right translators to translate that into both switches and it's really difficult and I always know this translator can only be able to translate this translator the other way around there's people who don't know that there are a lot of people who say when you get this translator it's not easy to be not being able to translate a little factoid Richard Hughes who you've cited on your first day is a very interesting man not very representative of British imperialism he was an Australian Marxist who was a friend of now and Ho Chi Minh and it is best through the years to report everything from their point of view someone who just sort of scraped the surface and I think people like John Carroll or there are a few other people who are also sort of westerners based in Hong Kong but who are really giving a more wider perspective on things so with what John Carroll has been doing he's talking a lot about Hong Kong people who have collaborated with the British government not necessarily being exploited by them but different perspectives on the same thing but I have to say Richard Hughes is also not a very serious historian he was kind of like a journalistic approach so we can't be too harsh on what he was trying to portray at the time but obviously his text is still a classic I think and his phrase or type is really stuck in a lot of minds I really appreciate it Christina you're bringing up this issue of national languages because there's been a lot of discussion about sort of a self evident language in which to translate English or French or whatever other colonizing language and when in the case of the Philippines for instance the Filipino is a made up you know, or the Galog is a made up national language and there are these other languages such as you know the Pampanga or Ilocana or whatever then choosing one language is in fact sort of veering towards another kind of internal colonization if you were, as you were same with Chinese right, are we going to translate to Tibetan, to Uyghur and so on depending on what the subject matter is I'm wondering if up to the other well also to the chair whether this is the case in other Southeast Asian languages as well, thank you the guiding principle for providing a second language, the guiding principle was to just be accessible to the local community to which the research was affected and so if I went to this community and I did research there and I published something I would be able to go back them to them and give them something in their own language that they could tell that was the guiding principle maybe I'll say something in closing because I know that the response to that encloses this and it does seem to me that a lot of the talk has been about internal colonization and it's really useful that you brought that up the not only languages we could certainly get to the question of many languages in Southeast Asia which colonize other smaller languages in Southeast Asia with the part of some of the questions that you raised as well but also if we go back to one of the examples from our first panel Gipat's discussion about what he calls mainstream art history and non-mainstream art history so there's a certain kind of internal public colonization which isn't articulated through a different language use which is articulated through different policy venues and those kinds of challenges that are certainly at work and which aren't always recognized I think in let's go back to the Southeast Asia example in Western's fellowship with Southeast Asia so folks will go and see if they're at all ethically oriented, they'll go and look at what's going on in the background publishing the news they're not necessarily at all so that seems to me to be a sort of important issue to follow up on I would like to take this opportunity to thank my conch shell to thank everybody including our last panelist thank you especially to Noelle for not only opening our day but closing our day we really appreciate your work and to thank all of you for coming and please join us for a reception outside