Lyon, March 24 - 25, 2016
Deadline: Jun 30, 2015

International Conference organised by the University of Lyon and
National University of Taiwan

The objective of this conference is to study private and public
collections connected to the Far East from a contemporary perspective.
While we intend to pay particular attention to contemporary art, the
considered collections can also be focused on more ancient objects, and
not only on art objects. The term “Far East” will be here understood in
a broad sense, including the islands of East Asia and South East Asia.
The approach will be interdisciplinary, combining art history,
aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, economics or even politics. We
will divide the conference into four panels:

Panel I: Profiles and motivations of the collectors

Private collectors are enthusiastic about the visual and material
cultures of the Far East. In China, since the 2000s, the number of
collectors is growing at breakneck speed, at the same time as a booming
art market has been developing: the art collection has become above all
a status symbol for the wealthy and new rich and for a part of the
middle class which numbers about 400 million people. From now on,
Western collectors are far from being the only ones who are active on
the Chinese art market. Among the various kinds of collectors
(established fortunes, dynamic young employees, academics with a
limited budget, fashionable bourgeois who invest in new neighborhoods,
etc.), two categories in particular stand out in Japan: the one of the
great entrepreneurs and, more recently, that of “salaried collectors”.
The former, feeling themselves invested with a social mission, decide
to open foundations rather than to speculate. With the support of their
respective companies, they have opened the way for an original
sponsorship model in a Japanese-style. The latter, enjoying a
comfortable or at least regular income, are the symbol of an educated
middle class acceding to the leisure of collecting. Through their
various strategies of acquisitions and their relationship to various
institutions, they daily sustain the art market. In this first session,
we will focus on the socio-economic profiles of collectors in the Far
East and will analyze their motivations to accumulate Asian art objects
and artifacts. In fact, it is necessary to distinguish between
psychological desires and ideas of an investment that can potentially
be monetized (with a profit in the future). Moreover, what about the
prestige and the social status of owners of collections which seem to
be “important”? Can this type of private collectors claim to be
contributing to increasing the scientific knowledge of Asian visual and
material culture?

Panel II: Institutional and Collective Collections

Whereas the Japanese state is little active on the art scene (the
possibility of the Agency for Cultural Affairs to support artists
appears to be limited for budgetary reasons, while fiscal policy
towards collectors, sponsors and foundations remains tentative), it is
not necessarily the same case in China, Korea or elsewhere. In China,
the state has openly supported the art world since the 1990s, and
especially since 2000, by financing and organizing exhibitions, which
are often related to Chinese contemporary art, trying to demonstrate
its involvement in economic globalization. Everywhere, the state acts
as a collector by bringing private collections into the public cultural
domain. Whereas the development of such collections has changed over
time with a significant decline in recent years in Japan, the museums
still provide an important outlet for gallery owners. When they decide
to exhibit - and even more so to acquire - the works of young artists,
profits for the latter are substantial, at least symbolically. So what
is the collective impact of these collections on the movements of
prices of an artist’s work, or in terms of support for contemporary
art? How can we distinguish between “museum-oriented art” and
“market-oriented art”? Can companies still influence collections in the
light of the increased pressure from shareholders in a sector - culture
- allegedly less “profitable” than sport or environment? What role do
visual arts play in their sponsorship activities in Far East Asia ?

Panel III : Collections: Intersecting Views

Whereas Westerners don’t often collect jade, fans or prints, preferring
oil painting, Asians want to acquire calligraphy, paintings in
monochrome ink or ceramic ... In this panel, we will study how the
fantasies from a country are perceived in another one in this time of
globalization and of an extraordinary opening of the art market to the
most diverse cultures. We can also pay attention to the way boundaries
between art, crafts and objects of all kinds fade. We can analyze Far
Eastern art collections in Europe, for example, or Western art
collections in Japan or China. The contemporary perspective will
complete some research already done on this issue in the past. How does
a contemporary European collector or a public museum select Asian works
? What is his impact on the local art scene ? We can question the
strategies of Western collectors who associate themselves with an
exotic and often idealized form of the Asian Other. What is the vision
of a Taiwanese collector about European art ? How does a Japanese
gallery owner consider contemporary Chinese art? It will also be an
opportunity to discuss the differences in the way of collecting in the
Far East and the West, as well as the consequences of globalization,
since the differences between Western and Asian art tend nowadays to
disappear.

Panel IV: Art market and identity issues

According to a survey which was performed in 2014 on behalf of the
internet auction house artprice.com, a multinational company based in
Lyon, 53 of the 100 most valued contemporary artists on the world-wide
art market have Asian origins, among them a big Chinese majority. The
recent creation of the Art Fairs and of the Biennales in Asia becomes
more and more important, for example “Art Basel Hong Kong”, “Art Fair
Tokyo”, and “Art Revolution Taipei”. The dynamics of the economy and
the technologies in the countries of the Far East play without any
doubt an important role: several works actually showed that, contrary
to the common idea that “art does not have frontiers” or that
nationality does not have any impact on the rating of the artists, the
long-term classification of the artists always places countries with
the highest economic power on the top of the art market. Furthermore,
do the creators of art collections and Asian artefacts want to express
an aspect of their national and ethnic identity (“indigenism”) by means
of their collections? Collecting Asiatic objects is not a neutral
affair but includes identity issues for which collectors are willing to
pay higher and higher prices.

Proposals for papers (title, an abstract of at most 500 words,
bio-bibliography of at most 10 lines, and 5 keywords in English or
French) should be sent by 30th June 2015 to Cléa Patin
(cleapatin@gmail.com) and Marie Laureillard (mlaureillard@free.fr).

The scientific committee will meet at the beginning of July to
establish the programme of the conference. Notification of acceptance
will be given on the 15th July 2015. The talks must not exceed 20/25
minutes to allow an open discussion after every talk. Presentations may
be in English or in French.

Speakers will be asked to send a revised version of their paper by the
end of the conference which will be examined with regard to a
publication of the proceedings.

Scientific committee:
Annie Claustres (Associate Professor in History of contemporary art
with an Accreditation to supervise research, Lyon 2 University),
Christophe Comentale (Chief Curator, Musée de l’Homme, Paris),
Marie Laureillard (Associate Professor in Chinese Language and
Civilisation, Lyon 2 University),
Liu Chiao-mei (Associate Professor in Art history, National University
of Taiwan),
Cléa Patin (Associate Professor in Japanese Language and Civilisation,
Lyon 3 University),
Paul van der Grijp (Professor in Anthropology, Lyon 2 University)

Organising committee: Marie Laureillard, Cléa Patin, Paul van der Grijp
(Lyon 2 University, Lyon 3 University, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Museum
of Confluences, National University of Taiwan)