From April 8 to 9, 2017, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) and Spring Foundation jointly hosted the international symposium Archival Turn: East Asian Contemporary Art and Taiwan (1960-1989), which resonated broadly with the art scholarship community. The symposium featured 24 speakers and moderators from such countries as the United States, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Participants presented 15 papers on the theme of "Archival Turn: East Asian Contemporary Art and Taiwan," and at eight round-table forums they engaged in discussion and dialogue on "Action in East Asian Archives" and "Constructing Platforms in East Asian Archives," comprising one of the Taiwanese art world's most academically substantial and broadly encompassing international symposiums of recent years. The symposium responded to the recent international trend of re-exploring the post-World War II history of contemporary art in East Asian countries: in the context of globalization, art archives have recently been founded in many East Asian countries to promote the establishment, translation, introduction and curation of basic documents and audiovisual materials regarding each of these respective countries and other countries of Asia.

The theme of this symposium focused on archives and memory. Worldwide, archival studies have now become a subject of cross-generational interest, one that new-generation artists are also attempting to explore and participate in. Archives cannot determine actual memories themselves, but archives are a method of remembering the past and a form that will determine the memories of the future. Past discussions of the "end of art" seem to have been severely challenged in terms of historiography, while current discussions seem to appropriate the ecosystem of art discourse. At this moment, we are reassessing what archives are, and we welcome the results of collaborative research between the fields of art history and contemporary art studies. This is not only the foundation of contemporary art discourse, but also the rebirth of alternative history. It not only clarifies the past, but is also greatly significant for the future.

4 Foreword from Taipei Fine Arts Museum∣Ping LIN
6 Foreword from Spring Foundation∣Shu-Chau Wang HO
7 Overview∣Po-Shin CHIANG

Papers
Part I.
15 The Archive in Time, Temporal Processes in the History of the Asian Modern∣John CLARK
39 Indeterminate Temporality Embedded in Nam June Paik’s Early Experiments from 1959 to 1963∣Hee-Young KIM
63 Descent to the Everyday: The Emergence of Critical Exhibitions in Southeast Asia in the 1970s∣SENG Yu Jin
83 Delayed Plasticity: A Preliminary Investigation of the Political Criticism of Sinophone Single-Channel Video Art in the 1980s∣Song-Yong SING
103 The Photographic Conditions of Contemporary Thai Art∣Clare VEAL
133 Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow – The New Chinese Renaissance after the Cultural Revolution and the Prelude to the Modern Art Movement∣Julia F. ANDREWS

Part II.
157 The Contemporariness of Material: An Investigation Centered Around the “Exhibition of the École de Seoul∣Po-Shin CHIANG
177 Archives of the Future – Remarks on the Concept of Tertiary Protention∣Yuk HUI
193 Other Worlds: The Native, the National, the Non-Objective∣Patrick D. FLORES
207 Woodcut as Social Media: Inter-Communal Alliance of the Nameless∣KURODA Raiji
219 The Market as Imaginary in Post-Mao China∣Jane DEBEVOISE
231 Documents: Reshaping and Remaking Art and Exhibitions in Contemporary China∣Anthony T. K. YUNG

Appendices
248 Biographies of Authors
260 Symposium Schedule

264 Acknowledgements