After Hope: Videos of Resistance

After Hope: Videos of Resistance

After Hope is a groundbreaking exhibition that rethinks not only the importance of contemporary video art in Asia but also the premises and goals of its exhibition site, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, whose main focus is traditional Asian art. The physical installation of the show comprises a six-and-a-half-hour loop of fifty-four videos and an “ephemera wall” of texts and images contributed by the artists. While the physical installation of the exhibit runs through December 31, 2021, a thought-provoking program of working groups, workshops and events, and a continually updated digital platform, afterhope.com, have been organized since July 2020 by the cocurators of the show, Abby Chen, head of contemporary art and senior associate curator at the Asian Art Museum; Viv Liu, research assistant for contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum; and Padma Maitland, assistant professor of architectural history and theory at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The curation of these videos has many strengths. It is diverse: there are videos at various stages of development, from cell phone footage that captures the raw power of events in real time, to aestheticized videos that are lush and cinematic. It is inclusive: there are videos from Asian countries less represented in the art world, such as Bangladesh, Burma, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. And it is contemporary: most of the fifty-four videos are from the last few years.

The title of the show reminds us that we live in an age of afterologies (a word from Marshall Sahlins, Culture in Practice, Zone Books, 2000). From terms that lament the current state of affairs, such as post-truth, to concepts that put us on the threshold of a not-so-brave new world, such as posthuman, the third decade of the twenty-first century is awash in the ends of things. After Hope throws itself into the ring of afterologies with a significant caveat. If one speaks of “after” as an end, then one must acknowledge that “after” also connotes pursuit. Going after hope is as important as considering what comes when hope ends. This collapsing of past, present, and future is also key to the theme of resistance, which is the overarching theme connecting these disparate videos. Resistance is never...