Aesthetics of Trauma: Designing for Ghosts, Memory, and Afterlives in East Asia

Catalog description

What does it mean to design and imagine a space of memory, haunting and historical trauma? How might we curate images that encapsulate and engender both pain and hope for the future? This course explores the aesthetic traces of trauma in contemporary East Asia through the investigation of cultural spaces of war, ruins, monuments and memorials as sites of critical inquiry. Taking an anthropological approach to understanding both the enactment of war and its cultural consequences, this course focuses on the legacies of the 20th century historical trauma in the present by questioning the symbolic significance of historical space, aesthetics, and memory in human societies. How does historical trauma take shape through a form of contemporary aesthetic? How is it felt within the lived experiences of contemporary Asia? What does it mean to live in the aftermath of the Cold War in Asia, or similarly, in anticipations of future war? By delving into various case studies from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, this course invites students to read and experiment with hands-on design and curation at the conjunction of applied aesthetics and historical reflection and aspires to begin to understand how aesthetic environments, objects, and interpretations become fundamental modes of existing with and within history.