Encounters: The Politics and Poetics of Art and Migration
Open Lecture
Diana Yeh’s research concerns four artists of Chinese descent, each based in Britain at different periods from the 1930s to the present day. Their migration histories also encompass locales in South Africa, Italy, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and their works circulate internationally.
Her lecture will focus on key points in the life and work of the artist Li Yuan-Chia. Born in 1929 in southern China, Li trained as an artist in Taiwan and subsequently moved to Italy and then England, where he ran the LYC Museum and Art Gallery for ten years.
Yeh’s research methods respond to boundaries between the arts and humanities and the social sciences (for example that between art history and migration studies). Adopting an anthropological approach, she seeks to navigate this binary paradigm, reconstructing intertwining histories of art and migration. The work in progress that she will present here emerges from the process
of excavating Li’s life and works – in collaboration with his surviving family, friends and fellow artists – during field research in London, Cumbria, Taipei and Cha Dong.
