Dr Vera Mey
Lecturer in Art Curating
Profile
Biography
Vera Mey recently completed her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research looks at regionalist tendencies of Southeast Asian art during the Cold War eras in Cambodia, Indonesia and Singapore, paying particular attention to tensions of modernity and tradition, and intersections of racial plurality within regionalism. Prior to this she was on the founding curatorial team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore led by Prof. Ute Meta Bauer where she led the Residencies programme which brought together artists from all over the world for a concentrated period of research. More recently as an independent curator she has co-curated and curated exhibitions in Bangkok, Berlin, New Zealand, Paris, Phnom Penh, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. This includes working on 'SUNSHOWER: Contemporary art from Southeast Asia 1980s to now' (2017) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo which was the largest survey of Southeast Asian contemporary art to be exhibited.
She has been a Getty Foundation scholar as part of the cohorts for 'Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art' (2015 – 2016), and 'Art Schools of Asia' hosted out of the Asia Art Archive Hong Kong. Mey co-founded the scholarly journal 'Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia' (National University of Singapore Press) and was part of the research colloquium 'The Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung' organised by the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Frankfurt, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California. She is currently working on an exhibition called 'Spectres of Bandung: a Political Imagination of Asia Africa' for the Gropius-Bau Berlin and has been appointed as Artistic Co-Director of the 2024 Busan Biennale in South Korea.
She has taught art history, curatorial studies and critical studies at several universities including Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland; Victoria University of Wellington; Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London; SOAS, University of London and was most recently Guest Professor at Städelschule, Frankfurt during the summer of the 2022/2023 academic year.
Research
Overview
Vera Mey's Doctoral research looked at the watershed event of the Bandung 1955 Asia Africa Conference and ways this intersected with changes in artistic representation, particularly as they pertain to critical regionalism and critical race studies in Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art. Although located within the boundaries of Southeast Asia, her research often goes outwards to both its diaspora and other postcolonial contexts. Questioning the contours of regionalism through conversations between Asian and African liberation movements of the middle of 20th century and their aesthetics form an ongoing interest. Curatorial methodologies inform her research which has been informed through her experience working as a contemporary art curator.
More recent research for her position as Co-Artistic Director of the Busan Biennale 2024 looks at the intersection between notions of Pirate Enlightenment as articulated by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (2023) and how Buddhist Enlightenment particular to the context of South Korea. She hopes to expand on the above topics for future research looking at the relationship between art and anticapitalism.
Research Interests
Curatorial Studies, Area Studies, Southeast Asia, Modern and Contemporary Art, Postcolonial Studies, Non-Aligned Modernities, Afro-Asian Networks, Cold War
Projects
- Busan Biennale 2024
- Spectres of Bandung: a Political Imagination of Asia Africa
Teaching
Undergraduate
- Art and Its Institutions
- Curatorial Practices Now
- Group Exhibition Project
- Made in Italy
- What is Pop Art?
