Diaspora, Art and Empathy

Abstract

The discussion thus far has offered different interpretations and deployment of empathy within a largely European context. We have explored the historical emergence of the concept of empathy and its role in creating different forms of affective communities in the global West but there is less interrogation of how empathy as heuristic device and/ or social phenomenon travels and translates across hemispheres and between cultures. In this essay, I address one such gap in the scholarship by focusing on two transnational art projects by an Asian Australian artist working between Europe, Australia, and China. What meaning systems are invoked in the deployment of transnational artworks and how do they test the ideological horizons of empathy as both theoretical abstraction and social practice?