Field notes : mapping Asia

In our most field note-like issue to date, we interweave artist work, an email exchange, literary extracts, a film plot, exhibition reviews, newspaper clippings, comics, and archival photos. If we were to list some of the entry points for the selections they would include (in no particular order) Guangzhou as site, speculative geographies, Hong Kong, seaborne histories, territory and myth, island disputes, language, migration, and sites of knowledge production and distribution. The journal is in no way intended to survey or comprehensively cover any of these, but to point to the entanglements between them, and provide an additional space, alongside our other projects, to construct reference points and connections across time, sites and geographies. We share with you some of the enquiries, threads, and (to borrow a geological term) hot spots that are currently shaping our notion of Asia. Echoing MAP Office’s Atlas of Asia Art Archive, which is imagined as an archipelagic configuration, like a series of islands that are independent, yet intricately connected by their relationship to one another and the ocean, we invite you to ignore the pagination and draw your own connections as you navigate the journal.