OCAT Shanghai is pleased to present Refocusing on the Medium: The Rise of East Asia Video Art, the first exhibition to assemble key protagonists that initiated experiments with the medium of video originating from Japan, Korea and China, on view from 27 December 2020 to 21 March 2021. The exhibition proposes a re-examination of the artists approach to the video medium rising from East Asia and contributes to the global history of video art as a transnational contemporary art medium.

Since the SONY Portapak portable video recorder was invented in Japan in 1965, artists on every continent gained access and have contributed to the development of this global medium.  Exhibitions exploring the histories of video art have featured across Asia in the past decade.  The cumulative results have enhanced detail and depth to specific national histories laudably expanding an existing world history of video art.  The exhibitions and accompanying research expose scholarly accounts of experimental practice and international exchange that provokes a more radical review of the way video art is considered.

This exhibition shows how the rise of East Asia video art developed as a hybrid global art form characterized by conditions of video art’s medium specificity in a context of post medium contemporary art practice. As a new technology and experimental artistic medium with distinct characteristics, video art arrived with no cultural traditions, no significant conventions or history – a new global contemporary art tool.

This view of the medium gives reason for a recalibration of thinking and reassessment of the contribution that artists from East Asia have made to this still contested history.  How did artists in East Asia take up the apparatus of video and experiment with this new global medium and can this change the way we might approach the history of video art?