The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Brianne Cohen

Powerful Ideas: New Research in Art History at the University of Sydney is convened by Mary Roberts and presented by the discipline of Art History at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.

Thursday 5 March 2026, 03:00PM - 04:30PM. Schaeffer Library Seminar Room 210, Mills Building (A26) Free. This research seminar series is also accessible via Zoom.

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US-based art historian Brianne Cohen will introduce her new book about lens-based art practices across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, and their commitment to Indigenous land relations and environmental justice.

This talk will introduce my forthcoming book, The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (University of Minnesota Press, fall 2026). 

Examining a range of photography and video work, The Empathic Lens explores how lens-based projects in Southeast Asia respond to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration—specifically by cultivating deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. In my analysis of lens-based art produced across Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, I highlight work by artists such as Tuần Andrew Nguyễn, Khvay Samnang, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, and Zarina Muhammad, for whom rampant urban development, resource extraction, and environmental toxicity are close at hand. 

As each artist takes their lens to these realities, I show how they draw on Indigenous knowledge and local traditions that have long recognized the kinship and interdependency of humans and nonhumans. Engaging often-censored discourses of Indigenous land relations and environmental justice in a region with a long history of colonial and neocolonial development, my book traces genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate how these artworks develop sustainable visions for the future coexistence of planetary life. 

As the first critical account of marginalized artworks that depict the centrality of the more-than-human in Southeast Asian Indigenous worldviews, The Empathic Lens argues for the importance of Southeast Asian lens-based art in contemporary media practice and the art of the Anthropocene. 

People

Brianne Cohen

Brianne Cohen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she focuses on contemporary art, visual culture, socio-environmental justice, and the formation of critical publics in Southeast Asia and Europe. Her books include Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (University of Minnesota, forthcoming in 2026), Don’t Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe (Duke, 2023) and the co-edited volumes, Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects (Amherst, 2023) and The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Cornell, 2016). She currently serves as field editor for contemporary art for caa.reviews and has published in journals such as Art Journal, Representations, Afterimage, Southeast of Now, Journal of European Studies, Third Text, and Image [&] Narrative.