Boreth Ly

Wed, 07/08/2009 - 1:34pm — juliannejosie
Faculty Main
Portrait: 

Boreth Ly

Title: 
Assistant Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture
Ancient and Contemporary Arts of Southeast Asia and Its Diaspora
Email: 
bjly@ucsc.edu
Phone: 
Office: 831-459-4564
Visual cultures of Southeast Asia and its diaspora: religions and materiality, theory of visual narrative, the politics of cultural translation, (Post) colonial and Cultural Studies. Issues of gender, sexuality, race, and trauma.
Research Interests: 

Boreth Ly has two major areas of research: ancient and contemporary arts and visual culture of Southeast Asia and its diaspora. He is interested in Hindu and Buddhist arts of Cambodia, and how the legacy of these ancient cultures is made manifest in the rituals and performing arts of contemporary Cambodia and its neighboring nations (i.e., Thailand, Laos, Burma, Vietnam). He approaches the study of the material culture of pre-modern Southeast Asia from an interregional perspective, considering it through a comparative lens. More importantly, he asks how these “ancient” arts and cultures were constructed as part of an academic teleology, always acknowledging these concepts as inventions of the colonial and nationalist periods. Ly’s research investigates the processes of cultural translation and interrogates the construction of historical authority and racial authenticity as it is embedded in colonial writings on and exhibiting of Southeast Asian art. The fields of Postcolonial, Cultural, and Visual Studies, as well as the discipline of Art History thus inform his writing and rewriting about Southeast Asian art and visual culture.
 
Ly’s second area of research is concerned with how contemporary artists of Southeast Asia and its diaspora create works that deal with the difficult issues of memory and trauma in the post-Vietnam–American War period. He believes strongly that artists and writers are agents of social change and political activism: they are thus public intellectuals. In particular, Ly has been thinking and writing about intersections between trauma, memory and cultural production in a late-capitalist and global world. In his writing on art, trauma, and memory, he draws from a rich variety of media, including photography, paintings, television, films, and material cultures, as well as different theoretical frameworks of vision and visuality. Ly employs different modes and styles of writing in the hope that they lend themselves to capturing the site/sight and experience of visual traces of trauma.

Office: 
Office Location: Porter College, Room 211
Office Hours: 
Office Hours: by appointment only
Selected Publications: 

"Protecting the Protector of Phimai" in The Journal of the Walters Art Museum 64/65 (2006/2007, published in July 2009): 35-48.
 
“Of Performance and the Persistent Temporality of Trauma: Memory, Art and Visions” in Positions: east asia culture critique vol. 16: 1 (Spring 2008): 109-130.
 
“Vom Ramayana zum Reamker Das Vermächtnis einer Legende” (“Narrating the Reamker in Paintings of Cambodia”) in Helen I. Jessup and Wibke Lobo, eds., Angkor: Göttliches Erbe Kambodschas (Bonn: Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2006): 243-247.
 
“Picture-Perfect Pairing: The Politics and Poetics of a Visual Narrative Program at Banteay Srei” in Udaya: Journal of Khmer Studies no. 6 (2005): 151-185.
 
“The Politics of Drawing from Photographs of the American-Vietnam War” in Catherine De Zegher, ed., Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-Vietnam-War, The Drawing Center, New York (May 2006): 133-165.
 
“Remembering from a Crossroad: The Archaeology of Photography, Memory, and Vision in the Art of Dinh Q. Lê” in Udaya: Journal of Khmer Studies V (June 2005): 99-114.
 
“Devastated Vision (s): The Khmer Rouge Scopic Regime in Cambodia” in Art Journal vol. 62: 1 (Spring 2003): 66-81.
 
“Narrating the Deaths of Drona and Bhurisravas at the Baphuon” in Arts Asiatiques vol. 58 (2003): 134-137.

Selected Presentations: 

2009
 
Invited speaker for a symposium, “A Female Prostitute’s Critique on Social Inequality in Cambodia as Portrayed in Rithy Panh’s Film, One Night After the War” Filmic Interventions in Southeast Asia. Center for Integrated Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan (November)
 
Invited speaker, “Contemporary Southeast Asian Artists, Identities, and the Dialectic of Global Capital and National Imaginaries,” Rice University (October)
 
Invited speaker, “Embodiment of Power: Re-looking at Political Palladia of Southeast Asia,” Princeton University (April)
 
Invited speaker for a series, “Poetic Justice: Engaged Buddhist Perspective on Trauma, Conflict, and Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Cambodia,” University of California, Berkeley (April)
 
Invited keynote speaker, “The Dignity and Indignity of Lived Experience: Identify Politics and Paradigm Shift in Asian and Asian-American Art History,” In conjunction with the exhibition, Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents 1900-1970, De Young Museum, San Francisco (January)
 
2007
 
Invited speaker for a conference, “Broken Threads: The Contested Histories of Brahmanism in Cambodia and Thailand and the Construction of Ritual Authority,” Conference on Indian influences in Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Movement, Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore (2007)
 
Invited speaker for a series, “Of Border and Battle Lines: A Critique of Art Historical Perspectives on Cultural Geography, Race, Identities, and the Politics of Ownership,” University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (February)
 
Invited speaker for a symposium, “Maitreya in Mainland Southeast Asia: Visions and Politics” symposium on Visions and Religions, University of Southern California (February)
 
2006
 
Invited speaker for an endowed lecture series, “Water in Hindu Arts and Architecture of Indonesia,” Roy Craven Jr., Memorial Lecture, Samuel Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville (November)
 
Invited speaker, “Kbach: An Elaboration on the Evolving Notions of Aesthetics in Cambodian Dance Gestures and Architectural Ornaments” Cornell University (March)

Teaching Interests: 

Boreth Ly teaches a series of thematic courses on the arts of both ancient and contemporary Southeast Asia and its diaspora. Ly’s teaching takes an interdisciplinary approach to his teaching of Asian Art History. He is interested in the intersections between text, ritual, art, aesthetics, ethnography, and religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. In addition, his analysis of the “image” and the “object” under consideration in the disciplines of Art History and Visual Studies is informed by theories derived from Cultural, Postcolonial, and Visual Studies, as well as theories of methodology in Art History. Issues addressed in his courses include the cultural constructions of gender, class, the body, race and sexuality.

Education and Training: 
B.A., Art History, Bates College, Lewiston, ME
Ph.D., Art History, University of California, Berkeley
Assistant Professor
faculty images: