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

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 Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore are responding to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration—specifically by cultivating deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. As each artist takes their lens to these realities, I show how they draw on Indigenous knowledge and local traditions that have long recognised the kinship and interdependency of humans and nonhumans. My book engages often-censored discourses of Indigenous land relations and environmental justice in a region with a long history of colonial and neocolonial development, tracing genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate how such artwork offers sustainable visions for the future coexistence of planetary life.

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 The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (University of Minnesota, forthcoming in fall 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).