The COVID-19 pandemic has restricted the mobility of people, usage of space, and embodiment of everyday life, triggering changes in the fields of arts and culture. While new artistic and cultural approaches aim to address deficits in existing systems and expand alternative possibilities in the contemporary neoliberal world, the pandemic has marginalised certain sections of people owing to their lack of resources, accessibility, and channels to communicate. Accordingly, it is crucial to reconsider care as a wide-ranging concept that ‘includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Tronto 2013, 19). In this backdrop, we can question whose needs have been addressed and considered as ‘basic’ or excluded as ‘private’.

　Our panel discussed arts and care in Asia, focusing on marginalised needs, isolation, and social divide based on instances from Singapore and Japan amid the pandemic. The presenters sought to provide strategies to listen and respond to marginalised voices from the fields and societies through their engagement with research topics as practitioners. FeliciaLow is a visual artist and founding director of the not-for-profit organisation (NPO) Community Cultural Development in Singapore. Her paper discussed the possibilities and difficulties of artistic practices, including the use of digital platforms during the lockdown period. Akemi Minamida organises music outreach programmes and workshops in Japan as a trumpeter. Her paper examined the cultural policies of Nishinomiya City in Japan by focusing on music outreach programmes for nursing and retirement homes. Yusuke Kazama is the director of the NPO Mother House in Japan that rehabilitates inmates and former inmates. His paper presented Mother House’s letter-exchange programme between the inmates and volunteers as an alternative to cognitive behavioural therapy. As a mother of a young child, Ritsuko Saito argued how different caring needs can be heard and responded to in the context of care for young children and their mothers in Japan during the pandemic.

　Our panel suggested possible ways to notice and address diverse caring needs beyond existing boundaries such as the oppressor/oppressed, aggressor/victim, and active/passive. The panel also sought to open a dialogue about care in the Asian context by referencing various practices in Asia.

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Presenters 

Dr. Felicia Low (Community Cultural Development (Singapore))

Akemi Minamida (Research Fellow of JSPS, Kyushu University)

Yusuke Kazama (The University of Tokyo)

Ritsuko Saito (National University of Singapore)

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Discussant

Dr. Rosemary Overell (Senior Lecturer, Media, Film and Communication, The University of Otago)