SYMPOSIUM
AfricAsia: Overlooked Histories of Exchange
September 14–xvi, 2020, nine–11 am

Connections between African and Asian spaces have defined cultural identities and expressions across centuries. This symposium will consider the dynamic locations, unique objects, and remarkable individuals whose stories evidence a radical realignment of celebrated power structures and axes of travel, growth, and exchange. Papers volition range from antiquity to the present with an emphasis on fine art and fabric civilisation.

Program | Speaker Bios | Abstracts

Program

Mon, Sept. 14: AfricAsian Spaces

Africa and Asia are frequently presented as monolithic and distinct entities, though they take been intertwined since antiquity. Professor Elizabeth Lambourn volition offering an introductory overview of "AfricAsia" and the historic connections between these regions. Professor Pedro Pombo, artist Shiraz Bayjoo, and curator Zoe Butt will then consider cardinal sites of exchange and their cosmopolitan milieus. Kathleen Bickford Berzock volition serve as a respondent.

9:00 am: Introduction
Christine Mullen Kreamer, Deputy Managing director and Principal Curator, National Museum of African Art

9:ten–11 am: Presentations and Word
AfricAsian Commutation: An Overview
Elizabeth Lambourn, De Montfort University

Coast / Island / House: Sensorial Cartographies and the Materiality of Afrasian Places
Pedro Pombo, Goa University

Shame and Resistance in the Post-colony: Plantation Legacies and Racial Hierarchies in the Mascarene Islands
Shiraz Bayjoo, Artist

Claiming Descendants of Colonial 'Order' beyond Empire: Vietnam to Senegal; Indonesia to Ghana—Embodying Memory every bit Artists
Zoe Butt, Factory Contemporary Fine art Centre

Discussant: Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Block Museum

Tuesday, Sept. 15: AfricAsian Personalities

This program will explore the lives of individuals whose travels betwixt Africa and Asia—by choice or by forcefulness—reveal complex networks of contact and entanglement across time. These personal trajectories mirror larger political and economic realities with resonances that continue today. Scholars Michael Laffan and Thomas Lockley will exist joined by creative person Thania Peterson for robust conversation with discussant Yoon Jung Park.

nine am: Introduction
Karen E. Milbourne, Senior Curator, National Museum of African Art

9:x–xi am: Presentations and Discussion
Yasuke: An African Warrior in Nippon
Thomas Lockley, Nihon Academy

Becoming Tuan Guru: Finding Greater Java in Southern Africa, 1780–1807
Michael Laffan, Princeton University

Orienting Africa
Thania Petersen, Artist

Discussant: Yoon Jung Park, John Hopkins University

Midweek, Sept. 16: AfricAsian Materialities

History leaves its traces. Art historians Iftikhar Dadi, Ruth Simbao, and Ruth Barnes volition look to the works of art and cloth culture shaped by AfricAsian exchanges. Cartoon attention to both the overlooked treasures of history and the insightful works being created past artists today, this enriching session volition besides characteristic professor Finbarr Barry Inundation as a discussant.

9 am: Introduction
Emma Natalya Stein, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur Thousand. Sackler Gallery

ix:10–11 am: Presentations and Discussion
Ships of Plenty—The Trade between the Arab Peninsula, East Africa, and Western India
Ruth Barnes, Yale Academy

Modernism in Art beyond West Asia and Africa
Iftikhar Dadi,Cornell University

Resisting Soft Ability, Subverting Solidarity: Visual Narratives of Chinese Presence in Zambia
Ruth Simbao, Rhodes University

Discussant: Finbarr Barry Flood, New York University

Speaker Bios

Dr. Ruth Barnes is the Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale University Fine art Gallery. She received her doctorate from Oxford University and was previously textile curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Her publications include The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera and Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Arab republic of egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. One of her most recent books, Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles, co-edited with Mary Kahlenberg, received the Cloth Society of America's R. 50. Shep Honour in 2010.

Shiraz Bayjoo is a Mauritian artist based betwixt London and Mauritius. Bayjoo studied painting at the University of Wales, Institute Cardiff, and was artist-in-residence at Whitechapel Gallery in 2011. He has exhibited at Tate U.k. and the Institute of International Visual Arts, London, New Fine art Exchange, Nottingham; fivethEdition Dhaka Art Summit; 14thBiennale of Sharjah; 13th Biennale of Dakar; 21st Biennale of Sydney; and is a recipient of the Gasworks Fellowship and the Arts Council of England. His piece of work is represented in the Sharjah Foundation collection, UK Authorities drove, and French National drove, as well every bit private collections in Europe and Asia. Born in Mauritius, Bayjoo'southward piece of work focuses on the Indian Ocean and the European historical legacies that have shaped the region. Bayjoo has been a visiting lecturer and critic at universities in Europe and the U.s., most notably the Courtauld Plant, Central St. Martin'south College of Fine art, and Monash Academy in Commonwealth of australia. Bayjoo'south practise explores the social, political, and historical weather integral to Mauritian cultural identity and the wider Indian Ocean region.

Dr. Kathleen Bickford Berzock is associate director of curatorial affairs at the Block Museum, where she provides creative leadership of the exhibition, publication, and drove programs in support of the museum's cross-cultural and interdisciplinary mission. She is curator of Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Civilization, and Commutation across Medieval Saharan Africa. The projection, which opens at the National Museum of African Art in October 2020, breaks new ground past presenting archaeological fragments in juxtaposition with artworks from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond and by considering the critical part Westward Africa played in the medieval menstruum. Berzock is also co-editor with Christa Clarke of Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (2010, University of Washington Printing) and is author of For Hearth and Chantry: African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection (2005, Yale Academy Press). From 1995 to 2013, she was curator of African art at the Fine art Plant of Chicago. She received her PhD from Indiana Academy.

Zoe Butt is a curator and writer who lives in Vietnam. Her practise centres on building critically thinking and historically conscious artistic communities, fostering dialogue among cultures of the globalizing souths. Currently Creative Director of the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Zoe formerly served as Executive Managing director and Curator, Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh Urban center (2009–2016); Director, International Programs, Long March Project, Beijing (2007–2009); and Assistant Curator, Gimmicky Asian Art, Queensland Fine art Gallery, Brisbane (2001–2007)—this latter post peculiarly focused on the development of its Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Her work has been published by Hatje Cantz;ArtReview;ArtAsiaPacific; Lalit Kala Akademi; JRP-Ringier; Routledge; and Sternberg Press, among others. Recent notable exhibitions includeSharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Bedchamber—Journey Beyond the Pointer, (2019);Interface: Oanh Phi Phi (2019); and Empty Forest: Tuan Andrew Nguyen (2018). Zoe'south curatorial endeavors also include interdisciplinary dialogue platforms such asRealigning the Cosmos(2020–);Witting Realities(2013–2016); and the online exhibitionEmbedded Due south(s)(2016). Zoe is a member of the Asian Fine art Council for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and in 2015 was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

Dr. Iftikhar Dadi is associate professor and chair of the Department of History of Art and director of the South Asia Program at Cornell Academy. He researches modern and gimmicky art from a global and transnational perspective, with accent on questions of methodology and intellectual history. Publications includeModernism and the Fine art of Muslim South Asia (2010), the edited monographAnwar Jalal Shemza (2015), the co-edited catalogLines of Control (2012), and the co-edited readerUnpackingEurope (2001). Dadi currently serves on the editorial and advisory boards ofArchives of Asian Art andBio-Telescopic: South Asian ScreenStudies. He is an advisor to Asia Art Archive. Every bit an artist, Iftikhar Dadi has collaborated with Elizabeth Dadi for xx years. Their art do investigates memory, borders, and identity in contemporary globalization, the productive capacities of urban informalities in the Global South, and the mass civilisation of postindustrial societies.

Dr. Finbarr Barry  Flood isfounder-director ofSilsila: Middle for Material Histories and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. His publications includeThe Slap-up Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Civilisation (2000) andObjects of Translation: Textile Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter(2009). In spring 2019 he was the Slade Professor of Art at the University of Oxford. In autumn 2019 he delivered the Chaire du Louvre lectures at the Musée du Louvre on the themeTechnologies de dévotion dans les arts de l'islam: pèlerins, reliques, et copies, accompanied by a book of the same championship published by Hazan/musée du Louvre.

Dr. Elizabeth A. Lambourn is a Reader (Associate Professor) in South Asian and Indian Sea Studies at De Montfort University in the Great britain. A historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean world before 1500 CE, she is committed to the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of medieval history, and her work engages equally with texts and 'things,' and with texts equally material 'things.' Originally trained in art history, she at present spends a lot of her time reading—and talking to—anthropologists, archaeologists, and textual scholars. Elizabeth has published widely on the circulation of artefacts, animals, people, and ideas around the Indian Sea area. Electric current research interests include: the material worlds of the 'Republic of india Book' (a sub-corpus of the documentary Genizah), food cultures and dietetics, emic perspectives on materiality, and equine cultures—e'er explored in the context of Due south Asia and the Indian Ocean globe. Her almost recent publication is the research monographAbraham's Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean Globe (Cambridge Academy Press, 2018).

Dr. Michael Laffanis a native of Canberra, Commonwealth of australia, and professor of history at Princeton. These days he is a pupil of Indian Body of water connections between Indonesia, South Africa, and Egypt. Having published on Islamic nationalism (Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia, Routledge 2003), orientalism (The Makings of Indonesian Islam, Princeton, 2011), and ideas of diasporic connection (Belonging beyond the Bay of Bengal, Bloomsbury, 2017), his latest manuscript interrogates the multiple claims of empire—Dutch, British, and Ottoman—on Malay and Arab subjects from the 1770s to the end of the Japanese occupation of Java. He likewise has a volume up his sleeve on the story of the Cocos Islands, which is remarkably connected to that of Greatcoat Boondocks.

Thomas Lockley is an associate professor at Nihon Academy College of Law in Tokyo. He has researched and published on a number of historical figures, but is primarily known for his work on Yasuke, the African warrior who fought beside the Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga in the 1580s. He has written books almost Yasuke both in Japanese translation and in English. The latter, entitledAfrican Samurai, was published in the US in 2019.

Dr. Pedro Pombo is Assistant Professor at Goa University, India. He received his PhD in Anthropology in 2015 from ISCTE- IUL, Portugal, with an ethnography on spatial belonging, local history and personal narratives in Southern Mozambique. Pedro investigates traces of maritime circulations in the Indian Ocean though dialogues between cartography and athenaeum, art, heritage, and material culture. While researching the materialities and sensorial worlds of maritime histories, Pedro as well explores coastal landscapes as repositories of oceanic histories and material and intangible heritages. Pedro is also co-authoring a documentary on Goans in Tanzania, focusing in space, place, and personal memories, to exist released in 2020.

Dr. Yoon Jung Park isa leader in growing field of China/Africa studies. She is the author ofA Matter of Honour: Being Chinese in S Africa (Jacana/Lexington Books) and is currently completing a book on Chinese migrants in Africa. Her enquiry focuses on ethnic Chinese in southern Africa and perceptions of Chinese people by local communities, centering on migration, racial and ethnic identity, race/class/ability, gender, affirmative action, and xenophobia. She is currently the Associate Managing director of the China-Africa Enquiry Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Schoolhouse of Advanced International Studies; adjunct professor in African Studies, Georgetown University; and Executive Director of the Chinese in Africa/Africans in Mainland china (CA/AC) Enquiry Network. She too has an amalgamation with the Sociology Department, Rhodes University. She holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (PhD), the Fletcher School at Tufts Academy (MA), and Pitzer College (BA).

Thania Petersen is a multi-disciplinary creative person who uses photography, performance, and installation to address the intricacies and complexities of her identity in contemporary Southward Africa. Petersen'due south reference points sit largely in Islam and in creating awareness most its religious, cultural, and traditional practices. She attempts to unpack gimmicky trends of Islamophobia through her analysis of the continuing impact of colonialism, European and American imperialism, and the increasing influence of right-wing ideologies. Threads in her work include the history of colonialist imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle E, every bit well as the social and cultural bear upon of westernized consumer civilization. Her piece of work is too informed past her Cape Malay heritage and the do of Sufi Islamic religious ceremonies. Petersen studied at Cardinal Saint Martin's College of Art in London. In 2018, Petersen held her solo exhibition IQRA at WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town. She has hosted boosted solo exhibitions in 2016 at the AVA, Cape Boondocks and in 2017 at the Everard Read Gallery, Greatcoat Town. She has participated in numerous grouping exhibitions both locally and abroad, includingRadical Dearest at the Ford Foundation, New York (2019) andPresent Passing: S by Southeast at the Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2019). Petersen was awarded the Thami Mnyele Residency in Amsterdam in 2019.

Dr. Ruth Simbao is the NRF/DSI Research Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa at Rhodes Academy in Makhanda, S Africa. She received her PhD from Harvard University, and is currently an editor of African Arts. She is a core researcher in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence (Rhodes, Academy, the University of Lagos, Moi University, Joseph Ki-Zerbo Academy, and Bayreuth University), and the PI of Artivism, Social Justice and Epistemic Revolution. Contempo publications focus on Africa–Prc and the arts, strategic southernness, cosmolocalism, Afrophobia, and a geopolitics of knowledge. She is the curator of Thania Petersen: Between land and a raised human foot (2019), Bright Ackwerh: Where de choy dey? (2018), Converge (2018), Consuming Usa (2016 with Azu Nwagbogu), Slip: Mbali Khoza and Igshaan Adams (2014), the BLIND SPOT performance art programme at the National Arts Festival (2014), and Making Mode: Contemporary Art from South Africa and China (2012-2013)

Abstracts

Ships of Enough–The Trade between the Arab Peninsula, East Africa, and Western India

Ruth Barnes, Yale Academy Art Gallery

This paper discusses the medieval sea merchandise between Due west India, the Cherry-red Sea, and East Africa. Gunkhole building, navigational skills, and the transfer of goods will exist considered. The trade covers textiles, wooden objects, ceramics, and food items. The wider context of travels and commercial transactions volition be discussed. The author has previously researched and published the largest drove of Gujarati merchandise textiles made for the Egyptian market—at present held in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford—and every bit part of that inquiry, she has too considered contacts between Yemen and West India.

Shame and Resistance in the Post-colony: Plantation Legacies and Racial Hierarchies in the Mascarene Islands

Shiraz Bayjoo, artist

The Indian Ocean region, home to the multiple crossovers of Africa and Asia, would somewhen shape European ambitions of empire. Through colonization, the Indian Ocean's sea routes and boundaries would be redrawn from the movement of spice and silks to include the burgeoning need for flesh and labor. It is at these sites of intense production that the plantation colonies of the Mascarene Islands were born. Previously uninhabited and strategically positioned, Republic of mauritius was established early equally a slave colony. First settled by the Dutch, it was nether French rule that the island'southward carbohydrate plantations expanded. Ruled by the Lawmaking Noir, information technology would become known as the "Maroon republic." Subsequently the abolition of slavery, the isle would serve every bit the site of the "Not bad Experiment," every bit the British replaced the need for labor on its plantations with the indenture labor arrangement. This presentation will explore how racial hierarchies persist through reductionist narratives, exposing the indelible legacies of the plantocracy. Through his ongoing practice and inquiry focus, Shiraz Bayjoo unpacks how Mauritius's Kreol identity is formed of Afro-Indo origins and how, through defiance from slave uprisings and escape into maroon communities, narratives of resistance and resilience begin to create new pathways of decolonization.

Claiming Descendants of Colonial 'Order' across Empire: Vietnam to Senegal; Republic of indonesia to Republic of ghana—Embodying Memory every bit Artists

Zoe Butt, The Manufactory Contemporary Arts Middle

The geopolitical landmass considered today as Southeast Asia has, for centuries, been eyed by capital and the legacy of empire. Beginning with a thirst for spice and tea forth the maritime Silk Road, trade shortly turned to opiates and mankind, which eventually, by the mid-twentieth century, had become a cross-stitch of various colonial enterprises monopolizing territory and peoples for economic and ideological gain. The security of the colonies was of grave importance, and thus its various armies were conveniently built of the oppressed. In this presentation, I explore particular art projects past Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Ho Chi Minh City) and  Jompet Kuswidananto (Yogyakarta), whose enquiry of colonial military machine society in the French and Dutch Empires recalls lilliputian-discussed histories in their local communities. From Vietnam to Senegal, from Republic of ghana to Indonesia, Tuan and Jompet reveal the ability of embodied retentivity (equally effective audio, image, object, and oral communication) gleaned from the descendants and rest friendships of colonial soldiers whose foreign posts seeded love and honor. Their experiences, imagined and relived, celebrate and give monument to the connections forged betwixt colonial subjects and the need to validate their significance and contribution today.

Modernism and Decolonization in Africa and Asia

Iftikhar Dadi, Cornell University

Modernism in much of Africa and Asia is consolidated with reference to the decolonization of the region in the decades following the Second World War. Questions of sovereignty and political independence are inflected in the work of artists from the region, who forge an aesthetic that ventures beyond sociology, stasis, and realism and instead embraces multiplicity, transformation, and abstraction. Artistic modernism in the region developed across multiple trajectories, which include written report and travel in the Western world, Due south–South exchanges, and a perception of decolonization that extends beyond nationalism. This newspaper will focus on two exemplary figures, Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985) from Pakistan and Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. 1930) from the Sudan, who both studied at the Slade School of Fine Fine art in the afterwards 1950s and who grappled with analogous concerns in their mature careers.

AfricAsian Commutation: An Overview

Elizabeth A. Lambourn, De Montfort University

Professor Lambourn'southward opening presentation offers an essential grounding to the ambitious timescale and geographies of this symposium. Her paper presents key moments in African–Asian exchanges from artifact to the contemporary period and is illustrated with ample maps and other materials.

Becoming Tuan Guru: Finding Greater Java in Southern Africa, 1780–1807

Michael Laffan, Princeton University

In this presentation, I will describe the transformation at the Greatcoat of Good Promise of a Moluccan exile who identified with his home isle of Tidore (in the distant Spice Islands) to a leading instructor who embraced the prestige of the more powerful island of Java.  Every bit I will argue, Java's prestige was felt not merely by his beau exiles and the many Asian and increasingly Afro-Asian slaves he ministered to, simply it was accepted past the Dutch authorities as well, to whom he ultimately dictated his will in 1806 as a "former prince" of that Island

Yasuke: An African Warrior in Nippon

Thomas Lockley, Nihon Academy

In 1579, an African warrior arrived in Japan. We do non know his given proper name, simply he became famous in Japan as Yasuke. For two years, Yasuke worked in Japan equally a bodyguard for his missionary employer, learning considerable Japanese and the etiquette of comportment in the process.  In 1581, the missionary approached the country'due south greatest warlord,  Oda Nobunaga, to ask permission to leave.

On the journey to court, Yasuke was mobbed twice by locals, who may take seen him equally a kind of divine visitor, every bit the Japanese associated nighttime pare with deities. Nobunaga demanded to know who was disturbing his peace, Yasuke was brought before him, and destiny intervened. Within a matter of months, Yasuke was a shut confidant of Nobunaga and was the first foreigner to be granted samurai condition. Rumors abounded that Yasuke would exist given a lordship of his ain. However, a general called Akechi attacked Nobunaga with overwhelming force, driving him to perform seppuku. Yasuke rescued Nobunaga'south severed head from capture but so faded into history. Today Yasuke is reborn every bit a character in computer games, books, and movies—and as a source of inspiration for people around the world.

Orienting Africa

Thania Petersen, creative person

I will be presenting my latest short picture show, KASSARAM . I grew up agreement the old Malay word kassaramto mean a "large mess" or things being "out of identify" or  "upside downward."

I am from a community whose ancestry traces the forced migration of European colonial merchandise routes betwixt Africa and Asia. We are quite simply described as the descendants of Indonesians brought to the Cape, known as the Cape Malays.

The mess begins when you realize that, as much as yous can trace our ancestry to Indonesia, you can undoubtedly link u.s. to many other countries and people from all over Africa, Asia, and Europe as well. The complexity of this story, however, does not form part of our cultural identity: nosotros accept been deliberately Orientalized, erasing all of our African heritage and permanently cementing us as the Other. In a mural built to mirror Europe but defiantly remaining "African," to exist "Malay" means to not belong. Too African to be Asian and too Asian to be African.

In a hyper-globalized, postcolonial/post-apartheid globe that is condign increasingly polarized, our very beingness challenges whatever set ideas of what it is to exist an African, Asian, European, Muslim. . . the list is endless.

This movie and presentation interrogate and explore the artistic strategies used by European colonial forces to create and impose the positioning of people in Due south Africa's society, highlighting how present-solar day imperialist agendas perpetuate these practices by standing to impose contemporary "orientalist" views on diverse communities worldwide.

Coast / island / home: Sensorial Cartographies and the Materiality of Afrasian Places

Pedro Pombo, Goa Academy

Based on research explorations of Afro-Asian worlds, this presentation essays the creation of new templates for counter-cartographies of the Indian Ocean coasts and archipelagos and their built, social, and natural ecologies. Exploring the concept of place in dialogue with the two other themes of this symposium, people and objects, I discuss fieldwork experiences between Western India and Due east Africa and how ethnographic inquiry on both the cloth traces and embodied memories of migration and coastal and insular waterscapes can unveil more truthful cartographies of Afrasian worlds.

Studying maritime connections in port cities and islands organically opens space to the aesthetics and epistemological possibilities of coastal landscapes (Hofmeyr 2012). Observations on architecture and historical urban processes, personal memories, and social and intimate spaces dialogue with visual and audible discoveries of estuaries, mangroves, coral reefs, backwaters, and bays. Assuming a sensorial arroyo to places and the multiplicity of histories and elements they embody—tangible, affective, mnemonic, and ecology—I appoint, thus, with the Western Indian Ocean as an Afrasian place where locations are simultaneously rooted in state and h2o, parting from three types of places that interact at unlike scales: coast, island, and home.

Coastal environments act every bit repositories for social and cultural histories: tidal movements, silting estuaries, or the monsoon system are deeply ingrained in historical shifts of maritime circulations across the Indian Ocean. In the example of the Western Indian Ocean archipelagos, insularity has had a fundamental role in political, social, and economical regional histories, and qualities of "island-ness" (Gupta 2010) in the region disturb assumed dichotomies between central/peripheric or mainland/oceanic territories. At smaller scales, urban ensembles, compages, and domestic spaces reveal, in their aesthetics and memories they keep, affinities built across space and fourth dimension. While intimate and family spaces can become, sometimes literally, museographic enclosures, public display of cultural belongings through decorative elements or customs buildings complexifies oversimplified notions of nation–state and citizenship.

Thinking with different scales and constitutive elements allows to organically connect places, people, and objects, as all of them are interweaved in multiple ways. And this, in turn, opens the path to alternative maps fatigued not with dividing lines only by using the instability of oceanic cycles and their lives on the shore, where each place has its own "elsewheres" (Meier 2016).

Resisting Soft Power, Subverting Solidarity: Cultural Narratives of Chinese Presence in Zambia

Ruth Simbao, Rhodes University

Political and economic discourses of "China-Africa" oftentimes reduce civilization to soft power—noncoercive yet persuasive diplomacy that drives a compelling narrative in club to serve a stipulated geopolitical impression. Similarly, solidarity tends to be relegated to the official and flattened rhetoric of "People's republic of china-Africa friendship" and "people-to-people encounters." Notwithstanding, cultural expressions and experiences are much more than complex. Solidarity and resistance are at times deeply entangled, and slippages between official/unofficial occur. Challenging simplistic notions of soft ability, solidarity, and resistance, I compare four contemporary cultural narratives of Zambian and Chinese encounters: (i) the collaboration between the Confucius Institute and art students at Evelyn Strop College and the Academy of Zambia, (two) the TAZARA Memorial Park that is being built in Chongwe, (3) the 2020 Temple off-white of the Chinese Bound Festival that included an artists' exchange and exhibition at the Sino-Zambian Art Salon in Lusaka, and (4) the practice-led research of the Lusaka-based artist Stary Mwaba. These cultural and creative expressions of Zambia–China narratives reflect a "geopolitics of intimacy" that grapples with the intricacies of human interaction, the hidden labor of intimacy, the assertion of personal and creative agency despite political pressure, and the destructive potential of artistic expression.