Artistic theme_en

>>｜Overview｜Mission & Vision｜Organizer｜Location & Art Village｜Submissions｜ Theme｜>>

^{_{Select a Section}}

Artistic Theme |
Interwoven Time-Spaces: From Waystations to Nodes

The Image-based Silk Road: Memory, Reality, and Imagination

This international art festival explores how human connections are formed across time, space, and technology. Using the Silk Road as a cultural model rather than a historical route, the project examines networks of movement, exchange, and communication from pre-modern civilizations to today’s digital world.

Through image-based practices—photography, moving image, documentary, and emerging technologies—the festival investigates how historical memory, bodily migration, material circulation, and technological systems continuously reshape global culture.

The theme unfolds through four interconnected dimensions:
▼ Waystations (History & Memory)
▼ Corridors (Human Mobility)
▼ Trade Routes (Material Flow)
▼ Nodes (Technology & Networks)

Waystations | History & Memory
“Waystations” symbolize historical pauses along the Silk Road where cultural memory accumulates and is recurrently activated. This dimension examines how image-based art functions as a vessel for memory, recording, reconstructing, and critically reflecting on the formation of historical experience. Through photography, archival imagery, documentary practices, and contemporary visual narratives, artists revisit relationships between premodern civilizations, local histories, and individual memory. These works reveal layers of history that have been forgotten, obscured, or rewritten. Image-making moves beyond mere representation, becoming an active medium that connects past and present and fosters ongoing cultural discourse, enabling history to resonate in contemporary contexts.

Corridors | Human Mobility
“Corridors” refer to human movement, migration, and cross-cultural experience, acting as vital pathways connecting regions, societies, and lives across borders and cultures. This dimension focuses on individual and collective mobility across historical and contemporary contexts, including migration, exile, travel, labor, and transnational existence. Through image-based practices that engage the body, action, and temporal processes, artists explore shifting identities, cultural adaptation, and emotional experience. These works address not only physical journeys but also social, political, and psychological corridors that shape contemporary life. Mobility is framed as a lens for understanding globalization, resilience, and the continuous negotiation of selfhood and belonging in interconnected worlds.

Trade Routes | Material Flow
“Trade Routes” foreground the circulation of materials, commodities, and resources between civilizations and their cultural significance. This dimension examines how trade, production, and consumption shape visual culture and social structures through image-based practices. Artists engage with objects, materials, technologies, and production systems to reveal power relations, value frameworks, and historical trajectories embedded in material exchange. From silk and spices to industrial products and contemporary data-driven economies, trade routes function as channels for both economic exchange and cultural transmission. Images trace invisible networks of labor, logistics, and consumption, highlighting how material flows continually shape aesthetic standards, social norms, and ways of life across time and geography.

Nodes | Technology & Networks
“Nodes” represent points of connection within contemporary technological systems where images, information, and data converge and circulate rapidly. This dimension explores how digital technologies, network structures, and emerging modes of image production reshape perception, cognition, and social relations. AI-generated imagery, interactive media, virtual and augmented reality, and network-based visual practices are approached as new cultural nodes that transcend traditional boundaries of time, space, and human experience. These works examine how technology transforms the production, circulation, and reception of images, while redefining relationships between humans and the world, reality and imagination, and perception and collective memory in the digital era.

Deadline for submissions: May 01, 2026. >> Application Form >>

Please send your application form and artwork submissions to: ny20plus.project@gmail.com

For any questions regarding the above themes, please feel free to contact us.