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Welcome to Making Animation: Seeing Animation Symposium 2026

This symposium is organised by LASALLE College of the Arts in partnership with NUS Department of Japanese Studies, and support from the Mitsui NUS Japanese Studies in Southeast Asia Endowment Fund.
This symposium is the third in an annual series alternating between single-day and multi-day formats, developed by the Puttnam School of Film & Animation at LASALLE, University of the Arts Singapore (UAS), in partnership with the Department of Japanese Studies at NUS.
Across two and a half days, the 2026 edition asks how contemporary animation in Asia gets selected, programmed, and made visible, and who decides these. Following earlier symposiums on animation as form (2024) and as practice rooted in observation and the touch of the hand (2025), this year the focus turns to the systems that carry work from being made to being seen: studios, festivals and classrooms, from those who make the work to those who shape its movement through them. The symposium gathers artists, festival programmers, and scholars from across Asia, alongside students from LASALLE and NUS. Audiences are invited not only to watch but to participate in the act of seeing animation, the question the symposium opens.

Day 1 (NUS) opens with practitioner-researchers: creative artists who also teach, programme, and write. Wang Chi-Sui, Executive Director of the KuanDu International Animation Festival (KDIAF) and professor at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), brings perspectives on contemporary Taiwanese animation. Thanut Rujitanont, founder of Graphy Animation in Thailand and PhD candidate at Griffith Film School, presents his practice and research on contemporary Thai animation. Joint student presentations from NUS and LASALLE share research-in-progress. Sessions at NUS are research-focused, with film excerpts to illustrate.

Day 2 (LASALLE) turns to practice and curatorial voices, anchored by director Sung Hsin-Yin (On Happiness Road), whose training in Kyoto and recognition at the Tokyo Anime Award situate her practice within a Japanese animation lineage while speaking from a distinctly cross-regional position. Zhu Yantong, festival director of the Feinaki Beijing Animation Week, presents a curated programme of contemporary Chinese works. Narita Hyoe, Executive Chairman of the Niigata International Animation Film Festival, and Hojo Masato, CEO of Eurospace (an independent movie theatre in Tokyo), bring a programme of award-winning shorts from NIAFF and a conversation on building cultural-community space through festival and theatre. The day closes with Kuwa from the Most Trash Animation Festival, whose name states its argument: a curatorial selection of compelling works the mainstream festival has overlooked or refused.

Day 3 (LASALLE) returns to LASALLE for 听见 / What We Heard, a closing day designed around slow listening. Year 2 LASALLE students host visiting guests in small groups for lunch near campus at venues of their choosing, such as kopitiams, picnic spots or any place which locates the symposium in Singapore. Each group has sixty minutes of relaxed conversation with one guest, and their reflections inform the semester's research and creative work.

The symposium closes with a screening of Liu Jian's Art College 1994, a film about young art students wondering what their futures might look like, followed by a recorded message from the director and closing remarks from the convener and our partners at NUS and LASALLE. The closing returns to the question the symposium opened with: who gets seen, and how the act of slow seeing might make the making matter even more.

Full programme here.

Programme for Day 1 at NUS, 10 September 2026