ASIA’s mission is to advance semiotics and the application of its scientific findings throughout Asia. To this end ASIA seeks to strengthen regional and international bonds between semioticians and researchers of cultural sciences and to promote and to facilitate channels of communication between individual semioticians

The Asian Semiotics International Association (ASIA) will be Asia’s leading academic organization dealing with semiotic and cultural studies. Collaborating with semiotic institutions in Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, ASIA serves as an academic community for scholars and researchers on Asia. The Association will organize the annual (biennial) congress and initiate a range of academic and professional activities such as book awards, regional and international conferences and workshops, and master classes for young students interested in semiotics and Asian cultures.

Organizations and bodies such as the Japanese Semiotic Association and its Annual Semiotic Journal, the Journal of the Chinese Semiotic Studies, and the Korean Association of Semiotic Studies and its semiotic journal, have opened up very significant epistemological and methodological spaces on Asian semiotics, by creating, extending, and sustaining, the scholarship of the cultural semiotics. These organizations can increasingly contribute to a larger global outreach, through their shared knowledge, while also receiving much input from a larger global network.

Through The ASIA, higher institutions and their affiliates, and organizations in general, globally, can further develop programs and scholarship in Asian semiotics and general semiotics, and can effectively access and can further contribute to the networks that the existing bodies have solidified. The ASIA aims to further bridge these major bodies in semiotic, cultural, visual, media, humanistic studies with the world.

1) Scientific reasons

• The experience of Asian semioticians reveals that many Western theories are not always applicable in Asia.

• So far Asian semioticians are too dependent to the Western semiotic schools, organizations and journals.

• It is the time now to develop Asian semiotic paradigm, because Asian semiotics should be developed in its own land, based upon its own resources, which is in Asia.

2) Other practical reasons

• Local conventions enable more local semioticians to participate

• Asian journals/publications give more opportunities for Asian semioticians to go international

• It is easier for Western semioticians to look for references on Asian semiotics

The ASIA is a nonpolitical and nonprofit professional association of scholars and students primarily based in Asia and engaged in related semiotic and cultural work on Asia. It also welcomes scholars and students beyond Asia to join the regional intellectual community.

• Promotion of research and teaching in all areas of the semiotics and humanities, in particular related to Asian cultures, languages and civilizations.

• Dissemination of research findings, institutional skills and syllabi

• Promotion of cooperation and exchange between individuals and regional and global institutions in the field of semiotics and cultural sciences

• Korea University

• Propedia

• University of Burgundy

• University of Torino

• University of Nanjing

• University of Morbiat Modares

• Hankook University of Foreign Studies

• Jeju National University