Contemporary Asian Art Research Articles

A Modern Critique of Orientalism in Contemporary Visual Art

Orientalism is historically understood as a cultural phenomenon of 18th and 19th century Europe, when Western artists emulated Asian culture and aesthetics in their work. In 1979, Edward Said’s Orientalism first introduced a post-colonial critical analysis to the European, Western portrayal of Eastern cultures in the Middle East. In spite of the perceived progress since the publication of Said’s book, the underlying principles of Said’s Orientalism critique are still widely applicable to modern visual art in 2023. This study is a fresh look at the persistence of Orientalism in contemporary Asian art. Research will show that Orientalism is not just a historical phenomenon, but an ongoing unsavory, and harmful reality in today’s art world. Using data and examples collected from contemporary sources, I will examine and analyze the artwork of visual artists and art institutions in Western countries that reflect Orientalism in their portrayal of Chinese and East Asian cultures.

The photography auction market in mainland china

The photography auction market in China has experienced the early stage from the 1990s to 2005, the development stage from 2006 to 2018, and the current stages from 2019 to the present. In the domestic auction market at the early stage, the auction of photography was not rare, but the special session of photography auction had not yet been formed. Photographs were auctioned in the session of Ancient Books, Stamps, Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, as well as Oil Paintings. In 2006, Chinese contemporary art rose rapidly: Sotheby’s held a special auction of contemporary Asian art on March 31 during the Asia Week New York in the spring of this year, the first large-scale Asian art special session in North America. In September of the same year, the photography work of Wang Qingsong, titled “Follow Me,” was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for 310,000 US dollars, which offers further drive to China’s photography market. Against the backdrop of the development of the markets both home and abroad, Beijing Huachen Auctions hosted the first photography session in China in November 2006, with a total of 365 lots auctioned for a total turnover of 350,857 US dollars. At this point, the photography auction market in China was officially established and entered the era of special session auctions. While Chinese contemporary photography works enjoy huge popularity in overseas markets, the domestic photography auction session shows its uniqueness from the beginning. According to the statistics of the highest-priced auction lots in the first three photography auction sessions of Huachen Auctions, the domestic secondary photography market favors historical old photos and documentary photographs more.

Cross-Cultural Exchanges and Interconnections from the 1980s and 1990s: ARX and the APT

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a proactive and pivotal period in Australia's engagement with contemporary Asian art. Australia increasingly began to explore the vibrant practices of artists fr...

Global Dawning

The rise of contemporary Asian art to global art, its huge success on the world stage of art exhibitions and art markets, is largely due to the ‘biennial effect’. This article scrutinizes the Asian biennial factor in pushing Asian art into the global arena through the lens of the Gwangju Biennale. South Korea initiated the Asian art biennale wave – the first Asian biennale took place in Gwangju in 1995. The history of the Gwangju Biennale, from its beginning as a local-regional exhibition to a truly global Asian exhibition, provides profound insights into the international making and global marketing of contemporary Asian art, including Korean art. By comparing four Gwangju biennales – the start-up biennale of 1995, the millennium biennale of 2000, the first decisively Asian biennale of 2006 and the most recent biennale of 2012, the forces of internationalization and globalization on art, biennial art curating and criticism in Asia are investigated.

Notes from the Field: Detail

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsSusan HillerAmerican-born Susan Hiller lives in London, where she began her artistic career in the early 1970s. Her commitment to exploring “the unconscious” of our culture is often cited as a major influence on younger artists. She works in a broad range of media and exhibits and publishes internationally [www.susanhiller.org].Spike BucklowSpike Bucklow trained as a chemist, made puppets for the film industry, and is now a conservation scientist. He teaches and undertakes research, mainly on old master paintings, at the Hamilton Kerr Institute. His follow-up to The Alchemy of Paint has the working title The Riddle of the Image [Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge, Whittlesford CB22 4NE, U.K., sb10029.cam.ac.uk].Johannes EndresJohannes Endres is visiting associate professor of German at Vanderbilt University. He works on German and European literature in an interdisciplinary perspective. Recent publications are on topoi and metaphors in art, culture, and science; concepts of similarity and resemblance; discourses on generation and inheritance; cultural theories and practices of fetishism [Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages, Vanderbilt University, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, Tenn. 37235–1567, johannes.endres@vanderbilt.edu].Carlo GinzburgCarlo Ginzburg, now retired, taught at Bologna, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. His books include The Night Battles; The Cheese and the Worms; The Enigma of Piero; Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method; Wooden Eyes; History, Rhetoric, and Proof; and Threads and Traces [Piazza San Martino 1, 40126 Bologna, Italy, ginzburg@history.ucla.edu].Joan KeeJoan Kee is the author of The Urgency of Method: Tansaekhwa and Contemporary Korean Art (2013), the editor of Intersections: Issues in Contemporary Asian Art (2004), and the co-editor of Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast Asia (2011). She teaches modern and contemporary Asian art at the University of Michigan [Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109, jkee@umich.edu].Spyros PapapetrosSpyros Papapetros is an associate professor of theory and historiography at Princeton University. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and the editor of Space as Membrane by Siegfried Ebeling (AA Publications, 2010) [School of Architecture, S-110 Architecture Building, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544, spapapet@princeton.edu].Adrian RifkinAdrian Rifkin is professor of art writing in the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, London [Department of Art, Goldsmiths, London SE14 6NW, U.K., www.gai-savoir.net].Joanna RocheJoanna Roche, professor of art history at California State University, Fullerton, investigates contemporary artists with a focus on memory and process. She recently published Tyrannical Angels and Other Love Poems (2011). Roche received the 2002 Art Journal Award from the College Art Association [Department of Visual Arts, California State University, Fullerton, 800 North State College Boulevard, Fullerton, Calif. 92831, jroche@fullerton.edu].Nina RoweNina Rowe is associate professor of art history at Fordham University. Her publications include The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 2011) and (as editor) Medieval Art History Today—Critical Terms, special issue of Studies in Iconography 33 (2012) [Department of Art History and Music, Fordham University, FMH 417A, 441 East Fordham Road, Bronx, N.Y. 10458, nrowe@fordham.edu].Alain SchnappAlain Schnapp is professor of classical archaeology at the University of Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), specializing in Greek iconography and the cultural history of antiquity. Alongside numerous visiting professorships, he was the first director of the Institut National d'Histoire l'Art and coordinator of the European cultural project Archives of European Archaeology [Université de Paris I/INHA, 2 Rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris, France].Blake StimsonBlake Stimson teaches contemporary art, the history of photography, and critical theory at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (MIT Press, 2006) and Citizen Warhol (forthcoming from Reaktion Books) [Department of Art History, m/c 201, Henry Hall 302A, 935 West Harrison, Chicago, Ill. 60607].Robert WilliamsRobert Williams, professor of the history of art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, 1997) and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2004; Wiley Blackwell, 2008). With James Elkins he edited Renaissance Theory (Routledge, 2006) [Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93106, robertw@arthistory.ucsb.edu].

“What Marco Polo Forgot”

In 1995, Cai Guo-Qiang set adrift a Chinese junk on the Grand Canal in Venice, marking the seven-hundredth anniversary of Marco Polo’s return to Europe. In 2008, as the world spiraled into a far-reaching financial collapse, a historian warned that in the long haul, “New York could turn into Venice.” These two historical moments set the stage for a discussion of how contemporary Asian art navigates the world of conceptual geography. An anthropology of art expands beyond expertise on “native artifacts” corralled in Western collections to the active interpretation of contemporary art alongside artists, curators, and critics in cosmopolitan spaces of encounter. Drawing on Cai’s exhibition I Want to Believe, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2008, I focus on the contrasting interpretations of Cai’s key installations, that is, the perspectives that dramatize different notions of the global. Is contemporary art the latest form of Chinese entrepreneurialism or an expression of an emerging global civil ...

Doing world art history with modern and contemporary Asian art

Three approaches to world art history are outlined: top down (transnational); bottom up (national); and interstitial. The constructed category of ‘Modern Asian Art’ relativizes all other modernities, including the Euramerican, and is first of all differentiated by a new corpus of reference works and the criteria for canonizing these. The implied audience for national studies may challenge the validity of these criteria.

Reinscribing Tradition in a Transnational Art World

Despite the increased border-crossings and hybridities that characterize contemporary art in a globalizing world, there is a pronounced trend among contemporary Asian artists and the art professionals who promote them to deploy and reinscribe selected notions of in an effort to carve out a distinct and marketable identity for their work in the transnational art market. While many contemporary Asian artists live and work between two, sometimes three, continents, often residing outside the country of their birth, they often still draw from a distinct repertoire of iconic cultural symbols from their native culture as a means of self-definition. Even the decidedly futuristic and technologized world of pop art fusions such as Takashi Murakami’s iconoclastic Superflat and Mariko Mori’s technicolor new-age spiritualism rest on a bedrock of these cultural forms. Such traditions, drawn from language, religion, aesthetics, and even sexual mores and erotica, are invoked to imbue contemporary practice with an aura of authenticity, while the traditions themselves are reconstructed within the transhistorical imagination of the contemporary. How does this complicate the age-old binary of tradition and modernity (or post-modernity) in our discussions of art in the 21st century? What does it reveal about the contemporary moment and the enduring power of what Bert Winther-Tamaki has called artistic nationalism? This paper will explore these questions and the various implications of the definition and deployment of so-called traditional cultural practices in contemporary Asian art.

The Aesthetics of "Silence": Cultural Consciousness in Contemporary East Asian Art Exhibitions

Exhibitions of Asian art in Japan experienced a turning point with the establishment of the Asian Art Museum in Fukuoka in 1999. Fukuoka serves as a gateway to continental Asia by way of its geographical location. The new museum was a response to a global tendency to overcome the supremacy of Western art systems; to represent our own and to dissolve the hierarchy between these two. To support the potentialities of Asian art ”now,” the museum systematically collects and exhibits only modern and contemporary Asian art. This is a totally new concept in the Asian region. Nevertheless, the concept of exhibitions of Asian art in Japan seems to have gradually departed from the politic of the West vs non-West dualism, and has gone beyond the simple schema of multiculturalism. The exhibition entitled The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art From East Asia, which was held at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2005, is one such example. It seemed predominantly based on the ”art for art's sake” approach, in relation to the concept of traditional thought in East Asia. The assertion of this exhibition was that China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan have inherited the intellectual traditions of ancient China, especially the culture of writing, and other reciprocal cultural influences. Through these common aspects, the exhibition was to show the beauty of nature and landscapes, as well as silence, as the title of the exhibition suggests. Both old and new, tradition and modernity are taken up dialectically and within this oppositional structure. There is an assumption that a new dynamism in art is rising. Yet the cultural unity of East Asia was, and is, both uncertain and provisional. The cultural consciousness is not definitive either. So, in the case of this exhibition, we have to firstly question: is nature or a collective view of traditional East Asian Art--”silence,” ”non-presence,” ”vacuum”-- effective enough after modernization? Secondly, are these characteristics even indigenous to East Asian art? German Romanticism and Abstract Expressionism in the USA during the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, was also pursued with this mentality, especially that of ”silence.” This distinct awareness between difference and commonality might be necessary. The art historian Michael Baxandall, in the well-known book Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (1991), remarked that the principle of exhibitions is to recognize the cultural differences of the artist, the exhibitor and the viewer. This approach was very effective in the era of multiculturalism, which had a tendency to offend the identities of each. However, as trans-culturalism and a sense of crossing boundaries are more authentic in the current context, art exhibitions as cultural politics may latently carry the message of a reactionary cultural consciousness for oneness.

Pursuing Two Paths: New Direction in Korean Modern Art Studies

Historiography of Korean modern art history is very short with only a handful of researchers. The researches have been done on the documentation of art works and individual artists, and the problem of authenticity and attribution have always been important. However, there has been shift of direction from the late 1990s when young art historians cautiously started to apply cultural theories to their researches. This was not merely an appropriation of Western theories, but a resistance to how very confining art history had become with its linear narratives of formalism, famous artists and their masterpieces; how research based on empiricism had evolved into a struggle for who gets the hand on the sources first. Their turn to post-modernistic cultural theories was supported by the fact that modern art itself rapidly arose from a transitional sphere where tradition and modernity coexisted in confusion. Also former methods of art history were not suitable for Korean modern period when there were not many works survived from the period; instead, there was a rich resource of photographs, prints, illustrations, etc, which revealed the experience and everyday life of modernity and provided a possibility of studying visual culture. Rather than renouncing formalism, these young researchers sought to open up a more diverse discourse as well as embrace new perspectives on art. Compared to traditional art history, modern art history has a shorter history with relatively fewer scholars. Since there is no solid body of scholarship as of yet, it has also proved easier to freely engage new methodologies. Another trend is that modern art history is no longer restricted to only Korean art and has expanded to include other areas of East Asia, stimulated by increase of interest in contemporary Asian art a well as the return of students who studied not only in the United States and Europe, but also Japan and China. If one recognizes that art is not merely a reflection of beauty, but more importantly, a reflection of culture, a product imbued with the consciousness of its period, then, it is true that the new methodologies have expanded the perspective and terrain of art history. Through such diverse perspectives, I think we can get a better sense of the identity of Korean modern art. Thus, Korean art history must pursue two paths at the same time: formal analysis of works of art with the excavation of primary sources ”and” the incorporation of multiple perspectives for the task of interpretation. In this paper, I will briefly address the state of research in Korean modern art history, as well as the search for new methodologies in contemporary scholarship.

Hong Kong and the Production of Art in the Post/colonial City

Contemporary and alternative art in Hong Kong has strong local roots and translocal connections, and while it reflects cultural politics in the city it lacks substantial international recognition. This interdisciplinary analysis focuses on the contexts of production of contemporary art by women in Hong Kong and their centrality in the city's arts community. The narrative contrasts the presence of contemporary and alternative arts and its absence from art criticism discourses through the disjuncture between the geopolitics of contemporary Asian art and the making of Hong Kong into an unprecedented territorial formation. Reading local art through alternative space–time concepts and intersubjective arts practice is proposed through the exhibit-event, “If Hong Kong, A Woman/Traveller.”

Guest Editor's Introduction: Twenty Questions

Since the late 1980s there has been a steady rise in the visibility of documentation concerning the body of work referenced as “contemporaryAsian art.” It has taken place on an institutional level, with the construction ofmuseums such as the FukuokaAsianArtMuseum (which opened in 1999) concentrating entirely on modern and contemporary Asian art, and the proliferation of university or foundation-sponsored symposiums devoted to the subject. Examples of the latter include the Japan Foundation’s series of intra-Asian conferences and the “Our Modernities” conference hosted by the National University of Singapore in February 2004. Museums and private galleries in both Asia and Euro-America have likewise staged several exhibitions of contemporary Asian art, albeit with special emphasis on the visual art of mainlandChina and Japan.1 Perhapsmost significant, however, is the quantity ofwritten attention in the formof catalogs, books, andperiodicals.These include JohnClark’sModern Asian Art, GeetaKapur’sWhenWasModernism,

Envisaging Hollowness in Contemporary Singapore

In discussions of contemporary Asian visual art, the one nation, region, or locality that always seems to escape scrutiny is Singapore. It is too perfect, and thus too boring. We, in the West, as well as in other parts of Asia—insofar as such blanket terms as the “West” and “Asia” can be used to refer to sociogeographical spaces—want our contemporary Asian art to be about oppression, suffering, and the like, because, after all, Asia must always be in a state of transition, turmoil, or conflict. Singapore, on the other hand, appears to have been immune to these struggles, at least in the past ten years. Under the guidance of its resident omniscience, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore in the present moment is a magical kingdom, carefully constructed for maximum sustainable efficiency and comfort. Every conceivable consumer good is available in the glistening malls lining Orchard Road, the streets are immaculately and perversely neat, and the manicured highways conveniently double as airplane runways—just in case extra runways are needed in the event of a surprise attack. And in constructing or partaking of this paragon of efficiency, one never has to work up a sweat, because the air conditioning is on all the time. In the beauty pageant of statistics, Singapore takes the crown with its low crime rates, high literacy, and equally high per-capita income levels. The city-state is poreless, a pristine model of development to envy and emulate.