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 "contemporary Asian art." It has taken place on an institutional level, with the construction of museums such as the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (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 mainland China and Japan.¹ Perhaps most significant, however, is the quantity of written attention in the form of catalogs, books, and periodicals. These include John Clark's Modern Asian Art, Geeta Kapur's When Was Modernism, long-running art journals like Bijutsu Techō (Tokyo) and, more recently, Art Asia Pacific (New York, formerly Sydney), the Web site Chinese-art.com, Yishu (Vancouver/Taipei), and Focas (Singapore). These and similar publications have given the modern and contemporary art in Asia much-needed visibility, not only in terms of alerting its presence to the visual art centers of Euro-America but also in terms of encouraging viewers to pay rigorous critical attention to the contexts in which works are created and where artists live.

Yet increased visibility has brought with it an increased awareness of the critical tensions underlying interpretations of contemporary art in Asia, and/or made by Asian artists. The most pressing, it seems, are those tensions concerning the prioritization of specific geographical locations, origins, and histories as critical points of analytic departure. To what extent should these specificities be emphasized?

Attempting to cobble a response to these questions provokes further and more deep-rooted tensions. What does "the contemporary" mean? Does it refer, in Jamesonian terms, to a continuation of the project of late capitalism? Is it a subhistory comprised of the past ten, twenty, or fifty years, whose presence is made palpable only by milestones of political, social, or intellectual trauma? Is it a montage of disparate times, where supposed "pasts" haunt the present? As Lee Weng Choy points out in his article, "the very act of citing, say, a dead German critic when thinking about late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art in Asia reveals the problem underlying how to think about any contemporary. Who exactly are our contemporaries?" Or, as Reiko Tomii suggests, is the contemporary not a temporal state at all, but a predicament known as "contemporaneity"?

We must also grapple with what we mean by "Asia" and "Asian" in relation to the creation and reception of visual art. For this reason, I have chosen to use the phrase, "contemporary art in Asia," rather than "contemporary Asian art," which tends to act as a taxonomic marker, closing down the interrogative affect raised by the fragment, "in Asia." Is it a geographical marker? Is it a politically strategic one, used to bind otherwise disparate entities together for the sake of a given purpose? Is it a fiction, a construct serving as a repository of external desires and speculations? As curator Hou Hanru asserts, is "Asia" an essentially nonracial/nonnational space continuously reinvested by multiple influences?² More specifically, is it a construction essentially meaningless in itself but assigned meaning by different agents—to use literary scholar Rey Chow's distinction, is "Asia" a truth, as argued by the "Orientalist"? Or is it a nexus of oppression valorized and maintained by the "Maoist" holding fast to the pleasures of a third world fantasy?³ Finally, what does it mean when these questions of the contemporary and Asia come together?

Questions of Approach

The answer to the first question—to what extent should specificities of geographical location, historical...