Contemporary Art in Asia—A Critical Reader (review)

Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio have edited a critical reader on Asian Art as a starting point for what one hopes will be more books on the subject. Chiu, Director of the Asia Society Museum in New York, and Genocchio, Editor-in-Chief of the publication Art Info, are a powerhouse duo whose Pacific Rim perspectives propel Asian art studies up a notch in a Western-centric art world. This compilation of essays, about the "changing nature and reception of contemporary Asian Art in Asia and the West over the past two decades," strives to be all-inclusive. What they create is a somewhat blotchy snapshot of the current state of affairs, as some nations are still grappling with that old warhorse Marxism, although Chiu's argument about transexperience is timely in light of the hemisphere's rising economic power. There is an emphasis on rich cultural traditions that have their own biennials and triennials, museums and alternative spaces, with the underlying message being that Asians are finally gaining control of their own cultural representation.

"Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian Art" (1993), by John Clark, is the most pithy piece, mapping out Asia geographically as "The Sakhalin Peninsula . . . bound by the Siberian Steppes to the north and the Indian Ocean and Straits of Timor to the south." Clark disparages those parts of Asia that redefine themselves through contact with the other, saying there is "often depredation at the hands of an 'other' . . . privileging the Euro-Americanization by denuding of value the Asian interface of modernity." His meaning is that, when you take an art form such as English oil painting and move it to 19th-century Japan, is that "appropriate contextualization"?

A salient and critical point he makes about modernity in terms of the Asian cultures discourse is that their art cultures are often deprivileged by the fact they did not originate modernism and its recent derivative, postmodernism. He defines modernism as a discourse that privileges a linked series of artistic developments for a group of Euro-American cultures that have modernized according to primary political, social or cultural criteria. He adds that, when artistic techniques jump across cultural boundaries in ways that are neither apparent nor relevant to the discourse of interpretation from the originating culture, this discourse is often interpreted as "bad taste." "Newness" can be thought of as "other." "The issue ultimately revolves around which and whose interpretative codes are to be sovereign." Euro-American codes favor rhetoric that privileges interpretation and are opposed to rhetorics that work against clarity. This explanation goes a long way toward explaining the difficult attitude in the art world toward less-developed countries' arts practices and is a refreshing and necessary explanation of said attitudes.

In "Why Cubism" (2006), Takehata Akira declares Cubism was never part of Asian art but nonetheless penetrated into all its major cities. Proffering an invaluable timeline in deconstructing aesthetic styles since colonialism came to Asia, he says Picasso stole it from Africa. The style showed up in Japan and China in the 1920s; Korea, India and Sri Lanka in the 1930s; and Southeast Asia in the 1940s and 1950s. It spawned both urban cosmopolitan and rural aspects that were further reified by ethnic and religious cultural fragmentation and regionalism.

Many essayists take issue with the Western notion of "other" or the "exotic." In "The Politics of Curating 'Contemporary Korean Art' For Audiences Abroad" (2002), Young Min Moon questions how Korea is perceived by Westerners and asks if there is an essential quality in Korean Art. He argues that most Western art institutions base themselves on tenets of postmodern nihilism and post-conceptualism. Lots of "otherness" results in loss of identity. In "Radicalizing Tradition" (2000), Salima Hashmi examines the tradition of miniature painting at National College of Art in Lahore during the 1980s. The school, set up by the British in India in 1875, always distinguished miniature practice from...