Traversing Thresholds—: A Showcase of Contemporary Art from Across Asia

As positions moves to consider all of "Asia," the contemporary art world is undergoing a similar tectonic shift in self-definition. The international art market has persistently clung to outmoded notions of Asian art that are rooted in the nation-state as a naturalized default position and has made segmented regional ghettoes a norm. Such trends riddled the market with essentialist ideas about national character and shaped "recognizable objects" of value around the parochial tastes of a collector market drawn to easily recognizable symbols of China, India, Iran, and so forth, that resonated in the mass media. Facile politicized, ethnicized, and exoticized images that hinted at dissent and disaffectation that resonated with the tired tropes of the mass media were the dominant criteria for defining desirable contemporary "art"from this region: the Communist Party, Bollywood aesthetics, Hinduist iconography, Islamic politics, and so on.

Now the tyranny of these tropes has been challenged, and a new kind of contemporary art from Asia has come to the fore. The older generations of artists currying favor by learning cynically to manipulate foreign collectors and galleries have given way to a new generation (generation being less an age-related cohort, and more a descriptor of a wave of practitioners getting recognition for their work only in recent years). Artists doing the most powerful work in Asia today turn away from iconic "branding" practices and mass-production-style art making. Instead, they work across disciplines on questions relevant to the human condition, locally and globally, in ways that are difficult to fit into neat, consumer-friendly boxes. The visual languages, materials, and lines of inquiry that have emerged in this new wave are as diverse, fragmented, ambivalent, and multilingual as the people and places that produce them. Political critique has gone from simplistic inversion to subtle consideration of gender, sexuality, class, caste, religion, consumer society, environmental degradation, and a keen interest in how power works, through performativity and interventions in public spheres that may become critical spaces.

In this spirit I have curated this print exhibition, Traversing Thresholds for positions' twentieth anniversary issue. positions seems to be repositioning itself vis-à-vis "Asia," just as my own practice as an independent scholar, art critic, and curator has expanded from localized expertise in Chinese contemporary art, begun during my dissertation fieldwork, to encompass "Asia" more generally as a part of my practice. I now pursue a Pan-Asian curatorial program and engage an "Asia" that spans East, West, South, and Southeast Asia, and I take an actively interventionist stance in these art worlds.

The concept of threshold is metaphorically apposite. Just as a threshold can be a physical demarcation between spaces, such as "the plank, stone, or piece of timber that lies under a door," it also implies an ontological division that is bidirectional in the sense of being both an "end" or "boundary" as well as "the place or point of entering or beginning"; and in this sense extends to the body and the mind as "the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced."¹ Because art criticism and curation are enmeshed in power, representation, and the struggle to produce alternatives, I advocate an interventionist curatorial strategy that challenges the art world's tendency to ghettoize Asian art, with its entrenched power asymmetries, vested institutional interests, and I question the dominance of institutions such as the biennal "national pavilions" that continue to reinscribe the national model as the default classificatory paradigm.

Yet opening a larger "Asia" raises many questions. Is there really a post-national way to engage the richness and diversity of a region and yet still root work in local knowledge and grounded expertise? Can a category as large and fragmented as "Asia" be rendered conceptually coherent enough to be of analytical use, or is it enough simply to make a pragmatic argument for the expanding focus? Does the shift to region just recast the older national problem? Perhaps there are no answers to these familiar questions, only what in India are affectionately called jugaad—crude improvisations on the...