Download PDF | Menene Gras, Jonathan Harris, Bashir Makhoul - The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Art in Global Asia-Routledge (2022).
294 Pages
This substantial collection of newly commissioned essays presents an ambitious, entertaining, and accessible guide to developments in Asian art over the past 20 years of the epoch of globalization.
The term ‘global Asia’ signals the genesis and evolution of contemporary art within the context of global economic, social, political, and intellectual change related to the end of the Cold War, decolonization, the emergence of postcolonial societies and cultures, and the rise of a global contemporary art world. In the handbook its editors establish, in an extended introductory section and in four section introductions, the theoretical, geographical, and historical parameters within which the contemporary visual arts of ‘global Asia’ may be described, analyzed, and evaluated. The collected chapters provide a diverse, multiauthored, heterogeneous, and genuinely plural account of art and its contexts. The democratic and inclusive character of globalization is reflected and produced within this anthology, which includes different styles of writing as well as varieties of analytic and thematic focus.
The anthology will appeal to both scholars and students in art history, art practice, curation, contemporary art, fine art, cultural studies, and globalization studies.
Menene Gras has been the director of culture and exhibitions at Casa Asia (Barcelona and Madrid) since 2003 and is also the current director of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona (AFFBCN). With a PhD from the University of Barcelona, Menene Gras is an art critic, curator, lecturer, and former professor at the same university. Author of many essays, catalogues, anthologies, and four books of poetry, she was art correspondent for Art Forum for more than 12 years and has been writing in many newspapers and art magazines for many years.
Jonathan Harris has taught at several British universities, including Keele, Liverpool, Southampton, Birmingham City, and the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, England, where he is the director of UCA Doctoral College. Specializing in modernist and contemporary art, Harris has published 23 books and over 150 book and journal essays, including a trilogy of studies on art and globalization, and most recently he has edited Terrorism and the Arts (Routledge 2021).
Bashir Makhoul is the president and vice chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts, UK. Professor Makhoul is a writer, editor, and artist with a substantial track record of driving globalization initiatives within higher education. He is an internationally exhibited artist, his work features in major collections, and he is widely acknowledged as a global authority on Palestinian art.
CONTRIBUTORS
David Elliott is a British art historian, curator, writer, and teacher who has directed art museums in Oxford, Stockholm, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Guangzhou. He has directed major biennales in Sydney (2010), Kyiv (2012), Moscow (2014), and Belgrade (2016) and has taught art history/ museum studies at universities in Oxford (1986-1996), Tokyo (2002-2006), Berlin, and Hong Kong (2008-2016). A specialist in Soviet and Russian avant-garde, as well as in modern and contemporary Asian art, he has published widely in these fields. He is currently based in Oxford.
Menene Gras has been the director of culture and exhibitions at Casa Asia (Barcelona and Madrid) since 2003 and is also the current director of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona (AFFBCN). With a PhD from the University of Barcelona, Menene Gras is an art critic, curator, lecturer, and former professor at the same university. Author of many essays, catalogues, anthologies, and four books of poetry, she was an art correspondent for Art Forum for more than 12 years and has been writing in many newspapers and art magazines for many years.
Anna Maria Guasch is a full professor in history of contemporary and global art at the University of Barcelona (Spain). She is director of the research projects Art, Globalization, Interculturality and Global Art Archive. She is the author of several books.
Jonathan Harris has taught at several British universities, including Keele, Liverpool, Southampton, Birmingham City, and the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, England, where he is Director of UCA Doctoral College. Specialising in modernist and contemporary art, Harris has published 23 books and over 150 book and journal essays, including a trilogy of studies on art and globalization, and most recently he has edited Terrorism and the Arts (Routledge 2021).
Gordon Hon is a professorial fellow at UCA and a lecturer in visual culture at the University of Southampton. He has written extensively on Palestinian contemporary art and is also a practicing artist and curator.
Kim Hong-hee is the chairman of the board for the Nam June Paik Cultural Foundation. As an art historian, curator, and critic based in Seoul, South Korea, she has served as the director of the Seoul Museum of Art (2012-2016) and the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (2006-2010). She has published over ten books.
Lewis Johnson is an independent historian, theoretician, and curator of art, living, and working in and beyond Istanbul. Recently, he was visiting Theodore Randall International Chair of Art and Design at Alfred University, NY, USA (2021). He has published on issues in modern and contemporary art in Europe, North America, Turkey, the Middle East, and South Africa.
Sumi Kang (Kang, Su Mi) is an art critic and aesthetician. She is an associate professor of art theory at Dongduk Women’s University in Seoul. She has published several books on art.
Kenichi Kondo is a senior curator at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. He specialized in contemporary art and has curated a number of exhibitions, including Chim} Pom: Happy Spring (2022) and Catastrophe and the Power of Art (2018).
Isaac Leung is a practicing artist, curator, and scholar in art and culture. He is currently an assistant professor in the faculty of arts of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the board director of the Hong Kong Jewish Film Festival.
Bashir Makhoul is the president and vice chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts, UK. Professor Makhoul is a writer, editor, and artist with a substantial track record of driving globalization initiatives within higher education. He is an internationally exhibited artist, his work features in major collections, and he is widely acknowledged as a global authority on Palestinian art.
Amanullah Mojadidi is an Afghan American conceptual artist and shamanic practitioner with degrees in cultural anthropology. He has published both fiction and nonfiction works.
Hammad Nasar is a curator, writer, researcher, and strategic advisor. His most recent exhibitions include British Art Show 9 (2021-2022); Turner Prize (2021); and Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play — the UAE’s pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). He is presently a senior research fellow, Paul Mellon Centre (London), and lead curator, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum (Coventry). Earlier, he was the executive director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, London; head of research and programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; principal research fellow, UAL Decolonising Arts Institute; and co-founded Green Cardamom, London.
Nicos Papastergiadis is the director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures and Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of several publications as well as the editor of over ten collections and author of numerous essays which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities; co-chair of the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture; and chair of the International Advisory Committee for the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore.
Davide Quadrio is the director of MAO, Museum of Asia Art in Turin, Italy, and 1s a visiting professor at the Visual Art Department, IUAV, Venice. He founded and directed for a decade the first not-for-profit independent creative lab in Shanghai, Bizart Art Center, as a platform to foster the local contemporary art scene (1998-2010). In 2007 Quadrio created Arthub, a production and curatorial proxy active in Asia and worldwide.
Rawan Sharaf is an art director, curator, and researcher in the Palestinian art field. Sharaf was the director of the Palestinian Art Court — al Hoash (2006-2013). She holds a PhD from Birmingham City University for a research project that investigates the politics of the institutionalization of the Palestinian visual art field.
Caroline Turner is an honorary senior research fellow in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, The Australian National University, Canberra Australia. She has published extensively on contemporary Asian art since the early 1990s. She is also a curator and was for many years a senior museum professional and was co-founder and project director for nearly ten years in the 1990s for the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (1993, 1996, 1999) at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane Australia.
Lee Weng-Choy is an independent art critic based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He has taught at such institutions as the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was artistic co-director of the Substation arts Centre in Singapore. His essays have appeared in a number of anthologies.
INTRODUCTION
ART IN ‘GLOBAL ASIA’ IN A TRANSFORMED WORLD
Jonathan Harris, Menene Gras, and Bashir Makhoul
Towards a new ‘order of things’
The recent era of globalization in economic and financial terms has been driven by industries, corporations, state institutions, international networks, agreements, and protocols established by Western (US and Western European) states since World War II. These primarily included the World Bank (1944), the International Monetary Fund (1945), the European Economic Community and later the European Union (1958 and 1993), the North American Free Trade Association (1994) and the World Trade Organization (1995). The rise of southern and eastern Asian economies since the 1980s, however, brought into question assumptions of the continuing dominance of Western power within globalization, especially as the People’s Republic of China’s economy grew to become the second biggest in the world after the USA by 2009 and its robustness apparently now a necessary condition of continuing global economic stability. !
In the contemporary art world, although the volume and sales of Asian art rocketed after 2000, the historically dominant institutions profiting from these markets remained Western, based in New York and London. Hong Kong has now become the third most important art trading city — although the US/UK auctioneers Sotheby’s and Christie’s compete to run the high-value sales there, both having decided to use the territory through which to centralize their entire Asian operations. In 2012 MCH, the company that owns Art Basel, the most successful art fair business in the world based in Switzerland (established in 1970), purchased a majority of shares in the ownership of the Hong Kong Art Fair and rebranded the event from 2013 as Art Basel Hong Kong. This was another sign, then, of the growing global significance of the contemporary art world in China, Hong Kong (its ‘Special Administrative Region’ since the exit of the British in 1997), and in Asia broadly. The Beijing government’s increasing control of institutions and developments in Hong Kong raises questions about the global future of its art market — in the context of renewed Cold War antagonisms — though politics in the West itself since 2015 have shown that neoliberal capitalism and authoritarianism can and do live happily side by side.?
Socio-cultural modernity and contemporaneity — the state of ‘being contemporary’ — are centrally implicated in the development of the global contemporary art world. This process was driven in the 2000s by a lucrative and rapidly expanding world market dominated by Western auction houses and commercial galleries — whether the sales took place, as they have done and do, in New York, London, Hong Kong, or in other Asian centres such as Taipei, Singapore, or Dubai. Given this predominance and the interrelated ability of powerful Western museums to validate contemporary art through purchase and exhibition of works by its high-profile global producers — many from Asia, if not resident there — it remains the case that the global contemporary art world is fundamentally asymmetrical, that is, unequal and inequitable, in its power relations.
This situation might be posed in terms of the grip that Western interests continue to have over the economic exploitation of contemporary art produced in Asia, as well as in all other parts of the decolonized postcolonial world. It might be dramatized in a statement such as ‘global contemporary art is essentially a Western construct, even if it is true that, for instance, transnational modes, such as installation, interactive media, and relational art have fundamentally superseded use of traditional Western media and materials. The latter (e.g., oil painting or sculpting in marble or bronze) remain bound up with philosophical definitions of art elaborated in Europe in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and since. From this perspective — although the geopolitical power relations have shifted and are shifting — the global contemporary art world system is a game in which its top players use some distinctly loaded dice.* Given these volatile dynamics, this book’s editors have sought through our collection of essays to reconsider the specificities of what we call contemporary art in a ‘global Asia’ and to offer diverse means to reconceptualize the interrelationships between contemporary art ‘from’ or ‘in’ Asia (also examining the rhetorical potency and intellectual weaknesses of such apparently innocent prepositions) and the Western-dominated global contemporary art world of which global Asia is a part.
At the beginning of their introduction to the 2011 anthology Contemporary Art in Asia, Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio chose to signal their book’s thematic and evaluative priorities in this way: ‘Asian artists have stormed the citadel of the New York art world, they tell us, with mention of two cases — Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s 2008 retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s at the Brooklyn Museum in the same year. These shows, acclaimed by leading US critics (Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker review of the Murakami exhibition is mentioned), may go down in history, Chiu and Genocchio observed then, as events in the year when ‘American art history’ is remembered for the ‘rise of Asian contemporary art.”
Although only about one decade has passed since this statement was made, the view of the world and sense of the ‘order of things’ upon which it was based — the founding assumption that it was in the courts of ‘American art history’ and its leading museums that the meaning and value of something called ‘Asian art’ should be judged — seem now to us to be wholly wrong.? That these initial remarks should have opened a book dedicated to ‘Asian art’ reflected (and reproduced) the power across the world, then, of such iconic US art institutions. They simultaneously raised the question of the wider powers of the US upon which this cultural power apparently rested — and, perhaps, still rests. Chiu’s and Genocchio’s comments also may suggest, no less significantly, that the readership for their book was conceived primarily to be Americans, or those based in the US, or to have been composed of readers elsewhere for whom the US forum was determining. If any or all these suppositions are correct, then they measure, we contend, another important break from that quite recent historical moment to ours — the recognition of which is central to the overall concerns of our anthology — although the ostensibly ‘factual’ situation of this American predominance is, both then and now, inseparable from a wider set of socio-political circumstances and cultural values underpinning the global contemporary art world.°
This criticism should not be taken to mean a dismissal of the importance of Chiu’s and Genocchio’s anthology. On the contrary, it remains one of the most important collective contributions to an evolving field of study, and its constituent essays, published in the 18 years between 1991 and 2009, were written by some of the best theorists, historians, critics, and curators. The editors’ introduction, in addition, is instructive in revealing the priorities of two scholars with posts, at the time, in museums and publishing rather than academe.” The development of intellectual inquiry is always, in fact, a collective process: ideas and arguments necessarily build upon as well as dislodge existing frameworks, responding to the changed and changing circumstances of the moment and places in which they are generated. Contemporary Art and Visual Culture in Global Asia 1s a contribution to this field of study and an attempt to transform its basic terms and references. Our argument underpinning this intention is that the conditions and character of the global social order and globalization processes have changed fundamentally in the last 20 years, requiring an equivalent transvaluation in the bases of our conceptual and ideological inquiry.®
This introduction sets out the basic theoretical and argumentative contours of our investigation, detailing in preliminary form (1) its primary concepts, (2) its relationship to disciplinary traditions, and (3) its organising structure of parts. Four shorter section introductions follow in the book, providing succinct accounts of their respective themes, relating these briefly to each chapter and discussing aspects of their inter-relationship. It will be clarified later in this introduction why these themes were chosen for our sections, which involved deciding not to lead with, for instance, more obvious categories, such as ‘artists? ‘media, ‘institutions, ‘styles, ‘curatorial modes, and ‘criticism’ What does this selectivity and our choice of themes imply about the intentions of our collection as a whole? Answers to this question are not separable, we will insist, from the task of understanding the ways in which globalization, in its phases and functions since the 1980s, has progressively shaped and challenged people’s perceptions of how, why, and what to write about for an anthology such as this. Finally, we wish to note that this book as a whole is much more than the sum of its parts and that it is the function of its introductions, and Menene Gras’s lead chapters, to articulate, theorize, and to a degree, ‘systematize’ the significance of the chapters, though not to attempt to homogenize their contents. The different stylistic approaches to writing exhibited in the chapters collected here — from the conventional historical or critical accounts, to quasi-autobiographical and fictive modes adopted by some authors — indicate, too, an active exploratory intent, and one that also involves its writers in reconsidering their own personal roles in the matters they have decided to address.
The book’s timeliness relates to the urgency of investigating a set of fused questions fundamental in understanding the likely future consequences of more globalization. These questions, we hope, are centrally registered in and motivate our title: (1) What is ‘Asia’ now, how is it global, and how has it been globalized? We offer ‘global Asia, it should become clear, as both a definition and a speculative term; as what Kuan-Hsing Chen called, in and as his 2010 book title, ‘Asia as Method’? Where does Asia begin and end? What in Asia, if anything, might not yet be globalized or be capable of being globalized? Gras’s opening chapters following this introduction pursue these questions in detail, joining together the broader issues concerning globalization to the geopolitical specificities of Asia, while the ‘geographical turn’ in critical, cultural, and historical studies remains the focus of her concerns throughout.
(2) What is Asian contemporary art? What is contemporary art in, or from, Asia? The importance of this conjunction of terms has become recognized in art history and theoretical writing especially since c.2000, though its three core components — ‘contemporary, ‘art, and ‘Asia’ — pose much wider philosophical, cultural, aesthetic, historical, and socio-political issues and problems, especially when considering the power of the leading US and European (‘Western’) art institutions and their continuing roles and influence within ‘postcolonial’ Asia, and also in Africa and Latin America, given the wider history of Western imperialism.
(3) How is contemporary art related to, and art of, a broader visual culture — that of the global art world and beyond it — and what representations and representational systems, besides contemporary art, form these ‘image-worlds’ of the digital, online, globalized era? How are these broader phenomena (including branding, advertising, and social media) parasitically interdependent now within the global contemporary art world of which ‘global Asia’ is an integral part?!” Though this anthology is not concerned with a history or analysis of, for example, design, advertising, mass or digital social media considered as industries, practices, or forms of representation in their own right, its editors’ contention is that we cannot understand contemporary art in Asia without understanding its relation within and dependence upon this broader infrastructure of supporting activities.
We offer this book as a strategic intervention into a set of intellectual, academic, and art world habits of understanding. Its overall aim is to promote a radicalized reconceptualization of how we think about contemporary art and visual culture in a world transformed by globalization and transforming still. Within this examination, as we have pointed out, the short connecting and apparently innocuous words we usually take for granted in such inquiry (‘in’ and ‘from, especially) themselves raise fundamental questions to do with ownership, meaning, and value. If there is now a ‘global Asia, then there is also a “global Europe’ and a ‘global Africa’ — and no doubt, a “global USA? This last conjunction returns us to the problem encapsulated in the words at the beginning of Chiu’s and Genocchio’s introduction. Contemporary Art and Visual Culture in Global Asia aims to respond positively and productively to this problem of power. The ‘and’ and ‘in’ of our title symptomatize the continuing dilemmas and questions of to whom or to what ‘global Asian’ art belongs, which agencies and interests create or contest its meanings, and who or what gives and takes its value and why.
Concepts, attitudes, and latitudes
Whether explicitly articulated or not in the chapters that follow this introduction, our anthology invites its readers to reconsider a set of pivotal terms and ideas. Many of these have already been mentioned. The primary set is global/Asia/contemporary/contemporary art/visual culture/ global Asia. These are not fully intelligible or useful, however, without being understood within a broader frame of interactive reference, as part of a group with an equally complicated history. This set is culture/colonization/postcolonial/Western/Westernization. As we have already declared, our book is offered as an intervention into a range of intellectual, academic, and art world habits of thought, so to this necessary conceptual armoury we must add theory/history/criticism. (In the next section we briefly explore connections to the disciplines of art history and art theory, along with some ideas and research methods in sociology and cultural studies.) The issue of ‘readership’ becomes sharply significant when this much broader convergence of ideas, methods, and values occurs. It can be posed in a number of ways that lead in quite different directions — for instance, away from academic research and study towards the inclusion of the interests and knowledge of people unfamiliar with and perhaps uninterested in theoretical issues. These comprise a set of concerns, however, which has now rooted itself firmly in the discourse of the global contemporary art world and especially in academic study of contemporary art. This development raises a difficult set of problems that we, as editors, have no wish to minimize: understanding contemporary art is complex and requires complexity of explanation. The relationship of this reality to matters of equity in global education, literacy, and access to learning resources is critical.'! The titles for our four sections also include a number of other key concepts — ideas of ‘mappings, ‘identities, ‘borders’/‘regions’/‘nations, ‘narratives, ‘sites, and “practices, whose meanings will be adumbrated at the beginning of each section introduction. The anthology was conceived as a form of active and interactive inquiry, where conceptual investigation both underpins and interrogates (‘deconstructs’) different kinds of new evidence about, for instance, artworks, artists, art traditions, institutions, cultural and social systems within what we are calling ‘global Asia’ We hope you can begin to see now, for instance, that the innocent-looking preposition ‘within’ in the last sentence may raise the same kinds of basic problems as the ‘and’ and ‘in’ of the book’ title. Learning the habit of questioning seemingly every term and word for its meanings as well as the things it apparently refers to becomes necessary once it is accepted that we live in a global world undergoing processes of further globalization which progressively integrate, align, or transform hitherto apparently separate and distinct phenomena of all kinds.
If an earlier stage of thinking about globalization had involved the usually negative judgement that such integration led inevitably to ‘homogenization’ — say, in global cuisine (“McDonaldsization’) — then, although this evaluation has not wholly disappeared, it is now more often part of more subtle arguments about how the identity and specificity of things includes recognizing the combination of indigenous (‘old’/‘pre-existing’) and extraneous (‘new’/‘innovative’) elements — a process registered in common terms such as ‘fusion-, ‘hybrid-, and ‘mix~’ used in music, cooking, and contemporary art.!? This observation, which recurs in many chapters here, can quickly start to sound both obvious and banal, yet this in itself indicates the distance we’ve travelled since the 1990s, when much of the most influential writing about globalization in culture and the arts focused on what was posed as the actual or looming collision between that which was held to be the indigenous ‘non-Western’ (in Asia, Africa, etc.) and extraneous ‘Westernizing’ forces. Such analyses were often confused by differential levels of recognition of the impact of a long history of Western colonization in Asia and Africa, which had already significantly altered/ distorted/corrupted that thing which was held to be ‘indigenous’ This fusion and confusion of basic theoretical and historical perspectives on imperialism and globalization — their interrelationships and differences — has helped to produce some significant analytic difficulties registered here in many chapters, especially, perhaps, those concerned with societies, cultures, and visual art in what is called the ‘Near’ or ‘Middle East.
These two historically received terms (along with ‘Far East, to complete the set) instructively indicate the continuing impact of colonialism and neo-colonialism on ways of thinking about Asia because they explicitly measured the distance between Western European imperial metropoles (e.g., London, Paris, Rome) and their territorial possessions. Geographical and socio-political references are thus also fused and often confused in analytic frameworks and may be examined for their evaluative senses. There is and can be no neutral or objectively descriptive language, although the values attributed to any and all terms are usually multiple and always disputable. We chose the term ‘global Asia’ partly in order to highlight the speculative and provisional nature of such definitional nomenclature, though received names also tell us, in a sense truthfully, about the power relations in place. ‘Middle East, for instance, doesn’t lie about past Western dominance in that region, once we understand the term’s origins, or about continued, historically related, interference there by the US and some European powers, including Russia. Sometimes well-meaning (i.e., intended to be non-evaluative) terms may actually counterproductively and unintentionally act to obscure this history of dominance and interference: ‘western Asia’ in lieu of ‘Middle East; for example, may work to do this. For our practical purposes, ‘Asia’ in this book refers to the whole of the landmass and connecting seas stretching from Turkey and Egypt in the west to Japan and the Philippines in the east, including China, India, Indonesia, and all land and peoples south to Australia, a European colonized territory and nation-state whose own place ‘in Asia’ remains questioned."
The abstract terms ‘West’ and ‘East, capitalized or not, are part of the same conceptual, geopolitical, and socio-cultural puzzle. Globalization has been bound up historically with processes of Westernization — especially in the history of Western imperialism in Asia and Africa — and continues to be powered significantly by economic, social, and cultural forces originated in North America and in Western Europe. (Americanization, a mid-nineteenth century term, is part-synonym for Westernization though its current meanings and future relevance require reconsideration.) But does globalization in 2022 include equivalent processes of something we might reasonably call ‘Easternization’? Posing this question reveals (1) the habit of still assuming Westernization is normative and (2) that Westernization is held to be an all-pervasive, ‘whole way of life’ process, while ‘“Easternization, if real at all, is usually held essentially to be the global impact of the growth in economic production and exports — for example from Japan, South Korea, China, and India — setting aside long-standing but essentially peripheral Western fads for, or appropriations of, specific things like Asian food or exoticized ‘spiritual’/‘lifestyle’ choices (e.g., yoga, Buddhism, tai chi).'4
One immediate and possibly irritated response to this characterization would be that people in Asia have actually been no more ‘Westernized’ in this supposedly comprehensive — ‘global’ — sense than people in the US or Western European countries have been ‘Easternized’ While there is always a question of degree, and South Korea and Japan may quickly be admitted to be more ‘Westernized’ nations than, say, Vietnam or Myanmar (and Americans more ‘Western’ in some senses than either the English or the Romanians), one of the problems with this kind of judgement is that it is made by one person, or three in our case, about or even against others — and, in this case, by three people who live in ‘the West’ (two indigenous Western Europeans and one Palestinian-British) about a whole continent and several billions of people living in ‘the East’ The inevitably limited ‘situatedness’ of such a judgement, true actually of all judgements, must be accepted, and although this recognition can also become an obvious and banal thing, it is no less true and important for that. Edward Said’s delineation of ‘Orientalism’ registered in an analytically powerful and still highly influential way the particular ‘situatedness’ of Western attitudes towards the East, yet Said’s account relied on the presupposition of a clear distinction and contrast between ‘West’ and ‘East’ that globalization processes since the 1980s (Said’s study was published in 1978) have increasingly put under strain, even if in the end we decide to continue to conclude that “Westernization, and hence something called ‘the West, remains the driving force.!>
‘The West’ in this latter sense, however, may no longer substantively mean people, systems, or societies in a particular geophysical part of the world — for example, in the USA, France, or Germany. Could ‘West’ now rather mean a group of companies and technologies, systems (offand online) of production and consumption, organizational allocations of resources and power that exist and proliferate all over the world and in ‘global Asia’? Globalization may mean now the generalization of these industries, companies, technologies, systems, and allocations anywhere and potentially everywhere, although there remain immense concentrations of these resources and powers in certain geo-regions and particular nation-states (such as in the USA, but also in China and Japan). It also remains likely that certain nations and blocs of nations (such as NATO and the EU) will continue to intervene politically and militarily in other territories. Although our anthology is concerned with visual art and its cultural settings ‘in’ global Asia — including the interrelated ‘visual cultures, for instance, of its branding, advertisement, and media dissemination in the contemporary art world — it exists within, and as a component of, this wider, perhaps even ‘total’ globalized world. While these introductory paragraphs so far may seem to some perhaps to constitute a long detour away from art (and from Asia), they are required in order to establish not only the industries, companies, technologies, systems, and allocations of the global world of which the art world is a part but also the theoretical and conceptual complexities of understanding within which this art is, now, perhaps most meaningful.
That ‘perhaps’ signals both tentativeness — because there will always be many different interpretations of art, made by countless people in countless varieties of circumstance, none wholly right or wrong — and an important qualification related to one final couplet of terms we must reintroduce now: ‘contemporary’/‘postcolonial? The linking of ‘contemporary’ with ‘art’ has not simply produced what appears to be a straightforward factual category: all the works made, say, by artists in the last 20 years. In the first place, “contemporary art’ as an idea is much more ambiguous, interesting, and contested because of the indeterminacy of the historical period to which it is held ‘contemporary’ actually refers. ‘Contemporary’ turns out to be an inherently judgemental, evaluative, and questionable notion as well as and because it is a historical and temporal one. In the later twentieth century (after c.1970) Western art — that is, in this sense, that art made in the US and Western Europe — began increasingly to attract the label ‘contemporary’ in distinction from that of ‘modern’ or ‘modernist’ Some break or change was signalled by this and other related, then emergent, terms such as ‘postmodernist’ or ‘post-conceptualist, both of which preceded the arrival of ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ as key descriptive, analytic, and historical terms in the 1990s. This break or change had many dimensions and references — in economic, technological, socio-political, and cultural realms — but these all shared a sense that a hitherto continuous past and presumption of progress or at least development, based on Western power and Westernization, had drawn to a close. This presumption of historical continuity could be traced back either to the relatively recent modernizing processes of capitalist urban industrialization (late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western Europe) or to the longer “Western episteme’ — system of knowledge and ‘order of things’ — traceable to the Enlightenment (from the seventeenth century in Europe), or usually to some combination of both.!”
But by the mid-twentieth century, what had Western modernization (and one of its cultural products, modern art) brought to the peoples and societies of the regions colonized in what we call Asia? These hitherto mostly agrarian, decentralized social orders — not ‘nations’ in the European sense and with mostly weak or no central ‘states’ at all — penetrated for economic and geopolitical gain by the most powerful European powers since the sixteenth century were subject to fits and starts of exogenously driven ‘development’ patterns that reflected their exploited and subaltern place within the empires of international trade, labour, and conquest established by the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, and most comprehensively the British by the late nineteenth century at the height of its world domination.'® If Asian societies and peoples had thus been highly ambiguously and differentially ‘modernized’ as a by-product of their colonization by the Europeans (in a process simultaneously as stratified by tribal and ethnic differences and conflicts as the process in Europe had been by social class, religion, and regional uneven development), then the coming of globalization forces after 1945 — in the Cold War era superintended by the US and the USSR that brought formal decolonization and the actual end of the European empires — could only equally as ambiguously and unevenly be ‘contemporary’ in Western terms. Some peoples, societies, and cultures are and will remain, in the predicable future, more contemporary, and differentially contemporary, than others.
It should be clear now that ‘modern’ and ‘development’ are also inherently evaluative notions which often hide normative assumptions bound up with ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ The European empires had not been shy to declare belief in their racial, moral, and cultural superiority: this had become the justification for their imperial missions across the whole of the world when the projection of political and military power joined with the naked economic domination of colonized peoples and their resources. Our term ‘global Asia’ is intended to reflect all aspects of this complex, extended historical process and thus also includes the latterly created ‘nation-states’ of this continent, where the widely differing circumstances and extents of previous imperial ‘modernizing’ penetrations — bringing with them “combined and uneven development’ — remains influential in shaping the present vastly different and unequal ‘contemporaries’ of all these postcolonial societies and peoples, in their economic, social, political, and cultural orders, incorporating both what is held still to be the ‘traditional’ alongside the ‘transnational’ of the globalizing world order now.
But the metropolitan (‘home’) societies of the European empires after 1945 also became themselves, again in different ways, ‘postcolonial? Their changing, initially exhausted or faltering economies, radically impoverished by the destruction of the Second World War, reflected the new loss of access to and control over colonial raw materials, labour, and markets. Immigration from previous imperial possessions — in Britain especially from the West Indies and the Asian subcontinent in the 1950s and 1960s — has permanently changed the character of all its major cities and their cultures. If the US steered its own globalizing ‘neo-colonialization’ in Central and South America; western, south-east, and eastern Asia; and in parts of Africa during the Cold War (in symbiotic competition first with the USSR and more recently China), then its own home social order has also become ‘neo-postcolonial’ — President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 signalled, apart from anything else, a reaction against perceived multiple ethnic elements within this transformed internal American contemporary identity and direction.'? The whole postcolonial world, then — in all of its internal differentiations and specificities; all its nationstates, blocs, significant aggregates, areas and regions; across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas — is also now the contemporary global and globalizing world.
The thematic structure of our conceptual framework
Understanding the forms and making sense of the place of contemporary art in global Asia entails mobilizing traditions of study and habits of understanding that have themselves been embedded in and shaped through institutions — in the US, Europe, and in Asian countries themselves — of the colonial and postcolonial eras. The limited ‘situatedness’ of our perspectives here will have already become evident to our readers, though in highly varied ways, depending on their own diverse locations, backgrounds, and interests. This recognition again returns us to our initial problem of ‘the Americans, and of US, and Western, cultural power in the world, and in global Asia.2? On the one hand, the presuppositions, ideas, categories, and research methods underpinning the formal study and wider appreciation of visual art in the West since the eighteenth century — philosophical aesthetics, antiquarianism, archaeology, cultural history, and art history as these congealed into recognizable modern academic arts and humanities ‘disciplines’ taught and researched in universities and museums in Europe and North America from around 1900 — remain a determining, if highly problematic intellectual and institutional basis for describing, analysing, and evaluating contemporary art in the globalized era. In their most traditional and received forms, these disciplines are quite ill-suited to this task, we believe, for many reasons. On the other hand, if we acknowledge that the colonial era term ‘Middle East’ usefully doesn’t lie about the history and legacy of Western imperialism in what are now called the nation-states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt, then there may probably be an equally persuasive argument for saying that accounts of art centred on ideals of individual authorship, subjective expression, and schemas of stylistic evolution in the study of contemporary art made in, say, China, Vietnam, or Myanmar, also don’t lie about the decisive impact of Western modernity and modernism on the art worlds that have grown up across the postcolonial societies of global Asia.*!
It was theoretical developments in social history of art and feminist art theory in the 1970s and 1980s (motivated by political commitments and organisations), along with wider critiques drawing on semiology, psychoanalysis, comparative ethnography, and cultural studies, that helped to illuminate the normative, if internally highly varied ideological bases and socio-political ‘situatedness’ of Western art history — its often rich but narrow and excluding interpretative focus on ‘national styles’; highly generalized cultural ‘worldviews’ and later obsession with modern individualist expression; the ultimately racialized, if not always racist, belief in a coherent, unitary “Western art’ tradition claimed to descend from ‘Greek’ art and civilization; arrogantly virtuoso but analytically vacuous studies of the supposedly autonomous development of ‘visual form’; the separation of an elite sphere of canonical ‘high’ artworks from other kinds of lesser-valued visual representational products; the sexist and racist devaluation or lesser valuation of works made by women, non- Westerners, the untrained, and many other ‘others. The persuasive critique of these ideas and their underpinning values, it is important to point out, was pioneered and developed by individuals (including academics, critics, artists, and curators), groups, and organizations active in the Western countries and by those across Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the globalized, postcolonial, and now ‘decolonial thinking, contemporary world emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.72
As the chapters in the following sections indicate, a highly sophisticated, ‘theorized’ discourse now exists — drawing on a wide range of traditions of analysis, including all previously cited — with which to make intellectually and experientially legible all the phenomena that comprise what we mean, or could mean, when discussing the contemporary art and visual culture of global Asia. This discourse includes accounts of (1) producers; (2) art objects, forms, and modes of visual representation; (3) institutions and agencies for exhibition, curation, commission, and collection; (4) artists’ groupings; (5) markets and media apparatuses for art’s sale, dissemination and consumption; (6) art education and the professionalization of artists; (7) associated forms of art criticism, theoretical and historical understanding; and (8) the transnational institutional infrastructures of, for example, law, transport, finance, and support services that enable the contemporary art world to reproduce and expand its activities at events such as fairs and biennials. That this extending and extendable range of elements is identifiable and their analytic interrelation possible testifies to the positive and productive impact that critical sociology and cultural studies methods’ and concepts (with their attendant arguments and values) had on the discipline of art history in the last third of the twentieth century as radicals within it sought to revive, transform, and challenge its purposes and founding concepts.”
Finally, our thematic structure is intended to establish a cross-analytic framework situating discussion of the empirical categories previously mentioned within four key ‘analytic fields.’ These, as previously mentioned, are (1) mappings, (2) regions and borders, (3) sites, systems, and practices, and (4) reflections on the dialectics of contemporary art in Asia. Each of these sections, following an introduction offering a preliminary outline, are followed by five chapters. Considerable overlap occurs between the four sections, both in terms of theoretical discussion and empirical case studies — the themes we have chosen are offered in a speculative and heuristic spirit, as diverse but complementary ways to interrogate all the chapters and for one section to interrogate or complement another and one chapter to interrogate or complement another. Global Asia is also, then, a method through which to understand the continent’s contemporary art.
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