Search results
Contemporary Asian art has had a remarkable impact on global art practice, and simultaneously has produced an enduring record of the history of that region from the moment of decolonisation to the present. Many artists in the region have a deep concern about what it means to be human and to contribute to the development of a better future for their communities as well as having a sustained commitment to making art. This book, written at the start of the ‘Asian century’, focuses on the contexts and conditions which have helped to shape both art practice, and postcolonial society, in the region. Using case studies of selected artists, it discusses their work in relation to issues of human rights, social and environmental wellbeing, and creativity and is one of the first surveys of these issues in contemporary Asian art. It is an important contribution to studies of contemporary Asian art and art history.
exhibitions have played a significant role in defining this new Asian art, reflexively adjusting their attitudes and practices. Collecting policies have been re-examined, and a number of galleries have deliberately 3 4 Art and human rights built collections of contemporary Asian art that extend beyond individual nations. Fukuoka in Japan and Brisbane in Australia were very early adopters, showing and collecting contemporary artists from across Asia: the Fukuoka Art Museum and later the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum from the late 1970s, and Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery
has observed in the Migrant series, ‘the artist’s own family history is the source of experiential data that coax ruminations about the global travail of migration and the discord and displacements resonant in tales of merging social classes.’40 Sook 43 44 Art and human rights 2.1 Wong Hoy Cheong, In search of faraway places (from ‘Migrants’ series), 1996. Detail. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1996 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through and with the assistance of the
Arts, and Australia has been his home. Young has exhibited widely in Australia as well as in Asia, Europe and the US, and has been a leader in developing opportunities for Asian Australian artists, as one of the founders of the Asian Australian Artists’ Association and the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney.88 His Globalisation and identity Asian identity is, therefore, clearly important to his practice and his public expression, and he has explored this quite extensively. After his studies at the Sydney College of the Arts, and encouraged by his
complexities. Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner’s Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making discusses interconnected contemporaneities across late twentieth and early twenty-first-century art from diverse contexts such as those within the PRC, Japan, India, and the Philippines.15 Antoinette and Turner bring together scholars including John Clark, Chaitanya Sambrani, Oscar Ho, and Marsha Meskimmon to effectively challenge Euro-American-dominated narratives of twentieth and twentyfirst-century art while critiquing the supposed unity of Asian
Image of Mao Zedong in Contemporary Art’, in Jiang Jiehong (ed.), Burden or Legacy: From Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 48. 3 John Clark, ‘Worlding of the Asian Modern’, in Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner (eds), Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 69. 4 Aminudin T. H. Siregar, Sang Ahli Gambar: Sektsa, Gambar dan Pemikiran S. Sudjojono [The picture maker: sketches, pictures and thoughts of S. Sudjojono] (Jakarta: S. Sudjojono
as an import article. Particular attention was directed either towards mainland Chinese art or towards Chinese overseas art that toured through the global exhibitions of the cosmopolitan art market, satisfying the desire for Chineseness as exotic otherness. For a relatively long period, Chinese art in the Australian diaspora was excluded from Australian exhibitions of contemporary Asian art. The new presence of Asian artists in the Australian art environment slowly penetrated the public consciousness of art institutions and exhibition curation. Only in 1999 were
of Xu Bing’s Tobacco Project, Cai Guo-Qiang’s graffiti acknowledging the important role of migrant labor in Shanghai’s urbanization, Ai Weiwei’s river crab party/protest) that reveal cracks in Shanghai’s worlding facades. Notes 1 For a discussion of sea turtles/overseas returnees (海龟／海归，both pronounced haigui) versus “ground beetles” who never left mainland China, see Jiayun Zhuang, “Left Hand and Right Hand—Waving from the Past in the PostSocialist Factory” (unpublished conference paper), presented in the panel Bad Hauntings: Contemporary Asian Art in the Post
Guangzhou Biennial.56 Chineseness and the logic of cultural capitalism China’s art and commerce have developed rapidly during the same millennial decades in which globalization has surged in the burgeoning of multinational capital. Since the 1990s, China’s contemporary art has contributed Chineseness: theoretical, historical, political to the development of both cultural capital and monetary-capital, initiating the ‘China Brand’ as suggested by Meiling Cheng. By 2006, Sotheby’s Auction House had hired Xiaoming Zhang to run its brand new contemporary Asian art