This Asian Century

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Editor Alison Carroll AM

A fascinating overview of the development of contemporary art in Japan, China, SE Asia, India, Korea, indonesia and Pakistan in all its diversity. Themes such as the visual arts and Islam, traditional and craft/art culture, cultures and Asian abstraction are also explored in detail. Until recently Director of Asialink Arts, Carroll is in a unique position to access the knowledge of her colleagues in all the key arts positions in Asia and the result is a star-studded team of writers looking back on some remarkable shifts and changes over the past twenty years, and their thoughts about what lies ahead. Contributors include Tan Boon Hui Director of the Singapore Art Museum, Oscar Ho academic, curator, Hong Kong, Kim Hong Hee, Director of the Seoul Museum of Art, Akiko Miki, Senior Curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Jim Supangkat well known curator and writer in Jakarta, and Kwok Kian Chow, former Director of the National Gallery in Singapore. In addition to these key players in Asian institutions, Carroll has invited other highly experienced writers, curators, thinkers, activists and artists: Sue Hajdu (Saigon), Salima Hashmi (Lahore), Aaron Seeto (Sydney), Chaitanya Sambrani (ANU, Tetsuya Ozaki ex editor ARTiT (Tokyo), Akira Tatehata (Tokyo), Kevin Murray (Melbourne) and Virginia Hooker (ANU) as well as a group of Australian artists who have been involved in Asia through residencies and exchanges over the last two decades. With recent sweeping changes in the Asian region, this coverage allows us to recognise the rapidly growing pool of expertise and innovation in the museums, exhibition curating and scholarship as well as the increase in the numbers of professional artists in the region. Offering a more considered review of art in Asia over this dynamic period than other Asia-focused periodicals, this issue, like our previous 3 issues dedicated to Asia, (1993, 2000 and 2003) will be used a a key point in the analysis of our region's visual art history.

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Articles in vol 33 no 1, 2013

Swimming with the current

Editorial by Alison Carroll

It is twenty years since Australia started its most recent love-affair with Asia, an affair in which Paul Keating was Mr Darcy spinning a web of soon-to-be requited desire between two scratchy but ultimately totally compatible partners. — More »

A landscape with or without you

Feature by Aaron Seeto

Aaron Seeto is the Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. He writes critically from his experience about the expediency of the Australian Government White Paper Australia in the Asian Century. He says "When we examine the biennales that we think are valuable or influential, Asian art is presented or discussed not as a kind of ethnographic-type but valuable as art that is illustrative of a global web of conversations and influences." — More »

A new broom sweeping changes to folk art in Asia

Feature by Kevin Murray

Kevin Murray is a writer and curator who facilitates the Sangam Project: Australia India Design Platform. He examines recent exhibitions in India in which what might be called folk art or craft are given attention and prominence through rethinking their purposes and provenances. Designers have returned home to India to work with traditional craftspeople whose work is being re-viewed as a form of creative expression with its own political interests. — More »

A view of Asia from Europe

Feature by Akiko Miki

Akiko Miki is Senior Curator at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She has been watching or taking part in contemporary art in Asia from the inside in the 1990s and from the outside in the 2000s, when she moved to France from Japan at around the turning of the century. Her lightning overview of these years points out many changes and ends with the hope that "a more collaborative dynamic can be created that is free of the phantom of 'otherness' (as well as ‘nationalism’) in this time of multi-dimensional matrixes for both organisations and thinking." — More »

Australian artists on Asia

Feature by Artlink

Australian artists Megan Keating, Craig Walsh, Emily Floyd, Guan Wei, Megan Kirwan-Ward, Jayne Dyer, Pat Hoffie, Dadang Christanto, John Young Zerunge, Charles Green, Fiona Hall, Danius Kesminas, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, Robin Best and Jon Cattapan comment on their rich engagements with Asia over many years. — More »

Beyond the material world: abstract art in Asia

Feature by Alison Carroll

Scholar, curator and Guest Editor of This Asian Century Alison Carroll examines abstraction in art made in Asia and finds its development is different from that made in Western countries. She reviews the emergence of abstract art in Asia finding it includes an engagement with spirituality and is renewed today with an emphasis on "the infinite". — More »

Contemporary art in Indonesia 1990 - 2010

Feature by Jim Supangkat

Jim Supangkat is an independent curator based in Jakarta. He reviews the often controversial ebbing and flowing of last twenty years of contemporary art in Indonesia. He writes: "Contemporary art in Indonesia reflects its progenitor, global contemporary art: it was celebrated in international biennials in the 1990s, and controlled by the art market in the 2000s. These signs led to the question: "what's next?" Most likely the answer will be efforts to understand global art." — More »

Decades of change in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan

Feature by Oscar Ho Hing Kay

Oscar Ho Hing Kay was the Exhibition Director of Hong Kong Arts Centre, founding Director of MOCA Shanghai, and is currently Program Director of the MA Program in Cultural Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He looks back over the last two decades of contemporary art practice and museums in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan, and finds complex differences, turmoil and hope. — More »

Indian art now

Feature by Chaitanya Sambrani

Chaitanya Sambrani is Senior Lecturer in Art Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. The full title of his essay is Staking out the globe: Indian art now. He writes about the contradictions involved in contemporary Indian art being successful on a world stage but marginalised within India. He also discusses the rise of political fundamentalism alongside economic globalisation. — More »

Islam and the visual arts in Indonesia and Malaysia

Feature by Virginia Hooker

Virginia Hooker is Professor Emeritus and Fellow at the Australian National University's College of Asia & the Pacific. She describes in some detail the work and work practices of A.D. Pirous, Sulaiman Esa, Khatijah Sanusi and Didin Sirojuddin AR, four artists who self-consciously make Muslim art. — More »

Korean art today: a conversation

Feature by Alison Carroll, Kim Hong Hee

Kim Hong Hee is Director of the Seoul Museum of Art. He speaks frankly with This Asian Century Artlink Guest Editor Alison Carroll about contemporary art in Korea and its development though alternative organisations. He says: "For them Asia is not a race or a region, but a geopolitical metaphor for a counter-community to establish a new aesthetic identity." — More »

Looking back on twenty years of art in Japan

Feature by Eriko Osaka

Eriko Osaka is Director of the Yokohama Museum of Art, and Chairperson of the Organising Committee for the Yokohama Triennale. She writes about the dramatic changes in contemporary art in Japan since the bursting of the economic bubble in 1990 and how the conscience of Japanese contemporary artists has been stirred by the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. — More »

Recent Pakistan art

Feature by Salima Hashmi

Salima Hashmi is the Dean at the School of Visual Arts and Design at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. She examines the way some Pakistani contemporary artists have come to terms with tradition, history and politics in their art. She writes: "The idea was that definitions of culture need to be shattered, not just broadened." — More »

The Flow Under the Flat

Feature by Atsushi Sugita

Atsushi Sugita is an art critic and Professor of Art and Design at Joshibi University in Japan. He writes about trends in Japanese contemporary art since the 1990s focusing on engagements with local communities and versions of relational aesthetics. — More »

The need for a digital criticism archive in East Asia

Feature by Tetsuya Ozaki

Ozaki Tetsuya is Publisher and editor-in-chief of REALTOKYO/REALKYOTO. He comments on the urgency of a digital archive in East Asia for commentary and reviews on contemporary East Asian art in Japanese, Korean, traditional Chinese and English, and on the website REALTOKYO has made a modest beginning at such an archive. — More »

Thoughts on art and institutions in Asia

Feature by Kwok Kian Chow

Kwok Kian Chow was the Founding Director of the National Art Gallery, Singapore to which he is currently the Senior Advisor. His penetrating reflections on art and institutions in Asia explicate the complex contradictions of "the need for a contemporaneity that draws from local cultural history, and yet is concurrently a critical engagement with prevailing art world discourses." — More »

Three trends in contemporary art from Southeast Asia

Feature by Tan Boon Hui

Tan Boon Hui is Director of the Singapore Art Museum. He analyses the complex history and interplay of markets, artist-run initiatives and critical discourse in contemporary art in Southeast Asia which is, as he points out, "a project in the making rather than a forgone conclusion". — More »

Twenty years of change in Vietnam's art world

Feature by Sue Hajdu

Artist, writer, artistic director of a little blah blah (albb) artists' initiative in Ho Chi Minh City, Sue Hajdu has 20 years of engagement with Vietnam. She describes the very particular nature of contemporary art practice in Vietnam in relation to education, markets, artist-run initiatives and government policies. — More »

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