The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Art in Global Asia

Book excerpt: 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.