CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Asian Art
Art made across East, South, Southeast and Central Asia since about 1980, spanning painting, ink, installation, video and performance.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary Asian Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Asia's contemporary art scenes developed at different speeds and under very different politics, from post-Mao China to South Korea after military rule and Indonesia after 1998. What links them since the 1980s is rapid urban change, new regional exhibitions such as the Asia Pacific Triennial (from 1993) and the Gwangju Biennale (from 1995), and artists who move easily between local traditions and global forms.
Nam June Paik, born in Seoul, had already made television sculptural. Cai Guo-Qiang, working in Japan from the late 1980s, began making drawings and outdoor events with gunpowder. Takashi Murakami fused animation, manga and Edo-period painting in the flat, bright aesthetic he called Superflat. Dinh Q. Lê wove strips of photographs together like Vietnamese grass mats; Rirkrit Tiravanija, of Thai heritage, cooked and served food as art; Subodh Gupta assembles steel kitchen utensils into large sculptures. Others transform calligraphy, ink painting and craft.