Modern art in twentieth century Asian Pacific regions and transformative works

Modern art in the Asia-Pacific region reflects the rapidly changing geo-political landscapes, as well as becoming increasingly integrated into architecture and urban planning. In the Asia-Pacific region, the art of the 21st century can be large scale and includes ambitious installation projects as well as graphic art, graffiti, and urban art. Although influenced by European trends like abstraction and surrealism, the art of the Asia-Pacific region is dedicated to communicating a localized aesthetic. Contemporary art in the Asia-Pacific region can also be politically powerful, designed to make statements. In some cases, art has become a critical component of social justice and communications. The work of Ai Weiwei reflects the fusion of art with politics at critical junctures. In Japan and Korea, political statements were less concerned about protests against governmental institutions and more about gender and oppression in general. Throughout the 20th century, Korean art aimed to celebrate the history and uniqueness of Korean culture.

Japanese 21st century art represents a radical shift in aesthetics and artistic ideology. The whimsical work by Takashi Murakami epitomizes the 21st century Japanese zeitgeist. With postmodernist flair and meta-criticism of popular culture, Takashi Murakami incorporates some of the pop art elements of the American 1960s as with his "And Then..." series, depicting a Mickey Mouse-like head in multifaceted new ways. "Tan Tan Bo - In Communication" is one of the artist's most recent works, and it is filled with lively colors and an urban graffiti sensibility. Takashi Murakami has been tremendously influential, founded a movement known as "superflat," and his aesthetic has been borrowed by other Japanese artists working in different media like Chiho Aoshima, and has also permeated the aesthetics of art beyond the Asia-Pacific region (Winners, 2016).

The work of Chiharu Shiota shows how 21st century Japanese art mirrors its counterparts in North America and Northern Europe. Chiharu Shiota's installations are cerebral and conceptual, as well as being large. Central to the artist's approach to installations is interactivity, not in the digital sense, but in an organic way as with Perspectives (2004), which was "made with more than 300 donated shoes accompanied by handwritten notes from each donor, confiding one personal memory," (Winners, 2016). Interactivity is also achieved in the preference for abstract and provocative performance art that requests deep audience engagement divorced from the colonialist gaze. For example, Ei Arakawa is a Japanese artist who appreciates the "pop up" sensibility of the postmodern urban landscape. Arakawa's work is "almost always collaborative, and engages with art's element of social spectacle -- from production to destruction. His artistic sensibility is informed by a performative, indeterminate, 'everywhere-but-nowhere' condition," (Winners, 2016). The interactive and social elements of contemporary Japanese art are actually just beginning to locate their parallels in the arts of Japan's neighbors like Korea. Japan had for much of the 20th century spearheaded the avant-garde movements and those are just starting to emerge, albeit strongly, in Korea.

In the 20th century, Korean art aimed to assert Korean culture and identity and extricate Korea from the ravages of colonialism. Korean art has therefore been strongly political, but also integral to Korean identity construction. Crucial to Korean identity construction was the search for uniquely Korean elements in art, reflecting the specific styles of Buddhism and political structures inherent in the society. Yet other 20th century Korean work bears elements of almost a primitive style, imbued with nostalgia for a pre-industrial past like Lee in-Sung's "Local Colors," which is controversial due to its hearkening to the ways European artists Orientalized local cultures. In some ways, "Local Colors" signals the re-appropriation of colonial forms in ironic ways.

Harumi Yamaguchi's 1972 painting "Apache" is also poignantly ironic. It is a Japanese painter who pierces through the Anglo-American misappropriation and exploitation of Native American iconography and culture. The lithograph shows a white woman, brazenly holding up an assault rifle, the epitome of American arrogance and gun-toting sensibility. She also rides and horse and dons a Native headdress with a feather, even as she also wears a beaded bra and moccasin-style boots with tassels. Yamaguchi shows how it can take an outsider to expose the insider's exploitation of that which is labeled as "other."

Chinese art throughout the late 20th and early 21st century has been more focused on the Chinese political situation and the transformations taking place within Chinese society. Like Japanese artists, Chinese artists have seemed less concerned about the colonial gaze, remaining relatively self-contained and in control of the creative spirit and aesthetic direction. Korean art, on the other hand, remained highly self-conscious in the 20th century, aware of how Japanese artists were portraying Korean culture and attempting to re-own that depiction by constructing new identities. Many Korean artists opted for an ironic approach that used Western means of appropriation such as Gauguin's style to depict Korean culture: as with Kee in-sung's work.

In the 21st century, Korean art walked away from the self-consciousness and reactionary traditions that characterized its scene in the 20th century and came into its own. The work of Xooang Choi, Jung Lee, and Lee Bul all include surrealist or conceptual elements. Jeongmoon Choi incorporates new media like light beams into her work. Like Chiharu Shiota's installations, those of Jeongmoon Choi require thoughtfulness and viewer engagement, changing the role of art in the contemporary world. Xooang Choi's pieces like "The Noise" are also large in scope and installations. "The Noise" includes 70 life-sized sculpted human heads, each with a different face and each rendered with a different size, all strung together and forming a ring shape. That ring of bald mannequin-like heads is then suspended from the ceiling high above the viewer. As such, the heads are "not just sculptures, but are strange and beautifully nightmarish creatures, which reflect social themes and reveal facets of human psychology," (Daunt, 2016). The contemporary art installation shows how art became centered in points in time and space, requiring viewer engagement and preventing the older modernist discourse in which there was the artist and the viewer engaging in a unilateral process of communication. With social media as an active force in the art world, the relationship between artist and viewer is now bilateral and in fact, multilateral because of the global patterns of migration that have changed the nature of the viewer and the viewed.

Some art from the Asia-Pacific region is futuristic, incorporating mechanical and digital elements that make commentary on the present. Science fiction blending with art in the form of virtual reality invites viewer participation in entirely new ways, but also dislocates the art from its space in a museum. Virtual reality art projects can be viewed and experienced anywhere, and are not like their counterparts relying on physical media. Some artists from Japan and Korea are also using robotic elements to convey the way the creative process works. The artificially intelligent machine can create live works of art or music, and also teach viewers about the fallible nature of human aesthetics and creative powers. Both Ryoji Ikeda and Jeongmoon Choi use light and abstraction to create architectural works that can be incorporated into urban landscapes.

The art of the Asia-Pacific region is therefore cutting edge and progressive. It can be political, sometimes overtly so as with Ai Weiwei. Sometimes the political messages in art are more subtle, such as the works that deliberately take away Japanese artists' power to render Korean culture as backwards or "other," which is what the European colonialists had also done to all cultures outside of its domain. Art can include commentaries on gender and socio-economic class too. In terms of divergent forms and functions, art in the Asia-Pacific region became increasingly fragmented and liberated from rules. There are traditional paintings, but those are only part of the overall artistic mix. Art is becoming increasingly pop-up in nature, temporary like a sand mandala. There are performance arts and flash mobs that can interrupt or punctuate urban landscapes, as with Ei Arakawa. The return to performance art as an age-old media is also mirrored in the resurrections of traditional media like puppets. Regionalism and localization is common, as is universalism in the artistic vocabulary. Large-scale installation projects do demand viewer attention in a given moment in space-time and cannot be moved around as easily as paintings, but can be achieved more readily than street art. A shift to street art shows how the urban landscape must be furnished with art and even by art in order to be relevant and credible to the new generations. As in Europe and North America, street art in Asia is integrated with urban design. Design and art are also blended to a greater degree, showing how functional items can be decorative and whimsical as well as purely aesthetic (Kleiner, 2016). As contemporary art in the Asia-Pacific region shifted from the modern era in the early 20th century to the post-modern era at the latter half of the 20th century, several meaningful changes took place in the consciousness of the artist and the viewer. Art was reconsidering itself, becoming self-conscious as a tool of communication and politics. Finally, art was blending popular culture vernacular with the fine art world in new and innovative ways.

References

Daunt, J. (2016). The 10 Korean contemporary artists you should know. Retrieved online: https://theculturetrip.com/asia/south-korea/articles/the-10-korean-contemporary-artists-you-should-know/

Kleiner, F.S. (2016). Gardner's Art Through the Ages. Cengage.

Winners, A. (2016). 10 Japanese contemporary artists to know. Retrieved online: https://theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/top-10-japanese-contemporary-artists-you-should-know/