Contemporary Art in the Asia-Pacific Region: Trends & Artists

Overview of Contemporary Asia-Pacific Art

Modern art in the Asia-Pacific region reflects rapidly changing geopolitical landscapes while becoming increasingly integrated into architecture and urban planning. The art of the 21st century in this region operates at a large scale, encompassing ambitious installation projects as well as graphic art, graffiti, and urban art. Although influenced by European trends such as abstraction and surrealism, Asia-Pacific art is dedicated to communicating a localized aesthetic. Contemporary art in the region can also be politically powerful, designed to make bold statements, and in some cases has become a critical component of social justice and communication.

The work of Ai Weiwei reflects the fusion of art with politics at critical junctures. In Japan and Korea, political statements were less concerned with protests against governmental institutions and more focused on gender and oppression in general. Throughout the 20th century, Korean art aimed to celebrate the history and uniqueness of Korean culture.

Japanese Art in the 21st Century

Japanese 21st-century art represents a radical shift in aesthetics and artistic ideology. The whimsical work of Takashi Murakami epitomizes the Japanese zeitgeist of the era. With postmodernist flair and meta-criticism of popular culture, Murakami incorporates pop art elements reminiscent of the American 1960s — as seen in his "And Then..." series, which depicts a Mickey Mouse-like head rendered in multifaceted new ways. "Tan Tan Bo – In Communication" is one of the artist's most recent works, filled with lively colors and an urban graffiti sensibility. Murakami has been tremendously influential: he founded a movement known as "Superflat," and his aesthetic has been embraced by other Japanese artists working in different media — including Chiho Aoshima — while also permeating 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. Shiota's installations are cerebral, conceptual, and large in scale. Central to her approach is interactivity — not in the digital sense, but in an organic way, as demonstrated by 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 through a preference for abstract and provocative performance art that requests deep audience engagement, divorced from the colonialist gaze.

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 only beginning to find their parallels in the arts of Japan's neighbors, particularly Korea. Japan had for much of the 20th century spearheaded the avant-garde movements that are now starting to emerge, albeit strongly, in Korea.

Korean Art: Identity, Colonialism, and Reinvention

In the 20th century, Korean art aimed to assert Korean culture and identity and to extricate Korea from the ravages of colonialism. Korean art has therefore been strongly political, while also being integral to Korean identity construction. Central to that identity construction was the search for uniquely Korean elements in art, reflecting the specific styles of Buddhism and the political structures inherent in Korean society. Yet other 20th-century Korean works bear elements of an almost primitive style, imbued with nostalgia for a pre-industrial past — such as Lee In-sung's "Local Colors," which is controversial for its echoing of the ways European artists Orientalized local cultures. In some respects, "Local Colors" signals the re-appropriation of colonial forms in an ironic register.

Harumi Yamaguchi's 1972 painting Apache is also poignantly ironic. As a Japanese painter, Yamaguchi pierces through the Anglo-American misappropriation and exploitation of Native American iconography and culture. The lithograph depicts a white woman brazenly holding an assault rifle — the epitome of American arrogance — while riding a horse, wearing a Native headdress with a feather, a beaded bra, and moccasin-style boots with tassels. Yamaguchi demonstrates how it can take an outsider to expose an insider's exploitation of that which is labeled as "other."

In the 21st century, Korean art moved away from the self-consciousness and reactionary traditions that characterized its 20th-century scene and came into its own. The work of Xooang Choi, Jung Lee, and Lee Bul all incorporate surrealist or conceptual elements. Jeongmoon Choi incorporates new media such as light beams into her work, and like Chiharu Shiota's installations, hers require thoughtfulness and viewer engagement, fundamentally changing the role of art in the contemporary world.

Xooang Choi's piece The Noise is also large in scope and installation-based. It includes 70 life-sized sculpted human heads, each with a different face and rendered at a different scale, all strung together into a ring shape that 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). This contemporary installation demonstrates how installation art has become centered in specific points in time and space, requiring viewer engagement and dismantling the older modernist discourse in which artist and viewer communicated through a unilateral process. With social media as an active force in the art world, the relationship between artist and viewer is now bilateral and, in fact, multilateral — shaped by the global patterns of migration that have transformed the nature of both viewer and viewed.

Conclusion: Fragmentation, Localism, and Liberation

The art of the Asia-Pacific region is cutting edge and progressive. It can be political — sometimes overtly so, as with Ai Weiwei — and sometimes its political messages are more subtle, such as works that deliberately challenge Japanese artists' power to render Korean culture as backwards or "other," replicating what European colonialists had done to all cultures outside their domain. Art can also include commentaries on gender and socioeconomic class. In terms of divergent forms and functions, art in the Asia-Pacific region has become increasingly fragmented and liberated from rules.

There are traditional paintings, but these represent only part of the overall artistic mix. Art is becoming increasingly pop-up in nature — temporary, like a sand mandala. Performance arts and flash mobs can interrupt or punctuate urban landscapes, as with Ei Arakawa. The return to performance art as an age-old medium is also mirrored in the revival of traditional forms like puppetry. Regionalism and localization are common, as is universalism in the artistic vocabulary. Large-scale installation projects demand viewer attention in a given moment in space and time and cannot be moved as easily as paintings, but they can be realized more readily than street art. A shift toward street art shows how the urban landscape must be furnished with — and even by — art in order to remain relevant and credible to new generations. As in Europe and North America, street art in Asia is integrated with urban design.

Design and art are blended to a greater degree than ever before, demonstrating 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 of the early 20th century to the postmodern era of the latter half of the 20th century, several meaningful changes took place in the consciousness of both artist and viewer. Art began to reconsider itself, becoming self-conscious as a tool of communication and politics. Finally, art blended 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 from

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

Winners, A. (2016). 10 Japanese contemporary artists to know. Retrieved from