This course provides a critical introduction to contemporary art in and from East Asia. It focuses particularly on art from across Greater China (mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau), Japan, South Korea, and related diasporic communities, from the late twentieth century to the present. Contemporary art in and from East Asia is characterized by intersections between local and western(ized) cultural thinking and practice. This course will enable students to develop understandings of the varied conditions and trajectories of contemporary art’s development in East Asia as well as its relationships to the international art world. Attention will be given to diverse practices used in the production and showing of contemporary art in and from East Asia alongside its contested theoretical significances and social impact. That attention will look towards the wider contexts of traditional culture and aesthetics as well as the development of artistic modernisms and postmodernisms in East Asia. The course is framed specifically in relation to emerging debates associated with the terms ‘contemporaneity’ and ‘decoloniality’, which have sought to extend legitimacy to artistic theories and practices beyond those associated with internationally dominant western(ized) post-Enlightenment discourses. As such, it will encourage multiple critical interventions into international and localized perspectives on contemporary artistic theory and practice.
