Book Review: Asian Art Nowby Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio from The Monacelli Press

Of course I'm highly qualified to evaluate a book about Asian art, because of my rich Asian heritage and the many decades I've spent traveling and intensively studying the art of China, India, Japan and so forth.

cough! cough!

OK, I wanted to review this book because I am almost completely bereft of any knowledge or understanding of contemporary Asian art. Yeah, I've got that Murakami guy down cold. Yoshitomo Nara's little kid giving me the finger from a diving board still makes me chuckle. And that guy who works with incense ash and dresses up in a meat suit has made a big impact on my life. But if you want to know more from me -- well, right now I'm drawing a blank.

In my defense I'd suggest that attempting to define the category "Asian Art" makes almost as much sense as attempting to define the category "Art from Earth."

Why attempt to define art by continent? The cultures on any given hunk of land are likely to be so diverse as to demand a breakdown that recognizes their divisions.

But in this case I'd argue that it's justified because of the centuries we've spent focusing on Western Art -- a category defined by an entire friggin' hemisphere. If that ever made sense at all it could only have been in a very small, painfully isolated world.

Well, the boundaries are gone and the world keeps growing. All these categories are breaking down in an information slushpile that we're slowly picking through. It's like a gargantuan thrift store -- YAY!!! As I gaze into my crystal ball I see a future in which categories we once defined as Western Art, European Art, Asian Art, and even Abstract Art and Painting and Sculpture, are re-sorted according to rubrics we're only now beginning to glimpse.

With this in mind if you're like me you need to own a copy of Asian Art Now, and hope to whatever deities you worship that they keep publishing as Asian Art Now 2, Asian Art Now 3, and so forth, hopefully once a year. Because if they don't this will quickly become Asian Art Then.

The reason is that Asian Art Now will help you get up-to-speed on much of the art that hasn't crossed your eyes yet through the pages of Art in America, Art Forum, Modern Painters and whatever other trade papers you subscribe to. It's fairly up-to-the-minute, and those crazy Asian artists keep pumping it out.

Chiu and Genocchio have done a shrewd job of identifying key landmarks in a teeming landscape of creative effort, and then presenting their information in clear language that's to the point, not terribly indulgent in conjecture, and sets you up for further, more intensive study on the artists they present.

The authors wisely lead off with a historical chapter that will remind you of artists nobody bothered teaching us about in the '80's, back when the world was small. Sure, there's Yoko, but there's also Sekine Nobo, Lee Ufan, Tanaka Atsuko (subject of an article in Art in America some years back), Kazuo Shiraga, Shozo Shimamoto, Li Keran -- a continent of names that never made it into my understanding of art history.

Then it's off to the races with chapters titled Politics Society and the State, Asian Pop Consumerism and Stereotypes, and Urban Nature.

The pages of this mid-sized book are balanced fairly evenly between text and clear, bright full-color images, often two or three to the page. The occasional full-page image is sadly a bit scarce, but that's understandable in a volume of 255 pages that attempts to cover such a broad subject.

The authors wrap with A Glimpse into the Future, one which I hope holds many more editions in a series.

Asian Art Now earns three-and-a-half out of five Nara-Girls-Flipping-The-Bird for being a brisk, colorful overview of a universe of creative expression that seems poised to surround and absorb us in a world of evaporating boundaries and, let's hope, of increasing reconciliation.

This would be an obvious candidate as one of several text books rounding out a college overview course on Contemporary Asian Art.

Sphere: Related Content