Asian Art Now

Overview

Asian Art Now surveys the explosion of contemporary art produced across Asia and its diaspora since the 1990s, a period the book frames as a turning point driven by loosening political constraints and rapid economic growth in several countries. Rather than organizing its subject by nation, the book groups artists around shared preoccupations: how they position their work against inherited traditions, how they respond to state power and social change, and how they metabolize consumer culture and city life into visual form.

The artist roster spans generations and geographies, pairing internationally recognized figures with lesser-known practitioners working in Indonesia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Vietnam, and beyond. The range of media is equally broad, taking in calligraphy and painting alongside photography, sculpture, performance, video, and net-based work, reflecting an art scene the book presents as too varied for any single style or national label to contain.

Built around thematic essays and extensive illustration, the volume functions as both a critical argument about a specific historical moment in art-making and a browsable reference, closing with biographical notes on the artists it covers.

A Survey at the Intersection of Art and Geopolitics

The book's organizing premise treats contemporary Asian art as inseparable from the political and economic conditions that produced it. Chiu positions works that grapple with censorship, rapid urbanization, and shifting relationships to the state not as regional curiosities but as central to understanding global contemporary art of the period. That framing places the volume within a broader effort, gaining momentum in museums and art history through the 2000s, to decenter Euro-American narratives of what counts as significant contemporary practice.

The book's attention to consumerism and pop culture also situates it within debates over how art absorbs and critiques mass media and commercial imagery, a tension recurring across the artists it profiles regardless of national context. By tying formal and thematic analysis to specific historical circumstances in each country represented, the book reads as much as a document of a particular art-historical juncture as a catalog of individual careers.

Why Asian Art Now Has Been Challenged

Visual depictions of the body have been the focus of objection, arising from the book's reproduction of performance, sculpture, and photographic works that include nudity or provocative imagery as part of their artistic argument. Because the volume functions as an illustrated survey rather than a text-driven analysis, its images are encountered directly rather than filtered through extensive written framing, which has made specific reproductions a point of concern for those reviewing its inclusion in library and school collections. The objections tend to center on individual plates rather than the book's overall critical purpose. Within the collections tracked here, the title has been the subject of formal challenge activity in 1 state and 1 school district.