Modern East Asian Art in a Global Contex

East Asian art occupies a privileged position with histories of non-Western modern art. The region has encompassed both colonial nation states and colonized territories that recognized institutional modern art as a site for negotiating regional and international power relations. At the same time, artists from the region also recognized modernism as a paradigm to challenge local political realities and cultural essentialisms.

This course introduces the history of Modern and Contemporary Art in China, Japan, and Korea through a comparative, Global Asias lens to investigate the preconceptions of modernity and art history revealed by the East Asian context. Following a largely chronological approach from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, we will consider questions including: What role did art play in the establishment of "modern" nations in East Asia? How did the European concept and institutional forms of "fine art" shift cultural production in the region? What cultural, racial, and gendered hierarchies did "modern art" in the region challenge or reinscribe? How did colonialism, wartime regimes, and Cold War politics influence the dominant forms of local artistic production and the recognition of East Asian artists abroad? How does post-WWII art from the region and from the Asian diaspora confirm or challenge the chronologies of contemporary art's "globalization" that pose 1989 as a point of origin? And how can we rethink the boundaries and expectations of the framework of “Modern East Asian Art” today?