In the Eye of the Beholder: Reception and Audience for Modern Asian Art

This book interrogates the relationship between different kinds of modern art and different kinds of cultural contexts in Asian and Pacific countries. The thirteen essays examines how the modern is formed by artists in relation to other traditions and practices ( Western or folk ), the audience and modern art institutions, and the burgeoning conceptions of the national as deployed by the post-colonial state. There are essays on the art codes of Maori folk designs applied to buildings, on academy painting in nineteenth-century Indonesia and the Philippines, on contemporary video and performance art from China, on Cambodian street signage, and on the Asia Pacific Triennale. The methodologies applied are broad, from anthropology and art history to cultural studies, and the perspectives include those of academics, curators, and new media theorists. In the Eye of the Beholder contributes a diverse understanding of where modern and contemporary Asian art is now situated.