Talk by Professor John Clark, Emeritus Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney
Mapping routes from the ‘Asian Modern’ to the 'Asian Contemporary' in India and Korea mapped the onset of the ‘contemporary’ in two different Asian art contexts to see how this depends on, or is articulated by, prior historical experience of the ‘modern.’ The advent of the contemporary varies through sequential phases or asynchronous modalities: in the causal sequences of modern and contemporary art outside Euramerica, place comes before time.
Two trajectories mark the transition from the ‘modern’ to the ‘contemporary.’ John Clark examined the trajectory from expressive figuration into visual abstraction of ‘national,’ or ‘our’ visual values, looking at the diagrammatic for K C S Paniker and the function of marking for Park Seo-bo.
He examined elsewhere the second major transition from a conceptualisation into a composition of figuratively designated mytho-themes, sometimes with broken or aleatoric narratives.
John Clark is Emeritus Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney. His book Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art of the 1980s and 1990s, Power Publications, Sydney, 2010, won the Best Art Book Prize of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand in 2011. His most recent book is Modernities of Japanese Art, Brill, Leiden, 2013. He is currently working on a two-volume study 'The Asian Modern, 1850s – 1990s.’
Mapping Asia is an unfolding publication, exhibition, and programme series presented by Asia Art Archive, that explores multiple vantage points from which to consider Asia, looking beyond inherited boundaries, histories, and political and economic systems to entanglements and connections across time, sites, and geographies.
