A Regional Contemporary

The first critical account of the enormous upsurge in cultural expression across Asian countries from 1979–2008, and the new possibilities it presented for the aesthetic and cultural re-imagining of a “unified” contemporary Asia.

Biennial-style art exhibitions. New discourses in modern and contemporary art. The production and circulation of increasingly debordered popular culture. A Regional Contemporary by C. J. W.-L. Wee is an investigative account of the dramatic increase in cultural expression in Asia from 1979 to 2008, with the 1990s as the focal point of this period. The so-called East Asian miracle, Wee argues, projected a fictive but shared contemporary regional identity onto Northeast and Southeast Asia, collectively taken as East Asia. The new cultural explosion was notably enabled by expanded capitalist energies that reached a level critical enough to reposition the region’s postcolonial and Cold War–era nationalisms, and this book examines the resulting implications.

A sophisticated and compelling study, A Regional Contemporary is the first to examine the conjunction of high and popular culture in the region. Moreover, Wee reveals how the various cultural formations of this regional contemporary were able to traverse—if not overcome—uneven national economies, the memory of Japanese empire, and the geopolitical rifts of post–Cold War nationalisms. While foregrounding new cultural expression, Wee simultaneously examines how novel economic conditions bolstered a more confident questioning of Western modernity’s dominance and enhanced the capacity for regional dialogue in the bid to overcome colonial-era legacies—even as those legacies were being absorbed into the region[VH1] .
 [VH1]For the designer: if space is tight on the back, this can be deleted.Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Regional Contemporary
1. “We Asians” in Exhibitions—Under Construction
2. Showcasing Tradition-in-the-Contemporary and a Post-Exotic Urban Modern
3. Cultural Infrastructure and the “Mastery of Knowledge”
4. Debordering Hong Kong Cinema and Commonality/Difference in Urban Spaces
5. J-Pop, K-Pop, and the Partial Negotiation of the National Coda: Contemporary China and Asia
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index“Wee's innovative book examines regional infrastructure, the flow of high art and popular culture, and the hyper-acceleration produced by the region's embrace of capitalism. It is distinctive for its thorough methodology and extensive empirical analysis.”
—Iftikhar Dadi, John H. Burris Professor of History of Art, Cornell University
 
“A remarkably instructive inquiry into the changing creative culture in Asia. Relating the ‘new’ of the region with the ‘contemporary’ of the mediatized milieu, it astutely marks the hectic convergence called the ‘regional contemporary.’”
—Patrick Flores, Professor of Art Studies, University of the Philippines; Chief Curator, National Gallery SingaporeC. J. W.-L. Wee is Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern and The Asian Modern and a coeditor of Contesting Performance.