Review: Asian Art and Its Discontents

Reviewed Work(s): Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century by Vishakha N.

Desai: What's the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context by Jan
Mrázek and Morgan Pitelka
Review by: Nora A. Taylor
Source: The Journal of Asian Studies , May, 2009, Vol. 68, No. 2 (May, 2009), pp. 573-577
Published by: Association for Asian Studies

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20619739

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Association for Asian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Journal of Asian Studies

This content downloaded from

141.20.217.74 on Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:55:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 68, No. 2 (May) 2009: 573-582.
? 2009 The Association for Asian Studies, Inc.

Review Essays

ASIA: COMPARATIVE AND TRANSNATIONAL

Asian Art and Its Discontents

Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Vishakha N.

Desai. Williamstown, M.A.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute,
2007. xiii, 253 pp. $24.95 (paper)

What's the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context.
Edited by Jan Mr?zek and Morgan Pitelka. Honolulu: University
of Hawai'i Press, 2008. 313 pp. $58.00 (cloth).
doi:10.1017/S0021911809000710

Every year or so, it seems, at least since I started graduate study in Southeast
Asian art in the late 1980s, a conference on Asian Art is held somewhere in the
world that asks the question, in some form or another: Why is modern Asian art
not recognized as a field of scholarly research? Starting in 1991 with the pioneer
ing "Modernism and Post-Modernism in Asian Art" at Australian National Uni
versity in Canberra, the list includes, among others, a forum at the Asian Art
Museum in San Francisco in 1998 titled "What Is the Place of Contemporary
Art in an Asian Art Museum?" followed by "Our Modernities" in 2004 at the
Asian Research Institute in Singapore, "Modernism and Its Discontents" at
Columbia University in May 2007, and, most recently, "What Is the Mission of
Asian Art Curators in the Age of Globalization?" at the Guggenheim Museum
in New York in September 2007. Everyone appears to have a bone to pick
with the way in which and about which Asian art history has been written, exhib
ited, and studied. The "Asian Art History in the 21st Century" conference orga
nized in 2006 by Vishakha Desai, president of the Asia Society, at the Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is no exception.
Although the conference did not begin with an interrogation, it did question
the usefulness of the category of "Asian art" in todays world (p. ix). Considering
that some seventeen years passed since the Canberra conference and this one, it
would appear that we either have not gotten very far in recognizing modern Asian
art, or there still remain some fundamental issues in the field of Asian art history,
or indeed, art history period, that have not been resolved.
These two publications are not so ambitious and groundbreaking as to set the
record straight once and for all, and they may appear to be simply two additional
entries in the growing literature on Asian art historical research, but they are
573

This content downloaded from

141.20.217.74 on Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:55:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 574 The Journal of Asian Studies

worth considering because, in a way, they represent two opposing views on how
to remedy the "Asian gap" or the lack of proper representation of Asian artists
and Asian art histories in Western art institutions.
Vishakha Desai's volume takes a historiographic approach by looking back and
tracing some of the sources for these problems (see the articles by Frederick
M. Asher and Nancy S. Steinhardt). The contributions also take a broader per
spective on the field by including the most common site for Western audiences
to encounter Asian art?the museum (see the articles by Saloni Mathur and
Kavita Singh and by Alexandra Monroe)?and expands the definition of Asia to
include Asian America (see the article by Melissa Chiu). The volume might be
seen as taking stock of where the problem lies and providing alternative
methods for remedying it. It does not radically rethink the ways in which art
history has been written; on the contrary, in my opinion, it readily accepts
certain art historical conventions such as chronology, canons, and museums and
simply provides new ways of looking at what can be seen as standard art historical
practice. This is not surprising considering that the conference was not only held
at a very prominent institute of art historical research (the Clark Art Institute at
Williams College) and organized by another, if not the most, prestigious institution
for exhibiting Asian art in the United States (the Asia Society in New York).
Desai's introduction seems to hesitate between embracing innovative ways of
writing art history and clinging to the old standards. For example, at the end of
her introduction, she laments the lack of rigorous language training in the "old"
school of art history and urges a preservation of the past before it disappears in
the grips of Asia's rapid growth. "The unprecedented pace of economic growth
and urbanization in China, India, and other Asian countries leaves one with a
troubling feeling that the unquestioning race for the fastest growing GDP,
these great millennial cultures are losing their sense of their rich past" (p. xiii).
To end an introduction to a volume on Asian art history in the twenty-first
century with a call to return to the past makes sense from the perspective of
an American institution aimed at raising funds for Asian culture. But it also has
a curious nostalgic ring to it, one that many critics of "first-world" development
organizations find problematic in their attitudes toward "third-world" nations.
I am thinking in particular of Geeta Kapur's discussion of the World Bank view
of Asia (When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in
India [New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2000]) and Saloni Mathur's notion of the
McGuggenheimization of Asia ("Museums and Globalization," Anthropological
Quarterly 78, no. 3 [Summer 2005]: 697-708). To call for a return to the past
almost denies Asian art history its future. Although Desai would balk at this con
notation, the fact that she raises the idea at all reflects her position as the presi
dent of an American institution rather than one that is located in Asia. In other
words, rather than alleviate the problem of imbalance in the field of Asian art, as
many of these conferences have attempted to do, in my view, she further compli
cates it. Asian art, then according to Desai, should now focus on the past and
museums should expand their collections of ancient art to fend off a possible
"Asian wave" or buying frenzy of works contemporary Asian artists, perhaps in
case the whole system collapses or the world, indeed, tilts too far the other way.

This content downloaded from

141.20.217.74 on Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:55:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Review Essays?Asia: Comparative and Transnational 575

The contributors to this volume do not necessarily share this view. The intro
duction notwithstanding, the strength of the volume lies in the quality of the
essays within. The conference gathered an "A list" of Asian art historians, all of
whom teach or hold positions at prestigious institutions (Cornell, Yale, Prince
ton). One may wonder what happened to the view from the margins, where
the field of Asian art history began. While this may compound the problem of
adequately reflecting the state of the field, two essays stand out as reflecting
the view from the "outside," or the ways in which art histories in the region chal
lenge our own theories of art historical practice. The essay by Saloni Mathur and
Kavita Singh, "Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in an Age of Reli
gious Revivalism" (p. 149), reverses the paradigm of the museum as temple in
discussing a case in which a temple in India became a museum. In their view,
their study of the return of objects from a museum to a temple illustrates how
museums need not necessarily be the final resting places for artifacts. Their dis
cussion complements nicely the arguments made by John Clark in his article for
the volume, "Histories of the Asian 'New': Biennales and Contemporary Asian
Art" (p. 229). In his essay, Clark discusses the transnational circulation of art
works of a global scale that calls into question the very nature of the "local."
Art works are made in one part of the world and shown in another challenging
the concepts of art patronage articulated by art historians of premodern
Europe that relied on local economies of taste. Both essays, in my view, point
at some of the inadequacies of art history in accounting for objects that transcend
the usual categories of time and place.
Jan Mr?zek and Morgan Pitelka's volume uses the metaphor of "wrapping
and unwrapping" art to unravel the dichotomies of discourses about art in the
East and West (p. 2). The authors aim to rectify what they see as a "gap"
between the ways in which Asian art has been exhibited and its original cultural
context of production and use. They take Stanley O'Connor's 1983 essay on con
noisseurship in the jungles of Borneo as their starting point to challenge Western
hegemonies of art historical practice. Rather than reviewing the canon or the lit
erature, in the way the Desai volume does, this volume dives right into the
subject matter at hand, so to speak, and presents a series of "ethnographies" of
art objects from Japan to Cambodia to Sumba and Bali. Each author presents
ways in which art objects do not perform in the ways in which they appear to,
but rather, they "act" in different ways depending on the needs of their audience.
This is not a radically new concept and resembles the critique of the ways in
which museums and art history books have removed works of art from their
"natural" contexts and distanced the viewer from their original usage. The
premise of the book, however, is not to argue for "authenticity." On the contrary,
it aims to challenge some of the binary oppositions of old and new, modern and
traditional, art and artifact, by blurring the boundaries between those categories
and presenting cases in which art objects cannot be classified according to either
of them.
Like the Desai volume, the essays originated in a conference?in this case, a
panel at the 2001 Association for Asian Studies meetings. The editors, however,
took the time to write a more extensive introduction and conclusion and invited

This content downloaded from

141.20.217.74 on Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:55:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
576 The Journal of Asian Studies

the authors to substantially revise their contributions. The result is that, unlike
the Desai volume, most essays speak to one another and cross-reference each
other. Each essay challenges the category of an Asian art work as an "object"
and explores the ways in which they are objectified and categorized both
locally and internationally by museum curators and art historians. Topics
include the lives of objects and the ways in which they are experienced by
local audiences, emulating scholars such as Stanley O'Connor (Kaja McGowan)
and Janet Hoskins (Lene Pedersen), herself a contributor revisiting an old
topic. While many of these essays remain within the realm of ethnography or
anthropological approaches to art, Ashley Thompson's struck me as particularly
antidisciplinary and a much more poignant commentary on the poor state of
art historical methodologies. In examining the intimate connections between sta
tuary portraits of rulers and religious practices, Thompson blurs the distinction
between what is human and what is divine. More than any other contribution,
Thompson's truly questions the use of art mentioned in the title of the volume
rather than seeking answers. Instead of exploring possible interpretations, in
other words, over the image of the king, she questions the utility of such an
interpretation.
The Desai volume could have made better use of its vantage point to
measure the field of Asian art history and to question the utility of questioning
the discipline. The Mr?zek and Pitelka volume makes a better display of the
various ways in which Asian Art can be discussed without resorting to cliches
and stereotypical assumptions about the problem of reinserting Asia into the cat
egory of Art history. It goes straight to questioning the art equation of the
formula. But, I wonder, if there could not be an avenue for paving the way for
alternative modes of art historical writing that are not so "on the defensive"
and self-analytical. Both volumes claim to be entering new territory, and I will
not dispute that they have presented innovative case studies, explored new
areas of research from the region, but I may remind the reader, if I may, that
the ground in the field was broken long ago by John Clark's edited volume Mod
ernity in Asian Art (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 1993). Furthermore, the recent
publication of the Asia Research Institute Conference proceedings offers a com
parative vantage point in presenting new discourses in art history from Asia (John
Clark, Maurizio Peleggi, and T. K. Sabapathy, eds., Eye of the Beholder: Recep
tion, Audience and Practice of Modern Asia Art [Sydney: Wild Peony Press,
2006]). In that volume, the writers simply move on from the binary oppositions
of East and West, old and new, traditional and modern, and present studies of
different artists and art movements regardless of how one chooses to categorize
them. However, it still does not solve the problem of the perpetual ghettoization
of Asian art in general art historical discourse. As long as we continue to address
Asian art separately, Asian art will be treated as an "other" art history. But, for
now, I highly recommend readers to consider these two volumes and others men
tioned in this essay as evidence not only of the tremendous growth in the field of
Asian art in general and modern Asian art in particular, but also of the sheer
variety of approaches and methodologies to the field. This, the rich array of art
forms and available art historical discourses surrounding Asian art, more than

This content downloaded from

141.20.217.74 on Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:55:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Review Essays?Japan 577

anything, is testimony to the progress in thinking and rewriting the field and
future of Asian art history in North America, out of the margins and into the
mainstream.

Nora A. Taylor
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

JAPAN

Social Capital in Japans Post-Bubble Economy

Accelerating Japans Economic Growth: Resolving Japans Growth Con

troversy. By F. Gerard Adams, Lawrence R. Klein, Yuzo Kumasaka, and
Akihito Shinozaki. New York: Roudedge, 2008. xviii, 182 pp. $150.00
(cloth).

Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis under Communitarian

Capitalism. By Marie Anchordoguy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2005. xii, 257 pp. $41.95 (cloth).

The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment

Relations in Japan and the United States. By Sanford M. Jacoby. Prince
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. xi, 216 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Japan Remodeled: How Government and Industry Are Reforming Japa

nese Capitalism. By Steven K. Vogel. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University
Press, 2006. 250 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Changing Japanese Capitalism: Societal Coordination and Institutional

Adjustment. By Michael A. Witt, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006. xiv, 225 pp. $101.00 (cloth).
doi:10.1017/S0021911809000722

There has been a flurry of publishing recently analyzing Japanese corpor

ations in the post-bubble economy and the extent to which change is or is not
happening and why. While the literature continues to expresses diverse views
on such time-honored themes as the role of the keiretsu and bureaucrats in
guiding corporate behavior, the five books under review shed a great deal of
light on the role of social capital and economic change in Japan. Although
many popular commentators continue to lament Japan s seeming intransigence
in the face of demographic, regional, and financial challenges, these titles
present a more nuanced picture. They show that Japans business model is
absorbing some of the components of corporate governance preferred by U.S.

This content downloaded from

141.20.217.74 on Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:55:53 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms