Conference paper
Coordinating Contemporary Asia in Art Exhibitions
The focus here is on a selection of key representative exhibitions in the 1990s in which New Asia
and its modern and contemporary art were curated into “being”: the 3rd Asian Art Show, Fukuoka
(1989) and the 4th Asian Art Show, Fukuoka: Realism as an Attitude (1994); “Contemporary
Art in Asia: Traditions/Tensions” (1996); and the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary
Art, Brisbane, Australia (1996). Te exhibitions in particular address the questions of tradition
and cultural change in recent contemporary art. But while, expectedly, the legacy of colonialism
persisted, the overall thrust was to set art in the everyday context of rapid modernization and
urbanization—particularly in the wake of Cold War-era nation building and the emergence of the
so-called East Asian Miracle economies of Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—
and to examine the art enabled by the weakening of modernism and its preoccupation with the formal characteristics of artwork and separation from daily life.