3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This seminar will examine a constellation of readings and moments in the history of Asian art since c. 1900 through the lens of the transnational. We’ll unpack this term and some of its relations including cosmopolitan, diaspora, and global, and then turn to several case studies of exchange, contact, engagement across geographies in the long 20th century. These include: pan-Asian aesthetics as discussed in India-Japan exchanges in the 1910s, Chinese artists who study and live in Paris in the 1920s and (sometimes) return to China, the concept of “international contemporaneity” as articulated in 1960s Japanese art, India’s engagement with internationalism and “indigenism” in the 1960s, Japan–US interfaces in the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist art and art histories in India in the 1970s and 1980s, the “East Village” in Beijing and NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Chinese avant-garde in a post-Maoist context.