Asia

In Xu Bing’s Cropland, part of the Series of Five Repetitions (1987-88), Chinese characters double as landscape depiction, creating a liminal work that resonates between word and image, representation and abstraction.

Hamaya Hiroshi’s Composition of December 1953 becomes a marker of US occupation and the climate of post-war Japan.

A look at the history of the modern house suggests that domestic living takes shape in the intermediate, and sometimes contentious, space between the aspirations of the dweller and architect.

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s work does not easily fit any neat categories, whether “Post-Minimalism,” “Fiber art” or “craft.” Considering Yakshi (1984) in MoMA’s reinstalled galleries, the essay highlights the influence of her cultural background on her methods and materials.

Following the opening event in which Xiao Lu’s shot at her own installation, Dialogue (1989), which caused the exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing to close, the work has paradoxically become both iconic and obscured. Initially conceived to address gendered violence, the piece was later absorbed into the history of violence of Tiananmen…

The Indian artist Sudhir Patwardhan is chiefly a painter in the realist tradition moving between images of the city, inhabitants, and milieu.

In this sardonic text, acclaimed Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed bitingly describes the conditions of filmmaking under the Ba’athist regime in Syria. Under strict control of the National Film Association that was founded in 1963, only one film was produced every year in the country.

This text is a reimagined transcription of a series of conversations between Prabha Sahasrabudhe and Indira Gandhi that took place in 1960 at the Westbury Hotel in New York City.The reason for their meetings was to discuss bringing an adaptation of MoMA’s Children’s Art Carnival to India.

Branislav Jakovljević, Claire Tancons, and Anoma Pieris consider how concepts related to self-representation and performativity not only generate sites of resistance, but also recast our perspective on established discourses of the national, ethnic, diasporic, and racial.

Mulk Raj Anand is perhaps best remembered as a cultural critic, writer, philosopher, and patron of the arts. But Rashmi Viswanathan turns her attention to his lesser known initiative to establish India’s First Triennale of Contemporary World Art in 1968. This essay explores Anand’s optimistic use of the triennale to shift international cultural relations and…

Riyaz Tayyibji considers the little-known architectural collaborations of Mahatma Gandhi, charismatic leader of the Indian freedom movement, in light of discourses of modern architecture. Weaving in discussions of phenomenology, material, and a discipline of privacy, the essay explores aspects of Gandhi’s philosophical and political thinking that propose a notion of the modern with an ethical and spiritual underpinning for 20th century architectural practice.

Cultural theorist Mieke Bal discusses her writing devoted to Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays, multi-dimensional artworks that draw from different cinematic technologies and disparate repositories of images.