Why Talk About Asian Contemporary Art Now?
 
“Asian contemporary art” does not refer to a single shared style or aesthetic. Korea, China, Japan, and the countries of Southeast Asia each have distinct histories, political and social conditions, art institutions, and markets.
 
In this essay, Asian contemporary art refers to a field of contemporary art produced across these different regions and interconnected through museums, biennials, markets, discourses, institutions, and international networks.
 
The purpose of discussing Asian art, therefore, is not to group different countries and cultures under a single notion of “Asian identity.” Rather, it is to look at Korean contemporary art not only from within the category of “Korean art,” but within the changing coordinates of Asian and global art, in order to understand its current position and future possibilities.
 
One important narrative through which modern and contemporary art in Asia has long been explained concerns how different regions received and transformed Western modernism and contemporary art.
 
Today, however, the direction of the question needs to change.
 
The question is no longer what Asia received, but what it has produced—and what it is producing now.
 
This provides a new starting point for understanding Asian contemporary art today.
 
 
 
Orientalism and Three Questions
 
In 1978, Edward W. Said published 《Orientalism》, examining how the West had historically viewed, represented, described, and constructed the “Orient” as an object of knowledge.
 
Said’s concern was not simply cultural prejudice or a fascination with the exotic.
 
Who is looking at whom? Who has the authority to name and classify? And how do such classifications determine the way their subjects are understood?
 
For Said, Orientalism concerned the structures of knowledge and power formed through the Western representation and interpretation of the Orient.
 
His theory was subsequently criticized for reducing complex relationships to an overly simple binary between “West” and “East,” and for not sufficiently accounting for the differences among diverse regions and societies or their active roles in cultural production.
 
Yet the fundamental questions remain important: Who explains? Who classifies? And through what frameworks is the world understood?
 
Nearly half a century after the publication of Said’s book, the actual geography of the art world has changed dramatically. Asian artists can no longer be adequately described as peripheral producers who simply absorb Western contemporary art. Contemporary art is being produced in Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, and many other cities, while artists from across Asia are active in museums, biennials, galleries, and markets around the world.
 
This raises another question.
 
Has the way the world views and classifies art changed as much as the reality of art itself?
 
Terms such as “Asian Art,” “Chinese Art,” “Japanese Art,” and “Korean Art” remain widely used. These categories are not inherently Orientalist. Historical, social, and regional contexts remain important conditions for understanding art.
 
The problem begins when regional identity ceases to be one interpretive condition among many and instead becomes the primary and fixed framework through which a work is understood.
 
 
This three-part series examines the issue in three stages.
 
Part I looks at the actual geography of Asian art today. Part II examines the frameworks and systems of classification through which the international art world views this changed reality, as well as the possibility that Asian art worlds themselves reproduce particular forms of “Asianness.” Part III considers what Korean contemporary art needs to produce, how it should document and interpret that production, and how it can connect it to the wider world.

 
The first step, then, is to look at the reality on the ground.

 
From One Center to Multiple Centers
 
Until the late twentieth century, Japan occupied a relatively advanced position in the development of modern and contemporary art in Asia. In addition to its accumulation of postwar artistic practices, Japan established museums, collections, research, publishing, and other institutional foundations earlier than many other Asian countries.
 
From the 2000s onward, China’s rapid economic growth and the expansion of its art market significantly altered the geography of Asian art. Hong Kong also developed into a major hub connecting Asian and global art markets as international auction houses, global galleries, and art fairs became concentrated in the city.
 
The situation today, however, is changing again.
 
Markets and capital, artists and exhibitions, museums and biennials, research and discourse, international circulation and networks are no longer concentrated in a single country or city.
 
One center is not simply being replaced by another. Multiple centers with different functions are operating simultaneously.
 
The purpose of comparing China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Southeast Asia, and Korea is therefore not to determine which region is ahead of the others.
 
What matters is to understand what each region produces and what role it plays within the current structure of Asian contemporary art.
 
 
 
China: Scale and the Base of Artistic Production
 
China’s greatest strength lies in the scale of its market and capital, together with its vast base for artistic production.
 
Centered on Beijing and Shanghai, China has developed extensive networks of galleries, museums, auction houses, and collectors. Since the 1990s, Chinese contemporary art has established a powerful international presence through Political Pop, Cynical Realism, and a wide range of experimental practices.
 
In 2025, China accounted for 14 percent of global art-market sales, remaining the world’s third-largest art market after the United States and the United Kingdom. It continues to be one of the major forces in the global art market.
 
Market size, however, does not automatically translate into cultural influence in contemporary art. Changes in the economic environment, political regulation, and conditions of artistic expression also affect the domestic and international activities of the Chinese art world.
 
Even so, scale, capital, and a vast base for artistic production remain the clearest sources of China’s strength today.
 
 
 
Hong Kong: International Circulation and Cultural Connectivity
 
Hong Kong has long functioned as a gateway connecting Asian and global art markets.
 
Its concentration of international auction houses, global galleries, and Art Basel Hong Kong has established the city as a key hub for the circulation of art in Asia.
 
More recently, its cultural infrastructure has also been strengthened.
 
M+ positions itself as an institution that collects and researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture from a perspective rooted in Asia yet global in scope. This reflects Hong Kong’s active use of its geographical and cultural position connecting mainland China, Asia, and the wider world.
 
Hong Kong’s importance today therefore extends beyond the buying and selling of art.
 
It functions as an international platform connecting markets and institutions, Asia and the world.
 
This remains one of the city’s most important roles.
 
 
 
Japan: History and Accumulation
 
Japan’s greatest asset is the long accumulation of modern and contemporary art history and the institutional foundations that support it.
 
Gutai and Mono-ha, as well as Neo-Pop and Superflat, have become established parts of global modern and contemporary art history, while artists including Yayoi Kusama, Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, and Hiroshi Sugimoto have secured lasting international positions.
 
Japan’s strength, however, does not lie solely in the success of individual artists.
 
Museum collections, exhibition records, research, publishing, conservation, and archives have been built up over decades. This provides a foundation through which individual artists and artistic movements can be continually researched, reassessed, and situated within art history.
 
It would be difficult today to describe Japan as the single center of Asian art.
 
Nevertheless, its accumulated capacity to document, research, and historicize art remains one of the most important strengths of the Japanese art world.
 
 
 
Singapore and Southeast Asia: Connectivity and New Modes of Practice
 
Singapore has developed into an important art hub by combining cultural policy, finance, English-language international networks, and its geographical position within Southeast Asia.
 
Museums, biennials, international art fairs, and cultural policies have created the foundations for Singapore to function as a platform connecting Southeast Asia with the international art world.
 
At the same time, diverse forms of contemporary art have developed across Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other parts of Southeast Asia, each shaped by distinct historical and social conditions.
 
Some artists and collectives in the region have connected artistic practice with issues such as colonialism, dictatorship, democratization, migration, ecology, and local communities, while experimenting with modes of artistic production different from established market- and institution-centered systems.
 
A prominent example is the concept of lumbung introduced by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa at documenta fifteen in 2022. Derived from the Indonesian communal rice barn in which harvests are collectively stored and shared, lumbung extended ideas of collaboration, sharing, and the collective management of resources into the very structure of the exhibition.
 
The diverse art practices of Southeast Asia cannot, of course, be reduced to a single tendency.
 
What matters instead is that different social conditions across the region have generated experiments in the ways art is produced, relationships are formed, and cultural practices are organized.
 
 
 
Korea: A Complex Art Ecosystem
 
Korea has developed the foundations of its contemporary art through a different configuration from China, Japan, Hong Kong, or Singapore.
 
It does not possess a market on the scale of China, nor can it yet claim the same depth of accumulated research and archival infrastructure as Japan. Nor are international finance and circulation the central foundations of its art ecosystem in the way they are in Hong Kong or Singapore.
 
Instead, Korea has developed a relatively dense and interconnected ecosystem in which artists, museums, biennials, galleries, nonprofit and independent spaces, public funding, the market, and international networks have grown alongside one another.
 
Since the launch of the Gwangju Biennale in 1995, institutions and events including the Busan Biennale, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, public and private museums, commercial galleries, and alternative spaces have expanded the foundations for the production of Korean contemporary art at different levels.
 
The launch of Frieze Seoul in 2022 should also be understood in relation to this pre-existing ecosystem. When announcing its entry into Seoul, Frieze itself pointed to the city’s thriving creative community and art ecosystem as important factors.
 
Rather than suggesting that Frieze Seoul created the internationalization of Korean art, it is more accurate to say that the accumulated foundations of artistic production, institutions, the market, and international networks in Korea were among the conditions that made Frieze Seoul possible in the first place.
 
Korea’s strength does not lie in the overwhelming dominance of any single sector.
 
Its strength lies in the fact that artistic production, institutions, the market, independent practices, and international networks operate together within a relatively dense and interconnected ecosystem.
 
This complexity represents an important strength of Korean contemporary art.
 
Yet the density of an art ecosystem does not automatically translate into the capacity to produce and circulate discourse internationally. Compared with the pace of exhibitions and market activity, long-term research on artists and artworks, criticism, documentation and archives, as well as translation and international circulation, remain areas that need to be strengthened.
 
The next stage for Korean contemporary art is closely tied to this challenge.
 
 
 
Where Does Asian Art Stand Today?
 
Asian art today can no longer be adequately explained through a single center or a single ranking.
 
China has scale and a vast production base; Japan has the accumulation of history and research; Hong Kong has strength in international circulation and connectivity; and Singapore combines policy and networks. Across Southeast Asia, alternative modes of production and social relations continue to be explored, while Korea has developed a complex ecosystem in which artistic production, institutions, markets, and international networks operate together.
 
Asian contemporary art is no longer moving toward a single center. It is becoming a multipolar structure in which different centers perform different functions simultaneously.
 
Korea’s task, therefore, is not to declare itself the new center of Asia.
 
What matters is what we produce, how we document and interpret it, and how we connect it to the world.
 
And this is where the next question begins.
 
The reality of Asian art has changed dramatically. But have the global frameworks through which it is viewed and classified changed to the same extent?
 
If the geography of art has changed, the frameworks through which it is understood must also be reconsidered.
 

Is Asian contemporary art truly free from Orientalism?
 
 
 

References

Edward W. Said, 《Orientalism》, Pantheon Books, 1978.
John Clark, 《Modern Asian Art》, Craftsman House / University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998.
John Clark, 《Asian Modernities: Chinese and Thai Art Compared, 1980 to 1999》, Power Publications, 2010.
John Clark, Contemporary Asian Art at Biennales and Triennales: The 2005 Venice Biennale and Fukuoka Asian Triennale, the Sigg Collection, and the Yokohama and Guangzhou Triennales, caa.reviews, 2006.
Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner, eds., 《Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-Making》, ANU Press, 2014.
Reiko Tomii, 《Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan》, MIT Press, 2016.
Asia Art Archive, >The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on the Contemporary, Field Notes 01, 2012.
M+, About the Collection; M+ Collection.
ruangrupa / documenta fifteen, lumbung, 2022.
Frieze, Frieze Will Launch a New Fair in Seoul, 2021; Introducing Frieze Seoul 2022, 2022.
Art Basel & UBS, The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2026, Arts Economics, 2026.

Jay Jongho Kim graduated from the Department of Art Theory at Hongik University and earned his master's degree in Art Planning from the same university. From 1996 to 2006, he worked as a curator at Gallery Seomi, planning director at CAIS Gallery, head of the curatorial research team at Art Center Nabi, director at Gallery Hyundai, and curator at Gana New York.

From 2008 to 2017, he served as the executive director of Doosan Gallery Seoul & New York and Doosan Residency New York, introducing Korean contemporary artists to the local scene in New York. After returning to Korea in 2017, he worked as an art consultant, conducting art education, collection consulting, and various art projects.

In 2021, he founded A Project Company and is currently running the platforms K-ARTNOW.COM and K-ARTIST.COM, which aim to promote Korean contemporary art on the global stage.