Contemporary Asian Art resources

Some great sources from Art Radar Asia:

e-fluxhttp://www.e-flux.com – A basic yet comprehensive list of new exhibitions and announcements in the art world. Its journal, which has been published online since November 2008, raises questions about contemporary art issues.

Art AsiaPacifichttp://www.aapmag.com – One of my favorite periodicals: it covers the Middle East and Central Asia as well as East Asia. AAP also has articles that describe the major successes and progressions of major Asian artists and movements, which makes it especially helpful for research—for example, in the last issue, Zhang Huan and Roberto Chabet were mentioned.

ArtRadarAsiahttp://artradarasia.wordpress.com – As a student, I appreciate ArtRadarAsia for its broad range of topics covering all of the Asian art world. It’s an excellent resource for finding a paper topic or finding an overview of a movement or a specific area of Asia.

New York Times exhibition reviewshttp://www.nytimes.com – The New York Times art critics often review Asian art shows in the New York area. I would especially recommend reading reviews by Holland Cotter because they contain valuable specialist information on Asian art.

Asia Art Archivehttp://www.aaa.org.hk – A library of contemporary Asian art resources in Hong Kong which contains reference materials, exhibition catalogues, periodicals, pamphlets, exhibition invitations, newspaper articles, among other things. It’s comprehensive (it has over 25,000 catalogued materials), especially for East and Southeast Asia, and its catalogue is viewable online. It also has a listing of special events related to contemporary Asian art.

Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China: This is my favorite book about the development of contemporary Chinese art. Wu Hung, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese contemporary art, wrote this book as a catalog for Cancelled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China, a 2000 show at Chicago’s Smart Museum. It explains the reconstruction of Song Dong’s installation Father and Son in the Ancestral Temple, which had originally been shown in the 1998 exhibition It’s Me, which was shut down by the Chinese government. It also lists all the exhibitions that were shut down or censored in the 1990s.

Emerging Japanese artists resources

Guides to Galleries/Exhibitions
Great list of collectors, dealers in NY

Assembly Language – Reference list of Tokyo art gallery spaces.

Directory of museums in Japan
Tokyo Galleries, Art Market
ArtNews.com exhibitions Tokyo
Japan Times art exhibition listings:
Artist-in-residence program Tokyo
Tokyo Visualist – Book, Curators, Artists

Galleries:
AZITO: online gallery specializing in Japanese contemporary art
Mizuma Art Gallery

Journals
Web directory of journals, organizations and events.
Tokyo Art Beat – Art e-Journal

Artnet.com – Tokyo art scene reviews
Kyoto Art Center critical journal.
Monthly Japanese art scene e-journal.

Individual Articles/Reviews/Reports:
Frieze Magazine – Tokyo – 2007
Report on 101TOKYO CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR 2009
Brooklyn Rail – Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York
Emerging Artists from Japan

Edan Corkill reviews for Japan Times:
The ins and outs of competitive art shows
Art world fortunes linked to the ‘noughty’ economy
Murakami’s influence continues to prevail
The parallel world of art associations
Asian art ‘madness’ a la mode
This ‘Garden of Painting’ needs to be perennial

“The logical question, then, is why not make an exhibition on the period 1995-2010, and really explore what it was all about?

The answer Shima gave was disappointing. Yes, he wanted to do that. No, he didn’t because — “for one thing” — one of the prominent figures of the period, Takashi Murakami, refused to allow his work to be included. (In the past, Murakami has told me that he doesn’t want his work included in any group shows in Japan.) The other reason Shima gave was that the other artists wanted to show new work, as opposed to work dating back to the late-1990s.

Shima’s response was to narrow his focus to the ’00s — a period where the absence of Murakami would seem less like a gaping omission. At the same time, though, he surrendered the chance to tell us his interpretation of the period dating back to 1995…..