serious and pressing problem of what Asia is, investigating

its

Manet's Olympia. But the institutions do not bring them into re-historical roots as well as the present and going back to the pastlationship,with a contemporary understanding.

context to the presentation

I give you Dr. John Clark.

and that accounts

for, I think, the lack of historicalof the modern in many international

exhibitions.

John Clark : I'm going to provide some headlines

and allow

you, at your leisure, to look at some of the theoretical

We must accept that there is a very large difference

betweenissuesthe interest of curators and the interest of art historians and crit-which I've referred to in a very tentative way, but issues which

ics. If we accepted this difference of interest, we might find that

I've been observing seem to be in play in this field.

we are less in conflict than we have been in the past. The differ-

At the beginning of the paper, I summarized

ence, largely, is that if people don ' t come and see art works in

six positions fromwhich modernity and Asian art can be understood.
clared my own position to be somewherethat modernities are heterogeneous,

I have de-museums , the museum or the gallery would not function. For art

between four and five,historians and critics , on the other hand, the articulation of the ar-but in the Asian context they

were largely mapped by local art discourses.

I am not in favor of

metropolitan centrism and its analog, the post-colonial
The periphery exists and it is from the periphery

discourse .

that we must

guments about works, the positioning
and the problematics

in terms of other works,of the works are important, not the fact thatlarge numbers of people have come to see the exhibition.
an art discourse or an art historical discourse-centered

This iscriterion,

look at these problems. In fact , we must look at them to the ex-

which is frequently

in conflict with the presentationof smooth,tent that the center-periphery

agreeable , somehow"feel-good"international

distinction disappears.

Secondly , something which has not come up in this conference

situations

about

exchange .

so far, which is my fifth point, that we must see modernityin

The second part of my paper deals with the question of recep-

Asian art , however we construct it. Modernity;

tion of modern Asian art. Here, I have tried to make a distinction

it is not a natural concept. We must see it from a position of resis-

in a way which has appeared in anthropologicaltance. Europe in the 19th century , in most of Asia , was not a very

not really appeared in the literature to do with modern Asian art,

nice cultural continuum to come in contact with. And it is in reac-as yet. It is about the distinction

tion and resistance against that, at all levels , from the most local

received and function in circuits of exchange or circuits of recep-

to high elite culture , that one sees the developmenttion , at other-than-Asianis a constructionof modernity

in Asian art.
also be awarethat these constructions

are notprac-

between the sites comes downto.

purely intellectual ones. They do not exist in some neutral intellectual space, the reason being that there is an institutional

between sites, where things aresites and where the works go to , andwhat the pattern of the circulation

We should

literature , but has

It is very unlikely any of you have ever seen this picture. It
hangs in the presidential

palace in Java and was painted at sometice in defining modern Asian art which has become clear in thistime, we suppose, in the 1860s. It displays the capture of a rebel-

conference. The institutional

lious Javanese prince by a Dutch general.

practice is linked to the functions ofcertain institutions , the functionsof artists, the functions

works , the functions of sites of production

works of modernity in the 19th century done by a Javanese aris-and reception of art

tocrat painter called Raden Salleh called, The Capture of Prince

works , and the sites of storage and distribution.

In the last two

Diponegoro by General de Kock (c. 1860s).

cases , the function of the museum seems to overlap.
There is an institutional

It was almost certain that these two works would never beinterest in creating a notion of origin

and creating a notion of modernity. That interest is based on thekind of institution

It is one of the earlyof artwhich provides for resource flows, curatorial

placed in the same space. This is Semsar

Siahaan ' s Olympia,

Identity with Mother and Child, again a work of 1987 whichmakes a comment on Olympia. You can see the fascination withtime , art historical research in universities, and exhibition budgets

this tragic treason against Western academic

in galleries and public spaces. It can be doubted that, without theamongst many Asian artists. I am putting these works together

institutions

to legitimatize

suchresources,

artisticexchangewould be recognized as such.
of works are recognized

Nud e by Hyakutake

in certain kinds of contexts. This work

Kaneyuki

because it seems that one of the positions for modern Asian art , todistribute

It is also clear that these interests mean that only certain kindsof aroundpainting by Manetit outside Asia , is to say that there is contemporary

Asian art. Yes, there are contemporary

artists ; their art is inter-esting and relevant.

1881 was painted in

Of course , this entirely ignores the fact that there has been a

Rome . This is a similar work by Juan Luna, roughly speaking, at

modern contemporary

the same time , that would not have been brought together withtury. These paintings that we look at as old , have something to do

Morimura Yasumasa's

work Portrait (Twin) of 1988.

Asian art since the middle of the 19th cen-with European discourses

Morimura ' s work exists in a different space to Hyakutake's

be-imposed or transferredlike to position it in some post-colonial

or however wementality,

was actuallycause institutions exist. They have been founded and are resour-the contemporary

ced to put the work in a different space. Yet we know that thesetury. They existed under different conditions , which we don't re-works are in some kind of relationshipally want to engage with because they were largely connected

in terms of its cultural lo-

cation and that its reaction against the interim term of European
Academypainting , and its series of representations

gressed , played around with, by Morimura

art of Asia , and was modern in the 19th cen-with European cultural and political domination.

are trans-

The attempt to create a modernity around Asian art in terms ofin this work against

works by Semsar Siahaan is a deja vu. This continual deja vu as-166pect to the discovery of the "modern" and the discovery of thethe economic value, is not produced by a market which is already"contemporary" which ignores history is found in many recent

there or a patron who is already giving money to the artists. In-

exhibitions.
This work is by the Chinese artist, Liu Wei, called The New

deed, you could say that modern museum curators are fulfilling

Generation from 1992. In an important sense, the discovery ofthe "contemporary" by the institutions who were presenting yesterday at this symposium, corresponds to a kind of exoticizing of
the present as a way of relativizing discourses of modernity
which seem to have already closed in the European or American
context, such as the movement away from academic realism towards impressionism, expressionism, and various kinds of abstraction and off-the-wall work, installations and so forth. Witness the "Oh, they're still doing installation art in Southeast Asia,
surprise, surprise," comments of New York art critics.
This is a work by Wu Shanzhuan , Red Humour of 1989. Perhaps we should not be too critical, however , of exoticizing processes in intercultural relations. It is fashionable to debunk exoticization. Exoticization is a learning process. We should judge it by
its results. If this learning process allows us to discover the Chinese modern - I say, "us" speaking from the other side, the nonAsian side of the presumed cultural divide for the moment -t hen
it is valuable that we are attracted to it by its strange contemporary irrelevance, since it is dealing with something in the 1980s
which was being done in Japan in the late 1950s, and slightly
later in America in the I 960s.
The next slide is a picture dealer, Joseph Duveen . He is responsible for accumulating masterpieces which were sold largely
to the American collections and some to the English collections.
He was on the board of Trustees of the National Gallery in London. I'm going to introduce you to two figures, as it were as theoretical models of positions which exist among our activities in theroles we sometimes ourselves perform . One is the entrepreneur,the dealer, the museum curator selling to his public , not formoney but for museum entrances of modern Asian art. The next
figure, who I am not comparing myself to, but might be analytically placed in the same space, is the connoisseur, the knower,
the one who has access to the facts. The one who says : "What isa Botticelli?" "What is a Michelangelo?" "What is a good Chinese painting from the last five years?" "Did you like the Chinese
installations in such and such an exhibition?" The person who isinterested, actually personally interested, in terms of career, interms of income sometimes, in making the right judgments forthe first person, the first role, the museum curator, about thekinds of work that they are interpreting. The model of this partnership , what I call the Berenson-Duveen partnership, is indicative for us. Neutral scholarly judgment or, nowadays , curatorial
estimates of artistic significance, change the value of a workwhether as an economic one on an art market, as Duveen did, or
as a fraction of cultural capital which curators distribute within
and across cultural borders.
When this model is transposed to the present situation or modern Asian art, the curator's opinion or the entrepreneur's opinion(sometimes they are the same person), creates cultural significance and, sometimes, a directly economic value in a work whenit crosses cultural boundaries. The cultural value, and sometimes

aristocratic patron."three functions, as they are also fulfilling the function of "theIn my last section I deal with a feature of art flows which has
been ignored so far, although it has been commented on veryhonestly by a number of curators. The Asian art flows , the flowof modern Asian art between cultures, are not unilateral. It does
not go from culture A to culture B. It also comes back from culture B to culture A. In other words, Lee U-Fan's Work of 1966
(fig. 22),or work of a similar kind, is recognized in 1970 in Germany and then comes back in 1977 (fig. 23), as a series of works,
now recognized by the Japanese art market. We could conceiveof this simply as Lee U-Fan being fortunate by being recognizedby German curators in 1970-71. We could also conceive of it as
the intervention of the artist in an external circuit. I think this is
the way we must increasingly conceive of it, because there areother cases as in the international activities of some Indian artists,such as Francis Newton Souza and Maqbool Fida Husain in London , New York and Bombay in the 1950s. In other words, we arelooking at a figure who is the site for a flow which moves in two
directions at once.
I want to try and identify the function of modern Asian art in,what I call, "Euroamerica." The first kind of function is to present
a different history of modernity. You are looking at the works of
Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunso painted in India in 1903
(fig. 24). They present a different kind of modernity, which issomehow in between the kinds of modernity presented by
Europe. Unfortunately, this is tied up in Japan, as we are wellaware, with ultra-nationalism in which the logical end goes into
the 1930s and to Nanjing. Some people think that there is an"Asian-type" of modernity. This may be appealing for nationalist
purposes and it's perfectly understandable that such emotions andconcepts arise. But this conceptualization is intellectually unfeasible. The founding moment of Asian modernity is the relativization of numerous

horizontallydifferentiatedart discourses,

through their contact with multiple European and American ones
from the 1750s to the 1930s and 40s. Modern art in Asia can only
be constructed in terms of analytical similarities between categories, simply because of this founding moment.
Finally, I would like to mention the new situation for the old
figures that I've described above in Asian art exchanges. The old
figure is the merchant. The art works in culture A are known topeople in culture B, and regarded as so valuable that it can be
traded onto culture C. This has happened demonstrably in the
movement of Japanese art works to China in the I 2th-century
Sung Imperial catalog. In the 17th century, we have records from
Siam of works given to the King of Siam by the Emperor of Japan, the shogun (he was called the emperor in those days by foreigners}, which are then given to the Shah of Persia. We actually
have historical records of these exchanges. This figure of the
trading-on of the cultural good is not new. What is new, perhaps,is that what has value in culture A may not function in the same
way when it moves to culture B once it has been changed into ex-167MC (T. Mizusawa)change capital.

: Thank you very much, Dr. Clark. In such a

We are looking at Lu Xun's Home Village by Wu Guanzhong

short time, many things have been said and touched upon. Dr.

of the 1980s or late 1970s. This is a Chinese oil painting. This is

Clark believes that contemporary Asian art shows different as-

an art historically important artist, art historically, although not so

pects when the frequent exchanges

artistically, in my opinion. He is important because he is the firstworld-level exhibitions is reassessed rationally and with greaterand distribution

through

Chinese artist of the 20th century to be given a one person show

self-awareness and that we already have had a variety of histori-at the British Museum in London. In other words, a particular oil

cal experiences in cultural exchanges.

painting which take on Chinese cultural tradition is valued out-

I have one question, Dr. Clark. When you write about "mod-side China, at a time when it was certainly not valued in China

ernism" in Japanese, you translate it as gendaishugi. When you

despite his personal status. It returns back to China having been

speak of "modern" in the Asian context, what do you mean?

given that status and is now privileged.

Would you comment on that briefly?

This work by Xu Bing, Cultural Animals, by an artist who has
been virtually thrown out of China and went to America, thenJ. Clark:

sent the concept/work back to China for an exhibition.

a problem in Chinese language. In China, they say "gendai." In

I think that is a problem of Japanese. I don't think it is

In conclusion, 1 want people who are engaged in this activity to

the Japanese language, you distinguish between "kindai" andthink much more carefully about the two figures at the centers of"gendai," modern and contemporary. However in China, anything that starts from the late 19th century is called "gendai"
which is, more or less, contemporary if you translate it into Japanese. I think that the concept of "kindai ," or modernity, was established in the Japanese context about twenty, thirty years ago.
Of course, historically or politically it can be traced even farther
back, by a century or more.
I think that in the field of fine arts, whether or not it is closely
related with other phenomena than art, the emergence of the concept or acceptance of the concept of the "modern" is closely related with the invasion of the West into Asia. In other words, the"modern" initially started as "otherness" for the Asian , then permeated to be called "contemporary. " In English, "kindai " is proto-modern or early modern, that is, the proto-type of the contemporary. However, in the Japanese language, you have two different
words : the "contemporary" for the more recent ones and thecontemporary phenomenon , while you use the word "modern" todescribe something earlier in the modern age. Because of the Hegelian and Marxist historical concepts which still prevail in
China, the Euramerican "modern" is set as "gendai" in the Chinese language.
That the introduction of the "modern" to the Asians was notwithout resistance, on the part of the Asians, is an important pointthat we should bear in mind. In the Meiji era, you can see
Western-style paintings by the Japanese which many Japanese
determined to be a copy of European art. But that is not necessarily true. It was something that the Japanese people painted but not
as a copy. I believe it was a modern painting tried by the Japanese. The Japanese people often called it "Western-style art," butI think that is not just so. Maybe you can find "Japanese-ness" inthem. For instance, you see some Raphaelian influence on thepainting Kannan, the Compassionate Mother by Kano Hogai, but
you cannot determine that it is !00% Western. The material may
be Japanese or the line drawing may be Japanese. Takamura Kotaro, when he wrote the Green Sun manifesto wrote that "if it issomething by the Japanese, it is a Japanese work."exchange. The two figures in the sense of models of types ofroles in exchanges which seem to overlap. One is the cultural
gatekeeper who controls what goes in and must come out, or
what goes out and must come in. They are frequently the same
person or sited in the same institution. The other is the producerof cultural goods, the artist or the craftsperson.
When the museum curator invites artists into an exhibition
space to make a work in site, they are actually functioning as a
substitute producer, particularly for some political reasons with
Asian art exhibitions. The atelier , or the studio, is being brought
into the gallery but , of course, we know that the curator is not
subject to the same judgments of history as the artist is.
All judgments of excellence which singularize modern Asianartists or works which are representative of cultures , but do not
articulate their locution against a specific and historically situatedfield of discourse, should be regarded as compromised by theirself-interest. Curators and artists - artists do this as well as curators-should

not be the blind servants of their own propaganda as

we have seen in many cases of the Asian art world or the Asianart field. This is particularly important in modern Asian art, because in a field of exchange between differently sited culturalzones, the information given to the audience at the other may bevery low about one cultural zone, yet may be privileged by ihe
curator's access to it. These fields are very easily subject to two
kinds of manipulation. One , as we have seen in the case of Chinese art, particularly but also sometimes in the case of Japaneseart, is nationalist construction,

sometimes of a chauvinist or,

super-patriotic kind. Another - as we have begun to see withsome exhibitions of Chinese "Mao goes Pop" variety - is a kindof entrepreneurial manipulation. This domain is very easily subject to these kinds of intervention, a self-interested intervention.
For the development of modern Asian art, this kind of intervention is not in the long-term interest of the field , although it is unavoidable to some extent, human beings being human beings, institutions being institutions. I also think that art historians andcritics should be sufficiently distant from the status of their own
judgments. They should work to be neutral when they make judg-

MC (T. Mizusawa):

ments about works and to foreground all of their reasons why

duced to Asia not without resistance is a very important point.

they like or dislike things.

That means that Asia still continues to resist the West.

168

Your point on the "modern" being intro-

historians and critics. It is not that I am being overly critical of

J. Clark : Well, if you read the fine print in my paper , you'll see

other people's performance who had to make choices and defend

that I regard these analytical types to overlap in any individual.

exhibitions and see that they work. What I'm trying to do is un-

I'm not suggesting that these come easily boxed. Yes , I agree

derstand different functions which are in play in this situation andwith your reservation.

which we have not brought to the surface.
There ' s a very good case in point which we could discuss here.

MC (T. Mizusawa): We would now like to go on to the next

Why is a large number of art works, which are inadequate, some-speaker, Professor Tatehata Akira. He is currently teaching attimes brought overseas by regimes who place a very important

Tama Art University in Tokyo but was once a curator al the Na-national construction on them ? There ' s a very good Chinese ex-tional Museum of Art, Osaka.

ample. Wu Guanzhong is presented as the great Chinese artist.

Today , we have speakers who overlap in their profession as

He is the great father of a large number of people in the Chinese

museum curators and independent curators. Their role is difficult
to categorize under a binary model. In Professor Tatehata ' s case,art world and made many brave comments about modern art. But
he is no way, in my view , a great artist. He is part of the national

he is an academic and a critic who works as an independent cura-construction of modern Chinese art by the regime and by particu-

tor. He curated the "Fang Lijun" exhibition held here at the Japanlar political groups within the regime. I have never seen an exhi-

Foundation Asia Center in 1996. He has been very much in-bition of Wu Guan zhong which handled, for example , his techni-

volved in Asian art in recent years.

cal inadequacies with drawing, his appalling use of the Chinese
brush , and so on and so forth. We can go through a whole range

Tatehata

of fairly public, fairly neutral technical categories to talk about

here today. Like the other panelists here, I am basically in favor

his work. But this artist was positioned as the great Chinese 20thof the way of thinking known as multiculturalism. However , I be-

century artist and still positioned so by the regime in Beijing.

Akira : I am very happy to have the chance to speak

lieve that the indigenous qualities peculiar to a certain region

So if you want to get people in your exhibition , you have toshould be thought of as something relative, not absolute or sa-

tell him he' s a great artist. The Emperor has no clothes. He's notcred , and I would like to make my remarks from this point ofa great artist. He' s a culturally important artist but not a great art-view. Before presenting my paper, I would first like to make two

ist in any sense that we can possibly think that we would remem-comments on some things discussed by the panel yesterday, point

ber his work in the same way as, for example, Fan Kuan , Ni Zan,out a certain problem, and tie it in with the content of my paper.

etc. The list is endless. And this is because of the very importantYesterday there was a discussion of organizing exhibitions ofrelationship between knowledge, media, producers of exhibitions,contemporary Asian art. The issues raised in that discussion in-political positions , regime power , resource distribution, etc. Thiscluded how to interpret works of art as well as how to select cura-is a typical case. In 111anyother cases, it won ' t be as severe as thistors for exhibitions. It was mutually agreed that for Asia, Asian

one but the same elements will be in play. All I'm trying to do isart should be placed in its original context and understood in

identify some of those elements which we have let more or lessterms of that context. Art museums should provide the necessary

pass us by.

information and educational programs for this purpose.

V.N. Desai : I want to really follow up on this question because,

how it is interpreted , it could lead into some dangerous tempta-

I believe that this is a very reasonable idea, but depending on
if you are really trying to make a distinction between curators andtions. I agree, of course, that works of art should be understood inart historians , and posing it as a binary is problematic. To maketheir original context , but I wondered why this idea became suchthe distinction , I think we also have to understand all of the sub-an issue here. We need to discuss this because we are making an

tleties. In other words , there are curators who are academics.

assumption that works of art will be exhibited in an art museum,

You , yourself, curate a show. There are a number of us, who

which means that they will be removed from their original loca-

have been academics and also curators , curating shows. I thinktion.

that sometimes there is, intentionality of production, in terms of

The institution known as the art museum, as pointed out by

certain kinds of constructions. There are other times , where there

Mr. Mizusawa , is basically a cultural device created by Westernis a de facto effect of an exhibition for things to happen.
You have to make tho se kinds of distinctions between a priorof modern civil society. Therefore, it is an organization with aEuropean modernity. That is, it is ultimately based on the premisea la Berenson versus those exhibi-

mission, the project of enlightening the members of society. In ations or curatorial practices that have become part of a system. I

sense, it is the institution which best symbolizes Western mod-think that by setting up the kind of the binaries that you set up ,ernism.

intention to create something

And this is the place where exhibitions of contemporary Asian

you are creating a fall guy of a curator or a cultural producer ...

art are to be held. That is, we can speak of an indigenous art ofJ. Clark: Or the art historian could be the fall guy, too.

Asia, but we do not speak of an indigenous Asian an museum, aunique Asian-model art museum. At least no such claim wasmade yesterday. To speak somewhat ironically, but perhaps dog-

V. Desai: Yes. I think that one needs to really make that kind of
subtle distinction as well. I wonder if you really believe in thematically, we are placed in the position of taking something fromkind of binaries that you are setting up?

outside the West and putting it inside the container of Western

170