This course explores how art and artists across Asia participate in a creative field of “global contemporaneity” (kokusaiteki dōjidaisei), to use Japanese art critic Haryū Ichirō’s term, from roughly 1945 to today. Case studies focus on experimental and socially-engaged art practices: late abstraction, hyperrealism, pop, conceptualism, documentary video and photography, performance, multi-media installation, new media, video art, Feminism and Queer Theory-based art practices, diaspora art, site-specific projects, and participatory art. The artwork today endures its own rapid dissemination through communication technologies; resonates with distant, simultaneous events (sometimes intended by the artist and sometimes not); and imbricates itself in human networks that often transcend national borders. We will ask how our case studies contribute to art’s global mattering, “now.” But we will also look at how art emerges at the grassroots level: how it connects with specific communities and regions to foreground their particular needs and character, and to articulate along with them a shared vision for the future. 

**This course will be online.