Every year or so, it seems, at least since I started graduate study in Southeast Asian art in the late 1980s, a conference on Asian Art is held somewhere in the world that asks the question, in some form or another: Why is modern Asian art not recognized as a field of scholarly research? Starting in 1991 with the pioneering “Modernism and Post-Modernism in Asian Art” at Australian National University in Canberra, the list includes, among others, a forum at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 1998 titled “What Is the Place of Contemporary Art in an Asian Art Museum?” followed by “Our Modernities” in 2004 at the Asian Research Institute in Singapore, “Modernism and Its Discontents” at Columbia University in May 2007, and, most recently, “What Is the Mission of Asian Art Curators in the Age of Globalization?” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in September 2007. Everyone appears to have a bone to pick with the way in which and about which Asian art history has been written, exhibited, and studied. The “Asian Art History in the 21st Century” conference organized in 2006 by Vishakha Desai, president of the Asia Society, at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is no exception. Although the conference did not begin with an interrogation, it did question the usefulness of the category of “Asian art” in today's world (p. ix). Considering that some seventeen years passed since the Canberra conference and this one, it would appear that we either have not gotten very far in recognizing modern Asian art, or there still remain some fundamental issues in the field of Asian art history, or indeed, art history period, that have not been resolved.

These two publications are not so ambitious and groundbreaking as to set the record straight once and for all, and they may appear to be simply two additional entries in the growing literature on Asian art historical research, but they are worth considering because, in a way, they represent two opposing views on how to remedy the “Asian gap” or the lack of proper representation of Asian artists and Asian art histories in Western art institutions.

Vishakha Desai's volume takes a historiographic approach by looking back and tracing some of the sources for these problems (see the articles by Frederick M. Asher and Nancy S. Steinhardt). The contributions also take a broader perspective on the field by including the most common site for Western audiences to encounter Asian art—the museum (see the articles by Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh and by Alexandra Monroe)—and expands the definition of Asia to include Asian America (see the article by Melissa Chiu). The volume might be seen as taking stock of where the problem lies and providing alternative methods for remedying it. It does not radically rethink the ways in which art history has been written; on the contrary, in my opinion, it readily accepts certain art historical conventions such as chronology, canons, and museums and simply provides new ways of looking at what can be seen as standard art historical practice. This is not surprising considering that the conference was not only held at a very prominent institute of art historical research (the Clark Art Institute at Williams College) and organized by another, if not the most, prestigious institution for exhibiting Asian art in the United States (the Asia Society in New York).

Desai's introduction seems to hesitate between embracing innovative ways of writing art history and clinging to the old standards. For example, at the end of her introduction, she laments the lack of rigorous language training in the “old” school of art history and urges a preservation of the past before it disappears in the grips of Asia's rapid growth. “The unprecedented pace of economic growth and urbanization in China, India, and other Asian countries leaves one with a troubling feeling that the unquestioning race for the fastest growing GDP, these great millennial cultures are losing their sense of their rich past” (p. xiii).

To end an introduction to a volume on Asian art history in the twenty-first century with a call to return to the past makes sense from the perspective of an American institution aimed at raising funds for Asian culture. But it also has a curious nostalgic ring to it, one that many critics of “first-world” development organizations find problematic in their attitudes toward “third-world” nations. I am thinking in particular of Geeta Kapur's discussion of the World Bank view of Asia (When Was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India [New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2000]) and Saloni Mathur's notion of the McGuggenheimization of Asia (“Museums and Globalization,” Anthropological Quarterly 78, no. 3 [Summer 2005]: 697–708). To call for a return to the past almost denies Asian art history its future. Although Desai would balk at this connotation, the fact that she raises the idea at all reflects her position as the president of an American institution rather than one that is located in Asia. In other words, rather than alleviate the problem of imbalance in the field of Asian art, as many of these conferences have attempted to do, in my view, she further complicates it. Asian art, then according to Desai, should now focus on the past and museums should expand their collections of ancient art to fend off a possible “Asian wave” or buying frenzy of works contemporary Asian artists, perhaps in case the whole system collapses or the world, indeed, tilts too far the other way.

The contributors to this volume do not necessarily share this view. The introduction notwithstanding, the strength of the volume lies in the quality of the essays within. The conference gathered an “A list” of Asian art historians, all of whom teach or hold positions at prestigious institutions (Cornell, Yale, Princeton). One may wonder what happened to the view from the margins, where the field of Asian art history began. While this may compound the problem of adequately reflecting the state of the field, two essays stand out as reflecting the view from the “outside,” or the ways in which art histories in the region challenge our own theories of art historical practice. The essay by Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, “Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in an Age of Religious Revivalism” (p. 149), reverses the paradigm of the museum as temple in discussing a case in which a temple in India became a museum. In their view, their study of the return of objects from a museum to a temple illustrates how museums need not necessarily be the final resting places for artifacts. Their discussion complements nicely the arguments made by John Clark in his article for the volume, “Histories of the Asian ‘New’: Biennales and Contemporary Asian Art” (p. 229). In his essay, Clark discusses the transnational circulation of art works of a global scale that calls into question the very nature of the “local.” Art works are made in one part of the world and shown in another challenging the concepts of art patronage articulated by art historians of premodern Europe that relied on local economies of taste. Both essays, in my view, point at some of the inadequacies of art history in accounting for objects that transcend the usual categories of time and place.

Jan Mrázek and Morgan Pitelka's volume uses the metaphor of “wrapping and unwrapping” art to unravel the dichotomies of discourses about art in the East and West (p. 2). The authors aim to rectify what they see as a “gap” between the ways in which Asian art has been exhibited and its original cultural context of production and use. They take Stanley O'Connor's 1983 essay on connoisseurship in the jungles of Borneo as their starting point to challenge Western hegemonies of art historical practice. Rather than reviewing the canon or the literature, in the way the Desai volume does, this volume dives right into the subject matter at hand, so to speak, and presents a series of “ethnographies” of art objects from Japan to Cambodia to Sumba and Bali. Each author presents ways in which art objects do not perform in the ways in which they appear to, but rather, they “act” in different ways depending on the needs of their audience. This is not a radically new concept and resembles the critique of the ways in which museums and art history books have removed works of art from their “natural” contexts and distanced the viewer from their original usage. The premise of the book, however, is not to argue for “authenticity.” On the contrary, it aims to challenge some of the binary oppositions of old and new, modern and traditional, art and artifact, by blurring the boundaries between those categories and presenting cases in which art objects cannot be classified according to either of them.

Like the Desai volume, the essays originated in a conference—in this case, a panel at the 2001 Association for Asian Studies meetings. The editors, however, took the time to write a more extensive introduction and conclusion and invited the authors to substantially revise their contributions. The result is that, unlike the Desai volume, most essays speak to one another and cross-reference each other. Each essay challenges the category of an Asian art work as an “object” and explores the ways in which they are objectified and categorized both locally and internationally by museum curators and art historians. Topics include the lives of objects and the ways in which they are experienced by local audiences, emulating scholars such as Stanley O'Connor (Kaja McGowan) and Janet Hoskins (Lene Pedersen), herself a contributor revisiting an old topic. While many of these essays remain within the realm of ethnography or anthropological approaches to art, Ashley Thompson's struck me as particularly antidisciplinary and a much more poignant commentary on the poor state of art historical methodologies. In examining the intimate connections between statuary portraits of rulers and religious practices, Thompson blurs the distinction between what is human and what is divine. More than any other contribution, Thompson's truly questions the use of art mentioned in the title of the volume rather than seeking answers. Instead of exploring possible interpretations, in other words, over the image of the king, she questions the utility of such an interpretation.

The Desai volume could have made better use of its vantage point to measure the field of Asian art history and to question the utility of questioning the discipline. The Mrázek and Pitelka volume makes a better display of the various ways in which Asian Art can be discussed without resorting to clichés and stereotypical assumptions about the problem of reinserting Asia into the category of Art history. It goes straight to questioning the art equation of the formula. But, I wonder, if there could not be an avenue for paving the way for alternative modes of art historical writing that are not so “on the defensive” and self-analytical. Both volumes claim to be entering new territory, and I will not dispute that they have presented innovative case studies, explored new areas of research from the region, but I may remind the reader, if I may, that the ground in the field was broken long ago by John Clark's edited volume Modernity in Asian Art (Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 1993). Furthermore, the recent publication of the Asia Research Institute Conference proceedings offers a comparative vantage point in presenting new discourses in art history from Asia (John Clark, Maurizio Peleggi, and T. K. Sabapathy, eds., Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience and Practice of Modern Asia Art [Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 2006]). In that volume, the writers simply move on from the binary oppositions of East and West, old and new, traditional and modern, and present studies of different artists and art movements regardless of how one chooses to categorize them. However, it still does not solve the problem of the perpetual ghettoization of Asian art in general art historical discourse. As long as we continue to address Asian art separately, Asian art will be treated as an “other” art history. But, for now, I highly recommend readers to consider these two volumes and others mentioned in this essay as evidence not only of the tremendous growth in the field of Asian art in general and modern Asian art in particular, but also of the sheer variety of approaches and methodologies to the field. This, the rich array of art forms and available art historical discourses surrounding Asian art, more than anything, is testimony to the progress in thinking and rewriting the field and future of Asian art history in North America, out of the margins and into the mainstream.