"This publication assembling the practices and discourses of 'Asian contemporary performance' is assuredly a statement of 'the world we have made' for the now and the future, as well as a means of connecting TPAC and other 'worlds.' "－Ruo-Yu LIU, Chairwoman of Taipei Performing Arts Center"While it is now hardly unusual to find choreographers working in an exhibition setting, or visual artists performing on a stage, it is still rare to see practitioners from the differ...

South Korean masculinities have enjoyed dramatically greater influence in recent years in many realms of pan-Asian popular culture, which travels freely in part because of its hybrid trans-nationalistic appeal. This book investigates transcultural consumption of three iconic figures — the middle-aged Japanese female fandom of actor Bae Yong-Joon, the Western online cult fandom of the thriller film Oldboy, and the Singaporean fandom of the pop-star Rain. Through these three specific but hyb...

K-pop, described by Time Magazine in 2012 as "South Korea’s greatest export", has rapidly achieved a large worldwide audience of devoted fans largely through distribution over the Internet. This book examines the phenomenon, and discusses the reasons for its success. It considers the national and transnational conditions that have played a role in K-pop’s ascendancy, and explores how they relate to post-colonial modernisation, post-Cold War politics in East Asia, connections with the Korea...

After demolishing the myth of the rock star architect with his book Against Architecture (PM Press, 2012, also available), Franco La Cecla now explores the decisive challenges that cities are going to have to confront in the near future. Urban planning and development has become increasingly inadequate in response to the daily realities of life in our cities. Human, economic, ethnic and environmental factors are systematically overlooked in city planning and housing development, and anachr...

Since the late 1990s South Korea has emerged as a new center for the production of transnational popular culture - the first instance of a major global circulation of Korean popular culture in history. Why popular (or not)? Why now? What does it mean socially, culturally and politically in a global context?This edited collection considers the Korean Wave in a global digital age and addresses the social, cultural and political implications in their complexity and paradox within the ...

This century has been marked by the rapid and divergent uptake of mobile telephony throughout the world. The mobile phone has become a poignant symbol for postmodernity and the attendant modes of global mobility and immobility. Most notably, the icon of the mobile phone is most palpable in the Asia-Pacific in which a diversity of innovation and consumer practices – reflecting gender and locality – can be found. Through the lens of gendered mobile media, Mobile Media in the Asia Pacific...

How new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding and visualizing the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific.Images of environmental disaster and degradation have become part of our everyday media diet. This visual culture focusing on environmental deterioration represents a wider recognition of the political, economic, and cultural forces that are responsible for our ongoing environmental crisis. And yet efforts to...

Design Anthropology brings together leading international design theorists, consultants and anthropologists to explore the changing object culture of the 21st century.Decades ago, product designers used basic market research to fine-tune their designs for consumer success. Today the design process has been radically transformed, with the user center-stage in the design process. From design ethnography to culture probing, innovative designers are employing anthropological m...

While the importance of the relationship between anthropology and contemporary art has long been recognized, the discussion has tended to be among scholars from North America, Europe, and Australia; until now, scholarship and experiences from other regions have been largely absent from mainstream debate.Alternative Art and Anthropology: Global Encounters rectifies this by offering a ground-breaking new approach to the subject. Entirely dedicated to perspectives from Asia, ...

For nearly 70 years, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has played a crucial role in developing policies and recommendations for dealing with intangible cultural heritage. What has been the effect of such sweeping global policies on those actually affected by them? How connected is UNESCO with what is happening every day, on the ground, in local communities? Drawing upon six communities ranging across three continents—from India, South Korea, Mala...

Since the 1990s, young Asian Americans including Doo-Ri Chung, Derek Lam, Thakoon Panichgul, Alexander Wang, and Jason Wu have emerged as leading fashion designers. They have won prestigious awards, been chosen to head major clothing labels, and had their designs featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and other fashion magazines. At the same time that these designers were rising to prominence, the fashion world was embracing Asian chic. During the 1990s, “Asian” shapes, fabr...

The Guggenheim Reader Series: Modern Asian Art is the second installment in an ongoing series collecting out-of-print and hard-to-find essays from past Guggenheim publications and lectures to illuminate focused topics in art history. Much like last fall’s Russia reader, Modern Asian Art examines five decades of the museum’s interest in the region, culminating in this spring’s simultaneous presentation of four separate exhibitions on Asian art in the Guggenheim’s New York location....