On-Site in the City: Comparative Urban Aesthetics in Asia at the turn of the 21st Century

Abstract Compelled by dramatic urban transformations in cities across Asia that have been ongoing since the late 20th and into the 21st century, artists in this region have engaged the built environment in innovative new ways. These artists move beyond simply depicting the city in earlier photojournalist, documentary, and modernist approaches to incorporate the effects of the specific sites they investigate into their modes and processes, and often even in their artistic materials. Emerging from local and interregional contexts within Asia, these creative approaches are in dialog with Western urban aesthetic forms and traditions yet also depart from them by incorporating fragments and palimpsests from their own fraught historical formation. This special issue, On-Site in the City: Comparative Urban Aesthetics in Asia at the turn of the 21st Century, brings urban artistic practices across Asia into a comparative register, highlighting artists and works from regions in South, Southeast, and East Asia, many of which include underrepresented and marginal spaces and “minor” subjectivities. Together, they illuminate a range of new aesthetic modes—from the calligraphic to the photographic, from the spectral to the speculative—that reflect 21st century urban life within postindustrial, postsocialist, and postcolonial conditions.