The first critical account of the enormous upsurge in cultural expression across Asian countries from 1979–2008, and the new possibilities it presented for the aesthetic and cultural re-imagining of a “unified” contemporary Asia.


Biennial-style art exhibitions. New discourses in modern and contemporary art. The production and circulation of increasingly debordered popular culture. A Regional Contemporary by C.J. W.-L. Wee is an investigative account of the dramatic increase in cultural expression in Asia from 1979 to 2008, with the 1990s as the focal point of this period. The so-called East Asian Miracle, Wee argues, projected a fictive but shared contemporary regional identity onto Northeast and Southeast Asia, collectively taken as East Asia. The new cultural explosion was notably enabled by expanded capitalist energies that reached a level critical enough to reposition the region’s postcolonial and Cold War-era nationalisms, and this book examines the resulting implications.

A sophisticated and compelling study, A Regional Contemporary is the first to examine the conjunction of high and popular culture in the region. Moreover, Wee reveals how the various cultural formations of this regional contemporary were able to traverse—if not overcome—uneven national economies, the memory of Japanese empire, and the geopolitical rifts of post-Cold War nationalisms. While foregrounding new cultural expression, Wee simultaneously examines how novel economic conditions bolstered a more confident questioning of Western modernity’s dominance and enhanced the capacity for regional dialogue in the bid to overcome colonial-era legacies—even as those legacies were being absorbed into the region.