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...

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