The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia Available to Purchase

For decades, as talk of an “Asian Century” has buoyed Asian art and its promoters, academic art history has lagged behind. Publishers have not waited for it to catch up. On a recent trip in East Asia, in a few days I accumulated over twenty kilos of newly minted art histories—remarkably, almost all of them bilingual—part of a regional glut driven by collecting institutions and the art market. Hence the long-awaited launch of the National Gallery Singapore's two-volume doorstopper The Modern in Southeast Asian Art, hot on the heels of English editions of hefty compendiums from Japan and South Korea, all produced with substantial state backing.¹ This official historiography still broadly follows “Free World” narratives spun during the Cold War and consolidated through exhibitions, narratives of modern art as expressive vehicle of national modernity, and an inexorable, if fitful, democratization. As in other regions, though, few histories are...