Word: modernize
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...most unexpected emotion. The region's contemporary-art market has never been so hot. Last year, a collection of dreamlike portraits and landscapes by China's Zhang Xiaogang raked in just over $24 million - more than British enfant terrible Damien Hirst made in 2006. In March, a sale of modern Indian art in New York City raised a record $15 million, including just under $800,000 for Captives, a stark evocation of desiccated torsos by New Delhi-born Rameshwar Broota. Two months later, an auction in London elicited $1.42 million for a Tantric-inspired oil painting by India's Syed...
...some ways, given the frothiness of the global art market as a whole, Asia's rise is understandable. Yet the boom in modern Asian art also serves as an important reminder that the region is not just a copier but an innovator as well. Asia's avant-garde artists explore the clash between ancient traditions and pell-mell development, the lure of commercialism, and, most fundamentally, the struggle for individuality on the world's most populous continent. "There's this misconception that art from Asia is static, that it's the same old boring stuff," says Eloisa Haudenschild, an Argentine...
...Vietnam, the 20th century's most promising painters attended the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de L'Indochine, an academy set up in Hanoi in 1925 by a classmate of Henri Matisse. There, the idiom was Western classical - with a dash of impressionism thrown in for modern élan. Even today, Vietnamese students at the Hanoi Fine Arts University, as the French-founded school is now known, spend an entire year sketching nude models, a rigorous exercise that has been abandoned at many Western art institutes. In all three countries, the emphasis on education means that even...
...sell for tens of thousands of dollars - for a more avant-garde series called Source Code, as the building blocks of digital material are known. Parthan uses software to unearth the underlying source code of iconic images, then creates mesmerizing diptychs and triptychs that reference the computer economy defining modern India. His digital gamble could very well pay off. "To have real staying power, contemporary art from India has to have universal appeal," says director of Mumbai's Bodhi Art Gallery Sharmistha Ray, who notes that most of the highest prices paid for Indian art at recent Christie's auctions...
...guardians of Asian culture. True, a handful of newly rich Chinese businessmen have invested in contemporary art, while members of the Indian diaspora snap up artwork with local themes to decorate their overseas homes. Nevertheless, it is foreigners - particularly European, American, Japanese and Singaporean collectors - who are driving the modern Asian art boom. The result has been a massive flight of contemporary art from the region. Exacerbating the trend is a dearth of quality modern-art museums in India, China and Vietnam. In August, the central Chinese city of Dujiangyan announced it was lavishing some of the nation...