East Asian Abstract Art in Rearview Mirror

Art history has long framed modernism as a Western, twentieth-century phenomenon, positioning it within a largely Euro-American narrative of rupture and innovation. If, however, modernism and postmodernism are recast as heuristic rather than strictly chronological categories, a more expansive and globally attuned account of artistic practice becomes possible. This paper proposes the concept of the “pastmodern” to foreground early modern East Asian practices that anticipate strategies commonly associated with modernity, including performative production, ecological and found-material approaches, minimalist abstraction, and sustained inquiries into presence and absence. Rather than advancing a reductive conceptualism in which the idea supersedes the object, these practices stage a dynamic dialectic between idea and material form, with materiality actively resisting and co-producing meaning.

Through this sustained tension between transcendence and immanence, early modern East Asian art critically engaged conditions later identified with modernity and even postmodernity. In negotiating rupture and continuity, deconstruction and synthesis, such works challenge linear genealogies and destabilize East-West and old-new binaries, ultimately proposing a polychronic, anachronistic understanding of modernity within global art history.