This volume challenges existing notions of what is “Indian,” “Southeast Asian,” and/or “South Asian” art to help educators present a more contextualized understanding of art in a globalized world. In doing so, it (re)examines how South or Southeast Asian art is being made, exhibited, circulated and experienced in new ways in the United States or in regions under its cultural hegemony. The essays presented in this book examine both historical and contemporary transformations or lived experiences of monuments and regional styles (sites) from South or Southeast Asian art in art making, subsequent usage, and exhibition-making under the rubric of “Indian,” “South Asian,” “or “Southeast Asian” Art.

Presents works of art selected from the South and Southeast Asian and Islamic collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, lessons plans, and classroom activities.

This basic dictionary of South and Southeast Asian art offers clear and concise explanations of hundreds of useful terms. With over 1,300 entries and 112 line illustrations, this volume makes a handy reference for anyone interested and engaged in South and Southeast Asia Entries range from terms encountered in South and Southeast Asian history, religion, mythology, literature, to those specific to art and architecture, and are drawn from the diverse religious traditions of the region.

This wide-ranging collection of essays examines the arts of Southeast Asia in context. Contributors study the creation, use, and local significance of works of art, illuminating the many complex links between an object's aesthetic qualities and its origins in a community.

Buddhist temples in Southeast Asia are centers for the preservation of local artistic traditions. Chief among these are manuscripts, a vital source for our understanding of Buddhist ideas and practices in the region. They are also a beautiful art form, too little understood in the West. The British Library has one of the richest collections of Southeast Asian manuscripts, principally from Thailand and Burma, anywhere in the world. It includes finely painted copies of Buddhist scriptures, literary works, historical narratives, and works on traditional medicine, law, cosmology, and fortune-telling. Buddhism Illuminated includes over one hundred examples of Buddhist art from the Library’s collection, relating each manuscript to Theravada tradition and beliefs, and introducing the historical, artistic, and religious contexts of their production. It is the first book in English to showcase the beauty and variety of Buddhist manuscript art and reproduces many works that have never before been photographed.

"Asian Art provides students with an accessible introduction to the history of Asian Art. Students will gain an understanding of the emergence and evolution of Asian art in all its diversity. Using a range of analytical skills, readers will learn to recognize patterns of continuity and change between the arts and cultures of various regions comprising Asia. Images set within their broader cultural and religious backgrounds provides students with important contextual information to understand and decode artworks"--Publisher's description.

Painting has played a significant role in modern Vietnam. Postage stamps, billboards, and annual national exhibitions attest to its fundamental place in a country where painters may be hailed as national heroes and include among their number fervent nationalists, propagandists, even dissidents. As Vietnamese painting has gained prominence in the contemporary transnational art circuits of Southeast Asia, many artists have become millionaires, yet Vietnamese painting is generally overlooked in art history surveys of the region. Nora Taylor sets out here to change that. Painters in Hanoi engages with twentieth-century Vietnam through its artists and their works, providing a new angle on a country most often portrayed through the lens of war and politics. Drawing on interviews with artists, cultural officers, curators, art critics, and others in Hanoi, Taylor surveys the impact artists have had on intellectual life in Vietnam. The book shows them within their own complex community, one fraught with tensions, politicking, and favoritism, yet also a sense of belonging. It describes their education, the role of the government in the arts, the rise and fall of individual artists, their influence as active players in the politics of place and gender, the audience for their work, and how tourism and the international art market have influenced it.

A constellation of thoughts by 25 established and emerging scholars who plot the indices of modernity and locate new coordinates within the shifting landscape of art. These newly commissioned essays are accompanied by close to 200 full-colour image plates.

In Pakistan's northwest, a sequence of temples built between the sixth and the tenth centuries provides a missing chapter in the evolution of the Hindu temple in South Asia. Combining some elements from Buddhist architecture in Gandharā with the symbolically powerful curvilinear Nāgara tower formulated in the early post-Gupta period, this group stands as an independent school of that pan-Indic form, offering new evidence for its creation and original variations in the four centuries of its existence. Drawing on recent archaeology undertaken by the Pakistan Heritage Society as well as scholarship from the Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture project, this volume finally allows the Salt Range and Indus temples to be integrated with the greater South Asian tradition.