Art and Trousers: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art

Published by ArtAsiaPacific, distributed by NUS Press

Cultural historian David Elliott is a key figure of the international contemporary art world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In his work as a curator and museum director since his groundbreaking exhibitions in the 1980s at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, Elliott has contributed to the global conversation on art through biennales and major exhibitions from Stockholm to Shanghai, Kyiv to Sydney, and as the founding director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and Istanbul Modern.

A collection of more than 30 essays, fully illustrated with more than 640 colour images, Art & Trousers moves deftly between regional analysis, portraits of individual artists, and a metaphorical history of trousers, presenting a panoramic view of modern and contemporary Asian art, and focusing on the various impacts of invention, tradition, exchange, colonization, politics, social development, and gender. Elliott spotlights the practice of many leading global artists of the early 21st century, including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Rashid Rana, Bharti Kher, Makoto Aida, Chatchai Puipia, and Yeesookyung, among many others. Art & Trousers offers insight into the development of a key curatorial practice for our times, and is an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand contemporary art and the way it operates across borders.