New cultural expression in East Asia – taken broadly to include Northeast and Southeast Asia – emerges in the 1990s. The 1980s economic ‘rise’ of Asia help support 1990s art exhibitions that curated Asian modern and contemporary art – then novel ideas – in Fukuoka, Tokyo, Brisbane and Singapore. An inter-Asian popular culture also circulated across borders first as a Japan Wave and then as the so-called Hallyu. Contemporary cultural expression is intertwined with Cold War-era conceptions of economic modernisation linked to 1950s and 1960s US Modernisation Theory – and, perhaps unexpectedly, a once-moribund idea of Asia is revivified. As Chen Kuan-Hsing observes, ‘using Asia as an imaginary anchoring point can allow societies in Asia to become one another’s reference points’ (Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization [2010], xv), even as no new ideology congruent with regional economic integration has come about. Nevertheless, what is notable aspect is that culture engaged with older modernist ideologies in ways not previously conceived. I draw upon my new book, A Regional Contemporary: Art Exhibitions, Popular Culture, Asia, to offer some consideration of what I describe as the ‘exhibitionary imagination’ as that transforms from the first exhibition of modern Asia as attempted in Fukuoka Art Museum’s inaugural exhibition, the two-part Asian Artists Exhibition (1979–1980), into the Japan Foundation Asia Center’s Under Construction: New Dimensions of Asian Art (2000–2002), a three-year project that tried to comprehend contemporary Asia as a region with transgressed national borders. I end with a reflection on the appearance Inter-Asia Cultural Studies in 2000 as a journal project that is part of the period’s cultural emergences.

C. J. Wee Wan-ling is Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has held Visiting Fellowships at (among other institutions) the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India, and the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. Wee is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore. He has recently completed A Regional Contemporary: Art Exhibitions, Popular Culture, Asia (in press, MIT Press).