Modern Asian Design

Description

Modern Asian Design provides a comprehensive introduction to the development of Asian design in the modern period, both tracing historical threads and offering a theoretical framework within which to chart the history of design in Asia. Rather than a singular "Asian history", this book presents a series of studies centred on trade routes, colonial relationships, regional networks and cross-cultural exchanges. Modern Asian Design builds on existing resources beyond design history in an effort to map the field, focusing particularly on relations between Asia and the West and also across Asian design cultures. Opening with a brief overview of trade and exchange networks in the 17th and 18th centuries, the bulk of this study comprises analysis of the development of modern design in Asia during the later 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of rapid modernisation. The book's final two chapters bring these central ideas into a contemporary and highly relevant context.

D.J. Huppatz is Deputy Department Chair of Interior and Industrial Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. He has edited the four volume Design: Critical and Primary Sources (2016), and has contributed chapters and articles to a number of journals and edited volumes, including the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (2015).

Huppatz's book is a welcome addition to a growing field ... [It] is hoped that viewpoints and writings on Asian Design will multiply in the coming years to create a more robust and inclusive global design history landscape. * Journal of Design History * Modern Asian Design is a rich and timely contribution to the emergent body of research on design histories beyond the West. The book expands our knowledge of modern design in Asia and provides methodological approaches to studying what are often viewed as marginal contexts in design history. * Megha Rajguru, Senior Lecturer in Art and Design History at the University of Brighton, UK *