Word: artisticness
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...academies of India, China and Vietnam, technical skill and an ability to reference the region's rich cultural heritage outweighed social commentary or renegade brush strokes. For centuries, Chinese students spent their school years laboriously copying the ink landscapes of ancient masters. The same held true in India, where artistic merit often was equated either with an ability to reproduce themes from religious epics or mimic the miniaturist details of the Mughals. In Vietnam, the 20th century's most promising painters attended the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de L'Indochine, an academy set up in Hanoi...
...contrast, in Vietnam political expression is so perilous that self-censorship has become an art form among even the most daring painters. Those who do try to cross the line face swift punishment. Tran Luong is one of the country's so-called Gang of Five contemporary artists who first gained international notice in the 1990s for his underwater abstracts. Lately, he has concentrated on performance and video art, documenting the lives of coal miners and street children left out of Vietnam's experiments with the free market. For the past few years, Luong has also encouraged young artists...
...Some Asian artists blame the consumerist hype on foreign collectors who impose their tastes - and dollars - on locals. "The foreigners already have an idea of what they expect from Chinese art, and they are more interested in works that have obvious Chinese symbols," says Shanghai artist Ding Yi, whose Mondrian-inspired geometries hardly betray his nationality. "It's very seductive," acknowledges Li Liang, the owner of Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai. "You know that if you put things up that look Chinese, they will sell well." But others worry that this impulse will only encourage soulless facsimiles with little cultural resonance...
...Even on a purely commercial level, endless neon Maos or identical riffs on the Ramayana will only saturate the market and, in the end, make artists' works less valuable. So, too, will a reluctance to explore different artistic avenues; imagine if Picasso spent his entire career in his Blue Period. Art critics worry that the current buying boom will only lead to creative stagnation - and that everyone from the artists to national governments are being blinded by money. "What people call avant-garde art in China has actually been co-opted by the government and is now mainstream," says Yang...
...Mumbai-based artist Baiju Parthan has also abandoned a financial sure bet - mystical paintings that sell for tens of thousands of dollars - for a more avant-garde series called Source Code, as the building blocks of digital material are known. Parthan uses software to unearth the underlying source code of iconic images, then creates mesmerizing diptychs and triptychs that reference the computer economy defining modern India. His digital gamble could very well pay off. "To have real staying power, contemporary art from India has to have universal appeal," says director of Mumbai's Bodhi Art Gallery Sharmistha Ray, who notes...