A highly illustrated history of the diverse visual art produced across East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, written by two specialist art historians. Asia is home to more than half the world’s population, and learning about the art of its many cultures helps readers understand the visual world that surrounds us. This book tells the story of the simultaneous development of artistic techniques, styles and ideas across East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia, exploring the ways these regions were often dynamically interconnected with each other, and with places beyond Asia. It covers the full breadth of Asian art history, with almost 500 artworks from China, Japan, Korea, South Asia and Southeast Asia; including areas often under-represented in other books on the subject, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Tibet, Nepal and Mongolia. Authors Lee and Hutton are active teachers, writers and speakers who engage with art history as a progressive field that promotes cross-cultural understanding. In this book, they situate Asian art in the context of art history globally, with 12 ‘Seeing Connections’ features drawing themes and comparisons with art from many other parts of the world. The authors’ approach encourages students to analyse and think about Asian artworks as a way of exploring ideas about gender and sexuality, personal and national identity, migration and diaspora, and anthropogenic climate change.

The essays in this anthology examine artwork and sites in East and Southeast Asia through the lens of eco–art history. In these regions, significant anthropogenic changes to terrain, watercourses, and ecosystems date back millennia, as do artwork and artefacts that both conceptualize and modify the natural world. The rising interest in earth-conscious modes of analysis, or “eco–art history,� informs this anthology, which explores the mutual impact of artistic expressions and local environments in East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, conceptual tools and case studies focused on these regions impart important insights bearing on the development of eco–art history.The book includes case studies examining the impact of the Little Ice Age on court painting and systems of representing marine life in the Joseon period in Korea. Other contributors consider contemporary artistic strategies, such as developing a “sustainability aesthetics� and focusing attention to non-human agents, to respond to environmental damage and climate change in the present. Additional essays analyse the complicated art historical ecology of heritage sites and question the underlying anthropocentrism in art historical priorities and practices. As a whole, this anthology argues for the importance of ecological considerations in art history.