It is perhaps instinctive for artists to regard and comment on the world as it plays out around them. Keeping their fingers on the pulse of contemporary society is a requisite for artists engaged in contemporary art practice, as is the assumption of a keenly critical stance within their own social systems, a position essential to their survival intellectually, morally and creatively. As social critic, today’s contemporary artist is faced with a minefield of choices that offers up limitless subject matter, be it profoundly serious or based purely in folly. The artists included in this section of Simulasian represent the vanguard of cultures across Asia, as well as an Asian diaspora that has spread to all parts of the globe. Where they go and what they encounter provide them with a constant source of ammunition with which to return fire.

The works included here will show that discrete national cultures may no longer exist in an unadulterated state, for in our proximate age, cultures mingle to create a global network of hybrid descent. The artists here look at that hybridity and react to it, sometimes affirming it, other times denouncing it in resistance to an increasingly international future. Perhaps for them, “Asia” is a global virus that may or may not find receptive hosts.

Bani Abidi is a video artist born in Karachi, lives in Lahore and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago who explores issues of national and cultural identities from several vantage points, fueled by the history of Pakistan since Partition, focusing on its volatile, antagonistic but also familial ties with India and its current uneasy alliance with the United States since September 11. Her lushly colored videos dissect Pakistani nationalism in the face of globalization with understated humour, irony and reproach. The Shan Pipe Band Learns the "Star-Spangled Banner," made in 2004, is a two-channel video that documents a Pakistani brass band attempting to play the American national anthem. Their mostly off-key renditions as they practice are both touching, funny and a sharp critique of current policy as well as Pakistan's colonial legacy. Abidi commissioned the musicians to learn the Star-Spangled Banner and videotaped them in their studio as they struggled to do so. These bands are remnants of the colonial Scottish Pipe Bands of the Raj, no longer performing at military parades. Instead, they play popular Bollywood songs at weddings. "This piece," Abidi said, in an indictment of the current American administration, "is a metaphor for all forms of clumsy and forced cultural and political acquiescences that various individuals and governments have had to display towards the U.S. over the past 3 years."

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is himself a hybrid: as a conceptual artist, curator, architect and writer, he is concerned with the ways things work in society, and whether they work at all. Leaving China in 1981, the artist moved to New York City and stayed on here for 12 years before returning to Beijing where he is now at the forefront of the Chinese contemporary art system. In addition to using cultural artifacts such as ancient bricks, antique furniture and huge ceramic urns in his work to place China’s past into the midst of our contemporary lives, for Documenta in Kassel this year, he promised to bring 1,001 Chinese tourists to see the exhibition for his work Fairytale, perhaps referencing the dream of unmitigated international travel for China’s populace. As of this writing, Ai Weiwei has publicly stated that he will boycott the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing due to China’s continued human rights abuses, even though he helped design the striking stadium in which the opening ceremonies are to take place. For Simulasian, several works from Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective series (1995-2003) are shown, all of them feature the artist flipping the proverbial bird at important architectural landmarks in the West, the Eiffel Tower and the White House among them. Is he throwing this gesture at the West, or is it reflected back on the self? Only Ai Weiwei knows for sure.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is himself a hybrid: as a conceptual artist, curator, architect and writer, he is concerned with the ways things work in society, and whether they work at all. Leaving China in 1981, the artist moved to New York City and stayed on here for 12 years before returning to Beijing where he is now at the forefront of the Chinese contemporary art system. In addition to using cultural artifacts such as ancient bricks, antique furniture and huge ceramic urns in his work to place China’s past into the midst of our contemporary lives, for Documenta in Kassel this year, he promised to bring 1,001 Chinese tourists to see the exhibition for his work Fairytale, perhaps referencing the dream of unmitigated international travel for China’s populace. As of this writing, Ai Weiwei has publicly stated that he will boycott the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing due to China’s continued human rights abuses, even though he helped design the striking stadium in which the opening ceremonies are to take place. For Simulasian, several works from Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective series (1995-2003) are shown, all of them feature the artist flipping the proverbial bird at important architectural landmarks in the West, the Eiffel Tower and the White House among them. Is he throwing this gesture at the West, or is it reflected back on the self? Only Ai Weiwei knows for sure.

Fake plastic deer decoys wearing white plastic Kenyan souvenir masks may not at first glance say anything about Asian contemporary art, when in fact, they speak volumes about the current state of the field overall. Asian artists and those of the Asian diaspora, as well as international artists who reference Asia in their work, have truly entered the global current of information and imagery, and they use the information gleaned from international exchange as their subject matter more and more every day. Fusing his own history with a theoretical critique of contemporary global culture, Brendan Fernandes often references African safari culture in his work as a form of self-portraiture that reveals his own hybrid background. Born and raised in Nairobi, Fernandes is a fourth-generation African, yet of Indian—specifically Goan—heritage. As a teenager, Fernandes and his family immigrated to Canada, but he now lives and works in New York City. With such a global trajectory, Fernandes is representative of the very topics discussed throughout this essay and presented in Simulasian: he is a truly international artist, influenced by and exposed to disparate cultures around the globe. Regarding his own identity, Fernandes often has trouble stating “where he is from” thanks to the varied elements of his upbringing. Is he Indian, Kenyan, African or Canadian? And more importantly, does it really matter in the end? Here, Fernandes presents his latest work Neo-Primitivism II, a work that features the fake deer and masks mentioned above. In reality, the works are synonymous with the artist; like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, these North American deer don white African masks in an attempt to hide their true nature. And like the artist, they know not where they are from, but they certainly know where they are going.

Thoroughly Indian, Ranbir Kaleka, who was born in Patiala, Punjab in 1953 and lives and works in New Delhi, has been greatly influenced by international art movements as well as his own cultural legacies. Praised as a magician of the surreal, his current multi-media sleights-of hand are an intriguing mix of painting and video, traditional usage and new media. His work in the 1990s consisted of highly saturated neo-Expressionist paintings, reminiscent of the Italian Transavanguardia painters, all European influences. By the late 90s, Kaleka was superimposing video projections on representational paintings in his desire to update Indian art. In the dream-like Man with a Cockerel (2001-2002), one of his most celebrated images, he has dispensed with the painting itself although retaining the illusion of one. The solitary, slowly moving Indian man holding a rooster whose way of life may be vanishing appears in a 19-second loop that is projected onto a large, shimmered vertical board in a room painted entirely black. The digitalized realism of the upper half of the body, shown from the waist up is contrasted with the lower half, which appears upside down, as if reflected in a mirror. As the rooster struggles, the image goes out of sync and seems to dissolve, creating a rippled, painterly effect. Kaleka has described this mesmerizing hybrid which seamlessly merges past and present as a “hyper-image with the presence of a painting but the aura of an image made of light.”

After attending graduate school at NYU, Japanese photographer and video artist Mayumi Kimura returned to Japan to focus on her art career. In her work, Kimura often critiques sexist and racist stereotypes, exposing them for the ill-begotten prejudices that they are. For example, in her early work, Kimura photographed dozens of plastic bride statuettes used for wedding cake adornment in a project that analyzed the commodification of women and their role in society. In a later series, she used fruit and vegetables outfitted with wigs and pieces of clothing to replicate women’s bodies; the works are both erotic and disturbing in equal measure. In her latest video work, Neverending She, Kimura uses clips from famous Hollywood films interspersed with her own image to examine the effect that Western media has had on domestic Japanese culture. She confronts the viewer with their stereotypes as she jumps in and out of various Western movies, inserting herself into the narrative as she goes. Wearing a t-shirt that says “masterpiece” in one shot, she asks, “You mean, I consider myself an aritst [sic], or an Asian aritist [sic]?” By throwing out such a question, Kimura urges the viewer to realize that, for her and her countless colleagues, the two terms are one and the same.

Japanese photographer Masayuki Yoshinaga captures underworld images of Japan’s b?s?zoku motorcycle gangs, both in action shots taken late at night on the streets of cities across the country and in formal studio portraits that focus on the riders’ intricate uniforms and supped-up motorbikes. Although the gangs are looked down upon as a nuisance and as a feeder for yakuza crime families by the general populace, Yoshinaga’s photographs lift the gang members into a much more heroic light. A former member himself, Yoshinaga shows that, for the most part, these gangs are made up of disaffected youth you are simply rebelling against the at-times staid placidity of daily life in Japan. In decorating not only their bikes, but their bodies as well, they show that pageantry and spectacle are just as important to them as mufflerless bikes and roaring engines. By humanizing the gang members in these stoic portraits, Yoshinaga shows a side of Japan that is otherwise left unspoken.