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Studies bronze icons of Hindu and Buddhist deities to better understand the flow of ideas across the sea routes of Maritime Asia in the first millennium.

While the great temples of Southeast Asia have inspired research in the past, the careful study of their smaller and more portable counterparts—bronze icons of Hindu and Buddhist deities—gives us a more dynamic understanding of the movement of beliefs and practices across Asia. These sacred images—found across Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi—rank alongside monumental temple complexes like Borobudur as among the most significant artistic and religious achievements of the region. Yet they have too often been treated as mere antiquities, prized for their beauty but stripped of their deeper historical meaning. 

Mechling recovers what these bronzes can actually tell us. By tracing their distribution patterns alongside their artistic style, iconography, fabrication techniques, and metal compositions, she reconstructs the shared cults, ritual practices, and technological relationships that linked communities across the western Indonesian archipelago and beyond from the sixth to the tenth century. The picture that emerges overturns a long-held scholarly paradigm—inherited from the colonial era—of passive Southeast Asian reception of Indian cultural influence. In its place, Indonesian Buddhist Bronzes in the Making of Maritime Asia reveals a world of multi-directional exchange among active, cosmopolitan participants whose networks of creativity and devotion shaped one of history's most dynamic cultural crossroads.

This innovative book reimagines modernism through the illegible scribbles and vibrant colors of southern Indian artist KCS Paniker.

KCS Paniker (1911–1977) is a canonical figure in India’s twentieth-century modernism. He was principal of the Madras School of Art and founder of one of the world’s longest-standing artists’ communities. Yet, even within India, he remains a marginal figure, positioned at the periphery of a dominant art world centered in the north. Paniker’s best-known body of work, the Words and Symbols series (1963–77), calls on us to reconsider how knowledge is produced and disseminated in a postcolonial, decolonizing world. These “written pictures”—paintings filled with symbols, tables, equations, and illegible scribbles—invite decoding, only to undermine the pursuit of wholeness or stable meaning.

Paniker famously called Paul Klee his “guru.” In this book, art historian Rebecca M. Brown explores what that might mean, moving beyond tracing influence and derivation to embrace a fuller sense of artistic relation across geography and time. Featuring over 100 stunning illustrations, Modernism in Relation explores the dynamic, twisting currents of modernism, tracing how Paniker navigated its waters on his own terms—abandoning prescriptions for what modern art should be or what Indian modernism should look like. The book reveals a maker seeking new creative languages, challenging ways of knowing, and exploring the unpredictable, ever-changing nature of relation.

The first English-language volume on Vietnamese contemporary art.

Contemporary art in Vietnam is a dynamic field shaped by memory, history, and experimentation. Over the last thirty years, Vietnamese artists have come to command international recognition, even as a growing domestic market for contemporary art fosters alternative infrastructures of collection and exhibition. Signs and Signals from Vietnam brings together artists, curators, and academics to examine artistic practice and contemporary art histories in Vietnam today.

Moving beyond familiar North-South or diasporic-national divides, the essays represent the perspectives of Vietnamese, Vietnamese diasporic, and non-Vietnamese writers of different generations, affiliations, and positionalities. Contributors trace the inventive ways artists work with language, narrative, performance, and archival practice to communicate through their art. Key themes running through the volume represent the predominant concerns of Vietnamese artists over the past three decades, including the enduring impact of socialist paradigms in contemporary art, gender, diaspora, memory, and the environment. Together, these essays demonstrate how contemporary art can convey lesser-known histories, contested narratives, and personal perspectives.