The Centre for Design History is proud to announce new books by its members: Harriet Atkinson, Verity Clarkson, Sarah Lichtman, Yunah Lee and Megha Rajguru and their colleagues. Join us for this book launch and hear from some of the authors and the editors and celebrate their success. This is an online event, and everyone is welcome.

The event with launch two books:

Design and Modernity in Asia: National Identity and Transnational Exchange

and

Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985

1 May, 1-2:30 pm BST (Online)

Free and open to all.

Email centrefordesignhistory@brighton.ac.uk for a Teams meeting link and for enquiries

Design and Modernity in Asia: National Identity and Transnational Exchange 1945-1990

Edited by Yunah Lee and Megha Rajguru

This new edited volume of critical essays examines designs for modern living in Asia between 1945 and 1990. Focusing particularly on the post-World War II and postcolonial years, this book advances multidisciplinary knowledge on approaches to and designs for modern living. Developed from extensive primary research and case studies, each essay illuminates commonalities and particularities of the trajectories of Modernism and notions of modernity, their translation and manifestation in life across Asia through design.

Authors address everyday negotiations and experiences of being modern by studying exhibitions, architecture, modern interiors, printed ephemera, literary discourses, healthy living movements and transnational networks of modern designers. They examine processes of exchange between people, institutions and with governments, in and across Asia, as well as with the USA and countries in Western Europe. This book highlights the ways in which the production and discourses of modern design were underscored by economic advancement and modernization processes, and fuelled by aesthetic debates on modern design. Critically exploring design for modern living in Asia, this book offers fresh perspectives on Modernism to students and scholars.

 

Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture and Design 1945-1985

Edited by Harriet Atkinson, Verity Clarkson and Sarah Lichtman

After World War II, museum and gallery exhibitions, industrial and trade fairs, biennials, triennials, festivals and world’s fairs increasingly came to be used as locations for the exercise of “soft power,” for displays of cultural diplomacy between nations and as spaces for addressing areas of social and political contestation. Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries opens with a substantial introduction to the key debates, followed by case studies that advance the field of exhibition histories both geographically and methodologically, focusing on postwar transnational exchange and the wider networks engendered through exhibitions.

Chapters trace relations across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific, and the United States of America, drawing on a range of approaches and perspectives, principally from art and design history but also from social, economic and political history, and museum studies. Featured case studies include the presentation of African-American Art at FESMAN ’66 and FESTAC ’77, the US’s 1961 Small Industries Exhibition in Colombo, Israel’s early appearances at the Venice Biennale, the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, and Hong Kong’s Pavilion at Expo 70 in Tokyo.