20 Books


man. Inspired by Marguerite Duras’s screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour, this novel is a demonstration of Kashimada’s distinctive voice, the polish and precision of her literary style, and her dedication to exploring the depths of her characters’ psychology that deals with the travails of history, with gendered identity, and with the tension between private and public selves.


Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum, translated by Shanna Tan, Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526662286, £8.50


Yeongju did everything she was supposed to go to university, marry a decent man, and get a respectable job. Ten it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, divorces her husband, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married housewife, and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju – they all have disappointments in their past. Te Hyunam-dong bookshop becomes the place where they all learn how to truly live.


DallerGut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee, Wildfire, ISBN 9781035412761, £8.50


In a mysterious town hidden in our collective subconscious, there is a department store that sells dreams. Day and night, visitors, both human and animal, shuffle in to purchase their latest adventure. Each floor specialises in a specific type of dream: childhood memories, food dreams, ice skating, dreams of stardom. Flying dreams are almost always sold out. Some seek dreams of loved ones who have died. For Penny, an enthusiastic new hire, working at the store is the opportunity of a lifetime. As she uncovers the workings of this whimsical world, she bonds with a cast of unforgettable characters, including DallerGut, the flamboyant and wise owner; Babynap Rockabye, a famous dream designer; Maxim, a nightmare producer, and the many customers who dream to heal, dream to grow, and dream to flourish.


Burma Sahib


by Paul Theroux, Hamish Hamilton, ISBN 9780241633342, £20


Eric Blair stood out among his fellow police trainees in 1920s Burma. Nineteen years old, unusually tall, a diffident loner fresh from Eton, after five years spent in the narrow colonial world of the Raj – a decaying system steeped in overt racism and petty class conflict – he would emerge as the George Orwell we know. Drawing on all his powers of observation and imagination, Paul Teroux brings Orwell’s Burma years to radiant life, tracing the development of the young man’s consciousness as he confronts the social, racial and class politics and the reality of Burma beyond. Trough one writer, we come to understand another - and see how what Orwell called ‘five boring years within the sound of bugles’ were, in fact, the years that made him.


Miscellaneous Buddhism:


A Journey through History by Donald S Lopez, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300234268, $40


ASIAN ART | WINTER 2024 |


Over the course of centuries, Buddhism spread from its place of origin in northern India to become a global tradition of remarkable breadth, depth, and richness. In this new book, the author draws on the latest scholarship to construct a detailed and innovative history of Buddhism – not just as a chronology through the centuries or as a geographic movement across a map, but as a dense matrix of interconnections. Beginning with the life and teachings of the Buddha, Lopez shows how a set of evolving ideas and practices travelled north and east to China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, and Tibet; south and southeast to Sri Lanka, Burma, Tailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia; and finally westward to Europe and the Americas. He provides insights on questions that Buddhism has asked and answered in different times and different places – about apocalypse, art, identity, immortality, law, nation, persecution, philosophy, science, sex, war, and writing.


Buddhism: A Journey Through Art by Rose M Woodward, Interlink Books, ISBN 9781623717162, £45


Te author chronicles art and artefacts from the first to the 20th century in a celebration of the artistic exchange of culture as Buddhism spread throughout Asia. Featuring a selection of over 300 works that exemplify the rich and diverse array of Buddhist art over the centuries.


How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn, Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526605184, £30


Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept – developed in the Victorian era – of separate ‘civilisations’. Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, How the World Made the West reveals a new narrative: one that traces the millennia of global encounters and sometimes diverges. From the creation of the alphabet by Levantine workers in Egypt, who in a foreign land were prompted to write things down in their own language for the first time, to the arrival of Indian numbers in Europe via the Arab world, Quinn makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out of date and wrong. It is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change.


Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World by Roger Crowley, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300267471, £15


Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the Portuguese finally reached the spice islands of the Moluccas in 1511, they set in motion a fierce competition for control – this struggle shaped the modern world. From 1511 to 1571, European powers linked up the oceans, established vast maritime empires, and gave birth to global trade, all in the attempt to control the supply of spices. Taking us on voyages from the dockyards of Seville to the vastness of the Pacific, the volcanic Spice Islands of Indonesia, the Arctic


#AsianArtPaper | asianartnewspaper | China in Seven Banquets by Thomas David Dubois, Reaktion Books, ISBN 9781789148619, £18


Tis book explores 5,000 years of China’s food history in seven iconic meals, from the ancient Eight Treasures feast to the ‘Tail-Burning Banquet’ of the Tang dynasty and the Qing court’s extravagant ‘Complete Manchu-Han Feast’. It also examines the lavish feasts from literature and film, a New Year’s


buffet from 1920s Shanghai, and a delivery menu from the hyperglobal 21st century, while predicting the tables of the not-too-distant future. Drawing on decades of experience eating his way around China, Beijing-based historian Tomas David DuBois explains why culinary fashions come and go, and recreates dozens of historical recipes in a modern kitchen.


Circle, and the coasts of China, this narrative includes eyewitness accounts of the adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters.


A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Corsair, ISBN 9781472155641, £18.50


In this book, the author rewinds the film of his own life and expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonisation, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis. At the age of four, Nguyen and his family were forced to flee his hometown and relocate to the US as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle with his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICA™. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films about the Vietnam War ,such as Apocalypse Now, throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents had left behind


The Exchange: Shanameh/ de Kooning by Oliver Hoare, Looking Glass Press, ISBN 9781399987820, £25


Tis is the story behind probably the most unlikely art deal of the 20th century, told in full for the first time by its protagonist, the late


Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History


by Thomas J Barfield, Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691181639, £30


Te world’s first great empires established by the ancient Persians, Chinese, and Romans are well known, but not the empires that emerged on their margins in response to them over the course of 2,500 years. Tese counterempires or shadow empires,


which changed the course of history, include the imperial nomad confederacies that arose in Mongolia and extorted resources from China rather than attempting to conquer it, as well as maritime empires such as ancient Athens that controlled trade without seeking territorial hegemony. Here, Tomas Barfield identifies seven kinds of counterempire and explores their rise, politics, economics, and longevity. What all these counterempires had in common was their interactions with existing empires, which created the conditions for their development. When highly successful, these counterempires left the shadows to become the world’s largest empires, such as those of the medieval Muslim Arabs and the Mongol heirs of Genghis Khan. Tree former shadow empires – Manchu Qing China, Tsarist Russia, and British India – made this transformation in the late eighteenth century and came to rule most of Eurasia. However, the DNA of their origins endured in their unique ruling strategies. Indeed, world powers still use these strategies today, long after their roots in shadow empires have been forgotten.


asianartnewspaper | Asian Art Newspaper


Oliver Hoare (1945-2018). In July 1994, on the tarmac of Vienna airport, a clandestine swap saw the government of Iran acquire the most significant part of the 16th-century Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp – the greatest manuscript in the history of Persian painting – in return for Willem de Kooning’s Woman III. Tis was the culmination of a series of events which had taken place over many years. It resulted in an extraordinary and ambitious exchange described at the time as the ‘cultural coup of the 1990s’. Tis is Hoare’s memoir and first-hand account of this remarkable transaction, published posthumously on the 30th anniversary of its conclusion.


The Tomb of the Mili Mongga by Samuel Turvey, Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781399409773, £16.99


A tale of scientific discovery, it relates the story of Samuel Turvey’s expeditions to the island of Sumba in eastern Indonesia. While there, he discovers an entire recently extinct mammal fauna from the island’s fossil record, revealing how islands support some of the world’s most remarkable biodiversity. But as the story unfolds, an unexpected narrative emerges - Sumba’s Indigenous communities tell of a mysterious wildman called the ‘mili mongga’, a giant yeti-like beast that supposedly lives in the island’s remote forests. What is behind the stories of the mili mongga? And what did he discover when he finally found the tomb of a mili mongga? Combining evolution, anthropology, travel writing, and cryptozoology, the book explores the relationship between biodiversity and culture, what reality means from different cultural perspectives, and how folklore, fossils, and conservation can be linked together in surprising ways.


Following Miss Bell: Travels Around Turkey by Pat Yale, Trailblazer Publications, ISBN 9781912716357, £15


In 1889, Gertrude Bell, the great British archaeologist, writer, and explorer, arrived in Constantinople (Istanbul) on the first of many visits to what is now Turkey. Over the next 25 years, she would travel the length and breadth of the country, climbing mountains Hasan and Cudi, crossing the Dicle (Tigris) on a raft of inflated goatskins, and taking the earliest photographs of remote corners of the country. Veteran guidebook writer, Pat Yale, set out to retrace Bell’s Turkish adventures as one British traveller following another. Her journey took her to the site on the Syrian border where she met Lawrence of Arabia, to forgotten monasteries with solitary occupants and to villages where the conversations of trilingual inhabitants recalled a more multicultural past. Along the way, she rubbed shoulders with adherents of faiths that barely survive in modern Turkey, with young men manning barricades in the troubled southeast, with refugees struggling to make new lives, with settled nomads making a living from modern tourism, and with a myriad of taxi drivers whose stories exemplify the Turkish dream.


Broken Threads:


My Family From Empire to Independence by Mishal Husain, Fourth Estate, ISBN 9780008712648, £15


Te lives of Mishal Husain’s grandparents changed forever in 1947, as the new nation-states of India and Pakistan were born. For years, she had a partial story, a patchwork of memories and anecdotes: hurried departures, lucky escapes from violence, and homes never seen again. Decades later, the fragment of an old sari sent Mishal on a journey through time, using letters, diaries, memoirs, and audio tapes to trace four lives shaped by the Raj, a world war, independence and partition. Mumtaz rejects the marriage arranged for him as he forges a life with Mary, a devout Catholic from an Anglo-Indian family, while Tahirah and Shahid watch the politics of pre-partition Delhi unfold at close quarters. As freedom comes, bonds fray and communities are divided, leaving two couples to forge new identities while never forgetting the shared heritage of the past.


Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market 1945-200 by James Stourton, Head of Zeus, ISBN 9781804541975, £30


On 15 October 1958, Sotheby’s of Bond Street staged an ‘event sale’ of Impressionist paintings from the collection of an American banker, Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh and a Renoir. Movie stars and other celebrities attended in black tie and saw the seven lots go for £781,000 – at the time the highest price for a single art sale. Overnight, London became the world centre of the art market and Sotheby’s an international auction house. Te event signalled a shift in power from dealers to auctioneers and pointed the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next 40 years. In this climate Sotheby’s and Christie’s became a great business duopoly – as aggressive, dominant and competitive in the field of art sales. Te resulting expansion of the market was accompanied by rocketing prices, colourful scandals and legal dramas.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24