Thinking Otherwise: Asia Revisited

Inspired by the “Asian Art and Culture” display in Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, designer Yi-fan Wang features a “Blue and White Porcelain” (青花瓷 qing-hua-ci) pattern as the cover image for this special issue of Concentric on “Asia and the Other.” In the light of traditional Asian ceramic arts,1 the editors of Concentric would like to invest this visual and plastic (ceramic) design, this aesthetic mode, with new metaphorical significance: we see its circulation or “traveling” throughout Asia as an example of Spivak’s conception of “many Asias.”