Asian Graphics Now! edited by Julius Wiedemann Taschen HK$320
Most of us probably didn't need proof that Asia is crammed with visual cultures of astonishing subtlety, beauty and sophistication - but if we did, Asian Graphics Now! provides it. A collection of the best graphics from the region across disciplines that include advertising, branding, editorial and packaging, it's a dazzling ride through a frequently awe-inspiring and occasionally disorientating landscape of wildly imaginative graphical output, alongside some more restrained but still impressive commercial work. The book's frequently spectacular visual content, however, is let down by its editing.
Inevitably, much of the best work in it comes from Japan, especially in the advertising and poster section, with impressive contributions also from South Korea and China. There's the elegant expressiveness and iconographic good sense of Akio Okumura's poster advertising, for example, and the formal, geometric elegance of those by China's Chen Zhengda. The ability of so many of the designers, particularly those from Japan, and particularly in their poster work, to condense immense amounts of information into small spaces with complete elegance and visual coherence is at times breathtaking, and a telling contrast to the collapse of long-copy print and poster advertising in the West.
Lumping the work of an entire continent together like this serves mainly to highlight the extent to which different nations' visual cultures tend to conform to expectations: Japan's output brims with minimalism and pictographic efficiency, whereas an awful lot of the quirkily maximalist pieces from India look like posters for a Bollywood movie.
But the book's breadth of focus is still problematic - and you need only read the essays at the start of the book to realise this. The essays, which appear in English, French and German, sell the book seriously short. Worst offender is editor Julius Wiedemann, whose introductory piece, The Asian Mystery, is written from a sometimes embarrassingly Western perspective that tiresomely posits Asia as the Exotic Other. It's also ponderous, waffly and filled with clich? of both subject and style, an inelegant contrast to the many beauties it precedes.
'I think it is fair to say that when it comes to Asia, it is the most diverse, and probably mysterious continent in the world,' it begins. This sentence tells you all you need to know about the quality of Wiedemann's writing.