All around the world, art and design are torn between their "modern" claim to emancipation and a simultaneous longing for a "pre-modern" cultural identity. Or is Heinrich Heine's harsh insight more to the point: that freedom arrives on horseback in the form of imperial might, just as Napoleon once did? In any case, the fact that art and design are also a form of power practice should no longer be denied. At least Goethe knew how to distance himself from the knee-jerk identity reactions of the Germans at that time; today, perhaps, it is once again a matter of an aesthetics of democracy, only this time on a truly global scale. It is precisely this historical dimension that reveals itself in the phenomena of what is now a truly global art scene. This volume takes as its example South, Central, and East Asia in an attempt to discuss these questions based on observations of a more recent globalized world art. The focus is not only on the forms that we know from the European and American art establishment, all of which are filtered by the Western art system's channels of selection, but also on the variety of forms that fill the new local art markets in Asia. Along with the respective "stars" of these countries, we also see forms of high and/or low art lesser known in the West. With essays by Marc Augé, Bazon Brock, Jürgen Wasim Frembgen, Regina Höfer, Sarah Khan, Hans Ulrich Reck, and Norbert M. Schmitz