LibGuides: Asian and Southeast Asian Art History: Reference sources

What are reference sources?

Reference sources are resources used to locate basic information and secondary literature.

There are many types of reference sources, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, handbooks, guides, and style manuals.

They are a fantastic places to begin your research, especially if you are exploring a new topic.

Reference sources can help you to:

define your topic in general terms
find background information, including themes and key points
identify keywords and alternative terms for conceptualising your subject, and for database searching.

Online reference resources

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms
An accessible and useful A-Z, covering a wide range of terms from the visual art world, including materials, techniques, and important styles and periods.

Oxford Art Online (formerly the Grove Dictionary of Art Online) This link opens in a new window
This database enables access to the entire text of the thirty-four volume "Dictionary of Art" as well as the "Oxford Companion to Western Art." It includes full text articles in the visual arts and art history, in addition to image links, thumbnail art images, and line drawings. Coverage includes time periods, art movements, visual mediums, geographies, styles, cultures, and peoples.

Print reference resources

Asian Art by edited by Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton
Call Number: CHIFLEY N7260.A815 2006
Publication Date: 2006
The first comprehensive anthology of important primary documents and key contemporary scholarship on Asian art history. Traces the rich artistic traditions in China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia across time periods, media, cultural contexts, and geography - from the terracotta armies of the First Emperor of Qin to late 20th-century installation art.
Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century by Vishakha N. Desai (Editor)
Call Number: ART & MUSIC 709.5 ASI
Publication Date: 2007
This text explores the field of Asian art and its historiography, tensions, and possible future directions. It features essays by fourteen leading authors specializing in Chinese, East Asian, Indian, and Japanese art history.
Asia through Art and Anthropology : cultural translation across borders by Fuyubi Nakamura, Morgan Perkins and Olivier Krischer (editors)
Call Number: ART & MUSIC 701.03095 ASI
Publication Date: 2013
This book explores the shifting roles of those who produce, critique and translate creative forms and practices, for which distinctions of geography, ethnicity, tradition and modernity have become fluid. Drawing on accounts of modern and contemporary art, film, literature, fashion and performance.
Reworlding Art History : encounters with contemporary Southeast Asian art after 1990 by Michelle Antoinette
Call Number: CHIFLEY N7311.A58 2014 & View online [ANU staff and students only]
Publication Date: 2014
A foundational reference work for those interested in Southeast Asia's contemporary art, including scholars of art history, Asian studies, curatorship, museology, visual culture, and anthropology, as well as professionals working in art and museum contexts.

Additional resources

Interlaced Journeys : diaspora and the contemporary in Southeast Asian art by Patrick D. Flores and Loredana Pazzini - Paracciani (editors)
Call Number: CHIFLEY N72.G55 I574 2020
Publication Date: 2020
This is the first anthology to examine the subject from the complex perspective of artistic and curatorial practice as it attempts to propose multiple narratives of diaspora in relation to a range of articulations in the contemporary context.
Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500-Present by Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton (Editors)
Call Number: View online [ANU staff and students only]
Publication Date: 2016
The chapters in this volume investigate place in all of its dynamism and complexity: several call into question traditional constructions regarding place in Art History, while others explore the fundamental role that place plays in lived experience.
Studies in Southeast Asian art : essays in honor of Stanley J. O'Connor by Nora A. Taylor (Editor)
Call Number: CHIFLEY N7311 .S78 2000
Publication Date: 2000
This wide-ranging collection of essays examines the arts of Southeast Asia in context. Contributors study the creation, use, and local significance of works of art, illuminating the many complex links between an object's aesthetic qualities and its origins in a community.