This book provides a bidirectional investigation of Asia’s spatiotemporality by asking how Asia is located and how localities are Asianized. Historical and theoretical inquiries into architecture and urbanism in order to trace a notional “common divisor” are integrated with readings of this Asian imagery. Such a common divisor is conditioned to Asia’s phenomenal postcolonial subjectivation and showcases Asia’s unique character. This book contends that the postcolonial condition of architecture in Asia suggests a potential and critical bridge to better understanding of the region. Theoretically, “display-ness” is a strategic and allegoric carrier that is in the focus of this book in order to emphasize the quality of display in a broader sense of time and space. Asia’s architectural and urban spectacle thus is meaningly magnified and intensified with this notion of display-ness to ground the cohesive abstraction among ideological discourse production, innovative theorizations, and empirical phenomena in contemporary scholarship.
