Megacities Asia

Artists from some of Asia’s largest megacities explore issues of migration, consumption, sustainability and cultural heritage raised by the region’s rapid urbanization.

More than half of the world’s megacities—cities with populations of ten million or more—are in Asia. This compact and dynamically designed book introduces the work of several artists from the megacities of Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi and Mumbai who are fueling their practices with materials found in those places and responding with large, immersive sculptures indelibly marked by their urban contexts. Like the cities in which they were conceived, the towering accumulations of stainless steel vessels, plastic wares, discarded architectural elements, grocery products and other found objects by artists Ai Weiwei, Choi Jeong Hwa, Subodh Gupta, Han Seok Hyun, Hu Xiangcheng, Aaditi Joshi, Song Dong, Hema Upadhyay, Asim Waqif, Yin Xiuzhen and the collective flyingCity dazzle us with their sheer mass and strange transformative power, and envelop us in complex global issues of migration, consumption, sustainability and cultural heritage.