What Scale Affords Us: Sizing the World Up through Scale

In the 1990s, contemporary art’s “global turn” was vividly demonstrated by artists whose works directly reflected upon their experiences of moving across vast geographical distances. Coinciding with a multidisciplinary crisis over globalization as expressed through different approaches to the question of scale, the ambivalence towards the global turn’s expansionism was vividly taken up by the large number of Asian artists whose rise to international prominence was enabled by this “turn.” Artists like Suh Do-Ho, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Danh Vo engaged with scale not simply as metonymical reflections of the world, but as a means of responding to those systems, standards, and hierarchies whose own assumptions about scale were mobilized to put things in their proper, but not always rightful, place.

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