SAN DIEGO, CA.- The San Diego Museum of Art presents Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, through March 6. This major group exhibition organized by the San Diego Museum of Art features many important established and up-and-coming artists from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. With additional tour dates scheduled at two other U.S. venues, the exhibition will provide American museum goers a rare, yet extensive look at work from several vital artistic communities in Asia that are quickly gaining a foothold on the world cultural stage. By including recent, new, and commissioned works, the exhibition serves as an introduction to the latest trends in contemporary East Asian art.

Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia features 22 artists and artist groups who have created innovative works that use the past to map the future. Among the featured artists are Soun-gui Kim, Cai Guo-Qiang, Wang Qingsong, Tadasu Takamine, Hiroshi Fuji, Michael Lin, and Leung Mee Ping. Working in a diversity of media—painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, digital media—these artists access the past by engaging aesthetic and conceptual principles that are rooted in the arts and culture of their particular region of origin. Occupying several of the Museum's galleries, each artist's work is featured in a separate section while accompanying wall texts—in both English and Spanish—articulate how the artist is responding to historical precedents.

Within the Past in Reverse exhibition space, in two separate sections, the Museum is presenting approximately 24 works from its own extensive holdings in East Asian art to illustrate many of the historical sources referenced, adopted, or manipulated by the contemporary artists featured in the exhibition. Explanatory wall texts will describe the nature of the relationship between the historical pieces—which include paintings, sculptures, drawings, and ceramics from Japan, China, and Korea—and the related works in Past in Reverse.
This portion of the exhibition is not scheduled to travel to other venues.