section_path: Modernism in Africa and Asia
section_name: Modernism in Africa and Asia
paragraph_text: Modernism in Africa and Asia
  
  Peter Kalliney suggests that "Modernist concepts, especially aesthetic autonomy, were fundamental to the literature of decolonization in anglophone Africa." In his opinion, Rajat Neogy, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka, were among the writers who "repurposed modernist versions of aesthetic autonomy to declare their freedom from colonial bondage, from systems of racial discrimination, and even from the new postcolonial state".
  
  The terms "modernism" and "modernist", according to scholar William J. Tyler, "have only recently become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-à-vis Western European modernism remain". Tyler finds this odd, given "the decidedly modern prose" of such "well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki ". However, "scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced "modanizumu" as a key concept for describing and analysing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s". In 1924, various young Japanese writers, including Kawabata and Riichi Yokomitsu started a literary journal Bungei Jidai ("The Artistic Age"). This journal was "part of an ' art for art's sake ' movement, influenced by European Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, and other modernist styles".
  
  Japanese modernist architect Kenzō Tange (1913–2005) was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designing major buildings on five continents. Tange was also an influential patron of the Metabolist movement. He said: "It was, I believe, around 1959 or at the beginning of the sixties that I began to think about what I was later to call structuralism ", He was influenced from an early age by the Swiss modernist, Le Corbusier, Tange gained international recognition in 1949 when he won the competition for the design of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
  
  In China, the " New Sensationists " (新感觉派, Xīn Gǎnjué Pài) were a group of writers based in Shanghai who in the 1930s and 1940s, were influenced, to varying degrees, by Western and Japanese modernism. They wrote fiction that was more concerned with the unconscious and with aesthetics than with politics or social problems. Among these writers were Mu Shiying and Shi Zhecun.
  
  In India, the Progressive Artists' Group was a group of modern artists, mainly based in Mumbai, India formed in 1947. Though it lacked any particular style, it synthesized Indian art with European and North America influences from the first half of the 20th century, including Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism.