I used to think transmodernism was just another art-world buzzword—one of those terms that sounds profound in a gallery brochure but means nothing when you try to pin it down.
Turns out I was wrong, or at least half-wrong. Transmodernism, which emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, represented something genuinely different: a deliberate attempt to synthesize visual traditions from multiple cultures without flattening them into some bland global aesthetic. The philosopher Enrique Dussel coined the term around 1989, though artists had already been working in this direction for years, pulling from Indigenous Mexican motifs, European modernism, African textile patterns, and Asian calligraphy all at once. What made it transmodern rather than just postmodern pastiche was the insistence that these traditions could coexist without one dominating the others—a radical idea, honestly, given how much of art history involves one culture borrowing (or stealing) from another and calling it innovation. The movement refused the postmodern irony that treated non-Western art as exotic raw material, instead proposing that multiple visual languages could speak simultaneously without translation.
Artists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco became early exemplars, creating performance pieces that layered pre-Columbian symbolism with cyberpunk aesthetics and colonial critique. Their work felt deliberately uncomfortable, I guess because it was supposed to be—rejecting easy consumption.
When Geometry Stopped Belonging to Anyone in Particular
Here’s the thing: geometry has always traveled. Islamic tessellations influenced Spanish architecture during the Moorish period, roughly between the 8th and 15th centuries, give or take a few decades depending on the region. Those patterns then showed up in Latin American colonial churches, where Indigenous artisans added their own symbolic systems—stepped frets representing mountains, spirals indicating water or wind. By the time transmodern artists started working in the 1990s, they had access to this entire layered history, plus digital tools that let them recombine elements at unprecedented speed. The Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes, for instance, creates paintings that feel simultaneously like Matisse cutouts, carnival decorations, and Baroque altarpieces. Her work doesn’t quote these traditions so much as let them bleed into each other, creating new hybrid forms that don’t quite belong to any single origin point. Critics sometimes describe this as visual creolization, though that term carries its own colonial baggage that artists definately don’t always embrace.
Wait—maybe the more interesting question is why this synthesis happened when it did.
The 1990s saw massive shifts in global migration patterns, the rise of the internet (still dial-up for most people, maddeningly slow), and the end of the Cold War’s rigid ideological binaries. Artists working in major cities like Los Angeles, Mexico City, São Paulo, and Berlin found themselves in spaces where multiple diasporas overlapped. The Korean-American artist Byron Kim created his “Synecdoche” series starting in 1991—hundreds of small monochrome panels, each matching the skin tone of a different person he knew. It’s a simple concept, almost too simple, but it visualized diversity without exoticizing it, treating human variation as just data points in a larger field. Similarly, the British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor began incorporating intense pigments derived from traditional Indian powders into massive minimalist forms, creating objects that felt ancient and futuristic simultaneously. These weren’t fusion projects in the culinary sense—not “let’s combine sushi and tacos”—but genuine attempts to operate from multiple cultural positions at once, acknowledging that most people in globalized cities already lived this way whether art reflected it or not.
The Unresolved Tension Between Authenticity and Appropriation Nobody Really Solved
Honestly, transmodernism never fully resolved its central contradiction.
If you’re synthesizing multiple traditions, who gets to decide which combinations are respectful versus extractive? The movement attracted criticism from artists who felt it gave cover to cultural appropriation—that claiming to “transcend” cultural boundaries was just a sophisticated way for privileged artists to raid marginalized visual vocabularies without accountability. The Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco addressed this directly in her 1992 performance “Two Undiscovered Amerindians,” where she and Gómez-Peña displayed themselves in a cage as fake “primitives,” forcing audiences to confront their own voyeurism. The piece was uncomfortable because many viewers didn’t realize it was satire—they actually believed they were looking at real Indigenous people, which was precisely the point. Transmodernism at its best operated with this kind of self-awareness, but plenty of artists simply layered aesthetics without engaging the power dynamics underneath. Gallery spaces in New York and London would showcase “global contemporary art” that looked transmodern—lots of pattern mixing, cultural symbols in conversation—but was sometimes just expensive decoration for collectors who wanted their homes to look cosmopolitan without actually having to think about global inequality.
I’ve seen museum exhibits that label everything vaguely multicultural as transmodern, which feels lazy. The term meant something specific: not just mixing but synthesizing with awareness of historical context and power. When the Filipino artist David Medalla created his “Cloud Canyons” installations—sculptures made from soap bubbles constantly forming and dissolving—he was drawing on Buddhist impermanence concepts, Baroque fountain spectacle, and 1960s process art all at once. The synthesis worked because he wasn’t treating these as interchangeable flavors but as philosophical positions in genuine dialogue. That’s different from, say, slapping a mandala pattern on a corporate logo and calling it transcultural, which happens more than anyone wants to admit. The movement’s legacy remains uneven: it opened space for artists from multiple backgrounds to work without being pigeonholed into representing their “culture,” but it also created a market category that could be exploited just like any other.
Anyway, maybe that’s the most transmodern outcome possible—messy, contradictory, still arguing with itself decades later.
