Music in contemporary Asia exhibits various layers of regional history, including traditional music—surviving, preserved, transformed, appropriated, and invented—European classical and contemporary music, Western-oriented popular music, and regionally manufactured and processed popular music. Since these complex and multi-layered musics in Asia unfold in mutually dissimilar contexts, there needs to be discussion of cultural transplantation and internalization via colonial, post-colonial, and multi-dimensional global cultural flows (Appadurai 2004, Tomlinson 1994, Yoichi 2002), and through trans- or inter-Asian cultural exchange (Kuan-hsing Chen 2003, Iwabuchi 2004). World music is a phenomenon of the late 20th century which exhibits various flows and discussions of West and non-West, traditional music and popular music, cultural transplantation and its internalization, colonization and post-colonialism, and global and local; it has become a cultural entity located in the cultural intersection of myriad texts and contexts. Asian music, in particular, as world music may provide the proper site to discuss several issues about the multi-dimensional global cultural flows mentioned above. As a meta genre, world music is a cultural entity in which new texts are (re)constructed and relocated in multiple directions. Among world musics, Asian music is seen as one geo-cultural entity— a new provider and, at the same time, a potential market. This paper begins with several questions. What is Asian music, and separately, what is referred to as Asian music? What about texts and performance practice, and who are the artists? How does Asian music obtain and construct its own geo-cultural entity? How is Asia presented and represented in world music? Asia—always the exotic other? How do the global network and global context intervene in the construction of Asian music on the world music scene?Based on several years of fieldwork, interviews, and knowledge of the field, combined with media analysis, this paper will answers the questions above and explore the multi-layered meanings of the unfolding of contemporary Asian music, and at the same time, examine the ways in which world music becomes an intersection where colonial and post-colonial ideas and globalization are tested and/or collide, and how world music becomes a site where “Asia” is re-defined and re-imagined.