Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2015 i ArtAsiaPacific

When contemplating what to cover in the May/June issue of ArtAsiaPacific, we were naturally compelled to consider the upcoming Venice Biennale. We were struck by how many of the artists who will represent their native lands have already graced our Feature pages. The list includes Tsang Kin-wah (Hong Kong), Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho (Korea), Wu Tienchang (Taiwan), Heri Dono (Indonesia), Fiona Hall (Australia), Istanbul-born, Paris-based Sarkis, who will inaugurate the new Turkish pavilion, and Danh Vo, the Vietnamese-Danish artist who will transform the Danish pavilion. We are very excited about the attention these artists will garner in the coming days. For this issue, the editors gaze back at some of the recent participants at Venice, and look forward to some of the figures who merit inclusion in future Biennales.…

Since one documentary about collector Uli Sigg is not enough, German filmmaker Michael Schindhelm will be making a second. Artists in China will be the focal point of his upcoming fulllength film. Recently, Schindhelm and his entire crew were knocking on almost every studio door in Beijing, including those of Cao Fei and Feng Mengbo. For a story that’s familiar to art-world insiders, let’s hope the film sheds new light on the former Swiss ambassador to China, Mongolia and North Korea, and pioneering collector of PRC art. Judith Neilson, the angel of Chinese artists, was seen making the rounds in Shanghai. Soon to launch her second art space in the heart of Sydney, the USD 32 million Phoenix, Neilson—who founded the nonprofit White Rabbit Gallery and sponsors the Biennale of…

“I could have gone further afield, but I came back because I wanted to do projects with New Zealand art at a level of detail that would only make sense here,” explains Robert Leonard, about his decision to take the position of chief curator at City Gallery, in Wellington, in 2014, after nearly a decade in Brisbane directing the Institute of Modern Art (IMA). Yet before Leonard had even begun his new role he was charged with an international project that would take him even further afield. In October 2013, the national arts development agency Creative New Zealand appointed him as curator of the New Zealand Pavilion, featuring multimedia artist Simon Denny, at the 56th Venice Biennale. Partaking in the Venice Biennale can make an artist, but it can also…

AUSTRALIA 4A CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ART 181–187 Hay Street, Haymarket, NSW 2000 »» www.4a.com.au »» info@4a.com.au »» (tel)+61.02.9212.0380 »» (fax)+61.02.9281.0873 »» 11am–6pm (Tues–Sat) »» Closed on Public Holidays We are a non-profit organisation. Our program of exhibitions, talks and lectures is dedicated to the contemporary art of the Asia-Pacific and Australian and Asian cultural dialogue. ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY 245 Wilson Street, Darlington, NSW 2008 »» annaschwartzgallery.com »» mail@annaschwartzgallery.com »» (tel)+61.2.8580.7002 »» 10am–6pm (Tues–Fri) »» 11am–5pm (Sat) 185 Flinders Lane, Melbourne 3000 »» (tel)+61.3.9654.6131 »» 12pm–6pm (Tues–Fri) »» 1pm–5pm (Sat) INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART 420 Brunswick Street, Brisbane, QLD 4006 »» www.ima.org.au »» ima@ima.org.au »» (tel)+61.732.525.750 »» (fax)+61.732.525.072 »» 12pm–6pm (Tues, Wed, Fri and Sat) »» 12pm–8pm (Thurs) Since its establishment in 1975, the Institute of Modern Art has been…

Tomoo Gokita has a cult following among his fans around the world. The Tokyo-based illustrator’s Dadameets-punk-rock designs have graced zines, T-shirts and album covers for more than two decades. His transition from geekdom to the art world in the early 2000s was almost seamless, as galleries in New York and Tokyo began mounting exhibitions of his surrealism-infused black-and-white paintings and quirky, exquisitely rendered drawings of awkward anonymous portraits inspired by vintage popular culture magazines. Last year, his first solo museum exhibition, at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Japan, came as a surprise to some of the more conservative members of Japan’s tight-knit art community. Here Gokita shares a drawing he made for ArtAsiaPacific in March, entitled Sexy Papa, which displays his playful elusiveness.…

INGRID DUDEK Ingrid Dudek is vice president and international senior specialist of Contemporary and 20th Century Asian Art at Christie’s. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, and a MA in Anthropology from New York University. Currently based in New York, she previously spent time in Beijing as a Fulbright fellow. (See FEATURES) INTI GUERRERO Inti Guerrero is a Hong Kongbased curator and art critic. He was previously associate artistic director and curator at TEOR/éTica, a nonprofit art space in San Jose, Costa Rica. Recent curatorial projects include “A Chronicle of Interventions” (2014) at Tate Modern, London, and “Islands off the Shores of Asia” (2014) at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. Guerrero is the Latin America desk editor at ArtAsiaPacific. (See FEATURES) KENICHI KONDO Kenichi…

VASUDEO S. GAITONDE UNTITLED 1963 Oil on canvas, 114.3 x 96.5 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s New York. Deep-pocketed art aficionados flocked to New York during Asia Week in March (3/13–21). Mainland Chinese buyers dominated the scene at Christie’s, which held a highly anticipated five-day, six-part auction (not including an additional online sale) of the Robert H. Ellsworth collection. A legendary Asian art dealer, Ellsworth, who died in 2014, left behind a vast trove of Ming dynasty furniture, archaic jade, ceramics, Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian art, and modern Chinese painting. In total, the Ellsworth sales, comprising more than 1,400 lots, brought in USD 134 million for the auction house, making up the bulk of Christie’s Asia Week grand total of USD 163.5 million— its highest total since participating in the annual…

To understand Emirati curator and Sharjah Art Foundation president Sheikha Hoor bint Sultan al-Qasimi, you first need to understand where she comes from. Sharjah, deemed the most conservative emirate in the United Arab Emirates, is shaped by both a strict adherence to Islamic legal and religious traditions, and a deepening respect for its own cultural legacy—from pre-Islamic archaeological sites to its modernist constructions. Yet, when Sharjah looks to the future, it does so from the vantage point of culture. Sheikha Hoor’s father, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qasimi, is a poet-playwright-politician, double PhD-holder and prolific author, who opted for cultural investment as a spearhead for the emirate’s future. A book fair, a calligraphy biennial, a heritage festival, an active cultural department, museums, universities and the internationally touted Sharjah Biennial were all…

The itinerant life of a curator never slows down. The March schedule of Sook-Kyung Lee, the research curator at Tate’s Asia-Pacific Research Centre, took her from a whirlwind weekend in Hong Kong to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and then Phnom Penh for studio visits and back-to-back meetings. I caught her at the beginning of this long trip and we sat down for coffee one Friday morning to talk about what’s been keeping her so busy. Born and educated in South Korea, Lee assumed her first position as curator at its National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 1993. In 1999, armed with a fellowship awarded by the British Council in Korea, she went on to pursue her MA in arts criticism and her PhD in art history and…

In 2010 when we first started Artspace, the online marketplace for contemporary art, we were surprised by how often friends and investors would ask whether people would actually buy art online. The question seemed crazy to me. I had been in the internet business for more than 18 years and had seen the industry grow from a time when it took ten minutes to download one page of a website to today, when the web has become an integral part of our lives. Collectors have been buying art sight unseen for years. For decades, auction houses have been publishing print catalogs, sending them to collectors and taking bids by phone. Galleries have been selling works with photographs sent via email for years. We buy groceries, cars and jewelry online. We…

It’s a drizzly March afternoon in Hong Kong’s Kwun Tong industrial district, located on the eastern side of the Kowloon Peninsula. Patrick D. Flores, curator of the Philippines Pavilion at this year’s 56th Venice Biennale, is in town for the opening of his latest exhibition, at Osage gallery, “South by Southeast.” Co-organized with Romanian curator Anca Verona Mihulet, the show forges conceptual links between contemporary art of Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe, by way of the geopolitical conditions that shaped the two regions’ histories and contentions for power. Based in Manila, 46-year-old Flores is considered one of the Philippines’ most active curators and art historians. Since 2009, he has been curator of the prestigious Jorge B. Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, where he is also a professor…

As we move from room to room in Sunil Hirani’s Greenwich, Connecticut home, I pick up my pace to stay with him. We drift from one artwork to another, catalogs fly off shelves as Hirani flips and scans the pages looking for an image to share, then we’re on to the next piece. It comes as little surprise when he tells me that he rotates the art that covers most walls of his family’s home as frequently as every three months. “I get antsy,” the India-born entrepreneur says. “I change it to get a different experience.” Twelve years ago, inspired by visits to galleries while vacationing in his wife’s native Colombia, Hirani embarked on a collecting journey that now consumes much of his spare time. Although the collection meanders from…

I. Coffee Culture In 1933, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), one of the foundational figures of Brazilian modernism, painted Operários (“Workers”), a social-realist portrayal of a multiracial proletariat in the already industrialized city of São Paulo. With smokestacks and factory buildings in the background, rows of faces fill the composition, depicting men and women of Italian, Lebanese, Syrian, German and Japanese backgrounds as equals to the group’s majority hailing from Brazil’s diverse biracial populations. Amaral’s portrait of São Paulo was created just four years after the Wall Street Crash devastated the coffee-export-based economy of the gigantic South American country. The artist herself had a personal connection with the coffee business. She was the daughter of a prominent coffee-plantation land-magnate, whose astronomical wealth had allowed her to study fine art in Paris…

The more topical an essay, the faster it becomes a primary document itself—particularly when its author is an active, influential figure working in a field such as contemporary art, which has evolved so immensely over the last two decades. This was the evident impetus behind the publication of Playing with Slippery Lubricants: Apinan Poshyananda, Selected Writings, 1993–2004, which reprises 26 essays and conference papers by the eminent Thai scholar and curator, now the permanent secretary for Thailand’s Ministry of Culture, whose writings provide a portrait of this formative decade in both art and Asian society. Already a recognized scholar of Thai modern art, the Apinan Poshyananda of 1993 proves to be as knowledgeable and familiar with the contemporary art scenes of Asia as one could be in the days before…

On a bright March day, the afternoon sun beats down on the tile roofs and red-brick facades of Hong Kong’s Cattle Depot Artist Village, a former slaughterhouse facility north of the city center. Built before World War I and renovated in 2001, the single-story complex is now home to 20 rented studios and artist-run spaces comprising a total of 15,000 square meters. Aside from the faint sound of taxis cruising by outside the complex gate, it is quiet and still in the open courtyard around which five identical buildings stand. Even the doors are all painted the same color. But, surveying the scene, it is not difficult to identify which studio belongs to Frog King. Reams of paper adhered to brick walls flap in the breeze, discarded furnishings and found…