Innholdsfortegnelse for May/Jun 2016 i ArtAsiaPacific

Vying for cultural influence on a global scale is a national project in Qatar. One of the most ubiquitous slogans seen emblazoned on billboards throughout the country— “Qatar Deserves the Best”—reflects the sentiment that Qatar has the money and clout to become an international powerhouse. The past ten years have been a heady time for Doha, armed with a huge budget to buy artwork and to develop new institutions for Islamic, modern, contemporary and Orientalist art, which resulted in exhibitions and events popping up all over the city. However, after a restructuring and rebranding of Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) into Qatar Museums (QM) in 2014 as a way to further engage with the public as an institutional and cultural partner—a streamlined private institution for the public good, as opposed to…

In March, the art world began its annual pilgrimage, setting forth to glitzy Dubai before journeying east to Hong Kong, where two art fairs, a flurry of back-to-back show openings and champagne-fueled “art parties” awaited. Although the economies of both regions have experienced hiccups in recent months, high prices were still being met as eager hands welcomed new stock. Dubai Shaking off the gloom of falling oil prices, visitors from across the emirates and around the world showed up for the milestone 10th edition of Art Dubai (3/16–19), the Middle East’s leading art fair. Although it expanded its geographical reach to include galleries from Georgia, Ghana, Lithuania, Oman, Palestine, Sri Lanka and the Philippines this year, Art Dubai’s statistics—94 galleries from 40 countries—remained similar to previous editions. All told, 27,500…

The most passé of painterly subjects is undoubtedly the nude. Feminist critics and art historians have rightly stripped down the sexist optics at work in the “disinterested” appreciation of the unclothed (usually female) form, which by the 19th century had become a prurient genre of painting in itself, rather than the legacy of Renaissance humanism and neoclassical history painting. These trajectories never fully pertained to the art made in the Ottoman Empire— or not until the late 19th century when, as part of a larger modernization campaign, French-trained painter Osman Hamdi Bey introduced figure drawing into the curriculum of Istanbul’s first art academy, the School of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi), when it opened in 1882. As recounted in the recent exhibition “Bare, Naked, Nude,” at Istanbul’s Pera Museum, while…

Using billowing swaths of fabric, Mikala Dwyer figuratively constructs the soft architecture that forms the memories of a person and place. One such work, Square Cloud Compound (2010), consists of fabrics hanging from the ceiling, anchored by a network of black stockings stretched taut overhead. The multicolored cloth pieces form the shape of impressively large cubes, recalling the soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg or the Minimalist felt forms of Robert Morris. Earlier this year, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney acquired two of Dwyer’s works for their permanent collection, which was also the focus of her most recent show there, entitled “Mikala Dwyer: MCA Collection,” organized by its senior curator Natasha Bullock. Produced during a six-month residency on Cockatoo Island—best known as one of the sites of…

“Ifs, Ands, or Buts,” Heman Chong’s first solo museum exhibition in mainland China, recently held at Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai, referred to words used as caveats in agreements. It was also a reference to Shanghai itself, which is built on international “concessions” and zones of free trade. The limits of these alternative inner cities are permeable and allow sanctuary, as they did to European refugees during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai until 1941. Similarly, modern Singapore, where Chong is based, has grown from a free-port agreement seeking concord among migrant settlements. Such agreements are often fragile and, relatedly, Chong’s exhibition looked at situations in which the understanding between truth and fiction is uncertain. The exhibition occupied RAM with newly commissioned installations on all six of its levels. The…

Through experimental performance, installation, painting and drawing, Tang Da Wu, one of the founders of the Artists Village, widely regarded as Singapore’s first artist collective, pushes the boundaries of artistic form and creative process. His work explores social and environmental themes that touch on issues arising from urbanization, deforestation, animal endangerment and the transformation of the natural landscape. Tang has always believed in provoking thoughts and emotions through his artwork as a way of introducing new ideas and perspectives. In “Earth Work 1979,” at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), Tang’s seminal land intervention works were revisited for the first time since their premiere at the National Museum Art Gallery in 1980, which had only lasted three days before being shut down and relocated to the Sin Chew Jit Poh promotion…

For his recent show in San Gimignano, Qiu Zhijie transformed the ground floor of Galleria Continua, a former theater and cinema, into an archaeological site. Qiu is arguably one of the most intellectually sophisticated figures of contemporary Chinese art. Over the years, Qiu, who is also a curator and scholar, has developed a multidisciplinary practice based on historical and sociological research—what he calls “guantong art,” or “total art”—which has led him to create environments that challenge mainstream thought and ideas. Such was the case with his exhibition “Racing Against Time,” conceived as a total environment for which Qiu mapped a visual genealogy of human development. On view were 47 new paper reliefs, created through an elaborate technique of pressing sheets of cotton paper onto supports made from wood and other…

“The Artist as Activist,” Tayeba Begum Lipi and Mahbubur Rahman’s exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, takes on oppressive societal concerns relevant to the artists’ native Bangladesh. While Lipi’s works are mined from personal experiences, Rahman’s explore local and global issues of Bangladeshi identity and the plight of the disenfranchised. Dexterously combined, the works by the husband-and-wife team enable viewers to engage with the stifling social conditions in Bangladesh on both micro and macro levels. Seeking a new kind of self-expression, Lipi began using stainless-steel razor blades in her art during a 2008 residency in Pakistan. Highly symbolic for their sharp edges, the blades are used to clothe Lipi’s personal objects like a skin, and to embody the painful tension between the loss…

The debut title in the “Philippine Artscape” series from Manila-based publisher The Modern Reader, Art After War: 1948–1969 covers the two decades immediately following the Second World War. In the first of three chronological chapters, the book’s author, art historian and curator Patrick D. Flores, paints a picture of the climate of postwar Manila as the city rebuilds. Historically, the Philippines had imported much of its art-making tradition from its colonizers, leaving artists struggling to adapt European artistic traditions to a Philippine context. Creative talent was neither appreciated nor was there any formal support for such pursuits. Flores’s opening chapter, “To catch up with the rest of the world,” takes its title from a quote by Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, a noted patron of the arts who in 1948 established the Art…

In the past year governments from Australia to Israel have targeted arts funding, in efforts to assert greater political control over art institutions and as part of austerity measures. Ranking among the world’s highest in per-capita spending on the arts, Australia has seen recent governments steadily axing cultural budgets, an agenda that culminated in May 2015 when arch-conservative federal Arts Minister George Brandis cut AUD 105 million (USD 80 million) from the government-backed independent cultural-funding body, the Australia Council for the Arts, over four years. Brandis had planned to reallocate the money to a new funding organization called the National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA) overseen by the arts ministry. The outraged local arts community and the group Australians for Artistic Freedom rallied under a movement called #FreeTheArts…

Art Dubai “The Time is Out of Joint” Opening at Sharjah Art Foundation The 20th Biennale of Sydney Hong Kong Art Week “M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art”…

WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS Lee Kit 5/12–10/9 Unassuming items drawn from the quotidian populate installations and sets constructed by Lee Kit. Washed-out tablecloths, faded curtains or stained bed sheets are canvases on which he paints a quiet commentary on the capitalist inclinations of Hong Kong society—and much of the world. In May, the Walker Art Center will be mounting the Hong Kong-born artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States: “Lee Kit: Hold your breath, dance slowly.” Featured will be a 2014 acquisition by the museum, the 13-channel video installation I Can’t Help Falling in Love (2012). The show will also include a selection of the artist’s paintings, drawings, objects and videos created over the last five years, rounded off with a newly commissioned site-specific installation. HAMBURGER BAHNHOF, BERLIN…

Hong Kong is different from most decolonized states in that the end of its European era of colonization did not result in independence. The people of Hong Kong had no say in the decisions surrounding the handover by the British government of their sovereignty to China, which took place in 1997. In 2003, having successfully battled the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic and with the massive July 1 protests to oppose a new anti-subversion law known as Article 23, Hong Kong society witnessed an unprecedented bout of solidarity. However, nearly 10 years later the push for immediate implementation of universal suffrage was denied by the Chinese government in 2014. The paradox of Hong Kong is that, in the face of globalization, it has been subsumed into China. Rapid transitions…

Since the 1980s, the work of Alfredo Jaar has dealt with the forms and ethics through which art takes responsibility for complex phenomena in society. He has created a language that breaks through the mechanisms that dehumanize individuals and communities in moments of turmoil from our recent history. Whether documenting the Vietnamese “boat people” crisis of the late 1970s through the early ’90s, the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, or disasters like the 2011 Fukushima earthquake in Japan, Jaar has always proposed his own politics of the image. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956, and a New York resident since 1982, Jaar studied filmmaking and architecture, two practices that have informed his often-dramatic installations critiquing media representations of human tragedies. Along with numerous solo exhibitions at galleries…

Motohiko Odani was born in 1972 in Kyoto, where he was raised, and since studying sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts, he has been actively creating works in such diverse media as photography, video, sculpture and illustration. As demonstrated in his works Phantom Limb (1997) and Fingerspanner (1998), a primary characteristic of Odani’s practice is his focus on the motif of bodily transformation—physical modifications, the loss of body parts—as well as the mental and emotional reactions to such changes, including fear, anxiety and an unstable and dynamic state of existence. When viewers enter Inferno (2008–10), a video installation featuring images of a waterfall, they feel a floating sensation and lose the ability to tell whether the waterfall is flowing upward or downward. They may even feel a sense of…

In January, Gallery Hyundai in Seoul hosted a tribute exhibition for Nam June Paik, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of the innovative South Korean video artist. By displaying a selection of roughly 40 works from the 1980s and ’90s, the exhibition emphasized the profound friendship that existed between the artist and Gallery Hyundai. Acquiescing to the commemorative occasion, “Nam June Paik: When He Was in Seoul” was closer to a personal memento of Paik rather than a survey of his achievements or the complexity of his ideas. The show appeared loosely chronological in context and void of new research. Yet the meticulous details and the two years that were spent in realizing this exhibition were astounding for a commercial gallery, especially considering the magnitude and scope of…

Even empty of artworks, Museo Tamayo is a dynamic structure of irregular polygonal spaces—some with high ceilings and others more intimate—and a light-filled atrium, where its pebbled-concrete forms are elevated from the brutalist to something more akin to the pre- Hispanic. While prominent architecture, whether spectacularly good or bad, can be a formidable adversary for an artist, Berlin-based Nairy Baghramian took Abraham Zabludovsky and Teodoro González de León’s building as “both host and foil” in her installation of newly created works in the exhibition “Hand Me Down.” The first object viewers encounter was The Snag (2015), a large, framed colored photograph capturing the legs of a man seen from behind, standing in the street. (The image is framed on just three sides and sat flush with the gallery floor on…

London-based Filipino artist Pio Abad shares his portrait of Gina Lollobrigida, who visited the Philippines in the early 1970s under the Marcos dictatorship, which spanned the mid ’60s through the mid ’80s. Former first lady Imelda Marcos had invited the Italian film-star-turned-photographer to produce a coffee-table book on the Philippines. Lollobrigida ended up photographing the Tasadays, a tribe of allegedly primitive forest dwellers, “discovered” in the early 1970s as living in complete isolation from society. The Tasadays, as it was later revealed, were entirely manufactured by the Marcoses, who pressured a Mindanao tribe to put on the appearance of living a stone-age lifestyle. Abad often engages with Marcos-era mythologies, questioning the construction of national identity and crony capitalism during the couple’s 20 years in power. This sketch is one of…

The Taiwanese Cultural Association, in operation between the years 1921 and 1931, was established during the period when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) by members of the resistance, educator Lu Ping-ting and intellectual Chiang Wei-shui. During that time, in 1925, the association launched Bitai Thoan (美台團), a traveling team of projectionists and silent-film narrators that organized screenings across the country. Taiwan didn’t have the resources to produce its own movies yet and so these screenings were of foreign short films. These short films were not the entertaining narratives or pithy documentaries that we have come to expect in the 21st century; instead, they were elementary, neutral pieces—a news segment on agricultural development in Denmark, for example. Though Bitai Thoan was a short-lived initiative (its operations ceased by 1927),…

SH RAZA CAGNES-SUR-MER 1952 Gouache and ink on cardboard, 50 x 56 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s New York. Auction houses around the globe have made headlines in recent months—and not for their sales figures. Sotheby’s layoffs, which began in November 2015, have carried into the new year in the company’s efforts to cut costs. The latest stream of high-level departures, announced in February, included David Norman, vice chairman of Sotheby’s Americas and co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art worldwide; Alex Rotter, global co-head of the contemporary art deparment; and Henry Wyndham, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, each of whom is leaving the company after a decade or longer. While Sotheby’s veterans clean out their desks, Christie’s employees are tangling with law enforcement. On March 11, officers from the United States’ Homeland Security…

Ang Sookoon SINGAPORE It’s difficult to categorize Singaporean artist Ang Sookoon, whose diverse practice ranges from video and photography to drawing, sculpture and installation. Tying together this mix of artistic forms, however, are her inquiries and provocations in the everyday spaces, in which she subverts perceptions of reality and presumptions of the norm. For the 2013 Singapore Biennale, Ang created an immersive environment with wall-to-wall screens that showed her four-channel video Exorcise Me (2013). The work slowly reveals a group of teenage girls at school—capturing them in classrooms and in the gym—each with a black-and-white death mask painted on their faces. The girls appear aloof and melancholic as they go about their tasks and routines. Contrasting with the crisp school uniforms they all wear, the varied masks project sentiments of…

Not many artists have been called a “prophet of abstraction” or the “greatest colorist” of their nation, but these are just two in an endless list of laudatory descriptions of veteran Australian artist Sydney Ball. In May of this year, Sydney-based gallery Sullivan+Strumpf debuted Ball’s latest solo exhibition, “Infinex IV, Chromix Lumina and Modular.” The ground-floor gallery walls were ablaze with a suite of large geometric shapes rendered in Ball’s signature smooth, shiny, bold colors. These 10 works from Ball’s latest series, “Chromix Lumina” (2015), were complemented upstairs by works from his acclaimed 1960s “Modular” series: three of the original paintings and fourteen exquisite color sketches that were preliminary studies for the celebrated series. The recent paintings matched the earlier works in their formal inventiveness, bold polychromatic decisions and calibrated…

There’s a moment in Alexis Teplin’s three-character play Arch (The Politics of Fragmentation) (2016) when one of the actors, wearing a costume fashioned of painted rags, drolly intones: “Some very precarious patterns of civilization are going to dissolve, which is why all of the time I feel so unreal.” Another character then blurts out: “There’s something wrong with my mouth; I can’t scream.” So continues this alternately comic-yet-ponderous, articulate-yet-alienated production, set within the Biennale of Sydney’s “Embassy of the Real” (at Cockatoo Island), amid Teplin’s own painted-then-shredded-and-reassembled canvases, and loosely evoking modern utopianism through references to the Italian neorealist cinema of Roberto Rossellini and the socialist activism of Safdar Hashmi’s street theater. The play epitomizes the tone of artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal’s Biennale of Sydney, whose seven so-called thematic “Embassies”…

In 1990, Swiss businessman and diplomat Uli Sigg began to amass the largest collection of Chinese contemporary art. He was motivated in part by the knowledge that no institution or collector was then engaged in preserving this important cultural history, occurring at a time when China was finally transitioning out of Mao Zedong’s authoritarian rule. Sigg saw the urgency to build a collection that would serve as an “encyclopedic documentation” of the birth and evolution of Chinese experimental art. In 2012, Sigg donated most of his collection to M+, Hong Kong’s museum for visual culture. The decision to gift to Hong Kong—the city has certain liberties that do not exist, yet, in mainland China—in a way brings the artworks back to the Chinese people, allowing valuable cultural insight into their…

Chinese-born artist Lantian Xie, who grew up in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and now splits his time between the latter and New York, is no stranger to creating compelling narratives that interrogate globalization and dislocation. His keen sensitivity toward the alienation created by global modernity was evident in his masterful curation of “1497”—a group exhibition recently held at Dubai’s Green Art Gallery. The gallery promotes local and regional artists and curators, focusing on criticality and engagement with current global issues, through research-based exhibitions and a publishing program. This multivalent approach, therefore, was the perfect stage on which to mount “1497,” for which Xie curated a synthesis of visual and written artworks by an international roster of artists engaged in critical inquiries of global existence and resistance. Xie chose…

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990), born in Karachi, India, left the Subcontinent in 1954 to attend St. Martin’s School of the Arts in London, and continued her studies in art in Paris during the 1960s. One might, therefore, point to her Western education as the cause of her fiercely abstracted work; yet her style is in fact the result of an array of factors. Mohamedi’s life was seemingly devoted to her work, as she never married nor had children, and she traveled extensively over the years, from Europe to America and throughout the Middle East. By the time she had honed the abstract, linear painting style she became known for in the 1970s and ’80s, she was also a successful instructor of art at the MS University of Baroda, India. The storied…

Combining ordinary objects in strange, inspired ways, Amy Yao has the uncanny ability to address sociopolitical issues with a dash of whimsy. In Phantom Surfer (all works 2016), featured in her recent show at Los Angeles’s Various Small Fires, bright, metallic Easter eggs float in used cooking oil from one of the city’s most popular restaurants. Yao often utilizes out-of-place, store-bought holiday décor as symbols of complacency and signifiers of something gone awry. The plastic eggs are also a tongue-in-cheek nod to the culinary flourish of topping food with an egg—a simple trick often used by restaurants to turn a dish into a trendy commodity. The work betrays the literal greasy underbelly of the restaurant world. Yao’s show, “Bay of Smokes,” also investigated the ever-growing gulf between the systems that…

My drive through the craggy Hajar Mountains to reach artist Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim’s studio conjured visions of Donald Judd’s stark Marfa, Texas refuge from the New York art world din. While Ibrahim certainly didn’t flee any comparatively hectic art scene in Dubai, his fascination with the rude, rocky land on this eastern shore of the United Arab Emirates recalls not only Judd’s own affinity to the barrenness of his Texan hideaway, but also the earthy toils of a generation of land artists, with whom Ibrahim shares a sort of spiritual lineage. Khor Fakkan (literally, in Arabic, “the creek with two jaws”) is Ibrahim’s birthplace and current home—a rambling coastal town bookended by the Gulf of Oman to the east and the choppy cusp of the Hajar Mountain chain to the…