Innholdsfortegnelse for 103 (May/Jun 2017) i ArtAsiaPacific

New cultural streams are running in Amman today as a number of groups seek to assess, design and challenge the strategies that shape artistic production in Jordan. One such group, comprised of independent artists, is researching cultural policies in the country through analysis and engagement into what constitutes as a cultural map. Named “About Culture in Jordan,” this research was partly presented in April 2016 at the Hangar Ras al-Ain, a former factory turned exhibition hall, where, in partnership with the Ministry of Culture and Greater Amman Municipality, more than 40 noncommercial cultural initiatives set up booths. It brought to the fore both the large and the small, as tiny initiatives with small budgets—including cultural cafés— appeared alongside prominent arts foundations. A good, but not great, number of visitors showed…

March art fairs in New York are still competing for the “best in show” crown, even more so this year amid political tension and economic dips. The first week brought the year’s initial wave of the city’s art fairs, from the Armory Show to the long-running Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America, and more niche ventures such as Volta, Independent and New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). Over in Dubai and Hong Kong, the air of competitiveness within art circles was friendlier, as the coterie of jet-setting collectors flying in for the fairs noticeably put gallerists, dealers and artists at ease. Our editors highlight coveted pieces that buyers were fighting to get their hands on. New York Once New York’s primary contemporary art fair before the arrival…

If you are in the center of Beijing and find yourself in an inconveniently narrow alleyway, flanked by low, gray-colored, traditional-style buildings, then you are in a hutong. These special alleyways are a uniquely Beijing phenomenon, and so then are the art spaces within them. On talking to those behind some of these art spaces I discovered that there is no overriding reason for deciding on a hutong location and that while there are benefits, there are also, usually, disadvantages. One certainty, however, is that the life of a hutong art space is markedly different to that of other galleries, museums and art spaces in Beijing and beyond. First, it is useful to understand the history and current sociocultural resonances of Beijing’s hutongs. As far back as the time of…

One morning several years ago, Lee Wan had an epiphany while eating breakfast. Looking at the various generic packages of cereal, juice and sugar that were on his kitchen table, he began to casually scan the items’ ingredients labels and the countries of their origin. Unsettled by these insignificant yet telling details, Lee began to consider how the most basic necessities of everyday life, such as simple breakfast foods, had traveled from small factories in Southeast Asia to giant supermarkets in the United States and Europe. That particular morning’s rumination led to Lee’s video and installation series, “Made In” (2013–17), for which he has adopted the roles of farmer, producer and craftsman to investigate how commercial goods are produced. Over the next several years, he traveled to different Asian countries…

In today’s geopolitical hotbed of activity, Tintin Wulia’s practice seems more relevant than ever. However, as an artist who focuses on the politics of borders, Wulia looks beyond current events, seeking to highlight recursive patterns in history. Born in Denpasar, Bali, in 1972, she mines her personal history as a Chinese-Indonesian growing up in the traumatic shadows of the mass anti-communist killings in Indonesia in 1965, as well as her own travel experiences as an Indonesian passport holder subject to numerous visa requirements. Her work thus employs politically iconic objects such as the passport, the wall and the map, in interactive installations and performances that explore imbalances in our globalized world. Wulia works across the globe, in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia, creating projects that are often ongoing…

It was, ironically, raining heavily when I arrived at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for the group show “Before the Rain.” Leaving my umbrella at the Sydney gallery’s entrance, I stepped in from the busy, drizzly street to be greeted by a small marquee that was Sampson Wong’s re-creation of one of the temporary structures that characterized Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations of 2014. Wong, along with the Umbrella Movement Visual Archive and Research Collective, 4A director Mikala Tai and other artists including James Kong and Swing Lam, had transformed the ground floor and stairwell of 4A into a space exploring this key moment in Hong Kong’s history. On the walls, a series of annotated diagrams created by Lam mapped the tent cities that made up the Fragrant Harbor’s…

Six days—that is the longest Siah Armajani has been away from his studio in Minneapolis, where he has resided since immigrating to the United States in the early 1960s. The Tehran-born, 78-year-old polymath spent those six days in Hong Kong last February to prepare a mini-retrospective of his six-decade practice and give public talks. For the architectural portion of the show, Armajani presented maquettes of his designs for bridges and gazebos, created between the 1970s and 2016. Some have already been realized as public art projects, such as Bridge Over a Tree (1970), a delicate, mixed-media model of wood and glue that features an acute climb and descent to preserve a tree’s natural occupation of space; the bridge was temporarily erected in the field that is now the Minneapolis Sculpture…

“Here After Here” brought the most comprehensive display yet of Jitish Kallat’s career to the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi. Spread between the old quarters of the Jaipur House and the institution’s newest wing, the retrospective examined Kallat’s practice through six themes—“time,” “sustenance,” “recursion,” “historical recall,” “cosmos” and the “cosmopolis”—but without much elaboration or criticality. The exhibition got off to an emphatic start in the Jaipur House with Kallat’s iconic “Public Notice” trilogy (2003–10). These works—acrylic mirrors onto which words have been burnt, bones formed from fiberglass arranged together to create text, and stairs embedded with LED displays spelling out statements—highlight the artist’s preoccupation with the outcomes of spectacular chapters from India’s cultural, political and social history. The words and statements are taken from landmark speeches delivered…

“Please Come Back. The World as Prison?” was a group show at MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome that examined the material and metaphorical meanings of prisons. The exhibition was organized according to three thematic strands, first reflecting on the physical and psychological experiences of prisoners in coercive structures, then on the politics of erecting social and political barriers, and finally on the global proliferation of sophisticated surveillance systems. By mounting the exhibition of 50 works spanning mediums including CCTV footage, video installations, paintings, drawings, photography and more by 26 artists, curators Hou Hanru and Luigia Lonardelli sought to explore our modes of navigation in constantly controlled environments, and our responses to new, boundless forms of global surveillance. The Cage the Bench and the Luggage (2011)…

Agus Suwage’s exhibition “Room of Mine” at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York offered the art world a visual banquet of mind-teasers. At 58 years old, Suwage is one of Indonesia’s highest profile mid-career artists and a master of many mediums and modalities. In nine large works—four watercolor paintings and five installations, all from 2016—Suwage presented himself as an outrageous psychologist, absurd humorist and social satirist. Indonesian political references and cultural symbols mixed with universal archetypes and allegories, but this time there was something new. Kama Sutra II was inspired by a well-known image of an embarrassing United States presidential moment: the August 2000 photo of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the White House Garden, taken at the instant when their dog had jumped up and buried its head…

Guangzhou-based Zhou Tao is primarily known for his visually arresting videos with ambiguous narratives. Born in 1976, Zhou uses his lens to witness the rapidly changing environments (natural and societal) across Asia and Europe. This sketch is related to the artist’s ongoing research into the idea of landscape in today’s built environment. Zhou believes that a new form of topography has emerged over the last few decades, which erodes any and all specificities of place, activity or trends that were previously pronounced, particularly in mainland China and parts of Asia. In a new work, which will be unveiled at the upcoming Venice Biennale in May, Zhou will piece together observed footage from different geographies to form a nonlinear tale that explores and questions humans’ relationship with brutally altered nature.…

On July 20, 2016, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) agents stopped Niasari at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport as she was about to board a flight. She was told to call her husband and ask him to meet her at the airport. When he arrived, the couple were detained. The following day, Vafadari and Niasari were taken to their Tehran home in handcuffs. IRGC agents removed artworks from the walls, damaged or destroyed some in the yard, while others were confiscated. IRGC agents also went to Aun Gallery and seized or destroyed artworks that were on display. According to Aun’s exhibition schedule, the gallery’s last show was an exhibition of Iranian artists that ended on July 21, 2016. Days after the couple were taken to Evin Prison, Tehran prosecutor Abbas…

The appointment of Christine Macel as director of the 57th Venice Biennale (5/13–11/26) is highly anticipated by the international art community, not least because the French museum veteran is the fourth female curator to direct the event since its inception 122 years ago. (The last female director was Bice Curiger, in 2011.) In her regular position as chief curator of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a title she’s held since 2000, Macel is credited with founding the Pompidou’s contemporary art department. The Biennale, titled “Viva Arte Viva,” will shift its gaze from contentious political topics to focus instead on the artists themselves and the process of creative expression. In her curatorial statement, Macel explains, “The role, the voice and the responsibility of the artist are more crucial than ever before…

Is culture a viable alternative to oil as a driver of economic growth? This is a question being mulled over by many of the oil-rich nations around the world that have based their futures on historically high oil prices over the past decade. These same nations are now rethinking their economic forecasts due to the current reality of lower global oil prices. Since 2001, state oil companies and their generous revenues have funded enormous urban expansion in places like the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Qatar, all of which have included national cultural projects such as the museums of Saadiyat Island in the UAE, the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, and the Kazakh National Museum in Astana. Many of these countries have…

Over millennia of human expression, we have continually shifted our comprehension of sound and its relationship to us, plunging ever deeper into mysterious, entropic fugues of noise. Twentieth-century musicians such as John Cage and György Ligeti, who felt constricted by the musical traditions of their predecessors and contemporaries, attempted to orchestrate new experiences of listening. Cage’s infamous 4’33” (1952) is void of even a single note, pushing forth the sounds of silence around the audience; in contrast, Ligeti’s Atmosphères (1961), used by director Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, conjures a cluster of tones that, to the listener’s ear, seem textureless, endless, as if one or a thousand notes were being played. Both pieces have since been canonized as acts of musical genius and performance art.…

In his recent solo show titled “Tryst” at Taka Ishii Gallery, New York-based Japanese artist Ei Arakawa stayed true to his practice and engaged with conversations in Japanese art history. His subject was five dynamic paintings produced in the early days of the Japanese artistic group Gutai. Founded in 1954, Gutai promoted a renewed sense of individuality within modern Japanese art, and arose in opposition to the social realism that was prevalent during aggressive reconstruction in postwar Japan. Now in the permanent collection of Les Abattoirs, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Toulouse, the five paintings, which were painted between 1959 and 1960 by Gutai artists Jiro Yoshihara, Akira Kanayama, Atsuko Tanaka, Shozo Shimamoto and Kazuo Shiraga, were originally brought to Europe by collector Anthony Denney and marked…

Hong Kong’s M+, shorthand for “Museum Plus,” will officially inaugurate its permanent building in 2019, but the institution is already living up to its name by reaching beyond the traditional parameters of an art museum. The ambitious HKD 5 billion (USD 644 million) project will be Asia’s first multidisciplinary establishment dedicated to art forms as esoteric as contemporary ink painting and video art, but also fold in other disciplines. Aric Chen, M+’s lead curator for design and architecture, mounted an offsite exhibition devoted to his specialization in 2014, and returned with a selection from the 2,500 design objects in the institution’s collection for a second show, “Shifting Objectives: Design from the M+ Collection,” at M+ Pavilion, a temporary exhibition space in the West Kowloon Cultural District. The presentation was split…

Biennials frequently appear at odds with themselves, torn between static formats of display and the ever-evolving discourses they enable. Within Sharjah Biennial 13’s (SB13) yearlong program—with projects in five cities organized according to four thematic keywords—the portion that took place in Sharjah (“Act I”) represented conversations in progress. Curator Christine Tohmé titled the Biennial “Tamawuj,” an Arabic word that describes the undulations of waves, and suggests the frothy cycles of societal improvement and degeneration in the region. SB13’s four keywords correspond to projects organized by Tohmé’s interlocutors: artist Kader Attia’s symposium on “water” held in Dakar in January; curator Zeynep Öz’s mid-May exhibition in Istanbul of existing and commissioned artworks associated with “crops”; artist-books commissioned by Lara Khaldi on the theme of “earth,” to debut in Ramallah in August; and…

For three years, Haus der Kunst director Okwui Enwezor, together with Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes, conducted research on art produced in the two decades following the Second World War. Their collective endeavor culminated in “Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965,” an exhibition of more than 350 artworks by 218 artists from 65 countries. Challenging the presumption that the genealogies of Modernist languages are rooted solely in a Euro-American narrative, the show resulted in a radical dislocation of one’s perspective on art history in the aftermath of global conflict. In the grand atrium of Haus der Kunst, visitors found an ensemble of sculptural works, including David Medalla’s Cloud Gates – Bubble Machine (1965/2013) and Atsuko Tanaka’s iconic Electric Dress (1956). These transformative works established a formal dialogue…

The 29-year-old Chinese photographer Ren Hang enjoyed a busy, successful career with a full exhibition calendar before he committed suicide in Beijing in February 2017. Ren’s penchant for producing straightforward, self-consciously posed color portraits of nude women and men engaging in a wide variety of sexual permutations raised hackles among Chinese authorities but has garnered him an international, cult-like following. His notoriety was derived from his unabashed, naive shots of straight and gay individuals, the figures often absurdly accompanied by octopi, snakes, lizards, cigarette smoke, fish, plastic bags and pastoral settings. Thumbing through Taschen’s 312-page retrospective volume, published in January before Ren’s untimely passing, I was embarrassed and delighted in turn by the explicitness of erect penises arrayed like an armorial crest, an octopus worn like a balaclava, vignettes of…

Nearly 30 years ago, I seriously began to question the origins and ideological assumptions of the West. What does it mean to be Western? What does it mean to be modern? These inquiries led me to Martin Heidegger and his fundamental question: “Why are there beings rather than nothing?” From Heidegger, I learned that my original questions were actually metaphysical in nature, and that the modern Western world expressed a particular understanding of what things are, of what it means to be, of what has meaning, of being itself. I would then discover Heidegger’s short 1941 essay, “Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics,” in which he outlines the historical stages of the Western understanding of being. This schema would become essential to my understanding of my own work,…

1 Rana Hamadeh The Sleepwalkers, 2016, single-channel HD video: 30 min 30 sec. Courtesy Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. 2 Fyerool Darma Portrait No. 8 (Si Komeng or The Colonial Puppet), 2016, from the “Moyang” series, 2015– , acrylic and charcoal on canvas and wood, 62 x 35 x 10 cm. Courtesy the artist and Yeo Workshop, Singapore. 3 Hilarie Hon Go on a Voyage, 2016, acrylic and oil on canvas, 75 x 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Exit, Hong Kong. 1 Rana Hamadeh NETHERLANDS Activities once seen as extrinsic to art, such as critical theory, research and even curatorial practice itself, have shaped contemporary art of the last decade far more than art-making. An exemplar of this shift is Lebanon-born, Netherlands-based Rana Hamadeh, who has grouped her…

On the evening of August 22 last year, artists, professors, students and collectors flocked to Ateneo Art Gallery in Quezon City, Philippines, for the opening of “Los Desastres de la Democracia (The Disasters of Democracy),” an exhibition of paintings, photographs and sculptures by Manuel Ocampo in collaboration with Jigger Cruz. I felt compelled to go, intrigued by Ocampo’s notoriety and stature within the local art scene. I was already aware that his explicit and often gory works were not for the fainthearted. Given the artist’s reputation, I assumed him to be either a brooding and ill-tempered misanthrope or a reckless and self-destructive motormouth. However, during the introductory speech, he was surprisingly polite, even soft-spoken. Yet he concluded his remarks with a provocative declaration, “Let’s have an orgy!”—which drew good-humored chuckles…

The main exhibition site for the first Honolulu Biennial was a hollowed-out warehouse, which just a year ago housed a sportswear chain retailer, then a Halloween costume store, and will soon host chic cafés and boutiques. The space stands a few blocks between where the Ola Ka ‘Ilima Artspace Lofts will be erected to provide low-income housing for artists in the community, and where the annual Pow! Wow! mural festival has transformed the walls of former warehouses into a neighborhood chock full of surrealist graffiti. Now, the Biennial has entered the scene and staked its own claim on what Kaka‘ako, also known as O‘ahu’s “Third City,” should look like. The Biennial’s inaugural theme was “Middle of Now | Here,” contending with the idea that Hawai‘i sits in the “middle of…

For nearly three decades, Song Dong’s practice has explored the relationship between life and art. In his vast body of work, the artist has drawn from the fragments of Beijing’s widespread demolition and urban transformation, and his knowledge of the vanishing world in which he came of age. His exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, “I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven,” staged the artist’s most extensive solo survey in mainland China. Set in the grand halls of the 1932 Art Deco building that once housed the Royal Asiatic Society’s North China Branch—a hub for Sinologists in one of Shanghai’s earliest expat enclaves—the exhibition presented Song’s playful, top-to-bottom conquest of the six-story structure; Sketch: RAS (Interior) (2016–17) demarcates in black tape the dimensions of the stairwells, giving visitors…

At Chiang Mai’s MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Thai artist Kamin Lertchaiprasert, who organized his own retrospective, exhibited artworks that were created as part of his own spiritual cultivation. By melding art production and meditation, the artist sought to anchor his ever-itinerant mind in the present moment. In the museum, Kamin’s drawings, paintings, wax sculptures, pottery, Zen calligraphy brushworks and even a video of the artist riding a bicycle were on display. In her essay for the show’s catalog, independent curator June Yap writes that Kamin’s creations are junctures where “art practice and spiritual practice . . . ‘disappear’ into each other.” The artist’s offerings propose that art-making must be executed as one of many techniques of vipassana—the activity of seeing things as they truly are, arising and passing away. The…

At The Third Line gallery, in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue arts and culture district, Qatari-American artist Sophia al-Maria interrogated submissive consumerism in “Everything Must Go,” her first solo exhibition in the United Arab Emirates. While she reinterpreted work from her 2016 exhibition “Black Friday” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, in which she introduced American audiences to the culture of hyper-consumption in the Arab Gulf region, Dubai’s backdrop offered a new context for her work: there was no voyeuristic glimpse of an exotic culture halfway around the globe. For nationals and expatriates of the Gulf nations, al-Maria’s show reflected lived experiences, sparked by the artist’s adaptations that both resonated with and unsettled her audience. The exhibition showcased the digital video Black Friday (2016), which presented roving images of the…

State-approved murals have lauded heroes and maligned enemies of Iran’s Islamic Revolution since its earliest days; conversely, for over a decade, Tehrani street artists have been creating murals that are frequently critical of contemporary Iranian society, risking arrest and even incarceration. Mehdi Ghadyanloo operates for neither side. Although he has created more than 100 government-sanctioned public artworks in Tehran, they are neither propaganda nor protest. Ghadyanloo’s public art, he says, is for the people. His murals are calming alternative spaces, surrealistic heterotopias that dissolve the bustle of the megalopolis and visually subvert the constraints of physics. They turn buildings into trompe-l’oeil views of the sky where Tehran’s pollution and poor city planning have obscured the real thing. Stylistically, the canvases in Howard Griffin Gallery’s offsite exhibition at London’s industrial space…

Known for remarkably persuasive trompe-l’oeil depictions of dumpsters, filing cabinets, suitcases and other banalities rendered in acrylic on canvas, Okinawa-born, Los Angeles-based Kaz Oshiro continues to build on his series of what he calls “paintings” with a new body of work that imitates the I-beam, a prominent symbol of the Industrial Revolution and a universal component of construction. To understand the artist’s intentions, it is worthwhile to revisit a passage in Hal Foster’s seminal study, Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996): “Since the Industrial Revolution a contradiction has existed between the craft basis of visual art and the industrial order of social life. Much sculpture since Rodin seeks to resolve this contradiction between ‘individual aesthetic creation’ and ‘collective social production,’ especially in the…

Iranian sculptor Sahand Hesamiyan’s studio is legendary in the Tehran art world. “If you see only one studio in the capital,” one artist advised during my breakneck three-day visit, “this is it.” Visitors to the gargantuan space—gallerists, guides, journalists, curators—walk away impressed as much by its scale as by the precision of the work that unfolds inside its four walls. Burrowed in the dusty Khorramdasht Industrial Zone well beyond the outskirts of town, off the road leading to the storied Mount Damavand, Hesamiyan’s lair is a site where industry and intricacy meet. His works—large, reclining vessel-like sculptures, each channeling a veritable universe of elaborate, repetitive patterns that recall Islamic architecture—have been likened to everything from vaulted domes and futuristic pods to ornamental projectiles. They conjure references to Sufism, metaphysics, symbolism…