Innholdsfortegnelse for 104 (Jul/Aug 2017) i ArtAsiaPacific

If the creative pulse of a capital indicates—at least in part— the artistic vitality of a nation, Bangkok’s own is of late an unstable one. Between the capital and cities upriver and downstream, flows of artistic energy long presumed as springing from either “core” or “periphery” centers are being recanalized, all the better to reflect regional concerns and outlooks. No longer is it questioned whether the northern city of Chiang Mai, as well as far-southern Songkhla or Pattani, can sustain independent and even conceptually unique art scenes. This attitude continues to hold true, even as, ironically, growing “alternative” practices can thank their recent surge and growing attention on a world stage to the promotional efforts of private collectors, consulting curators and arts administrators who owe their success to careers sustained…

The regional and international art fairs of April and May occur during a busy auction season in New York and London, and between the two Art Basels, in Hong Kong in March and Basel in June. In Asia and Europe, midsize fairs such as Art Beijing, with 160 galleries, or Art Brussels, with 140 galleries, have managed to strike a comfortable balance between scale and price, thus attracting collectors priced out of the big leagues or seeking new discoveries. In New York, however, the high end of the postwar market is increasingly competitive territory. Two spin-offs of European fairs, Frieze and TEFAF, are trying to reel in Atlantic Coast blue-chip collectors that are highly sought after by auction houses. Many of these collectors are likely saving their euros for Art…

In Kunié Sugiura’s Confucius Plaza (1977), a photographic image of a high-rise building silhouetted against the night sky is conjoined with a messily painted, dark-blue canvas. Two eminent modes of modern art-making—photography and abstract painting—are suspended in a strange equilibrium, each with their unique histories of capturing 20th-century life in New York. The associations reel off: we see Manhattan’s new buildings depicted in iconic photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott; and the midcentury abstract paintings by the European emigres and their American acolytes that came to embody the city’s postwar cosmopolitanism. While photography and painting have been locked in an unstated rivalry for much of modern art history, here the two media appear in transition, becoming more alike one another, despite, or even because of, their raw materiality. There’s…

With the art world often polarized between factions that instrumentalize art to promote sociopolitical agendas and those that have financialized art for commercial gains, it was notable that the curator of the 57th Venice Biennale, Christine Macel, announced that her edition was “a Biennale designed with artists, by artists and for artists about the forms they propose, the questions they ask, the practices they develop and the ways of life they choose.” Refusing to be a checklist of big names or to carry a heavy critical framework, Macel’s Biennale had a catchy, affirmative title. As it sounded, especially when shouted with gusto, “Viva Arte Viva” was meant to be “an exclamation, a passionate outcry for art and the state of the artist.” Perhaps reflecting her museum background as the chief…

“The New Normal” is the third iteration of what has become a tradition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA): to stage a large-scale group show every four years, and present a picture of the current state of art. The previous two, in 2009 and 2013, included only Chinese artists; this year, four curators—Guo Xi, Yang Zi, Alvin Li and Wenfei Wang—along with UCCA director Philip Tinari have cast the net a little wider, presenting the work of 24 artists both Chinese and foreign. It was clear that certain events—the ascent of Donald J. Trump, Brexit, the rise of right-wing movements around the world, plus continued wars in Syria and Yemen—loomed large in the curators’ minds. With anxieties about globalization now commonplace, and subsequent fractious reactions coming to define…

There is a spell in the word “Syria.” At any mention of the nation, our impressions are immediately loaded with images of destruction. It is the new shorthand for civil war. Daily news images show bombed-out cities and children pulled from rubble. Chemical weapons are deployed as we watch from afar. A bogus caliphate’s sleek propaganda asks young men to use all the pain that they have felt in their lives as currency, and trade it for blood. When we speak of Syria, we think of boilerplate themes of loss, displacement, strife. That is precisely why “Syria: Into the Light” was timely. The inaugural exhibition at Dubai’s Concrete, Alserkal Avenue’s newest exhibition space, aimed to present Syrian culture without strings of Syria the nation attached, yet did not elude associations…

Predator, conqueror, god—many qualities come to mind when considering one of nature’s most majestic creatures. Because of those traits, the tiger has, metaphorically, become an emblem of strength and economic dominance on the Asian continent. Tapping into the idea that the striped cat holds formidable power, curators Anselm Franke and Hyunjin Kim organized the show “2 or 3 Tigers” at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) as part of the exhibition series “100 Years of Now,” which aims to foster new sociopolitical ideas in art by linking our present political conditions to historical utopias. The show presented eight solo artists and a duo who describe the impact of colonial history on Asian national identities today. Inspiring the show’s title and premise, the work One or Several Tigers (2017) by…

We most often understand, negotiate and register space through our visual and bodily senses. However, when the freedoms of vision and movement are inhibited, other forms of awareness come to the fore, as in the phenomenon of human echolocation—where the visually impaired are able to map their surroundings by making sounds and interpreting reverberations. In his recent exhibition at London’s Maureen Paley gallery, Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan presented new works from his ongoing exploration of sound, which he uses as a means to discover and document the truth about spaces where visibility and movement are constrained by the exercise of power. In the first of the exhibition’s two installations, Saydnaya (Ray Traces) (2017), Abu Hamdan deploys his methods as a sonic artist and “private ear” to investigate the Syrian…

Korean-American painter Young-il Ahn has spent 34 years of his artistic career chasing a memory, attempting to capture it on canvas. In 1983, amid an extended malaise related to legalities that prevented him from selling his work, the artist sought solace in the fresh air and open sea aboard a small fishing boat off the coast of Santa Monica. Suddenly, a dense, disorienting fog rolled in, rendering Ahn unable to see and fearful for his life. Just as swiftly, the fog was burned off by bright sunlight. According to curator Virginia Moon, this “unexpected light,” as the exhibition is named, helped Ahn see again—not only off those shores, but also in his purpose as an artist, marking the beginning of his journey out of a deep depression. Since this incident,…

What makes a place, and what un-makes it? Lamia Joreige—artist, filmmaker and co-founder of the eight-year-old nonprofit Beirut Art Center— has explored these questions since the 1990s in her video portraits, multimedia installations and experimental films about her native city of Beirut. She has recorded oral histories in “Objects of War” (2000– ), revisited sites of wartime disappearances in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (2003), and followed her grandmother’s life story, from Beirut back to Jerusalem, in A Journey (2006). Her current project, “Under-Writing Beirut” (2013– ), is an ambitious multimedia trilogy portraying areas of the city, beginning with the Mathaf district around the National Museum of Beirut, an infamous crossroads during the civil wars. A sketch for a new silkscreen work, Museum Crossing, in this series is shown here. For…

As part of the promotion for the 14-day festival Dark Mofo, 78-year-old Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch disclosed plans to use a bull’s carcass for a live show on June 17 in Hobart, Tasmania. A group of actors, as directed by the artist, would be employed to stage a three-hour “bloody, sacrificial ritual” utilizing the animal’s remains and 500 liters of its blood, before the artist consumed the bull’s flesh. As its title 150. Action suggests, the performance was the artist’s 150th iteration of the ceremony. After catching wind of Nitsch’s plans in mid- April, Animal Liberation Tasmania launched an online petition to garner support for the Hobart city government to block the performance, stating that the event as proposed by Nitsch “trivializes the slaughter of animals for human usage, and…

NATIONAL ART CENTER AND MORI ART MUSEUM, TOKYO Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1980s to Now 7/5–10/23 The National Art Center, Tokyo, and the Mori Art Museum—with support from the Japan Foundation—will jointly host “Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1980s to Now,” one of the largest exhibitions of contemporary Southeast Asian art ever assembled. Targeting a territory home to more than 600 million people, the comprehensive show presents diverse perspectives from over 80 artists. Divided into nine sections, it aims to link cultures and engage with history and modern life through the artists’ stories. Ho Rui An’s video, for instance, reveals Singapore’s fight for democracy during multiple transitions of power, while Jompet Kuswidananto’s installation highlights the loss of traditional culture through Bali’s markets and rushed urban development. BUSAN…

In 1997, on the cusp of the handover of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China, academic Ackbar Abbas published Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong culture, Abbas argued in the book, was a “culture of disappearance,” one that appeared only when faced with the threat of its imminent departure. At the time and immediately after the handover, it indeed felt that way. The regional influence of Cantopop was being eclipsed by Mandopop and J-pop. Hong Kong’s previously vibrant cinema had fallen into a slump, its last nostalgic sigh coming with Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), which felt like both a pinnacle and a valediction—poignantly highlighted by the fact that the film was shot mostly in Bangkok, as the 1960s Hong Kong…

In our talks, we always circle back to ideas of flight. It is through the metaphor of the plane voyage where Zhou can describe his approach toward time construction and organization in his recent works. One of the recurring topics in my recent conversations with Zhou Tao is flight. Or, more specifically, the experience of air travel, especially long haul, and how it can distort one’s concept of time. Both self-evident and predictable, these discussions have become meditations on our own experiences of being on planes. Imagine the scenario, cruising at 35,000 feet above the ground: the view before you might be a cloudless and expansive sky, or an infinite darkness filling up your entire sightline through the oval-shaped windows (weather conditions permitting). It is within these circumstances that the…

The notion of home in a migratory world is conflicted and many-faceted. “Familiar Stranger,” a group exhibition mounted in Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, is anchored in the act of returning home, particularly the moments when memory collides with reality. Via the works of six artists, the exhibition examined experiences of migration and memory from the perspectives of those who have left their homes voluntarily or involuntarily, and reflected on the effects of a disrupted sense of belonging when a geographic connection is broken or absent. The artists have each employed gesture to explore this rupture. This began from the moment one entered the ground-floor gallery, encountering Chun Yin Rainbow Chan’s work To Enclose One’s Mouth (2017). A long, white swath of silk loops from the ceiling around…

Some Hongkongers reminisce about the “Golden Age” of Cantopop. In the 1980s and ’90s, the Fragrant Harbor shaped pop culture in East and Southeast Asia, and had the third-largest film industry in the world. Unwittingly tapping into that nostalgia, M+ mounted “Ambiguously Yours: Gender in Hong Kong Popular Culture” at the institution’s temporary exhibition space M+ Pavilion, questioning prevailing perceptions of gender by looking at examples of Cantopop’s androgynous and gender-fluid past. The show was timely, and, in theory, could chime with global conversations about gender and sexuality. It set out to challenge Hong Kong’s conservative character by shining light on topics that are often deemed too provocative for open discussion, and gave voice to people who do not fit into the typical constructs of male or female. M+ Hong…

The artistic landscape of the Arab Gulf has changed immensely over the past two decades, as the United Arab Emirates has pursued a rapid expansion of their cultural sector, bolstered by high energy prices. Detractors have dismissed the burgeoning art scene as imported, often citing the advent of the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim, both of which are scheduled to launch in coming years. However, since the late 1980s, Emirati artists have converged at the Dubai atelier of Hassan Sharif, the UAE’s most influential contemporary artist, laying the groundwork for the dynamic, homegrown art scene that exists today. “But We Cannot See Them,” an exhibition at the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, charted the emergence of contemporary Emirati aesthetic language from 1988 to 2008, through…

Liu Xiaodong is internationally renowned for his practice of documenting strained socioeconomic conditions via painting, photography, drawing and film. The artist often works with communities of personal interest over an extended period of time, developing relationships with those who end up appearing in his artworks. In recent years, the artist has traveled extensively with a small crew to probe difficult social conditions in rural China, areas of conflict between Israel and Palestine, and the routes of migrants and refugees across Europe. In July 2016, Liu traveled from his Beijing studio to south Bangladesh to visit one of the world’s largest ship-breaking yards in Chittagong, where tankers are taken apart to recover steel, copper and other materials. This industry, which leaves harmful oil deposits on beaches and generates an incredible amount…

With the incredible popularity of eSports and the prevalence of mobile gaming apps, video games are now squarely part of mainstream entertainment. Even in art, the format has been tapped as a medium. Ian Cheng utilizes a video-game engine to create live simulations of imagined societies in his “Emissary” trilogy (2015–17). Running on three screens at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York, each installment is also being livestreamed for six months on the museum’s website in conjunction with Twitch, a video platform developed specifically for gamers. Whether playing with motion-capture techniques as he did for Entropy Wrangler (2013), or deploying glitchy animations in the music video Brats (2012), commissioned by the band Liars, Cheng’s older work tends to be frenetic and unsettling. For his latest simulations, however, the artist, who…

Do we make art to eat? Or eat to make art? More importantly, what happens when artists think of food? These questions flashed when a cookbook penned by artists arrived on my doorstep. Recipes are free-form bits of text and image, making them excellent exercises (on paper) for the creatively inclined. But the results can range from frumpy mud pies to filet mignons, from nuts to nausea, depending on the pragmatism of the author. No matter the number of artists in the kitchen, it takes only a few to flavor—or spoil—the broth. For The Unappropriated Recipes, the nonprofit art space Para Site invited more than 80 artists and art figures to submit recipes for a cookbook that reflects one of Hong Kong’s national sports: eating. Venturing beyond the traditional, lubricious…

In early 1985, I found myself in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. After visiting the now-famous “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” show—a problematic but somewhat exhilarating experience—I began to wander aimlessly in the back garden of the museum. If memory serves, I recall that the garden grounds were full of small, loose pebbles. As I walked around, I almost tripped over a pair of steel structures lying low on the ground, covered in dust among these pebbles. As I soon discovered, they were not discarded pieces of a steel structure resembling box girders but the work Lock (1962), by the eminent British sculptor Anthony Caro. A short while later, as I sat in the museum’s restaurant with a cup of coffee, I began to think about…

1 Sougwen Chung NEW YORK The role of the artist has often been to challenge the way we see the world. As technology makes leaps and bounds in artificial intelligence, it seems inevitable that artists should assume the mantle of teaching robots how and what to see, as has become the mission of Sougwen Chung, a Canada-born, New York-based artist. For the multimedia project “Drawing Operations” (2015), commissioned by New Inc, the New Museum’s first cultural incubator, Chung worked with developer Yotam Mann to design a robotic arm that mimics the movement of the artist’s hand, naming it Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 (D.O.U.G._1). As Chung puts pencil to paper, the robot records the process— initiating visual learning—and then mirrors, though not always exactly, the organic shapes and line drawings.…

For all their chaos, ugliness and noise, cities have a poetic tendency to create serendipitous moments of beauty. Despite their size and variety, there are times when things just “come together.” I experienced one of these moments of urban happenstance the morning I visited Rana Begum’s studio in Haringey, North East London. It began when I discovered, on approaching, that the artist works across the street from a house I had lived in five years before, and only became stronger as I turned the corner into the industrial yard where Begum rents her two-story studio-workshop—a site that she shares with an ice-cream truck depot. Lined up in the sun were rows of polychromatic, rust-patched vehicles, a vision of form and color in the bright spring light—unmanned, empty and detached from…

Gazes were returned, archives were reconfigured, and languages—both visual and linguistic—were invigorated in Christian Thompson’s show, “Ritual Intimacy.” As part of a series of presentations by Australian artists, co-curators Hetti Perkins and Charlotte Day put together an exhibition of Thompson’s work spanning the artist’s career, showcasing sculptures, drawings and videos made between 2002 and 2017. During the artist’s PhD studies at Oxford University, he delved into the concept of “spiritual repatriation,” a term coined by Thompson that refers to bringing home the essence of cultural goods in lieu of physical recovery. This re-energizes what was taken from the artist’s ancestors during the colonization of Australia, and extends to reclamation of the artist’s own intergenerational story and spiritual identity. Thompson first came to public attention in the mid-2000s with his “Australian…

Korean conceptual artist Kim Beom claims that “what you see is what you see” and “what you see is not what you see”—which, for viewers, is a good reason to approach his works with strong doses of imagination and complicity. The artist’s curious forays into materialism and existentialism are present in his assemblages of found objects. For example, An Iron in the Form of a Radio, a Kettle in the Form of an Iron, and a Radio in the Form of a Kettle (2002), redefined essence through visual assumption. Kim’s 2010 installation Objects Being Taught They Are Nothing But Tools offered a surreal apologue on the nature of being. If existence precedes essence, as the artist’s works suggest, there is no predetermined nature to be found in, say, an iron.…

Documenta 14 artistic director Adam Szymczyk’s decision to stage part of the quinquennial exhibition in Athens was daring, given the fraught relationship between Germany and Greece, dating from the Nazi invasion during World War II to the ongoing debt crisis. Employing sites in the Greek capital, according to Szymczyk, allowed viewers to experience “displacement” firsthand and encouraged them to “abandon a single vantage point from which to see things.” Moreover, “the possibility of free passage of people and ideas” highlighted the advantage of living and working in the European Union. That thousands are continually denied this possibility, as they land on shores north of the Mediterranean and must live in camps, was one of the main drivers for many of the 160 artists commissioned to create works first in Greece…

In “Against Photography: An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation” at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Akram Zaatari’s artworks were displayed alongside a timeline detailing the history of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), a Beirut nonprofit focused on researching photography that he co-founded in 1997. “Against Photography” demonstrated how questions concerning archival practices have been central to artists such as Zaatari and others of his generation (including Walid Raad), as well as how the AIF has incorporated experimental policies of collection and preservation. This crosspollination between artist and institution can be appreciated in the breadth of Zaatari’s work, which explores various discursive positions in the production, circulation and preservation of the photographic image. The Zaatari works encountered first in the exhibition testify to the AIF’s early “cultural…

Inaugurating the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibition in 1932, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s private-secretary-turned-museum-director Juliana Force wrote that the exhibition would “represent in a broad way” the paintings of America. By the end of the 20th century, the Whitney’s institutional omniscience had abated and the frequency of its survey halved. As Adam D. Weinberg, the current director of the Whitney, notes in the foreword of the catalog for this year’s edition, it has been “many years” since the museum “believed in the notion of . . . a comprehensive exhibition representing contemporary American art.” That transition had congealed in 1993, with the edition Weinberg fingers as having “pointed beyond the social confines of the Museum.” Calling up that Biennial’s stated focus on “self and community” in 1993, curator Mia Locks defines the…

An appointment with Firenze Lai at her studio in the New Territories of Hong Kong began with “petite musique de chambre.” Translated as a “little chamber music,” the term was used by postminimalist composer Wim Mertens to define his 1983 EP Struggle for Pleasure, the lugubrious piano lines of which ran softly from Lai’s MacBook the day we met. Dimly lit by a few maple-syrup-toned lamps, the components of Lai’s studio slowly came into focus against this ebbing of music: there was an assembly of midcentury office furniture sourced from secondhand markets; there were her toy owls—“my guardians of the studio”; there were piles of books in languages such as Polish and French, rising like steeples across the space; there were her canvases, leaning gently against easels; there were drawings…