Innholdsfortegnelse for 105 (Sep/Oct 2017) i ArtAsiaPacific

Shenzhen might be the most famous art-related city that no one really thinks about. It is well-known due to the suburb of Dafen village, whose artist-residents at one time produced more than half of the oil paintings existing in the world—all of which are, of course, duplicates of masterpieces. What most are not aware of is that the young city also houses several generations of important Chinese artists, including Liang Quan, Zhou Li—both of whom have recently shown work at White Cube gallery in London—and Li Liao, who was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Asia Art prize in 2013. As Hong Kong gathers momentum due to Art Basel Hong Kong and other developments in the art industry, neighboring Shenzhen is similarly generating interest due to China’s development policies, which employ…

In the art market’s current froth, there are bigger and bigger bubbles forming on top of existing ones, while many smaller ones underneath are beginning to burst. In the first half of the year, inconsistencies in the auction market and news of gallery closings had tempered expectations and briefly stirred concerns that this top-heavy structure might no longer support itself. Uncertainties in the real world of geopolitics also threatened to puncture the art market’s rainbow sheen. Nevertheless, money appears to be flowing; equity prices have risen as of late and solid economic news has come out of Europe, keeping investors—and art buyers— happy and spending. Basel The 48th edition of Art Basel in Basel (June 14–17) further established that whatever worries about the market had been out there were entirely…

The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten. —Teju Cole, Open City How much do we really know about the places around us, about what has made them what they are? With populations becoming increasingly urban over the 20th century—last year, the United Nations estimated that 54.5 percent of the world lives in urban areas today, compared to 33 percent in 1960—the migration to, and within, cities has shaped the built environment of neighborhoods and their social fabric, even while the forces propelling those changes remain largely unseen. Along the way, history is forgotten or obscured, even as it imparts an intangible legacy on people’s daily lives. In Beirut, like many cities in the 21st century, the rapid mass-urbanization of the postwar period to more…

21 This year, pressing issues of our time—migration, gender, sexuality, race and religion—were tackled head-on at two events in New York: the exhibition “Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora” at Asia Society Museum, and the two-day conference “Fatal Love: Where Are We Now?” at the Asia Society Museum and Queens Museum. Nineteen South-Asian-American artists explored the narratives of recent immigrants, second-generation Americans and transnational artists working in and around South Asia and America in “Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions.” The exhibition was a microcosm of what defines the American experience. Here, numerous artworks examined the notion of home through intertwined personal and political histories within the framework of systemically biased and oppressive structures of authority. Artist-activist Jaishri Abichandani, who conceived of “Lucid Dreams and Distant…

One of the works on display in “Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now” was a short text by Lyra Garcellano that states “Sometimes we are only good for brief encounters.” Given the immense scale of the show, which was split between Mori Art Museum (MAM) and the National Art Center, Tokyo (NACT), Garcellano’s words provided visitors with a preview of what they were about to experience. “Sunshower” was more than just a presentation of art; it had the scope of a biennial exhibition. With 14 curators, 86 artists and artist groups, and nine thematic sub-sections with works by at least two generations of artists, the show was the result of astonishing ambition in its encyclopedic offering of contemporary art from Southeast Asia. Not only was it the…

China’s megalopolises, as we know them today, were built by hundreds of millions of migrant workers. These waidi laborers—workers from “elsewhere”—come from across China to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other key locations to build the cities and their own savings. Numbering some 280 million, they live itinerant lives, constantly forging new friendships or even brotherhoods (and sisterhoods). Double Fly Art Center (DFAC), a collective of nine artists all born after 1980, believe themselves not dissimilar from these migrant workers. For their exhibition “The Bro Generation” at de Sarthe Gallery in Beijing, the group asked, “What would art by these migrant laborers look like?” DFAC engage in mischievous performance and video works: dressing up as old men to wreak havoc on Shanghai’s Bund, or bathing in porridge at a Swiss hotel.…

In the exhibition “Suns and Neons Above Kazakhstan” at Baku’s Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, curators Bjorn Geldhof and Anna Fech sought to demystify Kazakhstan as a location that is often portrayed as a hinterland at the edge of the former Soviet Union—a place of steppes, eagles, cosmonauts and oil. After gaining its independence from the USSR in 1991, the country developed into an oil power, and modern Kazakh identity was emancipated from the confines of the Soviet system to take its own shape. Kazakhstan had long been a haven for artists— dissident thinkers were exiled there to diminish their influence on the USSR’s intelligentsia. This legacy was refined in the 1990s as the Soviet Union fell apart, and blossomed in the 2000s when Kazakh contemporary art found its own aesthetic…

A new body of work by Indian artist Subodh Gupta was gathered in a meditative show presented by Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, entitled “In This Vessel Lies the Philosopher’s Stone.” The exhibition included 11 works of sculpture, installation and watercolors displayed in the Leon Bianco Hotel, in a space annexed by Galleria Continua that is located on the top floor of an 11th-century building with terra-cotta floors and beamed ceilings. The exhibiting venue generated much of the show’s allure, boosting an immersive encounter with work that reflected on humanity’s place in the universe. Gupta is best known for his awe-inspiring, monumental installations of clustered utensils, pots and pans. The 53-year-old artist uses household instruments related to sustenance to recall his childhood in Bihar, one of India’s poorest rural regions,…

Kerryn Greenberg, curator of Fahrelnissa Zeid’s retrospective exhibition at London’s Tate Modern gallery, notes in her introduction how astonishing it is that “an artist of such force and originality should have been practically forgotten.” Although the Turkish painter has become obscure in the Western hemisphere in the 26 years following her death, her works remain full of life. Zeid’s biography reads like fiction. Born Fahrünnisa Şakir in 1901 to an elite and artistically inclined family, she lived the glamor of salons and high society, but also the tragedies of war and personal loss. Above all, she was a cosmopolitan and, after studying at Istanbul’s then newly established İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi (Academy of Fine Arts for Women), traveled to Paris with her first husband in 1928, where she was briefly…

On August 11, Chinese police acted on orders to remove residents from their studios and homes inside the Iowa co-op, which is located on 6.1 acres of land within Caochangdi. Chinese dissident artists Ai Weiwei and Wu Yuren, who lived under state surveillance for years when they were still residing in China, uploaded footage recorded during the evictions. Their video clips show that the Iowa co-op was cordoned off, with access to the neighborhood restricted by uniformed officers. As state security removed artists from their homes and studios, construction workers sat beside the commune’s entrance, awaiting instructions to begin demolition work immediately after residents were forcefully expelled. Occupants were given written notice on July 31, then August 1 and 5, to vacate their living quarters and work areas, with officials…

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, TAIPEI “Spectrosynthesis – Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now” 9/9–11/5 After a landmark ruling approving same-sex marriage in May in Taiwan, the government-run Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei celebrates the victory with Asia’s first-ever comprehensive institutional exhibition to focus exclusively on LGBTQ issues. Organized with the Sunpride Foundation, “Spectrosynthesis” collects more than 50 artworks that address the Asian LGBTQ community’s history—stretching from Taiwan to the diaspora clusters in the United States. Participating artists include Shiy De Jinn, Martin Wong, Tseng Kwong Chi, Ming Wong and Hou Chun Ming, whose series “Man Hole” (2014–16) exposes secrets and desires in oil pastel derivations of drawings sent anonymously to the artist. SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” 10/6–1/7/18 China’s…

With her abiding interests in theater, poetry and painting, Karachi-born Nalini Malani was one of the first artists from the Subcontinent to explore the interdisciplinary potentials offered by video and video-installation, beginning in the early 1990s. A graduate of the Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay (Mumbai), Malani has shown widely in India, the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, Australia and Japan, as well as at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and Documenta 13 in 2012. This is an edited version of a two-part conversation that took place on March 19 and 20, 2017, in Amsterdam, in the days after the opening of her exhibition “Transgressions” at the Stedelijk Museum. Malani was at that time in Europe for “Transgressions,” and was also preparing for her upcoming two-part…

Under artistic director Adam Szymczyk, Documenta 14 attempted a radical transformation—a self-described “dis-othering.” It decentered itself, moving half its resources and much of its intellectual focus from Kassel to Athens. It opened in Athens in April, then Kassel in June, thereby extending Documenta’s customary 100-day run to 163 days. Documenta’s heart in Kassel, the Fridericianum, hosted a survey of Greek and postwar art from the collection of the fledgling National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), which is struggling due to the country’s austerity measures imposed by German creditors. Throughout the German-state-funded project were many critiques of the white-supremacist, neocolonialist, heteronormative, and highly securitized neoliberal order of northwestern European countries exemplified by Germany under its conservative government led by Angela Merkel. The Documenta 14 team had relocated to Athens in…

Park Chan-kyong’s exhibition at Seoul’s Kukje Gallery was titled “Farewell” in English, but its original Korean title—“Annyeong,” which is both greeting and valediction, as well as a query about another party’s wellbeing—tinged the show with other connotations. The artist sought to leave behind traditions, and paid respect to the lives lost on Korea’s road to modernization. The Sewol ferry disaster of 2014, in which 304 lives were lost, along with other historical tragedies, was commemorated in the 26-minute, three-channel video Citizen’s Forest (2016). Its panoramic, grayscale footage of an arboreous mountain is a throwback to traditional East Asian landscape ink painting. Actors dressed in school uniforms—most of those who drowned as the Sewol went underwater were high school students—as well as shamans’ robes, military garb and royal garments, played roles…

Sait Faik Abasıyanık is one of my favorite Turkish writers, and I still remember the shock I felt when visiting his house in the Princes’ Islands for the first time. I could not read his letters, as they were written in a script that I did not understand. There is something bitter about such a realization: although I was aware of the Republic of Turkey’s language revolution in 1928, I had never really considered its implications. There is an entire corpus of literature, history and culture that I could not access. This is only one kind of social amnesia; there are also other forms that I am experiencing within my lifetime, such as the transformation of İstiklal Avenue into an abandoned strip, or the renaming of the Bosphorus Bridge to…

For the fifth edition of the decennial Skulptur Projekte Münster, German sculptor Tobias Rehberger proposed to use Donald Judd’s Untitled, a permanent work created for the exhibition’s first iteration in 1977, as a bar with a DJ console in the middle of the piece’s two concentric concrete rings. Rehberger’s plan, which was a genial take on the relational art that was prevalent in the previous decade, did not come to fruition. Judd’s work has resisted mellowing and remains an austere carbuncle in the parkland around a lake, making it a magnet for graffiti. To prepare for an influx of cultural tourists, the encrustations of spray-paint had been burned off, returning the work to Judd’s original stern, minimalist appearance. The desire to transform Judd’s uncompromising work into a site of conviviality…

Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the Indian Subcontinent’s independence from the British Empire, “Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions: South Asian Art in the Diaspora” at the Asia Society Museum in New York provided a rigorous yet nuanced survey of contemporary artists of South Asian descent. By showing only artists currently working in the United States, the exhibition succeeded not only in introducing viewers to the artists’ native lands—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Tibet—but also to the outsider experience of living between worlds. Themes of home, identity, race and migration were explored in a range of mediums. The exhibition layout was strongly guided by the formal and stylistic elements of the artworks in the museum’s largest hall, where 17 of the 19 artists’ works were located. Beginning with Ruby…

In the 1960s, art in Japan entered—as the critic Ichiro Hary? called it—a new era of “international contemporaneity.” Land art, happenings, musique concrète, “conceptual” works of nothing more than written instructions—Japan had them all. Though the island nation remained culturally remote in the eyes of the West, some art historians, such as Ming Tiampo, now argue that the first “happenings” were held in Osaka by the Gutai group in 1958 ( Two new books published in the United States further expand our understanding of diverse artists and movements. The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art, by art historian Namiko Kunimoto, provides monographic essays on four artists active from the 1930s to the 1970s—Yuki Katsura, Hiroshi Nakamura, Atsuko Tanaka and Kazuo Shiraga—and describes a postwar period of national…

My first encounter with Zhang Huan’s work occurred in Cambodia in 2008 thanks to independent curator Zoe Butt. I was with my artist collective, Stiev Selapak / Art Rebels, and she introduced Zhang’s and other Chinese artists’ work to us. Back then, my English language skills were not advanced enough for me to do more research on him, but I was particularly impressed by his performance piece from 1994, titled 12 Square Meters, where he sat naked and drenched in fish oil and honey, in a filthy public toilet in Beijing’s East Village artist community. He sat on the toilet, almost immobile, for an hour. Over time, his body became covered with flies. When I look at the photographic documentation of the performance, it seems like a form of sculpture…

1 Luke Willis Thompson LONDON What could a 29-year-old male, Auckland-born artist say about the viral footage captured by Diamond Reynolds after the police shooting of her partner Philando Castile in Minnesota? To put it critically, what is he allowed to say? Luke Willis Thompson’s video Autoportrait (2017)—which features Reynolds herself—attempts a conscious repatriation of power in constructed narratives. Produced during a recent residency in London, and shown in a 2017 solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in London, the work was conceived as a “sister image” to the original footage by Reynolds. Depicted in a subdued monochrome palette, Reynolds’s chest rises and falls in an otherwise still frame, suggesting her breathing defiantly in the vacuum of sound—a reference, in part, to Eric Garner’s repeated cries of “I can’t breathe,” but…

Picturesque Tashibunosho has remained relatively unchanged for 1,300 years. Since medieval times, rice paddies have blanketed the landscape, cleft by curves that are shaped by the natural geography of the Kunisaki Peninsula that faces the Seto Inland Sea. Though they are part of the estate of the Usa Jingu Shrine that brings thousands of visitors to Oita Prefecture each year, the quaint, quiet and rural farmlands see few visitors other than a handful of adventurous photographers hoping to place their next shot in National Geographic or Smithsonian Magazine. Still pools reflect hues of titian and auburn during the sowing season’s dusk hours; dense green fields with neat edges tile through the valley just before the prefecture’s famed rice is harvested. Like all farmers, those in Tashibunosho take great pride in…

“The Inventive Work of Shigeru Ban,” an exhibition at Sydney’s Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), was the organization’s final contribution to the Australian visual arts scene. Since 2008, the foundation has existed as a nonprofit, aiming to present museum-quality exhibitions, commissions and authoritative publications by many of the Asia Pacific region’s leading artists and writers. Now, the foundation has terminated its operation, and from its metaphorical ashes will rise the Sherman Centre for Culture and Ideas, a pared-down annual monthlong program of events. It was fitting then that SCAF ended its operation with an exhibition of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s community-minded practice, paralleling the foundation’s mission of social engagement. Ban, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize three years ago, is known mainly for making temporary disaster-relief houses from paper and…

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first-ever solo show in mainland China, titled “Monuments,” was a survey of films, videos, photographs and installations dating from 1994 to the present. Occupying two floors of ShanghArt Shanghai, the exhibition’s pacing was noticeably mindful in the use of color and content, optimizing its dramatic effect. The exhibition began with Haiku (2009), a two-minute documentary sketch taken from the capsule-like science-fiction set for Primitive, an ambitious multi-screen video made in the same year. It was shot in northeast Thailand’s “red zone” near the border with Laos, where the jungle harbored communist insurgents from the 1960s until the early 1980s, causing decades of political and military turmoil. Saturated in ruby infrared light, a group of young boys appear listless or in a trance, some sleeping inside a makeshift spaceship…

What is the difference between a circle and a dot?According to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, circles are flat, but the “moon, stars and people . . . are made of dots. They are infinity.” At 88, the doyenne of madness and polka dots grows only more popular with age, and ever more enmeshed in her recurring motifs of dots, nets, phalluses and cartoonish pumpkins—obsessions inspired by decades of mental illness. “Life Is the Heart of a Rainbow,” at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), is the first extensive survey in Southeast Asia of Kusama’s 65-year career, presented in collaboration with the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. This articulate sampling of the artist’s relentless fetishes—endless dots and aggregations—included paintings, installations, videos, and sculptures from the 1950s to the present.…

The Julia Stoschek Collection’s (JSC) second public showcase in Berlin, “Jaguars and Electric Eels,” borrowed its title from a special 1853 edition of the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s (1769–1859) chronicles that recount his expedition to the Americas. Von Humboldt is credited with being one of the first scientists to acknowledge nature’s mutability in the face of human production, consumption and destruction. That slice of history served as the loose conceptual framework for JSC’s natural-historian bent in the exhibition, which articulated a fresh outlook on humankind’s place within our ecosystem. The opening salvo of the show, which included Sturtevant’s Finite/Infinite (2010), considers the impact of nature—especially animals—on our processing of images. In the video, a black dog darts across four side-by-side screen projections in nine seconds. The seamlessness of its…

At the Boghossian Foundation’s Villa Empain in Brussels, Philippe Parreno and Ranjana Leyendecker’s untitled, site-specific multimedia endeavor features a pencil drawing of the Caribbean Sea and the Antilles on a wall. A translucent world map was affixed to a window on the other side of the room, becoming a lens through which visitors saw the outside world. This reflects the late Martiniquan poet, novelist and essayist Édouard Glissant’s thinking: archipelagos represent a departure from homogenous—continental—modes of thought, and open up endless possibilities of horizontal relationships, breaking down the geopolitical pecking order. In the exhibition “Mondialité,” which presented 38 artworks by more than 20 artists from different corners of the world, Parreno and Leyendecker’s negotiation with the practice of historically charged cartography was accompanied by audio recordings of Hans Ulrich Obrist…

In May, I found myself in Taopu, Shanghai, northwest of the city’s financial center at an enclave of factory units that were repurposed as artist studios several years ago. Ceramics artist Liu Jianhua moved here from Jiangnan in 2011, and occupies an 800-square-meter studio—formerly the site of the Phoenix Quilt Company—set among neat tree-lined lanes. Originally, the small industrial estate housed solely artist studios—about 20 in all, Liu said— but it has since evolved into a cluster of design offices and small businesses. As rents rose, artists such as Xu Zhen moved on. Now, only a handful remain. I was fortunate to have caught Liu at his studio. The day prior to my visit, the artist had just returned from the 57th Venice Biennale, where his enigmatic, large-scale installation Square…