Innholdsfortegnelse for 106 (Nov/Dec 2017) i ArtAsiaPacific

In the urban scene of Jakarta today, there is a vortex that is attracting many people to enter and engage with the city. That vortex is art. Exhibitions and cultural activities, as well as news about developments in the art scene, continue to garner national attention. The long-awaited private Museum MACAN (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara)—which we have been hearing about since early 2016— will open on November 5, just days before the opening of the Jakarta Biennale 2017. Artistic director Melati Suryodarmo, a well-known Indonesian performance artist, and curatorial team of Annissa Gultom, Hendro Wiyanto, Philippe Pirotte and Vít Havránek, will introduce the Biennale’s theme of “Jiwa,” which can be understood as life, energy, vigor or soul, and can be seen as a driving principle for…

Art fairs across the world took off amid rising political tensions and warnings of another global financial crisis, which continued to threaten market activities throughout September and October. Sydney The third edition of Sydney Contemporary (September 7–10) attracted 26,500 visitors and saw a total of AUD 16 million changing hands: up from AUD 14 million in 2015 and AUD 10 million in 2013. Signaling the fair’s confidence in the art market’s hunger, organizers also announced that the biennial event would now take place every year starting in 2018—a change welcomed by many of the 94 participating galleries who were overall pleased with sales. At the booth of Yavuz Gallery (Singapore), Melbourne-based Lucas Grogan presented a ten-meter wall installation from his painting series “Library” (2014– 17), which was snapped up on…

On a Sunday afternoon in June, the artist Chen Dongfan spoke with the aid of an English translator, about his solo exhibition, “You Know My Name, Not My Story,” closing that day at Fou Gallery in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Before an intimate audience of art bloggers, gallery professionals and artists, Chen, who splits his time between New York and Hangzhou, discussed his “Half a Man” series (2017), which consists of brightly colored, cartoon-like animal portraits painted on newspaper that hung like drying laundry across the brownstone apartment. Directly inspired by the work of Mike Kelley, the series reveals how Chen— like other artists in situations similar to his—are moving beyond certain aesthetics typically associated with Chinese art. But as with many recent transplants to New York, Chen finds…

Half an hour into the first of my Skype interviews with Rashid Rana, it was easy to forget that we were thousands of miles apart. On the screen of my laptop was an image of him in his Lahore study, responding without delay to my questions, and in the corner of that was a smaller image of me in my London living room. On my screen, Rana was large and I was small, and on his it was the opposite. Each rectangular image represented our respective locations, and despite the enormous physical distance between us, technology had managed to press these two planes together, flattening them: spaces in three-dimensions were compressed and compressed again into two. Then, at one point while Rana and I were still speaking, Skype froze. On…

Art Gallery of New South Wales While the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art has included Filipino artists since its inception in 1993, Sydney’s state art museum, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), has been slower to reflect the fact that Australia is home to one of the largest Filipino diaspora communities, with many living in Sydney’s western suburbs. Perhaps due, in part, to the long-standing directorship of Chinese art scholar Edmund Capon from 1978 to 2011, the disparity between East and Southeast Asian art in the AGNSW’s collection is pronounced. Although Australian artists and institutions have increasingly sought to engage with their Southeast Asian neighbors in recent decades, the focus, to date, has been on Indonesia, with the Philippines relegated to third-wheel status. It…

Asia Culture Center In a fabled experiment conducted in 1937, Harold Saxton Burr, a neuroanatomist at Yale University, proved the presence of electrodynamic fields around salamander eggs. The experiment would be fundamental to scientists who have since posited that the basis of life is found in fields of electrical energy, through which we interact with other living things. In other words, human beings are, by nature, not simply biochemical, but informational creatures that communicate constantly via invisible frequencies. Such new-agey theories have been sidelined as mysticism or quackery, perhaps because humankind has yet to subsume such ideas under its political agendas and capital machines, and because civilization has engendered that we favor the energetically masculine approach of screaming until our faces are red, producing a hullabaloo, instead of tuning in…

Jorge B. Vargas Museum “Rituals of Invasion and Resistance,” a retrospective exhibition of Norberto Roldan’s installations created in the 1990s and later, was presented at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum in Quezon City. These works, which reflect the artist’s growth over a quarter of a century, were shown in their original states as reconstructions or as modified versions, and were displayed in the same space for the first time. Given the artist’s thematically consistent practice of examining the Philippines’s religious, social and historical fabric via elaborate assemblages, the presentation felt like a single installation for visitors to navigate. Some works loomed large, such as Mother of Perpetual Colony (2002), where five square nylon banners with eight-foot-long edges were suspended side by side; others, such as The Dark Box (2005–17), a…

OCT Art & Design Gallery The artist quintet Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) —formed in 2005 by Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Song Dong, Liu Jianhua and Leng Lin—worked with curator Peng Feng for their exhibition “Our Red Packet for Your Favorite Blue” at OCT Art & Design Gallery in Shenzhen. The all-blue presentation was a celebration of 12 years of collaboration, but also an exploration of the nature of presentations and public design in galleries, as well as across the city. In this exhibition, we see that this color has been adopted by PSFO to reflect the collective’s apolitical—mainly, not red—ideas for our world. As the exhibition statement asserts, PSFO examines how artists can establish stronger connections with the public through design. The group draws from the established pedigrees of the creative…

Marian Goodman There is no doubt that Amar Kanwar’s feature-length film, Such a Morning (2017), and its accompanying installations in London’s Marian Goodman gallery are beautiful. Every shot of the 85-minute work is carefully composed to use color and light to optimal effect. The lines of text that overlay many of these scenes—drawing the loose narrative along—are poetic with aspirations to aphorism, and the several motifs that the artist has brought together are lyrical and poignant. However, by claiming that he “searches for a sensory, hallucinatory and metaphysical way to re-comprehend the difficult times we are living in,” and “seeks to navigate multiple transitions between mathematics and poetry, democracy and fascism, fear and freedom,” Kanwar invites scrutiny, and perhaps the best place to start is with those claims themselves. To…

The decision was reached after what the museum cited as “explicit and repeated threats of violence” from the public as a result of a highly publicized anti-animal-cruelty petition calling for the removal of the works. The Change.org petition’s author claims that “the exhibit will feature several distinct instances of unmistakable cruelty against animals in the name of art.” As this report goes to print, the petition has gathered more than 794,300 signatures out of its goal of 1 million. Protestors have also staged marches outside the museum. The exhibition, which opened on October 6 and runs until January 7, 2018, features more than 150 works of art created in China after the end of the Cold War, exploring the spread of globalization and the nation’s rise. It is the largest…

“Jiwa” is the theme of this year’s Jakarta Biennale—a word in Bahasa Indonesia that loosely translates into English as “soul,” encompassing energy and life. Touching on the artistic life force that runs through the country, the biennial aims to present a revisionist engagement between modern Indonesian art and contemporary practice that interrogates the histories of aesthetics and identity by gathering established and emerging local and international artists who have been asked to connect with their own histories. It is a fitting theme, led by this year’s artistic director Melati Suryodarmo—the first woman in the role and one of the country’s leading international performance artists whose work is in constant conversation with the past, present and future and “the world within.” It seems natural that she would want to connect artists…

Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei SPECTROSYNTHESIS Among those in attendance at the opening night celebrations of “Spectrosynthesis,” held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA Taipei), was Chi Chia-wei, an activist who, after decades of tireless campaigning, brought a case to Taiwan’s highest court to determine whether same-sex marriage should be made legal. The judges ruled in Chi’s favor, paving the way for Taiwan to become the first Asian territory to recognize marital unions between gay or lesbian couples. In part a celebration of this landmark occasion,”Spectrosynthesis” was the first major LGBTQ-themed public museum exhibition in Asia and featured 22 artists from Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore whose creative practices span more than half a century. Many of the works grabbed visitors’ attention through the sheer shock value…

Galerie Urs Meile In Lu Xun’s seminal 1918 short story A Madman’s Diary, a paranoid man becomes convinced that those around him are cannibalistic, and are plotting to eat him. Marked as the first work of modern Chinese literature, the story’s leitmotif is an exploration of the insider-outsider dichotomy. At Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing’s 798 art district, Cheng Ran’s namesake series “Diary of a Madman,” created over the last two years at residencies in New York, Hong Kong and Jerusalem, unfolded in the form of videos and photographs that interweave elements of markedly cosmopolitan psychogeography with astutely rendered cinematography and aesthetic jouissance. With these works, Cheng, like Lu Xun before him, gives voice to an outsider who expresses a profoundly melancholic interiority. Walking into the space, one might assume…

STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery Filipino artists Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan regard aesthetics as incidental to communal narratives—and so the tangled arrays of ships, shacks and wings that have long sustained the Aquilizan oeuvre are always propelled by context and, more fundamentally, by the artists’ collaborative processes. The pair emigrated from the Philippines to Australia in 2006, inspiring their ongoing sociopolitical enquiries into migration and home, transience and cultural dislocation. This could be seen in their past creations, such as Wings (2009), which is a set of heavily laden forms comprising thousands of tattered flip-flops acquired from inmates in a Singapore prison, and treated as earthbound allegories for thwarted freedom and flight. Another is In-Habit: Project Another Country (2012), an interactive installation of cardboard-box “houses” referencing shantytowns of the…

Sursock Museum Set on the ground floor of the beautiful Sursock Museum in Ashrafieh, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Beirut, two video installations documented moments of transition in relation to the ongoing war in Syria. With the same attention to detail and innate sense of space that comes through in his photographic works, Damascus-born Armenian artist Hrair Sarkissian indirectly represents the destruction of lives and the difficulties of starting anew through videos that depict, on the one hand, the crumbling of his home in Damascus and, on the other, the path taken by refugees fleeing to a Greek island. The two-channel Homesick (2014) is Sarkissian’s first video creation, and showcases the imagined bombing of his family abode in Damascus. “I wanted to do a work on our home, and…

CCS Bard Galleries “No to the Invasion: Breakdowns and Side Effects,” an exhibition curated by Fawz Kabra and Tarek el-Ariss, and mounted at the CCS Bard Galleries in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, showcased poignant contemporary artworks by 29 artists from the Arab world and its diaspora. Created between 1990 and 2016, all works were drawn from the collection of Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi, who established Sharjah’s Barjeel Art Foundation. The artists cited a series of historic moments and ruptures—including the rise of Arab nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, the end of the Lebanese Civil War, the Arab Spring and the recent divisions in Syria and Iraq—as well as their repercussions, to challenge real and imaginary perceptions of what constitutes an invasion. The show borrowed its title from an indigo-blue linocut…

How can art respond to a society in crisis? In 1940, amid the rise of fascism, theorist Walter Benjamin argued the job of the rebel should be to help society remember its unrealized dreams of liberation. To consider the past, wrote Benjamin, “means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” If we can recall the tradition of the oppressed, we might realize that the “‘state of emergency’ in which we live is the rule”—in other words, that we share a continuous struggle with people in history, who have secrets to offer about our condition if we are perceptive enough to listen. Seoul-based photographer Noh Suntag’s recent monograph, State of Emergency II: The 4th Wall, borrows Benjamin’s turn of phrase, and attempts to puncture…

1 Carla Chan The Ashes of Snow, 2017, installation with custom kinetic snow system and paper, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. 2 Yang Jung Uk We Were Doing It; Nobody Asked Us To Do It, 2016, wood, motor, steel, PVC and thread, 500 x 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. 3 Sarah Choo Jing Wear You All Night, 2017, still from two-channel video installation: 4 min 38 sec. Courtesy the artist. 1 Carla Chan BERLIN/HONG KONG Carla Chan’s installation The Ashes of Snow (2017), shown this summer at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, is a machine that generates simulated snowflakes indoors. White particles change colors as they descend from the ceiling-mounted contraption, graying as they fall and joining what resembles ashes on…

The word sculpture became harder to pronounce—but not really that much harder. – Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field I. ENIGMOLOGY There is a modernist house on stilts, the size of a child’s bunk bed, complete with a ladder—it is a treehouse without a tree, or a miniature forest-fire station made of wood. Near it are five pieces of roughly carved styrofoam clustered together, each more than two meters in height. One of them is leaning against a white pedestal. That can’t possibly be a representation of a flower, can it? Another object in the room looks like a shipping crate, or an altar made from plywood, with a round lamp sitting on one corner. From a distance, it also looks like a tiny kiosk. There’s an ear attached…

Various locations My mother’s father was from Crete. During the population exchange between Greece and Turkey after the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22), people fled their country, leaving everything behind, including the sense of home, and journeyed to an unfamiliar destination. My grandfather died at a young age, so my memories of him are limited, but I sometimes wonder what it was like for him to listen to Greek music, eyes welling with tears. Those thoughts have led me to question the concept of home—from a physical structure with a roof and four walls, to the culture, rituals and people who shape an impression of belonging. When my mother was growing up in Istanbul, she had Greek neighbors. Her godmother was Madame Aspasia, who had to leave years later even though she…

Art Sonje Center In a darkened hall, with meters of black height above you, there were two screens. On one, the large glowing head of a black-and-white, polka-dotted alien baby with elfin ears looks slyly left and right. On another, a second alien baby is hurtling through an abyss—occasionally a bright lens flare, as if from a flashlight fumbling in the dark, appears in the background. Through slits for eyes, this alien baby peers confidently at viewers, slowly bringing its arms up as its hands make a V-sign. It is unknown whether we are being offered a gesture of peace or victory, or being taunted, or witnessing a selfie-worthy, kawaii pose. In Koo Jeong A’s weird, protean universe, an alien baby presenting a V-sign offers a clue to the utter…

Yuz Museum Shanghai’s Yuz Museum, itself illustrative of the city’s recent and much-touted arts expansion, looked back to an era that predates today’s flashy fairs, glossy arts districts and collector-run museums by way of Zhou Tiehai’s allegorical film Will/We Must (1996). Made prior to Zhou’s ascension into the Chinese contemporary art canon, and before he undertook roles as director of museums and fairs, Will/We Must sees Zhou cast a handful of his fellow artists in a silent, subtitled, 35 mm black-and-white parody of China’s creative community of the late 1990s. Comprising nine independent scenes, each outlining the realities and frustrations faced by Zhou and his colleagues, the work blends humor and melodrama to highlight the fine line between creative integrity and popular plaudits that artists negotiate. Screened at Yuz Museum…

Empty Gallery The late filmmaker and theorist Toshio Matsumoto (1932–2017) was a seminal figure of the 1960s Japanese avant-garde movement, and worked in the ranks of graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo and Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop). In his video Everything Visible Is Empty (1975), katakana and kanji drawn from a Buddhist prayer appear in a sequence of fast-paced frames spliced with images depicting the Hindu-Buddhist cosmology, ending with flashes of color and light. This work is the namesake of an exhibition mounted at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery that surveys Matsumoto’s postwar creations. The career of the pioneer, striving to lead the vanguard in documentary practice, is traced through a selection of eight of his experimental endeavors and two made-for-TV documentaries. Matsumoto and his contemporaries contended with the popularization of television and…

Ilham Gallery “Malaysia 2009–2017” was a pilot project for the Ilham Contemporary Forum, and loosely explored current visual arts practices as well as more broadly defined “cultural projects” in the country. The show was assembled by seven curators, all under the age of 39, providing insight into the engagements of a younger generation of urban Malaysian artistic practitioners, gauging what they think is interesting, urgent, possible—and impossible—in Malaysia today. Paintings on canvas were nowhere to be found. In the context of a busy local art market dealing almost exclusively in the medium, that spoke volumes. Yet there were compelling engagements with painting, such as: Liew Kwai Fei’s wood-framed color and shape sequences created based on algorithms; Haffendi Anuar’s geometric wall compositions recycling forms from the windows and grills of local…

Arter – Space for Art Neo-Orientalist expectations have led to a subset of contemporary art that references—if only superficially—Eastern cultures in ways that would have Edward Said turning in his grave. In Turkey, where artists have a hefty catalog of civilizations to cite, we see “illuminated” cowboys sneaked into 16th-century Islamic miniatures, or venti-sized Starbucks cups adorned with vaguely Persianate odalisques. Such uninspired pastiches are hard to avoid, but there are artists who maintain ingenuity and sincerity, including Canan, who adapts Eastern motifs and engages with societal systems in thought-provoking ways. Canan’s solo exhibition “Behind Mount Qaf” at Istanbul’s Arter was a demonstration of the artist’s eclecticism. The show spanned three storeys, in an arrangement that inverted the hierarchy of afterlife’s stations according to the Abrahamic faiths: “Heaven” was on…

Galerie Lelong The fuzzy, pink lettering that read “Beauty Queen” was the first to jump out at me when I was in New York’s Galerie Lelong, the floor of which was covered almost entirely by Lin Tianmiao’s patterned carpets. What appeared to be one enormous piece spanning nearly 130 square meters is actually comprised of more than 100 found, vintage rugs sourced from a factory in Hebei province, and then sewn together to form one massive layer. Joining the throngs of Chelsea gallery-hoppers already exploring the soft landscape, I walked past the plush cutouts sprouting from the carpet: words such as “Chick,” “Concubine,” “Prude” and “Tiger Mom,” all of which can be interpreted as sexist labels for women. It took some time, and the help of a friend fluent in…