Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov/Dec 2015 i ArtAsiaPacific

Our cover Feature for the November/December issue of ArtAsiaPacific begins with a look at artistic life in China in the 1970s, specifically through the small landscape paintings of Li Shan. One of the youngest members of the No Name Painting Society, or Wuming Huahui, Li was widely admired by her peers for her gentle, luminous paintings of Beijing. As AAP managing editor Denise Chu explains, “Landscape painting was Wuming’s means, tactic and haven to preserve an art divorced from sociopolitics and, perhaps more importantly, to achieve a measure of spiritual freedom from the oppressive state ideology . . . To make apolitical art in Cultural Revolution-era China was, in reality, categorically political.” Together this loose band of largely self-taught artists would gather for clandestine group outings and paint exquisite, pocket-sized landscapes. Li’s innocent…

The Palace of Versailles’s latest contemporary art exhibition featured British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor. Five large-scale outdoor works in the gardens along with an installation inside the Jeu de Paume room respond to the political history of the 17th-century complex that housed the royal family up until the French Revolution in 1789. Among the works was the 60-meter-long, 10-meter-high Dirty Corner (2011–15), a rusted-steel funnel that sat among giant fragments of uncut marble on the main lawn, with its cavernous, flared opening facing the Palace. In an online interview with French media outlet Le Journal du Dimanche on May 31, the 61-year-old artist’s colorful description of the piece as “the vagina of the queen who took power,” alluding to the Palace’s notorious former resident, Marie Antoinette, had shocked the public—including Versailles’s…

With headlines cautioning about economic upheaval worldwide—as a result of bailouts in Europe, drops in commodity prices and an economic structural transition in China—the autumn auction season set off with uncertainty. But such trepidation proved to be unwarranted as auction results met, if not exceeded, auction houses’ expectations. Leading the rush of back-to-back sales was Christie’s Asian Art Week (September 15–18) in New York, with nine consecutive sales that reaped a grand total of USD 54.9 million, up from the USD 43.5 million reached during its September Asian Art Week last year. An eclectic array of high-end goods including furniture, snuff bottles, Chinese paintings and Southeast Asian sculptures appeared on the auction block. However, it was Christie’s sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art, on the morning of September…

Hailing from Ankara, Chengdu and Jakarta, three young artists use GIFs, videos and photography to probe patterns of human behavior Adri Valery Wens, SYDNEY In Indonesia, faith is socially mandatory: atheism remains taboo and religion is inextricably linked with identity. The Jakarta-born, Sydney-based photographer Adri Valery Wens explores his personal negotiation of these social dynamics through striking self-portraits. Growing up with a Catholic father and a Muslim mother, the 41-year-old recalls a childhood brimming with spiritual tensions as he attended Catholic school in the mornings and studied the Koran in the afternoons. It was after high school, while Wens was working as a model and actor in Jakarta, that he first encountered digital media. Stirred by a realization of the creative possibilities he could achieve through visual art, Wens enrolled…

As I am ushered into a spacious office at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) for my meeting with director Eugene Tan, I am reminded that it is casual Friday. Tall and lean, the 43-year-old is sporting not a suit but a smart pair of black-and-white sneakers along with his all-black attire. He greets me warmly as I enter. Tan has been a driving force behind Singapore’s art scene for more than a decade. Back in 2003, upon his return to Singapore from London where he had been studying, Tan began working as director of the Earl Lu Gallery at Lasalle College of the Arts, which he later restructured to focus on contemporary art and renamed the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore. More recently, he was program director of special projects…

Placebo Affectation The intangible results of intertwining conceptualism, materialism and mysticism Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world. — Robert Barry In a converted auto garage in a former industrial area in Zürich, a lone grate in the asphalt floor was emitting a dense vapor. Its soft scent was that of a muddy, languid river—or that is what I conjured up as I cupped the plumes into my hands, brought them toward my face and inhaled. The cloud quickly dissipated into the gallery space around me, as did the fleeting sensation. An onset of skepticism immediately followed. Did I really smell something—or anything? Was it actually a river? Or was I projecting what I had previously read about “All Whatness Is Wetness,” Dane Mitchell’s…

Li Shan “All the benches are green?” I asked, as I slowly lifted each painting from the stack in a box and carefully placed them on the table. “All benches were green at that time!” Li Shan replied, perhaps with a smidgen of defensiveness lest I were suggesting that, in taking creative license, she had concocted a new color for the outdoor public furniture of 1970s Beijing. That would have been a fair assumption, however, given that the artist had just recounted a memorable bit of feedback she had received many years ago from fellow and senior Wuming member Zhao Wenliang. “‘Without a bit of red,’ he would say, ‘the rest of the colors will lose their fullness; as in music, without the tuning fork’s standard pitch, the orchestra cannot…

Tokyo, Mori Art Museum Dinh Q. Lê, one of Vietnam’s best known artists and the subject of a retrospective at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, has over the last two decades created an insistent, moral critique of America’s version of the Vietnam War. He has attacked the myth of the white hero: the soldier or war correspondent who descends into the heart of international-police-action darkness and ultimately emerges from the hell of Vietnamese otherness. In this approach, Lê follows in the footsteps of Edward Said (1935–2003), the postcolonial deconstructionist who insisted that history is a construct in which, through a close reading of its mainstream narrative, one can find at its core traces of an ugly, buried colonial past. Born in Vietnam in 1968, Lê grew up during the war and…

SHANGHAI, Rockbund Art Museum Tangled extension cords are spread across the floor, a filled shopping cart is missing two of its wheels and a bathtub sits across from a motorbike and a stack of books. A work of the late Chinese artist Chen Zhen (1955–2000), Purification Room (2000/2015) is a chaotic agglomeration of domestic objects whose familiarity is masked by an all-encompassing coating of clay. Its earthen layer renders the installation a modern archaeological site. When the work was first created in 2000, Chen referred to it as a “monochrome tomb.” In a poignant twist, the capacious installation soon became a literal memorial due to the artist’s passing that same year. It was also the first of many breathtaking works in his recent exhibition at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, “Without…

SINGAPORE, Galerie Michael Janssen Since the early 1970s, Singaporean artist Cheo Chai-Hiang has teased viewers with his visual and linguistic epigrams. Eccentric, facetious, even vulgar, his work has prompted rejection and censorship. Although Malaysia-based Cheo has spent much of his career overseas, he has long been a critical observer of his country’s draconian development policies that are implemented at the cost of its multiracial heritage. As one of Singapore’s most influential pioneers of conceptual art, Cheo continues to test boundaries and nettle the country’s cultural oligarchy. In his solo exhibition at Galerie Michael Janssen, “In a Cowboy Town . . . . . ,” Cheo presented new and revisited works, some of which are an oblique appraisal of Singapore, which marked its 50th anniversary this year. In his practice, Cheo…

MILAN, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea “Jing Shen: The Act of Painting in Contemporary China,” displayed at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC) in Milan, looked at the importance of gesture in contemporary Chinese art through the work of 20 artists, spanning a variety of media, generations and geographic regions. In Chinese, one of the meanings of jing shen is “gestural awareness”—a concept that the exhibition’s organizers touted as the basis of Chinese calligraphy and traditional ink painting, and an influential factor in the country’s contemporary art. A prime exemplar of the exhibition’s theme was Kan Xuan’s multichannel video installation Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment (2009). Ten unsynchronized, looped videos show the hand of a “sugar man”—a type of street craftsman in China who uses liquid sugar to create small, animal-shaped candy figures—repeatedly writing the…

NEW YORK, Tina Kim Gallery Greatly influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, Yi Sang (1910–1937) is arguably the most renowned avant-garde writer of Korea’s colonial era. Yi, who was also an aspiring architect, passed away a decade before the country’s historic split, yet still today, his writing is seen as representative of the modern Korean identity—fragmented, disjointed and grappling with alienation. A recent exhibition named after a poem by Yi, “Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula,” took place at New York’s Tina Kim Gallery as an encore of sorts to the Korean Pavilion exhibition for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. For the show, South Korean curators, architect Minsuk Cho and architectural historians and critics Hyungmin Pai and Changmo Ahn presented works by artists and architects from both Koreas in four sections:…

Talking abstraction, Renaissance art and why the transcendental is overrated with the Turner Prize-nominated British-Iranian artist During London’s morning rush hour, as commuters crowd train platforms and stream toward the city center, I head in precisely the opposite direction, traveling to the placid southwestern suburb of Barnes, home to Shirazeh Houshiary’s studio. The site of a wetland conservation center—rather than the sort of postindustrial decay sometimes associated with artists’ studios—Barnes’s juxtaposition of city and nature is an oddly appropriate fit for an artist whose abstractions across various media are at once intense and calming, suggesting something beyond a standard urban setting. Born in 1955 in Shiraz, a major city in southwest Iran traditionally known for its art and literature, Houshiary has been in London since 1974, based in varying neighborhoods…

A veteran performance artist whose sensitivity toward others informs his engagement with time and space I first met Boris Nieslony after my performance Der Sekundentraum (“The Second Dream”) in 1999 at the Healing Theater in Cologne, Germany. He had been watching from the back of the room and, after I had finished, he approached to introduce himself. Prior to our meeting that evening, a friend of mine had told me about Boris—that he was a well-respected performance artist based in the city and the organizer of the Performance Art Nordrhein-Westfalen, an annual performance art event in Germany. A year later at the same venue, during Spot + Places, a performance art event organized by local Cologne artists, he came and watched my piece, Exergie – Butter Dance (2000). Despite these…

Museums around the world are going digital. Websites offer digitized images of their collections, enhanced viewing technology and online services including tours, educational programs and even curating opportunities. Yet while some institutions are proactively embracing new platforms and devices, others remain skeptical. Seeing technology encroach into every aspect of life, it is hard to believe that any museum can avoid the tide. Is the fear and controversy surrounding digitization of museum collections a sign of how technology is shaking the fundamental functions of museums? Do museums no longer define the rules of their own game? How should institutions weigh threats versus opportunities? It is widely accepted among museum professionals that digitization of a collection is good for its preservation. It offers increased opportunity for research, minimizes the physical handling of…

September is the beginning of a new season. There is economic uncertainty about emerging markets and big players such as the United States and China alike. Art fairs nevertheless put their best faces forward, convinced there are domestic markets still to be served. Istanbul In Istanbul, Turkey’s two art fairs are still waging a battle for the Bosphorus. As the profiles of the two fairs further diverge, both are living up to their names. The upstart aspirant, three-year-old Art International (AI) (9/4–6) pushes a global gallery lineup and is challenging the decade-old domestic stalwart, Contemporary Istanbul, which includes more actors in the local Turkish market—to the detriment of overall quality—but still draws a larger crowd. AI has faced stiff opposition since its debut. The Istanbul Biennial, around whose opening the…

A year of centennial commemorations for the 1915 Armenian Genocide When the Whitney Museum of American Art reopened in May, the double portrait The Artist and His Mother (1926–c. 1936) assumed a self-possessed prominence among the display of seminal modern artworks. Derived from a photograph taken in 1912, the canvas depicts a valiant-looking ten-year-old Vosdanig Manoog Adoian standing next to his seated mother and holding flowers in his hand. Her resolute, forlorn expression is well rendered, while the rest of her body and her dress are less defined, becoming sketchy and vignetted around the edges, as if a faded memory. Three years after the photographer’s shutter had closed on this scene, the family had to flee their home in Van as Turkish soldiers besieged the city and embarked on an…

As a child, Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton believed in unicorns, fairies and demons—a litany of curious fantasies swirling inside her head. More troubling perhaps were the hallucinatory states she would slip into—what she calls a “body-boundary confusion where the inside of my head seemed a kilometer back from the world.” She was sensitive to color, movement and sound, all of which triggered physical reactions. “I was always inside my head looking out,” she says—not unlike the subjects that inhabit her paintings: women gazing out from canvases through soft, watery doe-eyes. Even so, Barton described her rural childhood on a homestead north of Sydney in New South Wales as “deliriously happy.” What kept her sane, she said, was drawing—which she did fanatically and which led to the brightly colored wonderland…

Self, society and identity in the work of three Bangladeshi Women Artists We are undergoing a national identity crisis. Who are we? Are we South Asian, Bengali, Muslim? —Nazia Andaleeb Preema Bangladesh has undergone near constant political and cultural flux since its two independences: the first from Britain in 1947, after which it became East Pakistan, and then from Pakistan in 1971. Over the past four decades the nation has endured military dictatorships, natural and industrial disasters, rapid globalization and engagement with “Western” and developed Asian countries, primarily through nongovernmental organizations, businesses and factories established by multinational corporations. Concomitantly, there has been social, religious and economic engagement with the wider Islamic world as hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis travel to the Gulf and Saudi Arabia annually for employment,…

ISTANBUL, Various Locations The 14th Istanbul Biennial, titled “Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms,” necessitates a flood of explanation. “Drafted” (as the event’s press release describes her efforts) by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, whose previous endeavor was the spectacular and rich Documenta 13 (2012),“Saltwater” was something like a coda to that 100-day festival, set within the entirely different context of greater Istanbul. Extending from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara at 30-plus locations, the Biennial immersed itself in the intellectual currents of fin-de-siècle Europe, as well as Turkey’s early 20th-century history, most significantly addressing the 1915 Armenian Genocide orchestrated by the military government of Enver Paşa. To attempt a condensed explanation of the Biennial’s two-part title, “Saltwater” refers not only to Istanbul’s unique ecology, but also to the primary liquid…

SEOUL, Gallery Hyundai Listening to Seung-taek Lee speak candidly about his work—as an octogenarian artist whose pioneering contribution to modern Korean art was only recognized in the last decade—is endearing. In a 2012 video interview with the Korean Art Museum Association, he is seen casually recounting the conceptual quandaries that he had tackled in the past—“Why not [create] a white shadow . . . or a boneless human sculpture?”—and how they led to the birth of such celebrated, experimental works as Godret Stone (1957), composed of small stones strung on a wooden bar by rope, making them appear as though they are malleable, and Wind-Folk Amusement (1971), an outdoor performance in which the artist unfurled massive strips of red cloth in an open field in an attempt to reflect and…

MANILA, 1335 Mabini In Jose Luis Singson’s latest solo show at 1335 Mabini, the painter and conceptual artist tackled perceptions of history, referencing relics from the Philippines’ colonial past and contextualizing them within present-day Manila. The show’s title, “Suspension in Disbelief,” comes from a phrase coined by the 19th-century English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, describing a state in which one suspends their judgment in order to enjoy a staged reality. It is a theme that was carried throughout Singson’s show, which challenged viewers to reevaluate preexisting beliefs. Located in Manila, 1335 Mabini is a bright, airy gallery space spread across two floors of a heritage building that served as the military headquarters during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942–45). Its conservation and reuse as an art space makes…

NEW DELHI, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art “Constructs/Constructions,” a group exhibition at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, brought together artistic practices whose materials, process and scale deconstruct the idea of the “collage.” The terms “construct” and “construction,” as applied in the exhibition’s title, reference the immediacy of “process” as an artistic medium—a concept that, in the exhibition, was explored in various works that ranged from sculpture and installation to video, photography and painting. Scale played a crucial role in guiding the viewer’s gaze within the exhibition. At times some of the displayed works seemed to consume one’s entire physicality, while others drew one in with a sense of intimacy, before revealing an unexpected flip side. Such range was seen in the first work of the show,…

LONDON, Royal Academy Consummate, controversial, fearless: such words were ubiquitous in the descriptions surrounding the Ai Weiwei showcase that overtook London this fall. In September, the city’s Royal Academy of Arts premiered “Ai Weiwei,” the first major institutional survey of the artist to be held in the United Kingdom, which covered his works dating from 1993 to the present. Yet due to Ai’s reputation as a political activist and fervent social media user, there was a danger that his works would be eclipsed by the artist’s larger-than-life persona—a concern that, regrettably, had some merit. Standing out among the displayed works was the eye-catching installation Bicycle Chandelier (2015), a huge chandelier-like conglomeration of bicycles that hung precariously from the ceiling. While part of the work’s intention is to point out the…

LOS ANGELES, Harmony Murphy Gallery Life is full of choices, and Japanese-born, New York-based artist Aki Sasamoto’s witty installations, ready-mades, performances and videos demonstrate the banality of such trivial yet ceaseless decision-making processes. Scientific studies have shown that all decisions, big or small, result in the same amount of brain activity—evidence, perhaps, of farce and folly being defining characteristics of humankind. In “No Choice,” at Los Angeles’s Harmony Murphy Gallery, Sasamoto presented situations that mirrored, and perhaps mocked, the many choices we encounter in everyday life. In Fold Your Way (2015), a multicolored T-shirt rests on a counter-like table resembling those used to fill out forms at a government agency. Viewers are invited to fold the shirt and compare their results against a photo-based chart of possible outcomes, which serves…

In the previous edition of “Fine Print,” we saw how a recent New York court case between gallerist Larry Gagosian and collector Ronald Perelman exposed the risks of entering into high-value art transactions without the protection of a comprehensive written contract. Unexpected situations do arise: a deceased artist, a bankrupt gallery, a divorced collecting couple or any of life’s other vicissitudes can cause sudden changes to previously trusted relationships, leading to disputes and the involvement of third parties.In such cases, a contract setting out clearly the rights and obligations of the parties and serving as evidence of their intentions in entering into the transaction can save much time, expense and heartache, sometimes even avoiding the problem altogether. However, even if you understand the importance of a contract and have the…

Brink City The capital of Queensland, Australia’s second-largest state, Brisbane seems perennially on the cusp, always on the lookout for defining moments and keen to mint a progressive identity. Previous stereotypes—a city-sized country town, home of the “branch office” or poor cousin of southern cities—are stale. Currently promoted as Australia’s “New World City,” Brisbane is challenged by fast growth and conflicting desires to retain its discrete communities, as intimate neighborhoods and character architecture face transformation into master-planned urban villages with hubs, nodes and corridors. The city’s in-between-ness is a powerful metaphor of its potential and striving—rather than stagnation or recession—and keeps at bay any consensus on what the city has become. Often flagged as a gateway for the Asia-Pacific region, Brisbane is marketed primarily via the promotion of its major…

Who said Asia’s in a recession? During one of the most harrying biennial openings in recent memory, including two-hour-long ferry rides along the Bosphorus to hunt down or imagine a non-viewable artwork that mingled with the fish deep underwater, Istanbul Biennial’s overzealous artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev managed to create a self-indulgent spectacle of herself while raising maritime challenges to viewers. Over the course of the three-day preview, she appeared in outfits specially designed by Turkish fashion designer Arzu Kaprol for each of the endless celebratory events, along with perfectly coiffed hair managed by her favorite hairdresser, who was flown in from Germany for those finishing touches. In Shanghai, Tom Tandio, Art Stage Singapore’s new regional director, was seen cruising in a brand-new, top-of-the-line Mercedes hired to haul him around during…

QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY| GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BRISBANE, The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT8), 11/21/2015–4/10/2016 A group of stylized contemporary reinterpretations of traditional zurag paintings by four Mongolian artists are among the treasures tracked down for the 8th edition of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT8). In addition to representative and commissioned works from Asia and the Pacific, APT8 organizers—including the museum’s new curators Aaron Seeto and Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow—have expanded its geographical focus to include pieces by installation artist Hit Man Gurung from Nepal, Iraqi-American new-media artist Rheim Alkadhi, Georgia’s Bouillon Group, as well as the artist duo Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev from the Kyrgyz Republic. INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BOSTON, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party, 12/16/2015–3/27/2016 Iranian…

A look at Western galleries in China There was a time not so long ago when I would say with pride, and with an even larger dose of astonishment, that we were the first gallery from New York to establish itself in mainland China. But now, nearly eight years later, that doesn’t really mean much anymore. The landscape and ecology of the Chinese art world and art market have changed radically even within this seemingly short period of time. Like many of those living and working here, we witnessed tremendous changes—some would say for the better, others might feel differently—in what seems like the blink of an eye. The number of players has multiplied exponentially and the competitive waters between local and foreign galleries, such as ours, have become increasingly…

On a sunny day in early September, Tsherin Sherpa arrives to pick me up in Berkeley, California. As we embark on the hourlong drive to his house, the Tibetan artist fills me in on his recent trip to Nepal, from which he had just returned a few days before. The trip had been to take care of some issues surrounding items of silk brocade that he had commissioned from local tailors, which he was planning to incorporate in a new series of paintings, “This is Not a Rorschach” (2015). The finished brocades that were sent to him had incorrect measurements, so Tsherin had personally taken the items back to Nepal to see that they got properly remade. Tsherin was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1968, where he was raised by…

Nicholas Mangan “May you live in interesting times,” as the saying goes, appears to be a blessing, but in fact is meant as a curse. The expression is commonly purported to be an ancient Chinese aphorism that was drolly paraphrased by the British during the tumultuous 1930s in China. By today’s standards of accelerated technological means many might well say that the English understatement needs to be reconsidered. The present is much more than merely “interesting”: it is at once splendidly and anxiously radiant in its possibilities. And yet our planet, seemingly spinning ever faster on its axis, is showing worrying signs of not coping with humanity’s hubris. Over the past decade, Australian artist Nicholas Mangan has produced complex installations, sculptures, collages, photographs and videos investigating natural and human-made systems…

SYDNEY, National Art School Gallery “Rosemary Laing: Effort + Rush” was a timely survey of the Australian photo-media artist, whose works engage with themes of landscape and environment, national identity and belonging. Typically developed over several years, her photographic projects are the result of intensive research. In recent years, she has shifted her gaze beyond Australian shores to the island landscapes of Indonesia and Madagascar. These powerful new projects, along with Laing’s earlier works, were featured in her latest exhibition at Sydney’s National Art School (NAS), curated by Judith Blackall. Entering the ground level of the NAS Gallery, one was struck by the generosity of space devoted to Laing’s work. The floor was opened up into one unified space, and a similar arrangement was also found upstairs. The effect successfully…

TAIPEI, IT Park Gallery While most people tend to support technological advancements, there are always some detractors: neo-Luddites who decry the latest breakthrough as a sign of society’s decadence and decay. This is not to deny that there is some truth to their fears, but the doomsday reactions can feel like a knee-jerk—rather than an informed—response. How refreshing it was, then, to see Tu Wei’s exhibition “NOT YET!” at IT Park Gallery in Taipei, which featured works that approach the digital age with wonder rather than trepidation. On a tablet screen mounted on a wall in the first room of the gallery was Tu’s grimacing face shrouded in darkness. “Not yet,” he intones in the video. “Not yet. Not yet. Not yet,” he repeats endlessly, his face twitching as the…

HONG KONG, Hong Kong Arts Centre In September, Hong Kong gallery Alisan Fine Arts kicked off its fall program with “A Legacy of Ink: Lui Shou-kwan 40 Years On.” Held at the Hong Kong Arts Centre (HKAC), the exhibition commemorated both the art and the memory of one of Hong Kong’s preeminent mid-20th century artists on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of his passing. The show examined Lui’s impact through 26 of his paintings, as well as works by 12 of his former students who themselves are now noted artists. In addition, to further explore Lui’s legacy, a special section was devoted to works by local, emerging artists, including graduates from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Lui once taught. The exhibition was spread across the HKAC’s Pao…

BERLIN, Haus am Waldsee The act of kissing is generally considered an expression of affection between two people. However, one is prompted to reconsider the physical and emotional connotations of this amorous act when encountering Nezaket Ekici’s performative installation Emotion in Motion (2000). As part of the work, the Turkish artist painstakingly covers a whole room and all of her personal belongings that it houses—ranging from the walls to her own dress on a hanger—in lipstick kisses over the course of ten days. Looking at the installation, one is made to wonder whether it is a commentary on material culture or, rather, a territorial claim on overlooked, quotidian objects meaningful only to Ekici herself. This work, among others, was showcased in Ekici’s recent solo exhibition in Berlin, “Everything We Possess…

CASTELLÓN, Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló The two floors of Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló (EACC) were covered entirely in foil tape, like a silver river, moonscape or laptop screen that one could walk along. Created by South Korean artist Lee Bul, the installation was part of her eponymous traveling retrospective, whose finale was held at EACC after having toured the globe since 2014. In the museum, Souterrain (2012), a tunneled walkway lined with mirrored panes, acted as a disorientating threshold in the exhibition. Further inside was Via Negativa (2012), a hall-of-mirrors-like labyrinth partially interrupted by panels covered in pages from American psychologist Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book on the evolution of self-consciousness. Moving through the maze of excerpted text and splintered mirrors, one’s sense of possessing a whole body was…

Examining the history of photography in China, from Victorian exoticism to Maoist propaganda to avant-garde posing, and the books that served these ends More than the other forms of visual art, and in spite of the “selfie stick,” photography—still or moving—is a social art. Painting, engraving, drawing, even conceptualizing, are rare, long-honed skills compared with the ease of clicking a shutter and producing, in less than a second, a loaded visual statement, a “slice of life (or time or history),” an aide-mémoire or admissible evidence. Invented in Europe around 1840, photography spread rapidly around the world, borne by practitioners well versed in the complex technical requirements of the new medium. In China, photography, in the form of daguerreotypes, calotypes, albumen prints and collodions, was introduced in the 1840s by “visiting…

For The Sketch, an artist featuring in our next issue is invited to crack open a sketchbook to offer insights into her practice and daily process. There is a sense of inscrutable detail, at times, in the drawings of Hong Kong artist Au Hoi Lam—evidenced in this sketch, produced during the time she was preparing for the large-scale exhibition “My Father Is Over the Ocean” that opened at Osage Gallery in 2013. Evoking the traditional Scottish song “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” the exhibition explored Au’s relationship with her father, through works that documented details of their lives, minute by minute, day by day. At other times and places, the artist has produced paintings that seem, at first glance, to be purely monochromatic. With their evenly painted surfaces, they…