Innholdsfortegnelse for 108 (May/Jun 2018) i ArtAsiaPacific

All art in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is produced by the state, and is primarily controlled by the three main art studios in Pyongyang: Mansudae, Paekho and Central Art Studio. Mansudae is the largest art “collective.” Yet its sales are currently experiencing a low due to sanctions and the decline in tourist numbers. On August 5, 2016, after North Korea’s missile tests, the UN Security Council subjected Mansudae to a global asset freeze, effectively banning the export of artworks and construction projects like the recently completed visitor center in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, and the African Renaissance Monument in Dakar, Senegal. Showrooms at both Mansudae and Paekho consist of all manner of fine arts: oils, ink, linocuts, embroidery, sculpture, celadon pottery and “powder” painting (using crushed stone to…

The 2018 edition of UBS and Art Basel’s annual art market report, released on March 13, brought glad tidings for many in the commercial art world. According to the study, 2017 marked a year of economic growth, bucking the trend of art market deterioration evident since 2014. However, even as art fairs continue to expand in size and number, regional and midsize galleries are reportedly tightening their belts due in no small part to rising costs of fair participation. While several fairs in the first quarter of the year reflected the growing confidence that the report suggests, galleries’ budget shortfalls—due to over participation at many fairs that fail to attract buyers—point to a future that, for some, remains shaky. Manila March kicked off with the sixth edition of Art Fair…

She was, at first glance, expressionless, but her smooth facial features belied fearlessness and fortitude. Her straight, chin-length hair was neatly cropped. Dressed in a stiff kimono and entirely covered in gold paint to imitate the sheen of buffed bronze, she sat tall and straight-backed, staring directly ahead. Her mouth was covered with tape. Her hands were folded in her lap. Beside her, there was another sitting woman. This performance by Japanese artist Yoshiko Shimada, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, took place in Los Angeles on February 18, 2018, in an event that also included another performance, Against Forgetting, by the feminist, artist-activist collective Tomorrow Girls Troop. For an hour, Shimada sat next to a 1,100-pound bronze statue of a Korean girl wearing a hanbok—a traditional dress—in…

SHEN XIN Shen Xin’s video works—which focus on the ways spirituality and everyday life intermingle in a world complicated by power, science and love—convey a perpetual instability. In this turbulent environment, which mirrors our contemporary age, the artist posits that there is a need for constant reassessment of presented narratives. Through multichannel installations, split screens and the interweaving of abundant voices and images, Shen demonstrates the endless push and pull of disparate forces that affect our daily existence, and the fluidity with which these seemingly fixed and antithetical impulses interact with and transform one another. Achieving spiritual balance can be an alluring alternative to worldly conflicts, but in Shen’s work, faith is also depicted as a torturous journey paved with uncertainty. In the video installation Provocation of the Nightingale #1…

In Mami Kataoka’s keynote conversation with Ai Weiwei during the opening days of the 21st Biennale of Sydney (BoS), the artistic director asked the headline-dominating artist whether he thought bringing together so many artworks from around the world in the form of a biennial was really necessary anymore. It was a good question—and one that could also be directed toward the BoS organization itself. While biennials remain popular attractions, the well-defined formula of grouping many dozens of artists and collectives (there were 70 at BoS) under a ponderously all-encompassing title—in this case, “Superposition: Equilibrium and Engagement”—has become superfluous in many contexts. Once, mega-exhibitions were prime occasions to show the latest contemporary art in places where institutions were either non-existent or lacked engagement with new forms of artistic and curatorial practice;…

For almost two decades, Beijing-born artist Liu Wei has been attempting to visually crystallize the impacts of technological advances and industrialization on China’s relentlessly morphing urban environment and society. Liu’s ambitiously staged, large-scale solo show at Long March Space saw the continuation of such thematic engagements, with the introduction of bold, new formal elements. The most recently added trope to Liu’s oeuvre is kinetic movement, as seen in his sculptures in the show. The largest work on display, Period (all works 2018), greeted viewers with a slow-moving cavalcade of objects large and small. A constellation of globular forms, suspended from the ceiling from specially designed tracks, recall planets rotating in the solar system. Meanwhile, on the ground, cubes of varying volumes and bent sheets of metal slid across the tops…

On an unsettlingly warm February’s day in Toronto, a hodgepodge of geriatrics, hipsters and curious children gathered at a table at the Gardiner Museum. Taking their cues from the captions on the walls, they fumbled as they tried to join ceramic shards using glue, paper cement, tape and twine. The sound of stones being knocked over further punctuated the white-cube gravitas, barely raising the eyebrows of the bored-to-tears assistants ambling around the room. Resembling and feeling like an elementary school classroom, it’s difficult to imagine this as the setting of a serious exhibition, let alone a major Toronto show—but then again, perhaps not, when one considers the artist behind it. Yoko Ono’s “The Riverbed” enjoyed its premiere in New York in 2015 before journeying north of the border in February.…

Among the many changes brought about by 20th-century modernity was the expansion of human mobility, whether in search of refuge, opportunity or adventure. At various points in his life, the Hong Kong-born, self-taught artist Hon Chi Fun has packed his bags for all three. The flow of individuals, across borders and territories, initiated a coalescence of information, ideas and cultures; grounded in this context, Hon’s works embody the trail-blazing, boundary-breaking spirit of modernism, representing a generation of artists who found renewal in postwar destruction, and who pioneered a culture of experimentation that inspired the generations of contemporary artists who followed. Hon was born in 1922 to one of the first taxi drivers in Hong Kong and a stay-at-home mother. Although his parents received limited education themselves, both actively fostered Hon’s…

Writing from Paris, where he had arrived four years earlier, Guangdong-born art critic Hou Hanru—soon to be a leading independent curator in the era of globalization—explored the challenges that many Chinese immigrant artists face in the Euro-American art world. In issue two, Hou explained that immigrant artists frequently confront concerns of cultural identity, co-existence and subtle shifts of economic and political power. Featured at the beginning of Hou’s article was Huang Yong Ping’s installation Passage (1993), which appropriated and combined airport passport control signs—such as “EU Nationals” and “Others”—with actual lion cages containing only the scent and feces of the animal, highlighting how the experience of going through passport control reinforces national identity and differences. EWN A “video fiber artist” is how Lisa Reihana described herself in an article written…

For more than three decades, American photographer Lois Conner has journeyed through various parts of China, exploring the country’s diverse landscapes and cultures. During her first trip to China on a nine-month Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, Conner traveled to Guilin and discovered the dramatic terraced cliffs and surreal mountain formations, as seen in the Chinese landscape or shanshui scroll paintings she had initially studied in art history classes at Yale. It was there, Conner has said, that she became a photographer. “A Long View,” presented at Shanghai Center of Photography in Shanghai, is Conner’s first museum exhibition in China, focusing on a selection of thematic works created over the past 30 years. Neither a retrospective nor a showcase in chronological order, the exhibition was more an intimate survey, presenting truncated…

Stepping into Para Site, where “A Beast, a God, and a Line” made the second stop of its international tour after premiering at this year’s Dhaka Art Summit, one was immediately accosted by brightly-colored artworks, hung on similarly vivid walls of cobalt blue and fuchsia. The inescapable music of “Bali Ha’i,” from the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, blared from speakers. The song, performed by the alluring Tonkinese character Bloody Mary, refers to a mythical Pacific island paradise—a fitting soundtrack to an exhibition that would, through the works of more than 50 artists and collectives throughout the Asia-Pacific region, examine and deconstruct such fantasies, reframing historical narratives and contemporary threats within unresolved decolonization and the widespread loss of faith in Western liberal democracy. The music was part of…

In Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), a few familiar faces crop up. For instance, Fidel Castro announces Yasser Arafat will be taking over the podium, having been “appointed to speak for all liberation movements.” Some of the other characters are not as recognizable, such as Samia Zennadi, an Algiers-based archaeologist and editor; Zonayed Saki, a Bangladeshi publisher and leftist candidate for the 2015 mayoral elections of Dhaka; or Vijay Prashad, the Indian Marxist historian who facilitates interlocution for the better part of the film. The credits roll after the 85-minute-long presentation, and it is not until we are able to see the full roster of characters that we realize Mohaiemen himself has featured in his film. What binds these figures together is their involvement or…

After closing its doors in June 2017, White Rainbow has returned to its old location on London’s Mortimer Street with a new program of exhibitions and projects. For its inaugural event, it welcomed Chikako Yamashiro—the award-winning performance and video artist—to mount an exhibition that made optimal use of the modest, yet multifaceted space. In the gallery’s main room were three monitor-bearing podiums for Okinawa Tourist (2004). Each of the videos in the three-part work considers how a place can lose the essence of its image. Here, it is the image of Okinawa imposed by its tourist industry that obscures it multilayered history, ranging from the island’s indigenous culture to its continued subjection to a United States military presence. In Trip to Japan, one of the three videos, Yamashiro stands outside…

Jasper Johns’s retrospective at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles opened incisively with a singular work, Painting with Two Balls (1960), a conceptually rigorous yet jocular painting with a humor that is part schoolboy and part art-world-sophisticate. Wedged in a slender, horizontal crevasse between two of the work’s stacked canvases is a pair of paint-smeared balls. Behind them, the gallery wall peeks through. The painting’s surface is daubed in jagged, gestural brushstrokes, which, along with the interloping appendages, reference the macho culture of Abstract Expressionism that dominated the mid-20th-century New York art world. Showcasing Johns’s sardonic wit as well as his conceptual and material prowess, it is a surprising but concise prelude to a show that reflects the depth and breadth of the 87-year-old artist’s six-decade career. The exhibition’s title,…

The 2018 spring sales, taking place in the final weeks of March across New York, Dubai and Hong Kong, saw record-breaking auction results and high sell-through rates. This positive start to the year exceeded all expectations, especially as stock markets around the world tanked, indicating that the art market might actually exist in a parallel universe. New York’s Asia Week kicked off with a sale of modern and contemporary South Asian art at Sotheby’s on March 19, which featured masterworks from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The 72-lot sale achieved a total of USD 2.8 million, and was led by Raja Ravi Varma’s Untitled (Tilottama) (circa 1896)—depicting a seminude female figure with reference to a mythological nymph—which fetched USD 795,000, above its high estimate of USD 600,000. As one…

One night in mid-February, Cevdet Erek was standing alone on a small stage with a large Turkish bass drum, a davul, on the darkened top floor of Karga, a bar in an old wood-and-brick building in Istanbul’s Kadökoy district. With a soft-headed mallet in one hand, and thin sticks in the other that rattled against the drum’s skin and frame, he struck beats that built into tracks of long, intense phrases. The crowd was rapt; at one point the building itself began to quiver. When he finished a sequence, he would pause briefly to reset himself and then start again, as the sounds engulfed the dark room. After the end of the first set, which lasted about 25 minutes, he stopped and announced that after a short break he would…

Nothing sounds more gratifying than making a living from art, right? The mere thought of spending your days surrounded by works that nurture your soul and spark your creativity is thrilling. There is a certain romance in meeting like-minded individuals, traveling the world, getting caught up in mind-blowing conversations, discovering new artists and perhaps even playing a part in sculpting art history. While undertaking this journey can be an arduous task, the rewards include the possibility of living an exciting and passionate life. Maria Bernheim would tell you just that. She is an art-world wonder woman of many talents: petite, ambitious, dynamic, knowledge-hungry and sassy. Born in Romania and raised in Paris, Bernheim grew up with art in her blood thanks to her father, an artist and art dealer. After…

Raden Saleh and Juan Luna are cornerstone figures in 19th-century Southeast Asian art history. The two artists’ successes were unprecedented: Indonesia-born Saleh was the first person from Java to receive art training in Europe, while Luna, a Filipino artist, won the gold medal in the 1884 National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid. The result of three-plus years of research, National Gallery Singapore’s exhibition, “Between Worlds,” spotlighted the two painters. The show shifted the focus away from colonial centers of power by acknowledging the importance of Saleh and Luna in the Indonesian and Philippine national imaginations, respectively. However, “Between Worlds” did not merely dwell on the nationalist readings of Saleh’s and Luna’s artistic practices. The Arrest of Prince Diponegoro (1857) by Saleh and Spoliarium (1884) by Luna—two well-known paintings that…

Walking into Ali Mahmut Demirel’s solo exhibition “Isle” was like walking into a dark cave on a remote island, in a postapocalyptic future. The dimly lit entrance to the exhibition immediately summoned a sacred and isolated place, intensified by the recorded sounds of nature and the dark, narrow paths leading to four of Demirel’s video works. Inspired by the minimalist form of haikus, where less is more, the exhibition invited visitors on a meditative journey to imagine a future in which the human race has become extinct. Relating to the dystopic aesthetics and narratives on humanity’s toxic relationship with nature, as seen in the arthouse films The Last of England, Stalker and The Well, three of Demirel’s videos feature disused places abundant with biodiversity and water, but devoid of human…

In 1967, reflecting on the golden era of television, Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan declared: “At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.” Half a century later, Hito Steyerl—writing in a world that now includes the internet, artificial intelligence, big data and Bitcoin—confirmed: “Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal.” We are in the process of a total collapse in visual representation. Images are merged beyond recognition with an avalanche of information, then networked and multiplied through sprawling digital and capital infrastructures, by algorithms that sit on top of other algorithms. Steyerl’s description of this as the “new normal” in her latest essay collection, Duty Free Art (2017), comes as…

In her practice, multimedia artist Patricia Perez Eustaquio examines social and historical narratives through her exploration of fabricated objects and paintings, tying together strands of cultural references, especially those of her home country of the Philippines. For example, the image above is an iPad drawing of ancient Egypt’s Queen Cleopatra, part of a work-in-progress referencing Filipino artist Juan Luna’s famous 1881 painting, The Death of Cleopatra. Of the sketch, she said: “It’s a curious work—at least for me—and raises so many questions on cultural appropriation, authenticity, on the effects of colonialism in art and Philippine art history.” In the picture, Eustaquio has mapped out the main areas of the work in blocks of different colors, in an exercise similar to that of a paint-by-numbers kit. While colorful and digitized in…