Innholdsfortegnelse for 110 (Sep/Oct 2018) i ArtAsiaPacific

Artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s Zuoyou studio was recently demolished without warning in Beijing. A demolition crew turned up at Ai’s studio on the afternoon of August 3 and began to smash the windows of the former factory building while a drill truck tore down the walls. Though Ai was planning to relocate and the rental contract on the studio had expired in late 2017, the deadline to vacate the premises had not yet passed when destruction began. Ai posted videos and photos of the seven-day demolition to his Instagram. In his penultimate post about the event, published on August 9, he wrote: “From today (2018.08.09), this is the last footage of my Zuoyou studio in Beijing. I have used it since 2006. The sudden demolition started one week ago…

The old glass facade of the SEG Plaza in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, reflects a sky full of burning, flare-like clouds at sunset—in the same way that the vitrines in its shops reflect hundreds of LED lights. Transactions within the plaza’s electronics market are not much different from 40 years ago. On each of the more than 10,000 days, people have gathered at the stores to discuss small orders of the latest products. Nothing has changed except for the products and the sellers. The cheap versions of ræntenna sold here are mostly used for voice tagging video-to-audio conversions. In 2050, Huaqiangbei’s glories have faded. The building that rose in 1997 is now at best a model for government propaganda. A few years ago, tech insiders found and isolated the most important element…

“Absences are not just what there is not, but rather what was there and now is not any longer, or what should be there and yet is not.”1 The group show “How to See [What Isn’t There]”—on view at Langen Foundation, Düsseldorf, from September 2018 to March 2019—presents works from the Burger Collection, a Hong Kong-based private collection of contemporary artworks from Europe, the Americas and Asia. Artists have proven to be extremely innovative in activating the immaterial in their work, often operating in conceptual gestures and utilizing themes such as disappearance, emptiness, dematerialization and a simple—yet profound—framing of the void. In this particular exhibition, the works were selected to highlight and ultimately blur the dichotomy of presence and absence. The exhibition aims to unveil some surprising perspectives by exploring…

The Karrabing Film Collective was formed in 2008, following the Australian government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response or “Intervention” of 2007, when federal representatives suspended the protections of the Racial Discrimination Act, sent the army into areas of the Northern Territory, and raided the homes of a number of Indigenous families. The loosely organized group of now 30-plus artists saw a need for critical activism, and started making films that function as a strong, alternative voice to persistent settler-colonial dynamics, developing in the process their “improvisational realist” technique, which fuses fictional and documentary filmmaking. The conditions of inequality that Karrabing’s videos investigate and analyze continue to be deeply and painfully exacerbated in the wake of the Intervention, with many of the same “emergency” laws still actively enforced today. Their works play…

In the 1970s and ’80s, Chinese avant-garde artists showed their work in apartment spaces to evade intervention by government authorities. As part of this Apartment Art generation, Lin Tianmiao is known for her intensely introspective installations that examine body and identity through thread-winding: an intuitive and labor-intensive practice that involves “binding” objects in multiple layers of thread. The visceral installations connect what we imagine to be individual emotions, attitudes and feelings to reveal shared sociohistorical conditions. After three decades of textile-based creations and a life between Beijing and New York, Lin’s new works of glass and motors, presented in her solo exhibition at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), indicated how the artist has shifted gears, developing a new visual system within which she can reorient existing conceptual interests. Triggering a…

An “incarnator” can be interpreted as one who materializes abstract concepts, while the Spanish equivalent, encarnador, refers specifically to the craftspeople who render religious statues humanlike by applying skin-colored paints. With these two understandings of the term as his departure point, Paul Pfeiffer undertook a six-month residency at Bellas Artes Projects in Bagac, during which he worked with artisans to investigate the historical and contemporary making of icons, and their sacredness. The results were displayed in his solo show, “Incarnator,” at the Bellas Artes Outpost in Makati. The gallery space was illuminated with overpowering fluorescent lighting, such that the show’s wall-mounted and untitled wood sculptures appeared to be floating. The pieces were modeled on various sections of pop star Justin Bieber’s body and carved with craftspeople from Paete, the centuries-old…

“Plastic Democracy,” Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho’s solo exhibition at Arndt Art Agency in Berlin, refers to society’s possible shaping of governmental systems. Specifically, the title speaks to Nugroho’s focus on the political developments of his home country, which, after officially gaining independence from the Netherlands in 1949, is still negotiating its relationship with democracy. The system’s tenets, such as equal protection of ethnic and religious figures, form the core of his recent investigations. Dispersed over three spaces, the show included mixed-media works revealing the varied sources of inspiration—from street art to embroidery, comic-book culture and Indonesian shadow puppetry—that Nugroho has engaged with in his probing of the topic. In the space next to the entrance, three densely patterned canvases, Garden Full of Blooming Democracy #10, 5 and 11 (all 2017),…

No matter our roots, we tend to feel incredible anguish when culture is erased, even if that culture is not our own. The loudest example that comes to mind is the occupation of Iraq and Syria by the so-called Islamic State, in which monuments, erected centuries or millennia ago, were destroyed in an instant. However, after militants ravaged nine-ton lamassu statues in Mosul, accurate copies were reconstructed and put on display in Rome’s Colosseum by l’Associazione Incontro di Civiltà. The originals may be lost, but the legacy of ancient civilizations persists. Rayyane Tabet folds this idea into Fragments, a volume of more than 300 pages whose main text is a transcript of the artist’s reading performance Dear Victoria (2016–), which has been staged at multiple venues and events around the…

Over the course of a decade, Ma Qiusha has produced a large body of incisive work probing Chinese socio–political culture. Concentrating on her hometown of Beijing and on the Chinese female experience, Ma mines personal, familial and wider, communal webs of collective memory, studying the objects and social habits that mark and define modern life in 20th- and 21st-century China. She translates these studies into understated videos, sculptural installations and paintings that offer a wealth of memories and previously unconsidered significances, ripe for measured study by the audience. The sketch seen above is a pen study for Avatar (2015), a three-channel video showing a group of young Chinese women sunbathing while holding charged, religious objects—including Buddhist prayer beads and the Bible. The work encapsulates common themes in Ma’s practice, in…

For ArtAsiaPacific’s special 25th anniversary issue, we asked Yung Ma, curator of the Contemporary Art and Prospective Creations Department at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Clara Kim, Daskalopoulos Senior Curator, International Art (Africa, Asia and the Middle East) of Tate Modern, London, to consider the future of curatorial practices, from the lexicon to its geography, the focus of institutional resources and the expanding boundaries of the field of art. The following is an edited version of their conversation. Yung Ma: Although we’ve been asked to talk about the future, let’s first take a step back and start from the present, and explain how the institutions that we work for came to be. In my case, the Centre Pompidou was envisioned as an all-encompassing arts institution, opened in 1977 to renew Paris’s…

PART-TIME SUITE In 2009, three graduate students rented a musty, water-damaged basement in Seoul and invited guests to the space. As visitors descended the steps in galoshes provided by the trio, they first saw that the room was entirely flooded. Appearing like a black, inky sheet of silk, the water perpetuated an overwhelming sense of abandonment emanating from the hidden space, which was marked with brown stains due to leakages from the restaurant upstairs. Ominous and foreboding, this first project by Part-time Suite (which began as a three-person collective, and now consists of Miyeon Lee and Jaeyoung Park) was an ode to the disused spaces in Seoul’s cityscape as well as a resistance against conventional interactions with galleries and institutions, which can often involve long periods of stasis and social…

Zao Wou-ki (1920–2013) owes his greatness to the artistic patrimony of France, or so proposed the exhibition “L’Espace Est Silence” (“Space Is Silence”) held at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Museum chief curator Francois Michaud and independent curator Erik Verhagen assembled more than 40 large-scale oil paintings and ink works on paper from the mid-1950s through the early 2000s by the Beijing-born artist—“a figure at the crossroads of no less than three worlds,” they noted—though they declared the exhibition was not a retrospective. Instead, “Space Is Silence” focused on the period after Zao began to work in “a new idiom described as ‘abstract,’” beginning around the time of his painting Traversée des Apparences (“Passage through Appearances,” 1956), a horizontal, ivory canvas with a tangle of black…

The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (ETAT) is the pioneer of land art festivals in Japan. First presented in 2000, the event germinated from discussions on Asiatic globalization, localism, symbiotic ecosystems and protests against forgetting. Rather than focusing on the itinerancy of city life, as in Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s three-year traveling exhibition “Cities on the Move” (1997–99), where similar topics were broached, ETAT’s founder Fram Kitagawa instead wrests with the static, socio-topographic features of rural Japan and the drying up of its economic wellsprings due to severe depopulation. The 51-day, seventh edition of ETAT featured 133 newly commissioned artworks among the existing 354 across six areas in Echigo-Tsumari, Niigata Prefecture. The most explicit reference to environmental awareness was found in Chinese artist Xu Bing’s Background Story (all works 2018),…

A pioneering contemporary artist—with “Chinese” prefixed or not—Xu Bing needs little introduction, making him a more than suitable subject for what was essentially the comeback-blockbuster show of Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art after it had been semi-refurbished and acquired by new owners. Simply, the task for an exhibition of an artist of this stature is to add to understandings of their practice and to demonstrate that they are worthy of their footing. A logical route toward this is a large-scale career survey, as was set out in “Thought and Method,” a disjointedly chronological display, which began and ended with the same work, Xu’s magnum opus, Book from the Sky (1987–1991). Reams of hanging scrolls, weighty tomes placed on the ground and an overwhelming abundance of purposefully illegible Chinese characters…

Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta’s solo exhibition, “For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit,” was a year in the making. Presented by Baku’s Yarat Contemporary Art Space, the show brought together new, site-specific works, including sculptures, installations and drawings. Taking poetry as her central subject, Gupta draws from verses of different time periods and geographies to reflect on universal human experiences. The artist is known for her engagement in global political and social issues, and the deeply ruminative exhibition showcased her critical insight and empathy. On the lower level of the space, Gupta focused on poetry as an expression of political agency and how this is often met with persecution and censorship. The voices of poets who have been imprisoned for their beliefs were unleashed on the upper floor. Minimal interpretive…

A work catching fire and forcing the cancellation of a preview would seem an inauspicious start to any exhibition. The ignition of Lee Bul’s Majestic Splendor (1991–2018), caused by the volatile potassium-permanganate agent meant to preserve the installation’s sequin-covered fish, however, gave the artist’s midcareer survey at the Hayward Gallery a mythic quality. The mishap was a reminder that exhibitions are not static displays, but living, breathing parts of culture, prone to accidents, riots and mysteries. This dynamism was embodied throughout “Crashing”—a culture in itself, curated with an idiosyncratic geography in mind. The exhibition was arranged over several levels, the lowest of which was taken up by the installation Civitas Solis II (2014). Mirrors were spread across the floor and walls, while a series of light bulbs spelled the work’s…

Perhaps the best-known artist in Thailand is one the rest of the world has barely heard of. The day before visiting the studio of Mit Jai Inn, I visited MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, one of the most stimulating private institutions not only in Chiang Mai but in all of Southeast Asia. As I explored the permanent and temporary exhibitions, I kept coming across Mit’s name—whether it was an earlier piece that the museum’s owners, Eric Bunnag Booth and his parents, had acquired back in the 1990s, or acknowledgments to him in the wall text of other artists’ work. This only piqued my desire to meet the artist, who, despite being low-profile, has made an important impact on the Thai art scene. Driving to Mit’s studio is not straightforward. My taxi…

A photograph of a scuba diver painting underwater on a red canvas is on the cover of one of Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s monographs, produced by Mori Art Museum in 2004. The image is a still from Jun’s underwater film Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas: Battle of Easel Point – Memorial Project Okinawa (2003). Shot at the location of the fictional “Battle of Easel Point,” off the shores of Okinawa, Jun’s work reverses the principles of memorialization and narrative in its framing of a liquid landscape and silent actions. In our “Atlas of Asia Art Archive” (2013) project and installation, which we developed during a residency at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, we explored seas and oceans, interpreting these territories from different artists’ perspectives—including that of Jun. For “Atlas,” we wrote…

In an increasingly crowded market, art fairs come and go. This year, it was Art Stage Jakarta’s turn to postpone, while the biennial Melbourne Art Fair returned after skipping its 2016 edition. Fairs may tenaciously grind along, but results remain uneven and unpredictable. Basel After a blockbuster year in 2017, confidence was high among the more than 290 exhibitors at the 49th edition of Art Basel in Basel (June 14–17), bolstered by strong auction results in New York in May for blue-chip postwar and contemporary works. The first two days of the fair did not disappoint, with galleries reporting high volumes of artwork reservations and sales. Many exhibitors stuck with what has been proven to work. Neugerriemschneider (Berlin) anchored its corner booth with a large-scale Ai Weiwei sculpture—as it has…

Collecting art is an ever-changing endeavor. With the exception of certain inexperienced collectors, most people who love to buy art change their taste as they acquire more knowledge and experience. Good collectors must constantly strive to refine their ability to identify the quality of an artwork. In this globalized and rapidly-changing world, collectors have always to put their viewpoints under scrutiny. In the past, the way people interpreted artworks was dictated by art experts from Europe and the Americas, who applied ideas from Western art history to understand new art. A good work of 20th-century art, for instance, had to be original and universal. In that framework, tradition and national or local culture were taboo. The identity politics movement came out of 1960s counter-culture, anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial struggles, and immense…

AAP 30: “Yayoi Kusama: An Unwritten Biography,” by Takemi Kuresawa These days, Yayoi Kusama’s ubiquity in the art world is taken for granted. But how did an eccentric, fiercely independent and largely self-taught artist come to prominence, first in New York in the 1960s and then again, in Japan, in the 1980s? Japanese critic Takemi Kuresawa attempts to answer this in his Essay, “An Unwritten Biography: Overturning the Narrative of Yayoi Kusama’s Self-Obliteration,” which takes up the relationship between Kusama’s artworks and her mental illness. Kuresawa objects to the conventional understanding of Kusama’s practice that links her creativity to the hallucinations that supposedly inspire her dots and webs, which fill canvases, performances, sculptures and installations. Instead, the critic argues that the relationship could in fact be seen the other way…

There is a tall, sinister character who lords over many of Sun Xun’s gloomy, animated landscapes. He wears a top hat, and is the magician who rules the world. According to the artist, the truth is malleable in this figure’s hands—a magician’s job is to sell tricks after all. He is but a part of Sun’s allegories for how the powerful manipulate history and keep society under their control. Born in Fuxin in 1980, Sun became preoccupied with narratives of the past and the excavation of truth upon realizing the contrast between his father’s accounts of the Cultural Revolution and that of the Chinese Communist Party. He has since built an international career interrogating these concerns through traditional Chinese art-making techniques and new media, including handmade animations, woodcuts, ink drawings…

Ho Tzu Nyen is a narrator of speculative fictions. The often crisscrossing timeframes in which his works are situated stretch from one million BCE to 2045. Building on his exhaustive ongoing project, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2011–)—an archive of films gathered via internet-based algorithms and an accumulated set of concepts of what constitutes Southeast Asia—his solo exhibition “One or Several Works” at Shanghai’s Ming Contemporary Art Museum was a sweeping view of Singapore, and a microscopic dissection of its prehistory and potential catastrophic future. The exhibition was guided by three narrative strands: the weretiger mythology of Malaya; the influence of the Communist Party of Malaya and its enigmatic secretary general Lai Teck during and after the Second World War; as well as Singapore’s potential inhabitablity in the future.…

“In Search of Southeast Asia Through the M+ Collections” brought to mind the term “public engagement exercise.” The first (and only) time I heard the phrase used was by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, in reference to a series of open forums where citizens were invited to chime in on their expectations for M+ and the other institutions planned for Hong Kong’s overdue cultural hub. It stuck with me because it succinctly represents the Authority’s sense of responsibility to understand the public, which is contested by its fear of public opinion. The latter is betrayed by the word “exercise,” implying temporary effort while suggesting that the organization, by default, perceives itself as alien to its audience. The recent exhibition at M+ was true to that term. The primary motivation…

The fourth edition of Cappadox festival opened on June 14, just one week before Turkey’s snap elections took place. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had brought forward the presidential and parliamentary polls, originally scheduled for November 2019, to consolidate his iron-fisted control, claiming uncertainties in Syria and Iraq as his impetus. Fulya Erdemci, curator of the festival’s contemporary art exhibition “Silence,” began the show’s introductory text with a description of the country’s troubling political climate, as well as the post-truth era. Today, she argues, there are many words, facts and realities, all independent from their evidences. She then asks: within this zeitgeist, what potential meanings does silence carry? The works by the 15 artists of “Silence” were explorations of this question. The exhibition unfolded along a route that connected Ortahisar, a…

Reza Abdoh may very well be America’s most prolific avant-garde playwright and director that no one has heard of. He died of complications related to AIDS in 1995 at the age of 32. “Although not always a popular success, his work was generally staged to critical accolades,” read his obituary in the Los Angeles Times. Twenty-some years after his death, New York’s MoMA PS1 celebrated the Iranian-American artist in a large-scale retrospective featuring nearly the entirety of his oeuvre. Though he left instructions that his work should never be staged again following his death, the exhibition wove together videos, scripts, notes, personal photographs and other documentation in an immersive experience to illuminate who Abdoh was. Born into a wealthy and politically connected family in Tehran, he witnessed a turn during…