Innholdsfortegnelse for 111 (Nov/Dec 2018) i ArtAsiaPacific

Hanoi prides itself on its 1,000-year history and diverse mix of Chinese, French and Soviet cultural influences. It is much like a living theater, with all aspects of life played out in the streets, including eating, drinking, talking, singing, driving, dancing and fighting. The city is full of national museums, such as the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum, the Vietnamese Women’s Museum and the Vietnam National Museum of History. However, these sites seem to only attract foreign visitors. Internationally, there is curiosity and demand for arts and culture from Vietnam and historical information around the Vietnam War, but the local people, especially the younger generations, are generally more interested in the latest Korean fashion trends or the next Hollywood blockbuster. The exception to this is the new, private Vincom Center…

ZHANG DAQIAN BRIDGE TO MOUNTAIN TEMPLE SHROUDED BY PRISMATIC CLOUDS IN SPLASHED COLOR After the astonishing results of their spring series, expectations were high at Christie’s and Sotheby’s New York and Hong Kong outposts this fall. The Asia Week auctions in New York achieved satisfactory results that were nonetheless underwhelming in comparison to the March sales, proving that what goes up must come down. Fall auction earnings in Asia, on the other hand, remained impressive, led by offerings from the usual big names, while emerging auction favorites also enjoyed good sales. New York Christie’s New York Asian Art Week—which took place from September 11 to 14, and included Chinese antiquities along with classical Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian art—marked a lackluster start to the fall auction season. The series earned…

1. Xuan Ye TORONTO Xuan Ye, born in 1989, is a Toronto-based artist, but she would like people to think of “Xuan Ye” as a “prototype of many objects.” This distinction borrows from object-oriented programming, a software design paradigm in which code is organized into distinct objects that can interact with one another. For Ye—one of whose “objects” is the artistic persona also known as A Pure Apparatus—this post-human, pluralist approach to the many “dynamic, networked roles” brought together in her practice opens up possibilities for navigating complexities in art as in life. Ye’s deployment of digital media technologies to investigate instability in contemporary contexts is exemplified in the website work, IN BETWEEN () WE OSCILLATE (2018). The work presents the titular words in flickering neon yellow over antonym pairs…

Earlier this year, club owner and entrepreneur Qiao Zhibing invited 36 fellow art collectors from the greater China region to submit works from their private inventories for a group exhibition in Shanghai. Out of these proposals, Qiao handpicked around 50 artworks—of which approximately 40 were by men and fewer than 10 by female artists—for the exhibition, entitled “Art Patrons,” which was on display at the two initiatives he founded in the West Bund Culture Corridor: Qiao Space, and the 60,000-square-meter cultural hub Tank Shanghai. The show opened in late March, catering to the international museum directors, curators, collectors and art professionals who might have stopped in Shanghai on their way to Art Basel Hong Kong. It was revealing that the exhibition invitation listed all 36 contributing collectors and collections, yet…

HAYOUN KWON How deep into the unknowable can art take us? Using digital animation and virtual reality, Seoul-born artist Hayoun Kwon leads viewers into physical locales that we cannot otherwise access. Her early works explored a site central to the collective imagination of South Korean society that is nonetheless forbidden: the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two warring halves of Korea. Her interest in portraying this buffer area started with the project Panmunjom (2013), when she was refused permission to record the Joint Security Area where soldiers from the two sides face each other. Instead, she created an animation that initially simulates filming with a thermal-imaging camera, appearing to show soldiers on their patrols, before becoming an absurdist choreography of marching that blurs real and imagined, and one side and…

IMAGINED BORDERS Political scientist Benedict Anderson proposed in his 1983 book Imagined Communities that nationalism was a modern, global phenomenon created by standardization of printed information systems and liberal market economies (what he termed “print capitalism”). What then is driving the resurgence of nationalism in this era of de-territorialization with digital technologies, neoliberal capitalism and great flows of migrants and refugees? These questions propelled the 2018 edition of the Gwangju Biennale, which was titled “Imagined Borders” and sought to re-address what constitutes individual and collective identity today, as well as to delve into the Biennale’s own history with these topics. The inaugural Gwangju Biennale was held in 1995 during South Korea’s “Year of Art” to celebrate the country’s new globalization agenda. As GB Foundation president Sunjung Kim explained in her…

DIVIDED WE STAND History is a recurring nightmare. Renewed tensions between NATO allies and Russia and China have plunged the world into a second Cold War. It was fitting then that the 2018 Busan Biennale, hosted in the only corner of the Korean peninsula not captured by the communist forces during the Korean War (1950–53), examined the postwar legacy of divisions, from ill-fated partitions made in the process of decolonization to the enduring material and cultural borders cleaved between the first, second and third worlds. Organized by artistic director Cristina Ricupero and curator Jorg Heiser, with Gahee Park serving as guest curator for projects by younger artists from Asia, “Divided We Stand” featured 66 artists and collectives from 34 countries still affected by divisions and conflicts in the wake of…

A HOLLOW IN A WORLD TOO FULL In a dank, moss-covered concrete room, a Guan Yu statue sat in webs of dust in a shrine. Moody twangs of 1980s Cantopop played; mangoes spilled out of a basket onto the floor; and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II hung crookedly over a desk littered with papers detailing the case of an imprisoned poet. This scene, like many others in the works Cao Fei has produced since the mid-1990s, was wholly constructed: the mold was artificial, the mangoes a hard plastic and the prisoner a fictional character in a new film, Prison Architect (2018), commissioned for “A Hollow in a World Too Full,” the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition in Asia, housed at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Shown on the exhibition’s top floor,…

Although “Indonesia, Spirit of the World,” curated by Amir Sidharta and Watie Moerany, coincided with the Jakarta Palembang 2018 Asian Games, it was far from a mere diplomatic exercise. In its selection of artworks from the collection of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, the show offered a rare view of paintings and sculptures created and collected from the 1930s to the 1960s. These works express a collective optimism in Indonesia at the time and the forging of a new identity fueled by independence and rising internationalism. Here, the theme of colonization was boldly explored through images of resistance, revealing a shared, global vision of unity aided by intercountry friendship and artistic exchange—a far cry from the tightening of borders and racialization that we are seeing today. The cleverly curated exhibition showcased…

“The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India,” organized by guest curator Zehra Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan, director of New York’s Asia Society Museum, was centered around the Progressive Artists’ Group, a collective of men that formed in Mumbai following India’s independence from Britain in 1947. At the time, the young artists, mostly painters, saw themselves as rebels, passionate about their country’s potential. They envisioned an egalitarian society attuned to the avant-garde and broad-minded values. Their works reflect this burgeoning sense of hope while critiquing the nation’s postcolonial reality, revealing a forward-looking yet unsettled country seeking to establish its place in the world. Comprising 80 exhibits divided into three sections and occupying the two upper floors of the Asia Society Museum, the show began with “The Progressives in…

If the face is the mirror of the mind and the eyes the window to the soul, what happens when visages are obscured? Displayed at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, Tokyo-based artist Tomoo Gokita’s latest body of work comprises single, double and group portraits. However, the information central to a typical portrait—the subject’s likeness—is made to be bizarre, jarring or missing completely. As such, meanings in the black-and-white paintings are diffuse and dependent on the viewer—the blobs and smears covering the faces appear like Rorschach inkblots. Replicant J.B. (all works 2018), for example, takes a jovial image of deceased African-American musical icon James Brown and turns it into something ghastly. Where his face should be is a cavity, as if someone ripped off his skin, revealing his nasal skeleton…

For over five decades, Keiichi Tanaami has blended references to pop culture, Hollywood films, imagery from traditional Japanese ink paintings and myths from various civilizations. His creations—paintings, sculptures, prints and experimental films—unpack a traumatic childhood spent in Tokyo during the Second World War, with distorted contours of bodily horror and looming, vacant eyes articulating the overwhelming mental shock that the artist felt as a young boy witnessing incendiary air raids. Simultaneously, Tanaami’s works express his anti-war convictions and allude to his philosophy of humanity’s interconnectedness, through forms and symbols taken from Edo-period scroll paintings, ancient Greek lore and Christianity. Guangzhou desk editor Brady Ng looks at how Tanaami constantly revisits moments of terror and agony in his work, finding flashes of beauty in blinding flames that were ignited 74 years…

The esteemed 63-year-old photographer, photojournalist, educator and activist Shahidul Alam was arrested on August 5. Earlier that day, Alam had appeared on Al Jazeera and openly criticized Dhaka authorities’ excessive use of force in breaking up student protests calling for improved road safety. At around 10pm on August 5, plainclothes policemen arrested Alam at his Dhaka residence. He has been charged with “spreading propaganda and false information against the government” under Section 57 of Bangladesh’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act 2006, which criminalizes the electronic dissemination of content that “prejudices the image of the state” and may cause “deterioration in law and order.” When Alam appeared in court on August 6, he was visibly bruised and stated that he was tortured in jail, an allegation that the police denied.…

New and veteran fairs alike are continuously tinkering with their formats and programs, trying to maximize their chances of securing high-quality works and, more importantly, big-spending collectors. Fairs in Beijing, Sydney, London and Seoul presented a range of strategies for helping the bottom line. Beijing Art fair fatigue appears not to afflict the Chinese capital, which saw the inauguration of yet another fair this year, Beijing Contemporary (August 30–September 2), after JINGART launched in May. A total of 32 Chinese and international galleries participated in Beijing Contemporary’s two gallery sectors, while the other sectors highlighted design, fashion and lead organizing partner Cadillac’s new luxury SUV. Beijing’s Ink Studio offered works by prominent ink artists Li Jin, Yang Jiechang, Zheng Chongbin and Li Huasheng, selling the latter’s USD 205,000 large-scale grid…

Rarely are artists as expansive as Shezad Dawood, in their subject matter and methodology, and in probing the fault lines in contemporary society. For nearly two decades, the London-based artist of Indo-Pakistani descent has grappled with themes of cultural identity, migration, displacement, systems of power and structures of belief through diverse contexts and histories using a spectrum of media. Given Dawood’s South Asian heritage and diasporic experience of growing up in Britain, exploring the idea of otherness has figured prominently in his work since the start of his career. In his notable early project, Make It Big (2002–03), Dawood attempted to destabilize the binary of East and West by restaging film stills of Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic mystery thriller Blow-Up (1966) using Pakistani actresses, with himself as the director, and by…

Beijing traffic flows around six concentric ring roads. Demarcating the megacity and carrying its infamous traffic, these quadrilateral highways are in many ways markers of growth. Much like the layers of a tree trunk, Beijing’s rings have expanded with age as the city’s population has surged, and the need for living space has increased. Although Ma Quisha works out of a studio situated just inside the sixth ring road, her early childhood was spent in the city’s core. Born in 1982, Ma lived with her mother, father and great-grandmother in Shijing hutong, located a kilometer and a half south of Tiananmen Square, for the first three years of her life. These narrow alleyways, framed by clusters of courtyards found within the second ring road and laid out within the ruins…

1997 AAP 37: “Shilpa Gupta,” by Johan Pijnappel Cassette recordings of people expressing joy, paintings made from clothes stained by menstrual blood, canvases blessed by holy men—these are some of the projects that Shilpa Gupta created in the 1990s and early 2000s. In an Essay on the Mumbai-based artist’s practice, curator Johan Pijnappel contextualized Gupta’s works as critical takes on India’s new consumerist society, one in the throes of globalization and in thrall to the new fast lanes of the worldwide web. Gupta’s technological savvy and humorous satire coalesce in the love-letter ordering service with deliveries by mermaids or hostesses, sentiment-express.com (2001), typically shown in the exhibition context on a single desktop computer. Pijnappel also explored Gupta’s perspectives around the place of women in society, noting that the sectarian violence…

FROM WILL TO FORM Curated by Emily Cormack, the 2018 TarraWarra Biennial was based on a curatorial premise free from theoretical impositions to do with “the global” (a persistent trope in biennial frameworks), and offered artworks interconnected and enriched by an expansive theme. By tracing the creative determinations of 24 Australia-based artists through the material and immaterial outcomes of their diverse and sometimes collaborative practices, “From Will to Form” overturned the role of the artist as an egocentric creative genius and positioned them rather as transmitters of will, thus creating space for the works to be understood in their own right. Following this notion, the Biennial artists presented will as a fluid force, their works loosely exploring will in relation to the body, material world, the psyche, its ontology and…

THE LAMENT: MOUNTAIN GHOST As one of China’s foremost new media and video artists, Cheng Ran has, since the beginning of his career, made videos and films that address a world of private feelings or hermetic thoughts, but that skirt any direct or obvious autobiographical references. In recent years, however, a curious kind of gravitas, one that speaks to the ethos and ennui of his generation—born in the 1980s—has emerged in his works. With numerous accolades, including a Best Director Award, which he received at the Madrid International Film Festival in 2017, and a growing roster of international exhibitions at such distinguished venues as New York’s New Museum, Cheng’s ambitions have been high from the outset. His exhibition at Ota Fine Arts in Shanghai, “The Lament: Mountain Ghost,” marked the…

REMINISCENCE FX Harsono’s solo exhibition, “Reminiscence,” presented by Singapore’s Sullivan + Strumpf, was focused on the artist’s investigation of the genocide of ethnic Chinese-Indonesians in Java, Indonesia, from 1947 to ’49. Widely recognized for his prolific practice, which addresses the plight of minorities and the socially underprivileged, particularly in the context of Indonesia’s history of political turmoil, the show reaffirmed Harsono’s ability to powerfully convey narratives of pain and upheaval. It may be hard to grasp the heart of violent conflicts from the plethora of media that surrounds us today, but it was nearly impossible to avoid the sense of personal loss expressed in Harsono’s iconic installation The Spirit of Light (2016). A single tombstone, bearing a handful of names, replicates a marked gravesite and commemorates the victims—the actual number…

It’s more common than most of us would like to admit for people to have a nation—a binding identity based on culture, heritage and language—but no state of their own and no hold over their destinies. That pain is felt daily in the Palestinian Territories. In the West Bank, much of the land is under Israeli control, with jurisdiction of the rest shared by Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Movement is restricted. Profiling and baseless arrests are commonplace. The roads are rife with military checkpoints. When the AM Qattan Foundation and curator Yazid Anani organized the group exhibition “Subcontracted Nations” with 62 artists and collectives to inaugurate the Foundation’s new headquarters in Ramallah, critique was pointed even before the show opened: are new comforts such as the Foundation’s building mere…

DEATH AND DREAMS Best known for his psychedelic collages channeling 1960s pop culture, Japanese artist and graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo has dedicated himself to a new medium since renouncing commercial work in the 1980s. The pieces the octogenarian produces in his now preferred medium of painting present a noticeable departure from his signature, iconoclastic posters. At the same time, he continues to play with highly stylized, vintage imagery. Yokoo’s solo exhibition “Death and Dreams” at Albertz Benda gallery in New York focused on his portraits of women drawn from three different series, beginning with more impressionistic works and concluding with the surreal. The female subject loosely tied together the otherwise disparate paintings in oil, acrylic and watercolor, the majority of which were shown for the first time outside of Japan.…

The two provocateurs who populate Slavs and Tatars keep a low profile. Their real names don’t appear in their works or their writings, and as proper philosopher-nomads they don’t advertise where they’re based in. They describe themselves as a “faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia.” This vast canvas gives them ample space to roam; but rather than flailing with all-encompassing brushstrokes—they confess that they “are not painters, but polemicists”—they build complex, even absurd, structures from the minutiae of history, language, geography, ethnicity and the everyday. In so doing, they ride the rails of two major worlds of thought and action that have galvanized conflict in the past and present centuries:…

Typographic forms inscribed on canvas, stamped on cards, printed and bound in volumes, punched out on telegrams, voiced over airwaves. On Kawara’s date-related works suggest a level of remoteness and detachment in their use of data and a set-based logic of numeric and systematic languages. Abstract and serial in nature, the works describe time with a cool distance. However, Kawara’s language-objects are anything but hermetic codes: they are warm and generous spells that transport us through those very inscriptions. The devices that Kawara subscribes to—the attempted absenting of the hand in painting the sans-serif type of those beautifully endless tracts of dates; the reliance on telecommunication technologies to prescribe existence but that arrive minutes, hours, days late; the temporal nature of a voice reading out loud the dates of a…

Despite evidence to the contrary, a network of fair organizers, galleries, so-called tastemakers, and even government bodies in Singapore continue to cultivate an art fair-industrial complex under the assumption that introducing more art fairs is a winning strategy for the local economy and art scene alike. The individuals and organizations in this network will do anything to impress the cool kids of the art world—namely mega galleries, mega fairs and mega-rich buyers—social and financial consequences be damned. Recently, it was announced that the inaugural edition of SEA Focus, a commercial showcase of around 30 galleries featuring Southeast Asian art, will be held in the gallery enclave Gillman Barracks, during Singapore Art Week next January. Soon afterwards, it was revealed that MCH Group, the owner of the Art Basel brand, will…

In late August 2017, Katharina Amman, head of the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA) and Christina Vegh, director of the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, gathered in Zurich for a public dialogue with artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler at Villa Bleuler, the headquarters of SIK-ISEA. The event explored Hubbard and Birchler’s contribution to the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, cited by audiences and critics as one of the most meaningful, outstanding works in the Biennale. Continuing the initial dialogue, the artists and Vegh further explored ideas about feminism, storytelling and re-framing history in the following conversation. Christina Végh: I would like to start with Flora (2017), the film installation you developed for the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, in which you provide a multilayered, kaleidoscopic view…

ASPIRING EXPERIMENTS / NEW YORK IN 50 YEARS New York-based artist Kunie Sugiura’s first major retrospective in her birth country, “Aspiring Experiments / New York in 50 Years,” presented at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, was a five-part, chronological showcase of her multimedia practice, beginning with her graduation work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and ending with her latest digitally printed photo-canvas series shot in Japan. In 1963, cynical about what the future held for her as a woman in Japan, Sugiura decided to move from Tokyo, where she was a physics student, to study photography in Chicago. There, taking the advice of her tutor, Sugiura initially pursued photojournalism. Immediately realizing that was not for her, she retreated to her studio, where she aimed to push…

Spread across the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing’s Caochangdi art district, the first exhibition in China of the Japanese photographer Shoji Ueda (1913–2000) was an understated showcase of the joy that the artist found in his photography. For Ueda’s retrospective, Three Shadows—founded by well-known photographers Rong Rong and Inri—collaborated with the recently opened Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography in the artist’s hometown of Tottori, borrowing 141 original photographs selected by curator Masako Sato. From the show’s outset, there was an emphasis on the immutable presence of Ueda’s family and Tottori in his images, with the majority of the early works from the 1940s and ’50s portraying his family and close friends in the local sand dunes, his trademark setting. The black-and-white Papa, Mama and Children (1949) shows Ueda…

“Ties of History” took its name from the 1967 founding declaration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which describes the region as being “bound together by ties of history and culture.” On the occasion of ASEAN’s 50th anniversary, the exhibition, curated by Patrick D. Flores, brought together ten artists—one from each of ASEAN’s member countries—to survey the variegated artistic inquiries brewing in the region, while endeavoring to offer in-depth views of each of the artist’s practices. To see the totality of “Ties of History,” visitors had to journey through Metro Manila. Each artist was represented by three works, distributed between the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, the Yuchengco Museum and the Vargas Museum. The different locations allowed the artists to show a range of projects that differed in material…

“Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi) – Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism” at London’s Greengrassi Gallery and Corvi-Mora was, as the title suggests, concerned with the future, but what made it such a solid, compelling show was how firmly rooted it was in the immediate present. Curated by Hermione Spriggs, the exhibition featured works by ten artists, collectives and researchers deeply concerned with the land and exploitation of its resources (“Tavan Tolgoi” refers to one of the world’s largest untapped thermal coal deposits in southern Mongolia). The idea of roots, minerals—things that rest beneath the soil—predominated, and the promise of future deracinations, whether for positive or negative ends, loomed throughout the show. In Yuri Pattison’s Pick, Press, Fang Feng (The New Economy) (2018), a manual pill-press sits atop an LCD monitor, laid…

FOLLOW THIS LINE The last few years have been a time of reflection on past and present glories for Iranian modern artists. In 2018, New York’s MoMA PS1 staged a posthumous retrospective for director and playwright Reza Abdoh, and London’s Mosaic Rooms surveyed the career of abstract painter Behjat Sadr. In Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center cast the spotlight on septuagenarian artist and architect Siah Armajani, who has been living and working in the city since 1960. The sprawling retrospective of more than 100 works traced Armajani’s six-decade-long career. Considering its scale, as well as Armajani’s ravenous appetite for experimenting with, and blending, different forms and disciplines, the show’s title, “Follow This Line,” could be interpreted as ironic. Far from being linear, the path the retrospective took viewers down was…

To find Japanese multimedia artist Izumi Kato’s Hong Kong studio, I had to walk along a circuitous white corridor past a seemingly endless stretch of identical metal doors. This disorienting passageway, coiled inside an industrial building on the isolated southern tip of Hong Kong Island, could have easily been the movie set for a psychological thriller, and, admittedly, I began to feel the onset of panic as I attempted to locate the number two, supposedly marked above one of these otherwise indistinguishable entries. Thankfully, I found the correct door and rang the bell. Kato greeted me, dressed casually in a T-shirt and loose shorts—his standard attire that he wears even to his exhibition openings and on stage with his rock band Tetorapotz. His wife Tomoko Aratani, who is much more…