Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov/Dec 2016 i ArtAsiaPacific

Whether in politics or culture, Malaysia has never really gained the kind of international prominence that her immediate neighbors in Southeast Asia (such as Indonesia, Thailand or Singapore) have over the past decade. Recently rated as the second-most corrupt country on a list of emerging economies in Time magazine, Malaysia is, in the eyes of critics, practiced in mediocrity. Even in the art of corruption, it remains merely second best. On the other hand, Malaysia’s relative obscurity on the international stage might be the result of its racially plural makeup. One could say the very idea of Malaysia is resistant to convenient profiling. It is therefore commonly said that the Malaysian art scene is a fragmented one. This has resulted in a small but growing body of literature about Malaysian…

September shrugged off the current state of global mayhem by bringing our attention to the dynamic art scene in Lebanon, specifically with the Beirut Art Fair, where female artists had the spotlight. This same trend of championing women continued at Frieze in London. The diversity of work presented indicated that gallerists and artists were eager to impress with their breadth of coverage—it remains to be seen whether this momentum will continue in Asia, with two highly anticipated fairs taking place at the same time in Shanghai in November. Beirut The annual Beirut Art Fair (BAF, 9/15–18), now in its seventh edition, was held once again at the Beirut International Exhibition and Leisure Centre (BIELC). The BAF reported another year of steady growth in its visitorship (roughly 23,000 people, up from…

On May 22, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) announced that it would stop the display of Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now (2016), a LED-light installation that had been playing on the facade of the tallest building in Hong Kong, the International Commerce Center (ICC). The decision came after the artists Sampson Wong and Jason Lam revealed to select media outlets, after its initial projection at the opening of the public media-art exhibition “Human Vibrations” on May 17, that there was a latent political message within the work. Commissioned by HKADC, Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now was switched off on the grounds that the artists, according to exhibition curator Caroline Ha Thuc, had violated the contract and changed the nature of the piece. The artists then responded that they…

TEPPEI KANEUJI Like a scene out of a child’s nightmare, a vertical stack of four toy figurines forms a haunting installation on a bright-blue pedestal. Caked almost entirely in dripping white resin, the sculpture is dramatically frozen in a mid-action pose like the petrified bodies of Pompeii. Those familiar with Japanese pop culture will recognize the figurines as that of the popular manga and anime character Doraemon—a lovable robotic cat from the 22nd century armed with fantastical inventions, who travels back to our present to help a bumbling boy called Nobita Nobi navigate his life. The sculptural installation, White Discharge (Cat Shaped Robot) #2 (2015), is part of a series by Teppei Kaneuji, best known for his wonderfully bizarre installations that collage together, and joyously transform, various everyday objects. Standing…

GWANGJU Gwangju Biennale Hall & Various Locations more The earth seen from space, or an iridescent oil slick in a champagne glass? A visual double-entendre of highly charged clichés—about oil and wealth, fossil fuels and climate change—was collapsed in Agnieszka Polska’s banner Glass of Petrol (2015), which hung at the entrance to Gwangju Biennale 11 (GB11). Nearby were photographs showing polychromatic slices of a meteorite by the duo Faivovich & Goldberg, Katie Paterson’s candle layered with 23 unique scents representing a journey through space, and Ann Lislegaard’s animation of an owl reciting bits from the I Ching while resting on a miniature model of Saturn. From cosmic realms GB11 spiraled down toward earth in Pratchaya Phinthong’s photographs of a burning gas hydrate; Munem Wasif’s lunar-looking photographs of barren landscapes straddling India…

South Korea’s Busan Biennale opened to the public one day after the official start of the rivaling Gwangju Biennale. Comprising three subsections taking place in two locations. “Project 1” and “Project 3”—a group exhibition and educational program, respectively—were held at the Busan Museum of Art, while “Project 2,” another survey show, took place at F1963, a refurbished wire-rope factory. “Project 1” featured 148 artworks by 65 artists and chronicled Korean, Chinese and Japanese experimental avant-garde art, with a focus on pieces from the 1960s to the 1980s. The works were neatly categorized under the idea of “an/other,” which pertained to many of the limitations and aspirations shared by the featured artists, who had also thrived individually within their respective unique conditions and times. “Project 2,” meanwhile, assembled 168 artworks by…

A wise gallerist once told me, “Every exhibition reveals its intentions.” “SHE,” at Shanghai’s Long Museum, which featured works by 105 female artists from 13 countries that spanned from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) to the present, was a wildly ambitious project, with intentions that were mostly earnest and at times thoughtful. The exhibition, however, had a central problem, which was not the result of its good intentions, but its overall execution. Curated by the museum’s co-founder Wang Wei, the exhibition was divided into four chapters that were overarching and theoretically far-flung, titled respectively: “The Annihilation of Self,” “The Liberation of Self,” “The Introspection of Self” and “The Expression of Self.” Granted, it isn’t easy to cover a thousand years’ worth of history, but this was only part of the problem.…

For years, China-watchers have joked that the construction crane is the country’s national bird. Their logic is obvious: towns across the country have transformed into some of the largest cities in the world, all within a mere three decades. In particular, the 1990s were boom times, when low-rise brick houses rapidly gave way to towers of glass, steel and concrete. Such changes in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) prompted four artists in Guangzhou—Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, Lin Yilin and Xu Tan—to tackle nervous developments in Chinese life as a collective group known as the Big Tail Elephants. From June to October, Guangzhou’s Times Museum hosted the group’s first retrospective, “Operation PRD – Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows.” The exhibition restaged five shows organized by the Elephants…

A large cube, lined inside with hundreds of magnets, was covered with millions of black iron filings forming intestinal undulations that appeared as though fat worms lurked beneath the structure’s surface. Entitled Socle de Monde (1992–93), the sculpture pulled visitors into Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s retrospective at Tate Modern. In addition to this showstopper, the exhibition featured a broad range of works, including the panopticon-like installation Quarters (1996) and Light Sentence (1992), in which a light bulb illuminated the center of a rack of cages, creating unsteady shadows. These and works such as Corps Étranger (1994), a circular viewing space for visitors to observe a video of an endoscopy of Hatoum’s body, explored a key concern of her practice: surveillance, including the act of watching and being watched. Another work,…

The saccharine-sweet, instrumental melody of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (1961) greeted viewers at the entrance of Lee Kit’s exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, “Hold Your Breath, Dance Slowly.” The tune was the soundtrack for Lee’s 2012 work of a similar name, wherein an “I” interjected at the beginning of the title further personalizes the song’s clichéd romanticism. Though the ambitious 13-channel video installation, which the Walker purchased in 2014, was displayed one room away from the entrance, the song haunted and grated at one’s eardrums throughout the exhibition. Analog television monitors, organized across multiple shelves of a metal storage unit, each featured a video focusing on one of several consumer skincare products that make frequent appearances in Lee’s paintings, videos and sculptural installations. A…

On August 24, Ai Weiwei announced on Twitter that his artwork Redline had been removed from the inaugural Yinchuan Biennale in Northwest China, just two weeks before the opening. The first edition of Yinchuan Biennale, entitled “For an Image, Faster than Light,” is curated by Kochi-Muziris Biennale co-founder Bose Krishnamachari, and features 73 artists from 33 countries, including Song Dong, Dana Awartini, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. However, on September 9, the Biennale opened at the privately developed Museum of Contemporary Art Yinchuan (MOCA Yinchuan) without Ai Weiwei or his artwork. “China is trying to develop into a modern society without freedom of speech,” Ai said in a statement released on Instagram on August 24. While Biennale organizers attributed Ai’s exclusion to his “political sensitivity,” it was arguably the…

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AUSTRALIA, SYDNEY Tatsuo Miyajima: “Connect with Everything”11/3–3/5/17 Tatsuo Miyajima’s room-sized installation Mega-Death (1999) is the centerpiece for the Japanese artist’s major survey hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, as part of their 2016–2017 Sydney International Art Series. Blinking LED lights that count from 1 to 9 fill the walls with a blue tone, with higher numbers symbolizing a vibrancy of life while lower numbers allude to darkness—or death. In a gesture taken from the Buddhist belief of reincarnation in which patterns repeat and renew, the blinking numbers loop continuously. “Connect with Everything” will be Miyajima’s first major solo show in Australia, displaying his tech-inspired sculptures from his early career up to the present. VARIOUS LOCATIONS, SHANGHAI Shanghai Biennale 11/11–3/12/17 The 11th Shanghai Biennale bears…

The international profile of India has changed since Narendra Modi took office as prime minister in May 2014. With the intention of raising foreign direct investment and developing India’s reputation abroad, Modi, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has had a heavy travel itinerary. His global reception has included hugs from United States president Barack Obama, despite a previous travel ban issued by the US on account of “severe violations of religious freedom.” There were locked handshakes with French president François Hollande among artist Nek Chand’s elegant rock-garden sculptures in Chandigarh. There was even a Wembley Stadium reception by then British prime minister David Cameron in November 2015, which was garishly excessive in nationalist spirit, conveniently overshadowing the United Kingdom’s own travel ban on Modi that was only…

Juan Davila In 2010, after 40 years of painting, Chilean-Australian painter Juan Davila entered an unexplored, internal space new to his art practice. Davila buried his highly referential appropriations of the 1980s and the direct political critiques of the 1990s and early 2000s and began to engage in a more nuanced, less structured approach to analyze society’s unconscious. The “After Image” series (2010–13) and the paintings that he has produced since 2013 typify this new direction as Davila has lifted, mixed and twisted both local and global visual culture in a productive clash toward emancipating Australian society from its own bigotry and inhibition. The Davila of the earlier decades garnered a reputation in Australia and abroad as a firebrand. Born in Santiago in 1946, Davila graduated from the Fine Arts…

“Telling Tales: Excursions in Narrative Form,” at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), examined how artists tell stories in complex and sometimes ambiguous ways, from nonlinear and cyclical journeys to ones that encouraged viewers to construct their own narratives. It was clear that MCA chief curator Rachel Kent had a passionate engagement with the subject, which she explored through her curation of 14 Australian and international artists in the exhibition. Highlights included Safdar Ahmed’s sketchbooks, drawings and zines that he collaboratively made with refugees detained in Sydney; Angelica Mesiti’s videos that explored the notion of silence; and American artist Kerry Tribe’s menacing film installation There Will Be_____ (2012), which reimagines an unsolved Los Angeles murder from 1929. Additionally, works by two titans of Asian contemporary art cast their presence over…

Soil and stones, as geologic materials, are the essential building blocks that compose the vast areas of the earth fragmented by the abstract and arbitrary demarcations of geography. Within the context of the exhibition “Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs,” they also symbolized the spirits of the diverse communities who have built their homes both with and around such natural elements. Held at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila and organized by San Francisco-and Paris-based Kadist Foundation and Para Site Hong Kong, the exhibition contained a rich and overwhelming collection of works from the past few decades, ranging from collage-like paintings, biomorphic drawings and mini-sculptures to expansive murals, conceptual videos and archival documents, by more than 30 international artists. Despite the range of issues the artists sought…

The much-anticipated M+ Pavilion in Hong Kong debuted with a solo exhibition by Tsang Kin-Wah, ominously titled “Nothing.” As this was the first permanent space at the M+ museum of Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, expectations were high for both the artist and the main curators Doryun Chong and Stella Fong. Tsang had represented Hong Kong at the 2015 Venice Biennale with “The Infinite Nothing”—an installation that explored philosophical concepts through projected text and images—and he structured his M+ exhibition as a response to its new space and a development of his Venice presentation. “Nothing,” whose strikethrough represents the artist’s idea that “nothingness” is not a void but an extant condition, expanded Tsang’s foray into existentialist works. The entrance of the M+ Pavilion was built to let out onto…

One felt queasy immediately upon arrival. Conceived as a single installation, Stephanie Jane Burt’s first solo exhibition, “O Dear What Can the Matter Be,” papered the entire space of Yeo Workshop in a sickly hue of yellow, with a dizzying pattern filling the walls. The grating image was derived from The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a short story by pioneering American feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a young wife suffering from hallucinations of the titular wallpaper, which surrounds and condemns her to a life of servile domesticity. At the gallery, one could almost smell the malaise. Yet the nausea, even if it lingered, would not be the last thing that one took away from the installation. Standing in the center of the gallery was an assemblage of mostly recycled items…

With the current instability of West Asian politics giving cause for alarm, it was invigorating to be confronted by the work of an artist who, over the past four decades, has reflected deeply on, and acted within, such sociopolitical currents. “Chronographia,” Istanbul-based Gülsün Karamustafa’s retrospective held at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, made a virtuosic, and at times breathtaking, impact. Marking the first comprehensive showing of her work outside Turkey, the exhibition comprised around 110 works—ranging from her prison paintings of the 1970s, to her fabric and photo installations of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as her films, videos and installations since 2000. With the show split into three different areas of the museum, a thematic layout was adopted, which, as exhibition curator Melanie Roumiguière points out in her catalog essay,…

Behind a narrow nursery in Mong Kok’s Flower Market, tiny plant specimens glow like mutant organisms under a pulsing UV light. Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung inspects their bulbous caudices. Some sprout baby vines as thin as hairs; others carry cracks like those found on hoary tortoise shells. Although diminutive in size, these plants—some of which are saplings that will eventually become trees— will add meters to their height over time. “Sometimes things change so fast, especially in Hong Kong. I like these kinds of plants, because they grow so, so slowly,” says Yeung, tapping with precision the pointed, semi-translucent leaves of a potted succulent. Once a week, Yeung makes a trip here, as well as to the bird and goldfish markets nearby, to procure flora, fish and other biota…

AKBAR PADAMSEE GREEK LANDSCAPE 1960 Plastic emulsion on canvas, 132 x 366 cm. Courtesy Saffronart, Mumbai. It has been a headline-making year. From the shocking June results of the “Brexit” vote, which signaled the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union (Prime Minister Theresa May announced in October that she intends for the UK to leave the EU by March 2019), to the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July, which forced President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to declare a state of emergency, as well as the surreal lead up to the US presidential election in November, unrest rippled all around the world. Despite these signs of political and economic uncertainty, it has been business as usual at the auction houses as buyers continued to invest in art. Sales for Indian…

Izziyana Suhaimi Waiting for the North Westerly Winds (detail), 2015, hanging piece: woven cotton thread, 109 x 152 cm; prayer mat: cotton thread embroidered on prayer mat, 119 x 69 cm. Courtesy the artist and Fost Gallery, Singapore Taeyoon Kim Drop, 2016, 10-channel video installation, view of the exhibition “Blinded Coincidence” at One and J. Gallery, Seoul, 2016. Courtesy One and J. Gallery Gao Mingyan There are times when the unintentional words may be even more accurate than deliberate ones, 2016, paper, glue and pen, 36 pieces: dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Vanguard Gallery, Shangha 1 Izziyana Suhaimi SINGAPORE The Moirai, the Fates of Greek mythology, determined the destiny of all mortals by weaving the threads of life. Thread has maintained this meaning over the centuries as life force…

ETEL ADNAN Born in 1925, writer, essayist, poet and artist Etel Adnan is a keen observer of geopolitical unrest and, in particular, of imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism. Her literary practice combines observations—sometimes diagnostic, sometimes critical—of the historical and contemporary world with poetic and transcendental meditations. In her prose, the result of her experimentation sustained across the years, one notes the coexistence, and even interdependence, between history and metaphysics. For example, in The Arab Apocalypse, a major poem of 1989, there is no poetical contradiction between the politicized voice of the writer and her cosmological articulations and ecstatic and visionary metaphors. The extent of her literary works, her essays and her many artistic collaborations testify to this characteristic. Yet one wonders how her artistic practice—better known to a wider audience since…

Nedko Solakov is an internationally known artist, the master of witty narratives that are full of numerous, meticulously executed details. The narratives involve paintings, drawings, objects, text and the use of multimedia; they rely on space arrangements and achieve the perfect level of command over the total installation. However, each media used by the artist does not lose its own “dignity” and specific identity. Solakov is one of the most successful among the generation of artists that entered the profession at the end of the 1980s. For him, however, the meaning of “entering” had additional connotations, because it was not an act of simply joining the ranks of colleagues, as is usually the case with the advance of age and skills. In 1989, with the fall of the Iron Curtain,…

In the past, Makoto Aida has been vividly direct about his thoughts regarding the cultural neuroses that is at the heart of Japanese politics—namely, the neutrality of the younger generations toward a government that keeps them at arm’s length, and the escapism that modern culture promotes that simultaneously helps perpetuate that distance. However, with “Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things,” at Tokyo’s Mizuma Art Gallery, Aida offered a more ambiguous and potentially ambitious direction in his latest body of work, which consist of more than 30 distinctly painted, foam-filled lunch trays. A departure from his subversive neo-Nihonga paintings for which he is best known, the exhibition showed Aida abandoning his usual, meticulous methods of exploring painting as a politicized act, and instead subjecting…

Bureaucracy, archives and institutionalism are important hidden mechanisms that shape modern societies, but like their associated emotional states of “boredom” and “ennui,” they can be a very tough sell to an audience abroad. French curator Corinne Diserens nevertheless attempted a critique of such mechanisms in the 2016 Taipei Biennial, titled “Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future,” at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). The exhibition featured 76 artists, including Francis Alÿs, Ad Reinhardt and Peter Friedl, among many others. Notably, there were more than 34 Taiwan-based artists, the largest local contingent since the Taipei Biennial established itself as an international exhibition in 1998, including video artist Chen Chieh-jen, apparently having recanted on his 2010 declaration to never again exhibit at TFAM. (Chen was protesting the priority…

Immediately upon entering OCAT Shenzhen’s group exhibition “Summer Triangle,” familiar visual and audio stimuli vied for one’s attention—including a giant screening of a film featuring the Kool-Aid Man. One’s eyes were then drawn to the triangle of light in the center of the space that mimicked the show’s eponymous astronomical asterism, the “summer triangle” that constellated the works of Adrian Wong, Jon Rafman and Lantian Xie into what the exhibition’s curator Venus Lau called “multitudes of [Walter] Benjamin-ish ‘dialectical images.’” Under the notion that cities are formed of intangible and often changing popular culture and media, the artists presented installations and multimedia works that seemed unconnected except for their oblique references to Hong Kong. For example, Lantian Xie’s self-explanatory installation Home-delivery Bike Parked Outside (2014), instantly brought back memories of…

Against the hypnotic light of a disco ball and poignant guitar strums, a melancholic male voice claims to be Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This scene is from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s short film Sakda (Rousseau) (2012) and shows an actor reading an existentialist monologue that reflects the disenfranchised identities of those who feel far from Rousseau’s ideals of justice and freedom. The film’s poetic exploration of social immobility echoes the dehumanization of humankind seen in contemporary Thailand—as well as across the globe. Sakda opened Apichatpong’s retrospective, “The Serenity of Madness,” which inaugurated the new MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai. Curated by Bangkok-based Gridthiya Gaweewong, the show conveyed the dreamy and uncanny aesthetic of the Thai filmmaker, who explores complex social matters through nonlinear narratives. Each of Apichatpong’s films and video installations were…

Shahzia Sikander’s first museum exhibition in Italy, which explored the concepts of symbolism, literature and history, was rich and inspired. “Ecstasy as Sublime, Heart as Vector,” at Rome’s MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts, curated by Hou Hanru and Anne Palopoli, featured more than 30 of the artist’s works dating from the 1990s to the present, ranging from drawings and Indo-Persian miniature-painting-inspired works, to video and digital animations that traversed fiction and nonfiction. Rome rarely exhibits institutional solo shows of South Asian artists; thus the presentation of Lahore-born, New York-based Sikander was all the more poignant. The exhibition was delicate yet serious in tone, with works that featured critical analysis, literary references and political positions on complex issues such as religion, sociocultural issues and human identity. The show…

The first room of “Two Hours,” at New York’s Tina Kim Gallery, sought to gently disorient the viewer. Dedicated to the works of the late Bahc Yiso, the space was subdivided by walls of widely spaced, vertical wooden beams just shorter than the ceiling, which fully enclosed the area immediately inside the gallery. Beyond it were two distinct areas: to the left, an open space installed with Bahc’s drawings, paintings and sculpture; and to the right, a narrow corridor lined with translucent plastic that ended with a television, on the floor, showing looped footage of a dog lapping water from a bowl. Moving in either direction required the viewer to step through the temporary walls and ignore the space’s natural courses of movement. This unsettling combination of installation, two-dimensional media…

The ravaged East Village in New York during the 1970s and 1980s was a hive of artistic activity. The neighborhood’s industrial spaces and cheap rents attracted young creatives including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer and Kenny Scharf, all part of a generation that injected a rebellious spirit (and plenty of heroin) into the New York art scene. Tseng Kwong Chi found himself part of this group of artists when he moved to New York in 1978, after stints in Vancouver and Paris. Shortly after arriving, the Hong Kong-born photographer began obsessively documenting his friends—including Haring and Scharf—the parties and the downtown scene in casual snapshots. For his own oeuvre of square-format prints, Tseng provocatively assumed multiple roles and characters. Often, he photographed himself in a Zhongshan suit with mirrored…

Despite her multiple contributions to Lahore’s cultural community over the last 50 years, artist and teacher Lala Rukh keeps a relatively low profile. In contrast to her public work with Pakistani organizations such as the Women’s Action Forum, the All Pakistan Music Conference and the National College of Arts in Lahore (where she was director of the visual arts master’s program), her minimalist artistic practice has been largely developed in isolation from her peers and the public. Conveying equal parts restraint, rigor and repetition, her multidisciplinary work contain spaces for contemplation and silence. Mapping the parallel trajectories of activism and abstraction in her life reveals overlapping influences—from photography to printmaking, calligraphy to classical music. The sketch here illustrates an upcoming work looking to incorporate elements of musical annotation with digital…