Innholdsfortegnelse for 117 (Mar/Apr 2020) i ArtAsiaPacific

Since the late 1980s, Berlin has been hailed as the artistic center of Germany. The city offers a high standard of living for its population, and, despite steady rent hikes, has been affordable compared to the rest of the country. These conditions have also attracted crowds of artists, curators, and cultural professionals from across the globe, who have, in turn, gradually cultivated platforms representing diverse communities, seeding the city’s thriving international arts scene of today. Berlin’s dynamism is reflected in its many artistic centers and programs, timed chiefly around two seasons. During Berlin Gallery Weekend in April, and Berlin Art Week in September, the city brims with performances and exhibitions. Another key event is the Berlin Biennial, which typically opens in June. Since its inception in 1998, the project has…

As the new coronavirus sent much of the world into a mask-wearing tizzy and a rash of self-isolation left city streets in Asia devoid of people, one particular artist was blessed with double luck. Venice-based Japanese glass artist Ritsue Mishima had just finished installing a newly commissioned glass sculpture, Cosmic Ring, for Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi in its second headquarters in Wuhan in late December—fortunately for her, just a few weeks before Covid-19 crippled the city and all of Hubei province. Many gallerists’ heavily sanitized fingers are crossed that Xiaomi will continue commissioning artworks after quarantine is lifted. While most of the art world focused on the postponement of Art Basel Hong Kong, other important events were also wiped out by the panic caused by the epidemic. Among them included…

In line with projections of slowed global economic growth in 2020 amid widespread political unrest and strained international trade relations, sales at art fairs in January and February were mediocre, though blue-chip spaces at Taipei Dangdai reported more lucrative transactions. TAIPEI The second edition of Taipei Dangdai (January 17–19) once again took place at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center. Compared to the previous year, the total number of participants increased from 90 to 99, with more than 60 returnees. Among the 2020 exhibitors, 23 maintain permanent spaces in Taiwan, while a majority have bases across mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea. Booths tended to eschew installations and videos in favor of wall-based works, catering to the more conservative tastes of the fair’s predominantly Taiwanese collector base. Hauser &…

Expanding from her own locus and cultural politics, Yee I-Lann unpacks and shifts understandings of places and histories through her artistic practice. In Kuala Lumpur, over roughly 25 years, she became an active participant in the film industry, punk rock scene, art world, as well as a vocal activist for environmental and sociopolitical issues. At the end of 2016, she returned from Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, her birthplace, where she began collaborating with weavers from the Sulu Sea and the Sabah interior, exploring how traditional and contemporary concepts and media might engage, expand, and change the world. In November 2019, she installed a 15-meter-long, double-sided woven mat, Tikar-A-Gagah (2019), at the National Gallery Singapore, and held an exhibition of weavings, “ZIGAZIG ah!,” at Silverlens Gallery in Manila.…

The work of Heecheon Kim has experienced a steep critical ascent since the artist’s 2015 trilogy—Lifting Barbells, Soulseek/Pegging/Air-twerking, and Wall Rally Drill—enthralled audiences at major presentations at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and the Seoul Mediacity Biennale. It’s no surprise: Kim’s cheeky yet introspective videos seem refreshingly relevant, for they evince the ways in which reality and simulacra have collapsed by exploiting the aesthetic potential of virtual-reality technology, face-swap applications, and GPS tracking devices. But if his practice appears similar to those of many millennial wunderkinds who are churning out hyper-saturated moving images built around digital interfaces, Kim’s solo exhibition at Art Sonje Center suggested otherwise. With his newest video, Deep in the Forking Tanks (2019), Kim signals the beginning of an unexplored phase within his practice…

Chu Yun’s latest project at Vitamin Creative Space’s Mirrored Gardens was more than a mere exhibition; it was a holistic experience, one of uncertainty, opaqueness, and subtlety. Titled “The Mind of Things,” the exhibition didn’t elaborate much on the “things”; rather, the four assembled works pointed to an elusive “mind” pleasantly distant from fraught reality. The exhibition prompted an introspective look at seemingly mundane visual and bodily experiences that the artist detached from standardized ways of being. The gallery’s first room gave the impression of a set in which the idea of normality was simultaneously being constructed and deconstructed. Greeted with a punch clock and a stack of white cards adjacent to the gallery entrance, one could engage a time and space of one’s own by “clocking in” as if…

Retrospectives of artists working primarily with contemporary technology offer a unique opportunity to say with some conviction whether or not the oeuvre on display has genuine artistic merit. By the time of its showing, the novelty of a new technology will have been stripped away, enabling a clear-eyed judgment of the work as either nostalgic kitsch, or something more engaged, universal, and timeless. Sook-Kyung Lee, the curator of Nam June Paik’s retrospective at the Tate Modern, may have had this in mind while putting together this exhibition of the late video-art pioneer, because it opened with two works that are aesthetically enduring, if technologically, and perhaps conceptually, outdated. In the first gallery was TV Buddha (1974), in which an 18th-century wooden sculpture of the spiritual figure sits facing an equally…

Coined by political scientist Joseph Nye in the late-1980s, the term “soft power” came to define an American foreign policy that emphasized cultural, institutional, and ideological persuasion over military might. In a 1990 article in Foreign Policy, Nye wrote: “If a state can make its power seem legitimate in the eyes of others, it will encounter less resistance to its wishes. If its culture and ideology are attractive, others will more willingly follow.” Curated by Eungie Joo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), “Soft Power,” featuring 20 artists based in 12 different countries, untethered the concept from American doctrine, examining how art can exert cultural and sociopolitical influence across contexts. Many of the artists used their platforms to make visible the invisible. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s installation The…

The outbreak and spread of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) from China’s Hubei province has compelled numerous cultural organizations across Asia to postpone or delay events. Art Basel and its parent company MCH Group announced on February 6 that the region’s biggest event of the season, Art Basel Hong Kong, scheduled to take place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) from March 19 to 21 with nearly 240 international galleries, was canceled. The Art Central fair, which typically runs concurrently at the Central Harbourfront with around 80 international galleries, also nixed its 2020 edition. Organizers of both events cited health and safety concerns for workers and guests, severe logistical challenges in mounting the fairs, and travel restrictions and quarantines. In cities across China, the coronavirus outbreak caused new…

SINGAPORE HONG KONG…

3/14–6/7 PARA SITE, HONG KONG Garden of Six Seasons A prelude to the 2020 Kathmandu Triennale, “Garden of Six Seasons” will explore landscaping practices and gardening traditions in connection with notions of cultural specificity and transplantation. Among the 24 diverse practitioners represented, Naufus Ramirez Figueroa and Citra Sasmita will create new commissions. Other highlights include Vvzela Kook’s animation Columbus of Horticulture (2019), based on the historic roles of plant hunters in shaping various ecosystems, and Andrew Thomas Huang’s film Kiss of the Rabbit God (2019), a love story between a mortal protagonist and a deity. Additionally, maps from the 19th century will elucidate how humans have navigated the earth. 3/21–6/21 SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION Tarek Atoui: Cycles in 11 Over the past 11 years, sound artist Tarek Atoui has been exploring…

LI RAN “The features of the human skeleton vary from person to person while the skeletal structure reveals similar objective patterns,” Li Ran narrates at the beginning of Persona Swap (2017–19), as a black-and-white photograph of a face painted to resemble a skull fades into view, swiftly joined by its mirror image in the video’s second channel. In the lilting voice-over of midcentury film dubbers, Li relates the teachings of Soviet dramaturge V. V. Terevtzov, who in 1958 arrived at the Shanghai Theatre Academy as a makeup coach. Reeling through archival photographs of costumed actors, Li explains Terevtzov’s precept of “thinking in front of the mirror,” or conjuring the character from one’s maquillaged reflection. As Li expounds on the “class attitude” signaled by the beards of revolutionaries, and later warns of…

Known for its white-sand beaches and marine life, Bantayan Island in Cebu, like many coastal settlements, has borne the brunt of the global climate crisis. Rising sea levels have led to significant coastal land erosion, while warmer sea-surface temperatures contribute to increasingly destructive storms such as Typhoon Yolanda, which battered Bantayan in 2013. “Equation of State,” Martha Atienza’s third solo exhibition at Silverlens, revolved around Bantayan, documenting the impact of climate change on her hometown through video works and kinetic installations. At the center of the first exhibition space was Equation of State II – Rhizophora stylosa (all works 2019), an installation of 24 mangrove shrubs tied to a mechanized pulley system that lifts the plants in and out of a steel-and-plywood trough, mimicking the rhythm of the tide. Common…

A massive exhibition of LGBTQ art, “Spectrosynthesis II: Exposure of Tolerance” was the sequel to the 2017 iteration staged by the Hong Kong-based Sunpride Foundation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei. Featuring 58 artists working in a range of media, “Spectrosynthesis II” was loose and inclusive in its purview. Although it purported to be about queerness in Asian contexts, it sometimes felt more like a roll call of queer Asian artists, since the exhibition included works ostensibly unrelated to queerness, such as a minimal brick painting by Maria Taniguchi that seemed out of place in the often hyper-flamboyant presentation. Further confusing the matter was the inclusion of heteronormative painter Angkrit Ajchariyasophon, whose rainbow-colored polyptychs hung prominently in the spiral rotunda of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Titled…

Like many outliers of the 1980s, Nicolas Moufarrege challenged the boundaries of taste and tradition. A master appropriator who came to be admired for his eccentric woven tapestries clashing pop art with classical aesthetics, Moufarrege was as much an artist of his time as he was one who transcended it. Thirty-four years after his death from AIDS in 1985, his long-overdue institutional solo “Recognize My Sign,” which debuted at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in November 2018, landed at New York’s Queens Museum. For the itinerant Egyptian-born Lebanese artist, large embroidered panoramas made on needlepoint canvas became his métier. From his earliest works in the exhibition, such as Une Île (An Island) and Le Chemin (The Way) (both 1975), Moufarrege experimented by weaving tapestries with a combination of silk, cotton,…

“I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE.” Daniel Joseph Martinez will forever be known for this sequence of eight words, strategically split up and printed onto a series of admission badges for the 1993 Whitney Biennial. I consider Daniel a key mentor, who, in all his calmness, unleashed a sense of political urgency and agency that enabled me to consider what it means to have a practice invested in change. Choosing a life-path of art was one of the first transformations he effected in me. I entered the University of California at Irvine (UCI) in 1994 as a biology major. My goal was to become a doctor. I had been in California for about three years before my enrollment. The transition from the Midwest, where I had spent my…

The new decade started with global panic as the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) spread from Wuhan to the rest of China in December 2019, and across the world in January. While several cities in mainland China were placed in lockdown, many countries, including the United States, imposed restrictions on travelers who had visited China within the two weeks preceding their arrival. Virus-related disruptions affected auction houses in New York and Hong Kong, leading to postponements and cancellations of first-quarter events. NEW YORK Sotheby’s Asia Week sales of fine art and antiques were postponed from March to June 22–27, except for the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art auction, which will take place on March 16 as scheduled. At this event, Sotheby’s hopes to rake in USD 1–1.5 million with Indian modernist…

There are very few contemporary artworks that have returned after their physical disappearance. Among these legendary works, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake of Utah, is certainly the most famous, and remains shrouded in mystery. A spiral of stones and mud that was covered by water for decades, it is a monument of both utopia and dystopia, a testimony to the triumph of humans over nature and our capitulation to entropy. Half a century later, and across the Atlantic, Huang Yong Ping’s Serpent d’Océan (2012) resurrects the mystery of the return, while at the same time launching a new legend about the unstoppable power of entropy. In this case, the legend refers to both the natural world and human society. More precisely, this incarnation represents how…

The evolution of ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arranging), from its 7th-century application as religious offerings to the secularized decorative practice of the early 20th century, was subtle. Successive schools approached ikebana with unique aesthetic goals while retaining its fundamental expressive elegance. Working as a young ikebana artist in the 1920s, Sofu Teshigahara began to find the practice stale, out of touch with the rapidly modernizing world. Sensing this disconnect, he founded the Sogetsu School in 1927, which expanded the art form beyond the realm of flowers and traditional pottery. Applying constructive materials such as wood, stone, and steel, Teshigahara produced balanced, sculptural compositions, some teeming with botanical elements, others eschewing flora altogether. Now remembered as the founder of modern ikebana, Teshigahara also worked in sculpture and calligraphy until…

When cyberpunk emerged in the final decades of the 20th century, the genre reflected contemporary anxieties about radical social and technological change. Today, as governments and corporations mask ever more sophisticated data-mining and surveillance technologies behind deceptively benign interfaces, the world seems well on its way to fulfilling dystopian cyberpunk prophecies. “Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future” interrogated the ways in which the genre’s hallmarks have manifested in existing sociocultural imaginaries, with works that dissected, to varying degrees of success, the line it treads between astuteness and cliché. Among the touchstones of cyberpunk is the Asian metropolis, a meeting of glass-and-steel facades and rundown shanties under Western eyes. Projected onto the entrance of the gallery, Zheng Mahler’s Nostalgia Machines (2019)—which leads viewers through a neon-lit, video-game version…

Hajra Waheed’s “Hold Everything Dear” at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, lived up to its prodigious name in a sensitive and delicate way. The exhibition was an intrepid aesthetic response to the most urgent of our contemporary political and ecological concerns. Essayistic in tenor—like critic John Berger’s 2007 collection of writings, from which the show borrowed its title—“Hold Everything Dear” presented a redemptive visage of a world in crisis. Traversing familiar themes of environmental ruin, technological surveillance, and migration, Waheed appeared attuned to all that denotes existence as pained under the aegis of modernity. The show initially appeared sparse in the Power Plant’s cavernous space, though on closer examination one found a rigorous if understated display of media, techniques, and aesthetic choices that showcased Waheed’s thematic and…

States of Disaster One of Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s earliest memories is of the treacherous journey that his family made from Myanmar to Thailand in a horse-drawn carriage. It was 1972 and they were escaping persecution by the Tatmadaw (Burmese military), which had killed Yawnghwe’s grandfather, the nation’s first president, in 1962. Yawnghwe’s practice has been indelibly marked by this history. Drawing from oral accounts, personal photographs, and the allegorical canvases of 18th-century artist Francisco Goya, Yawnghwe’s paintings at once dissect politically significant phenomena and preserve familial memories. Building on the research of his political-activist father Chao-Tzang, the image above, for example, maps out events connected to the opium trade, which reportedly funds the Tatmadaw’s operations. In ArtAsiaPacific’s forthcoming feature, curator Kerstin Winking will delve into Yawnghwe’s clear-eyed critiques of modern Myanmar’s…