Innholdsfortegnelse for 141 (Nov/Dec 2024) i ArtAsiaPacific

The world of contemporary art continues to expand and evolve, often transcending borders and challenging the boundaries of national identity. A striking example of this global dialogue is “The Writings of Today Are a Promise for Tomorrow,” an exhibition currently on view at the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA@Jax), located in Diriyah. This show marks a momentous occasion as it introduces the dynamic world of Chinese contemporary art to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the very first time. With works by prominent Chinese artists that engage with pressing cultural, social, and political questions, the exhibition reflects both the rich heritage and the radical transformations shaping China today. For Saudi Arabia, a nation undergoing cultural transformation, this historic introduction provides a unique opportunity for cross-cultural exchange, deepening the…

One of the most respected Japanese photographers of the 20th century, the late Eikoh Hosoe was known for capturing human bodies in dramatic ways that defied the photographic conventions of social realism. His interest in the corporeal, in movement, and in sensuality form the nucleus of arguably his best-known work, Ordeal by Roses (1961), a darkly erotic series of photographs of the infamous Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. Transfixed by Hosoe’s bold visual style, Mishima commissioned the project, offering himself up to the camera with no restrictions. And so, Hosoe wound a garden hose around Mishima’s nude body and made him alternate between walking slowly and lying on the floor for an hour. When Mishima asked Hosoe why he had photographed him like this, Hosoe replied: “This is the destruction of…

Amid a sharp decline in the international art market and in China’s economy, industry giants—including the international auction house Sotheby’s and the Hong Kong property conglomerate New World Development (NWD)—have faced severe financial woes. Adrian Cheng, a major art collector and the eldest son of one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families, announced in late September that he will be stepping down as CEO of NWD, the most indebted property developer in the city. The company is expected to report its first annual loss in over two decades, with a projected deficit of up to HKD 20 billion (USD 2.57 billion). The profit warning was issued after a Chinese state-owned company placed a HKD 9 billion (USD 1.2 billion) bid on the NWD-owned K11 Art Mall, a mega outlet in Tsim…

NEW YORK Christie’s annual autumn auction of South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art on September 18 was held during New York’s annual Asia Week series of exhibitions and auctions, largely focused on the classical arts of Asia. Held in the centennial birth years of leading modernists Francis Newton Souza and Ram Kumar, Christie’s New York’s sale of 104 lots brought in USD 9.4 million, with all but two artworks finding buyers for an impressive 98-percent sell-through rate. Unfortunately for the house, one of those unsold was the auction’s cover lot, Souza’s monumental Resurrected Christ (1962), depicting a naked Jesus figure against an eye-searing orange and red ground, estimated at between USD 600,000–800,000. Nevertheless, Souza was still the top seller with his more modestly hued Still Life with Relics (1954) surpassing…

Lê Thuý HOI AN Often misunderstood as antithetical to speech or as the mere absence of sound, silence plays a crucial part in human communication. For the Hoi An-based artist, the complex phenomenon also serves as a repository for emotions, as well as a force of oppression. In her watercolor-on-silk painting Rumination of life and death (2023), an eerie quietness overtakes the figure of a woman cradling her child beside a wooden table. Their faces inscrutable, the woman and child appear to be in an otherworldly, yellow-green wasteland. The tender depiction of motherhood is further disrupted by the skull on which the infant’s right foot rests, and an unlit ceramic oil lamp ominously positioned on the table. In Vietnamese tradition, lamps are placed on ancestral altars and serve as protection…

“There is a terror in excess,” Mandy El-Sayegh told The Guardian in 2019. The London-based artist was referring to the abundance in her work, to the mass of material and symbolism that seemingly engulfs viewers of her large-scale collage-paintings. We see this in the texturally dense canvas Burning Square: prayers for rest (2023), with its streaked red background, illegible calligraphy, overlaid Palestinian keffiyeh scarf motif, silkscreened image of the United States one-hundred-dollar bill, and an Evening Standard newspaper cutout which reads “Israel pounds Gaza as the ground war looms.” These elements are not personal in an obvious sense—she prefers to allude to the historical, the scientific, the cultural, the philosophical—yet buried within them is a kind of reverse self-portrait, one that, underneath its many layers, exposes the artist’s innermost psyche.…

Ayoung Kim is fascinated with time—not only as a physical construct but as a human experience shaped and codified throughout history. In her latest exhibition, which inaugurated the 2024 ACC Future Prize, Kim explored this inquiry by tackling the imperial structures behind global standardizations of timekeeping methods. Titled Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024), it served as the second chapter in her ongoing narrative, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, which was first presented at Seoul’s Gallery Hyundai in 2022. Kim’s interest in forgotten temporalities is grounded in interdisciplinary research spanning mathematics, cosmology, archaeology, and speculative science fiction. Her work reconstructs alternative ways of perceiving time and is informed by her study of Asian and Indigenous cosmologies, challenging our perceptions of something that arose as a byproduct of imperialism. At the heart of Delivery…

A can of San Miguel Light or a cup of robusta coffee? A seemingly frivolous choice at the opening of “Cloud Chamber,” the collective Art Labor’s first institutional survey outside of Vietnam, but it demonstrated the difficulty of being an art collective focused on socioecological justice and operating within industry paradigms. Environmental NGOs have documented that the San Miguel beverage conglomerate constructed liquefied natural gas infrastructure in a center of marine biodiversity, caused an oil spill affecting 200,000 Filipinos, and violated Indigenous land rights—meanwhile, the coffee was sourced from a collective member’s family farm. Three Ho Chi Minh City-based artists, Thảo Nguyên Phan, Trương Công Tùng, and Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, established Art Labor to transcend their individual, and comparatively object-oriented studio practices. Since 2012, they have embarked on collaborative, years-long…

Progress is created through unity, but unity requires space to develop. Japan has a long history of LGBTQ+ visibility, with the documentation of homosexuality dating back several centuries. Personalities such as Maki Carrousel, a transgender woman active in the media since the late 1960s; Akihiro Miwa, whose gender identity has fluctuated since their debut in Shuji Terayama’s films; and Matsuko Deluxe, a crossdressing gay man who has become one of the most popular TV hosts of Japanese television, are a testament to this representation. Yet, queer people’s acceptance in the media contrasts sharply with government policies, as Japan remains the only G7 country to deny marriage licenses to homosexual couples. This is in spite of public opinion—according to a poll from 2023, over 60 percent of the population is in…

HONG KONG Art021 Hong Kong, a novel extension of the Shanghai-based fair that also runs events in Beijing and Shenzhen, rang its opening bell from August 29 to September 1. Supported by a HKD 15 million grant (USD 1.9 million) from Hong Kong’s Mega Arts and Cultural Events Fund, the commercial fair gathered artworks from 31 galleries at Phillips’s Asia headquarters in the West Kowloon Cultural District Tower with additional events elsewhere in the city and public sculptures in Victoria Park. Organizers reported that a total of nearly 30,000 visitors attended the four-day event, which faced logistical challenges at Phillips due to overcrowding and an approaching typhoon which forced outdoor sculptures to be removed. Indoors, the Galleries sector showcased mostly risk-averse works, with a prevalence of flower paintings. Notable presentations…

Juggling multiple projects, and always on the move, Pratchaya Phinthong pursues research projects that have taken him to the farthest reaches of the globe—from harvesting wild berries in Sweden to trapping deadly tsetse flies in Zambia. I tracked down the elusive artist in Tokyo, where he was researching suzumushi (bell crickets), golf clubs, incandescent light bulbs, and Japanese bamboo for a new project. Taking my call from a busy shopping mall, he revealed that he never writes down his ideas. Instead, he lets them drift, sometimes for years, until one sticks and demands action. Phinthong has been described as an “alchemist” of conceptual art, creating works that serve as portals to diverse places, ideas, and objects. He intricately weaves these elements into thought-provoking narratives that explore global systems, power dynamics,…

A lingering melancholy suffuses the moving-image works that featured in “on the way home,” an exhibition of three short films by the Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Wu Chia-Yun. The Farewell (2013), A Falling Dust (2017), and Portray a State (2018–20) explore age-old existential questions by way of narratives saturated with feelings of grief and loneliness. Predominantly shot in the early hours, or with cold, harsh lighting, the pervasive blue tones accentuate the sterile interior and exterior lives of the spaces and the characters (in other words, the physical and mental landscapes), highlighting Wu’s distant and removed cinematic style as well as her recurring interest in states of emptiness and emotional turbulence. While each film unfolds chronologically, telling its own story, the protagonists share numerous sorrows—those related to family tensions and…

For decades, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s 1979 poem “Hum Dekhenge” (We Will See) has evoked the spirit of revolution among Indians and Pakistanis alike. Sung during protests to a slow, lilting melody, the celebrated Pakistani poet’s words capture the shared grief and anger felt by ordinary citizens toward corrupt systems of government, as well as the collective hope of the people. By naming their joint exhibition after such an influential poem, Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah and Vikrant Bhise sought to capture the complex themes that reside within their respective practices. Mumbai-based Bhise has depicted various facets of what is known as the Ambedkarite movement—which seeks equality for the marginalized communities in India—through a series of paintings, the largest of which, Spectre of Killing II (2024), took up an entire wall at Experimenter. The…

The question of whether fictional characters can be liberated from their narratives, contexts, and genres drives much of Wu Tsang’s recent film and installation work. The New York- and Berlin-based artist’s silent film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), for example, emphasizes the relevance of the Transatlantic slave trade to the novel’s central saga, while her related work, Of Whales (2022), releases the mammal protagonist into an immersive, real-time video installation. La gran mentira de la muerte (2024), a sitespecific video installation forthe Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona’s (MACBA) Capella chapel, also references a 19th-century European work: the opera Carmen. While it premiered in 1875, Carmen is today revered among other ornaments of Spain’s exported culture, such as Seville’s orange trees, flamenco, and bullfighting—all of which animate Tsang’s filmic…

In their writings on posthumanism, cultural theorists Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway have cogently argued that the boundaries between humans, nonhumans, and technology have become increasingly porous. While the human subject is being redefined in an age of technological and ecological change, the anthropocentric canon is now a rather outdated worldview, leaving space for an understanding of life on Earth as a broad network of relations that includes humans, animals, machines, and the natural environment. Expanding beyond theoretical frameworks, these ideas have been embraced by artists over the last few decades, becoming a field for exploring new ways of understanding and reframing human life, as well as our shared future. Within this contemporary discourse, the work of Anicka Yi stands out as a visual and sensory experience that both mirrors…

NGUYEN TRINH THI For filmmaker Nguyen Trinh Thi, the disjuncture between her immediate lived reality and her world’s portrayal on screen—particularly in Vietnamese and American cinema, as well as through her own lens—has propelled her filmic practice. In recent years, Nguyen has shifted her concerns from the brightly projected single image to the “expanded cinema” as a dark, enveloping space of listening, shadows, and marginal visibility, like the forest at night. Her latest installation, the 30-minute-long sound and projected video composition, 47 Days, Sound-less (2024), commissioned by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, M+ in Hong Kong, and the Singapore Art Museum, begins with seven minutes of darkness. Only the sounds of the tropical forest can be heard, followed by instruments being struck or blown into by Indigenous performers…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a curator in charge of a global art roundup must be in want of a theme. Nicolas Bourriaud, artistic director of the 15th Gwangju Biennale has come up with a fanciful one: “Pansori: A Soundscape of the 21st Century.” The key term is the name of a highly narrative Korean vocal genre that involves a wailing, dramatically gesturing singer accompanied by one drum—just like 21st-century life, right? Pan means a gathering place, while sori is a type of sound or singing. The combination, usually rendered as “noise from a public place,” Bourriaud somehow translated as “voice of the subalterns,” as though the 17th-century tunes, preserving shamanistic tales from Korea’s imperial Joseon dynasty, had been composed last week for the art world’s liberatory present.…

The early precocity and peripatetic life of the late David Medalla (1942–2020) has long expressed itself in a self-mythologizing and meandering body of work that includes kinetic sculpture, performance, paintings, handmade masks, and, as necessitated by such an itinerant existence, an emphasis on collage, drawings, notebooks, and ephemera. Curated by Aram Moshayedi, “David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos” was arranged chronologically (a feat given that an archive of a nomad like Medalla was anything but systematized), with the first room displaying dozens of early self-portraits, including dozens of small drawings exuding confidence, self-awareness, and humor. A small, palmsized drawing, Autobildinis (1961), contains the aplomb of Rembrandt’s youthful selfportraits, while Medalla’s use of ballpoint pen captured the dynamism and line quality of the Baroque master’s etchings. Medalla’s mythmaking was evident…

Located on leafy Schüttelstrasse, which runs parallel to the Danube Canal in Vienna’s second district, is the studio of Chinese-born artist Ma Jia. Marked only by the word “Eingang” (entrance) and situated on the ground floor of a 19th-century residential building, the studio’s unassuming exterior offers an ideal foil to the elegant surrounding Gründerzeit architecture. Step across the threshold, however, and visitors are greeted by a bricolage of rusted metal parts, hand tools, sketches, canvases, metal bars, ladders, and 3D art models, providing tantalizing clues into the nature of the work being created—and all just beyond the notice of the building’s many residents, who go about their daily lives largely unaware of this vibrant artistic world in situ. For over a decade, Ma has lived and worked in the Austrian…

A multidisciplinary artist and composer whose practice encompasses performative installations, choreography, and architectural interventions, Pan Daijing has consistently made waves by refuting our expectations for the genres of music, live art, and contemporary art exhibitions. Based in Berlin and active internationally, Pan roots her practice in the primacy of sensations brought together in the bodies of the musical performer and audience members, while drawing narratively on sources from Chinese literature and contemporary life. In ArtAsiaPacific’s upcoming feature, we look at how Pan responds to space through sound and imagery in compelling fusions of the abstract and the brutally real.…