Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar/Apr 2016 i ArtAsiaPacific

The city of Shanghai—a center for economic activity, technological innovation, finance, conventions and logistics—boasts China’s highest GDP and a population exceeding 25 million. The metropolis is also a hub of art and culture, having played host to the 2010 World Expo, and regularly holds major international events such as the China Shanghai International Arts Festival, Shanghai International Film Festival and the Shanghai Biennale. The development of its arts industry has been a natural progression, given Shanghai’s esteemed position in China’s cultural history since the early 1900s: the country’s first art academy, art magazine and national art exhibition were all established in this very city. The upsurge in museums and art fairs in Shanghai has been a much-discussed cultural phenomenon in recent years—even attracting worldwide attention. New institutions of art and…

In 2015, the über-elite were out in style, flashing their cash and scoring back-to-back headline-grabbing sales. Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) (1955) fetched USD 179.4 million at Sotheby’s in May 2015, the highest auction price for any artwork, until November, when Christie’s sold Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu Couché (1917–18) to Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian for USD 170.4 million. Despite the impressive transaction, Christie’s reported in January 2016 that its global sales numbers for 2015 only reached USD 7.4 billion—a sum including private, public and digital sales—down from 2014’s USD 7.7 billion. While Sotheby’s has yet to release its annual figures as of press time, on January 22 it announced that it was expected to lose USD 12 million in the last quarter of 2015, as a result of…

1 Caline Aoun BEIRUT/LONDON While gravity defines sculpture as much as light does photography, digital images flatten objects and atmosphere alike into immaterial data—only to return as physically printed apparitions mounted on surfaces all around us. The nettlesome creations of Caline Aoun toy with this disjuncture, heightening the material properties of pictures and the imagistic properties of sculptures, to the point of being neither one nor the other. Blue Paperplane (2015), for instance, resembles a kid’s classroom creation, unfolded, with each facet printed with increasingly saturated increments of sky-blue, as Aoun slyly mixes associations between things that imitate flight and pictures that replicate the sky’s color. When not looking up, Aoun has also made numerous works about the spaces underfoot. In Carbon Copy (2013), she cast a gallery’s wooden floorboards…

“O my lord, O my love, what callest thou this article?” pointing to her slit, her solution of continuity. “I call that thy cleft,” quoth the Porter, and she rejoined, “Wah! Wah! Art thou not ashamed to use such a word?” and she caught him by the collar and soundly cuffed him. Said he again, “Thy womb, thy vulva;” and she struck him a second slap crying, “O fie, O fie, this is another ugly word; is there no shame in thee?” —One Thousand and One Nights, translated by Richard Francis Burton On a sunny October morning, while walking to İnci Eviner’s studio in the Çukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul, I found myself picturing each scream, laugh and slap depicted in the “Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of…

Personal readingson fragmentation Much of what is known as “Cambodian art” are fragments of figurative sculptures intended for spiritual, social and political functions in their ancient temple origins. Stone incarnations of Hindu, Buddhist and mythological gods, kings, warriors, vehicles, guardians, creators and destroyers were originally integral to the architecture of both public and private spaces of ancient Khmer cities. Since the French Protectorate in the mid-1800s, and especially during the conflicts between the 1970s and ’90s, thousands of pre-Angkorean and Angkorean-era stone sculptures have been looted, trafficked, traded, gifted, sold, purchased and acquired—reincarnated in the cyclic market sphere of both public and private art collections worldwide. Beheaded. Amputated. Bodiless. Limbless. In most collections, such fragments are presented as if whole, as aestheticized objects partnered with texts noting iconographic, stylistic and…

GOING EAST Did the Minimalist movement really begin in 1960s New York, when artists, fraught with expressionist fatigue, were favoring the cool over the dramatic? The popular history of Minimalism seems to extend only so far as North American art critics’ pens could reach, frequently overlooking artists situated beyond the narrow Western lens. Yet an alternate telling by certain critics and historians suggests that some of the first Minimalist sculptures were made by self-taught Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen in the mid-1960s. In late 2015, Hong Kong’s Rossi & Rossi showcased Araeen and his works as a pioneering Minimalist, with a refreshingly globalized perspective of modernity. In 1964, Araeen left his job as a civil engineer in Pakistan to pursue art in London. Without any formal training, he created sculptures influenced…

“Adapt the eyes to the darkness / A black color everywhere / Something close to the moon / Days collapse through the fog / Presence of little or no reflections / A very dark color in space / Now, complete absorption of light . . .” Written in chalk on a black entrance wall, the opening stanza of “Still a Blind Light in an Endless Night,” a 2015 poem by artist Marco Godinho, functioned as the prologue for “But Even If I Cannot See The Sun” at Dubai’s Grey Noise, setting a gloomy mood for the exhibition curated by the gallery’s director, Umer Butt. The addition of a new stanza from Godinho’s poem each week for the show’s duration was just one of the many featured poetic and performative gestures…

EUROPA Material for a Film (2004– ), Emily Jacir’s research project on the late Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter, is an intimate installation. It comprises archival documents including photographs of Zuaiter’s apartment in Rome, where he was shot dead by Mossad agents in 1972 for his alleged connections to the Black September terrorist group, which killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics earlier that year. That Zuaiter was among the first to be targeted by Israel following the Munich attack has led some critics to be wary of Material for a Film. In his 2009 review of Jacir’s project, New York Times art critic Ken Johnson questions a wall text stating Zuaiter was never “conclusively” linked to the Munich events; he asks, “How can we know if [Jacir] is manipulating…

In late 2015, a two-part exhibition took place at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Japan Society in Manhattan—a sprawling, absorbing display of Japanese photography, entitled “For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979.” It focused on a period generally referred to among Japanese cultural historians as “introspective,” a euphemism perhaps for its perceived lack of political or social engagement. On the contrary, the organizers of the New York exhibition argued that this period was pivotal, and one of heightened critical, conceptual and political interrogation into art practice—including, if not especially in, the practice of photography. The year 1968 was a tumultuous period the world over, in which massacres, protests and bloodshed took place across the globe. In Japan, widespread discontent over socioeconomic…

Australian painter Sydney Ball is distinguished by the rigor of his working processes and by his enduring relevance, even as the artist is now well into his 80s. Since embracing color abstraction while living in New York in 1963, Ball has produced more than 16 major series of work, all of them abstract, except for a decade-long interest in expressionism between the years 1981 and 1991. An artist who always experiments, testing himself and his medium, Ball is of great interest to young Australian artists and his work continues to be collected and exhibited by public institutions. Here, Ball shares Infinex Study i, a presentation drawing made in 2010 for an unrealized private commission. Created at the time he was beginning to work on his current modular “Infinex” series (2010–…

Since January 1, 2014, Ashraf Fayadh has been imprisoned by the religious police (mutaween) in the conservative Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Officers of the officially named Committee Members on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are known to prosecute people whose actions they consider apostasy under Sharia law. Fayadh had been ordered to serve four years in prison and 800 lashes until, in November 2015, an appeals judge increased his punishment to a death sentence. “Prophets have retired, so do not wait for yours to come to you,” are lines (translated to English by poet and activist Mona Kareem) that appear in Fayadh’s collection of love poems, Instructions Within (2008). The content of the book reportedly formed the basis of a series of apostasy charges that led to…

Although the global economic climate may be looking grim—in recent weeks, the price of oil hit a six-year low, the Australian and Singaporean dollars both plunged in value and China reported its slowest growth in a quarter-century—the Asian art world continued to do its best to impress. Singapore The sixth edition of Art Stage Singapore (ASS) (1/20–24), a mainstay of the annual Singapore Art Week, attracted over 45,000 visitors to the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre. Despite suffering its first attendance drop since the fair’s inception—down a drastic 20 percent on last year—sales reportedly came in a steady trickle. Visitors entered the fair through Thai artist Ploenchan Vinyaratn’s Netscape (2015), a walkway of black feathers lined with motley embroidery and appliqué fashioned into giant burrowing wings. Inside, 173…

In topsy-turvy times like ours—where people staple their stomachs to lose weight, pets have their own psychiatrists and dinner guests split bills eleven ways—we tend to find ourselves in the rearguard rather than in the avant-garde. Call us old-fashioned, or ol’ skool comme disaient les jeunes d’antan. Like our antimodernist mascot Molla Nasreddin, riding backward on his donkey, we often look to the past to anticipate, imagine or rue an impossible future. At the turn of the 19th century, Germany represented “a third way” to many developing nations such as Egypt, Iran and even Russia: modern but traditional, strong but autocratic. Today, a recent series of international crises— the Greek bailout, refugees, Volkswagen—sees a Germany clearly unsure of its position, as evidenced by its attempts either to avoid the spotlight…

It might seem surprising that Zheng Chongbin was once an instructor in figure painting. Although his multilayered paintings and installations contain the elements that are essential to the Chinese art tradition—the ink, the paper—in Zheng’s hands they are completely unfamiliar at the same time. His visceral, abstract style, with its eschewing of brushwork and its emphasis on redefining compositional structure, highlights the materials themselves. His former practice of painting from nude models and copying from master figure painters of imperial China, such as Wu Daozi, Gu Kaizhi or Liang Kai, is today a distant past. It is no wonder that, to many viewers, Zheng appears to have more in common with Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline than the early modern figurative painters in China…

The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, organized by the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, profiles contemporary art from a broad and diverse region. Planning for the eighth edition (APT8), guided by a team of 20-plus internal as well as external curators, was beholden to a number of issues: governmental arts funding continues to suffer from deep cuts, leading to increased pressure on corporate and private support; and QAGOMA’s ongoing focus on collecting from its own exhibitions meant the curatorial team needed to select artworks that related to both the Gallery’s permanent collection and APT8 as a whole. That APT8 succeeded within such parameters is a testament to QAGOMA’s curatorial teamwork, as its move away from the spectacle of previous editions ultimately worked to…

It has been five years since the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake caused nuclear disasters in Fukushima, Japan. Today, the approximately 24,000 residents who were evacuated from Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone still cannot return to their homes. In March 2015, this highly radioactive zone became host to “Don’t Follow the Wind”—an ongoing exhibition initiated by Tokyo-based art collective Chim↑Pom, and co-curated by Kenji Kubota, Jason Waites and artist-duo Eva and Franco Mattes—which showcases site-specific works by 12 artists. A controversial project, it cannot be viewed without special government permission and won’t be truly open to the public until such restrictions are lifted—which may not be for three, ten or one hundred years. One of the shocking aspects of the exclusion zone is that everything has been left untouched since the evacuation, as…

Five solo exhibitions, for Farid Belkahia, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Faraj Daham, Inji Efflatoun and Abdelhalim Radwi, made up “Focus: Works from Mathaf Collection,” recently held at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. The artworks in the exhibitions, each autonomous and independently organized, were culled from Mathaf’s 9,000-piece permanent collection of modern Arab art, assembled by Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali al-Thani since the 1980s. Out of the five exhibitions, “Faraj Daham: Divergence” was the only one to feature a Qatari artist. Daham is known for his collaged drawings that delicately layer scenes from Doha, as in Street Language #22/23 (2011). Here, six figures in varying states of camouflage—ranging from young men in keffiyeh, baseball caps and sunglasses, to local construction workers in hard hats and goggles—stand shoulder…

EXTRACTED Nestled among the traditional artifacts at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, “Extracted” was a solo exhibition of local artist Ranu Mukherjee’s works developed in response to the museum’s 50-year, “golden” anniversary. The exhibition’s title not only referred to Mukherjee’s practice of taking and combining various media to create collage-based videos, paintings and textiles, but also to her investigation of gold and its historical relevance to the San Francisco Bay Area. Displaying her works alongside related artifacts from the museum’s collection, Mukherjee intertwined fact and fiction to explore gold’s socioeconomic impact on the local region. Structured around the video installation Breach (2015), “Extracted” is planned as a three-part presentation, with its first segment unveiled in November 2015. Subsequently opening in January and May 2016, the exhibition’s second and last installments…

I arrived at Huang Rui’s studio in Huantie, an arts enclave on the fringe of northeast Beijing, by taxi. The driver had been struggling to find the remote location and only did so after several phone calls to the artist en route. The 2,000-square-meter building is a great slab of Bauhaus-inspired architecture, sitting lightly behind high gray-brick walls constructed from 200,000 Qing and Ming dynasty bricks, which Huang had rescued from hutongs (a Chinese term for dense, old neighborhoods) razed in the years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The surrounding landscape is planted with thousands of trees as a result of President Xi Jinping’s afforestation campaign to combat air pollution. I entered the compound, built in 2007 to Huang’s design. The artist speaks English as fluently as he…

ZKM, KARLSRUHE New Sensorium 3/5–9/4 When she’s not at her day job at Boston’s prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, British-Japanese artist and designer Sptuniko! (born Hiromi Ozaki) is whipping up works such as The Moonwalk Machine - Selena’s Step (2010), an installation with video and sound bringing a manga character to life. Sptuniko! is one of 17 artists and collectives—most of them emerging—invited by Yuko Hasegawa to consider what the curator calls the “dark confusion” of our current digital age. Working with the same technologies whose effects they chronicle, the digital natives offer their takes on whether or not the virtual will eclipse the real. Beijing-based Lin Ke’s compositions use rudimentary computer programs, like a seemingly simple arrangement of desktop folders in Data Foam Board (2013), an archival print. The…

War and postwar, persecutor and persecuted, righteous and corrupt: the binaries of conflict are often more entangled than they first appear. Assembling and excavating hidden documents, reports and images in the wake of war can help complicate and dismantle such bifurcated narratives. In the case of the 26-year Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009), which primarily took place in the north and northeastern parts of the island, the two opposing camps—the Sri Lankan army and the separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)— destroyed and erased many vestiges of record. At the first international seminar hosted by two-year-old nonprofit Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design (SLAAD) in April 2015, Sri Lankan academic and author Qadri Ismail described Jaffna—one of the primary sites in northern Sri Lanka embroiled…

Despite his many artistic transformations, Kwon Young-woo (1926–2013) managed to provoke several versions of the same response over the course of his six-decade career. At the 1954 National Exhibition in his native South Korea, the young artist showed with a group of ink painters who were described in the Kyunghyang Shinmun daily newspaper as “the new avant-garde of Eastern painting,” a tendency critics saw in works such as Sculptor’s Studio (1954), an ink-on-paper rendition of a room cluttered with easels and half-finished, semi-abstract sculptural forms. More than 40 years later, when Kwon was awarded the 1998 Artist of the Year prize at Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, curator Junmo Jung once again presented him as a modern literati painter, an artist who transforms our “seemingly stopped, traditional…

Making art is a way of caring for oneself and staying true to oneself by always staying vigilant. Nothing but blue skies / From now on. — Agnes Martin In January 2009, Hong Kong artist Au Hoi Lam submitted her MPhil at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Her thesis was entitled “Askēsis in Late Foucault: The Exploration of the Meaning of Salvation in Philosophy from the Paradoxical Relation of Subject and Truth.” In it she aimed to elucidate “how Foucault reconstitutes the spiritual precept ‘care of the self’ as the founding principle and axis of philosophy in Western Antiquity.” Out of this the artist wished to show how spirituality was capable of “ensuring individual subjects . . . reconstitute the relations between philosophy and one’s life.” This study…

BE POLITE “Gordon Bennett: Be Polite” at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) was the first posthumous exhibition of the artist since his death in 2014. Coordinated closely with his estate and curated by IMA’s co-executive directors Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, the exhibition paid homage to a local hero. Over three decades, Bennett’s artistic practice took aim at race relations, power imbalances, dominant histories and social conventions. The IMA show featured his largely unseen works on paper, predominantly drawn from the 1990s through the 2000s, a prolific and definitive decade for Bennett that began and ended with his most celebrated works, including his revisionist Australian history paintings and pieces he created in response to the neo-expressionist works of Jean-Michel Basquiat. For the exhibition, with its dim lighting and thoughtfully…

GOLDEN LADDERS Simultaneously poetic, unsettling and utopian, Yoko Ono’s first solo exhibition in Beijing, held at the Faurschou Foundation, brings her lifelong message of peace to China. In contrast to her recent show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which focused on Ono’s early career, her Beijing presentation, “Golden Ladders,” is a survey of old and new works. Together, the selection reveals an optimistic and Zen-like approach to life centering on universal themes of rebirth, revival and hope. With pieces specifically reconfigured for Chinese audiences, the exhibition invites spectators to interact with the works as a way to share their hopes, dreams and sorrows. Like many of Ono’s projects, “Golden Ladders” extends beyond gallery walls. On bulletin boards scattered throughout the city are peaceful, minimalist and affirming mantras, such…

CHRONICLES OF SILENCE (KHAMOSHI KI DAASTAN) Pushpamala N., curator of BV Suresh’s solo exhibition at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery in late 2015, calls the artist a “chronicler of our times.” It is an important reference in understanding the exhibition, which was an installation of overlapping objects with bold, symbolic meaning—including bread loaves, transistor radios, an albino peacock and sounds, such as those of music, voices, machines, crashing weights and the cranking of barrels. The 2002 Gujarat riots in India, which were sparked by religious conflict, deeply affected Suresh and marked a decisive moment in his investigations into the relationship between marginalized communities and the state, as well as between violence and nationalism. Suresh has since employed a reiterative visual vocabulary to explore the idea that feelings of “belonging” and…

FINGERSPITZENGEFÜHL In late 2015, to escape the gray, freezing weather, Berliners may have found themselves entering the minimalist universe of Ayşe Erkmen, housed at Galerie Barbara Weiss in the city’s Kreuzberg district. The Turkish artist’s exhibition, “Fingerspitzengefühl” (which roughly translates to “Sensitivity”), featured two parts: a bronze installation on the gallery floor, and a complementing neon-green video projected on a wall. Easily overseen and literally overstepped, colorful bronze sculptures depicted a miniature landscape of mountain tops, dispersed randomly on the gallery floor. Only a close examination— requiring the viewer to kneel on the floor— revealed each object’s unique shape and patina. Light reflections on their metallic, ridge-like seams provided insight into their otherwise imperceptible materiality. The corresponding video, Bronze Acid Green (2014), showed a seemingly unrelated, looping scene of (in)action:…

In the wake of Pakistani artists’ increasingly prominent place in global exhibitions, collections and galleries, two volumes released last year offer scholarly and discursive perspectives on the South Asian nation’s leading practitioners and their historical context. These books are inverses to each other. The first, a collection of essays edited by artist, writer and activist Salima Hashmi, The Eye Still Seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art, is a remarkably current yardstick for understanding the “now” of Pakistani art, offering a convivial slice of Pakistan’s intimately networked contemporary art world. The second, Anwar Jalal Shemza, a monograph exploring the practice of the 20th-century Pakistani artist and writer, edited by scholar, curator and artist Iftikhar Dadi, describes a career that broke down and then bloomed in the wake of losing that world. Gloriously illustrated,…