Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2014 i ArtAsiaPacific

History has a devious way of repeating itself. Today we see waves of progress and turmoil, criticism and censorship, smacking up against each other in the public sphere. The digital revolution has given us life-changing technologies, most notably the internet, but is slowly leading the way to the replacement of people with machines. Around the world, political unrest is again on the rise, much of it fueled by growing concern over increasing nationalism and sectarianism, as well as economic disparity and the lack of government transparency. In this issue of ArtAsiaPacific, we look at a group of post-1980s artists who are attempting to comprehend the rapid transformations taking place today—from a micro-level of specificity, such as the situation of Hong Kong, to larger worldviews of the human relationship to nature…

On September 3, news broke that Dutch collector Bert Kreuk is suing Danh Vo, the Danish-Vietnamese artist representing Denmark at the 2015 Venice Biennale, for USD 1.2 million in what is likely to be a protracted legal battle. Kreuk has filed a lawsuit in the Netherlands’s Rechtbank court against Vo for allegedly failing to deliver a USD 350,000 work, which Kreuk claims to have commissioned for “Transforming the Known,” an exhibition of his personal collection at The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum held from June to September last year. Berlin’s Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie denies any sale of an artwork by Vo was agreed to. The collector has claimed damages of USD 1.2 million, which, Kreuk said in an interview with artnet.com, is a proven value in the secondary market and has nothing to do…

The fall art season witnessed a seemingly endless string of auctions attracting a seemingly endless stream of money. It started in September during New York’s Asia Week, with Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams holding back-to-back auctions, featuring everything from Chinese ceramics and paintings to modern and contemporary South Asian art. Christie’s kicked off their South Asian Modern and Contemporary auction on September 17 with the single-owner sale “A Pioneering Vision: Works from the Collection of Shumita and Arani Bose,” the duo behind New York’s Bose Pacia gallery. Since the financial crisis of 2008, Bose Pacia has wound down their activity—moving from Manhattan to a miniscule space in Brooklyn and shedding most of their staff down to one. The auction of a few select items from their large collection is another sign…

Hailing from Korea, the UK and Malaysia, three artists give voices to the underrepresented and the suffocated Lee Wen, SEOUL Lee Wan’s installation If Given a Chance, I Do Refuse It (2012), displayed at this year’s Gwangju Biennale, is an imagined narrative. On the right of the work is a 30-piece collection of seemingly worthless objects accumulated around Seoul, including a knife with a punctured blade, a shovel covered in rust, a broken clock and an unidentifiable piece of steel. On the left are equally numbered out-of-date television sets, placed in diametric correspondence to the miscellaneous objects, with each monitor depicting images of the site from which the objects were scavenged. On a pedestal in the center stands a wooden balance scale, appearing to have reached equilibrium. The artist gathers…

A half-century of censorship in Myanmar has produced a unique visual vocabulary among both artists and censors In 1979, Burmese artist San Minn submitted several paintings for an exhibition in Yangon only to have four returned to him. Rejected by the censorship board, the works were stamped “not allowed to show” on both sides. None of the four paintings were remotely political in content, although they did reflect the artist’s embrace of experimental art. One depicted a couple sitting on a bench near Sule Pagoda, the 2,500-year-old stupa in downtown Yangon, bouquets of flowers emerging from their necks in lieu of faces. “I intended it as a love story and they just thought it was strange,” San Minn recalled to me in July as we flipped through photos of his…

In two barbed words, Tony Albert condemns the spot tucked away in institutional galleries for work by indigenous artists. “Darkies’ Corner,” he says. “Go to the furthest point in the gallery, open a few doors, go down some stairs, open more doors and you are at the native art area.” Albert may be stretching the truth, but it’s a convenient shorthand for the manner in which Aboriginal artists have long been treated by museums. It also sets the tone for our conversation at his battered, shared studio, above a carpenter’s shop in the dilapidated suburb of Lilyfield in Sydney’s Inner West. We had planned to discuss Albert’s success at two recent art prizes—the Basil Sellers Art Prize and the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award—which, between them,…

Night Moves A London-based artist of Indian and Polish origins, Prem Sahib graduated last year from the RA Schools at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. His works have been described as spare, with a minimal aesthetic. His are simple geometric forms, arranged in personified manners, crafted out of metal, steel, aluminum or, in an ongoing series of wall-based pieces, resin. The experiences of intimacy, desire, sexuality, relationships and community inspire his sculptures and installations, which are rendered with great precision and economy. Actual physical spaces (including nightclubs, public toilets and changing rooms), and how bodies organize and conceive of themselves in relation to these places, and their specific material aspects, are sources of inspiration and investigation. Traces, fragments, the remnants of encounters and persons, are folded into, or gestured to…

YOKOHAMA, Yokohama Museum of Art Is there too much art in the world? Right now, there are more artists at work, more art being produced and more competition between creative ideas than ever before in world history. But what about all those paintings from Art Basel Miami Beach that don’t sell? Or the drawings produced in some bedroom that never have a life outside of Facebook? Not all of us can be Jeff Koons. At the fifth edition of the Yokohama Triennale, the work that greeted visitors at the entrance was an enormous trashcan for art. Michael Landy’s Art Bin (2010) is a two-story-tall, steel-frame Plexiglas enclosure covering 30-square meters, smack-dab in the middle of the atrium of the Yokohama Museum of Art. Here, any artist or collector was welcome…

SHANGHAI, James Cohan Gallery For Li Shan, painting during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) was as much a means of escape as it was an appreciation for, and expression of, beauty. At the height of this tumultuous, repressive and persecutory period in China’s modern history, Li and her comrades of the Wuming (“No Name”) art group secretly painted Impressionist-inspired depictions of Beijing’s parks and surrounding mountains and farmland. Just 14 when she joined the collective of hobbyist painters in 1971, she was always considered the little sister of the group, which has retrospectively become recognized as one of the founding forces of Chinese contemporary art. Despite Li’s youth, her paintings showed a subtle and delicate beauty early on. In July and August, a retrospective of her paintings from that era, “Li…

SINGAPORE, Silverlens As our historical memory falters, over and over again, we skew both present and past into convenient, stylish fictions. Yet, without a grasp of historical authenticity, how do we come to terms with a past that has failed us in some way? In her solo exhibition “Tabled” at Silverlens in Singapore, Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann lamented the indelible traces left by European colonialism in Southeast Asia. The artist’s process of revisualizing memory is potent and lyrical, enlivened by her concurrent work in film and production design. Yee’s series “Picturing Power” (2013), comprising eight variously sized photo collages of archival images, depicts colonialism in all its topee-ed hauteur, complete with “artless,” diligent natives. Yee compiles arch clichés into a fluent historical subtext. Her sequential imagery has a jaunty filmic…

VIENNA, Galerie Krinzinger With her exhibition “A ° VOID,” at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Mithu Sen explored the global loss of linguistic diversity and, at the same time, submerged herself into the depths of the human psyche. She did so by combining various media, ranging from performance to works on paper to installation, thus bringing together two seemingly unconnected parts of her work—her drawings and her poetry. Sen’s performance piece I am a Poet (2013) is an expressive, perambulatory reading of her asemic writings from the transparent pages of her eponymous volume of poems. When immersed in the intensity of her sounds and movements, the audience becomes connected with Sen’s stream of consciousness. One is briefly reminded of the Surrealists’ “automatic writing” practice developed in 1920s Paris, and perhaps even…

NEW YORK, New Museum “Here and Elsewhere,” at New York’s New Museum, presented works by more than 45 contemporary artists from the Arab world that reflect on the indexicality of the image, its mobilization within politics and the ethical considerations inherent in image-making. The show’s title derives from a 1976 film-essay by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Miéville, a pro-Palestinian documentary that developed into an exploration of imagery’s role in shaping political consciousness. Taking on personal experiences and collective events, participating artists attended to the reappropriation of hegemonic representations, the creation of alternative archives and the treatment of the image as a space for intimacy and identity-building. Also included was an “exhibition within an exhibition,” curated by artist Ala Younis, which brought together artworks and archival materials to examine…

A compelling, enriching and exhausting trip to the cluttered, creative studio of the Mono-ha artist, currently riding a new wave of critical respect and recognition Wandering through a bulky group show in Hong Kong last May, I happened across three painted plywood panels. Each had been drilled through from behind multiple times in a roughly even pattern, covering the entire surface with smallish holes. The top layer of wood had splintered, sometimes in tight, sharp twists, other times in large shards that protruded outward, bringing the layer of space in front of the work within its compass. In places, the surface had fallen away entirely, revealing mottled wood that contrasted with the gloss paint. The works were quiet and captivating. The comparison with my present situation is stark. I’m sitting…

The last samurai of "Sim Jia Core" I began to call Jason Lim “the last samurai” after an impressive rendition of his performance piece Last Drop (2005) at “Vital 07: The Essence of Performance,” a live art festival held in Manchester in 2007. His cool, focused concentration was something I’d never seen in him before and it was quite extraordinary. Amazingly, it was also during a phase when he was going through an accumulation of troubled relationships, their effects rippling out into other areas of his life and pushing him close to self-destruction. In spite of the internal turmoil, and in contrast to earlier works, this new performance showed such calmness and focus, as if he were seeking a release from the chaos, and perhaps also a miraculous balance. Lim…

For me education is not first giving answers, but giving questions. And if a student comes to me with a question, I consider it very carefully whether I should answer him or not. When I give the answer to an execution, then I take away from him the opportunity to invent it himself and discover it himself. I say, “Boy, I know I could answer you, but I prefer for your own profit not to tell you.” – Josef Albers, 1925 Higher education faces a number of significant challenges, especially in those disciplines that find it difficult to demonstrate direct contributions to preparing students for traditional career paths or to improving university rankings and research ratings. And then there are warnings that the destruction of current models of education…

Melbourne In August, the Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) (8/13–17) played out in its usual haunt: the historic 19th-century Royal Exhibition Building, one of the oldest remaining exhibition pavilions worldwide. The art, in contrast to its setting, is skewing toward the new as the MAF, under the fresh leadership of Art Fairs Australia’s Barry Keldoulis, seeks to lure international galleries and revitalize its image through emerging artist programs. Pearl Lam Galleries—of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore—showed Chinese artist Zhu Jinshi and Australian Ben Quilty, among others. Priced to impress but perhaps not to sell—Zhu’s Yellow Yulan Magnolia Spread on the Floor  (2013) was listed at USD 240,000—several works went unclaimed. Regional galleries, outnumbering globetrotters, had better luck. Popular Brisbane artist Michael Zavros’s luxury-focused photorealist paintings were staged next to a Rolls-Royce Wraith…

Does the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s universalist stance prevent it from crafting its own narrative? The French have a curious epithet for the Louvre Abu Dhabi: le Louvre des sables. Translated as “the Louvre in the sands,” this oddly exoticized sobriquet for the fledgling museum, due to open in December 2015, has thoroughly peppered the French media since 2007, when the intergovernmental deal was sealed between France and Abu Dhabi. Even president François Hollande used it, in April to fire up his inaugural address at the “Birth of a Museum” show, the second iteration of the exhibition showcasing the Emirati museum’s growing permanent collection, held in Paris’s Musée du Louvre through July. Le Louvre des sables: from a French point of view, the name projects the familiar into the faraway; deposits…

Just six minutes into our breakfast conversation mid-May in Hong Kong, Gu Wenda describes himself as a “troublemaker,” who “didn’t follow school requirements—even as a teacher.” I’d expected as much from an artist who made his name outside of China beginning in the late 1980s with massive installations incorporating human hair and, for a notorious (but brief) period, using menstrual blood, placenta powder and even semen. Yet, as the amicable, bespectacled Gu reveals in our conversation, instead of repudiating the august history of Chinese art, he has spent the last four decades pursuing new ways of interpreting these literati traditions: an iconoclast infatuated with icons. A few nights earlier, Gu’s solo exhibition opened at Hong Kong’s Hanart TZ Gallery. There, he was showing an abstracted landscape on custom-made green-tea paper,…

Citizen HK It’s good to know there’s an artist like Chow Chun Fai in Hong Kong, who invariably deals with the city’s ever-changing identity head on. It is as if you know someone who’s always got your back—a friend you can always count on. Because, for Chow, existing in the art world is not a matter of choosing either a commercial or a grassroots approach; rather, it is a matter of inhabiting a transitional space in order to mediate between these two, often oppositional, poles. Of course, this position reflects a number of things about Chow. At once an artist and a provocateur, he is also a community representative and organizer. For one, he is the chairman of the Fotanian Artist Village, which represents the numerous artists and designers currently…

Powers of Suggestion How do you define an artist who seeks to defy definitions? Sun Xun is an anomaly among young artists in China—his artistic practice blurs the lines between drawing, animation and installation, and he believes that his personal artistic language, replete with allegory and overtones, is indecipherable to most. Still, Sun, a James Dean-like renegade among the post-’80s generation of artists in China, is widely considered to be one of the nation’s rising stars. In 2010, he was presented with the Best Young Artist award by the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards, and he has also received the Young Art Award from Taiwan Contemporary Art Link in 2010 and an arts fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. In the span of just a decade, he has shown…

SYDNEY, White Rabbit While private art museums—those owned by wealthy patrons to showcase their personal art collections—have become almost commonplace in China, they remain a novel concept in Australia. One notable exception to this is Judith Neilson’s White Rabbit, a three-story converted warehouse in Sydney that exhibits a rotation of her contemporary Chinese art collection of approximately 1,000 pieces by 350 artists—though only a fraction has been shown to date. Her eclectic selection captures the zeitgeist of today’s Chinese contemporary art, unashamedly mixing young unknowns with luminaries, with no genres unrepresented. White Rabbit, vanity project or not, has established itself on Sydney’s cultural landscape. In August, White Rabbit celebrated its fifth anniversary with “Commune,” a group exhibition. Following the concept of the “Great Family of China,” the show featured 23…

HONG KONG, Galerie Perrotin “Forest of Illusions,” held at Hong Kong’s Galerie Perrotin, featured three artists from the post-’80s generation of Greater China—Cheng Ran (China), Tsang Kin-wah (Hong Kong) and Yang Yi-shiang (Taiwan). Coming of age during the “East Asian miracle,” a period of rapid economic growth during the second half of the 20th century, this generation benefited from material abundance; today, they are in pursuit of even higher needs and wants. “Forest of Illusions” included works that represent the artists’ searches for love, sexual gratification and ideal urban living. In this increasingly technology-driven era, the artists also question the reality of the satisfaction they are seeking, with their desires often existing outside of the physical world. For Cheng Ran’s video installation, Always I Trust (2014), a short film is…

NEW DELHI, Gallery Espace “The Shape Things Will Take,” held at New Delhi’s Gallery Espace, and curated by independent exhibition designer and former gallerist Prima Kurien, was formed as a conversation between the works of Kerala-based Valsan Koorma Kolleri and Delhi-based Puneet Kaushik. On view was a portrait series by Kolleri, which spoke to Kaushik’s paintings that allude to the human body. A wire-mesh sculpture by Kolleri was also set up as a counterpoint to two similar installations by Kaushik. The senior of the two artists, Kolleri began his practice in the 1970s with abstract body forms cast in concrete and plaster stacked like totem poles. In the ensuing decades he created sculptures from bronze and found materials, and in the 1990s he turned his attention to architectural constructions in…

LONDON, Kashya Hildebrand London’s Kashya Hildebrand was colonized by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann’s exhibition, “Multitude.” There was a cornucopia of shapes and hues—as if plucked from Johannes Itten’s Color Sphere—as well as a profusion of lines, Abstract-Expressionist splashes, dribs, dabs, stains and brush marks of various intensities. Yet this is not to say that “Multitude” was an embodiment of bounteousness. Looking at Mann’s work, one might think she has mastered the ancient rites of a shaman, possessing the power to bestow, conduct and control—even to incite spiritual awakening and discovery. She laboriously weaves together ink on paper, drawings and screen prints to make a collage-like whole, whose purpose is sometimes not evident, or yet to be revealed. She does, however, provide some hints through the titles of her works. Sap, Knot,…

SAN FRANCISCO, Gallery Wendi Norris A nondescript whiteboard—normally used for brainstorming in business meetings or in school lectures—is filled entirely with a densely complex, fantastical illustration drawn with black marker. Entitled Hinkley Point (2014), this doodle on steroids is the work of Sydney- and Berlin-based artist-duo Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro. It was also the first piece that visitors encountered upon entering “Architects of Destruction,” the pair’s second exhibition at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. Featuring several renditions of their whiteboard installations, as well as works made from Lego bricks and cross-stitched cotton, the exhibition presented the duo’s nuanced take on the societal cost of human progress. In Hinkley Point—the title references a natural headland in southern England known for its bird-watching and fossil hunting, and is the site…

Art provenance is the history of a particular artwork, from its creation to the present. When purchasing a newly created artwork on the primary market—that is, when buying it directly from the artist or from the artist’s gallery as part of the first exhibition of such work—the history of the piece is clear. However, when acquiring artworks that are being resold by the initial or a subsequent purchaser (also known as secondary-market sales), the issue of provenance becomes particularly important to the collector. How is provenance communicated to collectors? Collectors active in the secondary art market are used to seeing a description of an artwork’s provenance or prior ownership on the invoice or bill of sale used during its purchase. The level of detail provided varies from transaction to…

On the Threshold The bipolarity of a capital city such as New Delhi is often characterized romantically, from the mythic and medieval to the colonial and contemporary, or cynically, via its urbanized issues of overt materialism, enormous inequalities and inefficient bureaucracies. Somewhere in between is the real and the imagined life of the city—the place for artists to exhibit and perform. With a staggering 25 million residents, Delhi is the world’s second-most-populous metropolis, whose territory extends into the National Capital Region including neighboring areas Gurgaon and Noida. Sequential waves of migration have given Delhi’s historic narrative its accentuations and inflections. Situated between the urban and rural, adjacent to a shopping mall and a 14th-century mosque, Khoj International Artists’ Association (Khoj) encapsulates the diversity of today’s post-liberalized India. While 17-year-old Khoj…

“Change or Die!” is an axiom many artists are taking to heart, hitting the road to search for inspiration. Trailblazing art group Chim↑Pom, known for their rabble-rousing, unplugged themselves from the Tokyo grid, and headed out to villages around Dhaka. There, apingTarzan and Jane, they went jungly for a reconnaissance trip. Surely something offbeat and mildly offensive will emerge from their rural time out with the lively Bengalis. Meanwhile, trekking up and down the congested, rain-slicked hills of Istanbul were some of Southeast Asia’s most provocative artists, in town for the Arter exhibition “The Roving Eye.” Among them were FX Harsono, Melati Suryodarmo, Bui Cong Khanh and Lee Wen, guitar slung over his shoulder. But it was the husband-and-wife duo Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan who really took in the sights,…

ASIAN ART MUSEUM, SAN FRANCISCO, Tetsuya Ishida: Saving the World with a Brushstroke, 11/14–2/22/15 “I am strongly drawn to saint-like artists. The people who truly believe that the world is saved a little with each brushstroke.” These words of Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005) inspired the Asian Art Museum’s exhibition of eight works representing his brief career. Known for their dark subject matter, Ishida’s paintings explore problems inherent within modern Japanese society. Just as his enigmatic paintings intrigued during his lifetime, Ishida’s troubled legacy continues to pose questions for audiences today, while providing insight into Japan’s “lost decade.” NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA, MELBOURNE, Emily Floyd: The Dawn, 11/21–3/1/15 Following her successful “Far Rainbow” survey at the Heide Museum of Modern Art earlier this year, Melbourne-based artist Emily Floyd will be the subject…

The emerging field of artificial creativity is producing computers that can make art. But are humans ready to accept this? In June of this year, a computer program that simulates intelligent conversation, known as a chatbot, stirred up a media kerfuffle when it convinced 33 percent of human judges that it was a live human—more specifically, a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. Some claimed that the chatbot, named Eugene Goostman, was the first computer program to have substantial success in the landmark Turing Test. This benchmark is named after the celebrated British cryptographer and father of machine intelligence, Alan Turing, whose objective was to see whether a computer program could successfully fool a human into believing that he is (or, in another interpretation, could be) communicating with another human, rather than a…

As a teenager in her native Jeddah, Basma al-Sulaiman persuaded her mother to purchase an artwork for her. It was al-Sulaiman’s first acquisition, a painting by local Saudi artist and Central Saint Martins graduate Safeya Binzagr. One of Saudi Arabia’s leading female artists, Binzagr is known for her depictions of the rich cultural traditions of Hejaz, the western Saudi Arabian region. The experience of acquiring a work of art, al-Sulaiman remembers, was defined by pure instinct and sheer pleasure. She was hooked. So began what would become an ongoing journey with contemporary art for the vibrant and colorful collector, now in her 50s, who divides her time between Jeddah and London, where her plush Belgravia home plays host to works by a varied and dynamic roster of international artists. When…

Beyound Relational Nicolas Bourriaud is certainly famous for “relational aesthetics,” a concept he proposed for art based more on actions than objects and which has survived as one of the most cogent theories of art after 1990. He is also an influential curator and arts administrator who, in 2012, ascended to the directorship of France’s top art academy, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, despite concerns that he is neither an alumnus nor an artist. As a curator and critic, Bourriaud’s output has been prodigious. He was co-founder and co-director at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 2000 to 2006 and has served as a curator at Tate Britain (2007–2010), the Moscow Biennale (2007), the Tate Triennial (2009) and the Athens Biennale (2011), among numerous other endeavors.…

NADIA KAABI-LINKE AND TIMO KAABI-LINKE Sometimes an artistic idea is born out of a gesture that can be as simple as a child’s manipulation of objects or digging in the earth. However, there is something that artists don’t have in common with children: artlessness. Like any adult, artists are not innocent—the games they play follow certain intentions and interests; they apply techniques and strategies to attain their goals. An artistic gesture, if carefully and subversively applied to the right context, can alter common opinion and reshape our perspectives on history. Thus an aesthetic practice can have political meanings, albeit very different from political actions. Here we touch upon the great opposition of the adult game. Art seems to be a beautiful lie, since it employs fiction to tell the truth,…

SEOUL, PKM Gallery Heeseung Chung’s eponymous solo show was the final exhibition at PKM Gallery’s temporary space before their move to a permanent new home. The show—consisting of four photographs and two installations—may have been disappointing in quantity but was arresting in its content, which transformed a small and challenging space into a conceptual jewel box. Visible from the sidewalk through the gallery’s glass facade was Untitled (2014), an imposing photograph of a nude woman’s back and her worn hands held together in prayer. Below Untitled was another installation, Tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut (2014), a stack of five black-and-white offset prints in which only the top image, a view of the sky, is visible. The work was placed atop Table-Diderot-Table (2014), a four-cornered gray…

JAKARTA, Art:1 New Museum In 1990, Heri Dono attended an artist-residency program in Switzerland—his first trip abroad—which became deeply imprinted in his mind. While in Europe, Dono saw, and was struck by, Bruce Nauman’s Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime (1990), in which moving images are projected onto linen and suspended sculptural objects, and by Jonathan Borofsky’s “Hammering Man” series (1979–2002) of large-scale kinetic sculptures that portray the silhouette of a laborer. It was in Switzerland that Dono started his acclaimed “Wayang” projects, which reinterpret traditional Indonesian puppet theater. Ever since, he has believed that variations on wayang can be a global alternative art form. “The World and I” was the Yogyakarta-based artist’s first retrospective in Indonesia, held at Art:1 New Museum, Jakarta. The exhibition displayed 86 installations, sculptures, paintings and…

DUBAI, The Third Line Slavs and Tatars have a way with words and letters. For their first solo show in the Middle East, the research-driven collective directed their language-focused lens on the slippery workings of alphabet politics. In the regions covered in Slavs and Tatars’s geographic purview—“the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China”—languages have been shaped and reshaped through various political attempts, leading to a parade of extinguished and evolved letters and sounds. Far from simply documenting the Latinization and Cyrillization campaigns wielded against Arabic-writing, Turkic-speaking Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia, “Language Arts” literally reveled in the vagaries of tampered-with tongues. Aided by their signature mashing of high-brow scholarship and low-brow zingers, Slavs and Tatars toyed with phonemes, graphemes…

MILAN, Primo Marella Gallery Considered one of the most interesting young artists in Singapore today, Robert Zhao Renhui is becoming more and more active on the international scene. For Zhao’s first solo show at Milan’s Primo Marella Gallery, “A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World,” the artist presented 21 photographs from his eponymous 2013 project, originally produced for that year’s Singapore Biennale, as well as three recent mixed-media installations. The show was an uncanny visual journey through images of animals and landscapes altered by humans and their obsession to manipulate nature. Driven by a passion for zoology and nature, Zhao’s art project is multifaceted. Committed to the defense of wildlife during his college years, the artist has developed a practice that blurs the line between art and…

An architectural history of the world’s most watery region It isn’t hard to see why architects have an affinity for islands. Remote fragments of land shaped by intricate geologies, tropical islands conjure up visions of idyllic utopias, with unique landscapes that include palm trees, lush green foliage and pristine white beaches, all protected or insulated by a blue ocean horizon. Nevertheless, Oceania—used in its narrow sense to denote those small islands in the Pacific Ocean lying south of the Tropic of Cancer—is a largely invisible and fragmented territory, made up of perhaps 20,000 remote and isolated bodies of land, better known for the supremacy of its nature than for its architecture, our knowledge of which is limited by the expansiveness of the region’s geography. Architecture in the South Pacific: The…

For The Sketch, we take a look at the evolving practice of an artist who will be featuring in our next issue I visited the gallery space at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, in early 2012, prior to a solo show there later in the year. During my conversation with the director, Chris Fitzpatrick, it became clear that there were significant problems with the gallery floor—it was completely worn out. “How much would it cost to get a new floor?” I asked, to which he replied, “It would cost one exhibition.” The resulting show was called “You Owe Me Big Time,” and was held from September to November. This was also the title of a permanent piece that I installed at the gallery for the exhibition—a new concrete floor. This pencil drawing…