Innholdsfortegnelse for Jul/Aug 2016 i ArtAsiaPacific

Wellington is a comfortable city where the pace of change is slow. It’s the sort of place that people leave because of its dependable consistency, before returning, attracted by the very same reasons. In terms of scale, the city is small and will remain that way. Curving around a harbor on one side and confined by a band of tree-covered hills on the other, its physical bounds limit possibilities for expansion. Politically, Wellington is New Zealand’s capital, but when it comes to population, economy and sheer scale, it’s Auckland’s game. Policy, including arts policy, tends to have a strategic focus on Auckland. Wellington instead plays the younger sibling, eager to prove itself more hip, more creative and fueled by better coffee. This emphasis on cultural capital gives the city two…

The forecast for the art market has lately resembled one of those days that meteorologists describe (ever so unhelpfully) as “partly cloudy.” There’s been caution about signs of encroaching storms during the first half of the year, but so far no front has gathered and the sun keeps bursting through. From Beijing to New York, Tokyo and London, the art fairs of May were themselves full of mixed messages of whether sunnier or stormier days will prevail in the months to come. Beijing The 11th edition of Art Beijing (5/1–3) took place at the National Agriculture Exhibition Center during China’s Labor Day weekend. Helming this year’s edition was Takahiro Kaneshima, former director of Art Fair Tokyo. Maybe it was the holiday mood, but the fair reported 95,000 attendees, up from…

Although the categories of “contemporary art” and “Indigenous art” each have their origins in the 1970s, Indigenous artists and their creations still occupy an unresolved position within an internationalized conversation about postcolonial art-making and museum display. This dilemma, one of un-assimilation, or dis-assimilation, is part of what gives exhibitions of (and with) Indigenous art a particular urgency at this moment. The other part comes from the incredible visual impact and diversity of the artworks themselves as their creators explore previously unseen modalities of the optical. To greater and lesser degrees, recent exhibitions of Indigenous art from Australia have tended either to problematize the former question or to showcase the latter qualities— curatorial stances that mirror conversations about the place of Indigenous cultures in societies around the world. “Everywhen: The Eternal…

In recent years, the independent art scene in Japan has seen a surge in activity. As part of that, a dynamic, homegrown curatorship that has very rarely—or perhaps never—been practiced before has arisen. Two exhibitions, “Dies Irae / A theater in the public spaces in the city,” organized by Youhei Kurose, which took place in Iwaki city in Fukushima Prefecture in September 2015, and the Arata Hasegawa-curated “Chronicle, Chronicle!,” which opened at Creative Center Osaka in January this year, exemplify aspects of this shift. In both exhibitions, the curators asserted their ideas and meta-narratives, while capitalizing on their intimate knowledge of local mythologies and cultural nuances specific to their country. Among the commonalities between the self-funded, independent projects were that the venues were located outside of Tokyo, led by young…

The self-titled survey of Walid Raad’s two major bodies of work to date, curated by Eva Respini and recently shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston, consisted of the Lebanese-born artist’s two primary and ongoing series: “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow” (2007– ), about the “history of art in the ‘Arab world’”; and “The Atlas Group” (1989–2004), a parafictional archive whose cast of contributors (including Raad himself) are imagined as documenting the legacy of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91). Raad’s work titles are hard to parse, but hint at the shifting, and at times self-contradictory, positions inhabited by the artist. “Scratching on Things,” for instance, implies that the system or subjects of investigation also implicate the researcher who may want to distance himself from what is found.…

In recent years, Dansaekhwa, which translates as “monochrome painting” in Korean, has emerged as the country’s most internationally identifiable art movement. This is in spite of arguments about its status as a legitimate movement, given its loose philosophy and grouping of artists. Emerging in the mid-1970s, and operating without a clear manifesto, artists who identified with this minimalist aesthetic nonetheless paved the way for a globally recognizable contemporary art form. In February, Dansaekhwa pioneer Cho Yong Ik made a stirring reentry into the art world with his quietly impressive retrospective at Seoul’s Sungkok Art Museum. The largely forgotten artist’s selection of more than 80 paintings stood as testament to his practice and served to reclaim his status as a prominent contributor to early Dansaekhwa. The exhibition’s title, “Revealing the Void,”…

Little did Icarus know, as he flew toward the dazzling embrace of the sun, that every moment was bringing him closer to his fateful demise. In the classic Greek myth that tells of the dangers of hubris, the boy who sought to touch the sky instead fell to his death. He was not fearless, this one, but foolish. How many who have sought, in a similar manner, the blinding glare of fame have fallen with broken dreams instead? And what, moreover, does it mean to be truly fearless? This was a pertinent question for recent visitors to Dubai’s Total Arts at Courtyard, particularly regarding three wax-covered figures that had hung from warped helicopter blades in the art space’s atrium for an exhibition in March. The life-size fiberglass models, created by…

Of the many perils in geographically defined exhibitions, most have to do with the dynamics of representation: who, what and when is made visible at the expense of other people, places and topics. The more sweeping the claims, the more likely an exhibition is to lapse into geopolitical cliché. Curated by Sara Raza (ArtAsiaPacific’s West and Central Asia desk editor), “But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa” sidesteps many potential hazards associated with the genre. Raza’s loose thematic construct of geometry as a metaphor for the “cross-circulation of knowledge” quickly yields to artists’ own interests. For instance, Susan Hefuna’s suite of nine abstract ink drawings, Building (2009), made on layers of tracing paper, eschew the linearity, repetition and order found in…

Winters in Afghanistan are long and bitterly cold. Springtime is pregnant with anticipation, but also marks the start of Taliban fighting season. In April, Taliban fighters detonated a truck bomb in central Kabul, killing 30 and wounding 300. For Pakistan-born, Afghani artist Khadim Ali— based in Australia since 2010 on a distinguished person visa— the bombing brings back tragic memories. In 2011, at the end of Ramadan, a car bomb in excess of 40-kilograms exploded outside his parent’s house in Quetta, near the Afghan border, killing 11. Ali’s mother was in the house at the time and his father along the road; both were badly injured but survived and subsequently he was able to relocate them to Australia. Today Ali and his parents are among a community of roughly 60,000…

On April 3, prominent figures in the art world became embroiled in the controversial leak of the “Panama Papers.” A trove of 11.5 million documents, referred to as the Panama Papers, was attained by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The documents, leaked by an anonymous source and shared between a coalition of media outlets, unveiled clients of Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm specializing in wealth management and known for establishing offshore tax havens for its clientele of global elites. The firm has allegedly created more than 214,000 shell companies. The ruling family of Azerbaijan was among the first named in the ICIJ’s reports. The London-based art patron Leyla Aliyeva, vice-president of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and daughter of Azerbaijani president Ilham…

VANCOUVER ART GALLERY, VANCOUVER Bharti Kher: Matter 7/9–10/10 Exposed, eyes closed, they sit in a row: the life-size, full-body nude casts of former sex workers that make up Six Women (2013–15). A raw reminder of female resilience, Bharti Kher’s latest inquiry into gender and body politics is one of 35 works in the first major retrospective of the New Delhi-based artist in North America. Her diverse output of sculptures, photography and paintings is celebrated for its directness and fantasy, taking inspiration equally from reality and allegory. “Matter” unites Kher’s haunting animal-human hybrid figures; abstract sculptures of abandoned saris; and now-iconic appropriation of the bindi, spilling across canvases, maps, mirrors and readymades, revealing an artist who does not shy away from conflict, but confronts it with a language all her own.…

An air of urgency weighed heavily on attendees at Sharjah Art Foundation’s (SAF) March Meeting (March 12–13) this year, resulting from a call to action by William Wells of Cairo’s nonprofit Townhouse Gallery. In his keynote address, Wells cautioned: “We are under siege . . . I cannot help but think we are living in a time where education is under the greatest threat in recent history.” At the ninth edition of March Meeting, more than 40 artists, cultural producers and educators from the United Arab Emirates and all corners of the globe convened at the Dar al-Nadwa building in Sharjah’s Calligraphy Square for two densely scheduled days of presentations and discussions under the rubric of “Education, Engagement and Participation.” Modern neoliberalism, Wells reasoned, is a universal condition in which…

PIO ABAD On February 25, 1986, the former president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda fled Malacañang Palace in Manila on board a US army helicopter, ending 20 years of repressive rule. Over the previous months, Marcos’s military apparatus had defected, millions of Filipinos had taken to the streets to demand democracy, and the Reagan administration—once supportive of the dictatorship as a buffer to the spread of communism in Southeast Asia—had changed its tune and was now backing the opposition. Hours after the Marcoses’ departure, a young civil activist and lawyer named Florencio Abad was among the first protesters to enter the palace grounds. Once inside the residence, a picture was taken of a grinning and somewhat incredulous-looking Florencio standing before a gilded bamboo-framed portrait of Ferdinand…

There is a moment in the video for British soul singer Jamie Lidell’s song “The City” where, standing in the forecourt of a gas station at night, he sings, “The city, it don’t like you . . . it never did,” shaving himself with a razor blade as the world carries on around him. The song describes the reasons why cities are loathed and loved—a mixture of moments marked by tragedy, comedy and, ultimately, convenience. In Tokyo, the urban experience is undeniably unique and at times strange, and always complicated by the reality of 13 million people living so close to one another. That kind of experience, at the heart of any city, will inevitably attract and repel people with equal force and measure. Photographer Osamu Kanemura is no stranger…

Widely recognized among art-world intelligentsia, Olafur Eliasson recently became the first internationally acclaimed foreign artist to have a major solo exhibition at Shanghai’s Long Museum. Some 30 works from the late 1990s to the present, including installations, sculptures, photographs, video, paintings and drawings, amply filled the museum’s cavernous spaces in March. The exhibition, however, felt part wacky science fair, part magician’s emporium, or a provisional laboratory for some of Eliasson’s all-too-familiar investigations. It was perhaps a tad overly instructive, though no didactic texts were found anywhere in the museum, and unfortunately the show was not the cool-handed, minimalist approach that it could have been. Like other artists one might categorize as poet-phenomenologists, Eliasson is known for grand acts of magic. For The Weather Project (2003), he created a huge artificial…

Singapore was recently named the world’s most important maritime capital, a label not without irony given the drastic erasure of its territorial waters and consistent expansion of land mass since the 1960s, thanks to its systematic land reclamation. In the ongoing project “Sea State” (2005– ), Singapore artist Charles Lim considers how the island nation is bound inexorably with the sea, even as its people seek to negate it. The artist is not one who regards his subject from afar: a former Olympic sailor, Lim literally navigates the ocean boundaries that make up Singapore’s territoriality. “Sea State” is at once documentarian, archival and fabulist, and for the first time its significant components—video, nautical charts, photographs and an enormous buoy—were on view together at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary…

Every historian is a bricoleur. Documenting and manipulating in equal measure, the historian sits at the fulcrum of twin impulses: to conserve and to craft; to decipher reality and to dramatize a narrative. Cairo-based artist Huda Lutfi, true to her training as a historian, excavates, documents and narrates. What Cairo spits out—the flotsam and jetsam of the heaving metropolis’s flea markets and junk merchants—she takes in. Following the so-called Egyptian Revolution of 2011 her resolve to record the events unfolding on her very doorstep intensified. Assembling these findings into a variety of works, including sculptures, photomontages, collages and videos, Lutfi “images” her urban surround. Like a historian stringing together facts to concoct a coherent narrative, Lutfi’s “imaging” is not a mere transposition of Cairene cosmopolitan reality. Rather, her bricolages constitute…

Man’s heart is like a bottomless sea and wisdom is the pearl that lies at the bottom of it. —Yusuf Has Hajib from Kutadgu Bilig (“Wisdom of Royal Glory”) The opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi looms over the calendar for late 2016, with the even more gargantuan Guggenheim Abu Dhabi a couple years behind it. Taken on its face, the whole enterprise of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island—the emirate’s complex of universities, museums and luxury beach resorts—ought to be a cause for celebration, particularly by those who have advocated for a shift in global power away from the traditional centers of cultural hegemony in Europe and the United States. It is long past time for international institutions to write history, and art history, from the perspective of the de-colonialized who…

I am often asked which artist has influenced me the most. To tell the truth, the answer is probably EYヨ. I think this is true for many artists of my generation and, potentially, not only those in Japan. EYヨ is a visual artist and musician who was part of many different bands based in Japan’s Kansai region during the 1980s—including the noise bands Hanatarash and Boredoms. As well as being the lead singer for Boredoms, EYヨ is known for his emotive use of various experimental instruments, such as the open-reel tape recorder and other electronic equipment. His music practice is characterized by songs that sound like they are from outer space and are accompanied by outrageous dance performances. Prior to the digital age, his drawings, print collages and sculptures— like…

1 Jason Phu SYDNEY The 2015 Sulman Prize, presented by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, was awarded to Australian-born Chinese-Vietnamese artist Jason Phu last summer. His award-winning work I was at yum cha when in rolled the three severed heads of Buddha: Fear, Malice and Death (2015) is a watercolor and ink work on rice paper. Spanning just over one meter wide, the composition features three haphazardly rendered Buddha heads flanked with Chinese and English texts. In awkward translations, they tell of a nonsensical story about the three religious icons making an uninvited appearance at yum cha (Cantonese dim-sum lunch)—in tandem with the work’s title—and the absurdities they go on to utter. Such straddling, or clashing, of cultural identities lies at the core of Phu’s cheeky…

Hale Tenger Through the use of highly charged imagery and symbols, Tenger has, from the beginning of her career, challenged the toxic mixture of Islamist-nationalist-authoritarian tendencies that have dominated public life in modern Turkey. When you stepped through the door into a sparse hallway, illuminated by a lone fluorescent bulb, it immediately felt like you had traveled back in time several decades. There was an old dining table shoved awkwardly against one wall, and an old radio sitting on a bureau at the far end was blaring the news, about the number of terrorists eliminated, before the broadcast switched over to a football match. The drab curtains behind the bureau were drawn shut. A door on the right led into a cavernous bedroom, which seemed too big and too empty,…

29 JUNE 2016 Ho Chi Minh City is the largest metropolis in Vietnam, with more than nine million inhabitants. Mornings rise fast here. On average, at approximately 5:25 am, light appears from the east, and within 40 minutes it illuminates the entire city. Motorbikes fill the streets. Six to seven million of them flow together. At a crossroad, while red lights count down, the bikes build up anticipation with their riders. Three seconds to green, they are already dashing forward. The cars follow them closely. And so they do. With the sound of engines roaring rhythmically to an invisible beat, the city awakes. In a small alley not far from the city zoo, tucked in a residential area, a Reading Room opens. On its wooden shelves, exhibition catalogs, monographs, art…

Platform-L, the new multidisciplinary art center in Seoul, opened at a critical moment in Korea’s art scene. Though K-pop, K-beauty and K-food are met with frenzied desire worldwide, and Korean filmmakers, architects and artists are garnering international attention, the art market inside the country tells a different story. Many Koreans are shifting their spending power to contemporary art, but are looking outside the country to collect. Most emerging and midcareer Korean artists rely on government grants to eke out a career. Moreover, the majority of contemporary art institutions in Korea are at the financial mercy of the government or wealthy families and, therefore, have been known to get closed on a whim, like Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art, which will fold in August despite its global recognition. Without the collective…

“Shahzia Sikander: Apparatus of Power,” organized by Asia Society Hong Kong Center, was heralded by the institution for its poignant engagement with Hong Kong’s colonial past. The Asia Society, where the exhibition took place, occupies a former British military barracks and explosives magazine. A small selection of Sikander’s videos and prints were also shown at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum on Victoria Harbour. Spanning these two sites, Sikander’s show was presented as an exploration of the British occupation of Hong Kong by both land and sea. Unfortunately, this historical framework distracted from the actual content of the exhibition, which was more an intimate study of Sikander’s processes and motifs nurtured over her 25-year practice; the subject of imperialism constituted but a fragment of the show’s works. On view were around…

Perhaps it was apt that, at a time when religious intolerance and state suppression are at a boiling point in India, a show held at one of its central government art institutions in the country’s capital reflected on the meaning of life, death, ritual and artifice. Though Sudarshan Shetty’s “Shoonya Ghar” was not an obviously political exhibition by any means, it did come at a moment when the right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party had begun to interfere with public institutions more than it had ever done before— from appointing its staunch supporters, rather than leading academics, as the heads of various cultural museums to rewriting historical narratives in school textbooks to promote a singular, traditionalist and dogmatic agenda. It is a time when older and younger artists alike are…

In 2012, Qatar Museums launched a program called “Years of Culture” as part of their outreach program aimed at the international audience. This year’s edition, the Qatar-China Year of Culture, presents “What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China,” curated by artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Conceived as a survey of Chinese contemporary art, it focuses on the depth and breadth of the practice of 15 emerging and established artists. Cai is no stranger to Qatar, having staged a celebrated solo show at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in 2011, and his affinity toward the regional culture is evident in his curation, which involves many site-specific artworks dealing with local themes. For the exhibition, the enormous white cube of Al Riwaq was partitioned into a labyrinth of rooms filled with sculptures,…

Water Whirler was designed by Len Lye (1901– 1980) around 1961, though it remained unbuilt within his lifetime. Driven by a reciprocating motor at a frequency that is harmonic with its length and set on a rotating base, its single upright tube forms an ovoid “figure of motion,” giving the illusion of a 3D volume produced through our persistence of vision. Varying the power to its rotating motor alters its spin to the point where it becomes chaotic. Pressurized water is pumped up through the spinning tube and streams out of nozzles set alternately to either side at intervals up the tube. This creates a swirling rain spreading laterally out from the central pole. The New Zealand-born artist envisaged Water Whirler as tall and brightly lit and the work now…