Innholdsfortegnelse for 107 (Mar/Apr 2018) i ArtAsiaPacific

1 Hana al-Saadi DOHA The tutu jutting from the waist of the sitting female figure in Hana al-Saadi’s Hmmm... (2017) might raise eyebrows from some observers. Conversely, the sitting ballerina’s niqab and abaya might invoke the same reaction from others. Cast in white resin, and casting hard shadows, the woman leans forward with both affecting grace and imposing presence. Even when presented in a solemn industrial space such as Kraftwerk Berlin, the site of “Contemporary Art Qatar” in 2017, the piece is humorous. With her contrasting peculiarity and poise, the dancer induces us to smile not at her, but with her. While she simultaneously embodies and shrugs off the ways in which different cultures place restrictions on women’s bodies, she also draws attention to their hypocrisy in criticizing each other…

Wild-eyed and dragging a square of cotton quilt behind him, Kwok Mang-Ho rustled out from the streets, making his way to a bare-bones sculpture in the middle of a sports ground on the outskirts of Hong Kong. The structure is minimal, clean, its metal lines resembling those of a tall pyramid. Crowds had gathered; the residents were out for the Tuen Mun Art Festival, and were anticipating an artwork by the organizer, Kwok himself. In one fell swoop, Kwok threw the quilt onto the sculpture and lit it on fire. A tunnel of flames shot up. Watching as the air quickly became choked with thick, obsidian smoke, the attendants grew frightened. “1978, there was no avant-garde art before so they were scared,” Kwok said years later, in his characteristically truncated,…

When Palestinian artist Inas Halabi asked family members to tell the story of how her grandfather received a scar on his forehead, they provided differing narratives. She recorded the various accounts for Mnemosyne (2016), a video installation commissioned for the London- and Ramallah-based AM Qattan Foundation’s Young Artist of the Year Award in 2016. Melding her family chronicles with those of her homeland, Halabi undermines the idea that defining moments carry a fixed history. Moving into more ambitious territory to probe humanity’s effect on the natural landscape and collective trauma, the artist has been working on the ongoing photo-video project Lions Warn of Futures Present (2017–), which was commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 13’s offsite project in Ramallah. Expanding on research by nuclear-physics specialist Khalil Thabayneh, who visited Palestinian and Bedouin…

The videos of the Karrabing Film Collective portray the multiple realities of life for Indigenous communities in Australia’s Northern Territory, from their confrontations with agents of the settler-colonialist Australian state, to disagreements between families, and the specific places and the figures of the Dreaming, a worldview held by Aboriginal communities that connects the spiritual and natural world. The collective dates back to 2007, when police and the military intervened into Aboriginal communities, tightening state control over daily life. Karrabing, a self-described “form of survivance,” was initiated to bring in revenue for the community and as an experiment in self-organized cultural production. Reframing the world through an Indigenous perspective that articulates a relationship to the natural environment developed across millennia, the collective creates their films through an improvisational method that allows…

CINEMANIA “Cinemania” at Sydney’s Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) was the first Australian survey of work by New Zealand Mori video and installation artist Lisa Reihana. The show embraced her three-decade investigation of how cultural histories and identities have been distorted in the South Pacific through the colonial gaze, whose roots can be traced back to when James Cook set sail from England in 1768 on a voyage that landed him in terra australis incognita. For Reihana, this is what gave rise to the misconceived European notion that the South Pacific was a utopian paradise. Through her practice, the artist seeks to redress that erroneous view. A few works in “Cinemania” were particularly memorable, including Tai Whetuki – House of Death Redux (2015–16), a two-channel, 14-minute-long video referencing the chief mourner’s…

LETTRES DU VOYANT If asked how I might tag Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) and Nam June Paik (1932–2006), both of whom count among the most influential artists of the 20th century, I might dub them as our “great communicators.” As the foremost inventor of video art at the dawning of the 1960s, Paik’s revolutionary experiments with television and early electronic technology laid the visionary groundwork for future multimedia artists. Beuys’s pioneering work as an educator, activist, philosopher and sculptor cemented a belief in the radical power of art and its capacity to transform society. “Every human being is an artist,” he famously proclaimed. The duo exhibition “Lettres du Voyant” (or “Letters of the Seer”) at Shanghai’s HOW Art Museum wasn’t the first time for either artist’s work to be seen in…

In November 2017, the tenth edition of the annual “Artisterium” exhibition was held at the Tbilisi History Museum under the Georgian National Museum, with additional programs at other venues. Curated by its founder Magda Guruli, funding came from the United States Embassy in Tbilisi, New York’s Parsons School of Design, the Goethe-Institut Georgien and many others. The exhibition was “dedicated to the dialogue between visual arts, craft and design,” and gathered diverse participants of some 45 visual artists and artist groups, performers and other practitioners mostly from Georgia. The majority of the exhibition was held at the History Museum. In the section curated by Guruli, “Art Craft Design,” South Korea’s Suh Yoonhee showed Memory Gap, Istanbul (2017), a video that takes us through a market in the Turkish city where…

A RETROSPECTIVE Aside from being heralded as the father of British minimalist sculpture, Rasheed Araeen has spent more than five decades advocating for the inclusion of peripheral communities into the art world, resisting hierarchical structures in Western art institutions. It is thus difficult to fathom that it was only last December when a major museum, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, mounted the artist’s first comprehensive exhibition in Europe. Curated by Nick Aikens, the retrospective showcased Araeen’s first exercises in portraiture in his hometown Karachi, seminal sculptures created throughout his career, abstract paintings produced only weeks before the show and more. The retrospective’s most intriguing aspectwas the artist’s works produced in Pakistan from the late 1950s onward. From drawings of Karachi residents to the triangular clusters of ships in the Karachi…

For almost five decades, Noboru Takayama has used the sturdy wooden beams that hold together railway tracks to create large-scale sculptures, invoking in his work the human body and postwar history. Now in his seventies, Takayama is often grouped with the Mono-ha movement alongside artists such as Lee Ufan, Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga and others, due to his simple interventions upon unfussy materials. He shares with these artists a wistfulness for the past and a slightly anti-modernist stance, and yet, in a conversation I had with the artist at his first exhibition in Los Angeles, he made clear that he no longer associates himself with the movement, which he feels was relevant to a specific point in history. While his work continues to encapsulate the mental and physical toll that…

Hon Chi Fun’s seven-decade career is inextricably tied to the development of art in Hong Kong. Poring over a history of the city’s culture, one discovers a plethora of institutions, societies and galleries, past and current, that either featured the artist or were initiated by him, such as the Modern Literature and Art Association. His artworks tell a similar tale of transformation. From his earlier days as a “Sunday painter” in the 1950s, when he would depict Hong Kong’s then-tropical landscapes outside of his weekday post-office job, Hon ventured into abstract expressionist approaches, which blossomed when he arrived on the shores of New York in 1969. Today, he is known for synthesizing ink and oil painting techniques and for probing Taoist philosophies. In the May/June issue, AAP will take a…

Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh was, up until April 1975, known as the “Pearl of Asia.” Under the administration of Sangkum Reastr Niyum—a political organization founded in 1955 by the late Norodom Sihanouk—the capital and country thrived and enjoyed a brief moment of cultural affluence. For many, this was the golden age of Cambodia: an era of innovation and creation for architecture, cinema, music, as well as visual and performing arts. The rise of the Khmer Rouge (KR) abruptly ended this growth. The storming and capturing of Phnom Penh by the communist forces of KR in 1975 marked the beginning of “Year Zero,” a period of genocidal massacre and racial purification. Four decades later, after having escaped near-death destruction, the city is slowly regaining its status as a vibrant region. In…

The global economic upswing of 2017 marked the beginnings of a period of recovery following the post-2014 lull. Although the trend of market growth is predicted to continue throughout 2018, for some in the art fair sector, the year has been off to a rocky start, while for others, the anticipation builds. Singapore Director Lorenzo Rudolf’s welcoming words at the press preview of Art Stage Singapore (January 26–28) were ones of defeat: “Strong economic growth has led to many new galleries and private museums opening in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Everywhere, everywhere, the art scene booms. The only place we have stagnation is Singapore,” he admitted. The fair had indeed become significantly reduced in terms of both participating galleries—with 97 exhibitors in 2018 compared to 131 in 2017—as well…

The buzz surrounding Xu Bing’s new film Dragonfly Eyes (2017) is that it was created from cutting and compiling more than 10,000 hours of video surveillance footage and is possibly the first such “film” to combine the technologies of over 245 million global surveillance cameras and cloud computing. But the release of the 81-minute movie also revealed an interesting decision by Xu—one of China’s most esteemed contemporary artists—to introduce this work not through museums, biennials or galleries, but rather via the ostensibly more mass-market medium of cinema. Dragonfly Eyes premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August of 2017 and was rolled out in other major film festivals—including those in Toronto and Busan—in the following months. The screenplay is by Chinese poet Zhai Yongming and writer Zhang Hanyi, and the…

“How many times have I told you this tale? Do you remember? We’ve been here before, hunting for spirits, in Bir Nabalah, perfume of za’atar all around us, and as far as I could see.” Jumana Emil Abboud’s resonant, measured voice filled the cool summer air in the courtyard of Ramallah’s Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center on a night in August 2017. She stood in front of two screens, one projecting footage of trees overhead and tall grass blowing in the breeze, as she evoked a moment from one of her expeditions into the hills of the West Bank, with the filmmaker Issa Freij, in search of natural springs. At the same time, on the garden stage, a young co-performer (Salma Misyef) was standing beside an overhead projector, painting onto a…

From afar, one sees a lunar surface: craggy, alluvial and glimmering with extraterrestrial detritus. Up close, the layers begin to shift: we spot the flat, hard plane of metal against an orange, fibrous material, and a glossy smattering of micro-bubbles floating in resin. A light from behind casts gradual tonal variations on the landscape. Yet it’s not a slice of the moon after all, but a self-enclosed scenery created by Hong Kong-based Andrew Luk. Exposing found material to homemade napalm—a violently flammable chemical that recalls conflicts and trauma of the past century—the artist lets the resulting layers settle and melt onto each other, pushing an awareness of the self-inflicted, warped scars that exist in our social and physical terrains. The topographical, historical studies latent in Luk’s ongoing “Horizon Scan” series…

As a painter, Genevieve Chua is beholden to reinventing the forms of surfaces she uses and the strokes she imparts on them. The Singaporean artist torques and shapes her canvases to break down the formalities of traditional painting and create a new kind of carte blanche space in which to discuss evolutionary progressions, or changes in landscapes initiated by natural incidents such as flooding. For example, in her “Swivel” series (2014–17), she reinforces her delicate pieces with a skeletal steel frame, creating kinetic mobiles that simultaneously confront and turn away from a visitor’s gaze. On their surfaces, she has painted and printed glitch-like marks that represent the often invisible under-painting processes of artists as well as futuristic geographies. In another painting series, the monochrome “Mnemonic, Staccato” (2015–16), the clustered dot…

THEATER OF THE WORLD The world in which artists have lived for the last century lies in a mound of paper pulp, piled on a glass shard atop an open wooden box. It’s all there, in Huang Yong Ping’s sculpture The History of Chinese Painting and A Concise History of Modern Painting Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987/93): the Duchampian legacy of artworks that make explicit their own histories and contradictions; its assertion of a formlessness, as in Surrealist writer Georges Bataille’s informe, describing the brutal, materialistic world in defiance of European Enlightenment ideals of universal empiricism, liberty and equality and the rigid forms of modern epistemology. As the introductory artwork in “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” Huang’s work set out the intellectual…

VESSEL In the past decade and a half, Kohei Nawa has nurtured an obsession with surface textures and outer layers, developing an idea that was first conceived when he was a doctoral student. His well-known “PixCell” series, part of which was shown in the exhibition “Vessel” at Arario Gallery in Shanghai, consists of various items—often taxidermy animals—encased in glass or resin, rendering them ethereal and dreamlike. Though the configuration of see-through spheres in the displayed works may initially seem random, there is nothing arbitrary about the sculptures at all—the globes are meant to misconstrue the objects that we are observing, prompting us to form our own interpretations beyond surface appearances, and to challenge our acceptance of what may at first appear to be obviously true. When Nawa was a student…

JIWA The Bahasa word jiwa loosely translates as “soul.” For the Jakarta Biennale’s latest edition, artistic director Melati Suryodarmo took the word as a departure point to question the separation between rational thought and intuitive feeling, and explored how jiwa manifests within the realm of art. Suryodarmo’s impassioned engagement criss-crossed many ideas, times and locations, including an era in Indonesia that is still fresh in the minds of older generations. The 1970s saw activists and members of the counterculture reacting against General Muhammad Suharto’s New Order military government. This included Siti Adiyati, a female artist affiliated with the male-driven, avant-garde Indonesian New Art Movement that emerged in the mid-’70s. At the Biennale’s main venue, Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem (GSE), the artist re-created her 1979 installation Eceng Gondok Berbunga Emas (“Water Hyacinth…

YASSIN HAUTE COUTURE Yassin Haute Couture was made possible by the 1960s. During no other period of pre-Reconstruction Lebanese history would the Paris-trained Beiruti fashion designer Samir Yassin—Raed Yassin’s father—have returned to his hometown to establish his high-end label. Beirut, having become the financial center of the Arab world after the passage of the 1956 Banking Secrecy Law, which encourages foreign investment in the Lebanese banking system, came to boast relative affluence just a decade and a half following its independence from French rule. Prosperity was not for all, but a wealthy urban minority made the most out of the swinging sixties, emblematized by the nightclubs and cinemas of Rue Hamra and the seafront. Against this backdrop and well into the Civil War (when he relocated to Jeddah until the…

THE GAP BETWEEN US In both content and form, Basma Alsharif’s first UK solo exhibition “The Gap Between Us” insightfully critiqued perceptions of distance, combining experimental filmic techniques and an intuitive sense for psychogeography to question the assumed remoteness of different locations and artistic styles. In the three film works screened at London’s Mosaic Rooms, representing different periods in the decade-long career of the Kuwait-born, Los Angeles-based artist of Palestinian origin, tricks of narrative filmmaking effectively merge with abstract and avant-garde methods. We Began By Measuring Distance (2009) begins with a dramatic sequence that might easily kick off a feature film. Sequential shots of a low, cloud-obscured sun over Gaza are overdubbed by a car alarm and a woman screaming “Father! My father! Shoot him,” growing louder until the screen…

The repercussions to these actions can be extreme, however. On January 9, 2018, Palestinian artist and community organizer Mohammed “Habshe” Yossef experienced firsthand how the Israeli military suppresses dissent. That morning, the Israeli military conducted a predawn raid on Yossef’s residence in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp, where he lives with his wife and three children. The artist was taken from his home to an Israeli detention facility, Ofer Prison, located south of Ramallah in the West Bank. Yossef was charged with “incitement on social media.” After nearly a week of detainment and interrogation, the military court dismissed the charge against him and he was released from Ofer. Yossef is involved with the art and activist collective MTL+ and residency program Decolonize This Place, the latter of which raises awareness for…

Running parallel to the Pasig River is Escolta Street, one of Manila’s oldest and most historically vital landmarks. The thoroughfare was built in the 16th century to connect the city to the glut of Spanish galleon ships, which arrived into Manila Bay. Absorbing both products and people from China, Latin America and Europe, the street was a hub of commercial activity, and, as early as the 1930s, office buildings began springing up with designs in the styles of Beaux Arts, Neoclassical and Art Deco. However, by the time the independent artist-run collective 98B Collaboratory moved into the First United Building on Escolta in July 2012, the area was largely changed due to the impact of the Second World War, and subsequent relocation of businesses to Manila’s financial center, Makati, during…

“Why are they so obsessed with using each other as memes? Bending the connecting band between each other into a globe,” asks a digitally manipulated voice in the fragmented language that runs throughout architect, artist and filmmaker Kim Heecheon’s video Sleigh Ride Chill (2016). The anonymous narrator is referring to what happened to a girl he supposedly knew when her sex tape was leaked online—one of the three storylines in the work that probe the ways in which the internet, video games and virtual reality reflect and affect contemporary Korean society. Dizzying footage of Seoul’s bustling nightscape is intercut with face-swapped videos and rollercoaster rides as the other threads, centered around a suicide club and a soliloquy about the future, delivered via a livestream of an online game by one…

THAI ART IN THE 1990S In the first chapter of Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary (2017), curator and critic David Teh outlines the development of contemporary Thai art in the 1980s within the context of the country’s then unprecedented economic growth: between 1985 and 1995, Thailand’s GDP per capita quadrupled. Within this climate, a clique of “neotraditionalist” artists who courted acquisitions and commissions from the country’s rising corporate elite emerged. Their artistic product was a “decorative patriotism” that demonstrated its kwampenthai (“Thainess”) through pseudo-Buddhist symbolism. Seemingly isolated at the time from the global art scene, this sector of Thai art was conducted within parochial networks of individuals desperate to gain royal favor. “Problem-Wisdom: Thai Art in the 1990s,” an exhibition at Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern…

COLLECTIVE ACTIONS AND EVERYDAY GESTURES Thanks to Hollywood blockbusters and the History Channel, the atrocities that befell most of Europe in two World Wars are well known. The same cannot be said of Asia, where Japan pursued an aggressive form of colonization on remote Pacific islands and across much of the continent. Though two atomic bombings by the United States in Japan ended World War II in 1945, they hardly brought peace. Authoritarian regimes took hold in many nations. No single version of this history is widely accepted across Asia. With that as a departure point, Myungji Bae of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea curated a mesmerizing exhibition of 38 artists and collectives in “Reenacting History: Collective Actions and Everyday Gestures,” looking at performance art…

BACK TO THE END For Yin Xiuzhen’s most recent solo exhibition in her hometown, the artist took over Pace’s Beijing gallery with the show “Back to the End.” Yin’s characteristic iconography and materials—butter, concrete and secondhand clothing, for instance—have defined much of her career, and allow her to utilize a highly developed, personal visual language in the service of offering pertinent insights into our sociopolitical milieu, which she suggests is characterized by angst, disillusionment and danger, though sanctuary may be available. These ideas are also advanced in new creations within Yin’s practice, including the previously unexhibited video installation Mosquitoes (2010) and a number of ceramic objects. A toppled, nearly three-meter-tall winged angel, titled Message Undelivered (2017), with stainless-steel rods protruding ominously from its back, was prominently placed near the gallery…

FRESH DEWDROP It rained on New Year’s Eve in Singapore. Up until mid-January, the city was overcast with a damp gloom that has colored most encounters. Chen Wei’s solo exhibition “Fresh Dewdrop” at Ota Fine Arts, tucked away in the arts enclave Gillman Barracks, was equally melancholy. The show was titled after Chen’s photograph of the same name. Taken in 2017, Fresh Dewdrop depicts a nondescript sidewalk with a single missing tile. Gold paint fills the hexagonal void, and its swirl of watery light, bringing to mind a miniature spiral galaxy, pulls the viewer’s eye toward the center of the frame. In more immediate terms, the paint fills a void with a simple material that shimmers, proffering understated beauty in imperfection. Chen’s style, as seen in Fresh Dewdrop as well…

MECCA JOURNEYS Moving between the sacred and secular, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater’s photographs, videos and installation works at the Brooklyn Museum situate the city of Mecca as both a historical pilgrimage site for Muslims and a locus of contemporary urban development. Adopting a chiefly documentarian approach, Mater records the influx of international believers as they travel through Mecca and its surrounding locales for the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca obligatory for all Muslims, whose annual date is specified by the Islamic calendar) and ’umrah (an optional visit to the holy city at any time), and juxtaposes these crowds with intimate images of construction workers and Mecca’s residents at home. The wide range of photographs, taken between 2011 and 2016, are culled from Mater’s project, Desert of Pharan: Unofficial Histories Behind…

Keiichi Tanaami was born in Tokyo, three years before the onset of the Second World War. As a child, he was barraged with the sights, sounds and smells of bomb blasts, machine-gun fire, scorched corpses and neighborhoods aflame—he lived with the fear of his entire home city being leveled in an instant. In one event, the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945, 300 US heavy bombers dropped around 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs on the eastern half of the Japanese capital, killing an estimated 100,000 and leaving roughly one million without a home. Later, in the 1960s—a decade that Tanaami has described as “full of stimulus and adventure”—the young artist was bombarded with a very different type of imagery: Pop art by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein; colorized…