Innholdsfortegnelse for 109 (Jul/Aug 2018) i ArtAsiaPacific

As an art city, Taichung has been on the rise. To rectify the city’s image of violence, perpetuated by a surge in organized-crime-related deaths and broad-daylight kidnappings since the 1980s, the government in recent decades has been investing in an alternate image of arts, design and culture. One way they have gone about doing this is through gentrification. In terms of housing, government-led programs have promoted the renovation of older residences throughout the city, with an aim to appeal to the city’s petit bourgeois. Public spaces and programming have also been given a facelift: for the last 15 years, the annual Jazz Festival has helped boost the city’s image, taking place on the communal, grassy lawns of the almost-four-kilometer boulevard, Calligraphy Greenway. However, the planning and restructuring of other major…

Call him naive, but Ahmed Mater sincerely believes art has the power to change the world. He believed it in the 1990s, when he was working as a community physician in the small mountain city of Abha, located in southwestern Saudi Arabia, and toying with the thought of becoming a professional artist. He believed it when his fledgling artistic career began to attract international attention during the decade-long roadshow of Saudi contemporary art produced by the Edge of Arabia initiative, which he co-founded in 2003 with British artist Stephen Stapleton and Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem. Certainly he believed it in 2011, when he moved to Jeddah and, with his wife, the artist Arwa Alneami, established Pharan Studio, a platform that continues to mount under-the-radar exhibitions with a changing cast of…

1995 AAP 5: “Nalini Malani: Missives from the Streets,” by Kamala Kapoor At the time when global art was first taking root, Nalini Malani was fast gaining visibility among curators both at home and throughout Asia. In issue 5 of ArtAsiaPacific, Mumbai-based critic and curator Kamala Kapoor conducted a lengthy interview with Malani, discussing topics from the narrative traditions of Indian art to the artist’s portrayals of human oppression and devastation—whether in the form of sectarian riots, imperialism or environmental destruction. The interview concludes with a discussion of Malani’s Medea Theater (1991–96), an ambitious, four-part multimedia project that combined painting, installation, performance and video art. Initially conceived for Max Muller Bhavan Bombay with Indian actress and director Alaknanda Samarth, the performances teased out Malani’s ongoing preoccupations with oppressors and the…

Patricia Piccinini’s art is a feverish dream of silicone flesh, gaping orifices and mutant beasts. The Melbourne-based hyperrealist sculptor seems to take pleasure in pressing buttons. Her works engender creeping nausea as much they pull you in with theatrical flair. The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art has worked with Piccinini for the last four years on “Curious Affection,” her largest solo exhibition to date. The survey marked the first time that the entire ground floor of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) has been dedicated to a single Australian artist. In many ways, the exhibition deserved recognition. Piccinini is a female artist succeeding on the international stage; her Melbourne studio is one of Australia’s most technically proficient and profitable; the exhibition’s curation and presentation was impressive. Yet,…

In planetary terms, the world we inhabit is but a minuscule speck. But that doesn’t stop Ni Youyu from affirming humanity’s centrality in the universe through his creations, as showcased in his solo exhibition at Perrotin, Hong Kong. While some works cast our attempts at controlling principles of nature as futile, the show lent a touching significance to human experience and endeavor. In Dust (Fog I) and (Fog II) (both 2017), we see the breakdown of a boundless subject matter into manageable, numerical units for easier human consumption. Ni imposes grids over black-and-white clusters of stars and nebulae, depicted with near-photorealist accuracy, disrupting the sightlines of viewers who might otherwise be swallowed by the starry expanses. Further accentuating the human handiwork were the smaller printed images next to Fog I…

The group show “1918” took as its starting point the establishment of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic 100 years ago, and the country’s complex history, from the takeover of the Bolsheviks and its being annexed into the Soviet Union in 1920, to the modern-day state’s independence in 1991. Intertwined with the country’s tumultuous past is the question of identity. Featuring multimedia works by 11 emerging and established local artists, the exhibition, presented by Gazelli Art House in Baku, explored the multiple, morphing facets of being Azeri—a discussion that had previously been blotted out by the Soviets. Highlights included the undated textile work, Sheep, by renowned artist Chingiz Babayev, who explores carpets—a key, well-established art form—as carriers of cultural memory and knowledge. More importantly, Babayev suggests that traditional motifs have shifting meanings…

German expressionist, great late colonial painter, modernist pioneer. Latiff Mohidin has been framed as all these things, due, in part, to the artist’s attitude toward his identity. He readily admits: “The critics gave me numerous personifications: individualistic, romantic, nomadic, pessimist, existentialist. To every label, I said yes.” However, in his iconic oil-on-canvas “Pago Pago” series (1960–69), we see how this all-embracing attitude is actually an act of resistance against polarizing anti-colonial discussions and the ideological turmoils of the Cold War. Created during Mohidin’s training at the Hochschule fur bildende Kunste in Berlin, as well as on journeys through the Southeast Asian tropics, the works feature natural and architectural tropes found throughout Malaysia-born Mohidin’s home regions, conveying instead the artist’s proclivity for a syncretic, regional consciousness. The series was the subject…

It wasn’t until I came to the penultimate page in Michael Findlay’s book Seeing Slowly that I understood why reading it made me uncomfortable. Featuring a photograph of James Rosenquist’s massive painting, Celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Eleanor Roosevelt (1998), these last pages recount the story of the work, which had been destroyed by a studio fire in 2009, but before that—and notably for the very first and last time ever—it had been shown at Acquavella’s booth at Art Basel in 2006. Up until that very moment, I, along with the book, had been treading water in a time warp back in the Modernist era. But in these final pages, I awoke in 2018. I find many similarities between Findlay,…

A display of posters memorializing slain Gazans at a Jerusalem art school has stirred controversy over freedom of expression. On May 16, a series of black-and-white posters designed by roughly 25 anonymous Palestinian-Israeli students were put up around the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Bearing the Arabic names of the 62 Palestinian protesters killed by Israeli army forces at the Gaza security barrier on May 14–15, the display was organized to raise awareness of the death toll from the 30,000-strong protest against the ongoing Gaza blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt, and the relocation of the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Separate posters, featuring a map of Gaza, read “Not Your Toy,” a reference to the Israeli winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. Factions…

“Eustaquio considers herself a painter with a sculptor’s sensibilities: canvases are objects to be made.” At one point during my tour of Patricia Perez Eustaquio’s studio in April, the artist brought out two rolls of mulberry silk, one white and the other gray, both soft as woven clouds. This was after I held one of her crocheted doilies and a fragment of stiff silk cloth, which she had sculpted using glue instead of the usual resin epoxy, in one of her many experiments that manipulate fabric as a way to illuminate its shape and form. Canvases, tapestries and huge graphite drawings surrounded us in the tidy studio, where thin, white fabric was pinned to its windows as a makeshift curtain. Eustaquio, who spent her childhood dabbling in crafts, has always…

It has always been possible for artists, at least at some stage in their career, to become benefactors and ideological patrons of the prevailing social and economic order. Instances of this are Pablo Picasso’s return to classicism entre-deux-guerres, the bourgeoisified search for authenticity of Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer,1 or the now common relationship between contemporary artists and creative industries. This latter phenomenon has gradually turned the possibility of complacency into unexceptional reality, and is the farthest we have come from what Walter Benjamin, less than a century ago, still thought was an “impossible place” for any artist or intellectual to occupy.2 One upshot of this complacency is that no one tries to preserve even the semblance of high culture as a utopian realm for imagining an alternative future and…

Since its inception in 1984, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain has served as a pioneering model for arts patronage in the corporate sphere. With a permanent collection comprised of primarily commission-based works by more than 350 artists of 50 different nationalities, the Fondation has maintained a commitment to supporting to artists, while sustaining an innovative and rigorous approach to their exhibition programming. “A Beautiful Elsewhere” at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art showcased 100 works by 30 participants from the collection—nearly all of which have been featured in past exhibitions mounted by the Fondation. Besides visual artists, the show featured scientists, philosophers, architects, designers and researchers, evincing the unique, multidisciplinary vision that has shaped the collection. The specific cross-section of thoughtfully selected objects instilled the mandate of discovery and reflection,…

As a rule, histories of photography reference the Western canon: the iconographies of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen or Henri Cartier-Bresson are typically cited as fundamental orthodoxy. It was while teaching a course on photography, however, that Thai contemporary photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom questioned whether there might exist Thai resources to complement this conventional pedagogy. Photography was introduced to Siam in 1845, and its practice immediately became a perquisite of the elite; common people were unable to afford cameras or film (nor, according to Manit, was it likely that they considered their humble lives worth recording). Studies of early photography in Thailand revolve around the photographic dabblings of its kings. Manit embarked on a search for photographers practicing after the country’s dissolution of absolute monarchy in 1932, and to date has identified…

I grew up in Istanbul in the 1990s. My family did not regularly discuss politics, so what I remember from that period are mostly big gatherings with family friends and a feeling of community. The first major survey of Aydan Murtezaoğlu and Bülent Şangar, prominent figures who shaped the ’90s Turkish contemporary art scene, presented as the reopening exhibition of SALT Beyoğlu in Istanbul, prompted a reconsideration of these glossed-over memories. Prints, photographs and installations from the ’90s and early 2000s addressed a period that was in reality marked with the tightening of the state’s grip over citizens, enacted in the name of safeguarding the new neoliberal economic system; weakening workers’ rights; as well as the unsolved murders and kidnappings of Kurdish citizens who had been labeled terrorists. Yet, underlying…

In a painted canvas or sculpted form, visual balance is achieved in its most basic terms by the consonance of shapes and colors. The differences between these components may create tension and, hence, meaning, but one way or another, they are ultimately resolved, and from this arises harmony. The successful negation of meaning in minimalist art, then, lies in taking symmetry as a starting point—beginning with a balance so complete that no tension, or meaning, can arise. Although it is important not to conflate the ideas and intentions of Western minimalists with the often very different ones held by artists working in South Korea and Japan throughout the 20th century, in terms of aesthetic and effect, minimalism is a viable idiomatic starting point from which to approach Seung-taek Lee’s works—presented…

Chills ran down my spine as I peered into the vitrine positioned toward the end of the late Tang Chang’s solo exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, so beautifully and adeptly curated by Orianna Cacchione. On a faded sheet of paper was the word “gunman,” handwritten in English, and repeated in a pattern that resembles a monument. In the top right-hand corner, the word “democracy” appeared; at the bottom right was the date 1978. The Thai artist was referring to the suppression of the student protest against the return of Thanom Kittikachorn, an exiled military dictator, which had taken place two years earlier in Bangkok. That event, known as the October 1976 massacre, had led to the deaths of many at the hands of the Thai military. Yet, reading…

At the time of writing this article, I was in Taiwan and fond memories of my artist friend, Chen Shun-Chu, had resurfaced. Shun-Chu was soft-spoken, with a gentle smile, squarish face and big, black eyes that are difficult to forget. I had known him for close to 20 years; we met up frequently in Taipei and Hong Kong. We shared similarities and differences in many conversations. Unfortunately, our exchanges ended when Shun-Chu tragically passed away in 2014. Shun-Chu was a well-known Taiwanese contemporary photographer who drew on the concept of “home” in his artistic practice. Death, memory, family, home and identity were themes that reoccurred in in his work. Although he studied painting when he was at university, he considered himself a photographer. In my mind, he was a master…

With new art fairs popping up left, right and center, existing brands face the challenge of staying relevant and distinct from the competition. Art Busan and Frieze New York returned this year with refreshed programs and, in the latter case, a revamped layout. However, fewer high-end sales at Frieze New York left a number of galleries wondering if participation was worth the rental cost. By contrast, galleries seem more willing to show at Chinese fairs, with the inaugural editions of Art Chengdu and Beijing’s JINGART attracting positive participant feedback. Busan The seventh edition of Art Busan (April 19–22) welcomed an unprecedented 60,000 visitors. In terms of its lineup, however, the fair has been shrinking—there were 161 participating galleries in 2018, down from 170 galleries last year and 191 in 2016.…

The traditional Cambodian myth of Moni Mekhala begins with a contest to see who can collect a glass of morning dew the fastest. As the legend goes, the sage Lok Ta Moni Eysei had set the task for his three best pupils: Ream Eyso, a powerful storm demon; Vorachhun, a god of the land; and Moni Mekhala, the goddess of the seas. Relying not on her great speed or strength, but rather her cunning, Moni Mekhala won easily by laying her shawl out overnight to collect the droplets, and then wringing it out and filling the glass at dawn. Pleased by the efforts of his students, Lok Ta Moni Eysei proudly bestowed magical gifts to them all: Ream Eyso received a diamond axe, Vorachhun a magical dagger and Moni Mekhala…

MARI KATAYAMA Pliant fabric limbs and loose skin tangle in a heap in Mari Katayama’s photography series “Bystander” (2016). Exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art Gunma in 2017, the photos show the artist herself modeling an eerie, human-esque creature of handmade prosthetics. Sewn with fabric printed with images of hands—from an all-female, traditional puppet theater troupe—the soft sculpture sometimes envelopes the artist’s torso, or sprouts from her waist. In performative self-portraits such as these, Katayama carves out a private space for fantasies staged amid remote environments such as beaches, islands or in a domestic lair, using her own body as an artistic vessel to examine tropes of feminine identity, hybridity, narcissism and prosthetics. Born with tibial hemimelia—a rare congenital condition that prevents the lower leg from fully developing—Katayama had…

The year 2006 marked a major transition in Haegue Yang’s career. For her solo exhibition at Basis voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) in Utrecht, Netherlands, she created her first installation with venetian blinds and indoor appliances such as standing fans, artificial scent emitters, strobe lights, electric heaters and humidifiers. The dynamic, autonomous system of that work, Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Version Utrecht (2006), and others that followed, can be read as a metaphor for a human or a social body whose elements are not always in harmony. Installed with the power cables plainly visible, the work is also extremely literal, as it wryly deconstructs the environmental conditions of indoor spaces (like museums or malls) that are designed to be “neutral” or to disappear. The anthropomorphic mise-en-scene became a hallmark of…

Based on examinations of war, violence, nationhood and governance across the globe, the artworks in Zhang Yue’s “If I Could” can feel more like pieces of broad-based investigative research than traditional art objects. The parts of the show that stood out were those that—with Cui Cancan’s innovative and careful curation—revealed Zhang’s marked dedication to his chosen subjects, and that came out of the artist’s personal experiences. In this sense, the first of the exhibition’s six sections, “Gun,” was slow to hit stride. There were bullet-hole-ridden paper targets plastered on the walls, created by participants invited by Zhang for “Firing” Project (2016–). On a white canvas, a table of results ranks the shooters’ marksmanship. These paper targets framed painted copies of gun licenses from various points in Chinese history and pen-on-paper…

Multimedia artist Ahmad Fuad Osman timed his first exhibition in Malaysia in more than a decade to coincide with the run-up to the country’s 14th general elections. As one of many citizens hoping for reform in a nation that had never seen change in government since its independence from British colonial rule in 1957, he felt the need to call for political engagement, as well as mark a unique moment in time. Amid the finger-pointing, vote-buying and online outrage, which had begun even before the campaign period, “Primitive” offered a sober critique of the corruption of politics and society, placing viewers squarely within the discussion. The exhibition was no simple harangue against the criminality and corruption of the regime that held power for over 60 years. The works spoke on…

The Damascus-born, Berlin-based artist Marwan Kassab-Bachi (1934–2016)—commonly known as Marwan—is renowned for bridging Arabic and Western artistic styles. Galerie Michael Haas’s showcase celebrated the pioneering painter, spotlighting a series of his canvases from the 1970s to the 2000s. Four early works greeted visitors to the gallery. Stillleben II (“Still Life,” 1974) depicts fruit and kitchen objects perched on a table, rendered with nebulous daubs of burnt sienna, cornflower blue and jade greens. Despite the work’s simple, almost mundane subject, its details present a vision of a world slightly off kilter. The shades of green that make up an apple, for example, are just a little too blue, the table is tilted forward, and the folds of the tablecloth are unnaturally strong and stiff. On the right of the painting, a…

In Hiwa K’s “Blind as the Mother Tongue” at New York’s New Museum, the artist escorts viewers through the political upheavals and social fabric of Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, where he was born. Titled after the 2017 video Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), which debuted at Documenta 14 in Athens, the exhibition emphasized showing over telling, as well as the artist’s commitment to vernacular knowledge and self-education as a politics that serves the underprivileged and marginalized. “It’s important to have a very simple language if you want people to understand and interact with what you’re doing. I happen to have no other choice, as I don’t speak any other language,” Hiwa K said in a 2017 interview with Ocula. This Lemon Tastes of Apple (2011), a video of a…

A catalog essay accompanying the exhibition “In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art” cites Edmund Burke’s oft-repeated aphorism: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” But, if the 125 works in the exhibition are any indication, it seems that Iranian artists who know their modern history—which is a complicated one, burrowed deep in the cultural psyche, beginning with the fraught golden age of the Safavid Empire and the enduring after-effects of the 1979 Iranian Revolution—are particularly inclined to find themselves caught in patterns of repetition. A central wall in the introductory room displayed a row of works that alternated depictions of the ancient mythical hero Rostam and the monarch Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar, who ruled between 1848 and 1896.…

The area around Emre Huner’s Istanbul studio is a sea of electrical hardware and lighting stores, occupying dilapidated, exhaust-stained buildings that surround islands of the city’s stalled gentrification, like the nearby mixed-used venue Suma Han. During the day, the streets on the hillside from Şişhane down toward Karakoy are flooded with merchants, jammed with cargo vans and littered with dollies, as stacks of industrial products are endlessly loaded and unloaded. It was mid-afternoon in early May when I visited Huner, who called out to me from the entrance of an incongruous blue-tiled building, and led me up a dusty staircase into a clean, freshly painted space, no more than 30 square meters. He had only occupied the studio for three or four months, he explained by way of apology and…