Innholdsfortegnelse for Almanac 2018 i ArtAsiaPacific

ArtAsiaPacific|Almanac 2018

CONTRIBUTORS

SHAWON AKAND is an artist and curator based in Dhaka. He co-founded the Crack International Art Camp in Bangladesh, and is author of An Outline of Bangladesh Folk Art and Tendency of Modern Art in Bangladesh. POJAI AKRATANAKUL is the project director at Sansab Museum of Contemporary Art in Bangkok—a new museum set to open in 2020. PEDRO DE ALMEIDA is the program manager at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia, and editor of 4A Papers. YUSCHAV ARLY is a freelance illustrator based in Bali, Indonesia. He creates realistic digital portraits as part of cutting-edge campaigns for global brands. FRANCES ARNOLD, before recently relocating to Europe, spent eight years in Shanghai, China, where she covered the contemporary art scene, museums and regional art market. MIRNA BAMIEH is an…

4 min

ArtAsiaPacific|Almanac 2018

FRIENDS ABROAD

New York’s Swiss Institute ventures far beyond Switzerland The founding of New York’s Swiss Institute was an expression of national pride, much more about tearing down boundaries than upholding them. Its founders are an intrepid group of Swiss patrons based in New York, who were inspired by the fact that other nations had their own outposts—Deutsche Institute, Japan Society—for cultural exchange in the city. They thought to do the same, and share work that was being made in Switzerland with New York. The broad sweep of Swiss culture that constituted the early days of Swiss Institute reflects the heterogeneous programming and topics that audiences still expect from the US-based kunsthalle today: cinema, dance, music, literary events and, of course, visual art. The key difference between Swiss Institute and other like-minded…

5 min

ArtAsiaPacific|Almanac 2018

Coast to Coast

Throughout the Asia Pacific, unforeseen reshufflings were seen at the top. In Hong Kong, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, which oversees the future home of M+, named Henry Tang Ying-yen as board chairman. Claire Shea joined the port city’s art scene after becoming Para Site’s deputy director. John Tain and Özge Ersoy joined Asia Art Archive as new head of research and public programs lead, respectively. Several announcements came as a surprise. Artist and critic Wang Nanming took up the directorship of Shanghai Himalayas Museum, succeeding Yongwoo Lee. On September 1, eight months after June Yap left the Singapore Pavilion’s curatorial team, she stepped into her new role as curatorial director at the Singapore Art Museum. Fallout from the presidential impeachment of Park Geun-hye has shaken the Korean Peninsula’s…

3 min

ArtAsiaPacific|Almanac 2018

Out in the Open

Notions of disruption imbued public displays in 2017. In New York, the Public Art Fund organized a blowout 40th-anniversary “Commercial Break,” in which 23 artists were invited to “hack” digital billboards across the city, including, in Times Square, Korakrit Arunanondchai’s clips of his grandparents and postelection protests in Thailand. Separately, at Brooklyn Bridge Park in May, Anish Kapoor installed a 26-foot-diameter roaring water vortex. In October, Ai Weiwei opened the multi-work public exhibition “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.” Also in New York, the biennial Performa in November saw Eiko Otake enact a series of movements that respond to post-nuclear-disaster Fukushima in areas of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Met Breuer and the Met Cloisters. At three new Second Avenue subway stations, finally completed on January 1, 2017, are commissioned…

Even before we had laid down our red pencils and signed off on the final proofs of this year’s Almanac, it occurred to us that real closure was impossible. As print editors around the world know all too well, proofreading can often feel futile, not just because human error is inevitable, but also because the world we track is constantly changing. As our cover and the design concept for the 2018 Almanac reveals, the world is an unfinished symphony of shifting layers, a fantasia of patterns, shapes and colors. For more than a decade, ArtAsiaPacific has published an annual compendium of the year in art from across Asia and the Pacific to the Middle East. Offering a record of the art world in 53 countries at a specific moment in…

4 min

ArtAsiaPacific|Almanac 2018

Heaven Can Wait

Many artists say they want audiences to interpret artworks for themselves, which is fine, until that certain viewer comes along and uncovers something objectionable that rattles the cage of their narrow worldview. It is often these same kind of viewers—whether security officials or freelancing collaborators of illiberal regimes—who are quick to yank frames off the walls, as was the case with an exhibition in June of Harit Srikhao’s photographic works in Bangkok. Thai soldiers stormed into Gallery Ver and confiscated three artworks, including the artist’s ironic depiction of 60-odd uniformed women wearing identical gold masks in front of a picture-frame-like archway to the skies. Was Srikhao’s depiction of Thai-smile-style mass conformity perhaps a little too spot-on? It was also hyperreality that drew religious-nationalist ire of the Turkish variety to a…

2 min

4 min

ArtAsiaPacific|Almanac 2018

States of Urgency

Under governments with authoritarian tendencies, cultural figures have increasingly found themselves targets of both the state and emboldened rogue actors. In South Korea, as President Park Geun-hye was impeached on March 10 following scandals entailing corruption and cronyism, news surfaced that her administration had compiled a cultural blacklist with more than 9,000 names of artists and figures. Cho Yoon-sun, Park’s culture minister, was allegedly responsible for maintaining the list, while Kim Ki-choon, former chief of staff, had drawn up the original roster. The two were arrested in January with charges of abuse of power and coercion. In July, Cho was acquitted of the two charges, and was sentenced to one year in prison for lying under oath. Labeled as the main culprit, Kim was sentenced to three years. Five other…

6 min

3 min

ArtAsiaPacific|Almanac 2018

Between the Lines

Do you prefer more pictures, or more text, when choosing a book? When selecting a shortlist of 12 books to feature in these pages, the criteria becomes increasingly abstract year after year, as the idea of what constitutes an art book, or, a book that discusses visual art, becomes ever looser. We have here volumes, such as two academic books in which critical theory and essayistic writing provide clear analyses of art scenes. On the other end of the spectrum, we have books that are in fact continuations of artworks: Yazan Khalili’s Scouting for Locations, with photographs and text relating to his ongoing project; and Simryn Gill and Michael Taussig’s Becoming Palm, a collaborative project that reveals each contributor’s ethnographic studies of oil palm, rendered in images, lyrical prose or…

11 min