Innholdsfortegnelse for 118 (May/Jun 2020) i ArtAsiaPacific

Untitled (Placebo) (1991) was the first work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres that I saw as a photograph when I was a sculpture student at the University of the Philippines. Five hundred kilos of silver-wrapped candies were laid out like a carpet on the floor of a large and mostly empty space. Later on I read that he was thinking about the mass of medication consumed by people dying of AIDS, including his partner Ross. I can’t remember who showed me that image and therefore introduced me to Gonzalez-Torres’s practice—and I am using the word practice but it might be the wrong word, because his works are really events. With him, what should be messy slurries of language, materiality, histories, and social relations come together brilliantly in forms that are both precise…

Shota Yamauchi SAGAMIHARA Though we have an abundance of tools that allow us to connect with one another, loneliness can still plague us. Japanese new-media artist Shota Yamauchi addresses this issue by bringing to life fictional worlds populated by an assembly of characters. Growing up, he often dreamed about living in role-playing games such as Final Fantasy. During his postgraduate studies, he picked up skills such as photo scanning, which facilitated his creation of his own virtual companions. These uncanny figures eventually became the protagonists in his interactive VR work ZONE EATER (2017), first exhibited at Tokyo’s NTT InterCommunication Center. The participant can choose to step into the bodies of the inhabitants in Yamauchi’s game, possessing them as a phantom. Yet donning VR goggles and groping around the exhibition space…

South Korea’s modern art history largely unfolded at a remove from Western art movements, forestalling the possibility of contemporaneity with the international avantgarde. The development of Korean video art, however, was subject to a relatively short lag time with the West and thus responded more closely to the methodologies that informed its emergence outside Korea. After its introduction in the early 1970s, the use of this new means of expression saw exponential growth in Korea over the subsequent decades before becoming a mainstream mode of contemporary art in the 1990s. Held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, “Korean Video Art from 1970s to 1990s: Time Image Apparatus” explored the range of aesthetic, technical, and conceptual approaches that propelled the development of the art form…

At the tangled heart of “Railtrack Songmaps Roosting Post 2” were birdsongs and stories from Tanglin Halt, one of many old neighborhoods in Singapore slated for en-bloc redevelopment in recent years. Among the earliest public housing estates, Tanglin Halt is home to thickets of nonhuman and human histories, gradually eroded by the city-state’s incessant appetite for redevelopment. On the neighborhood’s fringes, the disused railway tracks—one of the last infrastructural reminders of Singapore’s pre-separation bonds with Malaysia—have been removed, while the gardens that once mushroomed in these liminal patches have been tamed into sleek lookout decks and trails. But to merely glean anti-developmentalist advocacy from “Roosting Post 2” would miss the point. Rather, by foregrounding interspecies conversations through moving image, sound, and installation, the exhibition revealed the polyphonies in human-nonhuman relations.…

Hiroki Tsukuda’s second solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery, “They Live,” was named after John Carpenter’s 1988 cult movie, in which the protagonist sees the rich as hideous aliens whenever he wears his sunglasses. Like its namesake, “They Live” unveiled altered realities and consciousness to viewers. The exhibition had three distinct yet interrelated parts: large wall-based compositions, portraits that dangled from steel-pipe scaffolding, and installations consisting of several small drawings and natural materials. What united them was Tsukuda’s approach—monochromatic, collaged drawings in acrylic frames that in turn are screen-printed with intricate, digitally crafted designs—giving the exhibition a uniformity and coherence. His works are immaculately neat, yet also chaotic and entropic. For instance, installed on one of several plywood walls erected throughout the gallery—as if transforming areas into drawing boards—was Abyssal Grid…

As countries scramble to contain the spread of Covid-19, they are also grappling with the economic fallout from the pandemic. With shuttered museums and canceled fairs and auctions, the arts sector is among many to take a serious hit. A number of governments in the Asia-Pacific region have mobilized funds to support their arts communities. In mid-February, Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture announced a TWD 15 billion (USD 495 million) relief package for those working in visual and performing arts, film, cultural heritage, and publishing. Hong Kong’s HKD 30 billion (USD 3.9 billion) Anti-Epidemic Fund includes HKD 150 million (USD 19.3 million) for the arts. As part of Singapore’s sweeping stimulus packages announced on March 26, cultural industries received a SGD 55 million (USD 38.6 million) boost on top of the…

MF HUSAIN Padmini Mohini Shankhini c. 1969, oil on canvas, 64.7 × 124.4 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s New York. With cultural capitals such as New York and London becoming national epicenters of the Covid-19 pandemic, the art world’s auction calendar has been reshuffled repeatedly as auction houses try to decide the safest course of action. Sotheby’s and Christie’s have also furloughed hundreds of employees and slashed pay to make up the shortfall in revenues. Meanwhile, Christie’s Dubai nixed its March sale of modern and contemporary Middle East art, consolidating it with the house’s annual London sale in that category in October, citing insufficient high-quality consignments as the reason. NEW YORK Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art sale was the only one of its New York Asia Week suite to take…

Since 2015, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe has been producing art under the banner of Yawnghwe Office in Exile, a fictive museum he founded while searching for alternatives to the histories propagated by state institutions. Focused on unravelling suppressed traumas and recovering personal and collective identities from the neglected margins, the painter has an antagonistic relationship to hegemonic state narratives, one that is rooted in his familial past. Now based in the Netherlands, Yawnghwe has spent most of his life in exile. He was born in 1971 in a tent on the grounds of a Shan State Army camp. The surrounding jungle was part of the contested Shan territories, which today constitutes Myanmar. Before their annexation, the Shan states defended their autonomy and land as well as the survival of their languages and…

BRIE RUAIS American artist Brie Ruais creates abstract ceramic sculptures from clay equal to her own weight, which she spreads out dynamically, allowing the material itself to guide her in terms of its final shape and size. On the occasion of the artist’s first institutional solo show at Houston’s Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, “Movement at the Edge of the Land,” the exhibition’s curator Frauke V. Josenhans and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts curator Jodi Throckmorton, as well as artist Martha Tuttle, discussed their perspectives on Ruais’s practice. In Brie Ruais’s formidable sculptures, the motion of a body in space is materialized. She scrapes, excavates, tears, and spreads clay on the ground into oftentimes large-scale forms that are then fired. Though abstract in appearance, the…

Martha Tuttle is an artist based in Brooklyn. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, “Consume me.”—Virginia Woolf, The Waves In her studio I asked Brie if a person can be healed by the land. We spoke of this quietly, shyly. A hard question because it admits to the possibility of needing something outside of human creation. Yes, she said, because I dissolve into it. In Brie Ruais’s recent works, clay both marks earth and place, emphasized by outward beacons. Plant residue, dirt, an aerial view of Nevada over which Cycling (2020) is placed—these sculptures are made within a place, not a site. Brie needs the physicality of material and land in a way that makes her work less “about landscape” than…

Staged in dialogue with a survey of the Italian Arte Povera movement at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, the Patrick D. Flores-curated exhibition “Cue From Life Itself: Filipino Artists Transform the Everyday” took as its starting point artist and academic Brenda Fajardo’s monograph The Aesthetics of Poverty: A Rationale in Designing for Philippine Theater (1987). In it, Fajardo articulates the “sense of beauty” belonging to the materially deprived, a “sensitivity to the world” expressed through resourceful formal choices that are conditioned by their natural, cultural, and social environments. From this emerges “a new art” that authentically “expresses life which happens to be poor.” As such, works of bricolaged detritus abounded in the show. Kristoffer Ardena’s large textile collages recalling tarpaulin signage and Poklong Anading’s upcycled-fabric tent surrounded by concrete rubble…

One might be forgiven for mistaking the large black metal bin outside the entrance of Das Weisse Haus as nothing more than another on-street clothing donation bin. However, its lettering betrays a more subversive purpose: “Worried about your Nazi grandfather’s hat in the attic? Unsure what to do about it? Too ashamed to sell it, too emotional to burn it? I have a solution!” Withdrawing Adolf Hitler from a Private Space (2018)—a provocative project involving the collection and incineration of items from the Nazi period—was part of Japanese artist Yoshinori Niwa’s first solo exhibition in Austria, given the equally provocative title: “AB 1. OKTOBER 2017: VERBOT DER GESICHTSVERHULLUNG IN ÖSTERREICH” (“FROM 1 OCTOBER 2017: FACE COVER BAN IN AUSTRIA”). Niwa repurposed the name of the controversial Austrian law, known colloquially…

Lu Yang’s professional life unfolds almost exclusively in the digital realm, where, for over a decade, he has been creating vivid animations and computer games. Populating these cyberspaces are eccentric characters influenced by Japanese anime, Hindu polytheism, and various subcultures, who flit between deadpan violence and understated humor as they engage in battles, and, at times, dance-offs. Yet, every interstitial spaceship has a dock, so to speak; in November, I met with Lu in his Shanghai studio—the beating heart of his virtual universe. Lu’s studio is also his apartment where he lives with his husband, the performance artist, dramaturge, and director Chen Tianzhou, whose own artistic activities, produced partly under the theatrical collective Asian Dope Boys, are a hybrid mashup of absurdist dramas and techno raves. Their duplex is in…

California’s Bay Area is rife with contradictions. The region’s reputation as the land of opportunity harks back to the Gold Rush, when San Francisco grew from a small settlement of about 200 residents in 1846 to a boomtown of around 36,000 by 1852. As a result of settlers flocking to the frontier, however, 80 percent of the state’s Indigenous communities were wiped out by disease, displacement, and genocide. Today, the Bay Area has come full circle. The Silicon Valley Gold Rush, ushered in by technology giants such as Hewlett Packard, continues to displace communities: a report from 2010 predicted that the city’s Black population would decrease dramatically from 13.4 percent of the total population in 1970 to 3.9 percent in 2010. Artists in the Bay Area have resisted this development.…

Covid-19 is proving Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. In Hong Kong, real-estate developers are wringing their hands over how to maintain the status quo: charging sky-high rents. One of the most marked-up plots on Hong Kong island—if not in the world—is the Pedder Building, the art world’s favorite colonial-style enclave in the heart of Central business district. During its peak in 2015, Pedder’s owner was charging USD 1 million per month for its ground floor space to the faux collegiate fashion brand Abercrombie & Fitch. Upstairs, galleries were also paying near-extortionist rates. Now, after years of grumbling, the galleries are stretched thin trying to transact while also investing heavily into impressive online viewing rooms. Meanwhile, Pedder’s landlord—the estate of the late Henry Fok—has been trying to broker “discounts,”…

MANILA Days before the opening of Art Fair Philippines (AFP), the country’s largest art event, the inaugural ALT Philippines (February 14–16), co-organized by ten galleries that broke away from AFP, opened at the SMX Convention Center. A popular attraction presented by the Drawing Room (Manila) was Derek Tumala’s video installation Pure Impermanence (2020), which flashes more than 900 images across ten vertically oriented screens to imitate how photos are viewed on mobile phones. Other notable works included Lesley-Anne Cao’s engraved marble slabs at the artist-run MO_Space (Manila), and Josephine Turalba’s mahjong set, Todas (2019), at Galleria Duemila (Manila). While some exhibitors found success at ALT, selling out their booths by the end of the first day, a second edition of the showcase has yet to be announced. In its eighth…

Jodi Throckmorton is curator of contemporary art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia. She recently organized Rina Banerjee’s midcareer retrospective, which debuted at PAFA, and is currently showing at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. The show will subsequently travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham. Major publications include Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World (2019) and Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India (2015). Throckmorton is currently working on a retrospective of the works of Joan Semmel. Born in 1982 in Southern California, Brooklyn-based Brie Ruais received her BFA from New York University in 2004 and her MFA from New York’s Columbia University School of the…

The past decade of veteran ceramicist Liu Jianhua’s practice has seen a gradual turn away from works laden with references to sociocultural contexts, refocusing instead on abstraction and the materiality of his chosen medium. Liu’s “no meaning, no content” approach leads to inventive, purely formal explorations of ceramic art, the basis of his latest solo survey, “1342°C,” curated by Feng Boyi and Wang Jing at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal. In the main gallery, visitors encountered many seemingly mundane objects possessing a deceptively realistic quality. Scattered around the spacious hall were withered tree leaves swept into a heap, long ropes hanging from the wall, and sandpiles arranged in a grid on the floor. Respectively titled Fallen Leaves (2011–13), Rope (2012–15), and Sand (2012–19), these sculptures are in fact masterfully rendered porcelain…

Contemporary art frequently expresses the zeitgeist, with artists taking on the role of truth-teller or even diviner. Chinese-American artist Tishan Hsu began making work that approximated present-day screen culture back in the 1980s—decades before smartphones became commonplace. His uncanny clairvoyance in picturing our current technological intertwinement was so avantgarde at the time that audiences and the art market were simply baffled by his acrylic and wood wall sculptures and expansive tiled installations. As a result, Hsu continued to work in relative obscurity in the ensuing decades. His first institutional survey, “Liquid Circuit,” organized by SculptureCenter in New York, debuted in January at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. With pieces from the ’80s to the new millennium, the show introduced a new generation of viewers to Hsu’s prescient work. Hanging…

Creating Utopia In Mai-Thu Perret’s fictional text The Crystal Frontier (1999–), a group of women renounce the capitalist and patriarchal conventions of Western neoliberal society and set up a commune in the desert of southwest New Mexico. Their utopic experiment, New Ponderosa Year Zero, has subsequently guided Perret’s visual art practice for over two decades. The artist’s sculptures, paintings, textiles, and ceramics can be imagined as what the women produce or as scenarios from their lives. Female-centric craft traditions, including weaving, as seen in the image above of a work in progress, are particularly important for the women as alternatives to mechanical production. More broadly, these objects draw from diverse disciplines, histories, and cultural movements, from the egalitarian designs of modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi to the Kurdish Women’s Protection…