Innholdsfortegnelse for 119 (Jul/Aug 2020) i ArtAsiaPacific

Sometimes it is necessary to leave the crowds behind in order to discover the world again. Writers, monks, artists, naturalists, and astronomers are all known to check out for extended periods of time to gain a renewed perspective on life. In this era of extended isolation and social distancing, being away from the maddening throngs of society has been necessary, even mandatory. And with it, as time slowed down and activities came to a halt, there was a chance for reflection on the future direction of society. For the last two decades, in her ongoing project, The Crystal Frontier (1999–), Mai-Thu Perret has been conjuring a fictional commune of women who are in pursuit of an alternative realm, a place where alienation, the patriarchy, and capitalism do not exist. She…

Hun Kyu Kim LONDON / SEOUL Hun Kyu Kim’s intricate silk paintings feature provocative scenes layered with historical and popular-culture iconographies. The Secret Barn (2019), which calls to mind George Orwell’s allegorical fiction Animal Farm (1945), depicts a hierarchical society, with the central institution—a barn, shown in a sectional view—supported by a league of underground creatures. The ruling pigs have religionized their dominance, with a stained-glass window portraying a god in their image behind an altar in the attic. Meanwhile, the shrews who inhabit the tunnels beneath have infiltrated the barn in an uprising, only to discover a pair of skeletons manning the table, the institution that has controlled them merely a shell. Above, a herd of flying horses fall prey to shots from an unseen source, insinuating the demise…

Arthur de Villepin started collecting art when he was 22 years old. His first acquisition was a red-and-black rendering of the Parisian Basilica, Sans Titre (Sacré-Coeur) (1948), painted by Zao Wou-ki just after the artist had moved to the French capital from China at the age of 28. The work captured Villepin with its composition and its history, reflecting an artist adjusting to a different culture. Now aged 32, Villepin is the co-founder of a newly opened 186-square-meter art gallery in Hong Kong. I met him at the space, located on Hollywood Road, in mid-May. Wearing a white shirt and a tailored, dark navy suit, he was in a buoyant mood as he bid farewell to a group of clients. The gallery was bustling with activity, a welcome sign for…

Early in Perret’s development of the series, the women’s quest for non-capitalist and non-patriarchal lifestyles leads them to the history of Soviet Constructivism. Their research is reflected in the installation Perpetual Time Clock (2004), a device that guides the community’s days, while abolishing “the mechanical breakdown of time by the watch,” as Perret writes in The Land of Crystal. Comprising a ring of eight discs arranged around a central circle, each painted with a graphic symbol, the clock denotes “essential activities” such as “sleeping, making art, riding and caring for horses, meditation and yoga practice, reading and study, all the different types of agricultural work, the exploration of the unconscious, and various sports.” The icon depicting a paintbrush crossed over a hammer most clearly evokes the Constructivist’s vision “to make…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. In 2011, Zarina Hashmi was one of four artists selected to represent India at the 54th Venice Biennale, in the country’s first national pavilion. When the curator, poet, and theorist Ranjit Hoskote wrote about his curatorial premise for the pavilion as a laboratory for studying the concept of the nation, he cited Sunil Khilnani’s passage from The Idea of India (1998): “ultimately, the viability—and most importantly, the point—of India’s democracy will rest on its capacity to sustain internal diversity.” At Venice, Zarina exhibited her suite of 36 abstracted woodblock prints, Home is a Foreign Place (1999), dedicated to memories of the place she was born, along with a hanging strand of gilded lightbulbs, Noor (2008), and Blinding Light (2010), a…

NOV 8, 2019–MAY 9, 2021 The Shape of Time: Highlights of the Centre Pompidou Collection Vol. 1 West Bund Museum Shanghai NOV 30, 2019–OCT 11 Classics Remix Hong Kong Museum of Art FEB 28–OCT 4 Japanese Modernism National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne FEB 29–AUG 2 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres Art Gallery of South Australia and Adelaide Botanic Garden Adelaide MAR 7–AUG 31 Shaikha Al-Mazrou: Re-arranging the Riddle Maraya Art Gallery Sharjah MAR 11–NOV 22 Michael Rakowitz Jameel Arts Centre Dubai MAR 12–AUG 23 Nevin Alada?: Traces Arter Istanbul MAR 14–SEP 13 Xu Zhen: Eternity vs Evolution National Gallery of Australia Canberra MAR 14–OCT 11 22nd Biennale of Sydney: Nirin Multiple locations Sydney MAR 21–JUL 22 Lee Mingwei: Li, Gifts and Rituals Gropius Bau Berlin MAR 21–JUL…

The texts of art historians, critics, and curators are creative projects in their own right, and should not be seen as merely auxiliary mechanisms for the amplification of an artist’s or institution’s ideas. The importance of artistic discourse was not lost on the revered art historian TK Sabapathy, who throughout his over-fourdecade career sought to forge pathways for the scholarship of Southeast Asian art, from the context and historical genealogies of modernism in Malaysia and Singapore, to broader lenses through which to consider these trajectories. Divided into four sections, each oriented by a helpful editorial introduction, Writing the Modern (2018) collates the octogenarian’s efforts, which have inarguably set the course for Southeast Asian art history today. Chapter one, “The Southeast Asian Artist in Relation to Art History,” highlights how Sabapathy…

“Our city and environment are like an essay, there are many things happening in it, and sometimes it can be tiresome. If I could choose my position within this essay, I would want to be the punctuation marks, maybe the comma, full stop, or simply the dot dot dot,” said Lam Tung Pang in a 2009 interview. The acts of surveying one’s surroundings and reflecting on one’s own footing within such environs have been foundational to the mixed-media works that Lam has produced over his two-decade career. In the drawing above, for example, he renders himself standing on scorched earth, while examining a miniature globe that has been set ablaze. In AAP’s upcoming feature, managing editor Chloe Chu will discuss Lam’s observations of his hometown, Hong Kong, and the human…

MICHAELA BEAR Michaela Bear is a curator and writer currently working at the RMIT Design Hub Gallery in Melbourne. She previously worked on the 2017 Honolulu Biennial and has written for a range of Australian and international arts publications. (See REVIEWS) MIRTHE BERENTSEN As a writer, journalist, and advisor, Mirthe Berentsen contributes to a wide range of publications and organizations, such as the Dutch Council for Culture, advising the government and parliament on arts and culture. Her 2019 book about literature and psychiatry, Stories from Kings County Hospital, is the result of a sixmonth residency at a mental health hospital in Brooklyn, New York. (See DISPATCH) SARAH BURNEY Sarah Burney is a New-Yorkbased independent curator and writer with a focus on South Asian and Middle Eastern contemporary art, emerging New…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. On March 9, I published an open letter to Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA), withdrawing my participation from the exhibition “A New Constellation: Chinese Diaspora Now.” This move was prompted by the sudden departure of CFCCA’s curator, Tiffany Leung, which highlighted the reality of a systemic problem. Of the organization’s remaining team, only one is a non-white person. The situation reflects a wider demographic imbalance across conversations on “Chinese” arts and artists in the United Kingdom and beyond. This disparity perpetuates the overwhelmingly white Eurocentric perspective through which art is presented. As long as we operate in systems that offer more authority to the white voice, whiteness will continue to be the custodian of our narratives. As feminist…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. While surveying the Indigenous and contemporary Philippine art in the sunlit, al fresco galleries of Pinto Art Museum, I chanced upon a canvas by painter Winner Jumalon depicting a man with his shirt unbuttoned, exposing a scar across his chest. The stern-faced figure is Joven Cuanang, founder of the ten-year-old museum, located in a picturesque twohectare botanical garden in the hillside city of Antipolo, an hour’s bus ride from Metro Manila. In 1997, Cuanang suffered a heart attack and underwent quadruple bypass surgery. The 2006 painting, Second Life Portrait, acknowledges Cuanang’s neardeath experience, and the symbolic renewal of his life at the age of 57. One of the foremost neurologists of the Philippines, Cuanang has always seen art as a…

Zarina began her day by peeling and eating the seven almonds she had soaked in water overnight. She hated eggs but ate them regularly for breakfast. “Good protein.” With a slice of brioche. And tea of course. That Renu brought from India. Only Renu’s tea. Found writing emails tedious but never left one unanswered. Wanted to make art, read, and look at art. Knew exactly how her paper was made. Carved her own blocks. Didn’t believe in test prints. “Don’t assume you’ll get it wrong.” Called watercolor monotypes “squashed paintings.” Rarely listened to music. Met minimalism at Fatehpur Sikri. Never forgot the texture of a ruin. Took the ceiling furrier hooks in her Chelsea apartment down herself when she moved in in 1976. Was tidy. Organized. Never wanted an off-site…

From afar, Byron Kim’s Muffled (2019) appears to depict a dusty Martian crater, with a shaded clump lurking under diffused golden hues. Walk closer and the painting takes on the guise of a microscopic image showing the wound of a fuzzy, yellow peach. After a moment of further inspection, the canvas’s subtle web of tiny red lines evokes the expansive capillary networks under our skin. In this way, Kim’s latest bruise paintings investigate the resonances between human and celestial bodies, bringing to mind fleshy contusions, planets, and nebulae. The series is rooted in poet Carl Phillips’ comparison of the sunlit lesion on a lover’s body to “something like amber.” Kim began to see bruises as stains layered under human skin, and associated these strata with other phenomenon, such as zigzagging…

ABU DHABI NYUAD ART GALLERY www.nyuad-artgallery.org nyuad.artgallery@nyu.edu New York University Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi T +971 2 628 8000 Mon–Sat 12am–8pm An academic museum-gallery presenting exhibitions by internationallyestablished artists, curators, and scholars, on topics of regional relevance and international significance. ANTWERP AXEL VERVOORDT GALLERY www.axelvervoordtgallery.com info@axelvervoordtgallery.com Kanaal Stokerijstraat 19, 2110 Wijnegem T +32 3 355 33 00 Thur–Sat 2pm–5pm or by appointment From its inception in 2011, the gallery has been a strong supporter of Zero and Gutai art. Our vision has gradually evolved into contemporary art with a special interest in the concept of the void, space, and time. BANGKOK 100 TONSON GALLERY www.100tonsongallery.com info@100tonsongallery.com 100 Soi Tonson, Ploenchit Road, Lumpini, Pathumwan, Bangkok 10330 T +66 2010 5813 Thur–Sun 11am–7pm 100 Tonson exhibits cutting-edge contemporary art by…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. Imagine being 22 years old and attending an event in London in 1966 called the “Destruction in Art Symposium,” organized by artist Gustav Metzger with members of Fluxus and Viennese Actionism. The Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw was there, and remembers coming away from the experience thinking, “Everything was still possible.” Just a few years later he was designing inflatable enclosures for experimental cinematic projections, and polyethylene tetrahedrons and tubes to allow people to walk on water, launching a career of exploring interactive technologies. Spanning half a century, Shaw’s exhibition “WYSIWYG”—a computing acronym for “what you see is what you get”—illuminates how far into the expanded fields of cinema and new media the artist has gone since the late 1960s, beginning…

It was serendipity that brought me to Post-Partum Document (1973–79), one of Mary Kelly’s most expansive works. I was 21 and studying political science and international relations. Disillusioned with my course, I would take regular train journeys from Dresden, where my university was, to my hometown, Berlin, in search of a way out, some kind of excuse that would propel my life elsewhere. I was curious about art, but my understanding was limited to that offered by the magazines I would pick up at random. It was one such publication that introduced me to Kelly. During that period, her visual language was a fascinating mystery to me, something I couldn’t fully make sense of but could agonize over endlessly. What I related to most immediately was her process of thinking…

There are two common English words that borrow from Polynesian languages: tattoo (tatau) and taboo (tapu or tabu). In many precolonial Pacific cultures, tattoos were a form of familial identification and clothing. Yet when Christian missionaries gained footholds in the region in the 18th and 19th centuries, tattooing, deemed heathen, was highly discouraged and in some instances criminalized. Since then, the female-worn Samoan malu—which stretches from a woman’s knees to the very top of her thighs—has come to incorporate both tatau and tabu; the motif simultaneously marks a girl’s entry into adulthood and is an adornment of female flesh that is never to be shown in public. This implicit agreement to cover what was once considered clothing reflects Samoa’s complex relationship to its colonizers: hiding one’s tattoos allowed the tradition…

A blazing asteroid hurtles across the sky, alarming three dinosaurs who stand immobile as devastation looms on their horizon. The tyrannosaurus, mouth agape, exclaims, “Oh shit! The economy!!” A Covid-19-era internet gem, this meme’s witticism strikes home as the pandemic’s death toll rises daily while world leaders wring their hands about shrinking GDPs. Clearly, our priorities are all wrong. If we were to cast our myopia in a more generous light, however, it might look like our fault is that we are hopeful creatures. We believe we will survive. The optimistic among us view existential crises as opportunities to not only right our wrongs but to improve our lives. I, for one, have found myself asking the question: how can we rebuild societies so that they are better than before?…

INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION In painting but also in sculpture, visibility and invisibility, outwardness and concealment, go hand in hand. A painter puts some color on a canvas: the canvas is covered over. A gallerist or collector mounts the painting on a wall: that part of the wall is lost to view. Let the painting hang there for a long time and then move it to another location: the formerly covered spot will look different from its surroundings, its own paint a bit fresher, more robust. Time flows at different speeds for exposed surfaces and concealed ones. Hidden things may outlast those seen. A painting can patch over an absence—making, for instance, a convenient cover-up for an unsightly hole in a wall. It may render invisible another painting, as was the…

The garden has always represented human aspirations to the divine; paradise is found in the Persian charbagh and jardin à la française, where chaotic nature is tamed to symmetrical perfection. Yet gardens across the ex-colonial world also exemplify the forcible mapping of ideals, a reshaping of foreign soil for the empire’s elites. A precursor to the forthcoming Kathmandu Triennale, helmed by Para Site director Cosmin Costinas, “The Garden of Six Seasons” formed a patte d’oie of associations, exploring axes of coloniality, cosmology, and ecology that underpin conceptions of the garden. The architecture of Para Site’s top-floor gallery emulated the geometry of the neoclassical garden, with a central rectangular space separated from an outer pathway by green walls. This manicured harmony contrasted with the unruly profusion of art forms displayed, which…

What does it mean to live the good life? As ageless as it is protean, the question itself provided the starting point for Kunsthalle Wien’s expansive exhibition “… of bread, wine, cars, security and peace,” named after the metrics used by Lebanese writer Bilal Khbeiz in Globalization and the Manufacture of Transient Events (2003) to describe the unattainable dream of a “good life” for people in the Global South in contrast to the West. The first show at the Kunsthalle under the artistic leadership of Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolovi? from the curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, “of bread” conceptualized artistic practice as a means of reimagining moral, ecological, and scientific alternatives beyond the exploitative structures of contemporary capitalism. Upon passing through the museum’s entrance, above…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Covid-19 has wreaked havoc all over the world. UNESCO and the International Council of Museums have estimated that 13 percent of the world’s museums may never reopen again, and that 20 percent of museum workers have lost their jobs. Art institutions have not been spared. It is anticipated that the situation will further deteriorate. We have to grapple with questions regarding the pandemic’s impact on the world’s shared cultural wealth, as well as how museums can benefit society’s development in the wake of such closures and within a drastically changing landscape. It is in these times that the legality and ethics regarding deaccessioning become more important than ever—notwithstanding that the issue already drew heated…