Innholdsfortegnelse for 128 (May/Jun 2022) i ArtAsiaPacific

New Year’s Eve is an important event in the lives of Kazakh people. As part of the festivities, people make plans, list their achievements, and burn pieces of paper with their wishes scribbled on them. A Soviet Union tradition, the celebration signals a chance for a brighter future and carries many hopes and expectations for transformation. In 2022, those changes were swift to come. On January 2, protests began in the city of Zhanaozen after a sharp increase in the price for liquefied petroleum gas. They quickly spread to nearly the entire country, but were most destructive in Almaty. According to official data, 4,353 individuals were injured, 3,393 of whom are members of law-enforcement agencies. Morgues received 225 dead, including 19 police and military officers. The official account states that…

On March 18, Chinese-Indonesian industrialist and art collector Budi Tek (1957–2022) died from pancreatic cancer. Tek began collecting art in 2004 and founded the Yuz Foundation in 2007, first opening a museum in Jakarta in 2008. In 2014, he launched the 9,000-square-meter Yuz Museum in Shanghai’s West Bund cultural corridor, hosting temporary shows and his collection of 1,500 artworks by Chinese and international artists. Indonesian modernist painter Srihadi Soedarsono (1931–2022) passed away on February 26. Known for his expressionistic, gestural abstractions, brightly rendered landscapes, and depictions of classical Javanese and Balinese culture, Soedarsono was an acclaimed member of the post-independence avant-garde.…

From Germany’s Bauhaus, which placed equal value on craft, industrial design, and fine arts, to India’s Santiniketan, where an anticolonial, transnational perspective was promulgated, the radical art schools of the early 20th century catalyzed the modernist movements in today’s art-history textbooks. In the postwar era, alternative pedagogical initiatives took a more informal stance by disavowing degrees altogether. These unaccredited programs include Black Mountain College, which launched in the 1930s in the United States and encouraged self-directed education and community responsibility, as well as Joseph Beuys’s Free International University, an interdisciplinary forum conceived in the early 1970s for charting the future of society, through which the artist sought to counter the effects of war, violence, and disenchantment. Whether accredited or otherwise, these pioneering education models not only redefined what and how…

One day this spring, I joined the Wayang Kardus Workshop organized by the artist collective Taring Padi at Framer Framed art space in Amsterdam. Aside from making shadow puppets (wayang) with cardboard (kardus), the workshop entailed hanging out for hours with people from the neighborhood and the arts community while sharing conversation, food, and drinks, and enjoying live music. Taring Padi’s home base is in Yogyakarta but members of the collective have been organizing a series of Wayang Kardus Workshops abroad, ahead of their participation at documenta fifteen in Kassel. Few participants at this happy gathering in Amsterdam would have initially guessed that the event is rooted in over two decades of radical political activism through art. Background knowledge was not required to participate in the workshop because Taring Padi’s…

How does one process loss? At “Poetic Heritage,” one of the last exhibitions visitors could catch at Tai Kwun Contemporary before Hong Kong’s fifth wave of Covid-19, Leung Mee Ping’s installation Sound of Silence (2021) provided a poignant foreshadowing of our collective undoing. The work occupied a dimly lit room tucked at the end of the show. Aged and disregarded roof tiles from traditional village houses sat directly on the floor in neat piles of various, cascading heights. Affixed on a handful of tiles were delicate, metallic arches onto which swinging hammers are attached; one by one, the hammers’ spherical heads hit the tiles and produce percussive sounds that dribble across the otherwise quiet space. Commissioned for “Poetic Heritage,” the installation sought “to explore themes of attachment and rootedness to…

The Biennale of Sydney opened on March 12 after weeks of heavy rain along the east coast of Australia. Catastrophic floods had affected several regions. Emergency relief lagged, and grassroots organizations scrambled to help their communities themselves. Titled “rīvus” after the Latin for “stream,” this year’s biennale was a provocation to consider how life depends on water. It was a timely one. From the outset, José Roca had said he wanted to stage a more thoughtful, local, and sustainable biennale. The Colombian curator, who is also the co-founder of the nonprofit Flora ars+natura in Bogotá, planned to minimize travel and freight, and support the local production of artworks. He also collaborated with local curators Anna Davis, Hannah Donnelly, Paschal Daantos Berry, and Talia Linz. Together, they selected 89 artists, scientists,…

Painterly abstraction serves as a means of exploring the physical experience of cities in Seeun Kim’s works, which activate sensory impressions of liminal urban infrastructure like tunnels, overpasses, and embankments. These spaces primarily exist in the public consciousness as nothing more than unremarkable linkages between more prominent features of the cityscape, rather than being recognized as discrete elements of the urban fabric unto themselves. Kim’s works resonate with the subtle character of such overlooked parts of the city; indeed, it is nearly impossible to parse any recognizable forms within her colorful, energetic paintings. The inscrutability of Kim’s oeuvre is tied to her distinctive method of abstracting interstitial urban spaces through transposing her own physical sensations of specific sites and locations. She deploys diverse modes of mark-making to visualize her embodied…

When I think of a transmission, I picture a stream of digital signals passing from one point to another in fiber-optic cable networks, accompanied by the glitching and high-pitched screech of dial-up internet. In Sharjah Art Foundation’s “Passages through Passages,” a multimedia exhibition by Mumbai-based collective CAMP, visitors instead witnessed the transmission of information as a phenomenon that upsets the status quo and gives rise to new forces and tensions. Culled from the collective’s work in the past two decades, the survey’s video and audio works, archival materials, and interventions unfolded like a stream across two floors of the creekside Bait Al Serkal. The ground floor, dedicated to maritime realms, explored water as a messenger, calling upon the vast, ancient bodies of water that connect Southeast Asia, China, the Indian…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24 and has killed an estimated 20,000 civilians, displaced more than one quarter of the population, and sent global food prices soaring, has also upended international festivals and exhibitions. Just three days after war began, the artists representing Russia at the 59th Venice Biennale, Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, along with Lithuania-born curator Raimundas Malašauskas, quit the project, saying in their respective statements that the war made their plans untenable amid the human suffering in Ukraine. As a result, when the Biennale opened on April 23, the Russia Pavilion in the Giardini was shuttered. Meanwhile, the Ukraine Pavilion displayed the installation Fountain of Exhaustion (1995/2022) by Kharkiv-based artist Pavlo Makov, and the Biennale hosted a special exhibition, dubbed the “Piazza Ucraina,” organized…

What would the contemporary world of art look like if it were not globalized through the commercial marketplace, and instead connected internationally through shared concerns and practices? Between June 18 and September 25, visitors to documenta fifteen in Kassel will encounter versions of this alternative, parallel reality. Guided by the ethos of “lumbung”—the name for a communal rice-barn where farmers store surplus harvest—the Indonesian collective ruangrupa adopted a community-oriented, collaborative approach as artistic directors of the quinquennial festival, bringing together creators and activists from across the global south and diasporas in Europe. While the many curators of the mega-festival’s past editions focused on the exhibitions—particularly the traditional 100-day run at locations around the small central German industrial city, with a significant additional diversion to Athens in 2017—ruangrupa have drawn on…

It’s a situation that sounds farcical until it quickly becomes clear how real it is: Jumana Manna’s new film Foragers (2022) dramatizes the perennial struggles of Palestinians gathering the wild herb za’atar, the artichoke-like akkoub (gundelia), and other native species. Under Israeli laws, the foraging of these plants—including za’atar, akkoub, and sage, which are central to Palestinian cuisine—is illegal, as they were categorized as endangered species. To this day, the foragers, some of whom are elderly or low-income Palestinians, as Manna depicts in the film, are chased by the police and issued fines or even arrested, intensifying the ongoing struggle and pain of Palestinian communities dispossessed from their land during the 1948 Nakba and in the decades since. Foragers builds on many of the topics—such as food security, sustainable agriculture…

The National Gallery Singapore (NGS)’s latest survey on Chua Mia Tee, “Directing the Real,” and its 2020–21 Georgette Chen retrospective, “At Home in the World,” form a pair of counterpoints. The two exhibitions, of mid-20thcentury figures who loom large in Singapore’s established art-historical narrative, presented starkly divergent visions of the country in the pivotal years that led up to, and followed, its independence: Chua’s laboring bodies and palimpsestic urban textures contrast Chen’s academically inflected still-lifes and idyllic landscapes; his sensitivity to the subaltern condition and sociopolitical change, informed by a realist idiom, differs from her celebration of the tropical and the traditional, articulated through a picturesque visual language; his works possess an ideological heft, hers reflect formalist concerns. The work of one has aged better than the other. Chua’s exhibition…

The heaviest things we carry are often weightless. Informed by South Africa’s sociopolitical strife, William Kentridge’s five-decade-long practice imbues material heft to the intangible weight of history, while critiquing notions of certainty and reflecting the human urgency to understand our world. Kentridge’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, “Weigh All Tears,” offered a cohesive slice from the past five years of the Johannesburg-born artist’s vast body of work, from his charcoal and ink drawings to his expansions into sculpture, tapestry, animation, and theater. A wooden Ladder Horse (2021), with its timber unpainted and bolts exposed, opened the presentation via the artist’s philosophical question: “What is the minimum you need to be unable to resist the image of a horse?” The viewer sees that the object before them is a ladder…

“Metaspore” at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca was Italy’s first major exhibition dedicated to Korean-American artist Anicka Yi. Drawing from the cellular world—spores are selfreproductive cells that travel long distances—the show’s title underlined the transformative nature of Yi’s work and the spread of the artist’s ideas across the realms of art, science, and technology. Favoring the sense of smell over sight and using unconventional materials including microorganisms and bodily odors, Yi creates complex ecosystems that challenge anthropocentrism, highlight the interconnectedness between all living organisms, and comment on social injustices and prejudice. In the Shed of Hangar Bicocca, 24 multimedia installations dated from 2010 to the present touched on key points of the artist’s practice. The survey began with Immigrant Caucus (2017), an installation comprising tangible and intangible thresholds through which visitors must…

Ali Kazim’s fascinating exhibition “Suspended in Time,” with its excellent catalogue, marks a significant shift in the evolution of one of Britain’s oldest museums from being a Eurocentrically funneled repository of the world’s antiquities and art works to becoming an institution that engages actively with how present-day culture is an expanding, evolving project. The result of Kazim’s residency with Oxford’s Classical Art Research Centre, the show included items from the Ashmolean collection, selected by the artist. Moulded under diverse historical influences, many of them incompatible, these artifacts were expanded and elaborated by the nuances of Kazim’s own paintings, objects, and installations. Together, these components served as “signals” that stretch across time, surfacing memories, traditions, thoughts, civilizations, and memes that are part of Kazim’s view of the current world. This polyphony…

Multimedia artist Atong Atem won the first La Prairie Art Award for Australian women artists. Her winning photography series, A yellow dress, a bouquet (2022), features herself dressed in vibrant colors and celebrates a “decidedly African, postcolonial aesthetic style.” Video artist Choi Chan Sook won the Korea Artist Prize 2021 with the four-channel multimedia installation qbit to adam (2021), which investigates the privatization of land with video footage featuring stories of people evicted from their properties.…

MELBOURNE After a four-year hiatus, the biennial Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) (February 17–20) returned to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, luring 14,500 visitors and achieving USD 7.8 million in artwork sales from 63 galleries. For this edition, MAF launched an Indigenous Art Centre Program, which supported the participation of five First Nations art spaces and a new section, “Beyond,” curated by Emily Cormack and featuring six large-scale installations. With the spotlight on local and Indigenous artists, many galleries reported sold-out booths in the fair’s first three hours. Melbourne-based galleries offered new works by local artists. This Is No Fantasy presented the latest paintings series by Vincent Namatjira, the winner of the Archibald Prize 2020. Inspired by a trip to his hometown Mparntwe, halfway between Adelaide and Darwin, Namatjira’s series…

Han Mengyun LONDON/WUHAN In India, kite-flying is a spiritual activity that connects humans with the divine. This longing for the sky and the origin of the universe is captured in Han Mengyun’s multimedia installation Logic of the Ether (2021), which comprises a threemeter-tall wooden structure and a video installation featuring the Sanskrit Hymn of Creation from Rigveda and the kite festival in Jaipur. Swaths of patterned fabric, printed by Han with wood blocks collected in Jaipur, unfold in layers within the wooden structure and evoke the caisson ceilings found in both ancient Chinese timber-frame buildings and Indian temples. At the top of this installation, a flower emerges. For Han, these designs and motifs are products of our collective consciousness and share a spiritual language. Han began searching for a visual…

For more than a decade, Yang Yongliang constructed cityscapes in his contemporary ink-like collages and video-paintings. These digital shanshui-style compositions are assemblages of real-world imagery, featuring “mountain ranges” made of apartment buildings and flowing “streams” of traffic on roadways. Since the artist himself began to find these highly dense urbanized scenes to be serious, repetitive, and lifeless over time, Yang shifted his imagination to fantastical realms, creating animated videos of dragons. In his 2020 video Five Dragons, these godlike beings enter a natural landscape with grace: one hovers on top of a stream; another stretches its claws on an outcropping rock; one hops on a jagged rock; a fourth creeps in behind the branches; while a fifth tosses and chases clouds amid flashes of lightning in the sky. Mirroring a…

Eminent Australian artist Vivienne Binns is a master of many crafts, from enameling to painting, teaching to feminist activism. Presented at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Melbourne, “On and Through the Surface” surveyed six decades of the artist’s expansive oeuvre. Predominately centered on her prolific painting practice, the exhibition moved from her work within Australia’s feminist art movement to her exploration of Australia’s shared histories with the broader Asia-Pacific region. It’s difficult to talk about Binns’s work without mentioning her feminist and proto-community art projects that spanned the 1960s through to the 1980s. Put together by Hannah Matthews (senior curator at MUMA) and Anneke Jaspers (senior curator at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia), the survey began with a clever curatorial gesture, restaging a selection of works…

Stewart Uoo is something of a rhizomatic artist; spanning conceptual sculpture, video, fashion editorial-like photography, collage, and a cult art-and-performance event called It’s Get Better (2013–), his practice is characterized by a radical indeterminacy. His studio is located on the third floor of a former warehouse nestled in East Brooklyn, an industrial part of New York pullulated with boxcars and cranes. When I visited on a crisp March day, the hallways leading to the space were lined with big tropical potted plants, which were temporarily sheltering there due to a move (Uoo joked that walking through these hallways reminded him of the iconic vegetation in Jennifer Lopez’s music video for the 1999 pop hit Waiting for Tonight). Dominating one table across the entrance of the studio were peachy-colored silicone molds…