Innholdsfortegnelse for Almanac 2023 i ArtAsiaPacific

Even before its 100 day-run from June 18 to September 25, documenta fifteen landed at the center of Germany’s culture wars. The quinquennial’s artistic directors, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, faced a climate of skepticism from nationalist politicians and rightwing news media as they shaped the event through their non-hierarchical decision-making and community-oriented practices. Ruangrupa and members of the artistic team were initially targeted in January 2022 by a local Kassel blog that accused them of hostility to Israel, claims amplified in Germany’s national press. In an attempt to address the issues, Documenta planned a series of talks about artistic expression in an era of rising antisemitism, racism, and Islamophobia in May, but had to cancel after several panelists withdrew following criticism by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Weeks…

As the world entered the third year of co-existence with Covid-19, the pandemic faded to the background in many places as political and social strife took center stage. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 marked a major escalation in the conflict ongoing since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. At the 59th Venice Biennale, preparations for the Ukraine Pavilion were halted, while the Russia Pavilion artists, Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, and the curator, Raimundas Malašauskas, resigned, leading to the pavilion’s cancellation on February 28. After the European Union levied sanctions, including those prohibiting the sale and transfer of luxury goods, Finnish officials temporarily seized Russian artworks loaned from state museums—including the Hermitage Museum and State Tretyakov Gallery—as they were returning from Japan and Italy. On March 3, weeks before…

Cultural prizes recognized border-spanning influences. The Hasselblad Award honored Dayanita Singh, the first South Asian artist to win the Swedish photography prize. In Japan, artist-activist Ai Weiwei received the Praemium Imperiale prize for sculpture while multimedia artist Shahzia Sikander nabbed the Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize. The Venice Biennale jury bestowed the Silver Lion on interdisciplinary Lebanese artist Ali Cherri. Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova took home Amsterdam’s Eye Art & Film Prize. In New York, Indigenous arts collective proppaNOW received the 2022–24 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice from the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Veteran pyrotechnic artist Cai Guo-Qiang was conferred the Asian Cultural Council’s John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award and was named Honorary Academician of 2022 by the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara,…

After a successful 2021 when NFTs generated a total of USD 25 billion in sales and entered the mainstream consciousness, in 2022 it became clear that a frosty season was coming for digital collectibles. While sales of “non-fungible token” art in 2021 netted a total of USD 2.6 billion—with Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021) selling for a record USD 69.3 million—transactions have plummeted by 97 percent from January to September 2022. The values of NFTs have tumbled as well. The lowest price on the market, otherwise known as the floor price, of Yuga Lab’s popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (2021) series was 152 ETH, USD 429,000 in April 2022, but by November it had dropped to 57.5 ETH (USD 72,400 at the time of writing), marking an 83…

Founded in 1984, Japanese collective Dumb Type is known for their decentralized structure and pioneering multimedia works in the 1990s, which responded to the urgencies of the time and touched on the core of human experience in a digital age. The group gradually paused their activity in the 2000s as each member developed their own career, until they collectively returned with their new performance 2020 (2020), which premiered at ROHM Theatre Kyoto. After representing Japan at the 59th Venice Biennale, Dumb Type will restage their installation for the pavilion at Tokyo’s Artizon Museum in February 2023. Why did Dumb Type pause in the 2000s? The story is a bit long. When we were performing S/N (1994) at the Kanagawa Arts Festival in 1994, the festival’s director Maimi Sato introduced us…

In early December 2021, we encountered local culture bureau officials for the first time, who had questions about our fall 2021 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) at NYU Shanghai, “Do Rocks Listen?” (scheduled: 10/14/21–12/18/21) a survey of films by the Indigenous media group Karrabing Film Collective. Our exhibition was subsequently closed two weeks earlier than scheduled. Perhaps I was naive to think that this was a simple jurisdictional misunderstanding. Until then, I had thought that our modest university art gallery program was shielded from censorship, overseen by a local education commission which had given our university more latitude than others with regards to academic freedom. It seems that I was mistaken. Cultural programs were separate from academic programs, i.e., research and education, particularly if such programs were…

2022 was a tough year for Myanmar artists. While trying to hold on strenuously after the February 1, 2021, military coup d’état and the government’s crackdown on its citizens, many artists eventually decided to leave the country, including the artist-couple Nge Lay and Aung Ko. Nge Lay’s multimedia practice explores gender, time, and memory amid the sociopolitical backdrop of Myanmar, often involving communities. Aung Ko’s paintings, performances, and installations reflect on village life, geography, history, and customs. They stayed in Yangon for as long as they could, actively participating in the protests, until they eventually had to flee a few months ago to protect their daughter and themselves. While carrying on their battle for freedom through art abroad, they elaborated on the situation in the country before leaving for their…

How has it been in Dhaka in the last couple of years for artists? It’s been sad. It’s a brutal city, it’s a fast city. Highly dense, highly populated, highly polluted. It’s difficult to breathe sometimes, but there’s also an electrifying culture of intellectuals, writers, and activist-artists who are responding to their time in incredible, brave ways. We are going through a sensitive political time, with a heightened sense of censorship due to the Digital Security Act (DSA) 2018, so it matters how you navigate that space. For me, living in the city is crucial because it gives me a different form of oxygen—to always be on my toes, or almost on the verge—to either collapse or revolt, or to dream. But it’s incredibly difficult because there are very few…

What affected you the most this year in New York? Most events have been violent in the United States. I’ve read so much about gun violence and the war in Ukraine through the lens of the American press, which really affects the politics. I’ve tried to read other things too, but they are very concentrated on their own perspectives—it is impossible to look away from those pounding, repeated statements of their positions. But perhaps it’s not the same for every New Yorker. I just happen to be in academia and I have a toddler so I have to be very cautious. For your installation Sink or Float (2022) at the 59th Venice Biennale (4/23–11/27), you laid out a range of objects such as snail shells and magnifying glasses in sinks…

RĪVUS For the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, titled “rīvus” (Latin for “stream”), artistic director José Roca explored the political agency of water ecosystems, inspired by countries that have granted personhood to bodies of water. Featuring more than 80 artists and collectives, the Biennale occupied seven locations across New South Wales. Filipino artist Leeroy New presented a pair of commissions made of recycled plastic: Balete (2022), inspired by the roots of a tree native to the Philippines, wrapped around the exterior of a community-arts building; at The Cutaway, Flotilla (2022) was an installation of suspended boats, reflecting the political nature of waterways and the boats as one of the primary vessels of colonization. Yuko Mohri’s installation in the Pier 2/3 building of tubes, bottles, buckets, and plastic sheeting Moré Moré (Leaky):…

WE, ON THE RISING WAVE In “We, on the Rising Wave,” the curatorial team led by Haeju Kim and composed of Christine Tohmé, Philippe Pirotte, and philosopher Yuk Hui, explored the history of Busan from its position as the first open port following the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1876 to its modern decline as an industrial hub. Featuring 64 participants, with 18 from South Korea, the Biennale was spread across the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Pier 1 of Busan Port, Yeongdo Island, and the Choryang district as artists explored the city’s history and ecosystems through periods of technological change and migration. Mire Lee’s site-specific installation of hanging oil-stained fabric, Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Yeongdong Sea (2022), was housed in the abandoned factory building whose roof was partially destroyed…

ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES In “Treasure Island,” co-curators Isobel Parker Philip and Erin Vink surveyed Daniel Boyd’s two decade-long practice in deconstructing representations of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander peoples. The exhibition’s title derived from his 2005 canvas of the island-continent as a patchwork of First Nations with the phrase written across it in ironic cursive letters. His breakout works appropriated British history paintings, as in We Call Them Pirates Out Here (2006), where he portrayed Captain James Cook at the 1770 landing of the HMS Endeavour in Botany Bay as an eye-patch-wearing invader. Known today for his application across the painted surface of translucent dots—what he calls “lenses”—that both contain and obscure visual information, Boyd explodes the anthropological gaze traced through historical photographs and contemporary imagery of…

M+ In eight decades of creative output, the Matsumoto-born Yayoi Kusama has studied the beauty of plants, depicted the horrors of war, and charmed the world with her giant pumpkins and mirrored infinity rooms. As co-curators Doryun Chong and Mika Yoshitake reveal in their survey of more than 200 artworks, Kusama had many interconnected artistic conceptions of herself. When she moved to New York in 1957, she aspired to create limitless webs across often massive canvases. Her stuffed fabric sculptures spoke to neurotic obsessions and fears, while Kusama’s dots-obsession spanned later installations and political happenings. Though she struggled emotionally after her 1973 return to Japan, she later blossomed into the country’s poetic doyenne of restless creativity in search of universal love.…

SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY A key figure in the postwar history of Lebanese art, Aref El Rayess traversed the artistic circles of Paris, Senegal, Beirut, Italy, and the United States for two decades before returning to Lebanon to teach in 1967. A follow-up to a 2021 exhibition in Beirut, Sfeir-Semler’s 2022 presentation in Hamburg focused on his works from 1960 to 1988. From the mid-1960s came color-field landscape such as the series Homage to Flying Carpets (1965–67), followed shortly thereafter by his expressionistic works, such as Technologie et revolution (Blood and Freedom) (1968) that responded to major historical events of the time. After his drawings depicting the Lebanese civil war were censored in 1975, the artist relocated to Jeddah where his landscape abstractions of deserts took on mystical surreal forms and colors.…

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS, LONDON KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, BERLIN The Sri Lankan army defeated the Tamil Eelam de facto state in 2009. For Christopher Kulendran Thomas, the self-governing movement’s use of technology remain an intriguing alternative reality and formed the basis of his dual show “Another World.” The centerpiece was the newly commissioned video installation, The Finesse (2022), developed with Annika Kuhlmann, which situates the viewer amid mirrored screens and projections as an AI-generated narrative interweaves archival footage of guerilla fighters with avatar-voiced reflections on digital culture. Kulendran Thomas also grappled with meanings of contemporary art and human rights in the post-civil war era in the video installation Being Human (2019), which stars algorithmically synthesized characters including a renowned Sri Lankan painter and a young Tamil artist, and…

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, KOREA Hito Steyerl’s first major survey in Asia, “A Sea of Data,” presented the artist’s reflections on information technology and capitalism through 23 riveting works, from early 1990s videos to a recent commission. Divided into five thematic sections, “A Sea of Data” built off of Steyerl’s critical writings, including the three-channel video Duty Free Art (2015) about art museums before and after the 2011 uprising and refugee crisis in Syria and Turkey. The video installation SocialSim (2020) featured data analytics on trends in 2020, including demonstrations during the pandemic, while reflecting on the pervasive replacement of reality by virtual spaces. The newly commissioned Animal Spirits (2022) consists of three walls of interactive imagery from the Lascaux caves and a single-channel narrative video about…

GROPIUS BAU Dayanita Singh’s survey exhibition “Dancing with my Camera” put movement at the heart of her practice—from the portability of Singh’s display systems, such as books and custom foldable screens, to the people, places, and motifs of her documentary-style photography that has crisscrossed eras. Inspired by her photographer mother’s penchant for photo albums, books are the primary format for Singh, perhaps most notably in the Myself Mona Ahmed (2001) about a eunuch who recounts her transgender journey through letters accompanied by Singh’s black-and-white portraits. Playful and thought provoking, Singh’s mini meta-museums probe notions of display. Two foldable screens in dark teak wood, Museum of Chance (2013) houses 162 unconnected images spanning three decades, while Museum Bhavan (2017) combines nine discrete series in the form of accordion photo-books in handmade cloth…

Hong Kong witnessed many personnel shifts in the cultural sector. After its November 2021 opening, M+ saw the retirement of Victor Lo Chung-wing as board chair and his replacement with Bernard Charnwut Chan on April 1. From the museum’s team, Lesley Ma, M+’s ink art curator for nine years, departed for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Elsewhere in Hong Kong, in April, 25-year-old nonprofit Para Site selected Rockbund Art Museum curator Billy Tang as its new executive director and curator. Rebecca Ip succeeded Connie Lam as the new executive director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre on August 15. Around the region, South Korea reaffirmed Youn Bummo as director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art for a second three-year term through 2025. Justine Alexandria…

Before Covid-19 introduced “self-quarantine,” the otaku was the modern-day hermit who, absorbed in the world of ACG (animation, comics, and games), loyally practices their rituals connecting the physical and the virtual realms. Artist Lu Yang, perhaps once an otaku, extends this practice into his fantastical animated realms composed of sci-fi narratives and pop aesthetics. Mirroring the ACG industry’s obsession with fictional characters and drawing on deities from many cultures, Lu Yang introduced his own persona, DOKU, in 2021. Named after the Buddhist philosophy “Dokusho Dokushi” (born alone, die alone), the artist’s gender-neutral digital reincarnation dances in the form of six avatars, each with different colorful outfits and armor representing heaven, hell, human, animal, hungry ghosts, and asura. They collectively debuted in a single-channel 3D animation at Lu Yang’s solo exhibition…

In 2003 Meanjin/Brisbane artists Vernon Ah Kee, Jennifer Herd, and Richard Bell, laid the groundwork for the collective proppaNOW, whose aim was to support urban Indigenous Australian artists and challenge cultural expectations about “Aboriginal art.” In the years since, their communal activities, advocacy, and collaborative exhibitions have created opportunities for Black Australians to voice their experiences. The group’s members also include Tony Albert, Gordon Hookey, Megan Cope, and the late Laurie Nilsen (1953–2020), represented by his daughter, Lily Eather. In October, proppaNOW were awarded the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice from the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York. The jury recognized them for their projects that: “[have] broken with expectations of what is proper (‘proppa’) in Aboriginal art; created a…

In March 2022, Korea’s new president Yoon Suk-yeol was elected by the narrowest margin in Korean history—less than a single percentage point. The so-called “election of the unfavorables” was marked by the candidates’ divisive campaign strategies and inexperience in national politics, leaving both the conservative Yoon and his liberal opponent extremely unpopular among voters. Even before taking office, Yoon stirred up controversy by announcing an expensive relocation of the presidential office—at significant taxpayer expense—and struggled to keep his approval rating above 30 percent for the first several months of his term. Civic discontent has hardly abated since then, with the country’s inflation rate hitting a 24-year high in July and a string of North Korean ballistic-missile tests, beginning in late September, ratcheting up regional geopolitical tensions. Despite the political and…

How would you describe the energy in Manila this year? I was in Manila from March to May 2022 to do the show “Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts” (4/19–8/6) at Ateneo Art Gallery. Coming back for the first time since 2018 was a bit of a shock because during my absence so many things have been upended: former president Rodrigo Duterte had launched a full-scale attack on public discourse, from shutting down the media company ABS-CBN to arresting the journalist Maria Ressa along with other various voices of dissent. It was a bit of a rollercoaster before the May 9 presidential elections because, on the one hand, all signs were pointing to Ferdinand “Bongbong”R. Marcos Jr. winning—and thereby winning this fight over history—but at the same time there…

For the last five years Jakarta has been undergoing a major transition. It is undeniable that the megapolis is an important cultural center in Indonesia and has made a significant upgrade in its art infrastructure. However, despite the spirit of decentralization that has been propagated since the 1998 Reformasi and the planned relocation in 2024 of the political capital to Nusantara, a newly developing city in East Kalimantan on Borneo, Jakarta retains its position as the country’s nucleus and will uphold its cultural privileges in the coming years. The transition can be seen in the recent redevelopment of city infrastructure. Since early in 2022—with a budget two-to three-times larger than the other provinces in Java—the Special Capital District of Jakarta government has been revitalizing public facilities, from the expansion of…

As soon as people in Pakistan became relaxed again and started returning to normal life patterns after another wave of the pandemic in 2022, the country was hit by another calamity: the floods. Since June, one third of the nation’s territory had been submerged. Water dislocated millions, dismantled constructions, destroyed possessions, crops, and livestock, killed thousands of human beings, and caused diseases, infections, and malnutrition among innumerable citizens. The rest of the population watched, grieved, and tried to help their compatriots. Artists and cultural workers also participated in this humanistic service. The work of Rashid Rana, It Lies Beyond (2022), an installation on a monumental scale that filled the walls for the Karachi Biennale 22 (10/31–11/13), deals with the floods: a disaster caused by the shift in the global climate,…

Documenta was not the only mega-exhibition with a decolonial agenda that became plagued by controversy in Germany. Led by artist Kader Attia, the 12th Berlin Biennale (6/11–9/18) faced criticism over the display of the French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel’s installation Solvable Poison. Scenes from the American Occupation in Baghdad (2013), a maze of enlarged reproductions of the infamous photographs depicting torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by members of the United States military at Abu Ghraib prison, and its relation to three Iraqi artists’ works. In an open letter published in Artforum and co-signed by 15 Iraqi artists, Baghdad-born curator Rijin Sahakian critiqued the Biennale’s decision to feature Lebel’s installation, which she described as an “unconsidered reproduction of the invader’s crimes.” Solvable Poison also divided two of Iraqi artist Sajjad Abbas’s…

Guided by the spirit of the Indonesian collective rice barn (lumbung), ruangrupa, as artistic directors of documenta 15, devised a decentralized model for resource-sharing among invited collectives and artists. This distributed approach produced a mega-event in Kassel that resembled a congress or festival of collectives and artists engaged in social-practice initiatives, both locally and around the world. Many exhibition spaces were designed with activities in mind, as with the Indonesian education collective Gudskul’s transformation of the Fridericianum into the “Fridskul” to host numerous workshops with their international fellows, and Britto Arts Trust’s initiative PAKGHOR – The Social Kitchen, a cooking and eating space with planting beds constructed outside the Documenta Halle. Many collectives opted for mini-retrospectives, as with Taring Padi’s self-organized showcase at Hallenbad Ost of their many environmental and…

“Let this biennial be compost” were the words of the three co-curators of the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Singapore-based curator Ute Meta Bauer, artist Amar Kanwar, and academic David Teh as they envisaged an event with “no great gathering… no noisy culmination.” Distributed across 13 locations in the Beyoğlu, Kadıköy, Fatih, and Zeytinburnu neighborhoods in the form of 55 projects with more than 500 contributors, the Biennial emphasized process rather than the productions around a series of concerns: finding alternatives to the highly polarized media; developing sensory experiences that reconnect us; co-creating knowledge and histories; and re-learning to care for the Earth. A signature example was the project led by Cooking Sections, Wallowland (2022), about the vanishing ecosystems of water buffalos outside Istanbul; it comprised a one-day agricultural festival and then…

The Milk of Dreams Inspired by Surrealist writer and artist Leonora Carrington’s tales, curator Cecilia Alemani conceived of the 59th Venice Biennale as a showcase of contemporary discourse about the “the metamorphoses of bodies and definitions of the human” as well as our evolving relationships to technologies and the Earth. Featuring 213 artists from 58 countries—a majority of whom, for the first time in the Biennale’s 127-year history, are women and gender non-conforming artists—“Milk of Dreams” drew on the posthuman theories of Rosi Braidotti to critique the centrality of the white European male in the modern, Enlightenment-era conception of the human. In her transhistorical approach Alemani reached back to key 20th-century figures in five “cabinets,” which introduced thematic concerns such as witchcraft, ecofeminist, and Indigenous mythologies. Following those anchor points,…

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN ART TOKYO Shinro Ohtake’s first retrospective in 16 years showcased nearly 500 works from the artist’s 50 years of collecting, juxtaposing, and layering found materials into scrapbooks, mixed-media collages, and installations. Creatively inspired by the process of destruction, Ohtake presented the salvaged neon sign of the Uwajima Station above the MOMAT’s entrance, reflecting his longtime residence outside Tokyo. Inside the museum, the hut-like installation covered in printed matter such as old magazines, posters, and drawings, MON CHERI: A Self-Portrait as a Scrapped Shed (2012), comprises bicycle wheels, a kayak, street lamps, and fishnets as a three-dimensional self-portrait. As his collage technique has grown more sophisticated, Mnemoscape 0 (2022) features layers of paint and compiled industrial objects in an attempted translation of “the remaining landscape in the…

AXEL VERVOORDT Although Jaffa Lam is best known for her works engaging Hong Kong’s migrant communities, “Chasing an Elusive Nature” delivered an introspective inquiry into the artist’s practice. Comprising 11 works, the solo exhibition reflected the artist’s engagement with narratives and materials. The surface of A Piece of Silence from Lying (standing mode) (2022), a sculpture made of wood, evoked the soft ripples of water. Several works incorporated discarded umbrellas, including A Piece of Silence from Standing (2022), in which she transformed an industrial trolley into a stained-glass window made from a patchwork of fabric. In the sculpture Somersault Cloud (2022), Lam used white-painted wooden slates to capture the ephemerality of clouds, which were mounted on a standing umbrella anchored by a scholar’s rock and hovered over visitors.…

MOMA PS1 The first United States survey of filmmaker and artist Jumana Manna, “Break, Take, Erase, Tally,” curated by Ruba Katrib, brought together two recent films and nearly 20 sculptures. Manna’s latest feature, Foragers (2022), looks at Palestinian practices of gathering culinary plants such as za’atar and akkoub and how Israeli authorities have criminalized these activities as part of its occupation. The film builds on the themes of environmental and cultural extinction explored in Manna’s earlier Wild Relatives (2018), which documented a Syrian agricultural research center displaced to Lebanon and their replication of seeds from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. While Manna’s films explore tactics of resilience, her sculptural works are inspired by fragments of khabyas, archaic grain storage units once used in the Levant.…

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART Tala Madani’s first North American survey, “Biscuits,” spanned more than 130 works from the last two decades of her provocative painting practice. Known for her transgressive yet playful portrayals of gender stereotypes and bad behavior, the Iranian-American artist has generated a cast of colorful characters, from jinn-like denizens engaged in barbaric acts with one another to the overly wholesome children engaged in sadistic fun. The Cake Men (2005–08) series depicts cartoonish men in abject compositions, while in the series Shit Moms (2019–) “mother” is represented through bilious brown smears, enveloping an entire room in Wallpaper with Shit Mom (2022) or collapsed on a dining table in Shit Mom: Feedback (2021). Carrying on with sardonic motherhood theme, Cloud Mommies (2022) portrays idealistic, wispy cloud figures floating through…

TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM Through its archival approach, “The Wild Eighties: Dawn of a Transdisciplinary Taiwan” at TFAM argued for a history of 1980s transdisciplinary art and literature that is separate, if not counter to, the nostalgic, anti-communist modernist imperative. Through archival material, audio recordings, video documentaries, and interviews, the show revolved around five major sub-themes that examined the interlacing of politics and aesthetics. After the end of martial law in 1987, for instance, the Dawus indigenous group held the performance event known as “Rip the Evil Out of Orchid Island” as a demonstration against the nuclear waste dumped there. As cultural influences poured into Taiwan, the exhibition reveals how new mediums, ideas, and technologies impacted visual artists and new-media practitioners, who draw influence from experiment theater groups like Hong…

On August 24, the nongovernmental International Council of Museums (ICOM) approved a new definition of “museum” at its general assembly in Prague—the first significant overhaul since the consultative body was established in 1946. Its new 57-word text states a museum is a “not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage,” that “foster[s] diversity and sustainability” and “offer[s] varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.” ICOM ultimately excised words from earlier drafts such as “inclusive” and “democratizing,” which some members had found too ideological at its last meeting in 2019. More than 92 percent of member institutions voted in favor of the new language. The tension at the heart of the new definition of “museum” is whether such…

Hossein Valamanesh 1949–2022 Drawing on the culture and environments of his birthplace in Iran and adoptive home of Australia, Hossein Valamanesh explored the intertwining of love, spirituality, and nature in installations and mixed-media works. His retrospective “Puisque tout passe (This will also pass)” was held in 2021 at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam in Paris. Budi Tek 1957–2022 Budiardjo “Budi” Tek was a Chinese-Indonesian industrialist and art collector behind the Shanghai Yuz Foundation and Yuz Museum. His collection of more than 1,500 artworks included many large-scale installations by international artists such as Maurizio Cattelan and by famed Chinese artists including Xu Bing, Wang Guangyi, and Ai Weiwei. Mona Saudi 1945–2022 Born in 1945 in Amman, Mona Saudi left Jordan for Beirut to pursue her artistic passion at the age of…

As the global economy muddled through its post-pandemic recovery, art organizations ploughed ahead with their plans. The Sydney Modern project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) welcomed the public on December 3 with a robust program of exhibitions, performances, new acquisitions, and commissions. Designed by Japanese architectural studio SANAA, the AUD 344 million (USD 224 million), 22,000-square-meter complex comprises a new standalone building and a public art garden adjacent to AGNSW’s renovated existing structures. Not to be outdone, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne announced plans on March 15 to construct a new building called The Fox: NGV Contemporary, backed by a AUD 100 million (USD 74 million) donation from entrepreneurs Paula and Lindsay Fox. Slated to open in 2028, it will become Australia’s largest…

Despite outperforming pre-pandemic figures, auctions in 2022 struggled to outdo 2021’s exceptional turnover. Global contemporary art sales yielded USD 2.7 billion from July 2021 through June 2022, slightly less than the previous year’s USD 2.73 billion, according to Artprice’s annual report. Owing to its zero-Covid policy, China lost its place as the world’s largest auction market to the United States, while South Korea boasted dramatic growth. Buyers preferred ultra-contemporary artists as demand for established auction favorites faltered. Amid the crypto winter, the volatile NFT market collapsed 46 percent from its debut year. Tug of War An inverse of 2021’s tally, the US returned as the world’s largest art-auction market with a 39-percent share, while China, bolstered by sales in Hong Kong, comprised 27 percent, a significant drop from 40 percent…

Departing from the forms and substances of the human body, Jes Fan’s artworks, attend to states of fluidity and transformation. As societal debates rage about the mutable nature of gender categories, Fan’s creations intersect with increasing scientific and medical research into endocrinology. The New York-based artist sees his own body as material to be manipulated. His sculptures Fragrant Harbour and Wounding (both 2022), for instance, shown in the Venice Biennale’s central exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” (4/23–11/27), combine 3D-printed replicas of his torso before chest surgery with dripping, milky silicone components injected with prolactin, a hormone found in both breast milk and tears. His earlier sculpture Systems II (2018), shown at “Symbionts” (10/21–2/26/23) at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, comprises a resin-covered frame with amorphous glass pieces…

The year 2022 began with Naarm/Melbourne slowly emerging from one of the world’s longest Covid-19 lockdowns. Art institutions and those who run them waited with bated breath to see how the city’s first year of “Covid normal” would unfold. Conversations at Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) to commercial galleries to Naarm/Melbourne’s monolithic National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) were filled with a cautious trepidation and their programming seemingly matched. As the world returned to a new kind of normal so too had our city but at a slower pace, one filled with fatigue. Unlike previous years, the NGV’s yearly blockbuster was not a major commission by a contemporary international artist but instead an unruly collection show. “QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection” (3/10– 8/21) was touted as unearthing LGBTQI+ stories buried deep from…

As you entered “Phantasmapolis,” the 8th Asian Art Biennial (10/30/21–3/6) at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, you collected a round yellow sticker at the end of a catwalk platform with illuminated markers bearing the social-distance catchphrase, “Please keep 150 cm apart from others,” underfoot in Joyce Ho’s installation DOTS (2021). I’ve collected numerous dots in different colors over the past three years as evidence of having completed contact tracing and temperature checks upon my entry into malls, markets, and other public spaces. Though regulations have relaxed considerably since the start of the pandemic, most Taiwanese continue to wear or carry face masks upon leaving their homes, despite minimal disruptions to our daily lives compared to the rest of the world. However, since mid-May, confirmed cases rose…

What have you this past year? I just completed my MFA thesis at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where been working on over the course of a year, I was able to consolidate my ideas and art practice. I also participated in the exhibition “emo gym” (4/21–6/19) at Tai Kwun Contemporary, where I presented If Tomorrow Never Comes (2021–2022), which is the result of my recent experimentation with pinhole photography, and The Remnants of Yesterday (2022), a series of images featuring a cheongsam patched together by my grandmother. There was also the show “31 Women Artists – Hong Kong” (5/6–7/31) at 10 Chancery Lane gallery, which presented one of my earliest pieces, so both my earliest and latest pieces were showing at the same time. In 2022, you participated in…

If 2022 was a year of getting back to a pre-pandemic pace of activity in the Kuala Lumpur scene, then there was a blooming of new spaces and initiatives, and dare we say, new audiences. We felt something of a shift, an expansion, and a tentative energy following the introversion and mostly quiet productivity of the past three years. The National Art Gallery (NAG) reopened on June 21 after two years of renovations, with a very broad selection from its permanent collection—perhaps the first introduction to the national collection for some younger audiences. During the hiatus, under the helm of director Ameruddin Bin Ahmad, the NAG team undertook important outreach and decentralization beyond the immediate arts community and Kuala Lumpur–Klang Valley audiences, with art camps, discussions, and field trips across…

In January 2022, a boycott stirred Berlin’s art scene. Art professionals, loudest among them artist Candice Breitz, started a grassroots campaign against the new exhibition venue Kunsthalle Berlin that suddenly nested in the former Tempelhof Airport—one of the city’s largest historical spaces that hosts an annual art fair and music festival. The city and the so-called Kunsthalle—a term typically denoting nonprofit art spaces—came under fire as it transpired that the organization Foundation for Art and Culture, which had quietly received the space and funding from the Berlin municipal government, was a private foundation with friendly ties to the Russian president. The Kunsthalle has since suspended its program, and an open call next year will determine the future of the airport. The public debacle, which played out until mid-year, seemed like…

In its fourth edition, the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 bore the date from the Nepali Bikram Sambat calendar corresponding to the year 2020 when the event was originally due to be held. The pandemic-induced postponement became a fitting metaphor for artistic director Cosmin Costinas and co-curators Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung as they looked at the “uneasy synchronicities” generated by showing more than 130 artists from 40 countries working in traditional, Indigenous, craft-based, and contemporary practices across five venues. Paubha painter Lok Chitrakar’s depiction of Hindu deity Ganesh, Rakta Ganapati (2020), for instance, took 15 years to create and was shown at the Patan Museum alongside Nepali modernists such as Puran Khadka and contemporary Hong Kong ink painters Hung Fai and Wai Pong Yu. Works at the Nepal Art Council…

NATASHA The seventh Singapore Biennale was dubbed “Natasha” by its four co-curators—Ala Younis, Nida Ghouse, June Yap, and Binna Choi—in order to rediscover “the possibility of intimacy and spontaneity” provided by the act of naming, and in turn, reevaluate our relationship with festivals, artists, and artworks. More than 50 artists and collaborators participated at multiple locations across the island city, from Tanjong Pagar Distripark to the outlying St. John’s and Lazarus Islands. How names manifest our values is explored in Walid Raad’s Comrade leader, comrade leader, how nice to see you _ II (2022), a video projection of a waterfall overlaid with cutouts of military and political leaders, reflecting on Lebanon’s shifting alliances during its Civil War (1975–90). At the Singapore Art Museum, Cambodian artist Kanitha Tith’s mixed-media installation Hut…

Reading rooms are the new white cubes; flow charts are the new abstract paintings; weaving is the new archiving; gardens are the new video installations; cooking is the new performance. Dirt is the new clay. Weeds are the new flowers. Composting is the new curating; harvesting is the new criticism. The metaverse is the new multiverse, and vice-versa. At a time when contemporary art is increasingly unconstrained from conventional materials, forms of social practice and ecological art rooted in indigeneity have come to the fore, just as artists have simultaneously grown more engaged with digital technology. At Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, curators Tobias Berger, Jill Angel Chun, and Daniel Szehin Ho, explored the twin sense of the world’s disconnectedness produced before, and accelerated during, the pandemic—the feeling of…

GALLERY2 + P21 As a sculptor, hands are at the center of Haneyl Choi’s practice both as a tool and an impetus for “Manner,” co-presented at Gallery2 and P21. Shown at Gallery 2, H4 (2022) is a smooth, gray 3D-printed hand with six fingers, while C4 (2022) is inspired by cyclopia, a congenital condition where a newborn’s face fails to properly fuse. The nearly 40 artworks in this two-venue show reflected Choi’s meditation on the forms and deviations of the human body, as in C1, C2, and C3 (all 2022), sculptures of nude men with varying but extreme physical dimensions. Mixing references to exercise, sports, and digital media across his folding-screen sculptures and wall decals at P21, Choi adroitly explored the two meanings of “queer”: one meaning sexual identity, the…

ISHARA ART FOUNDATION Jitish Kallat’s first major solo presentation in West Asia, with new and older projects, “Order of Magnitude” contemplated the artist’s interests in the spatial and temporal interconnectivity between individuals, the universe, and the extraterrestrial. Redeploying systems of schematic knowledge, Kallat cut a large swath of linen shaped like half the conic Albers projection map for Postulates from a Restless Radius (2021), which bears a hand-drawn pencil-drawn grid that bleeds into intricately rendered botanical, geological, and celestial forms in place of the lands and seas. In the installation Covering Letter (terranum nuncius) (2018–20) Kallat reproduces the sounds and images NASA compiled on phonographs launched on the 1977 Voyager space probes, prying open the records again as a reminder of our connections amid the vastness of space.…

FONDAZIONE QUERINI STAMPALIA ONLUS Curated by artist Danh Vo with Chiara Bertola, the three-artist exhibition connected Vo’s own practice to those of the Korean nonagenarian Dansaekhwa painter Park Seo-Bo and the Japanese American sculptor, architect, and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988). Conceived as a “large sculpture” by Vo, the exhibition featured Noguchi’s modernist rice-paper lanterns situated in spaces within the Venetian palazzo, echoing its ornate architecture and illuminating the collection of European art. By constructing a wooden armature within the historical interiors, Vo guided visitors through the building’s “mess of time,” juxtaposing Park’s ultra-minimal, meditative works from his long-running Écriture series against the neoclassical décor. Throughout Vo also presented his new series of plant photographs, echoing the natural forms that inspired both Park and Noguchi.…

THE NEWARK MUSEUM OF ART ASIAN ART MUSEUM, SAN FRANCISCO A long overdue survey of the late artist, educator, and organizer Carlos Villa, “Worlds in Collision” was the first United States museum retrospective of a Filipino American artist. The multipart show foregrounded 36 works created between 1959 and 2011 that exemplified Villar’s “creolization of aesthetics” as a form of self-exploration and solidarity among diasporic individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area. The visually seductive Third Coat (1983), for instance, made out of feathers, bone dolls, and acrylic on canvas and taffeta, references ritual attire from Hawai‘i while drawing from ornamentation in postcolonial African, Asian, and Oceanic art and religions. Representing how people are often amalgamations of various cultures and identities, in his black-and-white portrait Tatu (1971) he covered his face…

VILLA ARCONATI – FONDAZIONE AUGUSTO RANCILIO A captivating retrospective of Anglo-Chinese female artist Angela Lyn, “On the Edge of Time,” was curated by Li Zhenhua with more than 150 works, from paintings to multimedia installations, made over three decades. Throughout the 25 rooms of the 17th-century palazzo the survey spun a narrative between past, present, and future—part fantasy, part autobiography. In the “great hall of blood, sweat and salt,” Lyn’s passenger (2021) was based on her father’s childhood in Xiamen and consists of an antique Chinese sedan chair with a miniature curtain embroidered with the phrase, “Are we nearly there yet, brother?” In the “hunting room” was will there be enough (2021), a low dining table with a surrealistic, oversized piece of cutlery, her bronze sculpture fork (1994). Embroidered on…