Innholdsfortegnelse for 134 (Jul/Aug 2023) i ArtAsiaPacific

Last July, followers of Ho Chi Minh City’s art scene struggled to book tickets to “Timeless Souls: Beyond the Voyage” (2022), Sotheby’s first noncommercial exhibition in Vietnam. Demand was especially high as locals were eager to see works by Le Thi Luu (1911–1988), Le Pho (1907–2001), Mai Trung Thu (1906–1980), and Vu Cao Dam (1908–2000), masters of the L’Ecole Des Beaux Arts de L’Indochine whose names have been mythologized in the national psyche and whose works have achieved record-breaking sums at international auctions in recent years. The exhibition’s success is a sign that Vietnamese art is finally receiving the recognition it deserves, as well as investment on the global stage—not least from a growing pool of local collectors. Jasmine Prasetio, managing director of Sotheby’s Southeast Asia, said, “We are delighted…

Failing banks, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and high inflation—the waning optimism of collectors and consignors in New York this May was reflected in modest presale estimates maxing out at eight-figure values. Later in the month in Hong Kong, auction houses witnessed lukewarm sales while waiting on promises of an imminent Asian reopening boom and recovery. NEW YORK Christie’s New York’s keystone 21st Century Evening Sale on May 15 boasted a strong female lineup. However, it was neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s triptych charting the Black diaspora across Egypt and America, El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) (1983), that stole the show at USD 67.1 million. The remainder of the night’s USD 98 million total haul was spread relatively evenly among other auction lots, with Cecily Brown’s dynamic oil-on-linen painting Untitled (The Beautiful and Damned)…

Priyageetha Dia SINGAPORE In many ways, Priyageetha Dia’s practice echoes communications scholar Marshall McLuhan’s golden revelation, The medium is the message (1964). Her argument is embodied in her careful selection of media, such as reflective gold, immersive CGI, or otherwise. She first made national headlines in 2017 for vandalism when she gilded a drab, concrete public staircase in foil. A tactile intervention that draws attention to the everyday spaces stifled by “ever-lifeless” state architecture, Untitled (Golden Staircase) prefigured the artist’s material experiments and foregrounded her later attempts to restore minority agency effaced by imperialist narratives. Leaning into her identity as a contemporary Tamizh woman in Singapore, Dia tells the stories of the long-overlooked diasporic Tamizh community in Southeast Asia. Her Kochi-Muziris Biennale animation, The Sea Is a Blue Memory (2022),…

In August 1990, the City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) organized “August Swirl,” a three-week women’s arts festival featuring theater, dance, video installation, and painting by the likes of Pia Ho, Mui Cheuk Yin, May Fung, Ellen Pau, Yau Ching, Lo Yin Shan, Ribble Chung, and Sze Yuen. Despite being a one-off event, the festival is still considered a pioneering project in terms of promoting gender consciousness in art.1 In November of that same year, three video artists who took part in “August Swirl”—May Fung, Ellen Pau, and Lo Yin Shan—contributed short essays to Crossover, which at the time was a new independent art magazine published by Willy Tsao of CCDC. The essays included in Crossover were “Video and Gender Politics (Edited Draft)” by May Fung, “Ten Notes on Video” by…

Unfamiliar with the temperamental properties of video art, I was initially intimidated by it. In fact, I’m not even sure how to operate a karaoke machine, which I’ve always thought of as an entertaining game solely for the amusement of oneself and of others. I first borrowed a video recorder after growing frustrated with the limitations of two-dimensional space,1 a space I have tried to push and to shift. I created a polyphonic space with sound and music and allowed this body of performance to interact with the extended space, building upon this relationship without being aware of it. But once I immerse myself in the performing state I cannot resist and instead fall willingly into the game of creation. Once it’s begun, it’s unstoppable, and one is unable to…

Fiftieth anniversaries are momentous: sometimes eagerly anticipated, other times dreaded. But what of the mundane and forgotten dates? In Leung Chi Wo’s most recent video installation My Random Diary 0 (2023) the artist continues his exploration of Hong Kong’s colonial history. The 18-minute film comprises black-and-white photographs capturing sites in Hong Kong where an official event took place—a government-sponsored children’s fair, for example—juxtaposed with an unrelated crime or a violent dispute between neighbors that took place on the same day in a different area of the city. Rather than using archival photographs, Leung returned to the locations in which the original events occurred exactly 50 years earlier. Images are captioned with the date, time, and details of the events, spanning February 22, 1970, to December 31, 1972, and plays in…

What does it mean to adapt or to assimilate? Where do the lines between borrowing, theft, and hybridity lie? These were the weighty questions raised by “A Third Language” at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Set among a growing set of exhibition histories on cultural heterogeneity and translation in the region, the show revealed how difference generates modes of knowledge-making and mitigates homogenous points of view. Vivid and sharp, Iman Radd’s cacophonic mural Days of Bliss and Woe: A Third Language (2018/22) is an array of cultural motifs that stylistically allude to Pakistani truck painting. Originally commissioned for the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT) in 2018–19, the work loomed over the gallery and grounded the exhibition. Across the panels, avocados orbit in outer space, extinct Tasmanian…

At the center of Kornkrit Jianpinidnan’s “Thru the Straits of Demos” sat Winkieboy Secret Map (2023), a reimagining in wood of a stone pedestal located in the heart of Bangkok’s Lumphini Park. Across its surface, thumbnail photographs were scattered like landmarks as a clock ticked in the corner. Attempts to unearth the identity of Winkieboy led to a 2018 tweet from a now-shuttered account that claimed the moniker, in which a jogger vividly describes his encounter with a group of men masturbating in the bushes. In the orgy of responses, the then-governor of Bangkok, Aswin Kwanmuang, countered, denying even the possibility that such a thing could occur. Suddenly, the image of the park was divided and the impossibility of truth in any representation of a place surfaced in Lumphini. The…

Presenting an elaborate network of sculptures, installations, and photographs across the two-story Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, in materials as varied as rammed earth, hand-blown glass, cast bronze, carved stone, found objects, and even chewing gum, Kelly Akashi’s latest show “Infinite Body” explored equally diverse and ambitious themes, including time, the body, the universe, transformation, and more. Spread across the gallery in various tableaux, the viewer was cycled between the macro and micro, timeliness and timelessness, and the universal and deeply personal. Two craggy calcite stones anchor the two platforms—both titled Polar Vistas (1993–2023) and (2022–23)—each carved with inset niches, further enshrining a sense of religiosity, spirituality, and ancestry. On one side, the larger rock is impressively hewed (especially as this is the artist’s first foray into stone carving) with a perfect…

CONTROVERSY: SHIFTING RED LINES Since the lifting of Covid restrictions in China, the Chinese authorities have tightened their control over freedom of speech. On May 6, authorities shut down an exhibition in Shenzhen for displaying artist Li Wei’s floor installation Manifesto (2023), which references a catchphrase that expresses people’s frustration and criticizes the Chinese government’s draconian Covid restrictions imposed over the past three years. Two weeks later, renowned Chinese contemporary artist Yue Minjun became the main target of attacks by Chinese nationalist netizens due to allegations of “humiliating the military.” Images of Yue’s work containing visual implications of the Chinese military or historical incidents have been censored by Chinese social media platforms including Weibo. On May 19, Chinese think tank Kunlun Policy Research Institute republished an article by Yang Zhaoyou…

Giant of Taiwanese modernist sculpture, Ju Ming, died aged 85 in his Taipei home on April 22. Best known for his Taichi and Living World series, his sculptures capture his everyday observations in boxy steel or bronze forms. Many of his works are still exhibited in public spaces around the world today. Rising Kazakh artist Bakhyt Bubikanova, who was most recently featured at the 14th Gwangju Biennale, died at the age of 38, after a battle with cancer. Through her multimedia practice, Bubikanova reconfigured entrenched imagery and associations tied to Central Asian identity.…

The jostle to be the artworld’s next “It” event is never-ending in today’s oversaturated scene. Between testing out post-pandemic models to attract buyers and navigating a congested calendar, art fairs in Busan, Taipei, and New York demonstrated this May that there is no single solution—or optimal size—to capture a fickle market in volatile times. BUSAN South Korea’s capital had its time to shine last September with the dual-staging of Kiaf and Frieze Seoul. In May, the limelight shifted 325 kilometers southeast to the country’s second-tier city where Art Busan 2023 (May 5–7) held its largest edition to date. Yet despite a lineup of nearly 150 galleries from 21 countries—up from 134 exhibitors in 2022—buyers showed more caution, leading to mixed sales and reflecting a cooling-off period after South Korea’s art…

With a 100-word bio and a few images, how would you characterize yourself to appeal to potential dates? Would you include your hobbies or certain physical features that you’re most proud of? Or would you opt for humor? Despite how much “swiping” has changed the dating scene and the relationship patterns of an entire generation, so little has been said about how digitization and the virtual realms of the internet are reconceptualizing romantic relationships, how it has made us at once more sexually open and repressed, and how genuine connections with other human beings have become difficult on a new level. An early reflection on these changes came from Hong Kong animation artist Wong Ping. Just one year after Tinder’s initial success in Asia, he released a nine-minute animation Who’s…

Videos can be transmitted via waves of electricity to any space with a television, or they can be projected onto a silver screen. In Hong Kong, the former caters to popular culture; the latter is rooted in the independent and underground scene, with Video Power’s “May Fourth Concert” and “April Fifth Action” being two examples. Both works reflect events in contemporary society and act as expressions of the videographer’s creativity. But they can also be analyzed through the lens of gender politics. As gender politics can be about discrimination or “the war of the sexes,” what we should ask ourselves is why issues of gender politics appear in videos in the first place. How (if only through the subtle influence of the moving image) do relations between men and women…

How could you make a memorial for a garden? And how might a garden be a portrait of someone’s life story? Simryn Gill’s installation Maria’s Garden (2021) is an index of an urban oasis: precise yet poignant records from 93 one-to-one impressions of the plants that inhabited her neighbor’s property. The eponymous Maria was an Italian immigrant to Sydney and a widow. After Maria’s death but before developers could demolish her paradise, Gill made an extensive six-month study of every plant—and many of the weeds—in the adjacent plot in the suburb of Marrickville. As the artist looked closely at the rows of trees and plants, she recorded an entire Mediterranean garden—from lemon trees to persimmons, grape vines to prickly pears, hydrangeas to succulents—whose inhabitants, like their caretaker, were non-native to…

INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION Since the mid-2010s Ebecho Muslimova has regularly exhibited works depicting Fatebe, a self-inspired, larger-than-life character whose feats of ridiculousness and perversity push against our natural instincts for humiliation and shame. Across drawings, paintings, and room-sized installations, Fatebe exists as a line-drawn entity, redistributing the limits of the body, decency, and the border between artistic illusion and experienced reality. But Muslimova’s works are more than just comic adventures. Instead, she harnesses her creation to depict universal feelings of otherness, awe, and possibility across two dimensions and actual space. Crisp ink drawings floating against clean white backgrounds usually depict Fatebe in the nude: distorting and reflecting her vagina and anus (rendered as a joyfully-stylized star) in warped contortions in Fatebe Funny Mirror (2017) or playing around with a version…

One of the most dynamic contemporary artists in China today, Sun Xun has a knack for creating genre-melding works that combine traditional Chinese art forms with digital media. He is best known for his stop-frame animation comprised of thousands of ink paintings, charcoal drawings, and woodcuts that seem to run counter to the flow of moving pictures and advancements in computer-generated imagery (CGI). Beyond suggestive titles, his films contain little dialogue, relying instead on the throbbing sound and images of dystopian worlds to explore mercurial ideas of memory, history, and politics, underpinned by contingent notions of time. In 2022, Sun’s prior solo exhibition at ShanghArt, “An Infinite Journey,” was never seen by the public due to Shanghai’s protracted lockdown. The ill-fated exhibition showcased the opening portion of his first feature-length…

Ask any one of the 220,000 rickshaw drivers swerving their way through Mumbai’s suburbs, and they’ll tell you that this is a city that’s always changing. Whether in the constant construction of new suburban tower blocks, the raising of massive infrastructural projects, or the tearing down of classic art deco buildings in the city center, this is an urban landscape in flux. TARQ Gallery is one of the more recent additions to the cityscape, and Sameer Kulavoor’s “Edifice Complex” was the first exhibition in their new space. There’s no shortage of shows that claim to grapple in some way with the nature of urban space. While many failed to convince, “Edifice Complex” supported its claim with a keen eye for India’s post-independence architecture and an acute sensitivity to the changes…

As visitors explored the third and fourth floors of Wrightwood 659, they were transported to the distant past of the Warring States Period (c. 481–221 BCE) that was aesthetically diffracted through the fabric of a speculative future. Drawing on Asian Futurism, a trend that foregrounds artistic work by Asian and diasporic producers, the exhibition was a creative reconfiguration of the life of a key figure in Chinese history and literature, the poet Qu Yuan (c. 339–278 BCE), which constructed a vision of an alternative future that is simultaneously dystopian and hopeful, but also ambivalent, haunted by pessimism and uncertainty. The question that lingered on my mind as I walked through the phantasmagorical display of multiscreen videos, neon installations, wall projections, excerpts from graphic novels, ancient Chinese objects, and textual works…

At the opening of the 14th Gwangju Biennale—held outdoors during an unexpected downpour—the sound of rain reverberated with claps of thunder and the roar of ocean waves created by Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui’s performance Prelude to Rain (2023), in collaboration with South Korean instrument maker In-seok Seo. Busily trying out different microphones and adjusting the many tools in front of him, Atoui was not at all discouraged by the chaos caused by the weather, as spontaneity has always been central to his performances. The sonic delays instead evoked the sense of anticipation one experiences before rainfall, adding another layer of interpretation to the event. For the next issue, associate editor Pamela Wong speaks to Atoui about the visual and tactile aspects of sound, the engineering process behind his projects on…

To trace the history of repression and reveal the mechanisms of power that silence the subaltern woman in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), comparative literature scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak drew on the example of the English abolition and criminalization in 1829 of sati, the Hindu rite of self-immolation of a widow upon her deceased husband’s funeral pyre. Using Derridean deconstruction, Spivak identifies two lies in the absence of the woman’s voice-consciousness: “White men are saving brown women from brown men” by the British as imperial rhetoric of subjugation; and “The women actually wanted to die” by the Indian nativists, for whom sati was an important proof of their allegiance to tradition as a reactionary ideology and of a nostalgia for lost origins. In Spivak’s words: “Between patriarchy and imperialism ……

On June 7, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra announced an indefinite postponement of the exhibition “Ngura Pulka – Epic Country” after press reports raised serious allegations about the authenticity of artworks from the Aboriginal-run APY Art Centre Collective (APYACC), which represents over 500 artists from Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Launched in April, an independent inquiry led by experts in copyright law, indigenous art, and museum ethics has yet to reach its conclusions, while the South Australia government, which funds the APYACC, is leading a separate inquiry. Due to open on June 3, “Ngura Pulka – Epic Country” was promoted as the “largest and most significant” project “entirely conceived, created, directed, and determined by Anangu people,” showcasing 30 major artworks by Aboriginal artists from across Southern Australia.…

Gallery guys, gals, and nonbinary pals—art-world denizens fka “gallerinas”—jobs are opening at a dealership near you! Gagosian Asia’s smooth-talking rainmaker Nick Simunovic is exiting his office in Hong Kong’s Pedder Building in Central. Although still in charge of “Asia,” he will work remotely from Toronto and shuttle between Asia and New York—while passing the behemoth’s regional reigns to Han-I Wang in Hong Kong and Christina You in Beijing. These two up-and-comers helped cultivate a new crop of young collectors across Greater China during the darkest days of Covid. Although two’s company, surely there is still space to fill Simunovic’s big shoes. Only Mandarin, Bahasa, or Korean speakers should apply! Also rumored to have absconded is Perrotin’s longtime Japanese fixer, Etsuko Nakajima. The glamorous Asia-Pacific partner, who started working for the…

JUL 22–AUG 20 MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AUSTRALIA, SYDNEY Adam Linder: “Hustle Harder” For “Hustle Harder,” choreographer Adam Linder created a month-long series of dances that will be performed from opening to closing each day. Curated by Anneke Jaspers, the performances are set against a backdrop of MCA collection artworks by contemporaries Hany Armanious, Agatha Gothe-Snape, and Tracey Moffatt. A self-styled polyglot of dance, Linder is not known for a signature movement or style, but instead has frequently choreographed in the museum or gallery space, and here looks at how art has become a favorite selfie backdrop. Without a stage to separate the dancers, visitors to the MCA enter as performers in their own right. JUL 22–OCT 22 TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM, TAIPEI Edward Yang: “A One and A Two:…

It’s well known here in the Philippines that the public transport system leaves a lot to be desired. As a broke university student in Metro Manila, I used to scour websites and apps for affordable ways of reaching locations far from any train station (there are simply not enough metro lines for the labyrinthine streets of this city). And while it may have taken a tricycle, two jeepneys, and a half-kilometer walk to get there, at least I’m there when I need to be. These urban voyages led me to two important realizations. First, I’m not keen to drive, especially in the congested streets of Manila. Second, the visual iconography of our transportation system is too rich to be ignored. The Light Rail Transit-1 stations were designed in the neo-vernacular…

Truong Cong Tung was born into a family with deep agricultural roots in Dak Lak, a province nestled in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, an area known for its rich biodiversity and contested sociopolitical histories. Soaked in the land’s nature and spirituality from an early age, Tung transfigures his memories and experiences in his homeland into his multimedia works that span from lacquer painting to the moving-image. It is Tung’s video-based works that we took as the departure point for our conversation about his practice that is embedded in visual spectrality, spiritual connectedness, and eco-critical perspectives. Firstly, congratulations on winning the inaugural Han Nefkens Foundation – Southeast Asian Video Art Production Grant 2023. How did you first begin working with this medium and what preceded it? I think everything is about timing.…

In an art space, the senses typically activated are the visual, auditory, sometimes olfactory, but rarely the haptic. At the 14th Gwangju Biennale, “soft and weak like water,” the inaugural recipient of the now-canceled Park Seo-Bo Art Prize, Korean multimedia artist Oum Jeongsoon, presented a work that emphasized the tactile nature of art that is so often overlooked—and usually discouraged. Here, signage on the floor read: “This work can be touched to feel the texture.” Typically a sight that would send gallery attendants and security into a tailspin, visitors were seen running their hands over three of the four large-scale sculptures comprising Oum’s Elephant without Trunk (2023). Inspired by the ancient parable of “The blind men and the elephant,” wherein each unseeing man describes the giant animal differently while touching…

From political protests to international art exhibitions, the motif of “water” has been well explored—and even exploited—in recent years. At the 14th Gwangju Biennale, titled after a quote from the Tao Te Ching, “soft and weak like water,” I arrived wondering what the festival could further contribute to the interpretation of “water,” and whether this would be another international art show that discusses already pervasive topics such as postcolonialism and climate change, albeit with an umbrella term conveniently grabbed from Asian philosophy. (The metaphor is quite loosely defined in the original classical text.) At the Biennale’s press conference, a Korean journalist even expressed that he was “bored by these themes” that have been addressed at festivals elsewhere. Artistic director Sook-Kyung Lee, senior curator of international art at London’s Tate Modern,…

In 2019, Los Angeles-based Various Small Fires (VSF) opened its second gallery in the heart of Hannam in Seoul. One of the most traditionally affluent neighborhoods, Hannam attracts a large number of visitors from adjacent Itaewon, a multicultural hub with a strong LGBTQ+ presence. As a result, Hannam is composed of multiple layers of demographic groups, each with different ages, genders, socioeconomic backgrounds, and values. At this intersection of the old and new, tradition and transition, VSF presented “I Surrender,” a solo show of Seoul-based artist Dew Kim. Kim’s seven new sculptural works greeted the visitor as one entered the space; five pinned on the walls and two standing on the floor. The concentration in both the installation design and number of selected works effectively enabled the viewer to grasp…

The Indian Ocean stretches nearly 10,000 kilometers between Oceania, Asia, and Africa, making up almost onefifth of Earth’s water surface. Known for its historic trade and exchange routes, the vast ocean expanse became the focus of Gropius Bau and Savvy Contemporary’s joint exhibition “Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora.” Curated by Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the extensive project boasted a formidable total of 34 artists, musicians, and writers, and aimed at mapping the waterways’ Afro-Asian migration, labor, and cultural transfers that the sea carried back and forth over the last few centuries. Diving headfirst into the plethora of practices, audiences at Gropius Bau stumbled past the unembellished painting remnants of Nikhil Chopra’s performance One Water, Many Lands (2023), before finding…