Indholdsfortegnelse for 113 (May/Jun 2019) i ArtAsiaPacific

New networks of alterity and resistance Chicago’s art scene reflects its reputation as a “City of Neighborhoods.” Artists from China, Hong Kong, India, South Korea and Taiwan, drawn to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, consistently bring new international perspectives. Rapid gentrification is currently pushing out many working-class people of color from their neighborhoods and into areas where they are crossing racial lines. Beyond the major institutions in the downtown area—the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) and the Chicago Cultural Center—lies a network of nonprofit and experimental spaces that support artists of color, including Asian and Asian American artists, whose individual identities and cultural histories are intermixing, thereby shaping new communities. These independent organizations are bolstered by the nonprofits 3Arts, Threewalls and…

Despite auction houses playing it safe by sourcing lots by the most sought-after artists, results from the March–April sales in New York, Dubai and Hong Kong confirmed numerous surprises. Along with the usual top transactions of longstanding market darlings, a number of big-name modern works notably underperformed, while other pieces surpassed expectations by staggering margins. New York Christie’s New York moved 73 lots at its South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art (SAMCA) sale on March 20, raising a modest USD 5.84 million. The cover lot, modernist MF Husain’s oil painting of stallions, Untitled (Horses) (c. early 1960s), cquired directly from the artist in 1969 and making its auction debut at this year’s SAMCA sale, exceeded its USD 900,000 high estimate to attain USD 1.04 million. Two other works by Husain…

1 Chan Ka Kiu Miss Toilet, 2017, still from digital video: 1 min 29 sec. Courtesy the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong. 2 Jala Wahid Oh Leander!, 2017, still from single-channel video with sound: 4 min 15 sec. Courtesy the artist. 3 Nadira Husain Performative Body – Embodied Performances, Red, 2018, tempera and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 140 cm. Photo by Dotgain. Courtesy PSM, Berlin; and Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig. 1 Chan Ka Kiu HONG KONG In 2003, a deadly outbreak of acute respiratory syndrome forever altered Hong Kong’s handling of hygiene. Concerned with the isolation and apathy that arose from the resulting collective germophobia, Chan Ka Kiu proposes an alternative perspective to contamination in her video A Theory About Flu (2018): instead of us catching the flu,…

How do we communicate without words? How do we speak without saying? How can language be transmitted, or translated, through sound and movement? Since 2012, Angelica Mesiti has explored the varieties and potentials of nonverbal communication in communities and with performers around the world. Beginning with Citizens Band (2012), Mesiti recorded four musical performers working outside traditional musical venues—from a Cameroonian woman who drums in a Parisian public pool, to a whistling Brisbane taxicab driver—and displayed footage of them all together in a cacophonous four-channel installation. Moving from the urban setting to the rural in her next project, Mesiti looked at three remote locations—in northern Turkey, the Canary Islands, and the island of Evia in Greece—where whistling is traditionally used to communicate across large distances. In recent three-channel works, she employed…

Shen Xin’s first solo exhibition with Shanghai’s MadeIn Gallery was titled “To Satiate,” which, among other possible interpretations, implies that the artist intended to fully satisfy the viewer. The title sat uneasily with the presented content, two new video installations that, with many loose ends, left one with more questions than answers. The first work that visitors encountered, Commerce des Esprits (2018), comprises four channels, shown on two-meter-high screens propped against one another in a parallelogram configuration and spanning much of the width of the gallery, such that only two feeds could be viewed simultaneously. On one side of the arrangement, two videos display, respectively, an English and a French translation of the soundtrack—a monologue that is delivered in Chinese by the artist’s mother—although the French is less a translation…

In her 1990 article “Reflecting Media: 10 Notes on Video,” Ellen Pau, one of Hong Kong’s foremost video artists, wrote: “If we can compare film to a love relationship, video would be like sex life. Film requires one to fall into it, just like falling in love, and only then can you engage with it. With video, you hit it off immediately, and love comes after that.” It is telling that Pau would use an analogy of erotic relations to talk about video art. Looking at the video works in her retrospective at Para Site, “What About Home Affairs?,” there was a palpable sense of intimacy that bordered on the erotic. For instance, the TV console of Diversion (1989), supported by a plinth, was positioned at about the same height…

Arpita Singh was discovered by accident. In the early 1970s, scholar and costumier Roshen Alkazi—who, along with her husband, Ebrahim Alkazi, is responsible for hundreds of contemporary art exhibitions in India—found one of Singh’s paintings mixed up with the works of another artist she was hoping to exhibit. Alkazi presented Singh’s first solo exhibition at New Delhi’s Kunika Chemould Gallery in 1972. In the same city nearly 50 years later, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art hosted a retrospective of the artist’s work, spotlighting a figure whom some now call the standard bearer of art in India. Aptly titled “Submergence: In the Midst of Here and There,” the exhibition wound its way around the museum’s labyrinthine space. At times difficult to negotiate, the layout demanded that viewers spend time to…

During the March launch of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice’s new gallery in New York, artist Vanessa German entered the building’s garden atrium, her body swimming in indigo fabric, as if emerging from the sea. The heavy skirt, crafted from hanging parcels of cloth in shades of blue, trailed on the floor as she moved. Surrounded by tropical plants and pools of water, she performed Tap.Dance (2019)—a combination of a cappella singing and poetry—repeating the refrain, “If my hands were anything other than hands […] they would be two shooting stars, galloping light across the galaxy.” Later, she wondered what miracle her hands could have performed for “the frightened police officers who shoot because they swear the hand was a gun.” Speaking to the vulnerability of black bodies…

Orientalism has been the primary lens for critiquing art and other forms of cultural production that reference Asia, the Middle East and North Africa ever since Edward Said published his seminal book on the topic in 1978. The term describes the way in which the West, historically, depicted those regions as exotic yet primitive, and how European and American artists repurposed Oriental cultures to suit their own colonialist narratives. But the world has changed drastically since then. China and India are now economic powerhouses and represent a global identity that largely rejects the Western gaze and dominance. Many artists from Asia and the diaspora view the future as a technological-flexible alternative to the rigid past. Orientalism, as an idea, should be reconsidered too—though critics and scholars have yet to present…

Two American museums, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), are facing criticism for selling important postwar paintings at auction in the first half of 2019. Deaccessioning, the process of removing an artwork or object from a museum collection—usually by selling it—is controversial, especially for cultural institutions that receive public funding, as artworks often return to private collections. Both the Guggenheim and SFMOMA plan to use the proceeds from the sales for further acquisitions. On March 31, Zao Wou-ki’s oil painting Untitled (1958)—which had been in the Guggenheim’s collection since 1964—sold for USD 14.8 million at Sotheby’s Modern Art Evening Sale in Hong Kong. The painting, a notable example of Zao’s formative “Oracle Bone” period, was donated to the Guggenheim…

While certain states have adopted nativist, isolationist rhetoric, the art world has found that it pays to have an international outlook. From the homegrown Art Fair Philippines to Asia’s premier fair, Art Basel Hong Kong, offering a breadth of international artists at varying price points brought solid results. Manila Art Fair Philippines (AFP) (February 22–24) returned to the Ayala Center’s multilevel carpark, the Link, in Makati City, drawing nearly 30,000 visitors to its seventh edition. Thirty-six Philippine galleries participated alongside 16 participants from other Asian countries. True to its aim of spotlighting Philippine art, AFP’s Projects sector restaged David Medalla’s participatory textile work A Stitch in Time (1968/2019) and the late conceptualist Ray Albano’s installation Step on the Sand and Make Footprints (1974). In the main portion of the fair,…

There was once a time in the (art) world, not so long ago, when geographical distance still mattered, and when countries, people and cultures still appeared “foreign.” There was a time when you couldn’t easily see artworks from around the globe, randomly agglomerated on your morning Instagram feed. Looking back on Nam June Paik’s exhibition in the Germany Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, one becomes melancholic for that pre-globalized art world, when much of what was to come in the electronic super-future was still a topic of speculation. Paik’s exhibition was important as much for what it showed—a huge global, multimedia spectacle—as it was for the fact that a “non-German” artist represented Germany in a historically charged building. The commissioner for the 1993 pavilion, Klaus Bussmann, called Paik an…

Styrofoam boxes, nylon bags and recycled rubber are not just the materials of Shirley Tse’s sculptures; they are the subjects too. Born in Hong Kong and residing in the United States since 1992, Tse has been fascinated by the material histories of plastics and polymers for three decades. For the artist, mass-produced materials reflect our cultural desires as well as the economic and political realities of modern society. Her sculptural and installation works bring to the fore the significance of these materials in our contemporary world—how we depend on them, and how the movements of people and patterns of trade are affected and reflected by their proliferation—while also demonstrating the materials’ metaphoric potential. Beginning in the late 1990s, her installations of oddly shaped packaging molds such as Polymathicstyrene and her…

The contemporary art world is an echo chamber par excellence, replete with its own media outlets, celebrity pundits, trolls, dominant discourses and jargon. Its insularity—enforced by its often-perceived exclusivity and aloofness from real-world concerns—further enforces the gap between the conversations happening in here and out there. As for what’s happening out there, we might agree that the problem is what Sharjah Art Foundation director Hoor Al Qasimi calls the “noise of mainstream media coverage, conspiracy theories, sensationalized storytelling and social media feeds … that prevents people from engaging with each other in complex ways.” The effort to combat those realities, and the urgency that many cultural institutions feel to connect artists’ stories with the public, animated Sharjah Biennial 14 (SB14) to become a site of more socially productive and richer…

The 2019 Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition opened almost exactly three years to the day after the inaugural edition of the event. Yet, chief curator Feng Boyi defied the label “triennial,” and instead referred to the platform as a “periodic exhibition” that unfolds in the historic water town of Wuzhen. Despite the lack of a defining nomenclature, the sophomore effort, titled “Now Is the Time,” had both the curatorial scope and material scale of a major international festival. The show delved into globalization and the hyper-dynamics of societal transformation, and the impacts of these factors on the here and now. Of the 60 participating artists, many vocalized the discontents, anxiety and confusion apparent in contemporary world affairs. As is inevitable with large-scale thematic exhibitions, some works felt like misses, particularly those…

The Chinese-American experience is one of dislocation. The generation that leaves China gives up a way of life. Then, their sons and daughters often need to straddle two worlds, catching glimpses of their familial roots through limited lenses. Some see the squaring of these identities as a struggle. Others experience it as a quest for answers to deeply personal questions. In 2012, artist Tishan Hsu—a native of Boston whose upbringing landed him in Switzerland and various corners of the United States—found a trove of letters written to his late mother and her brother. There were hundreds of pieces of correspondence penned by people who knew his mother before she left China, setting Hsu on a path of self-discovery. He traveled to Shanghai to reconnect with this part of his heritage,…

South African artist Sue Williamson brought to the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) 119 shirts, which she had dipped in the muddy waters of Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope. Each piece of clothing bore the hand-written profile of an Indian slave who had been traded to South Africa during the 17th century. Every day, over the course of KMB, one garment was washed at a public laundry, and was hung out to dry by the seaside of Kochi, a former colonial trading port, signifying a symbolic redemption. Williamson’s installation, uncovering a forgotten connection between Kerala and Cape Town, was one of many politically charged works at KMB that brought attention to marginalized voices. Titled “Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life”—a partial reference to the Marxist notion of how individuals are estranged…

In 1952, Brisbane’s Taubmans Paint Factory—at the time one of the world’s largest industrial sites producing the material—was built on rural Yeronga farmland. Today, the massive complex lies mostly dormant. Surrounded by single-story residential dwellings and encircled by metal fencing topped with barbed wire, it has been an issue of contention with developers and local authorities ever since the factory shut down in 2015, with the former wrestling with the latter for the rezoning of the site for residential use. Despite these ongoing conflicts, the complex remains well-kept. Several local artists have discreetly taken up studio space there, among them Vernon Ah Kee and Ross Manning, as well as Richard Bell, who works out of a ten-by-ten-meter former office space on a quid pro quo rental arrangement with the developers.…

“Anida, nice bugs don’t bite but dream.” Lee Wen scribbled these words inside my copy of his monograph Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real when I first met him in 2015. By that time, he already knew me as the “bug lady” because of my “The Buddhist Bug” series. I was simultaneously humbled and star-struck. Lee Wen showed an uncompromising commitment to performance as a language that unlocks possibilities for hybrid forms bridging life and art, and his works resonate for their poetic extensions of the body that unapologetically pushed against marginalization. By the late 1990s, Lee Wen was already a pioneering figure, a member of the Artists Village collective and Black Market International. At a time when performance art was being pushed underground in Singapore, he addressed…

The postcard-perfect image of Hong Kong features its junk boats and ferries, gliding from dawn till night across the waters of Victoria Harbour. On March 22, a 37-meter long inflatable sculpture of a floating body in tones of gray entered these waters, transforming the scenic harbor view for eight days. The installation was masterminded by American artist, designer, and street artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly) as part of Hong Kong Arts Month and featured his iconic character COMPANION. While an inflatable COMPANION was bobbing in the Central Harbourfront, a towering, 5.5-meters-tall pair of COMPANION figures were making their global debut in the courtyard of Central district’s boutique design complex, PMQ. Inside the galleries, from March 25 to the April 14, KAWS’s fans and aficionados were treated to a major solo exhibition…

We certainly do live in interesting times—if “interesting” means politically tumultuous and environmentally precarious. Artistic director of the 58th Venice Biennale, Ralph Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward Gallery, took the title for the central exhibition from a 1936 speech in which a member of the British parliament, Austen Chamberlain, cited an apocryphal Chinese curse. Though there is no such curse—as Rugoff acknowledges—the MP’s follow-up lines, “We move from one crisis to another. We suffer one disturbance and shock after another,” still ring true in our era. Compared to his recent predecessors, Rugoff has selected a modest 79 artists and collectives—all of them still alive and practicing. He says the title is not a theme, but rather that the Biennale will look at “art’s social function as embracing both pleasure and…

In 1998, the famed science-fiction writer and literary critic Samuel R. Delany sent a letter of rejection, via fax, to Shu Lea Cheang. In his characteristically polite and analytical tone, Delany lamented that he was not able to write the screenplay for Cheang’s then-upcoming film, I.K.U. Cheang had invited Delany to write I.K.U. because she believed he would not only be able to provide an added dimension of fantasy and futurity to her Japanese sci-fi porno, but also imbue a sheer abandonment and indulgence into the script, potentially transforming the depiction of sex on screen. But it was the wrong place and time. Ironically for Cheang, a self-proclaimed “digital nomad” who at the time was doing a residency in Tokyo, the New York-based Delany did not have email, making their…

TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN “Erasing is a choice … but remembering is also a choice,” says Macodou Ndiaye, a lawyer from Dakar who only discovered, near age 20, that he was métis, born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and Senegalese father. Ndiaye is one of the three protagonists in Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s cinematic four-channel video and photo installation The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), which uncovers the little-known stories of the small Vietnamese-Senegalese community in Dakar, and was commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 14 as part of curator Zoe Butt’s exhibition-platform “Beyond the Arrow.” The marginal community’s members in Dakar are the living descendants of West African soldiers known as tirailleurs, who were conscripted into the French colonial army throughout the 20th century and, in its waning days, were sent to fight…

Sheets of sheer fabric hung in a dim gallery in Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA). Each banner bore a drawing based on photographs of old-growth forests. Wandering through the concentric circles of voile, viewers were enveloped with dappled light and heard the birdsong of the endangered black cockatoo, before reaching a shaft of light at the work’s core. The installation, Forest (Theatre of Trees) (2018–19), commissioned for Janet Laurence’s first major survey, “After Nature,” was perfectly balanced, evoking an experience of nature without seeking to reproduce it. This is Laurence’s mastery—harnessing materials both organic and manufactured to situate humans as part of the natural world, subverting the perception that we are above or outside it. Laurence, born in Sydney in 1947, was deeply impacted by Arte Povera and…

On a late October day in 1983, five people wearing identical, nondescript clothing walked single-file through Taipei’s Ximending district, their heads covered with red hoods and eyes blindfolded. Without warning, the group broke formation, falling to the ground of Wuchang Street and clutching at the air while wailing unintelligibly in agony. At a time when public demonstrations in Taiwan were forbidden under martial law, this collective action organized by Chen Chieh-jen served as a wordless cry of resistance against the Kuomintang’s authoritarian regime. Chen’s gesture resonated with the first performative happenings in Asia’s cities, staged in the 1960s and ’70s by collectives such as Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension) and Hi-Red Center in Japan, and Mu (Zero) and Shin Jeon (New Exhibition) in Korea. As the 1980s approached, cities throughout the…

Minimalism is commonly associated with names such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. These New York-based artists changed the course of art history in the 1960s by extending the modernist notion that art is its own reality, while eschewing the emotive gestures of abstract expressionist paintings. Minimalism is based on the concept that viewers should respond solely to the forms that are in front of them, as opposed to their referential connotations, and promulgates art as an immersive, sensory experience. However, these core ideas, requiring careful spatial planning and better understood with in-depth historical context, were unsuccessfully conveyed in the first institutional survey of minimalist art held in Southeast Asia, which was also the first exhibition of its kind to include artists from the region. Organized by the…

In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” writer Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case for an alternative view of history, and of art. Expanding on the idea that early humans survived for the most part by gathering rather than hunting, she argues against narratives organized around phallic objects—symbolizing hunting and other forms of violence—and the traditional hunter-hero figure that arises within them. Instead, she suggests that stories should be formally structured in and around containers, which are more apt to hold narratives without subjecting them to hierarchies. In an exhibition of two new film works created during a yearlong residency at London’s Whitechapel Gallery—each in some way dealing with a kind of creation myth—Sophia al-Maria ostensibly took inspiration from Le Guin’s essay. The extent to which these…

The second Honolulu Biennial, “To Make Wrong/Right/Now,” took its title from the last line of a poem written by Kānaka Maoli artist ʻImaikalani Kalāhele. The title poignantly emphasizes the need to reconcile the legacies of uninvited interventions across the Pacific, providing an astute and locally relevant cohesive thread that ran through the ten sites of the Biennial. Kalāhele was one of the 47 exhibiting artists—a third of whom were from Hawai‘i, with the rest from across the Pacific Islands, Asia and the Americas. The central location, known as the “Hub” in Ward Village, featured works by 24 artists. Chiharu Shiota’s site-specific installation Crossroads (2019) greeted visitors with a vibrant web of red string entwined with historic maps reinforces the Biennial’s use of the ‘aha (a traditional Hawaiian technique of braiding…