Indholdsfortegnelse for 123 (May/Jun 2021) i ArtAsiaPacific

In 2021, the Point asks writers to explain how they are striving for better post-pandemic futures. For this issue, we invited artist Aram Han Sifuentes to discuss how she is combating disenfranchisement in the United States. According to the United States Elections Project, in 2016, a whopping 28.6 percent of Americans, equating to 92 million people, were ineligible to vote in the presidential elections. When we look at the make-up of this disenfranchised population, they are under-18 youths, immigrants, people of color, and those with disabilities. Voting is an incredibly important right to exercise. However, we have yet to recognize that the US voting system perpetuates systemic racism and White supremacy. The 2020 statistics about the country’s disenfranchised populations are still being calculated. This is a tricky process because much…

Sumi ink painter Toko Shinoda (1913–2021) passed away from natural causes in Tokyo on March 1. On March 13, Wang Fuchun (1942–2021), a prolific photographer who captured China’s modernization via the railroad passengers he encountered, died from an undisclosed illness in Beijing. Palestinian-born businessman Ramzi Dalloul (–2021), who amassed one of the largest private collections of modern and contemporary Arab art, died of cancer-related complications in London on March 24.…

Following a yearlong postponement due to Covid-19, artist and environmentalist Maya Lin’s site-specific commission Ghost Forest (2021) will open at New York’s Madison Square Park on May 10. The installation of dead white cedar trees from a land regeneration project brings attention to the destructive impacts of climate change. Gold Coast’s USD 47 million Home of the Arts Gallery will unveil two large-scale commissions at its May 8 launch. Waanyi artist Judy Watson collaborated with Quandamooka artists Libby Harward and Elisa Jane Carmichael to create a garden with native plants and sculptures reflecting Indigenous Australian histories, while sculptor Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s six-meter-high Double-sided avatar with blue figure (2021) will be stationed at the gallery’s lower-ground entrance. Artist Fiona Hall’s installation who goes here? (2021) is on view at the courtyard…

Small signs are appearing that the world is learning to live normally with Covid-19. One of the few gallerists who flew to the Emirates especially for the opening of Art Dubai was the ever-enthusiastic Emmanuel Perrotin. He was seen checking out the fair and other special exhibitions with New Yorkbased artist Tavares Strachan. A destination for influencers and sun-deprived Europeans, the United Arab Emirates is one of the rare countries that isn’t prohibiting foreign travelers from visiting—even during the worst days of the pandemic—and has bounced back after vaccinating most of its population. Perhaps this explains the openness of Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, who remains on the move. Now in Boston as a visiting lecturer of the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College, he is apparently doubling down on…

MAY 1–JUL 18 CENTRE FOR HERITAGE, ARTS AND TEXTILE, HONG KONG Interweaving Poetic Code In 1804, weaver and merchant Joseph Marie Jacquard programmed the movements of a loom using a system of perforated cards, which became prototypes for binary computer code. Exploring the historic and contemporary links between textiles and computing, “Interweaving Poetic Code,” co-directed by artist, computer programmer, and poet Taeyoon Choi, will spotlight seven international artists. Among them, Aarati Akkapeddi’s cotton prints bear motifs generated by an AI system; Amor Munoz’s Coded Textile (2018–20) asks audiences to decipher messages embedded in weavings; and KOBAKANT will showcase the bespoke wearable items created by the KOBA Electronic Textile Tailor Shop (2017–19). MAY 21–SEP 12 MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (M HKA), ANTWERP Shilpa Gupta: Today will end Curated by M HKA’s…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. When I spoke to Pakistani-Australian artist Abdullah M. I. Syed in February, he had just finished two weeks of hotel quarantine in Sydney, having returned to Australia after nine months in Karachi. His mother, Azra Waseem, passed away in late 2019 and as the family gathered in Karachi before and after her death, Pakistan ceased all international flights due to Covid-19. Syed’s extended time in his family home was spent sorting through his mother’s belongings and readying the house for sale. His mother was a significant influence on his life: she was a matriarch who raised seven children while Syed’s father was away working in Saudi Arabia, and continued to hold the family together as they dispersed across the globe.…

Two years ago, in perfect health and aged 40, Candice Lin decided to sculpt her own sarcophagus. Formed from terra-cotta, two striped cats sit atop the ceramic receptacle designed for her corpse; one is perched on a pillow, with a paw resting protectively on a statue of the seated artist swaddled in a blanket. This mixed-species band of tomb sentries—inspired by Etruscan coffin sculptures and Tang dynasty Chinese funerary pottery—is a projection of Lin and her feline companions at the time of her death. Beneath the figures, composting worms already inhabit the dirt-filled casket. Imaging the inevitable return of Lin’s body to the earth, the installation Future Sarcophagus (2020) is a memento of the finitude and fleetingness of a single life, as much as it is recognition that our existence…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. The germ of Caitlin Franzmann’s exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), “to the curve of you,” came to the artist during her daily walks along a local creek. Passing the site every day, she noticed a tall, rubbery plant with fanning leaves and delicate red flowers. She was surprised to learn that this was, in fact, a weed—the Peruvian achira or Canna edulis (edible canna), known in Australia as the Queensland arrowroot. “The Brisbane City tells me you are a ‘weed of waterways,’” Franzmann wrote in the text accompanying her show. “What defines you as a ‘weed’?” Achira was brought from the Andes to Queensland in the mid-19th century for its potato-like rhizomes, which were used to make…

In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” prisoners are lashed facing a rocky wall, unable to turn or move. There is a fire behind them, and as puppeteers maneuver objects through the light, the prisoners are left to make meaning of the shadows that parade before them. Visitors to Jam Wu’s exhibition “Through the Walls” chased shadows around the gallery of Taipei’s TKG+ Projects. Emerging across audio and video installation, Wu’s figures, free of chains, tumble through strange landscapes and morph into uncanny creatures, and the possibilities for understanding shift along with them. Nurturing his characters and audiences alike in this ambiguous space, Wu illuminates a stage for poetry and allegorical thinking. The floor-to-ceiling windows at TKG+ Projects were tinted, leaving the space in a persistent twilight. To Socrates, being dragged…

Artificially Natural In 1967, amid rising anti-Asian racism fueled by the Vietnam War, 25-year-old Carl Cheng established the John Doe Company, and began using the generic name to exhibit tool-kit-like sculptures that he called “nature machines.” The works imagined a future in which the Earth was entirely shaped by humans. Some were boxes that produced small piles of eroded soil; others were ecosystems in miniature. Long before the term “anthropocene” was coined, Cheng’s interest in how humans imprint themselves on the Earth extended into his public artworks, such as the tractor-pulled drum-roller, Santa Monica Art Tool (1988), sketched out above, which, once a month, terraformed the beach with a two-inch high cityscape that people could walk on. In ArtAsiaPacific’s upcoming issue, deputy editor HG Masters looks back at the six-decade-long…

Less than a year after Hong Kong’s national security law came into force, the local art sector is facing increased political scrutiny amid accusations of promoting “anti-government” projects. The recent furor ignited after M+ executive director Suhanya Raffel stated the museum would have “no problem” displaying politically sensitive artworks. The remarks were made at the March 12 media preview of the newly completed M+ building. At a Legislative Council meeting five days later, lawmaker Eunice Yung criticized artworks in the museum’s Sigg Collection for “spreading hatred” against China, a crime under the national security law. One of the offending pieces she mentioned was a photograph of Ai Weiwei raising his middle finger at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—part of a series titled Study of Perspective (1995–2003) showing the artist making the same…

On March 2, Singapore’s independent contemporary art space The Substation announced its permanent closure at the end of July. The organization had planned to temporarily vacate its current premises, rented under the National Arts Council (NAC) subsidized Art Housing Scheme in 1990, for the NAC’s twoyear renovation of the historic building, but The Substation’s board decided to cease operating completely after learning that the NAC was considering turning the venue into a multi-tenanted art center. In its statement, The Substation cited concerns over a “loss of identity” as well as “autonomy over spaces and facilities” and “income from venue hiring” under the proposed arrangement. Responding to calls for The Substation’s continuation during a March 6 virtual meeting with members of the local art community, the art space invited suggestions for…

NEW YORK The spring marathon of sales and events for New York’s Asia Week returned in March. Sotheby’s New York held a smaller-than-usual series (March 11–24), with three live and one online sales spanning antiques and modern and contemporary Asian art. The Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art sale (March 16) moved 94 out of 101 lots to bring in USD 7.12 million, exceeding the USD 4.8 million and USD 3.02 million achieved in March 2020 and 2019, respectively. The latest event was led by several fresh-to-the-market paintings, most notably VS Gaitonde’s USD 1.9 million Untitled (1962) red abstraction in oil, which outstripped its high estimate of USD 1.2 million. The sevenfigure sale came on the heels of the record-breaking USD 5.5 million auction price garnered by his Untitled (1961)…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. The Siege of Lanka (c. 1725), a series of miniature paintings by 18th-century artist Manaku, illustrates scenes from the epic Ramayana. In one folio, the hero Rama is seen surrounded by his loyal army of bears and monkeys as he interrogates the demon spies Shuka and Sarana, sent by his nemesis Ravana. While Rama’s animal troops are often considered insignificant in the poem, they are centered in the fantastical realm of Pakistani artist Maha Ahmed, who filled a 2018 miniature watercolor-on-paper work with the creatures. Provocatively titling the piece Demon Plans a Ruse, Ahmed asks audiences to locate the “demons” in her rendition of the Ramayana story, and yet sets them up to fail by rendering the figures with near-identical…

“This work sums up my life in the hutongs. Before, everyone was very relaxed. Now it’s not so free. Everything is forbidden, ‘No, No, No.’ Negation upon negation upon negation.” This is how Kan Xuan describes the impetus for her animated video Walking, Walking (2019), of cucumbers moving across a white screen to chants of (No oil! No garlic! No vinegar! No salt!), as a “negation of the most authentic, average Beijing dish.” Kan created the video for the Beijing alternative space Arrow Factory, where it was shown beginning in July 2019 for two months, during the space’s final summer. She placed the screen in the corner of the tiny space so that it was only visible when a passerby peered through the street-level window, echoing how “the entrances of…

Minouk Lim is a powerful chronicler of Korea’s national suffering. At the opening of the 2014 Gwangju Biennale, Lim installed two shipping containers bearing the remains of civilians massacred during the brutal Korean War (1950–53) who never received proper burials. Their descendants were greeted by the mothers of those killed by the military in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, which spurred Korea’s democratization movement. In the same edition of the Biennale, Lim also displayed the first iteration of Mr. Eui Jin Chai and 1,000 Canes (2014–20), which comprises more than 1,370 wooden walking sticks carved by Eui Jin Chai, who was a survivor of the Mungyeong massacre on December 24, 1949, when the South Korean army slaughtered 88 villagers suspected of communist sympathies. Chai lost nine family members, including his mother…

A white canopy of hundreds of handmade feather flowers by Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri, and Yorta Yorta artist Glenda Nicholls softened the imposing concrete architecture of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), inviting a sense of care and contemplation. Nicholls created Miwi Milloo (Good spirit of the Murray River) (2020) with her daughter using knowledge passed down by her matrilineal forebears, highlighting the important role Indigenous women play in continuing cultural practices. The installation was the first of 86 projects in the latest NGV Triennial, which for the first time infiltrated all four gallery floors, including the collection displays. Together these Triennial works reflected topical issues in global art and architecture today, and interrogated how collecting institutions have historically enshrined or excluded forms of cultural knowledge. More specific and conceptually rigorous…

At William Copley’s exhibition opening in Paris in 1953, visitors were handed a candy as they entered. Printed on the inside of the wrapper was “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost”—one of Marcel Duchamp’s petits jeu de mots. There were several layers of meaning to Duchamp’s candy wrapper, the most literal being that the ghost refers to the hollow etiquette of social engagements. There is the visual pun of the empty wrapper after the sweet is consumed, and there is the melancholy ghost of the evening, after the guests have gone. It has also been suggested that Duchamp was jabbing at the low turnout expected for Copley’s exhibition. Few of the original wrappers exist today, fewer still the references. So what does it mean for Theaster Gates to…

The image came to Dorian Sari in a dream: a gun pointed at the artist’s back, prodding into their jacket. With no shooter present, the gun incarnates an abstract threat that follows Sari’s movements, taunting them from behind. The artist has recreated their dreamimage in the video Ayayayay (2021)—the first work the viewer encountered in “Post-Truth,” Sari’s solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel. In its glitched sequences, Sari appears panic-stricken, running from the gun’s potential of violence. Yet with the object physically adhered to their back, Sari is unable to escape from the unseen source of danger. The menacing power of an all-encompassing violence was thematized throughout Sari’s exhibition. With the title “Post-Truth,” Sari invoked a loaded concept that has circulated in recent years. Selected by the Oxford English Dictionary as…

Pauline Shaw began working with wool several years ago. She taught herself to hand-dye and hand-felt wool through online forums, noticing that the most expert were empty nester moms who had displaced their attention and affection onto laborious handiwork. In part an ode to women’s invisible labor, and a redress to the tendency to demean the long tradition of textiles as outside the category of “fine art,” Shaw’s wool works are also connected to Joseph Beuys’s use of the material to symbolize the protective, mysterious cocoon of memory—a previous series of wool pieces, featuring psychedelic, swirling patterns, was based on MRI scans of Shaw’s own brain. The artist’s newest wall hangings, exhibited at In Lieu gallery in Los Angeles, were inspired by a specific object of cultural memory: a 1597…

As in other parts of the world, Myanmar struggled against the pandemic in 2020. The country was also fighting on several other fronts: against poverty, resisting pressure from neighboring countries, opposing the military, and trying to solve ethnic armed conflicts. Medical workers, volunteers, and civilians united and helped us to survive during the pandemic under the leadership of the State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. With the help of education workers, a general election was successfully held on November 8, 2020; the National League for Democracy Party won a landslide victory with more seats than the landmark election in 2015. However, the military made ridiculous allegations of electoral fraud and, on February 1, staged a coup d’etat in order to seize power from the people. The country was immediately…

On March 10, South Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) selected artists Moon Kyung-won and Jeon Joon-ho for its 2021 MMCA Hyundai Motor Series commission. Moon and Jeon’s installation Freedom Village (2021) will be exhibited at MMCA in September. The Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts named Ting Chaong Wen the inaugural winner of the Taoyuan International Art Award, worth NTD 500,000 (USD 17,620), on March 13, in recognition of his video Going home (2020). Lee Seul-gi won MMCA’s 2020 Korea Artist Prize on March 25, receiving KRW 10 million (USD 8,470) in addition to the KRW 40 million (USD 33,450) granted to all finalists, for her installation Dong Dong Dari Gori (2020). On April 1, Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum conferred the 7th Eye Art & Film Prize to…

In 2020, Tyler, a popular Mumbai-based street artist, asked Instagram users to call out public figures guilty of spreading propaganda. Tyler then painted a Walk of Shame (aping Hollywood Boulevard) on a sidewalk—each name was encased in a golden circle above an illustrated pile of excrement. Instagram suspended Tyler’s account and images of Tyler’s artwork were swiftly removed by the very platform that ushered its genesis. Tyler was not the first artist to fall victim to digital censorship on Instagram: Australian street artist Lushsux was suspended after posting a photo of his mural of Hillary Clinton wearing a swimsuit, while artist Betty Tompkins’s Instagram account was deactivated after she posted an exhibition catalogue that included a reproduction of a photorealistic work depicting sexual intercourse, titled Fuck Painting #1 (1969). In…

DIGITAL REALM The inaugural online fair South South Veza (February 24–March 7), led by Liza Essers of Cape Town-based Goodman Gallery, featured 50 galleries from 30 countries and was marketed as a platform for art from the Global South. Exhibitors had the option of either a group showcase with a maximum of 12 artworks or a solo presentation of up to six pieces by one emerging artist. A concurrent charity auction raised funds for nonprofits Raw Material Company (Dakar), Green Papaya Art Projects (Manila), and Casa do Povo (Sao Paulo). While participants thought the venture was an exciting initiative that attracted younger buyers, this did not necessarily translate to high profits. Among those who saw steady business, Blum & Poe (Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo) sold Zhu Jinshi’s multicolored impasto paintings to…

“You can’t lose it now,” I told myself as I sat at my office desk, trying to reel myself in from the brink of a laughing fit. I was looking at a digital copy of Huang Hai-Hsin’s painting Seeing is Believing (2011). A thick, veiny trunk crowned with a luscious bush has convened three men, who stand around the potted plant, appraising it. The subtle jut of the leftmost figure’s hips was what set me off. He appears to be surreptitiously sizing himself up against the phallic object. Since her days as a graduate student at New York’s School of Visual Arts, Taipei-born Huang has been drawing and painting observations of our awry world. Though humorous, her compositions are never simply chuckle-inducing. I later wondered about Seeing is Believing: What’s…

In 1996, Agung Kurniawan and his wife, Yustina Neni, founded Kedai Kebun Forum, an art space, shop, and restaurant in Yogyakarta. Their vision was to provide a financially self-sustaining platform where artists could tackle taboo and sensitive issues. I met the couple at the open, twostory building overgrown with tropical plants for the first time about ten years ago, when Kurniawan was also co-organizing the Biennale Jogja and overseeing the Indonesian Visual Art Archive, which he cofounded, all while developing his own artistic practice. As I listened to him talk about his multifarious activities, I was impressed by his abundant creative energy, intelligence, and considerate nature. It was also clear that he is not afraid of putting the cat among the pigeons, so to speak. With an academic background in…

The recent rise of majoritarian politics in countries across South and Southeast Asia—from the Hindu supremacism of Narendra Modi’s government in India to the state persecution of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar—has pushed many minority communities to the margins of society while also throttling outlets of free expression. In recent years, to the concern of international human-rights organizations, governments have shut down internet access and blocked social-media accounts in the face of social unrest—as India did during the annexation of Kashmir in August 2019 and recently during farmers’ protests in Delhi. This era of persecution and repression has in turn stimulated a strain of photo activism, which prioritizes political concerns and uses the medium as an outlet for pushing under-represented narratives…

Singapore-based multimedia artist Sarah Choo Jing is captivated by ideas of solitude, voyeurism, and surveillance—prevalent issues in contemporary society—which she explores through videos portraying quotidian scenes of anonymous people in private spaces such as apartments and hotel rooms. With the onslaught of the pandemic, however, seclusion and the desire for bonding have taken on new meanings, as was evident in her multimedia installation, Zoom, Click, Waltz (2020), which she presented at the 2021 Singapore Art Week. Reacting to the city-state’s lockdown last year and the rising popularity of virtual social activities via platforms like Zoom, Jing wrote to her neighbors, asking them to partake in a “project inspired by relationships, longing, and intimacy” on the evening of May 15, 2020, by dancing to their music of choice in their living…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. Visitors to Luke Ching’s solo exhibition at Para Site were immediately confronted with an unusual demand. Stood at the center of the entrance was a yellow sign asking audiences to “Take off your left shoe upon entry (Please leave it on the carpet).” There was nothing to justify the bizarre instruction; one was simply left to decide whether to obey or ignore it. I chose to heed the artist’s behest since I was a guest at his presentation, and spent the rest of my visit awkwardly walking about. The sign turned out to be a fitting introduction to a group of installations and videos that drew attention to what Ching calls the “totalitarian time-spaces” in our everyday lives. At our…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. The journey to Zhang Xu Zhan’s studio is like a retreat from the urban jungle of skyscrapers, motorbikes, and non-stop traffic in Taipei City. One passes through the outskirts of Xinzhuang’s Siwei Market, an area of western New Taipei City populated by hardware shops, kám-á-tiàm mom-and-pop shops, a few factories, several colorful murals, and a junior high school. Then one crosses in front of the Zhaode Temple, dedicated to Matsu, the goddess of the sea and patron deity of fishermen and sailors—a reminder of the early 18th-century migration and settlement in this area along the Dahan River. As I arrive at the unassuming apartment building that houses Zhang Xu’s studio, he greets me and lifts up a mesh curtain along…