Indholdsfortegnelse for 142 (Mar/Apr 2025) i ArtAsiaPacific

The scenes from Seoul that unfolded in the late hours of December 3, 2024, were deeply disturbing to all Koreans who were still awake that Tuesday night. Scores of armed soldiers poured out of helicopters and onto the lawn of the National Assembly, which they subsequently attempted to breach while legislators mustered inside and sought to nullify a presidential decree—the likes of which had not been issued since the bloody Gwangju Uprising of 1980. By the next morning, President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law had been voted down and officially rescinded, but the political fallout was only just beginning for the beleaguered South Korean president. The ensuing sequence of events has played out like a scripted drama, marking an unprecedented period of upheaval in the South Korean political…

Collectivism in art has a long history, recently renewed with discussion about the complexities of a non-hierarchical approach to curating and organizing large-scale exhibitions and biennials. When it comes to what we mean by “collective curation”—its pros and its cons—the 2024 Jakarta Biennale (JB24) was a case in point. Here a large number of local collectives took the role of artists, organizers, curators, and producers for a 50-day celebration of Jakarta Biennale’s 50th edition. JB24 highlighted how far the capital city’s marquee art event has come since its first edition—the Great Indonesian Painting Exhibition in 1974—which was organized by (the term “curated by” was largely unheard of then) the Jakarta Arts Council. At the time, oil painting dominated the art landscape, and highly respected painters, such as AD Pirous and…

Maria Taniguchi’s midcareer survey “body of work” at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) in Manila marked the first moment that audiences could take in the full breadth of her practice. With 32 works spanning over nearly two decades, the exhibition centered on her ongoing series of untitled “brick paintings,” which the artist initiated in 2008. Curated by MCAD director Joselina Cruz, the show gathered a score of these monochrome abstract canvases, highlighting her sustained effort and formal consistency. A winner of the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2015, Taniguchi grew up in the Philippines, earned an MFA at Goldsmiths in London in 2009, and now resides primarily in Manila. The artist makes her paintings in a time-consuming and labor-intensive manner. Their surfaces are covered with meticulously…

Julie Mehretu’s layered abstractions, which are often marked by gestural strokes and pulsating colors, embody a perpetual state of becoming. Their shifting nature refuses to settle, unfolding with prolonged viewing—open, untethered, and teeming with potentialities. Beyond their dynamic visual choreography, Mehretu’s works confront pressing concerns of our time—migration, the climate crisis, far-right politics, and global conflicts—while acknowledging the resistance movements that challenge them. Her compositions, meanwhile, transcend temporal boundaries, interweaving elements from prehistory to the digital age, drawing inspiration from art, literature, music, and influential figures who have shaped these fields. This dynamic energy is expressed in her large-scale aquatint etchings from the Six Bardos series, two of which—Luminous Appearance and Transmigration (both 2018)—were the first works encountered by visitors to the acclaimed Ethiopian American artist’s first major solo exhibition…

None of the roughly 500 photographs comprising “Either/Or”—Filipino photographer and painter MM Yu’s latest solo exhibition—stands alone in meaning. While it is tempting to exhume meanings out of the images’ content, the artist’s strength lies in her deftness with process and material. Spanning more than two decades of works, the exhibition at MO_Space in Taguig City presented recontextualization as Yu’s primary approach to image-archiving. Here, time was her collaborator, and subject matter the material. Consider the assemblage of photographs entitled no end (2001–25). Shot over the span of 24 years, the images are clustered above and below a bookshelf occupying the longest wall of the gallery. They show minute details of urban life in Manila, from nondescript closed storefronts to sidewalk garbage. An apparent preoccupation of Yu’s is signage; many…

A sanctum-like silence enveloped Prabhavathi Meppayil’s first solo exhibition in Mumbai since 2007, presented at Jhaveri Contemporary. Bathed in soft afternoon light were three blocky floor works and about six sculpture-drawings, each meticulously achieved by applying gesso to board and adding inlays of metal and found objects. To create m/eighteen (2023) and m/nineteen (2024), the artist buried stretched wires in layers of gesso, then rubbed and sanded the surfaces until metal traces emerged, exposing grids and lines in part or in whole. This making and unmaking, concealing and revealing, recur throughout her work, as does the weathered look of her surfaces. Meppayil’s studio is located in the jewelry district in Bengaluru, where she draws from her family’s generational occupation as goldsmiths. The found objects in her work are tools of…

How might a secular, industrialized society reconceive its relationship to the Earth? This concern animated Angelica Mesiti’s latest multimedia project, The Rites of When (2024), commissioned for the underground Tank space of the Naala Badu building at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. Four years in the making, the seven-channel video installation fills the cavernous former oil bunker with moving images of dancers and a soundtrack of voices, music, and percussion. For more than 30 minutes, Mesiti takes audiences on a transhistorical journey through cultural ceremonies tied to the solar cycle. The installation is structured after the seasonal extremes of the winter and summer solstice, with screens positioned in an arrangement of the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters—whose appearance in the night sky demarcated growing…

What do pirates and Buddhists have in common? As historical or symbolic figures, they can represent the dialectics of disruption and order, blindness and sight, processes of searching and finding, and the struggle between individual sovereignty versus the disciplinary regimes of nation-states. This conjunction of intellectual currents undergirded the Busan Biennale 2024, “Seeing in the Dark,” which was co-curated by artistic directors Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte, and staged in the major port city of a country with a long history of diverse religious beliefs and clashing political ideologies. Gathering works by more than 70 artists from 36 countries, Mey and Pirotte explored concepts of opacity and revelation, spiritual pursuit and social activism, histories of maritime migration and trade, and narratives of alternative (often anarchist) communities—pirates among them—that predated European…

Known for employing ecological metaphors to explore the politics of power and emotion, Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung took inspiration from the artificial breeding of betta fish (also known as Siamese fighting fish) for his latest solo exhibition, “Not a Fighter, But a Lover,” at Beijing’s Magician Space. By nature, the betta is territorial: males fight to the death, and for close to a millennia they have been bred for this purpose. Starting in the 1990s, they became popular as display fish, chiefly for their vibrant tails, and since then they have been spawned as “show bettas.” But are bettas still bettas if they are no longer able to fight? This sense of denatured ecology served as the narrative thread in Yeung’s exhibition about control and desire. “Not a Fighter,…

While a number of international exhibitions have celebrated art from Pakistan over the past few years, “MANZAR: Art and Architecture in Pakistan 1940s to Today” was arguably much more ambitious in scope. Held at the National Museum of Qatar (and co-organized by the forthcoming Art Mill Museum), the exhibition was curated by Caroline Hancock, Aurélien Lemonier, and Zarmeene Shah, and highlighted the artistic and architectural landscape of Pakistan from the dawn of the partition with former-British India in 1947 until today. In Urdu, manzar means “view” or “scene,” and according to Hancock, the curatorial team “discussed how to present plural perspectives, which remain just one introduction to encourage the development of many other future projects.” Various institutions in Pakistan and Qatar, and overseas, collaborated to bring together around 200 artworks,…

Humans didn’t always exist, nor will we exist forever. Which is why we must invent. – From Dumb Type’s S/N (1994) My first encounter with S/N came when I was 18 years old. I remember the day well. I was waiting, as always, at Shibuya Station to catch a bus to school, but I just didn’t feel like going that day. I left the line of students and jumped on an empty bus that was waiting nearby. Being a serious student, I had never done anything like that before. I sat right at the back, on the seats that are slightly higher than the others, and waited for the bus to depart while gazing out of the window with my chin in my hand. I knew the bus would get…

After nearly 16 months of the Israel-Hamas war—which has resulted in the deaths of around 1,700 Israelis and more than 48,000 Palestinians, and ravaged most of Gaza—a ceasefire came into effect in late January. Yet the region’s political strife continues to impact the global community, including the international art world where restrictions on artistic expression have amplified since the beginning of the year. In February, Germany’s scandal-ridden art event Documenta issued a new code of conduct ahead of its 16th edition that includes a contentious definition of antisemitism. Adhering to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition—which includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor”—the code aims to ensure “tolerance and respect for human dignity”…

The year 2025 kicked off Singapore’s Art SG in January and New Delhi’s India Art Fair (IAF) in February. Both events demonstrated abundant enthusiasm and healthy momentum, reflecting the upward trajectories of their respective local art markets and ecosystems during a period of global economic uncertainty. Art SG embodied Southeast Asia’s aspirations for greater artistic recognition and market prominence, while the IAF 2025 distinguished itself through initiatives that emphasized local art ecosystems while expanding international dialogue. SINGAPORE The third edition of Art SG (January 16–19), held once again in the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, was its smallest yet, with 105 galleries (versus 114 in 2024 and 150 in its inaugural 2023 edition) from 30 countries and territories. Notably, several heavyweights did not return, including David Zwirner and…

In a fluorescent-lit subway car, sometime in the early 1990s, Audrey Hepburn sat perfectly poised. Illuminated by the harsh overhead light, her legs elegantly crossed, a slender cigarette holder between her gloved fingers, she wore a classic pearl necklace and meticulously styled hair. Amid this mundane commuter setting, she engendered an unlikely scene—the surreal juxtaposition of a “Hollywood star” with bleakly mundane surroundings. But this image is not a lost frame from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) showing Holly Golightly in commuter transit. The protagonist is Yasumasa Morimura, in one of his countless transformations for the One Hundred M’s Self-portraits photo series (1993–2000), exhibited in “Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman: Masquerades” at Hong Kong’s M+ museum. For an artist who has spent decades masquerading as cultural icons and historical figures, from…

Our imagination of the world—in other words, our conception of places—is often shaped and influenced by maps. We rely on them to navigate our cities, we read nautical charts to cross oceans, and we consult geographical charts to understand borders. Coordinates, routes, satellite views—these abstract lines and images of cartographic logic may be fundamental to our spatial consciousness, but are the maps we draw true reflections of the world as it is? Or is mapping what the cartographer JB Harley described as a process of “selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and ‘symbolization’”? In “Best Synthetic Answer” the San Francisco-born artist Rindon Johnson navigated the “complex geographies” of the Pacific by posing a series of specific questions: How does a Black American, raised on the edge of the…

Across epochs and cultures, the concept of Gaia—the divine personification of planet Earth—has held significance in mythology, religion, philosophy, art, and science. Recently, under the title “Nurture Gaia,” it served as the theme of the fourth Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB), which meditated on poignant matters of environmental degradation and preservation. Engaging our collective moment, 76 artists from Thailand and across the globe presented nuanced reflections on how to move forward in an ecologically fragile era. In the show’s 11 venues—including the National Museum, the National Gallery, and four Buddhist temples along the banks of Chao Phraya River—contemporary works were often placed alongside religious artifacts in a dialogue between past and present, emphasizing how life and creativity are continuous, circular, and interconnected. Many of the contributions explored Buddhist notions. South Korean…

A peculiar yet striking architectural form—“The Sun” heliocomplex—features in the opening shots of Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova’s 18,000 Worlds (2023). Perhaps like no other building in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, it crystallizes the political, cultural, and economic will which animated the Central Asian city for nearly half a century; a hallmark of the Soviet Union’s postwar ambition for a modern socialist alternative to the capitalist West. In 18,000 Worlds, “The Sun” heliocomplex is juxtaposed with the traditional rooftops of the ancient Silk Road city of Bukhara, while archival footage from an early 1920s documentary reveals Soviet maps of Central Asia previously used for national territorial delimitation. The contrasting traditions evoked by the variety of images in the film—from the blue mosaic domes of Persian influence to the depictions of cosmonauts,…

How to be quiet, when the world is so loud? Where do small objects find their place in a large empty room? How can an object or material be itself, and also remind you of something else? These are the kinds of meditative questions that the artworks of Su-Mei Tse inspire. Often centering on nature or fragile man-made materials, Tse’s photographs, objects, installations, and videos thoughtfully reconsider the ways that physical entities and images meet. A photo of an ear is placed in a bird’s nest resting on an antique table; seven rectangles of paper-thin porcelain are wrapped in tissue and placed on the ground before a large window; two red strings intersect differently in each of several brass plates. Tse, who is trained as a classical cellist as well…