Innehållsförteckning för 112 (Mar/Apr 2019) från ArtAsiaPacific

While fairs across the globe experienced ups and downs throughout 2018, new fairs in Singapore and Taiwan signaled sustained hope for boosting their respective art markets. In New Delhi, India Art Fair put on a brave face despite MCH Group’s announced departure as its majority shareholder. Taipei The inaugural Taipei Dangdai (January 18–20) opened to much fanfare at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center. Helmed by Magnus Renfrew, the first edition featured 90 international galleries and attracted around 28,200 visitors, including figures from major global cultural institutions such as Hong Kong’s M+; London’s Tate Modern; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Taipei-based galleries made a strong showing. Liang Gallery had a solo booth of Hsu Chia-Wei’s 2018 multi-channel video installations, Black and White – Giant Panda and Black and…

In the two years since I first encountered Yoshida Minoru’s Epicurism of Space Universe on the Rock (1975), the video performance has stuck with me. In it, a lonely figure of an extraterrestrial explorer, wearing a partially-constructed, plexiglass-clad space suit, makes his way toward a beach, climbing over rocks as a ventilation tube swings haphazardly off the back of his bubbleshaped helmet. He weaves between what appear to be, from the low-quality black-and-white video recording, either well-worn pillars from a long-abandoned pier or some variety of thin, alien plants. Although the video itself has no sound, occasional closeups of the performer’s face reveal pursed lips and inflated cheeks that indicate some sort of sound component that has been lost to us. The figure explores the landscape in a measured, meditative…

In June 2018, during Keiichi Tanaami’s solo exhibition at the chi K11 art space in Guangzhou, the organization invited local children to construct standing structures made from photocopies of his artworks. Some kids handled papers featuring the Japanese pop artist’s mutated Betty Boop, her hair transformed into goldfish scales and squatting before a half-sunken American warplane. Others folded creases beside the feathers of a vacant-eyed rooster head, or pasted together skulls and rib cages sprouting from bonsai pine arrangements, with dozens of eyes floating behind them. The children seemed particularly interested in Tanaami’s totemic sculpture Body Decoration (2014), which features a caricatured Mickey Mouse head atop a skull sprouting legs balanced on the wings of a midcentury propeller plane. Observing the scene, Tanaami was amused by how the children handled…

When Xiao Lu picked up a pistol and fired two shots at her own installation Dialogue (1989), she stumbled into a global notoriety, which has shrouded her practice ever since. Displayed in the seminal 1989 “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition at Beijing’s China National Art Gallery, Dialogue comprises two phone booths featuring a photograph of a man and a woman, respectively, with a telephone hanging off a hook, and reflected the artist’s frustrations at being unable to communicate with her friends and family about a past trauma. Authorities temporarily closed the show following Xiao’s gunshots. Tang Song, Xiao’s friend, who would later become her partner, was incorrectly identified as a co-conspirator and was arrested by the authorities. Tang then reframed Dialogue in his own, political terms to media and their peers. Adding to…

Humans are wired to be myopic. Though we recognize the toll that modern life has taken on the planet, few make meaningful strides to avert the expected crisis brought about by climate change and rampant consumerism, so mounds of waste amass around the globe and noxious emissions clog the air we breathe. What might the traces of our existence look like eons from now? One answer comes from Swiss-born artist Julian Charriere, who fuses artificial lava with molten materials found in consumer electronics, such as the rare-earth elements present in smartphones. The result is a series of human-made rocks that look like something excavated by archaeologists in the far future—if any intelligent life-forms remain. Perhaps these works reflect our current human condition. It has become common for artists and curators…

Curated by Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, the ambitious survey “Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia” featured works by 18 artists and artist collectives, and was centered on three facets of displacement: “exit,” which implies economically motivated emigration; “exile,” the removal and disempowerment of a person; and “exodus,” suggesting a group or common experience of leaving one’s home. Aside from a few artworks referencing conflicts of the 20th century, such as Pao Houa Her’s melancholic photographs of Hmong veterans who fought for the Americans in the Vietnam War, or the beguiling, pastiched video The Nameless (2015) by Ho Tzu Nyen, which narrates the peregrinations of a communist triple agent during the Second World War, most of the works were related to existing diasporas, of which there is no shortage. In particular, since…

Despite the centrality of oil to the creation and current realities of the modern Middle East, the region’s history of hydrocarbon extraction, petroimperialism and the proliferation of unsustainable petro-based cultures has never been explored in a contemporary art exhibition. With his proposition that oil is both “magical and insidious,” Murtaza Vali, curator of “Crude,” the inaugural group exhibition at Dubai’s Jameel Arts Centre, suggested there are reasons for this oversight. Citing scholar Imre Szeman in his curatorial essay, Vali notes that oil is a substance that resists easy representation due to its paradoxical properties of ubiquity, opacity and mutability. Hydrocarbons are also the source of the wealth on which the region’s 20th-century Islamic kingdoms, autocracies and republics, founded or propped up by international powers, still largely rely. The precarity of…

For almost three weeks in 2018, 12 young football players and their coach were stuck in Chiang Rai province’s Tham Luang caves due to flash flooding. Their plight caught the attention of international news, as well as onlookers from around the world, including Tesla honcho Elon Musk. Meanwhile, the Thai junta attempted to reframe their image as one of benevolence by sensationalizing their rescue efforts. The narratives of care constructed around the trapped teenagers formed the cornerstone of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s three-channel video installation No History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 5 (2018). Presented by Carlos/Ishikawa gallery in an exhibition of the same title, the work relates the notion of genuine care and empathy between people to the state of being possessed. “In the act of letting…

As a response to the locale of her presentation in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, Shu Lea Cheang has devised a series of sonic, visual and participatory installations around the themes of surveillance, territory and autonomy. Within the Palazzo delle Prigioni, a former prison, Cheang’s installation 3x3x6 will reference a newly implemented architectural model in which a three-by-three-meter cell is monitored by six cameras. In our next regular issue, curator and writer Banyi Huang engages with Cheang on her upcoming projects as well as her seminal work in new-media art starting from the 1990s.…

On January 16, less than ten days before Art Stage Singapore was set to open, the art fair announced its cancellation. The ninth edition of the fair was slated to take place from January 25 to 27 at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre. Supporting governmental bodies—the National Arts Council, the Singapore Tourism Board and the Singapore Economic Development Board—remarked in a joint statement that it was a “commercial decision.” Founder and president of the fair Lorenzo Rudolf cited a “difficult market situation” and “unequal competition” in an email sent to the 45 exhibitors. In the same statement, he apportioned blame on an unnamed fair held concurrently at Gillman Barracks—a reference to the inaugural SEA Focus fair—saying the new event had invited galleries to exhibit for a fraction of…

The face of Jesus Christ on a Cheeto, the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich, Mother Teresa on a cinnamon roll—these are all instances of pareidolia, the psychological tendency to construct meaningful patterns out of random stimuli. Timur Si-Qin is interested in patterns, from cross-cultural aesthetic ideals to shared ritual practices, which he explores through installations that employ the sleek visual language of contemporary branding. Over the past decade, he has created a taxonomy of animatronic characters based on their resemblance to natural organisms, discovered vestigial traces of the human hand in men’s shower products, and launched an advertising campaign for a new faith. Taking an approach steeped in the philosophical school of new materialism—which is centered on realities arising from matter, as opposed to discursive practice or ideology—Si-Qin attempts…

In his 1989 essay “The End of History?,” published on the eve of communist collapse across Europe, international-relations scholar Francis Fukuyama argued that the political winds signaled “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” In the decades since, despite the dismantling of Europe’s Iron Curtain, the fall of the Soviet Union, and China’s paradoxical embrace of consumer-capitalism, the world now seems further away from any ideologically resolved endpoint. Europe is fracturing once more along national lines, ex-communist countries are reverting to authoritarianism, the United States government is mired in chaos, while the Chinese economic powerhouse has plateaued. In these troubled times, the 12th Shanghai Biennale, “Proregress: Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence,” was a clear-eyed reminder that continuous linear progress—an Enlightenment ideal that has taken on…

Shock, grief and compassion pour forth after calamitous events, whether natural or humanmade. Strangers bond as they navigate adversity, or gather to mourn and rebuild. That emotive fervor can be channeled into art. “Catastrophe and the Power of Art,” curated by Kenichi Kondo at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, showcased creative reactions from 40 artists, groups and projects after major mishaps in recent decades. For many of the Japanese artists featured in the exhibition, earthquakes were a shared reference. “Trace” (2012), Shimpei Takeda’s series of gelatin silver prints, charts the impact of the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which killed more than 19,000 and triggered irreversible failure in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Resembling constellations, the images result from the exposure of photographic paper to radioactive soil samples gathered…

Dancing hasn’t been given much exhibition attention in China yet. Presented by Beijing’s Taikang Space, “Dance With It,” curated by Su Wenxiang, was a show of nine artists resolutely focused on the cultural significances of the activity—specifically, the phenomenon of Western-style dancing in China from the late 1970s to the present day. In the first room, there was a glistening, rotating disco ball hanging from the ceiling. Viewers were invited to put on a set of wireless headphones and listen to a playlist emphasizing the inextricability of the imported tunes, such as Kraftwerk’s 1983 track Tour de France. Like much of the show’s works, two small oil paintings of partner dances by Cui Jie seemed to embody these songs. The canvases’ ambiguities, resulting from their weighty impastos, which belie the…

Historical accounts commonly pinpoint two incidents that unfolded on April 13, 1975, as the beginning of the Lebanese civil war. That day, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerillas attacked a Maronite church in Beirut’s ‘Ayn al-Rummaneh neighborhood. A few hours later, Christian gunmen retaliated by ambushing a bus heading for the Tall al-Za’tar Palestinian refugee camps. However, the underlying conditions that led to what would become the 15-yearlong conflict had been simmering long before the two eruptions. Since the early 1970s, the armed presence of the PLO in Lebanon had been confronted by the ultra-conservative Christian right, and much-needed land and labor reforms had failed to materialize, polarizing communities across many divides. Amid these rifts, in 1974 a Lebanese pharmaceutical laboratory analyst named Oumaya Alieh Soubra painted her Liseuse. Although Soubra…

Well into my conversation with Suki Seokyeong Kang at her Seoul studio, as she was explaining the many components of her projects (paintings, mats, mora, jeong), and how she evolves them into new projects, she turned to me and paused. Seeing my expression, she asked, “Is it too much?” and then exclaimed, “No? I think it is too much!” I reassured her that I had understood her by pointing to a stack of canvases (“Mora”) with a mat laid on top and said, “It’s layered, like this.” She laughed and then went back to explaining about the woven rush-mats, the invisible boundaries they create, their references to chunaengmu (the courtly “spring nightingale dance”) and how she commissions them from artisans on the island of Ganghwado in “north South Korea.” Kang’s…

I made my first super-8 movie The Glove, a surrealist tale of desire, in 1984, while studying radiology in Hong Kong. Besides filmmaking, I was working in theater as a sound operator, assistant backstage manager and in costume management. I even played a few acting roles with speaking parts and directed a short play. Yet my curiosity for the arts was not fully satisfied. At the time, I frequently visited the clubhouse of experimental theater company Zuni Icosahedron to watch European New Wave cinema. There, I met the founder and artistic director Danny Yung. He invited me to document their workshops, rehearsals and performances. Through these exercises, I witnessed how the process of deconstruction can birth a new, avant-garde theater language. Through the camera lens, I not only documented but…

1 Yi Lian HANGZHOU A CRT video projector imported from Italy screens short vignettes of characters in a small room conversing in the Yangjiang dialect of Cantonese about the history of a family-run cinema. These scenes are spliced together with incongruous-seeming footage of other people searching for the elusive sand crab in the dark. The clunky, low-lying projector is perched atop a set of arachnid-looking legs—half the height of a visitor—in a sand-filled room reminiscent of a shoreline, and acts as an eye or the muddled “brain” of a sentient witness, relentlessly playing the out-of-order scenes on loop. Presented for the first time at Guangzhou’s bonacon gallery in 2018—and then later in the 12th Shanghai Biennale—Cinema Paradiso (2017–18) by Yi Lian is a commentary on inaccessibility and the falsity of…

HAO JINGBAN When silent motion pictures were first introduced to mass audiences in Japan in the late 19th century, the task of a benshi was to preface the contents of a film and narrate the plot during the presentation. It was a paradoxical position that inevitably required benshi to lend their own readings to what was happening on the silver screen, though the conventions of the art form also emphasized “faithfulness” to the movies. Preoccupied with how we use language to fill in effaced and contested histories—particularly that of Sino-Japanese relations, which remain volatile today—and the possibilities of stripping away the intended messages of an image, Beijing-based Hao Jingban invited one of the few contemporary practitioners of the benshi tradition, Ichiro Kataoka, to collaborate with her. Hao edited a selection…

In his MFA thesis, completed in 1985 at New York’s Pratt Institute, Bahc Yiso (1957–2004) recounts a parable about a group of four blind men. Each man “felt the different parts of the elephant and all four came up with different conclusions,” he wrote. “One blind man was not more right or more wrong than the others.” Known at different points of his life as Bahc Yiso, Bahc Cheol-ho and Bahc Mo, Bahc defies easy characterization. In addition to being an artist, he assumed the roles of curator, director, critic and, later, professor. “Memos and Memories” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon provided an intimate portrait of the late artist, gesturing toward his multifaceted practice so that visitors, like the blind men, might piece together…

Astha Butail’s “In the Absence of Writing” included a subtle and challenging body of work. Presented by the Gujral Foundation at their experimental space 24, Jor Bagh in New Delhi, the exhibition comprised installations commissioned specially for the occasion alongside existing projects, all resulting from Butail’s yearlong exploration of oral traditions, particularly the Zoroastrian Avesta in Iran, Jewish oral Torah in Israel, and Vedic customs in India. Using the travel opportunity afforded her by the BMW Art Journey award, which she clinched in 2017, Butail visited each of the three countries, where she set up tents that she had designed with reconfigurable wooden frames and diaphanous white muslin. She then filmed the practitioners of the local oral traditions within the temporary structures. The resulting installation, Of a Flux of Hopes…

Times Art Center Berlin, an independent, nonprofit space initiated by the Guangdong Times Museum, opened its doors on November 30, 2018. Its inaugural show “Episode I: Urban Explosion”—the first of the three-part exhibition series, “The D-Tale, Video Art from the Pearl River Delta,” curated by Hou Hanru with Xi Bei—presented a mind-boggling 22 moving images, ranging from one-minute clips to one-hour-long feature films. Contributed by 21 artists based in or who have examined the southern Chinese region that includes bustling centers such as Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the works were displayed on eight screens, dispersed throughout the platform’s expansive hall. Viewers were greeted by a wall projection of Cao Fei’s renowned, cinematic Cosplayers (2004), for which the artist invited a group of costumed youth to engage in video-game-based, fantastical…

Like photographs, trees transcribe memory. Their bodies are histories of earth, sky and society, filling the shapes afforded to them by soil, light and human intervention. The tree is held taut between biological time and the time of human consciousness. This tension animates two recently published, independently produced monographs from Hatje Cantz that investigate society through images of displaced trees. In Forest, Chinese-British photographer Yan Wang Preston photographs trees that have been transplanted, sometimes violently, as part of China’s drive toward urbanization. In Jeju Island, the locale of which sits two-thousand kilometers to the east of Preston’s subjects, Korean photographer Oksun Kim looks closely at the arboreal equivalent of thirdculture kids: misfit palm trees, raised far from their ancestral homes. In Preston’s Forest, we see the outcome of a China…