Innehållsförteckning för 114 (Jul/Aug 2019) från ArtAsiaPacific

The vast, sunny and unhurried city of Los Angeles is home to Hollywood, mega tech companies and the porn industry. Its progressive art schools, including UCLA, Cal Arts, ArtCenter College of Design and USC, are engines for new generations of American artists. Yet unlike many other metropolises, LA also offers proximity to nature. Hiking in urban parks, rambling in the desert, yoga on the beach, surfing, and snowboarding in the mountains are integral activities for many Angelenos. As the founder of Various Small Fires (VSF) gallery Esther Kim Varet remarked, “You’ve gotta love the laid-back city, where work and wellness are equally important pursuits.” In recent years, LA has seen a huge influx of migrants, among them artists and gallerists, enticed by the pleasant weather, healthy lifestyle and available space…

AUCKLAND Auckland Art Fair (AAF) (May 2–5) switched from a biennial to an annual format in 2019. With 41 galleries presenting their goods at the Cloud on the Auckland waterfront, the event brought in an estimated total revenue of USD 6.4 million—up from the approximately USD 4.6 million raised last year. Auckland spaces were well represented. Gow Langsford noted robust sales primarily to New Zealand collectors, moving a number of Max Gimblett’s “Lyric Suite” series (2019) quatrefoils for USD 5,900 each, and Dale Frank’s turquoise-green Perspex work, priced at USD 62,000, during the opening. Starkwhite featured John Reynolds’s paintings of abstracted maps on the first three days, before switching to a mixed booth with works by Billy Apple, Alicia Frankovich and Seung Yul Oh. Tim Melville Gallery sold six figurative…

Before the boom of the 2000s—before Ai Weiwei exhibited at Tate Modern, and Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim, before a canvas by Zhang Xiaogang sold for USD 12 million, and one by Zeng Fanzhi went for USD 23 million at Sotheby’s—there was the 1990s. It was a very different period for art in China, when even the idea that artworks might be sold, or that a contemporary artist might make a living from their art, seemed far-fetched. The thought of a Chinese artist being an international media darling, exhibiting at global art institutions and breaking auction records in New York or London, seemed an impossible dream. When looking back on the history of Chinese contemporary art, most would consider the 1990s as the formative years. Yet some argue that the…

Mochu is an artist and filmmaker whose work treads with acidic vibrancy across cybernetic theory, psychedelics, utopianism and special effects. We first met on the occasion of “What Time Is It?”—a conference on technologies of life in the contemporary, convened by Sarai-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and Raqs Media Collective in December 2017—where Mochu spoke on holes and post-cinema. Since then, we’ve had many conversations, frequently leaving me with the feeling of being swept up in an undertow, at great velocity and yet without friction or edge. Here’s a transcript of one that we had over Skype, between Dubai and Delhi. Lantian Xie In your visual essay Trophies of an Afternoon1 you speak about becoming amphibian, so I’d like to start with Kevin Costner. More specifically, the…

During a recent high-speed rail journey from Hong Kong to Beijing, Lam Tung Pang felt a sudden jolt of anxiety as the train passed through a tunnel. Although he knew was still in Hong Kong, he could only see pitch-black through his window, a visual disconnect that brought societal fears over the city’s uncertain political future into sharp relief. This experience informed the artist’s first solo show at Blindspot Gallery, titled “Saan Dung Gei” (Cantonese for “Cave Chronicles”). In new paintings, installations and moving-image works, Lam mines the symbolism of the tunnel to convey the collective sense of entrapment and disillusionment felt by many Hong Kong natives in the face of increasingly fraught relations with mainland China. Designed to evoke a novel, the exhibition felt decidedly oneiric, with disparate timelines…

In a modest public square halfway between the banks of the Bosporus and Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar is a bronze sculpture of a draper showing off an unraveled bolt of fabric. The statue commemorates a figure once common among the neighborhood’s hive of textile businesses, which now sell imported, mass-produced clothing. This shift was provoked by Turkey’s 2000–01 economic crisis and later compounded by the boom of competing businesses internationally and the advent of new production technologies. Just steps away from the statue is another testament to these transformations: the largely empty Gurun Han, a building that used to be the textile industry’s epicenter in the city. Underscoring the building’s position on the brink of obsolescence, Mike Nelson rendered the site a living sculpture, subtly intervening in 16 derelict shops on…

Few conceptual bases appeared to have gone uncovered in preparing “Motions of This Kind: Propositions and Problems of Belatedness,” an ambitious group exhibition at London’s Brunei Gallery, at SOAS. Broadly, the show took for its curatorial foundation a passage in Isaac Newton’s Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which in turn refers to voyager and astronomer Edmund Halley’s observations of the tidal patterns around what is today called Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands. Newton’s bewilderment at the complexities of these tides was later reexamined by Filipino scholar Ricardo Manapat, who, we are told in a booklet accompanying the exhibition, expanded the original passage to account not just for the movements of the tides themselves but also for the “historical ebb and flow of ideas.” It is a convoluted if…

The ominously titled “They Live,” referencing the eponymous 1988 cult alieninvasion film, was Huma Bhabha’s largest survey to date, showcasing the Pakistani-American artist’s three-dimensional works, photography, and drawings from the past two decades. These include sculptures that resemble religious icons, ritual objects or props from sci-fi films, most made with scavenged materials. Simultaneously evoking a distant, more spiritual-centered past and a postapocalyptic, urban wasteland, “They Live” was an exhibition that looked deeply, into both the past and the future. Sitting sentinel at the entrance was The Orientalist (2007). From afar, the cyborgesque, bronze figure, on an artificially weathered pedestal suggesting exposure to the elements for millennia, calls to mind the enthroned granite sculptures of ancient Egypt. Up close, however, its coarse surface, bony legs and charred face evoke a corpse.…

A forthcoming publication on the late Australian artist Brett Whiteley (1939–1992), by respected art historian Kathie Sutherland, has caused considerable anxiety among Australian collectors and art world onlookers, who are not so much eager to see what she has included in the books, but more what she has excluded. In mid-May, the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that Sutherland would be excluding any artworks of questionable authenticity from the 2,400-page, seven-volume catalogue raisonne, which is being touted as the comprehensive, definitive guide to the artist’s oeuvre. The exclusions are being supported by Whiteley’s ex-wife, Wendy—who has long warned of authenticity issues—and follows multiple cases of alleged fraud around the artist’s output. One such case, a highly publicized six-week trial at the Supreme Court of Victoria in 2016, centered on three paintings…

In March, news broke that the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) had appointed Eugene Tan as its director—a position that he would hold concurrently with his directorship at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), making him the leader of the country’s two major public art institutions. The revelation was met with a placid public response, while in private, conversations on the subject exploded. Shortly after the announcement, I connected with some 15 gallerists, collectors, magazine editors, art fair directors and curators at Art Basel Hong Kong. Without fail, every single one of them asked, “Why the same individual? Is there no one else from Singapore or elsewhere who could do this?” They were all quick to qualify that their reactions had nothing to do with the caliber of SAM’s new director; in…

A horrifying deluge of oil-black liquid courses through narrow stone streets; it pours into the sacred interior of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. A mother runs into her stone house, grabs her daughter, and they flee their neighborhood as billows of smoke fill the skyline behind them. These scenes appear as flashbacks throughout Larissa Sansour’s two-channel, black-and-white film In Vitro (2019), co-directed with Soren Lind, and presented in the Denmark Pavilion, “Heirloom,” at the 58th Venice Biennale. The woman who is experiencing these memories is named Alia (Maisa Abd Elhadi) and she is a clone of the daughter seen in the flashbacks. She lives in an underground orchard city where the survivors took refuge; when she visits a gigantic black orb she experiences memories from before the catastrophe of a…

“Stop evoking movement and gesture. You are movement and gesture,” wrote kineticist Jean Tinguely in his 1959 manifesto For Statics. Zeynep Kayan’s series, “Temporary Sameness” (all works 2019), comprising grainy videos and prints of scenes captured from the recordings, takes inspiration from Tinguely’s text, foregrounding the artist’s body as a material. Wearing a loose, black dress that gives her a columnar presence and contrasts her figure against the video and still images’ white backdrops, Kayan performs various banal actions, exploring repetition and change. In the short clip Fabric I, Kayan is seen slowly shuffling her feet apart to mimic the triangular form of a partially unraveling roll of black paper, leaned against the wall, before the sequence is looped and she reverts to a standing position with her feet together.…

The curse at work in the 58th Venice Biennale comes not from the apocryphal Chinese malediction of the title, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” but the word “interesting” itself. The phrase has been repeated by Anglophone politicians, ever since a 1936 speech by British parliament member Austen Chamberlain, and utilizes “interesting” as a euphemism for violent, precarious, turbulent—all of which our times certainly are in political, environmental and economic terms. But what makes something “interesting” in the context of artistic or cultural production is something else entirely. It is an aesthetic category best theorized by the American cultural critic Sianne Ngai as “bound up with the perception of novelty (against a backdrop of the expected and familiar)” and also “as an aesthetic without content.” The 58th Venice Biennale itself…

“The Center Will Not Hold,” the title of the group show curated by Joselina Cruz at Manila’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, could be understood as a prophecy—one that resounded apocalyptically throughout the works in the exhibition. At the core of the presentation was a commanding installation, Here, There, Everywhere: Project Another Country (2018) by husband-and-wife duo Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan. Hundreds of cardboard models, made by volunteers to represent their dream homes, sit atop a wooden base shaped like a satellite dish. The installation’s center is missing. Visitors are prompted to step into this vacuous core. Viewed from this perspective, the work appears to be a treacherous whirlpool, with the models swirling toward the viewer. This city of dream houses, though wondrous in its initial visual effect, is…

“Xenogenesis” at Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum comprised ten works created between 2011 and 2018 by the Otolith Group, spearheaded by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Arranging the works in a nonchronological order, the artists were careful not to position the show as a retrospective, but rather as a cross-section of their practice, framed by science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s trilogy Xenogenesis (1987–89), which has significantly impacted their thinking of the past eight years. In her narrative, Butler delineates interbreeding between humans and aliens. Through these scenes, she explored posthuman subjectivities and imagined possibilities beyond anthropocentric intelligence and logic, which have led to the destruction of the environment and the endangerment of the human species. While Butler’s notion of xenogenesis was not immediately visible in the works on view, the group had expanded…

“Works and Days” was Simone Fattal’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States—a fact that seems rather shocking considering the Lebanese-American artist has been prodigiously producing work for the last 50 years. Curated by Ruba Katrib with Josephine Graf, the retrospective at MoMA PS1 showcased more than 200 of Fattal’s sculptures, paintings, watercolors and collages, some of which were dusted off from storage or retrieved from her studio and shown publicly for the first time. The oldest among them dates back to 1969, when Fattal returned from her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and first exhibited her paintings locally in Beirut. On loan from a private collection in Switzerland, Submarine Landscape reveals the artist’s early eye for organic shapes through swirling, dark lines washed with moody, blue oil…

There was a lofty goal behind “The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Positioning the exhibition’s works by 21 artists as their examples, co-curators Wu Hung and Orianna Cacchione attempted to coin the phrase “Material Art,” or caizhi yishu, with the hopes that it would enter the art historical lexicon as a new lens through which to understand contemporary Chinese art against a global (or perhaps more specifically, Western) landscape. According to Wu’s accompanying catalog essay, the term Material Art more aptly describes the practices of artists who gravitate toward specific materials, but who have been wrongly and awkwardly categorized under Western art labels such as “Conceptual Art, assemblage, readymades or object-based art.” In Wu’s estimation, these artists rely on materials…

In 2006, Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York City presented an exhibition that traced the Philippine roots of minimalism through two painters: Mario Yrisarry, who was born in Manila in 1933, and Leo Valledor, born to Filipino parents in San Francisco in 1936. Both artists were active in the New York art scene in the 1960s and ’70s but then disappeared. Yrisarry stopped painting in 1977 while Valledor moved back to San Francisco, where he persisted with a largely unheralded career—one that is now rightfully being reconsidered—up until his death in 1989. I first encountered Valledor’s work last year at SFMOMA, not realizing our shared heritage. His 1965 painting Skeedo, a large, irregularly shaped canvas of orange and blue-gray angles and yellow lines, exemplified his fascination with hardedged asymmetry and…

MAHMOUD SABRI Al Mawt Al-Tafl (The Death of a Child) 1963, oil on canvas, 137 × 196 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s, London. In London and Hong Kong, buyers showed a taste for the new. Though trusty market darlings—from modern masters to contemporary favorites—continued to perform well, a number of works by important and previously sought-after figures did not meet expectations. On the other hand, pieces by artists who have only fairly recently gained favor at auction have enjoyed staggering increases in prices over a short period, pointing to the art market’s sensitivity to the latest trends. LONDON Sotheby’s London held its 20th Century Art / Middle East sale on April 30, bringing in a total of USD 4.39 million—a jump from the USD 3.16 million achieved at the October 2018 sale.…

During the Biennale of Sydney’s off years, the city bolsters its local contemporary art scene with the six-year biennial initiative, The National, jointly launched in 2017 by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and Carriageworks. The 2019 iteration of the event was put together by four curators from the three institutions—Isobel Parker Philip (AGNSW), Clothilde Bullen and Anna Davis (MCA) and Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Carriageworks)—and was distributed across the three platforms, each of which offered distinct presentations. Anchored to its 19th-century, classical-style building, the AGNSW exhibition offered thoughtful critiques of the nation’s colonial history. Bookending the show was Andrew Hazewinkel’s three-part work, The Ongoing Remains (2019), which includes Romanstyle busts that populated the vestibule. While alluding to marble sculptures that depict…

The limits of a Western-style modernity became apparent in Kuwait at the close of the 20th century, following the end of the nation’s “Golden Era”—a period of oil-fueled economic prosperity. The same period saw local businesses, including petroleum companies and architecture practices, venturing into Western markets with an interest in capitalizing on the emerging neoliberal ethos. Preoccupied with the comparison between the grandiose vernacular of foreign building commissions in the country—manifestations of Western, utopic visions—and the bland utilitarian designs of Kuwaiti architects abroad, Kuwait-and Bahrain-based duo Civil Architecture scrutinize the place of architecture within international relations. Yoking historical documentation with wry conceptual play, their solo exhibition at Sultan Gallery, “Forensic Architecture / Domestic Policy,” homed in on how architectural forms “embody changing ideas of citizenship, foreign policy and the branding…

“Exile Is a Hard Job” at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig was the largest institutional exhibition devoted to the pioneering Turkish artist Nil Yalter to date. Impressive in its breadth and scope, the retrospective spanned some 50 years of Yalter’s provocative, politically engaged oeuvre, ranging from her 1960s paintings inspired by Russian Constructivism and Suprematism, with their bold colors and abstract, geometric forms, to her 2018 Untitled (Black Veil), which combines a 12-page image panel of photographs with three black, floor-length veils, referencing and indeed critiquing the chador worn by some Muslim women. Immigration, feminism, gender, class consciousness, digital aesthetics, languages of inclusion and exclusion—moving through the exhibition space, one was struck repeatedly by the extent to which Yalter’s work was simultaneously ahead of its time and yet remains thoroughly relevant to…

The cowrie shell appears throughout Rina Banerjee’s work, often as writhing clusters of biomass that erupt from her brimming, bricolage installations. These shells, both natural and man-made, were gathered from all over the world and can be seen in abundance in Banerjee’s first midcareer, traveling retrospective. The now-valueless-object was historically used as currency in Africa and South and East Asia, and appears throughout the exhibition as a metaphor for how the meaning and value of objects shift as they are traded. This notion of transformation underpinned Banerjee’s itinerant upbringing—she was born in Kolkata, raised in London, and is now based in New York—and numerous themes of the exhibition including commerce, identity and migration. The most striking work in the exhibition was a 2013 installation of black-glass horns emerging from a…

Istanbul is a palimpsest. From Byzantine to Persian kings, countless conquerors looking to expand their empires have lusted after the city for its strategically advantageous positioning on the mouth of the Bosporus Strait, which leads to the Black Sea. Each time a successful colonizer staked their banner on its lands, they also left their traces on the metropolis’s culture and architecture, often effacing and building over what already existed. Located on the southern tip of Istanbul’s European half, Beyond is a microcosmic reflection of the city’s layered past and mixture of cultures. Today, walking through the district, visitors encounter Byzantine-era relics, winding cobble-stone streets, storied Art Deco apartments and grand buildings with ornate, classical facades. The undeniable “Europeanness” stems from the neighborhood’s history as a home to embassies from the…

What can sound itself—unmoored from its source or from discourse—tell us about the context in which it arose? A lot, according to self-described “private ear” Lawrence Abu Hamdan. In the “Disputed Utterance” (2018–19) series, which is sketched out in the above image, the artist photographed the wide-open maws of individuals after he asked them to pronounce certain words. Each vocalization left a phonemic imprint on the tongues and palates, which had been stained with charcoal. These exercises reference real-life cases where evidence of potential foul play rested on a “disputed utterance,” such as whether a dying French woman’s last word to the emergency call handler was “murder” or “merde.” The artist has also used sound to uncover state violence, re-creating the sonic architecture of Syria’s Saydnaya prison, and investigating the…