Innehållsförteckning för 115 (Sep/Oct 2019) från ArtAsiaPacific

A creative hub for fashion and design, Milan lagged behind other European capitals as an international contemporary art scene at the beginning of the new millennium. However, in the last decade, the city has experienced a significant “global turn.” The universal exposition hosted by Milan, Expo 2015, injected new creative impulses into the city’s architecture and arts. Among the urban regeneration projects were the Milanese headquarters of Fondazione Prada, and the Museum of Cultures, a publicprivate partnership created to promote dialogue between non-European communities through cultural activities. Although aspirations to allocate resources to build a contemporary art museum remain unfulfilled—due to the chronic shortage of national public funding—Milan’s network of private foundations and galleries, initiatives run by artist collectives, and festivals has no equal in Italy. The annual Milan Art…

The 49th edition of Art Basel in Basel (June 13–16) reflected variations on the dominant trend of recent years: The big keep getting bigger. The postwar secondary market remains a prime-grade investment class, and a handful of younger North American and European artists are regarded as notable successors in that lineage. The situation was less sunny in Tehran, where Teer Art Fair (June 25–28) soldiered on through its second edition despite ongoing economic woes due to sanctions imposed by the United States. BASEL This was the first year that Art Basel offered a sliding scale of booth prices at its flagship event in Switzerland, supposedly to make participation more affordable for smaller and midsized galleries. Blue-chip spaces with the largest booths paid approximately a couple hundred Swiss francs more per…

There is a remarkable shortage of memes about Park Geun-hye, despite the former South Korean president’s political scandals and ongoing lawsuits. In 2017, Park was impeached for allowing a cult leader’s daughter, Choi Soon-sil, to unlawfully meddle in presidential affairs, and for soliciting bribes from the nation’s mammoth conglomerates. Though the circumstances supplied ample opportunities for dark humor, a quick Google search for memes—or jjal, as they are known in Korean—on Park yields unsatisfactory results. One merely encounters a handful of screenshots of her embarrassing public remarks—such as the statement that students would be haunted with “abnormal spirits” if they did not learn the “correct” version of national history, a message through which she pushed for a single, state-authorized history textbook. Entertaining as they might be, such disgraceful snippets of…

October 23, 1963, Calabar, Nigeria – March 15, 2019, Munich, Germany Ten Kilometers Queridísimo Okwui, What is memory? Why does one remember? How does one remember? Where do we keep hundreds, thousands of memories in our brain? When does memory become history? It feels strange to write you a tribute. How does one honor someone whose life was a tribute, a gift to me, and to so many artists around the world? A life dedicated to art and culture? A life spent insisting, asserting, demanding, that we, artists and intellectuals, create models of thinking the world? Of all the memories I have of you and us, it is the following reminiscence that came first to my mind: It was September 1998. We were in San Sebastian, in the Basque Country.…

“A falling leaf returns to the roots.” This Chinese adage aptly describes the final days of one of the global art world’s most visionary figures, Okwui Enwezor, who passed away in Munich in March 2019. And now his body has been returned to his native Nigeria, surrounded by his closest family. During his lifetime, Okwui was a veritable nomad and true cosmopolite. Born in postcolonial Africa, he adopted New York and then Munich as his new homes. He was radically contemporary: a constant traveler across the world, eloquently cultivated, impeccably elegant and absolutely urbane. A curator, writer, editor, and teacher, he transgressed all kinds of boundaries—geographic, cultural, social, and political. He was a Hermes transmitting the defying voices that challenged the dominance of the Western canon with the aim to…

A circular mirror lies on the floor within a ring of salt, from which 12 wooden, brass-tipped candlesticks arise. Punctuating the darkness, a white spotlight falls on the mirror, and reflects onto a nearby wall in the shape of a disk, forming an eerie, ersatz moon. In her performance Parallel Presence (2018), Naomi Blacklock invokes in this elaborate setting the rich iconography of ritual magic, refiguring the monstrous character of the witch as a radical and empowered embodiment of alterity. Clad in a black tunic, the artist lights the candles, each pointed perpendicularly toward the salt circle’s center. The varying heights of the stems correspond to different parts of Blacklock’s anatomy, rendering them “surrogates for a coven concocted from parts of [her]self.” As melted wax drips onto the mirror below,…

Violent threats, media sensationalism, political interference into a cultural event—the controversy around the closure of a small exhibition, “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’,” about artworks previously censored in Japan, within 72 hours of the opening of Aichi Triennale 2019, immediately overshadowed the rest of the festival. Though the central target of right-wing ire was Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung’s sculpture of a seated comfort woman, Statue of Peace (2011), the display featured works discussing many sensitive topics. Based on a historical photograph, Meiro Koizumi’s canvas Air #1 (2016) shows a seemingly empty interior with six chairs and a low table; the emperor and other figures have been painted over by the artist—a gesture that could be interpreted as disrespectful. Chim↑Pom showed two videos, KI-AI 100 (2011) and Enduring the Unendurable KI-AI…

“The Soul Trembles” at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum was the largest midcareer survey of Chiharu Shiota to date. Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota decided to become an artist at the age of 12, and has been making art ever since. Featuring 113 works spanning performance, video, sculpture, drawing, photography, and the artist’s signature monumental thread installations, the exhibition traced Shiota’s creative journey from her childhood to the present. In the museum’s atrium, visitors encountered a cloudlike group of boats made of white threads suspended from the ceiling. These vessels in Where Are We Going? (2017/19) ascended toward the upper floor, directing visitors to the unknown world of Shiota’s making that they were about to explore. The exhibition itself opened quietly, with various drawings and a photograph created from 2007…

The group exhibition “The Racing Will Continue, The Dancing Will Stay,” curated by Leo Li Chen and presented by Guangdong Times Museum, took China’s reform and post-reform era as its starting point. Showcasing works that delve into this period of societal transformations, which saw the rapid development of China’s entertainment industry, athletics, and urban infrastructure, the show investigated how individuals navigated the balancing act between their own identities and that of collective society amid such shifts. The center of the gallery accommodated works that explore theatricality. New Neighbour (2019), Li Ran’s newly commissioned installation, is an open, two-level stage, replete with inbuilt staircases and props such as a mop, trashcan, and coat. In the absence of performers, Li invites viewers to take the stage and act out his script. Adapted…

Artist and choreographer Geumhyung Jeong’s exhibition “Homemade RC Toy,” curated by Elena Filipovic at Kunsthalle Basel, evoked the sterile laboratory of an amateur roboticist. Spare parts—batteries, wheels, cables—were arranged almost fetishistically on top of the stepped plinths by the walls, along with informational videos that document the production process of the artist-turnedmechanical engineer. In the center of the space, on top of a black rubber mat, five of the artist’s robotic creations lay dormant, their outstretched limbs seductively suggesting potential for movement. These are not the prosaic, functional appliances—smartphones, baby monitors, automated kiosks—that have become as invisible as they are ubiquitous in today’s digitally connected society. The torsos of Jeong’s robots consist of the mechanical bodies of large remote-controlled cars, the four wheels serving as contact points, or sockets, for…

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have amassed more than 4,000 spam emails since 1999. This was the starting point for the duo’s project On Scams (I must first apologise) (2014), exhibited for the first time in Canada at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Spanning sculpture, installation, and video, “On Scams” was a timely exploration of the subject’s history and its connection to social anxieties in the so-called post-truth era. The exhibition was prefaced by The Jerusalem Letter (2014), a digital print reproducing an example of a type of scam—originating in late-18th-century France—in which fraudsters posed as nobility (or their servants) in need of monetary assistance after fleeing the French Revolution. The letter’s farfetched narrative might elicit a good laugh, but the tone and style is in fact strikingly…

On August 3, organizers of the 2019 Aichi Triennale shuttered “After ’Freedom of Expression?’”—a show about the history of censored works in Japan at Nagoya’s Aichi Prefecture Museum of Art—after receiving threats from members of the public. Those demanding its closure were incensed by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung’s Statue of Peace (2011)—a sculpture of a seated comfort woman representing the estimated 200,000 women in Korea, China, and across Asia who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army from the 1930s to the end of World War II. Aichi governor Hideaki Omura said at a press conference that the Triennale had received threatening emails, phone calls, and faxes. In one fax, the sender claimed they would bring a gasoline canister to the museum, echoing a recent deadly…

BASEL SINGAPORE HONG KONG GWANGJU _ SEOUL…

It takes a medium to contact the ancestors. Yen-Chao Lin’s video short The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay (2019), shot on hand-processed Super-8 film in traditionally Amis territory on the east coast of Taiwan over the course of a residency, records these moments of spiritual mediation. Lin, a Montreal/Tiohtià:ke-based artist of Taiwanese descent, has long pursued the crafts that allow you to know by touch the hard-to-see, like water dowsing, spirit possession, and kau chim (bamboo slip divination). Her video is overlaid with the voice of textile artist and community organizer Rara Dongi, as she narrates in both Mandarin and Amis the changes she has witnessed in the community. Scenes of medicinal herbs and joss-money-burning in ritual preparations lead into quasi-ethnographic footage of Daoist possession, Christian sacrament, and Amis sorcery. The…

In the late 1990s, one of the primary meeting points for many curators from around the world was, surprisingly, an art fair. Every year in Madrid, ARCO hosted a series of topical talks initiated by the fair’s inaugural director Rosina Gomez-Baeza. It was there, at one of the panels, that Okwui and I first met. In the same year, 1998, we were both invited as speakers to a conference in Copenhagen convened by the artist group Superflex. At a roundtable, Okwui and I got into an argument about the role of gender in Africa compared with Europe. When our session concluded I remember thinking, well, that was that. In reality our relationship had just begun. We met again the following year at the ARCO panels. Okwui, who had just been…

Nguyen Trinh Thi’s first name means “poetry” in Chinese-Vietnamese, and, as though a promise, her works brim with prismatic literary sensibilities. Her films Spring Comes Winter After (2008) and Unsubtitled (2010) trace the history of the North Vietnamese literary movement, Nhan Van-Giai Pham (“Humanism and Works of Beauty”), that the Viet Minh regime suppressed in the late 1950s, while Love Man Love Woman (2007) features the distinct dialect of the indigenous religion Dao Mau, spoken by a spirit medium. Texts also guide the forms of Nguyen’s works, such as Letters from Panduranga (2015), an epistolary narrative on the indigenous Cham people of Vietnam, and Eleven Men (2016), which is based on a short story by Franz Kafka. Along with an intuitive deftness for language arts, her oeuvre reveals her unswerving…

The unknown north; a matriarchal island off the south coast; cities steeped in both shamanism and high-tech cultures—the psychic geography of Korea gives an eerie weight to incidents on Dylan Mira’s journey to the peninsula. Mira recorded her travels from southern Jeju Island, where her great-grandmother had practiced as a shaman (Mu) despite the prohibition under Japanese occupation, to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the 38th parallel, which her uncle had once crossed on his motorcycle. In the infrared night-camera recording of her journey—showing Mira and her friends finding a stone lion in the dark, encountering a stray dog, and dancing in the back of a little truck—there is a glitch that causes the footage to constantly skip backward in time, sending figures across the screen, or in and out…

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s solo exhibition, “Certain Situations,” brought together a mix of painting and sculpture, projections and screen-based works, soundscapes and texts. The forms and words alike indicated an openness to inspiration, with allusions to the aesthetics of modernist abstraction and the poetics of everyday language, snipped and recombined to produce a display that was crisp, sparse, and familiar. At the heart of the exhibition, which spread across four galleries of Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, a temporarily installed lavender wall sliced through the room. In line with this diagonal intervention, a brilliant blue carpet spread across the floor like a shadow. And on the room’s far side, five screens hung haphazardly from the ceiling as part of Five Columns (2019), a collaborative project by Wrong Solo—Gothe-Snape’s ongoing collaboration with performance…

There is a fine line between nonsense and the nonsensical, humor and megalomania. Wu Shanzhuan’s works navigate this distinction, occasionally tipping into obscurity and solipsism. He first came to prominence with his installation Red Characters: Big-Character Posters (1986), which literalized the ideological and semantic chaos of postwar China. He asked his friends to paint over found posters with giant red, black, and white slogans—some taken from Cultural Revolution propaganda, others from classical poetry and commercial advertising. Wu then wrote out four characters on the floor: Wu ren shuo dao (“no one can interpret it”). More than three decades later, Wu deployed a similar strategy in his seven-monthlong exhibition, “Today Became a Holiday,” at Long March Space. The approach was maximalist, with more than 200 paintings filling the gallery walls on…

The legitimizing potential of art spaces should never cease to amaze us. A urinal in a restroom or an unmade bed in a bedroom is just that, but put them in a gallery or museum at the right point in time while alerting sufficiently influential people to their presence and you can change the course of history. With these two examples there is a transposition from one category to another. In a restroom or bedroom these items are primarily utilitarian objects. In a gallery or museum they are signifiers for more abstract concepts, intended for deeper consideration. With regard to the animations of Wong Ping, which he originally posted for consumption on the internet, the transposition from the online realm to the hallowed spaces of major arts institutions engenders no…

Unlike their predecessors, the 14 Vietnamese artists and one collective featured in “Where the Sea Remembers” do not dwell on the trauma of the Vietnam War. Rather, they belong to a younger generation—many from the war’s resultant diaspora—who have returned to Vietnam from abroad in the past decade, bringing with them refreshing perspectives on the country’s past and present. Staged at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, the show served as a personalized cultural dispatch from a lesser-known Vietnam. Trong Gia Nguyen touches on how technology and media operate within a rapidly developing Vietnam in his sculpture Cracked Mobile No. 5 (2019). The artist welded iron within a raw frame of gypsum and enamel paint to mimic the glass cracks of a shattered cell phone. Referencing the traditional window grates…

I was crossing London’s Waterloo Bridge on a bus to visit friends who worked for the BBC Burmese Service, which operates out of Bush House, when I caught a glimpse of a man standing on the pavement, looking as though he had just emerged from the River Thames. His body appeared to be coated with brown mud. On my return journey, I realized that the figure was a statue, and spotted another one perched on the roof of the nearby Hayward Gallery, where Antony Gormley’s solo exhibition “Blind Light” was on view. It was 2007. I had moved from Yangon to London the year before, at the age of 40, and finally had the opportunity to learn more about the international contemporary art scene. Curious, I visited the gallery, and…

Preliminary information on upcoming fall sales suggests that major auction houses are following a predictable strategy, with the usual blue-chip names represented across categories and works from series that have recently performed well at auction. However, with many auction houses still preparing for major fall sales, we may yet be surprised by news of unusual or rare works being put on the block. NEW YORK Christie’s New York will hold a sale of South Asian modern and contemporary art on September 11. The highest-valued lots in this category have typically been 20th-century paintings by South Asian modernists, particularly eminent members of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG). At the forthcoming sale, PAG luminary SH Raza’s oil-and-ink painting Untitled (Cityscape) (1956) will make its auction debut, with estimates of USD 350,000–500,000. Rendered…

Chang En-Man TAIPEI Prompted by a curiosity about her mother’s Indigenous heritage, Chang En-Man began to travel across Taiwan in 2010, training her camera on the island’s Indigenous communities. Interweaving documentary-style footage of the tribes’ daily lives with re-enactments of their rituals, her video installations probe what it means to be an Indigenous person in contemporary Taiwan. One such condition of indigeneity that is made evident throughout Chang’s works is the continued colonization of these communities’ territories. Ungrounding Land – Ljavek Trilogy (2018)—Chang’s contribution to the 2019 Istanbul Biennale—focuses on the displacement of the Ljavek people, who hail from the southeastern coast of Taiwan and first settled in Kaohsiung in the 1950s to look for work. The central video channel shows the various activities of the tribe, such as wood…

In 1984, the British Parliament passed the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act, which formalized officers’ powers to arrest, detain, and interrogate suspicious individuals. Artist and audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan is specifically interested in Part V, section 60 of the PACE Act, which mandates that police tape interviews with suspects. The Act “gave birth to a new era of investigation,” Abu Hamdan explained in his 2015 keynote lecture at the New School’s “The Politics of Listening” symposium in New York City. The practice of recording interviews introduced a new aspect to evidence analysis: the study of nonverbal information—accents, cadence, behavioral cues—conveyed in the voice. “From that point on the whole voice was captured in the interview,” Abu Hamdan noted in his presentation. “The ‘what’ you said, and also the…

With “touching listening,” anthropologist Roshanak Kheshti describes sound as “experienced (felt) by the whole body intertwining what is heard by the ears with what is felt on the flesh, tasted on the tongue, and imagined in the psyche.” This form of multinodal hearing—decentralizing the aural experience and exposing the body to the ineffable obscurities of sonic play—courses through the works of Christine Sun Kim, who was born Deaf. Despite being told by those around her that she could not receive or transmit noise, Kim found her own pathways to sound through sensorial experiments, such as a game in which Deaf kids scream in enclosed spaces to feel the tones trembling within hair, skin, and body. The neon-green buttons in the cubiclelike installation Elevator Pitch (2019), with letters and numbers scrawled…

In 1932, poet and artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published The Futurist Cookbook, with recipes that incorporate perfumes and inedible elements, as well as natural ingredients cut to resemble modern machines. Marinetti advocated for the use of theatrical staging and “scientific tools” in an attempt to revolutionize cuisine. Fifty years later, “molecular gastronomy” and “immersive dining” are culinary fads, with a debt to the spirit of futurism. Many artists today are proposing new futures for food, identifying it as a topic around which technological advances and ecological issues converge. Among the more than 20 projects and performances in the fifth edition of the ACT Festival, titled “FoodHack,” at the Asia Culture Center, was Park Eunyoung’s Kitchen Makerspace Cookbook (2019), a literal embodiment of the current DIY trends in food and bioscience,…

In the curatorial text for Bani Abidi’s exhibition, “They Died Laughing,” at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, the Karachi- and Berlinbased artist is described as an “urban archaeologist.” Abidi’s videos, photographs, and works on paper take the everyday lives of cities as source material, spinning intricate, anecdotal webs around her ordinary protagonists. The Berlin show surveys the past 20 years of Abidi’s oeuvre, which explores how humorous narratives of quotidian social struggle speak to wider political realities in Pakistan and beyond. Visitors were lured into the exhibition space by the cacophonic tune of Scottish bagpipes emanating from the film Shan Pipe Band Learns the Star Spangled Banner (2004). The film depicts a brass and pipe band—a remnant of British colonial rule that is still a part of public parades in Pakistan today—sitting…

A life-size figure made of knotted fiber awaited visitors who followed the undulating pathways of “Phenomenal Nature,” the first United States retrospective of Mrinalini Mukherjee, one of India’s most prolific women sculptors. Hooded eyes, a gaping hole where a mouth should be, and frayed rope ends evoke the mustached face of Mukherjee’s chimerical Van Raja I (King of the Forest) (1981). Appropriately dyed green, the sculpture hung from the ceiling of the Met Breuer, its “feet” just brushing the floor like creeping moss. Van Raja I is startling and indeed an “iconic presence,” as the late Mumbai-born artist intended, much like the other works that populated the show. Displayed chronologically for the most part, the 57 pieces included in the exhibition represent nearly 40 years of Mukherjee’s career. Though clearly…

For three months, beginning in August 2018, Judy Freya Sibayan lived in Manila’s Calle Wright art house. Upstairs in this space, amid piles of boxes, three days a week, in the words of the exhibition’s title, Sibayan was “Moving House, Unpacking a Life of Critical Art Making.” Downstairs was a timeline and artifacts marking the history of Scapular Gallery Nomad, a conceptual artwork and miniature project space that Sibayan carried around her neck as she traveled the world from 1994 to 2002. From this period of archiving and reflection comes the diagram above, representing her attempt to structure an inventory of her institutional critique works, while acknowledging the “auto-critical works as self-parodies.” In ArtAsiaPacific’s upcoming feature, Sibayan and deputy editor HG Masters delve into the artist’s projects, including her Museum…