Innehållsförteckning för 120 (Sep/Oct 2020) från ArtAsiaPacific

In Vancouver, virtually every conversation is about space in one way or another. The ongoing housing affordability crisis casts a perpetual cloud of precarity and anxiety that rivals the city’s notoriously gray skies. In the art community, the omnipresent specters of rent hikes and “renovictions” threaten not only the homes of the city’s art workers, but also their studios, galleries, and performance spaces. Race underlies many of these conversations. In 2016, British Columbia passed a foreign buyer’s tax—aimed at real and imaginary overseas Chinese speculators, the scapegoats of the housing crisis—to help calm the real-estate market. A mostly unspoken civic antipathy toward Asian settler-immigrants hangs uneasily over increasingly common public acknowledgment that Vancouver rests on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. As the city…

Held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC), Sotheby’s 17 sales spanned fine art, antiques, wine, jewelry, and watches, and brought in USD 411 million—the seventh consecutive Hong Kong series total to exceed USD 400 million. The fine-art evening sales kicked off on July 8 with Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, which attained USD 5.38 million over 14 lots. The sale was led by category mainstay Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merpres’s fresh-to-the-market oil painting Balinese Women in The Garden (undated), which met estimates at USD 950,940. The Modern Art Evening Sale moved 34 out of 35 lots to make USD 107 million, the second-highest total for the Hong Kong event after the record haul in September 2018. Sanyu’s oil-on-masonite Quatre Nus (1952) hammered at USD 33.3…

It was July 1, the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from the United Kingdom to China, when I headed to the Hong Kong Museum of Art to see Lam Tung Pang’s video installation Image-coated (2019). Projected onto a translucent screen over windows with panoramic views of Victoria Harbour, the central video is a bricolage of animated charcoal drawings, manipulated camera footage, and found images forming a multilayered, fantastical chronicle delineating the port-city’s history through its morphing landscape. As a rough contour of an undeveloped Victoria Harbour faded from the screen and the foreboding sound of rumbling thunder filled the space, I walked toward the uncovered windows where Lam had drawn raindrops with a whiteboard marker. Outside, gliding across the waters, was a behemoth barge stacked with 80 shipping containers…

What is driving the current season of outrage? One contribution is a new, powerful form of data analysis and evidence-based virtual modeling. The research agency Forensic Architecture (FA), in the decade since its founding, has been at the forefront of this emerging field, conducting multidisciplinary, open-source investigations that blend technology with testimony to push back against official obfuscations and denials. FA’s recent investigation, The Killing of Mark Duggan (2020), released in June in collaboration with The Guardian newspaper, revisited the 2011 police shooting of a young Black man that led to widespread social unrest across England and Wales. Using 3D modeling, digital recordings, and public testimony, FA recreated the inciting incident—the police pursuit of a minicab in North London, on August 4, 2011. Duggan, whom officers believed was in possession…

Vinyl on Vinyl gallery’s exhibition “Unusual Tranquility,” which opened in early July as Metro Manila cautiously emerged from lockdown, brought together figurative paintings and works on paper by Philippine artists Dennis Bato, Archie Oclos, Roberto Sanchez, and Anjo Bolarda. The all-new works tackle different facets of a society coming to terms with the present state of anxiety. At the center of the gallery, Anjo Bolarda’s large canvas When all else is stripped away, leaving you bare (II) (all works 2020) was laid out on the concrete floor beside a black folding chair. The painting depicts four stylized, featureless nude figures—rendered in solid-black acrylic with sparse, white contours—posed as if sitting on an invisible sofa. The chair seemed to invite the viewer to rest along with the characters, but one could…

We can think of the title of the late Lananh Le’s exhibition at MoT+++, “frozen data,” as questioning the idea of memory or experience as collective, contained, and rational. After graduating in 2015 from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies, the self-taught artist moved to Vietnam, where her practice has been visible in Ho Chi Minh City’s independent spaces since 2017. Le’s recent paintings and animations activate an extensive symbolic vocabulary drawn from the artist’s imagination and from found imagery, expressing a search for more magical, multiform worlds. “frozen data” comprised seven moving-image works presented as four projections. The images at first appear to be motionless, evoking the static connotation of the exhibition title. In fact, each work changes constantly, with hundreds of separate images providing details that…

On July 21, I stepped into a gallery for the first time in five months. I hadn’t ventured further than my local supermarket for weeks, and while I longed to stand under the glare of gallery lights once again, the idea of making that pilgrimage into central London was as disorienting as it was thrilling. As it turned out, this cocktail of emotions acted as a perfect primer for Joonhong Min and Shinuk Suh’s duo exhibition, which evinced the anxieties of modern city life and how these manifest physically and psychologically. Presented at the Korean Cultural Centre UK, “Rendered Reality” showcased multimedia projects that Min and Suh had created during their recent residencies at London’s Camden Arts Centre and Unit 1 Gallery, respectively. Min’s series of angular structures were grouped…

On June 15, Prix Ars Electronica conferred a Digital Communities Golden Nica to the Hong Kong people for digital activism, while Miwa Matreyek won in the Computer Animation category for her climate-crisis project Infinitely Yours (2020). The awards each include EUR 10,000 (USD 11,240). Sculptor Leelee Chan won the 2020 BMW Art Journey award on June 18. She will go on a funded research trip to examine post-industrial shifts in material culture. On August 7, The Contemporary Austin (TCA) revealed artist and composer Tarek Atoui as the recipient of the 2022 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Art Prize, which includes USD 200,000 and a solo exhibition at TCA. Director Ann Hui was announced as the winner of the 2020 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on July 20. She…

Whether it’s the first wave, second wave, or third wave, the endless summer of Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc on every shore around the art world. For commercial galleries that haven’t wiped out already, it’s sink or swim. Buoyed by multimillion-dollar bailouts from the US taxpayer, the Swiss behemoth Hauser & Wirth appears unsinkable, avoiding layoffs and finding fresh legs for new spaces and initiatives. But now some of its top riders are bravely bidding farewell to the golden barrel. Graham Steele, the Canadian who initially helped open White Cube in Hong Kong, defected to the Cube’s arch-competitor in 2015 to direct the conglomerate’s all-in-one lifestyle compound in Los Angeles. Early this year Steele was bumped up to a partner at the Alpine powerhouse, but in July he decided to…

BASEL For its 50th anniversary, Art Basel in Basel had to cancel its real-life celebrations and opt instead for an online iteration (June 19–26), the fair’s second following the digital version of Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK) in March. Organizers had initially postponed the Basel fair to September 17–20 but eventually decided in early June to replace it with Online Viewing Rooms (OVR), which displayed works offered by 282 galleries from 35 countries, and attracted 230,000 visitors over the week. The June platform updated the ABHK version—which showcased works to scale above a virtual bench—to allow for close-ups of images and videos. Consistent with the live fairs, the Basel edition was also larger, exhibiting nearly USD 740 million worth of art on the VIP opening day alone, compared to the…

Land reclamation is a fact of life in Singapore. For decades, the country has been one of the world’s largest importers of sand, maintaining a rhetoric and practice of expansion that began almost as soon as the British first laid claim to the island in 1819. Following its independence from the British in 1965, Singapore’s land reclamation has persisted as policymakers continue to view the city-state’s small land area as a limitation on urban development and, subsequently, economic, political, and cultural growth. The island has increased its size by 25 percent to 725 square kilometers since British colonization, and, under current plans, will have another 41 square kilometers by 2030. The act of reclaiming land has, in this way, become a symbol of the continuing colonial logic that underpins the…

A conversation with Miljohn Ruperto can feel like the mental equivalent of walking along multiple meandering paths and unexpectedly finding that they all converge. With interests in philosophy, art, and digital technology, the artist draws from diverse sources for his works. Among his influences are geomancy, a method of divination derived from decrypting patterns in nature; theories of the apocalypse; and parallels between molecular science and animism. Underlying Ruperto’s wide-ranging approach is his skepticism of concepts of originality and essentialism, which he believes reinforce the false singularity of art. He is more interested, as he explained to me in one email, in understanding the contexts in which art is made and how these shape particular ways of thinking about the world. Collaborating with practitioners from different fields is one way…

Designed to protect plants from the fluctuating forces of the wild, greenhouses are symbolic of humankind’s attempt to tame nature. In Cambodian-Australian filmmaker Allison Chhorn’s 46-minute docufiction The Plastic House (2019), however, one such enclosure serves as the setting for a young woman’s meditation on what lies beyond her control, including the death of her parents. Long, lingering shots show the protagonist, played by Chhorn herself, taking over the maintenance of her family’s derelict greenhouse. She steadily goes about the monotonous tasks of clearing debris, sowing seeds, and harvesting navy beans. These slow sequences put viewers in her ruminative headspace as she processes her grief. “If you can do a little work, it’s good for you,” says the voice of a relative on a phone call. It becomes clear that…

A boy stands on a mountain, blowing a tiny plastic bugle, clothes whipping in the wind. A dirge-like sound grows louder and louder, drowning out the boy’s jaunty music. The noise reaches a pitch so high that it becomes unbearable, an aural presence that blankets the landscape, cancels out its beauty, replacing it, instead, with an atmosphere of doom. Bow Echo (2019), a five-channel video work by Aziz Hazara, played on screens suspended in mid-air at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) as part of “NIRIN,” the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, curated by Brook Andrew, the first Indigenous artistic director in the exhibition’s 46-year history. Hazara’s work takes its name from a bow-shaped meteorological system that appears out of nowhere, sparking winds that rip through places with the magnitude…

“Diagonal,” curated by Leo Li Chen, opened at Magician Space amid the aftershocks of another wave of Covid-19 cases in Beijing. Exploring the performance of identity through the video works of eight artists in East and Southeast Asia, the show also inadvertently exemplified the fragility of identification via the gallery experience: identity became a literal question as mask-wearing visitors struggled to recognize their acquaintances. Against the backdrop of a pandemic that has abruptly shifted our experience and understanding of isolation and connectedness, how might we re-examine and re-imagine the boundary between self and other? How might we advance toward new solidarities that transcend the deep social, geographical, and ideological divisions of the present? Most of the works were positioned in subtle pairs to highlight associations and resonances between them. For…

Michael Rakowitz the artist, the archaeologist, the radio broadcaster, and the historian all congealed at his eponymous traveling survey. Debuted at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the exhibition jetted to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin before coming ashore the banks of the Dubai creek to arrive at the Jameel Arts Centre, marking the artist’s first solo presentation in the Middle East and Asia. In its final iteration, the show filled two floors at the Centre with eight installations from the past two decades of Rakowitz’s multidisciplinary practice. What resembled a skydancer moving in morbid lethargy beckoned viewers upon entry. Titled Dull Roar (2005), the inflatable vinyl structure swells with air only to collapse in feeble flatness. In this model of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, Rakowitz…

On June 3, a fire broke out in the two-story, 1940s-style apartment housing Manila’s oldest artist-run nonprofit, Green Papaya. Located in Kamuning, Quezon City, Green Papaya has served as a communal platform for two decades, hosting talks, artist residencies, and experimental projects involving Filipino and international artists and organizations, as well as members of the local community. The flames destroyed most of Green Papaya’s furniture, archives, and recent works by its artistic director, the contemporary artist Norberto Roldan. “Peewee,” as his peers fondly call him, co-founded the organization with choreographer Donna Miranda, and had been using the building’s second floor as his painting studio. Given that Green Papaya’s space is now disused, I scheduled to meet Peewee in July in his studio-residence in Scout Rallos, Diliman, instead. Only minutes away…

Rosalind Nashashibi’s Hreash House (2004) is centered on the collective existence of an extended family. Set in a concrete block in Nazareth during the month of Ramadan, the film is structured around the preparation of a feast and its subtle aftermath. Within this confined space, the family becomes a signifier for an entire community, reflecting how we live with each other and with seemingly inanimate objects. Closeups of various fabrics and furniture are choreographed with everyday gestures exploring the passage of time. These are engulfed with fragmented conversations and assorted sounds, such as that of a man snoring under layers of patterned sheets, commentary on a football game, a few seconds of heavy techno music, and the repetitive laughter of children. My favorite sequence in Hreash House leads to an…

The blast in Beirut’s port just after 6pm on August 4 destroyed huge swathes of the city and crippled the local art scene. Letitia Gallery’s director, Gaia Foudolian, and architect Jean-Marc Bonfils, a professor at the Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, were killed in the explosion. Others suffered damage to their property. Located adjacent to the port area, the gallery Marfa’ Projects posted photos to its Instagram showing fragments of a metal grate and glass debris lying in its exhibition area, an artwork pierced by shrapnel, and the back office collapsed into a pile of drywall. Galerie Tanit, located in Mar Mikhael in a building designed by Bonfils, also sustained heavy interior damage. In Gemmayze, directly south of the port, the explosion partially destroyed the mansion that houses the Sursock Museum.…

I think Gaylord would have liked to be missed, but not mourned. It is not easy to think about him except in the most vivid present tense. Gaylord himself would surely complain in Hades if we relinquished thoughts of him to the past. It has never been easy to pull wool over Gaylord’s eyes. He always saw through the polite facade of life. With Gaylord lying in his hospital bed, his family thought religion would ease his passage. I disagreed, whereupon Gaylord, muted by intubation, immediately gave me a thumbs-up. In 2001, after a major surgery, he told his friends his plan for a “soul experiment”: if the soul existed, the moment he took his last breath he would bid us farewell from above. We were to pull out a…

SEP 5–NOV 8 MULTIPLE LOCATIONS, BUSAN Busan Biennale 2020: “Words at an Exhibition – an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems” For this year’s edition of the Busan Biennale, curator Jacob Fabricius invited ten fiction writers and one poet to write about the features of Busan. Their texts then informed his selection of 90 artists and musicians from 34 countries, including Angelica Mesiti, whose performances and videos center nonlinguistic modes of communication; and Thu Van Tran, who manipulates photographic materials to reveal the delicate interactions between humankind and the natural world. Forming a symphonic response to the city, the biennial’s commissions and projects will be distributed across three areas, including the old town, Yeongdo Harbor, and Eulsukdo Island. SEP 19–OCT 18 MULTIPLE LOCATIONS, KYOTO Kyotographie 2020: Vision Titled “Vision,”…

It is survival as revival, resistance as reclamation, resilience as transformation. – The Spiral You step into the darkness. You look up, and through the layers of leaves, in the night sky, there is light. As you begin to move, a voice speaks. “The spiral is much more than just a form… It expands and contracts, increases and decreases… it is the form of smoke entering the air…” She finds the form in nature, and in ourselves. “The form of embryos and the cylindrical helices of our umbilical cords that tether mother to child.” The outlines of silhouetted leaves change above you. “It reminds us that just as everything comes together, everything falls apart again…” She evokes its deeper significations. “It is a way of seeing… It is about community…

A bloated plastic bag tied off with red tape expands and contracts—gulping breaths that disturb its sloshing contents and rustle the leafy surroundings. The film cuts to a close-up of blood-orange jelly stars, quivering within the bag’s yellow, watery womb. These translucent shapes recur in Diane Severin Nguyen’s Tyrant Star (2019), composed of three narratives that unfurl across static shots of garbage-choked landscapes, lonely domestic interiors, and a decrepit orphanage in Vietnam. The film begins as a narrated stichomythia about separated lovers adapted from Vietnamese folk verse. The melodrama feels out of place, even absurd, set to images such as a durian being pulled slowly apart, or a VND 50,000 bill disintegrating in sinuous flames. As in Nguyen’s visceral photographs of half-sucked sweets and napalm-burnt detritus, the degraded objects in…

In times of uncertainty, the human brain has a tendency to seek reprieve by deliberately detaching from reality. While exercise and entertainment have historically served as palliatives, the most engrossing diversion from today’s postmodern malaise is the internet. Pseudonymous media artist Insane Park’s double solo exhibition at Arario Gallery in Seoul was a timely endorsement of escapism for those seeking sanctuary from the global pandemic. In the gallery’s main space, “I have no idea, because I have no idea” encompassed an immersive media environment that bombarded viewers with audiovisual elements. Videos appearing on an array of outdated TV and computer monitors, as well as projected onto the walls and ceiling, overlapped and competed with each other within the darkened gallery, which itself served as an IRL proxy for the vast…

Liu Xiaodong’s exhibition “Spring in New York,” presented online by Lisson Gallery, offered small windows of solitude and contemplation amid the chaos that has erupted in the United States. The 34 exhibited works on paper record Liu’s extended stay in locked-down New York City. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese painter had completed a series of monumental, plein-air portraits, slated for the Dallas Contemporary, of those living on the US-Mexico border, only for the show to be indefinitely postponed and his flights home to Beijing canceled. As Liu and his family sheltered-in-place in a deathly quiet Manhattan, he began a daily practice of documenting quotidian occurrences through watercolors, photographs, and journal writings. On the exhibition website, Liu’s diary entries break up the rows of images. Sometimes, they appear side…

The world’s busiest shipping lanes, fisheries for the planet’s most populous region, untapped deposits of fossil fuels and minerals—the South China Sea and its reefs, atolls, and newly constructed islands comprise an uncharted territory under siege by rapacious nations. As parcels of the sea are transformed into military outposts, the marine habitats of the region are threatened with environmental degradation. In recent years, the Hong Kongbased art-architecture duo MAP Office, Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix, have turned their attention from the inhabitable human infrastructures of the city to ecologies of the sea. Above, for the 2020 Taipei Biennial, they have sketched out an “ocean monument” showing a section of the Tizard Bank in the Spratly Islands. In the next issue, AAP visits with MAP Office to discuss their abiding affinities…