Innehållsförteckning för 121 (Nov/Dec 2020) från ArtAsiaPacific

I first met Siah Armajani in 2008 when I became director of the Walker Art Center. I was struck by the quiet, soft-spoken qualities of the humble citizen-artist, whose towering legacy had shaped my sensibilities as a young curator more than a decade earlier. My initial encounter with Siah had been through his art. The sculpture Dictionary for Building: Closet under Stairs (1985) was a landmark piece in the Hirshhorn Museum’s collection, where I was an assistant curator. I recall how the hybrid architectural structure, which fused Western and non-Western elements, spoke to me. As the child of Cuban exiles, I recognized an immigrant’s perspective in Siah’s art, born of his own personal experience of exile from his native Iran in the late 1950s. For a young Latinx curator like…

On September 24, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara won the inaugural NZD 25,000 (USD 16,340) My Art Visual Arts Award, granted by New Zealand’s Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi. Painter Vincent Namatjira became the first Aboriginal artist to receive the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s 99-year-old Archibald Prize on September 25, winning AUD 100,000 (USD 70,600) for his portrait of himself and Aboriginal athlete Adam Goodes. On October 10, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at New York’s New School recognized artist Avni Sethi’s participatory museum project, Conflictorium, with the 2020–22 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, which includes a cash reward of USD 25,000. Mumbai-based collaborative studio CAMP was named winner of the 7th Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, worth KRW 50 million (USD…

NEW YORK Christie’s Asian Art Week series (September 22–October 1), spanning eight live sales of art and antiques, achieved a total of USD 82.8 million, doubling the USD 41.64 million total from the six sales in September 2019. The dedicated 2020 sale of South Asian art from the renowned Jane and Kito de Boer Collection raised USD 3.56 million over 68 lots. The sale was led by Rameshwar Broota’s monochromatic painting of abstracted architectural forms, Silent Structures (1991), which surpassed a high estimate of USD 300,000 to fetch USD 525,000. His painting of a gray-toned faceless figure, The Last Chapter (1982), made USD 287,500, within estimates. Bengal School painter Ganesh Pyne’s The Animal (1972), of a skeletal quadruped, more than doubled its USD 150,000 high estimate and earned USD 400,000.…

Tong Wenmin CHONGQING Embracing performance as a spontaneous, organic form of expression, Tong Wenmin utilizes her own body to explore her relationship with her surroundings. In Lawn (2018), Tong, wrapped in a long coat stitched from green turf, silently lies face down on an expansive field next to the partially demolished Zhongliang Village, located in her home city, Chongqing. By mimicking the stillness of the scenery, she conveys her admiration for the landscape, which offers respite from the nearby wreckage. Eventually, she stands and, with the aid of digital effects, her figure becomes translucent, merging with the greenery before entirely fading from view. For her three-part 2019 project in Malaysia’s Dinawan Island, Tong similarly immersed herself in natural environments. Wave features her sprawled on a beach, surrendering herself to the…

The history of the 21st century will be written on water. When sea levels are certainly on the rise, the sea becomes our new desert. – MAP Office, 2009 Liquid Land Our collective future lies in the ocean, and with the ocean. Deep in that future there is history—of pre-modern times when fishing and aquaculture sustained countless populations, and when the fastest way to travel and trade around the world was on a ship. Now with natural marine ecologies under pressure from overfishing, deep-sea resource extraction, inundation by plastic, agricultural and chemical pollution, and the warming effects of climate change, our blue planet’s greatest resource and last remaining commons is under threat. Far across the disciplinary spectrum from oceanography and marine ecology, architecture is commonly thought of as the practice…

Inspired by French philosopher Felix Guattari’s book The Three Ecologies (1989), Su Yu Hsin’s three-part video Mori (2020) investigates how nature, communities, and individuals mutually influence each other. The first chapter, “Shou (to protect),” focuses on the annual controlled burnings at Akiyoshidai Plateau in southwest Japan. The practice, once to improve the soil for stock farming, is now a tourist attraction and a part of the local community’s heritage, its initial purpose no longer important. Billowing smoke fills the frame as visitors observe the ritual at the Plateau, which is eventually reduced to a soot-covered field. In a voiceover, Su muses on how humans, in order to assert some form of control over nature, project narratives onto landscapes, which morph alongside our shifting beliefs and customs. Buy? dancer Jukanfuku Hanayagi…

In her 2009 Frieze article “The Big Issue,” critic Carol Yinghua Lu decried the trend toward large-scale spectacle in contemporary Chinese art driven by market forces that favored “visual extravaganzas” over criticality. Over a decade on, Lu’s concerns materialized at Xu Zhen’s “eternity vs evolution” at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the country, which saw some of the biggest-scale works that the institution has ever installed. Xu’s exhibition was marked by grandiosity. This was exemplified by his installation Hello (2018–19), a serpentine animatronic Corinthian column fitted with sensors that enabled it to turn toward visitors. The adjacent works also relied on monumentality for immediate impact: European Thousand-Armed Classical Sculpture (2014), for instance, is a procession of 19 classical European statues with their…

Wheezing: strained breaths signaling a deficiency of air; the desperate noise one makes after running up a flight of stairs too quickly, or getting punched in the diaphragm. Mark Chung took this word as the title of his debut solo exhibition, at de Sarthe Gallery in Hong Kong. Produced during a seven-week residency at the space, “Wheezing” explored the dysfunction suffocating the city. On a dull-green temporary wall at the entrance of the gallery was a small black-and-white photograph of the Hong Kong skyline blanketed by thick mist. Taken on a ferry trip in 2019, Befogged in fact depicts the remnants of police-fired tear gas, which on some days cast a dirty-yellow pall over the city at the height of the protests. The image was illuminated by a set of…

The 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art unfolded as a process rather than as a single event, prefaced by three programs of readings, workshops, and performances that launched last year at the ExRotaprint complex. Curated by Maria Berrios, Renata Cervetto, Lisette Lagnado, and Agustin Perez Rubio, the 2020 Berlin Biennale, “The Crack Begins Within,” concluded with a four-venue exhibition centered on diverse narratives of surviving and resisting the violence of broken, oppressive systems around the world. The Biennale’s title comes from a line by Egyptian poet Iman Mersal, who, in the curators’ words, explores how motherhood carries “pain and beauty, mourning and living.” Ideas of trauma and fissure, the destruction of the old and the birthing of the new guided the selection of works by 76 artists who mostly identify…

In 1996 in northwest China, a 13-year-old called Zhang Koukou watched his mother die after her fight with a neighbor turned violent. Twenty-two years later, Zhang brutally murdered his mother’s killer, along with the man’s brother and elderly father. The disturbing case captured the imagination of Beijing-based artist Wang Tuo, whose film Smoke and Fire (2018) ominously interweaves a migrant worker’s homecoming and his theatrical enactments of Chinese stories about duty, vengeance, and supernatural encounters. The work is the first of a tetralogy probing the spiritual, mythical, and historical roots of northern China. Above is a sketch for the upcoming third chapter, Tungus, which explores the Siege of Changchun by Communist forces in 1948. In our March/April 2021 issue, associate editor Ophelia Lai will delve into the troubled psyches of…

During the office of the socialist mayor Manuela Carmena (2015–19), the names of 52 streets in Madrid were changed. The original street names used before the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) were recuperated, or else the names of women scholars or pedagogical institutions, among others, were introduced. Madrid has been cracking open the sites of official memory to revision, civic dialogue, and participation. Yet when it comes to addressing the ways in which Spanish colonialism continues to organize city life in the present, contradictory policies of recognition and denial persist. On March 20, 2019, the city council held a ceremony marking an official apology to the Romani people for centuries of political repression. A few days later, the mayor responded to an attack on the homes of Romani families in the neighborhood…

BASEL The second edition of the boutique June Art Fair (August 20–31), hosted on a dedicated platform by Hauser & Wirth, featured solo presentations from 17 smaller, younger galleries, an increase on the 14 exhibitors at the 2019 live fair. Participants reported strong sales. Francois Ghebaly (Los Angeles) sold out its selection of Cassi Namoda’s figurative oil-and-acrylic paintings on the first day, including Eduardo in Matola Prepares Orange Pants and Orange Moon Gives Birth (both 2020) for USD 13,000 each. Five photographs of male nudes by Paul Mpagi Sepuya were purchased from Document (Chicago) for USD 5,000 each. Misako and Rosen (Tokyo) found takers for five abstract mixed-media paintings from Margaret Lee’s I.C.W.U.M. (2019–20) series, priced at USD 15,000 each. Tokyo’s XYZ Collective sold a multimedia work by Yuka Hasegawa…

Our blue planet has made more than 18,450 full rotations since the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, in major cities and on university campuses across the United States. Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, who was inspired by the anti-Vietnam War teach-in protests, had first proposed the idea in September 1969 at a small conference in Seattle in order “to shake up the political establishment” and force environmental issues “onto the national agenda.” From there it blossomed into a student-led nationwide campaign. For the commemoration in New York City, mayor John Lindsay sealed off Fifth Avenue from 59th Street down to 14th Street. Hollywood megastars Paul Newman and Allie McGraw gave speeches in Union Square. More than one million people turned out. A 35-year-old artist…

The farmers of India have been toiling on the front lines of climate change and crony capitalism for decades. In Prabhakar Pachpute’s home state of Maharashtra, in western India, more than 32,000 farmers committed suicide between 2001 and 2019, as recurring droughts, a depleted water table, and low crop prices have coincided to make loans too onerous to repay and their livelihoods impossible. Born into a family of farmers—who, after some were forced to sell their land, also became a family of coal miners—the artist channels the grievances of neglected laborers into his charcoal-drawn murals and sculptures that depict the twin exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and its human population. Inspired by the thousands of farmers who demanded reforms by marching 180 kilometers from Nashik to Mumbai in March…

At last. This sentiment arose when I visited the 7th Yokohama Triennale not only because it was the first major international festival to open following many pandemic-related postponements, but also because it marked many unprecedented changes for the event. For the first time since the Triennale was founded in 2001—yet, still before any other bi/triennales in Japan—organizers had appointed a non-Japanese artistic director. Led by the New Delhi-based artist trio Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), the 2020 edition, “Afterglow,” featured 67 artists, 36 of whom were exhibiting in Japan for the first time. A significant majority of the lineup was of non-White/Western origin, and around half were from the millennial generation. Besides increasing the diversity of the represented artists, the curators attempted to alter the…

“We are all prisoners here,” is the thought I had each time I went to visit the exhibition drafted by Xue Tan, “My Body Holds Its Shape,” over the course of its four-month run. The pair of live performers clad in gray sweatsuits in Eisa Jocson’s Zoo (2020) were the first to impart this impression, as they enacted animalistic gestures and routines that transformed them into quasi-human cartoon characters. Another performer, on a screen from their apartment in Manila (undergoing a lockdown at the time of the exhibition’s opening), also appeared as an incarcerated creature under constant video monitoring. Sometimes they were entirely engaged in their own activities—one of them tore their bed apart in a frenzy—while another would coyly sing melodies from Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) and try…

In 1995, sound recordist Umashankar Manthravadi was invited by Thomas Ault, professor of theater at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, to prove a hypothesis surrounding India’s Rani Gumpha caves: that as well as being a Jain monastery dating to circa 300–100 BCE, they were also a place of performance. Working at Delhi’s Archive and Research Center for Ethnomusicology, the self-taught recordist experimented with ambisonic tetrahedral microphones to measure the acoustic properties of spaces. The visual evidence for the hypothesis was there—in the millennia-old carvings of Odissi dancers—but how would the musicians have sounded, and in what ways were the caves built for performance? Thanks to Manthravadi’s archeoacoustic research, replicated in the exhibition “A Slightly Curving Place” at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), we have an idea. Curator Nida Ghouse…

Born and raised in Okinawa near an American military base (ZIP code 96375: the show’s title), Kaz Oshiro once came across a poster of a Ralph Goings photorealist painting of a ketchup bottle and salt and pepper shakers at an American-style restaurant. Describing this formative childhood experience in the exhibition text, Oshiro recalled that instead of being drawn in by the illusion, he had sensed something “wasn’t quite right.” This sentiment captured his latest exhibition at Nonaka-Hill Gallery in a Hollywood mini-mall storefront, where one encountered a haphazard tableau—a pile of rubble and some metal shovels leaned against a temporary wall; a half-finished paint job transitioned abruptly from blue to patchy white; and in an eerie but practical sign of the times, a paint bucket proffered Purell hand sanitizer. Due…

The first Kurt Vonnegut book that I ever read was his memoir, A Man Without a Country (2005)—incidentally, the last title that he had promised to write and publish. It was 2006, and my father had picked up a copy from an airport. After reading only a few pages, he declared Vonnegut as an essential voice for our time, which was, back then, five years deep into the “War on Terror.” I was 21, fresh out of art school, possessing more than the requisite rage, but able to exhibit only bewilderment at what I had concluded to be humanity’s capacity for inhumanity. Becoming an adult meant reconciling irreconcilable human endeavors; we could write poetry about daffodils, for instance, and build unwieldy regimes of mendacity and barbarity. I found the memoir…

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (NTU CCA), a leading nonprofit organization in Southeast Asia for artistic research, residencies, and exhibitions, will shutter its seven-year-old facilities at the Gillman Barracks arts precinct in March 2021. The closure is due to a funding shortfall that resulted from the decision of NTU CCA’s primary co-funders, the Nanyang Technological University and Economic Development Board, to decrease their monetary support. After the platform’s last show, featuring films by Trinh T. Minh-ha, ends on February 28, 2021, the organization will be pared down to a single research and administrative office, an online archive, and a final publication about its projects to date. The cessation of NTU CCA’s operations at Gillman Barracks was announced on August 18 by founding director Ute Meta Bauer. Practitioners pointed to…

The art world is holding on to its mask as one of many passengers on the never-ending Covid loop-the-loop. Continuing to defy gravity, and tagging along with the cresting United States stock market, is the world of auctions. In India, a one-time art juggernaut, yet sluggish since the 2008 financial crisis, two local houses sold top-drawer paintings for dozens of crore while the country’s infection rates climbed to tragic highs. In late August, homegrown Mumbai upstart AstaGuru pawned off an average MF Husain painting in an online sale for a respectable USD 2.5 million, with some punters suggesting it went to a Hong Kong buyer. A week later, the nearby Pundole’s house sold a subdued, gray-tone VS Gaitonde at a live auction to a nearly empty room, for a whopping,…

Grotesque histories of political domination and beautiful moments of intersubjective connection—for Thu Van Tran, these are both instances of contamination: a phenomenon where disparate agents come into contact, and a process that has fundamentally informed our world. Born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1979, Tran moved to France with her family at the age of two. Growing up between cultures led her to question “pure” as a descriptor of peoples, places, and histories. Subsequently, in her artworks of the last two decades, she has investigated the stains—a form of contamination—that mark the earth and its inhabitants. I caught up with the artist to discuss what tracing these residues has led her to uncover in relation to rubber tree plantations, the Amazon, and chemical weapons deployed during the Vietnam War.…

Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, a prominent communist revolutionary executed by the French colonial government in 1933, is a national hero in Vietnam, where many streets and schools bear her name. Yet, despite Minh Khai’s recognition, her identity exists only in politicized national memory. “Lost from View,” Hương Ngo’s solo show at The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, brought together books, archival documents, play scripts, newspapers, and prints that explore who this historical figure was, and examine more broadly how women are written out of their own stories. At the outset, the show gestured to Minh Khai’s multiple personas with four metallic silver prints of official records—which Ngo had unearthed at the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer in France—detailing the revolutionary’s various aliases, forged passport, and places of arrest. Much of what is…

Artist, educator, and curator Kelly Sumiko Akashi is well known in Los Angeles for her nimble mind and dexterous hands. A genuinely curious person, she enjoys visiting different places and observing a wide range of plants and creatures. Her mixed-media sculptures, utilizing materials such as glass, wax, bronze, stainless steel, and rope, reflect her biophilia and her interests in physiology and epistemology. Born in Los Angeles in 1983, she is part of a new cohort of artists who are radically reviving the studio glass movement by shifting the focus from craftsmanship toward expanding the medium’s potential for artistic expression. A visit to Akashi’s studio in September when Covid-19 was still spreading relentlessly in Los Angeles mandated many preventive measures: wearing masks, maintaining social distance, and disinfecting surfaces and hands every…