Innehållsförteckning för Almanac 2021 från ArtAsiaPacific

On April 15, amid the Covid-19 pandemic’s first global wave, Yayoi Kusama delivered a message of hope and peace to the world, calling for the virus to “disappear from this earth.” Many of the year’s philanthropic projects were aimed at supporting communities in light of Covid-19 and other disasters. Governments across Asia, including those in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong, announced relief packages for individual artists and organizations. Early in May, Adelaide’s Art Gallery of South Asia offered bursaries of AUD 10,000 (USD 6,450) each to visual artists, supported by the James and Diana Ramsay Foundation and the Neilson Foundation. Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art commissioned 40 artists for a four-part online and IRL initiative titled “Making Art Work.” Similarly, in Hong Kong, the nonprofit…

Choppy is one word to describe 2020. Shanghai, however, is ready to cast off for a future of smooth sailing. Continued growth is on the horizon for the local arts sector, with new cultural venues due to open. In early 2021, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art will inaugurate an outpost in the city, expanding its national footprint outside of Beijing’s 798 Art Zone and the coastal town Beidaihe. Dubbed UCCA Edge, the 5,000-square-meter exhibition, retail, and dining space in Shanghai is spread across three floors of a mixed-use complex in the trendy Jing’an District. In May 2021, the nonprofit Longlati Foundation, established in 2019 in Hong Kong by venture capitalist David Su and artist Chen Zihao, will activate its space in the Art Tower—a 93,000-squaremeter landmark unveiled on the West…

Against a sharp decline in revenue due to shuttered salerooms during the first half of the year, auction houses were forced to rely on online sales, many of which targeted younger buyers. Following a plateau in Covid-19 cases in Hong Kong, all the major houses staged their first live sales concurrently in early July, with Christie’s and Sotheby’s reaping the biggest rewards by offering proven favorites. In the second half of 2020, global sales held in between waves of infections produced mixed results, highlighting the market’s volatility. Parisian Sway Paintings by Paris-trained modernists continued to lead. Zao Wou-ki, Chu Teh-Chun, and Wu Guanzhong, dubbed the “three musketeers of Chinese modern art,” consistently achieved multimillion US dollar prices in Hong Kong. All seven oil abstractions by Zao offered at Sotheby’s July…

“One day, like the water, the land, beaches, and mountains will belong to all,” prophesized Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose words are affixed to the volcano-shaped theater that he designed in Le Havre. That day, as described by the socialist designer, has not come. The stifling of imagined egalitarian worlds, in particular those envisioned by Niemeyer and his contemporary, the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, formed the basis of Mai-Thu Perret’s solo exhibition “Les Etangs” (12/15–1/31) at Le Portique Centre Regional d’Art Contemporain du Havre. For over two decades, Perret has been probing utopian notions in her narrative about an all-female anti-capitalist commune, The Crystal Frontier (1999–), which she presents in the form of texts, sculptures, tapestries, and paintings. In “Les Etangs,” however, there was no apparent story. Instead,…

Antonio Vega Macotela’s Burning Landscapes (2019) tapestries of leaked tax-evader lists masked in code and Jonas Staal’s project on the rise of the far-right, Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective (2018–19)—both shown at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) for the 12th Taipei Biennial (11/21–3/14/21)—bookended a year that began with anxiously watching the bushfires in Australia, the rapid spread of Covid-19, violent global protests, and an extremely close presidential election in the United States. While much of the world struggled to contain outbreaks, Taiwan was lauded for its effective Covid-19 management. Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center implemented mandatory quarantine for all visitors, enforced with digital tracking and community follow-up, along with an ID-based mask-rationing system. By late October Taiwan had no new locally transmitted cases for more than 200 consecutive days,…

On January 9, your solo exhibition “Swampland” opened at Hong Kong’s Hanart TZ Gallery with drawings and installations that reflect on failed personal and collective utopias. Have you continued to think about this topic? What I Saw On Top of The World (2019) was a wall-mounted installation at the show. It comprises three Chinese characters, 打落弊, rendered in large, gold script. The nonsensical phrase is a Cantonese transliteration of the Thai word for “forever.” My poet friend described the work as “an eternity carelessly sworn in a foreign language.” I thought I was going to be condemned by the gods for my blasphemy. At the same time, the individual characters literally translate to hit, fall, fail. Sure enough, like a self-fulfilled prophecy, since 2019 and throughout 2020, I have experienced…

How did Covid-19 impact your 2020? Before the pandemic, I was invited to film festivals in Taiwan and South Korea, but the festivals were moved online. I was also selected to be a part of Art Basel Hong Kong in March. For that too I had to suddenly change my artwork to make it fit the digital platform, even though I prefer presenting my video works as installations. It has been a very challenging time for me as a movingimage artist. What has been your experience of the pro-democracy protests in Bangkok? I try to join the movement to fight for democracy as much as possible. There’s hope to make Thailand a better country where people’s voices matter. These hopes for democracy come from the young generation, some of whom…

When the world is filled with a sense of catastrophe, is it possible to convey anything of the scale and quality of what’s besieging Lebanon? That’s the question at the back of my mind whenever I speak to anyone outside the country. “How are things in Beirut?” they ask sympathetically. When I explain that things are falling apart, they nod yes, they understand, things are really tough there too, before describing the anxieties of the pandemic, its restrictions and economic ramifications. There’s no point trying to explain over another Zoom call. So, in turn, I nod. A couple of weeks ago, the popular Instagram comedian Farixtube posted a question on his Stories. “One wish,” it stated, before giving his followers a choice between two options, “No Corona in the world”…

My wife, Lu Zhang, and I were at the Milan airport on February 23, the day Italian newspapers screamed in boldfaced headlines about the coronavirus outbreak in the country’s northern regions. Suddenly, being Chinese in a European airport felt profoundly unsafe. I sensed suspicious eyes diverting their glares away from us at the security line and worried about not being able to get back home to New York. We were in Italy for a week to support our friend Trisha Baga for the opening of her solo exhibition, “the eye, the eye and the ear” (2/20–1/10/21), curated by Lucia Aspesi and Fiammetta Griccioli, at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca. Trisha filled the absurdly large space with a survey of her multi-dimensional, multi-media renderings of her dizzyingly complex thought processes, obsessive interests, and…

A nine-day festival, with a symposium and nine exhibitions held at Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the fifth Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) looked at ruptures happening across the global south, from independence struggles to feminist and Indigenous-rights movements and climate change. Welcoming visitors to DAS was Bharti Kher’s Intermediaries (2019–20), a nearly four-meter-tall mud sculpture of two conjoined, forgotten female deities transforming into a snake. The Academy’s atrium was occupied by Taloi Havini’s Reclamation (2019–2020), an earthfloored pavilion with a cane roof created with women from the artist’s matrilineal Hako clan of the autonomous region of Bougainville. A site for performances, it was flanked by murals created by the Jothashilpa collective, for a project initiated by Berlin’s nonprofit Savvy Contemporary, that narrated 15 colonial powers’ division of Africa at the 1884 Congo…

The seventh Yokohama Triennale marked a number of milestones for the festival. Led by New Delhibased Raqs Media Collective—the Triennale’s first non-Japanese artistic directors—“Afterglow” featured an unprecedentedly diverse roster of 67 artists, the majority of whom are of non-Western origins. The trio also adopted a decentralized curatorial approach, proposing five keywords—“autodidactic,” “luminosity,” “friendship,” “care,” and “toxicity”—as points of departure, along with a sourcebook of excerpts from, for example, anthropologist Tom Gill’s philosophical conversation with Japanese laborer Kimitsu Nishikawa. Directly embodying the Triennale’s title was Kei Takemura’s Renovated series (2015–), which pieced together fragments of everyday objects with glowing fluorescent silk at the Yokohama Museum of Art. Touching on “care,” Takashi Arai’s photo series Multiple Monuments for 1000 Women No 1 – 10 (2020) revisits senninbari, a World War II ritual…

The metaphorical title of the 2020 Taipei Biennial unfortunately rings true. We might all be earth dwellers, but our many unresolved conflicts suggest that few of us understand the world in the same way. The 57 artists and groups invited by curators Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard engage with divergent strategies for surviving catastrophe and strife. Their works were separated into five conceptual realms: Globalization, Security, and Escape were named after the concerns of those who live on these “planets,” whereas the inhabitants of Terrestrial and Alternative Gravity are attentive of Earth’s resources and respond to the metaphysical, respectively. On planet Globalization, Huang Hai-Hsin’s drawing After Art Basel (2020) depicts half dismantled booths at the titular fair, hinting at how threats such as Covid-19 are taking apart the global art…

Deemed too bizarre to sell in the 1980s, Tishan Hsu’s sculptures, wall reliefs, and drawings evoking biomorphic machines and medical apparatus were given an extensive survey first at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles followed by the Sculpture Center in New York. Using industrial materials like alkyd and urethane, Hsu’s tiled, curving structures, such as Vertical Ooze (1987), conflate the sleek lines of modernist interior design with cybernetic grids that reference the computing revolution. In Cell (1987), skin lesions open to reveal metal grilles, while the orifices and eyes in the iPadshaped Portrait (1982) evince with stunning prescience how electronic gadgets have become an extension of the human body in the 21st century.…

A survey of the Filipina-American artist Pacita Abad, “Life in the Margins” featured 20 of her large-scale quilted paintings (trapunto) and works on fabric made between 1983 and 2002, showcasing Abad’s twin interests in abstraction and social realism. The Sky is Falling, the Sky is Falling (1998), a vibrant, abstract composition incorporating beads and buttons, was created after Abad, living in Jakarta, witnessed the chaotic and violent fall of the Suharto regime. By contrast, her realist Immigrant Experience of the early 1990s depicts many immigrants like herself, including Korean shopkeepers at work and a Cambodian refugee standing next to the White House. The series culminates in L.A. Liberty (1992), in which she renders the Statue of Liberty as a woman of color in a vibrant patchwork robe, a new icon…

During World War II, the Japanese army experimented with developing aviation fuel using pine roots. Intrigued by this, Asako Iwama created Pinocchio (2020)—comprising resin blocks, distillation apparatus, and archival materials about European and Japanese pine industries—for “Things Entangling” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Produced in collaboration with Kadist, the exhibition materialized “fleeting affinities” between objects, cultures, and eras through works by 12 international artists. Exemplifying the show’s archival bent, Tom Nicholson’s crates of mosaics imagined the repatriation of an artifact looted by Australian soldiers in Gaza in 1917. Hikaru Fujii’s The Anatomy Classroom (2020) presents objects salvaged from a museum in the Fukushima nuclear contamination zone. Poised between excavation and speculation, the show projected a future in which the lost may be found.…

Covid-19 is the great accelerator. Economic, social, and cultural systems went into overdrive after the pandemic hit. Global wealth disparities elevated from wide to enormous. Political partisanship ramped up. Plastic consumption went through the roof. And the only thing that circulated more virulently than Covid-19 was misinformation, as authoritarian forces found ways to incite and divide people, largely via the digital technologies on which we are increasingly dependent. Amid societal strife, demands for social justice reforms ratcheted up after the release of video footage showing police officers killing an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, in broad daylight on a street in Minneapolis on May 25. The protests that followed in the United States for Floyd and others resonated with the anti-racist and decolonial struggles that have gained ground in different…

The spread of Covid-19 in 2020 generated fluttering rounds of closures—most temporary, a few permanent—of cultural institutions across the globe. Meanwhile several organizations opted for renovations, while others launched rebranding efforts. In Beirut, the August 4 port explosion led to tragic deaths and injuries as well as severe damage to many art spaces and galleries. The Sursock Museum’s iconic stainedglass windows were all shattered and several galleries filled with artworks from its collection of modern and postwar art were destroyed; by the end of the year the museum had raised one-fifth of the estimated USD 3 million needed for repairs. The blast wrecked the windows, computers, and cool storage room for photographs of the Arab Image Foundation. Along with solidarity campaigns and international fundraisers, staff from Paris’s Musee du Louvre…

Working at crossroads of music and art, Tarek Atoui is the conductor and convener of events that bring together musicians with a vast array of specialized talent, as well as the creator of unlikely musical instruments inspired by traditional forms from around the world. Continuing more than a decade of collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation and its surrounding communities, the exhibition “Cycles in 11” (9/19–4/10/21) highlighted Atoui’s practice of inventing instruments with a combination of ordinary objects like rocks or marbles, paired with mechanized or electrified elements, as part of the five-yearlong project The Ground (2016–20). Atoui also conceived of “Cycles in 11” as a sound workshop and established a musical residency program for 11 composers, musicians, and other artists in the eastern coastal city of Kalba. As a…

In the popular imagination, forensic science is the preserve of police detectives and prosecutors looking to put “bad guys” in prison. But what recourse do we have when the state commits the crime? For the past decade, the London-based collective Forensic Architecture have used investigative techniques such as audio analysis and 3D-modeling to speak truth to power, illuminating rights abuses in videos and large-scale installations. Forensic Architecture opened three major surveys in 2020, at the AM Qattan Foundation (AMQF), Ramallah (1/25–4/2); the Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at Miami Dade College (2/19–9/27); and the Rohsska Museum of Design and Craft, Gothenburg (2/1–1/10/21). At MOAD, the group debuted The Beating of Faisal Al-Natsheh (2020), a VR recreation of a 2014 assault on a Palestinian man by an Israeli soldier that…

The eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in June across the United States, far across the Pacific Ocean, pushed issues of race into mainstream Australian discourse, galvanizing critical reflections on prejudice and inequality within our own borders. While institutions were forced to close their doors due to Covid-19, they finally opened conversations around social justice, acknowledging and confronting systemic biases that continue to dictate “cultural taste” and exclude certain people. In 2020, some of the highest-profile national art and cultural events implemented changes. After a postponement of several months due to Covid-19 restrictions, the prestigious Archibald Prize was awarded to Vincent Namatjira, the first Indigenous winner in the accolade’s 99-year history, for his portrait of Adam Goodes, a footballer of Adnyamathanha and Narungga descent. Similarly, the Artspace NSW Visual Arts…

My only trip outside of China in 2020 was a visit to Singapore for the Art Week. As the Rockbund Art Museum had temporarily closed for a planned renovation, I was looking to spend time delving more deeply into research-orientated projects in mainland China and Asia. In a normal year, our work is focused primarily on exhibitions, so my hope was to shift to another rhythm of working and to maintain dialogues with artists in the region. The outbreak happened almost as soon as I returned home. When it started, Shanghai was already quiet and half-empty as everyone had returned home for the Chinese New Year celebrations. Surreal at first, it seemed like an awkward and prolonged extension of the holiday. The situation quickly turned, with a harrowing stream of…

Ruangrupa’s curatorial concept for documenta fifteen, lumbung, is inspired by Indonesian communal rice barns, and reflects your interests in collectivity, pooling knowledge and resources, and sharing these assets equally among different actors. As you have already started to bring together organizations, collectives, and artists—both online and in person, in Indonesia and in Germany—can we say that documenta fifteen is already in progress? In June, we announced nine lumbung members [partner institutions, including Fondation Festival Sur Le Niger (Segou, Mali), Gudskul (Jakarta), Jatiwangi Art Factory (Jatiwangi, Indonesia), and The Question of Funding: How to Work Together (Palestine)], and we will continue to build this collective in 2021. So for ruangrupa and our lumbung members, yes, documenta fifteen has already started. In fact, lumbung building commenced long ago. It is our utmost…

Though Covid-19 has taken its toll on the cultural scene in Palestine in many detrimental ways, the pandemic also generated renewed attention and discussions of neglected issues. When a strict closure began in March, Amani was in Beirut for the 2019/2020 Home Workspace Program and witnessed the struggles and catastrophes there—including the Beirut port explosion on August 4. As the Allenby Bridge was closed for months, travel became exponentially more difficult for West Bank Palestinians. She was stuck in Lebanon and only made it back a few months ago. Meanwhile I was in Ramallah at the time of the outbreak and was delayed for months before I could move to Amsterdam. Many other artists were stranded at residencies or study-abroad programs. Compounding the health crisis, Palestine watched as the Trump…

If two years ago you had told a professional curator that they would have to install an entire mega-exhibition using only messaging and video apps, they never would have agreed to it. But like many things in 2020, the once unthinkable became the only option—in this case, for the organizers of major international events in countries where foreign arrivals were prohibited. While big Asian biennials on the calendar for 2020 in Gwangju, Seoul, and Kochi, as well as the Kathmandu Triennale, postponed their dates to the following year, a few festivals carried on regardless of the limitations compelled by the pandemic. The most ambitious of those was the Yokohama Triennale, which was delayed from its original dates by only a couple of weeks to mid-July. But because Japan was still…

Directed by Jacob Fabricius, “Words at an Exhibition” was a collaboration between 89 visual artists, writers, and musicians that cast Busan in a new light. Departing from 11 commissioned stories and poems about the city, the artworks were displayed across Busan’s Old Town, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and Yeongdo Harbor. On the streets of the Old Town, Heo Chanmi’s gouache-on-paper paintings of everyday life responded to Bak Solmay’s Daily Walking Rehearsals (2020), a story about a protagonist’s search for a new apartment and their recollection of the 1982 arson attack on the building of the Busan American Cultural Service. At MOCA, The Antechamber (2020) by Bianca Bondi visually reinterpreted the wounded tundra swan in Kim Hyesoon’s poem. The surreal bedroom with a pond and swan was covered in salt,…

They say flies could survive a nuclear holocaust, so perhaps it’s appropriate that plastic insects dot the sculptures of Tetsumi Kudo (1935–90), whose teeming amalgamations of mutant plants, body parts, and scrap transistors describe an irradiated wasteland. The avant-gardist imagined “a new ecology” where the anthropogenic degradation of the Earth forces humans to “decompose” and adapt. A retrospective of Kudo opened in June at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebak, Denmark, after a fortuitous rediscovery in storage of his sculptures, including a rainbow-hued incubator containing sculpted brains, noses, and phosphorescent phalluses. In Human Bonsai – Freedom of Deformity – Deformity of Freedom (1979), zombie hands emerge from a tray of soil among sprouting penises. The artist’s irreverent brand of body horror disturbs with its suggestion not of death…

Is it possible to buy one’s way into heaven? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop people from trying, as Farid Rasulov conveys in his oddly satirical exhibition “Qurban Olum.” Centered on the Islamic festival of sacrifice, during which millions of animals are killed annually, Rasulov’s film Yuxularin Yuxusu (Dream of Dreams) (2020) visualizes two outlandish scenarios: two surgeons in ceremonial hats fill a sheep’s abdomen with jewelry, which later pours out of the disemboweled carcass to the amazement of three office workers. At Yarat Contemporary Art Space, the film was accompanied by an installation of the absurd operating theater and candycolored paintings of people enthralled by the ritual slaughter, illustrating the grotesquerie of a festival that, for the artist, has become a competitive display of secular excess.…

Timur Si-Qin transformed Von Ammon Co. gallery into a prayer hall for New Peace—his model for a spirituality that recognizes the oneness of all matter and the connective patterns that undergird them. Playing to our evolved attraction to luminance, Si-Qin combines tropes from sleek street advertisements and the ethereal designs of hallowed spaces, casting the doctrine of New Peace in an alluring light. Intricate emblems of intertwined animals, plants, and minerals were etched into LED-lit acrylic panels that recall temple plaques; nearby was a glowing billboard promoting a sunset over a Navajo plateau. “Take Me, I Love You” was a captivating vision for how we might reprogram the division and destruction of nature encoded in the Western spiritualities that dominate societies.…

As rural communities of the global south face environmental and economic catastrophe, farmers in the Indian state of Maharashtra have gained attention for their long-distance protest marches. Prabhakar Pachpute has been channeling their fighting spirit into his drawings, paintings, and sculptures of post-industrial landscapes and hybrid human-machines that are rising up in protest. In “Beneath the Palpable,” the massive painting The Relic of Our Time (2020) depicts a vulture lording over a barren valley despoiled by factories, while A march against the lie (IA) (2020) features a mountaintop monument of a raised first. Mirroring the zombie-mutant figures often seen in Pachpute’s murals, and straddling the line between animal and machines with human limbs, monstrouslooking sculptures emerge from the earth in anger and defiance.…

Presented online in a virtual 3D model of White Space Beijing, “Standing at the Crossroads” collated five of Wang Tuo’s films from the past two years. Conveying multiple, often anachronic, storylines through carefully paced tableaux, still images, and animations, the works strike at the core of emotional and psychological disturbances. The warped worldviews of Wang’s protagonists lead them to destruction, as with the haunted scholar in Distorting Words (2019) who feels that “all roads ultimately lead to a single dead end” and fulfils his own prophecy by committing suicide. Self-perpetuating patterns reappear in Spiral (2018), wherein Wang studies desire as a force that simultaneously propels and is fueled by obsession, revenge, and hysteria. A masterful storyteller, Wang reveals the alienation and “chaos of reality.”…

Covid-19 has necessitated overhauls in the way that arts platforms organize their time and spaces. Among the first major international events to be impacted was Art Basel Hong Kong. Gallerists began to pressure the fair to cancel in late January as cases surged in China and beyond. When Art Basel officially aborted the event on February 6—one week after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a global health emergency—promising a 75 percent refund for galleries, the decision was welcomed. Bo Young Song, director of Seoul’s Kukje Gallery, told AAP: “We fully respect and concur with the committee’s decision… especially when prioritizing the health and safety of all those [who] will be present at the fair.” At the time, the WHO had reported over 28,000 recorded global cases. Other…

As the Covid-19 pandemic brought systemic societal dysfunction into sharp relief, cultural figures took to social media and to the streets to speak out against oppression and exploitation, while regimes and powerful individuals redoubled efforts to muzzle critics and accusers. Istanbul police rearrested Turkish philanthropist Osman Kavala on February 18, hours after he and eight others were acquitted of “attempting to overthrow the government” via the 2013 Gezi Park protests—charges that the European Court of Human Rights declared baseless. The 63-year-old founder of the nonprofit Anadolu Kultur has been detained since October 19, 2017. Local supporters in the art community and other civil-society groups are actively campaigning to highlight his more than 1,160 days of imprisonment. In the Philippines, Manila-based artist Gabriela Krista “Kiri” Dalena and nine fellow activists were…

The surreal effects of 2020 on the art market hit home when, on June 29, Sotheby’s Europe chairman Oliver Barker stepped onto the podium in London to direct the marquee New York auction of impressionist, modern, and contemporary art to an audience of TV monitors. The on-screen specialists worked phone banks in New York, London, and Hong Kong over the five-hour session, which was broadcast like a sporting event; the auction house had even hired extreme-sports production company Chrome to design the salerooms and dress specialists for full impact. The milestone event—which raised USD 363.2 million—marked unprecedented changes for a traditionally conservative industry trying to stay afloat amid a pandemic. Online sales are not new for auction houses, but for the first time, they had to survive solely on such…

As the first Indigenous Australian to be named artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney in its 47-year history, Brook Andrew redefined the festival’s worldview with an artist- and First Nations-led perspective. Bringing together 101 artists and groups from around the world, Andrew proposed that in an era of environmental and cultural crisis, art has “power to resolve, heal, dismember, and imagine futures of transformation for re-setting the world” and gave a spotlight to artists addressing ideas of sovereignty, whether over land, resources, or one’s own body. Titled “NIRIN” after the Wiradjuri word for “edge,” the Biennale became a model for how an international art festival can be a platform of solidarity and resilience for marginalized voices and increasingly vulnerable communities. In a year when many in Australia were celebrating…

In the early days of 2020, South Korea quickly emerged as a hotspot for the virus. By late February, a cluster of Covid-19 cases connected to a religious sect in the southeastern city of Daegu made headlines, and before long, Covid-19 had spread to most of the country’s major cities, compelling the government to implement a rapid and comprehensive testing program that would later become a model for other countries to follow. Innovations such as drive-through testing centers and mobile contact tracing aided South Korea in effectively managing the pandemic, resulting in fewer than 500 Covid-19-related deaths during the first ten months of the outbreak, all while avoiding a total lockdown. Indeed, daily life in South Korea has mostly remained unaffected by the pandemic owing to the general public’s overwhelming…

In February, just as Covid-19 cases were beginning to spread, Malaysia was plunged into a political crisis which resulted in a sudden change of government behind closed doors—a gross betrayal of the mandate of the people, who in 2018 had voted in a new coalition government for the first time since the Federation of Malaya in 1957. Fortunately, the same month, public health authorities recommended decisive action to implement pandemic protocols, including an early Movement Control Order (MCO). Indeed, at first, Malaysia ended up being a success story in managing the pandemic even as the MCO proved economically unviable. The civil-society campaign #KitaJagaKita (we look after each other) gained nationwide traction, celebrating a communitarian spirit and supporting those in need, especially marginalized groups. However, its slogan, folded into the government’s…

What has been your experience of the Covid-19 pandemic in Almaty? The pandemic has primarily affected the event-driven side of contemporary art. While physical safety requirements have been a major factor, many events were canceled because the state had diverted funds allocated for culture toward fighting the virus. At the same time, the shortage of high-quality Kazakhstani online content became evident during the lockdown, when the internet became the sole source of entertainment. Most of us turned our attention toward Russian or American resources. The scarcity of contemporary-art-related educational content and entertainment was particularly noticeable. We lack specialized periodicals, TV programs, and lectures. In what ways have the local arts community adapted to the new realities of Covid-19? The contemporary art marketplace is underdeveloped in Central Asia: there isn’t a…

What was your experience of Covid-19 and the other notable events of 2020 in Istanbul? My experience has been one of reflection, anticipation, and presence in my immediate landscape of anxiety and homeschooling. I sought active ways to keep going. I feel grateful for the companionship of my family during the lockdowns and also for a studio where I could be alone. I continued to indulge in exercises of abstraction with the craft of paper marbling (ebru). I digitally welcomed a newborn nephew, had the pleasure of raising numerous kittens, was thankful for my partner’s quick recovery from Covid-19, and learned the joys of almost freely socializing in desolate outdoor spaces. In retrospect, I was lucky that I was able to complete and present my work The Division [Taqsim] of…

At its peak, the Mughal Empire spanned Kandahar to Dhaka, the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. The second Lahore Biennale, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, evoked the former capital’s cultural interconnectedness, which contrasts the region’s hardened nationalist and ethnic tensions in the postcolonial era. The anguish of two decades of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is evoked in Khadim Ali’s tapestries from his Otherness (2020) project, shown in the Summer Palace at Lahore Fort, that recall Mughal miniature paintings except they are overlaid with the outlines of drones, helicopters, and fighter jets. Inside a planetarium, Kazakhstan-born artist Almagul Menlibayeva, working with Inna Artemova and German Popov, created a ten-channel video-and-sound installation, Ulugh Begh: Intrinsic Futuristic Machine for Central Asia (2020), which narrates the astronomical discoveries made by 15th-century Islamic astronomers…

Led by Brook Andrew, the Biennale of Sydney’s first artistic director of Indigenous descent, “NIRIN” was titled after the Wiradjuri word for “edge.” Looking to narratives and perspectives historically relegated to the periphery, the exhibition was spread across eight sites and featured more than 100 artists from 36 countries, with a strong focus on First Nations practitioners. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Karla Dickens’s installation A Dickensian Circus (2020), composed of caged sculptural busts, rusty pails, and silver boxing gloves, recounts the historical exploitation of Indigenous circus performers and tent boxers, while Lisa Reihana’s video installation Te Wai Ngunguru – Nomads of the Sea (2019), on Cockatoo Island, imagines the power dynamics between 19th-century Australian pirate Charlotte Badger and Puhi, a woman of the Māori community that…

Amid historic protests calling for political reforms and rising anti-monarchical sentiment across Thailand, the artists and curators of the second Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB), which was privately inaugurated by Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn on October 12, were scrutinized for how they positioned themselves within a polarized context. The strength—or to some, its weakness—of “Escape Routes” was the BAB’s refusal to align with any singular vision for rectifying the world’s current abysmal state. Though there were spectacular crowd-pleasers, such as Anish Kapoor’s red wax installation at the Wat Pho temple, Push/Pull (2009), there were also nuanced, critical works. Among the latter, in the prayer hall of Wat Prayoon, was Bussaraporn Thongchai’s video installation Dear Family (2020), featuring sex workers discussing their ostracization from their relatives. At The Parq, Rungruang Sittirerk referenced…

Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai is hailed as a communist hero in modern-day Vietnam, but little is known about the young revolutionary of the 1930s beyond her propagandized mythos. In “Lost from View,” multidisciplinary artist Hương Ngo reexamined her legacy. Gesturing to the deliberate sidelining of women in historical narratives, Ngo copied a letter by Minh Khai in invisible ink, presenting the pages with a bottle of the iodine solution needed to render the text visible but not permitting its use. The show also included a blown-up pamphlet from 1940 by female members of the Indochina Anti-Imperialist United Front, and vintage Western book covers of exoticized Asian beauties, situating Minh Khai’s story within a wider study of 20th-century depictions of Vietnamese women. See our website for the Chinese version of this…

Referencing the Chinese concept of li—variously defined as “courtesy,” “gift,” or “ceremony”—Lee Mingwei’s retrospective at Gropius Bau demonstrated the universal importance of respect, reciprocity, and intimacy through installations and performances from the past three decades. Restaged projects included Lee’s poetic Guernica in Sand (2006/20), a monumental recreation of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting designed to be swept away, and Sonic Blossom (2013/20), in which gallerygoers are treated to an impromptu performance by an opera singer. The show included new adaptations, such as an offshoot of The Letter-Writing Project (1998/20) titled Letter to Oneself (2020), featuring notes sourced via an open call that express the contributors’ pandemic-era hopes and fears. Lee’s practice poignantly invokes gratitude and grace in a time of tragic uncertainty.…

“Garden of Six Seasons” brought together maps and depictions of the world by more than 50 artists who span Indigenous and traditional cultures as well as the high-tech, postcolonial world. Mary Dhapalany’s woven pandanus mat of four interconnected circular shapes, for instance, was paired with Liu Kuo-Sung’s 1973 painting of the atmosphere inspired by “The Blue Marble” image of the Earth taken by Apollo 17. Representations of paradise were woven into tapestries from Central Asia to Morocco, while Liang Hao’s scroll painting Fire and Water (2013–14) portrays the epic battle of kan and li from the I-Ching. Vvzela Kook’s animated video installation Columbus of Horticulture (2019) looked at the human impact of colonialism on ecology as it followed a plant hunter through a vivid land of exotic plants.…

Taloi Havini’s projects explore the history of her birthplace, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, and the legacy of the Australiaowned Panguna copper mine, which was active in the 1970s and ’80s and whose impacts on the region led to a decade-long civil war that forced her family to flee. The gallery’s entrance was covered with a colonialera map and photographic wallpaper of bright blue rushing water, depicting the result of copper leaching into polluted rivers. Havini explores the state of the mine and neighboring communities in the immersive, fourchannel video and sound work Habitat (2018–19), which combines archival footage of Bougainville with contemporary documentation. The installation Reclamation (2020) comprises an earthen floor and standing, lashed cane structures—a type of collective drawing—created by Havini’s matrilineal clan.…