Innehållsförteckning för 122 (Mar/Apr 2021) från ArtAsiaPacific

In 2021, the Point asks writers about the deep-seated issues that Covid-19 has brought into view, and how they might tackle these problems to create better post-pandemic futures. Below, Eunseon Park, director of the collective Listen to the City, outlines the importance of resilient urban networks. Many say that they want to return to life before Covid-19. However, if we continue to live the way we have until now, even greater catastrophes will arise. Art and urbanism can start to chart a different course for a post-Covid-19 future by understanding the complex interrelations that the pandemic has surfaced between the environment, discrimination, racism, and culture. Epidemiologists have linked the destruction of wildlife habitats to the transmission of pathogens from animals to humans. High-density cities are particularly vulnerable to the spread…

Despite the rollout of vaccines, cases are still on the rise in various parts of the globe, impeding travel and causing further cancellations and delays for art events. Most art fairs have gone virtual while physical events are limited. Art Basel’s in-person Swiss program will now take place September 23–26 instead of in June, while the Hong Kong edition, originally scheduled for March, will be held from May 21 to 23 with “ghost booths,” where attendants contracted by fair organizers will facilitate remote sales for international galleries. Meanwhile Art Basel will continue its online events. Normally held in February, Art Fair Philippines was moved online, while Gallery Weekend Beijing pushed its physical event to April 27–May 2. Taipei Dangdai is also postponed to July 2–4. Delayed by 12 days, Art…

With most of the world still contending with Covid-19, the new year feels very much like the previous one. As in 2020, auction houses are relying on digital offerings while remaining cautious about releasing details of their live presentations too far in advance of sales. NEW YORK Christie’s Asia Art Week (March 16–18) in New York will comprise one online and six live sales spanning antiques along with modern and contemporary art from Asia. The traditionally biannual series was held in-person only once last year, in September, after the March sales were scrapped due to Covid-19. Part of Asia Art Week 2021, the South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art (SAMCA) live sale is slated for March 17. The September 2020 event raked in USD 4.9 million over 43 lots, while…

Dominique Fung NEW YORK The West has long exoticized Asian women, imposing on us the role of a meek, subservient “other.” This fabricated image relegates us as commodities and status symbols up for grabs, much like coveted fine Chinese ceramics. Rooted in Anne Anlin Cheng’s 2018 essay “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” postcolonial theorist Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism (1978), and her own experiences, the work of Chinese-Canadian artist Dominique Fung holds a mirror up to the Western fetishization of Asian women. This method of critique is seen in the surreal painting Watering Hole at the Orient Pearl (2018). Nude feminine figures lounge around a fountain among other emblems of the “Orient”: vases, cranes, foo dogs, and a Chinoiserie parasol—a European take on a traditionally spiritual icon,…

HERA BÜYÜKTAŞÇIYAN A marble hand appears on screen and then floats above a grainy, colorless photograph of a city’s rooftops. A woman’s voice speaks, explaining she is trapped inside this marble body, her “pale, petrified fingers exhausted from their centuries-old sleep.” As the marble hand clears rows of stone cubes to reveal another photograph of old wooden balconies, the voice explains, “My fingertips follow the line that consists of an infinite number of points… gathering fragments of time and space for my own imagined universe.” Then the video cuts to contemporaneous footage of bright pink fabric that covers the black-and-white tiled floor of a derelict, yellow-walled courtyard. These stop-motion animated opening scenes of Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s 11-minute video Infinite Nectar (2019) begin a poetic travelogue through Sikh history in Lahore and…

Yang Fudong is known for his atmospheric painting-like films, which reinterpret classical Chinese art. His latest series, Endless Peaks (2020)—comprising cinematic acrylic canvases, photographs, and videos—marks a shift in media for the artist. Shanshui (mountainous waterscape) paintings are not just representations of nature, but also reflect metaphysical states. The latter is introduced via the rendering of thousands of peaks in multiple, shifting perspectives, which invite viewers to wander within the landscapes of their minds and hearts, according to the 11th-century, Northern Song dynasty artist Guo Xi’s canonical painting manual. Yang brought these literati ideals to the present at ShanghArt Shanghai’s two-story gallery. Endless Peaks I and II, both consisting of paintings and photographs, are conjoined in a row like a handscroll or the negatives of a film roll. Among the…

In his photographs and texts, Paul Hutchinson addresses issues of equality, urban life, and social mobility. In doing so, he gives his generation a unique voice, and at the same time draws a bittersweet portrait of our time. Sylvia Metz spoke with the artist in an interview. You were born in 1987 and, as you once put it yourself, “grew up in the gray post-war Berlin of the ’90s.” Doesn’t really sound like a good time, does it? That’s a pointed phrase of mine. In retrospect, I would say that I had a fulfilling, warm, and loving childhood. But what also corresponded to the reality of our lives was the fact that some of us grew up in precarious circumstances. The environment in the north of Schoneberg was a little…

In December 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 snapped a picture of home as they rocketed toward the moon. The Blue Marble has since become the most reproduced image of Earth, the view of our small and distant planet forever etched into our self-imagination. Preoccupied with different ways of seeing the world, and the ideologies and upheavals they reveal, the 2020 Taipei Biennial, conceived by Bruno Latour, Martin Guinard, and Eva Lin under the title “You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet,” proposed a new vantage point for interpreting our place in the universe. The sentiment of the French environmentalist zadistes—“we are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself”—was particularly palpable throughout the exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Covid-19 has provoked urgent conversations about…

Nineteenth-century breakthroughs in the study of electromagnetism pointed to a vast realm of unseen forces that, with the right technologies, could be manipulated in perceivable ways. It was hardly a leap, then, to infer that science could demystify paranormal phenomena—respected physicists including Joseph John Thomson and Oliver Lodge also investigated telepathy and spirit communication. By the mid-20th century, psychical research waned in the scientific establishment but the desire for mysterious communiques did not, finding expression in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Born in Athens in 1925, Panayiotis Vassilakis, better known as Takis, watched as cities were electrified and the first satellites entered space, and intuited the human desire for a beam of light in the darkness, a sign from a silent universe. Over seven decades, the self-taught artist translated this…

The late conceptual artist Chen Zhen described the moment of artistic creation as a “short-circuit” generated by presenting commonplace objects in unexpected combinations and contexts. Named for this idea, the artist’s recent retrospective, curated by Vicente Todoli at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Chen’s death, showcased 24 iconic installations from 1991 to 2000 that represent central concerns in his practice, from globalization and consumerism to the healing power of art. Born in Shanghai in 1955 to a family of doctors, Chen was diagnosed with incurable autoimmune hemolytic anemia at the age of 25. A painter and scenographer by training, he decided to move to Paris in 1986 to pursue his vision of a transcultural practice. He died in the French capital in 2000. Chen’s…

March 1, 2021 Dear ______________, Let’s get something straight: Michael Findlay is a dealer. Not a gallerist. He loathes that term. No, he’s a dealer. He makes deals on masterpieces, he’s been doing so for decades, and he feels there’s no need to bring in other fancy terms to dress up what he does. This point of terminology is important not just because he insists on it. It’s important because, for me, he’s also a dealer in another, equally vital sense. He’s my dealer. That’s not to say he represents me or sells my work. He deals to me. He deals me regular doses of wisdom about art history, practice, value, and language, which end up informing my sense of what it means to be an artist. Oh, and sometimes…

In his essay for the 2008 Gwangju Biennale, curator Okwui Enwezor describes our time as the “Asian Century”: “Judging from the shape and turn of events, the clockwork convergence of Asia’s polyglot cultures, the large and still-growing consumer society and middle class, and the rapidly changing technology that knits them together, it may not be premature to think that we are facing an Asian moment. This emergence of global Asia, in fact, does not benefit Asia alone; it creates a model for other societies in transition, especially in Africa and Latin America.” “Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965” (2016), the last major exhibition that Enwezor staged in his lifetime, offered an alternate history of the second half of the 20th century, not sprung from the Yalta Conference…

After almost two decades of living in Germany, the Iraqi-Kurdish artist Hiwa K moved back to his birthplace in Kurdistan in early 2020. When we connected over Skype, he had just returned to the mountainous territory from Dubai, where his exhibition “Do You Remember What You are Burning?” had opened at the Jameel Arts Centre on December 16, 2020. “I don’t complain that it came too late, but it could have been earlier,” he said of his first solo show in West Asia. “It’s nice that people now start to understand what I want to share with them. There has been a lot of art from the region that points directly to issues with the index finger. The works that I do mostly point with the pinkie; they leave space…

From 3D simulations of neurosurgical procedures to video-game avatars for gods of pain, Lu Yang’s eye-searing, pop-culture-inflected multimedia projects are products of the artist’s longstanding research into the nexus of the material and the metaphysical. Lu’s half-hour video-performance Delusional World (2020), livestreamed from the Chronus Art Centre in Shanghai to a custom website hosted by ACMI Melbourne, is a disco inferno that unleashes the horror and ecstasy of radical self-creation. Fitted with motion-capture harnesses and mirrored shades, dancer Qin Ran controls a motley crew of grotesque 3D-modeled characters, starting with a naked, headless figure whose stocky torso bears the artist’s contorted, grinning face. The mutant mimics the dancer’s choreography to an electronic soundtrack by GameFace as Lu, stationed at a computer off-camera, pans across an animated black-and-white checkerboard floor decorated…

“Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art” was not the retrospective one might expect from an institution designed to house 19th-century European art. Nigel Borell (Pirirākau, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, Te Whakatōhea), ex-curator of Māori art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, transformed both the institution and the art-historical record in Aotearoa New Zealand with this expansive exhibition, featuring more than 300 artworks by 111 Māori artists from the 1950s to the present. In a Māori worldview, time does not follow a linear trajectory, and neither did “Toi Tū Toi Ora.” Rather, the exhibition progressed through the Māori creation story, beginning with Te Kore, The Great Nothingness. In a dimly lit space, constellations of light explode into spiralling mirrored patterns on the black glittered surface of Reuben Paterson’s…

“Player of Beings,” at the Ming Contemporary Art Museum, took as its subject the history of the video game, artists who use the aesthetics of video games, or gaming as a platform for social commentary. It was an exhibition which, in lieu of examining one of these areas of inquiry with depth, touched lightly on all three. Upon entering the exhibition one found vitrines containing a chronological display of video game consoles, some of them replicas. Subsequent spaces were replete with an array of popular arcade machines, which visitors could operate using tokens handed out upon entry, along with playable console and PC games. For enthusiasts, such a collection sets an expectation of a historical overview of critical technological and aesthetic developments in video game production, with details about, say,…

Hydrographic concerns are salient in the contemporary art of Southeast Asia, a region with deep historical and material ties to the water. Recent years, in particular, have witnessed much art-making and conceptual discourse that relates to seas and rivers, marine communities and ecologies, and boats, maps and other implements of navigation—subject matter that is growing increasingly shopworn. It is to the credit of Taiwanese-American artist Mike HJ Chang, then, that his take on the theme retained its own idiosyncratic sensibility, quietly reveling in its unorthodox methods and vocabularies. “Calendar of Dilation,” curated by artist and researcher Alfonse Chiu at Singapore’s Yeo Workshop, began with a residency that Chang undertook in mid-2018, when he spent two weeks at sea on an oil tanker, traveling from Italy to the Netherlands. The works,…

Sitting atop a mattress on the floor of her studio apartment in New York City’s Ditmas Park district, Chitra Ganesh lamented being unable to properly host guests. “It’s so weird,” she said, her voice slightly muffled through her face mask. “I keep wanting to offer a cup of tea to people who come over.” Some six feet away, I perched on a blanket-draped futon, my own face partially hidden behind a mask. Although I had previously covered Ganesh’s 2018 dual exhibition “The Scorpion Gesture/Face of the Future” at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, this was my first meeting with the visual artist, known for her futurist twist on feminist and queer mythologies. Normally, between January and March, Ganesh would be working in India, preparing for art fairs…

I grew up in Rome in the 1990s as a first-generation immigrant—one of the privileged ones who attended an international school. I distinctly recall, though, the injustice that I felt on the playground, where speaking English brought admiration while communicating in languages from outside the European Union made you a foreigner from a backward country (in my case, former Yugoslavia). Yet, despite the casual racism and dysfunction, I adored Rome. Its beauty was breathtaking and it was queen of all that mattered: art, delicious pizza, and gelato. Things have changed since then; you hear more foreign languages everywhere. Still, Rome is home to only 13 percent of the nation’s migrant population, a modest share compared to Milan (19.9 percent), or even the smaller city of Florence (16 percent). The financial…

Less than two weeks after his 91st birthday, Korean painter Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929–2021), who spent five decades exploring representations of water drops, passed away in Seoul on January 5. On January 8, conceptual and installation artist Adrian Jones (1958–2021), who was devoted to public art projects and art activism, died from pancreatic cancer in his hometown, Perth. Jin Le (1966–2021), sculptor, educator, and the founder of Shijiezi Art Museum—China’s first village-based museum, located in Gansu province—passed away on January 11 in Lanzhou from an undisclosed cause.…

Not even the short sellers expected Covid-19 to rage on past 2020. Much of the art world was ecstatic last November when big pharma announced the effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines. Gallerists, curators, and artists alike began anticipating the resumption of the global cultural roadshow consisting of art fairs, auctions, and biennials. Yet since January, with second, third, and fourth Covid waves hitting countries big and small, those hopeful fantasies, especially for art-fair organizers, have been squashed. In January, galleries that normally salivate when contemplating ever-eager Taiwanese collectors were fielding calls from the Dangdai fair co-founder and co-director, Magnus Renfrew. First he was reminding them that Dangdai was rescheduled to July—because its original May dates collided with Art Basel Hong Kong’s move to the very same week. Secondly, Renfrew was enticing…

MAR 12–JUN 6 UCCA CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, BEIJING Cao Fei: Staging the Era Cao Fei’s first midcareer survey in her birth country will bring together videos, photographs, and installations probing China’s mind-bending modernization and social transformations. Seminal projects, such as Cosplayers (2004), comprising videos and photographs depicting costumed youth in Guangzhou’s urban villages, and the multimedia body of works RMB City (2007–12), which revolves around a virtual Chinese metropolis, will be on view. More recent pieces include the film installation Asia One (2018), about online shopping and an automated sorting center in Jiangsu Province, and HX (2019–20), a film and related objects based on the history of Beijing’s Hongxia neighborhood. MAR 27–AUG 22 QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY | GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BRISBANE William Yang: Seeing and Being Seen Chinese-Australian…

When American composer John Cage disrupted the historical discourse of Western music in the 20th century by challenging basic assumptions of composition and performance, he precipitated a fundamental reconsideration of musical linguistics. One pillar of his legacy is an understanding of music not as a language of tonal harmony, but of configurations of sounds generated through specific movements of the performer’s body. As such, the work of contemporary composers can be seen as designing sequences of movements that yield patterns of sound—at least, that’s the way that Min Oh thinks about it. The Amsterdam-based Korean artist’s multi-layered film practice triangulates multiple approaches to movement using media that are durational in nature—namely, music, dance, and film—to probe the mutable syntaxes of performance. In doing so, Oh examines the relationships that link…

WANG TUO “Madness fascinates because it is knowledge,” observes Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961). In his taxonomy of European sociocultural, juridical, and medical attitudes to lunacy, Foucault posits that the madman in late-15th- and 16th-century art and literature is an ambiguous figure, encompassing “menace and mockery, the dizzying unreason of the world, and the feeble ridicule of men.” It was after the Enlightenment that an unequivocal demarcation of Reason and Unreason took root, along with the mass institutionalization of the mad and other undesirables. The objective reality of the sane needed protection from the disruptions of the insane. These lines are not so clear for Beijing-based filmmaker Wang Tuo. “I think reality is actually quite chaotic,” he told me…

At 1,200-degrees Celsius, a drop of molten bronze can burn through flesh in seconds. For Lindy Lee, however, working with this dangerous medium holds a meditative power. This sumptuous materiality permeated Lee’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), “Moon in a Dew Drop.” Titled after a book by 13th-century Zen monk Dōgen, the exhibition posited that even a single drop—be it water or molten metal—contains the universe. Born in Brisbane in 1954 to Chinese immigrants, Lee long held a sense of “unbelonging” that she only began to reconcile in the 1990s through Daoism and Zen Buddhism. Their philosophies of chance, the power within each moment, and entanglements between nature, humanity, and the cosmos significantly influence Lee’s work and unfurl in what she terms a “practice of curiosity.”…

It’s no overstatement that Tarek Atoui’s work is literal music to the art world’s ears. Sitting somewhere between art display, performance, and sound lab, Atoui’s solo exhibition “Cycles in 11,” curated by Sharjah Art Foundation director Hoor Al Qasimi, occupied the heritage house of Bait Al Serkal, and unfurled more than a decade of collaboration with the Foundation and its wider community. Atoui’s relationship with the Emirate is longstanding. It started in 2008, when the electroacoustic composer was invited to participate in the inaugural March Meeting, which set the stage for his artworld debut. What followed was a decade of exploring different modalities of listening, composition, and performance, and the ensemble of custom instruments on view at Atoui’s show stand as testimonials that challenge the constraints of what it means…

At Centre A, Vancouver-based artist Gu Xiong’s exhibition, “The Remains of a Journey,” told a history of Chinese migrants, predominantly from Guangdong, who traveled to the west coast of Canada over a century ago to prosper from “Golden Mountain.” Working as miners, railroad builders, and bricklayers, these indentured laborers helped to fulfill the aspirations of Canada’s nationhood, playing a critical role in the extraction of resources and the unification of the country by building the Canadian Pacific Railway. Gu’s show posed questions about how one comes to understand the history of Chinese migration to Canada, but for an exhibition centered on the theme of land, it seemed absent of the complicating fact that the land was never ceded by Indigenous peoples in the first place. The exhibition’s three sites of…

The past is messy and so is Candice Lin’s practice. In her 2020–22 touring exhibition “Pigs and Poison,” a trebuchet flings balls of oil, wax, lard, and black pigment across the room, splattering the walls. The installation plays to the rumored origins of the Black Death: Mongol troops who catapulted diseased bodies into the walled city of Caffa during a 1346 siege. Along with interrogating racialized narratives of plagues, Lin, with her sprawling interests, dissects colonial-era commodities that were produced by indentured laborers. In the work-in-progress depicted above, for example, she experiments with indigo dyes, which, with mutated techniques, from cassava- to rice-paste resist dyeing, different communities transformed into a medium for beauty and cultural syncretism. In our upcoming issue, AAP will unpack Lin’s strategies for speaking to histories that…