Innehållsförteckning för 124 (Jul/Aug 2021) från ArtAsiaPacific

Before I dive into the artistic scene that has developed in recent years in São Paulo, I must draw attention to a fact: I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, but am in love with the so-called “land of drizzle.” My observations, therefore, come both from the frequency with which I visit and work in São Paulo, as well as from the inevitable otherness of my relationship with the metropolis. Where to start? We cannot forget: Brazil and particularly São Paulo—the most populous of the capitals of the 26 states that constitute the country—are in crisis due to Covid-19. There have been more than 30,000 related deaths in São Paulo—that is almost ten percent of the deaths in all of Brazil. It is difficult to analyze any artistic…

The summer is off to a hot start in Hong Kong, as the mercury passed 36°C on the last day of Art Basel Hong Kong—in May. For those dealers wishing to stay cool and continue exhibiting and selling works of art, the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, held an invitation-only Zoom roundtable with a small group of heavyweight local, regional, and international galleries. During this virtual closed-door meeting, Lam fielded red-hot questions such as whether commercial galleries would be penalized for showing artists like Ai Weiwei. Although her answer was vague, in a nutshell, she said, “galleries would have to work hard to break the rules.” That sounds remarkably liberal, although presumably Ai’s middle finger will still have to remain in storage to keep the temperature so tepid. Speaking of…

JUL 17–OCT 17 MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, TOKYO (MOT) “Genkyo Yokoo Tadanori” Groundbreaking graphic designer and painter Tadanori Yokoo creates visual poetry through his cross-cultural, strident, and colorful imagery. Playing on “genkyo,” a homophone for “present state,” humanity’s “original homeland,” and “imagined realm”—pertinent themes in Yokoo’s practice—his exhibition at MOT will showcase more than 500 works spanning 60-plus years. These pieces, selected by curator Yusuke Minami in close collaboration with Yokoo, include the artist’s latest paintings musing on existential conditions, produced under self-quarantine during Covid-19. Additionally, his collection of taki (waterfall) postcards, which exemplify his signature strategy of appropriation, will be reconfigured into a dynamic, room-size installation. JUL 23–SEP 6 GUGGENHEIM, NEW YORK Wu Tsang: “Anthem” (working title) Zürich-based artist Wu Tsang explores marginalized narratives through performances, films, and installations.…

I am looking at a painting by the Chicago-based Surrealist artist Gertrude Abercrombie, Self-Portrait of My Sister, created in 1941. The woman has sharp features, an elongated neck, and her gaze projects onto an unknown horizon beyond the picture frame. The radiant blue of her eyes echoes the green and blue of her dress, collar, and hat, the latter adorned with dark purple grapes and a corkscrew. Her lips are pressed, giving her face a stern, austere expression, in subtle contrast with the playful gesture of her right hand embracing her left wrist. Tellingly, Abercrombie was an only child. The artist used self-portraiture to create an alter ego, an imaginary sister—was she smarter, prettier, meaner, or more real somehow? In her records, she would refer to this painting as “Portrait…

The role of chief curator for the 13th Shanghai Biennale was, in many respects, an unenviable one: appointed in November 2019, Andrés Jacque barely had time to acquaint himself with Shanghai before the world was upended by Covid-19. It was in this context of disruption that Jacque and his fellow curators Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, Marina Verzier, and You Mi worked remotely to develop “Bodies of Water,” a wide-ranging exhibition exploring the fluid possibilities of humanness, and the ways we relate to one another and the environment. Ultimately, the decision was made to deliver it “in crescendo,” as an eight-month extended program that could be stopped and started as the conditions required. So when the final exhibition phase opened at the Power Station of Art in April, almost six months…

We tend to think of fracture as a kind of termination—an end to a functional and desirable wholeness in form, as with a broken vase, or in meaning, viz. a breakdown in communication. In a compelling dual presentation at Pace Hong Kong, architect David Adjaye and artist Adam Pendleton advance the productive capacities of disaggregated form. It is in the act of splitting—marble segments in the case of Adjaye’s sculptures, and semantic structures in Pendleton’s text-based paintings—that the two friends, exhibited together for the first time, open up spaces of play and fugitive meaning. On the walls were nine paintings—the largest spanning more than two by three meters—from Pendleton’s series Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2020). Each features various configurations of the words “we,” “are,” and “not,” repeated in densely layered…

Born on the island of Buka in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Taloi Havini delves into the history connected to her native Papua New Guinea and its endangered ecosystems through photography, sculpture, video, and installation. An ecological consciousness transmitted through the Sydney-based artist’s matrilineal, indigenous Hakö culture informs her connection to the ocean, and her sense that it must be protected for future generations. This was the theme of Havini’s European solo debut at Ocean Space, located in the Church of San Lorenzo in Venice. The venue was established by TBA21–Academy in 2019 to promote interdisciplinary research and art exhibitions in defense of the seas. The first chapter of “The Soul Expanding Ocean” (2021–22), a two-year exhibition project curated by Chus Martínez, Havini’s presentation unveiled Answer to the call (2021),…

Borrowing from the language of commemorative plaques, comic books, political cartoons, and pop culture, Ben Sakoguchi’s 15-panel, acrylic-on-canvas Chinatown (2015) was the banner work in his exhibition of the same name at Bel Ami gallery, itself located in Los Angeles’s Chinatown neighborhood. The central panel of Sakoguchi’s painting is a searing depiction of the Chinese massacre of 1871, in which 18 Chinese men were hanged by a mob of 500 White and Hispanic men, less than a kilometer from the gallery. Considered the largest mass lynching in United States history, it is an event not covered in the official history books that form American national identity. Sakoguchi’s exhibition—which, in addition to Chinatown, included smaller canvases made throughout a five-decade career—offered an alternative American history told through racialized and bigoted affronts,…

In May, art communities around the world witnessed newly energized and vocal support for Palestinians facing brutal Israeli attacks and forcible displacement. The surge in displays of solidarity—ranging from statements to renewed calls for boycotts of Israeli-state-funded projects—followed violent raids by Israeli security forces on the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem; the eviction of Palestinians from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah; mob assaults on people taken to be Palestinians; and, after Hamas launched rockets, an 11-day bombardment by the Israeli military that killed more than 248 people, including 66 children, across the densely populated Gaza strip. Social media became a crucial forum for recording these events. Some of the actions and protests by ’48 Palestinians (Palestinian citizens of Israel) and…

Live auctions in Hong Kong and New York saw eager buyers, with the usual blue-chip artists securing premium prices. However, a number of much-vaunted lots fell short of expectations. HONG KONG After a delayed and whittled-down four-sale series last July and eight live sales in December, Poly Auction rebounded this April 21–24 with 11 live sales of antiquities, fine art, liquor, rare tea, jewels, and other luxury goods at its Pacific Place gallery. The 96-lot Modern and Contemporary Art sale raised USD 34.4 million, with nine lots unsold, and was headlined by Yoshitomo Nara’s Berlin Barack, Room 1 (2007), a shack containing the portrait Hothouse Doll and acrylic-on-wood-panel Three Sisters (Berlin Version). The installation’s USD 15.4 million price tag is the second-highest achieved by the popular Japanese artist at auction,…

Stella Zhong NEW HAVEN Stella Zhong is a cartographer of limbo. Her paintings, videos, and sculptures depict environments at the threshold of reality, in which Escherian edifices manifest an awkward tangibility. In the video Pond in Pond (2018), futuristic buildings and bridges that lead nowhere rise out of a glassy pool. Cast in a lilac-blue glow, the scene would look rendered if not for the lo-fi prop effects, such as a sudden fountain of bubbles and the Godzilla-esque emergence of a can from the water. Unmoored from fixed paradigms of real/unreal, Zhong’s settings submit to the nebulous workings of dream logic. Such spaces find three-dimensional form in sculptural installations, seen in “comet without a tail” (2020–21) at Chapter NY. Her works are at their most uncanny when they destabilize sleek,…

In 1969, the John Doe Co. of Santa Monica, California, released the first in its line of “nature products”: Erosion Machine, a yellow, hi-tech-looking, microwave-size appliance. A switch on its exterior activates a pump inside one of its two chambers, and, under the rays of a black light, a pressurized stream of water wears down a “human rock”—a pile of natural sediment mixed with plastic chips—in an artificial simulation of water’s sculptural effects on a solid mass. According to the device’s inventor and the company’s founder, artist Carl Cheng, the idea behind this machine was to “model nature, its processes and effects for a future environment that may be completely made by humans.” In brochures of the time, John Doe Co. advertised a range of other products in development, from…

Words can be “#pointless #low #unprecedented #confession #relief #sweat […]”; these particular ones linked to other websites from the homepage of hashwords.net, a continuously updated index of 2,753 hashtagged words chosen by Deniz Gül, for which an algorithm trawls 75,000 online news sites to find examples of their latest usage. The web platform, #Words (2021), points to the artist’s abiding interests in “how to monitor the involvement and effects of words in periods of economic, ecological, and social crisis.” Run for two-months until June 13, #Words is a parallel project to Gül’s multi-part exhibition “Scratch and Surface,” which spanned the spaces of SALT Galata, in Istanbul, as part of SALT’s yearlong Sequential program. “Scratch and Surface” embraces language’s fluidity and contingency, where meanings are continuously constructed and deformed. To that…

“COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE/WOOMERA PROHIBITED AREA.” These lines featured on a sign photographed by Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha and Nukunu) on a recent research trip to Woomera, where the artist was born. The image appears in the catalogue and promotional materials for “Missile Park,” Scarce’s major survey at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), serving as a blatant reminder of the artist’s displacement from her homeland. I offer my words on the exhibition as an uninvited guest on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, where ACCA resides. “Missile Park” acknowledged Scarce’s Kokatha ancestors in rural South Australia whose lands fall inside the Woomera Exclusion Zone, alongside five other Aboriginal territories: Maralinga Tjarutja, Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yunkunytjatjara, Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara, Arabana, and Gawler Ranges. Since the 1940s this…

Rana Begum’s work to date has followed in the lineage of artists like Josef Albers, Bridget Riley, and Robert Irwin, whose varied practices all maintained at their core the enquiry of seeing itself. Begum’s first solo exhibition at Kate MacGarry, spanning drawing, painting, and installation, represented a steady continuation of the artist’s pursuits in this realm, exploring the interplay of material, form, color, and light, and searching for wonder in the visual experiences it yields. The exhibition’s most commanding presence was also the work least congruent with Begum’s foundational vocabulary of geometric patterns and precisely measured forms. Situated prominently opposite the entrance, the installation No. 1048 Mesh (2020) features undulant, improvisatory forms shaped from pieces of wire mesh in an array of bright colors, like a cluster of crumpled candy…

For those of you who do not know me personally this may come as a bit of a surprise—Dan Graham is a big influence. Dan, his words and his work, helped inform much of what I made in previous years. His statement, “my work is for children and parents on weekends,” however, has the most resonance for me today. Three favorites relating to this idea are his Children’s Day Care (1998–2000), Girl’s Make Up Room (1998–2000), and the Met Rooftop Commission in 2014, all of which are two-way mirror-glass pavilions that inspire play and social interaction. To backtrack a little, in a video art class at the San Francisco Art Institute sometime around 1999, I was introduced to the early video works of Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, and Dan Graham.…

Major art fairs in New York, Busan, and Hong Kong launched their first physical editions since the outbreak of the pandemic, implementing parallel online programs and alternative on-site staffing plans to maximize participants and audiences in spite of ongoing travel restrictions. NEW YORK Frieze New York (May 6–9) relocated from its longtime venue at Randall’s Island Park to Hudson Yards art center The Shed for its tenth edition. The first in-person fair in the United States this year featured a whittled-down roster of 64 exhibitors on site, although an accompanying online platform showed around 160 international galleries. The physical fair featured mainly US-based galleries, with the usual blue-chip mega-galleries securing strong sales. David Zwirner (New York/London/Hong Kong/Paris) sold out its solo booth of Dana Schutz during the VIP preview, with…

Berlin’s Museum Island is hailed as one of the most prestigious cultural hotspots in Europe. Located at the very heart of the city’s historical center, it is home to five institutions—the Pergamon Museum, the Old and New Museums, the Old National Gallery, and the Bode-Museum—housing precious state collections, including of ancient Egyptian artifacts, Islamic art, and 19th-century European paintings. Last year, the Unesco World Heritage Site welcomed a major addition in its immediate vicinity: the Humboldt Forum, which, heralded as the city’s new hub for transcultural research and discourse, now holds the public Asian, African, and South American collections that were previously located in Berlin’s less frequented district of Dahlem. However, the Forum’s exterior is an ill-considered architectural pairing: A faithful reconstruction of the city’s 18th-century Baroque palace, donning a…

A woman in her sixties reclines in a frothy bubble bath. This is perhaps not an odd image in itself, but in Bath the Pain Away (2021), German artist Bianca Kennedy’s current in-progress film, the woman is in a bathtub-on-wheels in a sun-drenched room, and she is not alone. Two other women are in the room with her. The three speak to each other, but silently, gesticulating as their words literally hang in the air as visible text, their gestures freezing alongside their words as the camera pans and twirls. The protagonist is a district judge, adjudicating cases while naked from her warm-water perch. Many questions arise, but the most obvious is, why is all of this taking place in a bathtub? For the past half-decade, the primary leitmotif in…

The year 2020 marked a global shift in biennial scheduling, with major art festivals in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, São Paulo, Sharjah, and Dakar all deferring their forthcoming exhibitions due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding, a handful of biennial exhibitions opted to forge ahead during these trying times, most notably in South Korea, which hosted the Busan Biennale in September 2020 and the Gwangju Biennale in April 2021. While the former was a mostly straightforward affair, the latter unfolded a more diffuse presentation that necessitated assiduous unpacking of its intertwined concerns and positions. Under the artistic direction of curators Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala, the 13th Gwangju Biennale, “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning,” asserted an unabashed reproval of Western, anthropocentric, patriarchal, and scientific biases that inform prevailing paradigms of knowledge production,…

Located in Berlin’s western district of Charlottenburg, the modern and airy apartment of aaajiao is not as grandiose as its exterior suggests. From the street, the building—a former maternity hospital dating from the early 20th century—is all wrought-iron railings, ornate red brickwork, and arched windows and gateways. The home of the new-media artist, who trained in computer science, doubles as his work space and is in fact on the top floor of a newly built extension to the original architecture. There’s no need to check I have the right number; the googly eyes on his front door—surplus from the installation work Fur (2019–20), which visualizes how people perceive data with a fluffy, unthreatening combination of plush fabric and cartoon peepers—are a clear giveaway. Aaajiao bought the sun-filled spot in 2017,…

Disputed Ownership It was in the early 20th century that archaeologist Edward H. Thompson dredged the Cenote Sagrado, a water pit dedicated to the Mayan god Chaac in Chichen Itza, Mexico. At its bottom, some 18 meters deep, was an abundance of sacrificial artifacts, including gold, copper, carved jade, weapons, and cloths. Equipped with knowledge of property-law loopholes and a willingness to exploit them, Thompson shipped the treasures off to the United States, where they entered the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Gala Porras-Kim’s preparatory schematic, seen above, lays out these artifacts, ahead of a series of exhibitions, including the 2021 Sāo Paulo Biennial, scheduled to open in September. Working with lawyers, Porras-Kim has set up a hypothetical inquiry that examines the ethics…