Innehållsförteckning för 125 (Sep/Oct 2021) från ArtAsiaPacific

I was still studying advertising in college in the early 2000s when, one fateful evening, I decided to go to the opening of an art exhibition with my classmates. The show was for a painting competition in Manila and the award ceremony was that night. We were hanging out at a table with some food and drinks when a man came to us with a plate in his hand. He was tall and had long hair. He asked us what we were doing at the opening, maybe because he saw us wearing school uniforms. I told him that we were there to see the exhibition and that we were interested in joining the next painting competition. He said, “you should do installation.” The ceremony started and people gathered in the…

On July 16, Filipino artist, critic, and educator Leonilo “Neil” Doloricon (1957–2021) died from an undisclosed cause. Known as “the people’s artist,” he revealed systemic oppression as the root of everyday problems through his creative work. Hung Liu (1948–2021), a Chinese-born American artist who gave voice to the marginalized in her paintings, passed away on August 7 from pancreatic cancer. Her survey “Portraits of Promised Lands” launched at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, on August 27.…

Sun Pei-Mao TAIPEI Broken railings, disconnected stairways, mismatched tiles—these subtle details lure viewers into Sun Pei-Mao’s There is No Sign for the Direction of the Park (2018). The Escherian fourpart painting resembles a thermographic, foldable travel map of a distorted garden. Amorphous teal splatters bleed onto gridded floors, green bushes are ablaze, and lost visitors stand under the claw of a banyan tree, between its crawling roots. This trippy scene is distinctive of Sun’s early works, where theatrical tension suspends viewers in an absurd reality. Sun’s creations, once defined by psychedelic hues, have since become darker—both in color and content. Inspired by Taiwanese American contemporary artist Mu Pan’s elaborate fight scenes, Lonely Spirits Wild Ghosts (2021) is a pencil-sketched nightmare. Ten grotesque figures sprawl across a colossal fish corpse, feasting…

Driven by a fascination with ancient knowledge, Bogota-born, Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim pursues her interests through a range of approaches, from conversations with living communities and institutions to shamanic communions with the dead. Throughout her research-driven process, Porras-Kim also tests the contemporary structures—such as museum classification systems—that organize and determine our relationships with historical lore and the material remnants of cultures. She manifests the results of her investigations in varying forms, including written exchanges, installations, books, paintings, and sculptures. Porras-Kim’s longest running series, The Mute Object and Ancient Stories of Today (2012–), homes in on the dozens of Zapotec languages that were passed down orally from the Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica in what is now southern Mexico. Starting in the 16th century, the Oaxacan people translated some of the…

“As an artist, I’d like to be able to move between those parallel concepts of time—time that people want to control and time that escapes their grasp. I’d like to inhabit that ambiguity.”LEE UFAN1 INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION In December 2018, I was in Kamakura, Japan, visiting Lee Ufan. The radiant winter sun warmed the ground of the quiet city, while running water glistened alongside the streets. The artist’s studio was flooded with light. The tea was steaming, the radio gently quivering. An assortment of brushes of different widths hung on the walls. I proceeded to interview Lee. We were preparing his personal exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, which was later titled “Inhabiting Time.” During the conversation, when he spoke to me in Japanese, I was hypnotized by the recognizable flow…

Zhao Yang’s earlier paintings tend to be populated by mysterious figures, alone or in couples, symmetrically arranged and portrayed as though viewed from afar. The subjects are mostly human, although sometimes mermaids and angels appear. Whatever the characters appear to be doing—dancing, ice-skating, playing music—there is always the sense that they have rich interior lives, that they are anticipating something. In Zhao’s latest paintings, exhibited in “Godlike Rage” at ShanghArt Gallery, what one finds instead is a theater without actors, the props and curtains left soiled and lying about. The people depicted in previous works are here replaced with statues and mannequins. In Planet (2020), for example, three cherubim appear to float above a pentagon with a superimposed sketch of a bodybuilder’s physique, admiring himself, or his Platonic ideal, in…

“Who the Bær,” Simon Fujiwara’s exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan, brought his new cartoon character to life. During lockdown, Fujiwara began collaging his drawings with cut-outs of news articles and pictures sourced from the web. This body of work eventually coalesced into the tale of a genderless bear, whose boundless identities and forms are shared via the Instagram account @whothebaer. Materialized in an installation at Fondazione Prada, Who the Bar infiltrated and distorted all sorts of images and objects to create a Who-branded universe. On the ground floor of the Podium, Fujiwara’s story unfolded inside a huge, bearshaped cardboard labyrinth, in which viewers were immersed in an intense visual experience featuring more than 60 works, from assemblages to stopmotion animations, organized in eight thematic areas to illustrate chapters of…

Part of the baggage we bring to photography, compared to other media like painting or sculpture, derives from the fact that photography seems to occupy a higher moral register than other representational media in its putative ability to objectively “tell the truth.” Vietnamese-American artist An-My Le astutely recognizes the expectations we bring to bear on photography and, accordingly, constructs photographs that are not exactly what they seem. In “?o-mi-no,” her solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery, Le articulates in three bodies of work how reality and myth commingle to form national and personal consciousness. This is evident from the very premise of 29 Palms (2003–04), a series of black-and-white photographs of a United States Marine Corps training site in the California desert that was used to simulate conditions in Afghanistan.…

If the Earth Could Speak During the Second Indochina War (1955–75), the United States dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Decades later, unexploded ordnance (UXO), buried in fields and forests, continues to claim civilian lives and limbs. Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen joined a bomb-disposal expedition in Vietnam’s Quảng Tri province for his film The Sounds of Cannons, Familiar Like Sad Refrains (Dai Bác Nghe Quen Như Câu Dạo Buồn) (2021), named in reference to a 1969 song by Trịnh Công Sơn about the bombardments at night. The film imagines a sentient UXO—portrayed in the production still above—that muses on its purpose and karma in the final moments before its controlled detonation. In the next issue, associate editor Ophelia Lai speaks to Tuan Andrew…

Recently in Seattle “normal life” has become a thing again. After losing its unspoken authority and drifting into the realm of signification, it is now something urgent to remember and authentically re-enact. The city’s commercial life resembles itself once more, with storefronts—boarded up in the midst of demonstrations and protests—uncovered and eager shoppers unmasked. By contrast, in Seattle’s residential neighborhoods, new versions of old problems are returning in various acts of covering up; fresh picket fences serve as demure markers of a supercharged housing market whose companion, homelessness, is now increasingly represented by its cipher—rings of plastic netting signifying a public space recently swept of a tent, an unhoused person, and all their belongings. June’s record-breaking heat wave exacerbated these disparities and arrived like the pandemic’s second act, further distorting…

Arts Maebashi, a public museum in Japan’s Gunma prefecture, is struggling to rehabilitate its reputation after its misplacement of six borrowed artworks—including four woodblock prints and two calligraphy works—and its former director’s delays in reporting the incident. An anonymous curator first discovered the loss of three works on January 6, 2020, during an inventory check, and on February 3, 2020, staff learned of three more missing pieces. These cases were relayed to Fumihiko Sumitomo, the museum’s director at the time. Sumitomo subsequently delayed notifying the artists’ bereaved families, who loaned the works, for nearly six months. The city government of Maebashi convened an investigation committee in December 2020, and, on March 24, published a summary of the committee’s 726-page report. According to the investigation, Sumitomo and the curator attempted to…

In a cruel irony, just ten days after I visited the opening of a virtual exhibition out of Myanmar that was curated around the state of dreaming and speculations about the future, the country’s military staged a coup d’etat on February 1. With their act of reprisal against the democratically elected government, the junta stripped from civilians the gamut of possibilities that the show had centered around. Titled “:\Screensaver_” and probing concerns of freedom, identity, and mental health, the exhibition imagines a post-pandemic world that thrives on change and positive disruption (or glitching) of the status quo. But the program was cut short by a nightmarish turn of events: amid both sporadic internet blackouts and the immediate danger that civilians now face, the Mozilla Hub room was left on its…

“Humans have a way of ascribing meaning to the landscapes they see,” a computerized voice says, after reminding us that the images halfway into Shuruq Harb’s ten-minute film The Jump (2020) are of the Dead Sea. The words resonate in two ways throughout the work, where emotional states and political narratives are intertwined and projected onto the earth. The Jump opens with shots of craggy ravines, and as the narrator speaks of “depression” in geological terms and how the Jordan Valley—which divides the occupied West Bank from Jordan—is the “lowest point on earth,” one begins to think more of suicide than sediment. Melancholia continues to tinge the imagery as the disembodied narrator wonders, “If we jump from here, how high can we jump?” The camera seems to answer that by…

The history of civilization is mostly an account of war, but it cannot be told without stories of fights against plagues. To read scientific reports on viruses makes one realize what perplexing, mysterious beings they are. They appear to be two-sided beings that bring with them not only the risk of death but the promotion of life within the progress and evolution of humanity. Therefore, as an unavoidable aspect of life, they cannot be eradicated or destroyed. In order to alternately fight and live in acceptance of them, we will need to exert more vitality—that is, our entire physical, intellectual, and spiritual strength—but it raises many other questions as well. As we know from the yakubyōgami (spirits of pestilence), the more we confront each other, the stronger we become, and…

In recent years the art world has taken steps to address inequalities in the representation of artists along gender, racial, ethnic, or geographical lines. In this context, many pioneering women artists who began their careers between the 1950s and ’70s are being revisited by scholars and curators in institutions worldwide. Staged at Mori Art Museum by director Mami Kataoka and independent curator Martin Germann, “Another Energy: Power to Continue Challenging – 16 Women Artists from around the World” directly reflected this trend. Among the first comprehensive institutional studies of still-practicing female artists aged 71–105, the exhibition featured around 130 works, organized in capsule solo showcases of 16 renowned figures from 14 countries of origin. The exhibition began with a massive sculpture that occupied the entirety of the first room. British…

Conceptual artist Joe “Joebau” Bautista’s “Throw Hide & Twist,” hosted by MO_Space in Taguig, Metro Manila, explored the manifold ways that prompts and action can create associations between artist, artwork, and audience. Spanning mixed-media paintings, wall-bound works, and a participatory installation, the displayed pieces embody variations of the artist’s titular commands—“throw,” “hide,” and “twist”—and accordingly take varied and sometimes contrasting material forms. Mounted in two rows on a gallery wall were Hide on Board 1–9 (2020), a set of framed ink works. Disrupting this neat arrangement was Hide on Board 10 (2020), which was hung off to the side. Seen collectively from afar, the series may appear as ordinary ink paintings on flat paper sheets, yet the one work separated from the rest hinted at something unusual, drawing viewers closer…

On June 25, Lausanne’s Musée de l’Elysée conferred the fourth Prix Elysée to photographer Kurt Tong for his semi-fictional book project Dear Franklin (2018–). Choreographer Ming-Hwa Yeh clinched the 19th Taishin Arts Award Grand Prize on July 10, receiving USD 53,700 for her 2020 performance The House Behind the Wall. Ting-Tong Chang, Hsien-Yu Cheng, and Dino’s multimedia work Taipei Robot Man 2.0: Infodemic (2020) won the USD 35,800 Visual Arts Award. Pitjantjatara painter Timo Hogan took the top spot at Australia’s 2021 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards with his painting Lake Baker (2020), collecting USD 36,700 on August 6. New Zealand’s Walters Prize 2021, worth USD 35,000, went to Mata Aho Collective and Maureen Lander on August 7, in recognition of their textile Atapō (2020).…

SEP 4–OCT 10 YENI KUNDURA, ISTANBUL “Once Upon a Time Inconceivable” In the installation Overgrowth (2004), Ceal Floyer plays with the scale of a bonsai tree projection by manipulating the slide projector’s distance from the wall. Similarly toying with physical space, Gülşah Mursaloğlu’s Merging Fields, Splitting Ends (2021) features six waterfilled steel vessels; as the water boils, steam melts the containers’ bioplastic coverings, changing their material state. Such distortions abound in “Once Upon a Time Inconceivable.” Marking Protocinema’s ten-year anniversary, the group exhibition challenges the reliability of human perception through works by Abbas Akhavan, Hera Büyüktaşçlyan, Banu Cennetoğlu, Zeyno Pekünlü, Paul Pfeiffer, Amie Siegel, and Mario García Torres, in addition to Floyer and Mursaloğlu. SEP 8–NOV 21 SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART, SEOUL Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2021: “One Escape at a…

Halfway into my conversation with Zadie Xa, raucous caws emanated from her end of the video chat. It turns out there was a nest of seagull chicks right outside the window of her London studio. “They’re celebrating. Apparently, they get excited because they’re going to fly and become independent,” Xa told me, conveying her research into the avian cries. Not coincidentally, a seagull stars as a narrator in her touring solo exhibition “Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers” (2020–21), alongside a cabbage, conch shell, orca, and fox. In the show’s audio work, the wise cabbage says, “All beings respond to the movement of Earth and her Moon, to the undulations of all planets, stars and cosmic bodies of the universe. This is Moon Poetics. How well…

Resembling manga characters with sparkling, oversize eyes and kawaii smiles, the protagonists in Liu Yin’s paintings are often avatars for public figures, national leaders, and magazine models. Madeleine, the star of Liu’s newly crafted story, told through a painting series, is an AI bot in human skin, with hair swept back in an Edwardian pompadour roll or perhaps a Maoist quiff. In their past life, Madeleine was “an important, powerful, and influential man in history” who was determined to live again in a female body. Their reincarnation is portrayed in The Birth of Madeleine (2021), a parody of Sandro Botticelli’s iconic painting The Birth of Venus (1485–86). Surrounded by fluttering, pink peaches that replace the posse of deities in the original composition, Madeleine emerges as a blushing goddess, demurely avoiding…

The words “YOU CAN GO NOW!” blazed in orange as audiences entered Richard Bell’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This demand, painted on a monochromatic map of Australia, epitomizes Bell’s signature wit and political critique, deployed here to undercut governmental policies on immigration and on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights. It set the tone for “You Can Go Now,” the largest Australian institutional survey of the leading artistactivist’s practice, where nearly 40 paintings, installations, videos, and photographs synthesized Bell’s longstanding examination of sovereignty, identity politics, and inequity. A descendant of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman, and Goreng Goreng people, Bell was born in 1953 in the rural town of Charleville, Queensland. For much of Bell’s youth, Queensland was a state governed by conservative, right-wing politics and…

Cao Yu’s “Passing Through the Human World” at Galerie Urs Meile touched on different relations: between men and women; human and nature; material and supernatural; and perhaps most of all, between the two sides of herself, as subject and object. The exhibition featured a number of photographed portraits that differ strikingly in approach. In The Thing in the Chest (2020), Cao appears naked from the waist up, holding aloft a gigantic heart. Looking freshly butchered and bloody, the heart has been tattooed with a scowling tiger, a folkloric symbol of strength and bravery that is also associated with the feminine yin in Taoist philosophy. In the exhibition text, Cao remarks, “Some people tattoo their fierceness on their bodies, but I engrave my ambitions in my heart.” Yet the image and…

A single property on the row of Victorian terrace houses that leads to Chisenhale Gallery has been painted a stark concrete gray. A deliberate line bisects it from the rich golden brick of its attached neighbor, and the dark paint engulfs the building, windowsills and all. At the end of 2020, criticism of the “gray plague” spreading across London’s developing housing markets gained traction on social media. Perhaps this is the eventual fate of all of the centuries-old flats in Tower Hamlets, one of London’s rapidly gentrifying boroughs. For now, the gray house tells a story through its contrast with its neighborhood, an allegory about the delicate balance between development and community, between humans and our environment. In her London solo debut, Shanghaibased artist Yu Ji took a similar approach.…

Built on reclaimed tracts, the Hong Kong neighborhood of Kwai Chung is home to one of the world’s busiest commercial ports, a sprawl of Lego-like shipping containers clogging the shores of Rambler Channel. Just a few kilometers from the cargo terminals, among the warehouses and auto-body shops further inland, is artist Leelee Chan’s studio. After circling the nondescript loading bays of one industrial building, I eventually located the elevator and ascended to a dimly lit floor, where a cheery yellow door distinguishes Chan’s studio from its drab surrounds. The studio occupies one of the higher levels, with large windows letting in ample sunlight. Small yet airy, the studio is impressively compartmentalized so as to wrestle the cramped workbenches, storage areas, and miscellaneous clutter into a semblance of order. The artist…