Innehållsförteckning för Almanac 2022 från ArtAsiaPacific

ArtAsiaPacific Foundation is an educational platform committed to spreading awareness and understanding of modern and contemporary art through publishing projects and public activities. Art plays a vital role in creating and maintaining a tolerant and inclusive society, and for that reason we are dedicated to embracing the diverse ideas and points-of-view that are intricately woven into the art of today in Asia. A sibling organization to the 28-year-old bimonthly magazine, ArtAsiaPacific Foundation is a nonprofit that offers a unique platform and voice in the fast-expanding field of contemporary art. At the heart of our mission is the advancement of knowledge about contemporary visual art from Hong Kong, Asia and beyond, through research, scholarship and the dissemination of information about culture today to the wider public. The Foundation initiates its own…

Art institutions around the world found themselves caught in controversies and political crossfire that tapped into many of today’s pressing social issues. In Hong Kong, M+, the first international museum devoted to postwar art, design, and visual culture from Asia, was preparing to open its doors when, in mid-March, lawmakers questioned the territory’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, about whether the museum would display artworks that might violate the new national security law and spread hatred toward China. Lam defended the museum but vowed that no artworks would break the law. Chris Chan Kam-shing, the chairman of the visual arts group of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), who defended M+ in the press, resigned along with two others from the HKADC in August, citing his personal safety after a…

The 2021 report released by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that 70 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that are either backsliding on benchmarks of civil liberties and democracy or are already authoritarian or “hybrid” regimes. The global shift in favor of repressive rule was witnessed on February 1 when the Myanmar military seized power from the civilian-led government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Artists and art organizations joined the civil-society protest movement across the country against the coup d’état. On March 27, performance artist Moe Satt and several poets were arrested at a protest. Satt spent 95 days at the notorious Insein prison before his release. Following the rapid fall of the Afghan government and the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul on August…

Recognition was abundant as organizations attempted to get back to the new normal. South Korea’s highest cultural honor, the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, was bestowed on Dansaekhwa pioneer Park Seo-Bo. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) gave the 2020 Korea Artist Prize to Paris-based Lee Seulgi, and the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series commission went to artist duo Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, who debuted their new film installation in September. Beijingbased filmmaker Hao Jingban and Filipino choreographer Eisa Jocson received the 2021 SeMA-Hana Media Art Award for their works at the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Hyundai Motor Group’s 4th VH Award named Lawrence Lek its Grand Prix winner for the virtual-reality work Black Cloud (2021), while Ryu Sung-sil became the 19th Hermès Foundation Missulsang laureate. Other…

A fuse was lit on March 11 with Christie’s USD 69.3 million sale of the NFT for Beeple’s digital collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021). This led to the astronomical art-market boom of NFT sales, accompanied by talk of how the unique tokens, which can rarefy reproducible digital images by a vast array of authors, are revolutionizing the industry. Trends swiftly emerged within the highest-grossing works, with templated portraits and avatars, such as Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club (2021) series and Larva Labs’ algorithm-generated CryptoPunks (2017), both collections of 10,000 NFTs, commanding attention. At Sotheby’s “Natively Digital” (6/3–10) online auction, CryptoPunk 7523 (2017) was purchased for USD 11.8 million. By year’s end, at least four CryptoPunks ranked in the top ten list of most-expensive NFTs. The NFT craze…

In October 2021, Park Seo-Bo was bestowed the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, South Korea’s highest cultural honor, for his contributions to Korean art, most notably as the pioneer of Dansaekhwa. The 90-year-old artist joked, “It’s an award that I wanted to receive. You should have given it to me earlier.” Since the early 1960s, Park has been a forerunner of abstract art. After being discharged from the military following the Korean War’s ceasefire, he painted a series of murky, abstract canvases, Primordialis (1962–66), which captures the darkness of the conflict and served as catharsis for Park’s anger and loss. In 1966, he resigned as an art professor at Hongik Universtiy and retreated into books on Eastern philosophies. Around this time, he found inspiration from his son’s penmanship and started…

The multimedia works of Sung Tieu bring viewers face-to-face with the forces that insidiously condition our lives, making specific and articulable that which is often structurally dispersed, anonymous, fatalistic in appearance, or evasive. Her past interrogations have homed in on factors such as spiritual beliefs, including astrological principles, as well as state policies and their bureaucratic manifestations. Building on these investigations and her own biography, in 2021, the Hải Dương-born, Berlin-based artist presented a series of installations that shed light on what shaped the lives of Vietnamese workers—including her father—who were brought to state-owned factories in the German Democratic Republic under a 1980 recruitment agreement with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In Sung’s solo exhibitions “Multiboy” (6/12–10/3) at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig and “Fall” (10/14–12/12) at the Kunstmuseum…

Yet another year with the pandemic passed. Despite major events—the Tokyo Olympics in the summer, a change of the prime minister in October followed by a national election at the end of the month—it felt as if 2021 was a very undramatic year. As the government constantly cycled between various levels of state of emergencies until pandemic restrictions were completely lifted nationwide in November, our life—from daily shopping to cultural experiences, let alone traveling—still felt totally paralyzed. Nonetheless, we managed to create moments of interest and topics worth looking back on. At the beginning of 2021, the common greeting among those of us who work in the arts was: “Have you applied for that Ministry of Culture stuff?” The “stuff” we were talking about was the funding scheme called the…

How would you summarize life in Manila in 2021? It was a rollercoaster, to say the least. Everyone faced their fears every day. There’s a collective anxiety, which is not so different from any other part of the world, but specific to the Philippines are the systemic imbalances in our culture and economy. This tension or sustained collective anxiety needs work in terms of contextualizing and understanding. Why do we have this thorn latched in our throats when we wake up? We need to figure out ways to understand it together, because the general symptom of the times is that there’s so much disinformation, which the state and other centralized bodies are banking on as an investment to stay in power. How do you think the pandemic and this collective…

As we discuss social movements and civic solidarity during periods of emergency in countries around the world, we should recognize that Indonesians are among strongest to react in order to support each other. Indonesian society closely adheres to the tradition of gotong royong, a term that means to share and to build together with the community’s resources. According to the research done by the Charities Aid Foundation’s World Giving Index 2021, Indonesia is ranked as the world’s most generous society, with high rates of donation and volunteerism. As the government announced another semi-lockdown in July and applied more limitations on social activities, I was amazed and touched by the many social initiatives, such as public kitchens; financial or material-aid groups for those who had lost their incomes; and fundraising to…

How did people navigate the second year of the pandemic in New York? As the pandemic is still happening, I can only speak to what I saw. Many of us are still less active in the usual ways. My gallery in New York, 47 Canal, hasn’t had any opening receptions since the pandemic started. In the early days there were stages of fear and the moment when you realize social welfare is tied to your immigration status, which we overcame through intimate circles of friends supporting each other. Then there came a moment of reflecting more deeply on art-making and ideas of engagement. We have tried to reflect on what has changed—and what should be changed—in the social context of the art scene. I noticed that more artists are redirecting…

In “One Escape at a Time,” artistic director Yung Ma looked at the many creative potentials, and problems, with the idea of getting away from it all. The event included projects by 41 artists spanning video, sound, and other electronic media. A mural by Minerva Cuevas in the lobby of the Seoul Museum of Art, titled Recipe for a little landscape (2021), depicts a tranquil, romantic mountaintop scene—except it is pixelated and there are giant mushroom tops and a can of Spam growing off to one side. Eisa Jocson’s karaoke video Superwoman: Empire of Care (2021) juxtaposed entertainment tropes of fun with the realworld struggles of healthcare workers. In a satirical rendition of adopting a myopic vision of the world, Li Liao recorded himself out in the empty streets of…

Cities value spectacular art projects and new museums for their ability to draw visitors and attention. For those reasons, in South Korea, the fate of the late Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee’s art collection was closely watched. On July 7, South Korea announced a budget exceeding KRW 100 billion (USD 88 million) for the construction of a new museum to house the 23,181 objects donated by Lee’s heirs. The museum, slated to open in 2027, will be located near the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in central Seoul—a decision many regional cities decried. Tokyo amplified its Olympics festivities with art. The Tokyo Tokyo Festival featured pavilions designed by Japanese artists Yayoi Kusama and Makoto Aida, as well as six architects in the area of the National Stadium, while…

Will 2022 be the year that the international art world reconvenes for major events? Many are counting on it, especially in Europe and North America. The first headline event will be the 59th Venice Biennale—delayed by one year, “The Milk of Dreams” is curated by Cecilia Alemani and will run from April 23 until November 27, 2022. National pavilions and collateral exhibitions are already in the works. In the Giardini, Japan will spotlight the multimedia collective Dumb Type. Korea will feature multimedia artist and electronic musician Yunchul Kim; Marco Fusinato, another artist-musician, is creating Australia’s presentation. In the Arsenale, Turkey will highlight sculptor Füsun Onur; the United Arab Emirates is looking back at a pioneering outsider artist, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim; while Singapore draws attention to the research-based practice of Shubigi…

Before the 20th-century discovery of oil, the Arabian Gulf traded another coveted resource extracted from beneath the surface: pearls. Though it defined the region for more than a millennium, pearl diving has been quickly severed from contemporary Arab culture since the dawn of black gold. With the movement towards alternative energy sources, oil now faces obscurity. In her works, Monira Al Qadiri excavates the forgotten histories of pearling and fuses them with present-day petro-cultures and speculative post-oil futures that define identities in the Gulf. Bumps and swells of the iridescent Chimera (2021) glistened under the sun at Expo 2020 Dubai, during the July debut of the festival’s public-art program. A magnified oil drill head, the nearly five-metert-all sculpture draws attention to the largely invisible mechanical components of the industry. Its…

What changes have you noticed in the Tokyo art scene since the pandemic began? Since museums were closed for a good chunk of time in the last two years, artists and curators launched their own platforms, experimenting in smaller venues, especially around the Shinjuku area. There are now three to four times more artist-run spaces than before the pandemic. Many of us were able to get money from the pandemic support fund. There’s Gallery Toh, an alternative art space in Yoyogi, and I’ve been running White house. Nearby is Decameron, a small art space and bar, and Ugo, in the Okubo area of Shinjuku, focused on themes around diversity. Though previously not an art area—Chim↑Pom was maybe the only group working there—Shinjuku has really emerged as an art hub during…

After two years, since the political unrest and then the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the quieted art world in Hong Kong steadily began to regain its former velocity. It has not been easy for artists and makers, as many of them are looking anxiously to the growing interventions and disruptions in their autonomy, both personal and social, caused by the pandemic and the imposition of an austere National Security Law. Artist Siu Wai Hang captured the perturbed spirit of the times, and hinted at the use of big bio-data for mass surveillance, through his installation Hot Shots (2021), a collage of headshots taken with a thermal gun—now a regular feature of our daily lives—showcased in the exhibition “Can’t Touch This!” (3/9–5/23) held at the nonprofit WMA Space. Many more…

The present intervenes in, penetrates, and (re)constructs memory. Its presence—textured, textual; bodily, incorporeal; fleeting, mortared, or excised—inscribes personal narratives and collective history whose lessons, we hope, inform the future. The anamnesis of Vietnam’s triumphant handling of the pandemic until May has been interposed by a reality inundated with undulating suspensions of certitude. Gone were the many months of the “not-so-new normal,” in which life preponderantly resumed after a 15-day nationwide lockdown in April 2020. Entered on stage were the Delta variant; the National Assembly elections in May; the general public’s habitual appetite for traveling on the national holiday that month—and Vietnam’s zero-Covid strategy was existentially challenged. In July, the country’s economic center, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), along with the southern provinces hit the hardest by the pandemic and its…

As the global events of 2020 barreled through the United Arab Emirates, state-mandated regulations and travel bans caused the UAE to shrink to their actual geographical scale in a way that I haven’t experienced here in the last decade. This was especially true for the local art community, which relies heavily on artists, collectors, and audiences based outside the country. Art spaces and government bodies went into troubleshooting mode, setting up temporary funds and relief plans for artists and galleries—which was great in theory but not always effective or entirely altruistic. In retrospect, the past two years have been about taking stock of how wide the chasm is between policymakers and art professionals. One of the most significant shifts has been the realization that the art community was in danger…

On the day when I began to reflect on 2021, news poured in: Kyle Rittenhouse, a then 17-year-old White teenager who openly carried a loaded semiautomatic rifle during civil unrest in Wisconsin, where he fatally shot two men and wounded a third in August 2020, was acquitted on all five charges. The theatrical trial had played out like a travesty that profoundly exposed the fault lines on all fronts of our society. Our current cultural landscape seems to operate in parallel to the Rittenhouse narrative: it is unfair, divisive, and chaotic. Whenever economic disparity increases exponentially, the art business booms. As homelessness, inflation, environmental damage, deteriorating infrastructure, and public-safety crises are growing out of control, Los Angeles is at the forefront of art prosperity, propelled by a great moment of…

APR 1 MAY 9 Artistic directors Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala assembled works by 69 artists from 40 countries under the theme of “Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning” to follow different ideas of intelligence and consciousness into realms of spirituality, theories of technology, and ecology with an emphasis on heterodox and communal systems of knowledge. This was rooted in the exhibition through displays of Korean shamanic ritual objects alongside works such as Sangdon Kim’s The Gate of Hell (2021), an installation of banners bearing motifs from Jindoisland funeral processions placed in shopping carts and mixed with consumer items. Alternative communities and networks of resistance were evoked by Kang Seung Lee’s installation Untitled (QueerArch) (2020), which displays materials related to queer figures, such as pages of a transgender woman’s diary, from the…

DEC 11 MAR 11, 2022 The first edition of the Diriyah Biennale, curated by Philip Tinari, director and chief executive of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in China, took place in the industrial Jax district of Diriyah, outside of Riyadh. Titled “Feeling the Stones,” after a slogan about careful reforms popularized in the 1980s by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, the Biennale featured more than 60 artists in six sections on subjects including memory and preservation, cultural transmission, social engagement, the Anthropocene, and the spiritual. Looking at the cultural connections between Chinese and Islamic cultures, Han Mengyun’s installation of paintings echoing miniature painting, curving metal arches, and mirrored panels, The Pavilion of Three Mirrors (2021), was based on a fictional story about Alexander the Great arguing with a Chinese emperor about…

On November 2, Sydney-based artist Thea-Mai Baumann found herself blocked from the Instagram account she had used for nine years, @metaverse. Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, had renamed itself Meta just five days prior as part of its plan to expand into the “metaverse” and had deemed hers an imposter account. Following a New York Times investigation, Instagram gave Baumann back her handle, but her temporary ejection raised concerns about the unchecked power of social-media companies given free reign over content on their platforms thanks to Section 230 of the United States’ Communications Decency Act. One has to wonder how the metaverse is actually conditioned for the diversity its proponents purport to value. Equity likewise surfaced as an issue plaguing the NFT marketplace, where, despite theories that all creators have a…

Kim Tschang-yeul 1929–2021 Kim Tschang-yeul is renowned for his paintings of water droplets, a motif that he pursued for five decades because it allowed him to dissolve “rage, anxiety, and fear.” Kim was recognized with numerous prestigious awards, and in 2016, a museum dedicated to his artworks opened on South Korea’s Jeju island. Arturo Luz 1926–2021 Along with neorealist paintings, Arturo Luz created sculptures for prominent locations in the Philippines. In 1960, he established Luz Gallery, and was the founding director of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila and the Design Center of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s. He was named a National Artist in 1997. Toko Shinoda 1913–2021 A trailblazing modernist, Toko Shinoda painted dynamic compositions marrying calligraphy and abstract expressionism. Though she was acclaimed during her eight-decade-long…

Along with the world’s gradual reopening in 2021, new institutions debuted and established spaces resumed operations. In Hong Kong, M+, the first international museum of modern and contemporary art and visual culture from Asia, opened to the public on November 12 in the West Kowloon Cultural District after more than a decade of debates, delays, and controversies. The Herzog and de Meuron-designed, 65,000-square-meter museum debuted with six opening exhibitions that featured more than 1,500 of the 8,000-plus items in its collections, and spanned modern and contemporary art, architecture, and design in Asia. The museum infrastructure continues to expand apace in mainland China. Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art opened its third outpost, UCCA Edge, in a Shanghai high-rise commercial tower near People’s Square on May 22, expanding the museum’s scope…

For as long as she has been an artist, Yee I-Lann has been a social and environmental activist attuned to community dynamics. In the cacophonous lead-up to Malaysia’s 2018 general elections, she found herself unable to think clearly, and decided to return from Kuala Lumpur to her birthplace, Kota Kinabalu. Emerging from a desire for meaningful connection, the tikar (mats) that she has since been co-creating with Bajau Laut and Dusun/Murut artists gained traction in 2021, offering models of togetherness and hope to viewers who find themselves isolated and unmoored by the hullabaloo of the pandemic. At the Sabah International Convention Centre, Yee displayed several tikar made with her collaborators, in “Borneo Heart” (5/2–30). Tanahairku #002 (2020) and #003 (2021) bear the words “Tanah & Air” (earth and water), and…

Using irony and humor, Bani Abidi takes aim at the self-seriousness of patriarchal tyrants and the flimsy pageantry of militaristic nationalism. In the newly created photo installation The Reassuring Hand Gestures of Big Men, Small Men, All Men (2021), Abidi catalogues the gestures and dispositions of various “masculinist” leaders who attempt to project power through their charisma and body language. The work was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in Abidi’s midcareer survey exhibition “The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared” (9/4–6/5/22), curated by Natasha Ginwala and Hoor Al Qasimi, who had also overseen Abidi’s 2019 surveys at the Gropius Bau in Berlin and the Sharjah Art Foundation, respectively. In the same Chicago exhibition, Abidi expanded her ongoing series of watercolor portraits The Man Who Talked Until He…

Unlike much of the world, Auckland welcomed 2021 with New Year’s Eve celebrations in the thousands, and many traveled across the country or retreated to beach-front locations. There was a celebratory air, like we had come out the other side of a pandemic with very slight scratches while it continued to ravage the rest of the world. Our pandemic experience was a distortion of what others knew. With our place in a vast ocean being our protection from the rest of the world, New Zealand artists and curators forwent the usual international travels, and instead turned inward to what had always been here while we were busy looking outward. A timely and important exhibition that reminded us of the value of Māori art in New Zealand was the much-anticipated “Toi…

Koreans of all ages and backgrounds had art on their mind in 2021, when the entire country became fixated on the prodigious art collection amassed by late Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee, who passed away in late 2020. As Korea’s wealthiest man, Lee left behind a reported net worth of USD 21 billion, and with it an inheritance tax bill of more than USD 10 billion. In a bid to avoid losing control of Samsung (which in 2020 accounted for some 20 percent of the country’s GDP) and to partially offset their onerous tax burden, Lee’s heirs donated more than 23,000 artworks, artifacts, and rare books from his collection—at an appraised value of USD 2.2 billion—to the state. Highlights from the Lee Kun-hee collection went on view in a special…

After trundling along listlessly for months in 2020, battered from the effects of a Covid-19 circuit breaker, a faltering economy, and the recent loss of a number of institutions and spaces, the Year of the Ox started off with a bang for Singapore’s otherwise enervated visual arts community. The ninth edition of the annual Singapore Art Week (1/22–30), coinciding with the initiation of a nation-wide vaccination program, featured a deluge of exhibitions and events. Highlights included “Singapore Ceramics Now” (1/20–2/13), curated by artist Jason Lim, a show that inflected the titular medium with sound, installation, and performativity; “ON/OFF/SCREEN” (1/21–2/18) by the Moving Picture Experiment Group (MPEG) at DECK, which expanded the possibilities of the moving image; and “Baroque Archipelago” (1/22–3/7) at Mizuma Gallery, where curator Tan Siuli juxtaposed the syntaxes…

There are organizational “nuts-and-bolts” questions, and there are artistic ones. Let’s start with the practicalities of functioning in 2021. Unlike their Dutch and German neighbors, Belgian museums kept their doors open the whole year, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), where I work. We had to deal day-to-day with the pandemic, though a lot of scenario planning the year previous went into making a safe environment to activate programs again. It felt good, as well as symbolic, that visitors trusted museums, and museum-going lends itself to social distancing. Conferring with our peers in Asia, my colleagues and I at M HKA asked, for instance, how the National Gallery of Singapore designed its new signage and what measures the Mori Art Museum had taken leading up to its…

The pandemic sent every biennial into crisis, whether with scheduling, funding, participant travel, logistics, or public health guidelines. At the same time, every biennial seems to be increasingly focused on the many crises of our world, from the environmental to the civilizational. The 13th Gwangju Biennale, for instance, postponed from 2020, foreshadowed this with artistic directors Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala’s interests in collapsing hierarchies of knowledge and belief. Then, in Shanghai, Venice, Seoul, Taichung, as well as Oceania and Papua by way of Yogyakarta, mega-exhibitions tackled forms of environmental degradation alongside serious cultural rifts. From crisis to contingencies, new modes of working and collaboration are emerging. Looking ahead to 2022, many are curious how the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa will transform Documenta, the quinquiennial festival that is arguably the most-watched…

Asian Futurism is perennially relevant in a region where, for better and for worse, much of the world’s digital infrastructure is assembled and advances in technology are racing ahead. Naming the 8th Asian Art Biennial “Phantasmapolis,” a neologism combining the Greek words phantasma (phantom) and polis (city-state), Nobuo Takamori and his curatorial team, consisting of Ho Yu-Kuan, Tessa Maria Guazon, Anushka Rajendran, and Thanavi Chotpradit, looked at ideas of science fiction through the practices of 38 artists and groups. Part of the exhibition examined past ideas of the future, starting with Fifth Moon Group painter Liu Kuo-sung whose paintings mixing Chinese ink techniques and hard-edge abstraction from the late 1960s were inspired by the first moon landing. Elsewhere, Shu Lea Chang explores connections between queer culture and science fiction in…

In his remarkable book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), Amitav Ghosh roots anthropogenic climate change in colonial conceptions of nature, wherein the organic world is sterilized as an inanimate resource, to be taken and controlled. This view extends into imperial formulations of history, which often overlook the agency of animals, insects, plants, and landscapes as creators of fates. As an example, Ghosh cites Dutch “Golden Age” still lifes, which depict the spoils of the empire’s trade while seldom acknowledging what made this booming economy possible: nutmeg extracted from the Banda Islands, as well as other spices from the East Indies. In contrast, fokorndan, the word for history used on the Banda Islands, is etymologically tied with fokor (mountain), and reflects how the islands’ Gunung Api…