Innehållsförteckning för 127 (Mar/Apr 2022) från ArtAsiaPacific

When non-residents imagine the culture of Brunei Darussalam, they most likely picture serene mosques, the stilt houses of water villages, and eating family meals on a woven bamboo mat. Conversely, those who call Brunei home feel in their bodies the complex nuances that make up the country’s culture. This is important to consider when discussing the art scene within the heart of Borneo—though thriving, the artists here face the conundrum of being overlooked. In the past five to ten years, the contemporary Bruneian art scene has mushroomed, thanks in large part to the country’s high internet penetration. Yet, while this virtual melting pot of cultures continues to inspire artists and make global opportunities accessible, there are little government initiatives to support this growth. This is due to Brunei’s economic history…

After social-media posts by women claiming to be sexual-assault victims of Sakuliu Pavavaljung began to circulate online in mid-December 2021, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) decided to cancel the artist’s solo showcase at Taiwan’s collateral pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. In a January 12 statement, TFAM, which has organized Taiwan’s participation in the Biennale since 1995, cited the international attention that the allegations have attracted as well as the need to “protect Taiwan’s diplomatic image and reputation” and “avoid distraction from the Taiwan Pavilion’s artistic performance” as reasons for terminating the commission. The decision was reached by an advisory committee comprising individuals who had nominated the artist, experts in gender equality, lawyers, and representatives of the museum. Pavavaljung was the first Indigenous Paiwanese artist selected to represent Taiwan…

Atsuko Mochida TOKYO/IIDA Two houses collided. One was sliced open and detached from its foundation, lodged into the living room of the neighboring structure. Titled Collision (or Rupture) (2021), this installation by Atsuko Mochida was shown at the 2021 Northern Alps Art Festival. The scene evokes tensions and conflicts between neighbors, while recalling the earthquakes that have shaken the work’s site in the Hida Mountains, an area known for its frequent tectonic movements. In Mochida’s works, houses are not meant to last, but expand, transform, and interact with other entities, resonating with the principles of Metabolism, the post-war Japanese architectural movement. Her most well-known project, The Revolving House of T. (2017), utilizes an abandoned abode owned by her grandparents in the Ibaraki prefecture. The couple first moved in after their…

See our website for the Chinese version of this article. “It felt like home,” Sin Wai Kin said effusively when asked about their monthlong trip to Hong Kong in November 2021. Born to a Hong Kong Chinese father and a White British mother, Sin grew up in Toronto and is now based in London. They have been to Hong Kong on several occasions, with their father as a child and later on as an artist, but never stopping for more than a week. This time, it was to launch their most ambitious solo exhibition to date, which also happened to be their first solo presentation in Asia, at Blindspot Gallery. Sin’s survey spanned works from 2016, when they finished their graduate degree at London’s Royal College of Art, to 2021,…

On the innermost wall in the dim basement of New Delhi’s Talwar Gallery, an image flickered to life. A red-robed woman, visage indiscernible, began moving slowly to a mournful thrum, the torpid choreography seemingly prolonging time. A lion, blackgarbed dancers, minuscule men with suitcases, and a body floating on water eventually appeared on the same screen in staccato, animated sequences. Abstruse yet mesmerizing, the video Life is fluid (2021) has the air of a séance, with phantom characters being “summoned” in the dark, inviting immersion rather than interpretation. This occult quality permeated Kartik Sood’s solo exhibition “In Thin Air.” Featuring works from the past two years, the show drew on the romantic idiom. Romanticism emerged in the 18th-century to counter the then growing rationalization and regimentation of life and society…

Etel Adnan, the late Lebanese-American poet, writer, and painter, started a chapter of her short-story collection Master of the Eclipse (2009) with the following question: “Why is it that when one has more past than future, life’s earliest memories acquire a frightful acuity? More and more I realize that my childhood and early adolescence surge in front of me too often, as if they have become a person—a different person each time—who stops me in the street, begs for something I don’t understand, and then disappears not behind some corner but into fog, oblivion.” In this short chapter, titled “First Passion,” readers are privy to a rare glimpse of her life growing up in 1930s. It’s also the story of her first love—or as Adnan calls it, “somewhere between friendship…

In July of 2021, the Chinese central government enacted new regulations, ostensibly designed to reduce the burden of the nation’s young students. The crackdown, known as the Double Reduction Policy, took aim at extracurricular tutoring businesses whose rising popularity in the competitive Chinese educational landscape saw scores of children locked into intensive and isolating educational commitments for up to seven days a week. With the introduction of the regulations, the employment of international teachers within China became increasingly scrutinized, and foreign educators in the digital space were outlawed in a single line of legislative text. As the pandemic continues, understandings of experiences outside of one’s own community remain as vital as ever, but are becoming increasingly inaccessible due to restricted movement, and are only foreclosed more firmly by global educational…

“How can I make art when all the world is a conceptual artwork? What do you do then?” Simon Fujiwara is known for his complex and multilayered works spanning everything from the rebranding of a woman whose career was destroyed after her private photos were circulated in her workplace, to the origins of commercial culture via the last queen of France. His most recent project is a cartoon bear named Who, with an appetite for images and a quest for identity. Who is an extrapolation from an approach that runs throughout the artist’s body of work. An inveterate storyteller, Fujiwara exposes and unpicks issues of identity through near forensic investigations into images including literal likenesses, public personae, ideology, and myth. The British-Japanese artist’s childhood was spent in St Ives, in…

“At first, we were spies; then, we became explorers; finally, we evolved into underground workers.” - Cao Fei, “Hongxia”1 “Even [a] long life comes to an end.” - Mao’s response to a Red Guard’s prayer that he live forever “At the very time when [humans] appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battles cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language.” - Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851–52) As an object of analysis, China is a moving target. Its economic rise and social transformation keep producing outcomes that make…

Deep time is a salient theme in “The Eternal Return of the Same,” Manal AlDowayan’s first solo exhibition at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in Dubai. Fixated with the cycles of nature that run like clockwork, and the births and deaths that occur in-between, the Saudi artist looks at the pleasant surprises and wicked violence wrought by the relentless passage of time; the luminous aggression of daylight followed by the velvety relief of nightfall; the Earth’s monotonous rotation on its axis; the rain and the drought. AlDowayan also attempts to capture social shifts, specifically those in her home country, which have been occurring at an accelerating rate. The transience and dissonance of life (beyond piled-up exhibition proposals and grant applications) incubates a great deal of the artist’s ideas. It is…

“Lumen,” Sutapa Biswas’s first solo show in 14 years, began with Kali. The goddess loomed over viewers at the entrance of Kettle’s Yard in the mixedmedia work Housewives with Steak-Knives (1983–85), holding a machete and wearing the severed heads of men strung on a necklace. At first glance, the image could be understood as the beginning of a bitter rage that permeated the whole show. Yet Kali’s anger also enfolds resistance and protection—after all, her mythological purpose is to defend the innocent by destroying evil. In Housewives, her slain nemeses include the British Raj and Adolf Hitler, who stand in for authoritarians and colonialism. With a name translating to “black goddess,” Kali’s defiance radiates against the whiteness that surrounds her, a space that recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951). A…

Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme have created an exceptional and unabashed statement on what it means to give mediated presence to a people whose existence is the target of eradicative forces. Going far beyond addressing flaws in representation, their exhibition “If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust” served as a powerful vehicle toward radical visibility, starting with its form. Placed deep within the Art Institute of Chicago’s architecture collections, the show encompassed a single darkened gallery, separated by a temporary wall that concealed its visual climax. This barrier did nothing to hold back the deep auditory experience that emanated throughout the gallery, pulling the viewer forward in a metaphorical fulfilment of the show’s title. A collection of 14 prints and vinyl texts slowly emerged…

We thought we had seen the worst of Covid-19. But in 2022, the shocks of the pandemic are still bringing us down. What is most disturbing is how quickly new normals are absorbed into our lives, including our emotional state of shock. Perhaps this is a survival strategy: telling ourselves that we are okay. In 2019, I was in South Korea setting up an exhibition. Prior to the trip, I had anticipated that my task would be more than that—I had to stay calm when my Hong Kong hometown was falling apart. What I hadn't imagined was the severity of the situation. For three days, like most people at home, I didn’t sleep much. In bed, through the small window of the internet, I saw a brutal reality that seemed…

Surreal is an apt description of recent years, as the pandemic has upended lives in ways both tragic and absurd, fueled a surge in virtual-reality technologies, and rendered the familiar world unrecognizable. For Cecelia Alemani, artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, the worlds imagined through surrealist art and literature reach not only back to events of one century ago when the global disruptions of World War I tore through societies and landscapes with an unprecedented ferocity, but also touch on the present-day crises that are channeled into contemporary culture’s fascination with posthuman identities and a postanthropocentric planet. Tapping into those historical lineages and contemporary themes, Alemani’s central exhibition is titled “The Milk of Dreams” and will feature 213 artists from 58 countries—a majority of whom, for the first time…

Conversing with Kidlat Tahimik was as surreal as watching his movies. His narratives unfold in different layers, steadily unraveling stories and perspectives, giving insight into his practice and the world he examines. He described his film practice and aversion to scripts, shared his life story and how his experiences translated into his works, offered his perspective of taking time and letting things ferment like tapuy [rice wine], and put forward Indigenous beliefs as a key to understanding our culture and attaining happiness. “I think of myself mainly as a storyteller; it’s what I tell people. Forget any awards you attach to Kidlat Tahimik, that I got a National Artist Award in Cinema. Yun nakakahon yun [Those things are boxed away]. I feel for the last two and a half decades…

Spread across Ota Fine Arts Singapore for Guo-Liang Tan’s solo exhibition “Soft Turnings” were five H-shaped wooden stands, each holding up a painting executed on translucent fabric. Gradient stains in soft shades of magenta, teal, cobalt, gold, and pink, as well as voids of color created by Tan, are suspended on both sides of the diaphanous material—an aeronautical textile favored by hobbyist makers of model planes or boats—and are viewable from myriad angles. This dual-sided approach marks a development in Tan’s engagement with painting, throughout which he has distilled the characteristics of his chosen medium, pushing the possibilities of its materiality to encourage new perspectives on painted images in three-dimensional space. As witnessed in recent works, Tan experimented for years with the aeronautical fabric’s water-resistant properties, which allow pigments to…

“Human” has the same etymological root as humus, the Latin word for “earth.” Since the dawn of existence, our relationship with soil has formed the basis of our cultures and civilizations, and opened up understandings of the interconnectedness of all life. However, ecological loss owing to an anthropocentric treatment of Earth has severed our connection with the natural environment. Candeğer Furtun’s retrospective at Arter, which brings together ceramic works by the artist produced in the last 60 years, is a reflection of the fascination with the potential of soil, for its ability to inform human nature on a collective and individual level. Central to Furtun’s practice is an ongoing experimentation with clay, her primary material. Upon entering the gallery, visitors first encountered four works, created in 1980 and 1988, that…

For six weeks beginning in October 2021, the Prison Yard at Hong Kong’s heritage and arts complex Tai Kwun was busier than usual. Among visitors indulging in a cool courtyard respite were the living components of Tino Sehgal’s human sculpture, These Associations (2012). Indiscernible from the common stranger at a glance, two dozen or so “interpreters”—individuals trained by Sehgal and his team specifically to activate his work—would sing, dance, and play among unsuspecting visitors continuously throughout the day. Interpolated between collective activities of walking, running, shuffling, dancing, and vocal harmonizing were moments of intimacy where interpreters would individually approach a visitor to share a personal story, which sometimes led to a deeper conversation, or even an embrace, and was often punctuated by an abrupt exit. Concurrently, upstairs on the third…