Innehållsförteckning för 129 (Jul/Aug 2022) från ArtAsiaPacific

When I fled Shanghai on May 13, the city’s most brutal lockdown to date was in full effect. Beginning on April 1st—although, for many, the closure of their residential compounds began in early March—the two sides of the Huangpu River, Puxi and Pudong, became virtually inaccessible to one another. Public transport had been halted, and nearly every intersection fenced and patrolled by police. Getting to the airport was far from certain, flying out less so. The airport had become a tent city of refugees who had made it so far only to have their flights canceled. Daily testing had become the norm, as had the inability to order food or seek medical attention, as everything shuttered. The urgency was not evenly felt—wealthier districts received regular food parcels and support while…

Art fairs in Asia are powering through the late arrival of Omicron across the region, with Art Busan and Art Basel Hong Kong seeing decent results at their third in-person events since the pandemic’s outbreak, and Taipei Dangdai’s first physical, pandemic iteration drawing in crowds and overseas gallerists amid record-high cases in the city. BUSAN Featuring 133 galleries from 21 countries, the 2022 edition of Korea’s second largest fair, Art Busan (5/12–15), brought more than 102,000 visitors to the Busan Exhibition and Convention Center. Sales totaled USD 59 million, making it a record-breaking year, propelled mostly by young collectors. Utilizing tested tactics, international galleries presented lesser-known pieces by bigname Western modernists. Reportedly the most expensive work at the fair, Pablo Picasso’s Tete d‘homme et nu assis (1964), depicting a face…

Artmaking is an arduous individual pursuit, one requiring countless hours of unfaltering persistence and patience from artists as they work toward an indeterminate goal: namely, realizing a singular artwork that shatters their perceptions and reshapes their creative outlook anew. In the brief history of Korean modern art since the Korean War, the most significant breakthrough of this sort materialized in 1974, when Ha Chong-Hyun fundamentally changed the rules of painting with Work 74-A (1974). Rather than applying paint directly onto a flat surface, Ha extruded paint through small fissures in the picture plane, deploying an inside-out methodology that gave the appearance of paint emerging from somewhere within the canvas itself. This inversion of painting’s directionality was the key inflection point of Ha’s career, operating as a cipher for the diverse…

As a sculptor, Tap Chan has come into her own with works that blur categorical distinctions between the artificial and natural, sleeping and waking, and virtual and real. Mine Project’s presentation of Chan’s recent works in the Discoveries sector at Art Basel Hong Kong allowed visitors to experience the artist’s “postreality” worldview. The sculpture Duplicity (all works 2022), which pairs an artificial plant and a living one, is a reflection of our rather pathetic inability to distinguish between the two, and the ways we’ve made even living things essentially artificial through their dislocation and material environs. In that sculpture, Chan constrains the pair of plants in metal pots with white barrier rails that she hand-molded from an “environmentally friendly”—whatever that means—thermal plastic used in 3D printing. The conscious confusion of…

“Happy Spring,” the latest retrospective of Japanese artist collective Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group (formerly known as Chim↑Pom), brought together works from the past 17 years. Organized by different themes, the works spanned a range of topics, including Tokyo’s urban development, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. As part of the show, the collective also hosted interactive spaces such as a daycare center, a museum shop, and an indoor asphaltpaved street with potholes, streetlights, and flyers. In general, Chim↑Pom’s works can be categorized as socially-oriented projects, events, interventions, and even parties, from which artifacts and videos are left to impart the seed of the moment. The sociopolitical themes they work through, however, seem to be venues through which they engage in their most facile medium and…

AWARDS The Asian Cultural Council awarded Cai Guo-Qiang the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award, worth USD 50,000, on May 11, honoring his outstanding artistic career and contribution to the international understanding of Asian art. On May 13, Sydney-based Blak Douglas won the AUD 100,000 (USD 68,800) Archibald Prize for Moby Dickens (2021), a portrait of First Nations artist Karla Dickens that spotlights the climate crisis and Aboriginal heritage. On May 26, Pakistani-American painter Shahzia Sikander received the JPY 3 million (USD 23,600) Fukuoka Arts and Culture Prize 2022, for her ability to “foster and increase awareness of the value of Asian cultures.” The Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul named Jeamin Cha the 2022 Art Spectrum Award winner for her essay-film Nameless Syndrome and videoperformance Maneuver in Place (both 2022).…

Florence Lam HONG KONG For 16 hours over the course of two days, Florence Lam crept along the floor under dim lights. She carried a car’s passenger seat on her back, and mimicking ancient cavemen, she carved and doodled on the fragments of broken vehicles that surrounded her. Part of the exhibition “Post-Human Narratives” at Hong Kong’s Cattle Depot Artist Village, her performance Heaven Spot (2021) imagines a postapocalyptic future where the industrial remains become the historical materials of future generations. Exhausted and emptied of thought during this long performance, Lam felt that she had merged with the mechanical parts. This direct confrontation with objects began with her study of sculpture at the University of the Arts London. After she graduated, she started reconsidering the transitory features of art and…

“Tuloy-tuloy lang”—“keep on going”—shared the 72-year-old Nunelucio Alvarado when I asked about his reflections on a career of art-making. This was also the theme of our virtual interaction, as we faced the challenges brought about by the pandemic and the underdeveloped infrastructure in the Philippines. Zoom is typically the solution to overcome distance and the limitations of in-person gatherings—but with limited internet connectivity in the province of Negros Occidental, where Alvarado lives, it is not as easy. Our conversation also involved Candy Nagrampa from the art gallery Orange Project in Bacolod City; Alvarado’s nephew Yqfryd Alvarado, who took care of the technical set-up; and his spouse, Sally Alvarado. The collaborative effort seemed fitting though, as Alvarado’s works through the decades often involved the communities that he lives in and the…

Before films animated silver screens and novels were churned out of printing presses, stories could be preserved and distributed in tapestries. Action-packed scenes unfold in Jennifer Tee’s striking Tampan Tulip (2014–) collages, which draw from the tampan, or ship cloths, of southern Sumatra’s Lampung region. Several symbols reappear throughout the series, including a symmetrical ship with a high prow and stern pictured with angular lines. In Tampan World Mountain, Tree of Life (2021), a column of tessellated, diamantine forms soars skyward from the vessel like an arboreal mast, another recurring motif. A human figure reaches for a trunk while two others are tethered via intricate, cascading branches. Swimming under the jagged waves that lap at the bilge are octopuses and fish. As with ceremonial tampan, in Tee’s work, multiple stories…

“Does vulnerability constitute a fundamental state of human existence, and of the world we live in?” asked curator Erin Li in the group exhibition “emo gym” at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Emphasizing responses toward delicate times, it staged the works of seven Hong Kong artists on a softly lit floor and a hidden staircase. Created in collaboration with dancer Leung Tin Chak, Yim Sui Fong’s Against Step (2019) addresses digital anxiety. A projected video sees Leung jolting and convulsing so as to elude gait recognition, a technology that tracks individuals via their habitual motions—as surveillance invades public space, the human subject is driven to a frantic dance. This act of resistance opposes a control station made up of eight CRT TVs, displaying footage that parses the quirks and fidgets of pedestrians,…

For “Nebel Leben,” her first retrospective outside Japan, Fujiko Nakaya transformed Haus der Kunst’s colossal east-wing exhibition hall into a misty pond-space with a semi-levitating floor. Every half hour, a fog bloomed. Thick and surprisingly opaque, it hovered, migrated, and wrapped visitors into a puffy togetherness while offering each body a personal cocoon. There was a hushed giddiness as we took in the fugitive experience. When the haze floated off, we seemed to wake from a dream. The skylit surroundings appeared refreshed, even as the fog’s dissipation may have left us wondering, ruefully, whether visibility is overrated. The centerpiece of an exhibition that convened around 50 varied works, Munich Fog (Wave) #10865/I (2022) hissed forth from impressive irrigation. Beneath the wooden platform visitors walked on, a placid canal ran several…

The concept of change articulated through the philosophical arguments of the Persian-Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra Shirazi (c.1571–1640) has greatly shaped my life. He was a Muslim mystic who categorized changes in quantity, quality, place, and position as fundamental to the nature of substance. Sadra states: “In general, every material object, whether it is the material of the stars or the elements, whether soul or body, constantly requires a new identity and its personality and its existence is never fixed.” His philosophy was particularly controversial for his ideas about substance, as, according to the doctrines of Islam, matter cannot change. On this point, Mulla Sadra disagreed with many revered Muslim thinkers and earlier philosophers like Aristotle who advocated that a substance always fundamentally remains the same and is inherently unchangeable. As…

“Are we nothing but postcolonial? As planetary destruction by human greed is upon us, the mindset change that is required must accommodate such questions and more.” Literary theorist and critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak began her keynote talk at Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF)’s March Meeting 2022 by issuing this challenge, before referring to the late Egyptian-French theorist Samir Amin’s call to “re-center ourselves to confront globalized neoliberalism, which is what turns nation-states into global capital managers while encouraging the nation-ization of identity in the name of anticolonialism.” Spivak then proposed: “We must look at classed-based collaboration. What was there before the colonies? Did all deployment of power relations start with the colonies?” She then quipped: “I speak from a country [India] with thousands of years of caste oppression—the colonies are the…

To ensure the survival of their species, the dominant male of a school of Tu’u’u-lumane, or the pink skunk clownfish, will change their sex to female. For Yuki Kihara, this phenomenon of the fish’s kinship system debunks the assumptions of heteronormativity in Charles Darwin’s 19th-century theory of evolution. Like the Tu’u’u-lumane native to the Pacific’s coral reefs, Samoans have long perceived and interacted with the world beyond heterosexual binaries, with four culturally recognized genders: fafine (woman), tane (man), fa‘afafine (in the manner of a woman), and fa‘afatama (in the manner of a man), each with a specific familial and communal role. Yet colonial powers, including New Zealand, which controlled the islands from 1914 to 1962, in their effort to shape the culture according to Christian-European values, implemented legislation that criminalizes…

Shezi Island, a sandbank at the crossing of two major rivers in northern Taipei, is a ghostly place. Since a devastating typhoon in 1963, new constructions have been prohibited there, with redevelopment plans constantly being shelved. Lost items, garbage, and nameless corpses frequently wash ashore, stranded, but preserved, recycled, and worshipped by local inhabitants. Chu Chun-Teng’s three-channel video installation Eel (2021), filmed during the Lantern Festival, illustrates the wandering state and routines sustained by residents. One screen is suspended from the ceiling and two are situated on the floor. The top video shows two men carrying a palanquin, which bears the island’s tutelary deity, across stores and factories. In a similarly ritualistic manner, seen on another screen, a woman drags a grocery cart with her through the various rural areas…

If anyone should turn humanity’s impending demise into a visual punchline, it should be the task of the artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset—collectively known as Elmgreen & Dragset—who opened one of their most ambitious solo exhibitions to date at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in March. “Useless Bodies?” took a probing and playful look at a wholly existential question: where do we physically fit in a world increasingly mediated through digital and virtual technology? To broach this, they have been given carte blanche over the foundation’s premises, allowing them to flex their well-established prowess in transforming architectural spaces, reconfiguring them into zones as vital to the show as the works themselves (aptly, the foundation’s building was once a distillery). In doing so, Elmgreen & Dragset focus on the…

The phrase “data-driven” can be applied in many different realms, from business strategies to Covid measures, cancer research, bicycle design, and even to the analysis of fans visiting a football stadium. In an era when information technology is considered a beacon for socioeconomic guidance, Hito Steyerl’s first major survey in Asia, “A Sea of Data,” landed in Seoul at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in a timely manner. Divided into five thematic sections, “A Sea of Data” displayed the diversity of the artist’s vision with 23 riveting works, from early videos produced in the 1990s to a recent commission exploring topics such as digital imagery, capitalism, and the recent pandemic. The first section, also titled “A Sea of Data,” after Steyerl’s 2016 essay, features six video…

The establishments and points of interest within a three-mile radius of painter Hanna Hur’s studio reflect the heterogeneity of Los Angeles: Michael Jackson’s famous “Thriller” video was shot in the vicinity; taco trucks and Mexican restaurants line the boulevards; there are some of the best galleries in Los Angeles, featuring gleaming new build-outs in old factory spaces; and the Los Angeles River and several freeway arteries wend their way above and below ground level. Everywhere are signs of the constantly evolving and sometimes slapdash development of the city. In contrast, Hur’s studio is deliberate and spare. Set within an old factory building, the studio is accessed by traversing a set of doorways situated next to a loading dock, going up several winding flights of stairs, and then passing through more…