Innehållsförteckning för 131 (Nov/Dec 2022) från ArtAsiaPacific

Thailand’s art scene is beginning to breathe again as the strangleholds of politics and pandemic ease. In 2020 and 2021, art suffocated under Covid-19 lockdowns and a crackdown on young pro-democracy protesters. The government’s harshest weapon was Article 112, Thailand’s draconian law against royal insults, which dispatched over 200 protesters to jail. Freedom of expression was effectively banned. After Thailand’s world-famous tourism destinations reopened in late 2021, artists found hope in May when Chadchart Sittipunt was elected Bangkok’s new governor with a vow to create one of the world’s top 50 livable cities. At his side was pro-democracy artist Prakit Kobkijwattana, bringing outdoor theater and music to get Bangkok buzzing again after lockdown. “We color our metropolis with art and culture by hosting various cultural events to boost the economy,…

For 2022, the Point asks writers to examine art-education models. Below, curator and researcher Naz Cuguoğlu reflects on her participation in the Whole Life Academy initiative. How can we use collaborative learning tactics as a speculative methodology to challenge the hierarchical structures of art institutions for an alternative world-building? I participated in Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)’s Whole Life Academy in 2019 with this question in mind. The project invited curators, researchers, and artists from around the world to explore the Archiv der Avantgarden in Dresden, a repository of Bauhaus objects, Fluxus artworks, and Russian avant-garde journals compiled by the collector Egidio Marzona and given to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in 2016. Visiting institutions and museums in town and delving deeper into the documents in the archive for a…

Despite being the largest non-Chinese population in Hong Kong, and the providers of many essential forms of labor, the city’s 200,000-plus Filipino residents are largely absent from its cultural ecosystem. Having landed in Hong Kong from the province of Bulacan at the cusp of adolescence, I grew up with an awareness of this invisibility. Entering the art world—one that is rich in discourses of migration but not in tangible, empathetic spaces for working-class migrants—only amplified this void. My navigation of this selectively inclusive environment, as with being a minority in any space, has thus been punctuated with periods of loneliness. Therein lies the significance of representation: the comfort of companionship, the relief of being seen. Of the thousands of works in the collections and opening exhibitions at Hong Kong’s M+,…

Hindu deities Vishnu and Lakshmi are painted lounging on the back of the multiheaded serpentine demigod Shesha. Behind them, a propagandistic logo of the ubiquitous, Indian-produced milk-and-wheat biscuit Parle-G overcasts the psychedelic scene. Contrary to the popular image of Lakshmi in perpetual service to Vishnu as his consort, Hong Kong artist Riya Chandiramani flips the script in Thank You Ji (2022): not only is Vishnu depicted as the same size as Lakshmi, he is also rendered with mortal skin while the goddess embodies his typical celestial blue complexion. Above all, Vishnu massages Lakshmi’s feet—returning the service she had always been shown providing—while she sips on a cup of tea and eats Parle-G. Inspired by her grandmothers who were born at a time when wives were expected to serve their husbands,…

A bizarre congregation of cartoonish fish characters perched atop the Central Pavilion’s roof greeted visitors. They hold surfboards, electric guitars, and ukuleles; two sharks appear to be chewing plush toys shaped like missiles. By the entryway, two black ceramic oysters sit on a swing, eyes staring from valves ajar, while a purple crab’s giant claws droop from a red cement mixer suspended from the ceiling. WHAT IF THEY BARK 01–07 (2022), Cosima von Bonin’s installation of anthropomorphic creatures, introduced the whimsical gist of Cecilia Alemani’s “The Milk of Dreams,” the 59th Venice Biennale’s main exhibition. Dedicated to exploring imagination as an agent of transformation, the show’s suggestive title is borrowed from a collection of short stories filled with quirky mutant characters by British Surrealist Leonora Carrington. Drawing from Carrington’s poetic…

“Behind Your Eyelid,” presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, was Pipilotti Rist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Comprising more than 45 works from the Swiss media artist’s three-decade-plus career, the show promised to be the hottest Instagram spot for the city’s summer, with the visual spectacle that one expects from a ticketed blockbuster exhibition. At the show seemingly curated for social media, one was immersed (and at times, drowned) in the colorful world of Rist, while also having access to some of her earlier experimental works. The exhibition started on the third floor with the Hong Kong version of the photogenic Pixel Forest (2016–22), an installation with hundreds of lights, each embedded in translucent resin casts reminiscent of what the artist describes as “frozen labias.” These forms were strung together…

There was a blaring and visible cognitive dissonance at work between the lines that contextualized “Carved Conversations,” a group exhibition that juxtaposed its 13th-century Seljuk architecture in the remote flatlands of inner Anatolia with the site-specific interventions of a thoroughly international, contemporary selection of artists chosen by the young American curator and artist SaraNoa Mark. Featuring seven conceptually disparate but spatially adjacent installations by artists from Turkey, the United States, and Cuba, the show centered the work of Mark herself. Within the immediate core of the Sultan Han caravanserai (a medieval roadside inn), with its white marble gleaming under the roofless facades of its Arabic calligraphy and Persian architecture, Mark adapted the spiritual heart of the building into a well-integrated series of engraved clay. Mark’s installation, Yazılıkaya (2022), which can…

If bad art is esoteric and ostentatious, “Death and Furniture” epitomized excellence. The exhibition, a five-oeuvre anthology of Ken Lum’s career, testified to the philosophical potency of everyday objects and popular culture. Allegorizing mortality with artifacts of lifestyle and leisure, Lum posed deft questions about social class construction, intersectional subjecthood, and temporal recursion throughout history. Lum’s text-based series Necrology (2017–) and Four French Deaths in Western Canada (2002) ushered visitors inward with quasi-historical obituaries. In Necrology, archival inks, predominantly in blacks and reds, impress text and decorative elements onto ivory-colored paper. Each line features a new serif font and ample typographic emphases. The Victorian ornamentalism, extreme typographic variation, and social realism reference the Industrial Revolution. The accounts, however, are anachronistic assemblages of fact and fiction pieced together by Lum. One…

Since mid-September, artists around the world have been staging protest-performances, joining rallies, and circulating open letters to support the growing Iranian movement calling for women’s rights and an end to the country’s theocratic regime. The mass protests, which spread to more than 80 cities in Iran even amid an internet blackout, were sparked by the death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini on September 16 after the morality police held her in detention for not wearing a hijab properly. In August, Iran’s hardline Islamist government passed a new “hijab and chastity” law ordering stricter enforcement of women’s dress in public and online. On September 25, Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi posted an Instagram video encouraging people “to stand in solidarity with the powerful and brave women and men of Iran by…

JAKARTA Following Art Jakarta Gardens, an outdoor edition of the regional fair held at the Hutan Kota by Plataran in April, Art Jakarta (August 26–28) returned in full swing at the Jakarta Convention Center. Featuring more than 60 local and international galleries, the fair attracted 32,000-plus visitors. “The energy was incredible,” said Gajah Gallery’s sales manager Joseph Kong. “Everyone was very positive and simply happy to witness the successful turn out of such a massive event.” He noted that most collectors were from Indonesia, but that there were familiar faces flying in from nearby regions. The gallery spotlighted Yunizar’s untitled 2022 painting at an undisclosed price, which features his signature style of illegible writings and doodles. Linda Gallery (Jakarta/Beijing/Singapore) featured 12 copper and brass sculptures by Nyoman Nuarta, on offer…

NOV 1–FEB 5, 2023 NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, TOKYO Shinro Ohtake Multidisciplinary artist Shinro Ohtake’s first major retrospective in 16 years will retrace his nearly half-centurylong career with around 500 works. Presented under seven themes, such as “Time,” “Memory,” and “Sound,” the exhibition will include early paintings from the 1980s and later work produced during the pandemic. Highlights include the Retina series (1988–), which explores how technology has changed painting by combining the medium with Polaroid film transfer, as well as the installation MON CHERI: A Self-Portrait as a Scrapped Shed (2012), an interactive cottage whose core is a giant scrapbook surrounded by audio-visual elements that respond to visitors’ movements. NOV 26–MAR 12, 2023 BUNDANON, SHOALHAVEN Siteworks 2022: “From a deep valley” The 2022 edition of Bundanon’s annual Siteworks…

In our public lives as much as in our private spaces, we are constantly negotiating who gets to see what of ourselves. Where and how are we allowed to be seen? How much of ourselves—physically, emotionally, or culturally—can or should we reveal? Who stops us from deciding for ourselves? And how are we shaped physically and psychically by our surroundings? All these questions—whether understood socio-politically or more specifically as feminist issues, or historically as topics in psychoanalysis, existentialist philosophy, or media theory—circulate in the semi-abstract, semi-figurative artworks that the London-based Radhika Khimji has been creating over the last two decades. They came flooding back in my mind as we were catching up on a video call in September. I started by asking about her most recent major endeavor: the multipart…

History as fiction, fiction as history—over the last five years, in his multimedia projects encompassing video installations, sculptures, and publications, Hong Kong-based artist Lee Kai Chung has been unraveling official narratives of the Second Sino-Japanese War to reveal their ideological inflections and omissions. But far from being simply analytical, Lee’s works present their own fictions. Beneath their often-torpid rhythms and multiple, fragmentated storylines, his videos capture moments such as the possible shoulder-grazes between passersby who may have unwittingly influenced one another’s fates, and the psychological tensions experienced by individuals during conflicts and in their aftermath. For example, in The Shadow Lands Yonder (2022), his most ambitious video to date, viewers are brought to ponder the cultural identities of the Japanese farmers who worked the lands of Manchuria for over a…

A Leaf Through History: Family Tree (2022) by Chang Yoong Chia comprises 28 batik paintings, mounted in four rows of seven. It seems to adapt the structural conventions of an altarpiece, showing “crucifixions” with a story of a Passion and transfiguration, but not of the Christ. Twenty-four of the panels depict human bodies emerging from tree trunks, arms growing into branches; the trees are rubber trees, and their sap is collected in cups by the male, female, androgyne, old, young bodies in different colored skins as they toil, suffer, cling together, bear new life. Death appears in different cultural representations. The Union Jack at the nexus, a loinclothed figure obscured between its stripes, ties this narrative of naked suffering to a history of colonial extractionism and migrant labor (rubber was…

Pushed back one year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 17th Istanbul Biennial was realized in an unprecedented time of disintegration for our accustomed communication, social, and economic systems. This significant breaking point between past and present models of living acts as the central axis of the Biennial, which seeks to develop a collective language of social healing, action, and resistance for the future. Instead of focusing on a single overarching theme, the curators Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar, and David Teh defined the Biennial’s process-based perspective as analogous to “composting,” enabling new concepts and definitions to grow, fertilize, and unfold beyond the event’s duration. Spread out across 12 locations around the Beyoğlu, Kadıköy, Fatih, and Zeytinburnu neighborhoods, the Biennial featured 55 projects with more than 500 contributors in myriad…

Walking, for the able-bodied, is a quotidian movement with symbolic connotations. A child’s first steps are an important milestone, pilgrimages are often done on foot, and walkouts are an expression of protest—acts that embody a sense of innate agency and vitality. “Walking the Crack,” curated by Fang-Wei Chang, was an exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum that explored the spatial possibilities of this movement. The title suggests a cautious, balancing act alluding to the precariousness of contemporary society. But cracks can also symbolize a breakthrough: a split without complete separation. Occupying the museum’s second floor, the exhibition brought together eclectic works from 28 international and Taiwanese artists. One of the show’s first pairings was of Lucio Fontana’s blue Concetto Spaziale (1961) and Shih-Chiang Yeh’s whimsical Hopscotch (2009), a black-ink painting…

Initiated by artist-curators Li Zhenhua and Thomas Eller, the group exhibition “Forming Communities: Berliner Wege” at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art brought together 18 Berlin-based artists, with a focus on the city’s East Asian diaspora. Opening in late August, two months after the sudden closure of one of the few local institutions dedicated to Asian art, Times Art Center Berlin, the show looked to be involuntarily prognostic of Berlin’s vibrant East Asian art scene and its possible future sites. Yet its concept and artist selection was curiously loose—a few of the artists were asked to invite others from their networks to participate. This was underscored by a curatorial text that only vaguely outlined the show’s premise of “similarities and differences in the artists’ individual life stories.” The divergence of…

As 2022 comes to a close, people in Asia are finally taking off their masks and slipping back into the global groove as far as Covid-19 is concerned. Since March, Southeast Asia has drawn the roadmap for most of its East Asian neighbors to escape Covid armageddon, and Art Jakarta was the main beneficiary in late August. Collectors and curators from afar flew in for the real-life event—so many of them, in fact, that fair director Tom Tandio organized 20 large buses to cart them around. Homegrown galleries such as Nadi and Lawangwangi reported selling multiple hangs many times over. And while the few regional galleries that did participate only issued a small handful of invoices, they did not complain. They were upbeat about the throngs of visitors—from Gen Zs…

Ali Eyal has been exploring the complex relationships among contemporary politics, personal history, and the ways in which catastrophes are remembered, especially in his hometown of Baghdad following the 2003 American-led invasion. In his distinctive, dense, and elusive constructions, typically in drawings, installations, and videos, Eyal contemplates the lasting impact of war trauma and examines the places where violence might dwell, from urban and rural landscapes to the unconscious. His practice raises questions about the challenges of representing the vast scale of the tragedies brought about by armed conflict—calamities that evade the frames within which one might wish to inscribe their multiple dimensions, and that often obscure other, more mundane, nuanced, and tender aspects of the survivors’ lives. Eyal recently participated in documenta fifteen as part of a reunion of…

Referencing director Chantal Akerman’s classic 1975 film about a woman’s unraveling life, Mika Rottenberg described her first feature-length film Remote (2022) as “Jeanne Dielman during a pandemic in the future.” True to this analogy, Rottenberg’s collaboration with filmmaker Mahyad Tousi opens with the solitary routine of Unoaku, who starts her day in her brightly hued apartment with a handstand. At one point, Unoaku bangs a pot by the window, presumably to cheer on health workers. To relax at night, she puts on a visor and tunes into the livestream of Eunji the dog groomer. But then she notices that the clock behind Eunji is moving backwards. She points this out to other viewers on the second evening. They respond with comments like, “What you drinking, hun?” On day three, she…

For his solo exhibition “Unknown Affinities,” Dane Mitchell transformed Two Rooms in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau into what resembled a liminal museum, with a hopscotch of uneven plinths and 107 meticulously exacted sculptural museum mounts for every bird known to be extinct in Aotearoa New Zealand. Most grandiose were the mounts for two moa—North Island giant moa, Dinornis novazealandiae and South Island giant moa, Dinornis robustus (both 2022)—which evokes the flightless birds’ long, curving necks and animated statures with blackened metal rods that swoop through the air like unfinished sketches. By all accounts, the moa thrived before the introduction of predators and hunters. Their extinction is lamented as a tragic outcome of human arrival in Aotearoa around the 13th century, before endangered species were monitored and bred for preservation. Boundless museums…

Moving through life, what do you take with you and what do you leave behind? Do Ho Suh asks this question in his eponymous show at Lehmann Maupin New York. Centering on new works, this presentation explored memorialization on multiple levels: political, historical, and personal. The exhibition opened with Inverted Monument (2022), a red pedestal crafted out of plastic fibers. Inside its porous surface, a man is encased with his head skimming the ground. Part of Suh’s project with a robotics team at the Centre for Print Research in Bristol, the sculpture is based on a machine-rendered image. The figure within, a man who appears to have three legs and multiple protruding arms, is a composite of 3D scans of actual monuments. The result is an “ideal” subject of commemoration,…