Innehållsförteckning för 132 (Mar/Apr 2023) från ArtAsiaPacific

The construction of Charoen Krung Road left a significant footprint in Bangkok’s forward march toward modernization. Completed in 1864, it mirrored the flow of the Chao Phraya River, shifting the infrastructure of the city away from an elaborate lattice of canals traversed by boat and hardening into the backbone of the frenetic network of modern roads that comprises contemporary Bangkok. For the second iteration of the triennial festival of video and performance art, Ghost 2565, “Live Without Dead Time,” navigating the fast-paced corridor that cuts through Bangkok’s Chinatown was essential to access the show’s two premier historic exhibition sites, each salvaged from the cutthroat development happening in surrounding areas. As the name suggests, Ghost, initiated by artist Korakrit Arunanondchai and gallerist Akapol Op Sudasna in 2018, is concerned with specters.…

In late 2022, for the first time since the pandemic began, I was able to fly the 15 hours from the United States to Hong Kong with my mother to visit our family. We had been planning the reunion with my relatives for more than one year. Still, I could not have anticipated how emotional I would feel to be able to travel again to a place that had always felt like a cultural home. Just three months earlier, artist Jes Fan was making a similar journey from New York to reunite with his immediate family, whom he hadn’t seen in three years. He landed the day after the government ended Hong Kong’s quarantine measures. “I arrived with a full plane of babies,” he remembered, alluding to the many parents…

A gray bush chat perched on a tree branch quietly gazes at its surrounding in a stern manner. Where did it come from? Where will it go? We ask these questions when we encounter a bird, but as it flutters its wings and flies away without hesitation, we are left to question ourselves: Why are we here? Where should we go next? This is the ethos captured in Lo Lai Lai Natalie’s double-channel video, A Messenger – Passerby in Our Battlefields (2022–23), produced at a time when the people of Hong Kong are split between the decision to leave or to stay, amid a new emigration wave. The video visually leads us into the mountains of the New Territories visually, with closeups on the greenery, and audibly, by blending ambient…

After Taiwan’s severance of diplomatic ties with the United States in 1979, the 1980s was a transformative and liberating time for the island-nation, defining Taiwan’s sense of—and search for—identity. As martial law lifted in 1987 after 38 years, the economic boom with a rising middle class informed a new era of cultural development. Leaning into this history, “The Wild Eighties: Dawn of a Transdisciplinary Taiwan” at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) was a large-scale exhibition that contextualized the emergence of the country’s avant-garde in art, literature, cinema, music, and theater. Curated by TFAM’s director Jun-Jieh Wang and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts’ director Chien-Hung Huang, the exhibition sought to visualize its extensive research of tracing notable, concurring events and experiments across social sectors in Taiwan through an archival approach,…

The third edition of the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) carried a sense of progressive evolution from the expo quality of the first edition, a brash showcase of different practices seemingly without a unifying intention. BAB 2022 displayed a more finessed relationship between the large varieties of artworks, with their placement in sometimes unconventional spaces appearing relatively considered and the selection of art particularly compelling. Three more editions have been promised, as artistic director Apinan Poshyananda has secured the requisite support, so one can be reasonably hopeful that BAB will continue to evolve. This conjunction in BAB 2022’s title, “Chaos: Calm,” was intended less to invoke a post-Covid world of relative peace than to point to how the former can provoke the latter, and how an awareness of continuing world fragility…

The appearance of a spirit can mean many things. It could be an ancestor or a deity, a reminder of the unresolved or a lingering old wound. Princess Bari (2022), a colorful robe that opened Zadie Xa’s exhibit “House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness” at Whitechapel Gallery, represents all of the above. Originally a guide for spirits entering the underworld in Korean mythology, Xa’s iteration seeks instead to shepherd us through a ghostly in-between that drew together everything from folklore to speculative fiction in an interrogation of identity and the legacies of colonialism. When settler-colonialists first arrived in the New World, they seized land on the basis that it was terra nullius—“nobody’s land.” For this logic to work, the people and ecologies that lived on it had…

When you see Turkish artist İnci Eviner’s work, it is hard to imagine what her studio might look like. Her recent solo exhibition “Houris and Travelers” at Dirimart gallery in Istanbul in November 2022 highlighted the range of her artistic practice. In the main gallery space, a ten-meter-wide projection of the video work Reenactment of Heaven (2018) was accompanied by ceramic human-animal figures lined up in row, some splashed with black ink, of Eviner’s latest series, Travelers (2022). Fervent with motion, the four-minute-loop of Reenactment—horizontally divided, with the top third depicting women dancing on an Istanbul rooftop and the bottom portion showing disjointed figures performing repetitive actions amid inky brushstrokes—contrasted with the inanimate ivory ceramic sculptures of Travelers. Tucked away in the quaint neighborhood of Hasköy is Eviner’s studio. I…

The first month of 2023 belonged to Singapore, which kick-started the year with the launch of the new Art SG fair, the return of S.E.A. Focus, as well as the ongoing Singapore Biennale across the island-state. Other locations across Asia, such as Hong Kong, are warming up for citywide art events, as borders reopen and regional travel resumes. SINGAPORE Four years after the abrupt cancellation of Art Stage, Singapore’s then-largest art fair, in 2019, the inaugural Art SG (January 12–15) welcomed over 42,700 collectors and art enthusiastic to the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, where 164 leading galleries from 35 countries and territories occupied two floors. Regional- and Singapore-based galleries were excited about sales and new contacts at Art SG. Gajah Gallery (Singapore/Jakarta/Yogyakarta)’s sales manager Joseph Kong expressed…

APR 7–JUL 9 MULTIPLE LOCATIONS, GWANGJU 14th Gwangju Biennale soft and weak like water Buoyed by the Taoist principle of harmony amid contradiction, the 14th Gwangju Biennale proposes the transformative-restorative potential of water as a metaphor for alternative modes of power and change. Artistic interventions by nearly 80 local and international artists address four subtopics: the spirit of Gwangju; the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity; migration and diaspora; and environmental justice. Among the participating artists are First Nations filmmaker Sky Hopinka, Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist Buhlebezwe Siwani, and the late South Korean painter Oh Yoon. The Biennale is centered around the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall, with neighboring art institutions hosting site-specific works. MAR 24–JUL 9 GROPIUS BAU, BERLIN Daniel Boyd Rainbow Serpent (Version) Named after a deity from Australian Aboriginal mythology,…

At the Dutch Warehouse in Kochi, the performance artist Nikhil Chopra was busy gearing up to launch a live art program titled “Where Do We Stand Now?” Slated for the opening week of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022 from December 13 to 17, the string of performances was curated by Chopra and the live-arts platform HH Art Spaces, and went ahead despite the Biennale’s two-week delay. The energy and buzz in the air was palpable. For the performers, this was the first large-scale live event in which they had participated since the pandemic. Chopra had flown in for the week, taking a short break from an intense six-month residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. There, he was in the middle of a new project called Recomposing the Panorama…

In December 1991, Crossover, the leading independent art magazine in Hong Kong at the time, published a statement written and signed by a group of 22 Hong Kong artists and critics to voice their discontent about the lack of support from public art institutions. These creatives and art workers, mostly born in the late 1940s to the early 1960s, were the core members of the small but vigorous avant-garde art community in Hong Kong. Their disappointment stemmed from “Too French,” the inaugural exhibition at the new building of the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA), held from November 16, 1991, to February 19, 1992, in Tsim Sha Tsui. The show was a collaboration with the Paris-based Cartier Foundation, with little-to-no relation to Hong Kong art. The statement and subsequent series…

Events in the world change how we look at art. Ahmet Doğu İpek’s exhibition at Arter in Istanbul, “A Halo of Blackness Upon Our Heads,” featured artworks produced in the last three years, bringing viewers into encounters with materials whose associations resonate with the urgencies of our time. The two video installations of black ink slowly swirling in water, Zephyr I and II (both 2021), are mesmerizingly powerful evocations of fluid dynamics, recalling tornadoes, sandstorms, and elemental forces while elevating them with a mythological aura. The artist’s five watercolors of rocks produced at more than two meters in height, Figures: Stone I–V (2021–22), and the pair of giant boulders crushing large pieces of foam, Subjected: 75 kPa / 1490 kg and Subjected: 75 kPa / 1130 kg (both 2022), look…

An oddly moving moment in the latest iteration of the Singapore Biennale was occasioned by a video of a playground being built in rural Jordan. Initiated by the collective Malaeb in the village of Umm Sayhoun, the project aimed to provide a community-oriented site that is “joyful, ethical, accessible and inclusive.” Strategies of social intervention and the language of universal inclusivity have become platitudes in the global circulation of contemporary art but here it was unexpectedly uplifting to consider what was taking place in a distant corner of the world. That Malaeb: Pilot 1.0 (2022), featuring the children of a desert settlement “climbing over frames and shooting down slides as a direct result of a permanent project commissioned by the international art event” (according to The National newspaper), was displayed…

After trekking across the city’s concrete terrain, visitors to MO_Space Gallery witnessed a lush ecosystem of artworks, each requesting our intention to preserve and remember. “Phylogeny of Desire,” a group show curated by artist and environmentalist Ronald Achacoso, gathered nearly 50 artists and botanists to create a visual epistemology of Philippine flora. The show marked 12 years since the botanist, conservationist, and ethnopharmacologist Leonard Co was killed by the Philippines Army while examining a tree in a Leyte forest. and Achacoso commemorated his mentor through the cross-disciplinary diversity of works that Co’s accomplishments have bled into. The assemblage turned the exhibition space into a dense forest that held an unplaceable sense of mystery. Viewers moved around the seemingly lifeless yet steadfast wooden trunks of Christina Quisumbing Ramilo’s Sibol sculptures (2022),…

“The 90s Onstage” offered an overview of Turkey’s cultural scene in the 1990s, a time of social and cultural revival, with a focus on performance and its relation to society, the street, the economy, and politics. The decade marked a period of artistic collaborations that were experimental in nature, followed by the introduction of the term “interdisciplinary” into Turkish culture. Installed across both Salt Galata and Salt Beyoğlu, the exhibition collected an archive of materials: photographs, live performances, video recordings, objects, sketches, printed material, and correspondence from selected events spanning 1988 to the early 2000s. A selection of moving images such as TV program segments, Turkish pop music videos, and a Fenerbahce-Galatasaray football match were displayed as a part of the local history of performance art, offering an expanded understanding…

How does a nation’s history look from a woman’s perspective? For Imelda Cajipe Endaya, active since the 1960s as a printmaker, painter, and co-founder of feminist collective Kasibula, women’s leading roles in Philippine society toppled a dictatorship and led to the election of the country’s first female leader. Yet, the artist’s experience was also one of migration, after moving to New York to care for her mother. Endaya draws on these experiences to center the work, struggle, and cross-generational solidarity between women. The sketch above is a guide for the reinstallation of Kapatiran for her 2022 retrospective at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. An altar of prison windows and red fabric, Kapatiran commemorates the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of pro-independence Philippine revolutionaries. In ArtAsiaPacific’s upcoming issue, Manila-based contributor…

Ashley Bickerton’s passing has initiated a period of subdued reflection as I mourn the loss of an artist and friend who understood deeply the artist’s life. His friendship provided me and so many others a bulwark against the vagaries of the art world. I was always glad to know Ashley was out there, dedicated to his work no matter the conditions. It is a tremendous loss to wake up one day and realize that someone who understood you and your work is no longer with us. In 2008, as contemporary art became more widely known in the region, Ashley Bickerton’s name was on the lips of many collectors and artists in Indonesia, mentioned as an important artist from New York living in Bali. He was often linked with his famous…

Buyers and dealers beware, especially when in Korea. Seoul is all abuzz with the latest art world indiscretion. The word on the street is that Gladstone Gallery’s Seoul director Heejin Park was fired instantly and banned from the gallery in early 2023, after allegedly shady invoice practices. Only on the job for one year, Park is said to have given deep discounts to clients in exchange for a percentage of the buyer’s final invoice. To make matters worse, she apparently sneaked back into the gallery after being booted, with the help of an intern, but was caught trespassing on CCTV. The story resembles an outlandish K-drama, considering that, as the founding director of the Seoul outpost, she herself probably had the surveillance cameras installed. Perhaps these kickbacks aren’t uncommon at…

Berny Tan SINGAPORE Our perceived reality is constantly shaped by the language we use. To become more aware of her own thought patterns, Singaporean artist and curator Berny Tan employs data visualization to translate emotions and relationships into a rational, systematic forms. One early example is her Study of conversational patterns in phone calls to my grandmother (2014), in which Tan categorized the topics of her and her grandmother’s weekly talks with different-colored threads. The four quadrants of a two-axis alignment chart are labeled with “worry,” “guilt,” “apathy,” and “security” and the allocated threads are each marked with repeated expressions such as “Did you cook?” and “Have you eaten?,” with their length signifying the duration of the conversations. While Tan found it difficult to engage with her grandmother, the saturation…

Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The artists occasionally appear together in the work—dancing across a dusky shoreline or sharing a candlelit kamayan feast with collaborators who recount superstitions and stories around a Buwaya sculpted from rice. These scenes weave historical accounts of the Babaylan—queer and trans shamans who mediate between physical and spiritual realms—with precolonial animist affinities to the ancestral Buwaya and Kinnari (bird) in Philippine mythology. ANG IDOL KO casts these figures as kindred spirits in their vision of “queer, trans, and animist idols for today.” This work refines Club Ate’s shimmering ecology of future folklore, revisiting ideas that have informed their practice from the outset. The collective formed in 2014 after Shoulder and Ra met at a nightclub and connected through shared interests in performance, dance, and…

Mythologies of the modern state feature founding fathers, independence fighters, and military generals, often hailing from a dominant ethnic group, who anchor hypermasculine cultures in societies today. In Natasha Tontey’s video and installation Garden Amidst the Flame (2022), the artist flips the script on these nationalist patriarchal formulas. While researching the Christian-majority Minahasa (or Manado) culture of northern Sulawesi Island in Indonesia, Tontey participated in the Karai ritual, in which men are symbolically dressed in invincible armor for tribal wars. There, she became interested in “destabilizing and reconfiguring” what she calls the “heternormative playground” of the Minahasan cosmos. The artist’s ensuing 27-minute video begins with close-ups in a pink-light-saturated room of Jesus and Mary tchotchkes and magazine cutouts of media icons Timothée Chalamet and Britney Spears, and introduces Virsay, the…

I.“The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events, a point in history and nothing else.” A bewildering series of vignettes play out, larger than life, across white gallery walls: a woman hangs in mid-air, with what appears to be a baby below her; another woman, baby in arms, offers her hand and foot to a man who is either buried or missing his lower half. Legs, whether his or another’s, are draped over the shoulder of another man who watches on, in too-close proximity, to this scene of unsettling intimacy. A trio of figures, some nude, some clothed, run and drag each other across the landscape, tugging on ropes, nooses, and shackles. Meanwhile, children run toward danger, fall into ravines, and molest each other. The…

The first since the pandemic, the 2022 edition of the triennial series “Roppongi Crossing” had a lofty goal of synthesizing a new Japan, one that experienced border closures, the spectacular failure of the Olympics, and the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe, among other dramatic events. The curators chose to approach this show through drawing out three trends: a heightened sensory awareness of our environment; the variety of lifestyles that became apparent in lockdown; and ethnic diversity. Departing from this framework, one strong theme was the interplay between alienation and intimacy. Shingo Kanagawa’s photographic series for a while (2011) consists of portraits of the artist’s aunt who had been missing for most of his life but was later found in a hospital. Touching but eerie, these intimate portraits tie…

In 2022, Franco-Chinese artist Ma Desheng was awarded the distinction of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an important French honor. Four decades of the artist’s oeuvre was on view on the permanent collections floor of Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, offering a window into the larger story of the generation that came of age in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) in China. After 1976, Ma’s generation, faced a reckoning with western postwar abstraction and strove to liberate themselves from Chinese socialist realism, all while questioning the possibility of finding modernity within Chinese tradition. Ma is an artist who ceaselessly addressed the questions central to contemporary art in 1980s and 1990s China. The exhibition surveyed many of the mediums the artist has worked…