Innehållsförteckning för 133 (May/Jun 2023) från ArtAsiaPacific

On the night when multiple Asians and Asian Americans won Academy Awards—most notably for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)—I reflected on the Los Angeles art community from the perspective of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). Since my last dispatch on the LA scene’s remarkable growth in the ArtAsiaPacific Almanac 2022, the city has put itself firmly on the map: outposts of David Zwirner, Lisson, and Perrotin galleries have arrived in town; established local galleries are expanding their existing spaces; and Moran Moran and Commonwealth and Council are opening across the border in Mexico City. Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which has been in financial and leadership trouble for some time, restructured its key staff by appointing LA native Clara Kim as chief curator—the first AAPI woman…

In New York City, artists and dealers alike cringed with delight during the new spring reality TV program The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist. Co-produced by MTV and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the series featured the Hirshhorn Museum’s director Melissa Chiu presiding over eight fellow jury members who selected one of seven young artists who battled it out for a cash prize of USD 100,000 and a chance to show at America’s national museum for modern and contemporary art. The Chinese Australian curator, known for her crisp elocution and self-assuredness, looked right at home in the TV spotlights. Exuding Hollywood glamor with her flowing blonde locks and tastefully vibrant frocks, she took center stage, explaining to the camera and jury member Kenny Schachter that art “is not about…

MAY 17–SEP 3 IKON GALLERY, BIRMINGHAM Melati Suryodarmo: “Passionate Pilgrim” In “Passionate Pilgrim,” Melati Suryodarmo brings her unrelenting, physically challenging performances to Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. Inspired by Javanese cultural traditions, and a disciple of key figures in Butoh dance and European live art, Suryodarmo restages her own epic works, such as I’m a Ghost in My Own House (2012), in which she grinds charcoal with a stone rolling pin for 12 hours, expressing her feelings of cultural alienation. Suryodarmo is collaborating with a UKbased domestic worker advocacy group on a new version of Passionate Pilgrim (2010), while gallery-goers can view her recent video works, past projects, and new collaborative installations. MAY 25–JUL 14 NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, SEOUL “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s”…

Imelda Cajipe Endaya’s personal story is repeated in the lives of so many women in the Philippines: she raised a family, provided care for an aging parent, and became part of the Filipino diaspora. At the same time, since the 1970s when she became a leading figure in the vibrant printmaking scene in Manila, she has created art that engaged in social commentary and worked as a curator, activist, critic, the founding editor of Pananaw: Philippine Journal of Visual Arts (first published in 1997), and author on issues of identity, power, feminism, and the plight of Filipina migrants and domestic workers. Over the course of her career, Cajipe Endaya has received multiple accolades, including the Cultural Center of Philippines (CCP) Thirteen Artists Awards in 1990; a CCP Centennial Honor for…

In the three years after her father’s sudden death and her home city’s historic sociopolitical unrest, Vaevae Chan built a cave to hide herself away. Now the artist has invited others to visit her refuge. To locate it, I journeyed to the 17th floor of an industrial building in Hong Kong’s San Po Kong neighborhood where I was faced with four identical gray doors. Entering through one, I was enveloped in darkness, my eyes adjusting as my fingers traced rough stones lining the entrance. The artificial rocks were light and hollow but I allowed myself to collapse into the illusion of their density and concreteness. On top of the crevices were perched black-painted figurines and vessels—pitches, vases, ashtrays—a nod to the artist’s training in clay. The sound of footsteps echoed…

During a talk at Sharjah Biennial 7 in 2005, Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) proposed “thinking historically in the present” as a model for those in the cultural field to recover the emancipatory potential of postcoloniality—or “what the Third World meant in 1955,” at the time of the Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations. For the Nigerian-born poet-turned-critic and curator, the idealistic spirit of that era holds the potential to liberate us from Western modernity as a “machine of globalization” and its “unremittent program of violence.” In that same talk, he observed how in places of mixed cultures and religions like Nigeria and Sharjah, there are “multiple temporalities and multiple historicities” and cautioned the audience against making the West’s anxieties about “authenticity” central to how they interpret their sense of place.…

If Wang Tuo’s earlier video The Interrogation (2017) carefully analyzes the body language and tactics employed by the Chinese national security apparatus during an interrogation process, the second episode, which premiered at Hong Kong’s Blindspot Gallery, delves into artists’ psychological states when confronted by the machine of censorship. The Second Interrogation (2023) explores the current reality faced by Chinese artists, who often need to conceal their intentions as they are screened by government officials, potentially being “invited for a cup of tea” (questioned by national security) or having their show canceled due to censorship. Offering two perspectives—one of the artist-character and one of the censor—the first part of the double-channel video installation was cleverly arranged in a V-shape at one end of the gallery. Standing in one corner, the audience…

“I love SRK. My Name Is Khan (2010) is a must-watch.” A Lebanese expatriate swooned over a cutout of Shah Rukh Khan, one of the idols lighting “Bollywood Superstars: A Short Story of Indian Cinema” at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The topic is dear to the Arab audience, with everyone quick to rattle off songs by big names like Amitabh Bachchan and the Khan triumvirate, commemorating their royal visits. (SRK’s 2010 drama on Islamophobia premiered in Abu Dhabi; his comeback caper Pathaan (2023) still dominates the Emirates’ box office.) Despite the “Bollywood” catchword, the show delved into the richness behind cinema of the Indian subcontinent, encompassing song, dance, worship, and storytelling. Co-organized with the Musee du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and France Museums, the exhibition ethnographically explored how traditions…

Ekphrasis, or the translation of an image into words, is a shadow following many histories of visual art. As a literary device, ekphrasis promises, perhaps falsely, a separation of form and subject so that an artwork’s content might be poured from one vessel into another. Samson Young’s recent video installation, Variations of 96 chords in space (feat. William Lane) (2022–2023), one of two works at his debut solo exhibition at New York’s Petzel Gallery, proposed not an ekphrasis from image to text, but from color to sound. I hesitate to call this a work of synesthesia because the associations drawn between the seen form and heard form were not at all instantaneous, or quasi-neurological. Rather, Variations asked: what would it mean to purposefully carry color into sound, and to do…

Philanthropist and art collector Myriam Ullens, who together with her husband Guy Ullens established the first private museum of contemporary art in Beijing, was shot dead by her stepson Nicolas Ullens on March 29 in Ohain village near Lasne, Belgium. Guy was also wounded in the leg but survived the attack, which reportedly took place after a dispute over the family’s inheritance; Nicolas turned himself in to Belgian authorities the following day. In addition to potential criminal charges, Nicolas is also facing a civil suit brought by his father. Myriam’s killing sparked an outpouring of shock and grief from the worlds of art, fashion, and the Belgian aristocracy, including Queen Mathilde of Belgium, who announced her devastation at losing a close friend. With a family fortune from beet-sugar production, Guy…

NEW YORK The Christie’s New York live auction of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art on March 22 during Asia Week brought in just under USD 12 million from 70 lots, further boasted by online sales (March 15–28) of an additional 120 works, netting just under USD 1 million. Manjit Bawa’s untitled 2004 rendering of the multiarmed Hindu goddess Durga atop a lion—previously sold in 2010 and again in 2014 at Christie’s New York—was the top seller at USD 1.98 million. The only other seven-figure item was FN Souza’s pre-independence painting View from Crawford Market, Bombay (1946) at USD 1.7 million. Other Progressive Artists Group members performed well, with a 1953 SH Raza painting of houses more than tripling its high estimate to sell at USD 756,000, while an Akbar…

Jess Lau Ching-Wa HONG KONG Tiny, charcoal-gray human figures shuffle toward the center of a white landscape from all directions of a three-meter-wide screen. In the top left corner, the hands of an analog clock sweep forward relentlessly as these figures gather in the void. Seconds after the space is filled, an invisible force erases the figures, returning the surface to its original state. This stop-motion animation by Jess Lau Ching-Wa, The Cave with a Wheeze (2021), was made during a bleak period of social isolation in Hong Kong. In response to the pandemic and nascent political restrictions, Lau sought to reassure a dispirited public by invoking a sense of togetherness and reaffirming our shared need for human connection. The Hong Kong-born artist’s practice has evolved over the years to…

Sit down, lie down, close your eyes, try to stop seeing, and just feel the sound around you. That itself is the first commitment to Hajra Waheed’s sonic installation Hum II (2023), which was installed in a conical architectural structure at Sharjah Biennial 15. Despite beautiful light from an oculus—stark during the day, enchanting at dusk—the experience come the voices that surround you, humming or throat singing, captured with such startling immediacy it feels like you are in the room with them. Without words, without instruments, yet so much vocal variety fills this 31-minute composition. There might be familiar musical refrains: reminiscent of anthems from South Korea’s candlelight vigils in 2016 to remove the corrupt president or from videos of the 2022 protests in Iran following Mahsa Amini’s death in…

Over the past decade, Paris-based multidisciplinary artist Iván Argote has gained notable attention for his large-scale public monument projects and for the playfulness he brings to historical interrogations. During last year’s nomination for the Centre Pompidou’s prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp, Argote exhibited Air de Jeux (2020), a three-channel video installation projected in a room filled with soft obelisks that visitors could sit on. The projections showed separate yet interrelated narratives of three contested public monuments: the Egyptian obelisk at the Piazza del Popolo in Rome; the statue of Christopher Columbus at Plaza Colon in Madrid; and a bronze sculpture honoring the French general Joseph Gallieni at the Place Vauban in Paris. Argote selected these for their physical manifestations and representations of colonial power and exploitation. Each chapter of the video…

In the Christian theological system, the body is not only a temple for God’s spirit to inhabit but the carnal representation of God himself. While the Earth and its bounty are evidence of God’s creative prowess, human beings are created in God’s image and accordingly, elevated as a manifestation of divinity reflecting upon itself. Goro Kakei (1930–2021), a postwar Japanese artist and a Christian, worked primarily with figurative sculpture and the human form. He imbued his work with this Christian worldview, believing in the supremacy of the human body. His solo show at Taka Ishii Gallery presented paintings and sculptures from the 1970s to the 2000s that explored these themes. The first thing to note was the approach to installation. The gallery and estate collected more than 50 sculptures, primarily…

That Taiwanese modernist Liu Kuo-sung has earned a place in the canon of avant-garde ink art, or shiyan shuimo, is a fact. He invented the eponymous Liu Kuo-sung paper, from the surface of which fibers are removed to create textural effects. He is also renowned for the Space (1969–73) series, informed by the Apollo 8 and 11 missions; Moon Walk (1969), for one, famously incorporates a photograph of astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, an amalgamation of Pop Art-esque collage and Sinic brush-and-ink methods. Art historian Wu Hung credits Liu’s series of high-profile solo exhibitions throughout China in the 1980s with fomenting the experimental ink movement, noting that Liu’s work represented to a new generation of artists “possibilities to modernize guohua.” (Guohua, or Chinese painting, is synonymous with ink painting.)…

What does it mean to make artworks in collaboration with plants, soil, bones, flesh, insects, temperature, and time? Born in Đắk Lắk in the central highlands (Tây Nguyên) of Vietnam, Truong Cong Tung has explored this question in sculptural installations that begin with the materials of the earth—from rubber-tree roots to gourds—and highlight their intersection with human activities and systems, which, like the rubber industry, has left legacies of ecological damage in his home region. The relics of human activities and the spiritual value imputed to them, like the amateur video seen in the still above from the Magic Garden series (2012–), further complicate the meanings we assign to the things of the world. In the upcoming issue of ArtAsiaPacific, we hear from the artist about his thought process behind…

During my final year at RMIT University in Melbourne, my professor made something clear: being an artist requires transcending conservative boundaries. It means the fundamental transformation of oneself. Repeating traditional patterns of thought and behavior, he said, will fail to yield any new questions or insights. That winter I jumped into the freezing waters of Port Melbourne; during the summer, I returned to the beach, buried myself beneath the hot sand, and tried desperately to breathe. No new insights, no new questions. Only physical pain and a creative dead end. It occurred to me that alongside the practical, the intellectual and the theoretical are integral components to my practice, so I immersed myself in books on art, design, and philosophy. It was one of those volumes, with the mesmerizing and…

For some of us it can be a perplexing exercise to contemplate the role of museums as public spaces. Regardless of where they are located, many museums make certain individuals and communities feel that they don’t belong. Perhaps this is because their history can be traced to entrenched power interests and to the heart of the global capitalist project. Despite the efforts of many middle-position cultural workers who in their everyday actions make museums more inclusive and accessible, these institutions still carry traces of a dominant, elitist, and colonial legacy—a heavy, hegemonic narrative that is very hard to let go of. But we, the invisible and anonymous cultural workers, do have enough power to make a difference if we work together. So, what keeps museums separate from the people? Or,…

DUBAI Dubai’s glitzy, fort-like Madinat Jumeirah resort hosted the emirate’s anchor fair, Art Dubai (March 1–5), drawing more than 30,000 visitors from around the world to this spotlight of art from the Global South. Now in its 16th edition, Art Dubai in 2023 was all about “currency”—in all senses of the word. With the UAE’s relatively lax sanctions on Russia, as compared to western counterparts, there was an sudden influx of foreign investment and migration spurred by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. These shifts in geopolitical alignments fueled speculations of where most art purchases might be attributed. Sales reported during the VIP days across the fair’s Modern and Contemporary sections proved to be a mixed bag this year. While Ghana’s Efie Gallery made a swift sale of Abdoulaye Konate’s multilayered textile…

Steeped in Taoist and Buddhist thought, Shim Moon-Seup once declared his artworks “anti-sculptures” in order to express the energy and spirit embedded in natural materials. Born in 1943, Shim was active in the Korean art scene beginning in the mid-1960s, an era which saw artistic movements around the world—from Mono-ha in Japan to Arte Povera in Italy, Supports/Surfaces and Nouveau Realisme in France, and land art in the United States—join the broader political protest movements in opposition to war (in Vietnam and elsewhere), the military industrial complex, and the rise of consumer culture. Shim participated in the National Art Exhibition of 1969 to 1971 and became a member of the Korean Avant-Garde Association (better known as the AG Group) before going on to represent Korea at major international exhibitions of…

Churches have long been sites where rituals of life and death took place side by side. It was thus fitting that Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, a deconsecrated 9th-century Roman church-turned-gallery space, housed Taiwanese American artist Brook Hsu’s paintings from her series Pale Green (2022), which featured playful and animated human skeletons characteristic of her oeuvre, subverting the solemnity and gravity that often surrounds the topic of mortality. Hsu’s installation eschewed the typical signifiers of the start and end of a painting, whether with frames or with installation: the body of work appeared as one Pale Green line that horizontally traversed the brick and plaster interior of the former oratory. The series comprises a total of 24 diminutive oil paintings on maple wood, all 5.1 centimeters in height and ranging from three…

A low-pitched buzz from a concealed speaker by the entrance reverberated throughout the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, welcoming guests to the exhibition “Adaptation: A Reconnected Earth,” curated by the museum’s director Joselina Cruz and scholar James Tana. Visitors soon became accustomed to this sound emanating from four humanmade hives constructed from bamboo, coconut husks, and wood present throughout the gallery. Reminiscent of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee (1899–1900), Issay Rodriguez’s installation Song of Increase (2023), which comprises looped recordings of Philippine-native bees, provided a sonic backdrop to the wide-open space, as their busy humming seemed to call forth an acknowledgement of an ancestral symbiosis with the natural environment. “Adaption” centered on the tactics of preserving the world in its current state, as works honed in on tailored…

A video clip from the documentary Portrait of Martin Wong (1998) by filmmaker Charlie Ahearn shows Wong (1946–1999) in the streets of New York’s Chinatown during Chinese New Year, amid an onslaught of exploding red firecrackers, thick smoke, and onlookers shrouding the sidewalk. Wong, with his signature untamed black hair, flashes a toothy, wide grin, before turning back to capture the deafening spectacle with his own point-and-shoot. The clip is one of the many candid glimpses into the late artist’s life in “Malicious Mischief,” the first major museum retrospective in Europe of Wong’s works, curated by director Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustin Perez Rubio at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The long overdue survey highlighted the Chinese American’s incisive portrayals of San Francisco’s and New York’s queer counterculture and non-white…

The demographics of Point Chevalier in New Zealand have long been in flux. Originally home to a small number of Māri settlements due to the lava formation of Meola Reef to the east of the peninsula, European colonization rapidly expanded the region and the area became strategically important as a military encampment securing the main route south. In the years after World War II, the beach became a popular weekend destination for middle-class families from Auckland’s Central Business District and the predominantly rural area was redeveloped. The demographics shifted again in 1959 after the completion of the Auckland Harbour Bridge, making north-bound travel accessible to a newly mobile population. As a result, once-thriving businesses at Point Chevalier Beach became deserted. And, as they closed, shop owners and middle-class families moved…