Innehållsförteckning för 135 (Sept/Oct 2023) från ArtAsiaPacific

Made up of diverse communities, Zurich is developing many interesting cultural layers. These cultural strata are continuously crossing different fields, spaces, and social classes. While art is an everyday presence in the high-priced, high-quality-of-life city, unlike the flamboyance of London, New York, Paris, and Berlin, Zurich’s art ecology is a gesture of slow advancement. Zurich does not have a single “art neighborhood,” even if the Westbau building housing the Kunsthalle Zürich, LUMA, Hauser & Wirth gallery, and the Migros Museum exerts an almost-gravitational attraction, such that visitors who come to see a specific show find it difficult not to view each institution’s exhibition, as if one was at an expo. At Zurich’s influential Galerie Eva Presenhuber, American artist Tschabalala Self launched a new large-scale solo exhibition in June, right after…

Winds of change are swirling in all directions. Seoul’s culture vultures cannot stop talking about who might fill the directorship vacancy atop the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). Korea’s biggest cultural institution marches in lockstep with political administrations, and MMCA’s previous director, Youn Bummo, resigned halfway through his second term in mid-April. It was widely speculated that Youn—who had an academic penchant for the patriotic Minjung “people’s” art—stepped down due to his association with former center-left president Moon Jae-in. The shortlist being considered to helm the rudderless ship—comprising curators Kim Sung-hee, Kim Chan-dong, and Shim Sang-yong—meanwhile has attracted plenty of commentary about how insular and bland the candidates are. One person everyone expected to be on the list was Jiyoon Lee—known for her UK connections and…

Growing up at the turn of the millennium in Calaca, a small town around 100 kilometers from Manila, I remember boredom being somewhat endemic. Among the few things I would do to amuse myself was visit my aunt’s store, which was located in front of a public market, climb a stack of cardboard boxes of goods, and find the ideal vantage point, high up, as close to the ceiling as possible. Strange to have this memory come flooding back as I entered one of the dimly lit rooms in The Listening Biennial 2023, held at Parola: UP Fine Arts Gallery, University of the Philippines, Diliman, and saw Benj Meamo’s Extension of Stalls (2023)—a stack of carboard boxes, each covered in familiar logos for cigarettes, milk formula, and snacks. The boxes…

Over the past two decades, Tarek Atoui has established a distinctive experimental sonic practice, working in the interdisciplinary spaces of contemporary art—where it is possible to synthesize and hybridize elements of genres such as electronic music, live performances, and sculptural installations into new formats that defy a singular cultural mode of production. Born in 1980 amid the Lebanese civil war (1975–90) and having lived in France since his university years, Atoui has traveled extensively to connect with the musical practices of different cultures. Most recently, he performed an electroacoustic composition, Prelude to Rain (2023), with a Korean instrument maker at the opening of the 14th Gwangju Biennale. In September, the latest iteration of his touring installation project Waters’ Witness (2020) will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia,…

A realist portrait. A muted palette. At first glance, Yooyun Yang’s Beam (2020) is straightforward, matter-of-fact. Any of the paintings in the Seoul-based painter’s recent show “Passing Time” at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, might give a similar impression. That’s how Yang operates—drawing one’s attention with images of heads in profile, a sleeping face, babies’ hands. There’s a lulling quality to the amount of skintone in each piece, but then a detail will catch you off guard: an eye squeezed a little too tight, a white cable hanging from a wrist, a trick of light. Occupying a central position on the leftmost wall of the gallery’s first room, Beam sees a bespectacled figure stand in near-profile at the center of a sheet of hanji. Their face is in shadow, while strong…

The first international retrospective of the late Pacita Abad (1946–2004), curated by Victoria Sung with Matthew Villar Miranda, was as celebratory as it was studious. Navigable by the curators’ bold use of color across four expansive galleries and several smaller enclosed spaces, the eponymous exhibition constructed cohesive narratives from the many thematic and stylistic movements of Abad’s autobiographical coordinates, while simultaneously correcting various omissions from the canon of 20th-century art through an intimate and timely dialogue with Abad’s diasporic, feminist practice. Born in 1946 in Batanes, the northernmost island province of the Philippines, Abad grew up in a political family as the fifth of 13 siblings. Raised in activist circles—first in her Indigenous Ivatan homeland and then in diasporic communities in Manila—Abad’s leadership within various interethnic, multilingual student unions shaped…

Four long-necked figures appear together: a man and a woman in green-blue hues silhouetted against an orangered background, shielding a pair of children in front. Song Huai-Kuei (1937–2006) painted herself and her family in the late 1960s in Sofia after she and her husband, the Bulgarian artist Maryn Varbanov (1932–1989), had relocated there following their studies, and marriage, in Beijing. The potency of the colors feel creatively elusive, much like Song herself, the iconic figure at the heart of M+’s exhibition, “Madame Song: Pioneering Art and Fashion in China.” Who was Song Huai-Kuei? Was she the generative, collaborative force behind a genre-defying range of artistic productions, or the canny facilitator of European high-culture in post-Maoist China? It was this fracture of expectations, between rebuilding cultural mythology and explorating the person…

Can the art market in mainland China bounce back to pre-pandemic form and avoid the slowing growth experienced by the country at large? Would the North Atlantic art world shake off a bad auction season in New York in May to find renewed enthusiasm among European fair-goers? And does Asia still have room to expand its annual calendar of art fairs beyond the March-September rivalry of global behemoths Art Basel and Frieze? BEIJING Since the early 2010s, China’s network of art fairs has been steadily expanding beyond the two main Shanghai events that anchor its November art week. Beijing’s Jingart is managed by the same team as one of those, the ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. After a two-year break, its 2023 edition was held from June 1–14 at the…

Insomnia, anxiety, and the inability to concentrate are common afflictions of life in the modern world. In searching for ways to alleviate these ailments, there has been a growing interest in sound frequencies—also known as binaural beats. In Corinne de San Jose’s latest work, 417, the Manila-based artist explores the healing properties of a single frequency, 417 hertz—or vibrations per second—in her new site-specific sound installation for Silverlens’ new Lubi Art Residency in the lush Mindanao region. In late May, when de San Jose, who is best known for her sound work for films as well as art projects, landed on the remote island of Kopiat—an hour’s boat ride from Davao, the region’s largest city—she was amazed to find that most of the flotsam and jetsam on the beach was…

In “mOTHERTONGUE,” everything was a provocation. A collection of cultural and linguistic artifacts, this exhibition was an exploration of two decades of Mithu Sen’s career, spanning 40 artworks and 12 new commissions. Curated by Max Delany for the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA), it was imbued with a sense of urgency and controlled chaos that consumed the space. And just as the form of the work was sprawling and vast, so too were the themes imbedded in, and agitated by, Sen’s practice. Myths of identity, the pitfalls of linguistic hierarchies, the body as the site of protest, digital misrule, and the aesthetic of the artist’s persona all percolated here in thematic fluidity. It was immediately apparent that its creator is a relentless and devoted collector of cultural relics, phrases,…

As the decade-long love for the Korean monochrome movement known as Dansaekhwa begins to wane, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum unveiled “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s.” The show highlighted a less familiar period of postwar creative output that extended beyond the painted canvas. Jointly curated by the MMCA’s Kang Soojung and Kyung An of the Guggenheim, “Only the Young” took five years to assemble and featured documentation of works and performances that were fleeting, lost, or destroyed. The first gallery, “Statements of Youth and a Historical Transition,” showcased the earliest experiments with performance, readymades, and neon lights. For instance, the legendary renegade happening The Murder on the Han Riverside (1968)—which only exists as a series of photos—by…

Feathers were ruffled over the opening weekend of the first instalment of National Gallery Singapore’s (NGS) two-part exhibition, “See Me, See You: Early Video Installation of Southeast Asia.” In the museum’s Ngee Ann Kongsi Concourse gallery, a coop of live chickens sat in front of stacked crates bearing stenciled images of the Mona Lisa and interspersed with cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions. This recreation of Thai artist Apinan Poshyananda’s 1985 installation, How to Explain Art to a Bangkok Cock, amused visitors with its riotous introduction of clucking fowl to the air-conditioned gallery as they were lectured on the Mona Lisa. Poshyananda’s playful installation, together with the works of four artists from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, contributed to a light-hearted yet pertinent survey of video works from the region between the…

“Several Reenactments” was Korean-born Haegue Yang’s first solo exhibition in a Belgian museum and acted as a Gesamtkunstwerk (or “total work”) in which different situations were (re-) staged to unpack the various semantic layers of the artist’s oeuvre. Comprised of diverse yet cohesive elements—including installations, videos, and musical interventions that organically coexist and overlap—the show generated new meanings in which each artwork stood alone while making indirect and direct visual and cultural references to Yang’s practice and the inspirations that form its core. In the first work, The Source of Spring is in the Trace of a Movement (2021), Yang screen-printed a slogan (“The Source of Art is in the Life of a People”) onto a 60-by-60cm sheet of paper that hung, framed, on the wall, signifying a firm declaration…

Leading international arts and cultural organizations around the world—from the United States to the United Arab Emirates—canceled or paused projects by architect David Adjaye after the Financial Times (FT) reported on July 4 the cases of three women, all former employees of his firm Adjaye Associates, who accused him of sexual assault and harassment. Following the allegations, president of the Africa Institute in Sharjah, Hoor Al Qasimi, terminated plans for a 32,000-square-meter campus designed by the Ghanaian-British architect. The Studio Museum in New York also cut ties with Adjaye, who designed the organization’s new building in Harlem. In August, Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum followed suit. Adjaye and his lawyer have categorically denied the women’s detailed claims of sexual misconduct and abuse, though Adjaye did acknowledge to the FT that he…

The creation of socially themed art is founded on the premise that an artist is a member of society with inherent social obligations. During the New Order era (1966–98), artists in Indonesia who addressed social issues raised the theme of resistance to the Suharto government’s repressive and harsh political practices, particularly those related to policies that were not in favor of the people. This resistance was consistent with movements led by activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) at the time. The process of creating and presenting works coexisted with activist movements, and because of their strong friendship and collective actions—talks, collaborations, workshops, and public demonstrations—they were referred to as “activist artists.” The government closely monitored the resistance movement, and some activists and artists were arrested. However, it remained relatively safe for…

SEP 6–FEB 25, 2024 NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART, SEOUL Jung Yeondoo: One Hundred Years of Travels For the tenth edition of the annual MMCA Hyundai Motor Series, renowned South Korean multimedia artist Jung Yeondoo debuts work in his first large-scale solo exhibition at MMCA since 2007. “One Hundred Years of Travels” is centered around a video installation and its prologue, Generational Portraits (2023), about diasporic identities, with a sound installation inspired by John Lennon’s song Imagine in a room of hanging cactishaped sound absorbers, and a large wall of sugar sculptures, reminiscent of archaic castle walls. In these works, Jung contemplates how cultures across borders are inextricably linked through global events. SEP 7–DEC 31 LEEUM MUSEUM OF ART, SEOUL Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole In her new…

Over the course of five decades Filipino artist Jose “Bogie” Tence Ruiz has advocated for social realism across paintings, illustrations, graphic design, and curatorial work, embracing the label with what he calls “the broadest definition.” Emerging onto the scene during the dictatorship of former president Ferdinand Marcos, Ruiz worked through (and sometimes with) the volatile sociopolitical shifts of his nation, and like so many of his compatriots he lived part of the time abroad, mostly in Singapore, where he struggled to support his family after the revolution brought an end to Marcos’ regime. During a long and storied career Ruiz has created thousands of works, one of the most important of which is Litanya 1972–2022, a book he self-published during the Covid-19 pandemic. Ruiz is widely recognized as a founding…

“Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic—it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable. Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?”– Julia Kristeva, Black Sun (1987; trans. by Leon S. Roudiez, 1989) Mire Lee frequently turns to industrial materials and machinery to mine for waste and unexpected byproducts. In her installations and sculptures, there are low-fi motor-driven pumps, concrete mixers, PVC tubing, and hand-grafted silicon abscesses, which merge into experimental assemblages. Evoking a postindustrial dissolution between machines and organisms, her kinetic installations rely on circulatory systems that mimic the homeostatic process of…

For almost ten years, Hong Kong artist Elvis Yip Kin Bon has obsessively collected newspaper cuttings of the city’s police force arresting criminal suspects, then carefully removed any extraneous text and actors from the page, save for the suspects—handcuffed, black-hooded, wearing t-shirts on which a variety of slogans are printed. Using a strategy of decontextualization, Yip wants us to focus on these slogans and reflect on their embedded, coded language, much of which suggests an ironic absurdity and wry humor. To date, Yip has archived 40 press cuttings as part of a series titled The Day You Put Me On (2014–23), which was recently included in his solo exhibition “Overriding the Light of Day” (2023) at the Hong Kong nonprofit WMA Space. “Give Peace a Second Chance,” “Cultural Traveler,” “Freedom,”…

French-born Charles Munka’s latest paintings are littered with references to different places, tracing and encircling the islands of his former home of Hong Kong, as well as Japan, specifically Sado, where he now lives and works. The typographic joy of old stationery and out-of-date packaging found in urban and rural stationery stores fill Munka’s works with a strange nostalgia; and much like the act of writing, his paintings employ what comes to hand while ridding themselves of the superfluous, the extraneous. Inaugural exhibition “Tameshigaki (lignes de vies)” at the recently opened INS Studio in Shibuya was full of writing, or, more specifically, notes—mental notes that trace the artist’s voyage from a suburb near Lyon to Sado Island, and back again; it is these typographical “life lines”—lignes de vies—that draw upon…

For most people, time is linear—perpetuated by calendars, annals, and other historical recording devices. For others, it is merely an illusion. As artists engage creatively with time-based media, alternative forms of experiencing durational or chronological shifts begin to emerge. But what possibilities of historical experientiality might be elicited by such temporal orientations? And how can the various photographic or videographic mediums interpret and complicate time-related experiences, such as trauma, micro-narratives, and nebulous dreams? Entering the dimly lit space of the Jim Thompson Art Center, one’s gaze was directed toward Rungruang Sittirerk’s mixed-media installation. At its center was a semi-documentary moving-image work entitled TO AND FRO (2023), in which Sittirerk splits the dominant narrative voice—a traditional symbol of authority and “truth” in documentary film—into two: a woman’s (arch, formal) recounts the…