Innehållsförteckning för 136 (Nov/Dec 2023) från ArtAsiaPacific

On October 7, Hamas militants fired 3,000 rockets into Israeli territory, invaded dozens of border towns, and stormed the Supernova psychedelic trance festival in the Negev desert, killing more than 1,400 people in total and abducting an estimated 200 hostages. In response, Israel embarked on a bombing campaign of the Gaza Strip ahead of a planned ground invasion that in the first 11 days has killed more than 3,000 people and displaced nearly half of the territory’s two million residents. Amid the devastation, regional artists have become victims of war. Thirty-six-year-old Israeli filmmaker Yahav Winner was found among the dead in the kibbutz Kfar Aza; he died protecting his wife and one-month-old daughter from Hamas militants. Winner’s films include Neurim, which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2020,…

SEOUL In the five-year partnership between KIAF (Sep 6–10), run by the Korean Galleries Association, and London-based, American-owned Frieze Seoul (Sep 6–9), the two fairs occupy different floors at the Coex convention center during the same week. Their dates coincide but their audiences are complementary. Frieze Seoul is an international art fair with a significant Korean focus, while KIAF is more oriented toward the domestic market and younger collectors. With the Korean economy slowing and a dramatic downturn in the domestic art market year-on-year, galleries arriving in Seoul had modest expectations ahead of the fairs. While North American museum groups grew in number, many Chinese buyers were on their first post-pandemic trip to Korea. For its sophomore edition, Frieze hosted more than 120 galleries of which more than 55 percent…

The pink dolphin of the Pearl River Delta is a lost species, long associated with Hong Kong but now more mythical than real as its numbers have dwindled to the point of extinction. The memory of them, or the imagination of them, as cultural signifiers, returns anew in Cici Wu’s new lantern-sculpture Foreign Object #2 Umbra and Penumbra (Dolphin) (2023). Constructed with bamboo and rice paper, the various-shaped lanterns she has made in recent years are central to her practice. They become visionary devices, illuminating the darkness and casting undefined shapes, light, and shadows, as if animating the ways our memories can be transformed and resurface in unexpected ways, invoking the interplay between our identity and memory. For Cici Wu, many of the questions she raises in her practice tackle…

As a professional storyteller, there is perhaps no better history for Simone Fattal to divulge than her turbulent, inspiring own. After enduring a riotous and fraught youth in Beirut, the Damascus-born artist studied philosophy at the Ecole des Lettres before moving to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. But Fattal soon grew tired of the Western canon’s confines, returning to Beirut in 1969 and abandoning her prior philosophical pursuits in favor of creation. She started working as a visual artist (initially focused on painting) and before long was exhibiting in local galleries. In 1975 the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War halted her success, and five years later she fled to California and founded The Post-Apollo Press, an experimental publishing house responsible for publishing her late partner Etel Adnan’s poetry, among…

Across 25 years of artistic practice, Yeondoo Jung has explored the theatrical space between individuals’ dreams and reality, their imaginations and history. While on an artist residency in Jeju Island, Jung encountered prickly-pear cactus plants and learned the seeds had originated in Mexico and were carried across the Pacific by the Kuroshio Current. Investigating the countries’ connections, Jung found that in 1905, a British merchant vessel, the SS Ilford, transported more than 1,000 workers and families from Incheon to Merida, in the Mexican state of Yucatan, to work in the henequen industry. He subsequently spent two years interviewing second- to fifth-generation members of the Korean diaspora in Mexico, giving form to the multipart project One Hundred Years of Travel (2023). Projected into a white-hued room with installations in henequen- and…

“Landscape theory” (fukeiron), as theorized in 1969 by film critic and anarchist Matsuda Masao, states that the landscape of modern Japan is banal in its sameness and that this homogeneity is a product of the state’s authoritarian structure. The center reproduces itself in the periphery to the point that any dichotomy is flattened; there is no more hometown, only a longing to understand the nation’s hometown: Tokyo. “After the Landscape Theory,” a group exhibition exploring the seminal theory’s influence, started with works from the present day before gradually moving back in time. With this reverse chronological order, the exhibition drew viewers from the contemporary omnipresence and ubiquity of the camera into spaces of slower viewing in order to understand the concerns of the 1960s, a time of student movements and…

Stepping into Cengiz Çekil’s retrospective at Arter, “I Am Still Alive,” visitors were confronted by WHAT TIME IS IT? (2008), a work consisting of 12 clocks mounted in a circle on the wall. Imprinted with the artist’s name, each clock was one hour behind the next, with only one showing the local time in Istanbul. This initial encounter set the stage for the exhibition, reflecting the artist’s fascination with the interplay between temporality and timelessness. It captured the underlying tension experienced in Çekil’s sculptures and installations—namely, a sensation of being bound to time, acutely aware of its perpetual passing. Spanning his career from the mid-1970s to his death in 2015, “I Am Still Alive” took its name from Çekil’s influential work Diary (1976), which emerged from a turbulent period in…

“Intimacy” and “distance” are oppositional concepts often used to map and define the relationship between oneself and others. For Tokyobased interdisciplinary artist Maiko Jinushi’s first solo exhibition in Canada, she explored relationships with others through dialogue and collaborative performances. And by utilizing a wide range of media, Jinushi created works as a “visual form of literary experience,” with four recent video installations and preliminary drawings. The exhibition opened with fuchsia text on a single-screen projection. Jinushi could be heard reciting the lines of contemplative free verse poetry from the short multimedia work Lip Wrap / Air Hug / Energy Exchange (2020). Using elements of recitation, simple animation techniques, and stark self-portraits and drawings, this work reflected the emotional state of those reluctant to experience direct physical contact yet still desiring…

In the busiest month for Taipei of the postpandemic era, previously postponed exhibitions get their due. Despite heightened political tensions across the strait in anticipation of the upcoming presidential election in January, residents appear as ready as ever for the city’s peak art season. The upcoming Taipei Biennial, “Small World,” breaks from the previous thematic focus on ecological crises. Curated by Freya Chou, Brian Kuan Wood, and Reem Shadid, the 13th edition aims to explore the unknown, challenging the scales, values, and measures we are accustomed to. Starting from November 18, the Biennial’s organizer, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) will transform into an exploration space, hosting live performances such as that of artist Li Jiun-Yang. Known for sourcing imagery from Taiwanese temples and pop culture, Li will improvise mixing…

Women are causing ripples in the art world. Hillary Clinton used her magnetic charm to pull out of his studio the reclusive Ai Weiwei, who since decamping from Berlin to the countryside in Portugal, has been enjoying newfound rural solitude since late 2021—mainly traveling only for museum openings. He accepted the invitation to do a one-on-one talk with the former US Secretary of State for her husband’s Clinton Global Initiative forum in New York City in September. True to form, Ai was more animated when discussing social issues—from artificial intelligence to the ongoing refugee crisis— compared to the rather narrow confines of art, instead saving the latter for a sideshow appearance in Los Angeles to discuss one of his earliest video works, Chang’an Boulevard (2004), with Museum of Contemporary Art’s…

NOV 9–MAR 31, 2024 POWER STATION OF ART, SHANGHAI 14th Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema The 14th Shanghai Biennale, “Cosmos Cinema,” is led by e-flux cofounder Anton Vidokle with a curatorial team of Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis. Located at the Power Station of Art, “Cosmos Cinema” creates a spacetime continuum across past and future to explore the intrinsic relationship between life on Earth and the universe, connecting ancient Chinese philosophy and artistic engagements with cosmology. Featuring more than 80 artists, the Biennale attempts to reposition Shanghai’s cosmopolitan history within East Asia, coinciding with China’s ambition to turn the city into a hub for the development of space technologies. NOV 18–MAR 24, 2024 TAIPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM, TAIPEI 13th Taipei Biennial Small World The 13th Taipei Biennial, “Small World,”…

With a newspaper held outstretched, a man with a white chin beard, black ponytail, and gray fedora stood on stage. In a declarative voice, he read an article aloud in Korean, then placed the spread on the table before him and cut out a rectangle. He repeated the sequence: lifting the paper up and reading, cutting out a section, and holding the paper in front of his face. Next it was our turn. Lights illuminated rows of tables where more than 100 of us—all non-Koreans—as we stood and mimicked him, reading articles in our native languages, then cutting them out. The German exchange student next to me giggled, mid-Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article, after I read a quote from politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in The New York Times; the Shanghai art journalist…

A man enters frame right and tracks a small ravine as sunlight casts through the foliage, striking the ink-green, algae-covered ground. At times, he crawls, holding tight to the wall, trying to maintain his balance. The man is Ong Yong Lock, a veteran Hong Kong-based Malaysian dancer and choreographer, and the short film is A Long Walk (2022), co-directed by Elysa Wendi and Lee Wai-Shing and commissioned by Tai Kwun. But despite initial impressions that this film might be a covert reflection of Hong Kong’s political unease and social disruption, it is, in fact, a portrait of Ong and his struggles throughout a long and seasoned career. The title card appears, and in an instant all life drains from the picture—a reversal of the sublime switch from black-and-white to color…

It is hard to think of a more optimistic artist working today than Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Odd, given that his subject matter is the intergenerational trauma provoked by the long legacies of colonial war in his home country of Vietnam. His latest solo exhibition, “Radiant Remembrance,” at the New Museum in New York, transmuted pain through elements of the sublime, and the presentation of sculptures, video installations, and still photographs coalesced in a reflection on the legacy of violence across multiple countries. Under Nguyen’s spell, dark material shimmered. The first exhibition space juxtaposed a large Alexander Calder-esque mobile sculpture, A Rising Moon Through the Smoke (2022), with a 60-minute video titled The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). The film follows the story of Nguyệt, a young Vietnamese woman…

“A One and a Two: Edward Yang Retrospective” was the latest attempt by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) to grapple with the weight of Taiwanese history, following on from “The Wild Eighties,” a widely discussed exhibition earlier this year concerning the explosion of creativity that emerged after the end of martial law in Taiwan in 1987. In this comprehensive account, the museum explored the legacy of Taiwanese New Wave cinema through the lens of one its most admired figures, filmmaker Edward Yang, who died in 2007 aged 59. Yang, who was born in Shanghai and rose to prominence in the 1980s alongside fellow Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, was heavily influenced by new movements in global cinema, in particular Italian neorealism and modernism. Yang’s films include the…

In a dark, black gallery space a strange figure lay face down on top of shattered glass and an ornamental rug, its upper half draped in a multichromatic Jathilan robe used in Javanese folk dances to invoke spiritual possession. Its lower half was dressed in a pair of jeans, feet splayed at awkward angles, arms stretched out as if attempting to crawl, head morphed into that of a wolf, concealing any indication of consciousness. Caught between awareness and entrancement, Subterranean Thunder #1 (2023), this half-human, half-lupine figure—and, by extension, the entire exhibition—became a portal through which Indonesian artist Jompet Kuswidananto projected his personal encounters with mysticism. The installation was Kuswidananto’s way of representing its role as a catalyst for collective resistance and populist intoxication. For trance-inducing rituals, the element of…

On August 18, Japanese artist Tadaaki Kuwayama, known for his minimalist explorations of space, color, and surface, passed away at age 91 in New York. Kuwayama sought to revolutionize color field and monochrome painting into “pure abstract” art, devoid of historical context. Park Seo-Bo, a Korean artist revered as a pioneer of the Dansaekhwa movement, passed away on October 14 at age 91. Known for his Écriture series (1973–2023), Park influenced a generation of Korean artists to pursue meditative, process-oriented abstraction. His artworks are in collections of major public and private museums around the world.…

HONG KONG In late August, Sotheby’s Hong Kong announced it would hold the first of several auctions of modern and contemporary artworks collected by the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei, who in 2012 founded the private Long Museum in Shanghai and later a second branch in Shanghai and a satellite space in Chongqing. While maintaining that the works destined for sales come from their personal collection, Liu and Wang consigned a portion to Sotheby’s Hong Kong for the house’s auction week, (October 2–9), marking its 50th anniversary in Asia. The special sale, “A Long Journey,” was held on the evening of October 5 between Sotheby’s modern and contemporary sales. Of the 39 works from Liu and Wang, 29 sold for an accumulated total of HKD 544…

In Yu Hong’s paintings, the very nature of time is at stake. Her artistic practice contrasts the weight of history against present banality, merging significant and ordinary time alongside grand narratives and personal memory. These dichotomies aptly coalesce in her colossal, nine-meter-wide triptych The Ship of Fools (2021), in which Yu centers the composition on a vessel which is about to capsize. The painting’s title and theme are borrowed from one of Hieronymus Bosch’s panels in an iconic triptych of the same name from the 1490s, wherein a group of ravenous adults don’t seem to notice the menace that awaits them while they carry on dining. In Yu’s depiction, however, a dozen adolescents cling to the angled bow and sides, the only portion of the ship still protruding from the…

“How does one differentiate reality from dreamscape?” As a pertinent question raised by Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi, we may desire a more ambiguous boundary between the real and unreal, as the reality we live in—the climate crisis, war, political turmoil, economic hardship—could all be a dream. Yet, we can’t control our dreams, and our nightmares emerge as mirages of reality, absurd and fragmental. Confused, we might then suffer from madness, a syndrome caused by dementia, depression, sleep deprivation, and even emotional stress. Mark Chung’s Calenture (2023), a wooden structure covered with plastic sheets, is an oddly accurate manifestation of such hysteria. Occupying the unlit main gallery space of Rossi & Rossi in Hong Kong, Calenture was a wall-sized installation with a curvature reaching the ceiling built for his solo exhibition “Splinter.”…

What is a monument? What values do monuments project into civic spaces? And what does it mean to work in a monumental format? The three-person collective Tromarama, comprised of Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans, and Ruddy Hatumena, conceived of their moving-image work Growing Pillars (2023) for the giant 65-by-110-meter screen on the M+ Facade as an intimate family tribute. Instead of digging into a nation’s history for the iconography of heroic and nationalistic tropes, each member of Tromarama explored materials from their own families’ past, uncovering stories—in some cases unknown to them about their own relatives—that revealed details of their individual heritage and, more widely, the stories of a nation in the postcolonial era. In Growing Pillars, Tromarama composed a multilayer animation incorporating old footage digitized from Betamax and VHS tapes,…

The exhibition of four artists “She could lie on her back and sink,” curated by Lisa Beauchamp, was a conceptual exploration of alternative knowledge as embodied by the historically mythic figure of the witch. Though rather than serve as a metaphor for the demonization of nondominant thinking, the witch was deployed in service of deconstructing other contemporary issues: colonialism, transgenderism, and psychedelic utopianism. The show’s strongest work was Ann Shelton’s i am an old phenomenon (2022–), lush photographs of roots, herbs, and fungi that hold medicinal or hallucinogenic qualities, here displaying a visual compendium of knowledge of the natural world held by wise women and witches. Shelton’s work refers back to collective female practices which were eradicated in the witch-hunts of the late Middle Ages, drawing connections between these purges…

Like water, grief seeps into everything. It trickles through cracks. It gathers speed and rushes in. Filipina artist Eunice Sanchez found herself amid pools of sorrow in her second solo exhibition, “Sa Ilog, Nagtatagpo (On Rivers, Gathering)” at West Gallery. Following in her hometown’s tradition of going down the river after a funeral to wash away one’s sorrow, Sanchez comes to terms with loss through cyanotype photograms of moving water, wintering trees, and fading images of loved ones. Steeped in a blue hue, these small prints on paper, put together in assemblages, create a ghostly sense of stillness against the shattering tragedy of death. More than lamentation, the impulse to make art out of loss is often the desire to concretize one’s absence. In Permutations I & II (2023), Sanchez…

Human beings are apt to seek meaningful patterns in things, with a wealth of research suggesting that the human brain evolved in this way to aid learning and survival. But can the patterns we see be influenced by our education and our history, that is to say, by power? And if so, can they be changed or undone? In “Disfigurations,” Kader Attia, who partly grew up in Algeria, and Malaysian-born Mandy El-Sayegh experimented with this pattern-seeking instinct, hence why none of the artworks here were labeled, a negation of context that could be interpreted as an exercise in deconstructing the underlying forces—such as capitalism and the colonial gaze—that make up the contemporary world and inform these learned patterns. At first glance, the two rooms of the exhibition looked like a…