Innehållsförteckning för 137 (Mar/Apr 2024) från ArtAsiaPacific

At first glance, Eora/Sydney’s art scene appears more robust than ever. Over the summer, the city hosted three blockbuster exhibitions—for Vasily Kandinsky, Louise Bourgeois, and Tacita Dean—as part of the Sydney International Art Series held across the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Snapshots of Bourgeois’s monumental spider sculpture Maman (1999) soaked in the subtropical rain circulated on social media alongside images of the newly unveiled Sydney Modern complex. The celebratory Sydney Festival 2024, which, while acknowledging the sense of “distress … due to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas,” kicked off the new year by activating arts, music, and performance venues across the city. Adding to the list of Eora/Sydney’s infrastructural developments is the refurbished Artspace. Coinciding with its 40th…

In 1978 the late German artist Joseph Beuys argued in his essay “Appeal for an Alternative” that “the dignity of man stands and falls with the inviolability of the person, and whoever disregards this, steps down from the level of humanity.” Today, many of us feel helpless in the face of persistent war, conflict, and ecological time bombs, as well as the rise of an artificial intelligence that supercharges misinformation and threatens human livelihoods. All of these problems can be considered damaging to “the inviolability of the person,” but arguably none more so than AI, which has instilled a new and unique fear in humankind. The idea of individual agency or of self-preservation now appears increasingly quaint and feeble. The question is, are these fears warranted? Do machines have minds,…

Ambitious and contrived, Liu Chuang’s Lithium Lake and Island of Polyphony (2023) is a 56-minute, three-channel video that brings together sci-fi, ethnomusicology, and material culture to forge a fictional journey. Interspersed with a plethora of footage, from lithium mining in Bolivia, photos of historical China, polyphonic singing by an Asian ethnic group in dense foliage, to an animated Chinese painting of bestiaries, the video evokes the artist’s indiscriminate fascination with, and inspection of, human civilization throughout historical periods. Commencing with a shot of a bone flute spinning through the air (an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 film 2001: A Space Odyssey), the introduction quickly establishes its sci-fi tone with the appearance of Voyager 1 and the particle-collider CERN. In contrast, the narrator calmly speaks in the rare Muya language, a…

Robert Gober was born in a small town in Connecticut in 1954 and is known for his wry, terse, whimsical sculptural lexicon and his depiction of domestic, quotidian objects, such as legs, babies’ cribs, doors, wallpaper, newspapers, and kitchen sinks. He came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with works that were widely associated with the postminimalist movement in New York, many of which draw favorable comparisons to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, as well as the assemblages of the Surrealists. Over the decades Gober has adapted and recreated his works for solo exhibitions and permanent installations at seminal institutions and events such as the Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Schaulager in Basel, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Despite his celebrated…

Suki Seokyeong Kang Willow Drum Oriole Leeum Museum of Art One of the most traditional artists working in the field of contemporary art in Korea today is Suki Seokyeong Kang, though this can be hard to recognize when first encountering her artworks, which can take the forms of abstract paintings, geometric wall sculptures, dyedreed panels hanging or lying on the floor, and are frequently combined as installations or in videos. Kang’s traditionalism is not a reactionary outlook. Rather, it is a foundational position of cultural continuity that undergirds her practice and its proliferating forms. Kang consciously inserts herself into a lineage of Korean visual art, music, poetry, and dance that spans the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897/1910) and crucially transcends Japan’s occupation (1910–45), the 1950–53 war, and extends to the 70 years…

Ho Tzu Nyen Time & the Tiger Singapore Art Museum Ho Tzu Nyen has maintained a longstanding fascination with the historical migration of tigers across Asia and their presence in the region’s histories and mythologies, particularly as weretigers in Malay cosmology. Traditionally perceived as liminal figures, tigers inhabit the interstitial zone between civilization and wilderness, the living and the ancestor-spirit world, and as symbols of diverse temporal concepts connecting the past, present, and future. The transition of these majestic creatures from apex predators to endangered species due to human activities prompts the artist’s reflection on the complex interplay of various time scales, wherein human desires and destinies fluctuate. In his first midcareer survey, “Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger,” the Singaporean artist and filmmaker beckoned audiences to engage in…

Tishan Hsu recent work 2023 Secession Whether edifices or objects (or even the people around us) things endow human life with stability and meaning. But as theorist Byung-Chul Han has noted, “This terrestrial order is today being replaced by the digital order.” Unmoored from the physical world, we now find ourselves adrift in a sea of data and information mediated through screens and necessarily subordinated to the fleeting syntax of the binary number system—the basis of all computers, and, subsequently, most of our embodied experience. We might even ask whether we have inadvertently rendered ourselves, in Han’s words, “the material derivatives of information.” This relationship between humans and technology has occupied artist Tishan Hsu for the better part of four decades. As he summarized in a 2021 interview: “What are we…

Park Chan-kyong Gathering National Museum of Asian Art In Park Chan-kyong’s solo exhibition, “Gathering,” ghosts appeared in various forms: as radioactive remains, as a sun-dappled dream, as self-unravelling garments. Across five photographic and video works, the South Korean media artist explored the legacies of historical trauma and disasters that can still be traced in contemporary society. An eerie, black-and-white film opened the exhibition on the cusp, in the middle, and in the wake of, catastrophe. Belated Bosal (2019) follows two hikers—a scientist measuring radiation, and a woman searching for a shipping container—as they explore the mountains and escape what appears to be a world on fire. As one of them scans a Buddhist temple for radioactivity, the other stumbles through wailing rock shrines. In the end, both meet at the…

The lunar new year season has ushered in auspicious beginnings across the Asia-Pacific region. Iwan Wirth and Manuela Wirth, two of the three cofounders of Swiss gallery juggernaut Hauser & Wirth, jetted in from Zurich to unveil their new street-level gallery in the heart of Hong Kong’s Central District. In tow were partner and president Marc Payot and directors from some of its other 20 branches around the world, plus their artistic heavy hitters Zeng Fanzhi and Mark Bradford. Painter Zhang Enli was also in attendance for the kickoff show starring his own work—amazingly, his debut in Hong Kong. All of Zhang’s colorful loop-the-loop paintings sold out on the day of the grand opening. The feng shui master should receive a big red envelope of Hong Kong dollars! In Thailand,…

AUSTRALIA Archie Moore Born in Toowoomba, Queensland, Archie Moore explores key signifiers of identity, intercultural communication, and racism through his conceptual and research-based works that portray his personal and national history. With language a central element in Moore’s practice, in “kith and kin,” the artist traces his family’s Kamilaroi/Bigambul lineage that dates back more than 65,000 years. Curated by Ellie Buttrose, “kith and kin” explores the legacies of colonialization and the impacts that an incarceration epidemic has had on familial connections across Indigenous communities and marks the 25th anniversary of Australia’s presence in the Venice Biennale. KOREA Koo Jeong A Known for their conceptual practice, Koo Jeong A has created a wide range of work, from glow-in-the-dark skateboard parks and paintings to animations and sound and scent-works that explore inter-conscious…

For the past seven years the interdisciplinary artist Robert Zhao Renhui has been investigating a number of secondary forests in his native Singapore—specifically, one nestled between expressways near his home, the other surrounding Gillman Barracks, a former colonial-era military site turned art precinct. And despite a conservationist friend warning him about the inferior biodiversity of secondary forests compared to primary ones, Zhao was resolute in allowing overlooked patches of greenery born from previously deforested land to reveal themselves through his work. Such spaces have been Zhao’s primary focus in recent exhibitions, acting as dynamic sites for explorations into the intricate web of human and nonhuman cohabitation. In his commissioned project Albizia (2023), for example, Zhao created an immersive performance installation that incorporated objects, plants, video, photography, and sound. Similarly, The…

Between artists and their work there exists a space where emotions and expressions transpire, like leaves giving off water vapor through the stomata. Yet, for many artists, such space ends when the artworks depart from the artmaking process. For the Hong Kong-based artist Trevor Yeung the bonding between the artist and artworks never ends, as long as the plants in many of his works continue to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen through photosynthesis. Yeung gives the impression of being not only an artist but a lover of living things. And since graduating from Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts in 2010 he has developed a unique practice incorporating botanic and aquatic elements into site-specific installations. He is known for his specimen-like and biomimetic collages of found objects and…

Amol K. Patil Lines Between the City TKG+ Projects Prior to being an exhibition, Amol K. Patil’s “Lines Between the City” was a route. On one side, a wall was painted with an unbroken gray horizon; on the other, a rough plywood scaffold inhibited movement through the space. Nods to the chawls of Mumbai, these makeshift margins imposed a new, brief line through the city—a tangent with the same homogenizing impulse as any other whim of urban development. This choice reframed the gallery not as a place of exception where the work could transcend the everyday, but instead infused it with the stifling mundanity of contemporary public life. Patil’s clever architecture transformed encounters with the paintings and sculptures that congregated throughout into run-ins like we might anticipate in the streets.…

Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023 Multiple Locations The third, and arguably best, edition of the roving, government-sponsored Thailand Biennale took place in Chiang Rai, a remote northern province bordering Myanmar, Laos, and the Mekong River. This mountainous region is, however, mired in unresolved issues: overlooked and contested histories; legacies of war, colonialism, and top-down governance; rural inequality and the marginalization of women, ethnic minorities, and migrants; and imperiled cultural and natural heritage. The show’s 60 Thai and international artists explored how these realities play out in Thailand and around the world, guided by artistic directors Gridthiya Gaweewong and Rirkrit Tiravanija as well as curators Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram, each having links to the country’s north. Several works confronted the degradation of the region’s waterways, forests, and biodiversity. Wit Pimkanchanapong’s…

Thao Nguyen Phan Reincarnations of Shadows Pirelli HangarBicocca Thao Nguyen Phan’s works are at once beautiful and devastating, their harrowing stories poetically revealed like emotional gut punches. And one is struck by the extent of the tragedy and the burning shame at knowing almost none of it. Phan asks us to consider why it is that certain events in history are glorified while others are hardly mentioned, if at all. Who gets to determine what is dutifully preserved in archives and what is overlooked, erased altogether? Where should we turn to if we want to uncover more complex truths? Take Mute Grain (2019), her hypnotic three-channel black-and-white video on view at her solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, which focuses on the 1945 famine of the Red River Delta in Japanese-occupied…

Paul Pfeiffer Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom Museum of Contemporary Art In an age in which we spend our waking hours looking at screens, Paul Pfeiffer’s midcareer retrospective of manipulated videos and photographs from the last 25 years felt eerily prescient and pertinent. Presenting digital videos on now-retro technology—CRT cube television monitors, LCD monitors, camcorder screens, portable DVD players, and projectors—Pfeiffer revealed the invisible forces of power, violence, and historical trauma using the techniques of image-editing software: looping, erasure, splicing. His gestures of recontextualization change the passive viewer into an active one, critically watching and reconsidering the media—and the ideas and structures they represent—that we surround ourselves with daily. Spectacles of sporting events and popular culture are frequent subjects for Pfeiffer. The photographic series Four Horsemen…

Two millennia ago, the ancient Nabataean people inscribed their stories onto sandstone cliffs, clay walls, and tomb facades throughout Hegra, an archaeological site in modern-day Saudi Arabia. For the AlUla Arts Festival in February, multidisciplinary artist Manal AlDowayan took inspiration from this history to begin planning Oasis of Stories, a large-scale land art installation that reimagines the walls of Old Town AlUla. After hosting participatory workshops, AlDowayan will cast residents’ drawings onto the constructed walls in an immersive labyrinth that mimics the Old Town, reviving the site’s ancient history while highlighting stories from the present community. To view the artworks, visitors will traverse through the narrow “streets,” physically and spiritually engaging with the land and its people. In the upcoming issue of ArtAsiaPacific, assistant editor Anna Lentchner speaks to AlDowayan,…

A retrospective exhibition at the Indiana University Bloomington (IU) of 87-year-old Palestinian American artist and alumna Samia Halaby, titled “Centers of Energy,” was abruptly canceled on December 20 ahead of its February 10 opening. The university informed the artist that the show had been terminated in a two-sentence email citing unspecified “safety concerns.” “Centers of Energy” would have opened at the school’s Eskenazi Museum of Art, marking Halaby’s first retrospective in the United States. Curated by Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert, the survey intended to exhibit approximately 35 abstract paintings and drawings from across Halaby’s career. In a petition launched to reinstate the show, IU students stated the exhibition had been in the works for more than three years and blamed IU president Pamela Whitten for the decision. The statement, which…

SINGAPORE Singapore’s warm air of optimism comes from the influx of new-moneyed immigrants despite the recessionary winds hitting the region caused by the dwindling growth rate of the Chinese economy. In its second edition at the Expo and Convention Centre at Marina Bay Sands, Art SG (January 19–21) is still in its early development, as the number of participating galleries dropped from 164 in its debut year to 114 in 2024—reflecting a more comfortable scale for the market’s size. Despite the 30-percent reduction, during the fair’s first preview day (January 18), Magnus Renfrew, the cofounder of Art SG, reported solid transactions. Korean art proved popular. Johyun Gallery of Busan sold a collection of charcoal paintings by Lee Bae on day one with prices ranging from USD 50,000 to 180,000. Leading…

Vunkwan Tam HONG KONG The circulation of global capital often results in an exchange of objects and symbols that connects the internet and the physical world. It is also a transfer that informs Vunkwan Tam’s artistic practice. The Hong Kong-based artist is known for his installations of marginally adjusted readymade artifacts found on the streets or purchased online, and the objects’ removal from their original context, the way in which Tam processes and works with them, and their placement within the gallery space evoke a unified force that is bleak, shadowy, and tarnished. Tam’s first solo exhibition, “F,” at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery in 2022, refers to the internet meme “press F to pay respects” that originated from the first-person shooter video game Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014). This…

In queer culture, a “second adolescence” often occurs after coming out, as one experiences a transformation typically associated with teenage development. For me, that metamorphosis occurred during my late 20s when I began navigating my deeply ingrained unease toward my gender expression. I have always been considered “effeminate” in the manner I conduct myself, but have never overtly presented as such, particularly in my clothing. In the last year, I decided to grow my hair past my shoulders, and last July I dared to venture out to a rave wearing a slinky, emerald satin slip. While my femininity was confidently on display, however, I was furtively selfconscious. In his photography series Bagong Salta (2023), the Filipino artist Eric Bico encapsulates how it feels to unburden oneself of the internalized stigmatization…

A bowl of fruit is a classical subject in European painting. A long roll of paper might provide the perfect surface for a calligrapher’s strokes or an ink painter’s depiction of a beautiful landscape. A well-tuned piano’s strings vibrate at just the right frequencies for the musician sitting in front of it and playing its keys. Yuko Mohri, however, has other ideas about the potentials for these objects and materials: ones that you didn’t necessarily expect to see, or hear—or even smell. Visitors to the Japan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 will have an opportunity to encounter Mohri’s latest installation. Fruit will be a component, she says, as will electricity as a source of sound, motion, and lighting, among other experiential elements. Her project for Venice builds…

What gives comfort? What offers support? And what small moment of kitsch sparks a sense of fleeting joy? (One set of answers: break-up songs, walking-assistant devices, and iridescent plastic animals.) Watershed (2023), the Berlin-based, Tehran-born Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s newly commissioned installation at the Taipei Biennial 2023, combined these elements in the tree-filled courtyard of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). There, Sadr Haghighian created an approximately 40-minute-long sonic environment of music, field recordings, and dialogue that was broadcast by transducers located inside body-like forms perched on top of walkers. The song that inspired the work and filled the gravel-floored space—“Suddenly” (1999) by Cantopop star Karen Mok, originally in Mandarin and then translated into Minnan and Cantonese by Haghighian—was voted the TFAM staff’s favorite. Its original chords and subsequent re-recordings in…

Hiroshi Sugimoto Time Machine Hayward Gallery In 1974, Hiroshi Sugimoto was standing in front of a large diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when he had a sudden revelation. Conceding that the backdrops looked fake, he noticed that by “taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real.” Two years later he returned, this time with a large-format camera, and with the precision of a Meiji-era photographer produced a single frame of a polar bear standing over a dead seal. Setting his exposure to 20 minutes in order to capture the subtlest textures and tones, Sugimoto emerged with Polar Bear (1976), and in that very moment realized that his career as an artist had begun: “I had…

Kongkee Warring States Cyberpunk Tai Kwun Contemporary Comics, illustrations, graphic novels, and animations are seldom exhibited at art museums, as many of these mediums still rely upon traditional narrative structures of storytelling. Likewise, although their discernable visual identity may capture viewers’ attention, most academically trained, institutional curators shy away from such “layman” approaches. While contemporary artists like Takashi Murakami’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriations of anime and comic strips created an outlet for future artists to take inspiration from popular visual culture, still, few artists of the aforementioned practices have been able to present as more than supplementary additions to established exhibitions. One exception is the Malaysian-born, Hong Kong-based artist-illustrator Kong Khong-chang, or “Kongkee,” whose first institutional solo exhibition “Warring States Cyberpunk” debuted at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum in 2022.…

Atul Bhalla Auscultation: False Clouds and Real Deluges Vadehra Art Gallery During a tea break in Ranjeetpura, a village in Rajasthan’s Bikaner district, the multidisciplinary artist Atul Bhalla noticed marbled sandstone on a nearby fence that resembled a piece of meat. After bringing the stone home, Bhalla featured it in The Table (2023), an installation in his exhibition “Auscultation: False Clouds and Real Deluges.” Here, he placed it at an angle on a long dining table, its hardness a counterpoint to the fragility of the surrounding wine glasses and fine crockery. The Table also recalled one of Bhalla’s earlier photographic works, Still Life with Fictitious Object (2017), in which he photographed meat of indeterminate origin on a white plate. At the time, its significance was clear: the rising tide of…

Candice Lin Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory Canal Projects Candice Lin’s recent solo exhibition, “Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory,” was as strange as it sounds. The immersive installation clacked and oozed and enveloped viewers in an environment that was as amusing as it was confounding. At the front of the gallery stood a series of laboratory-like stations cluttered with tubes and tinctures, clocks, and spinning gadgets as well as animated videos mounted in clunky frames that evoked atrophied technological apparatus. Elsewhere, a haphazard assortment of pens and sticky notes scrawled with enigmatic lists and messages suggested sudden abandonment, perhaps the aftermath of a natural disaster. Or were preternatural forces at work? Among these stations, connected by sputtering tubes and wires, stood large clay vessels known as onggi, a…