Innehållsförteckning för 138 (May/Jun 2024) från ArtAsiaPacific

In Mumbai, growth is the only constant. Along with an expressway being built across the entire coast and reclaimed land being dug up for an ever-delayed metro project, there are so many ongoing construction sites in the financial capital that it periodically ranks as having some of the most polluted air in the world. Those who can afford it retreat into air-conditioned, purified bubbles, overlooking a distant view of the gnawing haze. As a sliver of the city’s upper class begins moving into newly built homes, even larger than those they previously occupied, residents procure more walls to fill and higher aspirations to meet. Accordingly, Mumbai’s real estate boom has brought an onslaught of interior decorators and their clients into commercial art galleries in search of works that can serve…

Dreams of easy money are a recurring fantasy among art fair entrepreneurs, both seasoned and green. Art Basel held its first full-sized Hong Kong edition since pre-pandemic 2019, overflowing with more than 240 galleries across two floors, and overrun by mainland visitors and international museum groups. Transactions, on the other hand, were subdued, even by Covid-era standards. It was heard that Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz descended to his knees to assuage angry gallerists during the first two preview days due to initially tepid sales, although by the end of the week, most gallery directors were sighing with relief after better-than-anticipated numbers. Despite commercially sobering results this season, the week’s dinner-party chatter included rumors that Shanghai’s trendy Art021 will make a “cross-boundary” debut in the crown jewel of the Pearl…

WILMOTTE FOUNDATION Lee Bae La Maison de la Lune Brûlée Hansol Foundation – Museum SAN “La Maison de la Lune Brûlée” (The House of the Burning Moon) is a showcase of the charcoal-derived works by South Korean artist Lee Bae, who explores the centuries-old “moonhouse burning” ritual. With themes of renewal, circularity, and nature, Lee’s dramatic works intertwine folklore and heritage. Curated by Valentina Buzzi, the show presents his video work of the daljip teugi ritual, Burning (2024); charcoal-on-canvas works of the Issu du Feu (2024) series; the nearly five-meter-tall black-granite sculpture, Meok (2024); and the empheral sculptural installation Moon (2024), which leads to the Venetian waters. ARTENOVA Seundja Rhee Towards the Antipodes Korean Research Institute of Contemporary Art Curated by the former director of the Korea’s National Museum of…

Looking back over half a century of confronting the Hydra-headed force of global affairs, the esteemed Turkish artist Gülsün Karamustafa has two words for humanity: hollow and broken. These words also form the first part of “A State of the World,” the title of her Türkiye Pavilion exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale—reflecting their concern in the face of the systemic self-destructiveness of modern existence. “When I was informed about Venice, the war was continuing in Ukraine. We also had this unbelievably harsh earthquake in southeastern Turkey and Syria in which many lives were lost. Then, when I started to think over a new project for Venice, a new war started,” Karamustafa tells me over the phone, contemplating her present means of inspiration, aligned with what could be aptly described…

Friendship, kinship, community—how can these interpersonal connections be established and maintained across geographies and even across generations? The multiplicity of relationships that Kang Seung Lee forms through his artistic practice is both imaginary and real, as he recovers personal stories and transforms them into alternative histories of queer genealogies. Born in Seoul and now based in Los Angeles, Lee has formed a conversant network of artist-friends and mentors including artists such as Peter Hujar (1934–1987) and David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), the late Hong Kong-born artist Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–1990), who captured himself in photographs at sites around the world wearing a zhongshan suit, and the first openly gay politician in the United States, Harvey Milk (1930–1978), who was assassinated in San Francisco. As a nominee for the Korea Art Prize 2023…

Midway across the Emirate of Sharjah lies an uninhabited settlement of houses with a mosque known as Al Madam, built in the 1970s to settle the region’s nomadic people in a modern village. Yet the waves of red sand carried by the wind across the desert proved to be unstoppable, and the structures were abandoned. Decades later, the partially submerged town is now the site of a new structure, Concrete Tent (2015/23), designed by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, who work together as the Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR) collective. The full-scale replica of a canvas refugee tent, complete with a sloping roof and open flap in the rear, is recreated in a solid-wooden frame and covered in a concrete-like applique. The structure stands like a monument to the millions…

What contributions has contemporary art made to address the world’s environmental crises? This was the question posed by co-curators Martin Germann and Tsubaki Reiko in the four-chapter group exhibition of 34 artists at the Mori Art Museum, “Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living.” The private museum atop a Tokyo skyscraper was, paradoxically, an appropriate venue for this subject, as the postwar industrialization of the global economy that has produced such massive urban structures and surrounding megacities like Tokyo—and, in the process, so much of our catastrophically fatal pollution and the planet’s sixth great extinction—originates largely from the post-World War II economies of the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. Within 25 years of the war’s end, as these intertwined economies boomed, they also produced contemporaneous environmental, antiwar, and countercultural movements,…

Over the past two decades, Heman Chong has harbored a deep fascination with knowledge circulation through his multifaceted, conceptually driven practice. “Meditations on Shadow Libraries” at STPI gallery represented the Malaysian-born, Singapore-based artist’s steadfast exploration through nine diverse works, with mediums spanning installation, painting, and video. Within the exhibition, a “shadow library”—online databases that facilitate open access to commercialized or copyrighted material—served as a conceptual anchor for alternative, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic approaches to knowledge dissemination and collection building. Books, libraries, textual materials, and the artistic act of collecting were a palpable presence throughout the exhibition. Fittingly, the first work that greeted visitors was The Library of Unread Books (2016–), a collaborative endeavor with Singapore-based collection manager Renée Staal. As its title implies, it features donated works that were unread by…

An-My Lê’s latest retrospective traced the artist’s career from 1994 to the present, rendering global conflict with self-reflexive nuance and grace. “Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières,” ranged in subject matter from eerily bucolic images of war-ravaged Vietnam to Hollywood film sets and American war games—an expansive body of work, united by a desire to explore the effects of military conflict on our physical and psychic landscapes. With each successive project, Lê steps further away from the epicenter of historical trauma, the American war in Vietnam, which has long served as her creative inspiration. Viêt Nam (1994–98), the first photographic series in “Between Two Rivers,” represents Lê’s return from exile to the country of her birth. Aged 15, Lê and her family were evacuated by American forces just…

CAREER MOVES: FRESH STARTS Several leadership changes were announced at Asia’s major art institutions. On April 1, Eugene Tan, the current director of the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) and Singapore Art Museum (SAM), took over as CEO of both institutions from Chong Siak Ching. He was also appointed head of the Visual Arts Cluster, comprising NGS, SAM, and STPI gallery. In Hong Kong, M+ named Russell Storer as its new senior curator and head of curatorial affairs. Before joining the museum of visual culture in March, Storer was the head curator of international art at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Departing Hong Kong, Xue Tan, the founding senior curator of Tai Kwun Contemporary, was appointed chief curator at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. As head of exhibitions…

“It’s a pleasure to be here,” artist Nida Sinnokrot said quietly, before pausing. “‘Pleasure’ is not the right word—it’s good to be here, in company. We thank you for your solidarity, your shared sense of urgency, and for organizing this March Meeting that celebrates resilient community practices rooted in preservation and care.” Along with his partner, Sahar Qawasini, Sinnokrot was here to discuss their art and ecology initiative, Sakiya, which is located on a rewilded hillside in the West Bank outside Ramallah. But “here” was not Palestine. In the presence of many of its leading cultural figures, we were in a small auditorium in a former boy’s elementary school in the emirate of Sharjah, in the home of The Africa Institute, where the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) was holding its…

For a long time, Manal AlDowayan did not see herself as an artist. Having grown up in the Saudi Aramco residential compound in Dhahran during the 1980s, she witnessed few, if any, examples of full-time artmaking, let alone by women. Confining her practice to her spare time, AlDowayan studied computer science at Boston’s Suffolk University and, after graduating in 1999, became a programmer at the oil company where her father worked. During her MSc at London Metropolitan University, AlDowayan secretly enrolled in nearby art classes, yearning for the chance to explore her practice further. Finally, in 2003, a one-year photography workshop in Spain culminated in her first-ever exhibition, the group show “Looking Through the Glass” in Burgos. Her work—in particular, multiple series of black-and-white portraits—was met with immediate acclaim, receiving…

Having become accustomed to consuming short-form content on social media, submerging oneself in long-duration video works can often induce a certain restlessness. But watching The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023) by New Delhi-born filmmaker Amar Kanwar, which combines a series of fleeting moments displayed across seven loosely assembled screens in a soundproofed pitch-black room, was a captivating experience. Shown at the M+ group exhibition “Shanshui: Echoes and Signals,” the 28-minute multichannel video work chronicles five tales written by the artist and inspired by Indian folklore. “The Priest,” “The Hangman,” “The Landlord,” “The President,” and “Pabu Holla” were separate stories told through sparsely synchronized moving images combined with white-on-black text. Footage of animals, plants, landscapes, and objects—all imbued with elements of symbolism—unfolds within each chapter. Yet beyond the abundant allegories, the stories’ political…

When art critic Linda Nochlin published her groundbreaking essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” in 1971, she shattered a male-centric canon that seldom recognized women’s accomplishments. But despite small progressions, half-a-century later certain discrepancies remain. Faced with the question of why female artists continue to lack deserved celebration, museums and galleries have demonstrated numerous attempts to spotlight women and integrate their works and practice into existing historical narratives. The special exhibition “Pambabae,” meaning “for women” and curated by Miguel Rosales, was one such endeavor. Dedicated to Filipina abstract artists, “Pambabae” demanded that historians and critics re-examine sidelined works between the years of 1969 to 1989, the same period that the Philippines’s newly established Cultural Center championed abstraction over figuration. “Pambabae” displayed 12 artists’ kaleidoscopic range, from the…

Dutch artist Jennifer Tee insists on the essential bond between spirit and matter in defiance of the materialist understanding of world history. For her solo presentation “Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings” she investigated the history of migration through the transnational circulation of commodities that connect the metropole and the colony, as well as the production and exchange of artifacts, various belief systems, and temporalities that traverse and undo hierarchies. The first work viewers encountered at Tina Kim Gallery was the sprawling Crystalline Floorpieces/Sanguine Sea (2019). An expansive territory knitted from hand-dyed wool and dotted with small ceramic oblong shapes, Sanguine Sea continues Tee’s interest in alternative strategies of relaxation and comfort, evident in her invitation of poets and dancers to interact with it in a form of participatory engagement. Representing an…

Rummana Hussain (1952–1999) is widely considered one of India’s foremost conceptual artists. I had the great fortune of seeing her last solo show before she died, “In Order to Join,” held at Art in General in New York in October 1998. The exhibition was a culmination of a months-long residency, and the convergence of Hussain’s work with this space was, in itself, extraordinary. The site-specific installation featured a projected video of her walking barefoot across the Queensboro Bridge (which connects Manhattan and Queens), combined with found objects such as hair and costume jewelry. The exhibition impacted me as a 23-year-old who had recently lost her mother, and Hussain’s practice continues to move me. Her vision is more vital than ever in 2024’s geopolitical climate, the waves of which are as…

From chubby hearts to luminous eggs, two of Hong Kong’s government-funded recent “mega events” have drawn selfie-seekers as well as criticism from residents. Announced in 2022, the Mega Arts and Cultural Events (ACE) fund is an initiative to support 200 crowd-drawing concerts, exhibitions, and public installations from 2023 to 2025 to reinvigorate the tourism industry following Hong Kong’s post-Covid economic recession. In February, the Hong Kong Design Centre organized the “Chubby Hearts Hong Kong” campaign, consisting of giant red heart-shaped balloons created by British fashion designer Anya Hindmarch and installed across the city on Valentine’s Day. In her opening speech, Hindmarch stated that she hoped the hearts would “bring smiles to the public.” But despite attracting over 65,000 visitors, netizens were quick to ridicule the display, demanding to know how…

MELBOURNE The biennial Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) (February 22–25) was back in force at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, attracting more than 15,000 visitors and achieving USD 9.53 million in sales, a reported 37-percent increase from its 2022 edition’s total of USD 7.8 million. This year MAF invited curators Tamsin Hong and Shelley McSpedden to spearhead its program, spanning more than 60 Australasian presentations including 11 young galleries established after 2016 and four Indigenous art centers; research-based projects from independent art spaces such as Gertrude and Firstdraft; and a commissioned performance installation Newretro, reworked by the dance company Lucy Guerin Inc. The Sydney-based Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert presented new bronze works by Melbourne-based tapestry artist Tammy Kanat, known for her vibrant color and abstract patterns through her weaving pieces in…

“When do we reach the sea?” my companion asks, clinging to the front seat of the car as it lurches in the tracks cut into the desert floor. Our guide, a Russian-speaking local from the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in the northwest of Uzbekistan, gestures to the baked sands outside. “We are already in it.” Our party had left the city of Nukus two hours earlier and driven north toward Moynaq, a once bustling seaport now 150 kilometers from the water in what is currently the Aralkum Desert. Moynaq was formerly home to more than 60,000 residents and part of a network of thriving fishing communities fringing the Aral Sea. Most worked on the boats or in the canneries on the coast of what used to be a body of…

Over the course of nearly four decades and across a diverse range of mediums, Philippe Parenno has investigated such fundamental concepts as language and communication, time and memory, and the nature of reality and fiction. A frequent collaborator with fellow artists and curators, from Liam Gillick to Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Parreno often works on a massive scale to produce installations that are inherently site-specific—from the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. On the occasion of a major exhibition in Seoul, the acclaimed Algerian-born French artist sat down with ArtAsiaPacific to discuss AI-generated language, the power of the cinematic medium, and the importance of embracing the unknown. “VOICES,” currently on view at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, is the largest survey of your work in…

On the edge of a quiet river bank a barefooted, red-robed monk presses his heel carefully into the soil. Later, he walks at an inexplicably slow pace across the marble floor of Washington, DC’s iconic Union Station, entirely at odds with the anxious commuters who are either too pushed for time or too distracted by their phones to pay the wayfarer any attention. The life of the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist monk and pilgrim Xuanzang, who the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang admires for his “solitude, stubbornness, and stupidity,” has served as the inspiration behind the director’s unique body of work known as the Walker series, which now spans 12 years and multiple cities worldwide. The tenth installment, Abiding Nowhere (2024), was commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art…

Consider a bamboo blind and the way it obstructs and concedes light across each corded slat; recall the coolness of a material that does not carry heat quite like concrete or brick. Placed in a climate-controlled museum, the defunct blind-turned-exhibition-banner—painted over with this year’s title, “Ten Thousand Suns”—was perhaps emblematic of the broader problems of the contemporary biennial (with its entourage of patrons and board members), which inevitably flattens in its search for visual idioms of diversity. But just as the decision to substitute exhibition directories with newsprint referenced historied technologies of communication, the blinds—and their apparently rudimentary forms—were reminders of a continuity between past and present. Our negotiation with the life-giving and life-threatening light of the sun is historical—stretching across time, geography, and cosmologies. For the 24th Biennale of…

For his first solo exhibition in the city of his birth, Canadian-Hong Kong artist Howie Tsui presented a new series of mixed-media works featuring surreal characters and absurdist scenes, in large part inspired by his nostalgia for mid-20th century Chinese novelists and late-20th century screen and television writers working primarily within the wuxia (martial arts) genre. In actuality, Tsui’s pigment and ink paintings reveal a wide range of cultural influences—from the Japanese pictorial tradition of ukiyo-e, Western surrealism, and Chinese painting, to Hong Kong television soap operas and martial arts classics. In Tsui’s large painting The Banquet (2023) a plethora of grotesque characters—baton-holding security guards with heads resembling mahjong tiles, a blindfolded woman playing the Chinese zither, a gongshi (Chinese decorative rocks in irregular shapes) in the form of an…

Responding to various global sociopolitical tensions, “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, was as timely as it was resonant. Complemented by an increasing exposure to textile-based art, the exhibition of works from the 1960s onwards proposed how the cultural history and material function of textiles challenge existing knowledge and power structures. More than 100 artworks by 50 international practitioners were showcased across six sections: “Subversive Stitch,” “Fabric of Everyday Life,” “Borderlands,” “Bearing Witness,” “Wound and Repair,” and “Ancestral Threads.” Named after Rozsika Parker’s eponymous book The Subversive Stitch (1984), the foremost section featured wall texts that set the tone for the exhibition in its condemnation of hierarchical artistic structures that deem textiles “inferior as a domestic or ‘craft’ practice” and “feminine…

For well over four decades, Mao Ishikawa has documented life on the margins of Okinawa, where she was born, as well as those whose presence on the Japanese island has caused great social tension. Some of her early works explored the lives of local bar hostesses on Okinawa and their relationships with Black American soldiers stationed there, which eventually led her to the United States to photograph the series Life in Philly (1986), continuing a process in which she immerses herself in her local environment. Ishikawa’s work has grown increasingly political over time, culminating in her series The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll (2014–), hundreds of images, both staged and unstaged, that sharply critique the longstanding US military presence in Okinawa and the complicity of the Japanese government. For a wide-ranging…