Innehållsförteckning för 143 (May/Jun 2025) från ArtAsiaPacific

In our collective moment of anxiety-inducing political rhetoric and endlessly cascading bad news, this issue of ArtAsiaPacific spotlights artists’ work that seeks to reframe our sense of reality. Our cover article features the work of Angela Goh, whose performance Total (2024) I was fortunate to experience at a symposium at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul last November. I was hypnotized by Goh’s unpredictable, quietly insistent actions that unfolded before a small audience. Like a vivid dream, her absurd gestures hover in my memory. AAP Sydney desk editor, Johanna Bear, explores Goh’s decade-long career of contorting her body like a puppet, pushing its limits. The artist explained to Bear that her choreography, as she experiences it, is an embodied meditation on life: “Thinking of what is not yet, not…

True to its reputation as a port city dating back to the late 17th century, Saigon (now administratively known as Ho Chi Minh City) is a confluence of cultural streams carrying millions of microhistories. Constantly in flux, the metropolis seems to molt and change skin every week, with new people and ideas emerging to replace previous ones. If you blink here, you might miss something (be it a trendy new cafe or a spirited Grab driver waltzing your way!). Saigon’s receptive attitude toward novelties thus offers fertile ground for unconventional seeds to germinate in the city’s ever-expanding contemporary art scene. Over the last few years, the Saigonese contemporary art landscape has undergone critical shifts. When world-renowned artist Dinh Q. Lê died in 2024—one of the founders of Sàn Art, an…

On February 7, Adrian Collette, CEO of the national arts council Creative Australia, announced that artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino, director oftheChauChak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, would represent Australia next year at the 61st Venice Biennale. “We are proud to support this extraordinary team,” Collette said. “Khaled Sabsabi’s work … reflects the diversity and plurality of Australia’s rich culture, and will spark meaningful conversations with audiences around the world.” Less than a week later, the commission was cancelled on the grounds that it would create an unacceptable risk to public support for the arts. What happened in those intervening six days has been the subject of much debate. A column in The Australian newspaper, behind a paywall, criticized the selection of the artist based on…

HONG KONG As Asia’s art calendar becomes increasingly crowded, discussions surrounding Hong Kong’s position as the region’s premier art hub have intensified in recent years. The 12th edition of Art Basel Hong Kong presented some intriguing insights and steady sales across sectors, indicating a measured return of market confidence. The year’s edition gathered 240 galleries from 42 countries, with Asia-Pacific galleries comprising more than half the participants—the highest representation from the region to date. With the expanded presence of Southeast Asian and African galleries, this shift mirrors the art world’s increasing attention on the “Global South.” Blue-chip galleries reported significant sales across the board. Hauser & Wirth placed Louise Bourgeois’s bronze sculpture Cove (1988/cast 2010) with a collector in Asia for USD 2 million, coinciding with the artist’s solo exhibition…

US President Donald Trump’s April 2 executive order imposing tariffs of a minimum of 10 percent on all US imports, commencing three days later, sent shockwaves around the world. Commentators stated that such measures, directly targeting free trade, would upend global trade and hinder economic growth. While the tariff rates have been consequently relaxed for some countries, and exemptions provided, it bears considering the impact of tariffs on art practices and the international sales and movement of artworks. The Trump tariffs were generally calculated based on the US’s trade deficit with each country. That amount was divided by the total annual value of imports from that country, and the result was then divided by two. With the European Union, for example, the US has a USD 235.6 billion deficit and…

Emptied In a room at the top of Kiang Malingue’s vertical gallery building in the Wan Chai neighborhood of Hong Kong, large double-height windows overlook the trees across the alleyway. Before the windows, in late 2024, for her exhibition “Daydreams,” Su-Mei Tse had laid eight white porcelain sheets resembling folio pages onto translucent silk paper on the floor. High up on the wall to the right of this configuration was a 1.5-meter-square image of the moon. On the left wall, closer to ground level, was a framed photograph of a marble Roman bust, the woman’s nose smashed off, her tight curls still intact. The contemplative poise of the objects, their collective evocation of a poet or musician sitting at a desk before a blank sheet of paper, with a view…

Each issue, ArtAsiaPacific presents a critical essay in collaboration with Burger Collection, a Hong Kong nonprofit that partners with many institutions to support contemporary art worldwide. In the few photographs that exist of Anne Truitt in her studio, she is always wearing a placid, nearly inscrutable expression. She makes eye contact, but her mind is elsewhere. In 1962, perhaps she is thinking about Tor, the imposing poplar slab she has just bisected and layered with dark paint. In 1986, perhaps it is about the pale blue buoyancy of Landfall (1970), and how she will finish the two sculptures towering beside her. Even in photographs, Truitt’s forms captivate. This is due to her rigorous and intimate craftsmanship: after enlisting a cabinetmaker to make a structure to her exact specifications, she repeatedly…

What does it mean to bear the weight of sociopolitical histories, ancestral knowledge, and collective memory? How do we transmute the gaping wounds of intergenerational grief and trauma into active, forward-looking modes of healing and resistance—especially as the world continues to sink into anthropogenic crises, with seemingly no salvation in sight? Such dire concerns pervaded the 16th Sharjah Biennial (SB16), which opened on February 6, shortly after US President Donald Trump announced his disturbing plans to “take over” the Gaza Strip. The shocking proposal was partly drowned by the never-ending reportage about wars, economic downturns, and environmental disasters in today’s media landscape, but it set the stage for an art event dedicated to challenging the Western world order. This endeavor began in 2003, when Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi took charge…

In her recent solo exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, artist Yee I-Lann beckoned visitors to sit on a tikar, a Malay mat of the sort made in her northern Borneo homeland of Sabah and central to her artistic iconography. Stepping shoeless onto TEPO PUTIH (White Mat) (2019), an oversized, unadorned example produced in collaboration with Bajau Sama Dilaut weavers from Omadal Island, one immediately felt its inviting softness underfoot. The pandanus leaf mat was a gathering point for experiencing PANGKIS (2021), a video in which dancers, connected by a reimagined seven-headed Murut warrior headdress, perform hypnotic movements punctuated by cries that echoed throughout the gallery. Such procedures lie at the core of Yee’s practice, which draws strength from kinship, ancestral knowledge, and the intimacies of communal labor. These themes…

In deconstructing the mechanics of gesture, Angela Goh remakes notions of space, time, and truth. For over a decade, the Sydney-based dancer and choreographer has cultivated a unique kinetic language charged with beguiling precision and theoretical rigor. She raises metaphysical questions about what shapes and unravels the world by exploring how movement makes meaning. What distinguishes a gesture of affection from one of threat? When does a body no longer seem human? Such musings enthrall Goh, who eschews definitive meaning to instead reach into the recesses of imagination. The magic of Goh’s work is belied by the simplicity of its staging. Her performances generally take place in gallery zones or white-box theater sets; props are often commonplace and used sparingly. Her attire—typically a t-shirt, sneakers, and jeans—matches that of the…

For Ho Tzu Nyen, histories are neither linear nor contained. They are spectral, fragmented, and often resistant to the kind of authoritative narratives that empires, colonizers, or even anthropologists have sought to impose. His 2015 video The Nameless conjures a ghostly version of the real-life Lai Teck, an enigmatic triple agent who moved between colonial powers, Communist insurgents, and revolutionary forces during the 1930s and ’40s in Southeast Asia. Known by more than 50 pseudonyms, this “nameless” figure slipped between identities and across boundaries, leaving elusive traces of his existence across official archives. Lai Teck is not just an individual for Ho, but an allegory for Southeast Asia itself—a region as manifold as the character he portrays. Ho’s exhibition “Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time,” recently on view at Kiang Malingue…

StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream (2021), shown in Shilpa Gupta’s solo exhibition at the Bikaner House art center in New Delhi, featured several flap-display boards of the sort once ubiquitous in train stations and airports. The signs present words and phrases distilled, like poetry, from various thoughts penned by the midcareer artist over the years—for instance, “as we slowly nearly always / give in.” The works remind us of transit waiting zones, in-between spaces of commingled anxiety and rest. But they can also evoke harsh political realities: “Raid Histories / Erase Voices.” The letters clatter violently as they flip, drawing our eyes to the upcoming word. The term “facts” becomes “fcats” and “cannot” becomes “cnat”—intentional misspellings that nod to the frequent distortions and fabrications in daily discourse, both public and private. Despite the gaps…

For her eponymous solo show at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles, American artist Kelly Akashi took an almost Ikebana approach to her installation. As in the poetic Japanese art of floral arranging, she readjusted and repositioned her hewn and cast sculptural objects down to the minute of the exhibition’s opening. Originally intending to open the show at the end of January, Akashi suddenly found herself, like tens of thousands of Angelenos, completely displaced, as her home and attached studio—and the artworks within—were lost to the Eaton Fire that razed her Altadena neighborhood. Akashi solicited the local art community, seeking donations and other support, and, as a result, was able to almost entirely remake her show in under a month. The fires burned an astonishing 14,000 acres—roughly the size of Manhattan—and…

Signifier versus signified, symbol versus sign—that intellectual exercise from the 1990s has been a more profound lived experience for Korean American artist Christine Sun Kim, now based in Berlin. Born in 1980, she earned a BFA and two MFAs—from the Rochester Institute of Technology, the School of Visual Arts, and Bard College—before going on to show works at venues such as Amsterdam’s de Appel Arts Center and London’s Tate Modern. Kim uses and advocates for American Sign Language—an autonomous, grammatically complex mode of communication—while challenging societal norms regarding sound through her drawings, performances, and videos. In our forthcoming July/August issue, critic Xintian Wang analyzes Kim’s first one-person museum exhibition, “All Day All Night,” which runs through July 6 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The show…

It was during the summer of 2015, just following my graduation, that I first encountered the work of Colombian-born artist Doris Salcedo at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her show was on the fourth floor, the last one I visited in the museum that day. Before stepping foot into the exhibition, I had no idea it was about to change the course of my practice. At the time, as an Indonesian living in the US, I felt constantly challenged. I had difficulties grasping the language, mannerisms, and context of discussions in my social life and classes. I forced myself to endure these trials in order to survive and create with honesty. It was not easy, and I often felt small. Perhaps these experiences played some part in my deep…

After Israel resumed its brutal military assault on Gaza in late March, shattering a tenuous 42-day ceasefire deal, the conflict continues to reverberate through the global art scene. On March 11, renowned Pakistani architect and humanitarian Yasmeen Lari turned down this year’s Wolf Prize for architecture, which is granted annually by the Israeli nonprofit Wolf Foundation. Just a day after the latter revealed its list of winners, Lari announced her rejection on social media, citing the ongoing atrocities in Palestine as her reason for declining the USD 100,000 accolade. She thanked the jury for selecting her, but stated that “in view of the unfortunate continuing genocide in Gaza, I am not able to accept the award … even from an organization that is independent of the government.” Following Lari’s decision…

As Art Basel Hong Kong concluded on March 30, all eyes turned to the major auction houses, where both Christie’s and Sotheby’s had aligned their spring marquee sales with the fair for the first time. Would the fair’s energy and robust attendance—which was considered across the board as a bellwether for a recovering market—translate into bidding in the auction room? Do the back-to-back sales offer any insights about collector confidence across Greater China? HONG KONG Christie’s evening sale of 20th and 21st century art on March 28 in Hong Kong delivered generally positive signals about the Asian art market, bringing in HKD 560 million (USD 72 million) with fees. The house drew over 7,000 visitors to its pre-auction exhibitions amid the busy March art week. The evening saw a 95-percent…

A will to psychic reclamation pervades the work of video artist Jane Jin Kaisen, who grew up as a Korean adoptee in Denmark. Now 45 and a professor of media arts at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, she has spent two decades imaginatively processing the cultural ethos of her birthplace. The undertaking has gained her multiple honors, including that of representing South Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. More recently, Kaisen was one of four artists awarded the 2024 Korea Artist Prize from the country’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) and the Seoul Broadcasting System Foundation. Behind Kaisen’s seven large-screen videos—presented together in a single open space at the MMCA under the collective title “Ieodo (Island Beyond the Sea)” (2022–24)—lies a highly…

Alberto Giacometti’s palpably angst-ridden figures recently made their way to Guangdong, where they appeared even more anxious than usual. To mark the 60th anniversary of Sino-French diplomatic relations, Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang and Emilie Bouvard, director of collections and scientific programs at the Fondation Giacometti, co-curated “Figure as Monument: Alberto Giacometti in Langtou,” bringing 79 Giacometti works from Paris to a 700-year-old village in southern China. Addressing the relationship between Giacometti’s oeuvre and the built environment, the exhibition placed sculptures, paintings, and drawings by the Swiss modern master in dialogue with works by three contemporary Chinese artists as well as the ChunYangTai Arts and Cultural Center itself—a contemporary complex designed to integrate harmoniously with the lush natural setting and ancient architecture of the historical village. The juxtaposition was thoughtful,…

“Amnesia lies at the core of the digital age. We have an overflow of information but not necessarily more memory,” said Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, to mark the opening of Arpita Singh’s exhibition at the gallery in March. “Remembering,” which brought together 165 works created by Singh over the course of her prolific six-decade career, was the artist’s first solo show outside of her native India. As its title suggests, the survey highlighted Singh’s exploration of memory—especially recollections of war, gender-based violence, and communal riots. Singh portrays the human body as a recipient of collective memories, inherited at birth. These individual, ancestral, and social recollections come together in thick paint on her borderless canvases. As Obrist notes, by “engaging with the local and the global,…

Ai Weiwei’s latest US museum exhibition, a survey of his four-decade career, came at a particularly tense time in global history. The prolific artist, known for art that comments on human rights and political oppression, presented over 130 works at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). “Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei,” echoed the title of Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction collection I, Robot (1950). While Asimov examined the relationship between humans and technology, Ai deals with related issues of systemic power and the suppression of truth. His defiant yet playful spirit was evident in photographs from two crucial periods in his career: his time in New York during the 1980s and the era following his return to Beijing in 1993. The presentation featured iconic works such as…