Innehållsförteckning för 144 (Jul/Aug 2025) från ArtAsiaPacific

In our fraught global political landscape, where conservative policy proposals like Washington’s Project 2025 are not only being embraced, but also realized by populist regimes, this issue highlights artists whose practice mirrors key issues of power, access, and inclusion. American artist Christine Sun Kim challenges conventional notions of sound and language, positioning her work at the intersection of conceptual art and lived experience. In our cover feature, Xintian Tina Wang shares her encounter of interviewing Kim during her midcareer survey at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art earlier this year. As Wang writes: “Her work doesn’t just point out what is missing, it demands that the gaps be filled—laying claim to what should have been available from the start.” Kim inhabits sound not as a given, but as a…

With adolescence comes a new sense of self which develops in that strange moment when we become hyperaware of our identity, as if our consciousness has split into performer and observer, and we feel everything twice: once in the moment, and once through the lens of our own introspective gaze. The teenage French poet Arthur Rimbaud captured this liminal state of mind that signals our first encounters with love, desire, and melancholy in an 1871 letter, writing: “For I is an Other…. I am present at this birth of my thought.” Such themes of connection and alienation permeate the works of Chinese-born artist Xingzi Gu, who translates these visceral experiences into a distinctive painterly language. Drawing from Japanese coming-of-age cinema, Chinese Bildungsroman novels, intimate snapshots on social media, and nebulous…

In person, Ali Kazma is not unlike his camerawork—steady and focused. Clad in forest-green rimmed glasses and stylish, tailored attire, the midcareer artist from Istanbul—now based in Paris—moves with poise and thought. In his films, totaling around 70 productions, Kazma often uses a still lens to accentuate his subject’s movements. His framing frequently juxtaposes static shots of landscapes, photographs, machines, or book pages with people moving through everyday actions, such as walking through interiors or stamping documents, repeating gestures ad infinitum. Since the beginning of his practice, Kazma’s attentive eye has been directed at trades and crafts that typically remain backstage, prompting reflections on production, consumption, and human labor. Back in Istanbul in preparation for his solo exhibition at Istanbul Modern, the artist spoke to me about his recent preoccupations—a…

Conceptual art—in its questioning of the very nature of art itself—often tests the limits of conventional legal and ethical boundaries. Initially, commentators debated whether conceptual and non-representational works could even be classified as art at all. The conversation has since evolved to focus on the complex legal and ethical dilemmas that arise—particularly in relation to intellectual property rights—when artists reference or incorporate the work of others. Artist as Commissioner For each work in her series Home Sweet Home (2019–), artist Mak2 (Mak Ying Tung, b. 1989, Hong Kong) commissions three different pay-for-hire artists through the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao to paint one-third of a screenshot from the video game The Sims, providing them with only limited instructions. She then combines the three separately completed sections into a single image. The…

First presented as part of last year’s West Space Commissions in Melbourne, “Extinguishing Hope” at Sydney’s UTS Gallery marked the second installment of Akil Ahamat’s debut solo exhibition. The show expanded on the Sri Lankan Malay artist and filmmaker’s nearly decadelong inquest into the aesthetics and psychosocial affects of our information-flooded reality, reflecting on the collapse of truth and certainty that has fueled the rise of global fascism. Yet, despite what its title might suggest, “Extinguishing Hope” was a salve for overwhelmed audiences. Guided by the possibilities of what remains unknown and unseen, it probed the question: how do we find our way in the dark? Throughout their practice, Ahamat attempts to visually and metaphorically evoke the sensory overload of what they call “the contemporary dark age.” The spatially mirrored…

Because it is so intimately connected to the social fabric of daily life, craft has historically been viewed with a different lens from art. The notion persists that functional objects lack the originality of “fine art” due to their utilitarian nature. In Europe and the US, fiber art emerged in the 1960s largely as an extension of modernism. Western artists were drawn to the geometric motifs of traditional weaving primarily because they echoed the Bauhaus movement’s formal emphasis on pattern, line, and composition. However, in Asia, the ’60s were a critical period of postcolonial nation-building. Artists in Southeast and Central Asia embraced Indigenous craft traditions such as batik, weaving, and embroidery—practices that were regarded as “folk art”—as a way to reconstruct fractured cultural narratives and identities that were rooted in…

In Vietnamese, tam tã is an idiom for heavy rain. For Trần Lương’s first international survey at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, the title “Tam Tã – Soaked in the Long Rain” evoked the torrential downpours of his country’s wet season while suggesting an overwhelming feeling or experience—perhaps alluding to the war-scarred childhood that shaped the Hanoi-born artist-activist’s philosophy and practice. The exhibition opened with Tran’s Underwater World series (1992–99), which he began in his early 30s. Mystical, aquatic-themed watercolor and gouache paintings lined the walls of the dim anterior gallery, accompanied by gentle sounds of a trickling stream. Dating back to Tran’s beginnings as a painter, the tableaux demonstrate his rejection of French classical aesthetics in favor of figurative abstraction and homegrown cultural narratives. Love Affair 2 (1992),…

Vien Valencia MANILA At the heart of Vien Valencia’s multidisciplinary practice lies a deep concern for the precariously intertwined relationships between people and their environments. Valencia—a Filipino artist working across installation, photography, video, and process-oriented community art projects—assumes manifold perspectives to scrutinize, in his own words, “how spaces shape lives, and how people in turn shape, reclaim, or resist them.” An itinerant childhood—marked by constant relocation due to economic challenges—was formative, fostering an empathetic, exploratory, and collaborative research-based approach to understanding the complex experiences of displacement, both his own and others. Valencia’s work along the Tinipak River—located in Tanay, Rizal Province—exemplifies his approach. Beginning around 2021 and set for completion in 2027, construction of the Kaliwa Dam nearby threatens to submerge the area’s unique limestone rock formations (tipak-tipak) as well…

Walking into Richard Hawkins’s exhibition felt like stumbling into a fever dream simultaneously nightmarish and erotic. At Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, “The Garden of Loved Ones” presented a series of collages, videos, and sculptures centering on one of Hawkins’s long-standing obsessions: Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the Japanese Butoh dance, whose ashen, convulsing body pervaded the artworks in the presentation. One of Hawkins’s new works, Head of a Dancer (2025), features a haunting plaster cast of Hijikata’s decapitated head, wig hair grotesquely sprouting from its mouth. The sculpture rests on a crimson pillow covered with tattered kimono fabric, enmeshed by a delicate layer of artificial cobwebs. Its facial expression is ambiguous—neither peaceful nor anguished. This gruesome display mirrors an earlier work in the show: Hawkins’s 2018 collage The Decadent Scholars, which…

Since their founding in 2006, Tromarama has critically interrogated the technological and societal developments of social media, tracing its evolution since the dawn of its influence. The Jakarta- and Bandung-based collective’s first solo exhibition in Korea at SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation presented works spanning 19 years, from their earliest video Serigala Militia (2006)—created the year before the iPhone launched—to newly commissioned installations. The past two decades have borne a growing disillusionment with tools once celebrated as emancipatory, but which have increasingly transformed into instruments of corporate control and social division. Humorous and obscure at first, the exhibition title “Ping Inside Noisy Giraffe” was a recursive acronym for the word “ping” that cleverly referenced itself: a ping is both a signal and a measure of transmission time between computers. The…

Through a compassionate yet distanced lens, Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê examines the physical and psychological impacts of war on everyday life, environments, and memory. Captured with a large-format camera, her images oscillate between reality and fiction, often depicting military training grounds and reenacted scenes of historical conflicts—as seen in her acclaimed photographic series, Small Wars (1999–2002) and 29 Palms (2003–04). Lê, who was born in 1960 in Ho Chi Minh City, fled to the US as a teenager after the American war in Vietnam. Her quietly introspective practice interweaves personal history with collective consciousness to unsettle mediatized narratives, probing the lingering aftermath of geopolitical strife. Through this subtly subversive approach, Lê challenges the conventions of documentary photography, creating a unique visual language that demystifies the spectacle of combat and…

When I first encountered Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s 45-minute video Drama 1882 at the 2024 Venice Biennale, I felt hypnotized, utterly defenseless, as though I had stepped into a different density of time. Shot in an historic theater in Alexandria, the musical features 150 costumed performers, enacting eight highly stylized scenes drawn from the late 19th-century ‘Urabi revolt in Egypt. That conflict, I later learned, went on for three years (1879–82) and was crazily complex, with Turkish, French, British, and Egyptian factions vying for control of Lower Egypt. Today the whole dispute bears the name of Ahmed ‘Urabi, an Egyptian colonel who won popular support with the rallying cry “Egypt for Egyptians!” Shawky, now 54 and a veteran of numerous exhibitions at top-tier international venues—chose to focus on the most…

Ahead of its highly anticipated opening on May 9, 2026, the Venice Biennale has faced a number of unexpected challenges. In early May, Cameroonian Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh—who was selected to lead the upcoming 61st edition—tragically passed away from a recently diagnosed cancer, just five months after her appointment was revealed. Recommended by the Biennale’s president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, she was the first African-born woman to helm the international exposition, disrupting assumptions that the event would take a more nationalistic turn under prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government (of which Buttafuoco is an open supporter). Organizers announced at a May 27 conference that the Venice Biennale will proceed with its 61st edition, titled “In Minor Keys,” honoring the original vision of its late curator. According to the curatorial text, her presentation…

BEIJING Last year, a massive banner that read “The Global Art Destination” dominated the halls of Gallery Weekend Beijing (GWBJ) 2024. The ambitious international theme was notably absent in this year’s edition. Now in its ninth iteration and held in tandem with the inaugural “Beijing Art Season,” GWBJ appears to have shifted away from its international outlook toward a renewed focus on the local. The change followed significant structural adjustments, including a transition from a pay-to-enter model to an invitation-only format, and coincided with broader transformations in Beijing’s art landscape, particularly the merger of the 798 and 751 districts in late 2024. The result was a quiet reaffirmation of homegrown and diasporic talent. While Beijing’s art ecosystem has traditionally been domestically grounded, with galleries showcasing primarily Chinese artists, this year’s…

Christine Sun Kim’s solo exhibition “All Day All Night” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York resisted the conventions of a midcareer survey. Instead of tracing a career arc, it immersed viewers in a dense spatial and conceptual vocabulary. Comprising 95 works made between 2011 and the present, the show brought together charcoal drawings, murals, video installations, and sculptures, all orbiting a central theme: sound as social currency. Kim, a Berlin-based American artist who is Deaf, confronts how sound can be wielded for power, privilege, and exclusion. One of the first works on display, the mural Ghost(ed) Notes (2024), greeted visitors with a sprawling array of musical notations. Instead of the standard five-line musical staff, Kim employs a four-line staff, visually echoing the feeling of being “ghosted”—when…

A river passing through a landscape doubles it, offering within its currents a shifting, shimmering doppelgänger world. For their new work Don’t Worry, Baby (2025), the Taiwanese art group Xindian Boys—a four-person, cross-generational, cross-disciplinary collective named after their native Xindian district—collaborated with the new media art group XTRUX to create a digital doppelgänger: a parallel universe of the Xindian River basin that runs on algorithms and game engine technology. Filling three of the four walls of a massive gray-cube hall at the newly opened New Taipei City Art Museum, the commissioned site-specific projection presents a vast, immersive panorama. The imagery transitions between the idyllic and the mischievous, ranging from the dreamlike to the dystopian: scenes of people playing in shallow waters or flying kites over lush greenery are interspersed with…

Comprising more than 300 works, “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective,” which began its two-year tour at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in April, explored six decades of the artist’s groundbreaking practice. It also told—through onsite didactics and a muti-author catalog—the quietly compelling story of the artist’s life. Most disconcerting to readers today are Asawa’s World War II experiences. Following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive orders prompting the internment of about 120,000 US residents of Japanese descent. In 1942, FBI agents picked up Asawa’s father, an immigrant Southern California vegetable farmer, and shipped him to New Mexico. Asawa, American-born and 16 at the time, was sent along with her mother and five siblings to the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia,…

Nonagenarian artist Hung Hsien’s exhibition at Asia Society Texas exuded the rarefied air of a long-hidden local treasure finally being unearthed. Having resided in Houston for over 40 years, she had lived, unbeknownst to the curators, merely a block away from the museum now hosting her first retrospective at the age of 91. Arranged chronologically, the show brimmed with ink scrolls, oil paintings, sketches, and studies accumulated over decades, highlighting the artistic evolutions tied to the geographical and cultural parameters of Hung’s peripatetic life; over the years, the artist lived in various locations in China, Taiwan, the US, Hong Kong, and Canada. The earliest work in the exhibition was created in 1950, when Hung was just 17 years old, while the most recent dates from 1999. At the beginning of…