111 (Nov/Dec 2018)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Us, You, #MeToo
It has been one year since the New York Times published a report on the numerous allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The article unleashed the #MeToo movement that has swept across the globe in almost every i
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Contributors
Megan Cope is a Quandamooka artist from North Stradbroke Island, Queensland. Her works, which probe issues of identity, the environment and mapping practices, have been exhibited in institutions such as the Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; Musees de la
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
On Kawara
Typographic forms inscribed on canvas, stamped on cards, printed and bound in volumes, punched out on telegrams, voiced over airwaves. On Kawara’s date-related works suggest a level of remoteness and detachment in their use of data and a set-based lo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Hanoi
Hanoi prides itself on its 1,000-year history and diverse mix of Chinese, French and Soviet cultural influences. It is much like a living theater, with all aspects of life played out in the streets, including eating, drinking, talking, singing, drivi
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Spinning Up, Winding Down
As the autumn art season kicked off in the northern hemisphere, a cross section of the art world ventured to the 2018 Gwangju Biennale on their respective trains, planes and automobiles. In typical biennial fashion, there was plenty of chaos to navig
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Global Uproar Over Shahidul Alam’s Arrest
The esteemed 63-year-old photographer, photojournalist, educator and activist Shahidul Alam was arrested on August 5. Earlier that day, Alam had appeared on Al Jazeera and openly criticized Dhaka authorities’ excessive use of force in breaking up stu
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
The Inevitable Descent
BRIDGE TO MOUNTAIN TEMPLE SHROUDED BY PRISMATIC CLOUDS IN SPLASHED COLOR After the astonishing results of their spring series, expectations were high at Christie’s and Sotheby’s New York and Hong Kong outposts this fall. The Asia Week auctions in New
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Gana (Hear, Think, Understand)
In Australia, the white colonial settler fantasy has historically positioned Aboriginal people at the lowest rung of society. The government maintained this stance until the 1967 referendum, in which Australians voted overwhelmingly to amend the cons
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Survival Strategies
New and veteran fairs alike are continuously tinkering with their formats and programs, trying to maximize their chances of securing high-quality works and, more importantly, big-spending collectors. Fairs in Beijing, Sydney, London and Seoul present
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Here and There
ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, BEIJING 11/24–3/3/19 Politics, mythology and history come together in “Mappa Mundi” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a presentation of the large-scale calligraphic works of Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie. Taki
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
In Between
Xuan Ye, born in 1989, is a Toronto-based artist, but she would like people to think of “Xuan Ye” as a “prototype of many objects.” This distinction borrows from object-oriented programming, a software design paradigm in which code is organized into
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
We Are Each One An Other
Rarely are artists as expansive as Shezad Dawood, in their subject matter and methodology, and in probing the fault lines in contemporary society. For nearly two decades, the London-based artist of Indo-Pakistani descent has grappled with themes of c
ArtAsiaPacific6 min readWorld
Hopping On A Broken Bandwagon
Despite evidence to the contrary, a network of fair organizers, galleries, so-called tastemakers, and even government bodies in Singapore continue to cultivate an art fair-industrial complex under the assumption that introducing more art fairs is a w
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Ladies And Gentlemen Of Leisure
Earlier this year, club owner and entrepreneur Qiao Zhibing invited 36 fellow art collectors from the greater China region to submit works from their private inventories for a group exhibition in Shanghai. Out of these proposals, Qiao handpicked arou
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Always Painting, Always Sculpting
Carnarvon Gorge, a nearly 20-mile canyon situated in Central Queensland, Australia, is a space uniquely defined by its rock art paintings and by the sculpting of its landscapes, the cliffs forged by the coursing of creeks and springs. The place carri
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Understated Visionaries
“When I first started to think about collecting, I really had no basis for judging what was good or bad,” the ever-humble Jerry Yang said when I asked him about the beginnings of his journey as a collector. Yet after getting married in 1997 and settl
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
The Long Way Home
“If I hear there are protests in an area, I go there. I want to know what happened, and I want to show it through art,” Khvay Samnang said to me. He was explaining his artistic process, which has involved dumping buckets of sand over himself in a ser
ArtAsiaPacific9 min readWorld
Cutting Through Histories
Beijing traffic flows around six concentric ring roads. Demarcating the megacity and carrying its infamous traffic, these quadrilateral highways are in many ways markers of growth. Much like the layers of a tree trunk, Beijing’s rings have expanded w
ArtAsiaPacific14 min readGender Studies
Naked And Knife - Sharp
Noor Mohammed, a lower-class Muslim businessman—the alter-ego of Anita Dube, who could be identified as a middleclass Hindu woman artist, but whose life and practice seeks to blur such boundaries—tells us that it’s his lucky day; he’s been given 15 m
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readWorld
YOUNG & EMERGING
How deep into the unknowable can art take us? Using digital animation and virtual reality, Seoul-born artist Hayoun Kwon leads viewers into physical locales that we cannot otherwise access. Her early works explored a site central to the collective im
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Then And Now
1997 Cassette recordings of people expressing joy, paintings made from clothes stained by menstrual blood, canvases blessed by holy men—these are some of the projects that Shilpa Gupta created in the 1990s and early 2000s. In an Essay on the Mumbai-b
ArtAsiaPacific14 min read
Giving Voice, Forming Body
In late August 2017, Katharina Amman, head of the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA) and Christina Vegh, director of the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, gathered in Zurich for a public dialogue with artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchl
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Gwangju Biennale 2018
IMAGINED BORDERS Political scientist Benedict Anderson proposed in his 1983 book Imagined Communities that nationalism was a modern, global phenomenon created by standardization of printed information systems and liberal market economies (what he ter
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Tarrawarra Biennial
FROM WILL TO FORM Curated by Emily Cormack, the 2018 TarraWarra Biennial was based on a curatorial premise free from theoretical impositions to do with “the global” (a persistent trope in biennial frameworks), and offered artworks interconnected and
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Kunié Sugiura
ASPIRING EXPERIMENTS / NEW YORK IN 50 YEARS New York-based artist Kunie Sugiura’s first major retrospective in her birth country, “Aspiring Experiments / New York in 50 Years,” presented at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, was a five-part, chronolo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readWorld
Busan Biennale
DIVIDED WE STAND History is a recurring nightmare. Renewed tensions between NATO allies and Russia and China have plunged the world into a second Cold War. It was fitting then that the 2018 Busan Biennale, hosted in the only corner of the Korean peni
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readWorld
Cheng Ran
THE LAMENT: MOUNTAIN GHOST As one of China’s foremost new media and video artists, Cheng Ran has, since the beginning of his career, made videos and films that address a world of private feelings or hermetic thoughts, but that skirt any direct or obv
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Cao Fei
A HOLLOW IN A WORLD TOO FULL In a dank, moss-covered concrete room, a Guan Yu statue sat in webs of dust in a shrine. Moody twangs of 1980s Cantopop played; mangoes spilled out of a basket onto the floor; and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II hung cro
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Shoji Ueda
Spread across the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing’s Caochangdi art district, the first exhibition in China of the Japanese photographer Shoji Ueda (1913–2000) was an understated showcase of the joy that the artist found in his photogr
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
FX Harsono
REMINISCENCE FX Harsono’s solo exhibition, “Reminiscence,” presented by Singapore’s Sullivan + Strumpf, was focused on the artist’s investigation of the genocide of ethnic Chinese-Indonesians in Java, Indonesia, from 1947 to ’49. Widely recognized fo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Ties Of History
“Ties of History” took its name from the 1967 founding declaration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which describes the region as being “bound together by ties of history and culture.” On the occasion of ASEAN’s 50th anniversary
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Indonesia, Spirit Of The World
Although “Indonesia, Spirit of the World,” curated by Amir Sidharta and Watie Moerany, coincided with the Jakarta Palembang 2018 Asian Games, it was far from a mere diplomatic exercise. In its selection of artworks from the collection of Indonesia’s
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readWorld
Subcontracted Nations
It’s more common than most of us would like to admit for people to have a nation—a binding identity based on culture, heritage and language—but no state of their own and no hold over their destinies. That pain is felt daily in the Palestinian Territo
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Five Heads (tavan Tolgoi) – Art, Anthropology And Mongol Futurism
“Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi) – Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism” at London’s Greengrassi Gallery and Corvi-Mora was, as the title suggests, concerned with the future, but what made it such a solid, compelling show was how firmly rooted it was in t
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art For A New India
“The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India,” organized by guest curator Zehra Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan, director of New York’s Asia Society Museum, was centered around the Progressive Artists’ Group, a collective of men that formed in M
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Tadanori Yokoo
DEATH AND DREAMS Best known for his psychedelic collages channeling 1960s pop culture, Japanese artist and graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo has dedicated himself to a new medium since renouncing commercial work in the 1980s. The pieces the octogenaria
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Siah Armajani
FOLLOW THIS LINE The last few years have been a time of reflection on past and present glories for Iranian modern artists. In 2018, New York’s MoMA PS1 staged a posthumous retrospective for director and playwright Reza Abdoh, and London’s Mosaic Room
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Tomoo Gokita
If the face is the mirror of the mind and the eyes the window to the soul, what happens when visages are obscured? Displayed at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, Tokyo-based artist Tomoo Gokita’s latest body of work comprises single, double and group portra
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
The Art Of Place, The Place Of Art
The two provocateurs who populate Slavs and Tatars keep a low profile. Their real names don’t appear in their works or their writings, and as proper philosopher-nomads they don’t advertise where they’re based in. They describe themselves as a “factio
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Izumi Kato
To find Japanese multimedia artist Izumi Kato’s Hong Kong studio, I had to walk along a circuitous white corridor past a seemingly endless stretch of identical metal doors. This disorienting passageway, coiled inside an industrial building on the iso

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