116 (Nov/Dec 2019)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
The Practice of Self
How does an artist’s life shape or determine their artwork? It’s often impossible to know unless the artist appears in their work, or they tell us in words. In the Feature articles in the November/December issue of ArtAsiaPacific, we look at two arti
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Contributors
Bani Abidi is an artist working primarily with video, but also with photography and drawing. Her work uses humor in all its gravity. She lives mostly in Berlin and partly in Karachi. A major survey of her works from the past 15 years, “Funland,” is o
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Bani Abidi on Elia Suleiman
During the opening credits of Elia Suleiman’s 2002 film Divine Intervention, a middle-aged Arab man drives down a street in Nazareth. Along the way, he passes relatives and neighbors who wave to him as he smiles and waves back, a cigarette dangling f
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
London
It’s impossible to provide a snapshot of the visual arts in London without mentioning the B word. Boris (Johnson), the city’s ex-mayor and the poster boy for Brexit, took over as the British prime minister in July, and has attempted to prorogue parli
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
MIT Media Lab Director Resigns Over Epstein Ties
After eight years at the helm, Joi Ito stepped down as director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab on September 7. He announced his resignation after MIT came under public scrutiny for accepting donations from the late finan
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readWorld
Tipping the Scale
It was only a matter of time before Chinese art and antiques became subject to import duties in the United States. As of 2018, the stated policy of Donald J. Trump’s administration has been to impose tariffs on 96.8 percent of all Chinese-origin good
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Business in Conflict
While international media outlets are reporting the domino damages made during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, now entering their fifth month, local business owners are focused on the bad news at hand: vacant hotels, empty restaurants, and shoppe
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Choppy Waters
New York’s September auction series kicked off with Sotheby’s Asia Week, which included sales of classical Chinese paintings as well as antiquities. The 68-lot Fine Classical Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy sale raised a total of USD 3.55 million,
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Mid-tones
Under new management by collector Tom Tandio and curator Enin Supriyanto, Art Jakarta (August 30–September 1) underwent a makeover in its 11th edition, with sleeker-looking booths at the Jakarta Convention Centre Senayan instead of its former home at
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Past And Future Visions
11/3–3/1/2020 MOMA PS1, NEW YORK A woman teeters. Her body, like the carving of the winged demi-god behind her, has been pierced several times. This scene from Afifa Aleiby’s painting Gulf War (1991) stems from the work’s titular conflict, and will b
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Rectification And Healing
PENANG / KUALA LUMPUR To be multilingual is to have multiple personas—or so it seems in Okui Lala’s My Language Proficiency (2017), a 16-minute video in which the artist simultaneously appears across four sections of the frame, ostensibly conducting
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Does Revolution Still Resonate?
I was reading Prisoner of Love (1986), Jean Genet’s posthumous masterpiece about the years he spent with the Palestinian revolution in the 1970s and ’80s, as my flight from Berlin started its descent into Amman. The “fasten seatbelt” sign had just be
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
David Huang
David Huang’s multi-colored, whimsical illustrations can easily brighten anyone’s day. Meticulously detailed, they capture scenes of cosmopolitan life: never-ending traffic in Taipei, as seen in Home (2016); bustling corner stores in New York, the su
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Nadim Karam
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Beirut was undergoing a metamorphosis. Crumbling, pock-marked buildings etched with the violence of the 15-year-long Lebanese Civil War were being knocked down and replaced at a dizzying rate. A new, barely recogniz
ArtAsiaPacific11 min read
Judy Freya Sibayan
In January 1977, Judy Freya Sibayan, aged 23, participated in the Philippines’ first declared work of performance art. She and two other artists—Ray Albano, the acting director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), and Huge Bartolome, with
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Eugenia Lim
Eugenia Lim was rifling through her personal archives when she chanced upon a photo of her parents from 1980. That year, Ron Robertson-Swann’s metal sculpture Vault had been unveiled in Melbourne’s City Square. Canary yellow and angular, it was incon
ArtAsiaPacific11 min read
Between The Waking Life And The Lucid Dream
Tala Madani is best known for her comically twisted paintings and stop-motion animations that portray middle-aged men and mischievous toddlers engaging in destructive, perverse, and sometimes gruesome acts. With nimble lines and expressive brushstrok
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Farah Al-qasimi
The crumbling coastal settlement of Jazirat Al Hamra is widely rumored to be haunted. In Farah Al-Qasimi’s debut film, Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire) (2019), the titular djinni is first seen wandering through the ghost town, swathed in a patchwork of fl
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Zico Albaiquni
Divided into three structural layers—background, middle ground, foreground—Zico Albaiquni’s Perusing the Perversion (2019) is a collage of utopic visions. The jagged peaks of the furthermost tier are drawn from the landscapes of eminent Indonesian ar
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Liu Chuang
Can human cultures resist the totalizing grip of digital technologies? That is the question animating Liu Chuang’s three-channel video essay Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018), researched with Yang Beichen, which weaves t
ArtAsiaPacific10 min read
Marguerite Humeau: Two-Headed Venus
Two-headed Venus. A 25-year-old pregnant female human and herself as a 90-year-old have ingested a tortoise’s brain. Shameless Venus. A 20-year-old female human has ingested a mole’s brain. Queen with Leopards. A 150-year-old female human has ingeste
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Soungui Kim Lazy Clouds
Until recently, the name Soungui Kim sparked little recognition in Korean contemporary art circles. The retrospective of her works “Lazy Clouds” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul has changed that, bringing to light
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
The Herstory of Abstraction in East Asia
“Gender is a key issue in this era,” says Ping Lin, director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), in an interview screened at the entrance of “The Herstory of Abstraction in East Asia,” an exhibition of postwar abstract paintings by 13 multigenerat
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Poklong Anading and Neil Fettling Normal Scheduling Will Resume Shortly
Poklong Anading and Neil Fettling’s exhibition “Normal Scheduling Will Resume Shortly” explored the concept of urban disruption through drawings, photographs, videos, and installations inspired by the conditions of the artists’ respective home cities
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
16th Istanbul Biennial: “The Seventh Continent”
International biennials are often formed around painfully vague terms: “unity,” “division,” “multiplicity,” and so on. By contrast, the 16th Istanbul Biennial was refreshingly specific. Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, the show was titled “The Seventh C
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Mark Bradford Los Angeles
Mark Bradford’s solo exhibition “Los Angeles”—named for his hometown, which anchored the presentation—inhabited the capacious bottom floor of the Long Museum, in Shanghai’s West Bund, with a selection of works that not only explored the formal evolut
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa
Of the many issues humanity is facing today, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), with its far-reaching ethical, ontological, and practical implications, is perhaps the most controversial and misunderstood. The group exhibition “Lying Sophia and
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
NS Harsha Gathering Delights
Walking through the doors of the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT), visitors to NS Harsha’s solo exhibition, “Gathering Delights,” were greeted by 193 sewing machines arrayed along the arcade. At first glance, they might have been mistaken
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Arin Rungjang They Beat Your Father
Arin Rungjang’s solo exhibition “They Beat Your Father” featured three of the artist’s audio-visual installations that shed light on Asia’s sans-papiers, or undocumented migrants, in sentimental yet unassuming ways. The show’s curatorial structure wa
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts: Crack Up – Crack Down
The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts was inaugurated in 1955, when the present-day European capital was part of socialist Yugoslavia. Historically positioned between East and West, Ljubljana falls within the remit of Slavs and Tatars, the provocati
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Alia Farid In Lieu of What Was
As teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg sailed across the North Atlantic Ocean to the United Nations Climate Action summit on a zero-emissions yacht, and the burning Amazon forest dominated news headlines in August, the climate crisis loomed
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Clapping With Stones: Art And Acts Of Resistance
The world is in a state of turmoil. Governments across the globe have been peeling back laws protecting civil rights. Tensions between nations are escalating. News outlets, ceaselessly recording these events, project imageries of mass unrest. Taking
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Yutaka Matsuzawa
Widely considered the father of conceptual art in Japan, Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922–2006) spent most of his life attempting to formulate an impactful art practice characterized by invisibility and impermanence. According to an autobiographical account fr
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Tracking Transformations
Photographs by Liu Heung Shing Texts by Pi Li, Geoff Raby, Christopher Phillips, and Liu Heung Shing Published by Steidl, Gottingen, 2019 1 A cyclist takes a puff from his cigarette, his bike parked next to him on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. He appea
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Hilmi Johandi
Shortly after arriving at Hilmi Johandi’s studio at Goodman Arts Centre, the artist informs me that he’s moving in two weeks to a more spacious—and cooler—studio elsewhere at Goodman. Indeed, after only minutes in his narrow work area, it’s obvious t

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