115 (Sep/Oct 2019)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
The Art of Listening
In the mountains of Lebanon, villagers drape strands of shiny magnetic tape from old cassettes over fruit trees to keep the birds away. No one pays too much attention to the tape—or the audio content imprinted on it. But a few years ago, Lawrence Abu
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Contributors
Ute Meta Bauer is an international curator and researcher on contemporary art, film, video, and sound, with a focus on transdisciplinary formats. She is the founding director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She has curated or co-curated
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Htein Lin on Antony Gormley
I was crossing London’s Waterloo Bridge on a bus to visit friends who worked for the BBC Burmese Service, which operates out of Bush House, when I caught a glimpse of a man standing on the pavement, looking as though he had just emerged from the Rive
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Milan
A creative hub for fashion and design, Milan lagged behind other European capitals as an international contemporary art scene at the beginning of the new millennium. However, in the last decade, the city has experienced a significant “global turn.” T
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Aichi Triennale Shuts Down Censorship Show
On August 3, organizers of the 2019 Aichi Triennale shuttered “After ’Freedom of Expression?’”—a show about the history of censored works in Japan at Nagoya’s Aichi Prefecture Museum of Art—after receiving threats from members of the public. Those de
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Thinking Outside the (Fair) Box
The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) is a membership organization founded in 2002—for galleries, nonprofits, and individuals—dedicated to the cultivation, support, and advancement of new voices in contemporary art. NADA produces a range of programming
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Seeking Enlightenment
As trade wars, political protests, and bouncing currency rates create havoc in many corners of the globe, members of the art world are attempting to decipher tarot card readings and I Ching hexagrams, as they seek out a strategy when heading into an
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Playing Safe
Preliminary information on upcoming fall sales suggests that major auction houses are following a predictable strategy, with the usual blue-chip names represented across categories and works from series that have recently performed well at auction. H
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
On The Horizon
9/14–11/10 MULTIPLE LOCATIONS, ISTANBUL Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, who authored Relational Aesthetics (1998), the 16th Istanbul Biennial is titled “The Seventh Continent” in reference to the mass of detritus swirling in the Pacific. Like this floa
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Top Heavy
The 49th edition of Art Basel in Basel (June 13–16) reflected variations on the dominant trend of recent years: The big keep getting bigger. The postwar secondary market remains a prime-grade investment class, and a handful of younger North American
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Shaping Identities
Prompted by a curiosity about her mother’s Indigenous heritage, Chang En-Man began to travel across Taiwan in 2010, training her camera on the island’s Indigenous communities. Interweaving documentary-style footage of the tribes’ daily lives with re-
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readWorld
The De-satirized Zone
There is a remarkable shortage of memes about Park Geun-hye, despite the former South Korean president’s political scandals and ongoing lawsuits. In 2017, Park was impeached for allowing a cult leader’s daughter, Choi Soon-sil, to unlawfully meddle i
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
The Ancestral Turn
It takes a medium to contact the ancestors. Yen-Chao Lin’s video short The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay (2019), shot on hand-processed Super-8 film in traditionally Amis territory on the east coast of Taiwan over the course of a residency, records the
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
As 21st-century collectors increasingly seek big returns on their art investments, leading to brand names and bland conformity, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo remains committed to pursuing an individualistic path. On the day of my visit to her epon
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Sydney Shen
Ghost-faced, temples crusted with blood, Michelle Pfeiffer rips around her chintzy little flat, hungering for a new identity: she rams her soft toys into the whirring incinerator; defaces her cloyingly pink walls with black spray paint; smashes her c
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
INCi FURNi
Since 2016, hundreds of Turkish civil rights activists, academics, and journalists have been detained without trial and questioned, or have been fired from their jobs as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempts to root out dissidents. In Apr
ArtAsiaPacific14 min read
In The Ear Of The Beholder
In 1984, the British Parliament passed the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act, which formalized officers’ powers to arrest, detain, and interrogate suspicious individuals. Artist and audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan is specifically interes
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Remembering Okwui Enwezor
October 23, 1963, Calabar, Nigeria – March 15, 2019, Munich, Germany Queridísimo Okwui, What is memory? Why does one remember? How does one remember? Where do we keep hundreds, thousands of memories in our brain? When does memory become history? It f
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Okwuchukwu Emmanuel Enwezor
In the late 1990s, one of the primary meeting points for many curators from around the world was, surprisingly, an art fair. Every year in Madrid, ARCO hosted a series of topical talks initiated by the fair’s inaugural director Rosina Gomez-Baeza. It
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
A Memory Of A Singular, Triumphant Spirit For Our Time
News of the passing of the extraordinary curator and intellect Okwui Enwezor, who greatly impacted people all over the world, found me during preparations for the Korea Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and gave me a great sense of loss. “Who canonized
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
What Do You Think Of Hong Kong, Now, And Tomorrow, Etc.?
“A falling leaf returns to the roots.” This Chinese adage aptly describes the final days of one of the global art world’s most visionary figures, Okwui Enwezor, who passed away in Munich in March 2019. And now his body has been returned to his native
ArtAsiaPacific10 min read
Filmmaking As Resistant Poetic Amplitude
Nguyen Trinh Thi’s first name means “poetry” in Chinese-Vietnamese, and, as though a promise, her works brim with prismatic literary sensibilities. Her films Spring Comes Winter After (2008) and Unsubtitled (2010) trace the history of the North Vietn
ArtAsiaPacific2 min readMedical
Christine Sun Kim
With “touching listening,” anthropologist Roshanak Kheshti describes sound as “experienced (felt) by the whole body intertwining what is heard by the ears with what is felt on the flesh, tasted on the tongue, and imagined in the psyche.” This form of
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
Naomi Blacklock
A circular mirror lies on the floor within a ring of salt, from which 12 wooden, brass-tipped candlesticks arise. Punctuating the darkness, a white spotlight falls on the mirror, and reflects onto a nearby wall in the shape of a disk, forming an eeri
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Dylan Mira
The unknown north; a matriarchal island off the south coast; cities steeped in both shamanism and high-tech cultures—the psychic geography of Korea gives an eerie weight to incidents on Dylan Mira’s journey to the peninsula. Mira recorded her travels
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Joyce Ho
For Joyce Ho, what is considered “decorum” within a society can be dissected into actions encoded with significance via repetition. In the artist’s video installation Reception (2019), she examines how people move through their daily lives, and the p
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Timothy Curtis: Facial Recognition
INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION Whether or not you were tuned into the nuances of early 21stcentury Philadelphia graffiti, chances are that if you lived in or visited the city during that time you would have caught a glimpse of at least one of AGUA’s tags o
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Agatha Gothe-Snape and Wrong Solo Certain Situations
Agatha Gothe-Snape’s solo exhibition, “Certain Situations,” brought together a mix of painting and sculpture, projections and screen-based works, soundscapes and texts. The forms and words alike indicated an openness to inspiration, with allusions to
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
ACT Festival 2019: FoodHack
In 1932, poet and artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published The Futurist Cookbook, with recipes that incorporate perfumes and inedible elements, as well as natural ingredients cut to resemble modern machines. Marinetti advocated for the use of theat
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Chiharu Shiota The Soul Trembles
“The Soul Trembles” at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum was the largest midcareer survey of Chiharu Shiota to date. Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota decided to become an artist at the age of 12, and has been making art ever since. Featuring 113 works spanning pe
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion
Violent threats, media sensationalism, political interference into a cultural event—the controversy around the closure of a small exhibition, “After ‘Freedom of Expression?’,” about artworks previously censored in Japan, within 72 hours of the openin
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Wu Shanzhuan Today Became a Holiday
There is a fine line between nonsense and the nonsensical, humor and megalomania. Wu Shanzhuan’s works navigate this distinction, occasionally tipping into obscurity and solipsism. He first came to prominence with his installation Red Characters: Big
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Sim Chi Yin One Day We’ll Understand
Sim Chi Yin’s project One Day We’ll Understand (2015–) began with the artist’s interest in her paternal grandfather Shen Huansheng’s personal history during Malaya’s anti-colonial, communist insurgency—coined the “Malayan Emergency” by the British. S
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readWorld
The Racing Will Continue, The Dancing Will Stay
The group exhibition “The Racing Will Continue, The Dancing Will Stay,” curated by Leo Li Chen and presented by Guangdong Times Museum, took China’s reform and post-reform era as its starting point. Showcasing works that delve into this period of soc
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Manuel Ocampo Ideological Mash-Up/Remix
“It doesn’t matter if beautiful or ugly as long as it takes up space / It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it takes up space / It doesn’t matter what it means as long as it takes up space.” Respectively in Tamil, Chinese, and Malay (three of Sing
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Bani Abidi They Died Laughing
In the curatorial text for Bani Abidi’s exhibition, “They Died Laughing,” at Berlin’s Gropius Bau, the Karachi- and Berlinbased artist is described as an “urban archaeologist.” Abidi’s videos, photographs, and works on paper take the everyday lives o
ArtAsiaPacific3 min readRobotics
Geumhyung Jeong Homemade RC Toy
Artist and choreographer Geumhyung Jeong’s exhibition “Homemade RC Toy,” curated by Elena Filipovic at Kunsthalle Basel, evoked the sterile laboratory of an amateur roboticist. Spare parts—batteries, wheels, cables—were arranged almost fetishisticall
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Wong Ping Heart Digger
The legitimizing potential of art spaces should never cease to amaze us. A urinal in a restroom or an unmade bed in a bedroom is just that, but put them in a gallery or museum at the right point in time while alerting sufficiently influential people
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Mrinalini Mukherjee Phenomenal Nature
A life-size figure made of knotted fiber awaited visitors who followed the undulating pathways of “Phenomenal Nature,” the first United States retrospective of Mrinalini Mukherjee, one of India’s most prolific women sculptors. Hooded eyes, a gaping h
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige On Scams
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige have amassed more than 4,000 spam emails since 1999. This was the starting point for the duo’s project On Scams (I must first apologise) (2014), exhibited for the first time in Canada at The Power Plant Contempora
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Alternative Perspectives
Edited by Kurt Tong Published by Jiazazhi Press/Library, Ningbo, 2019 A decadent sponge cake, a three-tiered arrangement of steamed lotus-seed buns, and a pile of ham-and-cheese sandwiches are spread out among other party foods before a table of chil
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Where the Sea Remembers
Unlike their predecessors, the 14 Vietnamese artists and one collective featured in “Where the Sea Remembers” do not dwell on the trauma of the Vietnam War. Rather, they belong to a younger generation—many from the war’s resultant diaspora—who have r
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
On Board with Good Business
Recent revelations that board members of major international arts organizations own companies that are allegedly involved in the pharmaceutical opioid crisis, produce spying software or chemical weapons, though shocking, should not come as a surprise
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
South Ho Siu Nam
The roughly two-hour journey from Hong Kong Island up to the historic industrial area of Fo Tan requires venturing through a series of interconnecting routes by train, bus, and on foot. On my way there to see South Ho Siu Nam, I glimpsed fleeting sli

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