ArtAsiaPacific

After signing off on the July/August issue of ArtAsiaPacific, the editors are hoping to savor two comparatively languid months off from the frantic art world calendar. However, world events, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, won’t relent. This issue is clo

In 2006, Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York City presented an exhibition that traced the Philippine roots of minimalism through two painters: Mario Yrisarry, who was born in Manila in 1933, and Leo Valledor, born to Filipino parents in San Francisco

The vast, sunny and unhurried city of Los Angeles is home to Hollywood, mega tech companies and the porn industry. Its progressive art schools, including UCLA, Cal Arts, ArtCenter College of Design and USC, are engines for new generations of American

A forthcoming publication on the late Australian artist Brett Whiteley (1939–1992), by respected art historian Kathie Sutherland, has caused considerable anxiety among Australian collectors and art world onlookers, who are not so much eager to see wh

Al Mawt Al-Tafl (The Death of a Child) 1963, oil on canvas, 137 × 196 cm. Courtesy Sotheby’s, London. In London and Hong Kong, buyers showed a taste for the new. Though trusty market darlings—from modern masters to contemporary favorites—continued to

Auckland Art Fair (AAF) (May 2–5) switched from a biennial to an annual format in 2019. With 41 galleries presenting their goods at the Cloud on the Auckland waterfront, the event brought in an estimated total revenue of USD 6.4 million—up from the a

Before the boom of the 2000s—before Ai Weiwei exhibited at Tate Modern, and Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim, before a canvas by Zhang Xiaogang sold for USD 12 million, and one by Zeng Fanzhi went for USD 23 million at Sotheby’s—there was the 1990s. I

A 31-year-old poet, Mohammed Rashid al-Thani is the visionary behind the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA), the first art and cultural space in New York to focus on modern and contemporary art from the Arab and Islamic world. Al-Thani founded

“If artists can work with technology, then why can’t curators?” asked Long Xinru, when we met in a coffee shop close to her workplace, the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. Long, who is both an artist and curator, is currently working o

The commune of Bagnolet—where South Korean artist Seulgi Lee lives—is known by Parisians as a quartier populaire, a term that has become synonymous with working-class neighborhoods. Located in the east of the French capital, Bagnolet is a hive of ind

In March, news broke that the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) had appointed Eugene Tan as its director—a position that he would hold concurrently with his directorship at the National Gallery Singapore (NGS), making him the leader of the country’s two maj

In early May, Patty Chang sent an email asking me to enumerate my fears. “The fears can be about anything,” she wrote. “They can be personal, global, societal, mundane or profound; everything is valid.” Her only stipulation was that the list be writt

Mochu is an artist and filmmaker whose work treads with acidic vibrancy across cybernetic theory, psychedelics, utopianism and special effects. We first met on the occasion of “What Time Is It?”—a conference on technologies of life in the contemporar

A horrifying deluge of oil-black liquid courses through narrow stone streets; it pours into the sacred interior of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. A mother runs into her stone house, grabs her daughter, and they flee their neighborhood as billows

“Ghosts wander about in the kitchen and bedrooms, fueled by grudge / They roll your vegetables off a cutting board and crumple your duvet inside its sack.” These bitter, vengeful ghouls, summoned by Aki Sasamoto in a poem and video published by Tripl

In Alain Badiou’s treatise In Praise of Love (2009), the French philosopher claimed, “Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.” A decade later, Lin Jingjing’s multidisciplinary Lov-Lov Project (2018–) posits a world that proves

“Stop evoking movement and gesture. You are movement and gesture,” wrote kineticist Jean Tinguely in his 1959 manifesto For Statics. Zeynep Kayan’s series, “Temporary Sameness” (all works 2019), comprising grainy videos and prints of scenes captured

Herlinde Koelbl’s work is most often described as “sociological.” Renowned for her photography, videos and films as her incisive interviews with notable cultural and political figures, Koelbl has dedicated her artistic career to exploring an enormous

The curse at work in the 58th Venice Biennale comes not from the apocryphal Chinese malediction of the title, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” but the word “interesting” itself. The phrase has been repeated by Anglophone politicians, ever since a

During the Biennale of Sydney’s off years, the city bolsters its local contemporary art scene with the six-year biennial initiative, The National, jointly launched in 2017 by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), the Museum of Contemporary Art

Ha Chong-Hyun, among the pioneers of the Korean Dansaekhwa (“monochrome painting”) movement, has been working exclusively on his iconic, extremely laborintensive and formally complex “Conjunction” paintings since the 1970s, and has never made a sketc

Beginning in 1975, a young painter named Lee Kun-Yong embraced performance art as an alternative mode of expression, activating gesture and action in some 50 performances proposing an epistemological sensibility based on the experience of the everyda

During a recent high-speed rail journey from Hong Kong to Beijing, Lam Tung Pang felt a sudden jolt of anxiety as the train passed through a tunnel. Although he knew was still in Hong Kong, he could only see pitch-black through his window, a visual d

“The Center Will Not Hold,” the title of the group show curated by Joselina Cruz at Manila’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, could be understood as a prophecy—one that resounded apocalyptically throughout the works in the exhibition. At the co

The limits of a Western-style modernity became apparent in Kuwait at the close of the 20th century, following the end of the nation’s “Golden Era”—a period of oil-fueled economic prosperity. The same period saw local businesses, including petroleum c

In a modest public square halfway between the banks of the Bosporus and Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar is a bronze sculpture of a draper showing off an unraveled bolt of fabric. The statue commemorates a figure once common among the neighborhood’s hive of t

“Xenogenesis” at Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum comprised ten works created between 2011 and 2018 by the Otolith Group, spearheaded by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. Arranging the works in a nonchronological order, the artists were careful not to positi

“Exile Is a Hard Job” at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig was the largest institutional exhibition devoted to the pioneering Turkish artist Nil Yalter to date. Impressive in its breadth and scope, the retrospective spanned some 50 years of Yalter’s provocativ

Few conceptual bases appeared to have gone uncovered in preparing “Motions of This Kind: Propositions and Problems of Belatedness,” an ambitious group exhibition at London’s Brunei Gallery, at SOAS. Broadly, the show took for its curatorial foundatio

“Works and Days” was Simone Fattal’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States—a fact that seems rather shocking considering the Lebanese-American artist has been prodigiously producing work for the last 50 years. Curated by Ruba Katrib with

The cowrie shell appears throughout Rina Banerjee’s work, often as writhing clusters of biomass that erupt from her brimming, bricolage installations. These shells, both natural and man-made, were gathered from all over the world and can be seen in a

The ominously titled “They Live,” referencing the eponymous 1988 cult alieninvasion film, was Huma Bhabha’s largest survey to date, showcasing the Pakistani-American artist’s three-dimensional works, photography, and drawings from the past two decade

There was a lofty goal behind “The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Positioning the exhibition’s works by 21 artists as their examples, co-curators Wu Hung and Orianna Cacchione attempted to coin the

Istanbul is a palimpsest. From Byzantine to Persian kings, countless conquerors looking to expand their empires have lusted after the city for its strategically advantageous positioning on the mouth of the Bosporus Strait, which leads to the Black Se