113 (May/Jun 2019)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Renewed Contact
In his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, psychologist Gordon Allport proposed that individuals’ inherent bias against people of different genders, races or classes could be overcome through increased contact under positive conditions. He was particu
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Contributors
Anida Yoeu Ali is an artist whose works span performance, installation, video and photography. After residing for over three decades outside of Cambodia, she returned to Phnom Penh in 2011 as part of her Fulbright Fellowship. She is a founding collab
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
We Dare to Dream: On Lee Wen
“Anida, nice bugs don’t bite but dream.” Lee Wen scribbled these words inside my copy of his monograph Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real when I first met him in 2015. By that time, he already knew me as the “bug lady” because of my “The Buddhis
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Chicago
Chicago’s art scene reflects its reputation as a “City of Neighborhoods.” Artists from China, Hong Kong, India, South Korea and Taiwan, drawn to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, consistently bring new international perspectives. Rapid gent
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Guggenheim and SFMOMA Deaccession Major Artworks
Two American museums, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), are facing criticism for selling important postwar paintings at auction in the first half of 2019. Deaccessioning, the process of
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Change Agents
In 2019, the articles published in The Point explore new models for operating in the art market. For this issue, we asked Matthias Arndt to discuss the transition from running a gallery to an art agency. When I started Arndt & Partner Galleries (late
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Spoiled Fruits
The campaign to file a lawsuit against Art Stage Singapore (ASS) and its erstwhile director Lorenzo Rudolf has fizzled. Galleries jilted by ASS’s last-minute cancellation in January had planned to pool their money to pay the legal fees, but when they
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Hublot Loves Art!
The postcard-perfect image of Hong Kong features its junk boats and ferries, gliding from dawn till night across the waters of Victoria Harbour. On March 22, a 37-meter long inflatable sculpture of a floating body in tones of gray entered these water
ArtAsiaPacific7 min read
Savers and Splurgers
Despite auction houses playing it safe by sourcing lots by the most sought-after artists, results from the March–April sales in New York, Dubai and Hong Kong confirmed numerous surprises. Along with the usual top transactions of longstanding market d
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Something for Everyone
While certain states have adopted nativist, isolationist rhetoric, the art world has found that it pays to have an international outlook. From the homegrown Art Fair Philippines to Asia’s premier fair, Art Basel Hong Kong, offering a breadth of inter
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
58th Venice Biennale
We certainly do live in interesting times—if “interesting” means politically tumultuous and environmentally precarious. Artistic director of the 58th Venice Biennale, Ralph Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward Gallery, took the title for the central
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readWorld
In Our Place
Miss Toilet, 2017, still from digital video: 1 min 29 sec. Courtesy the artist and Para Site, Hong Kong. Oh Leander!, 2017, still from single-channel video with sound: 4 min 15 sec. Courtesy the artist. Performative Body – Embodied Performances, Red,
ArtAsiaPacific7 min readWorld
Speeding Down the Electronic Super Highway
There was once a time in the (art) world, not so long ago, when geographical distance still mattered, and when countries, people and cultures still appeared “foreign.” There was a time when you couldn’t easily see artworks from around the globe, rand
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Prelude to Venice
One late, rainy afternoon in March, I traveled to the far end of Berlin’s Tempelhof district to visit the artist Song-Ming Ang in his studio. Located on the third floor of an inconspicuous building that houses everything from a car repair shop to a p
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readGender Studies
Con/With Tempo
In 2007, siren eun young jung began to photograph the doors that obscure the impossibly narrow passageways between nightclub buildings in the small city of Dongducheon, South Korea. Pictured with partial views of their garish neighbors’ facades, thes
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Immeasurable Distance
At one point during our conversation in his studio-warehouse, Mark Justiniani asked: “What is truth?” The Filipino artist was referencing Plato, whom he sees as the “most artistic philosopher” due to his poetic explorations into knowledge and truth.
ArtAsiaPacific14 min read
Docile, Mutating And Resistant Bodies
Samuel R. Delany sent a letter of rejection, via fax, to Shu Lea Cheang. In his characteristically polite and analytical tone, Delany lamented that he was not able to write the screenplay for Cheang’s then-upcoming film, I.K.U. Cheang had invited Del
ArtAsiaPacific10 min read
The Polymer Multiverse
Styrofoam boxes, nylon bags and recycled rubber are not just the materials of Shirley Tse’s sculptures; they are the subjects too. Born in Hong Kong and residing in the United States since 1992, Tse has been fascinated by the material histories of pl
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Bourouissa’s Method
Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.—William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark In his book Camera Lucida (1980), French cultural theorist Roland Barthes expounds on his concept of punctum (the sometimes hidden elemen
ArtAsiaPacific11 min readPerforming Arts
Gestures Of transmission
How do we communicate without words? How do we speak without saying? How can language be transmitted, or translated, through sound and movement? Since 2012, Angelica Mesiti has explored the varieties and potentials of nonverbal communication in commu
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Sharjah Biennial 14
The contemporary art world is an echo chamber par excellence, replete with its own media outlets, celebrity pundits, trolls, dominant discourses and jargon. Its insularity—enforced by its often-perceived exclusivity and aloofness from real-world conc
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
In Depth
“Erasing is a choice … but remembering is also a choice,” says Macodou Ndiaye, a lawyer from Dakar who only discovered, near age 20, that he was métis, born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and Senegalese father. Ndiaye is one of the three protagoni
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Janet Laurence
Sheets of sheer fabric hung in a dim gallery in Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA). Each banner bore a drawing based on photographs of old-growth forests. Wandering through the concentric circles of voile, viewers were enveloped with
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Shen Xin
Shen Xin’s first solo exhibition with Shanghai’s MadeIn Gallery was titled “To Satiate,” which, among other possible interpretations, implies that the artist intended to fully satisfy the viewer. The title sat uneasily with the presented content, two
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition 2019
The 2019 Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition opened almost exactly three years to the day after the inaugural edition of the event. Yet, chief curator Feng Boyi defied the label “triennial,” and instead referred to the platform as a “periodic exhibiti
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Awakenings: Art In Society In Asia 1960s–1990s
On a late October day in 1983, five people wearing identical, nondescript clothing walked single-file through Taipei’s Ximending district, their heads covered with red hoods and eyes blindfolded. Without warning, the group broke formation, falling to
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Ellen Pau
In her 1990 article “Reflecting Media: 10 Notes on Video,” Ellen Pau, one of Hong Kong’s foremost video artists, wrote: “If we can compare film to a love relationship, video would be like sex life. Film requires one to fall into it, just like falling
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Tishan Hsu
The Chinese-American experience is one of dislocation. The generation that leaves China gives up a way of life. Then, their sons and daughters often need to straddle two worlds, catching glimpses of their familial roots through limited lenses. Some s
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Minimalism: Space. Light. Object.
Minimalism is commonly associated with names such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. These New York-based artists changed the course of art history in the 1960s by extending the modernist notion that art is its own reality, while eschewing
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Arpita Singh
Arpita Singh was discovered by accident. In the early 1970s, scholar and costumier Roshen Alkazi—who, along with her husband, Ebrahim Alkazi, is responsible for hundreds of contemporary art exhibitions in India—found one of Singh’s paintings mixed up
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Perilous Bodies
During the March launch of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice’s new gallery in New York, artist Vanessa German entered the building’s garden atrium, her body swimming in indigo fabric, as if emerging from the sea. The heavy skirt, crafted
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Sophia Al-maria
In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” writer Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case for an alternative view of history, and of art. Expanding on the idea that early humans survived for the most part by gathering rather than hunting, she argues
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Wang Xu
At the heart of Wang Xu’s solo exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM), a monumental female figure standing more than seven feet tall carries an urn on her left shoulder. She extends her right arm forward, her fingers gently reaching out. Y
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Kochi-muziris Biennale 2018
South African artist Sue Williamson brought to the 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) 119 shirts, which she had dipped in the muddy waters of Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope. Each piece of clothing bore the hand-written profile of an Indian slave who h
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Honolulu Biennial
The second Honolulu Biennial, “To Make Wrong/Right/Now,” took its title from the last line of a poem written by Kānaka Maoli artist ʻImaikalani Kalāhele. The title poignantly emphasizes the need to reconcile the legacies of uninvited interventions ac
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Objects and Ornaments
Orientalism has been the primary lens for critiquing art and other forms of cultural production that reference Asia, the Middle East and North Africa ever since Edward Said published his seminal book on the topic in 1978. The term describes the way i
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Richard Bell
In 1952, Brisbane’s Taubmans Paint Factory—at the time one of the world’s largest industrial sites producing the material—was built on rural Yeronga farmland. Today, the massive complex lies mostly dormant. Surrounded by single-story residential dwel

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