112 (Mar/Apr 2019)

ArtAsiaPacific

Contemporary Visual Culture

ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Digital Terrestrials
“Artists suffer aftereffects of the feebleminded media and the computerized media … Artists are shifting their task to communication, using Third Materials produced by all sorts of industries.” This 1969 quote by Japanese artist Yoshida Minoru (1935–
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
Contributors
Wilfred Chan is a writer and photographer based in New York. He is a co-founding editor of Hong Kong art and culture magazine Still / Loud, and a former writer at Splinter and CNN. (See BOOK REVIEW) Nina Horisaki-Christens is an independent curator a
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Ellen Pau on Danny Yung
I made my first super-8 movie The Glove, a surrealist tale of desire, in 1984, while studying radiology in Hong Kong. Besides filmmaking, I was working in theater as a sound operator, assistant backstage manager and in costume management. I even play
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
New York
Race, representation and power—issues that multiculturalism and “identity politics” brought to the fore in the 1990s—have re-emerged with a sense of urgency in New York’s art and cultural realms. This renewed awareness reflects a very real shift in d
ArtAsiaPacific6 min readWorld
Art Stage Singapore Cancelled Days Before Scheduled Opening
On January 16, less than ten days before Art Stage Singapore was set to open, the art fair announced its cancellation. The ninth edition of the fair was slated to take place from January 25 to 27 at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre. Suppor
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Advising for Longevity
Over the next five issues, writers commissioned for The Point will explore new models for operating in the art market. Here, Art Agency, Partners director Meredith Kirk explains how art-advisory services are enlarging their scope of activities to inc
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
Pigging Out
The Chinese lunar new year typically creates topsy-turvy moments as the world transitions into a new zodiac cycle. Saying goodbye to the Year of the Dog—traditionally a year of querulous barking—and hello to the Year of the Boar, the 4,717th Year of
ArtAsiaPacific4 min read
New Year, Same Story
After a strong start in the first quarter of 2018, auction results descended to less astronomical heights later in the year, with the typical art market darlings securing top prices across the board. The March 2019 sales look to be playing it safe, o
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Game Faces On
While fairs across the globe experienced ups and downs throughout 2018, new fairs in Singapore and Taiwan signaled sustained hope for boosting their respective art markets. In New Delhi, India Art Fair put on a brave face despite MCH Group’s announce
ArtAsiaPacific2 min read
There and Back Again
SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION, SHARJAH 3/7–6/10 The 14th Sharjah Biennial (SB14) will present three individually curated exhibitions under the title “Leaving the Echo Chamber.” “Journey Beyond the Arrow,” curated by Zoe Butt, will reveal how the meanings of
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Drawn to Memory
A CRT video projector imported from Italy screens short vignettes of characters in a small room conversing in the Yangjiang dialect of Cantonese about the history of a family-run cinema. These scenes are spliced together with incongruous-seeming foot
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
The Whole Spectrum
In a painting by Qian Hui’an (1833–1911), two young boys share a white-fleshed watermelon. At their back is a rock wall; in front is another melon, this one unsplit, its curves mimicking the fluid lines of their embracing, huddled figures. The dress
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
A Step Ahead
Sue Cato is the go-to person to call during a crisis. As an expert in corporate issues management, she knows exactly which course of action to take when an errant CEO is caught with his hands in someone else’s hip pocket, having worked as a discrete
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readWorld
The Flow Of The River
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping designated the Pearl River Delta a Special Economic Zone, transforming its farmlands and backwaters into an industrial powerhouse as part of his Reform policies. Today, the infrastructures of the major southern cities—Hong Kong
ArtAsiaPacific8 min read
When Video Promised a Sci-Fi Future
In the two years since I first encountered Yoshida Minoru’s Epicurism of Space Universe on the Rock (1975), the video performance has stuck with me. In it, a lonely figure of an extraterrestrial explorer, wearing a partially-constructed, plexiglass-c
ArtAsiaPacific5 min readWorld
Forming Public Spaces
Edmund Cheng is one of the main, quiet forces behind the growth of Singapore’s contemporary art scene. Since the early 1990s, the Hong Kong-born real-estate developer has lobbied for art to be placed in publicly accessible locations. Cheng’s idea cam
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
From Seed to Bloom
Since arriving in Cambodia in 1994, Christoph Bendick has, in a number of ways, helped nourish the fledgling arts scene, whether through acquisitions or direct financial aid to artists. As a collector of Western and Asian contemporary art and Asian a
ArtAsiaPacific10 min read
Radical Immanence, Infinite Difference
The face of Jesus Christ on a Cheeto, the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich, Mother Teresa on a cinnamon roll—these are all instances of pareidolia, the psychological tendency to construct meaningful patterns out of random stimuli. Timur Si-Qi
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
In Depth
When silent motion pictures were first introduced to mass audiences in Japan in the late 19th century, the task of a benshi was to preface the contents of a film and narrate the plot during the presentation. It was a paradoxical position that inevita
ArtAsiaPacific1 min read
How To See [what Isn’t There]
The artists in this exhibition are extremely inventive in activating the intangible in their work, often operating with conceptual gestures, disappearance, emptiness, dematerialization, and the simple, yet profound, framing of the void. The exhibitio
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
12th Shanghai Biennale
In his 1989 essay “The End of History?,” published on the eve of communist collapse across Europe, international-relations scholar Francis Fukuyama argued that the political winds signaled “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to We
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial Of Contemporary Art
As I wandered recently through a major Western art museum, a creeping numbness set in. After yet another eyeful of paintings by the usual, male, blue-chip names, I put my finger on it: I was over it. The predictability. The patriarchal dominance. The
ArtAsiaPacific13 min read
Deme K In memor Ies
In June 2018, during Keiichi Tanaami’s solo exhibition at the chi K11 art space in Guangzhou, the organization invited local children to construct standing structures made from photocopies of his artworks. Some kids handled papers featuring the Japan
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Xiao Lu
When Xiao Lu picked up a pistol and fired two shots at her own installation Dialogue (1989), she stumbled into a global notoriety, which has shrouded her practice ever since. Displayed in the seminal 1989 “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition at Beijing’s C
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Catastrophe And The Power Of Art
Shock, grief and compassion pour forth after calamitous events, whether natural or humanmade. Strangers bond as they navigate adversity, or gather to mourn and rebuild. That emotive fervor can be channeled into art. “Catastrophe and the Power of Art,
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Bahc Yiso
In his MFA thesis, completed in 1985 at New York’s Pratt Institute, Bahc Yiso (1957–2004) recounts a parable about a group of four blind men. Each man “felt the different parts of the elephant and all four came up with different conclusions,” he wrot
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Taipei Biennial
Humans are wired to be myopic. Though we recognize the toll that modern life has taken on the planet, few make meaningful strides to avert the expected crisis brought about by climate change and rampant consumerism, so mounds of waste amass around th
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Dance With It
Dancing hasn’t been given much exhibition attention in China yet. Presented by Beijing’s Taikang Space, “Dance With It,” curated by Su Wenxiang, was a show of nine artists resolutely focused on the cultural significances of the activity—specifically,
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Zeng Fanzhi
“In the Studio,” Zeng Fanzhi’s first exhibition since signing with Hauser & Wirth in March 2018, was billed as a single show mounted across three of the gallery’s worldwide locations. Through concurrently presenting works of different styles, genres
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus Of Southeast Asia
Curated by Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, the ambitious survey “Diaspora: Exit, Exile, Exodus of Southeast Asia” featured works by 18 artists and artist collectives, and was centered on three facets of displacement: “exit,” which implies economically m
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Bangkok Art Biennale
One of three biennials taking place for the first time in Thailand in 2018, the inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB), titled “Beyond Bliss,” relied unashamedly on the established and ubiquitous biennial model, involving strategies such as presenting
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Astha Butail
Astha Butail’s “In the Absence of Writing” included a subtle and challenging body of work. Presented by the Gujral Foundation at their experimental space 24, Jor Bagh in New Delhi, the exhibition comprised installations commissioned specially for the
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Oumaya Alieh Soubra
Historical accounts commonly pinpoint two incidents that unfolded on April 13, 1975, as the beginning of the Lebanese civil war. That day, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerillas attacked a Maronite church in Beirut’s ‘Ayn al-Rummaneh neigh
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Crude
Despite the centrality of oil to the creation and current realities of the modern Middle East, the region’s history of hydrocarbon extraction, petroimperialism and the proliferation of unsustainable petro-based cultures has never been explored in a c
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
The D-tale, Video Art From The Pearl River Delta
Times Art Center Berlin, an independent, nonprofit space initiated by the Guangdong Times Museum, opened its doors on November 30, 2018. Its inaugural show “Episode I: Urban Explosion”—the first of the three-part exhibition series, “The D-Tale, Video
ArtAsiaPacific5 min read
Forest of Lost Trees
Like photographs, trees transcribe memory. Their bodies are histories of earth, sky and society, filling the shapes afforded to them by soil, light and human intervention. The tree is held taut between biological time and the time of human consciousn
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Korakrit Arunanondchai
For almost three weeks in 2018, 12 young football players and their coach were stuck in Chiang Rai province’s Tham Luang caves due to flash flooding. Their plight caught the attention of international news, as well as onlookers from around the world,
ArtAsiaPacific3 min read
Yukultji Napangati
A midsized, square-format painting by Yukultji Napangati was hung by the gallery reception at Salon 94 Bowery in New York. The untitled work appeared, from a distance, like a bas-relief. As I stepped closer and my eyes followed the careful, ritualist
ArtAsiaPacific6 min read
Suki Seokyeong Kang
Well into my conversation with Suki Seokyeong Kang at her Seoul studio, as she was explaining the many components of her projects (paintings, mats, mora, jeong), and how she evolves them into new projects, she turned to me and paused. Seeing my expre

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